Splits, Coalitions, and Resolutions
While lesbian-feminists, as homosexuals and as feminists, had natural affinities with other gay and feminist groups, their relationships were not always without ambivalences. Butch/femme women and older middleclass and wealthier lesbians generally shunned them for their radicalism. Racial and ethnic minority lesbians felt that lesbian-feminist goals were irrelevant to the major problems that minorities faced. Feminists sometimes feared that lesbian-feminists would stigmatize the whole women’s movement as being made up of “nothing but a bunch of man-hating dykes.” Movement gay women felt uncomfortable with the separatist program of some lesbian-feminists. Though there were occasional useful and fulfilling coalitions and mergers between lesbian-feminists and members of other groups, mistrust was frequent (just as it was between revolutionary and more conservative groups within ethnic minorities). Lesbian-feminists were especially critical of what they saw as the superficiality of the “liberal” feminist and gay demands for social change. They attempted to educate the older groups. For example, they exhorted feminists to become lesbians and lesbians were told they must become feminists in order to aid in the battle against male supremacy.
Many ignored such exhortations, but some older women who had been lesbians long before the birth of the lesbian-feminist movement found it easy to accept the movement’s goals and philosophies, since they had long lived as feminists without defining themselves as such. The new lesbian chauvinism was a heady experience for them, and they were embraced by the young women in the lesbian-feminist movement with great enthusiasm. They were made to feel they had moved practically overnight from miscreants to historical role models. They remembered well the persecution and the need to hide that characterized their lives in the 1950s and throughout much of the ’60s—and suddenly the world had changed. “It was like living in a time warp,” one woman remembers. She had moved from the Midwest to New York in order to have more access to the blossoming new culture:
Suddenly there was women’s music, which I’d never heard before, and it was performed in front of such huge audiences of proud lesbians. There were all of these workshops. There were all-women dances at Columbia. There was a place in the Catskills where hundreds of women took over the entire hotel, running around bare, giving each other massages. And they all wanted to talk to me as a lesbian who had been around for a while. They respected me. I was forty-five years old and as delirious as a fourteen year old. It was like I’d never lived before.33
“Old gays” who were willing to venture out of their closets or out of their butch/femme roles (which lesbian-feminists disdained) were delighted to change their identity to lesbian-feminist. It was as though the new movement was what they had been waiting for their entire lives, but that it could come to fruition in their day was beyond their sweetest dreams.
While the lesbian-feminists welcomed older lesbians who adhered to feminist principles, they were not willing to welcome gay men into their revolution, and on this account they differed emotionally from the women who were part of the gay revolution and who insisted that even if women received all the rights they wanted, lesbians would still be pariahs by virtue of their homosexuality. “If we take up the issues of child care, wife battering, abortion rights,” the “gay” women asked, “who will take up the issues of gay rights for us?” Barbara Gittings, who continued to work in the gay movement throughout the 1970s, characterized the dilemma as “It’s a matter of where does it hurt the most? For me it hurts the most not in the female arena, but in the gay arena.”34 Lesbian-feminists argued in response that homophobia was due to patriarchal values and would be cured once those values were destroyed.
Although lesbian-feminists and gays occasionally worked together in the face of grave threats such as the antihomosexual Briggs Initiative in California, lesbian-feminists generally found it disruptive to be with gay males, since to them they did not constitute a special category of men: they had been socialized just as badly as straight males and had similar chauvinistic expectations of females. Lesbian-feminists most often chose to dissociate themselves from gay concerns and work on issues that were specifically feminist, because they felt that gay men wanted to use them only as mediators between gay male interests and society. They pointed out with anger that they had nothing to do with washroom sex or public solicitation, and yet those were historically the problems on which women’s energies were spent in coalitions with gay men. Lesbian-feminists insisted they were not the “ladies auxiliary of the gay movement.” Their slogan became: “We are angry, not gay.”35
For many lesbian-feminists the problem stemmed from gay men’s lack of a radical analysis over the questions of sex and sex roles. They accused gay men of being merely reformist—defining the issue of homosexuality as a private matter about with whom you sleep—instead of understanding the deeper political issues such as questions of domination and power. They complained that gay reformists pursued solutions that made no basic changes in the system that oppressed lesbians as women and their reforms would keep power in the hands of the oppressors.36 As lesbian-feminists, they were not interested in promoting what they saw as trivial laws and mores that would make it possible for everyone to sleep around freely while maintaining the status quo of women’s powerlessness.
They were especially repelled by gay male culture because they believed that lesbians, as women, would not naturally do as gay men did, with their dominant-submissive modes of sexual relating and their separation of sex from emotional involvement. Adrienne Rich, in a speech at the 1977 New York Lesbian Pride Rally (an event whose express purpose was to offer lesbians an alternative to the Gay Pride Rally that had commemorated Stonewall throughout the 1970s), even blamed all that she saw as wrong in old lesbian culture on the influence of gay males, including “the violent, self-destructive world of the gay bars” and “the imitation role stereotypes of ‘butch’ and ‘femme.’” Her cry, along with that of myriads of other women, was for lesbian-feminists to create a self-defined, self-loving, woman-identified culture.37 Because a general disenchantment with and suspicion of all males was central to lesbian-feminist doctrine, the gay man was naturally seen as being no less an enemy than any other human with a penis, and lesbian-feminists could make no lasting coalition with gay men in a gay revolution.
Although lesbian-feminists saw themselves as feminist rather than gay, they did not enjoy an unalloyed welcome in the women’s movement. Betty Friedan, the founder of NOW, the largest organization of the women’s movement, even went so far as to tell the New York Times in 1973 that lesbians were sent to infiltrate the women’s movement by the CIA as a plot to discredit feminism.38 However, despite the displeasure of NOW’s founding mother and her supporters, who called lesbians the “lavender menace,” when a showdown actually took place in NOW most heterosexual feminists voted on the side of lesbians. In a 1971 resolution, NOW identified lesbians as the frontline troops of the women’s movement and accepted the lesbian-feminist analysis that the reason lesbians had been so harassed by society was that they were a significant threat to the system that subjugates women—the very system that heterosexual women were trying to challenge and destroy by their feminism. The 1971 resolution acknowledged the inherent feminism of lesbianism and the antifeminism of lesbian persecution: “Because she defines herself independently of men, the lesbian is considered unnatural, incomplete, not quite a woman—as though the essence of womanhood was to be identified with men.” It affirmed that the oppression of lesbians was a legitimate concern for feminism and that “a woman’s right to her own person includes the right to define and express her own sexuality and to choose her own lifestyle.” The resolution passed overwhelmingly and without any change in wording. That victory was a great testimony to lesbian-feminists’ success in communicating their position even to more conservative feminists.
Other feminist organizations followed suit in showing support for love between women such as few would have dared to express in earlier years. I
n the mid-1970s the National Women’s Political Caucus issued a position paper supporting nondiscrimination against lesbians in areas such as employment, housing, and education. The National Women’s Agenda, which included such traditional groups as the Girl Scouts and the YWCA, supported lesbian rights in its 1975 constitution. Gloria Steinem offered the rationale for such actions in an essay titled “The Politics of Supporting Lesbianism”:
We must understand that what we are attempting is a revolution, not a public relations movement. As long as we fear the word “lesbian” we are curtailing our own strength and abandoning our sisters. As long as human sexuality is politically controlled, we will all be losing a basic human freedom.39
But while many gay women were shouting “Out of the closets and into the streets” at Gay Pride parades and lesbian-feminists were openly demonstrating their contempt for heterosexual institutions, most older lesbians still felt that their best chance was in continued silence. They left confrontation and admission to younger women who had been brought up in more liberal times and who had often even declassed themselves in the push toward downward mobility in the radical ’60s and the aftermath of that decade. Older lesbians explained to themselves that the younger women had less to lose.
An uncomfortable split sometimes developed between those who felt free to come out and those who remained in the closet. As an Albuquerque, New Mexico, woman who worked as an administrator in education wrote defensively:
Radical feminist politics would be ill at ease among the company I keep, which often includes some very conservative, yes, “straight” people…. My words would be dismissed, my credibility destroyed if it were known that I was a lesbian. I choose the closet. That is surely my right…. More power to those who open a collective or a women’s service of some kind, but would everyone please get off my case for doing what I know and like best?40
They had been practicing all their adult lives to live in hiding and to maneuver despite that handicap, just as the times that formed them had demanded, and they now resented what seemed like the cavalier exhortation of the younger women not only that they risk everything they had built but that they change the very modus operandi that had become second nature to them.
Nevertheless, those who were fearful of coming out were often honest enough with themselves to realize that they owed the activists a debt. It was through the revolutionary efforts of gays and lesbian-feminists that the lives of many of the more cautious women were made easier. They were able to feel, albeit in secret, that they were socially or professionally a little safer and a little more comfortable. Not only had the activists pushed for policies and legislation on various levels that often meant that those covert lesbians no longer needed to fear they would be discriminated against in a job or in school or with regard to housing, even should their sexual orientation become known, but the activists had also succeeded in remaking the lesbian self-image so that shame about love between women could feel anachronistic.
The benefits even covert lesbians enjoyed came from the work of both revolutionary movements, as basically different as they were. Gay revolutionaries of the 1970s saw lesbians as unlike most women, an aggrieved minority who were justified in demanding rights that had been denied them ever since the sexologists first identified them in the previous century. In contrast, lesbian-feminist revolutionaries of the ’70s saw themselves as being just like other women, except that they were more astute in their sociopolitical analysis and they believed that once other women saw the light they too would become lesbian-feminists. But unlike many lesbians who had been indoctrinated with guilt and self-hatred in earlier decades, lesbian-feminist and gay women revolutionaries were similar in refusing to accept the premise that love between women was inherently flawed. And they battled that notion openly. They agreed that society was at fault for its policies of persecution and its dissemination of misinformation about same-sex love. Homophobia, and not homosexuality, needed curing. It was not lesbians, they agreed, but society that was sick.
1970s dyke style. Although butch-and-femme were “politically incorrect” in the lesbian-feminist community, everyone looked butch. (© Cathy Cade, 1972. From Lesbians Speak Out by Cathy Cade, 1974. Reprinted by permission.)
Lesbian Nation required that women learn new skills so that they might be independent of “the man” in all ways. (© JEB [Joan E. Biren], 1979. From Eye to Eye by JEB, 1979. Reprinted by permission.)
Artist/designer Wendy Cadden of Women’s Press Collective at the printing press. Lesbian-feminists learned to print so they could communicate their own vision of lesbianism in the 1970s. (Courtesy of the June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Los Angeles.)
Country Women in the 1970s. Lesbian separatists who went off to the country wanted to escape the man-made world that drained their energies. (© JEB f Joan E. Biren], 1979. From Eye to Eye by JEB, 1979. Reprinted by permission.)
Third World lesbians of the 1970s did not always trust white lesbian-feminists to be sensitive to their special problems. (© JEB [Joan E. Biren], 1979. From Eye to Eye by JEB, 1979. Reprinted by permission.)
Older Latina lesbians of the 1980s. The visible lesbian community became increasingly diverse. (© Cathy Cade, 1982. From A Lesbian Photo Album by Cathy Cade, 1987. Reprinted by permission.)
In the 1980s the increasing number of visible Asian American lesbians permitted them for the first time to establish a separate group within some communities. (© Cathy Cade, 1981. From A Lesbian Photo Album, 1987. Reprinted by permission.)
Betty Shoemaker and Sylvia Dobson at the first old lesbians convention in 1987. “To walk in and see 200 white-haired dykes, all ready to stand up and assert themselves, was mind-boggling.” (© Ruth Mountaingrove, 1987. Reprinted by permission.)
The 1980s saw a baby boom in the lesbian community. (© Cathy Cade, 1981. From A Lesbian Photo Album by Cathy Cade, 1987. Reprinted by permission.)
S/M lesbians believe that feminists have much to learn from sexual outlaws. (Courtesy of Jesse Merril.)
Lesbian sexual radicals of the 1980s wanted to escape from “politically correct” sex and expand lesbians’ sexual horizons. (Courtesy of National Entertainment Network; photograph by Jill Posner.)
Lesbian punk styles, 1980s. (© Isa Massu, 1987. Reprinted by permission.)
Lesbian style wars in the 1980s. (© Kris Kovic. Reprinted by permission.)
Lipstick lesbians of the 1980s at a lesbian wedding. (Courtesy of the June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Los Angeles.)
“Softball is the only consistent thing in this community. Political groups and social groups come and go, but softball will always be around,” Rhonda in Omaha. (Courtesy of JEB [Joan E. Biren]. Reprinted by permission.)
The 1990s?—“The thing that’s important to me about Queer Nation is that we’re ready to act…. Sometimes you have to take to the streets.” (Courtesy of Robert Fox/Impact Visuals.)
Lesbian Nation: Creating a Women-Identified-Women Community in
the 1970s
Sweet Betsy the Dyke
(to be sung to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike”)
Oh do you remember Sweet Betsy the Dyke
Who came from New Jersey on her motorbike,
And riding beside her was her lover Anne,
A sister, a friend, and afar out woman.
(CHORUS) Singing “Dykes, come together, we can change this land!”
Singing, “Dykes come together, we can change this land!”
They rode across the country, Sweet Betsy and Anne, And said to all women, “YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN!
So leave all your menfolk and come on with us. If you don’t have a cycle, we’ll charter a bus …
—Les B. Friends, 1973
The two things we are trying to do—set up a counterculture and make a revolution—It’s hard to do both things at the same time.
—June Arnold,
The Cook and the Carpenter, 1973
Despite the strong movements of the 1970s that attracted multitudes of lesbia
ns, others remained untouched. Many middleclass white lesbians who did not declass themselves in the radical 1970s continued to be completely closeted outside of their circle of lesbian friends. Those women saw movements based on sexual politics as being superfluous to their lives. They were joined in that view by lesbians who had come out in the gay bar culture of butch and femme and had no desire to adapt to a new set of standards. Their view was also shared by lesbians who belonged to racial and ethnic minorities and felt they had to place the needs of those communities first. To all of them, as to Jane Rule’s character in her novel of the 1970s, Contract with the World, “loving another woman [was] nothing but that, with no redeeming politics or transforming art.”1 But lesbian-feminists often built their entire existence around politics based on their feminism and lesbianism.
Many lesbian-feminists had discovered lesbianism through the radical feminist movement. They were often women in their twenties who had grown up in the era of the flower child and had learned to approach life with passion and idealism. Their decision to become lesbian-feminists stemmed from their disillusionment with the male-created world and their hope of curing its ills. The fruitless war in Vietnam, the proliferaton of ecological problems, the high unemployment rate even among the educated, the general unrest that was left over from the 1960s, all contributed to their radical lesbian-feminist vision that American culture was in deep trouble and drastic measures were required to reverse its unwise course. Since they were convinced through feminism that the root of the problem was male—caused by the greed, egocentrism, and violence that came along with testosterone or male socialization—they believed that only a “woman’s culture,” built on superior female values and women’s love for each other, could rectify all that had gone wrong in male hands. Thus not only was love between women—“lesbianism”—destigmatized among them: it was “aristocraticized.”2 Although women before the 1970s often became lesbians because of their discontent with the way men behaved, the lesbian-feminists were the first to articulate such motivation and to create a coherent philosophy out of it.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 28
