Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (56 page)

And most lesbians, even outside of the ghettos, did indeed feel that their lives had changed. There were more numbers, more choices, more possibilities of meeting other women who loved women. The proliferation of visible community members was not only reassuring; it also provided support systems that did not exist earlier. In a 1980s study of older lesbians (ages fifty to seventy-three) more than half the women said that in earlier decades, during the traumatic events of their lives such as a breakup of a relationship, they received little or no comforting since they did not belong to a lesbian community and they could not tell their heterosexual friends why they were suffering. But most of those women in the 1980s stated that “things were different for them now.” They perceived themselves as having more lesbian friends to turn to since the community had grown so much, not only because more women were becoming lesbians, but especially because fewer lesbians were in the closet to the degree they had once been.
⁴⁷
Of course there were still many women in the ’80s who found themselves isolated and alone in their lesbianism, but if they were willing to seek out a community, it was there for them. The phrase “the well of loneliness” as a description of lesbian life lost any aptness it many once have had.

By the end of the ’80s, as some lesbian communities grew older together, a sense of security within their friendship circles was even further reinforced. As one thirty-six-year-old woman observed:

I’m much closer to my lesbian friends than I am to my family. We’re really there for each other. If I never had a lover again it wouldn’t matter because I have so much love in my life. Most of my friends I’ve known for ten or twelve years. We’re really family.
⁴⁸

The sense of family and the larger sense of community had not been easy to come by. It required not only that women acknowledge their love for women as they did at the beginning of the century, but that they accept the definition of themselves as “lesbian” and part of a sexual minority. It required not only that they commit themselves to lesbianism as a lifestyle as they did in the 1950s, but that they see themselves as having distinct political needs because they are homosexuals in a heterosexual world. It required not only that they temper their views about how lesbianism should be lived as they did after the radical ’70s, but that they learn to create coalitions with those who do not live it as they do. There was insufficient consciousness, moderation, and savvy to do all of that in the past, and the hostility of heterosexuals seemed too forbidding to permit lesbians to think creatively. In the course of the 1980s, however, lesbians who sought it were able to find all that was requisite to create among themselves both family and community.

A Note on the ’90s: Queer Nation?

As the last decade of the twentieth century begins there is evidence that yet another change may be evolving in the most visible segment of the lesbian community. The shift to moderation that characterized much of the 1980s seems to have brought about a reaction among some young lesbians, particularly those who are now in their early twenties. There are hints that they are demanding more drama and intensity, not only in their personal style, which is often far more colorful than that of older lesbians, but especially in their emerging political stance. An incipient movement seems to be gathering momentum. In its angry militance this new movement promises to have something in common with lesbian-feminism of the 1970s. It is different, however, in that gay men were its first organizers and it is presently dependent on coalitions with gay men.

The new militance actually began near the end of the 1980s and owes its start to impatience felt by gay men and concerned lesbians with the heterosexual world’s slow response to the AIDS crisis. ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed by a group of gay men and some lesbians who were activists in the fight against AIDS and felt that more confrontational action was required to bring attention to their cause. For example, to dramatize the reality of AIDS deaths, the gay men and lesbians of New York ACT-UP staged a huge mock New Orleans-style funeral procession in front of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel where President Bush was speaking at a Republican fund-raising dinner. By the beginning of 1990 several members of ACT-UP had also begun the tactic of “outing,” exposing public figures who were closeted homosexuals. One argument they used in favor of outing was that if the heterosexual world understood that “we are everywhere,” even in the most respected and admired positions, it could not pretend that AIDS should be ignored because it struck only the most despised and insignificant.
⁴⁹

In April 1990 a group of New York ACT-UP lesbians and gay men who were interested in doing direct action around broader lesbian and gay issues formed Queer Nation, which almost immediately spread to other coastal cities such as Boston and San Francisco. Although gay men were the most active in establishing Queer Nation they clearly wanted the participation of lesbians, and hence carefully selected the word “queer” to serve as an umbrella term—a synonym not only for “faggots” and “fairies,” but also for “lezzies” and “dykes.” At writing, only approximately twenty percent of Queer Nation is lesbian, but press coverage of the group’s activities often focuses on the women in Queer Nation who seem very committed to its principles.

The rhetoric and tactics of Queer Nation hark back to those of earlier black militants and lesbian feminists. The name Queer Nation itself is reminiscent, of course, of Lesbian Nation. “Straight” is their code word for oppressive mainstream culture equal to “white” or “patriarchal” in the earlier groups. The language of angry separatism is also familiar. For example, one member of Queer Nation is quoted in Boston’s
Gay Community News
as saying:

For fifteen years as an activist I have tried to explain the gay and lesbian lifestyle to the straight community, and I don’t have time … [to educate them] anymore. If straights can get it together on their own, fine. But I don’t have time for them.
⁵⁰

The New York group has issued a broadside entitled “I Hate Straights,” decorated by a pink fist, exhorting the “queers” to whom it is addressed:

How can I convince you, brother, sister, that your life is in danger. That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act…. Until I can enjoy the same freedom of movement and sexuality as straights, their privilege must stop and it must be given over to me and my queer sisters and brothers. Straight people will not do this voluntarily and so they must be forced into it.

Thus far “force” has consisted primarily of lesbian and gay kiss-ins in straight bars, lesbian and gay marches through straight neighborhoods, and the wearing of confrontational T-shirts, such as one that reads, “Queer Nation—Get Used To It.” But more militant tactics are in the planning stage. For example, Queer Nation is in the process of organizing “Pink Panther” (cf. Black Panther) vigilante groups that could respond physically and immediately to gay- and lesbian-bashing. “Queers Bash Back” is their slogan. They are also exploring ways to express economic power such as a campaign to ask businesses to sign an antidiscrimination statement of principles, which would then entitle those businesses to display a pink triangle or a rainbow flag sticker so lesbians and gay men could shop selectively.

Although Queer Nation realizes that it is to the organization’s benefit to involve women and people of color, they have already been accused by members of both groups as having too narrow a focus, one that appeals primarily to white, middle class gay men and is oblivious to the special problems of lesbians, the working class, and racial and ethnic minorities. In the east, women’s caucuses of Queer Nation have already been formed. The divisiveness that plagued militant groups in the preceding decades may be repeated in the 1990s. It is too soon to predict whether Queer Nation will be able to transcend those earlier problems, or even whether it will really appeal to large numbers of lesbians, who may still be wary of being sucked into concerns that are peculiar to gay men. But one female member of Queer Nation may be voicing the feelings of many other young lesbians who are not fully cognizant of the achievements of the lesbian movement since the 1970s and who are impatient with the “tame” community they inherited in the 1980s:

The thing that’s important to me about Queer Nation is that we’re ready to act. People are frustrated with endless talking about issues around lesbian and gay concerns. We don’t want to sit around and strategize anymore. … I want to do something provocative. Sometimes you have to take to the streets.
⁵¹

Epilogue: Social Constructions and the
Metamorphoses of Love Between Women

Jeradine: Aliciane! I’ve just had a vision
—
of the future! … In a thousand years or so, why, the population will be tremendous, don’t you imagine? I mean, everybody living to two hundred and eighty-five and so on? Well, now picture it: every place just like China, say. Or India. Stacks of people and not enough food and not enough places to live. So
—
the psychologists, et cetera, will all begin telling everybody it’s a sign of a definite inferiority complex to want to be having children all the time … that no really well balanced individual would be so unhappy with [herself] and [her] kind anyway that [she’d] so much as think of falling for anybody of the opposite sex! … Can you imagine it? All the poor heteros slinking about furtively? Pretending they were only friends and all that? Why, why, y’know, in time there might be
laws
against it!

—
N.M. Kramer,
The Hearth and the Strangeness,
1956

I have tried to illustrate through this history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America the extent to which sexuality, and especially sexual categories, can be dependent upon a broad range of factors that are extraneous to the “sexual drive.” For example, love between women, especially those of the middle class, was dramatically metamorphosed from romantic friendship over the last century: it became “lesbianism” once the sexologists formulated the concept, economic factors made it possible for large numbers of women to live independent of men, and mobility allowed many women to travel to places where they might meet others who accepted the label “lesbian.”

Another metamorphosis that has come about in the twentieth century through factors extraneous to the “sexual drive” is in the meaning of lesbianism itself, which has been transformed from a state from which most women who loved women dissociated themselves, to a secret and often lonely acknowledgment that one fell into that “category,” to groups of women who formed a subculture around the concept, to a sociopolitical statement and a civil rights movement that claimed its own minority status and even formed its own ghettos.

And just as “lesbianism” as a phenomenon barely existed a hundred years ago, lesbians now have little similarity to their counterparts that the sexologists first described into being. There are, for instance, not many lesbians today who would see themselves as men trapped in a women’s bodies; yet in the earlier decades of this century that seemed a perfectly plausible explanation to a woman who had no interest in the pursuits that were permitted to females or who let herself be convinced that she must have a “masculine soul” because only men would want to arrange their affectional lives around women. Today a female who feels she is a man trapped in a woman’s body might more likely consider herself a victim of “gender dysphoria,” a transsexual—another sexual category that is a social construct of our century—rather than a lesbian. Modern medicine and technology have even made it possible in the twentieth century for such a woman to rid herself of “gender dysphoria” through “sex reassignment surgery” that would metamorphose her into a man.

But there are few women who see themselves as men trapped in women’s bodies today because feminism has helped bring about another metamorphosis by calling the idea of appropriate gender behavior and even appearance into question. Body image has become far less rigid. It is not just that women can now wear pants almost as often as men; in recent years strength and even muscle have become acceptable for women. And of course sex roles have become much more flexible. At this point in time in America there are few areas that are considered by great consensus totally inappropriate for a female. A woman today who is unhappy with whatever is left of sex role restrictions would more likely think of herself as a feminist (whether or not she also considered herself a lesbian) rather than a man trapped in a woman’s body.

The metamorphosis of love between women has been accompanied by a metamorphosis in public attitudes, from the sentimental admiration suggested by the William Cullen Bryant quotation that begins this book, to a view of it as a rare medical phenomenon, to public fear, disdain, and condemnation, and slowly, in more recent years, to a view of same-sex love as an individual right. One aspect of this metamorphosis was dramatized for me vividly in the course of my research for this book: In Omaha, Nebraska, there is a bright yellow building on a main street. It is across from a police station and a parking lot filled with scores of police cars. Having come out as a working-class lesbian in the 1950s, when McCarthyism was still giving its tenor to American life and lesbians were outlaws, I cannot see so many police cars at once without an almost unconscious sharp intake of breath. Police cars always meant trouble for us in those days, and there is something inside that does not forget. But it was almost the 1990s and I was here with Rhonda, a twenty-six-year-old woman, a college graduate who wears lipstick and eye shadow and restores cars for a living. She chauffeured me from interview to interview around the lesbian community in Omaha during my visit and brought me to the Max, a huge lesbian and gay bar that is housed in the big yellow building.