Finding Women’s Lands and Lesbian Communities
Shewolf said that it was a miracle that her directory happened at all. She believed it was important to document this movement, to show how widespread it was . . .
It was 1983 when my partner and I were setting out from Washington, D.C. to find lesbian land. We had visited Heathcote in Maryland; and we had tried to start our own place, Turtleland, in Virginia. We were looking for something more. Our minds were open, our schedule was cleared, but where were the women on land?
Our only resource for finding women’s land was the magazine, Lesbian Connection, which had published the first land directory as part of a regular issue in 1982. We called and wrote to the lands listed, rarely getting answers. Nevertheless, we were able to put a few places on our itinerary: the Women’s Peace Camp in Seneca Falls, Aradia in Grand Rapids, Adobeland near Tucson, and SPIRAL in Kentucky. Jes and I ended up at SPIRAL in 1988. In 2010, I moved to the North Forty in Florida.
It would have been so different if Shewolf’s Directory of Wimmin’s Lands and Lesbian Communities had been published earlier than 1994. This directory was the most complete, detailed, and frequent of the few networking tools we had; and it was the only one to come out of the South. There have been six editions of Shewolf’s Directory of Wimmin’s Lands and Lesbian Communities, from 1994 to 2013, published approximately every three years. Shewolf loved to travel. She made her way from her own land in Louisiana to visit as many lesbian lands as possible. While most of the groups listed are located in the USA, a few are scattered throughout the English-speaking world, and a couple of them are in European countries.
Shewolf started by traveling with her copy of the book Lesbian Land, by Joyce Cheney, first published in 1985. Her quest was, “Which and how many lands still exist that were listed in that book?”
Author’s biographical note
Cedar Heartwood (Kate Ellison) was born in 1949 in north Louisiana of parents who were both born in New Orleans. She has lived on Women’s Land most of the time since 1988, building female community and creating culture outside patriarchy. Retired from the many jobs that were only a means to survival, she finally has time to push for progressive-leaning change in her rural county, where “don’t ask, don’t tell” is still operative. Her poetry and prose have been published in the periodicals Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine, WomanSpirit, We’Moon, and more recently in Sinister Wisdom.
She contacted every place she could discover, and she heard about more lands everywhere she went. Jae Haggard and Lee Lanning offered to publish Shewolf’s research in Maize, A Lesbian Country Magazine, and it was simply too much material for the magazine. The first edition of Shelwolf’s directory contained 28 lands with comments from her visit to each one she had found. The second edition grew to 75; and by the third edition, there were 100, a number she tried to keep as some lands disbanded and new lands were born. Many women and lesbians living in community on their land didn’t feel safe revealing their location in published material. Some were not looking for new members, though most were. There was a lot of justifiable fear, even in the 1990s. In Oregon, two women had been killed. Although this not reported as a hate crime, everyone in the extended community knew the murder was a hate crime because they were two lesbians living way out in the country.
Shewolf’s Directory of Wimmin’s Lands and Lesbian Communities balances on that edge between safety and privacy on one side; and publicity and outreach on the other. She kept publishing. Since it brought no trouble to the communities, gradually, most of them became more open.
Shewolf said that it was a miracle that her directory happened at all. She believed it was important to document this movement, to show how widespread it was, and to give us a way to find each other. She had her own land community, Womonworld, in south Louisiana. She knew firsthand how hard it was for us to connect. For her first few editions, she advertised through Maize, A Lesbian Country Magazine and Lesbian Connection magazine. She sold her directory at festivals and women’s bookstores – in other words, she only marketed it to lesbians. The fifth edition, in 2007, was the first one to be openly sold on the Internet. Many women told her they found their new home on lesbian land through her directory. “Now, that’s satisfying!” Shewolf said.
Shewolf passed away on April 24, 2020, at age 88, having already chosen a traveling dyke to succeed her. This new woman was working on the project, traveling and visiting lesbian lands, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing her to cancel all her plans.
Two other publications also are working on updates to a lesbian land directory. The latest Maize “Connections and Resources Directory” is to be published in 2022. Lesbian Natural Resources has been collecting longer stories from all the lands that are willing to participate, and published them as Landykes: Our Stories in Our Own Words, available in 2022. Lesbian Natural Resources had given grant money to rural, lesbian communities. It also helped publish Maize, A Lesbian Country Magazine; and the books, Lesbian Land (1985) and Landykes: Our Stories in Our Own Words (2022).
The update “in my neck of the woods” is that the North 40 will be celebrating our 50th anniversary this fall [2022], which is amazing. We are all ageing, and looking for those mythical young ones to carry on after we are gone. We have one or two parcels available, depending on how you count it.