Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  3. New York Times, April 19, 1950, p. 25. New York Times, May 5, 1950, p. 15. New York Times, May 20, 1950, p. 8.

  4. “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government: A Report Submitted to the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by its Subcmmittee on Investigations, December 15, 1950,” reprinted in Government vs. Homosexuals (New York: Arno Press, 1975). John D’Emilio estimates that by the mid-1950s 20 percent of the labor force faced security investigations, “The McCarthy Era,” The Advocate, December 3, 1982, pp. 25–27.

  5. E. M., “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty,” One (April 1953), 1(4):3~4.

  6. New York Times, December 20, 1951, p. 1. All the cliches to be found in psychiatric writing of the period were reiterated in government writing on all levels: e.g., Judge Morris Ploscowe argued that homosexuals must not be employed by government: “There is no real permanence to homosexual relationships. The quality of emotional instability encountered in homosexuals, both male and female, makes them continually dissatisfied with their lot. Many of them are continually on the prowl, looking for sexual partners”: “Homosexuality, Sodomy, and Crimes Against Nature,” (1951); reprinted in Donald Webster Cory, ed., Homosexuality: A Cross Cultural Approach (New York: Julian Press, 1956), pp. 394–406.

  7. New York Times, December 16, 1950, p. 3. Wherry discussed in Max Lerner, The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 311–19. See also Max Lerner, interviews with Kenneth Wherry, New York Post, July 11, 17, 18, 1950.

  8. Personal interview with M.K., age 79, San Francisco, October 22, 1988.

  9. The text of this Executive Order was reprinted in the New York Times, April 28, 1953, p. 20+. For an example of state harassment see the Florida report, “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” which was begun by an interim committee established in 1955 to investigate homosexuals in government employment. Homosexual teachers were especially singled out for attack. Reprinted in Government vs. Homosexuals.

  10. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1982), pp. 149, 198.

  11. “The ACLU Takes a Stand on Homosexuality,” The Ladder March !957> pp. 8–9. The ACLU did, however, protest when two San Francisco State College coeds were arrested that year in a gay bar and charged with wearing men’s clothes. See “ACLU Clashes with San Francisco Police on Vagrancy Arrests,” The Ladder, March 1957, p. 19. In the early 1950s the ACLU refused to help lesbians who were discharged from the military because “the ACLU held that homosexuality was relevant to an individual’s military service.” In responding to a discharged Air Force woman who asked for help in 1951, the ACLU staff counsel advised her to submit herself to medical treatment that would enable her to “abandon homosexual relations”; quoted in Allan Bérubé and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians During the McCarthy Years,” in Estelle Freedman et al., The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 290–95. More recently the ACLU has been very active in gay rights and has even published a gay rights manual, Thomas B. Stoddard et al., The Rights of Gay People (1975; rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1983).

  12. Milton E. Hahn and Byron H. Atkinson, “The Sexually Deviant Student,” School and Society (September 17, 1955), 82: 85–87. Personal interview with Betty, age 66, Omaha, Neb., October 11, 1988.

  13. Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Washington Confidential (New York: Crown Press, 1951), p. 94.

  14. Ralph H. Major, Jr., “New Moral Menace to Our Youth,” Coronet, September 1950, pp. 101–108. “Women Who Fall for Lesbians,” Jet (February 1954), 5:20–22.

  15. Rosie G. Waldeck, “Homosexual International,” Human Events, in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1950s.

  16. Court decison quoted in One, March 1957, pp. 5–20. See also “Owe Takes a Stand,” The Ladder, June 1957, pp.3–6. One appealed to the Supreme Court which reversed the ruling of the lower court in 1958. See One, March 1958, p. 6, and Homophile Studies (1958), 1:60–64.

  17. “Sword of self-revulsion” from Edwin West, Young and Innocent (New York: Monarch, 1960), p. 43.

  18. Publishers’ demands discussed by 1950s novelist Vin Packer, quoted in Roberta Yusba, “Twilight Tales: Lesbian Pulps, 1950–1960,” On Our Backs, Summer 1985, pp. 30–31+. Paula Christian, another prolific lesbian paperback writer of the 1950s, similarly observed: “Through my own experience at Fawcett, it should be understood that a publisher (with the moral character of a nation in mind) cannot allow this theme to be promoted as something to be admired or desired. Nor can a publisher in the paperback field expect the general public to accept a truly sophisticated treatment where there is no justification for the ‘deviation’ with a great deal of why’s, wherefore’s, and ‘we hate ourselves, but what can we do?’” The Ladder (February 1961), 5(5): 19. For discussions of lesbians’ reading of the pulps as the only literature in which lesbian love was portrayed see Kate Millett, Flying (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974), p. 202; Dorothy Allison, “A Personal History of Lesbian Porn,” New York Native, June 16, 1982, p. 22; Fran Koski and Maida Tilchen, “Some Pulp Sappho,” in Karla Jay and Allen Young, eds., Lavender Culture (New York: Jove, 1979), pp. 262–74.

  19. Helen Hull papers, Columbia University, photocopy in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, Hull biographical file.

  20. In the ’50s, as in earlier decades, front marriages were not uncommon among black lesbians as well as white. See Virginia Harris’ story about middleclass black lesbians in the 1950s, “A Pearl of Great Price,” Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives (Spring 1987), 2:3–10. Regarding parents having children committed see interview with Whitey in Nancy Adair and Casey Adair, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (San Francisco: New Glide Publications), pp. 6–7. Personal interview with Terry, age 58, in Kansas City, Kans., October 16, 1988.

  21. Personal interview with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, San Francisco, August 14, 1987.

  22. DOB greeter in Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 100. “Attorney Stresses Nothing to Fear in Joining DOB,” The Ladder, April 1957, pp. 15–16; “Your Name is Safe,” The Ladder, Novemeber 1956, pp. 10–12. The latter article was reprinted in The Ladder, February 1958, pp. 4–6.

  23. FBI File 94–843, 8/6/59.

  24. Allan Bérubé, “Behind the Spectre of San Francisco,” The Body Politic, April 1981, pp. 25–27, and personal interview with Martin and Lyon, cited above. Homosexuality was never illegal under California state law, although certain acts such as oral sex were until the mid-’70s: Sarah Senefield et al., Sex Code of California: A Compendium (Sausalito, Calif: Graphic Arts of Marin, 1973), pp. 164–65.

  25. “Instructions for Committee on Indoctrination and Education,” quoted in Berube and D’Emilio.

  26. “Discharge of Homosexuals,” Air Force Regulation 35–66, Department of Air Force, Washington, D.C., May 31, 1956.

  27. Personal interview with Annie, age 65, San Francisco, August 11, 1987. Official treatment of suspected lesbians in “Report on Homosexuality with Particular Emphasis on this Problem in Governmental Agencies,” p. 4, and Louis Jolyon West et al., “An Approach to the Problem of Homosexuality in the Military Service,” American Journal of Psychiatry (1958), 115:392–401.

  28. Personal interview with Dina, age 56, Fresno, Calif, November 1, 1987.

  29. Personal interview with Sandy, age 57, Lincoln, Neb., October 12, 1988.

  30. Interview with Pat Bond in Adair and Adair, pp. 57–61.

  31. Maida Tilchen and Helen Weinstock, “Letters from My Aunt,” Gay Community News, July 12, 1980, pp. 8–9.

  32. Jackie Cursi, “Leaping Lesbians,” Lesbian Ethics (Fall 1986), 2(2)181–83.

  33. Personal interview with Marie, age 58, Fresno, Calif, April 26, 1988.

  34. Investigative board quoted in Berube and D’Emilio, p. 280. Personal interview with Elizabeth, age 66, Marin County, Calif, Aug. 12,
1988. Personal interview with Marie, cited above.

  35. Vito Russo, “Pat Bond: The Word Is Out WAC,” Christopher Street (May 1978), 2:11.

  36. Case summarized in Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976), pp. 119–23.

  37. Personal interview with Wilma, age 54, Los Angeles, May 14, 1988.

  38. Janet S. Chafetz et al., “A Study of Homosexual Women,” Social Work (November 1974), 19(6)1714–23, and Virginia R. Brooks, Minority Stress and Lesbian Women (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1981), p. 63. Other studies show that even higher percentages of lesbians believe they must be closeted at work. For example, Martin Levine and Robin Leonard studied 203 middleclass, white collar, highly educated lesbians in New York City. Three-fifths expected discrimination at work if their sexual orientation became known. Those who did not either worked in fields accepting gays or their employers were gay: “Discrimination Against Lesbians in the Work Force,” in Freedman, pp. 187–97.

  39. Written communication with H.P. cited above. Such trepidation and suspicions are not limited to women who survived the 1950s. In the mid-1970s much younger lesbians, who were members of the middleclass feminist organization NOW, insisted that the FBI, which had just infiltrated radical lesbian communities in the East and South looking for Weathermen Susan Saxe and Katherine Ann Powers, had begun to harass the middleclass lesbian commuity in an attempt to destroy lesbian-feminist progress. In a flyer titled What to Do When the Man Comes to Your Door, lesbian NOW members complained that the FBI had already visited some of them and were beginning a campaign that was comparable to the Salem witch trials. See Sarah Schulman, “The History of the Commie-Pinko-Faggot,” Womanews (New York), July/August 1980, p. 1 +.

  7. Butches, Femmes, and Kikis

  1. Early German homophile activism discussed in Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, Lesbians in Germany: 1890–1920, (Tallahasee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1990), introduction. Lesbian society in France discussed in Catherine van Casselaer, Lot’s Wife: Lesbian Paris, 1890–1914, (Liverpool: Janus Press, 1986).

  2. Personal interview with Pat, age 51, former member of the Orange County Lionettes, the Huntington Park Blues, and the Fresno Rockettes, Fresno, March 5, 1988, and personal interview with Cleo, age 61, Omaha, Neb., October 11, 1988. Softball continues to be a major activity among young lesbians in areas such as the midwest. As Rhonda, age 26, observed, “Softball is the only consistent thing in this community. Political groups and social groups come and go, but softball will always be around”; Omaha, Neb., October 11, 1988. On the continuing importance of softball in the lesbian community see also Yvonne Zipter, Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend: Reflections, Reminiscences, and Reports from the Field on the Lesbian National Pastime (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1989).

  3. Personal interview with Donna, age 54, Carson City, Nev., June 10, 1987.

  4. A 1973 study of lesbians indicated that both sexually and socially, homosexual women tend to behave by and large like heterosexual women, rather than like gay or straight men. Only in their interest in sports and abuse of alcohol were lesbians more like men than like other women: Marcel T. Saghir and Eli Robins, “Clinical Aspects of Female Homosexuality,” in Judd Marmor, ed., Homosexual Behavior: A Clinical Reappraisal (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 280–95. Esther Newton observes in “A Place in the Sun,” a study of middle-and upper-middle class lesbians of Cherry Grove, that those women too had a drinking problem, perhaps acquired at their cocktail parties, where the excitement of alcohol may have been associated with the rebellion of the speakeasies, where modern women could drink in public for the first time (paper given at the Berkshire History of Women Conference, Wellesley College, Mass., June 20, 1987).

  5. Reported in “The Gay Bar—Whose Problem Is It?” The Ladder, 4: 3 (Dec. 1959), pp. 4–13 +.

  6. Ohio woman quoted in Margaret Hunt, “A Fern’s Own Story: Interview With Joan Nestle,” Gay Community News (October 4–10, 1987), 15(12):16–17 +. Personal interview with L.J., age 57, Los Angeles, April 5, 1987.

  7. Reported in “The Gay Bar …,” and “Sequel to the ‘Gay’ Bar Problem,” The Ladder (February 1960), 4(5):5~9 +.

  8. Personal interview with Marlene, age 60, San Francisco, August 9, 1987. Interview with Rikki Streicher, 1981, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1950s. Kelley’s raid reported in The Ladder, (November 1956), 1 (2):5. Personal interview with D.F., age 55, Los Angeles, April 5, 1987. Sea Colony information from Joan Nestle interview in Neighborhood Voices, producer Amber Hollibaugh, 1985.

  9. Quoted in Bob Skiba, “Pansies, Perverts, and Pegged Pants,” Gay and Lesbian Community Guide to New England (n.p., 1982), p. 4.

  10. Oral interview with Peg. B. by Joan Nestle, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1950s.

  11. Merril Mushroom, “Confessions of a Butch Dyke,” Common Lives/ Lesbian Lives (Fall 1983), 9:39–45.

  12. Personal interview with Shirley, age 60, San Francisco, January 31, 1987. Although many black women were, according to Lorde, “into heavy roles,” others like Lorde rejected them and felt especially resentful that white America’s “racist distortions of beauty” meant that in an interracial couple it was usually only the white woman who could be femme, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1982), p. 224.

  13. New England lesbians discussed in Skiba, pp. 2–5 and in paper presentation by Mirtha Quintanales et al., Berkshire History of Women Conference, Wellesley College, Mass., June 20, 1987. Bluff discussed in Julia Penelope, “Whose Past Are We Reclaiming?,” Common Lives/Lesbian Lives (Autumn 1984), 13:16. Greenwich Village discussed in Maida Tilchen and Helen Weinstock, “Letters from My Aunt,” Gay Community News (July 12, 1980), 7(5):8.

  14. Personal interview with Toni, age 59, Kansas City, Mo., October 16, 1988.

  15. Joan Nestle, “Butch/Fern Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” Heresies: Sex Issue (1981), 12(3)121–24, and personal interview with Joan Nestle, New York, October 6, 1987. Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 30–31, 47. See also Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy, “Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, NY, 1940–1960,” in Martin Duberman et al., eds., Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 426–40.

  16. On being flipped among white lesbians: Mushroom, p. 42. Penelope, p. 26; personal interview with Suzanne, age 39, Boston, Mass., June 16, 1987. Being flipped among black lesbians discussed in Lorde, p. 140 and Ethel Sawyer, “A Study of a Public Lesbian Community,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo, 1965. In women’s prisons during the 1950s various other terms were used to describe being flipped. At the Federal Reformatory for women at Alderson, West Virginia, a butch who became a femme was said to have “dropped the belt.” At Frontera it was said she “gave up the works.” See Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966).

  17. Laurajean Ermayne, “My Friend the Night” Vice Versa, October 1947, pp. 11–12. Joan Nestle, “The Fern Question, or We Will Not Go Away,” lecture notes for conference, “The Scholar and the Feminist: Toward a Politics of Sexuality,” Barnard College, New York, April 24, 1982.

  18. Personal interview with J. C, Houston, Tex., March 26, 1988. Personal interview with Ann, cited above. Judy Grahn also remembers that in Washington, D.C., some women in the bars would be femme one night and butch the next: Grahn, p. 156.

  19. Personal interview with Lucia, age 42, San Francisco, August 2, 1988.

  20. Penelope, 23.

  21. Laurajean Ermayne, “Radclyffe Hall,” Vice Versa, November 1947. In her own life the strict role division between Hall and her primary partner, Una Troubridge, seems to have faded as their years together passed. While Troubridge appeared traditionally feminine at the beginning of their relationship, later photographs show her to be increasingly less so. The two women appeared o
ften in public in men’s jackets and ties. After Hall’s death, Troubridge wore exclusively men’s clothes. See Richard Ormrod, Una Troubridge: The Friend of Radclyffe Hall (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1985). With regard to the influence of The Well of Loneliness see Blanche Weissen Cook, “Women Alone Stir My Imagination,” Signs (1979), 4:718–39. See also Rebecca O’Rourke, Reflecting on the Well of Loneliness (London: Routledge, 1989).

  22. John D’Emilio as respondent on panel, “Love and Friendship in Lesbian Bar Communities of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s,” Berkshire History of Women Conference, Wellesley College, Mass., June 19, 1987.

  23. Newton.

  24. Jon Bradshaw, Dreams That Money Can Buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman (New York: William Morrow, 1985).

  25. Bradshaw; Milt Machlin, Libby (New York: Tower, 1980).

  26. Denis Brian, Tallulah, Darling (New York: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 34, 67–68; Bradshaw, p. 84.

  27. Bradshaw, pp. 260–61, 310.

  28. George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), p. 44.

  29. Elisabeth Craigin, Either Is Love (New York: Harcourt, 1937), pp. 68–70. Diana Fredricks, Diana: A Strange Autobiography (New York: Dial, 1939), pp. 72–73.

  30. Lisa Ben, “Protest,” Vice Versa, January 1948, p. 14. In later writings Lisa Ben acknowledged the importance of butch/femme in her own social group. For example, she wrote a “gay parody” of “Hello, Young Lovers” with the line: “All you cute butches lined up at the bar,/ I’ve had a love like you,” Leland Moss, “Interview with Lisa Ben,” Gaysweek, January 23, 1978, pp. 14–16.

  31. “The President’s Message,” The Ladder (November 1956), 1(2): 3. A 1958 DOB questionnaire indicated that the lesbian readership of The Ladder was solidly middle-to upper-middle class in terms of education, occupation, property ownership, and civic activities such as voting: The Ladder (September 1959), 3(12):4–32. The appeal to homosexuals to blend in had some resurgence at the end of the 1980s, which may be a harbinger of more conservative times: see Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball (New York: Doubleday, 1989).