Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (53 page)

I really enjoy sex and would like to sleep around. I used to do it with women I didn’t care anything about—after a few beers. But I haven’t been to bed with anyone since the AIDS virus became heavy here—it’s been years. I’m not infected with anything now. For a one night stand, if I get AIDS it just wouldn’t be worth it.

Casual sex was never widely popular among lesbians, but AIDS made it even less so in the ’80s. According to one mid-1980s survey of lesbians, almost 80 percent viewed monogamy as “the ideal relationship.” Because of this renewed commitment to monogamy it is probable that the ’90s will see more “holy unions” or “relationship ceremonies” between lesbians such as those that were conducted in the ’80s by various liberal churches.
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But it was not AIDS alone that made the lesbian community much more sober than it was in the 1970s. The “clean and sober” movement operated to help stem the party frenzy that many lesbians said they experienced in the 1970s. One study by Jean Swallow
(Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends,
1983) said that 38 percent of all lesbians are alcoholics and another 30 percent are problem drinkers. Swallow concluded: “For a lesbian, those statistics mean you either are one or you love one.” While other studies suggest that Swallow’s statistics are inflated, there is no question that alcoholism as well as drug abuse were common in the lesbian community in the ’70s just as they were among heterosexuals. That the incidence should be somewhat higher among a segment of the lesbian community is not surprising, since historically so much of lesbian life was lived in the bars. As Diane, a Boston woman, recalls of the late 1960s when she first came out:

Learning to drink played a big role. The whole culture revolved around the bars. It would be the main social event during the summers. We would just bar hop from one place to another—in Boston, Provincetown, Providence. It was just what everyone did.
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The campaign to “just say no” and live “clean and sober” that was waged in the mainstream throughout the ’80s caught fire in the lesbian community. Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12 Step Program, and Living Sober groups quickly adapted themselves to the needs of homosexuals. For example, the patriarchal, Christian emphasis of AA literature was modified when presented to the all-lesbian AA and Al-Anon (partners of alcoholics) groups that cropped up around the country. Boston alone had eighty weekly AA meetings for lesbians in the late ’80s. San Francisco had ninety such weekly meetings. Living Sober conventions that targeted the lesbian and gay community attracted large, rapidly growing numbers. The Living Sober contingents were the biggest in the Gay Pride parades at the end of the decade. There were even all-lesbian and -gay residential programs for the treatment of alcohol and drug dependency, such as the Pride Institute in Minnesota, where patients were encouraged not just to deal with drug and alcohol abuse but also to think affirmatively about homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.
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Lesbians who participated in “clean and sober” programs were often euphoric in their enthusiasm. Janet said unabashedly:

AA saved my life. I’m so different than I was a few years ago. I was going to die. I was spiritually bankrupt. I had no hope. I got to the point where the coke and the alcohol weren’t fun anymore. And then Living Sober AA came along and gave me a whole support group—a peer group. Ten years ago there weren’t such things as lesbian AA. I wouldn’t have gone in with all those hets who probably hate queers anyway. There was no place for me to go. Now there are even sober lesbian dances.
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A whole culture of sobriety developed to replace the bar culture that had been so pivotal to the lives of many lesbians in the past. Women who, outside of the lesbian community, might not have identified themselves as being in need of “recovery” found support for such identification within the community, and “clean and sober” became a social movement for lesbians.

All these phenomena illustrate the shift to moderation that overtook a community whose dominant tone in other eras had been far more extreme. While the general relative conservatism of the ’80s had an influence on the shift, there were additional factors that explain it, such as the influx of young, postfeminist women who saw no need for serious militance, the disillusionment of lesbians who had been around in the ’70s with the older lesbian lifestyles, and the realistic fears about health. But it appears to be warranted to conclude that the demeanor of the visible community changed primarily because of economic reasons. There were in the ’80s more women in the American work force who were pursuing careers than ever before, and more opportunities were opening up to them. Since lesbians have generally attained higher levels of education than heterosexual women because they knew they had to be self-supporting and they seldom have multiple children who could interfere with career advancement, they are more likely to be successful professionally. There was a significant increase in the number of lesbians who reached middleclass status through their work and who would have difficulty denying their middle-class socioeconomic position and values in the 1980s. Those women had fewer fears than their middle-class lesbian predecessors about becoming a part of the visible lesbian community. Thus their values gave a tenor to that community that connected it to the mainstream much more closely than it had been connected since lesbianism first became a subculture in America.

Of course not all middle-class lesbians became part of the visible community. Some were still no more comfortable with being lesbian than their 1950s counterparts may have been. They saw their lesbianism as a problem for their careers and believed that exposure would do them great professional damage. A central California woman told of having regular “fire drills” with her lover, who was employed in the same public institution where she worked: “We made up a complete story. Like if anyone would accuse us we would absolutely deny it. We practiced answers about why we weren’t married, why we had gone somewhere together (just in case anyone saw us), why we have to share a home. We know how we would answer everything.”
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In the 1980s some lesbians still went to such lengths as to ask gay men to “front” for them at work-related social functions, or they constructed a second bedroom so that they would not be suspected of sleeping together if heterosexuals came to visit. As one San Antonio lawyer said, “We don’t exactly live in a gay ghetto here. Texas is twenty years behind the rest of the country unless you’re in Austin. So we even have to hide our Lezzie library. You just don’t display it here. Our housecleaner would faint, and I have clients coming over.” But thanks to the sexual and social liberation of the ’70s, the need to hide was not a foremost consideration for many women who loved other women in the 1980s. While they tended to be closeted in some situations, they did not feel that they must disguise their affections at all times, as their counterparts did in more conservative eras. On the whole they were free to be—as psychologist Barbara Sang described a group of lesbian career women she studied—“self-actualized,” “self-confident,” “self-accepting.”
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Validation of Diversity

The San Francisco Gay Pride Parade of 1987, which commemorated the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, ended in front of the City Hall area, where three stages were set up in order to accommodate a variety of speeches and entertainment, all going on simultaneously. Three separate stages had been erected not only because the organizers despaired of being able to communicate anything to an audience of a third of a million people with only one stage, but also because after almost two decades of parades and “Gay Pride” they realized that there is no such entity as “the gay” or “the lesbian” and speeches or entertainment that would be welcomed by one segment of the community would be irrelevant to another. The parade organizers’ strategy was, as the lesbian president of the parade board of directors announced, “to offer diversity to a diverse community.”
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The sexologists who first described lesbians seemed to believe they were mostly all alike, and the heterosexual world allowed itself to be cognizant only of the most obvious stereotypes. Even many lesbians themselves have preferred to see all women who loved women as being from the same mold, such as the butches and femmes in the 1950s and ’60s and the dykes of Lesbian Nation in the 1970s. But lesbians have always comprised a diverse community or, more specifically, diverse subcultures. As more women in the 1980s dared to join the visible lesbian community and to demand a place within the definition of the lesbian, the extent of the diversity became clearer. Paradoxically, the community’s shift toward moderation actually encouraged that diversity. It muted the passion for conformity that had characterized lesbian communities, and the peripheries felt more able to make themselves visible, since the dominant community was generally not as violently critical of all who did not fit its mold. Although significant conflicts still erupted in the ’80s such as the sex wars, the end of the decade seemed to promise more acceptance of diversity within the larger lesbian community than at any other time in the past. Peripheral groups and the dominant community sought ways to coexist and to merge whenever it was mutually helpful.

The visible lesbian community became more racially and ethnically diverse in the 1980s, succeeding to some extent where radical lesbian-feminists had reaped mostly frustration (though it was the radicals who had helped to foster awareness in minority lesbians, who now began to see themselves as a group with lesbian and feminist political interests). “Integration,” however, has been complicated because minorities who were very sensitized to issues of injustice were often quick to see prejudice among white lesbians. White lesbians, hoping to ameliorate such distrust, helped to place minorities in leadership positions in the dominant lesbian movement—which sometimes backfired, resulting in accusations of tokenism and then more distrust.
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By the end of the ’80s minority lesbians usually felt most comfortable working and socializing with each other when possible; however, they were also willing to offer their input to the larger lesbian community on issues they felt were pertinent. Although the arrangement was not ideal as far as activist white lesbians were concerned, it was consonant with their desire to nurture diversity and be able to rely on unity when it was crucial to the circumstances.

Minority women had been slower to organize as lesbians because they often witnessed acute homophobia in their parent communities. It was difficult for them to risk the animosity to which lesbian activism could subject them. But the growing feminist sentiments in America during the 1970s eventually encouraged many minority women also to choose to be lesbians and finally to dare to organize as lesbians. Most refused, however, to call themselves lesbian-feminists because they were alienated by certain tenets of lesbian-feminism such as lesbian separatism, which, they believed, shared many of the components of racism. Minority lesbians preferred to call themsleves “lesbians of color” in the ’80s, rejecting the 1970s term “Third World,” which they now felt to imply that the “First” and “Second” worlds are better. As their numbers grew in the visible community, especially in the largest cities, it was not uncommon by the end of the ’80s for there to be not only “lesbians of color” groups but also organized groups of Latina lesbians, Chicana lesbians, Asian lesbians, South Asian lesbians, Japanese lesbians, black lesbians, fat black lesbians, etc.

Their splintering reflects a ubiquitous desire to discover common roots and experiences, a desire that had been prevalent in the parent culture as well over the last two decades. But it was intensified for lesbians. While in earlier eras accepting a lesbian identity was in itself so overwhelming that it was important just to find other lesbians with whom to share that identity, the loosening of social strictures in the ’70s made the choice to be lesbian somewhat less overwhelming. By the ’80s many lesbians required something more than just a shared sexual identification with other lesbians. The larger the lesbian community grew, the deeper became the realization that a shared sexual orientation alone does not guarantee that its members will have much in common. A great longing emerged to have all aspects of self validated by the group, not just the sexual aspect.

While the white lesbian community saw itself as being welcoming, many lesbians of color believed that their deeper selves were left untouched in that community. They needed to combat the sense of alienation that comes from perceiving an insufficient commonality. But because their parent communities were usually intolerant of homosexuality, there was nowhere that they could feel that their entire self was recognized. Abby, a Native American, characterized that sense of frustration:

When I went to Eureka, to my Yoruk tribe, I felt as though I was somewhat accepted but they were not always ready for me as a queer, so I had to keep that part hidden a little. It felt easier for me to live in San Francisco than at home. But when I was in San Francisco, in a lesbian group, I felt they couldn’t understand the Indian part of me. They’re different from what I’m used to: different values, different approaches, a different sense of humor. They didn’t know about those families back home I grew up with, the disputes, the importance of questions like “How’s the fishing?” There was no place where all of me was validated.

Other lesbians of color such as Mariana Romo-Carmona, a Latina lesbian from New York, described such frustration as feeling “kind of like you’re in exile wherever you go.” She explained that it was to combat that sense of exile that she helped to form the Latina lesbian group Las Buenas Amigas (the Good Friends—a Spanish euphemism for women in lesbian relationships). She believed that such groups were vital because, try as they might, white lesbians had no way of understanding the alienation of lesbians of color or of accepting their unique perceptions.
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