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"There is a big gap between the LGBT history that exists, and the LGBT history that is taught, and known," a high school student told me at a recent museum event. In that spirit of preserving our lesser-known community legacies, I have devoted my scholarly career to recording and documenting the women's music movement in the United States-a grassroots genre of the 1970s that daringly affirmed lesbian and feminist identities on vinyl, cassette, and radio, serving as the soundtrack for my own coming out process, as it did for so many other women. While still a teenager, in 1980 I discovered the national network of women's music festivals and concerts, a subculture where female artists used their time at the microphone to advocate, empower, and exhort. The singing was beautiful and empowering, but I also found that the official announcements and spontaneous speeches by performers and producers offered a true barometer of lesbian feminist politics: an education worthy of a three-credit course. The sounds from audience members also offered important indexes of cultural response, ranging from laughter to weeping to gratitude, applause, dissent.
This spoken-word component of women's music festivals, often neglected in official news reports and archival documentation of these events, played a central role in shaping lesbian activist communities both within the festivals and beyond.
During graduate school, I began documenting these sounds of lesbian culture as an historically significant phenomenon-first with careful notes in my ever-present journal, then with 90-minute cassette recordings. I gradually made the important shift to working at events as a regular crew member, thus gaining backstage and mealtime access to artists and producers I sought to interview. At festivals and Pride rallies I used blank Maxell or TDK cassettes and a battery-powered Panasonic RQ-340 recorder, with a builtin microphone so sensitive that crowd noises and speeches of stage performers could be taped with the recorder poking out of my backpack, taped to the underside of a chair, or squeezed between my knees. This analog technology served me from the 1980s through the early 2000s, resulting in a personal collection of over four hundred 90-minute cassettes of spoken-word recordings that I have maintained along with accompanying transcriptions documenting three decades of the women's music scene. In this essay, I...