Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  12. Victor Robinson, introduction to Diana Frederics, Diana: A Strange Autobiography (New York: Dial, 1939), p. ix.

  13. Henry, Sex Variants, pp. 1023–27. “Surgery May Save Human Race from Extinction: Evolutionary Trend Toward Neuter Race May Be Checked by Gland Operation,” Science News Letter, May 19, 1934; “Women’s Personalities Changed by Adrenal Gland Operation,” New York Times, October 28, 1935, pp. 1 +.

  14. For an extensive bibliographic study of lesbian novels of the 1930s see Jeannette Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956; reprint, Baltimore, MD.: Diana Press, 1975), pp. 290–324. Donisthorpe, p. 234. For my discussion of nineteenth-century French decadent novels see Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), pp. 254–94. There were a few early twentieth-century novels published outside of France in which lesbians were depicted as monsters, but such characterizations were relatively rare at that time, e.g., Clemence Dane, Regiment of Women (New York: Macmillan, 1917). Nineteen-thirties novels: Idabell Williams, Hellcat (1934; reprint, Dell 1952); Lois Lodge, Love Like a Shadow (New York: Phoenix, 1935); Lilyan Brock, Queer Patterns (New York: Greenberg, 1935); Helen Anderson, Pity for Women (New York: Doubleday, 1937).

  15. Elisabeth Craigin, Either Is Love (New York: Harcourt, 1937), pp. 45, 146. Diana Frederics, p. 119.

  16. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: Harcourt, 1937); Gale Wilhelm, We Too Are Drifting (1935; reprint, New York: Triangle Books, 1940), pp. 11, 14.

  17. Publisher’s ad for The Scorpion in New York Herald Tribune, April 2, 1933.

  18. Discussion of expurgation of Club de Femmes in Time (October 25, 1937, pp. 26–28.

  19. Theater censorship attempts discussed in Kaier Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage (Boston: Alyson, 1987), pp. 210–11. George Jean Nathan, “Design for Loving,” American Spectator (April 1933), pp. 2–3. Review of Girls in Uniform in New York Morning Telegraph, January 1, 1933.

  20. Robert Coleman, “Love of Women,” New York Daily Mirror, December 14, 1937. The Children’s Hour received a much friendlier critical reception than other lesbian plays of the decade, perhaps because Martha fulfills the maxim through her suicide that “the only good lesbian is a dead lesbian.” See Kaier Curtin’s review of the critical reception of The Children’s Hour in “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”.

  21. Interview with Anne Revere in Curtin, p. 201.

  22. Early studies of lesbianism in correctional institutions include Margaret Otis, “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology (June/ July 1913), 8(2):1 13–16; Charles A. Ford, “Homosexual Practices of Institutionalized Females,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychiatry (March 1929), 23:442–48; Samuel Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality (Boston: Meador, 1937). Study of slang: Gershon Legman, “The Language of Homosexuality” (1941), appendix in Henry, Sex Variants. Books such as Imitation of Sappho (1930) and Diana (1939) were tellingly bound in lavender. Lavender may have come to be associated with lesbianism through the play The Captive in which one woman sends violets to another, which resulted in a long popular association of violets and lesbianism. But in Mary Casal, The Stone Wall (Chicago: Eyncourt Press, 1930), p. 155, Mary sends Juno violets when she courts her in the early twentieth century, so such a gift may have been customary between women lovers even before The Captive brought it to public attention. Frederics, p. 123.

  23. Box-Car Bertha, pp. 65–67.

  24. Paul Yawitz, “Greenwich Village Sin Dives Lay Trap for Innocent Girls,” New York Evening Graphic, 1931, in Lesbian Herstory Archives, files: 1920s and 1930s. Arno Karlen refers to lesbian bars in New York in the 1930s in Sexuality and Homosexuality: A New View (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 311. Other information about lesbian bar life in the 1930s comes from Lesbian Herstory Archives News (December 1981), 7:16; the newsletter of the West Coast Lesbian Collections: In the Life (Fall 1982), 1:5; Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, “Lesbianism in the 1920s and 1930s: A New Found Study,” Signs (Summer 1977), 2(4):902; Box-Car Bertha, p. 65.

  25. Personal interview with Win, age 74, San Francisco, August 15, 1987. Lesbian bars were sometimes raided by police in the 1930s. A mid-’30s Chicago newspaper article headlined “Shut Two Nightclubs with Girls Garbed as Men” reported that women in masculine attire were nightly patrons. The article quoted the police major as saying, “Such places are a disgrace to the city, and they will not be tolerated in Chicago. Every place of such character will be closed”: New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1930s. On lesbian nightclubs in Berlin before 1933 see Adele Meyer, Lila Nachte: Die Damenklubs der Zwanziger Jahre (Cologne: Zitronenpresse, 1981). See also “Sixty Places to Talk, Dance and Play,” Connexions (Jan 1982), 3:16–18. For a discussion of lesbian bars in 1930s Paris see Brassai (Gyula Halasz), “Sodom and Gomorrah,” The Secret Paris of the ‘30’s (New York: Pantheon, 1976).

  26. Nucleus Club information in letter from Gean Harwood and Bruhs Mero, SAGE (New York), February 1989.

  27. Personal interview with Mary, age 68, Marin, Calif, August 12, 1987. Personal interview with Olivia, San Antonio, Tex., August 17, 1990. See Foster, ch. 10, for a bibliographic discussion of women’s institutions as a meeting place for lesbians during the 1930s.

  28. Personal interview with Mary, cited above.

  29. Personal interview with Sandra, age 77, San Francisco, August 9, 1987.

  30. Personal interview with May, age 82, Los Angeles, August 2, 1987.

  31. Craigin, p. 145.

  32. Richard Lockridge, “The New Play,” New York Sun, November 21 1934).

  33. For a discussion of middleclass lesbians’ rejection of the popular view of lesbianism see Bullough and Bullough. Henry, Sex Variants, pp. 771, 825, 839, 864, 867, 916.

  34. In Surpassing the Love of Men I explore male pornographic images of lesbians in fiction from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as well as the nineteenth-century sexologists’ discussions of lesbian sexuality. I also deal with Renee Vivien and her predecessors in that book. Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1902), p. 182. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), p. 458.

  35. Casal, p. 185.

  36. Vida Dutton Scudder, On Journey (New York: Dutton and Company, 1937), pp. 224, 226, 211–12.

  37. Frederics, pp. 168–69, 210.

  38. Elisabeth Craigin, pp. 11, 15, 117. For earlier lesbian writing that dealt with the emotional aspects of love between women see my discussion in Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 197–230, 297–313.

  5. Naked Amazons and Queer Damozels

  1. Fleischmann’s ad reprinted in Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990).

  2. Public impression discussed in Mattie Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps (Washington, D.C.: 1954), pp. 625–26, 767.

  3. For the effects of World War I on lesbianism see Compton Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women (1928; reprint, London: Seeker, 1932); for the effects of World War II, Frank S. Caprio, Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism (New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 134–35. Women comprised the bulk of the civilians who migrated to large cities in order to work during World War II. See William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), chs. 6–8. Allan Bérubé points out that World War II was as crucial to the creation of a homosexual culture at that time as the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion was to a later generation, but its impact was lost in the tragedy of the war, and no gay movement or gay press could be developed in those years to record its history: “Marching to a Different Drummer,” in Ann Snitow et al., eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 88–99.

  4. Personal interview with Mildred, age 58, Berkeley, A
ugust 10, 1987.

  5. Miami News, May 20, 1942, quoted in John Costello, Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 43.

  6. For a history of women in the American military see Martin Binkin and Shirley T. Bach, Women and the Military (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1977), and Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982). For military policy toward homosexuals see Newsweek (July 9, 1947), 29:54, which notes the Army’s change of policy in instituting the “undesirable” discharge in 1947. See also Allan Bérubé and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians During the McCarthy Years,” Estelle Freedman et al., eds., in The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 279–95.

  7. Information on WAC psychological examination from written communication, H.P., age 68, accepted for WAC officer training in 1943 (Los Angeles, May 28, 1988). At the end of 1942 the adjutant general issued a confidential letter ordering recruiters to investigate women applicants’ “local reputations” to determine whether they had undesirable traits such as “homosexual tendencies,” but nothing came of this order since by that point women were desperately needed in the military. In fact, only a few months later the adjutant general ordered looser screening standards for women in order to meet unfilled quotas. Although other directives against lesbians were halfheartedly issued now and again during the war, they continued to have little or no effect on lesbians being accepted or retained in the armed forces. Finally only a minute number of women were discharged for lesbianism. The Army and Navy kept no record of such discharges; Marine records indicate that twenty women were discharged. Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, pp. 30–32, 147.

  8. Sex Hygiene Course (for Officers and Officer Candidates, WAAC), War Department, Pamphletjio. 35-I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), see especially “Lecture V: Homosexuality.”

  9. Personal interview with Mary, age 68, Marin County, Calif., August 12, 1987.

  10. Rita Laporte, “Living Propaganda,” The Ladder, June 1965, pp. 21–22.

  11. Berube, “Marching to a Different Drummer.” Although the investigative team could find no real “homosexual addicts” the brutal psychological techniques used by their psychiatrists to determine whether a woman was lesbian caused three women to be hospitalized by emotional stress. Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, p. 345.

  12. Personal interview with Elizabeth, age 66, Marin County, Calif, August 12, 1987.

  13. Pat Bond, quoted in Berube, “Coming Out Under Fire,” Mother Jones, February/March 1983, pp. 23–29 +.

  14. Harrison Carrol, “Miss Dietrich Defends Use of Pants,” World Telegram, January 17, 1932. Garbo headline quoted in Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart (1968; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), p. 229.

  15. Rusty Brown, “Always Me,” in Marcie Adelman, ed., Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians (Boston: Alyson, 1986), pp. 146–47.

  16. “Past Times: Unearthing the History of Gay G.I.s,” Chicago Reader (June 18, 1982) 11:36.

  17. Personal interview with Mac, age 63, San Francisco, August 11, 1987.

  18. Pat Gozemba and Janet Kahn, presentation given at the session, “Love and Friendship in the Lesbian Bar Communities of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,” Berkshire History of Women Conference, Wellesley College, Mass., June 19–21, 1987, and Berube, “Coming Out Under Fire,” p. 20.

  19. Information on Lucky’s in “Harlem’s Strangest Night Club,” Ebony (Dec. 1951), 7:80–85. Information on the 181 Club from personal interview with Lyn, age 64, now living in San Diego, July 28, 1987. Information on the Music Hall from personal interview with Elizabeth, cited above. See also description of Boston bars during this period in Bob Skiba, “Pansies, Perverts, and Pegged Pants,” Gay and Lesbian Guide to New England (n.p., 1982), pp. 2–5, in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1950s.

  20. Yank, November 16, 1945, p. 18, quoted in Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, p. 253.

  21. Personal interview with Betty, age 66, Omaha, Neb., October 11, 1988.

  22. Lisa Ben, Vice Versa, September 1947, pp. 4–5.

  23. Freud’s antifeminist attitudes have been frequently discussed in feminist writing since the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970). Hannah Lerman’s A Mote in Freud’s Eye: From Psychoanalysis to the Psychology of Women (New York: Springer, 1986) is a book length study of Freud’s blind spots with regard to feminism. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 147–72.

  24. Clara Thompson, “Changing Concepts of Homosexuality,” in Patrick Mullahy, ed., A Study of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Hermitage Press, 1949), pp. 249–61.

  25. Caprio, p. 143.

  26. Charles Berg and Clifford Allen, The Problem of Homosexuality (New York: Citadel Press, 1958), p. 53. Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (1956; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 9.

  27. Thompson. Albert Ellis, introduction to Donald Webster Cory, The Lesbian in America (New York: Tower, 1964), p. 13. Charles W. Socarides, Homosexuality (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 60.

  28. Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” Standard Edition, 18:556. Prison populations have also been used to help establish a picture of the homosexual, e.g., Samuel Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality (Boston: Meador, 1937). Kahn based his discussion of homosexuality on his examination of homosexuals in prison without attempting to discover whether homosexual prisoners were different from heterosexual prisoners or whether they were similar in any way other than their sexual orientation to homosexuals outside of prison.

  29. Cornelia Wilbur, “Clinical Aspects of Female Homosexuality,” in Judd Marmor, ed., Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 268–81.

  30. Vicki Owen, “A Story of Punishment,” in Margaret Cruikshank, ed., The Lesbian Path (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1981).

  31. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), pp. 143, 296. Caprio, p. 133. The popular press shared these ideas and promulgated them to the masses. See, e.g., William G. Niederland, “‘Masculine’ Women Are Cheating Love,” Coronet, May 1953, pp. 41–44.

  32. Freud, “The Psychogensis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” and “Historical Notes: A Letter from Freud” [to an American mother about her homosexual son, written 1935, uncovered by Alfred Kinsey], American Journal of Psychiatry (April 1955), 108:787–89. Cf. letter from William J. Fielding to Mr. James Cissel, December 21, 1923, in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1920s; Aaron J. Rosanoff, “Human Sexuality, Normal and Abnormal, from a Psychiatric Standpoint,” Urologic and Cutaneous Review (1929), 33:505–18; and Helene Deutsch, “On Female Homosexuality,” Psychiatric Quarterly, (October 1932), 1:484–88 +.

  33. Albert Ellis, “The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy with Individuals Who Have Severe Homosexual Problems,” Journal of Consulting Psychology (1956), 20(3): 191–94. Bergler, Homosexuality, p. 178.

  34. Richard C. Robertiello, Voyage from Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual (New York: Citadel Press, 1959), pp. 27, 76, 234–35, 239, 246.

  35. Caprio’s Female Homosexuality is also a particularly good compendium of myths about lesbian murder, suicide, etc. See, e.g., pp. viii, 146, 148. Cannibalism statement by Paula Heimann and Susan Isaacs (1952), following the 1948 theory of Edmund Bergler that homosexuality was a defense against the acute anxieties connected with oral and cannabilistic fantasies, quoted in Berg and Allen, pp. 145, 149. This insane idea was taken literally in 1977 in Anita Bryant’s hate-filled antihomosexual campaign. Bryant wrote: “Oral sex, where the tongue is used to stimulate the clitoris producing an orgasm, is a form of vampirism or eating of blood. Such degeneracy produces a tas
te and craving for the effects, as does liquor and narcotics.” Quoted in Sarah Schulman, “The History of the Commie-Pinko-Faggot,” Womanews (New York), July/August 1980, p. 1 +. “Curable Disease?” Time (Dec. 10, 1956), 68:74–76.

  36. Allison in Marcy Adelman, ed., Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians (Boston: Alyson, 1986), pp. 60–61.

  37. Thomas Szasz, “Legal and Moral Aspects of Homosexuality,” in Marmor, pp. 124–39. Bergler, p. 271. For a similar position see Caprio, Female Homosexuality, pp. 285–86.

  38. Written communication from Harriet, age 68, Los Angeles, May 28, 1988.

  6. The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name

  1. Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953), pp. 474–75; also, Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), p. 623. Kinsey also found that 37 percent of all males and 13 percent of all females had had homosexual experiences to orgasm. Edmund Bergler, “Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report” (1948; reprinted in Aron M. Krich, ed., The Homosexuals As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities [New York: Citadel Press, 1954], pp. 226–50. Kinsey pointed out what many Americans did not want to recognize—e.g., “Such a high proportion of the females and males in our population is involved in sexual activities which are prohibited by the law of most of the states of the union, that it is inconceivable that the present laws could be administered in any fashion that even remotely approached systematic and complete enforcement,” Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 20. M. S. Guttmacher, Sex Offenses (New York: Norton, 1957).

  2. Dismissal figures quoted in “Report on Homosexuality, with Particular Emphasis on this Problem in Governmental Agencies, Formulated by the Committee on Cooperation with Governmental (Federal) Agencies of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry,” report no. 30 January 1955, p. 5. McCarthy’s charge of the State Department reported in New York Times, March 9, 1950, p. 1. Regarding the homosexuality of McCarthy’s aides see Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (New York: Doubleday, 1988).