Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (29 page)

Entrapment was part of official policy. During the Korean War the Marines not only sent women from their Criminal Investigation Divison (CID) into lesbian bars to serve as decoys to catch other personnel, but they also planted informers on women’s softball teams on military bases, assuming that an interest in athletics was practically tantamount to lesbianism. Women who looked stereotypically lesbian were sometimes kept in the service as Judas lambs, under the assumption that they would attract other women with homosexual tendencies and the military would thus be able to catch lesbians who might otherwise have gotten away.
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Another common lesbian-catching tactic was to identify particularly vulnerable young women who were under suspicion of lesbianism and to threaten them not only with court-martial and discharge but even with exposure to their parents. They were interrogated until they gave the names of all women from their unit they knew or even thought were lesbian—or, in at least one documented case, until they committed suicide.
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The military’s brutal methods were not much different from those of the civilian government at the time, although they must have been even more devastating to the young women who had been encouraged to see the military as one big family and a way of life. To be shamed and cast out of that family must have annihilated more than a few of them.

Since military personnel were encouraged to rid the services of lesbians, officers believed they might have a free hand in their achieving their goal. One woman, who was an Army nurse in occupied Japan in 1954, says that when she and her lover were accused of being lesbians the intelligence officer assigned to the case raped her lover “to teach her how much better a man was than a woman.” When she contacted a higher officer she got his promise of protection from future harassment only in return for her agreement to leave the Army without fighting the case. Nothing was done to punish the intelligence officer.
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But because the military’s irregular methods were sometimes incredibly heavy-handed, the most savvy lesbians were able to escape detection with ease. One former WAC estimates that of the 250 women who arrived with her at a WAC detachment, 150 were booted out, primarily on the basis of a ludicrous verbal test they were forced to take immediately upon arrival, in which investigating officers asked questions such as:

Did you ever make love to a woman?

Have you ever thought of making love to a woman?

Do you envision sucking a woman’s breast?

She, a lesbian, trained in hiding, of course said no to everything and survived the test. More naive women, undoubtedly many of whom had had no lesbian experiences and knew nothing of the street wisdom that lesbians learned in the subculture, were more honest and answered as Kinsey’s statistics could have helped predict they would. The next morning at the barracks the sergeant told her, “They weeded out all the Queers last night.”
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Despite such outrageous systematic spying and demoralization, which naturally led to an atmosphere of tension and anger, many lesbians could survive precisely because they had developed such sharp skills in looking over their shoulders. As Marie remembers of her stint during the Korean War:

You learned to always be skeptical about someone new, to always keep track of who was around before you spoke, to hang on to the friends you knew you could trust. When I came to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina I went out for softball, but for half a year all the women on the team were really distant and quiet. I finally found out that since I was three or four years older than most of them they figured I was a CID plant. One of them had been at El Toro Air Force Base in Santa Ana where they discovered that the pitcher on the team was actually a planted informer.
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By refusing to acknowledge, as it had during World War II, that lesbians would be especially attracted to military life and that such a life would even encourage lesbianism, the military was denying the obvious. The military’s obtuse policies encouraged lesbians to be cynical toward authority and reinforced the notion they had learned from the outside world that because enemies were everywhere, “lesbian” had to signify an “us” and “them” mentality at least as much as it signified a sexual orientation. Those lesbians who managed to get through the service in the ’50s without being detected had learned that they must find ways to outwit the authorities or they would be destroyed. Usually they succeeded in manuevering. Although a secret investigative board for the Navy actually claimed in 1957 that the rate of detection for homosexual activity in the Navy was “much higher for the female than the male,” lesbians who were in the military say that most of them managed to escape detection and that “for the few lesbians they got in the services, there were hundreds of us who fell through their grip.” It was often a matter of luck whether or not one would get caught. But even more often it was a matter of networking. Women in the Marines, for example, were able to establish a pipeline so that they knew what was going on at all times and when crackdowns and investigations were likely to come. Friends from boot camp who had been sent to different bases kept in contact with each other. The softball teams would travel and spread the word about witch-hunts. Lesbians who worked in places such as the Filing Office would know who was under investigation and could warn other lesbians. At least partly because of such good pipelines, most lesbians who were in the service in the 1950s left with honorable discharges, although not without emotional scars.
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But despite networking, large numbers of lesbians were occasionally purged from some bases, such as a WAC base in Tokyo from which 500 women were sent home “under conditions other than honorable.”
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Those who were discharged from the service for homosexuality were deprived of all veteran’s benefits. They were generally so upset, exhausted, and mortified by the process that they did nothing but slink off to hide and heal their wounds as best they could.

Almost never did they have the energy to protest what had been done to them, although one woman, an Air Force Reservist, Fannie Mae Clackum, actually did win a suit against the government in the U.S. Court of Claims in 1960, which suggests that in somewhat saner times an objective court could understand how outrageous the military’s tactics were. Clackum demanded eight years of back pay, complaining that she was accused of homosexuality but given no trial or hearing and no opportunity to know the evidence against her or to know her accusers. From April 1951 to January 1952 she had been repeatedly questioned by an OSI officer regarding lesbianism. She was asked to resign, although she was never informed of specific charges. When she refused, she was demoted from corporal to private and ordered to take a psychiatric examination. She was finally discharged as an undesirable at the beginning of 1952. The court found that her discharge was invalid, but Clackum was an isolated instance of a woman who dared to carry out a challenge to the reigning powers in the 1950s, since everything—the psychiatric establishment, the military’s demoralization tactics, the government, popular wisdom—militated against the lesbian believing that she had the human right to expect justice.
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A major effect that military life of the 1950s had on lesbian subculture was to confirm even further that for the outside world love between women was a love that dared not speak its name, that it would certainly not be treated with common decency and respect. But at the same time the military experience strengthened the bonds between women who chose to be part of the lesbian sisterhood; it showed them how to network and how to guard against the forces that were enemies of women who loved women. Such knowledge was also to become very useful in life outside the military.

A Sad Legacy

Although the McCarthy era has been long dead and the lot of the lesbian has improved considerably, the years of suffering took their toll and created a legacy of suspicion that has been hard to overcome, more liberal times notwithstanding. That suspicion has not been entirely groundless. Even in the last two decades, at the height of the gay liberation movement, lesbian teachers have been fired from their jobs, not for committing illegal acts such as having sexual relations with a minor, but simply for being lesbian.

Wilma, who was a high school physical education teacher in Downey, a Los Angeles suburb, in the early 1970s, says that after a couple of years at the school she decided she would tell her best friend on the faculty that she was a lesbian because “I thought we were really close. She was always telling me about her problems with her husband and her children, and I was tired of living a lie with her.” The other woman went to the principal the next day, saying that in the light of what she had learned she could no longer work with Wilma. He immediately called Wilma into his office and demanded that she write out a resignation on the spot. In return for her resignation he promised he would not get her credential revoked: “But he said he just wanted me out of the school. We had been good friends. He was priming me for a job as an administrator. I thought, ‘I screwed up my whole life for a ten-minute confession.’”

Wilma was able to get another job in the Los Angeles school system, but she drastically changed her manner of relating to her colleagues. She married a gay man, always brought him to faculty parties, and made sure everyone knew to address her as “Mrs.” She came to school in dresses, hose, and high heels: “Even when I went to the school cafeteria I’d change from my sweats into a dress.” Fifteen years later, she still feels she must constantly censor herself with her colleagues: “I keep a low profile and I’m always on guard.”
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Wilma’s situation remains a nightmare for many lesbians. While very few engaged in front marriages in the 1970s and ’80s, some still attempted to pass as heterosexual and even invent, or let heterosexuals assume, an imaginary heterosexual social life. Two studies of lesbians, one in the ’70s, the other in the ’80s, both indicated that two-thirds of the sample believed that they would lose their jobs if their sociosexual orientation were known. Most of those who did not feel threatened were self-employed or worked in the arts, where homosexuality is equated with bohemianism.
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Despite the many successes of the gay liberation movement, which has made homosexuality much more acceptable in America, middle-class lesbians often feel that activists are a real threat to them because they draw public attention to the phenomenon of lesbianism and thus create suspicion about all unmarried women. The closeted lesbian’s cover could be blown. Older lesbians especially, who perfected the techniques of hiding through most of their adult lives, still cannot conceive of suddenly coming out into the open, even in what appear to be freer times.

They are uncomfortable not only with radicals who demand that they leave their closets, but with anyone who discusses the subject of lesbianism, as I discovered a number of times in trying to arrange interviews with “senior citizen” lesbians, women over sixty-five who were professionally employed during the McCarthy years. Despite my promise of complete anonymity, they were often fearful. As a sixty-eight year old retired teacher wrote me:

One reason lesbians of my generation are reluctant to come out is our memory of that time; there is no guarantee that there won’t again be a rush to the documents, and a resurrection of our names from somewhere, with who-knows-what-kind of repercussions. I am retired and on a pension; presumably nothing can change that. But we didn’t believe the stuff McCarthy got away with, either. Can anyone promise for sure that “they” won’t say to me, “You taught under false pretenses; therefore, you don’t get your pension!”

They have little faith that the progress that has come about through the gay liberation movement is here to stay. There is probably nothing that would convince them that lesbians are not still surrounded by hostile regiments out to destroy them, as they were in the 1950s.
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Lesbians inherited a mixed legacy from the 1940s and ’50s, when lesbianism came to mean, much more than it had earlier, not only a choice of sexual orientation, but a social orientation as well, though usually lived covertly. While the war and the migration afterward of masses of women, who often ended up in urban centers, meant that various lesbian subcultures could be established or expanded, these years were a most unfortunate time for such establishment and expansion. Suddenly there were large numbers of women who could become a part of a lesbian subculture, yet also suddenly there were more reasons than ever for the subculture to stay underground. The need to be covert became one of the chief manifestations of lesbian existence for an entire generation—until the 1970s and, for some women who do not trust recent changes to be permanent, until the present. The grand scale institutional insanity that characterized the Cold War also affected many lesbians profoundly by causing them to live in guilt, pain, self-hatred born of internalizing the hideous stereotypes of lesbianism, and justified suspicion as well as paranoia. The 1950s were perhaps the worst time in history for women to love women.

However, even the persecution of the 1950s aided in further establishing lesbian subcultures. It made many women feel they had to band together socially to survive, since heterosexuals could seldom be trusted. And while it made lesbianism a love that dared not speak its name very loudly, nevertheless it
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it a name over and over again that became known to many more thousands of American women. Were it not for the publicity that was inevitably attendant on persecution, some women, even by the 1950s, might not have realized that there were so many who shared their desires and aspirations, that various lesbian subcultures existed, that lesbianism could be a way of life. Fanatical homophobes who would have preferred a conspiracy of silence with regard to lesbianism were right in believing that silence would best serve their ends. Each time the silence was broken—even by the hateful images of homosexuality that characterized the 1950s—more women who preferred women learned labels for themselves, sought and often found others who shared those labels, and came to understand that they might probe beneath the denigrating images that society handed them to discover their own truths.