Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  But the most important aspect of the bars to young and working-class women was that they provided a relatively secure place where lesbians could connect with other lesbians, whether for friendship, romance, or (more rarely) casual sex. How else might a young or working-class woman meet lesbians? It was certainly not safe simply to approach a woman at work or in the neighborhood. If you suspected that another woman was gay you went through lengthy verbal games, dropping subtle hints, using the jargon of the subculture (not many straights even knew that the word “gay” meant anything other than “merry” in those days), waiting for her to pick up your clues before you dared to reveal yourself. It required great effort and some risk. In the bars there were no such difficulties.

  But although the gay bars were for many young and working-class lesbians their only home as authentic social beings, they were hazardous for various reasons. They posed a particular danger because they encouraged drinking. You could not stay unless you had a drink in front of you, and bar personnel were often encouraged to “push” drinks so that the bar could remain in business. As a result, alcoholism was high among women who frequented the bars, much more prevalent, in fact, than among their heterosexual working-class counterparts. Not only did lesbians have pressure to drink while in a gay bar, and, as the cliche of the pulp novels suggested, take to drink because of the daily pain of the stigma of lesbianism, but they also had to endure the socioeconomic difficulties of their lives as self-supporting women in low-paying jobs at a time when females were not supposed to work. Donna, an American Indian woman who had lived in Los Angeles during the 1950s, remembers:

  Some gay men I knew took me to a One [homophile organization] meeting in L.A. I liked it, but it wasn’t for women at my level. I was working in a plastics factory. I couldn’t think about political movements. Neither could the other women I knew. We did a lot of drinking because the poorer you are, the easier it is to take if you’re half-loaded. At the bar where I hung out a lot of women would come after work. We’d work all day with nothing to show for it, and we felt we might as well buy a beer where we could be around company of our own kind.3

  Heterosexual women of their class, who were usually housewives in the 1950s, were less likely to suffer the angry conflicts of working hard to be self-supporting while realizing that one could not get far beyond subsistence and a few dimes left over for small diversions. Many working-class lesbians saw drinking in a gay bar as the one pleasure open to them. They were not very different from heterosexual males of their class in this respect.

  The rebel lifestyle, in which these women as lesbians demanded some of the social privileges and customs ordinarily reserved for men, may also have encouraged heavy drinking among them. Those who challenged social orthodoxies about sexuality in the 1950s and ’60s found it not only easier, but even necessary, to challenge other orthodoxies, such as the appropriateness of sobriety for females. They would drink if they pleased, drink “like a man.” Drinking in the 1950s became another means for lesbians to refuse the confinement of femininity.4

  However, it was not the drinking problem alone that made the gay bars a dangerous place to be. While the police frequently harassed butch-looking women on the streets, the worst police harassment took place inside the gay bars. In many cities, as long as a bar owner was willing to pay for police protection, the bars seemed relatively safe—unless it was close to an election period in which the incumbent felt compelled to “clean up” the gay bars for the sake of his record. During those times raids were frequent. The bars sometimes took precautions against raids. At the Canyon Club in Los Angeles, a membership bar patronized by both gay men and gay women, dancing would be permitted only in the upstairs room. If the police appeared at the door, a red light would be flashed upstairs and the same-sex partners on the dance floor would know to grab someone of the opposite sex quickly and continue dancing. At the Star Room, a lesbian bar on the outskirts of Los Angeles, women could dance but not too close. The manager would scrutinize the dance floor periodically with flashlight in hand. There had to be enough distance between a couple so that a beam from the flashlight could pass between them. In that way the owner hoped to avoid charges of disorderly conduct should there be any undercover agents among the patrons.

  There were indeed undercover agents in the bars. Preceding the 1960 election year, the head of the Alcoholic Beverage Control in Northern California announced “a vigorous new campaign against bars catering to homosexuals,” and he admitted that “a dozen undercover agents are at work gathering evidence to root out homosexual bars in the Bay Area.”5 While the prime targets were the men’s bars because there were more of them, women’s bars fell victim to the campaign as well.

  Most street-smart lesbians who frequented the gay bars knew about undercover agents and tried to take precautions against entrapment, but there was not much that could be done. Perhaps the tyranny of “appropriate” butch and femme dress in working-class bars can be explained in part by patrons’ fears: A Columbus, Ohio, woman recalls walking into a lesbian bar in the 1950s and finding that no one would speak to her. After some hours the waitress told her it was because of the way she was dressed—no one could tell what her sexual identity was, butch or femme, and they were afraid that if she did not know enough to dress right it was because she was a policewoman. LJ. remembers that the lesbians she met in Los Angeles were almost paranoid when she arrived in 1952. She was told by a stranger in the rest room of a lesbian bar that she had better be careful of “police plants” and by another woman in the bar that “sometimes they [undercover agents] would say ‘I’ll give you a ride home,’ and they’d start talking to you in gay language. If you understood what they were saying they would just drive up in front of the police station.”6

  Whether or not the police were that capricious, it is certain that there were police spies in the women’s gay bars, gathering indiscriminate bits of evidence in the hope that some of it would rile the courts. One female undercover agent was sent to stake out Mary’s First and Last Chance, a San Francisco bar, for nine months. She testified in the appellate court in 1959 that “she sat at a table and that a patron dressed in mannish costume sat down and stated to her, ‘you’re a cute little butch’ and also kissed the waitress in her presence.” The patron’s behavior in front of the undercover agent, as inconsequential as it may have been, became the keystone of the testimony in Vallerga v. Munro, in which the prosecution attempted to have the license of Mary’s First and Last Chance revoked on the grounds that the existence of the bar was “contrary to public welfare and morals.”7

  Usually, however, undercover agents did not return to lesbian bars night after night to gather little bits of evidence. The police simply pounced. Perhaps it was missed payoffs that ignited their ire, or perhaps it was random chance that would make them raid one bar rather than another, but a bar raid during the 1950s or ’60s could be violent. Marlene says that in San Francisco during the early 1950s the raiding police were accompanied by police dogs. In a 1956 raid at the San Francisco bar Kelly’s Alamo Club, thirty-six women were hauled into the city jail and booked on the charge of “frequenting a house of ill repute.” D.F. remembers a Los Angeles raid in which all the patrons’ names were collected and everyone was made to strip and was searched. At raids in the Sea Colony, a Greenwich Village bar, women would be pushed up against the wall and the policemen might put their hands in the women’s pants and say, “Oh, you think you’re a man. Well, let’s see what you’ve got here.”8

  In Worchester, Massachusetts, raids were so frequent, according to one woman, that it seemed the police were pulling the paddy wagon up to the door every Friday and Saturday night. “We’d make a joke of it. ‘Hurry up and finish your beer,’ we’d say, ‘cause we’re goin’ for a ride.’” Not even private lesbian parties were always safe. They too might be raided and the guests’ names printed in the newspaper with lurid headlines, such as that in the sensationalistic Boston paper, the Midtown Journal: “Butch Ball Baffles Bu
lls.”9

  Although young and working-class lesbians were pushed into the bars since they were welcomed nowhere else if they allowed their lesbianism to show, the raids were intended to intimidate them while there and to ruin gay bar business. Humiliation and fear were used as tactics to that end. Peg B. describes a 1964 raid at Maryangelo’s, a Greenwich Village bar:

  A large man appeared at the doorway and yelled, “This is a raid.” Everyone froze; then like a bunch of sheep we all tromped downstairs and into the waiting paddy wagons, about forty-three of us. We later learned that two women hid under a table in the back room and got away. In the paddy wagon a woman panicked and ate her driver’s license.

  In the search by a policewoman they were made to pull down their underpants and bend over. After the search they were transported to small cells, where they were kept all night. In the morning they were given bread and watery coffee for which they were charged a dollar each and were then taken out to court: “On the way we had to pass a line of cops on the stairs. It was like running the gauntlet because they all jeered as we went by and made crude remarks.” The charges against the women were “disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace.” A detective testified that some of the women were dancing together, but he could not identify them, and since there was no other evidence against the women the judge was forced to dismiss the case—but meanwhile all forty-three of the women had gone through a night of anxious misery.10 Incredible as it seems in the context of saner times, they were forced to endure all that only because they had gone to a public place where they might meet other people with whom they could be comfortable.

  Not just the possiblity of such intimidation but also the fear that if they were arrested their employers would be contacted or their names would be published in the newspapers kept some women who thought they had something to lose away from the bars. But others felt they could not afford to stay away. Since the bars alone provided a home for them, they had to risk whatever was necessary for the sake of being there. They tolerated the smallest crumbs and the shabbiest turf in their desperation for a “place.” And even that was periodically taken away, whenever the majority community wanted to make a show of its high moral standards. But in their determination to establish some area, however minute, where they could be together as women and as lesbians, they were pioneers of a sort. They created a lesbian geography despite slim resources and particularly unsympathetic times.

  Working-Class and Young Lesbians: Butch/Femme Roles

  Although suddenly significant numbers of women were coming together to express a lesbian social identity by the 1950s, there were few models for how to do it. The pattern they had all observed before their decision to live as homosexuals was heterosexual. While the first generations of middle class career women could see advantages in a “marriage” of equals, the world that working class women lived in never hinted at such benefits. A functioning couple for them meant dichotomous individuals, if not male and female, then butch and femme, or—as they later were called in some areas of the country—“masons and orders” or “butch and Marge.” Even if they looked at their most visible counterparts, those who frequented the men’s gay bars, they often observed that a heterogenderal pattern, not unlike that between straight people, was common among gay males, too: many of the men saw themselves as “nelly queens” in pursuit of “real men,” those who appeared extremely masculine. The whole world, heterosexual and homosexual, seemed to be divided into masculine and feminine. As one woman who was a butch during the 1950s and ’60s observed, “The problem was that the only models we had for our relationships were those of the traditional female-male [roles] and we were too busy trying to survive in a hostile world to have time to create new roles for ourselves.”11

  Yet the roles came to have an important function in the working-class and young lesbian subculture because they operated as a kind of indicator of membership. Only those who understood the roles and the rules attendant upon them really belonged. To many lesbians, the stringently mandated butch/femme dress and role behaviors that seemed to confirm the early sexologists’ descriptions of “the man trapped in a woman’s body” and “the mate of the invert” were a crucial part of who they were only once they discovered the subculture.

  When a young woman entered the subculture in the 1950s she was immediately intitiated into the meaning and importance of the roles, since understanding them was the sine qua non of being a lesbian within that group. While some women saw themselves as falling naturally into one role or the other, even those who did not were urged to chose a role by other lesbians, or sometimes their own observations forced them to conclude that a choice was necessary. Being neither butch nor femme was not an option if one wanted to be part of the young or working-class lesbian subculture. Those who refused to choose learned quickly that they were unwelcome. In some areas the issue was very emotional. Shirley, who lived in Buffalo, New York, in the years after World War II, remembers being in a working-class bar and admitting to a group of lesbians there that she thought of herself as neither butch nor femme: “They argued with me for a long time and when they couldn’t convince me I had to be one or the other, they threatened to take me outside and beat me up.” Although the issue seldom led to violence, butches and femmes were often adamant about rejecting what they called the “confused” behavior of “kiki” women, those who would not choose a role.12

  One New England woman remembers:

  We used to have parties and play games like charades. The butches would be on one side and the femmes would be on the other. There was one couple who’d have to flip a coin to decide who was going to be on what side, and we used to think they were the craziest people.

  Another New England woman recalls that “kiki” also referred to two butches or two femmes who were lovers. They often had to “sneak it,” she says, because of the hostility of those who were committed to roles. Membership in her group demanded that one select a partner who was heterogenderal, that is, who took the opposite role, at least in appearance: “If I wasn’t going to choose that, I couldn’t be in a gay bar. I couldn’t be with gay people.” In New York kiki lesbians were also called “bluffs”—the word being not only a combination of “butch” and “fluff” (another term for femme) but also an indication of how such women were regarded in that community. Even in Greenwich Village, which in the 1920s had been a melting pot of all manner of straight and gay people, the pressure to make a selection and to stick to it had become very stringent. One denizen of the Village says that already by the 1940s one was expected to be either butch or femme. “Those who did not conform were contemptuously referred to as people who didn’t know their minds.”13

  Such strict role divisions continued throughout the 1960s in much of the bar subculture, even during the era of “unisex” among heterosexuals; they are testimony to the essentially conservative nature of a minority group as it attempts to create legitimacy for itself by fabricating traditions and rules. One woman, who is 5’ 10” and of stocky build, remembers going to a lesbian bar in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1967, that had two rest rooms. “I stood in line for a couple of minutes and then the girl in front of me said, ‘You have to get out of here. This is the femme line.’ She pointed to the signs on the rest room doors. One was marked ‘butch’ and the other was marked ‘femme.’”14

  Several lesbian historians, such as Joan Nestle and Judy Grahn, looking back over the 1950s and ’60s, have suggested that butch and femme roles and relationships were not imitations of heterosexuality, but unique in themselves, based not on the social and sexual models all lesbians grew up with, but rather on natural drives (such as “butch sexuality” and “femme sexuality”) and on lesbian-specific, lesbian-culturally developed behavior. Grahn has argued that butches were not copying males but rather they were saying “here is another way of being a woman,” and that what they learned in the lesbian subculture was to “imitate dykes, not men.”15 Yet butch/femme style of dress was not much different from w
orking-class male and female style; descriptive terms in relationships were often modeled on heterosexual language, since no other appropriate words existed to convey commitment and responsibility (for example, a butch might call the femme she was living with her “wife”); the role expectations (butches were supposed to control emotions, do the husband-type chores around the house, be the sexual aggressors; femmes were supposed to cook, be softer, more yielding, stand behind a butch as a woman stands behind a man) looked for all the world like heterosexuality.

  Although the sexual dynamic between a couple who identified as butch and femme could be subtle and complex rather than a simple imitation of heterosexuality, some lesbians considered themselves “stone butches” and observed taboos similar to those that were current among working-class heterosexual males. For example, letting another woman be sexually aggressive with you if you were a stone butch was called being flipped, and it was shameful in many working-class lesbian communities because it meant that a butch had permitted another woman to take power away from her by sexually “femalizing” her, making a “pussy” out of her, in the vernacular. Among black lesbians a butch who allowed herself to be “flipped” was called a pancake. In other circles also a flipped butch was greeted with ridicule if word got out, as it sometimes did if a disgruntled femme wanted to shame a former lover.16

  The taboo against being flipped, which was probably related to the low esteem in which women were held at the time, even made some young butches try to better protect their image by refusing to undress completely when they had sexual relations. One former stone butch recalls, “The derision shown those few butches who had been flipped was enough to prevent many of us, especially those of us who were not yet secure about our sexuality, from letting our partners touch us during lovemaking.” Having to hold on to power by being the only aggressor in a relationship, as some butches felt they must, was a stringent task, not too different from that of the young working-class male who had to maintain total vigilance so that no one ever made him a “punk.”