Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (35 page)

“Not a Public Relations Movement”:
Lesbian Revolutions in the 1960s
through 1970s

As homosexuals we share the dubious honor with males of being “the last of the minority groups.” As Lesbians we are even lower in the sand hole; we are women (itself a majority/minority status) and we are Lesbians: the last half of the least noticed, most disadvantaged minority. There is no room here for any other cause. We have the biggest bag to carry and we need a good many strong shoulders. Get your head out of the sand hole and help with this very urgent, very needful battle.

—
Marilyn Barrow (pseud. Barbara Grier),
“The Least of These,”
in
The Ladder,
1968

It’s so strange, you know, in the early seventies, one day half the women’s movement came out as lesbians. It was like we were all sitting around and the ice cream truck came, and all of a sudden I looked around and everyone ran out for ice cream.

—
Sarah Schulman,
The Sophie Horowitz Story

Because most of the nineteenth-century sexologists who first formulated the concept of homosexuality were German (Karl Westphal, Karl Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing), their ideas were more quickly disseminated in Germany than anywhere else and permitted Germans who acknowledged they loved the same sex to identify as a group sooner than those in other countries. Men who practiced same-sex sodomy banded together at the end of the nineteenth century to form organizations such as the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in order to challenge German laws against sodomy with the “scientific” arguments that the sexologists had provided for them: legislation outlawing sodomy made no sense because those who practiced it were only following a congenital drive. Lesbianism was overlooked by the law since women were generally beneath the law. However, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee welcomed women who loved women into its membership because they swelled the group’s numbers and because the conception of homosexuals as a “third sex” was more persuasive if the phenomenon was seen to exist among those who were ostensibly female as well as those who were ostensibly male. By the turn of the century, German lesbians were actively working with men on homosexual rights issues.
¹

There were no comparable groups in America at that time, since the sexologists’ ideas were promulgated slowly among the lay public outside of Europe. Many American women who loved other women could continue to maintain the view of themselves as romantic friends or devoted companions. When a lesbian consciousness was finally established in this country, women who loved other women did not immediately band together in a political group. Lesbianism was less likely to be seen sympathetically as a “scientifically” inherent condition in the United States than it was in Germany, and the opprobrium visited on lesbianism prompted them to be silent. Numerous phenomena throughout this century—the push toward companionate marriage and the identification of same-sex attraction as a hinderance to its success, the depression, McCarthy-era persecution, the obsession with molding all women to fit the feminine mystique, and the identification of those who did not as queer or sick—also discouraged women from organizing and demanding their rights as lesbians.

The 1960s, however, altered the temper of America drastically. In the context of widespread interest in liberalization and liberation, the next decade actually saw the growth of not one but
two
strong movements for the rights of women who loved women. One included “gay” women who were “essentialists”: they believed they were born gay or became so early. They identified their problems as stemming from society’s attitudes about homosexuality. The other was made up of women who called themselves “lesbian-feminists” and who usually believed they “existentially” chose to be lesbians. They identified their problems as stemming from society’s attitudes toward women, and lesbianism was for them an integral part of the solution to those problems.

The Gay Revolution: Quiet Beginnings

While McCarthyism persecuted homosexuals in the 1950s, it also inadvertently helped to foster self-awareness and identity among them. For a few homosexual men and women it provided a cause around which to organize, even as it pushed others further into the dark closet or into gay bars as the only place where they could feel comfortable. Although the number of organized homosexuals remained small throughout the 1950s, at the decade’s end enough had joined various groups to suggest that there might be potential for more action and to tempt a writer for a lesbian magazine to wonder, although precipitously: “Is there or could there be a homosexual voting block?”
²

Mattachine, the first homosexual organization of that era, was started in 1950 by five Los Angeles men who had been members of the Communist party. Although the organized Left was no more sympathetic to homosexuality than the Right, the men’s radical origins permitted them to formulate in the midst of McCarthyism an objective that was startlingly advanced for their day (the group’s rhetoric soon became more tame as its membership grew and diversified): they wished to “liberate one of our largest minorities from … social persecution.” Like the German Scientific Humanitarian Committee at the beginning of the century, Mattachine made some attempt to attract women, and the San Francisco branch, established in 1953, actually succeeded in enrolling a number of lesbians. But the group kept such a low profile that when the first all-lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, was established in San Francisco a couple of years later, the founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, did not know of the existence of Mattachine. The founders of DOB were in the beginning much less politically aware than the founders of Mattachine. Initially DOB aimed only to fill the role of a social club outside the gay bar setting. Once the organization got under way, however, it almost immediately turned its attention to the problems of lesbian persecution and their solution. DOB and Mattachine had goals that were revolutionary for the ’50s, but (despite Mattachine’s radical beginnings) mild by contemporary standards. Their major effort became to educate both homosexuals and the public with regard to the ways in which the homosexual was just like any other good citizen.
³

As modest as DOB’s goals were in the 1950s, its very establishment in the midst of witch-hunts and police harrassment was an act of courage, since members always had to fear that they were under attack, not because of what they did, but merely because of who they were. One early member says that even at DOB events where the group was being addressed by establishment lawyers or psychiatrists, everyone was aware that there was always the possibility of a police raid: “We were less fearful of an invasion by street toughs than by the authorities,” she recalls. And such police invasions did occur. At DOB’s first national convention, in 1960, San Francisco law officers came to hassle the organizers with questions about whether they advocated wearing clothing of the opposite sex, which would have been illegal. (They could have answered their own questions by looking around the auditorium, where they would have seen middle-class women clad in “appropriate” dress, as the organization demanded of its membership). It is no wonder that DOB remained small. Most middle-class lesbians, to whom DOB had tried to appeal, had no desire to expose themselves to such harassment.
⁴

However, DOB has significance for lesbians not because it was able to attract large numbers or to succeed in its goal of advancing lesbian rights, but rather because of the mere fact that it existed during such dangerous times. Like the later Stonewall rebellion, DOB helped provide a history—a Warsaw ghetto-like symbol—that would suggest to lesbians in more militant times that they were not always passive collaborators in their oppression, that some fought back, even if only by refusing to deny their own existence.

It was not until the early years of the more liberal 1960s that the first lesbian and gay confrontational action was staged by a mixed homosexual group, Homophile League of New York, who picketed an induction center with signs such as “If you don’t want us don’t take us, but don’t ruin our lives.” The idea of picketing caught on quickly among the handful of homosexual activists at that time, since they were witnessing the effectiveness of such tactics by other oppressed groups. In 1964 when the news leaked that Cuba was shamefully mistreating homosexuals, conservatively dressed lesbians and gay men picketed the White House, the Pentagon, and all government installations. They carried signs that asked: “Is our government any better?” As one lesbian protestor now describes the picketing: “We knew we were on the cutting edge of an important beginning. We were tweaking the lion’s tail of government to get our rights.” Yet as some of the first lesbians to shed their masks and employ a bit of drama in their challenge to the establishment, they not only endured the disdain of many heterosexuals, but they were also ignored by working-class lesbians and generally treated with hostility by middle-class lesbians. Most lesbians reasoned that the less aware the public was of the existence of homosexuality, the more comfortable the homosexual’s life would be. It was still too early for many lesbians to be able to have faith that confrontational tactics might improve their lot.
⁵

But there were plenty of indicators that the activists were reading the new public mood correctly. By the end of 1963 the
New York Times,
which had dealt with homosexuality earlier only in critical terms, began to change its tone. It objectively reported in one article the existence of an “organized homophile movement—a minority of militant homosexuals that is openly agitating for removal of legal, social, and cultural discriminations against sexual inverts.” In reaction to the dogmatic, authoritarian 1950s, the public had begun to soften toward diversity, and homosexuals were slowly reaping the benefits along with other minorities. When DOB held its 1966 annual convention in San Francisco, the
San Francisco Chronicle
ran a four-column article: “San Francisco Greets Daughters.” Reporters from Metromedia News taped the program highlights, and local radio stations made on-the-hour spot announcements about convention activities. Such publicity not only was an indication of more tolerant times, but also served to spread the word to other homosexuals about an organizing community. Although according to a mid-’60s study, only 2 percent of American homosexuals were even aware of the existence of homophile organizations, such mass coverage as that of the
New York Times
and
San Francisco Chronicle
was helping to increase awareness. It made some older homosexuals ask themselves what they were doing for their own cause, and it encouraged some young homosexuals who were just coming out to develop a new perspective about the possibilities of gay rights.
⁶

As the decade progressed, there was palpable evidence of change in big cities. In the mid-1960s San Francisco DOB together with Mattachine decided to tackle the most insidious persecutor of homosexuals, organized religion. With the help of a liberal Methodist minister they were able to organize a Council on Religion and the Homosexual. DOB and Mattachine held a New Year’s Eve ball to raise money for the newly formed Council and invited sympathetic clergymen. The police not only infiltrated in plainclothes, but also attempted to intimidate by McCarthy-era tactics, such as having uniformed officers place floodlights at the entrance and photograph all the arriving guests. One policeman told a minister, “We’ll uphold God’s laws if you won’t.” Those ministers, witnessing firsthand the way the police harassed a minority group, became staunch defenders of that group. The Council on Religion and the Homosexual spread to other parts of America, and major Protestant denominations began to reconsider their positions on homosexuality.
⁷

By the end of 1966 the New York Civil Service Commission, which had previously rejected applicants if anything in their appearance, attitude, or actions indicated they were homosexual, began approving homosexual hires. Homosexuals got bolder. In the same year, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations took the example of the militant black movement to heart and adapted the slogan “Gay Is Good” from “Black Is Beautiful.” In the spring of 1967 lesbian and gay male students at Columbia University organized the Student Homophile League, which soon spread to Cornell, NYU, and Stanford. Although as Rita Mae Brown, who was one of the organizers, recalls, “The fur flew. ‘Organized Queers!’ the administration gasped,” Columbia approved a charter for the group. Even big city police, who had gotten used to diversity and minority protest, were becoming less belligerent toward homosexuals. In contrast to their harassment a few years earlier, by 1968 the San Francisco police were making efforts to cooperate with homosexual organizations, providing security at public events that was helpful rather than hostile and meeting with the organizations for “a mutual exchange of ideas.”
⁸