Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

6. From Jook Joints to Sisterspace: The Role of Nature in Lesbian Alternative Environments in the United States

chapter 6 From Jook Joints to Sisterspace: The Role of Nature in Lesbian Alternative Environments in the United States nancy c. unger Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands’s groundbreaking “Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature ,” with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be “the last one on the topic.” Instead she hopes “fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes]” (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further “insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature” (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman nature in the alternative environments lesbians created and nurtured in their efforts to transcend the sexism, homophobia, violence, materialism, and environmental abuse afflicting mainstream society. Certainly such an investigation supports the challenge, detailed in Katie Hogan’s essay in this collection, to the notion of queers as “unnatural ” and “against nature.” Lesbians’ ways of incorporating nonhuman nature into their temporary and permanent communities demonstrate how members of an oppressed minority created safe havens and spaces to be themselves. In addition to offering mainstream society insight into the impact of place on identity, in some instances lesbian communities also provide some important working examples of alternate ways of living on and with the land. 174 Green, Pink, and Public Early Lesbian Environments Place has played an important role in the creation of lesbian identity and community. Although modern urban environments, with their softball fields and lesbian bars and bookstores, are conventionally perceived as most conducive to lesbian life, pockets of safe spaces for women who loved women existed earlier, even in the more conservative rural south. Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism details the explorations of sexuality granted to African Americans following their emancipation from slavery. Prohibited from frequenting white establishments by virtue of their race and economic status, rural African Americans danced, drank, and socialized to blues music in ramshackle jook joints, also called barrelhouses, frequently located in wooded, remote areas away from disapproving eyes and ears. These informal nightclubs “where blues were produced and performed were also places of great sexual freedom” (1998, 133). Davis examines in particular female African American blues performers who were “irrepressible and sexually fearless women,” many of whom were openly lesbian and whose songs celebrated sexual love between women (137). Most lesbians, however, associated sexual freedom with urban rather than rural life. To Mabel Hampton, a young African American lesbian who moved from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to New York’s Harlem in 1920, the idea that non-urban, outdoor settings might prove to be a valuable partner in creating and fostering a positive lesbian identity would have been a total anathema. For Hampton, there could be no more nurturing and empowering environment for lesbians than the open atmosphere of Harlem, a small section of racially segregated Manhattan. “I never went in with straight people,” she recalled decades later in the film documentary Before Stonewall. “I do more bother [have more contact] with straight people now than I ever did in my life.” She summed up her memories of the clubs and nightlife available to openly lesbian women with a wistful, “[you had] a beautiful time up there—oh, girl, you had some time up there” (Rosenberg, Scagliotti, and Schiller 1984). In Hampton’s heyday, it was indeed cities, with their potent combination of proximity and privacy, that promised the greatest liberation for most homosexuals. The very notion of homosexuality as a lifestyle grew out of the urban centers of newly industrialized nations. Many cities included a more “bohemian” area in which people who were considered to be outside mainstream society found a home. In these centers lesbians found each other. They enjoyed the chance to experience nightlife in clubs From Jook Joints to Sisterspace 175 featuring lesbian entertainers, some of whom got their start in the jook joints of the rural south. Private parties were far more common than nights on the town, however , because they were cheaper and provided both safety and privacy. During non-work hours “‘I didn’t have to go to bars,’ Hampton recalled, ‘because I would go to the women’s houses’” (quoted in Nestle 2001, 346). During periods when she was not working at the Lafayette Theater, Hampton and her...