"Baby Prick Go Home": A Separatist Storm in a Tiny Teacup

How the 1989 East Coast Lesbian Festival ended in acrimony

In the late-summer of 1989, amid the rolling hills of West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a controversy erupted that perfectly encapsulated the peculiar politics of women-only spaces in the late twentieth century. The inaugural East Coast Lesbian Festival, intended as a celebration of lesbian culture and separatist values, found itself embroiled in what is properly described as an absurd tempest in a tiny teapot, despite its featuring an angry mob, intimidation, and a heated debate about the presence of a sixteen–month-old baby boy.

The festival's organisers, Miriam Fougere and Lin Daniels, had created what they hoped would be a groundbreaking event. Unlike the more established Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which tolerated the presence of male infants, the ECLF aimed to be strictly women-only. The brochure listed prices for "women and girls," though as multiple people would later complain, it failed to state explicitly "No Boys", an oversight that would prove rather significant when a miniature provocateur – in the guise of a sixteen-month-old male infant – arrived at the festival with his mothers, an interracial couple attending their first such event. What followed was, to put it mildly, not the festival's finest hour.

Evidently, the festival organisers had not anticipated that some lesbians would disregard the implicit no males rule, and bring their baby boys. Sheila Anne, coordinator of the Lesbian Separatist camping area, was outraged, writing later in off our backs that the presence of this infant boy represented an “invasion” and “betrayal”, and the anger of separatist women was an appropriate response.

Others obviously agreed, because the family with the baby boy awoke on the Saturday morning of the festival to find their cabin had been plastered with signs bearing such welcoming messages as "BABY PRICK GO HOME" and "DON'T FEED MALES, DON'T BREED MALES". One imagines that this was not quite the warm festival atmosphere the parents had anticipated.

Unsurprisingly, not everybody was best pleased by this turn of events. Many lesbian mothers and their friends were incensed that a multiracial lesbian couple and their sixteen-month-old son had been targeted in this manner, especially given that there were reportedly adult males on the land throughout the weekend.

Lesbian separatists, for their part, bristled that they were being blamed collectively for the autonomous actions, possibly justified, of a few of their comrades.

The schism between lesbian mothers and separatists is perfectly illustrated in two contrasting accounts of the same festival workshop, each version transforming the event into a piece of political theatre.

Sheila Anne, writing from the separatist perspective, described how a workshop titled "What is Separatism?" was besieged by lesbian mothers and their supporters. When participants tried to raise the issue of the "attack on the Lesbian mother," Anne, as facilitator, informed them "this was not the time or the place to address their issues." Outside the tent, she reported, with evident dismay, a mother weaponised her child by wheeling "her daughter's stroller angrily to and fro like a protester might wield a righteous picket sign" - an image that perfectly captured the theatrical nature of the confrontation.

Dotty Johnson's account of the same event painted a very different picture, but one no less dramatic: 

Parents and friends of parents crossed the "STOP BREEDING, STOP MOTHERING..." sign and entered the large, fenced off camping area. Questions were raised about the signs that were plastered on the family's cabin. They were told that this was not the time or the place to discuss it. Statements were made concerning male children and mothering in general. Again and again the lesbians were silenced.

In Johnson's telling, it was the mothers who were marginalised, their legitimate concerns dismissed by an intransigent separatist leadership–the same scene, but with the roles of protagonist and antagonist neatly reversed.

The next morning, at 9 AM, over a hundred women gathered at a meeting organised by the lesbian mothers and their supporters. Despite attempts to remove signs advertising the gathering, Johnson reported that "every lesbian had a chance to speak her mind, one at a time." The ensuing discussion ranged from thoughtful to inflammatory. Some participants drew explosive parallels between the separatists’ actions and Hitler’s systematic exclusions–a comparison that would later draw sharp criticism from festival organiser Lin Daniels.

The meeting produced a quasi-formal statement condemning the treatment of the family. After some negotiation with festival organisers, it was agreed this would be read from the day stage, along with a rebuttal from the separatist perspective. In what seems a fitting metaphor for the entire controversy, when the moment came, the main statement was “read to applause and cheers,” while the promised rebuttal was not read by the MC at all, but instead delivered by “a self-proclaimed separatist writer.”

On the separatist side of things, Sheila Anne, watched all this with dismay:

The idea that being with Lesbians be the priority for this 4 days out of the year even was met with overwhelming booing and hissing. I felt like I was witnessing a tragedy, a death–the demise of a basic Lesbian consciousness, the valuing of ourselves as Lesbians superseded by supremacist values of motherhood, by a supremacist value of boy children over girl children, and adult females. Haven't we heard this somewhere before? Sounds like hetero-patriarchy to me.

The closing of the festival - marked by “bitterness, resentment, anger, frustration and pain”–did not spell the end of the affair. The protagonists took to the feminist press to air their grievances (which, of course, is how we know so much about these events).

A number of interesting details emerged over the following months. For example, according to one correspondent, a festival organiser proposed that lesbian mothers should undergo prenatal testing and abort male foetuses–a position that might be characterised as taking separatism to its logical, if somewhat dystopian, conclusion. The same organiser helpfully suggested that nursing mothers could either “express four days of milk or give them formula or let the boys stay in a hotel and have the mothers leave the land to nurse them”.

A letter from Kate Moran in the January 1990 issue of off our backs added a rather significant detail to the circumstances that sparked the initial protest. According to Moran, the offensive signs were actually posted by disabled lesbians who had been locked out of an indoor bathroom at 2 AM because the boy was sleeping inside. These women had apparently tolerated the male child's presence all day, but their perspective shifted dramatically when denied access to essential facilities. 

Do I need to tell you that they were furious? They knew that the sleeping baby, the "reason" they were barred from using the indoor bathroom, was a male child, at a Lesbian festival! Now, they'd known about this male child all day and had done nothing. But one's perspective changes when she's a disabled Lesbian in pain told she can't pee.

What had begun as an abstract political principle about male presence had suddenly collided with very concrete questions of accessibility and accommodation–though the modern phrase, “Well, that escalated quickly”, does, it must be said, tend to spring to mind here.

Elizabeth Braemen, writing in defence of separatists, took a harder line:

I believe that lesbians should not be bearing and raising boy children in the first place. Lesbians should not put our valuable energy into raising the oppressor. Lesbians should not be compromised in the development of womyn-only space by boy children.

The notion that male privilege and power as an oppressor might be manifest in a nursing infant is one of the more… interesting theoretical positions to emerge from the debate.

One sympathetic observer, Angela Johnson, while agreeing that bringing a male child to a separatist festival showed dubious judgement, questioned the methods of protest employed:

I don't think the women who brought their son to the festival were acting with prudence, courtesy or even much thought… However, I absolutely deplore the means chosen to communicate this. Surely at a festival designed to shelter women from the violence of men and boys, the violence of sadomasochism, the hatred of the patriarchy, surely at such a place as this women's values could be expressed without recourse to violence.

Looking back from the perspective of 2024, the entire episode seems very odd. But actually, there were real thorny challenges in play here. If one accepts that women should be able to gather together and organise in spaces from which biological males are entirely excluded–and they should be able to–then what exactly happens to male children? The East Coast Lesbian Festival was not the only women-only event to struggle with this issue, and it was an issue never settled to everybody’s satisfaction.

Nevertheless, it’s probably best if you don’t plaster signs targeting a 16-month-old child all over its parents cabin. It really isn’t a good look. In the end, perhaps Linda Coate's letter to off our backs put this general point most succinctly: "What kind of rationale can be offered for ‘directing violence’ at an 18-month-old (sic) child, of either gender? Common sense would indicate that the child did not choose to be there; I don't imagine he came toddling in on his own".

Sources

Gay Community News, 01/10/89
off our backs, October 1989, November 1989, December 1989, January 1990