Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  The visible lesbian community became more racially and ethnically diverse in the 1980s, succeeding to some extent where radical lesbian-feminists had reaped mostly frustration (though it was the radicals who had helped to foster awareness in minority lesbians, who now began to see themselves as a group with lesbian and feminist political interests). “Integration,” however, has been complicated because minorities who were very sensitized to issues of injustice were often quick to see prejudice among white lesbians. White lesbians, hoping to ameliorate such distrust, helped to place minorities in leadership positions in the dominant lesbian movement—which sometimes backfired, resulting in accusations of tokenism and then more distrust.23 By the end of the ’80s minority lesbians usually felt most comfortable working and socializing with each other when possible; however, they were also willing to offer their input to the larger lesbian community on issues they felt were pertinent. Although the arrangement was not ideal as far as activist white lesbians were concerned, it was consonant with their desire to nurture diversity and be able to rely on unity when it was crucial to the circumstances.

  Minority women had been slower to organize as lesbians because they often witnessed acute homophobia in their parent communities. It was difficult for them to risk the animosity to which lesbian activism could subject them. But the growing feminist sentiments in America during the 1970s eventually encouraged many minority women also to choose to be lesbians and finally to dare to organize as lesbians. Most refused, however, to call themselves lesbian-feminists because they were alienated by certain tenets of lesbian-feminism such as lesbian separatism, which, they believed, shared many of the components of racism. Minority lesbians preferred to call themsleves “lesbians of color” in the ’80s, rejecting the 1970s term “Third World,” which they now felt to imply that the “First” and “Second” worlds are better. As their numbers grew in the visible community, especially in the largest cities, it was not uncommon by the end of the ’80s for there to be not only “lesbians of color” groups but also organized groups of Latina lesbians, Chicana lesbians, Asian lesbians, South Asian lesbians, Japanese lesbians, black lesbians, fat black lesbians, etc.

  Their splintering reflects a ubiquitous desire to discover common roots and experiences, a desire that had been prevalent in the parent culture as well over the last two decades. But it was intensified for lesbians. While in earlier eras accepting a lesbian identity was in itself so overwhelming that it was important just to find other lesbians with whom to share that identity, the loosening of social strictures in the ’70s made the choice to be lesbian somewhat less overwhelming. By the ’80s many lesbians required something more than just a shared sexual identification with other lesbians. The larger the lesbian community grew, the deeper became the realization that a shared sexual orientation alone does not guarantee that its members will have much in common. A great longing emerged to have all aspects of self validated by the group, not just the sexual aspect.

  While the white lesbian community saw itself as being welcoming, many lesbians of color believed that their deeper selves were left untouched in that community. They needed to combat the sense of alienation that comes from perceiving an insufficient commonality. But because their parent communities were usually intolerant of homosexuality, there was nowhere that they could feel that their entire self was recognized. Abby, a Native American, characterized that sense of frustration:

  When I went to Eureka, to my Yoruk tribe, I felt as though I was somewhat accepted but they were not always ready for me as a queer, so I had to keep that part hidden a little. It felt easier for me to live in San Francisco than at home. But when I was in San Francisco, in a lesbian group, I felt they couldn’t understand the Indian part of me. They’re different from what I’m used to: different values, different approaches, a different sense of humor. They didn’t know about those families back home I grew up with, the disputes, the importance of questions like “How’s the fishing?” There was no place where all of me was validated.

  Other lesbians of color such as Mariana Romo-Carmona, a Latina lesbian from New York, described such frustration as feeling “kind of like you’re in exile wherever you go.” She explained that it was to combat that sense of exile that she helped to form the Latina lesbian group Las Buenas Amigas (the Good Friends—a Spanish euphemism for women in lesbian relationships). She believed that such groups were vital because, try as they might, white lesbians had no way of understanding the alienation of lesbians of color or of accepting their unique perceptions.24

  The last minority to become part of the lesbians of color groups in the ’80s were Asians. Although there were isolated Asian lesbians within the community during the ’70s and earlier, it was not until the next decade, as more Asians became Americanized and broke out of the confinement of immigrant values and deeply entrenched traditionalism, that their numbers became sufficient to permit them to establish a separate group within some lesbian communities. The largest Asian lesbian group was in San Francisco, which has the oldest and therefore most acculturated Asian population. But Asian lesbian organizations were also started in other areas, such as the Chicago Asian Lesbians Moving (CALM), the New York based Asian Lesbians of the East Coast, Houston’s Gay Asians and Friends, and Philadelphia’s Lesbian/Gay Asian Network.25

  At the 1987 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, Asian lesbians gathered as a group, chanting, “Say it clear,/Say it loud,/We are Asian, gay and proud.” After the march they declared in Phoenix Rising, an “Asian/Pacific Lesbian Newsletter”:

  We are not going to let ourselves be forgotten…. We are so marginal, so out of view, a secret our own people won’t dare admit. To mainstream America we are unheard of, unthought of, impossible. A contradiction in terms. Seeing our faces and hearing our names on national news was one step closer to where we can be.

  While in the past they may have been relieved by their lesbian invisibility, in the late ’80s it became a source of irritation to many Asian lesbians. They wanted to claim a place in what they saw as a flourishing community that represented women’s strength and an effective protest against the coercions into feminine weakness they often associated with their parent culture. They became anxious to dispel the myth that lesbianism is a Western phenomenon and, in doing so, legitimize their own choices.26

  Lesbians of color in the 1980s were sometimes as critical of the white lesbian community as their “Third World” counterparts were in the ’70s. They pointed to instances of racism that they believed were rampant even in the lesbian bars. “At Billie Jean’s Bar in Kansas City,” a Missouri lesbian insisted, “there was an unspoken policy that we all knew about. If you were white you could get by with a driver’s licence. If you were black you needed three pieces of i.d. and suddenly there was a cover charge.” But unlike earlier years, when Third World lesbians suffered such discrimination by themselves, in the ’80s they were able to make coalitions with white lesbians to protest. At Private Eyes, a woman’s club in New York, when word got out that the manager “had instructions from headquarters to not let too many blacks in,” lesbians of color joined together with predominantly white lesbian groups for a victorious protest. The incident itself confirmed the conviction of many lesbians of color that racism is far from eradicated among lesbians and that they have reason to look primarily to each other for comfort and unity. But the interracial picketing helped to dispel the impression that racism was ubiquitous in the larger lesbian community.27

  Other minorities, such as disabled lesbians and fat lesbians, continued the battle that they began in the 1970s for recognition and regard in the lesbian community. They organized groups such as Fat Dykes and published magazines such as Dykes, Disability, and Stuff. They adapted the psychology and rhetoric of the gay liberation movement, calling themselves “differently abled;” referring to “fat liberation;” and proclaiming, “The space I take up is the space I deserve.” Because the basis of lesbianism as a lifestyle is a challenge to accepted notions about what
is normal, they felt that the lesbian community, more than any other group, was obliged to understand and help them fight their own battles against stale perceptions of “normal” regarding appearance or abilities. They demanded that the community continually renew its commitment to pluralism and nondiscrimination and that it invent new and better ways of treating one another, lest it mirror the injustices of the outside world. For example, when a fat lesbian was fired from a counterculture food collective in 1988, she not only brought the case to the Fair Employment Commission but also called on the lesbian community to boycott the collective and write letters of protest against “fat phobia.” Throughout the ’80s splinterings continued among lesbians with special interests. However, they invariably grappled for acknowledgment as organized parts of the lesbian community, and they demanded support that would prove the community’s devotion to the principle of diversity-within-unity.28

  The visible lesbian community also became more diverse in the ’80s with regard to age. While in earlier decades it often seemed like a youth culture because as lesbians got older they would drop out of the visible community, in the ’80s new resources and particularly encouragement of diversity caused older lesbians and even old lesbians to remain and take an active part. Like other lesbians with differences, by the end of the 1980s they began to organize on their own, often clarifying their position to themselves and others with angry rhetoric. But the larger community took some care to assure them of a place despite differences, consciously opening up to include not only middle-aged lesbians, but old lesbians as well.

  In the 1980s old lesbians undertook for the first time to organize. They held gatherings such as the West Coast Conference and Celebration by and for Old Lesbians. The conference participants militantly preferred the term “old” for the same reason that other minorities have preferred to call themselves “black” or “dyke”—to defuse its power to sting and to reject trivializing euphemisms. The keynote speaker at the first conference set the tone with an angry volley charging her audience to confront ageism in lesbian and feminist groups, which, she said, is covered up as respect for older women. As one conference participant observed, “This was the birth of the angry old woman [cf. the “angry young man” of the 1950s]…. To walk in and see two hundred white haired dykes, all ready to stand up and assert themselves, was mind-boggling.” Like other minority lesbians, they looked to each other for a sense of solidarity, but at the same time they demanded visibility within the larger lesbian community. At the 1988 San Francisco Gay Pride March a contingent of old lesbians chanted as they marched, “2, 4, 6, 8, how do you know your grandma’s straight?”29

  Younger lesbians took seriously old lesbians’ criticism which was being voiced in books such as Barbara McDonald’s Look Me in the Eye and Baba Copper’s Over the Hill.30 Some of the younger women who were social workers (a time-honored profession among lesbians) focused their interest on lesbian gerontology. They helped start groups such as Gay and Lesbian Outreach to Elders (GLOE) and Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE), which attempted to encourage old lesbians to be a part of the visible lesbian community, offering services such as visiting homebound or isolated seniors, organizing lesbian senior citizen dances, and providing information regarding housing, health, and legal matters. The presence of old lesbians in the community served to remind younger lesbians that they could not simply sit and dream about the Lesbian Nation of the future. They had some responsibility to deal with those who were here now.

  The increased presence of children served a similar purpose. There had always been mothers within the lesbian community, but they usually became mothers through marriages that antedated their lives as lesbians, and they sometimes made other lesbians uncomfortable, since children were seen as antithetical to an all-women environment. In the ’80s, however, a growing number of women chose to have children after they established themselves as lesbians. One study of lesbians at the beginning of the 1980s indicated that 49 percent had considered motherhood since they became homosexual. The community generally supported such a choice by the 1980s. There was even a spate of books and films aimed specifically at lesbians that discussed getting pregnant outside of heterosexuality and being a lesbian parent.31

  Thus not only had the visible community become chronologically older, but many more lesbians opted to raise families, further challenging the public image of lesbianism as a youth culture that was carefree and without lasting ties. It was also another indication of the growing acceptance of diversity within the community that lesbian motherhood was no longer seen as a contradiction in terms and women were not so quick to claim, as they had been in the past, “I became a lesbian because I didn’t want children in my life.”

  While in earlier eras the choice to get pregnant and raise children outside of heterosexual marriage was unthinkable for most women, including lesbians, the 1970s had taken the sting out of single parenting. For lesbians, who had seen examples in their community of women who had had children in marriage and then were forced into traumatic, disheartening court battles over custody, it was especially important to find ways to have children without men. Those ways were not so difficult to envision in the ’80s when heterosexual women were taking for granted the fact that intercourse did not necessarily lead to having a child; lesbians felt the right to assume that having a child was not necessarily the consequence of intercourse. Since working mothers also became more acceptable in the larger culture during the 1970s, lesbians by the ’80s were more easily able to envision undertaking the responsibility of having children and working to support them without the help of a man. Some chose to adopt or become foster parents in the states where they could do so; there have even been court-approved joint adoptions by openly lesbian couples in recent years. But most of those who felt the need for motherhood chose donor insemination (often self-administered with the help of a turkey baster). That choice was made easier during the 1980s not only by the numerous sperm banks set up originally to service heterosexuals, but also by the establishment in some large cities of sperm banks for the primary use of lesbians, which promoted a minor baby boom in the lesbian community.32

  The community generally encouraged women who wanted to be mothers. For example, in 1987 the San Francisco Lyon-Martin Women’s Health Service and the Lesbian Rights Project co-sponsored a well-attended “Parenting Faire.” There were not only numerous lesbian mother support groups in big cities such as Latina Lesbian Mothers, Lesbian Couples With Children, Lesbian Moms of Young Children, Lesbians Parenting Adolescents, Gay/Lesbian Parenting Group, Lesbian Mothers Problem Solving Group, and Lesbian Parent Counselling, but even play groups for children of lesbian mothers. Lesbian newspapers ran articles that would have been found only in Family Circle-type magazines a decade earlier, exhorting prospective lesbian mothers: “Well, if you’re trying right now, take heart. It almost always happens…. Honor yourself and keep on!” Lesbian mothers marching in the 1988 Gay Pride parades chanted, “We’re here and we’re gay and we’re in the PTA.”33 The 1980s saw the birth of the first generation of openly gay parents. Against considerable odds, the lesbian community became one that included many children. Not only was more tolerance demanded from the childless, but also a more moderate approach to life (which parenthood demands) had to be developed by lesbians who chose to become mothers.

  In accepting into their fold a wide range of people, the most visible lesbian community demonstrated for the first time that unity was possible even though it had become much too large to hope for uniformity. The extent of lesbian diversity was really dramatized when a conservative institution such as Yale University, which had not one admitted lesbian twenty years earlier (when it first began admitting women), had in the late 1980s what the Wall Street Journal described as “a growing number of special-interest [lesbian] factions,” including the “lipsticks” (Yale’s “radical chic lesbians”), the “crunchies” (“granola dykes who have old-fashioned Utopian ideas about feminism”), a “Chicana lesbian grou
p,” and the assimilationists (“who don’t want to draw attention to their sexuality”).34 Such diversity was multiplied myriad times over in the lesbian communities across America.

  The lesbian-feminists of the 1970s attempted to create a transcendent lesbian identity in which all lesbians looked alike, ate alike, thought alike, loved alike. Since lesbians had never been uniform, lesbian-feminism’s ideological rigidity generally doomed it to failure. But lesbian-feminists were successful in that they drew a good deal of public attention to lesbianism, usually without disastrous results, since the liberal ’70s permitted differences. This meant that less radical lesbians began to feel that it was safer to come out than it had been in the past, and it also meant that the visible lesbian community could become much more diverse than ever before. By the end of the ’70s the proliferation of small groups fraught with mistrust for other groups seemed to signify the death of any hopes for a strong lesbian community. But as the ’80s progressed, because moderation replaced ideological rigidity, it began to seem that the community could learn to deal with diversity and that a politics of coalition was possible when desirable, as symbolized through the tremendous numbers of diverse lesbians who appeared for the many Gay Pride parades and the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.