Tyler, Robin - interviewed by Rose Norman, 2016-06-17

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0:38:38

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Featured in Sinister Wisdom #104

Biographical / historical:

For nine years (1984-92), the Canadian-born Jewish comic and lifelong activist Robin Tyler produced the Southern Women's Music and Comedy Festival (SWMCF), the third largest women's music festival in the country, after the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (1976-2015), and Tyler's own West Coast Women's Music and Comedy Festival (1981-95, with gaps). Held over Memorial Day weekend, Southern drew a crowd of 2000 and was held at Camp Coleman, in northeast Georgia, until 1992, when difficulties with the camp led to relocating to a camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Hendersonville, NC.1 Camp Coleman, owned by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), created problems for the festival (raising the price drastically each year), as had White County, where the camp was located. These issues are described in some detail in the 1992 Southern Voice article about the relocation (cited below). The camp that Tyler had rented for $5000 in 1984 (the high end of camp rental prices at that time) was renting for $40,000 in 1991. Before it was over, Tyler had involved the National Organization for Women, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and the ACLU in negotiations and protests around that camp. Tyler has been out of the closet since the age of sixteen (1959) and has been an outspoken supporter of lesbian and gay rights her whole life, support that has cost her professionally. To get a job for a USO tour of Vietnam to entertain the troops, she and her partner had to be billed as a singing "sister act" (Tyler and Harrison) in the 1970s. Krefting quotes Tyler telling a reporter for The Advocate in 1972 that "We're not a cute comedy team. We are a revolutionary comedy team. We came here to educate [and] to entertain" (qtd p. 141). The comedy team had a broadcasting contract with ABC that wasn't renewed after Tyler was outspoken about Anita Bryan's anti-gay campaign. In 1978, in response to that Anita Bryant campaign, Tyler called for the first National Gay March on Washington and followed up on that, despite some gay opposition, leading to the March on April 14, 1979 (details in Krefting, p. 147). In 1979, she released the first openly gay or lesbian comedy album, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Groom (updated in 2007). She went on to produce main stage for the 1987 and 1993 Marches on Washington. In 2004, she and her partner Diane Olsen filed the 2004 marriage equality lawsuit that led to other California lawsuits and, ultimately, victory for marriage equality.

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