Dear Editors

Kathy Walmer's editorial is a little confused about the difference between separatism and segregation.

Segregation is imposed by the more powerful on the less powerful (or the minority, on the minority). It amounts to the powerful forbidding the less powerful to have access to the more powerful's desirable territory: well-paying jobs, pleasant places to live, leisure, money, community status as “important” or “normal” and so on.

Separatism is the attempt of the less powerful to deny the more powerful access to themselves and their spaces, few and meager as these are, while also claiming equal access to those good jobs, nice places to live, leisure, community status as “normal” and “important,” space to have their news reported in community papers and so on. Getting angry because straight people invade a gay bar is separatism; making it impossible for gay people to be ourselves in straight places without feeling uncomfortable or being afraid of violence is segregation.

To claim half a page out of a sixteen-page paper isn't separatism; it's segregation. “Womensource” is that old, condescending newspaper tradition, The Woman's Page, under a new name. Many of us campaigned to get the big dailies to drop that sexist stuff for years. The Source oughtn't to start off by doing the same nerdish nonsense. A woman's page WILL cause dissension between the lesbian and gay male communities – and we have enough of that as it is, right?

Author's Note

The Seattle Source was a gay community newspaper, begun in Seattle, Washington, in 1986 (when I was living there). Complaints about women and women's doings going unrepresented in the paper led to the editorial mentioned above: one page out of 32 was proposed to be devoted to “women's” news. The editorial also condemned a strictly all-female newspaper (which possibility had been mentioned as a solution to the lack of women's news in The Source) as segregation.