Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (28 page)

The pulps, with their lurid covers featuring two women exchanging erotic gazes or locked in an embrace, could be picked up at newsstands and corner drugstores, even in small towns, and they helped spread the word about lesbian lifestyles to women who might have been too sheltered otherwise to know that such things existed. Lesbians bought those books with relish because they learned to read between the lines and get whatever nurturance they needed from them. Where else could one find public images of women loving women? Of course the characters of the lesbian pulps almost always lived in shame and with the knowledge that, as the titles often suggested, they belonged in “twilight,” “darkness,” or “shadows.” Self-hatred was requisite in these novels. Typically the lesbian was characterized by lines such as “A sword of self-revulsion, carefully shielded, slipped its scabbard now for one second to stab deeply to the exposed core of her lesbianism.”
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But often the books suggested that lesbianism was so powerful that a heterosexual woman only had to be exposed to a dyke and she would fall (though she was usually rescued, rather perfunctorily, by a male before the last pages—in which the real lesbian was shown to be doomed to suitable torment). Lesbians could ignore their homophobic propaganda and moralizations and peruse the pulps for their romance and charged eroticism.

Perhaps lesbians knew enough to be realistic about the limitations of the publishing industry. Just as they needed to be careful in their own lives, writers and publishers needed to be careful: novels with lesbian subject matter and even fairly explicit sexual scenes could escape censorship if they had “redeeming social value,” which meant that they could not “legitimize the abnormal condition [of lesbianism]” by showing lesbians as anything other than ultimately defeated.
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Writers who through their personal experiences might have been able to present more honest and happier depictions of lesbians did not dare to, even if they could have gotten such a book published. For example, novelist Helen Hull
(Quest, Labyrinth),
who spent much of her adult life in a love relationship with academic Mabel Robinson, was inspired by the Kinsey report in 1953 (that showed such a high incidence of lesbian experience in America) to think about writing a novel on lesbianism. She observed in her writer’s journal that such a novel could show “what I have always thought, that conduct is not in any way consistent with either social code or law.” Hull reflected that most of the women she knew best had not conformed to the stated mores of their society, “even when they have been important through their work and recognized positions.” She briefly considered putting some of those lesbian friends into a novel: “K…. had courage and serenity, had groups of followers, must have had people whom she helped; E. had courage and liveliness and capacity for work and ingeniousness about developing her school…. She kept her sanguineness and her invincibility.” But such people, who could have been much-needed role models for young women who chose to live as lesbians, never got into a lesbian novel because Hull concluded, as would most women writers with a reputation at stake during the period, that after all, “I don’t want to be connected with the subject [of lesbianism].”
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It was not true, of course, that lesbians during the 1950s invariably paid for their nonconformity through misery, as the pulp novelists said they did. But whatever joy they found had to be procured outside of the main social institutions, and they had to be clandestine about it in a society that withheld from them the blessings it gave freely to all heterosexuals. Front marriages with gay men were not uncommon during the 1950s, not only for the sake of passing as heterosexual at work, but also in order to hide the truth from parents who could not bear their own failure in having raised a sexual nonconformist and who might have a daughter committed to a mental hospital for lesbianism. Lesbians often felt they could not trust close acquaintances with knowledge of their personal lives, even if they suspected those acquaintances might also be lesbian. A Vermont woman remembers, “Everyone was very cagey. We pretended to ourselves that we didn’t talk about it because it shouldn’t matter in a friendship, just as being a Democrat or a Republican shouldn’t matter between friends. But the real reason we never talked about it was that if we weren’t 100 percent sure the other person was gay too, it would be awful to be wrong. We’d be revealing ourselves to someone who probably couldn’t understand and that could bring all sorts of trouble.”
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It was a climate calculated to lead to paranoia, and many lesbians never overcame it, even when times improved.

It was also a climate that stripped lesbians of the possibility of self-defense by making it dangerous for them to organize effectively. The decade following the war that expanded the potential of lesbian lifestyles did see the formation of the first lesbian organization in America, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), which was originally founded as a private social group to give middle-class lesbians an alternative to the gay bar scene. That such an organization could have been started in the 1950s is testimony to the war years’ effectiveness in creating something of a self-conscious lesbian community. DOB was not interested for long in remaining a social club. It soon became involved in “improving the lesbian image” and demanding lesbian rights. But an organization that valiantly attempted to be political in a time when the idea of rights for sexual minorities was inconceivable was bound to remain minuscule for a long while.
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Daughters of Bilitis, which was founded in the mid-1950s, understood lesbians’ fears that joining the group would expose them to the danger of being harassed as perverts. Recognizing the need for lesbian anonymity, DOB tried to overcome those fears by pledging secrecy to their membership in the best of faith. At meetings a greeter would stand at the door and say, “I’m—. Who are you? You don’t have to give me your real name, not even your real first name.”
The Ladder,
which was DOB’s official magazine, even ran articles quoting an attorney who stressed that lesbians had “nothing to fear in joining DOB,” and they assured the readers: “your name is safe”—that there were no reasons to worry about the magazine’s mailing list falling into the wrong hands, that the constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, and that a 1953 Supreme Court decision said a publisher did not have to reveal the names of purchasers of reading material, even to a congressional investigating committee.
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But such legal protection apparently did not apply to lesbians. Daughters of Bilitis could not know that informants had actually infiltrated DOB in the 1950s and were supplying the FBI and CIA with names of the organization’s members. The FBI file on DOB stated, as though the mere fact in itself were evidence of the organization’s subversiveness, “The purpose of [DOB] is to educate the public to accept the Lesbian homosexual into society.”
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Nor was DOB free from local harassment. During the 1959 mayoral campaign in San Francisco, Russell Wolden challenged the incumbent, George Christopher, by saying that Christopher had made San Francisco a haven for homosexuals. Wolden’s scare tactics campaign literature highlighted DOB:

You parents of daughters—do not sit back complacently feeling that because you have no boys in your family everything is all right…. To enlighten you as to the existence of a Lesbian organization composed of homosexual women, make yourself acquainted with the name Daughters of Bilitis.

DOB suspected that as a result of such exposure there might be trouble, so they removed all membership and mailing lists from the San Francisco headquarters for the duration of the race. As they later discovered, they were right to be prudent, since the San Francisco police, goaded by Wolden, did search the organization’s office. Lesbianism in itself was not against the law in California, but law enforcement officials ignored that detail.
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Not by virtue of what they did, but just because of who they were, lesbians were subversive, and no such action against them by the police was considered excessive.

Obviously the time was far from ripe for any successful organizing to create a large-scale movement through which the lesbian could work to put an end to persecution. Several DOB chapters were begun around the country by the end of the ’50s, but the organization remained small (though its mere existence was something of a miracle in those days). Through official intimidation, the public policy of control and containment of lesbianism was largely effective, even to the end of the next decade. The many women who loved women and were bisexual or did not wish to live a lesbian lifestyle usually felt compelled to deny that aspect of their affectional lives and thus could do nothing to challenge the view of the lesbian as “other” than the “normal” woman. Women who were part of the lesbian subculture also usually denied their lesbianism by day and even by night were afraid to join with other women politically to begin to present their own versions of what their lives were about.

War in the Cold War Years: The Military Witch-Hunts

Military life had particular appeal for working-class women who identified themselves as lesbians in the 1950s. In addition to compatible companionship, it offered them opportunities for career training and travel that females without monetary advantages would have had difficulty finding on their own. But lesbians who enlisted in the military at this time were at grave risk, regardless of their patriotism or their devotion to their tasks. Civilian life could be difficult in the 1950s, but military life was harrowing. The tolerant policy regarding lesbianism that was instituted during the war was long gone. Now love between women in the military was viewed as criminal. Military witch-hunts of lesbians were carried out relentlessly, though frequently without success: not because there were few lesbians in the military, but rather because civilian life had already trained lesbians to guard against detection and they learned in the military to polish those skills.

In contrast to the liberal Sex Hygiene lectures that military officers had been given during wartime, officers in the women’s branch of the Navy (WAVE) were instructed in 1952 that “homosexuality is wrong, it is evil, … an offense to all decent and law abiding people, and it is not to be condoned on grounds of ‘mental illness’ any more than any other crime such as theft, homocide or criminal assault.” The WAVE recruits in turn had to listen to set lectures which told them that sexual relations are appropriate only in marriage and that even though they were in the military they were expected to conform to the norms of femininity. Lesbians were presented in the cliche of sexual vampires who seduced innocent young women into sexual experimentation that would lead them, like a drug, into the usual litany of horrors: addiction, degeneracy, loneliness, murder and suicide. Not only were the women encouraged to inform on each other, but chaplains and psychiatrists who were naval officers were instructed to help detect and discharge lesbian personnel.
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Air Force policy was similar: Air Force regulation 35–66 stated that prompt separation of homosexuals from the military was mandatory, and specifically demanded that physicians and psychiatrists, as well as all other military personnel, report to administrative officials any knowledge they had of an individual’s “homosexual tendencies.”
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A woman was to be considered culpable even if she had had only an isolated lesbian experience years before she joined the military, since that was evidence of her “homosexual tendencies.” As Kinsey’s statistics indicate, a huge number of women in the military would probably have been subject to discharge if their full histories were known, though luckily for the functioning of the female branches of the armed services, most women were willing and even anxious to lie about that aspect of their affectional lives.

But even mere association with putative lesbians was enough to get a woman discharged in the 1950s if she were caught, since this too was considered evidence of “homosexual tendencies.” Annie remembers a friend who had been in WAVE officer training school with her in Virginia who had not yet even decided that she was a lesbian, but she socialized with a crowd of women who were investigated and found guilty of homosexuality. Never actually having had lesbian experiences, she nevertheless was ordered to leave the WAVES “because of the company she kept.” Like all military personnel who were asked to resign, she was required to submit a statement saying she was tendering her resignation for the good of the service. If a woman refused to do so when requested she would face a trial by general court-martial. Although she had to sign such a statement incriminating herself, she had no right to know her accusers or to have access to documentary evidence against her. She had none of the protections of a civilian court.
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Investigations for lesbianism in the military were capricious and violated the rules of common sense and common decency. One woman who had been in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954 says that her Air Force squadron at Otis (which she estimates was about 50 percent lesbian) was required to sit through repeated lectures against homosexuality. Their personal possessions were subject to inspection at any time without notice, often at hours such as 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and evidence of lesbianism was especially sought by the inspectors. Official tactics defied rational explanation:

I had my mother’s wedding ring in a drawer and they took it and demanded to know who the girl was that I put
my
initials in there for—even though the date on the ring was 1930, which was before I was born. They refused to give it back to me. They said it was the property of the government and they were holding it for future investigations. They threatened me with discharge even though they couldn’t prove anything. I wasn’t even sexually active while I was on that base. But to this day they have my mother’s ring.
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