Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  The middleclass older lesbian subculture may best be understood not in juxtaposition to that of wealthy lesbians who had little in the way of a formal subculture, but rather in contrast to that of young and working-class lesbians. One reason that butch and femme role behavior may have had much less appeal to some older middleclass lesbians than to young and working-class lesbians was that it would expose them too much in times when there was good reason to stay in the closet. Whether or not they practiced role distinctions in their relationships at home, in public they had to hide any such proclivities. Working-class women and young women who had not yet entered a career could feel less fearful than those who were employed in government positions, for example, as teachers or social workers, as many middleclass lesbians were. But the private expression of the roles may also have been more important to working-class women than to those of the middle class because the latter did have other models. They could look to the tradition of romantic friends, early twentieth century professional women, or the unmarried career women of the 1920s and ’30s, who may have been considered maladjusted by psychologists, but who were nevertheless valid social types—independent women who managed to live personal lives of their own choosing and to form couples that usually were not heterogenderal.

  Even before the 1950s, masculine identification had less appeal to middleclass lesbians. Though some 1930s novels such as Nightwood and We Too Are Drifting feature middleclass butch lesbians (Jan Morale of We Too Are Drifting even models for a statue of Hermaphrodites), autobiographies suggest that middleclass women tended to reject butch/femme division. Elisabeth Craigin even talks of being repulsed by it. “The possibility of the false male was a thing I was in arms against,” she says. “My lover was a girl, a particularly attractive girl, with initiative and strength and personality above most, to be sure, but a girl with all the primary feminine capacities.” She describes their sexual connection as “sensuality between loving young women and not that of a loving young woman for the other gender in disguise…. She was my woman-mate, never a pseudo man-mate.” Diana Fredricks in Diana says she too was repulsed by masculine women who “indulged in transvestism,” and she saw them as “puerile” in their “smart-aleck unconventionality.” All the lesbians who play an important part in her 1930s autobiography are femininely attractive. These writers insisted that the sexologists’ observations about lesbian couples being made up of an invert and a feminine mate of the invert were totally alien to them.29

  In the years after the war, when butch/femme roles became so intrinsic to the young and working-class lesbian subculture, a good deal of hostility developed between those who did and those who did not conform to roles. Butches and femmes laughed at middleclass “kiki” women for their “wishy-washy” self-presentation. The few lesbian publications of the era, which were middleclass in their aspirations and tone, such as Vice Versa and the journal of the organization Daughters of Bilitis, the Ladder, expressed embarrassment over butch and femme roles, which, by their obviousness, encouraged the stereotype of the lesbian among heterosexuals. Lisa Ben, for example, editor of Vice Versa, included in one of her issues a poem titled “Protest,” which expressed her puzzlement about why young and working-class lesbians would want to “imitate men”:

  What irony that many of us choose

  To ape that which by nature we despise,

  Appear ridiculous to others’ eyes

  By travelling life’s path in borrowed shoes.

  How willingly we go with tresses shorn

  And beauty masked in graceless, drab attire.

  A rose’s loveliness is to admire;

  Who’d cut the bloom and thus expose the thorn? …

  Away with masquerade and vain pretension.

  ‘Tis thus we bow, reversely, to Convention!30

  She, like many lesbians outside of the working class, was troubled not only because butches were aesthetically displeasing to her, but also because it seemed to her that butches acquiesced to conformity by looking stereotypically like males just because society said those who loved women were supposed to be male.

  Some middleclass lesbians complained that it was butches and their femmes who made lesbians outcasts. One of the earliest issues of The Ladder proclaimed: “The kids in fly front pants and with butch haircuts and mannish manner are the worst publicity that we can get.” Beginning in October 1957 and until the height of the civil rights movement in 1967, Daughters of Bilitis listed on the inside cover of every issue of The Ladder among the organization’s goals “advocating [to lesbians] a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society.” The middleclass readership applauded that goal, finding it crucial to their aspirations that lesbians be tolerated in the mainstream.31

  They believed that unpopular forms of overt self-expression such as wearing masculine garb led not only to danger for lesbians, but also to further alienation from the parent culture, which was especially painful during a time when the middleclass lesbian culture was still in a relatively inchoate form. There were not scores of organizations to join or vast numbers of friendship circles one might become a part of. Some lesbians wistfully hoped that their differences might be ignored and that they might be accepted among heterosexuals. They insisted (rather unrealistically, considering McCarthy’s hunting down of covert homosexuals) that the way to achieve acceptance was to minimize differences through adopting a conventional style. As one San Leandro, California, woman said in a letter to the editor of The Ladder:

  I have personally proved, in more than a dozen cases, the importance of mode of behavior and acceptable dress in establishing understanding with heterosexuals…. [My mate of twenty years and I] have been accepted by heterosexuals and later informed by them that this acceptance, in its initial stage, was based entirely upon appearance and behavior.32

  Many of her class counterparts would have been outraged at such heterosexual condescension by the 1970s, but in the 1950s and early ’60s there was no sufficient vocabulary for such outrage nor any inclination to be militant on the part of middleclass lesbians. Like most middleclass blacks at the start of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, middleclass lesbians generally aspired to integration rather than special status based on what made them a minority. They felt most comfortable blending in, insisting that they were unlike their age and class counterparts in the parent culture only by virtue of their sexual preference, about which they would willingly be silent if they could be accepted into heterosexual society. Perhaps the conception of integration for lesbians was revolutionary enough during an era when the government and the psychiatric establishment were saying that homosexuals were outside the pale of humanity.

  Statistical studies of lesbian couples during the period also concluded that middle-and upper-middle class lesbians preferred to blend in with heterosexual society in terms of their styles. For example, a 1962 study showed that lesbians “in the upper financial brackets who owned homes in affluent neighborhoods, generally appeared in feminine clothes and demonstrated no marked emphasis on roles.” The sociologist who conducted the study concluded that “just as in the heterosexual group, role is more enforced [among lesbians] in the blue collar and lower white collar classes.”33

  Such a lack of interest in stereotypical styles and roles may have been encouraged not just by the desire to blend in with heterosexual culture, but by the rules that were as vital to the middleclass lesbian subculture as the rule of butch/femme was to their working-class counterparts. “Propriety” was especially important. One could not be part of the middleclass lesbian subculture unless one understood the value of dressing “appropriately”: A West Coast university professor remembers that she belonged to an all-gay circle of friends in the San Francisco area—psychologists, teachers, professors, librarians—that held salons and dinner parties regularly, to which most of the women wore navy blue suits and pumps, almost as much a requisite uniform as butch and femme dress in the gay bars. It was crucial in the middleclass lesbian subculture to behave with suff
icient, though never excessive, femininity and not to call attention to oneself as a lesbian in any way. Obvious lesbian behavior on the part of one member might cast disgrace on the entire group.34

  Middleclass lesbians also seem to have avoided butch/femme relationships and styles because they did violence to their often unarticulated but nevertheless deeply felt feminism. As a Los Angeles lesbian woman who is now a psychologist remembers of her response to butch/femme in the ’50s, “I didn’t think anything could be that simple—with the polarities of sheer masculine and sheer feminine between two women. I didn’t even like it between men and women, but between two lesbians it really seemed strange to me.”35 The disdain was mutual. Butches and their femmes thought these “kiki” women were the ones who were buckling under by dressing like conventional women. It was something of a class war.

  Socializing among older middleclass lesbians was also generally different from that among young and working-class lesbians. Part of the difference is attributable to the fact that they were more likely to have homes in which to entertain and money to spend on more expensive forms of amusement outside of the bars. They were also less likely to go to the bars because of the threat of raids. Entertainment among them often consisted of dinner parties or groups gathered around some event or ritual, such as listening to Tallulah Bankhead’s weekly radio program.36

  When middleclass lesbians did go to bars it was often with great trepidation, as a woman who worked in a government law library recalls. Although she lived in San Francisco, she never dared to venture into the bars there but went instead to bars in Sacramento or Bryte, always worrying about imaginary harrowing newspaper headlines, such as “State Law Librarian Caught in Lesbian Bar.”37 Despite such fears, however, some did visit the bars occasionally, hoping that the anonymity of the environment would keep them safe. The appeal for them, no less than for working-class and young lesbians, was that the bars were almost the only place, outside of their circle of friends, where they could see large groups of lesbians. The bars offered them the assurance of numbers that they could not get elsewhere.

  But class wars among lesbians were especially apparent in the bars. In small cities, which often had only one lesbian bar, such as the Cave in Omaha, middleclass lesbians when they risked a bar visit found they had to share the turf with butch/femme working-class lesbians, but they drew invisible boundaries. At the Cave the middleclass women, who dressed in conservative Saturday night finery, sat on one side of the room, and the working class women, often in T-shirts, “with cigarettes rolled in their sleeves” and “their overdressed femmes with too much lipstick and too high heels,” sat on the other. “The butches would play pool and look tough,” Betty, who was a high school teacher in Omaha in the 1950s, remembers. “Some of them were truck drivers from Council Bluffs. Some worked in factories. You would say hello, but you didn’t get together at all, any more than you did with a truck driver or a factory worker if you should happen into a straight bar.” Although the groups shared a sexual identity and both sought places where they would feel free to express it, that was all they shared.38

  In large cities, where lesbians had more than one bar from which to choose, they selected their hangout according to class, but there were always more butch/femme bars, since middleclass women tended to go to the bars so seldom. At the Open Door, the If Club, the Paradise Club, and the Star Room, lesbian bars in Los Angeles in the 1950s, the customers were young women who were supermarket clerks, waitresses, factory workers, beauty operators, prostitutes. They were almost invariably either elaborately made up, dressed in high heels and skirts or capris, or totally without makeup, in pegged, fly-front pants, white cotton undershirt showing beneath a man’s button-down shirt, black penny loafers, and a ducktail haircut. A couple would consist of one of each. Dress was the indicator regarding with whom one might or might not flirt. But at the Club Laurel, a North Hollywood cocktail lounge in its heyday during the same years, which catered to older, more affluent or upwardly striving lesbians, there was little discernible difference between two members of a couple. The tone of the club was set by the singer-manager, Beverly Shaw, who would entertain in the style of Marlene Dietrich, perched atop the piano bar in impeccably tailored suits, high heels, beautifully coiffed hair, and just the right amount of lipstick. Women in more obvious butch-femme couples were quickly made to feel out of place in such an environment.

  Generally, however, the bar culture was alienating to middleclass lesbians who felt they had little in common with the women who predominated in most lesbian bars. In an article that appeared in One in 1954, the lesbian writer described the gay bars as being “slightly removed from Hell” and hoped for a public meeting place for lesbians “who wish more from life than the nightmare of whiskey and sex, brutality and vanity, self-pity and despair.” Her pulp novel description of the bars was echoed by others who were resentful that the most public manifestation of the subculture, the bars, often seemed to offer only pleasures that were discomfitting to “well-brought-up” females of the 1950s. Young women who wanted to maintain their middleclass self-image had a particularly difficult time. Jane, who was a USC student during those years, says that to her the bars were degrading: “Their location in awful neighborhoods, the people who drank too much and didn’t have their lives together, just the idea of being in a bar. I felt I had no place there.” Barbara Gittings describes her early experiences in Philadelphia gay bars in similar terms:

  Since I didn’t have much money and didn’t like to drink anyway, I’d hold a glass of ice water and pretend it was gin on the rocks. I’d get into conversation with other women, but I’d usually find we didn’t really have any common interests. We just happened both to be gay. I just didn’t run into any lesbians who shared my interests in books and hostel trips and baroque music. They all seemed to groove on Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra and nothing older. It was only later, in other settings, that I found gay people I was really congenial with. In those days I felt there was no real place for me in the straight culture but the gay bar culture wasn’t the place for me either.39

  To older middleclass lesbians who had made a circle of friends, what they saw as their incompatibility with bar lesbians presented no great difficulty. But young lesbians even of their class, who did not know where else to meet other women who loved women and who were not easily welcomed into the closed, conservative and often fearful circles of the older women, could be very lonely in the 1950s and ’60s.

  Because middleclass lesbians were less stereotypically obvious as homosexuals, they paid less dearly in everyday life than their working-class counterparts who were more blatant in their public behaviors and in their style of dress. Women of the working-class lesbian subculture usually dressed and behaved as they did to communicate to each other, but on the streets—even going to and from their bars—they also inadvertantly communicated to heterosexuals, who were often intolerant of the implications of butch/femme style. They were harassed by any hoodlum who took it into his mind to be nasty.

  Butch women who would not be covert and the femmes who let themselves be seen with them often led dangerous lives. They courted violence. Many of them were certainly courageous in their insistence on presenting themselves in ways that felt authentic, but their bravery made them victims. Heterosexuals, particularly working-class young men who were still unsure of their own sexuality, could stand neither the idea of a woman usurping male privilege in comfortable dress and autonomy of movement nor the idea of a sexuality that totally excluded them. Their outrage was sometimes limited to name-calling but often took the form of physical violence, as young males challenged butch women in the streets, saying, “You look like a man, so fight like one.” The ghettos could be particularly hazardous. One researcher, who believes that in more recent times there has been a healthy integration among heterosexuals and homosexuals in ghettos such as central Harlem, says that his older black lesbian respondents informed him that from the 1930s through the 1950s lesbianism was looked o
n as a grave threat to working-class black males, who ascribed to lesbians a sexual prowess that exceeded their own. Butchy women were said to have been often “gang whipped by black men who were fearful of the myth of lesbian invincibility.”40

  Official hostility toward young and working-class lesbians was pervasive even outside the bars. Most middle-and upper-class lesbians who could pass for heterosexual could believe that policemen, whose salaries were paid by their tax money, were there to serve and protect them. But butches and their partners seldom had the luxury of that illusion. They learned to be wary, to maneuver, to move in the other direction if they saw the law coming. Jackie, who lived in New Orleans during the 1950s, says that she was often stopped by the police, who just wanted to scare her, and she had to develop “street smarts”:

  They would ask if I was a man or a woman. They could arrest a woman for impersonating a man, so you had to be sure you were wearing three pieces of women’s clothes. You learned to avoid the police by walking on the side of the street where the cars were parked, or in the opposite direction on the one way streets so they would have to back up to get to you. It was always in the backs of our minds that we could be arrested. Any woman wearing pants was suspect.41

  Working-class and young lesbians often felt hunted down during the 1950s and ’60s. For them, the pulp novels that presented lesbians as outcasts carried a veracity with which they could identify.

  Middleclass lesbians, on the other hand, usually had less difficulty. While they often feared that exposure would cost them their jobs and they had to cope with preposterous images of lesbians in the media and in psychoanalytic literature, generally their “discreet” style permitted them to carry on quotidian existence without molestation. As a lesbian writer for the magazine One proclaimed rather smugly in 1955: