Lorelei Esser: Artist and Cultural Activist

Interview transcripts were edited by Marie Steinwachs and Corky Culver in 2022. Interview by Rose Norman at Lorelei Esser’s home in Gainesville, Florida, on March 21, 2016.

I went to Gainesville High and P.K. Yonge. [P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School is a laboratory school associated with the University of Florida, grades K-12. She attended GHS first, then PKY, then went back to GHS.] My saving grace were my friends, my girlfriends. When I was in junior high, I was in a group called The Villagers. That group probably saved my life from having to be in high school and deal with teachers and rules. We were on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, and we sang at the Miss Universe pageant in Miami. We had quite a career for a group of young girls! This was when folk singing first came out, and we were some of the first folk singers in Gainesville. We sang everywhere. We had all sorts of awards and trophies. We sang at all the women’s clubs and at many local events. I looked at someone’s scrapbook recently and saw that we were usually paid in boxes of candy, and maybe $20, which was a good deal back then! That was in the 1960s. I graduated high school in 1967.

Marrying a Man

I had an older boyfriend that I started dating in high school. I loved Bill; he was the funniest person I had ever met. The Vietnam war was accelerating when he was in college. He was told that if he enlisted, rather than waiting to be drafted, he could be in the band. He was a very good drummer, so he signed up to be in the band, and in two weeks he was on the front lines in Vietnam until he got malaria there. After he recovered, he started a band and he was the first to take entertainment to the fire lines.

When Bill came back from Vietnam, he was completely changed. He was very skinny, and his experience of being with his men and being faced with death really freed him in a way that changed his whole experience. This is scary, and I know it happens in Afghanistan and Iraq today. They are all doing drugs, escaping into a different realm.

We had psychedelic experiences together. Before then, I had felt like I was walking on a line, and I was either going to go all the way down or my whole world would be changed. Everything was changed, for the good. We lived in a world like Sergeant Pepper land. We were extreme hippies, the beautiful people. We lived in a beach house with white carpet and glass hanging shelves. He played in a band. We had a beautiful life. His parents would come by every day after work to the beach house and smoke pot with us. This was at Jupiter Beach in south Florida, Palm Beach County.

I’ve always been fortunate in meeting or being drawn to or by people who are of a different ilk. I used to think all people thought like me, but they don’t, as is so clear now. When we got married, we did everything our own way, like sending in a copy of our marriage license and keeping the original. They said that wasn’t legal but we never did anything about that until four years later when Bill and I broke up. I was going to the Netherlands to go to school, and that’s when I found out I was never officially married. To get my passport, I had to send in my original marriage license because I didn’t have time to do anything else. The marriage was legally finalized after the fact. I think that was 1972.

I left my husband after a trip to the mountains of Georgia, camping on Lake Burton,
with a group of women. We all dropped LSD together and came back lesbians.

Lesbian By Choice

Honestly, I am a lesbian by choice. I wasn’t sexually attracted to women back then. I loved being with my girlfriends, but I didn’t have crushes on them. Most of the women I know aren’t like that, but I know a couple more who are lesbians by choice. When I met the women’s community, it was the first time I felt like a real person. I didn’t feel like a woman or girl who had to be a certain way. I didn’t have to be my husband’s mother or wife and take care of him, or be looked at for being pretty instead of who I was. I felt valued. I felt that people wanted to know what I was thinking and doing and creating. I’d never had that experience with men. That’s why I like to be with women. Now, I’m total lesbian and would never even think of going back. But then, I made the choice and I wished I’d known about it sooner.

Back when I was in high school, the lead singer in our singing group [The Villagers] was having an affair with another member of the band. Rosemary was my best friend and the person who had started the group, and even I didn’t know. It was a disaster. Her mother found one of their love letters. That’s how our group found out about it. Her parents took her out of school and sent her to a psychiatrist who told her she was sick. It ruined her life, and she was in the closet for years. When we met years later, I told her I wished she’d told me, that I wished I had figured out my lesbianism sooner. But for her it was all shame and pain. Nowadays, I would have known immediately that Rose was a dyke, but then I didn’t have a reference. We didn’t know anything about lesbian sex. We didn’t talk about sex at all, or boys. We were just having a great time, and it didn’t have anything to do with sex.

With my other great friend Pat, we practiced dancing together all the time. I never had a high school boyfriend. I wanted to be asked to the proms and dances. I went to the Sophomore Frolics, and that was about it. Later, I had bad boy boyfriends, older than me. Some were college students, some weren’t. I liked to wear really tight, short skirts, stockings. I had a little bit of a bad girl look going, too, when I was young. I was a tough girl.

I left my husband after a trip to the mountains of Georgia, camping on Lake Burton, with a group of women. We all dropped LSD [took a hallucinogenic drug] together and came back lesbians. When we got back, I met lesbians through Christine, who was my husband’s brother’s girlfriend and Dore Rotundo’s secretary. We went out to Melrose, to Corky Culver’s house, the Red House. It’s funny, Christine didn’t go with us. We met those women, and we partied with them solid for an entire month. We went out there every night. We all fell in love with each other and had the most spectacular awakening and time of our lives. It was brilliant. We made art. We talked politics. We took trips. We formed groups and “corporations,” like “Ms. Magic Cornucopia.”  We made groups that went out to earn a living. Corky went to seek opportunity in New York, and Dore and Linda and I drove there to bring her back. Corky and I stayed, and the others returned to Gainesville. I’ll never forget calling up the nursery I cofounded and saying I wasn’t coming back: “I feel well today, I’m not coming in.” [laughter]

Circuitous Route Back to Florida

New York was different then, a bit dark and dreary, but still fun and exciting. There I met Sally, my first girlfriend. Corky had told me about her, and here comes this woman with a Coor’s mountain shirt, big flowing blonde hair, just fresh as a peach. She looks like she’s just walked out of a farm, and here she is in New York. She stuck out like a sore thumb. She had a great apartment, but then she wanted to come to Florida. So, we went to her apartment and most of the stuff we threw out of the window. The good stuff we took [to a place] down the street, the Great American Dream Machine. If people could answer the questions, they’d get a gift. That’s how we got rid of her things.

I met Flash Silvermoon in New York through Corky. The way she did the Tarot was like watching a film. The cards came out like slides. My husband was in it, that it was over. Sally was in it. I said, “Oh, no, no, no. I’m free now. I don’t want to have another relationship for a while.” But she was right. Sally and I got together.

We hitchhiked back to Florida on airplanes. Sally knew how to do this. We’d go to these small airports and ask if anyone was going our direction. We flew with the governor of one of those small New England states, he and his daughter. Sometimes you weren’t even going in the right direction. But it worked out. When rides ran out, I think we were in North Carolina, and we hitchhiked by car the rest of the way to north Florida. I’ll never forget walking up to Dore’s house on the North Forty with Sally!

We had a place on Lake Swan in Melrose. Sally and I formed the “Flying Jumbeanies.” We always were in costume, and called our style of dress “genteel poverty,” made of old velvets from the thrift stores. We performed ridiculous tricks at schools, tricks that were funny because they were ridiculous. We went to Santa Fe Community College when it was the experimental, great, far-out, psychedelic school.

I never would have imagined how boring it would be watching Betty Dodson masturbate.

Women’s Renaissance Festival (1974) and Kampho Femnique Frothingslosh

During the times we got together at the Red House, I thought we should do something for women, so we planned the Women’s Renaissance Festival that was held at the Thomas Center in Gainesville. We had music, art, great workshops. I remember being interviewed by the local TV stations, and we’d be asked why men weren’t allowed. I explained that men could attend, they just weren’t part of the planning or on the program. Everything else was geared toward men. No one was ever asking why don’t you have women on this board or that. That’s why we did it, so women could have an outlet. The festival was a great success. It was wonderful! We even had a parade the day before. My sisters and my mother were in that parade, marching for women.  

After the festival, we wanted to do a follow up so we came up with KFS [sic] (Kampho Femnique Frothingslosh), named for things that rise to the top and slosh over and touch us. We did a women’s retreat at Camp Crystal. There were probably a hundred women who came from everywhere to that retreat. The cooking was great. It was well organized. That place has cabins, and there were workshops on health issues and on things like how to clean house in fifteen minutes or less. We had great fun. We were so nutty back then that we kinda liked the fact that we were the first group thrown out of there –for drinking. You’re not supposed to drink there. They didn’t really throw us out, but we weren’t ever allowed to come back.

When the Gainesville Women’s Health Center hosted Betty Dodson’s masturbation workshop, it was about $50 for the weekend, which was a lot in those days. Sally and I were the only lesbians that group knew, so we got to go for free. They felt it was safer having us there. We showed Betty Dodson around and almost got arrested several times. She was so bizarre. She’d be fanning her vagina, and we’d have to tell her to put her pants on. She wore jeans with her vagina embroidered on the front. The workshop was like a woman’s circle jerk. You do the mirrors with everybody looking at their vagina. First, Betty did a demonstration. There was nothing more boring in your life, her with her vibrator, and we thought she would never come. We ordered a pizza in the middle of it.  Finally, she did. Then everyone had to have a Hitachi vibrator. I’ve always been interested in exploring things a little out of the ordinary, but that was the silliest thing. I never would have imagined how boring it would be watching Betty Dodson masturbate.

Traveling in Europe  

At some point, Sally and I met some Dutch lesbians at Wild Iris Books. They were on an exchange program. That’s when Sally and I got into an exchange program through the University of Florida and went to Holland for over a year. Sally was studying English, and I was studying art. Of course, we traveled around Europe from there, lived in student housing. I went to Artibus Academy, studying art. She went to the Rijks Academy.

I met a Dutch man there, Jan, and we fell madly in love. He’s a real fairy. I don’t mean fey or homosexual. He studied at Findhorn, and he was like a Pan. That was very attractive to me because my leaning has always been towards outdoors and plants. I didn’t do anything about it except feel it, and there was a lot of angst between me and Sally and Jan.

Then there was a tragedy. On December 7, my brother was murdered in the States and we came back. Of course, it was horrible. My whole family, everybody, was changed and affected by this. I didn’t stay with my parents. Probably, I should have. I don’t know. There is no “should.” But eventually I went back to Holland, without Sally, and was with Jan for about a year and traveled to visit relatives in Germany and Switzerland. My friend Pat was living in Spain, so I went and stayed with her for a while. I like to live in a place when I’m travelling. I don’t want to live out of a suitcase. I want a neighborhood.

I came back to Gainesville because I didn’t want to have a little family, or a heterosexual relationship. Jan has visited me in the States and in Thailand. I saw him a few years ago and we still have a very big connection, but I never wanted to be a couple or live with him, probably because I’m a lesbian by choice.

Living in Thailand

In the 1980s, I was planning to go to American Samoa, and got to thinking I’d be in the middle of nowhere there.  I read an article about Thailand, and a good friend of mine had a friend, Fran, who was living in Chaing Mai, the largest city in Thailand. Her husband worked for U.S. Aid so I had a connection. Jane and I stayed with Fran for two weeks, and we just loved her! She was a great artist. Then we found a place with an English doctor who was studying the Huong people. I had a studio there for a year in the 1980s and sold to the foreign community there. I also had a big show, for which the mayor spoke, and my name was printed on a huge banner!

Being an Artist

I’ve always been an artist. This room we’re sitting in was the first bedroom built on to the original family home, for my brother’s and my bedroom. This was a tiny house to begin with. We had been sleeping in the living room on day couches. When they built the upstairs, I finally had my own room, which was apart from them. The whole room was covered with collage. It was an art piece. I have done that ever since, everywhere I go. 

My art form is found object art. I collect everything. I don’t go and buy things for the art. I’ve got to find it, which takes me on many adventures and travels and journeys. I’m always looking for pieces for the work. I’ll see an object, and I’ll know what it will become. Other things are just so interesting I have to have them, and later on it’s revealed to me what it is. I’ve always looked at the world that way, visually. I don’t see the tree or the house, but the shapes and textures. To me, that has been a great opening, to see past what something is referred to or known as.

When I cast women’s breasts, they would talk about them, and I started to take notes.

My first Gainesville studio was on University Avenue above Vidal Drugs. I started casting women’s breasts. How did I get started in that? I think just the shape was so interesting. I wanted to do a sculpture by putting all these pieces together into a huge globe. I don’t know who the first person was, maybe Sally. I didn’t cast it as a mold, but used plaster bandages soaked in water and laid on the body (covered with Vaseline) to dry. You can paint right on that. One time I forgot the Vaseline. It was Randi, and when I pulled the plaster off it had underarm hair stuck to it. That would only happen to Randi.

When I cast women’s breasts, they would talk about them, and I started to take notes. “This one’s bigger,” “this one’s smaller,” “my nipples are inverted” or “too big.” I would write these down while the casts were drying. I was surprised at how many women were not happy with their breasts. My mother, when I cast hers, talked about breast feeding. She was a nurse, and she talked about how you had to teach a baby how to nurse. Everyone had their breast stories, and that became a part of it. Women would call me up, and they wanted to be cast. They wanted to be a part of it, wanted their breasts and their stories in it.

I would write the stories on the inside of the plaster. That part isn’t always going to be seen. To me, a lot of the things I do, it’s there but you don’t see it. Here’s another example. I was the properties designer at the Hippodrome regional theatre here for years. When I would do the actor’s purse, which no one in the audience looked into, it would have inside it a credit card with the character’s name, all the things I would expect to be in it. It made it more real for the actor. It was a certain type of energy.

Most of my work is about the energy of these objects, what they’ve been through, whose pocket they’ve been in, who loved it, who shoved it away in a drawer. These things all have a life, and putting them together captures the energy of the story. That’s what these breasts were about, and those props. Everything I do is about the energy of these things.

In 1993, I had a story and a photo of my art in Ms. Magazine. They published a photo of the “Under the Sink” part of Kitchen Box, which was the worst picture to use.  I had done my entire kitchen as an installation. The sandwiches were money sandwiches. The refrigerator was full of poison that you can buy at the grocery store. Someone brought a curator here, and I did a big show at Neptune Beach.

This is the latest piece that I did [above right]. It has a piece of siding from my friends Susan and Bill’s house. They know I love materials like this, and they gave it to me. There is part of somebody’s roof. This is the sole of a very big shoe that I found on the road. Who walked in those shoes? They walked a lot in them because they walked part of it off!  This is the kind of work I do from found objects.

Working at the Hippodrome (c. 1996-2011)

I was properties designer for the Hippodrome regional theatre for fifteen years. My friend Marilyn Wall was the costumes designer. We’re great friends. We designed a show together where the costumes were props and the props were costumes. I’ve done costumes for a couple of shows that she didn’t want to do, like Night of the Living Dead zombie costumes. I love extreme prop shows, like Alice in Wonderland. That was one of the most fabulous prop shows ever.I did a birthday cake for that with cigarette butts for candles. We did an adult version, where the food was rotted with maggots. It was gross and beautiful. I like using my imagination to turn something into something else. I was the curator for the gallery at the Hippodrome. I brought Tennessee Williams’ false teeth to it and a painting that Tennessee Williams did. When we did Anne Frank, I brought the Holocaust traveling show to the gallery. I curated my own show at the Thomas Center.

After fifteen years, I was done. I thought we could creatively be so much more but the leadership was afraid to step outside of any boundary. It was always about money. If you put out, it’ll come back, but it didn’t happen at that time. Now it’s changed.  My good friend Lauren Caldwell Warhol is the artistic director there now, and I freelance for her. I did costume design for their most recent show, Women in Jeopardy.  Now I work freelance for the theatre, which I like better. When I get back from Asia, I’ll be designing shows there, and I hope I’ll be doing a lot of costume design.

Adventures with Women

When nothing is familiar, there’s such a freedom to be who you are
without being affected by the daily grind.  Travel is very freeing.

With every girlfriend, I’ve had a big adventure. Sally and I went to the Netherlands and lived in Europe. Jane and I lived in Thailand for a year. Jennifer and I went to Africa. Julie and I are going to Southeast Asia, and we’ve traveled a lot.  Travel is my vehicle for processing and advancing. I find that you have so much growth when you’re outside of your day-to-day habit that we don’t even know we’re stuck in. When nothing is familiar, there’s such a freedom to be who you are without being affected by the daily grind.  Travel is very freeing. You get years of experience in one year. That’s my personal experience of it.

Wrapping Up

I have been a feminist activist. I’ve been to the marches on Washington, the Kampho Femnique, the Women’s Renaissance Festival. All of that was radical feminist politics. Now I feel more identified as an artist, and I would say I’m a pantheist. That’s what matters to me. I guess I always will be a radical feminist, but not so much an activist. I’m more an activist for the environment. I’m not a separatist anymore, and I used to be. I still don’t have a lot of men friends and I don’t seek them out. I’m not crazy about men, but we all find individual ones that we know, the nice men that are out there, like your girlfriends’ husbands.

Working at the theatre and collaborating with different designers, [I find that] most of the heavies there are women. The lighting designer, Bob, and the men in the shop, I love. They are fine, lovely people. I don’t socialize with them, but I’d vouch for them.

Last year, I was supposed to die of pancreatic cancer and I kind of let everything go.
I thought, at least I don’t have to worry about my taxes this year!

Dying

Last year, I was supposed to die of pancreatic cancer and I kind of let everything go. I thought, at least I don’t have to worry about my taxes this year! I’m terrible about paperwork and dates. I really am about being in the present, which gets in my way a lot. I’ve got a huge basket of papers from just what happened last year. I keep having this huge, opening-up experiences. Dying last year was the last one I had. That was huge. It was beautiful. I would never give up that experience. I was ecstatic a lot of the time. I thought, now here’s the next big adventure, but then I thought, we’re all going to have that adventure. I just don’t have to have it right now.

This interview has been edited for archiving by the interviewer and interviewee. It has been edited and updated for posting on this website. 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:

Barbara Esrig, Robin Toler, and Rose Norman, “Lesbian Feminist Visual Artists in Gainesville, FL,” Sinister Wisdom 104 (Spring 2017): 113-21.

Website: loreleiesser.com 

Facebook: www.facebook.com/iconcoctions

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iconcoctions/?hl=en

Ms. Magazine, vol. 4, no. 2, November 9, 1993, p. 84, and photo inside front cover.

A Tour of Art in Lorelei Esser’s Home in 2016

After the recorded interview, Lorelei took Rose on a tour of the art in her home. Here we pair photos Rose took that day with photos of the art from Lorelei’s website, loreleiesser.com, which was still live in 2023.