The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

Before the movement, such women had few models for any other kind of relationship. Elana had spent many years trying to go “straight,” even while she enjoyed lesbian relationships with women. “The only knowledge I had about Lesbians came from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which my mother gave me when I was 14 and in the throes of a serious crush on a girl in high school.”57

  The women’s movement would have a tremendous impact on this earlier generation. It encouraged them to come out; it named their desires. But it also rejected the butch/femme roles, that is, one woman dressing and acting manly and the other dressing and behaving in a traditional feminine manner. Instead, new feminists promoted loving relationships between two strong, independent women.

  Still, the political and cultural upheavals of the sixties freed some of these women from self-hatred. “I first realized I was a Lesbian in 1968,” wrote one twenty-six-year-old woman. “I had always known that I loved, was attracted to, was comfortable with women, but before the Women’s Movement I didn’t have a word for someone who felt those feelings.”58

  But lesbians still had no visible movement and no refuge. In 1969, gay men successfully fought off police raids at New York’s Stonewall bar, igniting the gay liberation movement. Some lesbians joined them, hoping they would fight together for social acceptance and civil rights. But to their disappointment, many lesbians discovered that gay men could be just as blind to the needs of women as straight men. By 1970, Del Martin, a prominent lesbian activist, was already writing her “farewell” to the male gay movement, much as Robin Morgan had done to the New Left. She called her missive “If That’s All There Is.”59

  At the same time, lesbians who had joined NOW felt outraged by Betty Friedan’s characterization of them as a “lavender menace” that would provide enemies with the ammunition to dismiss the women’s movement as a bunch of man-hating dykes. Homophobia had injured countless women, confining them to the closet, condemning them to psychiatric wards, and taking away their children. Purging lesbians from the movement was a morally indefensible solution and, in the view of many, would have discredited the movement even more. The real menace would have been a feminist movement that stigmatized and excluded other women. Some lesbians now fled the Gay Liberation Front and NOW for the women’s liberation movement, where they found a somewhat more open and hospitable atmosphere.

  For younger women who had never identified themselves as lesbians, the women’s liberation movement provided a political and highly sexualized context in which to explore their sexuality. Between 1967 and 1970, relatively few women felt secure enough to come out in the women’s groups they had joined. The feminist writer Susan Griffin, whom I met in our small group, never discussed her attraction for women at any of the meetings that spanned two years. Later, she told me, “I certainly didn’t feel it was safe in this group either. But it wasn’t as if it were a characteristic of this group as opposed to other groups; this group was safer than anything else. It’s just that the topic seemed so completely verboten.”60

  “In the early days,” explained Cindy Cisler, “we were boy-crazy. There was practically no discussion of lesbianism.” Rosalyn Baxandall remembered Robin Morgan asking her group to discuss their attraction to one another, but the group decided “we don’t want to talk about that.”61 In 1969, Martha Shelley began to articulate the political importance of lesbian feminism in an essay titled, “Notes of a Radical Lesbian.” “Lesbianism,” she wrote, “is one road to freedom—freedom from oppression by men. . . . The woman who is totally independent of men—who obtains love, sex, and self-esteem from other women—is a terrible threat to male supremacy. She doesn’t need them, and they have less power over her.”62

  In New York City, a group of young women who called themselves “Radicalesbians” started recasting lesbianism as a political choice in 1970. These lesbian-feminists declared themselves the “new vanguard” of the women’s movement and denounced sleeping with men as “reactionary” political behavior. Only with women, they insisted, could feminists integrate their emotional, political, and sexual lives. Only with women could feminists discover emotional freedom and sexual satisfaction.

  “Vanguardism” had long poisoned the movements of the Left, most recently in the sixties. Casting yourself as the “vanguard” meant that you were morally superior because you had suffered the most and had therefore gained the right to lead the much-awaited “revolution.” During the sixties, the “vanguard” kept changing—from students to black nationalists to the working class. In the end, it also fragmented movements, leading to separatist politics rather than to political coalitions rooted in inclusiveness.63

  Political lines began to be firmly drawn. At the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970, Radicalesbians wearing T-shirts that read “Lavender Menace” grabbed an open microphone to promote the politics of lesbianism, and passed out copies of an essay called “Woman-Identified Woman,” a position paper that quickly swept through the nation’s women’s liberation groups. “What is a lesbian?” the paper asked.

  A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society . . . allows. . . . On some level she has not been able to accept the limitation and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society—the female role.64

  But who qualified to be a woman-identified woman? Did a woman have to support lesbians or sleep with them in order to be labeled a woman-identified woman? Some heterosexuals (wishfully) concluded that a “woman-identified woman” simply had to swear allegiance to lesbians as the vanguard. Yet others interpreted the “woman-identified woman” as a lesbian litmus test that decided each woman’s political credibility.65

  Invited by a friend in NOW to the Congress to Unite Women, one feminist began to realize how scared some feminists were of lesbians. “I went to the Conference with much curiosity. I had high hopes of seeing a Lesbian. And I did . . . and they didn’t look very different from anyone else except that they seemed stronger, more articulate, more attractive, more powerful, and funnier than the other women.”

  Rita Mae Brown was the first up-front lesbian I ever saw. She was marvelous. Small, beautiful, strong, wearing a “Super-Dyke” T-shirt which she had dyed Lavender. . . . When she asked for women in the audience to join their Lesbian sisters at the front of the auditorium, I jumped up, eager to be counted as a sister traveler. A friend sitting with me, who I knew to be a Lesbian, would not join us. When I asked her why, she said it was too dangerous. That made me want to be a Lesbian even more. After all if Kate Millett and Anselma Del’Olio were not afraid to be lesbian-identified, why should I be? Besides, I thought the Lavender Menace take-over of the conference was done delightfully and humorously. . . . They had seized the time and created a Lavender Happening.66

  Between 1970 and 1975, countless women’s liberationists made the “political choice” to live life as lesbians. By describing lesbianism as a political choice, these activists reframed female homosexuality as something other than sexually deviant behavior. The American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders provided legitimacy for such a position. But to women who already considered themselves lesbians, these “political lesbians” seemed strange. One young feminist “decided” that she was going to have sex with a woman.

  Even though I had not yet had sex with a woman, I was sure that it would be far superior to sex with men. Politically, I wanted my energy to be going to support wimmin and to building a feminist revolution together, not to struggling with individual men.

  When she met an older lesbian, she was scared to tell her that

  I had never slept with a woman, afraid she would not be interested in me because I was so inexperienced. She was very surprised and taken aback by my hesitant admission of Lesbian virginity. A dyke of ten years, out long before there was any suc
h thing as feminism, she could not understand how I could be so militantly Lesbian before I had even made love with a woman!67

  In 1972, Robin Morgan found herself caught in the crossfire between lesbian and heterosexual feminists. The First Lesbian Feminist Conference in Los Angeles had invited her to give its keynote address. Criticized and questioned by lesbian feminists as to why she—a wife and a mother of a son—was going to address the fifteen hundred lesbians at the conference, she responded that she was an engaged activist in the movement who supported lesbians. In New York, Radicalesbians had recently warned her, “Don’t you dare call yourself a lesbian—you live with a man and you have a child.” Like other women, Morgan was discovering that in such an environment, you could not, after all, simply identify yourself as a “political lesbian.”

  Tired of what she called “vanguarditis,” Morgan later described the absurd fragmentation of the movement:

  There were lesbians, lesbian-feminists, dykes, dyke-feminists, dyke-separatists, “old dykes,” butch dykes, bar dykes, and killer dykes. . . . There were divisions between Political Lesbians and Real Lesbians and Nouveau Lesbians. Heaven help a woman who is unaware of these fine political distinctions and who wanders into a meeting, for the first time, thinking she maybe has a right to be there because she likes women.68

  Many heterosexual and lesbian feminists shared Morgan’s sentiments, but just as many felt intimidated by some lesbians’ moral self-righteousness. In 1974, a member of a Kansas City women’s liberation movement wrote that “she and other heterosexuals felt uncomfortable with lesbians—not because they were deviant, but because they felt their entire lives judged to be as inadequate, inferior, backsliding, not feminist enough.” She still felt like a novice, she explained, and had “not come far enough along for a lesbian love relationship right now.”69

  But it was not just political pressure that turned some feminists’ attention to other women. Nor did all lesbians feel a need to politicize their sexual orientation. “Nouveau Lesbians,” a term used to describe the newly converted by those who had been lesbians before the women’s movement, made their exodus from heterosexuality seem immensely appealing. More than one feminist discovered that life as a lesbian quickly resolved the painful conflicts between her feminist convictions and heterosexual relationships. “I think that part of it was dealing with issues like pornography,” the novelist Valerie Miner explained. “It was very hard to go from [these kinds of revelations and discussions] to home to a man at the end of the day. . . . I felt that I would be able to have more time for women and feminist activities if I were involved with a woman.”70

  In personal conversations, in testimonies, in feminist fiction, and at meetings, new lesbians gushed euphorically, thrilled by their newfound sexual passion. Women, they said, were better lovers. They took their time, they snuggled, they teased, they wove sexual and emotional intimacy into a seamless passionate experience. And, better yet, they didn’t need a guided tour of women’s anatomy. Given the self-evident superiority of such relationships, they asked, how could women still sleep with men?

  Women who had married early, doubtful of their attraction for men, sometimes discovered that they were actually attracted to women. “I really had no identity of my own,” wrote one married woman. “I was somebody’s wife, mother, lover, friend, daughter and so on, ad infinitum. I blended. I accommodated. My theme song was, ‘tell me what it is you want me to be and I’ll be that.’” The woman’s movement freed her to see “her sexual preference” no longer as a handicap, or a “crippling disease.” “My life changed dramatically in a relatively short time from Mrs. Straight White Suburbia to Ms. Alternative Lifestyle.”71

  As a result of the women’s movement, wrote Sara Lucia Hoagland,

  forgotten dreams became possibilities as my first feminist perceptions, having snatched my attention two years earlier, now settled solidly in my gut. I had never quite buried my childhood rage at grown women acting like two-year-olds around men.

  At the time, Hoagland didn’t think she was physically attracted to women but had begun to argue that “political Lesbianism was a legitimate alternative.” Soon she experienced sex with a woman. “It was the most natural thing in the world. I wondered where I had been all my life, yet I did not regret one moment spent in arriving. To this day I wonder why it is not called, ‘coming home.’ For the first time I was at ease with being a woman, body and soul were united—healed—or was it completed?”72

  Beverly Toll could hardly believe the love and passion she now experienced with another woman. “The best way I can describe it,” she wrote, “is to say that this is the only time in my life when making love was completely spontaneous. I didn’t think about it; if I had I would probably have pulled away from this kind, gentle womyn that was touching me. It didn’t occur to me to question what was happening. There were no decisions to be made. I thought of nothing, experienced for the first time in my life, the tender, satisfying love of a womyn.”73

  The difference seemed astounding to women who had rarely enjoyed sex with men. “Suddenly you aren’t alone anymore. This closeness, this sharing with another womon amazes you. This could be a womon you’ve known all your life, you know each other so well. You can’t believe that all this happiness has descended upon you in the form of this blue-jeaned thick-shoed womon.”74

  Some lesbians feared straight women’s disapproval. And many straight women feared lesbians’ condemnation. In such an atmosphere, fear turned into self-righteousness, and by 1972, a “gay-straight” split affected nearly every women’s liberation group. Only in small cities or less-urban settings did gay and straight feminists continue to cling together, given the common enmity they faced. By the end of the decade, some heterosexual women clearly felt defensive. As one straight woman quipped, “The women’s movement is the only place in the world where women have to come out of the closet as a heterosexual.”75

  Not surprisingly, idealizing lesbian relationships created its own problems. Some feminists ended their relationships with men only to discover the predictable reality that all intimate relationships are laced with emotional land mines. Between lesbian feminists, who were students or middle-class, and “bar lesbians,” who were predominantly working-class, lay even deeper cultural and political differences. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, lesbian feminists at first criticized bar lesbians “for mimicking heterosexuality” by adopting butch-femme roles. These new lesbians, committed to equality between themselves, argued that the butch-femme relationship replicated heterosexual power relations, turned women into sex objects, and they criticized the bar lesbians for not participating in feminist activities. Over time, these differences diminished. By the late seventies, a local lesbian bar hosted feminist fund-raisers. Lesbian feminists, for their part, began to recognize how bar culture had allowed prefeminist lesbians to survive and began to mute their critiques of butch-femme subculture.76

  In some regions, at particular moments, the pressure to identify as a lesbian grew fierce. Naomi Weisstein, in Chicago, recalled, “Everybody I knew experimented with lesbian relationships—the openness to lesbianism was really very strong.” One day, she went to a meeting and found two women colleagues naked on the sofa. “In those days, it was really uncool to go ‘hey, you’re naked and I’m coming for a meeting.’ There was an acknowledged social protocol, which was ‘congratulations, how are you?’”77 Barbara Haber remembers moving to Boston in the early seventies as lesbian feminism was just emerging as the political choice du jour. Two of her close friends were having their first lesbian love affair with each other while most of her other friends and acquaintances had already become lesbians. “Many of them,” she observed,

  have returned to heterosexuality since that time; others have not. But at that moment it was impossible to be heterosexual. Even if you didn’t become a lesbian, you couldn’t be a heterosexual. There was definitely a recoil from heterosexual relationships. If you want to talk about the roots of the women’s move
ment, you have to talk about the roots of that “recoil.”78

  Pressure for separation grew increasingly strong. Jill Johnston’s book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973) gained a surge of media publicity unavailable to most lesbian feminist writers. Based on a series of articles in the Village Voice, New York’s alternative newspaper, Johnston’s book reported on living at the edge of New York’s avant-garde art scene and rejected the idea that lesbians were simply women attracted to other women. Such a sexual definition, in her view, was too narrow, even in its focus essentially pornographic, because lesbians were revolutionaries and subversives. “Many feminists,” she argued, “are now stranded between their personal needs and their political persuasions. The lesbian is the woman who unites the personal and the political in the struggle to free ourselves from the oppressive institution [marriage]. . . . By this definition lesbians are in the vanguard of the resistance.” By sleeping with the enemy, heterosexual feminists were, she believed, undermining the revolution against patriarchy.79

  The urge to separate not only from men, but also from the nonlesbian women’s movement sometimes seemed irresistible. Small groups of lesbian feminists began to found separatist communes, urban as well as rural, some of which even excluded male infants or male children. The Furies, a Washington, D.C., group, became one of the most influential lesbian separatist groups in the country, partly due to the power of their writings, first published in Off Our Backs and then in Quest, a new magazine they founded.

  Before she joined The Furies, Charlotte Bunch, already a veteran activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, had been married. After sleeping with a woman, she chose complete separatism from heterosexual women as well as men. Later, she explained why the Furies had separated from the women’s movement:

  It [was] because it has been made clear to us that there was no space to develop a lesbian feminist politics and life-style without constant and nonproductive conflict with heterosexual fears, antagonism and insensitivity. . . . The Furies was not just an “alternative community,” but a commitment to women as a political group.80