The general ambivalence toward lesbians in Greenwich Village, despite the milieu of tolerance and a popular attitude that lesbian experimentation was chic, is suggested by a description of one retreat, Jo’s, that catered to both homosexuals and heterosexuals. The presence of “oddities” such as women who called themselves lesbians was thought to bolster the artistic unconventionality of the place. When Jo’s held open discussions on topics such as “What Is Sex Appeal?” the views of the lesbians present were especially called for. But there was apparently considerable discomfort about the genuine lesbian and some relief at any evidence of her bisexuality. One Village observer tells smirkingly of a young woman who was the joke of the place “because she was trying so hard to be a lesbian, but when she got drunk she forgot and let the men dance with her.”43 Despite the worship of nonconformity in the Village, lesbianism was clearly not accepted as a sexual choice as valid as heterosexuality. Bisexuality was far more easily understood here, as it was in Harlem, particularly if it ended in heterosexuality.
Perhaps the chief reason that lesbians fared at least relatively well in the Village was that bohemian men did not take them quite seriously. The men often cherished a real conviction, born of a knowledge of Freud on which they prided themselves, that lesbianism was just a phase some women went through and while it was all right to express it in order to get rid of suppressions, it must not become arrested as a way of life. They were confident it could be gotten out of a woman by a good psychoanalyst or a good man.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s experiences in the Village may be seen as a paradigm of what some women encountered if they let it be known that they considered themselves lesbian. Millay, who had been called Vincent in college, was probably the model for Lakey in Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group. Like Lakey, she was the creative and independent leader of her fellow students at Vassar, and also, like Lakey, all her love affairs during her college career, which did not end until she was twenty-five years old, were with other women. Her strongest “smash” in that all-female environment was with Charlotte (Charlie) Babcock, who was the model for Bianca in Millay’s play The Lamp and the Bell (1921). The play depicts a self-sacrificing love between two women about whom others say, “I vow I never knew a pair of lovers/ More constant than these two.” Millay also had a passionate attachment to Anne Lynch during those Vassar days, and even several years later she wrote Lynch: “Oh, if I could just get my arms about you!—And stay with you like that for hours. … I love you very much, dear Anne, and I always shall.” Another Vassar classmate, Isobel Simpson, Millay called her “Dearest Little Sphinx” and “[my] own true love.” From Greenwich Village she promised Isobel: “Someday I shall write a great poem to you, so great that I shall make you famous in history.”44
But although Millay’s erotic life had been exclusively with women, once out of that all-female environment and in Greenwich Village, there was pressure on her to become at least bisexual. As a good bohemian she pretended, of course, to continue to regard homosexuality in a blase manner, as her response to the psychoanalyst who tried to cure her of a headache suggests. Yet despite her panache, Millay eventually bowed to the pressure to give up exclusive lesbianism, as many women’s college graduates must have in the heterosexual 1920s, when companionate marriage was seen as the “advanced” woman’s highest goal.
The unpublished memoirs of Floyd Dell, who became Millay’s first male lover in Greenwich Village, give some insight into how women who came to the Village as lesbians were sometimes steered toward heterosexuality in this “progressive” atmosphere. For weeks Millay had agreed to go to bed with Dell, since she was taught in the Village that free bohemian women should have no scruples against such things; but she was obviously ambivalent, insisting they remain fully clothed and refusing to have intercourse. Finally Dell pressured her sufficiently to make her overcome her reluctance. “I know your secret,” he said. “You are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls in college,” devaluing such relationships as a mature sexual experience. Dell claims that Millay was astonished at his deductive powers and she admitted, “No man has ever found me out before.” In her chagrin she gave in to him. Dell’s memoirs indicate that he was one of the early lesbian-smashers. He says he made love to her, feeling that it was his “duty to rescue her.” His rescue was obviously imperfect, however, since she was still having affairs with women years later when she took up with Thelma Wood, the woman who also became Djuna Barnes’ lover and her model for Robin in Nightwood. Dell finally had to admit with disappointment that Millay could not be entirely rescued. Years after their relationship, he lamented in an interview, “It was impossible to understand [Millay]…. I’ve often thought she may have been fonder of women than of men.” But despite his cognizance of her feelings about women he believed he had right on his side when he proselytized for heterosexuality, and he was encouraged in this conviction by the bohemians who scoffed at the technical virginity of women whose erotic lives were exclusively with other women.45
Dell even urged Millay to undergo psychoanalysis in order to “overcome” her interest in women, although she thought analysis silly and, with a feminist awareness developed in her all-women college environment, saw Freudian ideas as nothing but “a Teutonic attempt to lock women up in the home and restore them to cooking and baby-tending.” Yet despite her various attempts to resist, she appears to have succumbed to the pressure. She married, although it was to a man who, she claimed, left her relatively free to behave as she pleased. She said of her life with her husband that they “lived like two bachelors.”46 But to have chosen to live as a lesbian, even in the world of Greenwich Village, was too problematic for her, despite her history of love for other women.
The kind of pressure that was put on Millay to give up her love for women, or at least to make it take a secondary position to heterosexuality, was probably typical of what happened to young females even in this most bohemian environment during the 1920s, when love between women such as had been so vital in earlier eras was devalued. While sex between women was acceptable and even chic in circles that were enamored with the radical or the exotic, serious love relationships between women could no longer be highly regarded since they would interfere with companionate heterosexual relationships. Of course there were some bohemian men who saw lesbianism as part of the Village’s experiment with free love and they respected the women’s choices, and there were others who were titillated by it, and still others who were homosexual also and happy enough that their female counterparts were enjoying themselves. However, many bohemian men, if they could take lesbianism seriously at all, resented not only the women’s ties to each other but their general assertive-ness, which in itself may have signified danger to some of the men.
Floyd Dell is again an example of the latter attitude. Like a good bohemian he prided himself on his radicalism, while maintaining views of women that were often quite traditional. His short stories and poems in Love in Greenwich Village (1926) suggest that he really believed that sexual experimentation is dangerous, women’s primary concerns are, or should be, their husbands’ welfare, and all women, in spite of their protest, want to be sexually conquered. Hutchins Hapgood astutely observed of the typical male in Greenwich Village at that time that he felt like a victim deprived of his property: “No matter what his advanced ideas were, his deeply complex, instinctive, and traditional nature often suffered [from woman’s] full assumption of his old privileges.”47 Her most outrageous assumption was her notion that she was sexually independent. Love between women made these male bohemians uncomfortable, despite their pretended liberalism and sophistication. Even in the Village, men of the 1920s were not free of the received notions of what a woman should be. It was thus impossible for women who wanted to try to live as lesbians even in the Village to feel that they could carry on with the full approval of the “unconventional” individuals with whom they shared the turf.
However, in disregard of the discomfort of many
Village men, love between women did continue to flourish there throughout the 1920s and a lesbian subculture took root, challenging the requisite tolerance of bohemia. By the early ’30s there were enough like-minded women to form a real community. Its headquarters, side by side with that of homosexual men, was a block of nightclubs near the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street. Gay men converted the street into a major cruising area, and it was soon called the Auction Block, although lesbians claimed a bit of space for themselves in the clubs that catered to them and featured lesbian entertainers.48 Non-working-class lesbians were more at home in the Village than anywhere in the United States, although they were forced to recognize that even bohemians were not entirely comfortable with them.
The Heterosexual Revolution and the Lesbian in the Woodpile
Many Americans were certainly intrigued with homosexuality, but the intrigue was not without ambivalence. In some circles where sexual matters were discussed openly, lesbianism was even blamed for some women’s inability to transfer their libido to their husbands and the resultant failure of marriages. Even many of the 1920s Freudians were ambivalent about homosexual experimentation between women. While some of them believed its suppression caused great damage in a patient and its expression could be very positive, others found it profoundly disturbing. And still others believed both at once, such as the doctor who stated in a 1929 article that homosexuality may represent a high stage of psychosexual development for an individual and that it is the job of the psychoanalyst working with a homosexual to study “the nature of the disorder” and ways to adjust the patient therapeutically to heterosexuality; or another doctor who reported on a diary kept by two college girls in love with each other that it expressed “the finest sentiments of sexual love I ever read” and that through proper psychiatric treatment they were “cured” and “both have lived normal lives ever since.”49
Freud’s work and distorted interpretations of it sometimes even became an excuse for various alarmists during the very sex-conscious 1920s. For example, Freud believed that all children went through a homosexual phase on their way to heterosexuality. His identification of childhood homosexuality, “normal” as Freud thought it was, alerted medical doctors to the existence of the phenomenon and then provided fuel for hysteria among some of them. A 1925 psychiatrist and psychologist team noted that during the past year a number of cases of homosexuality in children had come to their attention, and they traced the psychogenesis of those cases to an early excessive affection for the mother or the father, suggesting that parents must be wary of their children’s love. The 1920s, with all its ambivalence regarding sexual revolution, ushered in a concern about childhood feelings that were previously seen as natural. Psychiatrists were now warning parents that every childhood and adolescent emotional attachment must be scrutinized in order to nip homosexuality in the bud and that reciprocal same-sex crushes, which had long been considered a normal aspect of girlhood, were truly dangerous even if no sexual activity occurred, since they might stimulate the girl’s unconscious desires and fixate her on same-sex love.50
Romantic friendship had clearly outworn its social usefulness as a preventer of illegitimacy in America of the 1920s. By that time contraceptive devices had become widely available and birth control clinics multiplied rapidly, thanks to the efforts of Margaret Sanger, who began opening such clinics in 1916. The fear of pregnancy, which had been seen as a great danger in premarital sex, was greatly mitigated. A man could more easily demand that a woman not place limits on the degree of intimacy in which she would indulge with him. Sexual, or rather heterosexual, Puritanism became passe. Popular arguments from Freud assisted this revolution. If a woman refused to be receptive to a man, she was repressing a natural urge, she was blocking her libido, and that would cause her to be neurotic. The leaders of this sexual revolution managed to make pleasure seem like medical necessity. They argued that heterosexual intercourse cured digestive disorders and anemia, created a “salutary euphoria,” and calmed the nerves even of sick people. In fact, they said, without heterosexual intercourse, nothing of value would be produced in the world, since those glands that induced the desire for intercourse also supplied the energy for work. It was intercourse, they insisted, that even helped broaden social sympathies and acted as moral inspiration. The new sexual compulsion pushed many women into heterosexual relations. As one writer in the 1920s observed, instead of living at their own tempo and inclination, “whole groups appear to fall under the suggestion that they must busy themselves with flaming bright red.” The nineteenth-century excesses of heterosexual repression had been replaced in the 1920s by “the excess of [hetero]sexual expression.”51
Such pressure to be heterosexually active brought with it in more conventional circles a concomitant pressure to eschew whatever could be characterized as homosexual, including whatever remnants were left of the old institution of romantic friendship. While such homophobia represented just one more taboo to be joyously flaunted by the adventurous and the experimental, it must have been confusing to many, especially when the popular sex reformers managed to sound modern and revolutionary while promoting antihomosexual prejudice, warning that maintenance of what they called “outworn traditions” regarding virginity was manufacturing what they called “perverts.” Their advice to women, that the only true happiness lay in heterosexual fulfillment, was a far distance from the work of supposedly conservative, traditional writers of earlier centuries such as William Alger, who had advised in his 1868 book The Friendships of Women that unmarried females (whose numbers had increased because so many men were killed during the Civil War) would do well to form romantic friendships with other women, since those relationships bring to life “freshness, stimulant charm, noble truths and aspirations.”52
In contrast, during the post World War I years, when for the first but not the last time in this century men came back to reclaim their jobs and their roles, it was insisted that virtues such as Alger delineated were to be found not in romantic friendships but in “companionate marriage” alone. Companionate marriage, which now became an American ideal, was supposed to rectify the most oppressive elements of Victorian wedlock; marriage would become an association of “companionship” and “cooperation,” although real social equality between men and women was not a concern that its advocates addressed. As a means of achieving the goals of companionate marriage, numerous marriage manuals and other texts on how to attain happiness pressured men to perform sexually, to bring their mates to orgasm and contentment. If they were unsuccessful, the blame was attributed not only to their “performance skills” but also to the woman’s “failure to transfer the libido from a love object of the same sex to one of the opposite sex.”53
Since in earlier eras “decent” women were generally not expected to respond to men sexually, no such “explanations” for unresponsiveness had been sought and it was unlikely that lesbianism would have been suspected as a reason for heterosexual unhappiness. By the 1920s, however, the notion that love between women could stand in the way of marital happiness instead of being “a rehearsal in girlhood” for such happiness, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had characterized it in 1849, was so popularized that Broadway audiences flocked to see Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive, the succes de scandale play devoted to that theme. Lesbianism thus became the villain in the drama of bringing men and women together through (hetero)sexual freedom and companionate marriage (in which the female companion was implored to stay put in the kitchen and the bedroom). As villain of the piece, the lesbian gradually came to be characterized by a host of nasty moral attributes that were reflected in literature and popular culture for the next half century.
The sexual revolution of the 1920s, which was felt throughout cosmopolitan areas but most particularly in offbeat centers such as bohemian Greenwich Village and tourist Harlem, had two important effects on love between women of middleclass backgrounds in particular: to some of them who were just beginning to define themselves consciously as
sexual beings, an erotic relationship with another woman was one more area to investigate and one more right to demand, though quietly compared to the vociferous demands fifty years later. Unlike romantic friends of other eras, who would have happened upon lesbian genital sexuality only by chance if at all, their counterparts of the ’20s knew all about the sexual potential that existed between females. Having been given concepts and language by the sexologists—from Krafft-Ebing to Ellis to Freud—they could consciously choose to explore that potential in ways that were not open to their predecessors. And the temper of the times often seemed to give them permission for such exploration.
On the other hand, the times were not, after all, far removed from the Victorian era, and despite seeming liberality, the notion of sex between women was too shocking a departure from the past image of womanhood to be widely tolerated. Nor could the sexual potential of women’s love for each other be ignored now by those outside the relationship as it could be earlier. American men realized with a shock that if they wanted the benefits of companionate heterosexuality, which sexologists and psychologists told them was crucial to well-being, they needed to suppress women’s same-sex relationships—which had almost always been companionate and therefore rivaled heterosexuality. Thus, ironically, in the midst of a sexual revolution when sex between women became an area of erotic exploration in some circles and some women were beginning to establish a lifestyle based on that preference, lesbians came to be regarded as pariahs.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 12