Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (41 page)

The 1990s?—“The thing that’s important to me about Queer Nation is that we’re ready to act…. Sometimes you have to take to the streets.” (Courtesy of Robert Fox/Impact Visuals.)

Lesbian Nation: Creating a Women-
Identified-Women Community in
the 1970s

Sweet Betsy the Dyke

(to be sung to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike”)

Oh do you remember Sweet Betsy the Dyke

Who came from New Jersey on her motorbike,

And riding beside her was her lover Anne,

A sister, a friend, and afar out woman.

(CHORUS)
Singing “Dykes, come together, we can change this land!”

Singing, “Dykes come together, we can change this land!”

They rode across the country, Sweet Betsy and Anne, And said to all women, “YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN!

So leave all your menfolk and come on with us. If you don’t have a cycle, we’ll charter a bus …

—
Les B. Friends, 1973

The two things we are trying to do
—
set up a counterculture and make a revolution
—
It’s hard to do both things at the same time.

—
June Arnold,
The Cook and the Carpenter,
1973

Despite the strong movements of the 1970s that attracted multitudes of lesbians, others remained untouched. Many middle-class white lesbians who did not declass themselves in the radical 1970s continued to be completely closeted outside of their circle of lesbian friends. Those women saw movements based on sexual politics as being superfluous to their lives. They were joined in that view by lesbians who had come out in the gay bar culture of butch and femme and had no desire to adapt to a new set of standards. Their view was also shared by lesbians who belonged to racial and ethnic minorities and felt they had to place the needs of those communities first. To all of them, as to Jane Rule’s character in her novel of the 1970s,
Contract with the World,
“loving another woman [was] nothing but that, with no redeeming politics or transforming art.”
¹
But lesbian-feminists often built their entire existence around politics based on their feminism and lesbianism.

Many lesbian-feminists had discovered lesbianism through the radical feminist movement. They were often women in their twenties who had grown up in the era of the flower child and had learned to approach life with passion and idealism. Their decision to become lesbian-feminists stemmed from their disillusionment with the male-created world and their hope of curing its ills. The fruitless war in Vietnam, the proliferaton of ecological problems, the high unemployment rate even among the educated, the general unrest that was left over from the 1960s, all contributed to their radical lesbian-feminist vision that American culture was in deep trouble and drastic measures were required to reverse its unwise course. Since they were convinced through feminism that the root of the problem was male—caused by the greed, egocentrism, and violence that came along with testosterone or male socialization—they believed that only a “woman’s culture,” built on superior female values and women’s love for each other, could rectify all that had gone wrong in male hands. Thus not only was love between women—“lesbianism”—destigmatized among them: it was “aristocraticized.”
²
Although women before the 1970s often became lesbians because of their discontent with the way men behaved, the lesbian-feminists were the first to articulate such motivation and to create a coherent philosophy out of it.

In their idealism they resembled the cultural feminists of the beginning of the century, such as Jane Addams, but instead of hoping to transform patriarchal institutions as the earlier women often did, they wanted to create entirely new institutions and to shape a women’s culture that would embody all the best values that were not male. It would be nonhierarchical, spiritual, and without the jealousy that comes of wanting to possess other human beings, as in monogamy and imperialism. It would be nonracist, nonageist, nonclassist, and nonexploitative—economically or sexually. It would be pro-women and pro-children. These women believed that such a culture could only be formed if women stepped away from the hopelessly corrupt patriarchy and established their own self-sufficient, “women-identified-women” communities into which male values could not infiltrate. Those communities would eventually be built into a strong Lesbian Nation that would exist not necessarily as a geographical entity but as a state of mind and that might even be powerful enough, through its example, to divert the country and the world from their dangerous course. Their visions were Utopian. Lesbian-feminists were true believers and destined, as true believers often are, for fanaticism and eventual disappointment.

They found themselves in conflict with working-class butch/ femme lesbians whose roles they considered an imitation of heterosexuality and hence heterosexist. But they were in even greater conflict with lesbians who maintained what the lesbian-feminists scoffed at as bourgeois lifestyles, and those women often returned their disdain. By the 1970s a number of middle-class lesbians felt that they had made a sort of peace with the establishment world, which had many rewards to offer if one were willing to practice a modicum of discretion. They deplored the radicals’ funky and flamboyant style. Although some middle-class lesbians worked within the feminist movement, they would never refer to themselves as lesbian-feminist. They found the radical lesbian-feminist philosophy naive and thought that the radicals were giving lesbianism a bad name. Although middle-class lesbians usually did not feel free to represent lesbianism to heterosexual society, they unrealistically hoped that someone who was more in their own (idealized) image would represent them. As one woman observed:

The public is still not seeing that there are good and bad in this life, too. And, unfortunately, the ones they’ve seen aren’t the ones I’d run around with either, at least some of the ones I’ve seen on television. Why, they’re not the caliber that I would associate with—you get a lot of mouthy women up there, who go hollering around and they’re obnoxious. … I guess they are out there fighting the battles for us, but I’d rather see some women up there who look like women, presidents of companies that had responsible jobs saying their piece, on a little higher plane.
³

In their turn, lesbian-feminists criticized middle-class lesbians for benighted behavior, believing that if they saw the light, they would come to understand that their bourgeois capitalism and all its social manifestations were corrupt. Most frequently lesbian-feminists tried to ignore the existence of both working-class and middle-class lesbians, appropriating the term “lesbian” for themselves as being synonymous with “lesbian-feminism” and thereby excluding all lesbians who were not a part of the movement. The split that developed between lesbian-feminists and lesbians who just loved other women could be as virulent as the split between the classes and generations in the 1950s. But despite detractors and the philosophical obstacles they represented, the radical lesbian-feminists forged ahead to create a unique community and culture. While their community encompassed only a fraction of American women who loved women, it was their image of lesbianism that dominated the 1970s, since they felt freer than the other women to present themselves through the media.

Blueprints for a Lesbian-Feminist Culture

The Utopian world that lesbian-feminists envisioned was based largely on socialist ideals and reflected the background many of them had had in the New Left. But those ideals were filtered through lesbian-feminist doctrine, which sometimes led to extreme convictions such as the importance of separatism to attain their goals: some lesbian-feminists thought it necessary to exclude all heterosexual and homosexual males as well as heterosexual females from their personal and political lives, just as militant blacks had urged separatism from whites. Not all lesbian-feminists agreed on that issue, or on any other issue, for that matter. But though varying from the start with regard to the extent of their radicalism, lesbian-feminists believed in the beginning of their movement that the commonality of committed lesbianism would be sufficient to help them build a unified lesbian community. Such unity seemed easy to attain, since there appeared to be a consensus among them about what the broad configuration of the Lesbian Nation would finally look like: a Utopia for women, an Amazon dream.

Lesbian-feminists sometimes called the culture they were building “women’s” rather than “lesbian” culture, perhaps because they felt that it was the nurturing, loving values associated with women that they wanted to emphasize in their communities. They also chauvinistically believed that all the women who were producing anything worthwhile—books, music, women’s centers, abortion clinics, women’s garages, women’s restaurants—were lesbians and hence “women’s culture” and “lesbian culture” were synonymous. So “women’s books,” for example, meant books by, for, and about lesbians.

Language became important to them as an indication of political awareness and as a tool to raise consciousness. Sometimes lesbian-feminists changed the spelling of “woman” and “women” to “womyn,” “wimmin,” or “womben” in order to obliterate the root “man.” “History” became “herstory”; “hurricane” became “hisicane”; “country” became “cuntry.” Lesbian-feminists wanted especially to reclaim the word “lesbian” from the psychiatric and moral morass into which it had fallen, and they exhorted each other to use that previously taboo word and even the word “dyke,” understanding, as African-Americans had about “black,” that it was possible to take a word used by the enemy to hurt and reclaim it by giving it proud associations. The vocabulary of the old lesbian subculture was usually rejected as being counter to their politics. “Butch” and “femme” disappeared as far as lesbian-feminists were concerned, as did “gay,” which they saw as belonging to homosexual men. “‘Gay’ doesn’t include lesbians any more than ‘mankind’ includes love and sisterhood,” they wrote.
⁴

Their initial euphoria brought a great blast of energy and industry. By the early 1970s there were active lesbian-feminist groups in most states, scores of newspapers and journals that were predominantly or exclusively lesbian-feminist, and numerous bookstores that sold only women’s culture books. Even women who were not in the big city lesbian-feminist communities could take part in that culture through the written word.
⁵

The creation of economic institutions that would lead to financial independence was considered particularly crucial to the blueprint for a lesbian-feminist community. Such independence was necessary so that lesbian-feminists would not have to fear that they would lose their livelihood because they “came out.” They also felt that they should not waste effort that ought to go to the lesbian-feminist community in working for heterosexuals. As one writer phrased it, “Hopefully, we will soon be able to integrate the pieces of our lives and stop this schizophrenic existence of a straight job by day and lesbian political work at night. It keeps us in a state of permanent culture shock and drains our energies.”
⁶

They attempted to create economic cooperatives, child care centers, food co-ops, health clinics, halfway houses, and skills centers, and they dreamt grandiously about multiplying their institutions all over the country so that their values would eventually predominate. Borrowing from
Daily Worker
rhetoric, they declared: “Ultimately, women must be prepared to take over the power of the State and reorganize society. As long as power remains in the hands of men, we are at their whims and our lives will not be free.” They wanted to bring their ideals about integrity, nurturing the needy, self-determination, and equality of labor and rewards into all aspects of institution building and economics. For example, they recommended that priority in hiring be arranged according to need, lower-class women and Third World women coming first. They were opposed to the concept of bosses and workers. All the “shit work” must be shared, they said. Everyone must be given the choice of learning new skills and holding different jobs in the company for which they work. Workers would not have to give up control over the quality and the politics of what they produced. Whatever they did would be nonoppressive and non-sexist.
⁷