From Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter

Juana Maria Paz, The “La Luz” Journal, published by Paz Press, 1980. [via Boyd Used & Rare Books]

It’s not common knowledge that for several decades at the end of the last century, Southern Oregon was the heartland of lesbian separatism. Midway between San Francisco and Portland, the region is sparsely populated. A cluster of steep canyons forested with Douglas fir, sugar pine, and Pacific madrone are framed by one wild river to the north, the Umpqua, and another to the south, the Rogue. Tucked among the canyons are picturesque pockets of meadowland. Lesbian locals termed the I-5 corridor that cuts through this crumpled topography the Amazon Highway; they sometimes called the hills ‘Mama’s Many Breasts.’

Nestled here was a thriving community of women-owned, women-built enclaves. At the heyday of the movement, from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s, eight separatist collectives flourished in Southern Oregon, with a ninth just south of Portland. Their parcels ranged in size from seven to 150 acres, and were home to anywhere from four to 30 women. Thousands of lesbians visited, from all over the world.…

…Each community was born from the same conviction: Patriarchy had created a destructive, unjust society that needed to be junked. The aim was a mode of living that respected the earth, eradicated class oppression, rejected paradigms of dominance, and regarded female biology as noble, even sublime. From casual nudity to consensus decision-making, the land-dykes overturned assumptions they’d inherited. They built their own houses, invented practices of worship, modified language, and attempted wealth redistribution. They loved each other fiercely, and insisted on a politics that began and ended with that love.

The aim was a mode of living that respected the earth, eradicated class oppression, and regarded female biology as noble, even sublime. At the time of this writing, some of the lands have long since been sold, and some remarkably persist, albeit at much-reduced scale. What, now, can be learned from the tribulations of these women building a new society by hand in the American wilderness? Much has changed in the last 50 years. Uncloseted lesbians are not the anomaly they once were, and elements of the land-dykes’ environmentalism — so unconventional in the 1970s — are now accepted truths. Queer identity remains indelibly associated with cities, to the degree that rural exceptions are easily sidelined. Gender-exclusive alliances, once so liberatory, now seem less so. The separatist legacy is sullied by some separatists’ antipathy towards trans women.

Long article from Maui Surfer:

placesjournal.org/article/on-wimmins-land-the-heartland-of-lesbian-separatism

Every time I drive up to Point Arena to visit my friend Louie Frazier,* I admire this sculpture of wind and rock.

*which I’m gonna do in a few weeks, now that all us old people have been vaccinated.

In the middle of a vegetable garden, hooked into the world with a half dozen Macs and a bunch of iPhones.

Built almost entirely of used wood from torn-down Navy barracks at Treasure Island (between Oakland and San Francisco) during the early ’70s.

I made friends with the wrecker, George Taylor, and we did a feature on his tools and techniques in our book Shelter.