Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (2 page)

Throughout much of the twentieth century those concepts and questions about the “true meaning” of a woman’s love for other females were inescapable and demanded responses and justifications such as would have been undreamt of before. Unlike her earlier counterparts, through most of our century a woman who found herself passionately attached to another female was usually forced to react in one of four ways:

1). She could see her own same-sex attachment as having nothing to do with attachments between “real lesbians,” since the sexologists who first identified lesbianism and brought the phenomenon to public attention said that lesbians were abnormal or sick, “men trapped in women’s bodies,” and she knew that she was not. Whether or not her relationship was sexual was insignificant. What was significant was that she could not—or she refused to—recognize her love for another woman in the sexologists’ descriptions of lesbianism.

2). She could become so fearful of her feelings toward other women, which were now seen as unnatural, that she would force herself to repress them altogether, to deny even to herself that she was capable of passionate attachment to another female. She would retrain her psyche, or society would help her do it, so that heteroaffectionality alone would be attractive to her, and even the mere notion of physical or emotional attachment between females, such as her grandmothers and their ancestors enjoyed as a matter of course, would be utterly repulsive to her.

3). She could become so fearful, not of her own emotions but of her community’s reaction to them, that she would spend her whole life in hiding (“in the closet,” as that state came to be described in the mid-twentieth century), leading a double life, pretending to the world—to everyone but her female friend—that she was a stranger to the feelings that in fact claimed the better part of her emotional life.

4). She could accept the definitions of love between women that had been formulated by the sexologists and define herself as a lesbian. While such definitions would set her apart from the rest of womankind (even apart from other females who felt no differently emotionally and sometimes even physically about women than she did), they would also privilege her: acceptance would mean that she could live her attachment to women for the rest of her life, without having to acknowledge that a heterosexual relationship had precedence over her same-sex love; it would mean that she could—in fact,
must
—seek ways to become an economically and socially independent human being, since she could not rely on a male to support and defend her; and it would mean that she was free to seek out other women who also accepted such an identity and to form a lesbian subculture, such as could not have existed before love between women was defined as abnormal and unusual.

For most women, who were of course socialized not to challenge their culture’s ideology about acceptable behavior, with the turn of the century began not only the death knell of romantic friendship (which might have been too simple to survive in our complex times anyway), but it was also the beginning of a lengthy period of general closing off of most affectional possibilities between women. The precious intimacies that adult females had been allowed to enjoy with each other earlier—sleeping in the same bed, holding hands, exchanging vows of eternal love, writing letters in the language of romance—became increasingly self-conscious and then rare. While such possibilities have been restored, to a greater or lesser extent, by the feminist movement of the last twenty years, history does not repeat itself. Love between women in the late twentieth century can no longer hide completely behind the veil of sexual innocence that characterized other centuries. Our era, through the legacy of Freud and all his spiritual offspring, is hyper-sophisticated concerning sex; thus whether or not two women who find themselves passionately attached choose to identify themselves as lesbian today, they must at least examine the possibility of sexual attraction between them and decide whether or not to act upon it. Such sexual self-consciousness could easily have been avoided in earlier eras.

But in earlier eras a lesbian identity, which many women now find viable, appropriate, and even healthy, would have been unattainable also. That identity is peculiar to the twentieth century and owes its start at least partly to those sexologists who attempted to separate off women who continued to love other women from the rest of humankind. The sexologists were certainly the first to construct the conception of the lesbian, to call her into being as a member of a special category. As the century progressed, however, women who agreed to identify themselves as lesbian felt more and more free to alter the sexologists’ definitions to suit themselves, so that for many women “lesbianism” has become something vastly broader than what the sexologists could possibly have conceived of—having to do with lifestyle, ideology, the establishment of subcultures and institutions.

In fact, for these women, lesbianism generally has scant similarity to the early definitions of the sexologists. For instance, it has little to do with gender-dysphoria: those who see themselves as men trapped in women’s bodies usually consider themselves as “transsexual” rather than lesbian, and modern medical technology has even permitted them to chose to alter their sex to be consonant with their self image. Lesbianism has nothing to do with morbidity: there are enough positive public images of the lesbian now and enough diverse communities so that lesbians are assured that they are at least as healthy as the heterosexual woman. Not even a sexual interest in other women is absolutely central to the evolving definition of lesbianism: a woman who has a sexual relationship with another woman is not necessarily lesbian—she may simply be experimenting; her attraction to a particular woman may be an anomaly in a life that is otherwise exclusively heterosexual; sex with other women may be nothing more than a part of a large sexual repertoire. On the other hand, women with little sexual interest in other females may nevertheless see themelves as lesbian as long as their energies are given to women’s concerns and they are critical of the institution of heterosexuality. The criterion for identifying oneself as a lesbian has come to resemble the liberal criterion for identifying oneself as a Jew: you are one only if you consider yourself one.

The changing self-definitions of lesbians have evolved in the context of a changing society in which the smug conceptions of what is normal, natural, and socially permissible have been called into question for heterosexuality as well. There has been a relative social and sexual openness in America in the last couple of decades. That factor, coupled with a strong feminist movement that was very critical not only of men’s treatment of women in society but also of their treatment of women in their own homes, has meant that more and more females were willing to consider themselves lesbians. Those women have had a tremendous effect not only on many who were lesbians before this era of social upheaval, “old gays,” as they have been called, but also on those who do not consider themselves lesbians but who feel now that they can give themselves permission to form more loving and more physically affectionate relationships with women friends than their counterparts might have dared to do earlier in this century.

“Lesbianism” has not yet become a term that is as neutral as “romantic friendship” once was, but love between women appears to have begun the process of being rescued from the infamous status to which it was relegated for most of this century. Many women who identify themselves as heterosexual have been far more willing in the last twenty years to see other women as kindred spirits and battle allies than such women were throughout the earlier decades of the century, when females were socialized to believe that other women were their enemies and rivals. They now have more insight into what would make some females want to identify themselves as lesbians. They have helped create a new climate in which love between women is no longer accurately described as it was in the sensational pulp novels of the 1950s and early 1960s, in titles such as
Odd Girl Out
and
Twilight Lovers.
Love between women is no longer quite as “odd,” the “twilight love,” the love that dares not speak its name, as it had been for so long in our century. That new climate has also permitted self-definitions that transcend the stereotypes such as were characterized by the homophobic essayist of 1942 who argued that women should not be allowed to join the military because the only woman who would be attracted to such a pursuit would be the “naked amazons and queer damozels of Lesbos.”
²

This book is a history of these metamorphoses. I am concerned with tracing the evolution of love between women as it has been experienced in twentieth-century America, beginning with the institution of romantic friendship that reached a zenith around the turn of the last century, when middle-class women in large numbers were able to support themselves independently for the first time in our history. I am also concerned with how the theories of the sexologists filtered into popular consciousness, not coincidentally at about the same time that many jobs that had earlier been closed to women were opening up. I argue that the sexologists’ theories helped to erode relationships that now threatened to be permanent and thus more “serious” than earlier romantic friendships, which had to give way to marriage when women had no means of support.

My examination of the demise of romantic friendships leads to a study of how some women constructed an identity and a subculture (and how they were frequently discouraged—by psychiatrists, the law, and public and familial pressure) in which they could express their love for other women. I focus particularly on the gradual establishment of lesbian subcultures in large cities; the relationship of class to the nature of those subcultures; the effects that all-female environments such as women’s colleges, the military, and women’s bars have had on the development of lesbianism; the ways in which feminism and gay liberation changed the view of love between women, both for lesbians and for society in general; and the forces that have moved female same-sex loving from the status of romantic friendship to sickness to twilight loves to women-identified-women, and that are gradually destigmatizing it, so that while it is not yet viewed as positively as romantic friendship was, it is becoming far more socially neutral, as even recent opinion polls indicate.
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The general movement of this book is in the direction of tracing the development of lesbian subcultures. But I have tried also to provide glimpses of lesbians who have remained outside of those subcultures, both historically and in the present, those whose lives were or are lived primarily or exclusively within heterosexual communities and who may be considered lesbian only by virtue of their secret sexual identification. My goal has not been to trace the development of “the lesbian.” There is, of course, no such entity outside of the absurd constructions of textbook and pulp novel writers of the first half of the twentieth century. I have been interested rather in the metamorphoses and diversity of lesbians as they related individually and/or collectively to changing eras in American life.

Through my research methodology I hoped to be inclusive of the broadest spectrum of lesbian life, past and present. For the sections of this book dealing with the previous century or the earliest decades of this century obviously I had to rely on archives, journals, and other published materials to reconstruct the history of lesbian life in America. But for the chapters for which I could locate women to tell me about their experiences (beginning with the 1920s) I was anxious to do so, not only to round out the picture of lesbian life by a conscious attempt to look at class, age, ethnic, and geographical diversity, but also to provide this study with their living voices.

I conducted 186 unstructured interviews (lasting from two to four hours) in which I asked lesbians open-ended questions and permitted them to talk as long as they would (often digressively), in the hope of establishing what seemed important to them as lesbians: how they saw themselves and their sexuality, how they related (or did not relate) to the subcultures, what lesbianism meant to them. Through contacts in various states (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas, and California) who assisted me in setting up interviews, I spoke to a wide diversity of women, from the ages of 17 to 86; women who are white as well as those who are Asian, African American, Latina, and Native American; women who span the socio-economic spectrum from one who milks cows for a living in central California to another who is the primary heir of her grandfather, one of the richest oil men in West Texas; women who have established their lives right in the center of a lesbian community and those who have no contact or only the most peripheral contact with such a community.

The women I interviewed are, for the most part, self-identified lesbians, in keeping with my definition of post-1920s lesbianism: you are a lesbian if you say (at least to yourself) that you are. Of course such self-definitions were rare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, where I begin this book, since many women did not yet have the vocabulary or even a concept of lesbianism that was broad enough to encompass them. I have included such women in my study if it is clear through what can be traced of them that their emotional lives were primarily homoaffectional.

As will be revealed in the pages of this book, in the debate between the “essentialists” (who believe that one is born a lesbian and that there have always been lesbians in the past just as there are lesbians today) and the “social constructionists” (who believe that certain social conditions were necessary before “the lesbian” could emerge as a social entity) my own research has caused me to align myself on the side of the social constructionists. While I believe that some women, statistically very few, may have been “born different,” i.e., genetically or hormonally “abnormal,” the most convincing research I have been able to find indicates that such an anomaly is extremely rare among lesbians. Perhaps in the future studies will emerge that present compelling support for the essentialist position with regard to lesbianism, but such work does not exist at present.
⁴
A small number of the women I interviewed told me they were convinced that they were born men trapped in women’s bodies; however, for the most part they suspected they were not lesbians but “transsexuals” (two of them had actually had sex change operations and are living as men). Others told me they were born lesbians, but what they said in the interview suggested to me that what they saw as the earliest signs of “lesbian feeling,” erotic interest in other females, in most cases may not have been particularly different from the childhood crushes that even Freudians have described as being “normal” in the young. Their early “lesbian behavior” also seemed often to have amounted only to “inappropriate” gender behavior, a phenomenon that has been convincingly called into question by feminism.