Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  In April 1990 a group of New York ACT-UP lesbians and gay men who were interested in doing direct action around broader lesbian and gay issues formed Queer Nation, which almost immediately spread to other coastal cities such as Boston and San Francisco. Although gay men were the most active in establishing Queer Nation they clearly wanted the participation of lesbians, and hence carefully selected the word “queer” to serve as an umbrella term—a synonym not only for “faggots” and “fairies,” but also for “lezzies” and “dykes.” At writing, only approximately twenty percent of Queer Nation is lesbian, but press coverage of the group’s activities often focuses on the women in Queer Nation who seem very committed to its principles.

  The rhetoric and tactics of Queer Nation hark back to those of earlier black militants and lesbian feminists. The name Queer Nation itself is reminiscent, of course, of Lesbian Nation. “Straight” is their code word for oppressive mainstream culture equal to “white” or “patriarchal” in the earlier groups. The language of angry separatism is also familiar. For example, one member of Queer Nation is quoted in Boston’s Gay Community News as saying:

  For fifteen years as an activist I have tried to explain the gay and lesbian lifestyle to the straight community, and I don’t have time … [to educate them] anymore. If straights can get it together on their own, fine. But I don’t have time for them.50

  The New York group has issued a broadside entitled “I Hate Straights,” decorated by a pink fist, exhorting the “queers” to whom it is addressed:

  How can I convince you, brother, sister, that your life is in danger. That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act…. Until I can enjoy the same freedom of movement and sexuality as straights, their privilege must stop and it must be given over to me and my queer sisters and brothers. Straight people will not do this voluntarily and so they must be forced into it.

  Thus far “force” has consisted primarily of lesbian and gay kissins in straight bars, lesbian and gay marches through straight neighborhoods, and the wearing of confrontational T-shirts, such as one that reads, “Queer Nation—Get Used To It.” But more militant tactics are in the planning stage. For example, Queer Nation is in the process of organizing “Pink Panther” (cf. Black Panther) vigilante groups that could respond physically and immediately to gay-and lesbian-bashing. “Queers Bash Back” is their slogan. They are also exploring ways to express economic power such as a campaign to ask businesses to sign an antidiscrimination statement of principles, which would then entitle those businesses to display a pink triangle or a rainbow flag sticker so lesbians and gay men could shop selectively.

  Although Queer Nation realizes that it is to the organization’s benefit to involve women and people of color, they have already been accused by members of both groups as having too narrow a focus, one that appeals primarily to white, middle class gay men and is oblivious to the special problems of lesbians, the working class, and racial and ethnic minorities. In the east, women’s caucuses of Queer Nation have already been formed. The divisiveness that plagued militant groups in the preceding decades may be repeated in the 1990s. It is too soon to predict whether Queer Nation will be able to transcend those earlier problems, or even whether it will really appeal to large numbers of lesbians, who may still be wary of being sucked into concerns that are peculiar to gay men. But one female member of Queer Nation may be voicing the feelings of many other young lesbians who are not fully cognizant of the achievements of the lesbian movement since the 1970s and who are impatient with the “tame” community they inherited in the 1980s:

  The thing that’s important to me about Queer Nation is that we’re ready to act. People are frustrated with endless talking about issues around lesbian and gay concerns. We don’t want to sit around and strategize anymore. … I want to do something provocative. Sometimes you have to take to the streets.51

  Epilogue: Social Constructions and the

  Metamorphoses of Love Between Women

  Jeradine: Aliciane! I’ve just had a vision—of the future! … In a thousand years or so, why, the population will be tremendous, don’t you imagine? I mean, everybody living to two hundred and eighty-five and so on? Well, now picture it: every place just like China, say. Or India. Stacks of people and not enough food and not enough places to live. So—the psychologists, et cetera, will all begin telling everybody it’s a sign of a definite inferiority complex to want to be having children all the time … that no really well balanced individual would be so unhappy with [herself] and [her] kind anyway that [she’d] so much as think of falling for anybody of the opposite sex! … Can you imagine it? All the poor heteros slinking about furtively? Pretending they were only friends and all that? Why, why, y’know, in time there might be laws against it!

  —N.M. Kramer,

  The Hearth and the Strangeness, 1956

  I have tried to illustrate through this history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America the extent to which sexuality, and especially sexual categories, can be dependent upon a broad range of factors that are extraneous to the “sexual drive.” For example, love between women, especially those of the middle class, was dramatically metamorphosed from romantic friendship over the last century: it became “lesbianism” once the sexologists formulated the concept, economic factors made it possible for large numbers of women to live independent of men, and mobility allowed many women to travel to places where they might meet others who accepted the label “lesbian.”

  Another metamorphosis that has come about in the twentieth century through factors extraneous to the “sexual drive” is in the meaning of lesbianism itself, which has been transformed from a state from which most women who loved women dissociated themselves, to a secret and often lonely acknowledgment that one fell into that “category,” to groups of women who formed a subculture around the concept, to a sociopolitical statement and a civil rights movement that claimed its own minority status and even formed its own ghettos.

  And just as “lesbianism” as a phenomenon barely existed a hundred years ago, lesbians now have little similarity to their counterparts that the sexologists first described into being. There are, for instance, not many lesbians today who would see themselves as men trapped in a women’s bodies; yet in the earlier decades of this century that seemed a perfectly plausible explanation to a woman who had no interest in the pursuits that were permitted to females or who let herself be convinced that she must have a “masculine soul” because only men would want to arrange their affectional lives around women. Today a female who feels she is a man trapped in a woman’s body might more likely consider herself a victim of “gender dysphoria,” a transsexual—another sexual category that is a social construct of our century—rather than a lesbian. Modern medicine and technology have even made it possible in the twentieth century for such a woman to rid herself of “gender dysphoria” through “sex reassignment surgery” that would metamorphose her into a man.

  But there are few women who see themselves as men trapped in women’s bodies today because feminism has helped bring about another metamorphosis by calling the idea of appropriate gender behavior and even appearance into question. Body image has become far less rigid. It is not just that women can now wear pants almost as often as men; in recent years strength and even muscle have become acceptable for women. And of course sex roles have become much more flexible. At this point in time in America there are few areas that are considered by great consensus totally inappropriate for a female. A woman today who is unhappy with whatever is left of sex role restrictions would more likely think of herself as a feminist (whether or not she also considered herself a lesbian) rather than a man trapped in a woman’s body.

  The metamorphosis of love between women has been accompanied by a metamorphosis in public attitudes, from the sentimental admiration suggested by the William Cullen Bryant quotation that begins this book, to a view of it as a rare medical phenomenon, to public fear, disdai
n, and condemnation, and slowly, in more recent years, to a view of same-sex love as an individual right. One aspect of this metamorphosis was dramatized for me vividly in the course of my research for this book: In Omaha, Nebraska, there is a bright yellow building on a main street. It is across from a police station and a parking lot filled with scores of police cars. Having come out as a working-class lesbian in the 1950s, when McCarthyism was still giving its tenor to American life and lesbians were outlaws, I cannot see so many police cars at once without an almost unconscious sharp intake of breath. Police cars always meant trouble for us in those days, and there is something inside that does not forget. But it was almost the 1990s and I was here with Rhonda, a twenty-six-year-old woman, a college graduate who wears lipstick and eye shadow and restores cars for a living. She chauffeured me from interview to interview around the lesbian community in Omaha during my visit and brought me to the Max, a huge lesbian and gay bar that is housed in the big yellow building.

  She told me that on weekend nights the place is so crowded with homosexual men and women that their sociability often pours out onto the street. “But what about all those police?” I asked. She did not seem even to understand the import of my question at first. Then she explained, “But we’re happy they’re there. There’s a strip joint not too far away, and those guys sometimes try to cause trouble. The police come to help us. It’s a real comfort to have them so close.” I understood for the hundredth time since I began my research on lesbian life in twentieth-century America that there are no constants with regard to lesbianism, neither in the meaning of love between women nor in the social and political life that is created through it.

  These metamorphoses in meaning and attitudes developed because of factors that have been peculiar to our century. For example, more than any other era in history, the twentieth century has been one of sexual awareness. It has been virtually impossible to escape “knowledge” of the existence of sexual repression, expression, sublimation, symbolism, perversion, inversion, and so forth. Ironically, that awareness meant for a while a lessening of affectional possibilities. Romantic friendship had to breathe its last shortly after the century began, since intense love between women was coming to be seen as sexual. It became so incredible to our century that passionate love could occur without genital sexual expression that the term “romantic friendship” dropped out of the language. Such a relationship between women was either lesbian, that is, genital, or it did not exist. Whatever wide spectrum of subtleties, gradations, or varieties that were once possible in women’s love relationships with each other became much more circumscribed. Even if two twentieth-century women might have thought that their intense feeling for each other was more like what some women experienced in other centuries—perhaps more spiritual than erotic, more amorphous than concretely definable—they would undoubtedly have been disabused of their ideas by any outside observer who could tell them it was lesbianism, whether repressed, suppressed, or secretly expressed.

  But while one form of female same-sex relationships became impossible in this century, myriad ways to live a lesbian identity were invented for the first time in history. What was most vital before such a variety of lifestyles could be developed was the proliferation of possibilities that would enable women to support themselves without relying on fathers or husbands. Without women’s economic independence, lesbians, as they emerged in the twentieth century, could not have existed, regardless of the nature of their love for other women, since they would have had to obey papa or to lock themselves in heterosexual marriage for the sake of survival alone. While a few working-class women might have managed, might even have exercised the option of passing as men, for middleclass women who were tied to their class status (as most “well-brought-up” females were before the radical 1960s and ’70s), unless they could have found a way to be decently employed lesbian life would have been impossible for them. It was only the twentieth century that offered such ways to large numbers of women.

  Lesbian life has also been made possible in the twentieth century by the formation of institutions that did not exist at any other time: not only women’s colleges, which began in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but also women’s military units, women’s athletic organizations such as softball teams, and bars for women. Without those institutions not only would large numbers of women have been unable to make contact with other women in order to form lesbian relationships, but also it would have been impossible to create lesbian communities. Even if the concept of lesbianism had been available to women in earlier centuries, they would have had difficulty establishing lesbian communities because historically females—other than prostitutes—were permitted little mobility, nor did they have many meeting places where they might feel free of restrictions by family or church. Women had been virtual prisoners in the home, whether as ladies of leisure or as house workers. The twentieth century saw their release as well as the creation of meeting places for them.

  But while this century has allowed women who love women the consciousness, the space, and the wherewithal to create communities and lifestyles such as never before existed, the rapid and continual flux in values and mores in the parent culture, which inevitably affects the lesbian subculture, has helped to guarantee constant metamorphoses in the conception of lesbianism and the nature of lesbian communities and lifestyles. Circumstances and events that once seemed inextricably a part of lesbian culture and even of the definition of lesbianism itself have constantly come and gone throughout this century. It is hard now to remember that around the turn of the century those few who knew about the existence of the lesbian believed that she was a man trapped in a woman’s body; or that at the same period of time two women could have loved each other, slept in the same bed, held and petted each other, and yet thought of themselves as romantic friends rather than lesbians; or that even as late as 1919 a magazine such as Ladies Home Journal would publish a story in which one woman is described gazing on another “as if a goddess, high-enshrined and touched by the sun, stood revealed. She gave a gasp of pleasure.” It is also hard now, near the end of the twentieth century, to remember that in the 1950s lesbians were frightened by the sight of a police car or that in the 1970s many lesbians thought the birth of a Lesbian Nation was imminent. The lesbian community and lesbians’ relationship to society in the twentieth century have defied any pat definition; they have been in perpetual metamorphosis.

  Most of all, lesbians themselves have defied definition. In 1964, Donald Webster Cory, a gay man who was, according to his publisher, a “widely acknowledged spokesman for the homosexual community in the United States,” wrote a book titled The Lesbian in America. Lesbians were still so afraid to identify themselves that no woman dared to undertake a book on that subject because it might cast suspicion on her. Although few people remarked on the presumption of Cory’s endeavors then, it is obvious now. The problem was not simply in his daring to speak for lesbians though he was a man. It was, even more, in his conception, implicit in his title, that there was such a being as “The Lesbian” who was representative of all lesbians in America.

  Even in 1964 lesbians and lesbian communities were extremely diverse. They have metamorphosed to be even more so as more women have dared in a relatively liberal society to accept a lesbian identity and a broader spectrum of women has publicly claimed a place in the community. More than ever they challenge the notion that lesbians can be described as a whole, as writers have tried to do since the sexologists first formulated the concept. Not only are lesbians as diverse proportionally as the female heterosexual population, but if any generalization can be made about large numbers of them at any given time, it is bound soon to change anyway, just as it has throughout the course of the century. The only constant truth about The Lesbian in America has been that she prefers women.

  The twentieth century inherited a penchant for classification from the nineteenth century, with its delirious enthusiasm for the new science and its conviction that everything
—even affection and sexual feeling—was unquestionably categorizable. Love between women was classified as “sexual inversion,” a category that encompassed women who were uncomfortable as women, women who had sexual relations with women, women who thought women’s socioeconomic opportunities needed to be expanded, and even women who were romantic friends. Paradoxically, such rigid and simplistic categorization opened new possibilities to some women by permitting them to begin to create subcultures of “inverts”—lesbians—such as had never before existed. However, once they became a part of the category the nineteenth-century sexologists had established, they altered it continually by their own lived experiences of love between women. And they thereby helped to demonstrate the large extent to which sexuality is often a social construct—a product of the times and of other factors that are entirely external to the “sexual drive.”

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. William Cullen Bryant to the Evening Post, July 13, 1843, in Letters of William Cullen Bryant, vol. 2, eds. William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss (New York: Fordham University Press, 1977), pp. 238–39.