Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (48 page)

Their success was limited primarily because lesbians are raised like other women in this culture. They are taught that what is most crucial about sexuality is that it leads to settling down in marriage. Not having the official heterosexual landmarks of engagement and wedding, lesbians create their own, often telescoping those events in time toward the goal of establishing a home. Joann Loulan, a lesbian sexologist, jokes: “The lesbian date is like an engagement … [and] once you have sex with her you get married.” Despite the 1970s’ ideological push toward nonmonogamy in the lesbian-feminist community, most lesbians continued to idealize monogamy, although the pattern tended to be serial monogamy—that is, relationships last for a number of years, break up, and both women get involved in a new monogamous relationship. In their approach to sexuality they have been much more like heterosexual women than homosexual men, who historically and statistically have many more brief sexual encounters. When both parties in a couple are female, it appears that the effects of female socialization are usually doubled, lesbianism notwithstanding. While a few lesbians have been able to overcome that socialization, most have not yet been able to.

Typically, in a 1987 survey among lesbians in Boulder, Colorado—a liberal, trendy university community—fewer than 10 percent had ever experimented with sexual activities such as s/m or bondage, 75 percent said they had never been involved in sexual role playing, and only 1 percent thought casual sex was ideal for them.
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Clearly, in the midst of such sexual conservatism, lesbian sex radicals could not have an easy time promoting their theories about the path to equality and happiness.

In the late 1970s, when a handful of lesbians who wanted a more radical sexuality first began to surface, they found their best allies among gay men. Before the impact of AIDS became known, the sexual explorations of gay men, which surpassed even those of heterosexuals in the “sexualized” ’70s, seemed very enviable to those lesbians who had managed to (or wished they could) transcend the sexual constrictions that had been imposed upon them as women. In big cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, they had been witnessing gay male sexual freedom, as exemplified through public cruising, sexually explicit ads in gay newspapers, and flamboyant styles in dress that advertised sexual tastes. Those were exciting concepts, especially to lesbians who remained outside the constraints of cultural feminism, and the gay male example allowed them to feel more self-permissive about their own sexuality. They observed that while many women were busy in the 1970s building lesbian-feminist alternative institutions such as women-only living places and women’s music, their male counterparts were exploring revolutionary sex; and they were convinced that it was an area that the lesbian subcultures, especially lesbian-feminism, had neglected to their own detriment. The women who saw themselves as lesbian sexual radicals thus went about the business of modifying gay male sexual customs and institutions—which represented the essence of liberation to them—for a female community.

Some behaviors were adopted by them without modification. For example, s/m lesbians copied the handkerchief code developed by gay men who enjoyed s/m sexual practices: a handkerchief worn in the left hip pocket meant that one was dominant; in the right hip pocket, that one was submissive; a black handkerchief in the right hip pocket meant one desired to be whipped, and so forth. Leather, which had long represented to gay men machismo and a preference for s/m sex, was also imported into the lesbian community. Kathy Andrew, the proprietor of Stormy Leather, a San Francisco wholesale-retail establishment that caters especially to lesbians of the s/m community, explains that she got her initial inspiration working in a homosexual male leather store in the gay Castro district. Throughout the 1980s she made and sold leather specifically for lesbian s/m: leather corsets, leather bras with cut-out nipples, leather-and-lace maid’s aprons, leather garter belts, dildo harnesses in black or lavender leather. There was for a time such a growing interest in those products that her volume of business doubled each year during the mid-1980s.
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There was some interest, too, in promoting more casual sex between lesbians, toward the goals of pleasure and liberation. Street cruising—making “quickie” sexual contact with strangers, which gay men had always enjoyed—has never been a lesbian practice, not only because of the way women have been socialized, but also because of the physiology of female sexuality. But that is not to say that lesbians have never envied men the ease with which they obtain sexual relief with a partner. Writing at the height of lesbian-feminism, in a 1975 essay titled “Queen for a Day: A Stranger in Paradise,” Rita Mae Brown expressed her disappointment in the lesbian’s lack of opportunity for casual sex. She described dressing in male drag and invading Xanadu, a gay male bathhouse in New York. Women had built no Xanadus where they could make casual contacts, Brown pointed out, not only because they lacked the money but also because they lacked the concept. They had been too well taught that sex for the sake of sex is wrong, that it must at least be connected with romance. She suggested that such a rigid equation of sex with romance and/or commitment had limited lesbians’ choices. Brown voiced a cry in that essay that was enthusiastically echoed by lesbian sexual radicals a decade later:

I do want a Xanadu [Brown said]. I want the option of random sex with no emotional commitment when I need sheer physical relief…. It is in our interest to build places where we have relief, refuge, release. Xanadu is not a lurid dream; it’s the desire of a woman to have options. Like men we should have choices: deep, long-term relationships, the baths, short-term affairs.

Brown’s avant-garde conviction was that women could not hope to be truly equal unless they were sexually equal and shared men’s prerogatives even in the area of casual sex.
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But apparently because of socialization, from which lesbians often had as much difficulty escaping as heterosexual women, the realization of such prerogatives was not achievable in the 1980s despite militant efforts. Serial monogamy continued throughout the decade to be the predominant pattern of lesbian sexuality. The institutions that lesbian sexual radicals devised to expand avenues of lesbian sexual expression were either short-lived or greatly modified to reflect values that are, ironically, not very different from those promoted by the cultural feminists. For example, in the early 1980s lesbian Xanadus became a reality, but their success was limited. JoAnna remembers attending the Sutro Baths, a San Francisco swingers’ bathhouse that had opened its doors exclusively to lesbians one night a week: “Six or seven women walked into this large group room a few minutes after I arrived. One of them shouted, ‘Let’s get down!’ and everybody started doing everything. Everywhere you looked there were women doing it, either in couples or in large groups.” Such a scene was precisely what Brown and the sexual radicals who followed her had envisioned, but this initial enthusiasm for casual sex was not long maintained among lesbians. Clare, who attended the Sutro a few months later, shortly before it discontinued its lesbian nights, says that she found only eight or ten women in the orgy room, sitting around in their towels, talking. “Nobody was even kissing. We ended up playing a nude game of pool.” There were apparently not enough lesbians who felt comfortable about public sex and would attend often enough to make the venture economically feasible for the Sutro and the few other bathhouses that attempted lesbian nights, and the AIDS scare soon militated against further endeavors by the baths.
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Another attempt to expand the possibilities of lesbian sexuality—lesbian strip shows—illustrates how female values that reflect the ways women have been socialized can infiltrate even the baldest of male sexual institutions when adopted by lesbians. The first shows were staged in the early 1980s in lesbian bars in San Francisco and drew large crowds, with women reportedly “hanging from the rafters,” although by the late ’80s the novelty had worn off and sheer lust alone could not sustain the institution. But clearly sheer lust was never the point of those shows, though on the surface they seemed to resemble heterosexual burlesque where nude women danced and men ogled. Lesbian strip shows, which began as a determined attempt to claim male prerogatives and increase women’s choices, were generally overlaid with women’s consciousness. The strippers who did lesbian burlesque sometimes had an almost spiritual zeal for their work that is not found among those who do burlesque for men.

One stripper, Rainbeau, who also managed several other dancers in a group called Rainbeau Productions, explained that she used a diversity of women in her company, including black women, fat women, and older women, because it made the diverse groups in the audience feel good about themselves. “I pray to the goddess before I go out on stage,” she remarked, “to help me do it right.” Rainbeau’s analysis of her work as a lesbian stripper was patently political, a product of lesbian-feminist consciousness of the ’70s, though expressed through the ’80s’ sexual radicals’ desire for more freedom of sexual exploration: “Women’s eroticism is a main source of female power. It’s taken away from us by men because it’s tied in with bearing their children. But we try to help women understand that it’s important for them to reclaim their power and love their bodies.” Tatoo Blue, who also did burlesque exclusively for lesbians, had similar ideas about her work being more significant than mere lustful entertainment. Stripping for other women was “a way of expressing myself or touching people without ever knowing them…. What I do is make people stop and think about a lot more than just a body taking her clothes off.”
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Lesbian strippers in front of lesbian audiences transformed the heterosexual institution of burlesque, bringing to it traditional female values—nurturing, relating, emotionally touching—that had been totally outside the concerns of such entertainment.

Several lesbian movie companies devoted to making lesbian sex films also emerged in the 1980s, such as Blush Productions, which released a cinematic trilogy,
Private Pleasures,
in 1985 that laughed at the notion of “politically correct” sexuality and gave women permission to explore butch/femme role playing, s/m, leather, the use of dildos, and “fist fucking” (a technique that spread among the gay male community in the 1970s, in which one man gradually inserts his entire fist into another man’s anus. Among lesbians who adopted the technique in the 1980s the act was often accomplished vaginally). But like in lesbian burlesque, and unlike in similar heterosexual institutions, sheer sleaze was less an express value in lesbian porno films than promoting lesbian sexual freedom to explore.

Generally the lesbian film companies emphasized the erotic rather than the pornographic. Lavender Blue Productions, for example, produced
Where There’s Smoke
in 1986, in which the sex is even politically correct: two women drink tea and have gentle conversation before they make love orally, with soft guitar music in the background. In the same vein, Tigress Productions made the film
Erotic in Nature,
which, although advertised in lesbian pornographic magazines, promised the reader to go beyond pornography: not only does it “steam with pleasure,” according to the producers, but it also “exults in beauty and displays a tenderness which we feel will warm your hearts.” The film aimed at the graphic sexuality that lesbian sex radicals encouraged, but maintained traditional female moods and images.

Like lesbian burlesque shows and films, lesbian-centered pornographic books and magazines in the 1980s were also concerned with more than titillation. The lesbian sex magazine
On Our Backs
announced in its first issue, in 1984, that its goals were beyond entertainment: the staff wanted to encourage “sexual freedom, respect and empowerment for lesbians.” Susie Bright,
On Our Backs’
editor, said of the magazine’s purpose, “I think women should be pissed that sex is a good old boys’ club and they weren’t allowed in. We’re letting them in.”
Bad Attitude,
another lesbian sex magazine that began in 1984, claimed: “We call our magazine
Bad Attitude
because that’s what women who take control of our sexuality are told we have.” The magazine was published by a collective of lesbians who were committed to “a radical politics of female sexuality.” Although both magazines featured stories and articles that advocated casual and even sometimes violent sex, often in fantasies that mirrored what has more commonly been gay male sexual behavior, the editorial emphasis was invariably on responsibility such as consensuality and safety, as well as freedom.
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The biggest ad feature in lesbian porno magazines was the personals, in which women described themselves and the partners they desired. Personals have had some history among lesbians since the mid-1970s, when the
Wishing Well,
a quarterly devoted to personal ads, presented itself as “an alternative to
The Well of Loneliness
.” The
Wishing Well
personals provided a vivid contrast to gay male personal ads at that time, since the lesbian emphasis was on seeking romance, while the gay male emphasis was generally on seeking sex partners. But some ads even in the lesbian porno magazines of the 1980s continued to call wistfully for a partner with whom to share moonlit walks: “Let me prove to you romance is not dead,” one implored. Others forthrightly admitted, again in language first used by gay men during their 1970s sexual revolution, to wanting “fuck buddies” and rejected romance and “marriage.” One woman confessed in a personal ad: “I’m tired of pretending love when I want sex.” However, the ads often began with the boldness advocated by lesbian sexual radicals, listing, for example, interests in “bare bottom spankings, immobilizing bondage, enemas, colonic irrigations, vaginal and rectal exams, dildos, vibrators,” but ended on a more conventional female note: “After I’ve endured what was bestowed upon me, comfort me in your loving arms. Long term relationship possible.”
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