âAll material collected will be archived, and we will keep gathering it until we die!â With those brave words, Merril Mushroom launched the adventure now known as the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist (SLFA) Herstory Project, or âthe Herstory Project,â to the dozens of lesbian feminists who have worked on this over the last sixteen years since we began talking about it on a porch at a state park in Georgia.
May 2025 marks our third anniversary as a website, another brave adventure that Merril Mushroom helped launch and has nurtured with her writing and encouragement. This month, we feature Merrilâs life story in her own words: from lesbian awakening in Miami Beach in the 1950s, through political harassment at the University of Florida, to a decade in New York City in the â60s, then a cross-country search for land, working construction, and finally settling in rural, middle Tennessee, where she has written and stirred up âgood troubleâ since the 1970s. Along the way, she has championed marginalized groups through volunteer work, taught special education, and adopted five children.
Her publication list is a mile long, stretching from âtrue confessionsâ with a feminist thread to exposĂ©s of the McCarthyesque Johns Commission that harassed lesbians and gays in Florida in the 1950s, to speculative fiction. She has written two novels and two plays, one of which, Bar Dykes (1984), has been produced in Los Angeles, California; Florida; New York City; Easthampton, Massachusetts; and this year in Tennessee.
As coeditor of all six volumes of Sinister Wisdom drawn from SLFA Herstory Project interviews, Merril Mushroom wrote over thirty articles based on interviews, and edited many more. Without her, there would have been no Herstory Project.
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