“Dykes We Lyke” vol. 2

Sadie Benning

Chances are Sadie Benning is the only lesbian feminist to ever officially make a name for herself with a Fisher-Price toy.  At sixteen, young Sadie received a pixelvision camcorder from her father, experimental (synonym for “weird” in the film industry) filmmaker James Benning, and continued the family tradition of bizarrely beautiful filmmaking.  In her impressive career, Benning’s work has been displayed and admired at the Wexner, the Whitney, and YouTube.

Most of Benning’s early work was shot primarily in her bedroom, on grainy black and white film, with a hum that could wake the neighbors.   These films, intertwined disturbing news clips, haunting direct addresses to the viewer, and hand-written notes describing the horrors of life that she’s already encountered, can be more than slightly disturbing.  And with topics such as Nazism, rape, and the physical tormenting of children, it’s not so surprising that Ellen turned out to be lesbianism’s first major star of the screen.

Benning’s most significant work, If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), has her coming out to her camera from the superficial safety of her bedroom.  On-screen, Benning not only manages to explore her own selfhood, but help to create a lesbian identity.  In the film’s heaviest moment, she famously states: “I’ve been waiting for that day to come when I could walk the streets and people would look at me and say, ‘That’s a Dyke.’  And if they didn’t like it, they’d fall into the center of the earth and deal with themselves.”  Just picture that airing on ABC in place of “the coming-out episode.”

On one probably rainy afternoon (actually, this was probably one of the sunnier moments of her career), when she had some downtime, Sadie Benning managed to put down her camera long enough to start the world’s greatest electro-punk band.  Teaming up with Kathleen Hannah of Bikini Kill and zine queen Johanna Fateman the trio formed a kind of holy trinity of 3^rd wave feminism that came to be known as Le Tigre.  In the course of about a year, the three managed to write and record the greatest collection of songs about John Cassavetes, metrocards, and slideshows the world will ever know, followed by an E.P. that taught a new generation of riot grrrls how to dance to the beat of mediocrity.  Benning eventually left the band in 2001 and fell into relative obscurity until she re-entered the world of “high art” and filmmaking with Play Pause, a video installation project.

Sadie Benning is the perfect example of when the world of “high culture” and pretentious feminist art stumbles onto something worth seeing.   And while her films may be more intense or avant-garde than the average viewer may care for, hopefully those LYKEable girls and guys out there will appreciate their beauty.  Although, as you could’ve guessed, All Over Me will be a much easier watch than Flat is Beautiful.  (Izzy Cihak)

Image courtesy of www.medienkunstnetz.de

“hers and hers” by Moriah Lancaster

If you’ve ever taken the time to Google “famous lesbians,” you would find a site listing Angelina Jolie as the second most famous lesbian of all time (because maybe she hooked up with a girl or two), behind Sappho, and another that lists Christina Aguilera, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu alongside Gertrude Stein and Melissa Ferrick, simply because they admitted to smooching with a few girls. Even in 2008, a lot of America seems to think that lesbianism is something that happens to straight girls at drunken parties and as far as mainstream media goes, if you’re a young lesbian who doesn’t enjoy listening to Melissa Ethridge or watching A League of Their Own, you’re out of luck in the role model department.

For those of you who are willing to do a little bit of research, you will find tons of LYKEable women in the public eye. And, for those of you who aren’t, it’s you’re lucky day because the lovely staff of LYKE magazine will do the research for you. In the meantime, if you’re up for the leg work, you can start with especially LYKEable fields, such as indie rock bands and 90s alternative groups, high fashion, and the independent film industry. With more extensive exploration, you can even discover trailblazing lesbian feminists who organized some protest or another, but have long since been forgotten by just about everyone aside from Kathleen Hannah and Bust magazine. “Dykes We Lyke” will cover both the Pop Dykons and the leaders of social revolutions. The goal is to offer alternative role models, whether it’s someone who organized a march or just played bass in some Boston band of the early 90s. After all, we can’t have the lesbian youngsters thinking they have to look up to the likes of the Indigo Girls. -Izzy Cihak

Question to Reader: Who was the first lesbian in the media that you remember looking up to or admiring? If I like your answers, I’ll strongly consider your picks for women to be featured in the column. For me, Kate Schellenbach from Luscious Jackson (and countless other projects) was the first dyke I ever really LYKEd and in 1999 I even got to dance onstage with her and the band at the Naval Academy, so you can be sure that there will be a column about her early on.