Lesbian Couple Pursue Dream Despite Danger : Prejudice: Pair are trying to raise funds and support for a feminist retreat in Mississippi, where neighbors have responded with threats, harassment and lawsuits.

It was somehow appropriate that the lesbian couple from Ovett, Miss., should be eating shrimp fettuccine in Robin Tyler’s San Fernando Valley kitchen last week.

After all, it was a women’s festival produced by Tyler that helped set Brenda and Wanda Henson on the path to Ovett, a sandy speck of country where dreams and fear, defiance and gunfire have come to mark their lives.

The two women, who use the same last name, are trying to establish a feminist education retreat called Camp Sister Spirit on a former hog farm. The notion is downright demonic to many of their neighbors, who have responded with harassment, threats and lawsuits. The clash has drawn federal mediators, talk show hosts and the national press, but so far, no resolution.

“Just about the time you think it’s OK, then something else will happen,” says Brenda, who, with Wanda, has been in Los Angeles over the last week meeting with gay groups and activists as part of a monthlong trip around the country to raise money and support for their cause.

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During the last year, they have recorded 64 incidents. In the first, a dead female dog--shot in the stomach--and a sanitary napkin were draped over their mailbox. Last Thanksgiving Day someone tossed a note on their driveway. It read: “Leave qeer’s (sic) now.” On Christmas Night, a man phoned to inform them they would be dead before dawn.

They say they have been chased off the road and shot at. They have lost nine tires to spikes tossed on the half-mile drive to their 120-acre property. They have received bomb threats and dozens of vulgar, harassing phone calls a day. A dead copperhead snake was left at their gate.

They now own a shotgun, a .30-30 rifle and a security gate. They try not to go anywhere alone.

Yet they have no intention of leaving Ovett. “I’m a home girl. I ain’t going nowhere,” says Wanda, who was raised in a Pentecostal household and has lived all of her 39 years in southeastern Mississippi.

The pair met a decade ago doing abortion clinic defense work. Both were the divorced mothers of two children. Brenda had been married four times. “I tried and tried and it just didn’t work,” she says. Once was enough for Wanda, who had married, had children and obtained a nursing degree by the age of 20.

Six months after meeting they were living together. Within a year they were bold enough to venture north to a Georgia women’s festival organized by Tyler, a comic and gay activist who produces women’s events around the country.

“Before I left the festival I went up to Robin and said, ‘I want you to know something. You have changed my life forever,’ ” says Wanda, who is now a veritable fount of feminist movement jargon.

“I wasn’t sure what they were saying because they had these thick Southern accents,” says Tyler, who helped raise $10,000 for the camp at a festival last year and at whose North Hills home the couple stayed for several days last week.

Indeed, when Tyler heard news accounts of the harassment and called to suggest they might consider leaving, the women reminded her that in a roundabout way, they were in Ovett because of her.

They had returned from the Georgia festival transformed. They mortgaged their house and opened Mississippi’s “first and only” feminist bookstore, which evolved into a community crisis center and food bank as well.

With some advice from Tyler, they also organized their own women’s festivals on the Gulf Coast. Weary of the problems they had in leasing sites for the events, they began raising money to buy land.

Eventually they found something they could afford, a wooded, creek-crossed piece of Ovett, a hamlet of 200 people and a handful of buildings about 80 miles north of the coast. They bought the tract last year for $60,000 and started work on Camp Sister Spirit. It would be devoted to education, advocacy and counseling on a potpourri of social issues, ranging from racism, sexism and homophobia to religious freedom, ecology and oppression of fat people.

They mailed out a newsletter boasting of their progress and a new shower “nice enough for two.” Residents got hold of copies and didn’t like what they read.

The dead dog appeared. At first the Hensons didn’t even realize they were the target.

“We thought it was a message to our daughter,” said Brenda, whose 28-year-old daughter has done advocacy work for police brutality victims.

It soon became apparent just who the intended targets were. Two town meetings were called about the retreat. An opinion piece in the Hattiesburg newspaper warned that the camp was “the tip of the iceberg that sinks the Titanic” and called on readers to take action to “rid our county of this blight on our land.”

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There were more threats and harassment, enough to prompt the Hensons to request federal intervention. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno asked the FBI to investigate a mail threat and sent federal civil rights mediators to Ovett. It was the first gay harassment case for the mediation team--and it was not successful.

The camp opponents not only declined to participate in mediation, they sued Reno, saying she had overstepped her authority. The action was later dropped, but a group of neighbors also filed a nuisance suit against the camp, saying the retreat would generate noise and traffic and would constitute a moral nuisance.

Opponents have offered to buy the Hensons’ land and relocate the camp to an urban area. It’s one thing to be homosexual, they say, quite another to open a center that would turn a placid patch of the Bible Belt into “Lesbianville, USA, South,” as one pastor has put it.

David Daniels, the Hensons’ Biloxi attorney, has countersued for fees and damages in the nuisance action, which he terms “pretty ridiculous.”

If the Hensons can raise the money for legal expenses, Daniels also hopes to use a century-old anti-Ku Klux Klan law to sue the Jones County sheriff and the group crusading against the camp.

“The sheriff really needs to be held accountable in the courts,” Daniels said. “He deliberately evades his responsibility in respect to my clients.” The Hensons have complained repeatedly that the sheriff’s department has failed to adequately investigate their complaints or to make arrests.

Daniels further faults the performance of the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Mississippi. “I’m no bleeding-heart liberal . . . but I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” he says.

The case is not about being gay, he says. It is about the right to freedom of speech and association, to live without fear and to own property.

Criticism of Sheriff Maurice Hooks heightened this month, when two gay men were found shot to death in the county. The sheriff, saying robbery appeared to be the motive, has dismissed suggestions of a hate crime.

Hooks could not be reached for comment on Daniels’ complaints. The U.S. attorney’s office in Mississippi referred inquiries to the Justice Department in Washington, which confirmed an investigation into the mail threat. Information about its outcome was not readily available.

Underlying both cases are the limits of federal civil rights laws, which do not protect people on the basis of sexual orientation.

“The only thing that the hate crime law does in regard to gay and lesbian people is keep statistics on us when we’re dead,” Brenda says sarcastically.

Part of the couple’s aim, she continues, is to raise awareness “about the fact that (gay) people are living this false sense of security all over the country. They believe they have civil rights.”

Repeating a favorite phrase of her partner, Wanda says, “You kicked this soap box under my feet, now I’m going to take a stand on it.”