Landykes of the South

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Landykes of the South is the second special issue of Sinister Wisdom (Sinister Wisdom 98) featuring memoirs, interviews, essays, and artifacts from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, a project of Womonwrites, the Southeast Lesbian Writers' Conference. For some early women's liberationists in the first consciousness- raising groups, forming a women's land group was an outcome of the process, putting theory into action. Some Lesbians came out in the counterculture's back-to-the-land movement, some waking up to feminism after moving to the country with a mixed group or male partner. Our collection of Landyke stories begins in 1969 when Corky Culver's consciousness-raising group in Florida, possibly the first Lesbian land group in the country, began to look for land. We chose to end the storytelling at the end of the twentieth century in 1998 with Maat Dompim, but the Landyke movement continues in some form to this day.