Kathleen “Corky” Culver: Activist, Organizer, Filmmaker, Landyke, Poet

• Corky Culver and the Women’s Peace Walk

Introduction

The following biography is compiled from interviews with Rose Norman in 2012, Arden Eversmeyer in 2012, and Marie Steinwachs in 2024, and edited by Marie Steinwachs and Corky Culver in 2025. 

Girl Scouts Changed My Life 

In the ninth grade my family moved to Clinton, a small town in West Kentucky that was eight blocks long and eight blocks wide. My stepfather’s job was almost an hour away, but he had found us an amazing place to rent cheaply in Clinton that was an old fourteen-room manor, on a block-sized lot bordered by an ornate wrought-iron fence. The house had an elevator and an intercom system. Since we had very little furniture, we had rooms dedicated to crafts, ping pong, and BB gun target practice. It was a fun place to live!

I joined Mother at camp again when she became director of the Girl Scout Camp in Paducah, Kentucky, where I began to really respect what women are capable of! We were chopping down trees, building things out of wood, making tables and fireplaces. We traveled and camped. I immediately got the idea that I did not need to be attached to a man to complete my life. In fact, life was better when I was not. 

My First Lesbian Love 

I graduated from high school at age sixteen and attended Case Western, a very good college in Cleveland, Ohio. I lived with my uncle (Dr. Waymon Parsons, who was a minister and a founder of the United Church Council) and his family. After a year, I was so homesick for my mother and warmer weather that I formulated a plan to leave. By then, my family was in the process of moving to Florence, Alabama. While I was home on break, I proposed to my parents that, by allowing me to attend the University of North Alabama (UNA) right there in Florence, they would save so much money that they could buy a house—and I convinced them!

I started UNA as a liberal arts major, joined the English Club, Drama Club, and the Drill Team, and ended up graduating second in my class. While in college, I noticed that I had always had special “enthusiasms” for some women, but when I met Cathy Drompp during my senior year, I slowly began to recognize these un-worded, unfamiliar feelings as love, and romance! Cathy had a rich background in progressive issues and music. She brought into my life Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Odetta, Mort Sahl, and Tom Lehrer, for example. I was eating it up. I just loved all of it, and I loved her and her brain. She had a wry kind of resistance to the status quo and the conventional—a real rebel. In 1960 I started graduate school at the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville while Cathy finished her undergraduate work at UNA. When she finally graduated, we drove my little Austin Healey to California and spent part of the year doing odd jobs and having adventures. 

In 1962 0r 63, we returned to Gainesville so I could finish my master’s degree but arrived too late to find affordable student housing in town. I saw an ad for a house on twenty-four acres and a lake in Melrose (about twenty-five miles east of Gainesville) with a fireplace and a tire swing. We named the place “Frothingslosh.” Cathy and I lived there a few years before we had a painful split up. At some point, I dropped out of school again. Not long after, I met Dore Rotundo, and eventually we fell in love. 

In 1965 we went to San Francisco where Dore got a job teaching architecture at a trade school. I was supposed to be writing my thesis and attending to the household, but what a great time it was to be distracted in San Francisco! It was the beginning of the flower child era and there was a whole new sound emerging from the city from start-up bands like Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. Dore and I hung with bohemians and started a gallery of found art that was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. In spite of the exuberance of the place and time, Dore and I missed Florida. So, in 1968 we returned to Melrose, where we purchased a log cabin on Lake Swan. Once again, I had planned to finish my degree at UF but missed the deadline for submitting my thesis. In order to keep the credits I’d earned and not repeat a semester, I enrolled in the PhD program for English and philosophy, and worked as a teaching assistant. I was awarded a PhD in 1978. This is important later in the story.

Consciousness-Raising (CR) Groups and Early Feminism in Gainesville

In the late 60s, I ran head-and-heart-first into some of the rigorous revolutionary thinkers —Judith Brown, Carol Giardina, Carol Hanisch—leading the second wave of feminism from Gainesville and organizing the first Women’s Liberation consciousness-raising (CR) groups. One of them said to me, “We need to have a lesbian CR group.” Lesbians were so closeted in those days that I didn’t know any in Gainesville. In 1968 we had to scour several counties to get together, by word of mouth, a group of about ten women. As far as I know, it was one of the first lesbian CR groups in the country. Rita Mae Brown attended one of our meetings! 

The basic format of the CR groups was to speak from your own experience, develop a theory about the experience, develop some action (like some new way to respond), and to share what we learned. As we spoke from our own experience, we found we shared many of the same experiences with others. For example, it wasn’t because of their personal failings that women were insecure about going to college. It was that they were being forced out of their own areas of talent. If women wanted to go to graduate school, the counselor would often ask, “Don’t you want to have children? Don’t you want to be at home?” Women who said they wanted a job might be told, “You don’t want to take that job from a man who has a family to raise, do you?” They kept women repressed and oppressed. Discovering that set off the whole second wave of feminism. 

Our first action was to send a letter to the Deans of Women in colleges saying,
“Don’t kick lesbians out of school,” and “We know some of you are lesbians.”

It was being in a lesbian CR group for several years that really developed my feminist politics. It was partly a response to the recent Johns Committee, as well. [The Johns Committee, 1956-1965, used the Florida legislature to attempt to purge colleges and universities of gay faculty and students.] I had friends who were kicked out of school, and it really hurt their lives and their opportunities. They lost their scholarships; they lost their education.

Our first action was to send a letter to the Deans of Women in colleges saying, “Don’t kick lesbians out of school,” and “We know some of you are lesbians.” At some point, several women split off to join the National Organization for Women (NOW) and to focus on electoral politics and equality in heterosexual relationships, while others pursued lesbian rights, the arts, and ecofeminism. All of us worked on social justice issues. 

Out of our lesbian CR group came the idea of a women’s land trust. It would be a place for us to retire when we were old. We were thinking ahead, worried that we might not have families or children to take care of us in our later years. In 1972, we found forty undeveloped acres of pine and oak forest near Melrose. Ten or twelve of us agreed to buy in, and two of those had money for a down payment. The rest paid what they could afford until their share was paid for; I paid $15 a month at first. (See Finding Women’s Lands and Lesbian Communities.) No one lived on the land for several years, but we would camp there sometimes. 

[Read more in “The North Forty: Florida (1972-Present),” in Sinister Wisdom 98 Landykes of the South (2015): 19-24.)  

The Red House 

In Gainesville area feminist herstory, a lot of things happened at the Red House, where Corky lived, on an off, from 1972 to 1983. 

I got the Red House in 1972. I had been living across the lake, and I loved the sight of this old house. It was built in the late 1800s in the style of a Maine farmhouse, before there were sawmills here (Florida was late to develop), and the lumber had to be brought down from up north. The house was high on a hill, surrounded by five hundred acres of hayfields, a pecan grove, an orange grove, a kumquat tree, and a huge magnolia tree in the front yard! You could gather pecans and, in the winter, go out and get a cold orange from the tree and have your chilled orange juice. It had open meadows; in the spring there were acres of wildflowers. It had a nice clear lake to swim in. From the hill you could see the whole sweep of the sun and the moon from dawn to sunset.

The house was totally rundown inside, with cracking plaster and a few leaks. But it had four bedrooms, four fireplaces, and a little back porch. There was a lot of room in it, and I’ve always liked people, so different women would live there for a time, and folks from out of town could stay with me. People used the different bedrooms, and there was plenty of room all around for camping. We would all eat out of the kitchen and have fire circles and swim. It was just a beautiful place! 

Women enjoyed being at the Red House. It was also a great place for meetings because women could come in on a Thursday night and stay the whole weekend. We had a lot of meetings there, starting in the 1970s. The parties at the Red House were legendary and full of music. Many of the visitors were fantastic musicians—Abby Bogomolny, Jane Yii, Flash Silvermoon, Barbara Ester, and Heather Vick. I’m not a really good musician, but I’m a big singalong person, and this was participatory music. Even when the “stars” were singing, everybody joined in. These were amazing, happy times. 

 So, along with singalongs we had some stars too! Flame and I produced two Ferron concerts, her first in this area. One was at the Pagoda, then we produced one in Gainesville. Ferron came down, stayed at the Red House, and everybody enjoyed it. Minnie Bruce Pratt spent three or four days with me once. I’m not quite sure how that came about, but it was quite amazingly wonderful! We talked and floated in Echo Lake and became friends. She said our conversation and the time there had a big effect on her life. It certainly did on mine. 

Joan Larkin, the writer, was another one of the stars who stayed at the Red House. She had created the first Amazon quarterly. [Larkin was published in the quarterly journal Amazon Quarterly; the founders and editors were two college students, Gina Covina and Laurel Galana.] Larkin anthologized lesbian poetry into a book, did anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry, and wrote the first coming out story in Ms. Magazine. She stayed with me for a month and came back many times for our different writers’ conferences and events. She’s a fantastic teacher of writing. Barbara Esrig lived at the Red House and Barb Ester was there for a while. Z Budapest visited and Barbara Vogel was there while she did the art for Flash Silvermoon’s tarot deck. 

I was paying the rent on the Red House, which was very low—about $150 a month or so. Many of us were doing part-time jobs, like teaching, and we had a cleaning group called Ms. Magic. We picked up pinecones for seed and planted the trees, sold oranges, bucked hay, and did various other odd jobs; we lived on very little money. 

I was restless again, so during the summer of 1974, I left the Red House in the care of friends and went to New York City where I sought out Flash Silvermoon. Flash was a great musician and an internationally known leader in women’ spirituality who created her own tarot deck, had a radio show, and made a huge number of contacts. I was eager to meet her! I became interested in filmmaking and met with Women Make Movies and the Women’s InterArt Center. I spent quite a bit of time with Alma Routsong (author of Patience and Sarah, under the penname Isabel Miller). I spent the summer partying so hard in New York that when friends drove up to bring me home, I didn’t want to go. I did leave, finally, to be back in Gainesville in time for the Renaissance Festival. 

Women’s Art Fair and Women’s Renaissance Festival 

In the spring of ’74, one local group of feminists who had identified as straight wanted to explore loving women. They came to meet the lesbians, and it was (appropriately) on the day after Valentine’s Day! The lesbians had a tradition of singing together—activist songs and general folk songs. This new group of women had very firm roots in art, so we just ignited each other, and it was very exciting! We thought it was like lines of surf coming together and bursting upwards.  

We immediately envisioned a women’s art space that featured only women artists, and we wanted to act on that. “Kampho Femnique Frothingslosh,” or KFS, described our frothing with new ideas and then sharing them. We had one small women’s art show in Jacksonville, Florida and then we said, “Let’s have a big one in Gainesville!” We planned this for months, and I mean we really planned it. Our intent was to showcase women artists, and we would have paintings, drawings, music, dance, quilters, and fabric people. It would be feminist! The concept kept growing. 

One group from Lutz, Florida (a tiny town near Tampa) contacted us when we were organizing the festival. They called themselves something like the Lutz Liberation Free Lunch and Freedom Fighters. We thought, “How is it in this little town there’s a liberation front?” We were thrilled they wanted to participate!

The Women’s Renaissance Festival (held in 1974) drew hundreds of people throughout the day. It was at the Thomas Center, a restored Spanish style former hotel with beautiful grounds, tended meadows, a fountain, rose garden, and sprawling oak trees. We erected three tents and a large stage on the grounds. We offered a variety of workshops for women, designed to empower them by teaching skills that they had been denied. One workshop was on basic car repairs and changing oil. There was a “look at yourself with a speculum” tent, and a sickle cell testing site. We had lots of music and several women’s dance groups from local dance teachers. Some of us dressed up in little capes and face paint; it was great fun! There was only one speaker, Katura Carey*, because we wanted to show and to experience women’s arts, rather than talk about art and women’s issues. It was all about celebrating what women already have and are. [*Katura Carey was a Gainesville school teacher who formed the African People’s Socialist Party in 1972.]

The entertainment went on all day with people lying on blankets and watching. Women came from around the state to sing and perform. The Tampa Feminist Guerilla Theatre did their skits, and they were absolutely phenomenal! The argument was embedded in the theatre. They had one skit called Smile in which they just had these ridiculous smiles—you know women are always supposed to have the “coat hanger in the mouth” smile. They had another skit about shaving legs. I wish I had copies of those scripts—they were brilliant and fantastic, good theatre! They were funny while making eye-opening points about pressures on women at that time. 

There was a group of men and women from a meditation organization that were talking about their spiritual evolution. They had a couple of Conga drums and some guys in a drumming circle. I went up to them and said, “You know, this event is for women artists.” One guy said, “Well, the women can’t play the drums,” and I said, “Oh, come on!” Then the women said, “Wait a minute! We’ll play,” and they played all day. It was just fantastic! [Read more on KFS and the Renaissance Festival in Lorelei Esser, Artist and Cultural Activist. ]

We didn’t say the word lesbian, but some women were walking around holding hands. Over the years I’ve heard many people recall it was the first time they ever saw that. Out in a beautiful space, dancing and singing and drumming and art and quilts and paintings—there had never been anything like it, and there really hasn’t been anything like it since. Because the urgency of the whole movement was under there, it wasn’t just an art event. It was an opportunity to let women be all they can be. 

The Renaissance Festival wasn’t at all about money, of course. We gathered a few donations, here and there, but we weren’t trying to make any money. We volunteered our time and effort. We also did several more programs and performances at Eckerd College, and we had a retreat at Camp Crystal. 

We held another event at the Red House in 1978, called Communication Quest. It included the first spirituality circle in the area. None of us who participated had ever experienced that before. We didn’t know what we were doing but Flash Silvermoon came, and she did!

Jail and Peace Walk  

On October 24, 1983, several Gainesville women joined a national blockade at the notorious Savannah River nuclear bomb plant near Aiken, South Carolina. Corky Culver was one of the arrested and jailed activists who refused to provide law enforcement with names, becoming internationally known as the “Jane Does.” During sixteen days in jail the women spoke with the media and planned their next action–the Women’s Peace Walk–which launched from Gainesville in December, bound for Key West, Florida 540 miles away. 

The Peace Walk was life-changing for the participants. Corky’s transformation is detailed in her poem Sunday Night Service at the Bamburg County Jail After the Savannah River Nuclear Bomb Plant Blockade and the 2021 interview, Corky Culver and the Women’s Peace Walk.

Corky acknowledged the leap of faith that the Peace Walk required. “We didn’t have money backing. We had our sleeping bags and our blow-up air mattresses, our clothes, and our food.” Churches and people along the way donated money and food. Corky described how the feminist process of circles and consensus guided all decisions. She used details from her journals—and humor—to recount the hardships as well as the great surprises that they experienced along the way. 

The Peace Walk culminated at the U. S. Navy’s Caribbean Command Headquarters surrounded by media, tourist crowds, and buses with loudspeakers. The women spun an elaborate, colorful yarn web symbolizing the power of networking and the interrelatedness of all life. They climbed the iron bars, lifted the web until it caught on barbed wire above the gate, then draped down and gently enveloped the Naval Command’s entrance. 

More of Corky’s recollections of the Peace Walk are captured in “Into the Grueling Duelings of Consensus Dances Sweet Meditation,” Sinister Wisdom 93 (Summer 2014): 23-26. 

Chem-free 

I want to explain that, starting with the Peace Walk and the peace demonstration, we became very concerned with chemical-free, or “chem-free,” options, and we always provided chem-free space after that. At the Savannah River Peace Camp, they passed a bottle of Southern Comfort around and when it came by me, I didn’t take a drink. They looked at me and said they thought, “Wow. If she can do it, we can do it.” A whole bunch of women, my best friends like Judy and Lynda Lou and Pam, quit drinking then to support me. It was fantastic!

One of the first CR sessions we had at our planning meeting in St. Pete [St. Petersburg, Florida] was about addictions. I remember feeling very uptight about it because of my quitting alcohol. But this circle ended up not just being about alcohol. It was about the way addictions had impacted our lives, and we found out every single life in that circle was impacted. It could have been one of their personal addictions to something or it might have been a family member with an addiction. It became clear to us that the destructive power of addictions was a feminist issue and that it would be one of the things we were changing in the world. That was a powerful meeting. 

(Corky’s interview about her path to sobriety, transcribed by Barbara Esrig, appears as “I Get Dry With a Little Help From My Friends,” Sinister Wisdom 124 Deeply Held Beliefs (2022): 134-38.)

LEAP and the North Forty 

There were two conferences at the North Forty, both called LEAP, one in 1984 and one in 1985. The idea began at one of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festivals, where Minnie Bruce Pratt led a session about southern lesbians organizing. We talked about a lot of different things that day, I don’t remember all, but we thought it was so powerful to hear each other that we needed to get together with lesbians across the South to expand our network for the good feeling about being with each other and for enacting feminist changes in the world. There were a lot of us from Gainesville at that meeting, and somehow it evolved into how we would start organizing in Florida. 

We were able to develop a pretty big planning network because we had already met lesbian activists at the Peace Camp in South Carolina and during the forty-one-day Peace Walk down the length of Florida. We rotated the meeting locations and, since we came from a lot of different places, each meeting included staying over Saturday night. We had essentially a two-day meeting (two nights and two days), including one day that was a long CR group during which we would circle and talk about a new issue. The second day we called the “nuts and bolts” day where we were planning for the conference. Saturday night we partied, sang, and got to know each other! 

At the very same time, it felt magical, as everything did in those days when lesbians got together.

I don’t know when we started calling it LEAP, but I’ll tell you how the name got started. I was trying to think of something to call us that didn’t have fifty-five letters, like the Southern Lesbian Leadership Conference Organizational, you know? So, I had all these potent words and I’m sitting in bed, and I had a list a hundred acronyms long. Finally, it worked out that the name “Lesbians Empowered for Action and Politics,” and its acronym LEAP, could capture the exuberance that we were feeling, the sense of change, and the new world to be created out of our deepest joys and needs. Our big, clearest sense was that the things we were doing personally were making changes in lesbians’ and women’s situations in the world, and we were breaking new ground all the time. 

We were very broad-based in our sense of what was important. In planning LEAP, we decided we could have a variety of workshops (we called them “Learn Togethers”) including electoral politics, vegetarian eating, and even how to build boats to float down rivers and spread feminism! We cared very much, as the Michigan festival did, about having accessible facilities, so we planned hundreds of feet of carpeted paths everywhere so wheelchairs could get around on the sandy land. We made a brochure that included a lot of things about supporting the environment and the plants to cherish (or avoid). Our meals were going to be vegetarian, and we planned to cook over a couple of large fire pits using huge pots with big grates over them.

At first, we thought we were going to rent a site, so we looked at several camps and different locations. We didn’t consider the North Forty at first because trash had been dumped on it before we bought the land. It had only a shallow well and a hand pump, and it didn’t have electricity. It didn’t seem possible to have a large gathering there. But as time moved on, we found out the place that we had chosen was going to cost about $3,000 to rent for four days. Also, we wanted a separate area where we would have our own space. The guy from the campground said, “We’ll have to come in a couple times a day to slop the hogs. Otherwise, it will be private for you.” We thought that didn’t sound private!

At the very same time, it felt magical, as everything did in those days when lesbians got together. It was always amazing to us because we had never experienced being together before. Anyway, I got a phone call while I was in the kitchen at the Red House. The phone call was from my landlord, who said I would have to move. My offer to buy the place had actually backfired and caused the owner, who was a lawyer in New York, to decide to come down and refurbish the house because I described it as being in such dire straits. It was his dream to live in it, and I can understand that. It was a dream house! 

This was the moment of magic because I could feel disengaged from the physical reality of the Red House, all the opportunities it had given us. As I got untethered, I thought, “Well, I’ll move to the North Forty!” Then the light bulb sort of went on, and I thought, “Let’s look at the North Forty as a LEAP site possibility again.” We went back over there with the idea that if we put that $3,000 we had planned to spend for the rental space into the North Forty to get electricity and a deep well, and we cleaned it up, would it make this a feasible place for LEAP?

We figured out that it could work, so the location for LEAP was decided! Meanwhile there were still piles of trash from years of illegal dumping. What happened was—oh, I don’t know how many—a lot of women camped out there for about a month and a half—just lived there and worked on the land. We took out twenty-four truckloads of trash. We went to a claypit and used our shovels and a pickup truck to haul in clay to make the base of a better road for cars than the existing sand trail. We dug a well and put in plumbing. We cleaned up the land, and we made it kind of utopian. It was beautiful!

We built a set of outdoor showers, like four showers, that we loved! Rainbow made wooden Statue of Liberty crown-top mirrors for each shower, and they were wonderful. When a woman showered, she could see herself in the mirror as a liberator—whimsically and literally! I think we built a shed where we could store stuff, and we had a refrigerator. By the time of the first event, we had put it all together! We even had three horse troughs that we built a fire under for hot tubs—three hot tubs, and they were all au naturel! One was for everything goes, one allowed drinking but no smoking, and one was for chem-free. 

There had to have been some donations because we had to get the well—I don’t remember how we worked that out. If you think about it, out of fifty women, getting that amount of money together wouldn’t have been that hard, and probably the members of the North Forty contributed a large part since they were going to benefit from the well and the electricity. A number comes to mind that LEAP paid the North Forty about $1,500. I remember we charged women a sliding scale fee from $0 to $40 to attend LEAP.

The enthusiasm in some of the letters from people who went to the LEAPs was amazing to read. We knew we were making history, and we were energized by finding each other and working together, learning building, organizing, and communication skills. It was amazing that it even happened—all volunteer, just brought together out of pure spirit. 

(For more on LEAP, see Corky’s article, “Transforming Lesbian Cultural Politics in Gainesville, Florida” in Sinister Wisdom 109 Hot Spots: Creating Lesbian Space in the South Issue (2018): 24-28.)     

A Degree of Focus 

During those years of lesbian feminist actions, we still had to support ourselves. I had a teaching assistant position at the University of Florida for several years while I was also researching and finishing my dissertation, focused on the writings of Henry David Thoreau. That included five trips to the annual Thoreau gathering in Massachusetts.  Like Thoreau, I survived on the gig economy for a time, painting houses, planting trees, hanging dry wall, cleaning houses, and pressure washing. I finished a bare start of a hand-built cabin, adding walls and windows, digging an outhouse, enjoying an outdoor shower. I had a little cleaning and house painting business with a friend. We called it Sparkle Plenty. 

I was the temporary director on a grant for SPARC (Sexual and Physical Abuse Resource Center), where I fielded calls between the police and women being abused. I was turning fifty, so I began to think about my future a little more and contacted Social Security to find out what my post-retirement income might look like. I was told I hadn’t paid enough into the fund to receive any benefits. That was a wake-up call! As I pondered over how to increase my earnings, my friend Denise Matthews pointed out the obvious. “Don’t you have a PhD?,” she asked. 

It was difficult to imagine myself as a professor, but I already had teaching experience. I applied for a position at Santa Fe College and was hired as an English professor, eventually became tenured, and worked there for seventeen years. In addition to teaching, I was the faculty coordinator of Tracings, the student arts literature journal, which won awards for its excellence. I also produced a finished film that the college used at conferences to promote diversity and inclusion. 

Filmmaking

In 1989 I bought my first movie camera with Denise Matthews, an award-winning documentary filmmaker. I wanted to pursue my longtime dream of making movies about our groundbreaking lives as feminists and other subjects, like my obsession with water, and, of course, my love for my family. I taped interviews with Blue Lunden, Theresa Carr, Julia Dragonfly, Donna Dyke, Ruth Dreamdigger, Abby Bogomolny, and others. 

I filmed lesbians building houses and stages at the North Forty, as well as the twenty-year, thirty-year, and forty-year reunions of that land. I filmed cronings [feminist celebrations or ceremonies to honor older women], dances, weddings, memorials, Pride events, performances, women playing, and Florida’s natural environment. I donated hundreds of hours of film footage to the Lesbian Home Movie Project. The films have been digitized and archived at the Harvard Film Archive for future use by filmmakers and researchers of lesbian feminism. 

Lesbian Feminist Action/Process 

In most of our groups, we stressed the importance of hearing from everybody, and not just from the person who was the most verbal, political, or the most brilliant. We used consensus decision-making for a lot of things, and for other decisions we used consensus minus one. When you go around in a circle you don’t have two points of view, you have many. We always felt that, eventually, we would make a decision that would grow out of everybody having their say. Consensus takes time; it takes dedication, but we found it helpful, very helpful. Consensus is also found in Native American traditions. 

Many other groups just vote, and whoever or whatever has the most votes wins. It’s often much more efficient, but it creates division and has either/or-ness. It’s not as respectful of all the different possibilities. People will dig in with a hurt feeling, resentment, or a position on a subject. I found many times that how you melt those rigidities is through hearing and listening. Formalizing listening is really what a lot of consensus building is. When listening, you’re not just arguing with whoever says something and waiting for your chance to put in. Some listening exercises involve repeating everything that the other person said to show you have heard them. Often, if a difference of opinion doesn’t resolve, it dissolves. 

After the Peace Walk and the LEAP planning and events, we started a group called Feminist Action Network (FAN) that did a lot of actions in Gainesville. For example, to protest and raise awareness about violence against women in our community, we dressed in whiteface and formed a circle outside a meeting at City Hall. It was a huge circle of women, talking about their experiences of violence. We also got a predator professor fired, calling attention to him with a cardboard coffin and chanting, “Decency is dead here!”   We did a march on the university’s Fraternity Row after learning about their assaults and abuse of women. We were pushing the envelope all the time, always doing something fresh and new, and the things we did had huge effects. Many of the services and organizations started then are still in existence. 

In 1992, after the Gainesville City Commission passed a statement comparing gay rights to necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality, the town’s gay population was ignited. That year, the first Gay Pride Parade marched down the sidewalk. I carried a bullhorn and led marchers in several songs and chants. We didn’t back down in our efforts until the city added “sexual orientation” to their anti-discrimination clause.

This interview has been edited for archiving by the interviewer and interviewee, close to the time of the interview. Original interviews are archived at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

See also:

“The North Forty: Florida (1972-Present),” Sinister Wisdom 98 Landykes of the South (2015): 19-24.) 

“I Get Dry With a Little Help From My Friends,” Sinister Wisdom 124 Deeply Held Beliefs (2022): 134-38.) 

“Transforming Lesbian Cultural Politics in Gainesville, Florida,” Sinister Wisdom 109 Hot Spots: Creating Lesbian Space in the South Issue (2018): 24-28.)  

“Into the Grueling Duelings of Consensus Dances Sweet Meditation,” Sinister Wisdom 93 (Summer 2014): 23-26.  

Corky’s film archives in the Lesbian Home Movie Project 

Interview with Dore Rotundo: Architect and Land Dyke

Interview with Lorelei Esser: Artist and Cultural Activist  

Interview with Marie Steinwachs: Waste Warrior and Environmental Champion