Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (38 page)

The connection between lesbianism and feminism was not new, but in the past it had been made with unchallenged scorn. When those late nineteenth-century antifeminists who wanted to scare females away from the women’s movement used the cudgel of “abnormality,” warning that “Women-Righters” were “men-women,” out to seduce innocent young girls and spread their taint under the guise of feminism, feminists did not dare respond to their attacks. With the start of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, those opposed to women’s rights used the same tactic, but this time, in the context of a more radical era, it backfired. Ti-Grace Atkinson, an early leader of the second wave of feminism, remembers that the first time she was called a lesbian was in the mid-’60s when she joined a group of women to picket the
New York Times
in order to desegregate the help-wanted ads. “I was so puzzled by the connection,” she recalls, “that I became curious. Whenever the enemy keeps lobbing bombs into some area you consider unrelated to your defense, it’s worth investigating.” The investigaton brought her and many other radical feminists to the conviction that “lesbian” has always been a kind of code word for female resistance.
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Those late nineteenth-century enemies of the women’s movement who had called feminism “a fertile breeding ground for lesbianism” were even more right than they knew—not because lesbians were vampirishly waiting to suck the blood of young innocents who had been temporarily deluded into being angry with men, but rather because feminism dissected the nature of the problems between men and women with a compelling analysis. It forced women to see ways in which they were exploited, to hear everywhere the “clicks,” as
Ms.
Magazine called the sudden insights one might have when confronted with a sexist incident. In the light of women’s new awareness, lesbianism seemed very attractive, and more and more radical feminists came to doubt if heterosexuality could really be consonant with their personal and political ideology. Just as heterosexuals in the past had seen their own variety of love as superior and homosexuality as a manifestaton of emotional illness, so the new lesbian-feminists, many of whom had spent all their previous adult years as exclusively heterosexual, now saw homosexuality as the highest form of love and heterosexuality as a sign of female masochism.

Lesbianism even came to be regarded as the quintessence of feminism, and in some ways the values of the lesbian-feminists of the 1970s were not unlike those of the pioneer feminists who lived together as “devoted companions” at the beginning of the century. Lesbianism implied that a woman could live without a man if she wanted to and still feel like a successful person. It suggested that work might be an essential part of a woman’s life and that a woman should want to work both to support herself and change society. It emphasized the importance of women loving and respecting themselves and other women. It had nothing to do with the sexologists’ notions and outrageous theories. Therefore, when a New York group of feminists who called themselves the Radicalesbians explained in a 1970 paper that as lesbian-feminists they were “women-identified-women,” putting women first in their lives in all ways, including the sexual, and that all feminists must become “women-identified,” their argument struck a chord for many. “What is a lesbian?” they asked in that paper. Their response expanded the meaning of lesbianism so that it applied to a far greater number of women:

A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is a woman who … acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and free human being than her society … cares to allow her…. She has not been able to accept the limitations and oppressions laid on her by the most basic role of her society—the female role.

In one sense, the Radicalesbian group’s definition came full circle, back to the early sexologists’ definition of the lesbian as a woman whose behavior is not appropriate to “womanliness.” But while the sexologists saw such women as rare and congenitally tainted, the new lesbian-feminists saw them as ubiquitous and heroic. Lesbianism was to the lesbian-feminists a cure-all for the ills perpetrated by sexism. Lesbianism was “women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation and the basis for cultural revolution.”
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And the best news was that any woman could embrace it.

Lesbian-feminists thus took a revisionist approach to essentialism. It was true, they said, that lesbians were born “that way.” But actually
all
women were born “that way,” all had the capacity to be lesbians, but male supremacy destroyed that part of most women before they could understand what was happening. Lesbian-feminists emphatically rejected the notion that they were part of a homosexual minority. While the movement did not deny the existence of
primary
lesbians (“essentialists” who believed they had been lesbians for as long as they could remember), it also encouraged women to become
elective,
“existentialist” lesbians (to make a conscious political choice to leave heterosexuality and embrace lesbianism). Rita Mae Brown, one of the most articulate spokeswomen for lesbian-feminism, declared:

I became a lesbian because the culture that I live in is violently anti-woman. How could I, a woman, participate in a culture that denies my humanity? … To give a man support and love before giving it to a sister is to support that culture, that power system.

To love and support women, Brown said, was lesbian. In that sense, lesbian was revolutionary, and it was imperative that all women who wanted to be feminists stop collaborating with the enemy and join that revolution.
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There were probably more lesbians in America during the 1970s than any other time in history, because radical feminism had helped redefine lesbianism to make it almost a categorical imperative for all women truly interested in the welfare and progress of other women. As one radical feminist, who divorced her physician husband in 1974 to become a lesbian, characterized it, lesbianism was seen to be “the only noble choice a committed feminist could make.”
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In this respect, the 1970s offer a prime example of sexuality as a social construct. It was demonstrated in that decade how the spirit of an era could influence sexual behavior in large numbers of people at least as much as those other factors that had long been regarded as determining sexuality.

Radical feminists propounded the behaviorist view of sexuality: as in a Utopian socialist society where the individual could be conditioned to be nonviolent, noncompetitive, incorruptible, so too could women be conditioned to change their attitudes and desires. They would exit from the patriarchy through severing their relationships with men, which were seen as the cornerstone of the subordination of women, and they could learn not only how to make a new society with women, but also how to respond sexually to women.
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Unlike the era of romantic friends or devoted companions, when sexuality might have been negligible in a woman’s life, in the sex conscious ’7°s women felt as guilty about denying themselves sexual pleasures as their predecessors would have felt guilty had they indulged. Thus when radical feminists who had previously been heterosexual experimented with love between women and discovered that it was indeed a sexual alternative for them, they were often relieved and elated. It was not that they had generally disliked sex when they were heterosexual, but rather they had come to despise all the personal and political aggravations that heterosexuality brought in its wake. They were delighted to discover in the heady early days of lesbian-feminism that they could experience sexual pleasure with other women without the inevitable subordination. As one woman who had been married before she became a lesbian-feminist in 1970 now recalls:

We investigated the other side of humanity and it became very viable. We weren’t going to give up sex, and we didn’t have to. Emotionally what we had with men wasn’t fulfilling. We weren’t being taken care of in those relationships, and so we stepped out of them, sexually as well as in all other ways. We were bright enough to perceive that it would be decades before men were even in the ball park.

Some radical feminists were only “political lesbians,” meaning that they sympathized with lesbian complaints about men and were not opposed to sexual love between women, but they chose celibacy for themselves; however, most “lesbian-feminists” did not deny themselves erotic relations with other women. Their view that men were dispensible in all ways, including the sexual, was dramatized by the logo on the T-shirts some wore and the posters that hung above their beds: “A Woman Without a Man is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.”
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Many 1970s feminists were encouraged in their exploration of lesbianism through consciousness-raising (CR) groups, small groups in which women met to discuss their personal lives in relation to sexual politics. In the course of those discussions women often came to believe that men were kept in power as a group because of women’s nurturing, subordinate personal relations with them. It was heterosexuality that supported male supremacy. With that realization, lesbianism became for those women the rational next step. They could choose not to be heterosexual and thus not support what they saw as the power system that oppressed them. As one San Antonio woman who had been married to a Presbyterian minister for twenty-five years and had raised five children now tells it:

I supported him while he was going to school. I walked the floor with the babies and never bothered him so he could study. And later I even did prayer meetings for him. My whole life had been devoted to doing
his
stuff. And then I went back to school and joined NOW and a CR group, and for the first time things were crystalized for me. I realized through CR that I didn’t have to be a good little girl anymore. What I wanted was an equal relationship, but I doubted it would be possible with a male—not any of the men I knew. They were trained as I had been trained, to have certain expectations about men’s privileges and women’s duties, and they had no reason to give it up. I did. I knew with a woman we could both just start from scratch.
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CR brought many feminists to such radical insights.

Through those CR groups they also became aware of the need for lesbian-feminist political goals that were far more radical than those of gay revolutionaries whose aim was equality with heterosexuals. Lesbian-feminist revolutionaries wanted a restructuring of the entire system of heterosexuality, which, they declared, was at the root of women’s oppression. They wanted to provide for all women what they believed was a healthy alternative to male-female relationships. Their political work was focused not only on taking care of the problems wrought by heterosexuality, such as staffing abortion clinics and battered women’s retreats, but also on creating a women’s culture (see
chapter 9
) that would be lesbian-feminist and clearly superior to the culture that men had foisted on humanity.

Splits, Coalitions, and Resolutions

While lesbian-feminists, as homosexuals and as feminists, had natural affinities with other gay and feminist groups, their relationships were not always without ambivalences. Butch/femme women and older middle-class and wealthier lesbians generally shunned them for their radicalism. Racial and ethnic minority lesbians felt that lesbian-feminist goals were irrelevant to the major problems that minorities faced. Feminists sometimes feared that lesbian-feminists would stigmatize the whole women’s movement as being made up of “nothing but a bunch of man-hating dykes.” Movement gay women felt uncomfortable with the separatist program of some lesbian-feminists. Though there were occasional useful and fulfilling coalitions and mergers between lesbian-feminists and members of other groups, mistrust was frequent (just as it was between revolutionary and more conservative groups within ethnic minorities). Lesbian-feminists were especially critical of what they saw as the superficiality of the “liberal” feminist and gay demands for social change. They attempted to educate the older groups. For example, they exhorted feminists to become lesbians and lesbians were told they must become feminists in order to aid in the battle against male supremacy.

Many ignored such exhortations, but some older women who had been lesbians long before the birth of the lesbian-feminist movement found it easy to accept the movement’s goals and philosophies, since they had long lived as feminists without defining themselves as such. The new lesbian chauvinism was a heady experience for them, and they were embraced by the young women in the lesbian-feminist movement with great enthusiasm. They were made to feel they had moved practically overnight from miscreants to historical role models. They remembered well the persecution and the need to hide that characterized their lives in the 1950s and throughout much of the ’60s—and suddenly the world had changed. “It was like living in a time warp,” one woman remembers. She had moved from the Midwest to New York in order to have more access to the blossoming new culture:

Suddenly there was women’s music, which I’d never heard before, and it was performed in front of such huge audiences of proud lesbians. There were all of these workshops. There were all-women dances at Columbia. There was a place in the Catskills where hundreds of women took over the entire hotel, running around bare, giving each other massages. And they all wanted to talk to me as a lesbian who had been around for a while. They respected me. I was forty-five years old and as delirious as a fourteen year old. It was like I’d never lived before.
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