Donna Minkowitz reports from the floor of the National Lesbian Conference in the Village Voice, May 21, 1991:

Some things have changed in the lesbian world: political purism apparently no longer extends to the bedroom. The first of four scheduled workshops celebrating s&m was one of the best-attended and least tense events, attracting a multiracial crowd of 350 with lots of self-identified incest survivors. When a muscular, gorgeous 20-year-old complained that "it's not enough to learn about s&m from books, I need experience!" 349 women looked blissful. "Do I hear her calling for teachers?! With shoulders like that, you're not gonna have any problem," one called out soothingly. Most postmodern line from the conference, also from the s&m workshop: "A beating that I had two years ago is what enabled me to get through Saudi Arabia, because it taught me I could withstand pain."

After a few days, many of us wished we'd had a similar preparatory experience. Censorship started on Day Two, when a local photographer and a cartoonist handed out 300 copies of a drawing chiding the policy prohibiting the use of flash cameras. (Conference organizers claim they can cause seizures in epileptics.)

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The Washington Post, June 22, 1991:

Minutes into "Sex/Love/Stories," Tim Miller's solo program at Dance Place last weekend, it's abundantly clear why this ardent and unshackled performance artist was denied a National Endowment for the Arts grant by NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer and his advisory council.

"Sex!" Miller bellows, entering from the rear of the space. "Love!" Then, in a quieter voice: "War ... AIDS ..." With these big, resonant, scary words, he offers up an outline of all that is to come bursting forth from his oh-so-clever mouth... He yanks down his pants and has a very frank, emotionally charged discussion with his bared anatomy about the importance of celebrating the flesh, especially in the midst of disease and censorship and death.

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In 1991, the city of Laguna Beach, California, prosecuted a woman because the picket fence she built in front of her house was six inches too high. The city zoning board targeted the woman even though twenty of her neighbors signed a letter stating that they had no objection to her fence and even though there were forty other houses in her neighborhood that also had fences higher than the four-foot limit. (The zoning rule had been put into effect ten years before, dictating that new fences had to be significantly lower than existing fences.)

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