Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  Unity

  Coalitions within the lesbian community were more than symbolic. Obviously not all the issues that divided the community and made a unified Lesbian Nation impossible to attain in the 1970s disappeared entirely in the ’80s, but they were usually met with less passion. Although the very real splits between groups such as the cultural feminists and the sexual radicals cannot be discounted, the ’80s brought significant truces which suggested a healthy semblance of unity in the visible community.

  Separatism, for instance, ceased to be the burning topic it once was. There still existed in the late ’80s some enclaves of separatists who insisted that in rejecting separatism the rest of the lesbian world had “lost its vision.” However, most of the lesbian community felt by the end of the decade that while separatism may be effective for a specific struggle at a certain time, as a lifestyle it attests to a “failure of global vision.” They now insisted that it is simply not possible for lesbians to separate themselves from the problems of the world. In growing numbers, they proclaimed in lesbian publications that a lesbian is also a complex human being, with attachments often to fathers, sons, male friends, and straight women, and separatism had failed to speak to all of the lesbian’s complexity. Separatism came to be identified with bigotry by some lesbians because it “judged people by gender and class rather than as individuals.” The greatest contact most lesbians had with separatism by the late ’80s was a temporary one, at the huge all-women’s music festivals around the country. For them it became a fantasy world of how life may once have been in an Amazon nation but no longer a model for how life could or should be in America as it approaches the end of the century.35

  Separatism would probably have died in the lesbian community just by virtue of its dogmatism, which choked off the possibilities of all relationships and interests outside of a narrow circle. But the AIDS crisis, which profoundly affected gay men in the 1980s, demanded soul-searching on the part of lesbians that not only led for many to a reconciliation with the men but also brought about a political and social unity on a scale much larger than ever before. Many lesbians felt called upon to take in active role in dealing with the crisis. As a blood drive advertisement sponsored by a lesbian group put it (in language reminiscent of World War II patriotic drives), “Our boys need our blood… . . Stand by our brothers in fighting the AIDS epidemic.”36 In the face of such an overwhelming threat to a segment of the population that has ties with lesbians, in terms of common enemies if nothing else, many lesbians felt they had no choice but to put aside the luxury of separatism.

  There were lesbians who believed that gay men brought AIDS on themselves because of their promiscuous lifestyle. Some proclaimed that if a fatal disease had threatened to wipe out the lesbian community, gay men would not be putting their resources and energy into helping lesbians as many lesbians felt obliged to help gay men. “I feel resentful,” one said, “because this crisis already overshadows many others, and because men’s issues always take precedence over women’s…. What about women’s health? What about lesbian health services?37 But such a response did not reflect many in the visible lesbian community who put a vast effort into raising money, giving blood, and serving as volunteers for projects that assigned them to make dinner, walk dogs, or go shopping for people with AIDS. Lesbians provided such remarkable support that a gay moviemaker, David Stuart, felt moved to produce a film of thanks called Family Values, a “salute from us gay men to you lesbians,” spotlighting women who brought gay men into their homes so that they could die surrounded by peace and love.

  The film’s name, with its ironic thrust at homophobes who claim that homosexuality is antifamily, was apt. The crisis did create a sense of family among many lesbians and gay men that was missing during the 1970s. As one woman explained the metamorphosis in lesbian-gay relationships, “When a whole community is dying you drop a lot of the in-fighting.”38 For many lesbians, losing acquaintances through AIDS made them reexamine how they wanted to live the rest of their lives and to conclude that the antagonism between the two linked communities was counterproductive and tragic. They undertook the battle against AIDS as though they were fighting for members of their very own family.

  Although AIDS was not the anticipated next step in their march toward liberation, many lesbians were convinced in the ’80s that the strength of the contemporary lesbian and gay movement would be judged by its response to AIDS. They believed that the right wing, which used AIDS as an excuse to attack all homosexuals, aimed to wipe out lesbians along with gay men, even if only as an afterthought. They quoted from homophobic literature such as a pamphlet issued by a group called Dallas Doctors Against AIDS: “Such a severe public health concern must cause the citizenry of this country to do everything in their power to smash the homosexual movement in this country to make sure these kinds of acts are criminalized.” Lesbians could have responded to statements by such hate groups, which claim that AIDS is God’s judgment on homosexuality, by saying that lesbians must then be God’s elect, since the incidence of AIDS among them is far lower than among heterosexuals. But they generally chose to make common cause with gay men rather than distinguishing themselves.39 The right wing’s poisonous attack on homosexuality because of AIDS reminded lesbians that there really were enemies out there they had forgotten about and they could not afford the complacency of turning their backs on their battle allies. Despite the loss of many gay male leaders through AIDS, the united homosexual community took the crisis as a rallying point and proved itself to be at an apex of strength in terms of its ability to mobilize and fight back.

  While compassion was instrumental in bringing about the reconciliation between lesbians and gay men, the growing realization that collectively they had greater power with which to fight their common enemies also led to their making common cause. Their potential for collective power was dramatized nowhere so much as at the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The march far exceeded the expected quarter of a million participants, drawing 650,000, which made it the largest civil rights march in American history, far surpassing the 1963 Civil Rights March and the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium demonstration. The mood of reconciliation was symbolized by the chants and the placards of the March that suggested the irrelevance of separatism, such as “Gay power is people power” and “We’re one country, one people—We’re part of the fabric of life in our country.”40

  Lesbian fiction in the 1980s sometimes reflected such reconciliation between lesbians and gay men, in dramatic contrast to the lesbian novels of the ’70s in which gay men were practically nonexistent. Vicki McConnell’s The Burnton Widows (1984), for example, shows a new unification coming about when heterosexuals throw lesbians and gay men together through homophobia and they are forced to create a “gay family.” As one character proclaims, “Even when a lot of places we live in won’t claim us or include us in any real sense, don’t think we don’t have our own network…. People with no civil rights have a historic bonding.”41

  Where lesbians and gay men pulled together in the ’80s they were able to affect startling and wonderful changes. Obviously their successes were most apparent in large cities, but what happens in large cities is often a harbinger of the future for the rest of the country. New York, for example, established a liaison out of the mayor’s office to the gay and lesbian community. Its lesbian head, Lee Hudson, believes, “I may have to initiate things with public officials, but once I do there’s always a lot of sympathy. I’ve never had a battle from them. They admit there have been problems in the past, and they haven’t known what to do or how to do it. But now they’re very interested in helping in whatever way they can.”42

  Other elected officials such as the Manhattan district attorney, the City Council president, and the Controller, all had similar liaisons to the gay and lesbian community in the 1980s. The chancellor of the Board of Education had appointed a multicultural task force to rewrite areas of the curriculum that were insensitive to various populat
ions, including lesbians and gay men. An open lesbian was placed on the advisory committee for the sex equity task force of the Board of Education. The New York Police Department staged a major recruiting campaign to hire lesbian and gay police officers. Groups that discriminated against homosexuals lost city funding. A comprehensive gay rights bill was passed in New York in 1986 (New York was the fifty-sixth city to pass such a bill). Public officials in New York saw homosexuals in the 1980s as a vital constituency. Progress, such as could only come about through a sense of community at the necessary times, was undeniable.

  Lesbians and gay men also joined forces in national organizations to exercise political influence. Unlike co-ed homosexual organizations of the 1950s and ’60s, those national organizations often made a special point to represent lesbian concerns as much as those of gay males. The Gay and Lesbian Democratic Clubs, for example, promulgated their support of equal rights and reproductive choice for women no less than their support of the abolition of all sodomy laws. Activist gay men appear to have taken to heart lesbians’ complaints in the ’70s that they were insensitive to women’s issues. Many lesbians thus came to see a coalition between homosexual men and women as being to everyone’s benefit. “We need to be a political force with gay men,” they said, “because unless we hang together and lobby to get the things we want, we’ll hang separately. We’ll remain invisible and be stepped on. We need more numbers and the way to get it is to join forces.” Lesbians’ concerns of the ’70s largely vanished as they proclaimed in the ’80s, “We don’t fear being subsumed. Wilting flowers are not common in the lesbian community.”43

  The increased tolerance among lesbians also had much to do with their disillusionment with “political correctness” and their shift to perceiving the world with more subtlety and complexity than the doctrinaire ’70s allowed. The issue of bisexuality presented a particular challenge to the tolerance of the visible lesbian community. Lesbians with a commitment to the lifestyle had feared and been suspicious of women who seemed to be merely “experimenting.” Not only could bisexual women break hearts when they returned to men, but also they might betray the secretiveness that was requisite for the community. When lesbians became political the suspicion was intensified because committed lesbians wanted all women in the lesbian community to be battle allies, and they were discomfitted by those who might fall back on bisexuality when the going got tough.

  As militancy decreased, some women became more willing to leave open questions of their own sexuality and that of other women. As a Texas woman characterized it, “I feel now there are more options open to me. Maybe one of the things that’s come out of the ’80s is that we all have more options. You don’t have to rigidly define yourself as one thing or another. If you can live with indefiniteness there’s a lot more potential.”44

  Though some continued to have reservations about bisexuality, they opposed it not because it was considered politically incorrect as it was in the ’70s, but rather because they were cognizant of the dangers of a bisexual contracting the AIDS virus heterosexually and bringing it into the lesbian community. However, philosophically there was far more openness to bisexuality. By the end of the decade there were about two dozen bisexual support groups in the United States, and lesbian newspapers gave significant space to reports of their concerns and activities. There was more willingness to recognize, as a character observes in a late 1980s lesbian novel set in a lesbian woman’s clinic, that not only do “straight women come to dyke bars to get picked up,” but also, although they may deny it even to themselves, sometimes “lesbians get swept away” and have sex with men.45 Such an admission was a tacit recognition of the accuracy of Kinsey’s finding that few people rank as a pure o (completely heterosexual) or a pure 6 (completely homosexual) on the Kinsey scale. While movement lesbians were very uncomfortable with that fact in the ’70s, it was not so politically disturbing to them in the less rigid ’80s, and bisexuals were no longer categorically shunned. Such a leap in tolerance made unity possible with one more group that was seen in less moderate times as pariahs by the lesbian community.

  While the radical vision of the ’70s was nowhere near realized in the 1980s, strong lesbian or lesbian/gay communities flourished. In some areas lesbians were able to live their whole lives in a homosexual context if they wished. Kriss, a 21 year old San Francisco restaurant worker, said, “My landlord is gay, my boss is gay, everyone I associate with is either gay or is used to dealing with gay people. I can walk down the street for miles holding hands with my lover. Nobody would say ‘dyke’ who wasn’t one around here.”46 Some gay and lesbian ghettos were so self-contained and populous in the 1980s that if one did not have to leave in order to make a living it might well seem that homosexuality was the norm and straights were “queer.” Although most lesbians lived outside of such ghettos, knowledge of them was psychologically beneficial. They represented a mecca to which one might retreat, even if only in fantasy, should one’s own milieu become difficult.

  Of course, for some lesbians those meccas may as well have been on another planet. Despite the gay and lesbian ghettos, the spread of civil rights, the successful challenges that had been made to the popular media images of lesbians as “odd girls” and “twilight lovers,” they remained as closeted as they or their predecessors had been during the McCarthy era. Their lifestyles were not very different from what lesbian life had been thirty or forty years earlier, as the San Antonio and central California women suggested (p. 284). As far as they were concerned, homophobia had been so ingrained in America for so long that they did not trust to the changes, and they continued to be fearful that they would lose their jobs, be kicked out of their homes, or be disowned by their famiilies should their lesbianism become known. But there were far fewer objective reasons to harbor such fears in the 1980s.

  And most lesbians, even outside of the ghettos, did indeed feel that their lives had changed. There were more numbers, more choices, more possibilities of meeting other women who loved women. The proliferation of visible community members was not only reassuring; it also provided support systems that did not exist earlier. In a 1980s study of older lesbians (ages fifty to seventy-three) more than half the women said that in earlier decades, during the traumatic events of their lives such as a breakup of a relationship, they received little or no comforting since they did not belong to a lesbian community and they could not tell their heterosexual friends why they were suffering. But most of those women in the 1980s stated that “things were different for them now.” They perceived themselves as having more lesbian friends to turn to since the community had grown so much, not only because more women were becoming lesbians, but especially because fewer lesbians were in the closet to the degree they had once been.47 Of course there were still many women in the ’80s who found themselves isolated and alone in their lesbianism, but if they were willing to seek out a community, it was there for them. The phrase “the well of loneliness” as a description of lesbian life lost any aptness it many once have had.

  By the end of the ’80s, as some lesbian communities grew older together, a sense of security within their friendship circles was even further reinforced. As one thirty-six-year-old woman observed:

  I’m much closer to my lesbian friends than I am to my family. We’re really there for each other. If I never had a lover again it wouldn’t matter because I have so much love in my life. Most of my friends I’ve known for ten or twelve years. We’re really family.48

  The sense of family and the larger sense of community had not been easy to come by. It required not only that women acknowledge their love for women as they did at the beginning of the century, but that they accept the definition of themselves as “lesbian” and part of a sexual minority. It required not only that they commit themselves to lesbianism as a lifestyle as they did in the 1950s, but that they see themselves as having distinct political needs because they are homosexuals in a heterosexual world. It required not only that they temper their views about ho
w lesbianism should be lived as they did after the radical ’70s, but that they learn to create coalitions with those who do not live it as they do. There was insufficient consciousness, moderation, and savvy to do all of that in the past, and the hostility of heterosexuals seemed too forbidding to permit lesbians to think creatively. In the course of the 1980s, however, lesbians who sought it were able to find all that was requisite to create among themselves both family and community.

  A Note on the ’90s: Queer Nation?

  As the last decade of the twentieth century begins there is evidence that yet another change may be evolving in the most visible segment of the lesbian community. The shift to moderation that characterized much of the 1980s seems to have brought about a reaction among some young lesbians, particularly those who are now in their early twenties. There are hints that they are demanding more drama and intensity, not only in their personal style, which is often far more colorful than that of older lesbians, but especially in their emerging political stance. An incipient movement seems to be gathering momentum. In its angry militance this new movement promises to have something in common with lesbian-feminism of the 1970s. It is different, however, in that gay men were its first organizers and it is presently dependent on coalitions with gay men.

  The new militance actually began near the end of the 1980s and owes its start to impatience felt by gay men and concerned lesbians with the heterosexual world’s slow response to the AIDS crisis. ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed by a group of gay men and some lesbians who were activists in the fight against AIDS and felt that more confrontational action was required to bring attention to their cause. For example, to dramatize the reality of AIDS deaths, the gay men and lesbians of New York ACT-UP staged a huge mock New Orleans-style funeral procession in front of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel where President Bush was speaking at a Republican fund-raising dinner. By the beginning of 1990 several members of ACT-UP had also begun the tactic of “outing,” exposing public figures who were closeted homosexuals. One argument they used in favor of outing was that if the heterosexual world understood that “we are everywhere,” even in the most respected and admired positions, it could not pretend that AIDS should be ignored because it struck only the most despised and insignificant.49