Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (33 page)

Some wealthy females adopted a butch identification when young but dropped it as they grew older, often opting not only to appear more feminine but to live as a bisexual rather than a lesbian. While still a teenager, Libby Holman wrote a little jingle about herself that gave a clue to her lesbian sexuality: “I am tall and very slim./ Am I a she or am I a him?” But only a few years later she married Smith Reynolds, a tobacco millionaire, and after his death she married two more times. Since she allowed herself to be romantically linked by the media with Montgomery Clift, who was homosexual, it may be that one or two of her marriages were nothing more than fronts, although her last husband is said to have banned all her homosexual friends from their home. But during and between those marriages she had numerous affairs with women.
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For some wealthy women the lesbian chic that pervaded the 1920s never ceased and they did not feel compelled to hide their lesbian behavior. Some women in the entertainment world felt as free to flaunt their unorthodox romances in the ’30s or the ’50s as they did in the ’20s. Tallulah Bankhead, for example, after passionatley kissing a young woman at a straight party, borrowed a handkerchief from an astonished male observer to wipe the smeared lipstick from the other woman’s mouth. When Bankhead encountered Joan Crawford with her husband of the time, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., on a train from New York to Hollywood, she was said to have loudly announced, “Darling, you’re divine. I’ve had an affair with your husband. You’ll be next.” She could get away with any behavior because she disarmed with her stance of ultrasophistication. She presented herself as being above the laws of mere mortals and even as phenomenally bored and blase with the shocking privileges she took for herself. “Sex?” she shouted in one group. “I’m bored with sex. What is it, after all? If you go down on a woman, you get a crick in your neck. If you go down on a man, you get lockjaw. And fucking just gives me claustrophobia.”
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Bankhead was married from 1937 to 1941. Since her biographers do not present that marriage as anything like a love match, perhaps it is explainable by an ephemeral impulse to deceive those who had not been in earshot of her sexual confessions. However, other wealthy women who had relationships with women married not for the sake of setting up a front, but rather for male companionship. Unlike many middle- and working-class lesbians, they seemed not to be particularly desirous of establishing long-term monogamous female marriages with their lesbian lovers. The writer Jane Bowles (who self-deprecatingly alluded to her stiff knee, her Jewishness, and her predeliction for women by calling herself “Crippie, the Kike Dyke”) remained married to fellow writer Paul Bowles from 1937 to her death in 1973. Paul Bowles was bisexual, though Jane seems to have had sexual relationships exclusively with other women. She and her husband agreed to lead separate sexual lives, but she relied on him for stability and continuity.
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There were, of course, groups of wealthy women like the Cherry Grove crowd, who were a consistent part of a lesbian subculture. But for some wealthy women who had relationships with other women such consistency seemed to have little appeal. Not only did their social position demand that they move in broader circles than a circumscribed lesbian world, but heterosexual marriage facilitated the ease of their movement. It also placated families on whom a vast inheritance might depend. Louisa Dupont Carpenter, for example, married John Jenny under pressure from her domineering father, who insisted that she make a union with a “well-situated” young man. Wealthy women who loved women generally did not seem to require an arena in which they could dress in drag, as working-class lesbians might, nor did they have the need to bond with other career women to give them courage to pursue their independent paths in a hostile world. Because they lived much of their lives outside of a lesbian subculture, free of its mores and rules, they felt less compelled to limit themselves to a lesbian identity and were more likely to behave bisexually.

Perhaps the lack of a significant subculture of wealthy lesbians in America explains why many upper-class women who saw themselves as exclusively lesbian chose to become expatriates and remained so throughout their lives. They seem to have believed that in America, close to their families and the social set into which they were born, the estabishment of such a subculture was problematic and that one needed to escape the country in order to live permanently as a lesbian. Natalie Barney’s revelation of why she chose to spend almost all of her adult life in Paris undoubtedly refers to that conviction: “Paris has always seemed to me,” she said, “the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.”
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Droves of other wealthy lesbians shared that assessment.

In gay male society, wealthy men historically have often been interested in “rough trade” and class mixing was not uncommon. Among lesbians during the radical 1970s wealthier women began to pride themselves on what they perceived of as their new democratic lesbianism. But in the 1950s and ’60s and earlier, such class mixing was extremely rare. Working-class lesbians tended to socialize only with other working-class lesbians. While some wealthy lesbians would occasionally have ties among middle-class lesbian groups, more often those groups tended to be made up exclusively of women who earned their livings in professions as teachers, librarians, or social workers. The classes remained as discrete as they were in the parent culture.

The middle-class older lesbian subculture may best be understood not in juxtaposition to that of wealthy lesbians who had little in the way of a formal subculture, but rather in contrast to that of young and working-class lesbians. One reason that butch and femme role behavior may have had much less appeal to some older middle-class lesbians than to young and working-class lesbians was that it would expose them too much in times when there was good reason to stay in the closet. Whether or not they practiced role distinctions in their relationships at home, in public they had to hide any such proclivities. Working-class women and young women who had not yet entered a career could feel less fearful than those who were employed in government positions, for example, as teachers or social workers, as many middle-class lesbians were. But the private expression of the roles may also have been more important to working-class women than to those of the middle class because the latter did have other models. They could look to the tradition of romantic friends, early twentieth century professional women, or the unmarried career women of the 1920s and ’30s, who may have been considered maladjusted by psychologists, but who were nevertheless valid social types—independent women who managed to live personal lives of their own choosing and to form couples that usually were not heterogenderal.

Even before the 1950s, masculine identification had less appeal to middle-class lesbians. Though some 1930s novels such as
Nightwood
and
We Too Are Drifting
feature middle-class butch lesbians (Jan Morale of
We Too Are Drifting
even models for a statue of Hermaphrodites), autobiographies suggest that middle-class women tended to reject butch/femme division. Elisabeth Craigin even talks of being repulsed by it. “The possibility of the false male was a thing I was in arms against,” she says. “My lover was a girl, a particularly attractive girl, with initiative and strength and personality above most, to be sure, but a girl with all the primary feminine capacities.” She describes their sexual connection as “sensuality between loving young women and not that of a loving young woman for the other gender in disguise…. She was my woman-mate, never a pseudo man-mate.” Diana Fredricks in
Diana
says she too was repulsed by masculine women who “indulged in transvestism,” and she saw them as “puerile” in their “smart-aleck unconventionality.” All the lesbians who play an important part in her 1930s autobiography are femininely attractive. These writers insisted that the sexologists’ observations about lesbian couples being made up of an invert and a feminine mate of the invert were totally alien to them.
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In the years after the war, when butch/femme roles became so intrinsic to the young and working-class lesbian subculture, a good deal of hostility developed between those who did and those who did not conform to roles. Butches and femmes laughed at middle-class “kiki” women for their “wishy-washy” self-presentation. The few lesbian publications of the era, which were middle-class in their aspirations and tone, such as
Vice Versa
and the journal of the organization Daughters of Bilitis, the
Ladder,
expressed embarrassment over butch and femme roles, which, by their obviousness, encouraged the stereotype of the lesbian among heterosexuals. Lisa Ben, for example, editor of
Vice Versa,
included in one of her issues a poem titled “Protest,” which expressed her puzzlement about why young and working-class lesbians would want to “imitate men”:

What irony that many of us choose

To ape that which by nature we despise,

Appear ridiculous to others’ eyes

By travelling life’s path in borrowed shoes.

How willingly we go with tresses shorn

And beauty masked in graceless, drab attire.

A rose’s loveliness is to admire;

Who’d cut the bloom and thus expose the thorn? …

Away with masquerade and vain pretension.

'Tis thus we bow, reversely, to Convention!
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She, like many lesbians outside of the working class, was troubled not only because butches were aesthetically displeasing to her, but also because it seemed to her that butches acquiesced to conformity by looking stereotypically like males just because society said those who loved women were supposed to be male.

Some middle-class lesbians complained that it was butches and their femmes who made lesbians outcasts. One of the earliest issues of
The Ladder
proclaimed: “The kids in fly front pants and with butch haircuts and mannish manner are the worst publicity that we can get.” Beginning in October 1957 and until the height of the civil rights movement in 1967, Daughters of Bilitis listed on the inside cover of every issue of
The Ladder
among the organization’s goals “advocating [to lesbians] a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society.” The middle-class readership applauded that goal, finding it crucial to their aspirations that lesbians be tolerated in the mainstream.
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They believed that unpopular forms of overt self-expression such as wearing masculine garb led not only to danger for lesbians, but also to further alienation from the parent culture, which was especially painful during a time when the middle-class lesbian culture was still in a relatively inchoate form. There were not scores of organizations to join or vast numbers of friendship circles one might become a part of. Some lesbians wistfully hoped that their differences might be ignored and that they might be accepted among heterosexuals. They insisted (rather unrealistically, considering McCarthy’s hunting down of covert homosexuals) that the way to achieve acceptance was to minimize differences through adopting a conventional style. As one San Leandro, California, woman said in a letter to the editor of
The Ladder:

I have personally proved, in more than a dozen cases, the importance of mode of behavior and acceptable dress in establishing understanding with heterosexuals…. [My mate of twenty years and I] have been accepted by heterosexuals and later informed by them that this acceptance, in its initial stage, was based entirely upon appearance and behavior.
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Many of her class counterparts would have been outraged at such heterosexual condescension by the 1970s, but in the 1950s and early ’60s there was no sufficient vocabulary for such outrage nor any inclination to be militant on the part of middle-class lesbians. Like most middle-class blacks at the start of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, middle-class lesbians generally aspired to integration rather than special status based on what made them a minority. They felt most comfortable blending in, insisting that they were unlike their age and class counterparts in the parent culture only by virtue of their sexual preference, about which they would willingly be silent if they could be accepted into heterosexual society. Perhaps the conception of integration for lesbians was revolutionary enough during an era when the government and the psychiatric establishment were saying that homosexuals were outside the pale of humanity.

Statistical studies of lesbian couples during the period also concluded that middle-and upper-middle class lesbians preferred to blend in with heterosexual society in terms of their styles. For example, a 1962 study showed that lesbians “in the upper financial brackets who owned homes in affluent neighborhoods, generally appeared in feminine clothes and demonstrated no marked emphasis on roles.” The sociologist who conducted the study concluded that “just as in the heterosexual group, role is more enforced [among lesbians] in the blue collar and lower white collar classes.”
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Such a lack of interest in stereotypical styles and roles may have been encouraged not just by the desire to blend in with heterosexual culture, but by the rules that were as vital to the middle-class lesbian subculture as the rule of butch/femme was to their working-class counterparts. “Propriety” was especially important. One could not be part of the middle-class lesbian subculture unless one understood the value of dressing “appropriately”: A West Coast university professor remembers that she belonged to an all-gay circle of friends in the San Francisco area—psychologists, teachers, professors, librarians—that held salons and dinner parties regularly, to which most of the women wore navy blue suits and pumps, almost as much a requisite uniform as butch and femme dress in the gay bars. It was crucial in the middle-class lesbian subculture to behave with sufficient, though never excessive, femininity and not to call attention to oneself as a lesbian in any way. Obvious lesbian behavior on the part of one member might cast disgrace on the entire group.
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