Another devil-may-care lesbian woos another ingénue in the fifth chapter of Tiffany Thayer’s Thirteen Women (1932), but this story is told much more cynically. Martha Viborg is a rich man’s wife and also “just a drop in the bucket61 from the well of loneliness,” as Thayer puts it, cheekily alluding to the novel banned four years earlier. Since Martha lives in Denver, Colorado, rather than, say, San Francisco, she has had to marry a doctor to provide a cover. Worldly and beautiful as well as “queer,” Martha prides herself on the fact that “her affairs were always of the heart, and never vulgar, hurried gratifications.” As the story begins, she sets out to awaken a frail, lovely innocent called Hazel Cousins. The narrator mocks all the participants in this comedy—“lady-lovers,” as he calls them—but without malice. He refers to Martha’s “condition” or “divergence from the norm,” but refuses to give any explanations for it: “She doesn’t know where she came from and your guess is as good as mine.” He offers her seduction technique as a model to husbands.
It is a delight to watch Martha work. Detail! The girl is past-mistress of detail and nuance. It is a fortunate thing for the few of us men left in the metropolitan area that all dykes are not as gifted and intelligent as was Mrs Viborg. She had a different appeal for every different kind of woman she sought, and she knew exactly when the laying-on-of-hands was permissible.
The sex is so superb that Hazel—once she gets over her panic—falls madly in love, telling her mother on the phone, “I’m leaving at once for Mrs Viborg’s. Goodnight.” It will not be a long affair—since Hazel is wasting away from tuberculosis—but it is certainly a lively one.
Judy Gardiner’s novella62 Fidelia (1967) has an equally satirical and upbeat but much more romantic tone. This cheeky tale starts with a declaration that Fidelia (Fido) and Matilda have been living as “man and wife” ever since their elopement, ten years ago, from their disapproving families. Sharing a crumbling house in the English countryside, “they worked and waltzed and made love” in complete happiness. That is, till Matilda says the fatal words, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a baby.” Fido’s surname—Denison—may hint that she will have to “deny” her “wife” a “son.” When she calmly points out that “begetting” is one of the few manly skills she lacks, she upsets the sweetly delusional Matilda, who likes to think of herself as “married” and “respectable” and “like everyone else.” The couple consider adoption, but find that they are disqualified because, as the form says, “No child can be placed in any form of irregular household.” Fido, increasingly troubled by a craving for fatherhood, suggests that they take “a bash at this artificial insemination lark”—and they get as far as the doctor’s office before Matilda loses her nerve and tells the doctor that what she’s suffering from is earache.
Enter Fido’s ne’er-do-well brother, Rupert, with his benevolent attitude toward the female couple’s sex life. When Matilda demands—with no warning—that he service her, at first he is appalled at the notion of being used as a “rutting ram,” but his big sister wins him over and persuades him to take Matilda off for the weekend to get her pregnant in a way that keeps it “in the family.” Judy Gardiner has great fun with this situation: Fido suffers agonies of jealousy while the others are away, and the reader is well aware of the risk that she will have unwittingly set in motion the man-wins-woman-from-woman plot…but no, Matilda comes home and bursts into tears, explaining that it was so ghastly, she had to keep telling herself that she was a patient about to have an operation.
When Fido wants to know what the baby will call them, Matilda is surprised by the question, because to her the situation seems delightfully ordinary: “I’ll be mother, you’ll be father.” In this fairy-tale atmosphere, they gradually allow themselves to forget that it was not their own lovemaking that conceived the baby. Waiting with the other fathers in the hospital, Fido is moved by a moment of solidarity with a bus driver who asks, “Your first?” It is not clear whether he is reading her as a man or a lesbian. The final hitch in the comedy is provided by Rupert’s next visit, this time with his new wife, Vivien, who has no idea that his sister is what he flippantly calls a “practising lesbian.” When she finds out about the conception, she goes into hysterics about this “unnatural vice,” but her wrath has the effect of uniting Fido, Matilda, and Rupert as a happy trio who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. This hilarious novella,63 when it came out in 1967, anticipated the lesbian baby boom by two decades.
These carefree lesbians were outnumbered ten to one by their suicidal sisters in the literature of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but they did pave the way for the explosion of confident lesbian writing in the 1970s. Here the devil-may-care girl takes on a more politicized role as the “defiant lesbian hero,”64 as Gabrielle Griffin puts it. Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), named for the female genitals, is said to be the best-selling lesbian novel ever. Cleverly combining a serious quest story with comic exuberance, Rubyfruit Jungle follows its smart, beautiful, working-class, tomboy heroine Molly Bolt from sixth grade through an experimental adolescence.
Me being a queer65 can’t hurt anyone, why should it be such a terrible thing? Makes no sense. But I’m not gonna base my judgment on one little fuck with ole Leroy. We got to do it a lot more and maybe I’ll do around twenty or thirty men and twenty or thirty women and then I’ll decide. I wonder if I could get twenty people to go to bed with me?
By adulthood, Molly has decided she prefers women, but her fervently held preference for nonmonogamy means that this picaresque saga is never going to turn into a traditional romance. Despite her flippancy, her openness has many painful consequences: rejection by friends, expulsion from university, even a week locked up in a mental hospital. But what bothers her most is the sense of being narrowly defined.
So now I wear66 this label “Queer” emblazoned across my chest. Or I could always carve a scarlet “L” on my forehead. Why does everyone have to put you in a box and nail the lid on it? I don’t know what I am—polymorphous and perverse.
The echo of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)—in which the heroine is forced to wear a red A for “adulteress”—reminds us that Molly’s struggle is a classic American one, a maverick’s demand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Early on, when one of her lovers is afraid they will be labeled as “lesbian,” Molly reacts in a knee-jerk way: “No, we just love each other, that’s all. Lesbians look like men and are ugly.” But by the end of the book, living in New York, Molly has made peace with the labels issue, and come to certain lasting conclusions about herself: “I love women. I’ll never marry a man and I’ll never marry a woman either. That’s not my way. I’m a devil-may-care lesbian.” Many coming-out novels after Rubyfruit Jungle would adopt its lively formula of a young dyke kicking her way through society’s obstacle course in pursuit of self-discovery and (maybe) love.
Sometimes the rebellion is political first (though, as the slogan goes, the personal is political). Often in women’s-liberation fiction of the 1970s and ’80s, feminism precedes—and opens the heroine’s eyes to—desire for women. The stern mother of a newly out lesbian, in Valerie Miner’s Blood Sisters (1982), “had known this would happen68 all along. Women’s poetry. Women’s music. It all led to women’s bodies.” Interestingly, these characters69 reach the point of loving women without necessarily renouncing men; their goal is an authentic freedom, however that is defined.
But many coming-out novels67 continued to follow Rubyfruit Jungle in narrating an individualistic quest. Jeanette Winterson’s semi-autobiographical, playfully literary Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), written in a few weeks, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. Raised as a missionary in the north of England by a fundamentalist Christian mother, the rebellious heroine Jeanette does not rebel against normality—because the way she is being raised (by a mother who despises men and intends Jeanette to become a celibate missionary) is anything but normal. Instead, the girl stru
ggles to form a sense of self that does not depend on anyone else’s rules. When the elders of the sect part her from her girlfriend and put her through a brutal two-day exorcism of her “Unnatural Passion,”70 Jeanette is tempted to give in. But she figures out that if she gives up her so-called demons, she will lose her self with them. “If I keep you, what will happen?” she asks the hallucinatory “orange demon” who appears in her dark room. “You’ll have a difficult, different time,” he promises her. No guaranteed happy ending, then, just an invitation to adventure that is, quite literally, devil-may-care.
PLACES FOR US
We saw in chapter 3 that female pairs in fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often long for “the beautiful house”—a domestic haven that offers security and privacy for their love. In the coming-out novel, this longing expands into a search for a place in which a couple can go about their lives, and perhaps find a community of the like-minded. “There must be others71 like us who can feel and love and live together despite everything,” the interracial couple tell themselves in Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her (1974), the first openly lesbian novel by an African-American woman.
In Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), Martha complains fearfully that because she and Karen have been labeled as lesbians, “There is not anywhere72 we can go.” The reviewer from the New York Sun raised an objection, very deadpan: “You immediately think of half a dozen…including the city of New York.” And indeed in fiction73 from the 1950s on, as we saw in Rubyfruit Jungle, a move toward lesbian identity usually involves a flight from oppressive small-town mores to the original queer ghetto—Greenwich Village.
Many of these novels are part of the publishing phenomenon of lesbian pulp fiction, which reached a very broad readership in the 1950s and ’60s. Typically, their titles use code words for desire between women (Strange Fire, Odd Girl Out, Queer Affair), and emphasize secrecy and gloom (Edge of Twilight, Love Like a Shadow, Women in the Shadows, Shady Cloister, Women of Darkness), taboo (Forbidden Sex), neurosis (The Strange Compulsion of Laura M.), experimentation (Part-time Lez), or simple wickedness (The Mischief, Women of Evil). Sometimes it is explained away as a matter of trauma (bad fathers, violent boyfriends) or environment (school, army, prison); often the right man can free the heroine from her trap. But the titles of certain pulp novels signal a more neutral or even upbeat coming-out narrative: I Am a Woman, Journey to a Woman, Another Kind of Love, Love Is Where You Find It. The first two are by Ann Bannon,74 the second two by Paula Christian, and this pair of authors—together with Valerie Taylor—stand out for their open-ended narratives (often in multivolume series) of young lesbians finding themselves by means of varied adventures in the liberating anonymity of New York, Los Angeles, or Paris. Gabriele Griffin75 makes the interesting generalization that tasteful literary writing of the 1950s and ’60s often tried to win sympathy for lesbian characters by treating them as victims, whereas lowbrow pulp could be freer to assert the joys of sex and romance between women.
“Le Sémiramis-Bar,” in La Vie Parisienne (March 27, 1909).
This piece was the first of two that Colette published about a queer bar in 1909 in a risqué literary/humor magazine founded in 1863. “Now I will dare to inform you that while dining at Sémiramis’s bar I enjoy watching the girls dancing together, they waltz well. They are not paid for this, but dance for pleasure between the cabbage soup and the beef stew…” The customers shown may all be women, too. The signature is not by any of the magazine’s regular artists.
The city, and in particular the urban lesbian bar, often comes across as a sort of seedy haven—for lesbians, if not for lasting relationships. Maureen Duffy both celebrates and critiques a bar she calls House of Shades76 (based on London’s famous Gateways) in her brilliantly dark and fractured novel The Microcosm (1966). Her central protagonist, Matt—one of several butches who go by “he” and refer to their “wives”—is a rueful Virgil, leading a Purgatorio-style tour of this microcosmic lesbian community. “He” compares it to an aquarium, with tourists ogling behind the glass, and to a rock pool where a multitude of creatures live who would be better off in the open sea. The Microcosm is very much of its era in its fretting over the origins of homosexuality, although by considering dozens of possibilities—biological and social as well as psychoanalytical—Duffy refuses to offer any one pat answer. But the book’s lasting brilliance lies in the confidence of its narrative voice, or rather voices. This postmodernist polyphony moves among the denizens of the bar, many of whom have moved to London from small towns, and are familiar with the confinement of the closet as well as the different restrictions of the gay ghetto. At times The Microcosm roams even more widely, like some radio picking up transmissions of consciousness from past eras; for instance, without preamble Duffy reproduces almost thirty pages of Charlotte Cibber Charke’s Narrative of the Life (1755), about a cross-dressed woman and her partner living from hand to mouth in a very different London. At one point, the narrator compares lesbians to “a lost tribe of aborigines buried deep in the heart of the social jungle” with a wall of sticks around their village, and suddenly the voice changes accordingly:
But one full day come the lightime we stand up all together and go walk away too out of the stickwall and not sorry leave our thatches all fall down. Come to the city and man and woman, friends altogether, speak out loud along the tall houses and our young people sharp as knives put hands each on brother’s shoulder, say, “This too our people.”
Then we too live free among the tall houses, working our living, dancing the night of no work along the tall city peoples, unafraid, never go back to the stickwall.
At first glance this passage might seem to reinforce the lesbian myth of escape from rural misery to urban fulfillment. But once we remember that the “stickwall” is a metaphor for the urban lesbian bar scene, then the “city” in which “man and woman, friends altogether” can live freely but still “sharp as knives” in diversity reveals itself as, certainly not London circa 1966, but an imagined utopia: the city of dreams.
The cult of the city lingers in many lesbian fictions, such as Jane DeLynn’s Don Juan in the Village (1988). But from the 1970s77 on, the longed-for destination was often a rural one. The lesbian-feminist movement of the ’70s, influenced by hippie culture, entwined the notions of women’s love and nature.
In this fiction, the rural locale is sometimes literal—the place where women fall in love—but more often a dream of female collectivity. For instance, Su in June Arnold’s highly original Sister Gin (1975)—an alcoholic in her forties who gives up the respectability of the closet when she joins a vigilante group to punish rapists—dreams of “all women78…in a field of brilliant green, buoyed up by unbelievable green—gathered in a giant sweep all yellow and blue and scooped it into one untouchable safe sea of women.” The hope for a female haven moved into science fiction, utopia and dystopia, producing such titles as Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978), and Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn (1984). One of the best-known examples is Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1978), in which nature has revolted against men by causing their machines to grind to a halt, and the nurturing, psychic “hillwomen”79 have escaped from the city to found their own idyllic settlement.
But perhaps the most fertile genre for the coming-out story in the past three decades has been historical fiction. The first lesbian historical80 novel is still one of the best: Patience and Sarah, as it is now known, was initially self-published and sold copy by copy out of a paper bag by “Isabel Miller” (Alma Routsong) under the significant title A Place for Us. It is also one of the best examples of the motif of a lesbian rural haven. This tough-minded romance was inspired by a real female couple, artist Miss Willson and her companion Miss Brundidge, who farmed in New York State circa 1820. Paradoxically,81 it was the lack of historical sources, the fact that Isabel Miller was
having to invent a form of credible passion between early-nineteenth-century women, that gave the novel its clean lines and the lasting force of legend.
Sarah, a tough tomboy who wears trousers to work as her father’s “boy,” has a grand plan: “I figure to take up land82 and make me a place.” She means land acquisition by homesteading, but it is also a bolder and more symbolic project of making a place in the world, rather than merely creeping into some corner. However, Patience, her older and more womanly spinster neighbor, is the one who actually plots their escape from Connecticut and family ties. The gender difference between Sarah and Patience is the tinder spark, the thing that forces them to notice their attraction and act on it instead of sublimating it into romantic friendship. Sarah decides that it was learning to shoot a gun that did it for her: “I could take care of myself, and not be beholden, and love who my feeling went to. I suppose lots of girls loved Patience but never said. Maybe it was because I could shoot that I could say.” But Patience is a rebel against some of the rules of femininity too; though she likes to sew and bake, she would rather paint pictures than sit around spinning or have babies. Gender itself must be made new in this tale of transformation: “I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women,” thinks Patience. “If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other.” The lovers are similar in as many ways as they are different, and throughout the book they swap roles: reckless leader and doubtful follower, greedy and cautious, seducer and resister. As an orthodox goer-to-Meeting, at one point Patience gets down on her knees to fight her desire and ends up praying for its fulfillment instead. She decides she and Sarah can be “an army of two…Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us: here we stand.”
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