For the thousands of women who converge on a 650-acre piece of land in rural Michigan every August, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is “home.” When I first attended the festival in 2003, I had no idea what that meant—but it soon became obvious. This was a place where I could walk around completely alone and feel perfectly safe. This was a place where friendly women offered to help out total strangers struggling to put up their tents. Sure, it was camping in the woods and there were plenty of mosquitos, but it didn’t seem to matter.

What mattered was the sense of camaraderie and friendship that was built up over the roaring bonfire; the spirit of joy and enthusiasm women brought to saying hello on the woodchipped paths; the simple peace of experiencing the lush summer woods and the way the shade dappled the walls of my tent.

For thirty years, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has drawn together women from all over the world to listen to concerts by women artists, participate in workshops on everything from kissing to feminist organizing, and to experience that indefinable sense of community that keeps bringing women back. Lesbian culture in the U.S. would not be the same without the festival, which connects goddess-loving hippies from Berkeley to pierced-and-tattooed rebels from Brooklyn.

Behind it all is a team of hard-working women headed up by festival co-founder Lisa Vogel, who was only 19 years old when she helped to organize the first festival. Thirty years of trial-and-error has created a well-oiled machine that works year-round to create an unforgettable experience for one week every August.

30 Years of Music for Womyn

The first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival drew 2000 women to Mt. Pleasant, Michigan for a weekend of concerts by women including Holly Near, Maxine Feldman, and Meg Christian. Organized by Kristie Vogel, Mary Kindig, and Lisa Vogel under the name We Want the Music Collective, the first festival offered camping, food, and performances for the bargain price of $20.

Since 1976, more has changed than just the ticket price, which is offered on a sliding scale and includes full access to three stages of live music and performance; three vegetarian meals daily; and a week full of workshops on topics ranging from songwriting to breast-casting. Even the name of the organization producing the festival changed to We Want the Music Company (WWTMC), and Lisa Vogel is the only co-founder who remains on the staff. The women who come to the festival now hail from all age groups, ethnic backgrounds, and abilities, a major change from the early years in which the festival goers were predominantly white lesbians in their thirties.

“Each and every year we’ve built on the ideas that come out,” says festival co-founder Lisa Vogel, “so I think we’ve really developed over time a very, very cool infrastructure so that it is still primitive in some ways, so that you really do…have the experience of living in the woods…but we’ve been able to figure out how to create a situation that’s freeing, that’s safe, that’s organized, that can provide the basic things.”

Although music is certainly one of the main draws—past and present performers include Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, Alice Walker, and Le Tigre—the festival has always been about more than that; it has also been an experiment in creating a feminist community. “One of the experiments of the festival is: what do we value?” explains Vogel. “Where do we want to throw our energy and our money? We have the arts…we have healthcare, we have childcare, we have disability services, we have interpreting services for deaf and hard-of-hearing…. Over time we’ve really been able to explore those kinds of things and develop a culture.”

That culture only exists in three-dimensional physical space for one week every year, but it has become an integral part of the lives of thousands of women over the past three decades. “For anybody who’s been coming for 30 years, if they’ve just even been there for the week, they’ve lived at the festival for…30 weeks, a half a year,” Vogel points out. “Some of us who work on long crew…we’ve been living on the land now for…two and a half years.”