Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (21 page)

But outside of all-female institutions and rare social configurations such as Mickey Mouse’s party, making contact with other lesbians for romantic or social purposes was far more complicated and problematic than it has become over the last few decades. Unless one was lucky enough to become an insider in a group, lesbian life in the 1930s could be lonely. Since there were no personal ads, no lesbian political organizations, few special-interest social groups for lesbians, none of the social abundance that exists today in many American cities, contact often depended on chance. And because silence was so widespread, it was possible that one often missed that chance. Many lesbians probably really did feel then, as Ann Aldrich’s later pot boiler was titled, that “we walk alone.”

A few bars congenial to lesbians still existed in the ’30s. Those outside of working-class communities were like the bars of the 1920s, catering to gay men and straight gawkers as well as lesbians—such as the Bungalow, about which the
New York Evening Graphic
published a typically hostile, scandalized editorial titled “Greenwich Village Sin Dives Lay Traps for Innocent Girls”:

I doubt if there are five places like it in America. Its patronage is composed almost entirely of lisping boys and deep-voiced girls. They eat, drink, and quarrel. They display their jealousies and occasionally claw at each other with their nails. They talk loudly, scream, jibe at each other and order gin continually. Always gin.

The writer was perhaps a bit conservative in his estimate about the number of similar places in the United States, since there were several other such bars in downtown and midtown New York alone, including Tony Pastor’s and Ernie’s, as well as in other cities. The Barn in Cleveland, the White Horse in Oakland, and even by then a few all-women’s working-class bars such as Mona’s in San Francisco and the Roselle Club and the Twelve-Thirty Club in Chicago. There were even several “tea shops” that catered to lesbians on the Near North Side of Chicago. But it was not until World War II, which brought much larger populations to work in big cities, that many more lesbian bars sprang up across the United States. Many young women who would have been delighted to discover lesbian bars in the ’30s undoubtedly had a difficult time locating one.
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Mona’s, the all-women bar in San Francisco, opened first in 1936 on Union Street and in 1938 on Columbus. According to Win, one of the women I interviewed for this chapter, who frequented Mona’s in the ’30s, it was a hangout for young working-class women, though there are reports of middle-class women who took brief vacations in San Francisco from as far away as Salt Lake City in order to go to Mona’s. Win remembers that at Mona’s the butches often wore drag and the women danced together in butch/femme couples with no fear that they would be molested by the vice squad, as lesbians were in Chicago during the ’30s and in later decades even in San Francisco. If a woman managed to locate such a bar, there were attempts by the other patrons, who knew it was in their interest to cherish so brave and rare a kindred spirit, to put her at ease quickly. Her problems with making contacts were at an end, at least as long as she remained a habituee. Win describes Mona’s as “safe and friendly. We always used to sing ‘If you’re ever down a well, ring my bell.’ It was just right for the atmosphere there.” One would have had to go to Le Monocle in Paris or to pre-1933 Berlin to find its equal.
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But most lesbians never went to bars. Occasionally middle-class lesbians could make contacts with other women if they were members of a private group such as the Nucleus Club, an informal New York-based organization of the late 1930s that held weekly parties for lesbians together with gay men. But although police harassment of lesbians was not common in the 1930s, they knew, perhaps by their observation of gay male experiences, that it was a potential they had to take into account, and that awareness must have dampened the enthusiasm of many to join such a club. The Nucleus Club parties were in private homes, but the group still thought it essential to adopt the rule that each gay man would pair with a lesbian as they left the party and they would go strolling out arm in arm so that neighbors would think the couples had been to a heterosexual gathering.
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One should not underestimate the fun in this game of “fooling the straights,” but underneath the fun was genuine fear.

Middle-class women who dared perceive themselves as lesbian had some possibilities of making contacts more safely in all-women institutions such as summer camps, residence halls, or colleges and universities. Mary remembers that in the 1930s, as a teenager, she had been a counselor in the Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls camps, and when she decided that she was a lesbian she became aware that there were many other young women among the counselors who shared her interests and who identified themselves to each other as lesbian. University life also provided an arena for women who consciously thought of themselves as lesbians to make contact with each other. At the University of Texas in the mid-1930s women physical education majors staged a mock-prom, ostensibly making fun of the university’s regular annual proms. Although heterosexual students were unaware of it, many of the physical education majors were lesbians. The mock-prom was a great lark for them since it sanctioned them to wear drag and dance together in a hall of a hallowed institution.
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But such cavalier gaiety was only occasional among lesbian college women in the 1930s. Their more usual reticence suggests that they were as fearful as the members of the Nucleus Club. When Mary went to the University of Washington in the late 1930s, she and her lesbian friends had a table in the commons at which they could usually find each other any day between 8:00 and 3:00. But what Mary remembers most about the experience now is that they all felt they had to be very circumspect:

Although several of us were in couples, no one ever talked about their love lives. We could unload with problems about families, jobs, money, but not lesbianism. If two women broke up they wouldn’t discuss it with the group, though they might have a confidante who was also part of the group. It was our attitude that this sort of relationship was nobody’s business. We all really knew about each other of course. But the idea was, “You don’t know if someone is a lesbian unless you’ve slept with her.” You didn’t belong if you were the blabbermouth type.

Not only was it a far cry from the “outing” that has begun to take place on college campuses in 1990, but every lesbian college woman in Mary’s group felt she had to be constantly guarded about herself because she was so aware of the danger of lesbian stigma. The easy intimacy that young college women often established with each other in the ’30s was impossible for many college women who were lesbians. They felt compelled to assume such a protective camouflage that those outside the group would have had no idea that they were looking at a table full of lesbians. But a lesbian newcomer would not have had an easy time breaking in.
²⁸

Non-college women were often just as reluctant to risk betraying their lesbianism, even among women they were all but certain were also lesbians. Sandra, who worked in a Portland department store during the early ’30s, tells of having been part of a group of eight women—four couples—who went skiing every winter between 1934 and ’37. “I’m sure we were all gay,” she remembers, “but we never said a word about it. Talking about it just wasn’t the thing to do. Never once did I hear the L word in that group or any word like it—even though we always rented a cabin together and we all agreed that we only wanted four beds since we slept in pairs.”
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Because lesbians were so frightened about divulging themselves and often had no idea where to meet other lesbians for social contact, life could be lonely even if they were lucky enough to have found a mate. May says she met her lover at the University of Texas in the late 1920s, and though they stayed together for more than twenty years, they told almost no one about the nature of their relationship. It placed such a strain on them that May often thought of leaving Virgie, especially during the ’30s, because “I was tired of hiding in a corner. And there was no question of coming out. I wanted so much to be able to talk freely with people, to be like everyone else, not to feel like we loved in a wasteland, but that was impossible. I had a lot of heterosexual women friends, but I thought that as long as I was in that relationship I could never have a close friend. I knew how people would have looked down on us if they’d guessed.”

Although May and Virgie had heard about homosexual men, they knew no lesbians. May claims that she did not become aware that there were other lesbians in the world until 1950, when they began going to dog shows and occasionally saw lesbian couples there, but even then they did not talk to them. At one point in the late ’30s they befriended two heterosexual couples who suspected they were lovers, but those friendships did not last long: “Both the men thought all I needed was a good fuck, and they let me know it.” When May left Virgie in 1953 she felt that although she was “going through a horrible time,” she had to suffer in silence, because there was no one in whom she could confide. It was not until the advent of the feminist movement in the 1970s, when she was already in her late 60s, that she felt she could talk about those years of her life. But the scars remained for women of her generation, as she indicates now. She says she still feels free to talk only in “appropriate circumstances.”
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Elisabeth Craigin also poignantly suggests the lesbian’s sense of isolation in the 1930s in her putatively autobiographical novel in which, when the author and her lover, Rachel, part, she too can tell no one, since their relationship was a secret. Craigin says that shortly after the breakup she had a minor operation and her life was flooded with flowers, kind notes, and good wishes from friends, but their attention to her unimportant physical problem struck her as bitterly ironic: “I could more easily have undergone five such operations than the amputation that was going on in my soul. But sympathy was an anesthetic that that other surgical interference [her break with Rachel] never had.”
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Such difficulty, not only in making contact with others who were willing to avow their love for women, but also in sharing their dearest and most poignant emotions with friends, must have rendered the choice to live as a lesbian overwhelming and explains further why so many of those who admitted emotional and physical love for other females in George Henry’s study of “sex variants” in the 1930s chose to marry men.

But life was clearly not uniformly unfortunate for lesbians of the 1930s outside of fiction. The cities were large enough and diverse enough even then to offer shelter and requisite anonymity to those who felt that they could not live an unconventional affectional life in a small town. The
New York Sun
critic who reviewed
The Children’s Hour
in 1934 was right in his commonsense response to Martha’s lament that because she and Karen had been accused of lesbianism, “There is not anywhere we can go”: “You immediately think of half a dozen [places lesbians could go],” he said, “including the city of New York.”
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If provincial life was uncomfortable, women who identified themselves as lesbian in the 1930s could hope to find refuge and sometimes even desirable social companionship in cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. They were not geographically imprisoned as women might have been in the preceding century. Although good jobs were not easy to come by, if it were essential to them they could move and they could support themselves.

Despite society’s views and restrictions, there were many compelling reasons for some women to choose lesbian relationships and remain lesbians. They found aspects of lesbian life and love far more rewarding than what heterosexuality offered. They were able to make their own lives, often without a large support group but with the help of a felicitous personal relationship that let them define themselves as they chose. While they had no notion how to go about changing the public images of lesbians, they often knew those images had little to do with them, and, as long as they remained covert, could have no effect on them. The series of interviews conducted by Dr. George Henry with lesbians in the ’30s illustrates a contentment in the lives of many of these women that would have frazzled the censors had that picture been reflected in the media. Many of his interviewees were self-actualized individuals, living to their full potential in mutually productive relationships. They say things such as:

I’m doing the work [as an editor] I always wanted to do and I’m very, very happy. I’m very much in love with the girl too. We click…. She has had the most influence for good in my life.

(29-year-old white woman)

If I were born again I would like to be just as I am. I’m perfectly satisfied being a girl and being as I am. I’ve never had any regrets.

(26-year-old black woman)

Our relationship is just as sweet now [after eleven years] as in the beginning.

(29-year-old white woman)

Since we have been living together our lives are fuller and happier. We create things together and we are devoted to our [adopted] baby.

(30-year-old white woman)

I have a great confidence in the future. I think I’m going to be a very well-known artist…. Homosexuality hasn’t interfered with my work. It has made it what it is.