“I came out when I was 40. So a lot of the period that we were covering which is about 1970 to 99, I came out in 1990 so I missed a lot of it. And it was invisible to me, the whole lesbian culture, completely invisible to me. Turned out half my friends were lesbian and I didn’t know it.” - Rose Norman

For this bonus episode we talked to Rose Norman, the editor of the Southern Lesbian-Feminist Activist Herstory Project which puts on the annual Womonwrites conference to produce and collect Southern lesbian feminist activist writers’ stories. The project collective came out of the Women’s Movement of the 60’s and is in it’s 39th year of operation. Her academic research focused on American women’s autobiography and she is now a retired professor of English and women’s studies who grew up in rural Alabama and now lives in Huntsville, Alabama.

We talk about the history of the conference, Southern lesbian feminist activist representation, the exploratory process of collecting interviews to document these women’s stories, and lesbian culture in the South.

Listen to the The Lesbian Testimony Podcast - Bonus Episode.