[OutVoice] Maxine Feldman

[Jddoyle1 at aol.com]

Hello,
   As I've not seen it posted yet, I am letting the list  know that Maxine 
Feldman passed away on August 18th, in Albuquerque, NM. I do  not have any deta
ils yet, but I want to share with you the text from the  description of her 
Outmusic Honorary Award, in 2004. She was indeed one of our  pioneers.
 
 
SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD  2004
Maxine Feldman 
The 2004 Special Recognition OMA - honoring special achievements in LGBT  
music - recognizes the role of MAXINE FELDMAN who is credited with writing the  
earliest openly lesbian song. It's called Angry Atthis. Here is a  quote from 
her about the writing of that song:  
"I went to California and wrote my first lesbian song, Angry Atthis in May  
1969, one month before the Stonewall riots. I wrote it in about three minutes,  
in a bar in L.A. Before Stonewall we had mafia-run bars where you were a  
fourth-or fifth-class person. It was the only place for dykes to meet; we didn't  
have festivals, or women's bookstores. At these bars, if you were in butch 
drag  you could be arrested; you had to wear three "female" items by law. And be 
 prepared for the bar raids. I didn't like the way it made me feel -- like we 
 were useless and sick. I felt we were worth a lot more. Stonewall proved I 
was  not alone. It was time for our protests. Angry Atthis, of course, is a 
play on  words. I was "angry at this" lesbian oppression. My brainy girl side 
wanted to  call my piece Sappho's Song, but then I read that Atthis was the name 
of one of  Sappho's lovers. And Atthis began to appear to me as a better 
statement of all I  felt. The song just spewed out of me." 
As she said, Feldman wrote the song in 1969, and it took another three years  
before it was recorded, as a 45. In those years she was OUT well before it 
was  considered safe for a gay or lesbian artist to be performing openly. This 
was  before Olivia Records or any of the other early openly lesbian recordings. 
 Feldman's openness lost her bookings and she was banned from some clubs, but 
she  never compromised her act or her music. The song Angry Atthis later 
appeared on  an album, 1979's Closet Sale. As a performer, she was a fixture at 
the Michigan  Women's Festival for most of the 70's, and her song Amazon became 
an annual  theme song for the event. 
******************** 
And, she gave me a wonderful interview in 2002, which you can hear at this  
link: 
_http://www.queermusicheritage.us/apr2002.html_ 
(http://www.queermusicheritage.us/apr2002.html)  
JD Doyle

my "Queer Music Heritage" radio show  site:

http://www.queermusicheritage.com
my  Outradio site:
http://www.outradio.com
and  co-producer of Audiofile, the monthly 
radio review of CDs of interest to the  GLBT
communities, airing on over 150 stations 
around the world on This  Way Out. 
The Audiofile site is at www.Audiofile.org
and all past  Audiofile segments are archived
at _http://www.queermusicheritage.com/af.html_ 
(http://www.queermusicheritage.com/af.html) 
Also  co-host of Queer Voices on KPFT, every
Monday night from 7-9 pm, _www.kpft.org_ (http://www.queervoices.org/) 
and at MySpace: _http://www.myspace.com/jddoyle_ 
(http://www.myspace.com/jddoyle) 



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