Judy Dlugacz was only 20 when she and a group of other women started Olivia Records, the first record company specifically for women artists. Soon Olivia became a leader in lesbian entertainment, putting out albums by performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Lucie Blue Tremblay, Linda Tillery and Margie Adam and sold more than one million albums.
After about 15 years putting out albums and producing concerts, Olivia branched out into offering vacations for lesbians. Since then, Olivia has become the largest lesbian vacation business in the world and has taken more than 100,000 lesbians on vacation since 1990. I had the opportunity to sail on Olivia’s 20th anniversary cruise in the Caribbean and spoke with Judy Dlugacz on trip in March 2010.
Lesbian Life: So, you started Olivia records in 1973.
Judy Dlucacz: There were 10 of us when we started in DC. After the first year, we decided that we were going to move to California. When we decided to move, half of the group didn’t want to go and the other half decided it was important to be near the recording industry. In 1975 we moved to Los Angeles. We lived together and worked together.When did you take over as the President?
Well, I was always the president, because we sat together in a group and said who wants to be president and I raised my hand. We thought all of that was just silly stuff. But after seven years of living together and working together, people from the original collective started to leave. We realized it had to be both a political thing that we were doing and it had to be a business. We had to make enough money to survive and we were having a bit of trouble with that. Some people left. It was a hard job. So by the time I was 28, it was just me and Meg [Christian] and in 1984 Meg retired.When did Olivia stop making records?
In the mid 90s. A few years after we started doing travel.Twenty years ago you started Olivia travel. What was your first trip and how many women were on it?
Our first cruise was a 4-day trip to the Bahamas. We did two trips back-to-back with 600 women each. We had 1200 women on our first trips. We were able to do that because of the record company. I had a list of 30,000 people who loved what we did and loved the music. I was able to reach them by sending out a letter telling them to come.What were the artists on the first trip?
All of the Olivia artists except for Meg. Cris, Linda Tillery, Tret Fure, Teresa Trull. There was a whole line up.In your words what is Olivia travel?
I think that it’s all about creating freedom and creating an experience. Originally it was all about freedom and visibility. We started something that never existed before. We go to places and we do things, but I think the most important part is to creating an environment, creating an experience, to go along with travel.You’re creating an experience for the women who go on the trips, but what about the communities you visit? Have you seen an impact there?
Everything that we do has an impact, which is great. Everyone on board, the crew, they love us. We work a lot with Holland America and they love us. We go to places and it’s about creating visibility. Where there are places where people might not know about lesbians at all, suddenly, we show up and here we are. And what great ambassadors we end up being.Has there ever been any negative responses?
We had a demonstration once in Nassau. This was many years ago. It’s a long story, but it was right after Easter and the Bishops had just had a conference and they declared their anti-homosexual statements and suddenly here comes Olivia right after Easter and everyone has the day off and somehow they realized we were coming and they organized a demonstration. But we went to a private island and by-passed it.Later the prime minister of the Bahamas apologized to us. He made a statement saying all people are welcome to the Bahamas.
