Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  There was some diversity in those definitions: while images of monstrosities and decadence were often associated with lesbianism in the 1930s, other attitudes, particularly those promulgated by “liberal” doctors, seemed to encourage some enlightenment in the public view. Such enlightenment, however, was largely based on a conception of the lesbian as a pathetic creature who was cut off from the rest of womankind by her rare abnormality and who deserved no more punishment than was already visited on her by her unfortunate condition. Those doctors tended to argue that the notion of the homosexual as a criminal was “unscientific” and that homosexuals could be productive human beings. But the underlying ambivalence in their pleas for homosexuals generally bled through in statements such as that of psychiatrist Victor Robinson, who wrote in an introductory note to a lesbian autobiography in the 1930s: “That charming women should be lesbians is not a crime, it is simply a pity. It is not a question of ethics, but of endocrines.” Lesbians were merely helpless victims of nature’s freakish pranks, and the best thing that could be done for them was to finds ways to eradicate their “affliction.”12

  Not only was the extent of lesbianism and bisexuality hidden often by heterosexual marriage and complicitously ignored on all social levels, but also, through the prevalent view of love between women as an affliction, it was totally forgotten that female same-sex love in the form of romantic friendship had so recently (only a few decades earlier) been considered normal. Since few women now were willing to proclaim their love for other women, when medical doctors of the 1930s expressed their determination to prevent homosexuality through “education” and treatment they went largely unchallenged. Homosexuals, the doctors said, “remained at an immature level of social adjustment” and could not hope to achieve maturity as long as they were homosexual. Who of the many women who had experienced love for other women in the 1930s could dare step forward to contradict them? Individually locked into their secret as most women who loved other women were, how could they have argued against “curing” love between women by psychotherapy or doses of hormones? How could they have responded other than with silence about their own experiences when they read in mid-1930s newspapers that women who were “suffering from masculine psychological states” (that is, who loved other women) were being “cured” by removing one of their adrenal glands and that such treatments, as a front page article in the New York Times revealed in 1935, could correct “overfunctioning” that caused some women to have an “aversion to marriage”?13

  The unexamined contention that the female who loved other females was someone other than the “normal” woman was thus reinforced. Her otherness was depicted sometimes as sickness, sometimes as immorality, only very seldom as consonant with soundness and decency—and always as a rare “condition.” The contradictory notions of lesbianism as both immoral and sick were especially common in the literature aimed at a broad reading public. With the American publication of The Well of Loneliness at the end of the 1920s, there was suddenly a great interest in the lesbian as a sexual freak, and the floodgates opened. Each year saw the production of new novels that were even clearer than Radclyffe Hall’s book had been in their treatment of lesbian sexuality. Obviously the public had a taste for such fare, which, unlike Hall’s work, often did not even pretend to the kind of sympathy characteristic of the medical tracts, and instead presented lesbians as vampires and carnivorous flowers. The sensationalistic lesbian pulps of the 1950s had their forerunners in the 1930s in books such as Sheila Donisthorpe’s Loveliest of Friends (1931), which described lesbians as

  crooked, twisted freaks of nature who stagnate in dark and muddy waters, and are so cloaked with the weeds of viciousness and selfish lust that, drained of all pity, they regard their victims as mere stepping stones to their further pleasures. With flower-sweet fingertips they crush the grape of evil till it is exquisite, smooth and luscious to the taste, stirring up subconscious responsiveness, intensifying all that has been, all that follows, leaving their prey gibbering, writhing, sex sodden shadows of their former selves, conscious of only one desire in mind and body, which, ever festering, ever destroying, slowly saps their health and sanity.

  Novels of the 1920s that were not kind to lesbians generally showed them as more confused than vicious. The novels of the ’30s often seemed to call on French decadent writers of the nineteenth century for their images of lesbian vampires. Perhaps the monstrous lesbian images proliferated during the 1930s not only because they mirrored a moralistic disapproval of lesbianism which seemed decadent during grim times, but also because those extreme depictions afforded the distraction of the bizarre and the exotic to a drab and gloomy decade. In any case, the market was flooded with titles such as Hellcat (1934), Love like a Shadow (1935), Queer Patterns (1935), and Pity for Women (1937).14

  There were, however, occasional lesbian novels written in the 1930s that were remarkably sympathetic and attest to a readership that identified with love between women, though silently. Elisabeth Craigin’s “autobiographical” Either Is Love (1937), for example, presents lesbian love as not only equal to heterosexuality, but “peerlessly perfect.” Craigin was almost defensive in her pro-lesbian stance, writing, for example, “A so-called Lesbian alliance can be of rarified purity, and those who do not believe it are merely judging in ignorance of the facts.” Diana, a 1939 novel that also purported to be an autobiography, even presented a kind of lesbian chauvinism. The author proclaimed that she had never seen a drab or stupid-looking lesbian:

  A stupid girl would probably never ascertain her abnormality if she were potentially homosexual … [and] the girl who did come to understand her inversion was likely to have character in her face…. No woman could adjust herself to lesbianism without developing exceptional qualities of courage.15

  But such images were rare.

  Much more common were depictions of lesbian suicide, self-loathing, hopeless passion, chicanery. Some of those novels were written by heterosexuals whose intensely angry depictions suggest that love between women posed a significant social threat in their view. However, others were written by women who had had same-sex love relationships themselves, but who were, by the 1930s, credulous of the “truths” that had been societally inculcated in them about the sickness and torment of lesbian love. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, for example, has a narrator who observes that lesbianism is an “insane passion for unmitigated anguish” and a lesbian character who says of herself, “There’s something evil in me that loves evil and degradation.” Jan Morale, the central character of Gale Wilhelm’s We Too Are Drifting, tells a lover, “Except for the dirty satisfaction we manage to squeeze out of our bodies, it’s nothing, I hate it. When’re you going to understand how much I hate it?” In response to the other woman’s protestations of love, Jan replies, “Someday I’ll kill you.”16

  Perhaps lesbian writers’ willingness to present such images were not only signs of brainwashing but also of complicity with the demands of the publishers, who feared censorship from groups such as the National Organization for Decent Literature, established in the 1930s. If a lesbian novel showed the character’s conversion to heterosexuality, publishers considered that a selling point. The American publication of Anna Weirauch’s The Scorpion (1933) was hailed with apparent relief in the publisher’s ads because the lesbian character, who had also appeared in Weirauch’s earlier novel, The Outcast, finally “quits a circle of abnormalities, turning to her devoted men friends, apparently not lost to a normal life.”17 Editors may have reasoned that if the lesbian characters were miserable or convertible the censors would let the books slip by since the dominant “morality” was upheld.

  But the would-be censors of the 1930s seemed to believe that even images of lesbians who wallowed in tragedy were dangerous. And they were right. To learn of the existence of other lesbians through the media, no matter how unfortunate those characters were, must have been reassuring to women who loved other women and feared by now, in the reticent 1930s, that they were rari
ties. The text offered them a double message. They could read between the lines or peek behind the agonizing theatrical depictions and know that they were not alone and that if miserable lesbians existed, happy lesbians might also exist. Perhaps it was out of such fears that the Motion Picture Producers and Directors Association of America adopted a code in 1930 that said that films must uphold the sanctity of marriage and must not ridicule “natural or human law” and filmmakers must abolish from the screen “sex perversion or any inference of it.” But even that did not satisfy certain religious zealots, such as those who formed the Legion of Decency in 1934 in order to police the movies more effectively.

  For that reason, when Lillian Hellman’s 1934 stage play The Children’s Hour was adapted for movies a couple of years later, any suggestion of the lesbian theme was omitted—despite the fact that Hellman’s lesbian killed herself in self-hatred and despair. The movie became a story about a heterosexual triangle, and the censors demanded that even the name be changed (it was issued as These Three), out of fear that the public would associate it with the notorious stage play be infected by the mere thought of lesbianism. When the French film Club de Femmes was imported into the United States in 1937, all intimations of lesbianism were cut.18

  Although theatrical depictions were also a view from the outside and never showed that lesbians could be anything other than neurotic, tragic, or absurd, the theater of the 1930s fared somewhat better than the movies, at least with regard to mention of lesbians. When a state senator in New York attempted to push through a bill in 1937 that would create a chief censor for Broadway—an equivalent of England’s Lord Chamberlain—63,000 signatures were gathered from Broadway theater audiences to protest. The appearance of “sex variants” was so common on the American stage that George Jean Nathan even wrote a parody in 1933, Design for Loving (playing off the title of Noel Coward’s Design for Living), whose cast included not only a hermaphrodite, an onanist, a flagellant, a transvestite, and a male homosexual, but also a lesbian and another woman with “tribade tendencies.” Of course it is possible that more censorship did not exist because theater owners and even censors could not always understand that what they were witnessing on stage was lesbianism. When a translation of Christa Winsloe’s German play Girls in Uniform appeared on Broadway in 1933 even some critics denied that it was about lesbianism, since the characters were neither degenerate nor decadent. The girl who falls passionately in love with her teacher, becomes delirious with joy on being given one of the woman’s undergarments, and then decides to commit suicide because she cannot face a separation was not a lesbian. She was only experiencing an “innocent” schoolgirl crush (as though schoolgirl “lesbians” never had crushes and were never innocent).19

  Those critics who recognized lesbian subject matter onstage were often dismayed. Typical was the New York Daily Mirror review of Love of Women, a short-lived play in which a woman character is “rescued” from a productive long-term lesbian relationship by a male suitor. The mere suggestion that the main character had been lesbian caused the critic to exclaim, despite her “happy” conversion, “Such matters as those with which [the play] concerns itself are best left to the consulting rooms of psychiatrists. They do not add to the health and well-being of the theatre.”20

  It is not surprising that some actresses who played lesbian parts on Broadway felt uncomfortable. Ann Revere, who was Martha Dobie (the character who commits suicide when she discovers she is a lesbian) in the first 1934 production of The Children’s Hour, maintained in an interview that Martha was not a lesbian, despite the character’s own admission of erotic love for another woman:

  She and the other girl were just good friends, in my mind, nothing more. Under the stress she cracks and thinks she is [a lesbian]. She felt guilty and would have thought or said anything under the circumstances, done anything to take the blame on herself for what had happened to them.21

  Such a blatant counterreading of Hellman’s script suggests that actresses may have feared that merely playing a lesbian role placed them under suspicion of lesbianism.

  Viewed from the outside the lesbian was either sick or sinful, and no one would want to be considered one. There was little public dissent over those images of her. Lesbians were not in the position to stick up for themselves and challenge such stereotypes, since self-defense by so small a minority would have done little but expose them to hostility, disdain, or, at best, pity. The many women who had love relationships with other women but did not acknowledge themselves as lesbians were even less in the position to correct the dominant images of their affectional preferences since they needed to distance themselves, both internally and externally, from the concept of lesbianism. As would be expected, under such circumstances a lesbian subculture could not proliferate very rapidly in the light of day. It was invited into darkness and secrecy, so that the dismal popular images were more likely to become self-fulfilling prophecies than if such a subculture could have developed without fear and shame.

  “In the Life”

  Viewed from the inside, or “in the Life,” as the bar phrase of the 1930s described it, lesbianism was of course generally quite different from the outside view of it. But because the view from the outside was so hateful, it necessarily affected the way many women in the Life thought about themselves. Females in the 1930s who did accept the label “lesbian” had to discover on their own that it was possible to live as a lesbian in America and not be driven to suicide or neurasthenia, as fictional and medical book lesbians almost always were. Many of them did find that they could forge a reasonably happy life for themselves, no thanks to the prevailing views of their day. But their problems in constructing such a life were compounded by those dominant views that scared women into hiding once they decided they wanted to live as lesbians. Their most difficult task as social beings was making contact with other lesbians in the context of a society that mandated that they be silent about their affectional preferences.

  Lesbian slang of the 1930s that described various aspects of the Life provides evidence of the existence of flourishing lesbian communities, though the uninitiated would usually have been able to discover them only with difficulty. Much of the slang came originally from women’s prisons, where lesbianism, which was sometimes situational and sometimes a lifetime commitment, was common. From the correctional institutions the argot seems to have filtered into working-class, and sometimes into middleclass, lesbian society. An end-of-the-decade study identified many terms used by lesbians during the 1930s, including words such as “dyke,” “bulldyke,” “bull dagger,” “gay,” and “drag,” which had also been current in the ’20s, as well as other terms that became current only in the 1930s such as “queer bird” and “lavender,” which referred to female homosexuals; “sil”—a contraction for silly, that is, infatuated—which meant a lesbian who was currently in love with another woman; and “trapeze artist,” which meant a woman who performed cunnilingus. Much of the argot described butch/femme roles in women’s relationships such as “jockey,” “mantee,” “daddy,” “poppa,” “husband,” and “top sergeant”—all referring to butches, and “mamma” and “wife,” which referred to femmes. Those terms were probably more descriptive of institutionalized and working-class lesbian life, although they were sometimes used by middleclass women also. The author of Diana acknowledges a special lesbian argot even among middleclass women, in words such as “spook,” which referred to a woman who strayed into lesbianism as second best but stayed because she discovered she liked it better than heterosexuality.22

  If Box-Car Bertha can be believed, in areas such as Chicago during the depression there flourished a fairly lively lesbian subculture in which working-class women sometimes even mixed with wealthy women, a rare phenomenon in lesbian subcultures throughout this century (though common among gay men, who often class-mixed for sexual contacts). She tells of a group of lesbians who had a “magnificent apartment” where they would throw soirees called “Mickey Mouse’s party.�
�� When Bertha attended she met half a dozen “wealthy women,” four of whom were married. They claimed to be merely “sightseers,” but she interjects, “Actually they had more than a superficial interest in these lesbian girls.” Apparently Bertha continued her contact with these women after the party, despite her claim that she disliked lesbians. She reports “constant exploitation” among the women (is she hinting of blackmail or lesbian prostitution?). The working-class lesbians would get the names and addresses of these wealthy women, Bertha writes, and borrow money from them by saying, “I met you at Mickey Mouse’s party.”23

  But outside of all-female institutions and rare social configurations such as Mickey Mouse’s party, making contact with other lesbians for romantic or social purposes was far more complicated and problematic than it has become over the last few decades. Unless one was lucky enough to become an insider in a group, lesbian life in the 1930s could be lonely. Since there were no personal ads, no lesbian political organizations, few special-interest social groups for lesbians, none of the social abundance that exists today in many American cities, contact often depended on chance. And because silence was so widespread, it was possible that one often missed that chance. Many lesbians probably really did feel then, as Ann Aldrich’s later pot boiler was titled, that “we walk alone.”

  A few bars congenial to lesbians still existed in the ’30s. Those outside of working-class communities were like the bars of the 1920s, catering to gay men and straight gawkers as well as lesbians—such as the Bungalow, about which the New York Evening Graphic published a typically hostile, scandalized editorial titled “Greenwich Village Sin Dives Lay Traps for Innocent Girls”:

  I doubt if there are five places like it in America. Its patronage is composed almost entirely of lisping boys and deep-voiced girls. They eat, drink, and quarrel. They display their jealousies and occasionally claw at each other with their nails. They talk loudly, scream, jibe at each other and order gin continually. Always gin.