Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  But despite networking, large numbers of lesbians were occasionally purged from some bases, such as a WAC base in Tokyo from which 500 women were sent home “under conditions other than honorable.”35 Those who were discharged from the service for homosexuality were deprived of all veteran’s benefits. They were generally so upset, exhausted, and mortified by the process that they did nothing but slink off to hide and heal their wounds as best they could.

  Almost never did they have the energy to protest what had been done to them, although one woman, an Air Force Reservist, Fannie Mae Clackum, actually did win a suit against the government in the U.S. Court of Claims in 1960, which suggests that in somewhat saner times an objective court could understand how outrageous the military’s tactics were. Clackum demanded eight years of back pay, complaining that she was accused of homosexuality but given no trial or hearing and no opportunity to know the evidence against her or to know her accusers. From April 1951 to January 1952 she had been repeatedly questioned by an OSI officer regarding lesbianism. She was asked to resign, although she was never informed of specific charges. When she refused, she was demoted from corporal to private and ordered to take a psychiatric examination. She was finally discharged as an undesirable at the beginning of 1952. The court found that her discharge was invalid, but Clackum was an isolated instance of a woman who dared to carry out a challenge to the reigning powers in the 1950s, since everything—the psychiatric establishment, the military’s demoralization tactics, the government, popular wisdom—militated against the lesbian believing that she had the human right to expect justice.36

  A major effect that military life of the 1950s had on lesbian subculture was to confirm even further that for the outside world love between women was a love that dared not speak its name, that it would certainly not be treated with common decency and respect. But at the same time the military experience strengthened the bonds between women who chose to be part of the lesbian sisterhood; it showed them how to network and how to guard against the forces that were enemies of women who loved women. Such knowledge was also to become very useful in life outside the military.

  A Sad Legacy

  Although the McCarthy era has been long dead and the lot of the lesbian has improved considerably, the years of suffering took their toll and created a legacy of suspicion that has been hard to overcome, more liberal times notwithstanding. That suspicion has not been entirely groundless. Even in the last two decades, at the height of the gay liberation movement, lesbian teachers have been fired from their jobs, not for committing illegal acts such as having sexual relations with a minor, but simply for being lesbian.

  Wilma, who was a high school physical education teacher in Downey, a Los Angeles suburb, in the early 1970s, says that after a couple of years at the school she decided she would tell her best friend on the faculty that she was a lesbian because “I thought we were really close. She was always telling me about her problems with her husband and her children, and I was tired of living a lie with her.” The other woman went to the principal the next day, saying that in the light of what she had learned she could no longer work with Wilma. He immediately called Wilma into his office and demanded that she write out a resignation on the spot. In return for her resignation he promised he would not get her credential revoked: “But he said he just wanted me out of the school. We had been good friends. He was priming me for a job as an administrator. I thought, ‘I screwed up my whole life for a ten-minute confession.’”

  Wilma was able to get another job in the Los Angeles school system, but she drastically changed her manner of relating to her colleagues. She married a gay man, always brought him to faculty parties, and made sure everyone knew to address her as “Mrs.” She came to school in dresses, hose, and high heels: “Even when I went to the school cafeteria I’d change from my sweats into a dress.” Fifteen years later, she still feels she must constantly censor herself with her colleagues: “I keep a low profile and I’m always on guard.”37

  Wilma’s situation remains a nightmare for many lesbians. While very few engaged in front marriages in the 1970s and ’80s, some still attempted to pass as heterosexual and even invent, or let heterosexuals assume, an imaginary heterosexual social life. Two studies of lesbians, one in the ’70s, the other in the ’80s, both indicated that two-thirds of the sample believed that they would lose their jobs if their sociosexual orientation were known. Most of those who did not feel threatened were self-employed or worked in the arts, where homosexuality is equated with bohemianism.38

  Despite the many successes of the gay liberation movement, which has made homosexuality much more acceptable in America, middleclass lesbians often feel that activists are a real threat to them because they draw public attention to the phenomenon of lesbianism and thus create suspicion about all unmarried women. The closeted lesbian’s cover could be blown. Older lesbians especially, who perfected the techniques of hiding through most of their adult lives, still cannot conceive of suddenly coming out into the open, even in what appear to be freer times.

  They are uncomfortable not only with radicals who demand that they leave their closets, but with anyone who discusses the subject of lesbianism, as I discovered a number of times in trying to arrange interviews with “senior citizen” lesbians, women over sixty-five who were professionally employed during the McCarthy years. Despite my promise of complete anonymity, they were often fearful. As a sixty-eight year old retired teacher wrote me:

  One reason lesbians of my generation are reluctant to come out is our memory of that time; there is no guarantee that there won’t again be a rush to the documents, and a resurrection of our names from somewhere, with who-knows-what-kind of repercussions. I am retired and on a pension; presumably nothing can change that. But we didn’t believe the stuff McCarthy got away with, either. Can anyone promise for sure that “they” won’t say to me, “You taught under false pretenses; therefore, you don’t get your pension!”

  They have little faith that the progress that has come about through the gay liberation movement is here to stay. There is probably nothing that would convince them that lesbians are not still surrounded by hostile regiments out to destroy them, as they were in the 1950s.39

  Lesbians inherited a mixed legacy from the 1940s and ’50s, when lesbianism came to mean, much more than it had earlier, not only a choice of sexual orientation, but a social orientation as well, though usually lived covertly. While the war and the migration afterward of masses of women, who often ended up in urban centers, meant that various lesbian subcultures could be established or expanded, these years were a most unfortunate time for such establishment and expansion. Suddenly there were large numbers of women who could become a part of a lesbian subculture, yet also suddenly there were more reasons than ever for the subculture to stay underground. The need to be covert became one of the chief manifestations of lesbian existence for an entire generation—until the 1970s and, for some women who do not trust recent changes to be permanent, until the present. The grand scale institutional insanity that characterized the Cold War also affected many lesbians profoundly by causing them to live in guilt, pain, self-hatred born of internalizing the hideous stereotypes of lesbianism, and justified suspicion as well as paranoia. The 1950s were perhaps the worst time in history for women to love women.

  However, even the persecution of the 1950s aided in further establishing lesbian subcultures. It made many women feel they had to band together socially to survive, since heterosexuals could seldom be trusted. And while it made lesbianism a love that dared not speak its name very loudly, nevertheless it gave it a name over and over again that became known to many more thousands of American women. Were it not for the publicity that was inevitably attendant on persecution, some women, even by the 1950s, might not have realized that there were so many who shared their desires and aspirations, that various lesbian subcultures existed, that lesbianism could be a way of life. Fanatical homophobes who would have preferred a conspiracy of silence with r
egard to lesbianism were right in believing that silence would best serve their ends. Each time the silence was broken—even by the hateful images of homosexuality that characterized the 1950s—more women who preferred women learned labels for themselves, sought and often found others who shared those labels, and came to understand that they might probe beneath the denigrating images that society handed them to discover their own truths.

  Butches, Femmes, and Kikis: Creating

  Lesbian Subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s

  To us it was our world, a small world, yes; but if you are starving you don’t refuse a slice of bread, and we were starving—just for the feeling of having others around us: We were the Kings of the hill, we were the Moody Gardens.

  —A Lowell, Massachusetts, woman describing the Moody

  Gardens, a working-class gay bar in the 1950s

  The bars had nothing to do with us. They were risky and rough. But we had what we needed because we had each other. All the graduate students who were lesbian in my Department found each other sooner or later. It wasn’t the way we looked. It was just a feeling we got that would let us know who was and who wasn’t. It was scary but wonderful—operating in a straight world, being totally undetectable by them, but knowing and trusting each other.

  —F.L., a UCLA graduate student in the early 1960s

  At first glance it is surprising that it was in the 1950s, in the midst of the worst persecution of homosexuals, that the lesbian subculture grew and defined itself more clearly than ever before, but there are explanations for the phenomenon. As has been discussed in the last two chapters, not only had many women learned about love between women during the war and come together in big cities, but also powerful creators of social definitions in the 1950s such as medical men and political leaders now declared with unprecedented vehemence that those who could love others of the same sex were beings apart from the rest of humanity: They not only loved homosexually; they were homosexuals. As insistent and widespread as that view now was, many women who loved other women believed they had little option but to accept that definition of themselves. The choice of love object determined more than ever before a social identity as well as a sexual identity.

  The dichotomy between homosexual and heterosexual was not only firmly drawn but, since homosexuals were of great interest to the media as sick or subversive, knowledge of homosexuality was more widely disseminated than at any previous time in history. Since one who loved the same sex was “a homosexual” and shunned in “normal” society, it became important to many who identified themselves as lesbian to establish a separate society, a subculture, both to avoid exposure such as would be risked in socializing with heterosexuals and to provide a pool of social and sexual contacts, since presumably such contacts could not be obtained in the “normal” society at large.

  It is not accurate to speak of “a lesbian subculture,” since there were various lesbian subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s, dependent especially on class and age. Working-class and young lesbians (of the middle class as well as the working class) experienced a lesbian society very different from that of upper-and middleclass older lesbians. Despite heterosexuals’ single stereotype of “the lesbian,” lesbian subcultures based on class and age not only had little in common with each other, but their members often distrusted and even disliked one another. The conflict went beyond what was usual in class and generational antagonisms, since each subculture had a firm notion of what lesbian life should be and felt that its conception was compromised by the other group that shared the same minority status. In its virulence it was perhaps analogous to the conflict between older middleclass blacks and young and working-class blacks in the turbulent 1960s, when those groups were attempting to redefine themselves in the context of a new era.

  But despite differences, what the lesbian subcultures of the 1950s and ’60s shared was not only the common enemy of homophobia, but also the tremendous burden of conceptualizing themselves with very little history to use as guidelines. Unlike for American ethnic or racial minorities, for mid-century lesbians there were no centuries of customs and mores to incorporate into the patterns they established of how to live. There was less than a hundred years between them and the first definition of the homosexual which called them into being as a social entity, and there was very little history available to them about how women who loved women had constructed their lives in earlier times. There were the concepts of the “man trapped in a woman’s body” and passing women, perhaps the predecessors of young and working-class butches. And there were the “romantic friends” and “devoted companions” of earlier eras who presented something of a model for middleclass lesbians. But there had been in America nothing like the politically aware homophile groups of Germany that had begun to organize in the late nineteenth century, not long after the German sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing categorized the lesbian, nor like the diverse lesbian societies of France that emerged in the late nineteenth century out of the sexually open belle epoque.1 In contrast to lesbians in those countries, American lesbians after World War II had to start almost from scratch to formulate what the growing lesbian society should be like. With little help from the generations who went before them, they had to find ways to exist and be nurtured in an environment that they had to build outside of the larger world that they knew disdained them.

  Working-Class and Young Lesbians: The Gay Bars

  Not only were American lesbians without a history such as helped to guide other minority groups, but they were also without a geography: there were no lesbian ghettos where they could be assured of meeting others like themselves and being accepted precisely for that attribute that the outside world shunned. There was little to inherit from the past in terms of safe turf, though safe turf was crucial to lesbians as a despised minority. Young and working-class lesbians, who were even often without their own comfortable domiciles in which to receive their friends, had no choice but to frequent public places where they could make contact with other lesbians, but it was essential that those public places be clandestine enough to ensure privacy, since exposure could be dangerous. It was for that reason that the lesbian bar, called, like the male homosexual bar, a “gay” bar—dark, secret, a nighttime place, located usually in dismal areas—became an important institution in the 1950s.

  There were a few attempts by working-class and young lesbians in the 1950s and ’60s to build institutions other than the gay bars. The most notable was the softball team. During those years many lesbians formed teams or made up the audiences for teams all over the country. Women’s softball leagues usually had at least one or two teams that were all lesbian, and most of the other predominantly heterosexual teams had a fair sprinkling of lesbians. The games did succeed in providing legends and heroes for the lesbian subculture, as well as offering both participants and viewers some possibility for making lesbian contacts outside of the bars. However, as a California woman recalls of her softball playing days, “We had no place to go after the games but the bars.” The bars were often even the team sponsors, providing uniforms and travel money. And it was “an unwritten law,” according to a Nebraska woman who played during the ’50s, that after the game you patronized the bar that sponsored you. Young and working-class lesbians who had no homes where they could entertain and were welcome nowhere else socially were held in thrall by the bars, which became their major resort, despite attempts to escape such as the formation of athletic teams.2

  Although the gay bars posed various dangers, many young and working-class women were thankful for their existence. They represented the one public place where those who had accepted a lesbian sociosexual identity did not have to hide who they were. They offered companionship and the possibilities of romantic contacts. They often bristled with the excitement of women together, defying their outlaw status and creating their own rules and their own worlds.

  To many young and working-class lesbians the bars were a principal stage where they could act out the roles and rela
tionships that elsewhere they had to pretend did not exist. The bars were their home turf. Once inside, if they could blur from their line of vision the policeman who might be sitting at the end of the bar, waiting for a payoff from the owner or just making his presence felt for the fun of being threatening, it seemed that it was the patrons, the lesbians there, who set the tone and made the rules. Occasional straights or “fish queens” (heterosexual men whose primary sexual interest was in cunnilingus and who hoped to find prospects in a lesbian bar) might wander in. But it was the lesbians who were the majority, and for a change they had the luxury of being themselves in public.

  The bars were a particular relief for many butch working-class women because it was only there that they could dress “right,” in pants, in which they felt most comfortable. There were few jobs in the 1950s for which women might wear pants, and still not many public places they could go and not be somewhat conspicuous. It was after work, at night, in the bars, that butches could look as they pleased—where it was even mandated that they should look that way.