Don't Stop the Music: Roundtable Discussion with Workers from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

This roundtable discussion offers a glimpse of one of U.S. lesbian culture's most important institutions, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2000. The festival emerged from 1970s lesbian feminism, which established women-only spaces and genres to nurture women's creativity and community. Its longevity and continuity are testaments to the dedication of Lisa Vogel, one of the festival's founders and its current producer, and of the thousands of women who have made the journey to "the land." The festival carries enormous symbolic significance, even for those who have never been there; it often represents 1970s lesbian feminism, and all the opinions it generates, despite the fact that the festival itself has evolved and grown over the last quarter century.

As roundtable participants, we present an inside view of Michigan because we are all festival workers, part of the workforce of five to six hundred women who set up the festival every year for the five to six thousand festivalgoers. As members of this intentional community for a period of ten days to a month, workers play, fight, perform for each other, work extremely hard, and debate the state of the lesbian nation. The discussion here is not intended to be representative of the festival; in fact, it questions whether such representation is possible. Instead it is merely one of thousands of conversations among friends that Michigan inspires.

One reason for publicizing the festival through this roundtable is the controversy that arose at the 1999 festival over transgender inclusion and the festival's "womyn-born womyn" admission policy. In 1999 a group of transgender people and their allies set up Son of Camp Trans (the return of 1994's Camp Trans) outside the Michigan festival gates to draw attention to these issues. Members of Son of Camp Trans staged an action by entering the festival and taking showers in one of the camping areas. Later that day a verbal confrontation between different groups erupted near the Main Kitchen and eventually turned into an impromptu town meeting facilitated by Bob Alotta, one of the roundtable participants. As of this writing, following the 2000 festival, the debate about the festival's admission policy continues, fueled both by last year's events and by this year's Camp Trans Y2K. A statement emerging from community discussion was distributed at the 2000 festival. It acknowledges the diversity of opinions in the festival community and affirms a commitment both to preserving "womyn-only" space and to challenging transphobia, stating that "claiming one week a year as womyn-born womyn space is not in contradiction to being trans-positive and trans-allies." Even if the festival's policy does not change, discussions of transgender politics have made an indelible impact on the community.

More than to offer a definitive position on the transgender controversy, our aim is to contextualize it by providing a picture of what Michigan means to those of us who have some history with the festival. The transgender debate is only one of many that have been addressed at the festival over the years: from S/M, which caused intense conflict in the early 1990s; to racism and the inclusion of women of color, which are ongoing concerns; to the lesbian baby boom and the increasing numbers of children and young people at the festival. As Gretchen Phillips suggests, the festival is a "petri dish" in which experiments are conducted and the festival's culture evolves.

This conversation focuses above all on the special nature of the Michigan workers' community and on how Michigan is perceived by those who have extensive experience there. Too often the festival has been written about in the media by first-time visitors...