Finding a space free from scrutiny

Former UWS professor shines light on LGBTQ movement in new book

by Tony Bennett

"Itcomes from my life experience, beginning in the Cold War and Vietnam era in Minot, North Dakota," Duluthbased writer Dianna Hunter said of her new book, “Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life.” It was a time, she said, that she was "deeply unaware" of her sexual identity. Her journey out of that darkness is what her book aims to describe.

"Lesbians were thought to be sick — both psychologically and biologically, potentially — and also criminal," Hunter said. "It was very hard to come to consciousness, which is kind of an old story."

Regardless, Hunter said she needed to tell her version of that tale. In her book, she looks to describe how a "burst of feminist, lesbian energy" led her and the people she found herself drawn toward to create environments where they could feel safe and secure and somewhat free from scrutiny. "There was no space for ourselves in the world that we were born into," Hunter said.

"I found my way from North Dakota to a college in St. Paul which had a progressive reputation," Hunter said of her youth. In college, she read early feminist literature like "The Redstockings Manifesto."

"It had a transformative effect on my life," Hunter said, adding that she has no memory of seeing works by women on her college syllabi at all. Eventually, she created an independent-study course on feminism. "The need was huge for women to discover their own history and talk to each other about shared realities and make our stories part of the American story."

Hunter wound up teaching a class at Macalester College called "Is Anatomy Destiny?" in 1971, long before things such as gender-studies or queer-studies classes were created. "One of my friends who sat in on my course joined in with me and other women I lived with, and we created a consciousnessraising group. We started talking with each other about our experiences, and our eyes were opened" about cultural forces that kept women subordinate, Hunter said. It was a time when terms like "sexual harassment" had yet to be defined.

This time was one of awakening for Hunter. Writers like Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston were sources of inspiration. Eventually, Hunter's path led her to an acceptance of herself. "My friend and I both came out," she said. "We realized, after talking about our experiences, that we actually were lesbians."

This led Hunter to the lesbian bar scene, a place where she said a gay woman could feel at ease with her nature. "The bars were the place where the culture was being perpetuated, and where you could be yourself," she said. With time, issues of alcohol abuse came to be a problem, and so Hunter and the people she was close to in her community began to talk about finding a place where they could have the same feeling of freedom without the problems alcohol can bring. All of these catalysts led to what Hunter calls her "lesbian-collective land experiments." These experiences are what “Wild Mares” looks to shine a light on. Hunter speaks about the alienating culture of war surrounding the Vietnam conflict and about how many professions were closed to women, and she does so not with anger, but to explain the conditions that inspired her to eventually seek refuge of sorts outside of the society that had no place for her, that seemed to reject her at every juncture. "There were all these interconnecting oppressions going on," Hunter said, recalling the prevalent questions being raised in her community at the time: "How can we get out of this? How can we escape?"

"A lot of young people had already decided to go back to the land," Hunter said, "to try to get away from militarism and materialism and environmental ruin. We decided to do it with other women. We thought we could make a space where we could start making healthier lives for ourselves and get strong and maybe start making a difference in the world."

"We began with some little hardscrabble farms," Hunter said of her early forays into living a new kind of life. "We wanted to find that simpler place." Things like indoor toilets and running water were luxuries that she gave up, at least for a time. Eventually, she landed on a dairy farm in 1981 and plugged away until about 1986.

As time went on, Hunter left the farm life and went fully into education. She taught college classes on gender studies and writing and women's studies, and she retired from the University of WisconsinSuperior six years ago. Today, Hunter's book exists as a reminder that the freedom and acceptance — however limited in some corners it may be — the LGBTQ community now has was hard-won by people who lived in a much different America than exists today. Forty or 50 years ago, the struggle was different, but it goes on. The future is promised to no one, and “Wild Mares” helps to remind people reading it in 2018 and beyond that much work has been done over the decades, but the forces that aim to divide and regress are always present. "It's kind of a crucial time to get that history recorded," Hunter said, "to make that movement visible." D