GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE June 30, 2000
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eveningsout
Bitchy-queeny view of L.A. lives up to its catch-phrases
Fabulous Hell
by Craig Curtis
Alyson, $12.95 trad e paperback
Reviewed by Anthony Glassman
Reviewers have certain phrases they like to bandy about. How many times have you heard things like, "It sent chills up my spine," "I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!" or the most over-the-top of them all, calling something "a roller-coaster ride?"
Fabulous Hell, frighteningly enough, actually lives up to those three epithets. Alternately hilarious and horrifying, the book takes the reader through a few years in the life of a gay man in Los Angeles, living with HIV, drugs, dancing, sex, drugs, friendship, drugs, and the torment of his youth.
Michigan
Continued from page 9
capsule, preserving some of the energy of those years when "liberation" was still an overt goal.
"You have to understand what it was like in 1976," says Karen Dodson, who traveled to the first festival from Chicago. "It was lezzie fever. It was an incredible upswelling of grassroots energy: you could put one lavender flier up in a city of 3 million, and 500
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women would find out about it."
MWMF
If the festival is a time capsule, though, it's one that's popped open every year.
"The women who were there in the beginning have kept in mind that the women's movement is fluid and that it needs to change to survive," observes Breedlove. "There are constantly new generations coming up and the younger women have taken the responsibility to make Michigan theirs as well." It may be the resulting diversity that's the key to the festival's longevity.
From the range of musicians (“The artistic span from Kay Gardner to Tribe 8 shows enormous breadth," comments Krissy Keefer) to the smorgasbord of athletic, cultural and educational activities (try the ever-popular kissing workshop), to the parade of differing ages, ethnicities and aesthetics—“diversity” at Michigan is a reality, not rhetoric.
"It happens here on the land," Keefer concludes, "in the mosh pit of our lives."
What makes this grand social experiment work? Boden Sandstrom, who's doing doctoral research on the subject after many years
Author Craig Curtis doesn't bother harping on the horrors that happen to the protagonist when he is young; instead, in flashback chapters, a single sentence will bring up goose pimples as the reader realizes what he or she had just seen.
Not that the book is all serious, either. Curtis captures a certain ennui-ridden, jaded glee in looking at the city around him; everything gets picked apart in the finest bitchyqueeny, Bette Davis-inspired vitriol. Much like the main character, Curtis has to make a scene, an entrance, must be noticed, and every chapter of the book is that scene.
Probably the best way to sum up the book quickly would be an excerpt from an interview with Curtis: "Have 4:00 sherry at Yamashiro. That's L.A. But don't eat there! That's botulism."
as a pioneer in women's music, has a theory. "None of these things would happen if not organized around women's music," Sandstrom says. "It's a performance space, and each of us is always performing our identity. All of those hard issues can get played out in performance."
The transcendent energy of music that's connected to our experiences as women and created in a space of our own making this is the beat of the festival's heart. Which brings us to the performing artists.
A sampling of artists scheduled to appear include long time festival favorites Holly Near, Toshi Reagon and Big Lovely, Teresa Trull and Barbara Higbie, Mary Watkins and Kay Gardner, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Edwina Lee Tyler, Ferron and Rhiannon.
Newer to Michigan but beloved among today's multi-generational audience are bands like Tribe 8, the Butchies, Straight Ahead, Bitch and Animal, Kindness and Latin American All Stars.
Theater, dance and spoken word will be well represented with Holly Hughes in Preaching to the Perverted, Marga Gomez in jaywalker, Sister Spit's Rambling Road Show, and dance performances by the Dance Brigade, Between Lines Dance Co., Kathleen Hermesdorf and Dominique Zeltman.
Solo music sets to watch out for are Melissa Ferrick, Catie Curtis and Kinnie Starr. And a surprise set by the Indigo Girls has recently been added to Wednesday night.
For many artists, Michigan's 25th anniversary is both a personal and cultural milestone. Toshi Reagon, now a popular headliner, remembers: "I first came to Michigan when I was sixteen with my mom [Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagon]. I couldn't even get onto the open mike stage."
For Ferron, "It's the reunion of our tribe. It's the young meeting the elders; it's the passing of the torch in some way." Lynne Breedlove goes so far as to say "My entire life's been changed."
Life-changing experiences on a sliding scale ticket. "It's magical," says Amoja Three Rivers. "It's like Christmas was when I was a child, something I look forward to each year."
Going to Michigan has been an annual event for 15-year-old Jezanna Garza since she was a baby swaddled on her mother's back.
"Michigan moves you; adults, kids, we can all feel it," says Garza. "When I'm there, I feel free. The festival taught me to stand up for my rights. It comes from knowing I have that safe place to go back to, that I try to take with me out into the world."
As a woman who will come of age during the festival's third decade, Garza has one word of warning:
"If you go, you're never going to be the
same.
For more information, see the festival's web site at www.michfest.com, call 231757-4766, or write We Want the Music Co., P.O. Box 22, Walhalla, Mich 49458.