While the majority of the women did not seem to be involved in heterosexually based role-playing, and were neither very “feminine” nor very “masculine” in dress, body carriage, or mannerisms, most were as “romantic” and monogamous as heterosexual women. Only two women, one aged seventeen, the other aged thirty-seven, were emphatically and ecstatically, non-monogamous (at least in their verbal presentations of self). The seventeen-year-old came trooping into my house with four women from her “living-collective.” Their laughter was infectious; they wore headbands and grease paint, carried frisbees and yo-yos, and told me, laughingly, that they all “made it” with one another.
Five of the six lesbians who were hospitalized had in varying ways, and at varying times, become feminists. By 1971, when these interviews took place, eight of the eleven lesbians had become feminists.
Without exception, every lesbian in private therapy was treated as “sick.” One woman told her mother about lesbian play with a girl friend, when they were both ten years old. Her mother took her to a psychiatrist who administered shock therapy as a form of treatment.
LOIS: One female therapist got scared when I became “gay.” “I can’t treat homosexuals. There’s nothing you can do with them.” She made it sound like terminal cancer. One male therapist kept insisting I wasn’t gay, but he told me it’s something I’ll outgrow. He told me I’d end up alone and bitter in the gay scene, and that didn’t appeal to me. It still doesn’t. Another woman therapist said, “But men are so marvelous to sleep with! Lesbianism isn’t necessary, it’s absurd!”
In a sense, being psychiatrically hospitalized helped me. I’d hit bottom. Now I could be a lesbian, that’s not as bad as a crazy.
MARSHA: I’ve been trying to kill myself since I’ve been twelve—gas, pills. I was walking around with a load of anger that I had no place to put. I wound up in Bellevue and was sent to a private hospital where I saw a psychiatrist who was shocked by my homosexuality. After I left Bellevue I saw him for a couple of months, privately. He called my mother in for an interview (he said he thought he would get a better understanding of me if he met her). In the course of that interview, he told my mother that I was a lesbian and suggested that I be weaned away from this woman (my lover). My mother blew her stack. She called this woman’s parents and family, and said how their daughter was destroying her daughter. The upshot of that was that I had been staying at my mother’s house for a few weeks after getting out of the hospital. I moved out and I didn’t speak to my mother for two years.
CAROLE: I became infatuated with my first therapist, who was a woman. She told me that lesbianism is a sickness. She also told me that I wasn’t a lesbian. I stopped eating and I was down to ninety pounds. I looked like a little boy with long hair. The therapist there, a man, also kept insisting I wasn’t a lesbian, that everyone had these feelings, and I should push them out of the way.
PHYLLIS: Did you ever ask, “Well, what would be wrong if I were?”
CAROLE: No, I only knew that from the general feeling on the ward, that it was wrong and that I’m not a lesbian. The therapist felt that the feelings I had for women were basically anti-male feelings instead of pro-woman feelings.
MARSHA: Then I saw a woman psychiatrist for a year. She kept encouraging me to relate to men. I couldn’t handle things any more and I admitted myself to Hillside [a private hospital]. I was there for a year and the anxiety built up tremendously. I was falling in love with women at the hospital and this was considered “sick.” When they have these dances Saturday night, which you are supposed to go to, you are not supposed to dance with another woman, you are supposed to dance with a man. They encourage you to have dates and to go to the movies. They have movies on whatever night it is. Saturday night. You are encouraged to have activities jointly with the men’s wards or cottages.
Although supposedly “sick,” these women were also discouraged from thinking of themselves as lesbians—and encouraged to date or have sexual relations with men. One well-meaning, very motherly therapist actually arranged several “heterosexual” dates for her painfully shy patient.
FRANCES: I fell in love with a girl for the first time when I was twenty-four. I’d been in therapy at a hospital clinic [Bellevue] and told my therapist about it when he came back from his vacation.
PHYLLIS: What was his reaction?
FRANCES: He freaked out. He started yelling at me. “You’re doing this because you think I’m your father and you want to hurt your father. You’re a spoiled child. The minute I go away you do this, you go and do something that can be so dangerous” and he just freaked me out! Y’know. Because, since I’d been in therapy, I was truly happy. I did what I wanted to do, ‘n’ she was really lovely, and I was very happy. But he freaked me out, y’know. Basically he just said that my behavior was arrested at a homosexual level. He sort of made me understand that it was a very unfortunate thing that I was doing and that it would result in heartache. Which I understand, I mean, I do. It’s certainly much better to live within the system. Although this system is for shit. You know, my girl friend was also coming to Bellevue for treatment. So one angle he took was that she wasn’t too cool, because look, she was coming to Bellevue for treatment and I said, “Oh, God, I’m here. What are you talking about?” Then he said, “How could you stand it—don’t women smell awful?” and I said, “Wow, y’know, if you wash” and he said, “Oh, please, no matter how clean a woman is, no matter how clean, she still smells.” And I said, “I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me.” He said, “Did you ever see the statue of David? A man’s body is so much more beautiful than a woman’s body!” “You’re crazy,” I said. “I’m not saying my values are the values, but you better dig it, Doctor, and check out your own set of eyes, you’ve got some thinking to do.”
PHYLLIS: Did he encourage you to go out with men?
FRANCES: Yes, he did, and I said to him, “Do you want me to go out with these pigs, just because they have penises? They’re stupid, they have nothing to say to me, I have nothing to discuss with them. The only thing they could possibly do is fuck me, and possibly take me out of this blissful existence with women. And you don’t care what they are, they could be the worst, filthy, perverted bastards, as long as they’re men, y’know, it’s okay. Is that what you’re telling me?” He says, “Well, I’m saying that you could find something to talk about.” I said, “Look, I’ve tried, there’s nothing that I could talk about with them.”
He [the therapist] acknowledged that some of the men might have been pigs. “Y’know,” he said, “well, maybe you went out with a few bad men, but, uh, not every one is bad. And you gotta keep looking, and you gotta find a man, and you gotta go with a man. Anyway, a woman can be just as rough, just as dangerous as a man.”
He said, “Let a man touch you. You’re too sensitive to a male touch,”—because I had been. I was getting very uptight, y’know, at being touched by men. A lot of men come up to you in a very familiar way, touch you like you’re a piece of equipment, or, I don’t know, like you don’t belong to yourself. Y’know, they come and touch you as if you owe them this kind of thing, to be soft for them, and to be responsive to them. And it got me really uptight. And I told him about this, and he said, “Force yourself. Touch someone’s hand. Force yourself to be touched by men. What are they going to do, kill you? They’re not gonna kill you!” And I said, “Well, I’m really afraid of men. Y’know, I was abused by men, there were some incidents in my life that were very painful,” and he said, “They’re not gonna kill you, they’re not gonna kill you.” And that’s what he tried to tell me. You know, the way I’m talking about him sounds really awful. I mean, I loved him at the time. I mean, I’m not committed to women only. ‘Cause I think that’s not good. I think that women should—y’gotta be committed to people, and to finding good people.
JOAN: I went into therapy because I was depressed about the way I look. I grew to about five feet ten inches, my present height, when I was twelve. I’d never dat
ed. I was passionate about literature and music and I was totally isolated. I was isolating myself in such a way that I’d have to pay a price for it. When I was eighteen I became enamored of my girl friend. We would listen to operas together and go to libraries. We’d hold hands and that was very beautiful, it had a tremendous amount of meaning. But I did not want to be a homosexual and go over the brink. I had started masturbating after years of being a good Catholic. I guess I didn’t believe in God any more.
Dr. B. was about forty-five and very charismatic, very demonic. He told me to masturbate and didn’t believe that I did. He wanted me to show him, right there in the office. He said if I didn’t get laid by the third date the guy was a fag. So I started fucking men. Dr. B. said I was very frigid, that I had a mask-like face.
PHYLLIS: You were about twenty?
JOAN: Yes.
PHYLLIS: Did you love this first man?
JOAN: No. I despised him. He always had to have new cars, like Cadillacs, but he couldn’t say Beethoven’s name properly. He was about ten years older than me and very materialistic. I started sleeping with a guy down the hall also. He sleeps with about five to ten different women each week. I had fifteen credits in college and a twenty-hour-a-week job and I was carrying on two affairs at once and I got very upset and very depressed. But I pulled myself together and did my schoolwork.
PHYLLIS: What did you feel?
JOAN: I was worried that I was somehow losing myself. I was abusing myself, not because I was losing my virginity, but because I was losing energy, and concentration, and control of myself.
Dr. B. didn’t allow me to keep a journal because I was too introverted, too “fixed upon myself”—something I’d always been hearing. Fucking was very highly valued no matter how exhausted or hurt you got or how you picked up this disease or that disease…. He said I’m not a homosexual, I don’t come on like one. I said, “What is a homosexual, because I never met one.” But he would just assure me that I didn’t look like one and that was strange because I was obviously at the beginning of becoming one.
I said I did not want children. I wanted my achievements rather than children. He really did not go into that. He thought that the whole society was so screwed up that there was no point in having children. He did not seem to value marriage much.
I attended group also. The group was ripping me apart. They ripped everyone apart. They didn’t like the way I looked, I didn’t wear makeup, I didn’t take dating seriously.
PHYLLIS: Did the other women in this group yell at you for this too?
JOAN: Yes.
PHYLLIS: Were there any lesbians in the group?
JOAN: No.
PHYLLIS: Were there any male homosexuals?
JOAN: Yes.
PHYLLIS: How were they treated?
JOAN: With more consideration. They had a right but I didn’t have a right to be where I was. The group’s technique was to tear everyone’s defenses down.
These two interviews make painfully apparent the extent to which lesbians (or lesbians who seek therapy) are as naive, fearful, and “suggestible” as heterosexual women: perhaps even more so. Their sexual experience remains a private, “personal” reality, one that they can’t share with their mothers, employers, classmates, children—or even with their therapists. Their sense of reality, their knowledge of pleasure, is treated as either non-existent, second best, or dangerous. (I have certainly never heard of a therapist actively questioning his patient’s heterosexual realities, or of subtly or overtly “prescribing” lesbian experiences.)
I would like to close this chapter by, in Charlotte Wolff’s words, “letting life itself comment.” The following interview was done with a black lesbian who had never been in therapy. She is not included statistically in either Lesbians in Therapy or Third World Women in Therapy. The interviewer was a black woman.
DORIS: Weren’t you married?
MARY: Married, me? You must be thinking about my girl friend. Honey, I wouldn’t get married to save my life. And I can truthfully say that most women who get married are sick! They’re really sick!
DORIS: What you’re saying is that all housewives are mentally sick? This is what it appears that you’re saying, that they’re crazy.
MARY: Wait a minute, do you realize that most housewives have a ninety-eight- or ninety-nine-hour work week slaving their fuckin’ ass off for some bastard?
DORIS: You’ve got to work sometime.
MARY: Well, honey, it’s a bullshit system and anyone who gets in it is crazy. But, all right, let’s dig this. You come home, right?
DORIS: All right, all right.
MARY: And I come home and I have to cook, and then I have to clean, and then I have to wash dishes and I have to wash his little dirty shorts, right, and heaven help me if my husband won’t bat the kids right around, right? Then he comes home from his little….
DORIS: Isn’t this what you were put here for?
MARY: Well, just wait a minute, honey. Just let me finish. When he comes home from his office job sitting behind his desk, right, and he eats.
DORIS: That’s there with the job, honey.
MARY: Well, freak that. I have to wash his dishes, and then he wants to screw, on top of all this. And I just can’t dig it! And, you know, ask me, I’m a lesbian, right? And I don’t have to love ’em, I don’t have to fuck ’em and I damn sure don’t have to depend on ’em, and that is freedom, honey, because no matter how heavy my load, honey, I’m gonna make it ’cause I’m free. I feel that I am free!
DORIS: It appears that you are a man-hating woman.
MARY: No, I don’t hate them. I don’t hate them. I just don’t dig them.
DORIS: What about child raising? Aren’t you denied that rewarding experience of giving birth to a child someday?
MARY: Surely you jest, honey. Who in the hell ever told you that having a kid was such a wonderful experience? If you think that a woman walking around with a swollen stomach for nine months is a pretty sight, you better go scratch your ass, I mean right now, ’cause then you a liar. If you think that labor pain is such a wonderful experience….
DORIS: This isn’t the rewarding experience I’m talking about. I’m talking about—
MARY: Wait a minute—
DORIS:—this baby. Having someone to take—it’s yours. Something of your own. I’m not talking about the labor pains. Of course, what’s so rewarding about that? I agree with you. Have you ever been through it?
MARY: Wait a minute. Let me talk, let me talk. You think that laying on a metal table with your legs all cocked up and some old white bastard shoving some cold clamps up your thing….
DORIS: There are black ones too.
MARY: Well, that’s his business. You don’t know many black ones, do you? While your fucking husband is probably out somewhere screwing everything in sight. Well, honey, I can’t stand it and I can’t dig it and anybody who goes through it is crazy. A man will feel you, fry you, fight you, fuck you, and then forget you, honey.
DORIS: You can always get a midwife.
MARY: He’ll turn around and tell you, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Ain’t that much coming in the world.
DORIS: How long have you been homosexually oriented?
MARY: Homosexually oriented, baby: why don’t you just say “in the light”? That’s what it breaks down to. Well, I’d say actively about six years. About six years.
DORIS: Phew, you ain’t kidding, are you?
MARY: Well, no, are we. Actively about six years.
DORIS: What do you mean by actively? Actively, actively, what do you mean, you just keep going from one to the other?
MARY: No, well, when I say actively—I’ve probably been in the light all of my life because I can’t remember having any meaningful experience with a man. You know, I can take them or leave them and, baby, I left them most of the time because they never interested me in any way. And, you know, in the books and everything—I must have slept through that period in my life when I
was supposed to make that big transition from girl friend to boy friend, but I never made it. But what I’m saying is that I didn’t have my first homosexual experience until I was about twenty-two.
DORIS: Why was it twenty-two? I’m sure you could have had some opportunities to engage, you know, at an earlier stage of life, or did you not?
MARY: Well, number one….
DORIS: Were you sheltered?
MARY: No! Come on, girl. Well, number one, I was very confused and very frightened about where I was coming from, actually.
DORIS: What do you mean by “coming from”?
MARY: Well, I thought I was one of the sickest persons in this world. You know, I dreaded even thinking about the term “lesbian” and I used to cope with the situation by telling myself that I was normal, you understand? And the only thing that would take my normality away would be for me to have an actual gay experience. And I also used to tell myself that you’re not gay if you never do it. So I didn’t, ’cause I didn’t want nothing to tread on my sanity. So I pretended to like boys and dresses and parties and all that bullshit.
DORIS: So you were just fooling yourself?
MARY: No, no, I wasn’t fooling myself, I was trying to live with myself, and I went out with fellas and I let them fuck me….
DORIS: Well, if you didn’t want to be a girl why—
MARY: That’s what I’m saying. The more they did it, the worse I got, and the more I pretended to act normal, the crazier I got. And I mean I was going out of my mind. When my mother died I just stopped pretending to be something that I wasn’t because it ain’t done much straightness in the world and it put my mind at ease, you better believe it, and I regained my sanity which was slowly seeping away from me, from trying to be ungay and I am definitely gay. And I realize that I am not the sick one. It’s all those poor simple fools out there, those little housewives that sign their life away when they say, “I do.” You know, they sign their death warrant. And like I said before, I am free. I am definitely free.
Women and Madness Page 28