Features
Queer Summit VII Gets Out the Vote
Return to Dyke Rock
Remembering a Lesbian Community Gathering Place
by Cathy Resmer
There aren't many dykes at Dyke Rock
these days. A recent trip to the semi-secluded swimming spot at Burlington's
Oakledge Park turns up rollerbladers, kayakers, and people walking their
dogs, but not a single topless lesbian. It wasn't always that way. In
the 1970s and 80s, before there was a gay bar or a community center in
the city, this particular wide rock ledge to the right of the bike path
was a popular informal gathering place for Burlington’s lesbian
community. "You could go at anytime on a Sunday afternoon and find
a group of dykes hanging out there," recalls Crow Cohen.
Cohen remembers her first visit. It was
the late 1970s. She had just come out, and was still married. A friend
brought her to Dyke Rock for a swim. "There were all these women
with their shirts off," she recalls. "Probably fifteen of them.
I was kind of, like, blown away."
Cohen says that women used to gather there
after softball games, and after events like Pride. Most of the women were
in their 30s or 40s, and many had been married. They had picnics, brought
their kids, even got their hair cut. "That was a ritual," remembers
Cohen. And in the days before the city started hiring park police to monitor
the beach, no one seemed to mind the nudity. Women frequently swam sans
suit. "We were just bold," Cohen declares. "We were friggin'
bold to do that."
Patricia Fontaine fondly recalls her summertime
excursions to Dyke Rock. "It was an easy, laid-back way to be with
other women," says the 50-year-old lesbian, who got teased as a twenty-something
baby-dyke back in the day. Fontaine had plenty of intense political conversations
on the rock. "There was some serious combat-boot stomping that happened,"
she says.
But Fontaine also recalls a few dicey encounters
- it wasn't uncommon for women to run into exes, or lovers escorting someone
else. "There was a fair amount of non-monogamy happening then,"
she notes cautiously. Not to mention the occasional male voyeur being
too blatant about his interest.
And then there was the time when Glo Daley
got arrested. No one seems to know exactly when it happened - mid 1980s
is as much as anyone involved can remember. One afternoon, after marching
in a Pride parade, a group of lesbians dropped by Dyke Rock for a swim.
They took their shirts off. The newly minted park police stopped by and
asked them to get dressed. Daley refused.
She speaks of the event reluctantly, in
a phone interview from HOWL, the Huntington Open Womens' Land. "I
tried to do a citizen's arrest on a guy that had his shirt off,"
she says, "and the next thing I know, the cop had me."
Fontaine can still work up some outrage
over the events of the day. "We did everything we could to stop them
taking her in," she says. She and her friends protested the arrest
by dancing around the police cruiser, then followed the car to the police
station.
But Daley sounds the tiniest bit sheepish
telling the story. She concedes that it wasn't necessarily the radical,
revolutionary act it might have seemed at the time. "I think I was
just having a bad day," she says.
The advent of regular police patrols seems
to have signaled the end of Dyke Rock's heyday as a lesbian hangout. Though
Crow Cohen continued to host birthday parties there all through the 1990s,
Dyke Rock is no longer her favorite swimming spot. She still stops by
to watch the sunset, but now she swims at North Beach-with her grandchildren.
Glo Daley often spends her time meditating
at the Shambhala Center rather than protesting public nudity laws. When
she wants to skinny-dip, she heads to the pond at HOWL. "It's kinda
murky sometimes, but there's total privacy," she notes. "And
no park cops."
Peggy Luhrs, one of Burlington's first out
lesbians, used to swim at Dyke Rock all the time. But now as she walks
down the narrow path toward the ledge, she's not quite positive she's
even in the right place. She steps onto the rock and declares, "This
is it." But when pressed, she points to another nearby ledge. "I'm
sure some days people moved over there," she says.
Patricia Fontaine admits that the Dyke Rock
days were probably bound to pass. She suggests that the rebelliousness
of the times was part of an "early adolescence" of lesbian culture.
Things are different now. Lesbians are more visible, less threatened than
they used to be. Burlington now has a thriving LGBT community, full of
hundreds of civilly united spouses.
Still, there's a note of sadness in her
voice when she speaks of Dyke Rock. "You could always sort of count
on someone [in the lesbian community] being there in the summer,"
she says. "And now that doesn't seem to be the case. Now it's everyone's
rock."
Cathy Resmer is a freelance writer who lives with her partner in Winooski.