Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  Some behaviors were adopted by them without modification. For example, s/m lesbians copied the handkerchief code developed by gay men who enjoyed s/m sexual practices: a handkerchief worn in the left hip pocket meant that one was dominant; in the right hip pocket, that one was submissive; a black handkerchief in the right hip pocket meant one desired to be whipped, and so forth. Leather, which had long represented to gay men machismo and a preference for s/m sex, was also imported into the lesbian community. Kathy Andrew, the proprietor of Stormy Leather, a San Francisco wholesale-retail establishment that caters especially to lesbians of the s/m community, explains that she got her initial inspiration working in a homosexual male leather store in the gay Castro district. Throughout the 1980s she made and sold leather specifically for lesbian s/m: leather corsets, leather bras with cut-out nipples, leather-and-lace maid’s aprons, leather garter belts, dildo harnesses in black or lavender leather. There was for a time such a growing interest in those products that her volume of business doubled each year during the mid-1980s.14

  There was some interest, too, in promoting more casual sex between lesbians, toward the goals of pleasure and liberation. Street cruising—making “quickie” sexual contact with strangers, which gay men had always enjoyed—has never been a lesbian practice, not only because of the way women have been socialized, but also because of the physiology of female sexuality. But that is not to say that lesbians have never envied men the ease with which they obtain sexual relief with a partner. Writing at the height of lesbian-feminism, in a 1975 essay titled “Queen for a Day: A Stranger in Paradise,” Rita Mae Brown expressed her disappointment in the lesbian’s lack of opportunity for casual sex. She described dressing in male drag and invading Xanadu, a gay male bathhouse in New York. Women had built no Xanadus where they could make casual contacts, Brown pointed out, not only because they lacked the money but also because they lacked the concept. They had been too well taught that sex for the sake of sex is wrong, that it must at least be connected with romance. She suggested that such a rigid equation of sex with romance and/or commitment had limited lesbians’ choices. Brown voiced a cry in that essay that was enthusiastically echoed by lesbian sexual radicals a decade later:

  I do want a Xanadu [Brown said]. I want the option of random sex with no emotional commitment when I need sheer physical relief…. It is in our interest to build places where we have relief, refuge, release. Xanadu is not a lurid dream; it’s the desire of a woman to have options. Like men we should have choices: deep, long-term relationships, the baths, short-term affairs.

  Brown’s avant-garde conviction was that women could not hope to be truly equal unless they were sexually equal and shared men’s prerogatives even in the area of casual sex.15

  But apparently because of socialization, from which lesbians often had as much difficulty escaping as heterosexual women, the realization of such prerogatives was not achievable in the 1980s despite militant efforts. Serial monogamy continued throughout the decade to be the predominant pattern of lesbian sexuality. The institutions that lesbian sexual radicals devised to expand avenues of lesbian sexual expression were either short-lived or greatly modified to reflect values that are, ironically, not very different from those promoted by the cultural feminists. For example, in the early 1980s lesbian Xanadus became a reality, but their success was limited. JoAnna remembers attending the Sutro Baths, a San Francisco swingers’ bathhouse that had opened its doors exclusively to lesbians one night a week: “Six or seven women walked into this large group room a few minutes after I arrived. One of them shouted, ‘Let’s get down!’ and everybody started doing everything. Everywhere you looked there were women doing it, either in couples or in large groups.” Such a scene was precisely what Brown and the sexual radicals who followed her had envisioned, but this initial enthusiasm for casual sex was not long maintained among lesbians. Clare, who attended the Sutro a few months later, shortly before it discontinued its lesbian nights, says that she found only eight or ten women in the orgy room, sitting around in their towels, talking. “Nobody was even kissing. We ended up playing a nude game of pool.” There were apparently not enough lesbians who felt comfortable about public sex and would attend often enough to make the venture economically feasible for the Sutro and the few other bathhouses that attempted lesbian nights, and the AIDS scare soon militated against further endeavors by the baths.16

  Another attempt to expand the possibilities of lesbian sexuality—lesbian strip shows—illustrates how female values that reflect the ways women have been socialized can infiltrate even the baldest of male sexual institutions when adopted by lesbians. The first shows were staged in the early 1980s in lesbian bars in San Francisco and drew large crowds, with women reportedly “hanging from the rafters,” although by the late ’80s the novelty had worn off and sheer lust alone could not sustain the institution. But clearly sheer lust was never the point of those shows, though on the surface they seemed to resemble heterosexual burlesque where nude women danced and men ogled. Lesbian strip shows, which began as a determined attempt to claim male prerogatives and increase women’s choices, were generally overlaid with women’s consciousness. The strippers who did lesbian burlesque sometimes had an almost spiritual zeal for their work that is not found among those who do burlesque for men.

  One stripper, Rainbeau, who also managed several other dancers in a group called Rainbeau Productions, explained that she used a diversity of women in her company, including black women, fat women, and older women, because it made the diverse groups in the audience feel good about themselves. “I pray to the goddess before I go out on stage,” she remarked, “to help me do it right.” Rainbeau’s analysis of her work as a lesbian stripper was patently political, a product of lesbian-feminist consciousness of the ’70s, though expressed through the ’80s’ sexual radicals’ desire for more freedom of sexual exploration: “Women’s eroticism is a main source of female power. It’s taken away from us by men because it’s tied in with bearing their children. But we try to help women understand that it’s important for them to reclaim their power and love their bodies.” Tatoo Blue, who also did burlesque exclusively for lesbians, had similar ideas about her work being more significant than mere lustful entertainment. Stripping for other women was “a way of expressing myself or touching people without ever knowing them…. What I do is make people stop and think about a lot more than just a body taking her clothes off.”17 Lesbian strippers in front of lesbian audiences transformed the heterosexual institution of burlesque, bringing to it traditional female values—nurturing, relating, emotionally touching—that had been totally outside the concerns of such entertainment.

  Several lesbian movie companies devoted to making lesbian sex films also emerged in the 1980s, such as Blush Productions, which released a cinematic trilogy, Private Pleasures, in 1985 that laughed at the notion of “politically correct” sexuality and gave women permission to explore butch/femme role playing, s/m, leather, the use of dildos, and “fist fucking” (a technique that spread among the gay male community in the 1970s, in which one man gradually inserts his entire fist into another man’s anus. Among lesbians who adopted the technique in the 1980s the act was often accomplished vaginally). But like in lesbian burlesque, and unlike in similar heterosexual institutions, sheer sleaze was less an express value in lesbian porno films than promoting lesbian sexual freedom to explore.

  Generally the lesbian film companies emphasized the erotic rather than the pornographic. Lavender Blue Productions, for example, produced Where There’s Smoke in 1986, in which the sex is even politically correct: two women drink tea and have gentle conversation before they make love orally, with soft guitar music in the background. In the same vein, Tigress Productions made the film Erotic in Nature, which, although advertised in lesbian pornographic magazines, promised the reader to go beyond pornography: not only does it “steam with pleasure,” according to the producers, but it also “exults in beauty and displays a tenderness which we feel will
warm your hearts.” The film aimed at the graphic sexuality that lesbian sex radicals encouraged, but maintained traditional female moods and images.

  Like lesbian burlesque shows and films, lesbian-centered pornographic books and magazines in the 1980s were also concerned with more than titillation. The lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs announced in its first issue, in 1984, that its goals were beyond entertainment: the staff wanted to encourage “sexual freedom, respect and empowerment for lesbians.” Susie Bright, On Our Backs’ editor, said of the magazine’s purpose, “I think women should be pissed that sex is a good old boys’ club and they weren’t allowed in. We’re letting them in.” Bad Attitude, another lesbian sex magazine that began in 1984, claimed: “We call our magazine Bad Attitude because that’s what women who take control of our sexuality are told we have.” The magazine was published by a collective of lesbians who were committed to “a radical politics of female sexuality.” Although both magazines featured stories and articles that advocated casual and even sometimes violent sex, often in fantasies that mirrored what has more commonly been gay male sexual behavior, the editorial emphasis was invariably on responsibility such as consensuality and safety, as well as freedom.18

  The biggest ad feature in lesbian porno magazines was the personals, in which women described themselves and the partners they desired. Personals have had some history among lesbians since the mid-1970s, when the Wishing Well, a quarterly devoted to personal ads, presented itself as “an alternative to The Well of Loneliness.” The Wishing Well personals provided a vivid contrast to gay male personal ads at that time, since the lesbian emphasis was on seeking romance, while the gay male emphasis was generally on seeking sex partners. But some ads even in the lesbian porno magazines of the 1980s continued to call wistfully for a partner with whom to share moonlit walks: “Let me prove to you romance is not dead,” one implored. Others forthrightly admitted, again in language first used by gay men during their 1970s sexual revolution, to wanting “fuck buddies” and rejected romance and “marriage.” One woman confessed in a personal ad: “I’m tired of pretending love when I want sex.” However, the ads often began with the boldness advocated by lesbian sexual radicals, listing, for example, interests in “bare bottom spankings, immobilizing bondage, enemas, colonic irrigations, vaginal and rectal exams, dildos, vibrators,” but ended on a more conventional female note: “After I’ve endured what was bestowed upon me, comfort me in your loving arms. Long term relationship possible.”19

  It seems that to this point, female upbringing, which inculcates in most women a certain passivity and reticence, has made it difficult for many lesbians to admit or encourage within themselves an unalloyed aggressive interest in sex outside of love and commitment. It is not surprising that as women they have problems even admitting such interests. Kinsey reported that 77 percent of the males he interviewed acknowledged being aroused by depictions of explicit sex, but only 22 percent of the females admitted to such arousal. A more recent study gives a possible insight into this discrepancy between male and female response to pornography. Both men and women were exposed to explicitly erotic audiotapes while they were connected to instruments that measured their physical arousal. The instruments actually recorded no difference in arousal rate between men and women, but while all the male subjects who were aroused admitted arousal, only half the aroused female subjects admitted arousal.20 Of course it is much more difficult for a man to deny the physical, very visual evidence of his arousal than it is for a woman, who has only to turn a mental page in her mind and say—and perhaps even believe—the arousal never happened. Females have been socially encouraged in such internal and external denial.

  Even some of those who prided themselves on aspects of their sexual liberation in the 1980s still had to admit to their difficulty in overcoming their well-inculcated sexual timidity. One woman who made a living manufacturing sex items and spoke unabashedly of having attended sex orgies nevertheless admitted:

  It’s still not easy to pick someone up at a bar. What do you do and say? With gay men, they have it down pat. They don’t worry if the other man’s lover is there. With women you worry, and you feel guilty. And you always have this frantic look about you. Everyone I’ve spoken to says it takes ages and ages before you do such things with ease. Maybe never.22

  The lesbian sexual radicals thus found that their struggle to encourage a more adventurous sexuality among lesbians was not easily won. While some few lesbians were successful in constructing a new sexuality for themselves, changing old attitudes among lesbians on a large scale proved to be virtually impossible in the course of one decade.

  The Attraction of “Opposites”

  Another way the sexual radicals hoped to enliven sexuality (even for those engaged in long-term lesbian relationships) was in attempting to avoid lesbian merging by encouraging polarities such as “top” and “bottom” or butch and femme. While some lesbians who engaged in sexual polarities felt that those roles were natural to them and had no superimposed meaning, others in the 1980s deliberately experimented in the hope that games of opposites would help them escape from the tedium of egalitarian vanilla sex. They also believed that the boldness of the roles made a blatant statement of their desire to overturn those conventional female sexual attitudes that lesbians shared with heterosexual women.

  The group that worked the hardest to break down conventional female sexual attitudes was those lesbians who rallied around the label of sadomasochists, not merely as an expression of private sexual taste but as a public stance. Their purpose, in addition to enjoying their own sexual preferences, was consciousness-raising: it was their goal to get women to understand that they have a right to their sexual desires, no matter how unconventional or “perverted.” In fact, they referred to themselves as “perverts,” both to parody public conceptions of them and to insist that it is all right, even admirable and beneficial, to be what society has dubbed “perverted.”

  Perhaps because they had to battle so much with the cultural feminists, lesbians who were involved in s/m and other radical forms of sexual expression often made pleasure seem like medical prescription. The clubs devoted to lesbian s/m during the 1980s such as Samois and the Outcasts in San Francisco, Leather and Lace in Los Angeles, the Lesbian Sex Mafia in New York, and SHELIX in Northampton, Massachusetts, were careful to explain that s/m sex has nothing to do with real-life violence or oppression of women. Instead, it is a cathartic sexual game based on fantasy, an important kind of sexual psychodrama in which the partners agree upon the limits, establish “safe words” that permit the bottom to stop the action whenever she wishes, and help each other return to everyday consciousness when the scene is concluded. They argued that it gave healthy release both to the top, who could deal in a controlled setting with her human perplexities about power and aggression, and to the bottom, who could surrender to her sexual pleasures and lose control safely. They insisted that it in no way affected a woman’s real-life personage, as a lesbian limerick about s/m bondage from a bottom’s perspective suggested:

  Jane rode around on a Harley-bike.

  To strangers she looked just like a bull dyke.

  But at home in bed,

  To her lover she pled:

  “Get the ribbons. You know what I like.”22

  Many of them saw s/m not simply as a bold sexual adventure, but also as a solution to “lesbian bed death” within long-term lesbian relationships. It was a way of creating a “barrier” that is necessary for continued sexual interest by constructing sexual polarities in bed such as mistress and slave, dominant and submissive, top and bottom. It could be a useful aid to monogamy if a couple wished to utilize it that way.

  Women who were involved in lesbian s/m in the ’80s also generally maintained that there is nothing about s/m that is inconsistent with the principles of feminism, since it is opposed to all hierarchies based on gender. The early founders of Samois, in fact, had their roots in the feminist movement and were among the first to in
sist that women must claim their sexual birthright, which was no different from that of men and only appeared different because society’s emphasis on exclusive gender identity suppressed natural similarities. Women who joined such organizations were usually s/m enthusiasts, but many felt they had joined not so much for s/m itself as for their perception that those groups presented the ultimate in female sexual liberation. The meetings were erotically affirming, conveying the idea that “sex is o.k. It’s o.k. to be sexual, to feel sexual, to act sexual.”23 Members believed that they were modeling an important concept of sexual freedom for all women, since women could not be free unless they owned their own bodies and had unrestricted right to pursue their erotic pleasures.

  S/m leaders specifically articulated connections between unfettered sexuality and the success of feminism. They claimed that examination of their s/m interests was a “feminist inquiry.” Corona, a professional s/m dominatrix, who did counseling for s/m lesbians and staged “Erotic Power Play” workshops as well as s/m orgies, asserted that feminists must not be afraid of power nor of looking at themselves to understand how their psyches operate and s/m helps them achieve such fearlessness. Other s/m activists emphasized that feminism that runs from sexual exploration is “femininism”; it is restrictive and contributes to women’s difficulty in breaking out of their hindering socialization as “good girls.” Feminists had much to learn from sexual outlaws, they said.24

  Several lesbian psychologists of the 1980s helped to promote s/m by agreeing that it could be a healthy working out of traumas rather than a giving in to them and that as an exploration of sexual variety it could add richness to lesbian sexual lives. They pointed out that dominance and submission, as well as pleasure and pain, are deep and troubling issues in society and in the individual psyche and that there is real value in exploring and experimenting with feelings about them. The realms of sexual fantasy and erotic play, they suggested, were enormously fruitful for examining these issues. The lesbian psychologists gave support to women who wanted to experiment by their hypothesis that s/m—where mind and body, ideas and sensations interplay—was much too promising for opportunities in self-knowledge to remain hidden behind the curtains of taboo.25