On Dessa and the Novartis Brand of Biomedical Engineering: Volume 1
Examining the intersections of music, politics, the personal, and monopolized healthcare.
I am very excited to share the first volume of a wide-ranging essay that began gestating after I first heard about the cure for leukemia over a family Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago.
Since the piece is rather lengthy and therefore not best suited for a single newsletter post, I will be serializing it here on Weird Catastrophe. You can read the first posting here, the second posting here, the third posting here, the fourth posting here, and the fifth posting here.
I’ll let the piece speak for itself, but I want to shout out a few people who were immensely inspiring or helpful in getting it to fruition.
Firstly, the amazing Dessa, the rapper and writer whose work is weaved throughout the piece. She is a true Renaissance woman and I am consistently awed by her many ventures. She is currently on tour right now, so grab those tickets while you can.
Secondly, the incredibly dogged and unwavering voice of reason in the den of thieves that is the videogame industry, James Stephanie Sterling, or Jim-Fucking-Sterling-Son. Their analysis of the avariciousness that has come to characterize the big-budget videogame space is a model for the kind of adversarial journalism and commentary that every industry desperately needs more of.
Thirdly, Noam Chomsky, who was gracious enough to respond to my emails regarding patent law in the medical industry and who pointed me in the direction of further research that really helped flesh out the piece.
And lastly, but not leastly, my cousin-in-law who provided me with an interview that was essential for me to understand the intricacies of Novartis’ leukemia therapy and all of the crazy work that goes in to the treatment.
There shall be more to come in the next few weeks besides the volumes of this essay. Stay tuned for more agitprop collages, poetic visual art, and well-intentioned tirades.
I.
Sweet Prometheus, come home
they took away our fire
and all that scarcity promotes
is desperate men and tyrants
– Dessa, “Beekeeper”1
I don’t believe in ghosts – I never have, not intellectually anyway. But that statement by itself is meaningless in a way. In the same way that merely saying you don’t believe in Zeus does not erase his many effigies and immense cultural impact. Simply telling a child not to believe in ghouls and monsters does not make them any less afraid of the dark. You cannot, in a very bodily sense, reason your way out of the shivers running down your back when you feel a certain something is watching you. And we do not get to choose the ghosts that haunt us. Life chooses them for us. Our ghosts find us out.
I would not define ghosts simply as the creeping dead. Rather, I would include anything that was once a part of our lives but is now lost or transfigured. An ex-lover, ex-friend, an old idea or way of living, family photographs burned in a house fire, memories gently slipped away and forgotten. Our ghosts are the remnants of our lives. They live in our bedrooms. They follow us in our dreams. They sneak up on our minds when we least expect them. And their haunting is often a rather one-sided, undemocratic affair.
And so it is that I find myself attempting to explicate the convergences in my life of ghosts, politics, music, family, past relationships, and the labyrinthine, tyrannical world of corporate healthcare – tenuous as these convergences may be.
It was seven years ago when I first fell into admiration and awe with the writing of the singer and rapper known as Dessa. It only took one song of hers played live on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series for me to have my preconceptions about hip-hop shattered. That first song, “Fighting Fish,” with its chorus referencing the Greek philosopher Zeno and his paradox of the arrow, opened up my mind to the vast lyrical possibilities of the genre. I had not heard the ideas which Dessa wrote about demonstrated in hip-hop before. Prior to watching her performance, I had only been exposed to the male-dominant, Top-40 type of rap and hip-hop played at every middle school and high school dance that I attended growing up. Which, admittedly, is perhaps akin to making sweeping judgments about the entirety of country music based solely on listening to Tim McGraw.
Hearing Dessa sing her literate, piercing lyrics behind the Tiny Desk while backed by her small, stripped-down live band also expanded the breadth of sonic possibilities that I thought hip-hop could utilize. The tight and simple rhythm section was comprised of electric bass, drums played with brushes, and a single electric guitar playing chugging rhythm parts in addition to essential lead melodies. The music sounded more akin to laid-back indie-rock than pumping, over-compressed dance club beats.
And the supporting star of the performance was co-singer Aby Wolf – calling her a backup singer does not do her work justice. Wolf weaved her voice throughout Dessa’s lead: emphasizing specific lyrics, covering when Dessa needed to take a breath, and taking lead on chorus parts as Dessa finished out verse lines. Watching the two of them sing together evinces a longtime, trusting collaboration. They share consistent eye contact and mutual, knowing smiles like close sisters. Their vocals emphasize delicate harmonies and are more reminiscent of traditional choral music than simple pop melodies.
On the song “Fighting Fish,” Dessa spouts the line: “I didn’t come lookin’ for love, I didn’t come to pick a fight, I come here every night to work, and you can grab an axe, man, or you can step aside.”2 It’s such a self-confident lyric that is made good on by Dessa’s formidable performance. She stands tall behind the Tiny Desk and spits out quick lines with an asymmetrical snarl on her face. It’s clear to see that this is an artist who knows her craft well and isn’t afraid to tell you so.
Before seeing this NPR performance I hadn’t heard a solo woman hip-hop artist. I hadn’t heard this sort of subject matter tackled in the form of rap before. It seemed that Dessa’s main musical intention, rather than to create an addictive beat to get down to at the club, was instead to demand deliberate and repeated listenings, preferably with headphones on. This performance introduced me to a singular artist who revealed the wealth of an entire genre of music and I was excited to hear more from her.
Dessa hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a member of that city’s independent hip-hop collective known as Doomtree – formed roughly around 2001. This seven member group holds onto their independence with a fierce pride. The collective has their own record label and publishing company under which each member releases most of their work. The crew cultivates their own side and solo projects and helps support each other on nationwide tours.
When delving into Dessa’s music I started out with her most recent release at the time, Parts of Speech, and moved backwards from there. I was struck by the artistic growth that was evidenced across her albums. It was clear to see how far Dessa and Doomtree had matured over the years, and how far they may yet propel themselves. They’d progressed from rushed-sounding DIY recordings with questionable mixing techniques onto their more surefooted incarnation of refined production and fearless performances.
There are a select few musical artists that I am an obsessive completionist over and Dessa has become one of them. She stands out amongst the rest of my listening habits that are mainly centered around the various branches of rock music. The other artists I can’t get enough of are The Band and The National, both five-men outfits with the typical rock band instrumental trappings. But like these bands, Dessa’s music broadens the horizons of her respective genre to the point where she sounds completely original and distinct while still fitting nicely within the larger genre itself. Her music deftly interweaves between dark synthesized production, lush classical strings and horns, smoky barroom jazz, unapologetic modern pop, and scrappy lo-fi garage band, all while being held together by her elegant vocals and philosophizing lyrics.
And besides her consistently strong musical output, Dessa also affords printed collections of her whip-smart poems, essays, and travel articles. And what a revealing experience it has been to read her various works, particularly her memoir My Own Devices, and be offered a better sense of how her mind behaves and where the inspiration comes from for much of her songwriting. Her work is often deeply personal and vulnerable, attempting to find meaning in the intimate details of relationships past and present. She demonstrates herself as someone who is emotionally intelligent and deft at getting a good read on people. She provides subtle observations that go beyond just her music and life of touring on the road – although her glossary of touring musician jargon and slang is a must-read (you’ll never want to be labeled a “punisher” by a touring performer). Dessa also muses about her interests in science, current events, death, and what it means to strive to be more authentic to herself. Reading her written word enriches the listening experience of her albums and vice versa.
I first had the opportunity to see Dessa perform live in Portland, Oregon at the Wonder Ballroom in the spring of 2018. This was shortly after the release of Dessa’s fourth full-length album Chime, which itself expanded her songwriting horizons and her airplay on the radio. I went to the show with a friend of mine who I was attending college with at the time. She and I drove an hour north from Corvallis to Portland and planned to make the same drive back after the show. On our way up we listened to The Hamilton Mixtape, on which Dessa performs a version of “Congratulations.” Many of Dessa’s fans may have been introduced to her through this Lin-Manuel Miranda connection.
After waiting in line at the front door of the venue I got a bit flustered when my pocket knife had to be confiscated by security. They assured me that I would get it back after the show but I was rather reticent to part with an $80 piece of equipment. We entered and got our wristbands for alcohol service. The space itself was what I thought to be a perfect size. No matter where you were in the room you had a good shot of the stage. The audience was separated by a barrier delineating those who were over 21 from those who were underage. When Dessa came onstage she commented on the somewhat awkward vibe this separation caused.
Other than that first Tiny Desk concert, I had not yet seen Dessa perform live or even speak aloud very much. So I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I remember most from that concert was the way she comported herself onstage. I was struck by her height and her commanding stage presence. She was at once graceful and ebullient, spritely yet charmingly clumsy. Her demeanor seemed to be composed of one part putting on an ironic face for the crowd and one part feeling like a genuine badass. And she had exquisite control over the audience.
During one song she extended her arms and parted the crowd by slicing us in two with a gesture of her hands so that she could join us down on the floor level. I couldn’t help but think about the similarity of this act to the customary antics of The National’s lead singer Matt Berninger during their live shows. But unlike Berninger – traipsing his way through festival-size audiences with what must be a five-hundred foot mic cable trailing behind him while a poor sound technician dutifully feeds the cable from onstage and audience members are clotheslined in its wake – Dessa prefers the neatness of wireless microphones. After she had danced among us and the song was over she asked everyone to turn around so that we wouldn’t watch her ungracefully crawl back onto the stage.
Between songs she read a couple of her poems, “Tits on the Moon” being a crowd favorite, with its line, “The moon’s gravity is only one-sixth of ours. My tits would be awesome there.”3 She also took time to expound the virtues of being an independent artist, being a part of the collective Doomtree, and how this independence affords her the ability to tour and play songs on her own terms supported by her loyal fans and without the burden of a record company telling her what to do.
One of my favorite songs by Dessa is a tune called “Call Off Your Ghost.” In it, she details the estrangement of a lover; a relationship that was on and off again over the course of more than ten years and which is the subject of much of her writing. In the song she is torn between having feelings for this man and wanting these feelings to be dissolved. His haunting presence and the jealousy she has for him, which she knows is a “perfect waste of time,”4 will not yield with the passing years.
The song demonstrates the fleeting nature of relationships and how someone who was so close to you can become a ghostly specter, an apparition that is too close for comfort and also achingly untouchable, a ghost that is perhaps better stood up to than subsumed. This song is a staple of Dessa’s live shows and as well it should be. It is one of the more immediately accessible tracks from her album Parts of Speech and it showcases much of her overall ethos. Our ghosts won’t always politely listen to us. Sometimes it is best to tell them instead of ask them.
Dessa ended the show with an encore of the rousing “Fighting Fish,” perhaps her most traditional hip-hop sounding piece and the one song that was as yet conspicuously absent from the setlist and which everybody in the room seemed to be anxiously anticipating. After the show Dessa graciously stuck around to sign merch and take pictures with the crowd. I stood in line and nervously approached her to ask for a signature for my copy of her book Spiral Bound. My words failed me so I simply greeted her and scooched the book towards her over the merch table.
“Would you like me to sign this?” she asked.
“Yes! Please, sorry,” I blurted out.
“I don’t want to presume,” she said, looking down at the book. “No, yeah, please, go for it.”
My date and I stuck around for a little longer to chat with her backing band, a strong three-piece outfit in their own right called Monakr who were also opening for Dessa on the tour. After hanging out inside the venue for a bit I got my pocketknife back from security and we headed home. It was a very late night driving back but I was glad we had gone out of our way, especially since Dessa and Doomtree don’t make extensive West Coast tours often enough.
My hope is that Dessa will be a household name headlining festivals and selling out huge venues someday. That is, if that’s what she has in mind for her own career. But, perhaps like many fans who thought of themselves as somewhat early adopters of artists, part of me relished in being among the niche to mid-size audience that Dessa and Doomtree had cultivated thus far. And it was so damn good to be at that Portland show and be crowded into an intimate little venue watching an underappreciated talent captivate that audience and do it on her own terms.
The next time I would get the chance to see Dessa play live would be two years later on another West Coast tour. This time it would turn into somewhat of a road trip odyssey for me. And a reckoning with ghosts of my own.
II.
Love, Drugs, Sex, Pain,
Those are just grade school games,
nothing major
nothing ages
nothing changes
but the names and dates
– Dessa, “Grade School Games”5
The first time I heard about the cure for leukemia was when my eldest cousin told me about it at a family get together at our Uncle John’s house. When I heard this miraculous news I felt like I’d stumbled upon some grand, poorly kept secret whose import hadn’t yet struck the world’s consciousness; some tremendous treasure that was just lying out in the open and being passed over by pedestrians. My god, they’ve done it. We’ve cured cancer! All hail the scientific machine. Why aren’t the bells ringing? Where are all the parades and the Hallmark movies? Someone please strike up the band. Poor malignant Timmy and Susy are going to be around for many more Christmases to come.
I understood later why this cure for cancer wasn’t such a big deal, at least with its current form of management. And by then the story reminded me less of some glittering gold on the riverbank ushering in a rush of eager prospectors than it did a banal, legalistic corporate document revealing the litany of reasons why we as a society can’t have nice things. But there will be more on the incensing details later.
It had been a while since I had seen this particular cousin of mine. My mother’s side of the family tries to get together once every year or so, barring any natural or manmade disaster, such as a global pandemic. But I hadn’t been able to attend the last few family reunions because I was always somewhere else in the country working at various theater companies. Devoting your energies to the theater and live entertainment industry as a career is a great way to meet people, travel, and see the world. But it’s also a great way to miss out on family occasions and to lose hope of ever developing any stable romantic relationships.
My cousin and I were chatting while sampling various BBQ’d meats and side dishes made by each faction of our family. And strangely enough my cousin and I were truly getting to know each other for the first time in our lives. It’s not that we hadn’t had opportunities to interact with each other before. We’d certainly been to many of the same family gatherings in the years prior. But I am the baby of the family, with six years between me and my closest sibling, and about twenty years between me and this particular cousin. So now, in my mid-twenties, this was perhaps the first time in my life where I had anything meaningful to say or ask of him, at least with a more equitable sense of footing between us.
This cousin of mine, who I’ll call Ryan, because that’s his name, is a man in his mid-forties who, apart from some slightly graying hair, looks like he could be thirty. He is a professor of English as well as a professor of Science and Technologies studies. He has a PhD from Harvard and has written two books on nanotechnology and another book examining the intersection of videogame culture, politics, and activism. While he’s not busy being the chair of his department, he travels the world giving lectures and consulting on side projects.
Needless to say, Ryan is the resident egghead of the family, and I admire the hell out of him for it, particularly because there’s no one else in the family who’s as academically rigorous as he is. Sure, I’ve got an uncle who’s a professor of Early Childhood Development at San Jose State. But he’s an old hippy, Bay Area guy who’d rather play one of his many guitars than write a book, more power to him. And then there’s my other cousin, Ryan’s younger brother, who is an aerodynamic engineer. But he has a more playboy, beach-bum aura about him compared to Ryan’s professorial bookishness.
So when I was around Ryan at this family reunion I felt a newfound interest in picking his brain in ways that felt different from any of my other family members. And during our conversation is when I first heard from him about this cure for leukemia and a certain pharmaceutical company called Novartis.
Let’s take one step back for a moment (I promise this kind of backtracking doesn’t happen too much – but even if it did fuck you.) This family get-together was happening at the house of my aforementioned Uncle John. Uncle John is a wonderful example of a seeming contradiction worth examining. He was raised along with his siblings out on a sprawling ranch in a rural area of California. He participated in 4-H and FFA growing up. He wears cowboy hats and cuts his own hair. He likes to BBQ and he has a taste for hard liquor. He served as a California Highway Patrol officer for decades and as such he has a tidy retirement fund. He rides tractors and tends to his orchards on his sizeable property. He has a distaste for city living and prefers the seclusion of rural America. He can ride a horse and shoot a gun and build a toolshed and confidently cut the head off a rattlesnake with a shovel.
In addition to all of these things, my Uncle John just so happens to be a homosexual. He lives with his partner who he has been together with for many years. They both wear blue jeans with large Western belt buckles and leather cowboy boots. Basically, Brokeback Mountain ain’t shit compared to my Uncle John and his partner.
For anyone who is confused regarding the distinction between gender expression and sexuality, this will hopefully clear some things up for you. My Uncle John behaves like the quintessential Western American man. That’s how he expresses his gender. He is also a homosexual. That’s his sexuality. These two things need not be related to each other. Take myself, for instance. I regularly wear nail polish and sometimes I highlight my hair. I work in the performing arts and I like to go antiquing in order to find interesting vintage clothes. Sometimes I like to go out to parties wearing makeup, a dress, and high heels. I consistently prefer the company of women over men and I love a good episode of The Golden Girls. I also happen to be a straight man. My partners have been exclusively women. My sexuality refers to whom I’m attracted to. But my sexuality does not necessarily determine how I express my gender.
Both men and women of various sexualities have thought that I was gay or bisexual upon first meeting me. I do not get offended at this because I understand that most people are conditioned to tie up gender and sexuality into an inextricable bond. But sometimes someone will ask me directly about my sexuality and when I tell them that I am straight they will look at me dubiously and try to assure me that I’m not totally straight. A few beers will surely bring out the gay in me. Often this is done with a light heart by some friend or acquaintance of mine who’s trying to tease me. So I try not to take it too seriously.
But this doubtfulness on their part only demonstrates the pernicious attitudes and stereotypes regarding sexuality and gender. It is assumed that if you behave a certain way that is considered outside of the traditional expressions of masculinity and femininity, then you must therefore be on your way to the gay side – if you’re not happily living there in sin already. If someone is doubtful of somebody else’s sexuality based solely on their observable gender expression – namely the way they talk, the way they dress, the friends they choose to have, their occupation, their leisure activities, etc. – then that doubtful person is attempting to, wittingly or not, police the acceptable bounds of gender expression. They are signaling that if you dare to go beyond that acceptable limit of behavior then you must surely be at least a little bit gay.
Now of course sexuality itself can be understood as a spectrum of attraction in the same way that gender can be understood as a spectrum of behavior. I am not denying this. You could be hyper-masculine in your behavior, something like my Uncle John, and also have a sexuality that’s somewhere in between being straight and gay. Or you could be attracted to women just slightly more than you are attracted to men, like one of my previous partners, but also be hyper-feminine. Any various combinations are possible.
But these two categories of gender and sexuality are not inherently correlated with each other. You cannot assume one based on the other. However, because of traditional Western socialization and mores, these two categories very often are related to one another in people’s minds. If you are gay, the attitude goes, then you must display some typical gender-bending behavior. But this is not an immutable fact which holds constant across different cultures and time periods. As Lillian Faderman puts it in her book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers – a wonderful sociological history of lesbianism in the U.S. – attitudes regarding sexuality, affection, and mental health are constantly changing, “not through the discovery of objectively conceived truths,” but, “through social forces that have little to do with the essentiality of emotions or sex or mental health.”6 What may be viewed as extremely masculine behavior in one culture or time period may be viewed as extremely feminine behavior in a different culture or time period.
And, as Faderman points out, even the very concept of same-sex sexual relations between women was unfathomable, unable to be understood or even guessed at, within Western society until Freud and other psychoanalysts began writing about the subject in the early 20th century. Before this, in the Victorian era, close romantic relationships between women were seen as perfectly healthful, normative, and unsexual. These “romantic friendships” were very much a part of the mainstream culture, and lesbianism as a concept, much less a distinct cultural sect, was yet to come into existence. It was not until sexologists began describing and pathologizing homosexuality that the world began to look askance at any two men or women who seemed to be unnaturally close to each other. Faderman writes that what was “within the realm of the socially acceptable during one era may be considered sick or dangerous or antisocial during another.”7
And so, attempting to tie a specific set of acceptable gender behaviors to sexuality is always going to be a shaky product of socialization that is bound to become outmoded with time. Connecting gender with sexuality and rigorously policing those behaviors is the breeding ground for harmful stereotypes and restrictive, toxic attitudes regarding masculinity and femininity. This kind of narrow thinking is authoritarian and rude and unoriginal so just stop it.
So anyway I was at my gay Uncle John’s house talking to my nerdy cousin Ryan who also just so happens to be gay. I had heard from family that Ryan had a male partner but I’d never met him before. You see, I didn’t even know I had any gay family members until my grandmother was on her deathbed. It wasn’t until after she passed away that the respective partners of my Uncle John and Cousin Ryan started being introduced to the rest of the family. Happy day! Grandma’s gone so now we can be gay! What pride.
The conversation I was having with Ryan was quite remarkable. I had never had such a free flowing and enthusiastic conversation with any member of my family before. It was really ridiculous. Here I am getting to know my cousin for the first time after my twenty odd years of being on this earth and it’s a more stimulating discussion than most other interactions I’ve had with my family. But that’s not to say that this newfound relationship felt in any way more familial than my other family relationships. It couldn’t possibly. Ryan and I were speaking to each other as if for the first time. Talking with him felt like getting to know an exciting new colleague in the workplace. His friendship with me could never touch the warmth, care – or aggravation for that matter – which my parents and closest siblings had demonstrated to me while I was growing up. In other words, he could reach me at an intellectual level but not an emotional one.
We talked about how his teaching was going at the university. I told him about my various jobs working in the theater industry around the country. He told me that he and his partner Patrick had season tickets to the San Francisco Opera and that they absolutely loved going there. He told me about their two houses that they own, one in the Castro District of San Francisco and the other in the city of Davis. “Two houses!” Yes, he told me that he and Patrick did think that it was a bit extravagant at times. They’d talked about selling the place in San Francisco but every time it came up they just couldn’t bring themselves to let it go.
At some point our conversation settled upon his partner, Patrick, who was travelling for work at the time. “What does Patrick do for work?” Ryan said he worked for a big pharmaceutical company in their cell therapy division. “Wow,” I said. I guess that explained the two houses. Ryan said that Patrick worked for a company called Novartis which had developed a single-dose treatment for leukemia that resulted in very high rates of long-term remission in patients; a treatment that was considered, for all intents and purposes, a cure.
I was shocked by this news. I wasn’t so much surprised at the advancement of medical science that this treatment demonstrated. I was more surprised that I had never even heard of this treatment before. Why wasn’t this all over the news? People talk about wanting to cure cancer all the time. Surely this treatment must portend great possibilities for the curing of all cancers in the near future.
This raised so many questions. How exactly does the treatment work? How readily available is it? Is this treatment administered exclusively by Novartis? What I was most interested in asking Ryan was how the economics of the treatment worked. If this is a cure, a onetime treatment, how does the company make money off of it without the recurring revenue from traditional drug treatments? How much does this cure cost? And what are the ethical implications of determining pricing for the cure for cancer?
Ryan told me that, yeah, basically because it’s a onetime treatment, the company charges a ton of money for it; hundreds of thousands of dollars in fact. “How does it work with different healthcare systems in different countries?” I asked. Well, basically Novartis owns the patent for this particular treatment and they charge a certain price that is negotiated with different governments and healthcare systems. So the price differs from country to country.
“And how does this treatment work exactly?” Ryan explained to me that basically a blood sample is taken from the cancer patient and frozen. The frozen blood is then transported to a Novartis lab where T-cells, a type of white blood cell that are a part of the normal immune system response, are taken from the blood sample and reengineered to attack the cancerous cells. These genetically modified cancer-killing T-cells are then reintroduced into the patient. So we’re at a point now where science can teach your blood to kill its own cancer cells. Welcome to the future! But good luck paying for it.
I was quite amazed at this. I looked over to my other family members to try to get them in on the conversation and share this glorious news. But not much else besides this was said and we all shortly returned to eating our BBQ’d sausages and chatting about the new olive trees that Uncle John was planting.
Before leaving the party I told Ryan that it was nice talking with him. We exchanged cell phone numbers and he told me that if I ever wanted to visit him and Patrick up in San Francisco they would be delighted to host me. I told him that I would absolutely take him up on that offer some time. And not much later the perfect opportunity would present itself.
Dessa, lyricist, "Beekeeper," performed by Dessa, Joey Van Phillips, and Jessy Greene, on Parts of Speech, Doomtree Records, 2013, compact disc.
Dessa: “NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert." Performed by Dessa, Aby Wolf, Dustin Kiel, Sean McPherson, and Joey Van Phillips. Video, 11:14. Youtube. Posted by NPR Music, December 9, 2013. Accessed February 28, 2021.
Dessa. "Tits on the Moon." Reading, Aladdin Theater, Portland, OR, January 19, 2020.
Dessa, lyricist, "Call Off Your Ghost," performed by Dessa and Jessy Greene, produced by Paper Tiger, on Parts of Speech, Doomtree Records, 2013, compact disc.
II
Dessa, lyricist, "Grade School Games," performed by Dessa, produced by Dessa, Andy Thompson, and Lazerbeak, on Good for You, Doomtree Records DTR-126, 2019, LP.
Lillian Faderman, "'Naked Amazons and Queer Damozels' : World War II and Its Aftermath," in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 119.
Faderman, "'Naked Amazons," 119.