Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty. “Compulsory heterosexuality” was named as one of the “crimes against women” by the Brussels International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976. Two pieces of testimony from two very different cultures reflect the degree to which persecution of lesbians is a global practice here and now. A report from Norway relates:
A lesbian in Oslo was in a heterosexual marriage that didn’t work, so she started taking tranquillizers and ended up at the health sanatorium for treatment and rehabilitation. . . . The moment she said in family group therapy that she believed she was a lesbian, the doctor told her she was not. He knew from “looking into her eyes,” he said. She had the eyes of a woman who wanted sexual intercourse with her husband. So she was subjected to so-called “couch therapy.” She was put into a comfortably heated room, naked, on a bed, and for an hour her husband was to . . . try to excite her sexually. . . . The idea was that the touching was always to end with sexual intercourse. She felt stronger and stronger aversion. She threw up and sometimes ran out of the room to avoid this “treatment.” The more strongly she asserted that she was a lesbian, the more violent the forced heterosexual intercourse became. This treatment went on for about six months. She escaped from the hospital, but she was brought back. Again she escaped. She has not been there since. In the end she realized that she had been subjected to forcible rape for six months.
And from Mozambique:
I am condemned to a life of exile because I will not deny that I am a lesbian, that my primary commitments are, and will always be to other women. In the new Mozambique, lesbianism is considered a left-over from colonialism and decadent Western civilization. Lesbians are sent to rehabilitation camps to learn through self-criticism the correct line about themselves. . . . If I am forced to denounce my own love for women, if I therefore denounce myself, I could go back to Mozambique and join forces in the exciting and hard struggle of rebuilding a nation, including the struggle for the emancipation of Mozambiquan women. As it is, I either risk the rehabilitation camps, or remain in exile.55
Nor can it be assumed that women like those in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s study, who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundly female emotional and passional world, “preferred” or “chose” heterosexuality. Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women, because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal” and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings—and our sensuality—have not been tamed or contained within it. There is no statistical documentation of the numbers of lesbians who have remained in heterosexual marriages for most of their lives. But in a letter to the early lesbian publication The Ladder, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry had this to say:
I suspect that the problem of the married woman who would prefer emotional-physical relationships with other women is proportionally much higher than a similar statistic for men. (A statistic surely no one will ever really have.) This because the estate of woman being what it is, how could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their “natural” destiny—AND—their only expectation for ECONOMIC security. It seems to be that this is why the question has an immensity that it does not have for male homosexuals. . . . A woman of strength and honesty may, if she chooses, sever her marriage and marry a new male mate and society will be upset that the divorce rate is rising so—but there are few places in the United States, in any event, where she will be anything remotely akin to an “outcast.” Obviously this is not true for a woman who would end her marriage to take up life with another woman.56
This double life—this apparent acquiescence to an institution founded on male interest and prerogative—has been characteristic of female experience: in motherhood and in many kinds of heterosexual behavior, including the rituals of courtship; the pretense of asexuality by the nineteenth-century wife; the simulation of orgasm by the prostitute, the courtesan, the twentieth-century “sexually liberated” woman.
Meridel LeSueur’s documentary novel of the Depression, The Girl, is arresting as a study of female double life. The protagonist, a waitress in a St. Paul working-class speakeasy, feels herself passionately attracted to the young man Butch, but her survival relationships are with Clara, an older waitress and prostitute, with Belle, whose husband owns the bar, and with Amelia, a union activist. For Clara and Belle and the unnamed protagonist, sex with men is in one sense an escape from the bedrock misery of daily life, a flare of intensity in the gray, relentless, often brutal web of day-to-day existence:
It was like he was a magnet pulling me. It was exciting and powerful and frightening. He was after me too and when he found me I would run, or be petrified, just standing in front of him like a zany. And he told me not to be wandering with Clara to the Marigold where we danced with strangers. He said he would knock the shit out of me. Which made me shake and tremble, but it was better than being a husk full of suffering and not knowing why.57
Throughout the novel the theme of double life emerges; Belle reminisces about her marriage to the bootlegger Hoinck:
You know, when I had that black eye and said I hit it on the cupboard, well he did it the bastard, and then he says don’t tell anybody. . . . He’s nuts, that’s what he is, nuts, and I don’t see why I live with him, why I put up with him a minute on this earth. But listen kid, she said, I’m telling you something. She looked at me and her face was wonderful. She said, Jesus Christ, Goddam him I love him that’s why I’m hooked like this all my life, Goddam him I love him.58
After the protagonist has her first sex with Butch, her women friends care for her bleeding, give her whiskey, and compare notes.
My luck, the first time and I got into trouble. He gave me a little money and I come to St. Paul where for ten bucks they’d stick a huge vet’s needle into you and you start it and then you were on your own. . . . I never had no child. I’ve just had Hoinck to mother, and a hell of a child he is.59
Later they made me go back to Clara’s room to lie down. . . . Clara lay down beside me and put her arms around me and wanted me to tell her about it but she wanted to tell about herself. She said she started it when she was twelve with a bunch of boys in an old shed. She said nobody had paid any attention to her before and she became very popular. . . . They like it so much, she said, why shouldn’t you give it to them and get presents and attention? I never cared anything for it and neither did my mama. But it’s the only thing you got that’s valuable.60
Sex is thus equated with attention from the male, who is charismatic though brutal, infantile, or unreliable. Yet it is the women who make life endurable for each other, give physical affection without causing pain, share, advise, and stick by each other. (I am trying to find my strength through women—without my friends, I could not survive.) LeSueur’s The Girl parallels Toni Morrison’s remarkable Sula, another revelation of female double life:
Nel was the one person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her. . . . Nel was one of the reasons Sula had drifted back to Medallion. . . . The men . . . had merged into one large personality: the same language of love, the same entertainments of love, the same cooling of love. Whenever she introduced her private thoughts into their rubbings and goings, they hooded their eyes. They taught her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be—for a woman.
> But Sula’s last thought at the second of her death is “Wait’ll I tell Nel.” And after Sula’s death, Nel looks back on her own life:
“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl!” It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.61
The Girl and Sula are both novels which examine what I am calling the lesbian continuum, in contrast to the shallow or sensational “lesbian scenes” in recent commercial fiction.62 Each shows us woman identification untarnished (till the end of LeSueur’s novel) by romanticism; each depicts the competition of heterosexual compulsion for women’s attention, the diffusion and frustration of female bonding that might, in a more conscious form, reintegrate love and power.
IV
Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community, the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other. The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers. It creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy strobe light of that lie. However we choose to identify ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts our lives.63
The lie keeps numberless women psychologically trapped, trying to fit mind, spirit, and sexuality into a prescribed script because they cannot look beyond the parameters of the acceptable. It pulls on the energy of such women even as it drains the energy of “closeted” lesbians—the energy exhausted in the double life. The lesbian trapped in the “closet,” the woman imprisoned in prescriptive ideas of the “normal” share the pain of blocked options, broken connections, lost access to self-definition freely and powerfully assumed.
The lie is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e.g., Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is “normal”; that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. Small wonder that lesbians are reported to be a more hidden population than male homosexuals. The Black lesbian-feminist critic Lorraine Bethel, writing on Zora Neale Hurston, remarks that for a Black woman—already twice an outsider—to choose to assume still another “hated identity” is problematic indeed. Yet the lesbian continuum has been a life line for Black women both in Africa and the United States.
Black women have a long tradition of bonding together . . . in a Black/women’s community that has been a source of vital survival information, psychic and emotional support for us. We have a distinct Black woman-identified folk culture based on our experiences as Black women in this society; symbols, language and modes of expression that are specific to the realities of our lives. . . . Because Black women were rarely among those Blacks and females who gained access to literary and other acknowledged forms of artistic expression, this Black female bonding and Black woman-identification has often been hidden and unrecorded except in the individual lives of Black women through our own memories of our particular Black female tradition.64
Another layer of the lie is the frequently encountered implication that women turn to women out of hatred for men. Profound skepticism, caution, and righteous paranoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman’s response to the misogyny of male-dominated culture, to the forms assumed by “normal” male sexuality, and to the failure even of “sensitive” or “political” men to perceive or find these troubling. Lesbian existence is also represented as mere refuge from male abuses, rather than as an electric and empowering charge between women. One of the most frequently quoted literary passages on lesbian relationship is that in which Colette’s Renée, in The Vagabond, describes “the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps found shelter in each other’s arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is often cruel, and there to taste better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten [emphasis added].”65 Colette is often considered a lesbian writer. Her popular reputation has, I think, much to do with the fact that she writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience; her earliest “lesbian” novels, the Claudine series, were written under compulsion for her husband and published under both their names. At all events, except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a less reliable source on the lesbian continuum than, I would think, Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may, indeed must, be one another’s allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other’s company and attraction to each others’ minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others’ strengths.
By the same token, we can say that there is a nascent feminist political content in the act of choosing a woman lover or life partner in the face of institutionalized heterosexuality.66 But for lesbian existence to realize this political content in an ultimately liberating form, the erotic choice must deepen and expand into conscious woman identification—into lesbian feminism.
The work that lies ahead, of unearthing and describing what I call here “lesbian existence,” is potentially liberating for all women. It is work that must assuredly move beyond the limits of white and middle-class Western Women’s Studies to examine women’s lives, work, and groupings within every racial, ethnic, and political structure. There are differences, moreover, between “lesbian existence” and the “lesbian continuum,” differences we can discern even in the movement of our own lives. The lesbian continuum, I suggest, needs delineation in light of the “double life” of women, not only women self-described as heterosexual but also of self-described lesbians. We need a far more exhaustive account of the forms the double life has assumed. Historians need to ask at every point how heterosexuality as institution has been organized and maintained through the female wage scale, the enforcement of middle-class women’s “leisure,” the glamorization of so-called sexual liberation, the withholding of education from women, the imagery of “high art” and popular culture, the mystification of the “personal” sphere, and much else. We need an economics which comprehends the institution of heterosexuality, with its doubled workload for women and its sexual divisions of labor, as the most idealized of economic relations.
The question inevitably will arise: Are we then to condemn all heterosexual relationships, including those which are least oppressive? I believe this question, though often heartfelt, is the wrong question here. We have been stalled in a maze of false dichotomies which prevents our apprehending the institution as a whole: “good” versus “bad” marriages; “marriage for love” versus arranged marriage; “liberated” sex versus prostitution; heterosexual intercourse versus rape; Liebeschmerz versus humiliation and dependency. Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of cho
ice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives. As we address the institution itself, moreover, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance which has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry us beyond individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex kind of overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control.
AFTERWORD
In 1980, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, three Marxist-feminist activists and scholars, sent out a call for papers for an anthology on the politics of sexuality. Having just finished writing “Compulsory Heterosexuality” for Signs, I sent them that manuscript and asked them to consider it. Their anthology, Powers of Desire, was published by the Monthly Review Press New Feminist Library in 1983 and included my paper. During the intervening period, the four of us were in correspondence, but I was able to take only limited advantage of this dialogue due to ill health and resulting surgery. With their permission, I reprint here excerpts from that correspondence as a way of indicating that my essay should be read as one contribution to a long exploration in progress, not as my own “last word” on sexual politics. I also refer interested readers to Powers of Desire itself.
Essential Essays Page 20