Originally published in The Lambda Book Report, Spring/Summer

2008

A Lesbian Archivist Discovers A Hidden Literary Treasure in

Southern Oregon

Interview with Linda Long by Carolyn Gage

Linda Long is the Manuscripts Librarian for the Special Collections

and University Archives at the University of Oregon in Eugene. When
she moved from Stanford in 1996 to take the job, little did she realize
that was sitting on a mother lode of lesbian culture, tucked quietly
away in the stacks of unprocessed collections and buried deep in the
hills of Southern Oregon.

Gage: What was your first clue about the treasure?

Long: Well, it was part of my new duties to familiarize myself with the
collection. During one of my walks through the stacks, I came across
thirty storage boxes marked “Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove.”

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Intrigued by the last name, I opened one of the boxes. What I saw
was title after title of lesbian and feminist periodicals. Some, I
recognized, but others, I had never heard of— Lesbian Tide, Leaping
Lesbian, Feminist Bookstore News, Amazon, Lesbian Connection,
Lesbian Insider Insighter Inciter, and so on. I took another box down
and found more of the same. Suddenly I realized what we had here—
a whole grouping of scarce—and possibly some rare—periodicals
that had been gathered together but not organized for research use.
At that moment I had what we archivists and manuscripts librarians
sometimes call that “tingly feeling” when we realize we found
something special in our collections.

Gage: Do you think that an archivist who was not lesbian would
have felt as “tingly?” The reason why I ask is that, as a lesbian
playwright who often works with historical figures, I frequently
uncover details overlooked or trivialized by heterosexual
cultural workers for whom these details have no context or
relevance.

Long: Yes, I agree. It’s true that as a lesbian archivist I had context
for this collection of periodicals. I also had a feeling of urgency to get
these materials available to scholars, and to specifically use the word
“lesbian” in the title so that a search of that word in the online catalog
would bring up the description of the collection. The “lesbian”
collections that I had discovered in our stacks were in a sense
closeted themselves, and I felt I was on a mission to out them and get
these valuable records available to scholars. I wanted to make them
as accessible as possible.

Gage: What was your next step on the treasure hunt?

Long: I found Ruth listed in our donor files, and I called her up. It was
during our conversations I discovered that Southern Oregon is home
to many lesbian intentional communities, or “communes.” Some of
these are collectives, and some are privately owned. Ruth and her
former partner, Jean, had published a journal entitled WomanSpirit
Magazine while they lived in a gay commune in Southern Oregon and
later while living in their own lesbian land nearby. The periodicals I
saw boxed up in the stacks were exchange copies from other
publishers.

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Gage: What was WomanSpirit?

Long: It was the first feminist/lesbian periodical solely dedicated to

the topic of feminism and spirituality, and it struck a chord with
thousands of women across the country. The publication of
WomanSpirit dovetailed nicely with the rise of the alternative feminist
press network that flourished during the 1970s and 1980s in the
United States, so WomanSpirit was able to reach a large audience of
women.

Gage: Goddess imagery and women’s spirituality are practically

mainstream now. It’s easy to forget that the roots of the
movement were taboo and counter-cultural, inextricably linked
to lesbian-feminism with its agenda of liberation. One of the
things that struck me as most radical about WomanSpirit was
how class-homogenous it was in terms of the contributors.
Working-class and academic authors were published side-by-
side, voices unedited, because the magazine had a commitment
to egalitarianism.

Long: A colleague and I drove down to Arcata where Ruth is now

living, and we spent a day and a half with her, talking about her
experiences. As I began to get a fuller picture of the development of
the lesbian land communities in Southern Oregon, it dawned on me
that Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove were only a part—albeit a central
part—of the story. The settlement of lesbian land communities in
Southern Oregon was a component of the larger Back-to-the-Land
movement of the late 1960s and 1970s when many individuals
wanted to escape urban life to return to a simpler life on the land,
establishing communes and collectives throughout the United States.
I started to realize that there was a rich history in these lesbian
communities—and if there was a history, there had to be documents
that reflect that history.

Gage: And where did Tee Corinne fit into this?

Long: Ruth had mentioned that Tee Corinne lived in Oregon. Again, I
had that same “tingly’ feeling of recognition. As a photographer,
visual artist and creative writer, Tee’s work was accessible in the

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popular lesbian press, and I had seen her work for years. For
example, she did the covers of most of the Naiad Press books for
many years.

Gage: And what happened after you contacted Tee?

Long: Tee was immediately positive about my interest in documenting

the history of the lesbian communities. Initially she sent copies of her
commercially-published writings and her desktop-published writings
so that we could catalog them and make them available at the
University of Oregon. Tee had written many essays and creative
works about the lesbian communities. Wild Lesbian Roses: Essays
on Art, Rural Living, and Creativity, 1986-1995 comes to mind. As a
photographer, artist, and writer, Tee was a remarkably creative
person who was very aware of the historical significance of the
lesbian land movement in Oregon. When she moved to Southern
Oregon in the early 1980s she became a central figure in the
community. Rural Oregon provided seclusion when Tee needed it so
Tee could get her creative work done, but she could also be a part of
a large, supportive lesbian community. The Southern Oregon Women
Writers’ Group, Gourmet Eating Society and Chorus often met at
Tee’s house.

Gage: I had a “tingly” feeling when I discovered that Writers

Group in 1989. I had just moved to the area, was newly “out,”
and just beginning to write lesbian plays. The Writers Group had
been in existence for fifteen years, meeting every three weeks in
different women’s homes all over the valley. It was like
discovering an ancient matriarchal tribe, or some cadre of
literary rebels and freedom fighters. It changed my life and my
writing forever.

Long: Along with several other women, Tee was instrumental in

creating “SO CLAP!” the Southern Oregon Country Lesbian Archival
Project, a very successful effort to gather the original records that
document the history of the lesbian communities in Oregon. Women
also contributed to SO CLAP! their own essays or poetry that reflect
their experience living in the lesbian communities. From her own
research on lesbian photographers and artists, Tee was very much
aware that the lives of lesbians and gays often go unnoticed in history

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for the simple reason that documentation is often hard to find. If there
are no records that document lesbian presence, that history is lost
forever. I use a quote from Tee to describe my work to collect and
preserve the records of the lesbian communities: “The lack of a
publicly accessible history is a devastating form of oppression;
lesbians face it constantly.” My goal is to collect and preserve the
documents so that the history of the lesbian communities in Oregon
can be made accessible to researchers, which will further scholarship
in this area.

Gage: We have talked about the possibility of Rootworks, the

Mountaingroves’ women’s land and the birthplace of
WomanSpirit, becoming registered as a national historical site.

Long: Rootworks is a historical site that is a perfect exemplar of the

feminist-lesbian dream. From the 1970s to today, the women’s back-
to-the-land community in Oregon was, and is, a dynamic expression
of the separatist dream. As part of that dream, women experimented
with new ways to live and work together—and with all sorts of
activities and rituals, from house-building projects and collective
gardening to the sacred circle. Many of the women were aspiring
artists of one kind or another—writers, painters, photographers—and
they hoped to be able to combine life on the land with their creative
work. All of this lesbian/feminist life and work is represented in
Rootworks. The buildings were all built by women; the “barn” in
particular was a big community effort and that building became a
central meeting place in the extensive lesbian community. At
Rootworks, gardens were created and maintained; outbuildings were
built to accommodate women travelers coming to Oregon. The
permanence of Rootworks and its status as a women-owned land
trust in perpetuity makes it a perfect example of a historic site. I think
a living museum would be an effective and dynamic way to preserve
the lesbian land dream and the history of the lesbian community in
Southern Oregon.

Gage: What is your dream for the future of this collection?

Long: My dream is to have the resources to be able to process,

describe, and catalog the collections we currently have so that they
are accessible to scholars worldwide. Manuscript processing is a

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time-consuming and expensive proposition, so we have to pick and
choose which collections can be processed in any given year. We
encode our “finding aids” (the guides to our manuscript collections) so
that they are available on the Web, where most researchers
nowadays will begin a search for collections. We participate in
Northwest Digital Archives, a consortium of repositories like ours in
the Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska) so
that the finding aids to the collections are easily located. The catalog
records for these collections are accessible on WorldCat, an
international bibliographic database that provides collection-level
information about our manuscript collections. From there, a link will
take the user to the online finding aid. So, we are doing everything we
can to make our collections findable and accessible to users. Most
recently, we were fortunate to have acquired the estate of Tee
Corinne, who died in 2006. As stated in Tee’s will, the proceeds from
her estate will help us process the lesbian land collections and
acquire more of these records from the lands or the personal papers
of the individual women who live on the land.

Carolyn Gage is a lesbian-feminist playwright, and the author of six

books, including Nine Short Plays and The Second Coming of Joan
of Arc and Selected Plays. Her play Ugly Ducklings is the subject of a
documentary to prevent harassment and GBLT youth suicides
(www.uglyducklings.org). Her catalog is online at
www.carolyngage.com.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

University of Oregon Special Collections

The lesbian collections at the Special Collections and University
Archives at the University Oregon currently include several
collections that are available for research at Special Collections
Index. The Feminist and Lesbian Periodical Collection contains 482
lesbian and feminist periodical titles including 36 Oregon titles and 31
international titles. Approximately 80 percent of the entire collection
contains titles published during the 1970s.

Southern Oregon Country

Lesbian Archival Project (SOCLAP!)
The Southern Oregon Country Lesbian Archival Project (SOCLAP!)

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was a non-profit corporation established in 1989 to collect and
preserve primary source material documenting the history of the
lesbian and feminist back-to-the-land movement in southern Oregon.
The collection contains correspondence, creative writings,
autobiographical writings, financial records, publications,
photographs, graphic materials, and ephemera.

The Ruth Mountaingrove Videotape Autobiography Collection

Ruth Mountaingrove is a lesbian photographer, writer and artist who
moved to Oregon in 1971, settling in communes and eventually co-
founding Rootworks, a lesbian community in Southern Oregon. The
collection consists of 21 VHS videotapes of Mountaingrove relating
the story of her life by talking, dancing, and singing.

The Tee A. Corinne Papers

Tee A. Corinne (1943-2006) was a photographer, artist, writer, and
lesbian activist. The collection includes correspondence, literary
manuscripts, artwork, photographs, artifacts, and other documents
that reflect Corinne’s life and work.