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Artist's take on political queer movement

Out spoken

• Published March 28, 2009

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My first introduction to Lamar Van Dyke’s art was a toilet seat with a luau dancer on it. I thought, “What a great toilet seat,” and sat down and peed.

I need to work on my first impressions.

But I wasn’t there to see her art. It was an unexpected bonus. (Looking back, I kind of feel like I violated her art.) I read about Van Dyke in a recent issue of The New Yorker. She was a lesbian separatist whose antics in the late 1970s were part of a greater movement made up of women who sought independence from the patriarchal system they were born into.

Lillian Faderman, a lesbian historian, writes about the drive to form a “Lesbian Nation” in her book “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America:”

“They put out a call to all lesbian feminists to ‘explore with fact and imagination our dyke/amazon culture of the past before there were parasitic male mutants and to work toward our dyke/amazon culture of the future when only xx’s exist.’ They had blind faith that their withdrawal from heterosexuals in itself would hasten the dissolution of the patriarchy and the advent of a utopian dyke/amazon world.”

The Van Dykes were exactly what their name implies: a group of lesbians traveling the country in vans. They stopped primarily on tracts of land owned by women in spots across the country.

“There was Women’s Land everywhere. There was Women’s Land in Arkansas, in South Carolina, Texas, New Mexico and all over California and Oregon,” Lamar Van Dyke said. “You could do a whole circuit of that. You’d just get to where they were and give them a call and ... ask them if you could park on their land.”

It was part of a search for “dyke heaven.”

“I spent a lot of time in New Mexico and California and Oregon,” Van Dyke told me. “In Oregon, there was Women’s Land where you could live there year round. You have various choices of accommodations, and I think that is still there. There were a lot of women there who were on personal retreat, like something traumatic had happened in their lives and so they ended up living there at Owl Farm. They were a little whacked out, but they were in a safe place and it didn’t cost anything to stay there.”

Van Dyke had been hoping the recent New Yorker article would connect her with friends from that time in her life. But she realized there was one major stumbling block.

“I realized that nobody knew anybody’s name,” she said. “I mean it was like Moonbeam and Star and Mountain Eagle. And I would have no idea. They probably had no idea. It was funny. We had these intimate relationships with people and we didn’t even know their names.”

But what intrigued me about Van Dyke was her take on the current political queer movement.

Van Dyke is a woman who can go out for a night on the town and have it end up as a major civil rights case. (Look up “Brunswick Four” — Van Dyke used to be known as Heather Elizabeth.)

After reading The New Yorker’s article, I had the feeling she would laugh at the actions of the new leaders of the movement. But she didn’t.

“It’s exciting that people are kind of waking up,” Van Dyke said of the movement motivated by the passage of Proposition 8 in California. “The movement is different. The issues are very different.”

She’s right: Her movement advocated separatism, shedding of patriarchal models of living. Today’s movement is about unity.

“It’s kind of like it’s gone full circle,” she said. “Now everybody is fighting to fit in to be the same as everybody else. We were fighting to get out of that structure and think for ourselves and set up our relationships however we wanted. ... Now I think the effort is ‘we’re just like you, except that we’re queer. But really, we’re just like you. We want to get married and have babies. We’re just like you.’ ”

She admits same-sex marriage and gays serving in the military are not issues she fights for — not that she doesn’t believe they are important. But she still is concerned with the larger picture.

“I would say that gay marriage is kind of on the bottom of my list,” she said. “I think people should have the right to get married if they want to. Gay marriage and gays in the military are sort of ... yes, gays should be able to be gay and be in the military, but if that’s what you want to do with your life ... OK ... all right ... it never would have occurred to me to do anything except to try to get the military to stop ... just stop.”

What’s on the top of her list?

“The civil rights aspect of all of those issues would be at the top of my list,” she said. “The issues in and of themselves, not so much. But the fact that we need to have those civil rights — that just needs to happen. Across the board, everybody has to be treated equally and have the same opportunities and be treated in the same way. Period. There is no question about that.”

She is right about that.

Ruth Schneider wants to get a tattoo from Lamar Van Dyke, whose art mesmerizes her. Contact her at rschneider@ theolympian.com.