Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Be it resolved that N.O.W. recognizes the double oppression of Lesbians

  Be it resolved that a woman’s right to her own person includes the right to define and express her own sexuality and to choose her own life-style and

  Be it resolved that N.O.W. acknowledges the oppression of Lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.5

  Lesbian/Woman is, in part, a story of that growth and change, but it is not so much about personal defeats and successes as it is about the women with whom Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon shared their experience in person and in correspondence over the years, the insights that come from so many together. There are the horror stories, of a father who ordered his daughter’s clitoris removed because she had been masturbating, a wife committed to a mental hospital for shock treatment as a cure for a lesbian relationship, stories of isolation, despair, madness, and suicide. They must be told, for in no other way can the oppression of lesbians be understood for what it is. There are many more stories of problems faced and solved, both by the authors and their friends. “As leaders … we could not display fear. In the process we overcame our own fears.”6 They took on psychologists and religious leaders, confronting them with the damage they were doing. They fought against discrimination in the work force. For some time they worked with men in the homophile movement. They have worked with N.O.W. They have worked anywhere with anyone as long as there was an opportunity to educate and change.

  Though their own views are clearly expressed, they are far more tolerant of a variety of attitudes and life-styles than other more recently public and radical women. The long years before there was the support of the movement taught them that. Having shed their own role-playing, they still allow an older lesbian of masculine disposition to explain herself: “I’m psychologically heterosexual.”7 Though they themselves speak from a place beyond anger, they understand its function: “the expression of hostility, of righteous indignation, was a stepping stone from martyrdom and self-pity to self-acceptance.”8 They are not afraid to preach. “It is only when she can denounce the idiocy of religious scriptures and legal strictures that bind her and can affirm her Lesbian nature as but a single facet of her whole personality that she can become fully human.”9 In some ways Lesbian/Woman is a book of homely advice about the ways of making love, the problems of raising children, the difficulties presented by and to parents of lesbians, offering a lesbian life-style much as one might give instructions on subsistence farming or a self-owned business, realistic about the difficulties, aware that it is not a choice for anyone who puts social approval, church membership, and job security above personal relationship and self-acceptance as priorities, yet warmly encouraging to those for whom the risks of denial are far graver than the risks of love.

  It is no wonder that a woman like Robin Morgan, poet and editor of the feminist anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, looks to people like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon for support when everywhere else she finds fear and hostility. In her keynote address at the West Coast Lesbian-Feminist Conference in April of 1973, Robin Morgan gave a frightened and frightening picture of the divisiveness and violence among groups of recently formed, militant lesbians. As Laurel, an editor of Amazon Quarterly, a lesbian feminist magazine, had previously pointed out, labeling and judging life-styles has developed into a mortal game among lesbians. Robin Morgan’s picture of New York is similar to the picture Laurel gave of the bay area. “In New York, there were divisions between Political Lesbians and Real Lesbians and Nouveau Lesbians … Hera help the woman who is unaware of these fine political distinctions and who wanders into a meeting for the first time, thinking she maybe has a right to be there because she likes women.”10

  Robin Morgan herself had been under attack because, since she was living with her husband and raising a child, some people felt she had no right to represent lesbians. They were, no doubt, left unpersuaded by her assertion that most lesbians in the country are married and raising children. She’s probably right, but the young militants have no sympathy with those still embroiled in the system and tied not only by economic need but often by affection to both husband and children. Robin Morgan put that split very strongly: “There is a new smell of fear in the Women’s Movement. It is in the air when groups calling themselves killer-dyke-separatists trash Lesbian Feminists who work with that anathema, straight women. …”11 For her there was a real war on, one in which she felt in real danger from many sides, and, though she made a plea for unity and paid tribute to the older leaders of the lesbian cause, she further contributed to division by attacking Jill Johnston and those who might be attracted to her vision of a separatist lesbian nation, calling it an irresponsible daydream at a moment of grave danger.

  The recent history of the women’s movement is very revealing if one is trying to understand Robin Morgan’s fear. The best over-all picture of what happened to lesbians in evolving liberation is given in Sappho Was a Right-On Woman by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, who wrote out of an ambition “to be the most ordinary people … to be able to spend all of our energy and time on work or fun, and none on the arts of concealment or on self-hatred.”12

  The first half of the book covers some of the same territory explored in Lesbian/Woman. Though their vocabulary is much more influenced by the movement, their politics more obvious, Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love share with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon a tolerance and optimism neither Robin Morgan nor Jill Johnston can or will afford. While Lesbian/Woman stresses lesbianism as only one aspect of a woman’s nature, Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love take a more current view: “Lesbianism is far more than a sexual preference: it is a political stance.”13 “To some women, then, the narrow boundaries of the female role have made heterosexuality unattractive, and the independence and self-determination of Lesbians appealing.”14 They describe the problems that create the generation gap for lesbians. Many pre-movement women are determined to maintain sex roles and monogamy while movement women see in that life-style negative political meaning of unequal power and ownership of people. Younger women are exploring other kinds of relationships, threatening to those whose security lies in lifelong commitment to another person. “Multiple relationships made it possible to comprehend people, not acquire them or own them.”15 The authors see virtues and pitfalls in the various choices; however, like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, they understand but reject sex roles. “The popular misconception that Lesbians wish to be men is so pervasive that a Lesbian herself may believe it.”16 “Later she discovers that a woman who wants a woman usually wants a woman.”17

  The second half of the book deals with the far more important conflict between lesbians and heterosexual women in N.O.W. Betty Friedan, the founder of N.O.W., has been from the beginning uncompromising in her attitude toward lesbians, seeing them as the greatest threat to the women’s movement. The lesbians who first joined N.O.W. accepted her view, and, because they believed in equal pay and equal rights for women, issues perhaps even more important to the lesbian than to the heterosexual woman, they were willing to be invisible. The first serious threat to that invisibility was Rita Mae Brown, a bright and outspoken young woman who had already taken too much persecution as a lesbian to play at invisibility for long. Though she did some very important rocking of the boat, she finally left N.O.W., convinced that the women’s movement had been co-opted by the media “because greedy reformists and egotistical writers have used it to advance themselves in the white male world.”18 Though her role in the early exposure of the conflict in N.O.W. is documented in Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, her own description of her experience is fuller and more negative in her article “Take a Lesbian to Lunch.” Her candor made it more difficult for those who wished to hide, perhaps not only for the good of the movement but to protect themselves and their jobs. “Each time a Lesbian speaks up, it decreases the effective cover of other gay women who do not want to speak up.”19

  Kate Millett had also been persuaded that her effectiveness would be severely limited if she were to ad
mit to her own past lesbian experiences, and, since she had been married for some time before Sexual Politics came out, the issue was not at that time a primary one for her. Lesbians, angry at N.O.W.’s attitude toward them, goaded Kate Millett into admitting her own bisexuality in public, and she did. She was then discredited in Time, and the sales of Sexual Politics dropped dramatically. Movement women acted in a surprising manner. They did not have time to go to their various groups for approval before they called a press conference; therefore they presented themselves as individuals rather than as spokeswomen for organizations. Many of them were already well known, and their unconditional backing of Kate Millett and their refusal to be intimidated by lesbian baiting impressed media people enough to drop that tactic and not seriously use it again. But there were repercussions in the unconsulted groups, and conflict mounted between lesbians and lesbian sympathizers and supporters of Betty Friedan who saw the acceptance of lesbians as the death of the movement. Finally a purge of the New York office was so blatantly engineered that even those who co-operated were troubled in conscience about it. Meanwhile, the problem was obviously being handled with more sanity in other parts of the country in consciousness-raising groups and small meetings so that, when Del Martin put her resolution to the national meeting in Los Angeles, lesbians were finally given official recognition in N.O.W.

  For many of those who had been involved in New York, the resolution must have come too late. Others were still trying to work. “For the most part activist lesbians have had to put much of their energy into fighting a Gay Liberation battle in Women’s Liberation and a Women’s Liberation battle in Gay Liberation.”20 For some the struggle to be acceptable to heterosexual women and to homosexual men finally seemed a waste of precious effort. More and more women were attracted to lesbian groups like the Radicalesbians dedicated, first of all, to fighting their own oppression.

  Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love remain faithful to the larger movement and to democratic process for achieving results. The women who have challenged the movement have, in the authors’ eyes, been successful and are presented as heroes, as are other colorful leaders like Flo Kennedy, whom they quote with delight: “Here I am a woman attorney being told I can’t practice law in slacks by a judge dressed in drag.”21 Not only women but men are given an honored place in the process of change. George McGovern “pledges the full moral and legal authority of his Presidency, toward restoring and guaranteeing first-class citizen rights for homosexually-oriented individuals.”22 Their enthusiastic optimism, given George McGovern’s general behavior after his nomination, is not fully justified. Their assertion that “Lesbians are not fearful and guilty any more”23 is no more than wishful thinking, as is their claim that “There is no political gain in silence and submission.”24 Important work is still being done by closet lesbians.

  Stories less encouraging are found in the anthology Out of the Closets, Voices of Gay Liberation. “A Letter from Mary” is a gentle plea for acceptance, but in “Gay is Good” Martha Shelly calls for nothing less than a conversion of heterosexuals to homosexuality, threatening “a rude and bloody awakening”25 for anything less. The anger in lesbians is probably best expressed in the by now much-quoted “The Woman-Identified Woman,” a position paper written by the Radicalesbians, which begins, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of exploding.”26 Unfortunately too many of the explosions have taken place among women, not only over the issue of lesbianism, but in charges of elitism, in purges of many gifted women for using their gifts, in struggles between classes and races. Rita Mae Brown thinks if the movement can deal with lesbians, it can then deal with race and class, for she sees the issue of lesbians as cutting across those other lines and offering a deeper unity. Unfortunately the experiences of people like Robin Morgan and Jill Johnston don’t reveal any such unity among lesbians.

  Jill Johnston’s book Lesbian Nation is far more personal than the others, and, since it is made up of articles she has written for The Village Voice, it does not have the sense of direction or consistency of the others, but Jill Johnston is not really interested in consistency, and direction for her is simply the way she happens to be headed at the moment. She has never been a joiner. “I’m persona non grata with every ‘group’ in the country …Anyway I’m on everyone’s list as number one menace to the universe. I have a case of the most exquisite paranoia. It’s a wonderful feeling. For a female lesbian bastard writer mental case I’m doing awfully well.”27 She is a self-publicist, an exhibitionist. “It’s necessary in order to attract attention, to dazzle at all costs, to be disapproved of by serious people and quoted by the foolish.”28 Yet another problem in quoting her is her habit of borrowing other people’s statements without anything but this general acknowledgment: “The only time I need to use quotation marks are when the words I write are mine.”29 Her combination of autobiographical confession, rhetorical bombast, borrowed wisdom, and invented history are not to everyone’s taste, and neither is her behavior. There is a painting of her in the July 1973 issue of Esquire, love-wrestling with a female friend on the stage where a panel discussion among Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, and Jill Johnston was supposed to be taking place. Jill Johnston discusses the episode at joyful length. “I couldn’t think of anything more drastic and wonderful than appearing at town hall before thousands of people who lived above 14th Street to tell them all women are lesbians.”30 “I had the correct instinct to fuck things up but no political philosophy to clarify a course of action.”31 This opportunism and lack of philosophy were exactly what angered women in the movement at the time. Though Jill Johnston later did begin to take herself and what she calls “the revolution” more seriously, though she has taken the charges against her seriously enough to defend herself against them, she has never been intimidated enough to consider giving up her own stance and style for the good of the cause. Instead she seems to collect insults and labels to hang them around her neck like all the other decorations she wears over her comically aggressive costume and then stick that neck out once again, not only to contradict other people’s visions of reality, but her own vision of six months or two years ago. For a while she invented a genealogy from her unknown father to impress the family of an heiress with her credentials as a lover. Then she invented a historical matriarchy to disenfranchise all men. Asked to express some solidarity with male homosexuals, she claimed to have more in common with heterosexual men.

  The autobiographical sections of Lesbian Nation, extravagant, self-critical, self-mocking, self-aggrandizing, are by that combination honest and terrible and awesome, for here is a woman who, however rebellious she was, suffered a far more ordinary sense of intimidation and guilt than any other of these writers admits to. “I never said I was a dyke even to a dyke because there wasn’t a dyke in the land who thought she should be a dyke or even that she was a dyke so how could we talk about it.”32 Her first two relationships were with women much older than she, and, though they were both good, the first because Jill Johnston was in love, the second because the love-making was marvelous, she was too guilty and frightened to cope with the label. First she allowed herself to be seduced by one of her male professors. “I think I just was unable to tolerate a third woman without having slept with a man even if I didn’t want a man.”33 Then she went to New York and slept with various men in order to do the right thing. After two abortions, one of which almost cost her her life, she “turned out to be an old dyke who gave up and married a man.”34 It was for her an inevitable resolution. “As I said we were all heterosexually identified and that’s the way we thought of ourselves, even of course when doing otherwise.”35 As long as “you rationalized that it just happened to be a woman and could as well be a man,”36 you were ripe to accept “the grave of marriage and the hell of motherhood.”37 Four years and two children and a great deal of violence later, she gave up for good. She still had to survive three severe breakdowns, or what she learned to call breakthroughs, for the delusi
ons of grandeur she had during those periods of schizophrenia as well as the appalling treatment she received gave her a vision of the real power she needed if she was not going to be entirely victimized. Though she sees now that “if the revolution hadn’t begun I might still be crazy and off in a bin someplace,”38 she was late to embrace the women’s cause. “i was writing the most offensive antifeminist line in the form of some personal snot about how i never considered myself the second sex.”39

  Jill Johnston did not publicly claim lesbian identity until 1970, on her mother’s birthday. It did not take her long then to put pressure on other lesbians, for she saw that there was only one way for social change to take place, “that is for all gay people, those who know it and accept it, to stand up and speak for themselves.”40 Her statements about bisexuality, though general, come directly from her own experience. “Bisexuality is not so much a copout as a fearful compromise.”41 “Bisexuality for women in the revolution in any case is collaboration with the enemy.”42 She takes the giant step further: “until all women are lesbians there will be no true political revolution.”43 It is exciting for Jill Johnston to see that “within just two years the meaning of the word lesbian has changed from private subversive activity to political revolutionary identity.”44 And now she wants “homosexual movies and novels and funnies and histories and songs and classics. Even problem stories.”45 The joyous energy which comes from this kind of lesbian identity has given Jill Johnston the reputation of a Don Juan, for she has given up any concept of love which includes possessiveness, celebrates her liberation from the necessity of being in love in order to enjoy her sexuality, boasts of pick-ups and one-night stands more like a fraternity boy than the middle-aged woman she has somehow survived to become.