Greg Youmans

As I’m experiencing the loss of the irrepressible and irreplaceable Barbara Hammer, I’ve been grateful for the many wonderful tributes and remembrances I’ve been reading here on Facebook and in so many magazines, newspapers, and web sites. She was one of the great lights in this world, and I feel her absence deeply. At the same time, right now at least, I’ve been feeling more love and gratitude than anything else. I can’t think of any other person over the years whom I’ve looked at and thought so consistently: Holy shit, that is a life well lived.

Maybe it’s the scholar/teacher in me (or is this the denial stage of grief?), but right now all I’m doing is pulling lessons from what she accomplished and modeled for us: how to stay connected to an inner core of vitality; how to balance (and integrate) work and life; how to keep growing and changing and exploring across one’s entire life (I remember how she gently but firmly pushed me to not look at only her 1970s films); how to stay committed and aware of your own value even when others aren’t (she was blessed with well-deserved recognition in her last decade, but there were spells in the past when she kept making work and putting herself out there even when the art world was turned the other way); how to nurture and support and inspire the artists and scholars of later generations (like me!) as well as those who are less privileged than yourself (she always showed up and paid things forward); and how to sow love and build community wherever you go.

I was so grateful to have some of that community around me when I got the news of her passing on Saturday. I was at the annual film studies conference and was surrounded by other queer and feminist film scholars as we started to process this tremendous loss. Much love to my fellow presenters on the “Resituating Barbara Hammer’s Queer Legacy” panel–Sarah Keller, Laura Stamm, and Ronald Gregg–and to the many other friends at the conference who shared my love for Barbara, including Rox Samer and Alexandra Juhasz. I was with people, in many respects, whom I know because of Barbara, and I’ll never forget that as I continue sharing the world with them.

Tonight I’m gathering my Sapphic community here in Bellingham to share some of Barbara’s magick and honor her. (The line-up, as of right now: Menses, Dyketactics, Women I Love, No No Nooky TV, and Still Point. But the program is open to change.)

And last but not least, I’m thinking so much these days about Barbara’s partner of thirty years, the fellow “genuine badass” with whom she traveled through life: the beautiful Florrie Burke. Florrie is someone else I’ve gotten to know through Barbara, and she has the same qualities I loved in her.

What a loss. But I’m so grateful that there are so many people sharing it, and hopefully no one out there is feeling alone.