Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (42 page)

But it was in the working out of the details and the day-to-day living that the blueprint broke down. It became apparent in the course of the decade that lesbian-feminists were as diverse a group as one might find in the heterosexual world. And those who were brought together by their general radical views were not immune to the factionalism that has beset most minority groups after the initial euphoria of discovering commonalities.

Culture Building: The Media

Lesbian Nation was doomed finally to failure because of youthful inexperience and inability to compromise unbridled enthusiasms, but nevertheless it helped to change the meaning and the image of lesbianism by giving love between women greater visibility and by presenting visions of self-affirmation through lesbian-feminist music and literature. In its success in reaching large numbers of lesbians, women’s music was perhaps the most effective of all the enterprises undertaken by the lesbian-feminist community in the 1970s. Women’s music attracted huge crowds at concerts and women’s festivals around the country and came into the homes of vast numbers of lesbian-feminists with self-affirming lyrics about lesbian politics, lesbian love, lesbian unity. The music, which was generally inspired by a folk art tradition, not only helped to create community by bringing women together, but it also proselytized for the cause. As one lesbian singer, Willie Tyson, observed in 1974, “We know about ten women who were straight before they came to the concert and were [lesbian-feminist] about two weeks later. The concert just blew their minds.”
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Although in the gay bars of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s lesbian singers like Lisa Ben and Beverly Shaw had performed songs “tailored to [the lesbian] taste,” as Beverly Shaw’s publicity blurbs touted, they were generally popular ballads that incorporated lesbian-specific words into heterosexual lyrics. For example, in “Hello, Young Lovers,” instead of “I’ve had a love like you,” the singer would substitute the line “I’ve had a butch like you.” During most of the 1960s, when, led by Bob Dylan, popular lyrics often expressed political consciousness, there was no attempt by lesbian singers to raise awareness of lesbian social and political difficulties through music. Under the influence of lesbian-feminism this changed. The first musician to perform publicly as a lesbian-feminist was Maxine Feldman, whose 1969 song, “Angry Atthis,” was about wanting to hold her lover’s hand in public. In 1971 Alix Dobkin began writing the lyrics that were finally collected on her album
Lavender Jane Loves Women,
which was heavily political in terms of lesbian-feminist consciousness. Songs such as “Talking Lesbian,” for example, warned that men cannot relate to a woman’s mind or a woman’s state and offered the “women-identified-women” solution of constructing a woman’s culture, which would be made possible only through lesbian love:

If you want high consciousness, I’ll tell you what to do,

You got to talk to a woman, let her talk to you.

You got to build you a union and make it strong,

And if we all stick together, girls, it won’t be long….

Of course, it ain’t that simple, so I’d better explain.

You got to ride on the lesbian train….

Women lovin’ women is where it’s at…
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It was soon clear that there was a wide audience for such entertainment.

Olivia Records was established in 1973 by ten women who had already been members of lesbian-feminist living and working collectives. The company ultimately became the leader in women’s music, with albums that sold in the hundreds of thousands and nationwide tours that attracted huge audiences. As a result of the taste Olivia helped to create, large annual women’s music festivals proliferated all over the country. The festivals were modelled on the hippie be-ins of the 1960s, in which counter-culture crowds, in various stages of undress, would dance, get high on LSD or pot, and listen to music.

The women’s festivals, however, always had political overtones. Workshops were held that attempted to raise and solve lesbian-feminist problems; movement literature and paraphernalia were widely available; and the organizers attempted to be sensitive to all the issues: they provided day care, easy access for the disabled, vegetarian meals, sign interpreters for the deaf, “chemical free” areas for women who disapproved of substance use, sliding scale entrance fees so that the poor would not be excluded. Nothing was allowed at the festivals that was not “politically correct,” a label that was to become a benchmark of all judgments in the community, even judgments passed on lesbian-feminist entertainers. At the first National Women’s Music Festival in Champagne, Illinois, in 1974, singers who appeared too professional, too much like stars, got a cold reception. The audience wanted to see their own declassed, unslick image on the stage. Making a mistake, being “human,” was better than being perfect. As Meg Christian, one of Olivia’s most successful singers, observed, “There was a big difference [in audience reaction to] performers who related to the audience as if they were there and women who got up and pulled a shell around them to perform, which is essentially your male performing trip.” To be in any way like a male professional was to be politically incorrect. In fact, “professionalism” of any kind was considered undesirable hierarchical behavior: it represented artificial and destructive categories, barriers set up by the patriarchy that limited the possibilities of women “creating a vision together.” Professionals were as suspect in the 1970s as they had been venerated in the 1950s.
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Women’s music companies also proliferated after the success of Olivia. By the mid-1970s they were scattered throughout America and women’s distribution networks were often able to get even establishment stores to set up women’s music sections and FM stations to play women’s music. The effect of women’s music in rousing and consciousness-raising was tremendous, both in private homes and in public settings. At the end of many concerts in the 1970s the all-women audiences stood up spontaneously, locked arms, and sang the refrain, which they had learned through records, from the entertainer’s finale—usually a number that was meant to inspire politically, such as Margie Adam’s “We shall go forth,/ We shall not fail,/ Bringing together all we know.” Through the self-affirming lyrics women were made to feel good about love between women. The music reached out even to lesbians who were not a part of the radical community, communicating to them that they were not alone and that lesbianism was a noble choice. As one woman who became a lesbian before the lesbian-feminist movement and was a teacher throughout the ’70s in a conservative Central California community now recalls:

When I first came out I used to think that a lot of lesbians were misfits, and my lover and I were just exceptions. But the music changed my perception—like Cris Williamson. Her songs talked about serious issues. I knew for the first time that lesbians didn’t have to be flaky. And it drew me to concerts, which were a thrill. To be in Zellerbach Hall and know that everyone in that room would be spending the night with her female lover! And the variety of people! There was no way you could stereotype who lesbians were. It made me really feel for the first time that there were millions of us in this world. It was power-fid.
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But despite all these successes, difficulties emerged quickly in lesbian-feminist music, just as they did throughout the Utopian-seeking lesbian-feminist world. Olivia Records’ problems were characteristic in the way their ideals could not finally withstand the crunch of reality. Olivia was conceived as one of the alternative economic institutions that would both produce a product that women would buy and employ women in a “nonoppressive situation.” The women who established the company believed they could operate collectively because, as Ginny Berson, a key founder, observed simply, “We trust each other politically…. We are all lesbian-feminists who see our present and future intimately connected with the future of all women.” They determined to pay women in their company “on the basis of need, instead of on the basis of male societal values, so that a bookkeeper with six children to support will be paid more than a soloist musician who has just inherited six million dollars.”
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There were to be no stars and no flunkies, only “cultural workers.”

Because lesbian-feminists were encouraged to believe that the singers were “cultural workers” and that Olivia itself belonged to “the people”—the lesbian-feminists who supported it—they felt that the company must always be sensitive to them in making policy. However, the community was diverse enough so that Olivia’s policies were always bound to offend someone. When Olivia sponsored women-only events, they were attacked by some for excluding male children; when they opened their concerts to everyone, they were attacked for offending lesbian separatists. As Judy Dlugacz, a founding member and the present director recalls, “We couldn’t win.” The company found itself under the greatest attack in 1976 when it unwittingly hired a recording engineer who was a male-to-female transsexual “lesbian” and refused to fire her once her chromosomal sex was discovered. “A man is a man,” the lesbian-feminist community cried, accusing Olivia of trying to put one over on them, since the news had leaked only by chance. Olivia so constantly felt the brunt of anger, Dlugacz recalls, that the company rethought many of its earlier idealistic policies: “It forced us to back away; we had to become more defended because we were getting crucified.”
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Olivia’s original idealism and the hard lessons it eventually learned were repeated often in the lesbian-feminist community and caused a blurring of the community’s Utopian vision.

The women’s presses that emerged in the early 1970s had a function similar to the music, speaking not only to women in organized lesbian-feminist communities in big cities, but also to women isolated in the hinterlands. The periodicals they produced were often modeled on the hippie underground newspapers of the 1960s, but the focus was almost exclusively on lesbian and feminist issues. The papers proliferated because lesbian-feminists believed they must control the words written about them, since they could not trust the establishment press. The periodicals, which were usually put together by a collective of women who had learned to print just so that they could contribute to the movement, were touchingly marked by their youth, energy, innocence, and good faith. Throughout the 1970s the publishers made every attempt to keep costs down so that poor women could buy their newspapers or magazines.
Lesbian Connections,
which began in 1974, was even circulated for free, until the mailing list surpassed five thousand and the publisher was forced to request a small payment “from those who can.” Other periodicals also stated (under a usually very modest asking price of fifty cents or a dollar), “More if you can, less if you can’t.” Such idealism often meant that a periodical went under after a year or two of publication, though others soon sprang up to take its place.

Like the newspapers and magazines, lesbian-feminist book publishing houses were often run collectively, with decision making not in the power of a hierarchical head, but rather of a group of women. Their growth and distribution was aided by the formation of businesses such as Bookpeople, a distributor specializing in women’s books, and women’s bookstores that featured such work. Lesbian-feminist readers were wildly enthusiastic about the new literature. What made those books so appealing was that the authors portrayed becoming a lesbian as connecting a woman with power. In exhilarating contrast to the 1950s novels where love between women led to defeat, in the novels of the 1970s it led to freedom. Many of them echoed the major interests of women’s music: the characters not only created themselves anew through their love; they also created a woman’s community and a woman’s culture that mirrored the ideal images that lesbian-feminists were trying to construct in their own lives, a world where, as Elana Nachman described it in
Riverfinger Woman
(1974), “all women are strong and beautiful … [and] unafraid to give to each other, one to one, in specific ways, and more than one to one, in groups, in the new ways we are learning.”
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Also like the music, women’s novels in the 1970s were crucial in promulgating the new values and in helping to affirm the lesbian-feminist in her conviction of good sense in having chosen to love women.

Although lesbian-feminist publishers aimed their work at a committed lesbian-feminist readership, their books and lesbian-feminism itself presented such an interesting new phenomenon that the attention of the establishment press was attracted. The
New York Times,
for example, ran a major feature article on lesbian-feminist publishing, “Creating a Woman’s World,” and the staid
Library Journal
presented a full-cover portrait of Jill Johnston with the title of her new book,
Lesbian Nation,
blazoned across the cover in 1973. Establishment publishers were now bidding for books that dealt with lesbianism, and they provided insurmountable competition for most of the small lesbian-feminist houses, which were plagued by financial and management inexpertise and could not hope to match the big commercial houses in terms of advances, advertising, and distribution.
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Because of such difficulties, most of the women’s houses of the 1970s eventually failed. There were more lesbian novels published by women’s publishers in the mid-’70s than at the end of the decade. Nevertheless, although most of the lesbian-feminist publishers did not have the business savvy to make sufficient profit from their enterprises, they were instrumental in encouraging lesbian-feminist authors to depict their lives as happy or hopeful and in pointing the way to commercial publishers, who saw that there was a market for literature about love between women that did not present the lovers in perpetual despair, speaking only in whispers and dwelling only in twilight. Because of the breakthoughs by the lesbian-feminist houses, by the end of the 1970s virtually every major New York house had published at least one novel or nonfiction book that presented love between women in a sympathetic and informed light. The counterculture publishers had contributed to a genuine metamorphosis among mainstream publishers with regard to the lesbian image in print.