Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  Post-World War II American psychoanalysts generally employed Freudian language and twisted Freudian theory to insist, with far greater certitude than Freud himself ever mustered and with much more vehemence than in the 1930s, on the sickness of lesbians, which they saw as being responsible for their “antisocial” behavior. Clara Thompson, for example, declared in 1949 that a person who accepts homosexuality as an overt way of life has a weak superego and is “unable to control the direction of [her] libido drives.”24 While Freud believed that a neurosis could always be traced to a disturbance in sexuality, Freudians in the postwar years came to believe that what they viewed as disturbed sexuality—same-sex love—could always be traced to neurosis, and they felt justified in attacking that sexuality since they claimed it was nothing more than a symptom of illness. A woman who loved another woman might come to analysis in the years after the war to deal with a particular problem unrelated to her affectional life, such as heterosexuals often did, or simply to know herself better, to see more clearly, to understand her motivations and choices, but she was often forced to deal with her lesbianism instead.

  The consensus among the postwar professionals was that lesbians are incapable of any kind of satisfaction in life, most especially personal happiness. Even if they claim they are happy, they are deceiving themselves, a leading “lesbian expert,” Frank Caprio, observed in the 1950s: theirs “is only a surface or pseudo happiness. Basically, they are lonely and unhappy and afraid to admit it.” Caprio argued that women who love women are characteristically ambivalent about life situations (as though ambivalence were not a part of human nature), and he pointed to several instances of lesbian suicide in fiction (as though Western literature, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to the present, were not rife with heterosexual suicide).25 His intent was not simply to separate off women who love women from the rest of humanity, but also to present any problems they might have not as part of the complex human condition but merely as a manifestation of their perversity.

  Other psychiatrists took up his cry. “The greatest importance of homosexuality,” wrote two of them in a 1958 book, “is that it causes so much unhappiness. If happiness is of any value … then homosexuality should be eliminated by every means in our power.” They placed on women who loved women a secret and impossible burden to be happy at all times lest they admit that they deserve “genocide.” Although their heterosexual counterparts in the postwar years had freedom to wallow in the miseries of the feminine mystique, women who loved women had to feel guilty if they were even briefly depressed and to attribute it to their lesbianism. But according to Edmund Bergler, another leading lesbian-smasher of the 1950s, any attempts they made to be happy would be self-defeating anyway because they had an unconscious wish to suffer that was only gratified by “self-created trouble-making” and “injustice collecting.”26 Inevitably, Bergler suggested, lesbians made not only themselves but everyone around them miserable.

  According to some psychiatrists of the postwar years, same-sex love was simply a symptom of a more general character disorder. It would disappear if the disorder were resolved, and the woman would then be content to marry and stay home, raising babies and tending to hubby’s needs. Other psychiatrists even declared that women who loved women were worse off than being “disordered” in their character: “not merely neurotics, but … actually borderline or outright psychotics.” One psychiatrist, Charles Socarides, who continued to promulgate his theories of lesbian psychosis years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, reported that in clinical experience the connection between homosexuality and paranoid schizophrenia is “striking” in a great number of patients. He never acknowledged, of course, that the connection between paranoid schizophrenia (or depression or homocide or epilepsy) and heterosexuality is even more striking, nor that lesbians, particularly during the 1950s, often were persecuted and not just suffering under delusions of persecution.27

  These psychiatrists disregarded the warning of their guru, Freud, who stated with surprising enlightenment in “The Sexual Aberrations” that it was not adequate to an understanding of homosexuality to consider only patients in treatment, that if doctors would “strive to comprehend a wider field of experience” they would see that homosexuality was far from being a degeneracy, and that even the concept of perversion was really a matter of cultural definition. Instead they based their definiton of lesbianism almost exclusively on records of patients who needed psychiatric care.28 It was worse than defining heterosexuality through divorce court records.

  Every aspect of same-sex love thus came to be defined as sick. Psychotherapists pointed out that within the lesbian couple there were tensions that could lead to a break in the relationship; that not only did lesbian relations serve the function of providing sexual release, but they also served a range of irrational defensive and reparative needs—ignoring the fact that similar problems were at least as probable for heterosexual coupledom.29 In these views love between women was always implicitly contrasted to a heterosexual norm based on 1950s Hollywood movies: after boy got girl heterosexual love was supposedly without complication, conflict, eruption. Only same sex lovers had troubles in their relationships.

  It is not surprising that in an era when conformity was worshiped, parents accepted such views without question and panicked if their children did not fit heterosexual norms. An adolescent crush on another female, which half a century earlier was seen as an important and welcome part of the normal course of development, made caring parents send their daughters off to psychiatrists. Parents even had daughters locked up in psychiatric hospitals for being “uncontrollable” because of their lesbianism. One woman tells of how her parents, upon discovering her crush on a physical education teacher when she was fourteen years old, first sent her to a psychologist “to find out if I was crazy.” When her parents’ persistent rejection of her sexual identification during her teen years caused her to be so depressed that she attempted suicide, they committed her to a hospital psychiatric ward where the nurses “tried to fix me up with boys” and the psychiatrists “made me feel I was the only one who ever felt love for someone of the same sex.” When her depression continued after her release, her parents again had her hospitalized, this time in a state mental hospital. She was not alone there, she says. She met a thirty-year-old lesbian who claimed “she had been in and out of institutions all her life for being a lesbian. I thought she was the sanest person there.” Similar stories were not uncommon during the mid-twentieth-century.30

  Such societal threats did terrify many females away from same-sex love. Lesbianism became a problem to be grappled with, even when parents and the psychiatrists they hired were not policing one’s emotions. Intense feelings for another woman—whether physically realized or more amorphous—could cause untold hours of worry and even vast expenditures in “getting professional help.” Nor was bisexuality any longer an area for exploration. It was a “condition” to be very concerned about, especially if it led to the horrors of lesbianism. Loving another woman meant that one had to live with the realization that almost anyone who knew would consider one a “lesbian sicko.”

  Curing Lesbians on the Couch

  Disdain for same-sex love quickly spread in a war-exhausted country that wanted only to return to “normalcy,” and American psychoanalysts felt entirely justified in their desire to cure women of their love for each other and their independence. Modern women who rejected what Betty Friedan has called “the feminine mystique” were now considered “the Lost Sex,” as the title of a popular 1947 book by two American Freudians suggested. According to the authors, such women were influenced in their aspirations by feminism, which was “an expression of emotional illness, of neurosis …, at its core a deep illness,” foisted once again on American women primarily by lesbians who carried the notion of independence to the greatest extreme. Psychoanalysts of the postwar years were very quick to pick up such a rallying cry. Not only did
lesbians influence feminism, but feminist gains in work, dress, and pastimes had “more than likely” influenced many women to become homosexual. “This new freedom that women are enjoying,” Dr. Frank Caprio pronounced with alarm in the early 1950s, “serves as a fertile soil for the seeds of sexual inversion.”31 A society that agreed once again that woman’s place was in the home saw feminists as a threat to the public welfare, and lesbians, the most obvious advocates of feminism, once more became the chief villains. The social benefits of curing lesbians, who were all sick anyway and needed curing, were unquestionable.

  In the name of science these therapists promoted heterosexuality with religious fervor, and they were at least as intolerant as religious zealots, despite their obligatory nod to the importance of “understanding.” There was no room for debate in their view that love between women was an illness that must be eradicated, regardless of the individual personality or level of adjustment or productivity of the women involved. Freud believed (and many of his early disciples agreed with him) that the object of psychoanalysis should not be the “cure” of homosexuality (which he thought was impossible anyway) but rather, as he said in his letter to an American mother of a male homosexual, to help the homosexual find harmony, peace of mind, and full efficiency. Although in the 1920s and ’30s in America there were a few psychoanalysts who desired to cure their patients of same-sex love, it was not until the ’50s, with its worship of “normality” and its terror of female independence, that the cure of love between women became such a large-scale business.32

  Many of the therapists of the 1950s simply ignored Freud’s conservatism regarding the efficacy of treatment, claiming that lesbianism was always curable if the doctors went about it the right way. They published in books and medical journals fabulous accounts of their successes in converting homosexuals into heterosexuals and shared their formulas with their colleagues. Albert Ellis, in a 1956 article, reported that through his work with lesbian patients one-third were “distinctly improved” and two-thirds were “considerably improved” in their progress toward heterosexuality. Ellis explained that his approach was to insist on unmasking the neurotic motivations behind his patients’ same-sex love and to show by his manner and verbalizations that he was himself “favorably prejudiced” toward heterosexuality. The patients were persuaded, Ellis wrote, “to engage in sex-love relationships with members of the other sex and to keep reporting to the therapist for specific discussion and possible aid with these love relationships,” outrageously regardless of whether or not they had come to Ellis desiring to change their sexual orientation. Edmund Bergler actually promised his patients that same-sex love was reversible, but only through psychoanalytic treatment by a psychiatrist for one or two years, with a minimum of three appointments each week (at the cost of as much as sixty thousand dollars, calculated in present dollars).33

  These medical doctors often promulgated a rather odd morality in their attempt to rid their patients of lesbianism. In a popular book of the 1950s, Voyage from Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual, Richard Robertiello wrote of a twenty-nine year old woman who had come to him for a cure for her insomnia after the breakup of an eight-year lesbian relationship. He told her that lesbianism was fraught with difficulties and that she needed to “make a clean break” from it and go to places where she could meet men. When she reported “necking” with a married man, the doctor enthusiastically applauded her “success.” By the end of her analysis she was “cured” of her lesbianism (despite the fact that she began therapy saying she had “no desire to change her sexual pattern … and was perfectly content to remain homosexual”). Though Robertiello was forced to admit that she continued to have insomnia (which was, of course, the problem that caused her to seek his help in the first place), he nevertheless considered his work with her a great success.34

  As further justification of their intent to “cure,” many of the leading lesbian specialists published patently sensationalistic accounts of lesbianism. Frank Caprio actually used “case histories” from true confession magazines of the 1950s such as Life Romances and My Confession in order to show how sick lesbians were. Some researchers of the early 1950s, who must have believed that the one sexual act of cunnilingus was synonymous with the entire lesbian experience, and who misunderstood even that act, suggested that homosexuality was really a manifestation of cannibalistic fantasies. References to lesbian murder, suicide, and seduction of the innocent were rife throughout the medical literature. It is no wonder, then, that popular magazines not only applauded psychiatric attempts to cure, but even adopted the language and attitudes of the medical men, further promulgating notions such as that in Time Magazine in 1956, that homosexuals are “generally unreliable in an essentially psychopathic way … regardless of [their] level of intelligence, culture, background, or education.”35

  The Freudian therapists were not alone in their promise and determination to cure lesbians. One woman tells of having gone to a Jungian therapist and discussing, among other things, her love for another woman, about which the therapist “comforted” her: “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll cure that in about six months.” When she persisted in describing her relationship with the other woman as “the best love of my life,” the Jungian replied that lesbianism was “not any worse than alcoholism, but it’s on the same level.”36

  Proposals for cures were generally couched in terms that suggested the liberal sympathies of the doctors, but their ill-disguised hostility toward love between women is easily discernible. By categorizing same-sex love as a disease they pretended, perhaps even to themselves, to be moving beyond morality. But as Thomas Szasz has pointed out, the concept of disease in this respect involves a value judgment, distinguishing some states of functioning as being inferior to others. With regard to lesbianism, the judgment was clearly based not on impaired functioning such as the inability to work or love, but merely on unpopular object choice: in that judgment, homosexuality is bad (regardless of the individual’s level of functioning or the quality of her love relationship) and heterosexuality is good (again, regardless of the behavior of the individual in all areas of her life or the nature of her heterosexual relationships). The doctors for the most part were blinded by their own narrow value judgments and believed they had the moral objectivity of science behind them. Typically, in his representation of the battlelines of the 1950s, Edmund Bergler bragged of his scientific stance, which he felt was embued with a humane desire to help:

  Homosexuals: We are normal and demand recognition!

  Heterosexuals: You are perverts and belong in jail!

  Psychiatrists: Homosexuals are sick people and belong in treatment.37

  Bergler had no doubt that he was on the side of the angels.

  All this is not to say that there was never complicity or ambivalence on the part of some women themselves, who sought out psychiatrists in the hope of being cured of their love for other women because they were infected with the rampant homophobia of their society. Harriet, who had been in therapy with three different Los Angeles psychiatrists during the 1950s, now explains with hindsight:

  Of course many of us were loaded with self-hate and wanted to change. How could it have been otherwise? All we heard and read about homosexuality was that crap about how we were inverts, perverts, queers—a menace to children, poison to everyone else, doomed never to be happy. And so we went humbly to the doctors, and took whatever other nastiness they wanted to spew out about homosexuality, and we paid them and said thanks.38

  Since there were so few countering messages of support from the external world, constant exposure to antihomosexual propaganda was bound to make some women who loved women believe that salvation lay in conversion to heterosexuality. Those who sold lesbian-smashing at this time had sufficient confused and fearful buyers.

  While World War II played an important role in the expansion of a lesbian subculture, the years that immediately followed determined much about its nature. The effect on lesbians of the onslaugh
t of the psychoanalytic establishment was usually not to convince them that they were sick, though some were convinced, but rather to create cynicism toward the pronouncements of authorities because it was apparent that authorities knew nothing or lied. Since lesbians were not organized to challenge the outrageous psychoanalytic views, they also had to endure frustration born of a sense of powerlessness. There were no gay militants or lesbian-feminists to point out that, in fact, far from being sick, a woman who dared to live as an overt homosexual in such unwelcoming times might well have an ego of impressive strength and health that permitted her to know her own mind and to be true to her conception of herself.

  The public image of the lesbian as sick in the years after the war confirmed the need for secrecy. A lesbian understood that if her affectional preference became known outside of her circle of lesbian friends she would be judged wholly by that preference and found mentally unhealthy. She would be discredited before any other aspect of her personality or behavior could be considered. She was virtually forced into hiding. Lesbianism, which in different societal circumstances might have signified simply affectional preference, thus became not only the basis for a covert society, but also an overwhelming aspect of one’s identity, precisely because it was so necessary to live it in secret and to be constantly aware that an important part of one’s life must be camouflaged at almost all times. As will be seen, the political milieu of the postwar years served to reinforce this state. In addition to the mischief wrought by the medical men who made lesbianism a sickness, the times also rendered lesbianism unpatriotic.

  The Love That Dares Not Speak Its

  Name: McCarthyism and Its Legacy

  At work you completely avoided people. If you did make friends, you had to be sure never to bring them to your home. Never to tell them who and what you really were. We were all terrified in those days. Lyn on New York in the 1950s