Exclusive: A conversation w/ lesbian feminist artist, Dr. Marie Cartier (Part 2)

On Tuesday, February 7th, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the 2010 ruling by Judge Vaughn Walker against California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8, which found the proposition to be unconstitutional. I was overjoyed.

One of the first people I immediately thought of after hearing the wonderful news was my friend and hero, Dr. Marie Cartier.

Dr. Cartier, a renowned radical lesbian feminist artist, author, and activist, has long inspired me with her work, especially that of her seminal Dandelion Warrior movement (which honors those who have survived incest and sexual abuse and choose not to commit suicide.)

Dr. Cartier and her wife, Kimberly, were one of the same-sex couples who legally wed in California before Proposition 8 passed in November 2008. Every year I send the couple an anniversary card, not only to honor their marital commitment to one another, but to also honor the belief that marriage is a right that belongs to ALL Americans.

In honor of this recent ruling, I present Part Two of my exclusive interview with feminist artist and activist, Dr. Marie Cartier, where the distinguished author discusses her passion for fire spinning, a stand-out story from her upcoming book, Baby, You Are My Religion, and how to maintain an artist's identity.

(Read Part One here.)

*********************

I recently learned that you do fire spinning.

I started taking fire spinning classes and I learned how to do it, but I haven’t lit up yet. If I can get that back in my agenda, then hopefully I will be able to light up and that could become part of some performance that I do.

When did you first become interested in fire spinning?

I think the first time I ever saw a fire spinning was at Michigan (Womyn’s Music Festival.) Ten years ago I first saw it and it’s one of my favorite things at Michigan. There are all these women fire spinners and when you go to a rock concert at night, there’s this whole other show happening in back of the crowd. People spinning fire--I’ve been super entranced by it.

For my surprise 50th birthday party, my wife Kimberly hired these fire spinners to come and perform, and in Long Beach there’s a women’s fire spinning troupe called Sirena Serpentina. They teach it and I was finally able to start taking classes. I was so into it and I bought all the stuff, like a light-up hula hoop.

I have really wanted to do this for like a decade and I’m getting good at it.

Do you have any upcoming projects after (finishing your book), Baby, You Are My Religion?

Ever since I’ve heard these stories, I’ve been envisioning a screenplay. I’ve written a (film) short from it and I have been drafting the outlines of a feature.

There’s this one story about this woman who came out--well, identified gay feelings and acted on them. I don’t really say “coming out” because none of them really use that language. She was “out”—identified gay feelings and acted on them--from 1945 to 1953, but she was Jewish. By 1953 she felt so guilty about not having kids that she married a psychiatrist. (He was involved in sex conversion therapy, which anybody would be who was in a psychiatric profession at that time.)

One of the last things I would say to people was, “You want to tell me anything else about the bars? Is there anything else you can tell me?” And she told me how she used to call the bars after she got married. She would call the bars three times a week, in the middle of the night. She still had the list of the numbers where she went in the 40’s, when she was out at that time. She would call just to listen to the sounds of the people and she would never say anything. She did that for 14 years. She would just wait for people to hang up on the other end, then she would call another number, and then she would call another number.

And when I talked to her, the eight years that she was out she was dating—her first girlfriend was one of the softball players. Did you see A League of Their Own?

Yes, I sure did.

That was her first girlfriend—one of those softball players. I interviewed her because I thought that’s what we’d talk about.

One of the things I talk about in my presentation is that it’s really amazing that I could interview 100 people and not realize how significant the bar structure was for people who couldn’t go. Just the fact that it existed, the fact that this space existed that acknowledged the existence of gay people, there was no other physical public space like that.

When I asked her that last question, I didn’t have any idea that those spaces meant something to people who weren’t in them, physically in them, just that they existed. She kept calling to listen to the sounds and she said, “I needed to know those spaces were there because I knew that someday I would be free.”

Did she ever experience that freedom?

Yeah. She got divorced when no-fault insurance came into California, because she definitely would have lost her kids. There’s no way as a lesbian she would get to keep her kids. She’s (considered) legally, mentally ill until 1973.

The fact that I interviewed all those people and I still hadn’t got that story is really significant to me, about how much of our gay history is not—has not—been recorded, that I didn’t even see that piece of it.

When I do these talks, I really, really encourage people to get the stories. Even if you don’t think you’re going to do anything specifically with the story, just getting the story of an elder gay person and putting it in an archive, somehow we will get all these stories to tell an accurate history, because so much of our history just hasn’t been told.

(Gay history) is housed in living beings whose lives were not considered important or were considered deviant. Actually I don’t want to say they weren’t important; they were VERY important. They were really demonized.

One of the things that I’m doing is encouraging people to get oral histories into archives. At the same time, I’ve created all these oral histories.

And it’s weird because that’s what MORGASM (the Museum of Radical Gender and Sex Matrix) is. And now I have all these archives of butch women. If I could have a museum space, a gallery space, I would definitely try to do Baby, You Are My Religion as some kind of listening to the testaments, listening to the stories.

Yeah, I could see it right now. We set up a bar and it has stools and headsets dropping from the ceiling, and you could just pull the headsets on and listen to the stories.

Do you have any final thoughts?

I feel like I want to say more about art making.

I guess what I would say is I really loved a quote of mine (laughs) because I read it and thought, Oh yeah. I did say that in the interview that one of the best ways when you’re not able to make art is to support other artists.

It has always been extremely important for me to find other people doing what I’m doing as an artist, who care about my work getting out there, who keep asking me, “Okay, are we going to get together?” or who show up at my performances. That’s one of the things that is so sustaining to me, that I have people in my life who are doing what I do, with some of the same circumstances as I’m doing them in. I feel a connection with them, especially if they have some of the same issues that I have.

A huge thing that sustains me is having people whom I have to be accountable for, because it’s so easy—and I think this is one of the things that people really don’t understand about artists—it’s so easy when you’re not accountable to anybody, that you just don’t do it. And if nobody gives a s**t, you know?

The other thing that really sustains me is writing at the same coffee shop. (laughs)

That’s a great thing you’re saying about artists connecting with other artists for accountability and encouragement.

I do think it’s really important that you don’t talk out a work. I have a rule that I don’t talk about work past where it’s created. I don’t want to talk a whole work out because then I won’t feel the need to do it.

This is a fact—the Q&As for my presentations, every single Q&A had to be cut off; it didn’t just peter out. People still wanted to ask questions.

There are a couple things I’ve learned from those conversations, which is that almost everybody remembers their first gay bar. (laughs) And they want to talk to me about it. And they want me to understand the importance of it—negative or positive. All those things really sustain me.

The other thing that artists really have to understand is that everybody wants art in the world. If you are an artist, you’re a storyteller and everybody wants their version of the story told. I think that’s one of the things that artists have to be really careful of--that everybody else wants their version of the truth told.

I also think that what is so valuable is when you find those people who are really supportive of you and the work that you’re doing, it sustains you and moves the work forward. And just sustains you in the world, so even if you’re not producing, you (still) have an artist’s identity.

For more information: MarieCartier.com