Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Judy Dlugacz

73 Judy Dlugacz In Listening to the Sirens, her book about “homomusical communities ,” musicologist Judith A. Peraino notes that during the early 1970s feminists were turning to women-identified music as “the product of choice to initiate the real goal of feminist business.” Among those pioneering feminists was Judy Dlugacz, one of the most successful women’s music entrepreneurs of the seventies and eighties. A founding member and president of Olivia Records, Dlugacz guided and nurtured the company from its days as the brainchild of a lesbian-feminist collective. “Going to school in feminism informed me,” Dlugacz tells me the day we connect at her office in San Francisco. It has taken us a year to find a mutually convenient time to meet, for Dlugacz is a woman as much out of the office as in. Olivia Records may be no more, but its reincarnation as Olivia Tours has Dlugacz sailing off to distant and exotic ports, where she puts together vacation packages for travel-loving lesbians of all ages. But today she’s back in town, happy to reminisce about her days with what Stephen Holden in the New York Times called “one of the record industry’s most solid success stories.” With its egalitarian ideals, ethic of consciousness raising, and promotion of lesbian love and community, Olivia’s discography—albums by Meg Christian, Chris Williamson, Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, Teresa Trull, Deidre McCalla, and others—resonated with lesbians of all stripes. While the majority of independent record companies fail within their first year of operation, Olivia kept putting out highly popular albums for almost two decades. “Here we were like the Little Red Hen,” Dlugacz recalls. “We had to do everything ourselves—create the music, distribute the music, produce our own concerts—because no one would really help us. We helped create visibility. In the early days, visibility was everything. It created community. It saved lives.” Born in 1952, Dlugacz grew up in Queens and “farther out on Long Island when my parents had a little more money to invest in a house.” Her father, of Polish Jewish extraction, was a CPA and a socialist; her mother, a teacher and union organizer. “We always had organizers in the house: everyone from Bayard Rustin to Norman Thomas, who ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket. All sorts of amazing people.” A self-described tomboy, Dlugacz remembers running around the neighborhood in a powder blue jean jacket, brandishing a cap gun. “My mother let me be exactly who I was. I was a fast runner and played sports. I wanted to slick my hair back like Elvis.” In high school, she was editor in chief of the newspaper, a member of the student council, and a flautist in the band. And, she adds, “politically active even then.” Inspired by her mother, who had led the first teacher strikes on Long Island, Dlugacz organized a march for Biafra. When she graduated, she got a scholarship “for being an iconoclast.” At the University of Michigan, where she majored in psychology, Dlugacz fast-tracked her way through in three years “so that my parents didn’t have to spend a lot of money.” On campus, she lived in a new residential college, which she calls “a think tank of radicals.” Hearing about the existence of the Radicalesbians, a lesbian-feminist collective, she decided to check them out, justifying her interest because she was taking a “deviant behavior” class that semester. “That was my cover. In that first meeting, I was sitting in a corner . My legs were tucked up to my chest, my arms were folded. I didn’t want anyone to look at me. But what they said absolutely did me in: that not only was it OK to be a lesbian; it was best to be a lesbian . It was all about being a strong, independent woman in the world. I thought, Oh, my God. I can come out now.” Dlugacz 74 Judy Dlugacz 75 Judy Dlugacz signed up, accompanying the Radicalesbians as they went around to colleges conducting coming-out groups for women. “In those days, women could not even get a credit card without a man cosigning. When I went to college, the Left was completely dominated by men, and women were getting strong and angry. You saw this real shift. It was a magnificent time to be in school.” Dlugacz graduated in 1972 and moved...