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"If you destroy an entire generation of a people's culture, it's as if they never existed." - Film trailer for The Monuments Men, 2013
THIS YEAR, as America's two oldest women's music festivals-Michigan and National-prepare to celebrate landmark fortieth anniversaries, a number of powerful organizations have signed a petition against the Michigan festival, endorsing an economic boycott of all artists who perform there. Though a life-altering destination for four decades of lesbian artists and activists, the Michigan festival's legacy has recently been reduced to one contentious issue: the question of trans inclusion. To clarify the policy: the festival does not ban, inspect, or expel transwomen. Its intention is to be a temporary gathering for women to address diverse experiences of being born female. It asserts that being female-assigned at birth fosters a unique identity. And as a weeklong, clothing-optional campout, it's a trusted sanctuary for the countless women and girls who have survived male violence in a traditionally heterosexual relationship. Many have testified that they can only regain a relaxed sense of physical safety during their annual retreat at Michfest. The last festival of its kind, Michigan has indeed consistently privileged, and celebrated, women and girls born biologically female.
Michigan's critics view the festival's impressive survival into its fortieth year as a trans-phobic failure rather than as a lesbian success. Complicating this era of tension between the T and the L is the powerful, still-evolving tool of social media that permits sloppily researched and even slanderous journalism to be recycled as factual, ingraining myth as truth. What I am archiving now, pretty much daily since HRC and GLAAD initiated a festival boycott in July 2014, is an almost gleeful barrage of name-calling, as well as anti-lesbian violence that has attracted little editorial oversight. Calls for the festival's destruction resound in anonymous postings ("Burn it down." "Thank God these dinosaurs will die off soon." "I can't wait for all of them to die."). Smears and stereotypes applied retroactively to any woman who ever camped at a festival also appear in credited political blogs. The reframing of festival artists and folksingers as hatemongers and KKK-like segregationists is being transmitted in cyberspace at a pace no one historian can correct, easily circulated for decades to come, in contrast...