ODD GIRLS AND TWILIGHT LOVERS
Between Men ~ Between Women
Lesbian and Gay Studies
LILLIAN FADERMAN
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
New York Oxford
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 1991 Lillian Faderman
Paperback edition, 2012
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53074-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faderman, Lillian.
Odd girls and twilight lovers: a history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America / Lillian Faderman.
p. cm.—(Between men—between women)
ISBN 978-0-231-07488-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-07489-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Lesbianism—United States—History—20th centtury. 2. Lesbians—United States—History—20th centtury. I. Title. II. Series.
HQ75.6.U5F33 1991
90–26327
306.76‘63’0973—dc20
CIP
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Between Men ~ Between Women
Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies
Terry Castle and Larry Gross, Editors
ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS
Claudia Card
John D’Emilio
Esther Newton
Anne Peplau
Eugene Rice
Kendall Thomas
Jeffrey Weeks
Between Men ~ Between Women is a forum for current lesbian and gay scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The series includes both books that rest within specific traditional disciplines and are substantially about gay men, bisexuals, or lesbians and books that are interdisciplinary in ways that reveal new insights into gay, bisexual, or lesbian experience, transform traditional disciplinary methods in consequence of the perspectives that experience provides, or begin to establish lesbian and gay studies as a freestanding inquiry Established to contribute to an increased understanding of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, the series also aims to provide through that understanding a wider comprehension of culture in general.
Contents
Introduction
1. “The Loves of Women for Each Other”: “Romantic Friends” in the Twentieth Century
The Educated “Spinster”
The Metamorphosis of Romantic Friendship
“Poets and Lovers Evermore”
Lesbian Sex Between “Devoted Companions”
2. A Worm in the Bud: The Early Sexologists and Love Between Women
Sexual Inversion and “Masculine” or Transvestite Women
Feminists as Sexual Freaks
The Attack on “Romantic Friendship”
The Dissemination of Knowledge Through Fiction
Why Some Lesbians Accepted the Congenital Invert Theory
3. Lesbian Chic: Experimentation and Repression in the 1920s
The Roots of Bisexual Experimentation
White “Slumming” in Harlem
Black Lesbians in Harlem
A Note on Working-Class Lesbian Communities Elsewhere in America
Lesbians in Bohemia
The Heterosexual Revolution and the Lesbian in the Woodpile
4. Wastelands and Oases: The 1930s
Kinder, Kuche, Kirche and the “Bisexual” Compromise
The View from the Outside
“In the Life”
Lesbian Sex in the 1930s
5. “Naked Amazons and Queer Damozels”: World War II and Its Aftermath
Armies of Lovers
A “Government-Sponsored” Subculture
The Heyday of the Lesbian “Sicko”
Curing Lesbians on the Couch
6. The Love that Dares Not Speak Its Name: McCarthyism and Its Legacy
“Are You or Have You Even Been a Member of a Lesbian Relationship?”
War in the Cold War Years: The Military WitchHunts
A Sad Legacy
7. Butches, Femmes, and Kikis: Creating Lesbian Subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s
Working-Class and Young Lesbians: The Gay Bars
Working-Class and Young Lesbians: Butch/Femme Roles
“Kiki” Lesbians: The Upper and Middle Classes and Subculture Clashes
8. “Not a Public Relations Movement”: Lesbian Revolutions in the 1960s Through ’70s
The Gay Revolution: Quiet Beginnings
The Gay Revolution: Explosion
Love Between Women in a New Light
The Lesbian-Feminist Revolution
Splits, Coalitions, and Resolutions
9. Lesbian Nation: Creating a Women-Identified-Women Community in the 1970s
Blueprints for a Lesbian-Feminist Culture
Culture Building: The Media
Taking Care of Our Own: Body and Soul
Being “Politically Correct”
Factions and Battles
10. Lesbian Sex Wars in the 1980s
Lesbian Sex and the Cultural Feminists
The Struggle to Be Sexually Adventurous
The Attraction of “Opposites”
11. From Tower of Babel to Community: Lesbian Life in the 1980s
The Shift to Moderation
Validation of Diversity
Unity
A Note on the ’90s: Queer Nation?
Epilogue: Social Constructions and the Metamorphoses of Love Between Women
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
A book of this nature could not be written without the generous help of many people and institutions. For assigned time to pursue my research and writing, I wish to thank the English Department at California State University, Fresno, and the former dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, Dr. Joseph Satin. For opening their doors to me, even at hours not always convenient to them, I am grateful to the staff of the Blanche Baker Memorial Library of the One Institute, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Collection in Los Angeles and the New York Lesbian Herstory Archives. My special thanks go to Degania Golove and Joan Nestle. For invaluable photographic and computer assistance I am grateful to Phyllis Irwin and Avrom Faderman. For arranging numerous interviews for me and often providing transportation and lodging and always support and encouragement, I thank Clare Freeman, Tracy Rappaport, and Peg Cruikshank in San Francisco; Sonia and Allison in New York; Olivia Sawyers, JoAnn, Margaret, and Ann in San Antonio; the women of Bookwoman and Dede in Austin; Sharon Young, Suzanne Valery, and River Malcom in San Diego; Alice and Jacki in Los Angeles; Mary Ann and Dena in Carson City; Sari Dworkin and Nancy in Fresno; Judy Carlson in Kansas City; Marsha Pelham and Tomi in Boston; Joy Letta Alice of Commonwoman Bookstore, and Kathleen Wingard in Lincoln, Nebraska; and Muriel Rada and Rhonda in Omaha. For their wonderful support when I needed it most, I thank my agent Sandra Dijkstra and my editor at Columbia University Press, Ann Miller. I am especially grateful to the women across the country who were willing to talk to me about their lives and gave me so many hours of their time.
Introduction
In 1843 the American author William Cullen Bryant wrote an essay for the Evening Post in which he glowingly described a trip to Vermont, where, among nature’s beauties, he had the opportunity to observe a beautiful “female friendship” between two revered “maiden ladies.” Bryant was not alone in his boundless admiration for the pair and the peaceful and loving relationship they es
tablished together, as he said when he gave their history:
In their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for 40 years, during which they have shared each others’ occupations and pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other tenderly in sickness…. They slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each others relations, and … I would tell you of their dwelling, encircled with roses, … and I would speak of the friendly attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them.1
If such a description of love between two women had been published in an American newpaper a century later, surely the editor’s desk would have been piled high with correspondence about immorality in Vermont (slept on the same pillow!) and the two women in question would have felt constrained to sue Bryant for defamation of character in order to clear their good names. In 1843, however, the two ladies were flattered and the newspaper’s readers were charmed.
What is apparent through this example and hundreds of others that have now been well documented by social historians is that women’s intimate relationships were universally encouraged in centuries outside of our own. There were, of course, some limitations placed on those relationships as far as society was concerned. For instance, if an eligible male came along, the women were not to feel that they could send him on his way in favor of their romantic friendship; they were not to hope that they could find gainful employment to support such a same-sex love relationship permanently or that they could usurp any other male privileges in support of that relationship; and they were not to intimate in any way that an erotic element might possibly exist in their love for each other. Outside of those strictures, female same-sex love—or “romantic friendship,” as it was long called—was a respected social institution in America.
What went on in secret between two women who were passionately attached to each other, as William Cullen Bryant’s friends were, is naturally more difficult to reconstruct than their contemporaries’ attitude toward what they thought they were seeing. There were few women before our era who would have committed confessions regarding erotic exchanges to writing. Trial records indicate that females of the lower classes who were vulnerable to harassment by the criminal courts sometimes had sexual relations with each other, but there is no comparable record in America for “respectable” women. One might speculate that since they generally lived in a culture that sought to deny the possiblitity of women’s autonomous sexuality, many of them cultivated their own asexuality, and while they might have kissed and hugged on the same pillow, their intimate relations never crossed the boundary to the genitally sexual. But surely for some of them kissing and hugging led eventually to other things and their ways of loving each other were no different from what the twentieth century would describe with certainty as “lesbian.”
However, such a description of love between two women would have been unlikely in earlier times because the concept barely existed. While some outrageous, lawless women might have stooped to unspeakable activity with other females, there was no such thing as a “lesbian” as the twentieth century recognizes the term; there was only the rare woman who behaved immorally, who was thought to live far outside the pale of decent womanhood. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the category of the lesbian—or the female sexual invert—was formulated. Once she was widely recognized as an entity, however, relationships such as the one Bryant described took on an entirely different meaning—not only as viewed by society, but also as viewed by the two women who were involved. They now had a set of concepts and questions (which were uncomfortable to many of them) by which they had to scrutinize feelings that would have been seen as natural and even admirable in earlier days.
Throughout much of the twentieth century those concepts and questions about the “true meaning” of a woman’s love for other females were inescapable and demanded responses and justifications such as would have been undreamt of before. Unlike her earlier counterparts, through most of our century a woman who found herself passionately attached to another female was usually forced to react in one of four ways:
1). She could see her own same-sex attachment as having nothing to do with attachments between “real lesbians,” since the sexologists who first identified lesbianism and brought the phenomenon to public attention said that lesbians were abnormal or sick, “men trapped in women’s bodies,” and she knew that she was not. Whether or not her relationship was sexual was insignificant. What was significant was that she could not—or she refused to—recognize her love for another woman in the sexologists’ descriptions of lesbianism.
2). She could become so fearful of her feelings toward other women, which were now seen as unnatural, that she would force herself to repress them altogether, to deny even to herself that she was capable of passionate attachment to another female. She would retrain her psyche, or society would help her do it, so that heteroaffectionality alone would be attractive to her, and even the mere notion of physical or emotional attachment between females, such as her grandmothers and their ancestors enjoyed as a matter of course, would be utterly repulsive to her.
3). She could become so fearful, not of her own emotions but of her community’s reaction to them, that she would spend her whole life in hiding (“in the closet,” as that state came to be described in the mid-twentieth century), leading a double life, pretending to the world—to everyone but her female friend—that she was a stranger to the feelings that in fact claimed the better part of her emotional life.
4). She could accept the definitions of love between women that had been formulated by the sexologists and define herself as a lesbian. While such definitions would set her apart from the rest of womankind (even apart from other females who felt no differently emotionally and sometimes even physically about women than she did), they would also privilege her: acceptance would mean that she could live her attachment to women for the rest of her life, without having to acknowledge that a heterosexual relationship had precedence over her same-sex love; it would mean that she could—in fact, must—seek ways to become an economically and socially independent human being, since she could not rely on a male to support and defend her; and it would mean that she was free to seek out other women who also accepted such an identity and to form a lesbian subculture, such as could not have existed before love between women was defined as abnormal and unusual.
For most women, who were of course socialized not to challenge their culture’s ideology about acceptable behavior, with the turn of the century began not only the death knell of romantic friendship (which might have been too simple to survive in our complex times anyway), but it was also the beginning of a lengthy period of general closing off of most affectional possibilities between women. The precious intimacies that adult females had been allowed to enjoy with each other earlier—sleeping in the same bed, holding hands, exchanging vows of eternal love, writing letters in the language of romance—became increasingly self-conscious and then rare. While such possibilities have been restored, to a greater or lesser extent, by the feminist movement of the last twenty years, history does not repeat itself. Love between women in the late twentieth century can no longer hide completely behind the veil of sexual innocence that characterized other centuries. Our era, through the legacy of Freud and all his spiritual offspring, is hyper-sophisticated concerning sex; thus whether or not two women who find themselves passionately attached choose to identify themselves as lesbian today, they must at least examine the possibility of sexual attraction between them and decide whether or not to act upon it. Such sexual self-consciousness could easily have been avoided in earlier eras.
But in earlier eras a lesbian identity, which many women now find viable, appropriate, and even healthy, would have been unattainable also. That identity is peculiar to the twentieth century
and owes its start at least partly to those sexologists who attempted to separate off women who continued to love other women from the rest of humankind. The sexologists were certainly the first to construct the conception of the lesbian, to call her into being as a member of a special category. As the century progressed, however, women who agreed to identify themselves as lesbian felt more and more free to alter the sexologists’ definitions to suit themselves, so that for many women “lesbianism” has become something vastly broader than what the sexologists could possibly have conceived of—having to do with lifestyle, ideology, the establishment of subcultures and institutions.
In fact, for these women, lesbianism generally has scant similarity to the early definitions of the sexologists. For instance, it has little to do with gender-dysphoria: those who see themselves as men trapped in women’s bodies usually consider themselves as “transsexual” rather than lesbian, and modern medical technology has even permitted them to chose to alter their sex to be consonant with their self image. Lesbianism has nothing to do with morbidity: there are enough positive public images of the lesbian now and enough diverse communities so that lesbians are assured that they are at least as healthy as the heterosexual woman. Not even a sexual interest in other women is absolutely central to the evolving definition of lesbianism: a woman who has a sexual relationship with another woman is not necessarily lesbian—she may simply be experimenting; her attraction to a particular woman may be an anomaly in a life that is otherwise exclusively heterosexual; sex with other women may be nothing more than a part of a large sexual repertoire. On the other hand, women with little sexual interest in other females may nevertheless see themelves as lesbian as long as their energies are given to women’s concerns and they are critical of the institution of heterosexuality. The criterion for identifying oneself as a lesbian has come to resemble the liberal criterion for identifying oneself as a Jew: you are one only if you consider yourself one.
The changing self-definitions of lesbians have evolved in the context of a changing society in which the smug conceptions of what is normal, natural, and socially permissible have been called into question for heterosexuality as well. There has been a relative social and sexual openness in America in the last couple of decades. That factor, coupled with a strong feminist movement that was very critical not only of men’s treatment of women in society but also of their treatment of women in their own homes, has meant that more and more females were willing to consider themselves lesbians. Those women have had a tremendous effect not only on many who were lesbians before this era of social upheaval, “old gays,” as they have been called, but also on those who do not consider themselves lesbians but who feel now that they can give themselves permission to form more loving and more physically affectionate relationships with women friends than their counterparts might have dared to do earlier in this century.
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