Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (51 page)

From Tower of Babel to Community:
Lesbian Life in the 1980s

This was not the 1940s with the isolation and lack of support that existed then for lesbians
….
There is a women’s newspaper to which I can turn to find the groups where I belong. I can purchase that newspaper at a women’s bookstore, or subscribe to it, openly. There are disabled rap groups, groups for aging lesbians. There are places where we can network, to help each other. We fight together for our place in the sunshine.             

—
June Patterson, disabled lesbian, age 62,
in
Long Time Passing,
1986

I was thinking of how far lesbians and gay men have come in this terrible decade, regardless of the concern or indifference of the rest of the world: how we are capable of forming, affirming, validating our own partnerships, raising our own children, mourning our own dead.                     

—
Jennifer Levin
at the Seventh Annual Gay Pride Run,
New York, 1988

While the 1970s rode on the steam of the social revolution that had been set in motion by the flower children of the ’60s, the momentum appeared to have been lost in the ’80s as mainstream America returned to more conservative times. Although the effects of the sexual revolution of the previous decade could not be totally eradicated and the sexual ethos of the 1980s was light-years away from times such as the McCarthy era, the “New Right” became vociferous in its desire to turn back the clock. The New Right, which had long been around but received little audience earlier, became increasingly effective in its techniques of fund-raising and proselytizing. It was partly responsible for the landslide 1984 defeat of the Democrats, whose presidential delegates had included activist lesbians and gay men. The Democrats’ platform had contained a plank for gay rights that they erroneously believed, in the context of the liberality of the past years, would be popular. Ronald Reagan, who understood far better than the Democrats that moods were shifting, played to the New Right with promises such as his intention to squelch hopes for gay rights by resisting “all efforts to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality.”
¹

The years that followed the election seemed to confirm the shift towards sexual conservatism. For example, in the mid-’80s a commission was formed, headed by Attorney General Edwin Meese, that reexamined the 1970 Supreme Court deliberations on pornography. The commission concluded, totally counter to the earlier findings, that pornography did indeed lead to violence. The conservatism of the Supreme Court also made itself felt in those years when it issued a decision
(Bowers v. Hardwick)
upholding the constitutionality of laws against homosexual sodomy.

The liberalism that opened the way for the radicalism of movements such as lesbian-feminism had slowed to a shuffle. The temper of the times seemed to demand if not retreat at least moderation. Had the questers after the Lesbian Nation not exhausted themselves by fanaticism, the new conservative mood would have checked the extremism of their visions anyway. That is not to say that lesbians were silenced in the 1980s, but rather that the community became increasingly moderate in its demeanor.

The change was a great shock to more radical lesbians who had not yet awakened from their dream of a lesbian-feminist Utopia. They panicked at what seemed like mass defection and the breakup of their movement. As a character in Jean Swallow’s
Leave a Light On for Me
(1986) laments:

I thought I was home. But I wasn’t. And now, there’s no more movement. We’re all scattered and all hell’s breaking loose all over the world. … I couldn’t find me anymore…. Everything’s changing and I’m frightened.
²

But while it may have appeared that nothing much was left by the mid-’80s of the lesbian-feminist movement as it existed in the ’70s, in fact it had reconstituted itself. Women who identified themselves as lesbians were exploring new ways to build personal and social lives and a community.

Many young lesbians who now entered the lesbian subcultures not only took for granted their feminist rights, but also made light of the high seriousness associated with being a politically correct lesbian-feminist. The young women demanded freedom to be as they pleased. They described themselves in terms, such as “girls,” that would have infuriated lesbian-feminists in the ’70s. Some of them reintroduced makeup and sexy clothes into the most visible part of the lesbian community. They were far less distinguishable from heterosexual women than their 1970s counterparts had been. The new young lesbians created images such as that of the “glamour dyke” or “lipstick lesbian,” and their frequently glamorous self-presentation may have been responsible for the beginning of a new “lesbian chic” that seems to be making bisexuality as provocative in some sophisticated circles as it had been in the 1920s.

Through those images lesbianism could once again be associated with a kind of super-sexy rebelliousness and allure. As in the 1920s, female entertainers by the end of the ’80s began to tantalize their audiences with hints of bisexuality. Madonna and Sandra Bernhard, for example, let it be known on network television that they were “an item” at the Cubby Hole, a New York lesbian bar. They even incorporated lesbian material into their shows. Sandra Bernhard reinterpreted the song “Me and Mrs. Jones” to be a story of a surreptitious lesbian affair and ended with the outrageously gleeful exclamation, “The women are doin’ it for themselves!” Lily Tomlin and her longtime companion and writer Jane Wagner made lesbians the heroes of half Tomlin’s skits in her virtuoso one-woman performances. Rock singer Melissa Etheridge skyrocketed to fame with her totally androgenous performance style and dress. Country-western singer K.D. Lang proudly declared of her own bisexual appeal, “Yeah, sure, the boys can be attracted to me, the girls can be attracted to me, your mother … your uncle, sure. It doesn’t really matter to me.”
³

Of course small enclaves of older lesbian lifestyles continued to exist as new ones were being formed. But the most visible lesbian community changed its character so that in the ’80s it was made up in good part of women who were far less separated from the mainstream in their appearance and outlook than had been the butches and femmes of the 1950s and ’60s and the lesbian-feminists of the 1970s. Perhaps many women who made up the dominant visible community of the ’80s intuited that less militance was appropriate to conservative times, and they were reinforced by the inclusion in their community of more and more lesbians whose economic status, lifestyles, and philosophy rendered them much more moderate than their lesbian-feminist predecessors. But together with the growing moderation of the most visible lesbian community, it grew in other ways as well: it came to include many more lesbians of color, women who “did not look lesbian” (i.e., “politically correct”), old people, gay men, and children of lesbian mothers. Despite this greater diversity, and some very polarizing issues such as the lesbian sex wars, the community was considerably more successful in fostering unity in the 1980s than was the visible community that had been dominated by lesbian-feminists in the ’70s. It generally understood that during conservative times, when many would rather see them disappear, lesbians would not survive as a community and they would be forced to return to the isolation of earlier years unless they became less doctrinaire about how to be a lesbian. They needed to discover areas where they might come together and work together despite differences.

The Shift to Moderation

Although the conservative swing in America was undeniable in the 1980s, women who loved women did not retreat en masse to the closets of pre-S tone wall and prelesbian-feminism. In fact, women who had been reluctant to become a part of the visible community that was dominated by radical lesbian-feminists in the ’70s mustered the courage to show themselves in the ’80s as the mood of the visible community shifted. Middle-class women and older women now dared to participate in public events they would have avoided in the ’70s (and run from in the reactionary McCarthy era) and even to stage their own public events. They were not ignorant of the conservative swing in the country, but they were also aware that the ’70s had wrought some positive changes. Those changes, such as the passage of gay rights bills in many cities and policies of “non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation” in many institutions, had not been eradicated even by the new conservatism. Lesbians could be fairly confident that America was still sensitive to issues of civil rights, and the shift to the Right, as annoying as it might be, was a far cry from the reactionary ’50s. They believed they were safe in venturing further into the visible lesbian community as long as they avoided extremism.

As more moderate women claimed a place in the community, they succeeded in shifting its values toward moderation even further, but the shift in values did not mean that all the “politically correct” issues of the 1970s were relegated to the history bin as being no longer relevant in the 1980s. Rather, some aspects of “political correctness” were taken for granted as the only way to proceed when reaching out to the lesbian community. For example, there were few public events for lesbians in the ’80s that did not promise child care, wheelchair accessibility, and interpretation for the hearing impaired. Radical lesbian-feminist theory had promoted a concern with human connections that went beyond simply enhancing the personal goals of career or self-gratification, and that concern was adopted even by less radical women as they joined the community.

But many of the issues that had plagued the lesbian-feminists were now seen as jejune, both by sophisticated young women who were coming into the community for the first time and by older women who were veterans. It no longer felt crucial, or even sensible, to shun whatever was valued in the heterosexual world for fear that it would sully lesbian aspirations for a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society. For example, 1970s lesbian performers had been given a cold reception by lesbian audiences if they appeared too polished, too much like professional male performers (see p. 222). The 1980s change in attitude was dramatized by Robin Tyler, the producer of what had been since the 1970s the very politically correct, huge West Coast and Southern Women’s Music and Comedy Festivals. Tyler proclaimed:

We’re at the point now where I think we should be professional about what we do, where professional is a good word. I think we need to start examining our attitude toward success and power. I’m not talking about parroting the patriarchy. I’m talking about wanting people to stand up and achieve a level of quality.
⁴

Success, power, professionalism, which had been tools of the enemy in the eyes of the radicals, became signs of accomplishment to the more moderate community of the ’80s. Striving to “achieve a level of quality” ceased to be feared as divisive and inegalitarian. The greater acceptance of “professionalism” was connected with attitudes toward class, which were also defused in the more moderate ’80s. Middle-class lesbians became more prominent in the visible community, young women of middle-class background no longer felt they must declass themselves to join the community, and many of the women who had been young, declassed radicals in the ’70s changed their socio-economic status. Olivia record company has served as a revealing barometer of these changes. This company that had started business in the ’70s, enchanted with the classless ideals of lesbian-feminism (see p. 223), by the end of the ’80s was sponsoring luxury cruises to the Caribbean for lesbians.

Having gotten older, former lesbian-feminists, like the counterculture heterosexuals of the 1970s, often took the jobs in the ’80s for which their educations had equipped them. Their new status sometimes sat heavily upon them, and they tried to retain at least the symbolic signs of their earlier affiliations, as Frederika, a Kansas City woman, observed of her friends who were formerly radical lesbian-feminists and had now entered the professions. They went to work in skirts and high heels, but many of them could not wait to put on their “lesbian clothes” when they got home or when they went out for amusement: “Not just something comfortable, but ragged Salvation Army type clothes, and they shop at thrift stores.” They continued to “live poor,” although their socioeconomic positions had changed. They were embarrassed by their apparent compromise with middle-class values in “moving up on the status-financial ladder,” according to Frederika.
⁵
However, by all American indicators of class they had become part of the middle class that they had “trashed” in the ’70s, their social lifestyle notwithstanding.