Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (52 page)

But as many lesbians of the ’70s got older in the ’80s they tended to become less radical and less critical of society in general, perhaps because they found a not-uncomfortable niche in the mainstream world. It was not atypical for them to say, as one Omaha woman did of the women in her social circle who were in their forties:

I think the whole picture has changed. The women in our group have it all together. They’re happy with what they’re doing. They all have good jobs. They’re career women who chose to be career women. They have nice homes. They have the money to take the kinds of vacations they want to. They don’t wish for anything to be different. Our group is happy.
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The visible lesbian community in the past often lacked older women as role models. If one knew only the bar culture or the softball teams, it would have appeared that there were no lesbians over thirty in the world. But many of the lesbians whom the Omaha woman described came up through lesbian-feminism, and they continued to go to lesbian events. Their more moderate demeanor could create for young women a new role model of how to be a lesbian. But the younger women’s broader version of ways to be a lesbian also gave the older women permission to revise the images of the 1970s.

The 1970s glamour related to jobs in which one worked with one’s hands had largely worn off in the next decade. Nora, who became an electrician in the ’70s, felt by the end of the ’80s that she wanted to find a “more respected profession.” She complained that while at the height of the lesbian-feminist movement blue collar workers were really valued, in the ’80s “those same dykes say classist things, even though I’m making twice the money they are. I just want to get out of it.” Class membership affiliations had shifted dramatically for many older lesbians.
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Some lesbians accepted what has been called “the politics of accommodation.” They believed that lesbians can, after all, carve safe niches for themselves in a world that is less threatening to the well situated, while not feeling compelled either to hide or to reveal themselves. Unlike their counterparts of the ’50s, they were generally not fearful about their sexual orientation being known. They had no reluctance, for example, about appearing at public lesbian events. But unlike their counterparts of the ’70s, their shift in the direction of moderation gave them little interest in confronting the heterosexual world with personal facts. Like Sandy, who called herself a radical in the ’70s and had since become a social work director, they said:

I don’t think it’s necessary to be out professionally. It’s irrelevant in terms of what I do in the day to day world. I think it’s even hostile: “I dare you to get heavy with me because I’m a lesbian.” I’m not primarily a lesbian in terms of how I identify myself. If you have to put all your chips in the dyke pile, you’re not very comfortable about who you are. I would never deny it, but I wouldn’t bring it up as a topic for discussion.
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The middle class in the visible lesbian community expanded not only through former radicals who joined the mainstream economically and professionally, but also through women who had never been part of the radical movement but felt in the ’80s that there existed enough social and civil protections so that no harm would come to them if they ventured out with some discretion. Although there were career women who loved women throughout the century, their number was greatly multiplied as the economic opportunities of all women with middle-class educations improved in the ’80s. Such increased numbers permitted the establishment of organizations all over the country devoted to lesbian career women, such as the Professional Women’s Network in New York, the San Diego Career Women, and the Kansas City, Missouri, Network. Their purpose was to bring together lesbians with shared professional and cultural interests. Their goals, as the San Francisco Bay Area Career Women stated, were typically “to empower lesbians to achieve their full promise and potential.” That full promise and potential, they believed, was facilitated by such middle-class, mainstream interests as forums on estate planning, buying real estate, (lesbian) parenting, and traveling for business and pleasure. Although groups made up of lesbian professionals were usually shunned by the radical community when such groups first started in the early ’80s, by the end of the decade, as the founder of the Bay Area Career Women observed, “many of those who called us classist are coming to our dances,” which often attracted two thousand women and more.
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All of these women were part of a growing class of what Phyllis Lyon has described as “hippies” (lesbian yuppies). The phenomenon was even reflected in lesbian fiction of the ’80s. Numerous novels presented characters who were less concerned with exiting from the patriarchy, as they were in the ’70s, than with buying Gucci luggage and French calf boots, furnishing their living rooms to look like those in
Architectural Digest,
driving Mercedes 450SLs or Buick Rivieras that “shine like a polished panther,” going to “snooty French restaurants,” and sporting twenty-four karat gold cigarette lighters. Some of those novels created fantasies and dream images of wealth merely to amuse the reader, comparable to heterosexual Harlequin novels, rather than to set up a model for reality. But in the ’70s they would have been trashed for being politically incorrect; in the ’80s there was little criticism of their characters’ penchant for conspicuous consumption.
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There were even a number of very wealthy women who identifed fairly openly with the lesbian community and helped to support it in the ’80s, further bridging class gaps and bringing in the money that was requisite to making the community more substantial. Wealthy lesbians helped form organizations such as Women With Inherited Wealth and sponsored monthly meetings in which philanthropy toward lesbian and women’s causes was encouraged. They donated money for the purchase of the Women’s Building in San Francisco; they bailed lesbian publishing houses out of the red; they even provided meeting spaces for lesbian groups by throwing open their own residences. Coming from largely conservative backgrounds, those women may have been fearful of identifying themselves as lesbian in earlier eras. But despite the signs of social conservatism that reemerged in the ’80s, the battles of the preceding decade had helped more of them to feel free to live as they pleased and let it be known that they had ties to the lesbian community. The increased wealth and professional status of women in the visible community altered its face in spite of the sentimental attachment some women retained to more radical times.
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Those who remembered the earlier years sometimes feared that all had been in vain. They bitterly regretted the demise of their dreams for an Amazon world. Looking superficially at the new face of the community, what they saw was a disappearance of the old concerns and institutions and an interest among lesbians in resembling mainstream society. They despaired, for example, that in Austin, Texas, where women’s music had been such a living force in the ’70s, concerts were losing money in the ’80s, and young lesbians were buying mainstream music. Kasey, who was in her ’40s, lamented:

Someone’s got to replace me for the Cris Williamson concerts. I’ve heard her twenty times. Where are the young lesbians? They don’t know how hard we all struggled to get such things going in the ’70s. The young people think no matter what happens it will continue to exist, and they can go once in a while if they feel like it. All they really want to do is make money and have a good time.

Kasey also despaired that in Kansas City, where she had lived during part of the ’70s, the Women’s Liberation Union was defunct and the Women’s House where they met was sold; a radical Austin women’s radio program that was started in the ’70s was off the air; young women had gone back to the bars—more than five hundred of them, all under thirty, usually gathered to dance at an Austin lesbian bar called Nexus on weekend nights in the late ’80s—instead of going to women’s events.

But while the quest for a Lesbian Nation had surely been lost by the ’80s, lesbianism as a lifestyle and the lesbian community were far from dead. Kasey also had to admit that despite the losses, there were some significant gains: Kansas City no longer had a Women’s Liberation Union, but lesbians were openly welcomed in Kansas City NOW and a new young lesbian and gay group emerged out of the 1987 Lesbian and Gay March on Washington. Austin lesbians who wanted to go dancing on Saturday nights were not limited to Nexus; they could even dance at the Unitarian Church, which made a place for them in the ’80s. If they wanted to go to a concert they had a choice not just of “women’s music” but music by “crossover” entertainers such as K. D. Lang and Melissa Etheridge, and they felt no need to be shy about holding hands with their women lovers in the theater lobby, despite the fact that half the audience was heterosexual. Lesbians in Austin were no longer doing a radical radio program, but young lesbians were joining the Austin Blood Sisters in order to give blood to people with AIDS; they were part of the Austin Lesbian-Gay Political Caucus, from whom candidates for local offices sought endorsements; and they succeeded in pushing through an Austin antidiscrimination ordinance for lesbians and gay men.
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To the extent that Austin and Kansas City were representative of fairly large lesbian communities in the 1980s, radicalism was defunct, but in its place there was a new lesbian and gay male unity, an increased acceptance of homosexuality in liberal circles, and even some manifestation of a growing political clout in that part of the mainstream that was not insensitive to the civil rights of homosexuals.

The goals of lesbian-feminism and the tenor of the community it established had come to seem too narrow and unrealistic. In the 1980s lesbians often sought ways to engage themselves politically that would not compromise their ideals but would be less parochial than what lesbian-feminism had permitted. Some of them maintained the Utopian vision they had developed as lesbian-feminists but brought it to bear on larger issues. Others rejected Utopian visions and wanted to find realistic ways to improve the world. In her novel
Valley of the Amazons
(1984), Noretta Koertge dramatizes the disillusionment with lesbian-feminism and the new yearning for action that might bring some results. Tretona, the lesbian hero, wanders from one lesbian group to another, discussing lesbian identity, non-monogamy, witchcraft as a religion. But she comes to believe about those “Utopian” and visionary lesbian-feminist groups that

All [they ever do] is trash what there is and dream about perfect little doll houses in the big separatist sky. I think it’s time we started with the here and now and started thinking about alliances and working to really change things instead of trying to define perfection.

Like many women who left lesbian-feminism, Tretona rejects the segregated lesbian-feminist community and works to create a unified gay and lesbian political community.
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Such interest in working to solve the problems of the here and now that were often broader than the lesbian community was reflected in many of the novels of the 1980s. In Maureen Brady’s
Folly
(1982), the lesbian characters are concerned with fighting corrupt factory owners. In Barbara Wilson’s
Ambitious Women
(1982), the lesbians battle urban terrorism. In Chris South’s
Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses
(1984), they fight the Ku Klux Klan.
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The novels mirrored real life.

“There is nowhere to run from nuclear ruin or chemical waste,” lesbians said in the ’80s. Those older women who maintained their gender chauvinism remained cultural feminists. They had been convinced by lesbian-feminism in the 1970s of women’s superior moral perceptions, and through that conviction they now developed the confidence to lead movements whose base is a Utopian social vision. They often became the backbone in “direct action” peace and environmental movements: for example, they helped organize the Seneca Encampment to protest the army depot in Seneca Falls, from which cruise missiles were being sent to Europe; they were central in the Women’s Pentagon Action, in which the protesters wove shut the doors of the Pentagon with brightly colored thread.
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Their radicalism of the ’70s was thus modified and diverted to different uses. Though the vision of a separate Lesbian Nation disappeared, some lesbians began to attempt in the ’80s to bring their own values and presence to the broader nation.

Other manifestations of the shift in mood during the ’80s were less global and had more to do with lifestyles in the dominant lesbian community, which came to reflect mainstream lifestyles much more than they had in the past. The ’80s saw a certain sobriety settle over the dominant lesbian community with regard to issues that had been treated more lightly in the ’70s, such as non-monogamy (the efforts of the sexual radicals notwithstanding) and drug and alcohol use. “Marriage” and “clean and sober” lifestyles became “in” among lesbians, just as they did among heterosexuals in the ’80s.

To the more radical women who remained in the community it was not necessarily a positive sign to see lesbians who had once proclaimed the virtues of non-monogamy and the excitement or enlightenment they got from highs suddenly become “conventional.” Some were fearful that the current war on drugs, sex, and other modern “evils” was really a hypocritical effort to rub out the culture changes of the past two decades by “masquerading as a caring crusade” about lesbian health. But many lesbians felt they had legitimate reasons to be concerned about their health. Lesbians as a group have the lowest incidence of AIDS in America; nevertheless, it is more frightening to them than to most heterosexuals because many of them have seen it up close among their gay male friends. Because of their concern, monogamy came to look attractive even to women who had been personally and ideologically against it in the past. Some of those who admitted to having been “promiscuous” said their patterns changed in the late ’80s. A San Diego woman reflected: