Maxine Feldman

Maxine “Max” Feldman was born in Brooklyn and, as a child with a stutter, took acting lessons; at ten Feldman had a small part in the television series “The Goldbergs”. Feldman studied theatre at Emerson College in Boston but was expelled for being a lesbian and sent to psychiatric treatment, refusing the electroshock therapy common at the time. From 1963 Feldman performed in the coffeehouses of Boston and Cambridge, openly lesbian at a time when a local DJ complained that this attracted “the wrong crowd”.

In May 1969, weeks before Stonewall, Feldman wrote “Angry Atthis” in Los Angeles – named after a lover of the poet Sappho. Its first performance is considered the first public performance of an openly lesbian song, and the 1972 recording is regarded as the first openly lesbian record of what became the women’s music movement. Feldman toured with the feminist comedy duo Harrison and Tyler, performed with Yoko Ono in New York in 1974 and in 1977 did comedy at the National Women’s Conference in Houston under police protection from Ku Klux Klan protesters.

Feldman described themself as a “big loud Jewish butch lesbian” and openly criticised antisemitism in the women’s movement. Feldman played at the first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 1976 and returned fourteen times; the song “Amazon” traditionally opened the festival. According to Feldman’s partner, Feldman later embraced a gender-fluid identity.

Without health insurance, Feldman fell ill in the 1990s and died in Albuquerque in 2007, aged 61.