Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (57 page)

She told me that on weekend nights the place is so crowded with homosexual men and women that their sociability often pours out onto the street. “But what about all those police?” I asked. She did not seem even to understand the import of my question at first. Then she explained, “But we’re happy they’re there. There’s a strip joint not too far away, and those guys sometimes try to cause trouble. The police come to help us. It’s a real comfort to have them so close.” I understood for the hundredth time since I began my research on lesbian life in twentieth-century America that there are no constants with regard to lesbianism, neither in the meaning of love between women nor in the social and political life that is created through it.

These metamorphoses in meaning and attitudes developed because of factors that have been peculiar to our century. For example, more than any other era in history, the twentieth century has been one of sexual awareness. It has been virtually impossible to escape “knowledge” of the existence of sexual repression, expression, sublimation, symbolism, perversion, inversion, and so forth. Ironically, that awareness meant for a while a lessening of affectional possibilities. Romantic friendship had to breathe its last shortly after the century began, since intense love between women was coming to be seen as sexual. It became so incredible to our century that passionate love could occur without genital sexual expression that the term “romantic friendship” dropped out of the language. Such a relationship between women was either lesbian, that is, genital, or it did not exist. Whatever wide spectrum of subtleties, gradations, or varieties that were once possible in women’s love relationships with each other became much more circumscribed. Even if two twentieth-century women might have thought that their intense feeling for each other was more like what some women experienced in other centuries—perhaps more spiritual than erotic, more amorphous than concretely definable—they would undoubtedly have been disabused of their ideas by any outside observer who could tell them it was lesbianism, whether repressed, suppressed, or secretly expressed.

But while one form of female same-sex relationships became impossible in this century, myriad ways to live a lesbian identity were invented for the first time in history. What was most vital before such a variety of lifestyles could be developed was the proliferation of possibilities that would enable women to support themselves without relying on fathers or husbands. Without women’s economic independence, lesbians, as they emerged in the twentieth century, could not have existed, regardless of the nature of their love for other women, since they would have had to obey papa or to lock themselves in heterosexual marriage for the sake of survival alone. While a few working-class women might have managed, might even have exercised the option of passing as men, for middle-class women who were tied to their class status (as most “well-brought-up” females were before the radical 1960s and ’70s), unless they could have found a way to be decently employed lesbian life would have been impossible for them. It was only the twentieth century that offered such ways to large numbers of women.

Lesbian life has also been made possible in the twentieth century by the formation of institutions that did not exist at any other time: not only women’s colleges, which began in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but also women’s military units, women’s athletic organizations such as softball teams, and bars for women. Without those institutions not only would large numbers of women have been unable to make contact with other women in order to form lesbian relationships, but also it would have been impossible to create lesbian communities. Even if the concept of lesbianism had been available to women in earlier centuries, they would have had difficulty establishing lesbian communities because historically females—other than prostitutes—were permitted little mobility, nor did they have many meeting places where they might feel free of restrictions by family or church. Women had been virtual prisoners in the home, whether as ladies of leisure or as house workers. The twentieth century saw their release as well as the creation of meeting places for them.

But while this century has allowed women who love women the consciousness, the space, and the wherewithal to create communities and lifestyles such as never before existed, the rapid and continual flux in values and mores in the parent culture, which inevitably affects the lesbian subculture, has helped to guarantee constant metamorphoses in the conception of lesbianism and the nature of lesbian communities and lifestyles. Circumstances and events that once seemed inextricably a part of lesbian culture and even of the definition of lesbianism itself have constantly come and gone throughout this century. It is hard now to remember that around the turn of the century those few who knew about the existence of the lesbian believed that she was a man trapped in a woman’s body; or that at the same period of time two women could have loved each other, slept in the same bed, held and petted each other, and yet thought of themselves as romantic friends rather than lesbians; or that even as late as 1919 a magazine such as
Ladies Home Journal
would publish a story in which one woman is described gazing on another “as if a goddess, high-enshrined and touched by the sun, stood revealed. She gave a gasp of pleasure.” It is also hard now, near the end of the twentieth century, to remember that in the 1950s lesbians were frightened by the sight of a police car or that in the 1970s many lesbians thought the birth of a Lesbian Nation was imminent. The lesbian community and lesbians’ relationship to society in the twentieth century have defied any pat definition; they have been in perpetual metamorphosis.

Most of all, lesbians themselves have defied definition. In 1964, Donald Webster Cory, a gay man who was, according to his publisher, a “widely acknowledged spokesman for the homosexual community in the United States,” wrote a book titled
The Lesbian in America.
Lesbians were still so afraid to identify themselves that no woman dared to undertake a book on that subject because it might cast suspicion on her. Although few people remarked on the presumption of Cory’s endeavors then, it is obvious now. The problem was not simply in his daring to speak for lesbians though he was a man. It was, even more, in his conception, implicit in his title, that there was such a being as “The Lesbian” who was representative of all lesbians in America.

Even in 1964 lesbians and lesbian communities were extremely diverse. They have metamorphosed to be even more so as more women have dared in a relatively liberal society to accept a lesbian identity and a broader spectrum of women has publicly claimed a place in the community. More than ever they challenge the notion that lesbians can be described as a whole, as writers have tried to do since the sexologists first formulated the concept. Not only are lesbians as diverse proportionally as the female heterosexual population, but if any generalization can be made about large numbers of them at any given time, it is bound soon to change anyway, just as it has throughout the course of the century. The only constant truth about The Lesbian in America has been that she prefers women.

The twentieth century inherited a penchant for classification from the nineteenth century, with its delirious enthusiasm for the new science and its conviction that everything—even affection and sexual feeling—was unquestionably categorizable. Love between women was classified as “sexual inversion,” a category that encompassed women who were uncomfortable as women, women who had sexual relations with women, women who thought women’s socioeconomic opportunities needed to be expanded, and even women who were romantic friends. Paradoxically, such rigid and simplistic categorization opened new possibilities to some women by permitting them to begin to create subcultures of “inverts”—lesbians—such as had never before existed. However, once they became a part of the category the nineteenth-century sexologists had established, they altered it continually by their own lived experiences of love between women. And they thereby helped to demonstrate the large extent to which sexuality is often a social construct—a product of the times and of other factors that are entirely external to the “sexual drive.”

Notes

Introduction

1
.  William Cullen Bryant to the
Evening Post,
July 13, 1843, in
Letters of William Cullen Bryant,
vol. 2, eds. William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss (New York: Fordham University Press, 1977), pp. 238–39.

2
.  
Miami News,
May 20, 1942, quoted in John Costello,
Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 43.

3
.  The latest Gallup Poll seems to suggest that homophobia in general is quickly receding. In 1987 only 33 percent of those polled believed that “homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal.” By Fall 1989 the number had risen to 47 percent. Similarly, in 1987 only 59 percent of those polled believed that “gays should have equal job opportunities.” In Fall 1989, 71 percent of the respondents were in favor of such equality. Reported in “The Future of Gay America,”
Newsweek,
March 12, 1990, p. 21.

4
.  Since the 1930s there have been a number of studies that have argued that male and female homosexuals are hormonally or genetically different, but many other studies have been unable to replicate such findings, and frequently those studies that have announced hormonal or genetic differences appear to be questionable in their methods. For example, in an article in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
(October 1977), 134(10): 1117–18, “Plasma Testosterone in Homosexual and Heterosexual Women,” Nanette Gartrell et al. found that testosterone was 38 percent higher in the plasma of lesbians than in heterosexual women. But the researchers accepted subjects as homosexual or heterosexual by determining only that their sexual practices “during the preceding year had involved only individuals of the same sex (for homosexuals) or the opposite sex (for heterosexuals).” But what if a woman had had exclusively heterosexual relations all her life and then formed a relationship with another woman in the preceding year, as often happened during the lesbian chic era of the 1920s or the radical-feminist 1970s? Or what if a woman who had long been a lesbian decided that she wanted to experiment with heterosexuality, as many lesbians do for significant periods of time? Would their testosterone levels rise or fall depending on with whom they had been sleeping? Such studies generally classify sexuality simply into homo and hetero, refusing to acknowledge (or paying only lip service to) the continuum that Kinsey observed in his massive research or the changes in sexual behavior that many individuals experience in the course of their lives. For studies that fail to replicate previous findings that show a physiological base for homosexuality see, e.g., J. D. Rainer et al., “Homosexuality and Heterosexuality in Identical Twins,”
Psychosomatic Medicine,
(1960), 22: 51–58; G. K. Klintworth, “A Pair of Male Monozygotic Twins Discordant for Homosexuality,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
(1962), 135: 113–25; K. Davison et al., “A Male Monozygotic Twinship Discordant for Homosexuality,”
British Journal of Psychiatry,
(1971), 118: 675–82; Bernard Zuger, “Monozygotic Twins Discordant for Homosexuality: Report of a Pair and Significance of the Phenomenon,”
Comprehensive Psychiatry,
(Sept./ Oct., 1976), 17(5): 661–69; N. McConaghy and A. Blaszczynski, “A Pair of Monzygotic Twins Discordant for Homosexuality,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
(1980), 9: 123–31; Elke D. Eckert et al., “Homosexuality in Monozygotic Twins Reared Apart,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
(April 1986), 148: 421–25; David Barlow, et al., “Plasma Testosterone Levels in Male Homosexuality: A Failure to Replicate,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
(1974), 3(6): 571–75; Susan Baker, “Biological Influence on Human Sex and Gender,”
Signs
(1980), 6: 80–96; H. F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, “Sex Hormones and Female Homosexuality: A Critical Examination,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
(1979), 8: 101–19; P. D. Griffiths et al. “Homosexual Women: An Endocrinological and Psychological Study,”
Journal of Endocrinology
(Dec. 1974), 63(3): 549–56; Ruth G. Doell and Helen Longino, “Sex Hormones in Human Behavior: A Critique of the Linear Model,”
Journal of Homosexuality
(1988), 15(3–4): 55–78.

1. “The Loves of Women for Each Other”

1
.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Kavanagh
(Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1849); William Alger,
The Friendships of Women
(Boston: Roberts, 1868), pp. 346–58. Ellen Rothman’s study,
Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1984) suggests that for many young women in the nineteenth century it was not romantic friendship but their “relationships with lovers and future husbands [that] provided their first experiences with closeness,” but Rothman too admits that there were others “who found openness and intimacy only with female friends,” p. 114.

2
.  Florence Converse,
Diana Victrix
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897).