Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (12 page)

Lesbian Chic: Experimentation and Repression in the 1920s

In my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace. [Lesbianism] was not then as it is now, chic
…
but as daring as a Crusade; for where now it leaves a woman talkative, so that we have not a Secret among us, then it left her in Tears and Trepidation. Then one had to lure them to the Breast, and now you have to smack them, back and front, to wean them at all.

—
Djuna Barnes,
Ladies Almanack,
1928

The decade of the 1920s witnessed a permissiveness among the more sophisticated to experiment not only with heterosexuality but with bisexuality as well—with erotic relationships that were more specifically genital than the romantic relationships of the Victorian era usually appear to have been. Such sexual liberalization had been building in America since the previous decade, at least partly in response to the popularizers of the most important of the sexologists, Sigmund Freud, who began at that time to disseminate their mentor’s ideas to large American audiences. Even readers of tame domestic magazines such as
Good Housekeeping
were being informed that the sex drive led one to desire various sensory gratifications and the individual had no control over its demands: “If it gets its yearning it is as contented as a nursing infant. If it does not, beware! It will never be stopped except with satisfactions.”
¹

The lay public was given to understand through such oversimplifications of Freud that to fight whatever urges might make themselves felt (presumably even those that emerged out of intimate friendships between women) was counterproductive. Even those who did not subscribe to Freudianism could not escape a familiarity with it, at least in middle-class America. It permeated not only popular culture but also everyday life. The playwright Susan Glaspell, who wrote a satire on the fascination with Freud that characterized the times,
Suppressed Desires,
was probably not exaggerating completely when she said, “You could not go out to buy a bun without hearing of someone’s complexes.” Actions and relationships were now examined with relish for sexual meaning.
²

The Roots of Bisexual Experimentation

By the 1920s there were already a few established communities of women who identified themselves as lesbians, in some astonishing places such as Salt Lake City as well as in more likely areas such as San Francisco. But few women, regardless of their sexual experiences, became part of the fledgling lesbian community. Even if they did not marry and had affectional relationships only with other women, they lived usually without a lesbian subculture. In small towns where heterosexuals often “never even knew that homosexuals existed,” according to oral histories of those who lived in such towns through the 1920s, they passed easily for heterosexual spinsters.
³

But although there were no huge numbers of women who suddenly identified as lesbians, statistics gathered by a 1920s sociologist, Katharine Bement Davis, indicate that many women were giving themselves permission to explore sex between women. Davis’ study of 2200 females (primarily of the middle class) shows that 50.4 percent admitted to intense emotional relations with other women and half of that number said that those experiences were either “accompanied by sex or recognized as sexual in character.” They frequently saw the relationship as an isolated experience (or one of several isolated experiences), and they expected eventually to marry and live as heterosexuals, though the times seemed to some of them to permit experimentation.
⁴

The etiology of “lesbian chic,” the bisexual experimentation of the 1920s, has been traced by some social critics to World War I. But the war, in which the United States was engaged for only two years, did not have so significant an effect in establishing a lesbian subculture in America as it seems to have had in some areas of Europe, where it was fought for five years and with much more female participation than American women were permitted. According to Radclyffe Hall’s 1920s works, “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” and
The Well of Loneliness,
for example, in World War I many English female “sexual inverts” took jobs such as ambulance driving and had the opportunity to meet others who were attracted to the active life that war service offered. It was not until the Second World War, in which American women participated on a much larger scale, that their war effort experiences actually did stimulate an unprecedented growth of an American lesbian subculture.

But while no large lesbian subculture was established in the United States as a result of World War I, the period seems to have marked the beginning of some self-conscious sexual experimentation between women. In the midst of women’s Freudian enlightenment about the putative power of sexual drives, two million men were sent overseas and many more were called away from home for the war effort. It has been speculated that women, turning to each other
faute de mieux,
found they liked sex with other women just fine. As one blues composer wag of the era suggested in his song “Boy in the Boat,” it was then that women learned about cunnilingus, manipulating “the boy in the boat” (the clitoris) with each other:

Lot of these dames had nothing to do.

Uncle Sam thought he’d give ‘em a fightin’ chance,

Packed up all the men and sent ‘em on to France,

Sent ‘em over there the Germans to hunt,

Left the women at home to try out all their new stunts.
⁵

Despite the composer’s humorous intent, there is probably some element of truth in his explanation of the growth of sexual relations between women during those years when the relative paucity of men encouraged same-sex intimacy not only among middle-class college and professional women, who had had the freedom to enjoy each other’s company for some time now, but also among a broader spectrum of females who might have married (if not out of love, then out of ordinary social pressure) had it not been for the war.

In addition to the effects of Freud and the war, bisexual experimentation was also encouraged in some circles by a new value placed on the unconventional and daring. By the 1920s, young American intellectuals, bohemians, and generic nonconformists were determined to rout with a vengeance the last vestiges of Victorianism in the country. To many of them it was clear that their parents had known nothing anyway and it was that ignorance that had not only involved the world in a fruitless war but also caused untold personal suffering in the form of harmful repression and absurd legislation. In metropolitan areas these young people often determined the temper of the times through their preference for literature and art that challenged tradition, as well as through their resistance to laws such as Prohibition, their adoption of new fashions such as bobbed hair and short skirts for women, and their rejection of received notions regarding sexuality. Freud provided them with a license to explore sex openly, but there was a particular charm in explorations that would have previously been considered especially unorthodox, that would have shocked Babbit, flown in the face of convention, shown an ability to live originally and dangerously. These became goals for the 1920s rebels—and in some circles, bisexuality seemed to address all those goals.

Unlike in earlier eras, love between women was now often assumed to be sexual (perhaps even in cases where it was not), and it was popularly described by the bald term
“homosexuality
.” With regard to sexual awareness, much of this generation had traveled a vast distance from their parent generation and the sophisticated would now have been incredulous over the concept of romantic friendship. But not only could they not believe in platonic love; they were also voyeuristically intrigued with lesbianism. The extent to which the subject fascinated the public is suggested by its popularity in American fiction of the era. Ernest Hemingway, for example, deals with the subject both briefly and extensively in his fiction of the ’20s: in
The Sun Also Rises
(1926), with the character of the “boyish” Brett Ashley; in
A Farewell to Arms
(1929), with Catherine Barkley’s nurse friend, Fergy, who is in love with her; in the short story “The Sea Change,” which is about a woman trying to explain to her male companion her erotic involvement with another woman; and in his posthumously published novel
The Garden of Eden,
set in the 1920s, whose major focus is a triangle that includes two women who are sexually enamoured with each other. Sherwood Anderson shows American women “experimenting” with lesbianism in two novels of the ’20s,
Poor White
(1920) and
Dark Laughter
(1925). A bisexual woman in
Dark Laughter
suggests that American wives played with lesbianism with great ease since American men “knew so little” about love and sex between women.
⁶
But the writers were working as hard as they could, along with the Freudians, to inform them. Minor novelists also, such as James Huneker
(Painted Veils,
1920) and Wanda Fraiken Neff
(We Sing Diana,
1928), and playwrights such as Henry Gribble
(March Hares,
1921) and Thomas Dickinson
(Winter Bound,
1929) all brought fascinated views of lesbians to literature and the American stage. The English novel
The Well of Loneliness,
published in the United States in 1928, became a huge
succes de scandale.

It is difficult to assess just what that widespread interest in lesbianism meant, to American men in particular. Clearly there was ambivalence in their response. But perhaps the exoticism of the concept captured their curiosity and sexual imagination. Or perhaps the image of love between women aroused subconscious anxiety that was then cathartically soothed in these fictional works, since they almost invariably ended by confirming conventional sexuality: the girl seldom got the girl—most often a male came in and stole the booty. The old, reassuring sexual order was restored after experimentation with the new.

Although there was considerable interest in unconventional sexuality among sophisticates of the 1920s, the official voice was not remarkably different from that of earlier eras and lesbianism, while discussed more openly than it had ever been before in America, was greeted with outrage by the guardians of morality who were nowhere near ready to accept such autonomous sexuality in women. In 1923
Theatre Magazine,
an important voice of Broadway, said of Sholom Asch’s
God of Vengeance,
one of the earliest plays with a lesbian theme to appear on Broadway: “A more foul and unpleasant spectacle has never been seen in New York.” The producer, director, and cast of twelve were all hauled off to court on charges of obscenity. Edouard Bourdet’s play
The Captive,
about a young woman who cannot be happy in her marriage because she is obsessed by another woman, met a similar fate in 1926 on Broadway, as well as in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit, when it appeared in those cities in 1927. Another play,
Sin of Sins,
opened in Chicago in 1926 and closed after a three-week run and a series of scandalized reviews such as that in
Variety,
which described the lesbian subject matter as being “not fit for public presentation.”
⁷

But despite such vestiges of suppression, public curiosity about the subject could not be stopped. In cosmopolitan areas like New York, the intrigue with homosexuality for the 1920s’ “rebels” was manifested by drag balls where some men wore evening gowns and some women wore tuxedos and many came to be spectators. The balls were held in “respectable” ballrooms such as the ritzy Savoy and Hotel Astor and in the huge Madison Square Garden. Despite the voices of censorship such as those that occasionally emerged in response to Broadway plays, these events were officially sanctioned by police permits and attracted large numbers, as one Broadway gossip sheet of the 1920s announced in a headline: “6000 Crowd Huge Hall as Queer Men and Women Dance.”
⁸

Although the headline hints at a clear distinction between the “queers” and the spectators, the fiction of the period (see pp. 70–71) suggests that the lines sometimes blurred as the “heterosexual” tourists made contacts that were more than social among the avowedly homosexual participants. Such balls were for many sophisticates what the ’20s was all about—the ultimate in rebellion and a good laugh at the naive world that took as self-evident matters such as sex and gender.

But although the “heterosexuals” in such places may have played for a while with homosexuality, they generally did not see themselves as homosexual. Since “homosexual” was in the process of becoming an identity, one now might feel forced to chose either to accept or reject that label. But an erotic interest in another female, and even sex with another female, was not necessarily sufficient to make a woman a lesbian. She might consider her experiences simply bisexual experimentation, which was even encouraged in certain milieus. One had to
see
oneself as a lesbian to be a lesbian. But despite the apparent sexual liberalism of many in the 1920s, the era was not far removed in time from the Victorian age, and to admit to an aberrant sexual identity must not yet have been easy for any but the most brave, unconventional, committed, or desperate.

White “Slumming” in Harlem