"In her study of gay culture, Another Mother Tongue, Judy Grahn envisions the women warriors in the lesbian tradition from antiquity to the persecution of lesbians in the U.S. armed forces since World War II. Grahn begins her odyssey of the lesbian warrior with the Celtic queen Boudica. Grahn disclosed details of the Amazon peoples on the European and African continents, who lived circa 3000 B.C.E. The oldest of these peoples were Libyan in northwest Africa who "were known not only as warriors but as founders of cities," most of which were named after their female generals, such as Myrine, Mytilene, Elaia, Anaia, Gryneia, Kyme. "At the city of Ephesus the Amazons established a shrine and magnificent statue to the Goddess Artemis." Included in this section of Grahn's book is a description of one of the many horrific witch-hunts of lesbians in the U.S. army in modern times. This ended in Grahn's discharge in 1960. "Military authority," she writes, "rules by the breaking of pride and dignity as much as by any threat of bodily harm. Nor can anyone humiliate you as deeply as your own." Describing this period in her life, Grahn continues: "Discharged into a poor area of Washington, D.C., with $80 and utter demoralization... I found that despair has no bottom; it can multiply itself indefinitely, inside the mind and outside. . . . I thrashed about at the bottom of the well of degradation among the more demoralized of America's people.... But I had to put the pieces of my life back together somehow." Grahn emerged from this time "fighting, studying, making notes on my own about Gay people I knew," embodying the warrior legacy she was soon to uncover in her search and make available to us."
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LGBT peopleWomen authors from the United StatesWomen academics from the United States20th-century poets from the United StatesFeminists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Judy_Grahn
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Judy Grahn
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