Mary Dean Carter: Cofounder of Richmond Lesbian Feminists

Interviewed by phone by Rose Norman on August 22, 2017

“I ain’t no radicallesbianmanhatincastratinballbustinbulldyke.
But I love womyn.”

A feminist organization that I believe Beth helped to start, or at least, she was one of the main organizers in it, the Organization for Women’s Liberation (OWL), is where I first met and got to know Beth. Also, in my junior year of college, I took a class called “female psychology,” and I developed a feminist consciousness. It helped me to be able to put words to some of the things that I had seen and had experienced. And it was also when I began to get in touch with, and/or acknowledge, that I had feelings for women. It was kind of a dual thing there with the feminist and the… well, at that point in time, I was calling myself bisexual.

RN: In college, did you come out as a lesbian?

MDC: I was putting my toe in the water. Let’s put it that way. It was a process for me. I did have relationships with men. I didn’t know how to meet other women, really. I tried going to some bars and things of that sort, identifying as bisexual. I did get into a relationship with a man. We lived together for a few years, eventually getting married. We had kind of an open relationship, where we both acknowledged our bisexuality. 

I had just graduated from college in 1974. At the same time [as that relationship with a man], I started doing some things in 1975 with the Richmond Lesbian Feminists (RLF). In the very beginning with them, bisexuality was my identity. I had gotten divorced fairly shortly after getting married, and I had another relationship with a man for a couple of years. 

Then in 1980, I had my first, primary relationship with a woman. I had also dated women in that period, say from 1975 to 1980. However, I did not have a primary relationship with a woman until 1980. That’s when I realized that my true leanings and feelings, emotionally and physically, were with women and for women. I have identified as lesbian ever since then. 

RN: Do you think that feminist organizations in college, like Organizing for Women’s Liberation, might have been the start of your feminist activism?

MDC:  Yes, I believe it probably was.

RN:  Were you an activist in any other way, like civil rights, the environment, or peace?

MDC:  Not until I got involved in RLF in 1975, a year after graduating from college in 1974.

RN: Was your activism almost entirely channeled through RLF then?

MDC:  I would say yes. Once I was involved in RLF, I started finding out about other things to be involved in, like Take Back the Night marches. I think Richmond WomensBooks was a group that Beth Marschak mentioned to you, too. I was a board member of Richmond WomensBooks. I stayed involved in that group until it basically disbanded. That was a very active group for a while. We had a book co-op. We ordered books and sold books.

The bookstore that we had here was Labrys Books. Terri Barry was one of the founders of that. That was one of the reasons behind the idea for Richmond WomensBooks. I think a lot of people felt a big void after Labrys Books closed here, and Richmond WomensBooks was a way of trying to fill that void.

I did have a little stint in the National Organization for Women, NOW, in 1976, I think. I was a program coordinator for them for a short time. I got a little bit disillusioned with them. I felt as if they weren’t as inclusive of lesbians as I would have liked. [That’s changed since 1976, when NOW began embracing lesbians as leaders.]

Even though a lot of women in NOW were lesbians, some of them were very closeted. At the time, it wasn’t as much of an “out there” kind of organization. I felt that their focus was passing the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment. There was also a feeling that some of the group might be a bit homophobic – or not quite comfortable with lesbians in their midst, or even with women who didn’t identify as straight.  This made me become less involved with NOW and more involved with RLF.

RN: It’s interesting that you say that. You were involved with RLF while you were still married [to a man] and identifying as “bi.”

MDC:  Yes, it was interesting because the very first meeting where RLF got started was at the conference for the Virginia Women’s Political Caucus. I read about it in the local newspaper where I saw Beth Marschak’s name. Beth was giving a workshop on lesbian rights, and thought, “Oh, cool. I’ll go to that.” And I did, and RLF grew out of that workshop. At first, it was going to be a state-wide organization. It quickly reached a point where we knew it was going to work better if we just made it a local group. That’s my recollection of how RLF got started.

I was pretty open about identifying as bisexual at that point. I remember that around 1975, I had gone to that conference with long hair, makeup, and my platform sandals. I remember shyly raising my hand, asking, “Can bisexuals be part of this group, too?” And someone else bravely raised her hand and said, “I’m in that category, as well.” I remember Beth saying that this is for women-loving-women. I can’t remember the exact phrase that was used. However, it was very clear that bisexuality wasn’t going to be a problem.

RN: When I interviewed some women in Durham, North Carolina, the topic of bisexuality came up. Whenever bisexuality came up, separatism came up too; that is, whether to allow men at events.

MDC: Respecting the women-only space and acknowledging the need for that was never questioned. I never really had a desire to bring any men to events. I guess on occasion, a man would show up at a NOW meeting or something, but that was pretty rare. And RLF was always women-only.

RN: Did you take any kind of leadership role during those early years with RLF?

MDC: You know, I never really thought of myself as the leader, I guess, partially because we had a very non-hierarchical type of structure. All decisions were made in a collaborative way through consensus. I didn’t really have the desire to be a leader. I did take a more active role in some aspects of the RLF.

I always had a tendency to focus more on building our community and on outreach, and those kinds of things. My real interest was what we called the Richmond Lesbian Feminists Flyer, which was the RLF newsletter. They were always looking for volunteers to help out. I volunteered. Then, over time, I became more involved in writing articles.

We would get together in someone’s living room, kitchen, dining room, whichever place had the most room. We’d have typewriters and a long table, and people would type up articles. Next, we cut the articles out, and we selected images that we thought might make it attractive. In those days [before home computers], we actually did the layout and paste-up, literally, and we had to take it to a print shop. When we got it back from the printer, we brought it to somebody else’s house to do the page collating, the stapling, the folding. After that, we stuffed it into the envelopes. And then, we took it to the post office. It was quite the ordeal!

RN: And it was a social thing.

MDC: Yes, it was. And it’s interesting, when I think of it now, and of all the technology that’s available, it’s like, “Wow!” We didn’t have any of that. It was a lot more of a cumbersome process then. For me, the idea was getting the word out to people that others like us existed, and that people didn’t have to live their lives alone, or live their lives in a vacuum, or feel as if they were the only one, or feel isolated. That was the heart of why I really felt more drawn to doing the RFL newsletter. If we got the message to only one person, the message that they weren’t by themselves, and that there were others like them, to me, it was worth it.

RN: Yes, that’s a good message. Nobody has said anything quite as good as you just did about how important it was to get the word out, that they weren’t alone.

MDC: Oh, thank you, yes. That was where my heart was. It was important to me to help somebody understand that they weren’t alone.

RN: How long did you work on The Flyer, and what were some of the other events that you worked on regularly?

MDC: Off and on, from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, I worked on The Flyer. I think we all go through periods in our lives when we are less active or more active.

Other activities that I was involved in had to do with First Friday Potlucks. We started those fairly regularly on the first Fridays of the month. We also had dances. The Friends [Quakers] Meeting House was kind enough to allow us to use their facility for dances. And we had dances probably about once a month, once every other month, and then, we also… I don’t remember the very first one we had. It was fairly early on when we started having New Year’s Eve dances. Those went on for a number of years. We recently found out that we lost the place where we’d been having our New Year’s Eve dance for many, many years. It was at a community center.

RN: The New Year’s Eve dance was not at the Friends Meeting House?

MDC: No, we had to have those at a community center that we rented. It was a bigger space. We stopped having the dances at the Friends Meeting House, I would say, in the 1980s. We started branching out and going to people’s homes. When Mary Gay Hutcherson came on the scene, of course, she was the social butterfly. She had a nice, large home, large enough to hostess parties for event like ours. She was always very generous, and that was a nice happenstance for our community.

RN: Were you ever involved in partnering with other organizations? I’m particularly thinking about Black women and women of color because that was an issue we discussed.

MDC: We were a group that believed in building coalitions and reaching out to other groups. We also did various things with other organizations from time to time. I know that we worked with the YWCA at times because one of their missions was to eliminate racism. We reached out to some other groups, too.

In the 1980s, there was a group, Women of Color, something like that [Lesbian Women of Color, LWOC], and Terrie Pendleton was involved in that group. I know our two groups worked together from time to time to try to blend some social activities as well as some political activism. It was kind of spotty, I will have to say, as far as any real consistency for getting Black women involved. I think we did reach out. Terrie could probably give a better synopsis of that than I have.

RN: Oh, yes. We’ve got Terrie Pendleton’s story, and it’s quite interesting.

MDC: I do feel that RLF definitely made efforts to reach out, to be inclusive and supportive of other organizations that had concerns about civil rights, and things of that nature.

RN: What about finances? Did the organization charge dues? If so, what did you use them for?

MDC: For a long time, we had a sliding-scale policy for The Flyer and for all of our events. In fact, at one point, I remember the issue getting contentious in the mid to late 1980s. There was a group of women who strongly felt that we needed to bolster our finances and raise costs for things. And there was another group of us women who were worried that raising the cost would exclude certain women. I was one of the women who worried about women being excluded due to cost.

We managed to come to a consensus about that, and we did decide to maintain the policy of everyone paying on a sliding scale. As far as the nitty gritty of the finances, I was never the treasurer or in charge of that. I knew more about other areas. We also raised money from subscriptions to the newsletter and from charging money for dances; and both of those things on a sliding-scale basis.

RN: It wasn’t a big deal except for that one time, right?

MDC: Yes, and I think that we were lucky, too, that we had people who were generous as far as donating to The Flyer. They were some who would pay more if they could. I think people were fairly honest when it came to that.

RN:  The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) comes to mind. It lasted for 22 years, The reason it finally failed was financial. They had bought a house, adding financial responsibilities that became unsustainable. ALFA lasted from 1972 to 1994, and they fell apart over finances. Your organization was always meeting in homes or in meeting spaces.

MDC: Yes, we never made any type of big, financial commitment like that. We never tried to do anything of that nature. At one point there was a talk of having a community center, a lesbian community center. They had various fundraisers for it, and there were some funds raised. It was never enough to really start a women’s center. At some point, it was decided that since Diversity Richmond was essentially meeting some of those needs as far as a community center was concerned, we should give the money to them even though they weren’t specifically a woman’s organization. And that was a point that was contentious, too. Some people felt that the money should go specifically to a women’s organization or a women’s group. I think Mary Gay Hutcherson had a large role in raising the funds. She very strongly felt it should go to Diversity Richmond. Eventually, some that were not in agreement finally consented.

RN: It reminds me that Durham, North Carolina, also had something called Our Own Place, which was a women’s center. They rented space for it. They had to raise $1100 a month. I don’t know how long they did it. That also went bust due to finances.

MDC: Durham also had a women’s book store at one point because I remember going to it, and I can’t remember what it was called.

RN: Southern Sisters.

MDC: Southern Sisters, that’s right. And I never will forget. I went there, and they had a t-shirt that I loved. I believe it said, “Southern Feminists: Not an Oxymoron,” or something like that. I wore that one out and about for a long time. I always chuckled when I put on that t-shirt.

RN: I’m impressed that the Richmond Lesbian Feminists organization is still around. I know it’s been up and down in terms of how active it was. As far as I can tell, there’s no other lesbian-feminist organization in the South with that kind of longevity, maybe not even one in the country. That’s a very long time, yet I had never heard of Richmond Lesbian Feminists before. I was impressed when I finally contacted Beth Marschak, who told me that the RLF had a 40^th anniversary party. I wish I could have attended.

MDC: That would have been awesome if you could have come because at one point, we sat there, and people talked about their memories. Supposedly, someone recorded those conversations that we had. Who did it and where it is, I don’t know.

RN: Some of it is online. I have found some things online that were recordings. I think it’s on the RLF website.* It’s been about a year since I looked. I did those interviews in 2015, and I think Bobbi Weinstock might have been the one who told me to look for them. [They have a Facebook page only. Recordings not found yet.] How has Richmond Lesbian Feminists changed since you started, and how has it affected your life?

MDC: Wow, good question. I think one of the most obvious changes is the fact that when we started, we had a lot to work toward, forty years in the making. And in 2014, we finally got the legal right to marry. Sometimes, it takes a lot of patience and a lot of persistence to keep at it. You don’t always see your results right away.

I think now we’re starting – at least we were until this last election [in 2016] – starting to see some results of our efforts. It’s really nice to see that after all those years of marching. RLF was also involved in supporting the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights in 1987. And at the march in 1993, we had a contingent of people there actually marching behind the RLF banner, if I’m not mistaken.

There are recordings of women made in one of the days of our 40th RLF celebration. We went around in a circle that day and recited our memories. Here are links to those recordings: http://www.gayrva.com/tag/richmond-lesbian-feminists ; https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2015/07/celebrating-40-years-richmond-lesbian-feminists-were-there-for-the-best-and-worst-of-times/

RN: If you had a picture of that, that would help.

MDC: I do have one of us marching. I don’t think the banner is in the picture. I also have one of myself with my former partner marching.

That’s something else I wanted to mention: my former partner. Her name is Beverly Rainey, and she’s in Alaska now. She probably wasn’t contacted about doing an interview, but she was active in producing The Flyer, around the time that they changed over from “meeting in somebody’s kitchen, typing up articles, cutting and pasting” to desktop publishing. She was our computer person, doing that for The Flyer for maybe three or four years, and she was also the editor.

I was always more focused on women’s organizations and organizations that were directly looking at the causes for women and lesbians. Bev was someone who worked with organizations with gay guys too. She was one of the women who worked in mixed groups with gay men. I didn’t find it as easy as she did… let’s put it that way.

At the same time, there was a newspaper in Richmond called the Richmond Pride, The Richmond Gay and Lesbian Newspaper, that grew out of an organization that was a gay and lesbian organization here called Virginia Gay Rights Association, or something like that (I’m not sure of the exact name). It’s funny how these things will slip out of your mind.

RN: True, some people who are more interested in women’s issues tend to downplay the lesbian issues. The women’s liberation group in Gainesville, Florida, had Judith Brown in it, and she stayed closeted. She’s the one who wrote half of the influential Florida Paper, “Towards a Female Liberation Movement.” Yet she thought that the gay issues and the lesbian issues undermined the women’s issues. That’s why she stayed closeted.

MDC: Oh, my goodness, she was closeted? Well, how interesting. I feel as if now, we’re in a backlash of that, even in our own communities. We are still living under a patriarchy. I feel that women’s needs and issues always seem to take a back seat. I feel that a lot of the time, and as if feminists are becoming obsolete. I don’t hear people using the “L” word very much anymore.

A newer generation has come along, and they’re using other words for themselves. Lesbian isn’t one of them. It’s a little disconcerting for me. There’s a book written by Bonnie Morris, The Disappearing L. She writes about this and about the disappearance of not only lesbians, but also women’s spaces. I kind of feel the way she does in that book, as far as all that is concerned. It’s just that patriarchy isn’t going away any time soon. We still have to keep women’s and lesbian’s rights in the forefront. We can’t lose ground on that.

RN: I agree with that, too. Are you at all active with RLF now? If they have parties, do you go?

MDC: Well, I’m not as active as before. Right now, we have some discussion groups. A lot of times, there aren’t as many people. We’re having a little trouble bringing in new people. Again, I think it’s from not wanting to identify with that word “lesbian.” The interpretation of that word seems to be that it’s too exclusive or something. To me, a lesbian is a lesbian. There’s really no other word for it. You can call it whatever, but it’s still the same thing, you know?

I don’t know if we’re becoming obsolete to the younger generation. We’re not cool enough for them or not cool enough for the millennials. They want to kind of reinvent the whole thing. You can’t reinvent the wheel in my opinion. It is what it is. It’s as if they want to rebrand it, repackage it, and call it something else. It’s Lesbian with a big “L,” sorry about that. And I do mean that very cynically, as if something about the “L” word is not allowed. I guess that what’s bothering me about it.  Now, it feels as if I’m being erased, my herstory and everything that I worked for all through the years. It’s like being put on the sidelines or something. The word “woman” and the word “lesbian” – they’ve got to still be there.

RN:  In Durham, the Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists (TALF) ended in the 1990s. Lately, when working on the story about it for Sinister Wisdom, the organizers were getting together with each other again, collecting reminiscences. Something came up about these younger lesbians who think about the 1970s and ‘80s as an awful time, a time when things were really terrible. And the woman that I was interviewing said, “Yeah, but we had a good time. We were enjoying ourselves. It wasn’t such a horrible time to be alive. These younger lesbians have this really wrong idea of what it was like.”

MDC: It sort of feels as if they are enjoying the fruits of our labors. And yet, they really don’t want us to have any credit for it.

RN: She said that they seem to think that she was criticizing them because they weren’t like us. She didn’t think she had said anything critical of them. She was just telling them that it wasn’t really the way she herself had experienced the 1970s and ‘80s. It was not all a grim and awful time. They had a lot of fun doing all that activism.

MDC: What’s that quote, is it Emma Goldman? “If you can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” It’s that whole thing, you know, how oppressed peoples through centuries and eons have always found ways to enjoy life and to have a sense of community. Even though you can do both, that is what I’m saying. You can fight for your rights, and you can have enjoyment and pleasure, too. There was certainly plenty of that. We all had lovers, and many of us were serial monogamists. When I was 54, I met my soul mate. We’ve been together 10 years now. We even got married in 2014 when it became legal here in Virginia.

RN: What a way to conclude to this interview. Is there anything else you wanted to say?

MDC: There’s so much I must have left out. I mean, there was a women’s coffee house, and there were issues about women-only space, and I was going to read you a poem I wrote about that.

RN: Oh, yes. Read me the poem. [See Mary Dean Carter’s poem below at the end of this interview.]

MDC: Well, I don’t have it right this second. One thing that I did write about the prom, though. When I went back through my flyers, I remember seeing this. “Spring Prom Reflection: backless evening gowns, black stockings, orchid corsages, purple ties, suspenders, lace shawls, jeans, t-shirts, crazy hats, long beads, glitter, and fun. Wonderful women at the prom. I loved you all!”

RN: That would make an excellent caption for a prom photo.

MDC: That was just a little reflection that I had. My poem was about women-only space. If I locate that, I may be able to send you a copy of it.

RN: Thank you. We could certainly include it in the archives.

MDC: That would be wonderful. All right, I guess that’s it.

RN: And if you have a picture of the women’s coffee house…

MDC: All I have is a flyer that was advertising it, and it’s got a little hole in the center of it. It says, “Music, Art, Poetry: Everywoman’s Coffeehouse, Friday, May 15. Craft by the Hand Workshops, Quiche by WCA. $1.50 donation.” It must be from 1981 because that’s what the postmark says on the back of it.

RN: That’s very helpful.

MDC: Thank you, again. I enjoyed it.

RN: Me, too. Thank you.

*Here is the poem that Mary Dean Carter sent us:

Separatism: Puttingitalltogether
by Mary Dean Carter

I ain’t no radicallesbianmanhatincastratinballbustinbulldyke.

But I love womyn  

And my own spaces  

Away from them who own  

A lot of places.

And tell me I can’t come in  

Because I’m a radicallesbianmanhatincastratinballbustinbulldyke.

And there are womyn who call me that too  

Because I want to be alone with them.

I don’t hate men really  

I just love womyn  

And if that means I’m a radicallesbianmanhatincastratinballbustinbulldyke  

Then where in hell are my boots?  

This interview has been edited for archiving by the interviewer and interviewee, close to the time of the interview. More recently, 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.