Please note:
Having brought our major projects to a happy conclusion, we dissolved Purple as of August 31, 2023. This site functions only as a repository of information about the Lesbian Legacies Endowment we created, and as a record of Purple’s herstory.
We are pleased to report that our next big project is already a success: we have created and actualized the Lesbian Legacies: Amazon Cultural/Political Activism in Second Wave Feminism Endowment Fund in cooperation with the Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections. In brief, the purpose of the fund is to maintain, expand, and make accessible invaluable materials from a vibrant and still extant current in lesbian herstory. If you already know you support that purpose, please DONATE!
The Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections stewards and makes available a wide range of primary source materials for research in popular culture, radicalism, and gender, among many other topics. Beginning in the 1970s, Anne E. Tracy, a bibliographer and stalwart member of the lesbian community in Lansing, Michigan, began to collect materials from the burgeoning lesbian and gay movements for the library. Everything from early rabble-rousing manifestos through lesbian pulp fiction and zines to event posters–most of what you can imagine–can be found in what is now the LGBTQ+ Collection. In keeping with Anne’s original impulse, there has always been a robust lesbian presence in the collection. Recently, the library’s collection of lesbian and feminist materials was enhanced by the donations of the archives of both the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Goldenrod Music, a national women’s music distributor based in Lansing.
Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival Archives
The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival began in 1976 as a one-time, regional women-only event in the spirit of the second-wave feminist movement. It evolved into an annual international gathering “for womyn by womyn,” encompassing concerts, spoken-word performances, theater, dance, workshops, and sales of arts and crafts. Donated in 2015 by festival producer Lisa Vogel, the records of the festival contain crew guides, handbooks, maps, banners, memorabilia, programs, posters, brochures, meeting minutes, correspondence, press clippings, and inventories.Goldenrod Music Archives (1976-2011)
Goldenrod Music, a women’s music distributor based in Lansing, Michigan, was founded by Terry Grant in 1976. Born out of the second-wave feminist movement and women’s music movement, Goldenrod was originally one of 60 independent women’s music distributors, and as a result of the evolving music industry, has become the last still in operation. This collection is a rich resource for information on women’s music, musicians and entertainers, and the broader evolving music industry. The Goldenrod Music collection contains sales catalogs, posters, artists’ press kits, photographs, administrative records, and approximately 700 recordings in vinyl, cassette, and CD formats by lesbian and feminist women musicians.
These two collections alone constitute an amazing trove of resources for remembering, story-telling about, researching, and interpreting a rich, complex, and politically important phase of lesbian/womyn’s history and our own personal histories. They hold accounts of the life-shaping adventures of thousands of lesbians—musicians, producers, entrepreneurs, women-in-print, audiences, campers, culture workers, and all of us who have been enriched by womyn’s music and our festivals. But these collections join an array of revelatory materials like the records of many activist and community organizations and the personal papers of such Michigan lesbian community members as Anne E. Tracy (bibliographer), Penny Gardner (organizer and activist), and Terri L. Jewell (Black lesbian-feminist poet and activist). The collections have recently been enhanced with materials such as personal items author Bonnie Morris gleaned at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival between 1995-2005 and the papers of musician and author Jamie Anderson, a popular performer at many womyn’s festivals. We also await Toni Armstrong Jr.’s archives of HOT WIRE: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture (1984-1994).
The Endowment
This extraordinarily rich and important expression of lesbian and womyn’s heritage is available for anyone to peruse, but, though some of the materials will eventually be digitized, presently most of the materials may be seen, handled and used only in the Special Collections reading room during open hours. So most users need to travel to visit them. The hands-on experience is invaluable in its own right: compare viewing photos on your computer screen to seeing and touching a sign painted on plywood or a 1983 fest t-shirt, mimeographed fliers, paper correspondence, workshop handouts, artist press kits and photos, invoices of sales to women’s bookstores, or records of production costs and income. For such access, you have to show up in person at the library in East Lansing. Since there is no standing exhibit and much of the material is stored off-site, it is advisable to use the Libraries’ Finding Aids (perhaps starting with LGBTQ+ Resources in Special Collections), and to consult with Subject Librarians such as Gay and Lesbian Studies specialist Eli Landaverde, to discover items of interest and to request in advance to view materials.
Purple sees the need for travel grants to make these important lesbian and womyn’s materials widely accessible. We are also invested in the continued acquisition, maintenance, and digitization of these and related materials by the special collections staff. So, in cooperation with the MSU Libraries Special Collections, we have established the Lesbian Legacies: Amazon Cultural/Political Activism in Second-Wave Feminism Endowment Fund.
We want to note right away that in the Visiting Scholars Program at the the MSU Libraries Special Collections, under which the endowment will be administered, the term “scholar” is relatively generously construed, not limited to academics. “Any researcher, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, artists, activists, or independent researchers, residing more than 50 miles from East Lansing, is eligible to apply. International scholars are responsible for obtaining the appropriate visa, which may have travel limits. Current or incoming MSU students are not eligible.”
Funding the Endowment
The endowment fund has been actualized by cash donations and by substantial trust-gifts from two individual lesbians. That is to say, we have surpassed the minimum $50,000 in cash donations required for the endowment to be able to start funding travel to the library in East Lansing for research. It can also begin to support maintaining and digitizing the collection.
But since grants are made only from the earnings of the investment, we will be working to build the endowment through ongoing fundraising soliciting cash donations and estate donations, so as to facilitate greater access. As the endowment grows it will continue supporting travel, acquisition, digitizing, and maintenance, into the future.
Because it will still take time to grow the endowment fund proper to the point where it can make a significant number of grants, we are also maintaining an expendable sister fund that can be tapped immediately for travel grants. (“Sister fund” is the actual term Special Collections uses, which we find rather endearing.)
Lesbian Legacies
We are excited and energized by the knowledge that so much of our lesbian and womyn’s herstory, in fine-grained detail, is being preserved by the expert staff of Special Collections, who are furthermore dedicated to making these materials known and accessible. This gives us hope that our lives, our work, our political activism and our culture may be harder to bury than those of our foremothers. We invite womyn whose lives and work are documented in these collections to visit them to remember, re-ground ourselves, use the materials for memoir and scholarship, and simply appreciate who we have been. And we look forward to seeing young womyn discover and own their herstory and make use of our legacy as they carry on the struggle to realize a feminist future.
