Plaid is the name of the game, but mackinaw is the key word in this photo. I loved these jackets and when one wore out, I’d get another. To me they signified the outdoors and Western riding wear. It must have been a cold January in LA for all three Hammer girls to be wearing this cloth. As for the hair, everyone has to have a poodle do once in her lifetime. More important, I am holding my first camera, a Brownie!
Date, BH, John, and Marian Hammer at AOPi Candlelight and Roses Dinner, 1960. I was an AOPi legacy. Little did I know of racism within the sorority, but when a young cheerleader who was half Hawaiian wasn’t pledged I left in protest for the UCLA dorms where I got a job as “dorm mother” for incoming freshman.
Jayne Mansfield and BH, 1959.
Sophomore year at UCLA, I was a cheerleader as well as president of SPURS, the sophomore honor society. I saw Jayne Mansfield in the bleachers at the football game and decided to present her with a blue and gold pom-pom. A photo op!
Sorority sisters on lawn of UCLA’s AOPi house, circa 1959.
As a teenager I was interested in politics. At Westchester High School I was student-body vice president. At UCLA I was elected to be the lower division women’s representative. Girls weren’t thought to be presidential material, so after serving one year on student council, I ran for VP. My name was helpful and my sorority sisters did their best to support my campaign, but I lost the election by ten votes.
Sue Canby and BH, Catalina Island, 1960.
Sue invited the sorority sisters over to her family home on the vacation island off the coast of Los Angeles. We are taking abalone meat out of the shell and getting ready to pound it for a big abalone steak dinner. Sue and I shared a love of “living off the land,” or, in this case, the sea.
Clayton Henry Ward and BH in Italy on our around-the-world motor-scooter trip, 1963.
The day after graduating from UCLA I married a young man from Oklahoma. I told him I would marry him if he went around the world with me.
175cc Lambretta and BH, circa 1963.
During the motor-scooter trip, I wore culottes. They came in handy because I could easily run when wearing them. They may have saved my life when I inadvertently approached a sacred mosque in Meshed, Iran, and was chased by a group of irate Muslims. I looked like a girl (and so I was chased), but I ran like a boy (and so I escaped).
70s
The 70s were a glorious time of feminist ideals and lesbian bed-hopping.
At least, it was for me. I was lucky to come out with a group of self-identifying and self-determining lesbians. We were making a new culture with hairstyles, dress (and undress), and ways of walking and talking in the world. Everything was part of this new self-definition. There were parties, meetings, coffeehouses, bars, picnics, and, of course, potlucks. The circles were always expanding, and a friend today might become a lover tomorrow and an ex the following week. It was empowering, community forming, and, most of all, it was really good fun. Certainly, my life changed when I came out in 1970.
When I made love with a woman for the first time my entire worldview shifted. I was touching a body much like my own which heightened all my senses. In addition to the sensual pleasures, my social network completely changed; I was swept up with the energies and dreams of a feminist revolution. We could make a new world where everyone was equal. We believed it, and we tried our best to live it. After returning from a motorcycle trip through Africa with my first woman lover, I enrolled in film school and gathered a group of women to go to the country for a weekend of filming. Cris Saxton and I shot an hour’s length of film as I directed women to walk through fallen leaves, comb one another’s hair, trace circles with their fingers on each others’ bodies, and embrace.
In the editing room I looked at the footage of the nature rituals and yawned. This was not cinema. This was an exercise in relaxation. I got brutal and cut the lackadaisical footage to shreds, only keeping the core of each image that showed touching. The hour became two minutes. I asked Cris to film Poe Asher and myself pretending to make love (in all my filming of sexuality, it has never been documentary). I directed her to stroke us with the camera as if she were part of the sexual foreplay. I wanted an intimate cinema, not a cinema of distance that invited voyeurs. My favorite shot is when I asked Cris to wind the camera tight and set it on the ground between our bodies, and let it film by itself as we ran our hands from our bellies to our breasts. This was as close to showing the interior sensation of touch as I could imagine.
My final edit was four minutes long with 110 shots. Dyketactics (which I sometimes call a “lesbian commercial”) was scheduled to premiere at the university’s film finals, where all the students’ films were shown at the end of the semester. I had been the only woman of twelve students in my film production course. But here I was not only making a woman-centered film but also putting my own intimately depicted body on the screen. I wasn’t prepared for the response.
Professors always attend film finals and all of them were men. After the films were screened, a number of my professors ran up to me where I was standing in the back of the large auditorium. They were full of praise for the film. I was truly dumbfounded, but knew I was on to something big. I didn’t know it then but Dyketactics was the first lesbian-lovemaking film to be made by a lesbian.
I had passion. I had a cabin without electricity or running water. I had an old manual typewriter. On a dirt road above the South Fork of the Yuba River in Northern California with no one around for miles, I sat on the front porch every day and wrote for one month. I disciplined myself: I would not leave the typewriter until I had either worked for four hours or written four pages. Then, feeling light of heart and in good spirit, I took off for the river and explored my surroundings, much as I had explored in writing characters in love.
The 70s were a heady time for newly self-identified feminist women. Many of us were attracted to each other and didn’t hesitate to act on those passions. We were in and out of bed between protests, demonstrations, and art making. I thought this was an unusual period of time and that I should write about these encounters and experiences while they were fresh. I decided to create a fictionalized version of my very early lesbian loves, featuring an overzealous narrator. Looking back on it now, it strikes me as so 70s, so me! Here is part of the novella I call, “My Life as Henry Miller.”
My Life as Henry Miller
I WAS SITTING ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER WITH ONE leg dangling. Across from me, cross-legged on the floor, sat a young woman with short hair wearing an Army fatigue shirt. Gathered around were others of the Santa Rosa Women’s Liberation Front’s Guerrilla Action Theater. We were planning our next action, a confrontation with a local woman journalist who had plagued us with her derogatory writings. We would meet her at