Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  Perhaps it was not so much that most butches desired to be men. It was rather that for many of them in an era of neat pigeonholes the apparent logic of the connection between sexual object choice and gender identification was overwhelming, and lacking the support of a history that contradicted that connection, they had no encouragement at that time to formulate new conceptions. If they loved women it must be because they were mannish, and vice versa. Therefore, many learned to behave as men were supposed to behave, sometimes with rough machismo, sometimes enacting the most idealized images of male behavior that they saw in their parent society—courting, protecting, lighting cigarettes, opening car doors, holding out chairs. They followed that chivalric behavior, as real men often did not outside of romance magazines and movies. It is not surprising that butch/femme was in its heyday during the 1950s, when not only were the parent-culture roles exaggerated between men and women, but the Hollywood values of dash and romance served to inspire the fancy of the young, especially those who were at a loss about where to turn for their images of self.

  There were, however, factors that undercut the apparent imitation of idealized male and female gender roles. Not all butches were stone butches, and femmes were often not simply sexually and socially acquiescent women, although some butches may have preferred to see them that way. Laurajean Ermayne, writing about butches and femmes for the lesbian magazine Vice Versa just before the 1950s, described the femme as “of a passive nature—a fluff, a cream puff, to be devoured…. More intensely womanly than jam [i.e., heterosexual] girls … more sensitive, more high strung, more dependent.” But lesbian historian Joan Nestle remembers a twenty-three-year-old femme who carried her favorite dildo in a pink satin purse to the bars every Saturday so her partner for the night would understand exactly what she wanted.17 By the liberated 1970s some heterosexual women may have been that insistent about their own sexuality, but in the 1950s there were not many who would have made so bold a statement.

  Just by virtue of being lesbians, femmes must have had a certain amount of rebellious courage that was not typical of the 1950s female. They engaged in sexual relations outside of marriage while most of their young female heterosexual counterparts did not dare. They braved the night alone to go out to gay bars to meet butches while straight women had not yet attempted to “take back the night” and wander the streets for their own pleasure and purpose. They often supported themselves as well as their butch partner if their partner was unwilling to compromise her masculine appearance and unable to find a job that would not require donning a skirt. Femmes were attracted to a rebel sexuality, and they let themselves be seen with women who made no attempt to hide their outlaw status at a time when supposedly every woman’s fondest wish was to be a wife and mother and to fit in with the rest of the community. Femmes were called fluffs in some regions during the 1950s and ’60s, but that term could be quite inappropriate.

  The roles were also undercut by the fact that although most young lesbians went along with them, they actually had little intrinsic meaning for many of them. The roles might be merely the rules of the game that you followed if you wanted to be one of the players—or as J.C., who was a Texas “butch,” phrased it, “I looked around and thought, if that’s the way you get to belong, I need to do it as good as they did, so I made myself remember to open car doors and light cigarettes and all of that.” Because they were to some only roles, they were reversible under certain circumstances. One might be a butch in one relationship and a femme in another, depending on how willing one was to accommodate a partner’s preferences. The roles could even change in the course of an evening, as Ann tells it:

  Once I went to an L.A. bar to meet this butch, and I was dressed femme. But she wasn’t there so I decided to go to another bar. On my way, in the car, I changed to butch. Butches had a lot more opportunities in the bars and I just wanted to meet another woman.18

  To such women appropriate role behavior was simply a nod of acknowledgment in the direction of subculture propriety that indicated that one knew the rules and belonged.

  Sometimes there were complex factors operating in the choice of a butch or a femme identity. Surely some women selected one or the other not because of peer group pressure, but because that felt sexually most natural to them. To other women the choice of a butch identity may have been motivated not at all by a “natural” or “congenital instinct” such as the nineteenth-century sexologists (and many lesbians) preferred to believe, but rather by their desire to be free from the awful limitations of femaleness. For some butches their sex role identity not only preceded but even overwhelmed their sexual interests. Lucia is representative. As a working-class Springfield, Massachusetts, teenager in the early 1960s, she passed as a boy and was employed at a car wash under the name of Ricky Lane. Her close friends were six other girls who also passed. None of them was sexual at the time. Lucia now explains:

  I have five brothers. As a girl in an Italian immigrant family I wasn’t allowed to have a will. I envied their fucking freedom so bad. That’s what being a boy represented—power and freedom. You could walk through the park at midnight or down the street at any hour. So of course we all wanted to pass. We even referred to each other as “he.” We said we were butches because that’s what girls like us were called, but we thought we were no different from any other adolescent boy. We did stealing. We did drugs. And we did it like a boy would.19

  For them, it was masculine gender identity that was most important in the assumption of a butch role. They saw that men had all the status, and it was not easy to understand how to obtain status, even within one’s small subculture, without emulating those who had it.

  Women who identified as butch during that era were often uncomfortable with their femaleness because they could not accept the weakness, passivity, and powerlessness that were presented to them as female. As one woman now analyzes her past identification, “Since I refused to be ‘female’ as I understood it, I concluded that I had to be a ‘male.’”20 Her confusion is understandable, since girls were indoctrinated with the message that only two genders were possible and the sex roles connected to them were fixed and rigid.

  Without other models, many young lesbians of all classes had no choice but to accept the logic of those roles. Even those young lesbians who were not yet a part of a community often defined themselves in the roles. In lieu of real-life models, those who were desperate for images to emulate and lacked contact with other lesbians looked to Radclyffe Hall’s depiction of Stephen Gordon. Hall’s characterization of Stephen, “a man trapped in a woman’s body,” the congenital lesbian in The Well of Loneliness, was directly influenced by Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. As the only truly famous and widely available lesbian novel for decades, Hall’s book, although it was published in the late 1920s, remained important into the ’50s and ’60s in providing an example of how to be a lesbian among the young who had no other guide. Stephen Gordon’s butch role in relation to the totally feminine Mary in the novel could be a plausible image to any homosexual female who grew up in a heterosexual milieu.

  Radclyffe Hall was, in fact, so influential among some young American lesbians that she was referred to as “Our Matron Saint” in a postwar article that suggested that the “inelegant word butch” be replaced by the word “Clyffe” in honor of Radclyffe Hall. One lesbian historian, Blanche Cook, has speculated that if young lesbians of her own generation of the 1950s had read the less stereotypical lesbian books that were published in the same year as The Well, such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack, “some of us might never have swaggered.” But it was The Well that received attention as the quintessential lesbian novel and that helped to form self-concepts among the young. While literature did not have so profound an impact on all lesbians, some of those who were hungry for any discussion or information about their secret life and could find no other source were very affected by the most obvious literary model.21

  The butch and femme roles as
they continued to develop during the 1950s should also be understood in the broader context of their times. The roles may have been manifested so strongly then because of the need of postwar America to simplify by categorizing and stereotyping. (Gay men were often seduced by this need as well, and it took times more open to complexity, such as the Vietnam era, to devalorize heterogenderality for them and to encourage both members of a male couple to wear mustaches or otherwise manifest masculinity.) Roles were in a sense the path of least resistence within the communities of young and working class lesbians. They provided the subculture with a conformity and a security that answered longings that mirrored those of heterosexual America, in which all members of the subculture had been raised. Needless to say, however, the parent culture did not validate the subculture by approving those similarities. Paradoxically, it was the assumption of roles, especially the butch role, that cast lesbians even further beyond the pale of the parent culture that they seemed to be mirroring.

  But the butches’ adoption of male images had other kinds of usefulness. For example, it permitted them to form a community, since it identified butches more easily to each other and to femmes. In addition, the roles emulated a certain kinship structure. As with their heterosexual working-class counterparts, women who maintained butch or femme identities were often socially separated from each other, coming together only for love relationships. They were no more friends than heterosexual men and women during that era. If a butch needed consolation, defense, someone with whom to spend an evening out, it was to another butch she went. Historian John D’Emilio has offered a compelling anthropological explanation for this particular homogenderal social arrangement. He sees its function as being analogous to the incest taboo, which guarantees that parental and sibling relationships remain stable though erotic relationships may fluctuate: lovers might come and go, but friends would always remain the same as long as they were off-limits as lovers. Butches would thus always have other butches as friends, and femmes would have other femmes.22

  But perhaps the most important function of the roles was that they created a certain sense of membership in a special group, with its own norms and values and even uniforms. The roles offered lesbians a social identity and a consciousness of shared differences from women in the heterosexual world. Through them outsiders could be insiders. And those who were not familiar with roles, rules, and uniforms were the outsiders on butch/femme turf. The adoption of roles during this authoritarian era may even have lessened the anxiety of anomie by giving what must have been a comforting illusion of structure and propriety that was meaningful and important to the group.

  “Kiki” Lesbians: The Upper and Middle Classes and Subculture Clashes

  Wealthy and middle class older lesbians generally rejected the roles in public and were much less likely to follow them in their love lives than were working class and young lesbians. Usually their dress and couple relationships did not readily fall into patterns of masculine and feminine. Although one woman in a couple may have been more naturally aggressive or more prone to traditionally feminine activities than the other, the development or expression of such traits was seldom as self-conscious as it was among the young and working class.

  Wealthy lesbians seem sometimes to have found butch/femme roles and dress aesthetically repulsive. At Cherry Grove, a summer resort area off Long Island, New York, that was popular among rich lesbians during the 1940s and ’50s, the style was “elegant” and “suave,” much like that of the Paris circle of Natalie Barney. Historian Esther Newton, who interviewed several former residents of Cherry Grove, reports that by the late 1950s these women left the Grove because more obvious butch and femme types began to come in. “They were diesel dykes, big and fat and mannish,” one of Newton’s informants recalls. “And there was always some drama, always some femme in a fight with another femme.” To them such obvious role division was strictly a manifestation of working-class lesbianism, and they had neither sympathy nor understanding for it. It was “tacky,” as one informant described it.23

  There were butch lesbians among the wealthy, but they appear to have been exceptional in their gay groups. The most notorious was Louisa Dupont Carpenter Jenny, a direct descendant and major heir of multi-millionaire Alfred Dupont. Louisa was a horse woman, a sailor of her own yacht, and an aviatrix. (She died while flying her own plane in 1976.) Her pastimes validated her predeliction for masculine dress. She preferred relationships with feminine bisexual women and had no objection to their being married. But even those in her upper-class society who were used to mixing with homosexuals were not comfortable with her. “Who is that person?” Helen Lynd remarked to two of her gay friends, Broadway stars Libby Holman and Clifton Webb. “She walks like a man, she talks like a man. God, she even dresses like a man.” Her society’s displeasure is suggested in Louisa having been dubbed a “he-she.”24

  Some wealthy females adopted a butch identification when young but dropped it as they grew older, often opting not only to appear more feminine but to live as a bisexual rather than a lesbian. While still a teenager, Libby Holman wrote a little jingle about herself that gave a clue to her lesbian sexuality: “I am tall and very slim./ Am I a she or am I a him?” But only a few years later she married Smith Reynolds, a tobacco millionaire, and after his death she married two more times. Since she allowed herself to be romantically linked by the media with Montgomery Clift, who was homosexual, it may be that one or two of her marriages were nothing more than fronts, although her last husband is said to have banned all her homosexual friends from their home. But during and between those marriages she had numerous affairs with women.25

  For some wealthy women the lesbian chic that pervaded the 1920s never ceased and they did not feel compelled to hide their lesbian behavior. Some women in the entertainment world felt as free to flaunt their unorthodox romances in the ’30s or the ’50s as they did in the ’20s. Tallulah Bankhead, for example, after passionatley kissing a young woman at a straight party, borrowed a handkerchief from an astonished male observer to wipe the smeared lipstick from the other woman’s mouth. When Bankhead encountered Joan Crawford with her husband of the time, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., on a train from New York to Hollywood, she was said to have loudly announced, “Darling, you’re divine. I’ve had an affair with your husband. You’ll be next.” She could get away with any behavior because she disarmed with her stance of ultrasophistication. She presented herself as being above the laws of mere mortals and even as phenomenally bored and blase with the shocking privileges she took for herself. “Sex?” she shouted in one group. “I’m bored with sex. What is it, after all? If you go down on a woman, you get a crick in your neck. If you go down on a man, you get lockjaw. And fucking just gives me claustrophobia.”26

  Bankhead was married from 1937 to 1941. Since her biographers do not present that marriage as anything like a love match, perhaps it is explainable by an ephemeral impulse to deceive those who had not been in earshot of her sexual confessions. However, other wealthy women who had relationships with women married not for the sake of setting up a front, but rather for male companionship. Unlike many middle-and working-class lesbians, they seemed not to be particularly desirous of establishing long-term monogamous female marriages with their lesbian lovers. The writer Jane Bowles (who self-deprecatingly alluded to her stiff knee, her Jewishness, and her predeliction for women by calling herself “Crippie, the Kike Dyke”) remained married to fellow writer Paul Bowles from 1937 to her death in 1973. Paul Bowles was bisexual, though Jane seems to have had sexual relationships exclusively with other women. She and her husband agreed to lead separate sexual lives, but she relied on him for stability and continuity.27

  There were, of course, groups of wealthy women like the Cherry Grove crowd, who were a consistent part of a lesbian subculture. But for some wealthy women who had relationships with other women such consistency seemed to have little appeal. Not only did their social position demand that they move in broader circles than a circum
scribed lesbian world, but heterosexual marriage facilitated the ease of their movement. It also placated families on whom a vast inheritance might depend. Louisa Dupont Carpenter, for example, married John Jenny under pressure from her domineering father, who insisted that she make a union with a “well-situated” young man. Wealthy women who loved women generally did not seem to require an arena in which they could dress in drag, as working-class lesbians might, nor did they have the need to bond with other career women to give them courage to pursue their independent paths in a hostile world. Because they lived much of their lives outside of a lesbian subculture, free of its mores and rules, they felt less compelled to limit themselves to a lesbian identity and were more likely to behave bisexually.

  Perhaps the lack of a significant subculture of wealthy lesbians in America explains why many upper-class women who saw themselves as exclusively lesbian chose to become expatriates and remained so throughout their lives. They seem to have believed that in America, close to their families and the social set into which they were born, the estabishment of such a subculture was problematic and that one needed to escape the country in order to live permanently as a lesbian. Natalie Barney’s revelation of why she chose to spend almost all of her adult life in Paris undoubtedly refers to that conviction: “Paris has always seemed to me,” she said, “the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.”28 Droves of other wealthy lesbians shared that assessment.

  In gay male society, wealthy men historically have often been interested in “rough trade” and class mixing was not uncommon. Among lesbians during the radical 1970s wealthier women began to pride themselves on what they perceived of as their new democratic lesbianism. But in the 1950s and ’60s and earlier, such class mixing was extremely rare. Working-class lesbians tended to socialize only with other working-class lesbians. While some wealthy lesbians would occasionally have ties among middleclass lesbian groups, more often those groups tended to be made up exclusively of women who earned their livings in professions as teachers, librarians, or social workers. The classes remained as discrete as they were in the parent culture.