In their poignant new documentary, Outliers and Outlaws, director Courtney Hermann and producer Judith Raiskin tell the (mostly) untold story of the hundreds of women who migrated to Eugene, Oregon in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, making the small town home to the greatest number of lesbians per capita in the United States.
At the dawn of Eugene’s identity as a lesbian refuge, America was defined by college protests, opposition to the Vietnam War, collectives and communes, a new back-to-the-land ethos, and the nascent women’s and “gay rights” movements.
At the center of it all for many women was Eugene. About halfway between Portland and San Francisco. it was a destination for lesbians seeking community and common purpose. That took the form of dozens of all-women cooperatives and other enterprises where, as one of the film’s participants observes, women discovered, “Wow, we really don’t need men.”
The movie was produced as part of the Eugene Lesbian History Project, a year-long exhibit telling the story of the town’s place in women’s history through oral histories, ephemera, and archival documentary sources from the time.
For Outliers and Outlaws, filmmakers Hermann, 52, and Raiskin, 67, “embedded” for two years with members of Eugene’s lesbian community, learning their stories, recording on location, digging through their personal archives, and ultimately drawing a line connecting their origins as world-builders in Eugene with who they are today.
LGBTQ Nation: Let’s begin at the end of the movie with Dolly Parton’s song “Eugene, Oregon,” which accompanies the credits. Dolly was on tour with country star Porter Wagoner in 1972, and they made a stop in Eugene. She wasn’t feeling very well, and she begged the audience’s indulgence, and of course, she wowed them. “They loved me and gave me my first standing ovation—actually two,” she said later. “I cried like a baby. I almost couldn’t go back into the next song I was so touched by it.” She wrote her ode to Eugene that very night. “The love you gave was genuine, Eugene Oregon, I’ll remember you for the rest of my life.” How does Dolly’s song sum up your movie?
Judith Raiskin: Part of the story was that it was more than just a standing ovation for the music. It’s that the community took care of her personally, and she was really grateful for that.
When I wrote to ask for permission to use the song, I said a lot of people came to Eugene and found sustenance and support and love and community and were able to achieve their best because of that kind of support that they found here. And so if Dolly Parton found it that way too, that felt very reifying of those ideas that we experienced, and that all the women that we interviewed for the Eugene Lesbian History Project — and that’s 83 people — similarly felt Eugene was a unique and supportive place.
Courtney Hermann: And now it’s interesting because audiences, it seems, are feeling it too through the film, and are, in a way, almost recreating a little corner of it in the auditoriums in which they’re all too briefly in community with one another. There are also folks who have been taking up the responsibility of trying to recreate a little bit of that community again in actual spaces where people are interacting.
Judith: For instance, we’ve had several intergenerational meetups in Eugene following the art house shows. And there’s a new group called DIQ, which is, Do It Queer, and it’s people who know how to fix things and build things teaching other queer people how to fix things and build things. We’re starting with a fence, and an older person who built our house is teaching all these young queer people how to build a fence and how to use the tools, and so that’s starting up.
I think everyone can relate to one of your participants’ observations early in the film, “You don’t really know until it’s history.” How did Eugene end up as an epicenter of what one of your subjects calls “Love between and among women”?
Judith: Well, that’s been a good question all along. You know, why Eugene? And part of that is the location between Portland and San Francisco. Part of it was economics. Part of it was people writing to their friends and saying, “Oh, my God, there’s so many dykes here! You have to come” (laughing). I mean, that’s been a question all along, why certain spaces become migration points, and I do believe Eugene is becoming a migration point now for trans people under the current political assault.
Is Eugene formally a trans refuge?
Judith: Yes.
One subject in the movie comes to the realization, “Wow, we really don’t need men.” Is that the basis of a separatist manifesto or just a simple statement of fact?
Judith: No, I think it’s not a separatist statement. The person who says it isn’t separatist, but what she’s saying is that we can do these things, and we don’t need to be reliant on men, which means that our choices in life can be free of that reliance, no matter what we choose. Whether we want to live with men, whether you don’t live with men, we don’t need to live with men to support ourselves economically, which allows us to have independent choices.
You know, this is a time when many women could only support themselves if they were married, if they weren’t in certain jobs or in certain communities. So I think that’s a statement of fact.
You get some laughs in the movie with the mention of meetings, lots of meetings, including “feelings meetings.” What was, and is, the role of meetings in women’s communal living and working? And do you have an example from making your movie?
Judith: Like meetings we had with each other? There were a lot of meetings.
Courtney: We would meet every Friday (laughing).
Judith: That’s true. I guess consensus decision-making is something that is not frequently done in our capitalist culture, and it takes a long time if you are operating an organization and you’re relying on consensus decision-making to move it forward. It takes stamina, because it foregrounds the value of each voice. It’s non-hierarchical, and that was a nuisance for some people, but it was also something that they accepted, or something that was necessary in order for them to maintain their relationships with one another.
Courtney: It was a very anti-capitalist thing. If you say, like, it’s impractical, then what’s the goal? If the goal is to maintain a community where everybody’s voice matters — and that was revolutionary for them, to experience the opportunity to voice their opinion, let alone their feelings — that’s a psychological journey that a lot of people were on in this.
Judith: And consensus in those meetings doesn’t mean everybody agrees. Consensus means it depends how you define it. You allow this decision to happen even if you have misgivings, and that’s different. But it was very challenging. You’d hear people say, “I never want to be in a collective again,” but they were all owners of the businesses, so you can’t move anybody out or have a hierarchy around that. It wasn’t just about like, “Oh, my voice has been squashed and my emotions have been undermined.” It was also about, “Let’s figure out a way that we can actually work together and live together in the right relationship.”
Courtney: It was very complex and pretty revolutionary, and amazing how people were able to sustain this kind of real interrogation of all of this while making decisions.
The movie describes a loose network of “Lesbian Lands” in Oregon. What were they, and what did they have in common with the lesbian community in Eugene?
Courtney: The Lesbian Lands were primarily located in Southern Oregon, south of Eugene. They attracted lesbian separatists, women who were interested in learning skills in building and physically building a community, but also in creating intentional communities. And so that DIY ethic, I would say, is the common thread, probably, across the lands, and that extends to Eugene.
Some folks were on their way to Lesbian Lands and ended up in Eugene. Some people passed from Eugene to the Lesbian Lands and back. Some folks were just on the Lesbian Lands and never became Eugene citizens. But there was a conversation between the Lands and the folks in town, which was, “Hey, we can do this. We can build these spaces. We can build these communities, women can do this, and we can do it outside of the usual constraints that we have.”
Judith: I’ll just add to Courtney’s great elaboration on the Lands. You have to see it in the context of a time when women did not have access to capital, were not allowed in certain professions, either because of the “moral turpitude” clauses in professions, or because they wouldn’t be allowed in the trades, or they wouldn’t be promoted, and they were earning 69 cents on the dollar. And so in the context of women and work, add to that, homophobia, misogyny, violence against women.
I love the descriptor, “land dykes.” Please define.
Judith (laughing): That’s a thing! “The women who lived on the separatist Lesbian Lands.”
Another term heard in the film is “local feminist ecology.” What’s the context we hear that in, and how would you describe it?
Judith: The women who lived on the Lands were part of the “back-to-the-land” movement of the time — not just for lesbians — and they were very conscious of growing sustainably. This is at the time of logging of the old-growth forests in Oregon. And so they were protective of the timber on their land. Some were involved in protecting the spotted owl, in logging issues. And they saw themselves, I would say, as having been used as resources, too. Women’s bodies are produced as resources. Land is used as resources in exploitative and cruel ways. And they were really interested in having a relationship with the land that was different.
In 1992, Measure 9 sought to amend the Oregon constitution to prohibit anti-discrimination laws addressing sexual orientation and declare homosexuality “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” A lot of people in Oregon voted yes. What was the relationship between the women in Eugene, and those on Lesbian Lands to the south, with their conservative neighbors?
Courtney: The Lesbian Lands folks had opted out of the kinds of relationships that the people in town built with their neighbors in order to create support for queer people who were being targeted by these measures.
Folks in Eugene, they were going across the street to their neighbors and coming out and saying (laughing), “Hi, I’m your neighbor, and I’m, you know, a lesbian!” I mean, I’m oversimplifying it, but really, it was the folks in town who were doing the kind of grassroots organizing, and coalition building, and the really scary and dangerous work of coming out to other people in order to build support for the gay and lesbian community and against these capricious and dehumanizing measures.
Judith: The whole state was embroiled. I mean, it was a very, very violent time. People were murdered. Gay people were attacked. And so I think the political coalitions that were made in the cities like Eugene and Portland probably carried the vote.
But so much work was done in places like Cottage Grove and smaller places that didn’t have very many queer people in them. There’s a really good book on this called “The Stranger Next Door,” and it’s about Cottage Grove, but it’s about how Measure 9 motivated people who didn’t have any gay people in their communities. It’s what’s happening right now, actually, around trans people.
Judith, you’ve said the film’s subjects “lived in a reality of affirmation, of joy, of collective living.” How did they react to Measure 9 sponsor Lon Mabon’s declaration that the fight over it was “war” and “it has to be fought like a war.”
Judith: His rhetoric is so similar to the violent rhetoric of today. You hear that quote in a clip from a documentary called “Ballot Measure 9,” which is also in the exhibit. It’s kind of a funny moment where he’s using this incredibly martial language and there’s not many people in the room.
It was extremely emotionally draining to have that kind of language thrown at you all the time, so people got together to figure out how to change their language around gay and lesbian people and who gay and lesbian people were and talk to people they’ve never spoken with about this and have to listen to people’s misinformation and prejudices, and then talk with them across these differences.
There’s not a single issue on the ballot to vote on today, but what can viewers learn from your film’s participants in Eugene about how to deal with the current political environment?
Judith: We don’t know what people are taking from it. You’re right in the middle of it, right? So we don’t actually know. But with all these events that are happening in Eugene, I think there’s a real recognition that community building is the way we’re going to be able to maintain our humanity during this time, absolutely.
Courtney: Yes, it’s going to be online, as it has been in recent years, and the younger generations are really good at doing that, but these younger generations are looking at what the older generation did through this film and saying, “Oh, well, there’s a lot of value, probably, in actually getting together.”
And as Judith enumerated, now these opportunities are popping up for people to do just that.
One of the places for organizing in the past was women’s bookstores. Mother Callie’s Women’s Bookstore is one of a number of bookstores that were mentioned in the movie. Describe their place in the lives of lesbians in a time before the internet.
Judith: So at the time, there were women’s bookstores all over, and I’d refer you to a book called “A Space of Our Own,” which is a new book by June Thomas, and she’s got a chapter on the importance of lesbian bookstores, women’s bookstores, feminist bookstores — you know, they were called different things, but they were hubs for information, for finding a place to live, for jobs, for speakers who would come in, poets, writers, academics. People would come in and share information and ideas.
You know, it was a place that wasn’t a bar. For one thing, it was open during the day (laughing). So it offered another kind of space than just the bar scene, which has its own value.
Courtney: You can read books.
Judith: You can read books.
Courtney: You can drink tea. You can have conversation. You can talk about ideas, which the Eugene lesbian community was very interested in doing. You could even maybe branch out and talk about feelings (laughing).
Judith: It was a place where people, younger people who weren’t out — and I’ve heard this story a few times — they’d be outside the bookstore for a while, and then finally find their way in and begin to talk to people. And Izzy, who was the manager for many years of Mother Callie’s, for many, many young people, she was the first person they came out to.
It was a safe space where they could read and think and put themselves in the context of a history. I mean, that’s what literature offers, right? It’s a history of art, of culture, and generations that have come before us, so that we’re not alone, we’re not making it up. We’re not the only one. And I think bookstores really offer that. There are only 30 or so women’s bookstores in the country now, maybe fewer. At the time, there were a couple hundred.
One of the movie’s subjects observes, “Lack of history is oppression.” How does Outliers and Outlaws address that idea?
Judith: So you’re referring to Tee Corinne. She’s talking about the power of erasure. You need to preserve the history, and you need to make it accessible. So in the oral history archive for the Eugene Lesbian History Project, Linda Long and I used that as our guide, and we did both of those things. We interviewed all these people with long interviews, one-and-a-half to two-hour interviews. We digitized them. We transcribed them. We bound them in books of acid-free paper, because who knows what’s going to happen to this digital business in 200 years? But there’ll be the books.
But then also the documentary is the epitome of making this history accessible and visible, because lesbian lives have been invisibilized and have been erased in all kinds of ways, in archives as well.
What we don’t want to be — what we don’t want to have left behind — are histories that are only about pain and suffering. And so we’re also trying to provide a history that is about power and joy and all of that good stuff, while not ignoring the context in which all of that was being generated, which was difficult, and which is why the women were in Eugene in the first place.
Does the political atmosphere right now mean folks are going to be looking for that same kind of oasis again?
Courtney: We have seen that people who interact with this video are really moved by it, and I think it does have to do with the political climate. I have to say that I still am kind of amazed at how these screenings become happenings. I get it that in this political climate, people need each other, and they need stories that promote hope, and courage by association, all that. But what is it about this movie that is hitting the spot for the people who come to see it, so much so that the experience is not just about going to see a movie, it’s about being with all of these other people who have come to see the movie?
I also have been amazed at how much the audience laughs, to the point where they’re missing the next bit because they’re laughing so much. It’s not just that our comic timing is amazing and that our participants are brilliant geniuses. It’s also that I think people are showing up ready to enjoy. And they’re willing to trust us to take them on a worthwhile journey.
Judith: It’s interesting to watch the end. People are singing along with Dolly Parton, whether they know the song or not, and in these big screenings, they leap out in their chairs afterwards with this very powerful standing ovation. And then everybody wants the microphone, and people talk about their own need for preserving their own histories. Hearing these powerful stories is igniting their desire to have their own stories recognized.
