LESBIAN NIRVANA

Most of the young women who moved to Eugene in the 1960s-70s didn’t know exactly where Oregon was, although they knew it was somewhere on the west coast. Along with hundreds of thousands of other young people across the country they joined the countercultural westward migration, enticed by images of the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco and the possibility of creating lives with different priorities than those of the generation that preceded them. Many of these young women had been involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in high school and college and now embraced the women’s liberation movement. The “lesbian lands” in southern Oregon drew women who wanted to help create non-patriarchal communities, explore women-centered work and rituals, and develop organic farming. Some of the narrators lived on these lands before joining the lesbian community in Eugene. The women who moved to Eugene represented a large gay and lesbian exodus from homophobic families and restrictive hometowns to cities that offered more acceptance, protection, and community. Men, who generally had more earning power, established gay neighborhoods in cities such as San Francisco, Manhattan, and Portland, while many women congregated in less expensive neighborhoods in Oakland, Brooklyn, and Eugene. As women came to Eugene, they wrote to their friends across the country extolling their experiences of lesbian communal living and collective work. Throughout the 1970s lesbians arrived by VW buses, old cars, motorcycles, and Greyhound buses and settled to create a vibrant lesbian community that valued social experimentation and personal exploration.