f= I. 3 z ere aren’t many dykes at Dyke Rock these days: A _ recent trip to the semi-seclud- ed swimming spot at Burlington’s. Oakledge Park turns up rollerbladers, kayakers, and people walking their dogs, but not a single topless lesbian. It wasn’t always that way. In the 1970s and 80s, before there was a gay bar or a community center in the city, this particular wide rock ledge to the right of the bike path was a popular informal gathering place for Burlington’s lesbian community. “,You could go at anytime on a Sunday afiemoon and find a group of dykes hanging out there,” recalls Crow Cohen. Cohen remembers her first visit. It was the late 1970s. She had just come out, and was still married. A friend brought her to Dyke Rock for a swim. “There were'all these women with their shirts off,” she recalls. “Probably fifteen of them. I was kind of, like, blown away.” Cohen says that women used to gather there after softball -games, and after events like Pride. Most ofthe women were in their 30s or 40s, and many had been married. They had picnics, brought their kids, even" got their hair_ cut. “That was a ritual,” remembers Cohen. And in the days before the city started hiring park police to monitor the beach, no i’ one seemed to mind the nudity. Women frequently swam sans suit. “We were just bold,” Cohen declares. “We were friggin’ hold to do that.” Patricia Fontaine fondly recalls her summertime excursions to] Dyke Rock. “It was an easy, laid- back way to be with other women,” says the 50-year-old lesbian, who got teased as a twenty-something baby- dyke back in the day. Fontaine had plenty of intense political conversa- tions on the rock. “There was some serious combat-boot stomping that happened,” she says. But Fontaine also recalls a few dicey encounters — it wasn’t uncommon for women to ‘run into exes, or lovers escorting someone else. “There was a fair amount of non-monogamy happening then,” she notes cautiously. Not to mention the i I the mountains occasional male voyeur being too blatant about his interest. And then there was the time when Glo Daley got arrested. No one seems to know exactly when it happened — mid 1980s is as much- as anyone involved can remember. One afternoon, after marching in a Pride parade, ‘a group of lesbians dropped by Dyke Rock for a swim. They took their shirts off. The newly minted park police stopped by and . asked them to get dressed. Daley refused. » — - She speaks of the event reluctantly, in a phone interview from HOWL, the Huntington Open Women’s Land. “I tried to do a citi- zen’s arrest on a gry that had his shirt off,” she says, “and the next ' thing I know, the cop had me.” v Fontaine can still work up some outrage over the events of the day. “We did everything we could to stop them taking her in,” she says. She and her friends protested the arrest by dancing around the police cruiser, then followed the car to the. police station. But Daley sounds the tini- estbit sheepish telling the story. She concedes that it wasn’t necessarily the radical, revolutionary act it might have seemed at the time. “I think I wasjust having a bad day,” she says. The advent of regular police patrols seems to have signaled the end of Dyke Rock’s heyday as a lesbian hangout. Though Crow Cohen contin- ued to host birthday. parties there all through the 1990s, Dyke Rock is no longer her favorite swimming spot. She still stops by to watch the sunset, but now she swims at North Beach- ’ with her grandchildren. Glo Daley often spends her i time meditating at the Shambhala Center rather than protesting public nudity laws. When she wants to skin- ny-dip, she heads to the pond at HOWL. ,‘‘It’s kinda murky some- times, but there’s total privacy,” she notes. “And no park cops.” ‘ Peggy Luhrs, one of Burlington’s first out lesbians, used to swim at Dyke Rock all the time. But now as she walks down the nar- row path toward the ledge, she’s not quite positive she’s even in the right _ place. She steps onto the rock and declares, “This is it.” But when pressed, she points to another nearby ledge. “I’m sure some days people moved over there,” she says. _ Patricia Fontaine admits that the Dyke Rock days were proba- bly bound to pass. She suggests that the rebelliousness of the times was part of an “early adolescence” of les- bian culture. Things are different now. Lesbians are more visible, less threatened than they used to be. Burlington now has a thriving LGBT community, full of hundreds of civil- ly united spouses. Still, there’s a note of sad- ness in her voice when she speaks of Dyke Rock. “You could always sort of count on someone [in the lesbian community] being there in the sum- mer,” she says. “And now that does- n’t seem to be the case. Now it’s everyone’s rock.” V Cathy Resmer is a freelance writer who lives with her partner in Winaoski.