Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  The growing liberality toward lesbian sexuality eventually infiltrated some of the most committed bastions of heterosexuality. For example, Vogue Magazine, which had always appealed to women who belonged to or aspired to belong to rich men, proclaimed in a radical chic article, “Who’s Afraid of Lesbian Sex?”: “Most women know, if they are honest with themselves, that it sometimes would be possible for them to connect their erotic knowledge with their early love and choose a woman partner.”22 Sexual love between “normal” women became less unthinkable than it had been for decades, and attitudes in some circles came to resemble those of the experimental 1920s.

  The new view of sexuality coincided with the awakening of the feminist movement, which had slept a long sleep but began to rouse itself in the early ’60s. Women witnessed the demands for rights by other oppressed groups and concluded that it was time for their own voices to be heard. As women had during the first wave of feminism in the nineteenth century, the new feminists now pointed out that females were kept second-class citizens by men who claimed all the social, political, and personal powers for themselves, and that the only way women would attain power was by banding together to demand it. Eventually some feminists, taking this argument to its radical conclusion, came to believe that banding together could be effective only if a woman did not go home to sleep in the enemy camp but instead devoted all her energies—not only social and political but sexual as well—to other women. While some nineteenth-century feminists may have felt that way also, their times would not have permitted the articulation of such an idea. The period that followed the sexual revolution of the 1960s did. These new wave women felt free to call themselves lesbian-feminists. To them “lesbian” meant a choice any female could make.

  “Lesbian-feminism” short-circuited a hundred years of social history—all the declarations of the sexologists and the media that separated off the lesbian from the “normal” women. Lesbian-feminists declared that the lesbian was the same as any woman and that any women could “existentially” convert from heterosexuality to homosexuality in the name of women’s liberation. Their convictions were made credible by a new minimalist definition of mental health that called into question older views of homosexuality as sick and abnormal. As one sociologist described it: “You don’t end up in a psychiatrist’s office or in the hands of the police, you stay out of jail, you keep a job, you pay your taxes, and you don’t worry people too much. That is called mental health.”23 Such a definition was impressive after the 1950s, when mental health was tantamount to conformity to an inflexible set of prescriptions. It served to encourage women in the belief that the gender of their love objects had nothing whatever to do with whether or not they were healthy, productive human beings.

  The hippie phenomenon during the 1960s—free sex, unisex haircuts and clothes, love-ins, challenge to authority and conventional morality—also served as a backdrop against which homosexuality appeared less outrageous and abnormal. For many young women who were hippies, lesbianism seemed like just one more exciting adventure, conceivable especially because hippies generally seemed to give at least lip service to the idea that if you grooved on someone, gender was not a major consideration. As Clare, who was a teenager during the ’60s, recalls:

  When you start getting free in your lifestyle, it’s hard to regress and go backwards. What got me into the lesbian trip is I hung out with hippie types, smoked pot, worked in the antiwar movement, rebelled in every way I could think of. I slept with most of the men in my group. Then there were two women in the group who had three-ways with men. I thought that sounded interesting. I was open to experience as a way of living.24

  Many of the young women who experimented with lesbian sexuality in the context of the hippie milieu saw it as only an experiment and nothing more. Others took it far more seriously, sometimes through personal inclination, sometimes through sexual politics. Although hippie culture had permitted women like Clare to have their first lesbian experiences, some of them realized, once they discovered radical feminist issues (which had considerable appeal to their radical natures), that hippie culture was sexist and patriarchal. They became disgusted over incidents which demonstrated they were not considered serious members of their groups, such as when hippie males at People’s Park in Berkeley demanded “Free Land, Free Dope, Free Women” and ignored their existence. The hippie milieu both liberated many women to have their first lesbian experience and pushed them into lesbianism as a way of life in order to escape hippie sexism.

  To some of these radical women, lesbianism was also appealing by virtue of the fact that love between women had long suffered under an outlaw status and it appeared to them to be one more necessary slap in the face of convention. In addition, the image of the Amazon—which had often been used as a euphemism for the lesbian—seemed to them especially seductive in an era when wars of liberation were being fought in Vietnam and Latin America and among ethnic minorities in the United States. In Amazonian guise they now had their own wars to fight.

  Young females who were brought into the New Left by the antiwar movement in the 1960s had similar experiences. Like the hippie movement, the Left was countercultural and radical on the surface, but its attitude toward women was no more liberated than that of the conservatives. The women of the Left who became interested in feminism when the movement was reborn in the mid-1960s had honed their analytical tools through New Left debate and literature. They not only soon resented that they had been reduced to making brown rice instead of policy, but they were also quick to recognize sex exploitation and inequality in bed as being political. When they tried to raise women’s issues in leftist groups such as SNCC and the National Conference for New Politics and were unsuccessful, they were convinced that they could no longer work complacently with males of the New Left. They would have to begin meeting separately if they wished to focus on those issues. Some of their radical all-women’s groups eventually evolved into lesbian-feminism. In their conviction that “the personal is political,” they came to believe that lesbian-feminism was appropriate for all women who took themselves seriously and wanted to be taken seriously instead of being “fucked over by the patriarchy” in the secondary, auxiliary status to which females had generally been relegated in heterosexual life.25 Thus the liberal sexual milieu of the era, the spread of radical behaviors, and the anger toward heterosexuality fomented by feminism all worked to permit women who might have been fearful of the “abnormality” of same-sex love in other eras to investigate it at this time and to scoff at the notion that it was abnormal.

  The Lesbian-Feminist Revolution

  The gay revolution took its steam largely from “essentialist” homosexuals who believed that homosexuality was no less involuntary than being black or Hispanic. Like members of the early Scientific Humanitarian Committee, they argued that because they did not chose to be homosexual—they were born or made as they were—discrimination against them could have no justification. Developing alongside of that revolution of gays was the other revolution of those young women who loved other women and wished to make a political statement out of their love but denied that they were “gay.” They insisted on being called lesbian-feminist.

  The connection between lesbianism and feminism was not new, but in the past it had been made with unchallenged scorn. When those late nineteenth-century antifeminists who wanted to scare females away from the women’s movement used the cudgel of “abnormality,” warning that “Women-Righters” were “men-women,” out to seduce innocent young girls and spread their taint under the guise of feminism, feminists did not dare respond to their attacks. With the start of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, those opposed to women’s rights used the same tactic, but this time, in the context of a more radical era, it backfired. Ti-Grace Atkinson, an early leader of the second wave of feminism, remembers that the first time she was called a lesbian was in the mid-’60s when she joined a group of women to picket the New York Times in order to desegregate the help-wanted a
ds. “I was so puzzled by the connection,” she recalls, “that I became curious. Whenever the enemy keeps lobbing bombs into some area you consider unrelated to your defense, it’s worth investigating.” The investigaton brought her and many other radical feminists to the conviction that “lesbian” has always been a kind of code word for female resistance.26

  Those late nineteenth-century enemies of the women’s movement who had called feminism “a fertile breeding ground for lesbianism” were even more right than they knew—not because lesbians were vampirishly waiting to suck the blood of young innocents who had been temporarily deluded into being angry with men, but rather because feminism dissected the nature of the problems between men and women with a compelling analysis. It forced women to see ways in which they were exploited, to hear everywhere the “clicks,” as Ms. Magazine called the sudden insights one might have when confronted with a sexist incident. In the light of women’s new awareness, lesbianism seemed very attractive, and more and more radical feminists came to doubt if heterosexuality could really be consonant with their personal and political ideology. Just as heterosexuals in the past had seen their own variety of love as superior and homosexuality as a manifestaton of emotional illness, so the new lesbian-feminists, many of whom had spent all their previous adult years as exclusively heterosexual, now saw homosexuality as the highest form of love and heterosexuality as a sign of female masochism.

  Lesbianism even came to be regarded as the quintessence of feminism, and in some ways the values of the lesbian-feminists of the 1970s were not unlike those of the pioneer feminists who lived together as “devoted companions” at the beginning of the century. Lesbianism implied that a woman could live without a man if she wanted to and still feel like a successful person. It suggested that work might be an essential part of a woman’s life and that a woman should want to work both to support herself and change society. It emphasized the importance of women loving and respecting themselves and other women. It had nothing to do with the sexologists’ notions and outrageous theories. Therefore, when a New York group of feminists who called themselves the Radicalesbians explained in a 1970 paper that as lesbian-feminists they were “women-identified-women,” putting women first in their lives in all ways, including the sexual, and that all feminists must become “women-identified,” their argument struck a chord for many. “What is a lesbian?” they asked in that paper. Their response expanded the meaning of lesbianism so that it applied to a far greater number of women:

  A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is a woman who … acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and free human being than her society … cares to allow her…. She has not been able to accept the limitations and oppressions laid on her by the most basic role of her society—the female role.

  In one sense, the Radicalesbian group’s definition came full circle, back to the early sexologists’ definition of the lesbian as a woman whose behavior is not appropriate to “womanliness.” But while the sexologists saw such women as rare and congenitally tainted, the new lesbian-feminists saw them as ubiquitous and heroic. Lesbianism was to the lesbian-feminists a cure-all for the ills perpetrated by sexism. Lesbianism was “women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation and the basis for cultural revolution.”27 And the best news was that any woman could embrace it.

  Lesbian-feminists thus took a revisionist approach to essentialism. It was true, they said, that lesbians were born “that way.” But actually all women were born “that way,” all had the capacity to be lesbians, but male supremacy destroyed that part of most women before they could understand what was happening. Lesbian-feminists emphatically rejected the notion that they were part of a homosexual minority. While the movement did not deny the existence of primary lesbians (“essentialists” who believed they had been lesbians for as long as they could remember), it also encouraged women to become elective, “existentialist” lesbians (to make a conscious political choice to leave heterosexuality and embrace lesbianism). Rita Mae Brown, one of the most articulate spokeswomen for lesbian-feminism, declared:

  I became a lesbian because the culture that I live in is violently anti-woman. How could I, a woman, participate in a culture that denies my humanity? … To give a man support and love before giving it to a sister is to support that culture, that power system.

  To love and support women, Brown said, was lesbian. In that sense, lesbian was revolutionary, and it was imperative that all women who wanted to be feminists stop collaborating with the enemy and join that revolution.28

  There were probably more lesbians in America during the 1970s than any other time in history, because radical feminism had helped redefine lesbianism to make it almost a categorical imperative for all women truly interested in the welfare and progress of other women. As one radical feminist, who divorced her physician husband in 1974 to become a lesbian, characterized it, lesbianism was seen to be “the only noble choice a committed feminist could make.”29 In this respect, the 1970s offer a prime example of sexuality as a social construct. It was demonstrated in that decade how the spirit of an era could influence sexual behavior in large numbers of people at least as much as those other factors that had long been regarded as determining sexuality.

  Radical feminists propounded the behaviorist view of sexuality: as in a Utopian socialist society where the individual could be conditioned to be nonviolent, noncompetitive, incorruptible, so too could women be conditioned to change their attitudes and desires. They would exit from the patriarchy through severing their relationships with men, which were seen as the cornerstone of the subordination of women, and they could learn not only how to make a new society with women, but also how to respond sexually to women.30

  Unlike the era of romantic friends or devoted companions, when sexuality might have been negligible in a woman’s life, in the sex conscious ’7°s women felt as guilty about denying themselves sexual pleasures as their predecessors would have felt guilty had they indulged. Thus when radical feminists who had previously been heterosexual experimented with love between women and discovered that it was indeed a sexual alternative for them, they were often relieved and elated. It was not that they had generally disliked sex when they were heterosexual, but rather they had come to despise all the personal and political aggravations that heterosexuality brought in its wake. They were delighted to discover in the heady early days of lesbian-feminism that they could experience sexual pleasure with other women without the inevitable subordination. As one woman who had been married before she became a lesbian-feminist in 1970 now recalls:

  We investigated the other side of humanity and it became very viable. We weren’t going to give up sex, and we didn’t have to. Emotionally what we had with men wasn’t fulfilling. We weren’t being taken care of in those relationships, and so we stepped out of them, sexually as well as in all other ways. We were bright enough to perceive that it would be decades before men were even in the ball park.

  Some radical feminists were only “political lesbians,” meaning that they sympathized with lesbian complaints about men and were not opposed to sexual love between women, but they chose celibacy for themselves; however, most “lesbian-feminists” did not deny themselves erotic relations with other women. Their view that men were dispensible in all ways, including the sexual, was dramatized by the logo on the T-shirts some wore and the posters that hung above their beds: “A Woman Without a Man is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.”31

  Many 1970s feminists were encouraged in their exploration of lesbianism through consciousness-raising (CR) groups, small groups in which women met to discuss their personal lives in relation to sexual politics. In the course of those discussions women often came to believe that men were kept in power as a group because of women’s nurturing, subordinate personal relations with them. It was heterosexuality that supported male supremacy. With that realization, lesbianism became for those women t
he rational next step. They could choose not to be heterosexual and thus not support what they saw as the power system that oppressed them. As one San Antonio woman who had been married to a Presbyterian minister for twenty-five years and had raised five children now tells it:

  I supported him while he was going to school. I walked the floor with the babies and never bothered him so he could study. And later I even did prayer meetings for him. My whole life had been devoted to doing his stuff. And then I went back to school and joined NOW and a CR group, and for the first time things were crystalized for me. I realized through CR that I didn’t have to be a good little girl anymore. What I wanted was an equal relationship, but I doubted it would be possible with a male—not any of the men I knew. They were trained as I had been trained, to have certain expectations about men’s privileges and women’s duties, and they had no reason to give it up. I did. I knew with a woman we could both just start from scratch.32

  CR brought many feminists to such radical insights.

  Through those CR groups they also became aware of the need for lesbian-feminist political goals that were far more radical than those of gay revolutionaries whose aim was equality with heterosexuals. Lesbian-feminist revolutionaries wanted a restructuring of the entire system of heterosexuality, which, they declared, was at the root of women’s oppression. They wanted to provide for all women what they believed was a healthy alternative to male-female relationships. Their political work was focused not only on taking care of the problems wrought by heterosexuality, such as staffing abortion clinics and battered women’s retreats, but also on creating a women’s culture (see chapter 9) that would be lesbian-feminist and clearly superior to the culture that men had foisted on humanity.