Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (34 page)

Middle-class lesbians also seem to have avoided butch/femme relationships and styles because they did violence to their often unarticulated but nevertheless deeply felt feminism. As a Los Angeles lesbian woman who is now a psychologist remembers of her response to butch/femme in the ’50s, “I didn’t think anything could be that simple—with the polarities of sheer masculine and sheer feminine between two women. I didn’t even like it between men and women, but between two lesbians it really seemed strange to me.”
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The disdain was mutual. Butches and their femmes thought these “kiki” women were the ones who were buckling under by dressing like conventional women. It was something of a class war.

Socializing among older middle-class lesbians was also generally different from that among young and working-class lesbians. Part of the difference is attributable to the fact that they were more likely to have homes in which to entertain and money to spend on more expensive forms of amusement outside of the bars. They were also less likely to go to the bars because of the threat of raids. Entertainment among them often consisted of dinner parties or groups gathered around some event or ritual, such as listening to Tallulah Bank-head’s weekly radio program.
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When middle-class lesbians did go to bars it was often with great trepidation, as a woman who worked in a government law library recalls. Although she lived in San Francisco, she never dared to venture into the bars there but went instead to bars in Sacramento or Bryte, always worrying about imaginary harrowing newspaper headlines, such as “State Law Librarian Caught in Lesbian Bar.”
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Despite such fears, however, some did visit the bars occasionally, hoping that the anonymity of the environment would keep them safe. The appeal for them, no less than for working-class and young lesbians, was that the bars were almost the only place, outside of their circle of friends, where they could see large groups of lesbians. The bars offered them the assurance of numbers that they could not get elsewhere.

But class wars among lesbians were especially apparent in the bars. In small cities, which often had only one lesbian bar, such as the Cave in Omaha, middle-class lesbians when they risked a bar visit found they had to share the turf with butch/femme working-class lesbians, but they drew invisible boundaries. At the Cave the middle-class women, who dressed in conservative Saturday night finery, sat on one side of the room, and the working class women, often in T-shirts, “with cigarettes rolled in their sleeves” and “their overdressed femmes with too much lipstick and too high heels,” sat on the other. “The butches would play pool and look tough,” Betty, who was a high school teacher in Omaha in the 1950s, remembers. “Some of them were truck drivers from Council Bluffs. Some worked in factories. You would say hello, but you didn’t get together at all, any more than you did with a truck driver or a factory worker if you should happen into a straight bar.” Although the groups shared a sexual identity and both sought places where they would feel free to express it, that was all they shared.
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In large cities, where lesbians had more than one bar from which to choose, they selected their hangout according to class, but there were always more butch/femme bars, since middle-class women tended to go to the bars so seldom. At the Open Door, the If Club, the Paradise Club, and the Star Room, lesbian bars in Los Angeles in the 1950s, the customers were young women who were supermarket clerks, waitresses, factory workers, beauty operators, prostitutes. They were almost invariably either elaborately made up, dressed in high heels and skirts or capris, or totally without makeup, in pegged, fly-front pants, white cotton undershirt showing beneath a man’s button-down shirt, black penny loafers, and a ducktail haircut. A couple would consist of one of each. Dress was the indicator regarding with whom one might or might not flirt. But at the Club Laurel, a North Hollywood cocktail lounge in its heyday during the same years, which catered to older, more affluent or upwardly striving lesbians, there was little discernible difference between two members of a couple. The tone of the club was set by the singer-manager, Beverly Shaw, who would entertain in the style of Marlene Dietrich, perched atop the piano bar in impeccably tailored suits, high heels, beautifully coiffed hair, and just the right amount of lipstick. Women in more obvious butch-femme couples were quickly made to feel out of place in such an environment.

Generally, however, the bar culture was alienating to middle-class lesbians who felt they had little in common with the women who predominated in most lesbian bars. In an article that appeared in
One
in 1954, the lesbian writer described the gay bars as being “slightly removed from Hell” and hoped for a public meeting place for lesbians “who wish more from life than the nightmare of whiskey and sex, brutality and vanity, self-pity and despair.” Her pulp novel description of the bars was echoed by others who were resentful that the most public manifestation of the subculture, the bars, often seemed to offer only pleasures that were discomfitting to “well-brought-up” females of the 1950s. Young women who wanted to maintain their middle-class self-image had a particularly difficult time. Jane, who was a USC student during those years, says that to her the bars were degrading: “Their location in awful neighborhoods, the people who drank too much and didn’t have their lives together, just the idea of being in a bar. I felt I had no place there.” Barbara Gittings describes her early experiences in Philadelphia gay bars in similar terms:

Since I didn’t have much money and didn’t like to drink anyway, I’d hold a glass of ice water and pretend it was gin on the rocks. I’d get into conversation with other women, but I’d usually find we didn’t really have any common interests. We just happened both to be gay. I just didn’t run into any lesbians who shared my interests in books and hostel trips and baroque music. They all seemed to groove on Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra and nothing older. It was only later, in other settings, that I found gay people I was really congenial with. In those days I felt there was no real place for me in the straight culture but the gay bar culture wasn’t the place for me either.
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To older middle-class lesbians who had made a circle of friends, what they saw as their incompatibility with bar lesbians presented no great difficulty. But young lesbians even of their class, who did not know where else to meet other women who loved women and who were not easily welcomed into the closed, conservative and often fearful circles of the older women, could be very lonely in the 1950s and ’60s.

Because middle-class lesbians were less stereotypically obvious as homosexuals, they paid less dearly in everyday life than their working-class counterparts who were more blatant in their public behaviors and in their style of dress. Women of the working-class lesbian subculture usually dressed and behaved as they did to communicate to each other, but on the streets—even going to and from their bars—they also inadvertantly communicated to heterosexuals, who were often intolerant of the implications of butch/femme style. They were harassed by any hoodlum who took it into his mind to be nasty.

Butch women who would not be covert and the femmes who let themselves be seen with them often led dangerous lives. They courted violence. Many of them were certainly courageous in their insistence on presenting themselves in ways that felt authentic, but their bravery made them victims. Heterosexuals, particularly working-class young men who were still unsure of their own sexuality, could stand neither the idea of a woman usurping male privilege in comfortable dress and autonomy of movement nor the idea of a sexuality that totally excluded them. Their outrage was sometimes limited to name-calling but often took the form of physical violence, as young males challenged butch women in the streets, saying, “You look like a man, so fight like one.” The ghettos could be particularly hazardous. One researcher, who believes that in more recent times there has been a healthy integration among heterosexuals and homosexuals in ghettos such as central Harlem, says that his older black lesbian respondents informed him that from the 1930s through the 1950s lesbianism was looked on as a grave threat to working-class black males, who ascribed to lesbians a sexual prowess that exceeded their own. Butchy women were said to have been often “gang whipped by black men who were fearful of the myth of lesbian invincibility.”
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Official hostility toward young and working-class lesbians was pervasive even outside the bars. Most middle-and upper-class lesbians who could pass for heterosexual could believe that policemen, whose salaries were paid by their tax money, were there to serve and protect them. But butches and their partners seldom had the luxury of that illusion. They learned to be wary, to maneuver, to move in the other direction if they saw the law coming. Jackie, who lived in New Orleans during the 1950s, says that she was often stopped by the police, who just wanted to scare her, and she had to develop “street smarts”:

They would ask if I was a man or a woman. They could arrest a woman for impersonating a man, so you had to be sure you were wearing three pieces of women’s clothes. You learned to avoid the police by walking on the side of the street where the cars were parked, or in the opposite direction on the one way streets so they would have to back up to get to you. It was always in the backs of our minds that we could be arrested. Any woman wearing pants was suspect.
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Working-class and young lesbians often felt hunted down during the 1950s and ’60s. For them, the pulp novels that presented lesbians as outcasts carried a veracity with which they could identify.

Middle-class lesbians, on the other hand, usually had less difficulty. While they often feared that exposure would cost them their jobs and they had to cope with preposterous images of lesbians in the media and in psychoanalytic literature, generally their “discreet” style permitted them to carry on quotidian existence without molestation. As a lesbian writer for the magazine
One
proclaimed rather smugly in 1955:

Compared to the male homosexual, the lesbian has a very easy time of it indeed, at least as far as persecution by a hostile society is concerned. Unless she chooses to deliberately advertise her anomaly by adopting a pattern of behavior that would be no more acceptable in a heterosexual than a homosexual, she is allowed to live a reasonably normal life, without constant fear of exposure and the ensuing ridicule, ostracism, and legal persecution.
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Surely the author’s optimism was overstated. It was, for example, perfectly acceptable for two heterosexuals to hold hands anywhere, though two lesbians, no matter how well dressed or otherwise well behaved, might start a near-riot if they did so in the wrong places; and lesbians could not fail to be cognizant of the homosexual witchhunts of that era that affected professional women. But if they were willing to be always covert, it is true that with a little luck the chances of insult or violence were slim for middle-class lesbians.

Because secrecy while manuevering in the heterosexual world became almost second nature to them, it did not even seem that they were being required to pay too great a price for peace. They usually viewed the situation with pragmatic realism. Their lives were often well insulated by a circle of similarly discreet friends, which helped to mute for them the fact that in the heterosexual world they would be considered pariahs if their affectional and social preferences were known (just as to racists “respectable” middle-class blacks were “niggers”). Perhaps because they could “get by” they were less motivated to organize and protest, even during the civil rights movements of the 1960s, than they might have been otherwise; and organizations that attempted to raise political awareness in them, such as Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine, remained small.

These lesbian subcultures that had proliferated in the 1950s continued unchanged through most of the ’60s. They were, each in their own way, more conservative than heterosexual society had become during the era of flower children, unisex, sexual revolution, and the civil rights movement. The working-class lesbian subculture maintained its polarities of dress and sexual relating throughout the 1960s. Middle-class lesbians generally had no conviction during that decade that, like other minority groups, they could demand their rights. Members of both of the lesbian subcultures accepted that they were persecuted when their status was known, because society seemed always to bully minorities. After all, they had before them the fairly recent examples of Nazi Germany and of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They could not organize to protest, because they saw that the protests of victims were, anyway, not efficacious. And perhaps many of them, lesbians of all classes, internalized on some level the views of the parent culture, which deemed them outcasts and guilty. They had neither the inner conviction nor the requisite knowledge and clout to insist that they were innocent.

However, by the end of the 1960s there was some evidence of a shift in lesbian life, especially through the energies of young, college-educated women who began their lesbian careers at that time. These women, coming of age in the ’60s with the reawakening of feminism and the militant civil rights movement, were not so willing to accept the style of butch/femme heterogenderality or the intimidated covert-ness of older lesbians outside the working-class. Because they articulately refused both the roles and the secrecy, it looked to the heterosexual world as though lesbians in general had changed: for example, a 1969
San Francisco Chronicle
article oberved: “The notion of role-playing is considered old fashioned among an increasing number of lesbians.”
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But the older lesbian subcultures had not altered; instead, still another lesbian subculture was being created by young women who were willing to publicly proclaim their lesbianism and whose upbringing in the unisex 1960s made the polarities of masculine and feminine particularly alien to them. Because they rejected the styles and behaviors that their predecessors held sacrosanct, they came into great conflict with the older subcultures. But as more and more young women came out as lesbians in the next decade, it was their style that dominated.