Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (26 page)

These medical doctors often promulgated a rather odd morality in their attempt to rid their patients of lesbianism. In a popular book of the 1950s,
Voyage from Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual,
Richard Robertiello wrote of a twenty-nine year old woman who had come to him for a cure for her insomnia after the breakup of an eight-year lesbian relationship. He told her that lesbianism was fraught with difficulties and that she needed to “make a clean break” from it and go to places where she could meet men. When she reported “necking” with a married man, the doctor enthusiastically applauded her “success.” By the end of her analysis she was “cured” of her lesbianism (despite the fact that she began therapy saying she had “no desire to change her sexual pattern … and was perfectly content to remain homosexual”). Though Robertiello was forced to admit that she continued to have insomnia (which was, of course, the problem that caused her to seek his help in the first place), he nevertheless considered his work with her a great success.
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As further justification of their intent to “cure,” many of the leading lesbian specialists published patently sensationalistic accounts of lesbianism. Frank Caprio actually used “case histories” from true confession magazines of the 1950s such as
Life Romances
and
My Confession
in order to show how sick lesbians were. Some researchers of the early 1950s, who must have believed that the one sexual act of cunnilingus was synonymous with the entire lesbian experience, and who misunderstood even that act, suggested that homosexuality was really a manifestation of cannibalistic fantasies. References to lesbian murder, suicide, and seduction of the innocent were rife throughout the medical literature. It is no wonder, then, that popular magazines not only applauded psychiatric attempts to cure, but even adopted the language and attitudes of the medical men, further promulgating notions such as that in
Time Magazine
in 1956, that homosexuals are “generally unreliable in an essentially psychopathic way … regardless of [their] level of intelligence, culture, background, or education.”
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The Freudian therapists were not alone in their promise and determination to cure lesbians. One woman tells of having gone to a Jungian therapist and discussing, among other things, her love for another woman, about which the therapist “comforted” her: “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll cure that in about six months.” When she persisted in describing her relationship with the other woman as “the best love of my life,” the Jungian replied that lesbianism was “not any worse than alcoholism, but it’s on the same level.”
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Proposals for cures were generally couched in terms that suggested the liberal sympathies of the doctors, but their ill-disguised hostility toward love between women is easily discernible. By categorizing same-sex love as a disease they pretended, perhaps even to themselves, to be moving beyond morality. But as Thomas Szasz has pointed out, the concept of disease in this respect involves a value judgment, distinguishing some states of functioning as being inferior to others. With regard to lesbianism, the judgment was clearly based not on impaired functioning such as the inability to work or love, but merely on unpopular object choice: in that judgment, homosexuality is bad (regardless of the individual’s level of functioning or the quality of her love relationship) and heterosexuality is good (again, regardless of the behavior of the individual in all areas of her life or the nature of her heterosexual relationships). The doctors for the most part were blinded by their own narrow value judgments and believed they had the moral objectivity of science behind them. Typically, in his representation of the battlelines of the 1950s, Edmund Bergler bragged of his scientific stance, which he felt was embued with a humane desire to help:

Homosexuals: We are normal and demand recognition!

Heterosexuals: You are perverts and belong in jail!

Psychiatrists: Homosexuals are sick people and belong in treatment.
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Bergler had no doubt that he was on the side of the angels.

All this is not to say that there was never complicity or ambivalence on the part of some women themselves, who sought out psychiatrists in the hope of being cured of their love for other women because they were infected with the rampant homophobia of their society. Harriet, who had been in therapy with three different Los Angeles psychiatrists during the 1950s, now explains with hindsight:

Of course many of us were loaded with self-hate and wanted to change. How could it have been otherwise? All we heard and read about homosexuality was that crap about how we were inverts, perverts, queers—a menace to children, poison to everyone else, doomed never to be happy. And so we went humbly to the doctors, and took whatever other nastiness they wanted to spew out about homosexuality, and we paid them and said thanks.
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Since there were so few countering messages of support from the external world, constant exposure to antihomosexual propaganda was bound to make some women who loved women believe that salvation lay in conversion to heterosexuality. Those who sold lesbian-smashing at this time had sufficient confused and fearful buyers.

While World War II played an important role in the expansion of a lesbian subculture, the years that immediately followed determined much about its nature. The effect on lesbians of the onslaught of the psychoanalytic establishment was usually not to convince them that they were sick, though some were convinced, but rather to create cynicism toward the pronouncements of authorities because it was apparent that authorities knew nothing or lied. Since lesbians were not organized to challenge the outrageous psychoanalytic views, they also had to endure frustration born of a sense of powerlessness. There were no gay militants or lesbian-feminists to point out that, in fact, far from being sick, a woman who dared to live as an overt homosexual in such unwelcoming times might well have an ego of impressive strength and health that permitted her to know her own mind and to be true to her conception of herself.

The public image of the lesbian as sick in the years after the war confirmed the need for secrecy. A lesbian understood that if her affectional preference became known outside of her circle of lesbian friends she would be judged wholly by that preference and found mentally unhealthy. She would be discredited before any other aspect of her personality or behavior could be considered. She was virtually forced into hiding. Lesbianism, which in different societal circumstances might have signified simply affectional preference, thus became not only the basis for a covert society, but also an overwhelming aspect of one’s identity, precisely because it was so necessary to live it in secret and to be constantly aware that an important part of one’s life must be camouflaged at almost all times. As will be seen, the political milieu of the postwar years served to reinforce this state. In addition to the mischief wrought by the medical men who made lesbianism a sickness, the times also rendered lesbianism unpatriotic.

The Love That Dares Not Speak Its
Name: McCarthyism and Its Legacy

At work you completely avoided people. If you did make friends, you had to be sure never to bring them to your home. Never to tell them who and what you really were. We were all terrified in those days.     Lyn on New York in the 1950s

When I was arrested and being thrown out

of the military, the order went out: don’t anybody

speak to this woman, and for those three

long months, almost nobody did; the dayroom, when

I entered it, fell silent til I had gone; they

were afraid, they knew the wind would blow

them over the rail, the cops would come,

the water would run into their lungs.

Everything I touched

was spoiled. They were my lovers, those

women, but nobody had taught us to swim.

I drowned. I took 3 or 4 others down

When I signed the confession of what we

had done together.

No one will ever speak to me again.

—
Judy Grahn on the military in the 1950s,
“A Woman Is Talking to Death”

The social upheaval occasioned by the war was more than many Americans could bear. The years after became an age of authority, in the hope that authority would set the country back in balance. The pronouncements of those in charge, not only in the medical profession but in government as well, were virtually sacrosanct. There was little challenge to their notion that “extreme threats,” such as the encroachments of the Soviets, required extreme solutions to weed out those who did not accept the reigning views. A breaking point in American rationality, justice, and common decency ensued. If political conformity was essential to national security, sexual conformity came to be considered, by some mystifying twist of logic by those in authority, as no less essential. In a decade of reaction, while women were sent back to the home, dissidents of every kind were deprived of their livelihoods and even packed off to jail.

Twentieth-century American witch-hunts began not long after the war. Those accused of Communism were their first target, but persecution quickly spread to other unpopular groups. Despite figures that Alfred Kinsey gathered during these years, which showed that 50 percent of American men and 28 percent of American women had what could be considered “homosexual tendencies” (that is, homoerotic interest in the same sex at some point in their adult lives), the statistical normality of same-sex love was now denied more fiercely than ever. The “homosexual” became a particular target of persecution in America. He or she presented an uncomfortable challenge to the mood that longed for obedience to an illusion of uncomplicated “morality.” Even Kinsey was suspected of being a subversive, merely because he said that so many people in his studies admitted to same-sex attractions and experiences. Dr. Edmund Bergler angrily wrote in the
Psychiatric Quarterly
about Kinsey’s statistics on widespread homosexuality in America that Kinsey had created a “myth of a new national disease.” That “myth” would be “politically and propagandistically used against the United States abroad, stigmatizing the nation as a whole in a whisper campaign.” Homosexuality was a detriment to the country’s image and standing in the world. As far as those who spoke for mid-twentieth-century heterosexual America were concerned, homosexuality was a love that had better not dare speak its name. The heterosexual majority tyrannized. As one writer expressed it in 1951, if homosexuality was condemned by most people in a society, then loyalty to the society demanded that good citizens support condemnation of homosexuality and the laws against it.
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By commonly accepted (though statistically erroneous) definition, the demarcation that separated “homosexual” from “heterosexual” was now more clear than ever. Between 1947 and 1950, 4,954 men and women were dismissed from the armed forces and civilian agencies for being homosexual. In 1950, the persecution escalated. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose barbarous tactics set the mood of the era, began by attracting attention as a Communist witch-hunter but soon saw an opportunity to broaden his field. Ironically, McCarthy’s two aides were flamingly homosexual, even flitting about Europe as an “item,” but that did not stop him from charging the State Department with knowingly harboring homosexuals and thereby placing the nation’s security at risk.
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The Republicans decided to make political hay out of the issue. Republican National Chairman Guy George Gabrielson wrote in the official party newsletter early in 1950 that “perhaps as dangerous as the actual communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years.” By April of that year ninety-one homosexuals were fired from the State Department alone. In May 1950, New York Republican Governor Dewey accused President Truman and the Democrats of tolerating not only spies and traitors in government service, but also sexual perverts. Soon after, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee joined the attacks, recommending that homosexuals be dismissed from government jobs since they were poor security risks because of their vulnerability to blackmail.
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Just as the number of women who dared to live as lesbians was increasing during the postwar years, their persecution was increasing as well—not just because of personal prejudices against them, but as a result of national policy.