But it was, of course, the white, middle-class, mostly cisgendered version of lesbianism that won out and came to occupy our contemporary aesthetic associations with “sapphic” and all its attendant branches. Just as women of the ’70s were using “Do you listen to Cris Williamson?” as a pick-up line, sapphics today ask the same question but with girl in red.
Listen to her, or many musicians in her “sapphic pop” cohort, and you’ll hear the fixings of womyn’s music: folksy, simple, hushed. The music appears like an afterimage of a 1970s separatist cultural project that fused politics, aesthetics, and community into a deliberate musical ideology that’s never quite left lesbian consciousness. What began as a deliberate counter to masculine rock energy has become, over generations, an intuitive taxonomy. Fans identify “sapphic-coded” music without necessarily articulating why, because the criteria have been internalized at the level of perception. Being a lesbian is no longer a requirement.
In 2021 piece for Artforum, Sasha Geffen recognized in Taylor Swift’s pandemic albums Folklore and Evermore an analog with the sound of Williamson’s era: “The harmonica, distant slide guitar, and springy acoustic chords on ‘betty’ do, in fact, nod to decades of lesbian musicianship, from the women’s-music movement of the 1970s to the latest wave of artists.” Since 2013, listeners have also tagged the Irish singer Hozier as “sapphic,” not because of his own identity but because his music eerily mimics the aesthetic criteria of womyn’s music. Like Williamson, his songs are quasi-religious (take me to church!), and treat women as devotional deities, with songs like “Sunlight” and “From Eden” rendering women as elemental, nature-bound forces, while weaving in Biblical and mythological allusions. In her blog post “What Is It With Lesbians and Hozier?” Toronto journalist and poet Jordan Currie writes that she can “hear an echo of [Sappho’s] spirit” in his “mythic depictions of women and femininity.”
Today, Hozier may be the closest we get to the faded dream of the womyn’s music movement. Olivia Records ceased operations in 1990 due to dwindling sales, rebranding as a lesbian travel company. After taking out a $50,000 loan to buy a ship, it’s become a modestly successful cruise line—famous enough to cameo in an episode of The L Word—but the fantasy it sells is, quite literally, a vacation from reality. The lesbian utopia, once imagined as a place you might live, now departs from port on a fixed itinerary. On land, there are roughly 36 remaining lesbian bars across the United States. For many young sapphics, “community” flickers around TikTok hashtags: #wlw, #girlkissing, #queerdaddy. Elder dykes gather on Reddit’s r/OlderLesbians to mourn what has been lost.
While Olivia Records would eventually wind down, it didn’t entirely mark the end of the lesbian-feminist label model. Mr. Lady Records, founded in 1996 by Kaia Wilson, carried that lineage forward, and her own band, The Butchies, covered Williamson’s songs, folding them back into a living continuum and reframing them within a queercore context.
Today, Williamson lives in Seattle, playing shows in much smaller rooms. She distanced herself from the womyn’s movement in 1980, when she committed its greatest sin: following up The Changer and the Changed with a rock album. The womyn’s music movement ultimately failed Black women, trans women, and even Williamson herself. Yet The Changer and the Changed, an album so exquisite, so beautiful, still opens imaginative space for other ways of living and relating. From the failures of the movement that birthed it, other possibilities can take shape—like the chance to loosen Williamson’s reputation from the limits of the movement that once held her.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.
