But starting from scratch in real life was not easy. Most of the separatists had been city women without even the basic country survival skills such as splitting wood, plumbing, or planting. They had to learn quickly, often with no help. Their problems could be intensified by the isolation of their chosen situation. They had no outside input to aid them in mediating conflicts that arose within the commune. Rough spots in relationships were not smoothed over by consanguinity or legal ties as in a heterosexual family, and a bad quarrel could easily break up a collective. Although the women often made noble efforts, most of the country communes that were established in the 1970s died before the next decade.40
Perhaps some lesbian separatist communes did not enjoy longevity for the same reasons that the many hippie communes which preceded them were not long-lived: in an isolated situation, where none of the measuring sticks and brakes of the outside world had relevance, listlessness and anomie set in. As they awaited the birth of Lesbian Nation, the members found themselves becoming diverted from their high purpose, and the realization that Utopia was not within easy grasp became disillusioning and frightening. As Suzanne remembers her experience on a commune outside of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the mid-1970s:
Some women got a hundred acres in the country with a house and some small buildings, and about twelve of us started living on the land. It was great in the beginning, but after a while I felt I was getting too far out. We were all doing hallucinogens and coke. I had no idea where people got the money, but the drugs were always there. No one had jobs. We just did odd jobs once in a while. We just worked to get by. We were doing vision quests (spiritual seeking), being in touch with nature. My cat was a psychic traveller. We grew fat. I finally got a dog just to keep me grounded. Then I left.41
But although like Suzanne many women left the communes and separatism with some disillusionment, they often recognized that they had gained from the experience. Separatism allowed them to immerse themselves in women’s culture in a way that for many of them resulted in “an overwhelming positive sense of congruency” that was “a powerful healing force,” as one 1970s separatist describes it. They were not forced to feel split and disoriented by working in the heterosexual world by day and the lesbian-feminist world by night, as many women were. Separatism had value, too, in that it sent a dramatic message to heterosexual feminists and homosexual men who cared to listen that lesbians believed that their interests were being overlooked in the feminist and gay movements and that they had some grievances that needed heeding before they were willing to become political allies. For some women, separatism became a political tool, a dynamic strategy that they could move in and out of whenever they felt their interests were being ignored in the larger movement or they needed more space to develop their insights.42 Separatism as a permanent way of life, however, as most of the separatists discovered, was easier in science fiction than in reality.
The grievances lesbian separatists had toward the larger movements were analogous to the grievances lesbians of color had toward white lesbian-feminists. Although radical doctrine enthusiastically encouraged the inclusion of lesbians of color in the lesbian-feminist movement, few participated. They too felt that their interests had been overlooked and it would not be to their advantage to try to integrate into a predominantly white movement.
Racial and ethnic minority homosexuals saw that lesbians and gay men were scorned in their parent communities, because at the height of civil rights movements it seemed that suddenly homosexuals had popped up and were trying to steal the minorities’ thunder by calling themselves a “minority.” But even before that source of conflict, homosexuals were generally more outcast in those communities than in many white communities, because the minority racial and ethnic communities tended to be working class and particularly rigid about machismo and sexuality. One black writer attributes homophobia among blacks to the black movement’s attempt to offset the myth of the black matriarchy by enhancing the image of black manhood. She observes, “Naturally the woman-identified-woman, the black lesbian, was a threat not only to the projection of black male macho, but a sexual threat, too—the utmost danger to the black man’s institutionally designated role as ‘King of Lovers.’” While black women on the whole may have found more freedom than white women to participate in sex, such freedom was limited to heterosexual sex.43 The black lesbian was safest in the closet. Other racial and ethnic minorities shared that antipathy toward lesbianism. Perhaps lesbianism was in such disfavor among minorities because on American ground they had often fought to preserve their own culture, which might dictate that women be unquestioningly obedient, and lesbianism is the epitome of sexual and social disobedience.
To compound the problem, socially aware racial and ethnic minority lesbians frequently felt that at a time when their people were finally organizing to demand rights, it was their inescapable duty to give their allegiance to their parent culture. They believed they needed to fight side by side with heterosexual men and women of their group in order to alleviate the kind of discrimination and oppression they had experienced even before they became lesbians. To them their parent culture seemed to have the greater need, and they felt they could not fight in two armies. Many believed that compared with the problems of their ethnic and racial groups, lesbians’ and women’s problems were insignificant. “We are fighting for survival—jobs, housing, education, and most importantly struggling for a sense of dignity in a country dominated by whites,” one Puerto Rican woman wrote after resigning her brief membership in a group called Lesbian Feminist Liberation: “Our problems are immediate, not long range. We as women in the [ethnic] community in order to be effective must accept their priorities as our own. We must put aside our lesbian-feminist perspectives and work within the framework that exists.” As minority members in a racist society, they also believed that there was a danger in attributing patriarchal corruption to biological maleness. Any kind of argument based on biological determinism was bad, they recognized, since it had often been used by racists to “prove” the inferiority of minorities. They felt greater solidarity with “progressive” minority men than with white lesbian-feminists who, it seemed to them, were denying that race could be as much a source of women’s oppression as sex.44
Although the lesbian-feminist community tried to welcome them, even those minority lesbians who were not involved in civil rights struggles often felt alienated from lesbian-feminism. They believed that in a pinch it was their parent community that they would have to rely on for survival. They continued to live lives not significantly different from those of lesbians in earlier eras, frequently in butch/ femme role relationships or without social contacts among other women who loved women. For them there was nothing relevant or comfortable in lesbian-feminist life. Leslie, a Native American woman who had had an eighteen-year relationship with a black woman, a mother of two children, explains that throughout the 1970s: “Because of the children we didn’t have any lesbian friends. We didn’t want the kids to have to suffer in school. And we didn’t have anything in common with the lesbian community around here anyway. I didn’t want to go in the street and hold up signs and march in parades.” They socialized with other minority people who were heterosexual. Lesbian-feminism seemed like a strange and distant world to them.45
The few minority women who became part of visible lesbian-feminist life in the 1970s were usually able to do so only at the cost of alienation from their ethnic communities. Often they were women who had a love relationship with a white woman and maintained few ties back in the ghetto. But the discomfort of some minority women who tried to work in the predominantly white lesbian-feminist movement of the early 1970s is captured in black lesbian writer Pat Parker’s poem “Have You Ever Tried to Hide?,” in which she observes that a white lesbian may have a smaller foot than a white man, “but it’s still on my neck.”46 Maintaining the rhetoric and militancy of the ethnic movements of the preceding years, it was not easy for minority lesbians to be convinced th
at white lesbian-feminists really could reverse the racism implanted in them by their parent culture. Midway through the 1970s, when more minority women began to identify themselves as lesbian-feminists, they aligned themselves with those who shared their backgrounds, not trusting white lesbian-feminists to be sensitive to the special problems of what came to be called in the 1970s Third World lesbians.
Black lesbians were the first to organize as lesbians and feminists along racial lines. They were active in the formation of the National Black Feminist Organization in 1974, and in 1978 they formed a National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gay Men. They also established in 1978 Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians, which had in its beginning little political awareness but recognized that it was important to create unity with other women who were both lesbian and Third World. Out of similar convictions some Hispanic, Native American, and Asian lesbians eventually formed lesbians of color organizations, published their own journals such as Vagina, and even established their own Third World Softball teams such as Oakland’s Gente. Multicultural alliances that excluded whites seemed beneficial because the various Third World lesbians felt they all shared the experiences of racism in a white society and white women needed to deal with their racism on their own. As a Latina Gente member expressed it:
There’s gotta be some separation some place to really get our own shit together. A white woman can sit down and talk to a white woman more than I can about what it feels like to be a white woman and have racist feelings about black people or Asian people or Indian people. I don’t have the time or the inclination to discuss these sorts of things with a white woman, but I can sit down and talk to somebody black about what it feels like to be oppressed. Some positive things can come out of that.47
Minorities were critical of white lesbian-feminists especially because they felt that while denying their racism those women acted on racist assumptions. As Chicana author Cherrie Moraga wrote, Third World lesbians became fed up with white lesbian-feminist organizations that would claim: “Well, we’re open to all women. Why don’t [lesbians of color] come?” but would refuse to examine how the very nature and structure of the group took for granted race and class. The criticism was puzzling to white lesbian-feminists who had been lamenting that the great majority of the movement was composed of white, educated women of middleclass backgrounds. They really did want to broaden the base of their group by attracting lower-income and Third World women, but they sincerely did not know how, outside of welcomes and appearing receptive. As radical as they were, they suffered from the liberal’s basic ineptness in dealing with other classes and races. In their frustration they sometimes came to suspect that they were being emotionally blackmailed by lesbians of color:
All the women were white on the commune where I lived except for Cara. She could be very violent and schizo. Sometimes she would beat the women up. We wanted to include her, but we didn’t know how to deal with the race issue. We just weren’t experienced enough to separate her violence out from her color. And she would use that against us, accusing us of racism—like when she stole one of our cars and drove it into the river and said we were racist just because we were angry at her.48
Needless to say, such paralyzing guilt, confusion, and ambivalence did little to patch the rifts between white lesbian-feminists and lesbians of color.
The women-identified-women who hoped to create Lesbian Nation in the 1970s failed in their main goal. But it was a goal born of excessive idealism as well as excessive youth and was probably unrealizable without the help of a cataclysmic disaster that would somehow render the earth all xx, as the seeker after the dyke/amazon world of the future had prayed. Their failure was inevitable not only because of their unrealistic notions, but also because, like most true believers, they had little capacity to compromise their individual visions. Whenever one set of visions clashed with another in their communities, tremendous and exhausting upheavals occurred.
But despite those clashes, the successes of the lesbian-feminists of the 1970s must not be ignored. They were able to take messages from both the women’s movement and the gay movement and weave them into a coherent theory of lesbian-feminism. They identified the women’s movement as homophobic and the gay movement as sexist, and they fought against both. In the process they not only forced those movements to open up to lesbian and feminist ideas, but they also established their own movement that created a unique “women’s culture” in music, spirituality, and literature that made at least a small dent in mainstream culture.
However, their accomplishment was less in realizing their vision than in raising consciousness, particularly among more moderate lesbians who sometimes used them as a measuring stick. If the radical lesbian-feminists could go so far, be so bold and outrageous, then surely the moderates could be a little braver than they had been. As one California woman now remembers:
I was not a conscious participant in the lesbian-feminist community, but I was eventually a grateful beneficiary. I’m still not an activist, though I acknowledge a debt to women who spoke out for and to people like me, and reminded us that there is no reason to go on fearing ourselves because other people fear us out of ignorance…. Would I have even “come out” without all their clamor? Hard to say. But I believe I owe a lot to those loud-mouthed lesbian-feminists who refused to swallow all the crap I swallowed about us.49
The lesbian-feminist contribution to lessening lesbian guilt and kindling self-acceptance—even among women who perceived themselves as in no way radical—was considerable.
Radical lesbian-feminists had one other function as well. They played a kind of “bad cop” in a social drama, which then permitted more moderate activist lesbians to play the “good cop.” It became hardly threatening for lesbians who were willing to work within society to be asking for rights such as institutional policies of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Such requests could be seen as entirely reasonable compared to radical lesbian-feminist demands for a separate society. Functioning as foils, lesbian-feminists made agitation for simple justice (which was considered outrageously radical in other times) seem tame. Through their very extremism—which allowed other homosexual activists to appear far less extreme—they made a vital contribution to the spread of gay and lesbian rights.
Lesbian Sex Wars in the 1980s
I do not know any feminist worthy of that name who, if forced to choose between freedom and sex, would choose sex.
—Ti-Grace Atkinson,
“Why I Am Against S/M Liberation,” 1982
Could it be that the real fear of those who want to use sexual repression to fuel the Women’s Movement is that we might actually make so much progress that (gasp!) we would not go to meetings at all? I guess some people would just be happier in a world where there’s never any time for romantic picnics or week-long orgies. They’d rather caucus than copulate or cunnilingicise. Un-fuck them, I say. They’ve already wished that on themselves anyway.
—Pat Califia, introduction to The Leading Edge:
An Anthology of Lesbian Sexual Fiction, 1987
The French author Colette, who wrote about lesbianism from her firsthand experiences, observed about love between women:
In living amorously together, two women may eventually discover that their mutual attraction is not basically sensual…. What woman would not blush to seek out her amie only for sensual pleasure? In no way is it passion that fosters the devotion of two women, but rather a feeling of kinship.1
The sense of her 1930 observation was generally not contradicted by women who lived as lesbians in the 1970s. This is at first glance curious, since America was in the throes of sexual exploration during that decade. Thousands of X-rated movie houses and “adult” bookstores emerged across the country. Gay men were graphically describing in newspaper personal ads what they wanted in a sex partner. Heterosexual females were in hot pursuit of the multiple orgasm. Heterosexual men and women were avidly reading books such as Alex Comfort’s The Joy of S
ex (1972) that would make them sexual gourmets, or Helen Kaplan’s The New Sex Therapy (1974) that would help them overcome whatever obstacles stood in the way of their becoming sexual gourmets. As historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman observe, America in the 1970s had become “the Sexualized Society.”2
But such “sexualization” passed most lesbians by. Despite the relish of pornographers in depicting lesbianism as merely a sexual phenomenon, it has seldom been just that, and lesbian-feminism, which dominated the visible lesbian community in the ’70s, rendered it less so than ever. Because most lesbians had been socialized first and foremost as female, they were no more able than most heterosexual women in the past to form relationships primarily on the basis of sexual lust. And unlike heterosexual women in the 1970s, lesbians generally did not have partners who would prod them on to greater sexual looseness. Thus, in the midst of rampant sexuality among heterosexuals and homosexual men, lesbians in the 1970s either felt the new “sexualization” to be irrelevant to their old life styles or—as lesbian-feminists—were too busy designing the Lesbian Nation to turn their attention to what they generally regarded as the triviality of sex.
Not only were lesbians outside of committed relationships far less sexual than gay male and heterosexual singles, but even within long-term relationships they tended to be much less sexual, as statistics gathered during the 1970s for a major study of both heterosexual and homosexual American couples confirmed. For example, only one-third of the lesbian couples in relationships of at least two years had sex once a week or more (compared to two-thirds of their heterosexual counterparts), and almost half the lesbians in long-term relationships (ten years +) had sex less than once a month (compared to only 15 percent of their heterosexual counterparts).3
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 32
