(tape rolling) - Womontown two!

(laughing) - [Mary Ann] We really just wanted to live in a neighborhood where we were accepted.

- [Drea] What if we created a vision?

And the vision turned into what we know today and what we saw develop over the years, Womontown.

- Map to Dyke City, here it is!

(hopeful music) - So this is the house bought in the '70s.

I was a radical out dyke.

And I was determined to quit paying rent.

And I thought, why not live here?

I was, you know, brave.

I thought, you know, and naive.

Then I got with my partner, Mary Ann Hopper and we've been together like 34 years.

- 36 years.

- [Drea] 36 years, lose time.

But what was cool about it was she came from the suburbs.

I was an inner city gal and she looked around and said "This is scary."

And it was, it was freaking scary.

- So we would be sitting out, you know, out on the porch and people would drive by and maybe heckle us.

Gunshots, we heard in the distance and stuff.

Andrea's sitting there going, "Yeah and I wanna fix up this house and it's gonna be so beautiful."

And I'm thinking, "And why do I wanna live in this beautiful house with all these people being so mean around us and whatever."

So I really broke down.

It was like, I don't think I can live here, you know unless we really make some changes.

So then we just started imagining what if we could just walk hand in hand, freely down the streets a bunch of lesbians all in this neighborhood.

And I thought, well, if we can do the work I could imagine that it would maybe be fun to live here.

So that's when we really started saying well let's see if we can get people to move here.

Lesbians in the '70s and '80s were still a very threatened class and we only had a few gathering places.

They were were just kind of word of mouth places.

Nothing was out, nothing was open.

Even where we live, we somehow had to be...

When you went to rent, you don't say "Hi, I'm moving in with my girlfriend or my partner or whatever."

So you kind of had to be covert about everything because of harassment.

- Well, it is true when my kids were a little younger and I lived in other neighborhoods that were all straight.

I definitely didn't go up and down the street and announce that I was gay because I was fearful they might try to take my kids away.

- [Martha] You know, at that time, of course it was rarer for someone who was gay or lesbian to intermix very well with the straight population.

So there were a lot of gay bars and women events because that was newly forming our own community where we could feel comfortable.

- Because we all have a life before that we remember what it was like, if it was high school, if it was college if it was whatever, family reunion.

Whatever part of your life, you remember nobody really cared about asking you what was going on in your life.

- Once they suspect or know that you're lesbian they don't ask you too many personal questions.

Like, what did you do this weekend?

No, they don't really wanna know cuz you might have been having sex and you might say that.

(harmonizing vocals) - [Mary Ann] In most cities, if you drive through with another woman they'll go, "Oh, a lot of lesbians live here and a few gay guys live there", but it was down this street and over there and maybe an apartment building.

It was just a basic area.

And I think the idea that we would be within a few blocks of each other and it was a concentrated thing I think that was, that was something very attractive that they hadn't thought of.

- I had this feel about, yeah we're trying to create a conscious community in a community already.

Because so many of the conscious communities at that time were created out in the, like on a farm or in a rural area.

- [Mary Ann] And there were a number of land co-ops all over the country but that was a different kind of lifestyle.

- I'm not a rural person.

Ain't walking with the chickens and the ducks.

I am a city gal.

I want the theaters and the activities.

- We definitely saw a reason to have it in a city cuz there was jobs available, homes already built.

And so there was a lot of reason to have it in the community.

- [Mary Ann] That was attractive to folks who wanted to live in the city and wanted to be out and wanted to have a lesbian community as a support because a lot of people's families were not supportive of their lifestyle.

So they didn't have family really.

And we were creating a family.

- It was kind of in on the beginning of it with Mary Ann and Andrea, they were good friends of mine from the mid '80s.

My then partner, Peggy and I went to the same National Women's Music Festival with them.

And we attended a lecture by a woman by the name of Sonia Johnson.

And she was talking about forming conscious women's community, basically to get away from patriarchy.

- Going to festivals and gatherings that were all underground back then, you got that feeling for three or four days of what it would be like for women to create their own community their own festival, to be in charge of everything like the music festivals, they were the musicians they built the stages, they did the crews.

Women were empowered.

Women were powerful and could create every aspect of their own life.

And they didn't need anybody from the outside judging them or saying that women like you are not worthy or can't create anything.

So we just started thinking about what would be attractive about the neighborhood.

And of course it was economics.

For a lot of lesbians, cheaper rent or even the ability to buy a house for 15, 17, $20,000.

A three story shirtwaist house was pretty amazing - We would say to them, this is a community, buy a house.

You hear me say it today, buy a house.

You have your own safe space.

You get to determine who you are.

You invite who you want in.

And economically you make yourself secure for in the future when rent goes from 250 to 1200 to 2,500 you will be at this because you own it.

- [Martha] We knew Andrea and Mary Ann and they had been trying to talk us into buying a house.

And we said, "Well, we gotta have this, this, this and this."

They said, "Well there's a house down close to us that is empty.

That has been 90% rehabbed.

Go take a look at it."

We took a look at it and bought it.

- We kind of got started with Kansas City Area Women's Gathering Group which was a potluck group we had one once a month.

- Well of course they had a meeting first where they gave the information and of course lesbians, it was a potluck.

(Sue laughs) And so we went and we got the information and Beverly right away was, "I'm gonna move in there.

I'm gonna get a house Sue."

And I was like, "Oh Bev let's think about it."

It's one block off of Troost.

And it was real gang infested and drug infested at that time.

And back in the '90s, it was pretty rough but she said, "Sue, we can do it.

This is the only time we can afford a house.

Let's do it."

And she was the first African American woman.

She's a pioneer to buy a house in Womontown.

I was with Bev for 25 years.

(sighs heavily) (voice breaking) COVID took her and she always, she was an entrepreneur.

She was fun.

And she was always willing to try a new adventure.

And that was it.

- Hi Bev!

How ya doing?

- [Bev] I'm doing great.

- I knew other women that lived in Womontown or had lived around there.

I thought it was a wonderful idea.

I was living with a woman at that time that also felt that way.

And we decided we would like to go there.

- When I met Cheryl and she told me about the Womontown.

I was just, "Yeah, no, I wanna be here."

This is it.

There wasn't even a question.

And even the place I lived in was a dump really.

And I still, you know, loved it because of the community.

- [Drea] This was the apartment building 2820 Harrison that we bought.

And the reason we bought this one first was the people that owned it, they were slum landlords and they just put anybody in.

And we get tired of, you know, the beer bottles being thrown over at us, telling us what they're gonna do to us if they ever got a chance to get inside our fence and our dogs would just go crazy and they would urinate on 'em and I'd come outside and stand on that little porch that I had I'd come outside and I'd say "Get 'em!

", you know, there was like, "Get 'em!"

- [Mary Ann] The guys that owned the building were apparently ready to sell it.

Drea approached them I think and said "Do you wanna sell it?"

And "Yeah, you take it."

You know?

So we were very happy to, to be able to clear that out.

And we said, "Okay, now we'll have a place for the women to come right, right off.

And, and they could rent from us."

So we could have a reasonable rent.

I think rent back then was about 200, $250 for a nice two bedroom apartment.

- Then when Mary Ann and Drea had a vacancy they took me to lunch one day and they said "What would it take for you to move?"

And I said, "A dishwasher."

And they said, "Welcome to the building."

They're kind of like my moms.

I was just coming out and, you know kind of making feelers in a new, strange world.

- Just the idea of being with a group of women just having all that female energy it was just very life affirming.

- [Mary Ann] So I thought, we'll put an ad in "Lesbian Connection" and figure out a way to contact the women cuz we had no internet then.

- One day we got the "Lesbian Connection" magazine in the mail and here's this little blurb in there about a deliberate, urban, lesbian community coming together in Kansas city, Missouri.

So we made a call.

I think we talked to Mary Ann and Drea and they said "Oh, come on, just come.

You stay at our house.

When do you wanna come?"

We flew to Kansas city and they had planned a potluck and a another party in the evening.

We walked through the neighborhood they pulled in the friendly neighborhood realtor who showed us what was available and what things cost looked at a few houses and we were just awestruck because things were so cheap.

And we decided, yep, let's move to Kansas City.

But we better make one more trip to be sure.

So we made another trip over Easter and it was gorgeous.

The tulips were out and there were yard parties and it was just fabulous.

So then the realtor, she showed us several homes and she showed us this big house at the corner of 28th and Charlotte.

They called it a mini mansion.

They were asking 104,000.

And we thought, "What?"

We sold our little three bedroom, two bath tract home in California for like 185.

We offered a hundred grand in cash and they took it.

- [Phyllis] And so Drea who can be kind of honery at times said "Let's go over and meet Barbara and Karen."

And so it was summer, so I'm just in a t-shirt and no bra.

And everybody else were in t-shirts and no bras.

So we knocked on their door they opened the door and we all flashed them.

And I think they were kind of like, "Oh what have we gotten ourself into?"

- [Barb] When I moved in, in '93, a lot of lesbians were moving in.

- [Mary Ann] People flew in from all over the country from New York, from California, from the south and Wisconsin.

- [Cyndi] Moving in from different parts of Kansas City too and different parts of Missouri.

- We had a song called "The Dykes Come Marching Two by Two and then there was Four of You."

And before you knew, we all knew each other.

- And just after corresponding with them a few times and they're saying, "Okay we're really gonna come" was very exciting.

- One couple that came there, they painted the fire hydrant in front of their apartment building purple and then somebody else painted a fire hydrant purple.

And that kind of got some of the neighbors up in arms cuz this was, they saw this as our first move to take over the neighborhood.

- Some of the residents who had been there long term, that had families, they had this misconception that we would turn their children to be, you know lesbians or gay.

It's like, no, we don't wanna have really anything to do with your kids.

You know, necessarily.

We like your kids, they're fine.

But we don't have any intention to turn them into anything.

- Straight people sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to behave (laughing) when they're completely surrounded by lesbians.

- Oh, and the rumor went around you know that we were separatists.

We were separatists.

And to me I never thought that word was so bad until I started hearing it from these gay men who said we were separatists in the neighborhood.

Like, so what?

We got this little tiny piece of the world.

And we don't like to be around men too much.

- If I said this house sold for $30,000 I wanted a lesbian to buy it.

Cuz we had no money because once the guys came in, what did they do?

This is what they did.

They bought it.

Dale bought it and we loved Dale.

We'd have parties over on my porch over there.

But Dale had, he was a nurse.

He could put 150 in it.

He's also male.

He had a different safety about him.

And I knew that.

So I didn't promote, I didn't discourage the gay men but I didn't promote the gay men.

Because to promote them was to set us aside.

- We're lesbians, we're lesbians.

We don't like, we don't like men, you know?

But no, we had no problem with men.

We just didn't want 'em running our lives.

You know?

- We weren't an exclusive community in that anybody could buy a house there obviously.

And there were people who owned houses before we moved in, who stayed there.

But that by that concerted effort to get people women to buy houses, we formed a nice community a nice social community.

- I remember hanging the Dutch Hill flags.

That was the lesbian tulip flags that we used to identify each other by our houses.

Cuz the only way you got a flag was we had to give it to you when you moved in.

So I'd say "Hang it, so we can recognize where you're living all over this 12 block radius."

- In these apartment buildings there's 15 in one six in the next, and three.

They were owned by Don Ricketts and his son owned the smaller one, Dennis.

They were my very first allies for creating the Landlord Tenants Association here.

The other thing that Don Ricketts helped me do was we did the tulips throughout the neighborhood.

And I will tell you Don dug into the deepness of his pockets.

He ordered boxes of tulips and brought 'em and we just had to get 'em planted.

And we planted in front of any house we could plant that was willing all up and down Harrison street.

And it tied into Dutch Hill, the women.

Of course we played because we were dykes.

You know, dykes, tulips, all of that.

But it also was okay for the straight world or the people that lived there, cuz it was still flowers.

It was still Dutch Hill.

(gentle piano plays) The ones who were allies, the people, the lesbians the gay men, the trans, those that were supportive of us they were all in.

Those who were not, they were vicious.

As hard as we would try to build community we always had that, you know, element.

- [Mary Ann] Promoting Womontown, going to different festivals to talk about it, keeping up with all the paperwork involved and really it was a full time, second job.

And so every weekend was pretty much dedicated in between mom and dad and Drea's grandmother who was also ill in Illinois.

And a lot of the neighborhood association meetings working also with the landlords and then the city programs and organizing activities on the weekend.

There was just a lot of, lot of work all the time.

And I think after five years things were working and really we kept all the property here.

So it was like, we need a break from this from the constant every day.

A lot of people are here now they can keep it rolling.

I mean there are over 80 or a lot of women were here during that period of time.

- So I kept trying to keep things going.

Other people were involved too, not just me except the the work of the community wasn't getting done by anybody much, but me.

Probably the end of '94 or so I just felt like I was driving the bus and got real quiet.

And then suddenly I turned around and there was nobody on the bus.

The main lesson I've told other people is all lesbians are not alike.

I think that was like one of my preconceived ideas that we would meet up and live with other women who were just like us.

It was so not true.

There's all kinds.

- There were several ups and there were several downs but that's life.

And that was lived in Womontown and it was a wonderful place to be.

- [Cyndi] I just miss seeing women I really enjoyed being around you know, I could walk down in the neighborhood and during the summer and people would be out I'd wave to 'em and you know, have a talk with 'em.

- [Sue] We always hosted the best parties, Bev and I the potlucks because Bev was an incredible cook.

Martha and Sarah they'd bring their instruments.

And we had street festivals.

- [Sarah] The get togethers that's to me was the fun part.

- [Barbara] Going out to Louisburg Cider Mill together looking for pumpkins, sitting around a big picnic table eating apple cider doughnuts and just laughing and having a good time.

- [Micki] You could always call somebody and say, "Hey do you have this tool?

Or do you have that tool?

Or can you help me with that?

I have to move some furniture."

And there was always at that time or over the years someone that you could call and they would be there.

- [Phyllis] Just the camaraderie and the friendship and hanging out on Drea and Mary Ann's porch.

- My mom came out on the porch and she said, "I'm not Lebanese."

(Laughs) She wanted make sure everybody on the porch knew she wasn't Lebanese.

- When we would go to the festivals for three days and we all knew this or (smooches) whatever.

We also knew that when we came back to Womontown guess what it was there.

You know, you (kisses) from the porch.

- The potlucks, the community was so important because we weren't assimilated as well as people are today.

So that's the plus and the minus behind that assimilation in a way that sometimes you don't have that community like you used to, we were almost forced into feeling being able to feel comfortable, find ourselves find one another.

And that's how we did it.

(harmonizing vocals) - [Drea] You bought it, you developed it you nurtured it, you won.

That's what I wanted for every woman, for every dyke for every alternative person that came in that neighborhood who financially struggled, who financially had been set aside by society who emotionally had been discarded as not better, but lesser than, to even live in a neighborhood or in a home that you own.

So it's emotional.

We were not supposed to be able to have any power.

We as women where always be the victim, the ones you used up and set aside, and then they would come in and rescue us like the knights on white horses.

But then they'd push us out.

This was a different intentional neighborhood.

We were so determined not to let them win that when we came up against things like the developers or the tax people or the politicians or the straight neighborhood association we did not let them deter us.

But that period of time from when it started to when we left in '93 ah, what a vision.

(peaceful music playing) Of all the women who are associated with Womontown who have left us like the Donna Vee's and the TJ (women overlapping names) - Jean Green.

- Beverly Powell.

- Eve Eggleston.

- [Drea] And so many wonderful wonderful women that we had the pleasure and honor of knowing in our lifetime.

And I hope all of you are (indistinct).

- Olga.

- Wow.

That's a lot of people already.

- And Darcy, I think.

- Darcy?

(women overlapping chatter) - She just moved away!

- If you move away, you're dead to us.

(women laughing) - Martha, Martha!

You got a couple lines to a song so we can sing?

- [Women Singing] Like a ship in the harbor ♪ Like a mother and child ♪ ♪ Like a light in the darkness ♪ ♪ I'll hold you a while ♪ ♪ We'll walk on the waters ♪ ♪ I'll cradle you dear ♪ ♪ And hold you while ♪ angels sing you to sleep ♪ - [Bev] Oh that's great!