My environmental activist side has never gone away. It’s just that for a number of years, feminist activism took precedence. I feel as if I’m coming home now, coming back these last fifteen years or so, to farming, studying, research, and growing things.

Martine Giguère looking cool in 1985, at the New England Women’s Musical Retreat. Photo by Beth Karbe

Martine’s Pagoda memories: the ocean, carpentry, and collaboration with lesbians there, which “got me on my feet and gave a direction to my life.” 

Mindy Dyke sought out the dykes when she moved from the Bronx to Miami when she was twenty-two, and did she ever find them!

Yer Girlfriend was a Louisville-based, lesbian band active from 1989 to 1996, with reunion concerts as recently as 2015. They recorded three albums: “We Won’t Be Silent!” (1989), “L-word Spoken Here” (1992), and “Not Afraid to Love” (1995), all published by Esther Records. In 2015, Rose Norman interviewed the two founders of the band, Carol Kraemer and Laura Shine. Four songs by Carol Kraemer are posted online at Sinister Wisdom (sinisterwisdom.org/YerGirlfriend), and Sinister Wisdom uses one of them, “The L-Word,” to begin and end Zoom readings from each new issue of this quarterly journal of lesbian arts and literature.