Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  The writer was perhaps a bit conservative in his estimate about the number of similar places in the United States, since there were several other such bars in downtown and midtown New York alone, including Tony Pastor’s and Ernie’s, as well as in other cities. The Barn in Cleveland, the White Horse in Oakland, and even by then a few all-women’s working-class bars such as Mona’s in San Francisco and the Roselle Club and the Twelve-Thirty Club in Chicago. There were even several “tea shops” that catered to lesbians on the Near North Side of Chicago. But it was not until World War II, which brought much larger populations to work in big cities, that many more lesbian bars sprang up across the United States. Many young women who would have been delighted to discover lesbian bars in the ’30s undoubtedly had a difficult time locating one.24

  Mona’s, the all-women bar in San Francisco, opened first in 1936 on Union Street and in 1938 on Columbus. According to Win, one of the women I interviewed for this chapter, who frequented Mona’s in the ’30s, it was a hangout for young working-class women, though there are reports of middleclass women who took brief vacations in San Francisco from as far away as Salt Lake City in order to go to Mona’s. Win remembers that at Mona’s the butches often wore drag and the women danced together in butch/femme couples with no fear that they would be molested by the vice squad, as lesbians were in Chicago during the ’30s and in later decades even in San Francisco. If a woman managed to locate such a bar, there were attempts by the other patrons, who knew it was in their interest to cherish so brave and rare a kindred spirit, to put her at ease quickly. Her problems with making contacts were at an end, at least as long as she remained a habituee. Win describes Mona’s as “safe and friendly. We always used to sing ‘If you’re ever down a well, ring my bell.’ It was just right for the atmosphere there.” One would have had to go to Le Monocle in Paris or to pre-1933 Berlin to find its equal.25

  But most lesbians never went to bars. Occasionally middleclass lesbians could make contacts with other women if they were members of a private group such as the Nucleus Club, an informal New York-based organization of the late 1930s that held weekly parties for lesbians together with gay men. But although police harassment of lesbians was not common in the 1930s, they knew, perhaps by their observation of gay male experiences, that it was a potential they had to take into account, and that awareness must have dampened the enthusiasm of many to join such a club. The Nucleus Club parties were in private homes, but the group still thought it essential to adopt the rule that each gay man would pair with a lesbian as they left the party and they would go strolling out arm in arm so that neighbors would think the couples had been to a heterosexual gathering.26 One should not underestimate the fun in this game of “fooling the straights,” but underneath the fun was genuine fear.

  Middleclass women who dared perceive themselves as lesbian had some possibilities of making contacts more safely in all-women institutions such as summer camps, residence halls, or colleges and universities. Mary remembers that in the 1930s, as a teenager, she had been a counselor in the Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls camps, and when she decided that she was a lesbian she became aware that there were many other young women among the counselors who shared her interests and who identified themselves to each other as lesbian. University life also provided an arena for women who consciously thought of themselves as lesbians to make contact with each other. At the University of Texas in the mid-1930s women physical education majors staged a mock-prom, ostensibly making fun of the university’s regular annual proms. Although heterosexual students were unaware of it, many of the physical education majors were lesbians. The mock-prom was a great lark for them since it sanctioned them to wear drag and dance together in a hall of a hallowed institution.27

  But such cavalier gaiety was only occasional among lesbian college women in the 1930s. Their more usual reticence suggests that they were as fearful as the members of the Nucleus Club. When Mary went to the University of Washington in the late 1930s, she and her lesbian friends had a table in the commons at which they could usually find each other any day between 8:00 and 3:00. But what Mary remembers most about the experience now is that they all felt they had to be very circumspect:

  Although several of us were in couples, no one ever talked about their love lives. We could unload with problems about families, jobs, money, but not lesbianism. If two women broke up they wouldn’t discuss it with the group, though they might have a confidante who was also part of the group. It was our attitude that this sort of relationship was nobody’s business. We all really knew about each other of course. But the idea was, “You don’t know if someone is a lesbian unless you’ve slept with her.” You didn’t belong if you were the blabbermouth type.

  Not only was it a far cry from the “outing” that has begun to take place on college campuses in 1990, but every lesbian college woman in Mary’s group felt she had to be constantly guarded about herself because she was so aware of the danger of lesbian stigma. The easy intimacy that young college women often established with each other in the ’30s was impossible for many college women who were lesbians. They felt compelled to assume such a protective camouflage that those outside the group would have had no idea that they were looking at a table full of lesbians. But a lesbian newcomer would not have had an easy time breaking in.28

  Non-college women were often just as reluctant to risk betraying their lesbianism, even among women they were all but certain were also lesbians. Sandra, who worked in a Portland department store during the early ’30s, tells of having been part of a group of eight women—four couples—who went skiing every winter between 1934 and ’37. “I’m sure we were all gay,” she remembers, “but we never said a word about it. Talking about it just wasn’t the thing to do. Never once did I hear the L word in that group or any word like it—even though we always rented a cabin together and we all agreed that we only wanted four beds since we slept in pairs.”29

  Because lesbians were so frightened about divulging themselves and often had no idea where to meet other lesbians for social contact, life could be lonely even if they were lucky enough to have found a mate. May says she met her lover at the University of Texas in the late 1920s, and though they stayed together for more than twenty years, they told almost no one about the nature of their relationship. It placed such a strain on them that May often thought of leaving Virgie, especially during the ’30s, because “I was tired of hiding in a corner. And there was no question of coming out. I wanted so much to be able to talk freely with people, to be like everyone else, not to feel like we loved in a wasteland, but that was impossible. I had a lot of heterosexual women friends, but I thought that as long as I was in that relationship I could never have a close friend. I knew how people would have looked down on us if they’d guessed.”

  Although May and Virgie had heard about homosexual men, they knew no lesbians. May claims that she did not become aware that there were other lesbians in the world until 1950, when they began going to dog shows and occasionally saw lesbian couples there, but even then they did not talk to them. At one point in the late ’30s they befriended two heterosexual couples who suspected they were lovers, but those friendships did not last long: “Both the men thought all I needed was a good fuck, and they let me know it.” When May left Virgie in 1953 she felt that although she was “going through a horrible time,” she had to suffer in silence, because there was no one in whom she could confide. It was not until the advent of the feminist movement in the 1970s, when she was already in her late 60s, that she felt she could talk about those years of her life. But the scars remained for women of her generation, as she indicates now. She says she still feels free to talk only in “appropriate circumstances.”30

  Elisabeth Craigin also poignantly suggests the lesbian’s sense of isolation in the 1930s in her putatively autobiographical novel in which, when the author and her lover, Rachel, part, she too can tell no one, since their relationship was a secret. Craigin says that shortly after the breakup she had
a minor operation and her life was flooded with flowers, kind notes, and good wishes from friends, but their attention to her unimportant physical problem struck her as bitterly ironic: “I could more easily have undergone five such operations than the amputation that was going on in my soul. But sympathy was an anesthetic that that other surgical interference [her break with Rachel] never had.”31 Such difficulty, not only in making contact with others who were willing to avow their love for women, but also in sharing their dearest and most poignant emotions with friends, must have rendered the choice to live as a lesbian overwhelming and explains further why so many of those who admitted emotional and physical love for other females in George Henry’s study of “sex variants” in the 1930s chose to marry men.

  But life was clearly not uniformly unfortunate for lesbians of the 1930s outside of fiction. The cities were large enough and diverse enough even then to offer shelter and requisite anonymity to those who felt that they could not live an unconventional affectional life in a small town. The New York Sun critic who reviewed The Children’s Hour in 1934 was right in his commonsense response to Martha’s lament that because she and Karen had been accused of lesbianism, “There is not anywhere we can go”: “You immediately think of half a dozen [places lesbians could go],” he said, “including the city of New York.”32 If provincial life was uncomfortable, women who identified themselves as lesbian in the 1930s could hope to find refuge and sometimes even desirable social companionship in cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. They were not geographically imprisoned as women might have been in the preceding century. Although good jobs were not easy to come by, if it were essential to them they could move and they could support themselves.

  Despite society’s views and restrictions, there were many compelling reasons for some women to choose lesbian relationships and remain lesbians. They found aspects of lesbian life and love far more rewarding than what heterosexuality offered. They were able to make their own lives, often without a large support group but with the help of a felicitous personal relationship that let them define themselves as they chose. While they had no notion how to go about changing the public images of lesbians, they often knew those images had little to do with them, and, as long as they remained covert, could have no effect on them. The series of interviews conducted by Dr. George Henry with lesbians in the ’30s illustrates a contentment in the lives of many of these women that would have frazzled the censors had that picture been reflected in the media. Many of his interviewees were self-actualized individuals, living to their full potential in mutually productive relationships. They say things such as:

  I’m doing the work [as an editor] I always wanted to do and I’m very, very happy. I’m very much in love with the girl too. We click…. She has had the most influence for good in my life.

  (29-year-old white woman)

  If I were born again I would like to be just as I am. I’m perfectly satisfied being a girl and being as I am. I’ve never had any regrets.

  (26-year-old black woman)

  Our relationship is just as sweet now [after eleven years] as in the beginning.

  (29-year-old white woman)

  Since we have been living together our lives are fuller and happier. We create things together and we are devoted to our [adopted] baby.

  (30-year-old white woman)

  I have a great confidence in the future. I think I’m going to be a very well-known artist…. Homosexuality hasn’t interfered with my work. It has made it what it is.

  (30-year-old white woman)

  Sadly and typically, all Henry was able to understand about such case histories is revealed in largely irrelevant Freudian-influenced comments that consider lesbianism as nothing more than a neurotic adjustment: for example, “Through homosexual alliances, the affection missed in childhood is obtained from women.”33 But those who were “in the Life” usually knew that their choices were far more complex and meaningful than what was understood in such simplistic little theories which were no more explanatory about lesbianism than speculations about compensation for missing a father’s love would be about female heterosexuality. With or without a large group to whom they could divulge themselves, and despite their need to hide their feelings from the outside world, these women were able to find enough sexual and emotional fulfillment as lesbians to give them satisfaction with their choices such as was never reflected in the media images of their day.

  Lesbian Sex in the 1930s

  Women who chose to identify themselves as lesbians in the 1930s were by and large a very different group from their mothers and grandmothers who may have been involved in romantic friendships only a few decades earlier—not because the quality of their love for other women was necessarily different, but rather because the nature of their awareness (especially of genital sexual potential between women) and of society’s awareness (especially of their “morbidity” and “decadence”) were very different. They were totally bereft of the luxury (and frustration?) of innocence that characterized their earlier counterparts. Women’s love for women was inevitably “lesbian” now—and patently sexual by definition.

  Lesbian sex had long been a subject for sensationalistic and pornographic male fiction writers who aimed to shock and amuse their readers with what they considered bizarre but titillating images, and it became a focus in the work of male sexologists who considered it as bizarre as did the fiction writers, though morbid instead of titillating. However, women said almost nothing whatever about it publicly before the twentieth century. Even during the first decades of this century females who broached the subject of love between women in print were likely to write as though sexuality were definitely not a part of it.

  There were rare exceptions, such as Mary MacLane, who confesses in her 1902 autobiography (whose purpose was epater le bourgeois) that she feels for another woman “a strange attraction of sex” and asks the reader: “Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?” The Anglo-American writer Renee Vivien, who wrote in French, also dealt with lesbian eroticism in the early twentieth century, but she did it under the influence of earlier male writers such as Baudelaire and Pierre Louys, who presented lesbians as unreal, exotic creatures. Vivien’s lesbian lovers have more in common with those earlier fictions than real life. Her work can be placed in the context of an established genre from which she did not veer, even though she—obviously unlike her male predecessors—had actually had lesbian experiences. For the most part, however, women were silent about lesbian sex. It was not until Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness that a book written in English by a woman went as far as to say of two female lovers, “and that night they were not divided”—but it went no further. In the ’30s, however, perhaps because of that one line by Hall that broke the silence, or perhaps because women who identified themselves as lesbian now saw sex as an inevitable aspect of their identity, women writers who loved other women began to treat sexuality in more vivid terms.34

  But those lesbians of the ’30s, like their straight counterparts, had a mixed and confusing legacy with regard to sex, despite their now inescapable knowledge that “lesbian” meant sex between women. On the one hand, they had been brought up by parents who were Victorians and often tried to inculcate sexual puritanism in their children. Vestiges of guilt for unorthodox sexuality must have sprouted even in many young lesbians who came out in the years after the roaring, flaming ’20s. On the other hand, young women of the 1930s enjoyed, at least in the abstract, some of the vestigial benefits of the sexual revolution of the previous decade, when popular wisdom claimed that sexual inhibitions could make you sick and sexual expression led to creativity and mental health. Of course as lesbians they had to juggle the prescriptions about gender and the nature of the sex act a bit, but there were lesbians who had no trouble doing that.

  The notion of sex as “good medicine” thus made some lesbian writers feel free even to explore their own form of sexuality in print. For ex
ample, Mary Casal, who was born a Victorian, in 1864, revealed in her 1930 autobiography The Stone Wall that she accepted not only with ease but even with relish the admonition about the unsalutary effects of repressed sexual desire. Without hesitation she announced that she and Juno, her woman lover, always “found ourselves more fit for good work after having been thus relieved.”35 Such a statement by a woman—and a self-identified lesbian woman at that—would have been inconceivable in literature of earlier decades.

  Of course other lesbians of her generation were not so adaptable in their sexual adjustment, and their writing about love between women sounded much more like that of romantic friends of previous eras, except that they realized that they had to explain away the popular wisdom about the importance of sex. Vida Scudder, a retired Wellesley professor who had been a “devoted companion” of the novelist Florence Converse, waxed rhapsodic in her 1937 autobiography On Journey about love between women, which, she believed,

  could approach near to that absolute union, always craved, never on earth, at least, to be attained…. More than any sublunar forces, it initiates us into the eternal. When it has not been born of illusion, it can never die, though strange interludes may befall it…. Its drama normally knows no end, for death sets the seal on the union. … In the Ever-Living land, lover and beloved move together.

  But she was certain that such passion, which combines the spiritual with the sensual, must stop short of the genital if it was to remain fine. She believed that Freud had “much to answer for” because he muddied the waters with sex. Scudder, as a displaced Victorian in a modern era, longing for the more innocent days when love between women was considered “romantic friendship,” could not understand why people “pay so much attention to one type of experience in this marvelous, this varied, this exciting world.” She concluded that a woman’s life devoid of sex “is a life neither dull nor empty nor devoid of romance.” Her own romances, she admitted, were all with other women.36 But Scudder was a rare exception by the 1930s in her ability to avoid the sexual implications in female same-sex love.