Calling all lesbians.

The 1970s Revival In pop culture contains a curious omission: any mention of lesbian-feminist culture, even though it invented so much of what is quintessentially '70s. Grunge? That was lesbian feminist clothing and fashion in the 1970s. The Lilith Fair tour? Olivia Records and Roadwork began that in 1978 with the Varied Voices of Black Women tour. The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival has averaged 9,000 lesbians a year for 22 years. PC? That was the self-deprecating joke that radical dykes coined in the 1970s. Ani DiFranco and artist self-distribution? Alix Dobkin did that in 1975 with Lavender Jane Loves Women, and Ladyslipper distribution still does it today.

Lesbians confront the paradox of enormous visibility accompanied by total silence about lesbian ideas, history, politics, and culture. Lesbians are on prime-time TV, in major news stories, running some of our national organizations. But not only do the details of this visibility reveal familiar absences, they suggest a new cultural erasure in which many of us are complicit.

Women of color, radicals, the poor, and the working class are still invisible in the new lesbian chic. And the exciting legacy of a thriving, passionate lesbian-feminist culture remains unknown to younger generations of dykes and bisexual women, except as the subject of derisive jokes. The public discourse on what it means to be queer in America is conducted largely by gay male writers and thinkers. Long articles by gay men dot the covers of magazines like New York, The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation. The articles are often about only men: gay male survival during HIV and after protease inhibitors; gay men's sexual freedom; or gay men's views of marriage, culture, or the origin of homosexuality.

Meanwhile, a vast underground of lesbian ideas, thinking, music, comedy, poetry, art, literature, and activism exists outside the mainstream spotlight. Lesbian political analysis occurs only in radical papers like Gay Community News, in academic books, in feminist and independent presses.

The cultural erasure is everywhere When lesbian writer Adrienne Rich refused President Clinton's and the National Endowment for the Arts' hypocritical designation of her for a National Medal of Honor, she generated a small story here and there. When gay male writer Larry Kramer's equally important action to endow a gay studies program at Yale was rejected, The New York Times gave it the front page of the metro section. Reports of the WNBA's "surprising success" never mentions the contributions of the dykes on the court and in the stands. Discussants on an Internet list called Queer Politics attack the movement's supposed domination by lesbians. They post the names, gender, and assumed races of all the staffers at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force as if organizations run by women and people of color are the problem. A better question is whether organizations run by lesbians are any different from organizations run by men. My answer is, sadly, no. Lesbians in leadership positions play a conventional kind of power politics invented by straight men.

Lesbian discrimination is often ignored in favor of more "generic" statements. Gays in the military? The fact remains that lesbians get discharged more frequently than gay men, and dyke baiting serves to slur all women who refuse sexual advances by men. Wouldn't our struggle a few years ago have been more effective if we focused less on patriotism and valor and more on the sexist double standard that rules the military? Health issues? One out of eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. Yet in 1990 the federal government spent only $90 million on breast cancer research, and even today it spends only $530 million. Still lesbians have created no militant movement to pressure government, insurance, and science to work harder.

The "new" hot topic is the sexual behavior of gay and bisexual men. While that issue deserves attention and debate, lesbian sexuality is threatened every day by rape, sexual violence, intimidation, regulation of our wombs, female genital mutilation, and moralistic government policies enacted to punish sexually active girls and women.

It's time for lesbian feminists to be more vocal about our existence. Our future is intimately tied to that of gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people, but most importantly it is tied to our struggle as women.