Jogging at Hawk Hill Community Land Trust, 28 June 2005

My undergraduate capstone project for my Women's Studies degree was to help document a lesbian feminist group, Aradia, Inc., that had been formed and was active in West Michigan during the 1970s and early 1980s. A number of key leaders in that group had migrated to Missouri and established a community on "womyn's land"; following graduation I spent a month with them at the Hawk Hill Community Land Trust (Drury, Missouri). Part of the reason for my being there was to transfer borrowed archival records back to the community. I was also assisting one of the community members with the organization of her own personal archives. At this time in my life (I was twenty-four), I had not yet articulated any type of sexual identity for myself beyond, when pressed, describing my sexuality as "mostly straight." Spending a month in a community of lesbian and bisexual women elders at that particular point in my life proved to be a really important physical, mental, and emotional way to step back from thinking about queer identities as a college student preoccupation and understand -- in a way much more concrete than reading archival sources and taking oral histories and reading memoirs had conveyed to me in the years prior to that visit -- that living an adult queer life, and having established same-sex relationships and households, was possible out in the world beyond the classroom. The person in this photograph was still several years away from being able to articulate her bisexuality, but the space of Hawk Hill was one of the many locations that made that articulation ultimately possible.