My shirts have some stories to tell
Vineyard people like to pretend we don’t notice when a celebritywell-known person passes us on Main Street, shows up at the same movie, or is eating two tables over at the same café. We’re sure the ones who gawk and point are all day-trippers or clueless summer people. To some extent this is still true,…
In the late 1980s unexploded ordnance was discovered on South Beach in Edgartown. Turns out that some 45 years before, toward the end of World War II, the military had used South Beach and Cape Poge for bombing practice. Needless to say, they did not clean up after themselves. That work got under way several…
If you’ve ever spent time on Martha’s Vineyard, or know someone who has, you’ve almost certainly seen a Black Dog T-shirt. The Black Dog T is, in a word I’m coming to hate, iconic. I do not own one of those Black Dog T-shirts. I do own these parodies, the Black Hog and the Dead…
I was horse crazy from an early age. In this my paternal grandmother, aka Grandma, formally Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis Little, played a major role. A longtime horsewoman, she had three sons, none of whom had the slightest interest in horses. Then along came I, first child of her oldest son (aka Dad, formally Robert…
WisCon, the world’s first and probably only fantasy/science fiction convention that focuses on feminist speculative fiction, was born in 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks to Joan Nestle at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, an avid f/sf fan, I learned about it and f/sf fandom, including feminist f/sf fandom, before too many years had passed; see “I…
The early ’90s get slippery for dates especially where the lesbian and gay awakening on Martha’s Vineyard is concerned. Complicating the chronology is that no one seems to have kept copies of Stone Walls, the handsome newsletter put out by Dan Waters and Hal Garneau for the fledgling Island Lesbian & Gay Association. I need…
I’d already seen the whole AIDS Quilt twice, but my mother hadn’t seen any of it ever. I think going to see this display of a small part of it was her idea, but I was up for it. I also think she bought me the T-shirt, but I was up for that too. For…
The second of my two show-specific shirts, unlike the first, commemorates a production mounted entirely on the Vineyard, but not by either of the two established theater companies, Island Theatre Workshop and the Vineyard Playhouse.[1] Seen from several decades later, the late 1980s and early ’90s were a golden age in Vineyard theater, and in…
Considering how many years I was involved in Vineyard theater and how many shows I was involved in, it’s surprising that I have only two T-shirts devoted to specific shows: this is one and the other will be up next. I was the main theater reviewer for the Martha’s Vineyard Times when For Colored Girls…
The 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian & Gay Rights wasn’t my first national march, not by a long shot. Barely a month into my freshman year of college, I participated in the first Vietnam Moratorium march on October 15, 1969, then exactly one month later, on November 15, I was a marshal at the…