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Lesbianism is a constantly shifting construction in the women's movement. There is not "lesbianism" but rather many "lesbianisms" and similarly many "lesbians." The one word situates a number of constructions, each bound in a specific moment, a political moment, a moment in time and place.
-Katie King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels
Captivated by the ideals of separatist lesbian feminism, I moved to Durham, North Carolina, in 1980, in order to take a full-time job at Ladyslipper (a nonprofit company devoted to the distribution of women's music and women's culture) and to live in the lesbian community thriving there. From the vantage point of twenty years later, it has become clear that many women were flocking to urban and progressive locations across the nation in the late 1970s and early 1980s for similar reasons; a movement had emerged which relied heavily on the idea that women constituted a unique identity, that we had special moral attributes, and that being or becoming a "woman-identified-woman" was the best and most effective way to express feminist politics. In moving to Durham to participate in its lesbian culture, I was one of many women who found a kind of separatist hope at that particular moment in history.
I have set myself on the difficult task in this essay of writing about a number of contradictory positions and experiences simultaneously. The first and perhaps simplest agenda addressed here expresses how and why life in this community was both exciting and life giving, at the same time as being constraining and narrow. Several studies of local lesbian U.S. and Canadian communities in the 1970s and 1980s have emerged recently, and the Ur-narrative underpinning most of them is quite similar: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.1 That's exactly how I now feel about my years as a lesbian separatist in central North Carolina. That period of my life provided me with dreams and politics that have lent a character to everything that followed. I also ended up in conflict with just about every person in the tight-knit, claustrophobic community. A full-fledged oral history or ethnographic study of the Durham community along the lines of Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Becki Ross, or Nancy Whittier is called...