MAKING THE PROJECT

After my first book (Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency), I wanted to write a book about the Furies and their newspaper. I had read the Furies newspaper in 1984, when I first came out. It was formative for me, and I wanted to do the research and write a monograph.

I ended up writing several other books instead, and had a sort of writer's block about the Furies project. Then it occurred to me: they're out there, still. I could talk with them. And so I did.

During that long writer's block, I read a lot. I traveled to  Duke University to explore the holdings of the Sallie Bingham special collections. There's a complete run of the Furies newspaper there, annotated by readers 50 years ago. The collection lives online here. I also went to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn to look at its collection. I presented on the Furies at a number of conferences. I just couldn't do the big project until the idea of documentary storytelling hit me.

I started my interviews in 2017, with a trip to Manhattan to talk with Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron. Over the next three years, I traveled to Columbus, Cupertino, Oakland, Santa Fe, Studio City, Afton, and Washington, D.C. with my recording gear and sometimes an assistant.