Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (37 page)

Unlike in the McCarthy era, when the more homosexuals were attacked, the more they felt compelled to hide, young radical gay men and lesbians in the 1970s understood that the temper of the times allowed support for diversity in America, so that rather than hiding they could use attacks on them to further politicize their cause and publicize their just grievances. The campaigns against Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative are prime examples. In 1977, entertainer and fundamentalist Anita Bryant, who established the antigay Save Our Children organization, attacked the Dade County, Florida, Gay Liberation Alliance in her book
The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality.
She succeeded in getting the citizens of Dade County to repeal a new ordinance that prohibited discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment. At that point many lesbians pulled together with gay men in the campaign against Bryant, even boycotting orange juice until the entertainer’s contract with Florida orange growers was canceled. When they heard of Bryant’s intention to open counseling centers across the nation to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, they advocated resurrecting the radical antiwar tactics of the 1960s: “Just as we helped put the brake on the war through incessant disruption and agitation, we’ll employ those same methods against this new oppression,” one lesbian magazine declared. They even devised plans for using overground political processes for retaliation against Bryant, such as challenging the expected tax exempt status of the counseling centers through the courts. While Bryant’s chief object of attack may have been gay males, clearly many lesbians also saw themselves as embattled and chose to work with gay men against a common enemy.
¹⁹

In the same way, lesbians pulled together with gay men in the 1978 campaign against a proposed California constitutional amendment by State congressman John Briggs, who succeeded, by riding on the hysteria of Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, in qualifying his antigay initiative for the California ballot. The initiative proposed “to fire or refuse to hire … any teacher, counsellor, aide, or administrator in the public school system … who advocates, solicits, imposes, encourages, or promotes private or public homosexual activity … that is likely to come to the attention of students or parents.” Lesbians working with gay men in the New Alliance for Gay Equality canvased houses and raised enough money to wage an impressive battle against the initiative, which almost 60 percent of the voters rejected. As one lesbian participant described those pre-election days in 1978, “It was wonderful. The gay movement came of age through that cooperation [as] we went door to door together, saying we were gay, asking people to vote against the amendment.” As a result of the campaigning against the initiative, a flourishing underground political network was established. Gay males and lesbians made similar political coalitions all over the country in the late 1970s, such as the one that led the successful 1978 fight in Seattle against an initiative sponsored by a group called Save Our Moral Ethics, which wanted to repeal a 1974 ordinance that made it illegal for Seattle employers and landlords to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.
²⁰

As the successes of the gay movement multiplied, some older middle-class women who would not have dreamed of leaving their closets earlier and some working-class women who had given up on society and hidden out in gay bars now felt safe in working for gay liberation. But neither the older middle-class lesbians nor their working-class bar dyke counterparts made up the bulk of the movement. Many of them continued to live exactly as they had in the years before Stonewall. The recruits who swelled the numbers most were those young men and women who knew the McCarthy era only through history books and who had come of age listening to the demands of the oppressed on nightly television. To demand their own rights seemed entirely natural to them, as it would not have been to most of their predecessors. They were a new species of homosexual who adamantly refused the burden of guilt and fear that had once been successfully foisted on many older lesbians and gay men.

Love Between Women in a New Light

The young people’s refusal was made easier by the times that were open to experimentation of all sorts, unlike those years that had shaped most older homosexuals. In this milieu of liberality and in reaction to the authoritarian years that had preceded, same-sex love was becoming far less stigmatized. Among certain radicals it even took on an aura of chic, and women whose sexual histories had been heterosexual now felt much freer to explore love between women. Not all of those who experimented with lesbianism were committed to gay rights, of course. Some saw it as simply sexual exploration, which the times seemed to encourage, and they continued to define themselves as heterosexual. But others, even among those who had earlier considered themselves exclusively heterosexual, did come to regard lesbianism in a political context, especially if they were introduced to it through militant feminism.

The decade of the ’60s had ushered in an unprecedented sexual permissiveness, characterized by mini skirts, the pill, group sex, mate swapping, a skyrocketing divorce rate, and acceptance of premarital sex. The rigidity of the 1950s was turned on its head. Heterosexuality began to look somewhat like homosexuality, as nonreproductive sex and cohabitation without marriage came to be commonplace. While some women may have been pressured under the guise of sexual revolution into having sex primarily for a man’s delectation, others were motivated by the desire to explore their own erotic potential and to please themselves, and they were encouraged in that pursuit by popular literature such as Helen Gurley Brown’s
Sex and the Single Girl
and
Cosmopolitan
Magazine. An end-of-the-decade study by the Institute for Sex Research showed that the number of women engaging in premarital sexual intercourse had doubled in the 1960s.
²¹
Because nonreproductive sex outside of marriage had become more and more acceptable, it made less social sense than it had earlier to condemn lesbianism on the grounds that lesbian sexual pleasure did not lead to reproduction.

The growing liberality toward lesbian sexuality eventually infiltrated some of the most committed bastions of heterosexuality. For example,
Vogue
Magazine, which had always appealed to women who belonged to or aspired to belong to rich men, proclaimed in a radical chic article, “Who’s Afraid of Lesbian Sex?”: “Most women know, if they are honest with themselves, that it sometimes would be possible for them to connect their erotic knowledge with their early love and choose a woman partner.”
²²
Sexual love between “normal” women became less unthinkable than it had been for decades, and attitudes in some circles came to resemble those of the experimental 1920s.

The new view of sexuality coincided with the awakening of the feminist movement, which had slept a long sleep but began to rouse itself in the early ’60s. Women witnessed the demands for rights by other oppressed groups and concluded that it was time for their own voices to be heard. As women had during the first wave of feminism in the nineteenth century, the new feminists now pointed out that females were kept second-class citizens by men who claimed all the social, political, and personal powers for themselves, and that the only way women would attain power was by banding together to demand it. Eventually some feminists, taking this argument to its radical conclusion, came to believe that banding together could be effective only if a woman did not go home to sleep in the enemy camp but instead devoted all her energies—not only social and political but sexual as well—to other women. While some nineteenth-century feminists may have felt that way also, their times would not have permitted the articulation of such an idea. The period that followed the sexual revolution of the 1960s did. These new wave women felt free to call themselves lesbian-feminists. To them “lesbian” meant a choice any female could make.

“Lesbian-feminism” short-circuited a hundred years of social history—all the declarations of the sexologists and the media that separated off the lesbian from the “normal” women. Lesbian-feminists declared that the lesbian was the same as any woman and that any women could “existentially” convert from heterosexuality to homosexuality in the name of women’s liberation. Their convictions were made credible by a new minimalist definition of mental health that called into question older views of homosexuality as sick and abnormal. As one sociologist described it: “You don’t end up in a psychiatrist’s office or in the hands of the police, you stay out of jail, you keep a job, you pay your taxes, and you don’t worry people too much. That is called mental health.”
²³
Such a definition was impressive after the 1950s, when mental health was tantamount to conformity to an inflexible set of prescriptions. It served to encourage women in the belief that the gender of their love objects had nothing whatever to do with whether or not they were healthy, productive human beings.

The hippie phenomenon during the 1960s—free sex, unisex haircuts and clothes, love-ins, challenge to authority and conventional morality—also served as a backdrop against which homosexuality appeared less outrageous and abnormal. For many young women who were hippies, lesbianism seemed like just one more exciting adventure, conceivable especially because hippies generally seemed to give at least lip service to the idea that if you grooved on someone, gender was not a major consideration. As Clare, who was a teenager during the ’60s, recalls:

When you start getting free in your lifestyle, it’s hard to regress and go backwards. What got me into the lesbian trip is I hung out with hippie types, smoked pot, worked in the anti-war movement, rebelled in every way I could think of. I slept with most of the men in my group. Then there were two women in the group who had three-ways with men. I thought that sounded interesting. I was open to experience as a way of living.
²⁴

Many of the young women who experimented with lesbian sexuality in the context of the hippie milieu saw it as only an experiment and nothing more. Others took it far more seriously, sometimes through personal inclination, sometimes through sexual politics. Although hippie culture had permitted women like Clare to have their first lesbian experiences, some of them realized, once they discovered radical feminist issues (which had considerable appeal to their radical natures), that hippie culture was sexist and patriarchal. They became disgusted over incidents which demonstrated they were not considered serious members of their groups, such as when hippie males at People’s Park in Berkeley demanded “Free Land, Free Dope, Free Women” and ignored their existence. The hippie milieu both liberated many women to have their first lesbian experience and pushed them into lesbianism as a way of life in order to escape hippie sexism.

To some of these radical women, lesbianism was also appealing by virtue of the fact that love between women had long suffered under an outlaw status and it appeared to them to be one more necessary slap in the face of convention. In addition, the image of the Amazon—which had often been used as a euphemism for the lesbian—seemed to them especially seductive in an era when wars of liberation were being fought in Vietnam and Latin America and among ethnic minorities in the United States. In Amazonian guise they now had their own wars to fight.

Young females who were brought into the New Left by the antiwar movement in the 1960s had similar experiences. Like the hippie movement, the Left was countercultural and radical on the surface, but its attitude toward women was no more liberated than that of the conservatives. The women of the Left who became interested in feminism when the movement was reborn in the mid-1960s had honed their analytical tools through New Left debate and literature. They not only soon resented that they had been reduced to making brown rice instead of policy, but they were also quick to recognize sex exploitation and inequality in bed as being political. When they tried to raise women’s issues in leftist groups such as SNCC and the National Conference for New Politics and were unsuccessful, they were convinced that they could no longer work complacently with males of the New Left. They would have to begin meeting separately if they wished to focus on those issues. Some of their radical all-women’s groups eventually evolved into lesbian-feminism. In their conviction that “the personal is political,” they came to believe that lesbian-feminism was appropriate for all women who took themselves seriously and wanted to be taken seriously instead of being “fucked over by the patriarchy” in the secondary, auxiliary status to which females had generally been relegated in heterosexual life.
²⁵
Thus the liberal sexual milieu of the era, the spread of radical behaviors, and the anger toward heterosexuality fomented by feminism all worked to permit women who might have been fearful of the “abnormality” of same-sex love in other eras to investigate it at this time and to scoff at the notion that it was abnormal.

The Lesbian-Feminist Revolution

The gay revolution took its steam largely from “essentialist” homosexuals who believed that homosexuality was no less involuntary than being black or Hispanic. Like members of the early Scientific Humanitarian Committee, they argued that because they did not chose to be homosexual—they were born or made as they were—discrimination against them could have no justification. Developing alongside of that revolution of gays was the other revolution of those young women who loved other women and wished to make a political statement out of their love but denied that they were “gay.” They insisted on being called lesbian-feminist.