Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (24 page)

Officials during the war sometimes seemed to deny that lesbianism even existed in the military, since they were placed in the awkward position of either condoning what had been socially condemned so recently, or disapproving of what really worked to the military’s benefit. Rita Laporte writes of being in the Army in 1943, where, for the first time in her life, she fell in love. When the other woman was transferred to a different base, Laporte decided that the only way to rejoin her was to “sacrifice all on the altar of love” by admitting she was a homosexual and thereby getting booted out of the Army. After reciting her well-rehearsed confession to the Major:

I awaited my fate. Then the Major smiled. In a kindly voice he said, “You’re kidding. I don’t believe you.” I was stunned. Naturally I had rehearsed all the Major’s possible answers. I was ready to hang my head in deepest shame, to bear up under all insults, to weep or not weep, as might be necessary. Something was terribly wrong.

At last I blurted out, “But I AM one!”

We argued. I pleaded. But it was useless; I could not convince him.
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Such denial seems to have taken place on a much larger scale in 1944 when the Inspector General’s Office sent an emergency team to investigate allegations of lesbianism at Fort Oglethorpe, a WAC basic training camp in Georgia, after the mother of a young WAC complained that her daughter was being pursued by lesbians. Although there were witnesses who testified that they had seen female “perverts” on base, “homosexual addicts” who affected “a mannish appearance by haircut, by the manner of wearing clothing, by posture, by stride, by seeking ‘to date’ other girls such as a man would … [and who] had certain signals by which they recognized each other,” such as whistling the “Hawaiian War Chant” [sic], nevertheless the investigative team concluded that in all of Fort Oglethorpe they could not find any real “homosexual addicts.”
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Of course military women during the war had been brought up in the homophobic 1930s, and they usually knew that they must not be flagrant in their lesbianism (despite the Fort Oglethorpe allegations of “flagrant behavior”). Elizabeth, who joined the Navy in 1943, says that in the Washington, D.C., hydrographic office to which she was assigned as a draftsperson there were many “butchy” women whose style suggested even the stereotype of the lesbian, “but we never talked about it. There were no problems and we wanted to keep it that way. We all knew that if we were discreet we wouldn’t get caught.”
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Few women who loved other women had serious difficulty during the war, since the military needed all the women it could get who would do their jobs and not disrupt the functioning of the service, and the women understood that if they practiced a modicum of discretion they would be quite safe.

A “Government-Sponsored” Subculture

With the end of the war and the start of the 1950s the situation changed drastically, but before that was to happen a much more significant lesbian subculture developed as a result of the war years. Such development was assisted by the fact that the war and especially military life fostered some tolerance regarding lesbianism among young women who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, came in contact with sexuality between women in the close confines of the barracks. Even women who did not identify themselves as lesbians in the military tended to treat lesbianism, which became a familiar phenomenon, with a “who cares?” attitude.
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It may be that such a relative tolerance toward homosexuality was also promoted by the social upheaval of the war, which threw off balance various areas of American life. Troubling questions of life and death confronted many young women directly for the first time, and “normality” and concepts of sexual “morality” were seen to be far more complicated than they appear during more ordinary years.

In addition to the changing attitudes about what constituted morality, the war also contributed to an easier formation and development of a distinctive lesbian “style” because it made pants acceptable garb for women. In the years before the war, the public was often scandalized if a woman appeared in pants outside her home. Even butch lesbians understood that while they might wear pants at home, they had to change to a skirt to go out on the street—unless they were able to pass as men. Not even movie stars were immune from censure, as was suggested by 1930s headlines such as “Miss [Marlene] Dietrich Defends Use of Pants” and “GARBO IN PANTS!” According to the latter article, “Innocent bystanders gasped in amazement to see … Greta Garbo striding swiftly along Hollywood Boulevard dressed in men’s clothes.”
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But since hundreds of thousands of women who worked in war factory jobs during the early 1940s were actually obliged to wear pants, they had become a permanent part of American women’s wardrobe, and they continued to be so after the war. The lesbian who loathed dresses felt much freer to wear pants out of doors than she had in the prewar years. Pants soon became a costume and a symbol that allowed women who defined themselves as lesbians to identify each other.

Perhaps because women were allowed more latitude in their dress during the war, butch and femme distinctions in style could be more pronounced, and the roles became very clear-cut for more lesbians. Rusty Brown, who was a civilian welder for the Navy, remembers that in a coffeehouse she frequented, a lesbian hangout in the early 1940s, butch and femme roles were already very strict. “You could tell when you walked in who was butch and who was femme,” she recalls. Unless two women were on a date, butches would sit only with other butches and femmes would sit with femmes. Stringent codes of behavior were soon established. For example, butches could date only femmes. They must never even dance with another butch because, Rusty Brown recalls, “We were too much alike … If we danced, who was going to lead! We would both be dominant.”
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Such behavior codes, which seem to have received sharper definition at this time, when butches were sanctioned to appear completely masculine in their dress, became pervasive in the working-class lesbian subculture of the 1950s.

Ironically, the military also contributed to the establishment of a larger lesbian subculture when it became less lenient in its policy toward homosexuals once the war was over. Thousands of homosexual personnel were loaded on “queer ships” and sent with “undesirable” discharges to the nearest U. S. port. Many of them believed that they could not go home again. They simply stayed where they were disembarked, and their numbers helped to form the large homosexual enclaves that were beginning to develop in port cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston. Historian Allan Bérubé wryly remarks: “The government sponsored a migration of the gay community.”
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The military even helped to introduce lesbians who had honorable discharges to large metropolitan areas where they could meet others like themselves. Mac, who had never been out of Iowa before she joined the service, was typical. She has lived in San Francisco since the war, and explains that when she had been stationed in the Bay Area she discovered that “San Francisco felt like home. I found a lot of different sorts of attractive people there. And I knew everyone minded their own business and didn’t care about what I was doing.” She speculates that were it not for the war she might still be in Iowa. Many women also came to big cities in order to work in factories during the war and they, like ex-military women, stayed because they found the anonymity of a big city to be more compatible with what became their life choices.
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The migration to big urban centers of large numbers of women who identified themselves as lesbians during and after the war meant that for the first time in America a number of bars could survive economically if they catered exclusively to lesbians. Although military bases sometimes posted notices declaring certain bars “off limits to military personnel” and the lesbian bars near the bases were also required to display such notices, it was during the war that more all-lesbian bars were opened in big cities, such as the If Club in Los Angeles. Military lesbians on weekend passes gathered there despite the prohibitions, as did lesbians who worked in the factories and held other jobs in the cities because of the war.
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Bars that catered to gay men and tourists along with lesbians also proliferated during the war, such as Lucky’s, a Harlem bar that opened in 1942 and attracted interracial couples as well as slumming tourists, and the 181 Club on Second Avenue in New York which opened in the mid-1940s. The 181 Club featured waiters who were butch lesbians in tuxedos and entertainers who were female impersonators. Like the bars of the 1920s, it drew many heterosexuals who came to gawk or to dabble, but many more men and women who were committed to homosexuality and who came to be with other homosexuals. Similar clubs opened during the war in smaller cities also, such as the Music Hall in Portland, Oregon, which featured male and female impersonators such as Mickey, the “master of ceremonies,” a lesbian who sang in a tenor voice.
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While there was not yet a lot of explicit political consciousness brewing in those bars during and right after the war, they often fostered a sense of community especially among working-class and young lesbians. And in fact, the changes in women’s lives that were triggered by the war—not only through experiences in the military or in factories, but also through social configurations such as the expanding bar culture—permitted those who loved other women to see their feelings in a broader context. They could now much more easily conceptualize lesbianism not simply as a secret and forbidden love but as a lifestyle shared by many other women. Perhaps some could begin to see themselves as a “minority.” This new vision accounts for the incipient lesbian political consciousness that was now just beginning to develop. Hints of that slowly awakening consciousness appeared even in military magazines such as
Yank,
in which one letter to the editor written by a lesbian WAC officer at the end of the war seemed to identify lesbians as a legitimate minority group and appealed for social justice, consonant with the ideals of justice for which Americans had been fighting. The writer declared:

I have voluntarily drunk from the Lesbian cup and have tasted much of the bitterness contained therein as far as the attitude of society is concerned. I believe there is much that can and should be done in the near future to aid in the solution of this problem, thus enabling [homosexuals] to take their rightful places as fellow human beings, your sister and brother in the brotherhood of mankind.
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Such emerging awareness led the way to lesbian organizing in the next decade and can perhaps partially explain why the gay and lesbian-feminist revolutions caught fire as quickly as they did at the end of the 1960s.

However, while many women may have come to identify themselves as lesbians during the war years, there were some, in more sheltered environments, far from the nascent pockets of the lesbian subculture, who had same-sex love experiences and yet managed to maintain something of the innocence of an earlier era. Betty, who lived in Nebraska during the war, says that she had been a psychology major in college, but when she fell in love with another woman in 1942 they did not call it lesbianism, any more than most of her counterparts would have at the beginning of the century: “I didn’t think that what I’d read in an abnormal psych text applied to us in any way.” Although they had a sexual relationship, they believed that they should both get married to compatible people so that they could live next door to each other. When their husbands went off to war, both women worked on a newspaper, but each moved in with her parents: “We were earning very low salaries, and it never occurred to us to get an apartment together. We didn’t even know there were other women like us out there. We had no idea that making a life together could be an option for us.”
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Betty’s knowledge of the medical texts that described lesbianism as a physiological or psychological problem gave her no information about her own experience, which she knew was not sick, and did nothing to reveal to her the growing society of women who were creating a lifestyle around their affectional preferences.

But other women, especially those in large coastal cities, became much more sophisticated during the war years. Women who identified as lesbians and who remembered the 1930s felt that lesbian life in America had changed permanently and for the better by the war. Lisa Ben, the editor of a short-lived post-war lesbian periodical,
Vice Versa
(the first of its kind in America), wrote a euphoric article in 1947 proclaiming that the day of lesbian freedom had finally come. She pointed to changes in fashion such as girls’ preferences for “jeans and boys shirts [instead of] neat feminine attire,” which made it easier for lesbians to dress as they wanted, and the proliferation of “night clubs featuring male and female impersonators,” as well as cafes and drive-ins that may have been predominantly heterosexual but were so frequently patronized by homosexuals that they came to be known as “a likely rendezvous in which to meet those of similar inclinations.” In addition, she observed, women’s freedom had so escalated in the years right after the war that it was immeasurably easier to be a lesbian in 1947 than it had been at any time in the past:

In these days of frozen foods …, compact apartments, modern innovations, and female independence, there is no reason why a woman should have to look to a man for food and shelter in return for raising his children and keeping his house in order unless she really wants to. Today a woman may live independently from a man if she so chooses, and carve out her own career. Never before have circumstances and conditions been so suitable for those of lesbian tendencies.
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