CHAPTER 3 - TOPIA

The 29 photographs that make up Barbara Hammer's 2017 exhibition Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979, at Company Gallery in New York City, have often been described as 'utopic', or, in the case of an essay by the artist A.L. Steiner for the exhibition's accompanying catalogue – as 'heterotopic': a world within a world, othered. They are dynamic visions that encapsulate the hopes of a moment: unabashedly joyful, sexy and brimming with curiosity. 

But what was brewing culturally, politically and socially behind these photographs?

In this chapter of New Friend, we trace Barbara Hammer's artistic and personal trajectory through the waning thrust of 20th century utopian aspirations, from the hippie and back-to-the-land movement to 1970s lesbian feminism and separatism, and then towards Hornby Island—an island so often associated with, and troubled by its utopian reputation.

Listener discretion: This chapter of New Friend contains themes relating to racist and settler colonial violence, transphobic and homophobic histories, and outdated terms relating to gender and sexuality.

New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the story behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer. The photographs were taken over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich.

Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project.

In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):

• Nym Hughes
• Barbara Hammer
• Audre Lorde
• Derek Anderson
• Scott Watson
• Judith Lawrence
• Clair Cronia
• Persimmon Blackbridge
• Elaine Savoie
• Bonita Wexler
• Annie Martin
• The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
• Barbara Hammer's diary entries are voiced by Martha Ross.

Excerpts from the following sources can also be heard within this chapter, whenever possible with permission from the author/copyright holder, and otherwise under Fair Use:

• Nym Hughes reading from A.L. Steiner's essay in Truant: Photographs, 1970-1979 (Capricious, 2017).
• Michel Foucault, Les Heterotopies, France culture, December 7 and 11, 1966, produced by Robert Valette.
• An Oral History with Barbara Hammer, interviewed by Svetlana Kitto, recorded for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 2018
• Lesbian Sisters: Getting Together in the Lesbian Community, July 1973, Courtesy of Radio Pacifica.
• Beth Elliot, Good Time, 1976 (Buried Treasure, 2005).
• Kathy Fire, City on Fire, 1978 (Songs of Fire: Songs of a Lesbian Anarchist by Kathy Fire, 1978).
• Barbara Hammer, recordings at UCLA West Coast Lesbian Conference, April 1973 (from the recording "Kate Millett, Audre Lorde, UCLA First Lesbian Conference, part of X soundtrack, 1973", Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University).
• Barbara Hammer, Sisters, 1974.
• Barbara Hammer, Tender Fictions, 1996.
• Good Morning America, Hornby Island report.

Credits:

• Hosted by Bitsy Knox.
• Production, research, script and sound design by Bitsy Knox.
• Mixing and mastering by Robert Steenkamer. 
• New Friend was originally aired on Cashmere Radio Berlin and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.
• Cover image courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer.
• New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thank you to:

• The Estate of Barbara Hammer
• Hornby Island Community Archives
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Cashmere Radio, Berlin
• 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
• KOW, Berlin
• Company Gallery, New York City
• Florrie Burke
• Louky Keijsers Koning 
• Martha Ross
• Derek Anderson
• Rebecca Dunne
• Emma Walter
• Emily Harrison
• All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral land of the K'omoks First Nation, the Eitsen, Pentlach, Sasitla and Sahtloot peoples.

Go here to learn more about the work of Barbara Hammer, including upcoming screenings and events.

Bitsy Knox is an artist, editor, radio producer and writer. She grew up on the unceded and ancestral territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She is based in Berlin, Germany. Follow her on Instagram here.

For more information, and to support independent community radio, visit Cashmere Radio and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_24 0:01

Trigger warning. This episode contains themes and language relating to racist and settler colonial violence, transphobic and homophobic histories, and outdated terms relating to gender and sexuality. Listener discretion is advised.

SPEAKER_17 0:20

The conquest of utopia is impossibility, a place that does not exist, an etymological quote, not place. Haterotopia is the place of hammer's photographs. Other, another different place.

SPEAKER_24 0:57

Chapter three, Utopia. Utopia, a literal no place, was named by Sir Thomas More in 1516, 24 years after Christopher Columbus first landed on an island in the Bahamas named Guanahani, which he named San Salvador. The notion of utopia has existed in the North American imagination since the beginning of settler colonialism. That the outdated and cramped edifices of the so-called old world could be shed in favor of a new and more perfect society, an Eden as constructed as the whiteness that settlers would harness in their rapacious exploitation and expropriation of land, resources, and people. The vision of a more just and beautiful world for some, in other words, would come at the expense of others. In 1966 and 67, the French philosopher Michel Foucault began to outline his vision of heterotopia as a physical representation of utopia, a world within a world, a place of otherness, of difference, of heterogeneity. He uses a mirror to describe the relationship between heterotopia and utopia. A mirror is a virtual place, a reflection or perhaps projection of oneself, and thus is a utopia. But it's also a heterotopia in that it is a real object, one that is connected to its surroundings. There are heterotopias of time, like museums, heterotopias of deviation, like prisons and social movements, and heterotopias of ritual or purification, like a beach. The origins of North American utopianism can be traced right back to the first ships from Europe. But it really took off at the dawn of photography in the early 19th century, when, partially inspired by Shaker communities a century earlier, intentional communities began to pop up, built on ideals of collective and communal living. Ideals that would re-emerge again in the late 1960s, as many young artists, hippies, and radicals left urban centers for rural areas.

SPEAKER_21 3:50

Is that there is a very large group. I'm talking about the church of the health, the opportunity for extreme. The establishment does not offer anything. The only place for those two people is part of a huge organization. And nothing has been offered.

SPEAKER_24 4:18

In the late 1960s, Barbara Hammer and her then husband Clay were two such people moving to Sonoma County in California to build a homestead of their own adjacent to other famous hippie communes.

SPEAKER_07 4:35

We bought land in Sonoma County for $1,000 an acre. We had six thousand six acres with a creek, a live creek going through it for six thousand dollars. We drew our own plans, we had them approved by the county. We dug out our own basement and we built a two-story house there, large. While doing this, we built ourselves a shower out of a redwood tree that we would put in a metal water container and heat with a wood fire so we could have hot water. We dug our own well. Um we were radical. I wanted him to blow up the Bank of America. The hippies were active at the time. They were confronting the bourgeois America in kind of the same way that the 1% movement did, which I support, but there was more violence attached. I hadn't looked at her yet. What I was doing was reading biographies because suddenly I had become a bit trapped as a housewife. Her house wasn't finished. Most houses don't get finished at the builders built. But we were living in it. And people would come over, interesting neighbors, poets, different artists, other people interesting people. And the men would congregate and I would serve the coffee. I was getting stuck in a housewife role. And even if the women came over, I wasn't a feminist yet. I would prefer to hang out with the guys because they might be talking physics. Something more interesting. And what the women were talking about. I didn't really give them much of a chance. But the hippies moved in. They moved out of Hay Ashbury into the neighborhoods around us. Morning Star Ranch was born where a lot of the famous hippies went. And closer to us in Sonola County, where we were, was Bill Walker's ranch. Bill was a painter and rich. I mean he lived like a hippie with his wife, but they opened their land to anybody. And so there'd be big school buses on there and dilapidated trucks parked. And I used to hang out there. I started going there and teaching school to the kids because the parents weren't LSD.

SPEAKER_09 7:12

To me, she never expressed a utopian view. Uh I mean, it was always wonderful for her to be surrounded by female energy and women and women's bodies and uh the diversity in women's bodies. So she just was not at all about that. It was more just uh how women inhabited their bodies. I don't think I ever heard any kind of reference to a utopian point of view.

SPEAKER_07 7:56

It's um fascinating and curious and fortunate for me that I came out at a time when a lot of women were coming out. It was the same time I was coming out as an artist, and I had decided to be a filmmaker rather than a painter. I came out with a woman, not knowing I was a lesbian, but being part of a woman's circle, and making a trip to San Francisco from Santa Rosa where I was teaching, and sitting next to her while we were watching Ken Kissis. One flew over the cuckoo's nest, her leg touched my own, and I felt this incredible rush, erotic rush, just through our knees. And I thought, oh my god, I'd never felt this for a woman before. I, or even that much for a man as I can remember. And I decided right then I can act on I can act on this or ignore it. I decided to act on it. And so Marie A. Shaw and I went back to my place in Santa Rosa and spent the night and were still up to see the dawn. I became a lesbian.

SPEAKER_24 9:31

It's spring 1973 in California. Roe vs. Wade, protecting a woman's right to abortion, had just passed in January. The Paris Peace Accords, ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, also were signed in January 1973, although soldiers were still being conscripted well into June. The wounded knee occupation is ongoing, with members of the Oglala, Lakota, and American Indian movement occupying the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following the murder of Buddy Lamont by federal officers. Watergate is reaching a climax. Stephen Biko has just been banned by the South African apartheid government. And in China, the Cultural Revolution is in full effect. Up and down the west coast of North America, from California to British Columbia, a counterculture is in bloom. The social experiments that had hatched out of the 1960s hippie civil rights and student movements are becoming established, with communes, intentional communities, and backed land movements sprouting in rural areas. In the cities, there are consciousness-raising groups, raps, meetings, festivals, and marches. New age philosophy, infused with psychedelics and ancient and eastern philosophy, provides aesthetic. But from within the guise of countercultural expression, of experimentation, and world-building, lies an imbalance in which the liberation of historically marginalized groups is placed at odds with these social and political movements organized by the white university-educated bourgeoisie. I look for Barbara and Terry in these interest dises.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

She told me something really interesting once about San Francisco in that period, and and she said that, you know, those of us who were in Berkeley who were so politicized, who were so interested in political change, we did not respect the the hate-ash gray hippies who were um you know just all there for sex and drugs and rock and roll. I mean that this this is supposed to be a movement that was supposed to change the world, not just make yourself feel good all the time, right? And and the reason I mentioned that is I think that if she found someone in San Francisco like Barbara who was an intellectual peer, was you know somebody who was interesting and dynamic and had something to offer Volcarry in the world, well then pursue that, you know, why not why not engage with that? Um and so it makes sense that they you know could have had a connection.

SPEAKER_24 12:48

Four years after Stonewall, 1973 becomes a pivotal year for gay liberation. By December, both Canada and the US will permanently remove homosexuality from their registers of mental disorders. Seminal gay and lesbian books, movies, record labels, and small presses emerge. For the lesbian community, there's Olivia Records, Amazon Quarterly, and NIAD Press in the US, The Circle in New Zealand, Press Gang in British Columbia, Canada, landmark lesbian literature, including Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation, Rita May Brown's Ruby Fruit Jungle, Audrey Lorde's From A Land Where Other People Live, and Monique Whitting's Le Corps Lesbienne are all published in 1973. But from within the gay and women's liberation movements, the Lavender Tide, lesbian feminism is simultaneously flourishing and fracturing. There are the lesbian separatists, radical lesbians, lesbian socialists, lesbian academics, black lesbians, third-world lesbians, lesbian mothers. I search for Barbara and Terry through their events. The festivals, the conferences, the protests, the demonstrations, the concerts, the readings, the screenings, the lectures, the workshops, the consciousness-raising meetings, the raps.

SPEAKER_04 14:30

Hey, a group of us are going to be a little bit more. I really like your article.

SPEAKER_17 14:36

Can we get together sometime and talk about it?

SPEAKER_04 14:39

What's the colour?

SPEAKER_25 14:46

Can I be in your consciousness raising group tonight? That was a great catch. You made a softball. Don't we vote in the same garage? I can't afford to buy a lesbian nation. Can I come up? We're doing a radio show. Would you like to come?

SPEAKER_24 15:03

On April 13th and 14th, the West Coast Lesbian Conference takes place at UCLA, organized by Kate Millette, the lesbian feminist writer and a new friend of Barbara's. The event marks a controversial moment in lesbian feminism in which the trans musician and activist Beth Elliott is forcibly ejected and accused of rape by audience members who assert that she is not welcome at the conference due to her gender assignment at birth. On the second day, the poet and activist Robin Morgan gives a transphobic speech, one of many that would contribute to the historic fissure between queer women who are welcoming trans and non-binary folks within lesbian discourse and those who would come to be defined as TERF or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Barbara Hammer is at the West Coast Lesbian Conference at the behest of Kate Millette. She documents the event's proceedings on her Bolex. Her 1974 film Sisters will emerge from the footage of this day.

SPEAKER_23 16:17

Sister, sister, sister, sister, sister, sister. Please quiet down for just a second. A large number of women got together this evening because we felt very unconnected to what had been happening since we've been at the conference. And we feel like a lot of us would like to get to know more different people and a chance to talk to people in smaller groups. And to um have the opportunity to find out what it is we'd like to know from each other.

SPEAKER_24 16:52

Barbara writes about the incident with Beth Elliott in her diary, but does not include mention of it in the film.

SPEAKER_10 16:59

We were back from the convention of hissing and booing, of outrageous screaming and incompatible and incomparable invectives. The divisive nation of lesbians, the woman hating women whose ideologies and blind hate ran far in advance of their compassion. The transsexual guitarist appearance that split the sisters into argument and frustration, rushing to the defense of the shaken woman slash man who sat on the stage with proud, fierce arms of the mistress of God around her shoulders. East Bay Dykes, with their metal chains hanging from belts, with knives where guns should be, challenged the unorthodoxy of men in their presences. Men at a lesbian conference.

SPEAKER_20 18:28

White feminists and lesbians should render their own histories, subjectivities, and writing complex by attending to their various implications in overlapping social discursive divisions and their histories. Barbara Smith.

SPEAKER_06 18:52

Audrey Lord, speaking at the first lesbian conference at UCLA in nineteen seventy-three, said what I will never forget.

SPEAKER_18 19:04

There are only a few of us here, but we are here. And when you go back to your cities, uh we will be there. When you see our faces again back in your hometown, black women have uh have a full history of strength and have always given an awful lot to everything they're involved in. Uh we are proud and we are a vital force. Uh we are part of the lesbian feminist revolution, and we are willing to give of ourselves for the effort of liberation. As women, as black women, we have known dimensions of oppression that you don't know anything about. Uh I've heard someone mention today that uh that the lesbians were the most down people, and I would like to deal with that. Uh when you return to your cities and your jobs and your CR groups and your bars, remember your black sisters and do this for yourselves and for us. Every time a racist act is done in your presence, don't let it pass. As I was saying, every time a racist act is done in your presence, don't let it pass. When you're in your office or wherever it is that you are and something is done or said which is derogatory to me, your sister, I want you to stand up for me.

SPEAKER_24 21:08

On May 26th, Barbara attends a women's conference at Sacramento State University titled Women's Studies in Feminism: Survival in the 1970s. At the time, the conference would be called a battle between the Marxists and the matriarchs. Terry's close friend, the professor Joan Hoff-Wilson, was a professor at Zach State at the time. I looked for Barbara and Terry there too. It strikes me that that's maybe the way in which Barbara and Terry would have met in the first place is through if not Kate Millette or Marie Del Drago or not Joan. If Joan didn't uh know Barbara, then there was somebody in this ether who would have put them together.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

I I think you know, we have to remember how rare it was. For women to get professorships and teaching assignments and in this program. All of these women are pioneers in academia. And um it makes total sense to me that they all know each other. Even if they're totally different fields, right? I mean that Berkeley is the it's like the forecast, it's the place where they all meet. It's the it's the the center of the storm. Given what happened in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s, that makes total sense too. So even if you're a tax state, even if you're anywhere, if you're an academic, I think you're gonna and on the left, you're gonna be pulled towards that atmosphere one way or another.

SPEAKER_10 22:47

In her diary on May twenty-eighth, Barbara writes Circle talk of academic women and faculty and students.

SPEAKER_24 23:12

Barbara is seeking inclusion in this new community that she's a part of, but more so recognition from them as an artist.

SPEAKER_10 23:22

I told Andrea to remember the maverick. She called me the artist, and Jill Johnston too walked up and said, Aren't you an artist? Recognition from women. What I wanted so long now, if you satisfy my need is not so great. Jill Johnston suggests I write my experiences upon coming back to the US and finding myself during nine months in the women's movement. We talk about need to work apart from the group as individual artists. I feel like more and more these days of collective politics. I am estranged from. Generally, though, politics bore me. It is myth, imagination, dream that excite me. Female politics, too much like the oppressors. Hierarchical, structured, energy sapping, watered down, mundane, boring.

SPEAKER_14 24:41

My heart is a city of fire. I got this country's firewell. I don't know where it will lead to. I just love untraveled in all.

SPEAKER_24 25:18

As the conferences and protests and festivals raged in the cities in the early and mid-1970s, some LGBTQ people, and particularly lesbians, were choosing to relocate to rural areas, setting up and moving to intentional communities closer to nature. Just as there were homesteaders, hippies, and back-to-the-landers, there were queer separatists. Lesbians began buying property and setting up women's land, particularly up and down the west coast of North America. For many people in the US, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War, Canada represented another kind of ideal, a place to escape the draft. Hornby Island on the west coast of British Columbia was one such ideal.

SPEAKER_03 26:25

Even before um, the only the only way to follow.

SPEAKER_12 27:37

But then came the draft dungeons, and with them the American counterculture. Today there are nearly a thousand full-time residents, and the counterculture is still alive and well. There is no police department, they will settle disputes on their own. Virtually everything in Hornby gets recycled. And if anyone needs some clothes or an appliance or whatever, they go to something called the free store where items are turned in rather than thrown out. There's also a non-profit food colony where the customers are the ownership.

SPEAKER_22 28:15

There were draft judges and hippies and just generally people getting the hell out of style things.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

And so she wanted to break away from that and was so bitterly opposed to the war that this was a way of you know, but basically, I'm gonna move to Canada because I don't believe in America, and uh so I can I can see that if that was her overall disposition, the idea of a communal utopian community on Cornby was just nirvana. I mean it was just perfect for her, I think. And I think that um falling in love too or having an affair, whatever with the nature of the relationship, um yeah, it was um I think it was a very powerful experience.

SPEAKER_24 30:06

The photos that Barbara took on Hornby Island that summer in August 1973 represent a spectrum of emotions intimately associated with that transition from powerlessness to empowerment, disenfranchisement to possibility. But what do these photos mean for the queer women who arrived at Hornby in the intervening years around Barbara and Terry's visit? And what does it mean for the people who grew up on the island at that time?

SPEAKER_26 30:40

The photos you shared, Barbara Hammer's photos, they were from what time, early 70s. 73. Yeah, I would have been 10. I was completely unaware of any such I mean, and it they would have been probably quite private too. You know, like I don't know that those women would have walked around sort of holding hands at the co-op store.

SPEAKER_17 31:07

The the naked women and the water and the rocks and the all that kind of thing. Um they're very familiar. There's lots of those kind of photographs uh from from the 70s. So there's a lot of naked women and naked women at festivals, and naked women on women's land, and naked women in water, and naked, like just wasn't just it was just a thing. And we were all much younger and had bodies like those bodies. So that that that was that's my main reaction. I don't think I've I don't recognize, I don't think, any of the the people in any of the photographs, but it's the the the imagery in those photographs is very familiar.

SPEAKER_05 31:57

We're the country dykes, you know the country dikes.

SPEAKER_08 32:00

All of us at the beach, this is exactly what we look like. Um now whether I can you know pick out the specific places on them with them, I you know, I don't know. Um, but but yes, they do all they all do resonate, and this is exactly what we were all doing. But we all had little children running around naked too. Yeah, making out all the steps of the co-op and and and you know we were free. We were here on Hornby. We were safe haven for the women in the cities, doing Gale and the whole group of those women when they needed to get out of town, or when heat was on them, they came to Hornby. We put them all up and we fed them and we massaged them and we cared for them and we were the safe place, haven't for all these women coming out of the cities that were doing hard, big, and uh we were all would go down for those, but we were also the safe haven spot for um many of the um city lesbians.

SPEAKER_15 33:39

There were queers here, but there was not a queer community because it's small, it didn't feel like it was a queer community. It felt like there were queer folks within the community. It was great to be met by super friendly queers, but it wasn't that kind of um almost defensive protective queer community that I was used to. It's like the artists too. It wasn't like oh the artists all associate with each other. It was like, yeah associate with each other, who else is there? You know. It's a symbolic community, you kind of associate with everyone. The the social norm is you are okay with weirdos.

SPEAKER_24 34:46

By the mid-1980s, uh there was a thriving population of lesbian and queer women on Hornby Island, including artists, lesbian separatists, and single moms. Some of the women who had grown up on Hornby Island also set up communal housing.

SPEAKER_25 35:03

There was Claire, me, Kathy, and Gail. Yeah. And we all lived in Westview, which is this big old farmhouse. It's now been renovated and quite beautiful. But we all lived in what I call the Trimble House. You know, and it was the first time I'd actually moved out of the house. My own ho my mom's and I was building this at the time. So living there, living on EI and building this. Right. Yeah. Okay. And then Gail would pretty much just she taught me how to use a chainsaw and drive a standard. And then would kick me out the door to go work here every day.

SPEAKER_08 35:33

My first few years on Hornby were involved with um uh the lesbian community. Some uh you know, really, really um what do you call the um sort of man-hating separatists? Yes, yes, yes. So I fell into that for about a week. It's like I can't, you know, this is not my scene. And I don't hate men, and I don't like the patriarchy, but I don't hate men. And so we it was hard to stay in a separatist state, um uh and and get along and be part of this community. There was these two factions on Hornby at that point in those early days. There were the separatists, and then there were lesbians that were not separatists.

SPEAKER_24 36:34

So uh one thing that I have learned since being here is about the the quote unquote women's land that was on Mount Road.

SPEAKER_19 36:41

Yep. Um were you did you have much involvement in that or could you have it?

SPEAKER_16 36:45

Yeah, but you know what? That that that was also weird. Because they were separatists. Even some of the women who were involved with them didn't really go along with our their ideology. Like they didn't want men on the land, and they didn't want i if you had a a boy, a son, which I had, they didn't want son to come around, you know, strange things like that. So it was difficult, and once again, you know, there's always division. Some of them were like, oh sure, it's fine, and others were like really hardcore. It wasn't like women's land. It wasn't like, I don't know, like maybe in the 70s, where you had, you know, women's land and you know, women walking around nude and you know, hanging out in the grass or making love re you know, and it wasn't like that at all. At all.

SPEAKER_24 37:52

So what what was it then?

SPEAKER_16 37:56

I don't know, it was just this there was only they were they were a family who had this land up there.

SPEAKER_08 38:05

You talked about the the scene up on Mount Road. Well, I was very involved in that, in those women and in supporting them in choosing to live their lives the way they needed to and wanted to. That was uh that was a scene back then up on Mount Road. And um and I very much supported it, and they adopted a lot of uh little girls, um, five to be exact, or six, and um it's blown up in their face, all of that now, and all the girls, none of the girls have ended up being lesbians, which is devastating to, you know, two of the women, and and they're not accept anyhow. It's uh it's uh was a hard scene, but that was going on in Hor uh on Hornby back in the that would have been from about 87 um till the mid-90s.

SPEAKER_24 39:12

That's interesting because I um I was looking around, poking around the archives here quite a bit and looking at the the there's a folder on the women's center here or the the women's mov like the Right, Betty Fairbanks and all of us, yes.

SPEAKER_19 39:28

Yeah. And there's a lot of notes that say we don't want to be lesbian separatists. But then and I think that that that comes up a number of times.

SPEAKER_08 39:38

So I kind of that makes kind of tracks with the that there was I could get the sense that there was like a separation of the separatists and the non-separatist lesbians. And it was uh I I found it very, very difficult. And um and the separatists were always causing um causing a scene which we all felt unnecessary in our little tiny community.

SPEAKER_19 40:13

What was it like raising your son here?

SPEAKER_16 40:16

Uh very I mean having nothing to do with being a lesbian, I don't think. Um, very, very, very supportive community for a single mom, even though the dad was here. Uh for a single mom raising uh a son. And uh that year that was 87, that was the year that my son was born, uh nine months after the harmonic conversions, because we all converged. And there was 23 kids born that year, the most that's ever born on Hornby in one year. So there was lots of lots of support. Lots of us didn't do uh school, we did homeschooling because there were so many kids and so many big big um group that have stayed connected over the years.

SPEAKER_19 41:17

So it kind of sounds like when you arrived here in the in the mid-80s, it was just like a thriving, cool scene.

SPEAKER_08 41:24

Thriving. Thriving, thriving. The community hall had just been re-redone. The separation of of old timers and locals and um and the hippies had happened because there was huge conflict between the old timers and the hippies. So then that's when the community hall was redone and Lloyd House and all that crowd, you know, built and converted the hall from a square building into this, put the round room on it and the big um stump and all of that. So it turned it, you know, all all that creative, the creative hippies had their own place now. So the hall became community hall became ours. When we came that first summer, it was the first, the um new school had just been built. So there was 140 kids in school. The family life was just, and the kids were just, it was incredible. Um, you know, I was, of course, an American, um, broke. I'd put everything I had into fixing getting my van fixed. Couldn't my my parents, everybody was mad I was here and nobody would send money or support me. We were a depressed area. There were no jobs. You could buy a lot in Sandpiper for $6,000. Really, really, really a depressed area. The whole area from here to, you know, the fishing industry had collapsed. The lumber, uh, uh all natural resources had collapsed. There was, it was a very difficult time on Vancouver Island during that time. There was no tourism, there was no any of that. So welfare was easy to get. And so many single women moved here with their children, moved here just to have babies. They weren't forced to work, they could stay at home because there were no jobs. You, you know, oh yes, I'm looking for work. There were no jobs. So you were this was a place to come and raise your kids and and and and be on welfare.

SPEAKER_24 43:55

Around that time, uh in the late 1980s, uh, a group of women on the island. Got together to form a women's center, a place for mutual support, education, creativity, and child care.

SPEAKER_16 44:11

We used to have a really strong women's collective, or we never called it the center. Group. We used to have gatherings and potlucks and there used to be quite a few of us.

SPEAKER_25 44:28

So Amanda and I had some pretty interesting conversations and decided to start a women's center. And I feel like it was more her push. And then Moira Armour, have you heard of her yet? Um, yeah. Uh Judith told me about it. Right, Moira and Judith Howells and were like, yes, and especially Moira though. Moira's fucking hardcore, man. Like, she just pushed us, but we did. Like, we got it going, we got a library.

SPEAKER_16 44:50

I mean You know, just like everything over the years, it's kind of dissipated, and now everybody sticks to their own whatever, and I mean, but it's pretty much like that on the whole island, not just the women's group, but you know, we used to have movies every week, and we used to have pot bucks all the time, and now none of that happens. I know. And this is before COVID. I mean, COVID really kind of sealed it in, but even before COVID it started happening. I don't know, I think it kind of started happening with maybe the social media, internet. Uh why go out when I can, you know, do everything I want to do on my my tablet or my computer, you know. So, and then uh various of the old crones, of course, died. And women moved on, and it just, yeah. Just doesn't seem to be that uh connect- there's hardly any of us left, you know.

SPEAKER_15 46:06

Well, Hornby has really changed a lot, but I've always been kind of a hermit. The kind of artwork I do is different from what a lot of artists here do, so um there were some people here who I had like close artistic relationships with, like Lane Savoy. Um, but a lot of people, like I really appreciated their work, and they seemed to appreciate my work, but there wasn't that kind of connection like I had with um a lot of artists in Vancouver, like either queer artists or artists with disabilities, um, where you know the subject matter and the politics was just like burning our heart. Um which, you know, people like Barbara Hammer really feel like they're like our older sisters, people from my generation, they're our older sisters, they're our trailblazers. Um they started doing crazy stuff during a time when it was just like unthinkable, and they made so much thinkable for us coming after them, and um so I can just adore someone's landscape, but I don't have that kind of connection of the burning subject matter. Um, you know what I mean? I can go, oh my god, that's so beautiful. Oh the brush is broke, oh the colors, oh your vision, but it's not the same as Oh my fucking god, he used a brass band as a visual finding his way device. He did that Carmen Papaglion. So you know, I miss my Vancouver art community, but I'm still connected with my Vancouver art community. I'm connected with the Toronto disability art community.

SPEAKER_16 49:07

I was thinking we should have some sort of I don't know, get together.

SPEAKER_19 49:16

So you miss you miss the feeling of community? Or that feeling that like there's a group of people, yeah.

SPEAKER_16 49:24

Yeah, yeah, we used to have a good time.

SPEAKER_17 49:30

There is no queer community. Interesting. There's lots of queer and gender diverse people, and there are there aren't high levels of of uh homophobia or transphobia that I know of that there might be that I don't know of. Um but there's uh there is no um there's no overt organized community like and it's the first time in 50 years that I've lived without it, and it's really weird. It's very weird for there not to be a community.

SPEAKER_26 50:11

I mean, I think that Terry and Barbara were liberated women, they were fully out and you know, uh probably really comfortable with their sexuality, and it was a time when they they had a lot of support in terms of like all the movements that were happening. But I I just recall uh this is kind of a cute anecdote. I had a girlfriend for a while when I was in Montreal who was from Cape Breton. We drove out uh to Nova Scotia and we went and visited her family in Badak. And then we got in the car and we were gonna drive around Cape Breton. But my gay friend was like completely uninhibited. He'd go to the beach and he'd strip all his clothes off, and then I would follow suit. So we were naked and we were sort of sunbathing naked and swimming naked on the beach. And my my um my girlfriend who was from there was like beside herself. She's like, get your clothes back on. Someone's gonna come down and yell at us. Because Cape Breton's very traditional. Like nobody, you don't go to the beach and take your clothes off. So we were kind of experiencing freedom because we weren't from there. None of our aunties or you know, people in the village up at the top of the bank were gonna come down and yell at us or call, you know. So we felt we were kind of somehow above any kind of any any sort of um repercussions. Or we were free from repercussions, we felt free. So like that idea, that's interesting to me how to be queer, you have to go away in order to really be myself in terms of the expression of my queer lesbian identity and self. I have to go away from my family, away from the people who knew me when I was a child. So whenever I came back to Hornby, it was kind of like partial. Like if I was just me and a couple of friends on the beach and no one was around, then we could kind of be free. But if anyone was around to witness, then I felt self-conscious. I felt uncom it just wasn't free. Uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_15 52:24

Uh, what is it now? Well, now it's money. Seems as if it's all about money. So we're just heading to Ornby Island for a week. Nah, this is gonna be home.

SPEAKER_24 52:38

Wait until I get to three hours.

SPEAKER_26 52:46

It's a different place than the one that I grew up in, you know. It's almost like in my mind there was a chapter up until the point where I graduated from high school where there were also lots of transitions. But I I hold in my mind and in my dreams when I dream about Hornby, a kind of space that was like kind of the 70s, the earlier part of the 70s, what I remember call and being like. And then there's a new chapter, which is kind of post that, which is much more about people moving to the island, but not to go back to the land, you know, that they were moving to the island maybe to retire or maybe to find a new life for themselves, still very aspirational, but they were building houses that were had all the modern conveniences, and you know, so the chapter that I recall that my my kind of subconscious recalls is like the the roads were dirt, and people lived in hand-built houses, and there was the co-op was this one small building that had very basic groceries. It would there were it was beautiful, it was there was a kind of expansiveness to the fact everything was really slow because to get anywhere, you know, it was like bumping along a dirt road, and there was big clouds of dust behind all the vehicles. And if you're walking along the road, you have to get off the road so that you didn't get covered with dust when the cars went by. So I think when I go back, part of me kind of connects in glimpses with memory. I have glimpses of memory of the way it felt when I was a kid. And I think I have a quite a deep longing for that, to kind of connect with that. But at the same time, it's not really possible to be on Hornby. It is kind of on, it's definitely very known to tourism, you know. There's a lot of, there are a lot, there's a lot of kind of being, like the way people are be on Hornby that I is unrecognizable to me. Like this kind of um coming with all your like your your stand-up paddle boards and your your bikes, and you're gonna kind of like recreate with your family of like a whole handful of kids. I feel like when I when I see people like that, I'm like, that's really lovely. That what what a great thing for those, you know, these kids who are coming to this beautiful place, but it's like they're not experiencing anything that I think of as Wornby. Like they're not, there's that texture of of it being kind of like um things weren't easy. As opposed to just sort of like driving through listening to your soundtrack, your playlist, and you know, I I feel that I think it's kind of like not a loss, but a longing for.

SPEAKER_08 56:07

You know, so many resort communities, and that's what we are now. And we weren't then, and the Gulf Islands really weren't that, and they were much more family-oriented than they are now, and it's a it's a shame. And um, it has, it's changed drastically, and and I will not say it's for the best. Um, and I don't think it'll never go back, it's just gonna get more exclusive because of what Hornby is. You know, this beautiful jewel of an island with some of the most incredible beaches and forests and parks in all of the islands. So there's no going back.

SPEAKER_26 56:56

Another layer that I acknowledge is always having a premonition that I that I didn't belong there. And my dad and I have this conversation, it's about a longing for rootedness, and I think it's a way of acknowledging our settlerness. And always longing for connection, but realizing that the place that you're at, that you're in, you're you're a guest. You're not from, you know. I mean, I'm experiencing it again here now in southern Alberta. But I think even as a as a child, I had no, my parents didn't talk race politics at all. They didn't talk about um nobody talked about the presence of indigenous people, peoples. Um, but I had an intuition of like having kind of like landed and not really fully belonging. That I think unsettles and interrupts and troubles, it troubles all of those utopian kind of narratives of going back to the land.

SPEAKER_24 58:09

New Friend is made by Bitsy Knox with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Barbara Hammer Estate, and the Beinickee Road Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as 96.5 CHFR, Hornby Island Community Radio, and Kashmir Radio, Berlin. In this chapter, you heard clips from the following sources. Lesbian Sisters Getting Together in the Lesbian Community from July 3rd, 1973, Courtesy of Radio Pacifica, Beth Elliott's Good Time, 1976, Kathy Fire's City on Fire, 1978, An Oral History with Barbara Hammer, recorded for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art by Svetlana Kitto in 2018. You also heard Nim Hughes reading from A. Steiner's essay in Truant, Photographs 1970 to 1979, by Barbara Hammer, published by Capricious in 2018. A recording of Michel Foucault talking about heterotopias for a French radio broadcast in 1966, and excerpts from Barbara Hammer's film Sisters of 1974, and Tender Fictions from 1996. Thank you so much to all of those who contributed their voices to this chapter of New Friend, Nim Hughes, Persimen Blackbridge, Bonita Wexler, Elaine Savoy, Claire Cronia, Annie Martin, and Judith Lawrence, and to the water, rocks, wind, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Hornby Island, Jedi H, to whom I extend gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the Comox First Nation.