In mid-July the office crew is joined by the set-up crew of electricians, plumbers, and carpenters, who re-build the infrastructure for the festival. The office crew moves to the land around the third week of July. “Once we move to the land we’re just like everybody else on long crew,” Wilson notes. “We have our tents, and…the longer you work there the more you know, ‘oh, I should bring a pad to sleep on.’ So people who’ve worked there longer tend to have posher quarters only because they have experience with camping for five weeks!” she adds with a laugh.

In late July the long crew arrives to construct the stages, prepare the land for festival-goers who arrive in August, and provide services for the workers themselves. The short crew, which arrives a few days before the festival begins, takes care of the campers, providing them with transportation, childcare, healthcare, food, and disability resources.

After the festival ends, the crew swings into reverse and disassembles all the stages, packing everything away for the next year. “When we come on the site in the middle of July, you drive through and you see nothing,” Ramsey notes. “You see meadows and flowers and ferns and that’s all you see…. And then we reduce it all back to that meadow and ferns.”

But even after the long crew leaves at the end of August, the office workers remain in Michigan until early September to winterize the physical plant, put the vehicles back in storage, and make sure that the land is in good shape. “There’s such an impact on that site for a very short period of time,” explains Ramsey. “That part is actually very important... If there is a very high impact deterioration happening somewhere…maybe we would do some mulching, seeding, landscaping…We’re very aware that we have to watch these things and do what needs to be done to make sure that we can continue to reuse them. We don’t want to relocate the main kitchen every year!”

Once the full-time staff returns to Oakland, they swing back into gear right away. Delk says with a laugh, “A lot of people expect…that the office closes down for a couple months…[but] no, we immediately unpack, set up the offices and start sending out more forms.”

Controversy and Community

Any lesbian will tell you that dyke drama is one of the defining characteristics of the lesbian community, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is no exception. The community that has been built up over the last thirty years has created a strong and enduring bond between thousands of women who gather together only once a year, but it has also led to tensions around issues that also affect the broader lesbian community.

Early on, one of the major controversies to shake the festival was its decision to not admit any men. “We were considered man-hating because we wanted to be a women-only space, and that was very challenging, particularly in our community,” Vogel recalls. This was followed in the early 1980s by clashes over the age at which boys would no longer be able to attend the festival with their mothers; difficulties with making the festival accessible to women with disabilities; disagreements over the rights of women to practice BDSM on the land; and the establishment of Camp Trans in the 1990s to protest the festival’s policy on admitting only women who were born female.

“It’s our right and it’s our responsibility to say who we want the event to be for,” Vogel states, “and it’s a pro space and about who we’re organizing it for; it’s not making a judgment or a statement or really about anybody else. It wasn’t back in 1976 when we said it was women only, and it’s not in 2005 when we want it to be for women-born-women. Our queer community is diverse, and I support separate and whole space for anybody who wants it.”

She continues, “I think it’s a really political, cultural, important right for everyone to have—to say who they want their gatherings to be for. As a white woman, I have never understood white women who felt somehow excluded from women-of-color space. I don’t even really get the exclusion; it’s not my space. You know what I mean? Or I feel the same way about women with disabilities who want to have this gathering to be for women with disabilities. Anybody who defines their community in a certain way has a time and a space.”

Many festival-goers as well as those who never attend the festival debate these issues on the festival’s online bulletin board, and in the anonymous world of the internet the debate can often become heated. For crewmembers and festival staff, their main outlet for engaging with difficult subjects comes during the six weeks when they are living on the land.

“I think it’s interesting how things get reasoned out,” Vogel observes about the process on the bulletin board. “Not always, but things kind of tend to get reasoned out and understood over a lot of bumpy struggle. That’s what we do in person. That’s kind of the women’s way of doing things, you know, talk talk talk talk talk, and then eventually you kind of go, well I disagree but I see your point.”

At weekly community meetings, crewmembers talk about the major issues impacting the festival, and sometimes special topic meetings are held to enable in-depth discussion of a particularly difficult issue. Women who attend the smaller topic meetings then present their conclusions at the larger community meetings.

Vogel stresses that the festival receives a lot of feedback from campers throughout the year, and they try to take that feedback into account. “I like to think that one of the reasons that Michigan is still here after 30 years…is that we’re pretty responsive to feedback and suggestions,” she says. “You obviously can’t take every suggestion and you obviously have to kind of see the way the wind blows, and if something just keeps blowing up… Like the women-born-women space: there’s just a real big diversity of opinion in there,” Vogel acknowledges. “And as a community we just have to agree to disagree and try to understand where each other is coming from.”

Despite differences of opinion, women come back year after year to experience the sense of community and safety that Michigan offers. Thinking back on some of her best experiences at the festival, Vogel says, “Sometimes I’ll be walking down the path and maybe I’ll come up to the Gaia parade or something, and I’m never not blown away by how incredible it is to just have that much life and that much energy and that much fun. I mean, the girls are having fun, but we all become children there, to some degree…. I’m 48 and I’m never not blown away. I’ve walked that path [between the acoustic stage and the day stage] every day, and I can’t get from there to there without having …those simple moments of just seeing women feel liberated, free, and safe, just to be playful, just to wear stupid outfits, just to be whatever—60 [years old] and act silly, and be naked or walk around without your shirt on and you’ve had a mastectomy and it’s okay.…We all just feel a little more grounded in ourselves.”

Although some women have been concerned that the festival isn’t going to continue, Vogel says that the work that the staff has done over the past few years in resizing the festival has made it possible to sustain in the future. She acknowledges that because the number of women attending the festival has fallen from 7000 to 4000, they have had to make some difficult decisions in order to reorganize the festival for a smaller number.

“Now 4000 women coming to any event is a really great number,” she stresses. “Right now how I feel is, if there’s the enthusiasm and the importance that Michigan holds for the women who come, and there’s still a number that can support the infrastructure that we have...I’m committed to seeing it continue.” For the many women whose lives have been changed by the festival, those are welcome words indeed.

For more on the festival, visit the official website