Sexual Social Scripts and the Re-Imagings of Community Identity‪.‬

Introduction I first attended the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in 1995. By that time, the festival had a twenty year history behind it and had become, since its inception in the mid 1970s, the largest and longest running women's festival in North America. For a young dyke like myself, the promise of a primarily lesbian and queer body of participants was particularly alluring, and I had a sense that my journey to the festival would be a pilgrimage of sorts. Still learning to traverse the boundaries of heteronormativity, I had begun to actively seek out spaces, both discursive and material, where I could cultivate and articulate my own emerging sexual and gender identities. Women's Studies classes, lesbian bars, and a cohort of lesbian and queer positive friends and mentors had already provided me spaces within which to imagine and enact identities other than those offered to me by my rural Manitoba homeland. "Michigan" promised one more space to live out that migratory process.(2)