Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (54 page)

The last minority to become part of the lesbians of color groups in the ’80s were Asians. Although there were isolated Asian lesbians within the community during the ’70s and earlier, it was not until the next decade, as more Asians became Americanized and broke out of the confinement of immigrant values and deeply entrenched traditionalism, that their numbers became sufficient to permit them to establish a separate group within some lesbian communities. The largest Asian lesbian group was in San Francisco, which has the oldest and therefore most acculturated Asian population. But Asian lesbian organizations were also started in other areas, such as the Chicago Asian Lesbians Moving (CALM), the New York based Asian Lesbians of the East Coast, Houston’s Gay Asians and Friends, and Philadelphia’s Lesbian/Gay Asian Network.
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At the 1987 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, Asian lesbians gathered as a group, chanting, “Say it clear,/Say it loud,/We are Asian, gay and proud.” After the march they declared in
Phoenix Rising,
an “Asian/Pacific Lesbian Newsletter”:

We are not going to let ourselves be forgotten…. We are so marginal, so out of view, a secret our own people won’t dare admit. To mainstream America we are unheard of, unthought of, impossible. A contradiction in terms. Seeing our faces and hearing our names on national news was one step closer to where we can be.

While in the past they may have been relieved by their lesbian invisibility, in the late ’80s it became a source of irritation to many Asian lesbians. They wanted to claim a place in what they saw as a flourishing community that represented women’s strength and an effective protest against the coercions into feminine weakness they often associated with their parent culture. They became anxious to dispel the myth that lesbianism is a Western phenomenon and, in doing so, legitimize their own choices.
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Lesbians of color in the 1980s were sometimes as critical of the white lesbian community as their “Third World” counterparts were in the ’70s. They pointed to instances of racism that they believed were rampant even in the lesbian bars. “At Billie Jean’s Bar in Kansas City,” a Missouri lesbian insisted, “there was an unspoken policy that we all knew about. If you were white you could get by with a driver’s licence. If you were black you needed three pieces of i.d. and suddenly there was a cover charge.” But unlike earlier years, when Third World lesbians suffered such discrimination by themselves, in the ’80s they were able to make coalitions with white lesbians to protest. At Private Eyes, a woman’s club in New York, when word got out that the manager “had instructions from headquarters to not let too many blacks in,” lesbians of color joined together with predominantly white lesbian groups for a victorious protest. The incident itself confirmed the conviction of many lesbians of color that racism is far from eradicated among lesbians and that they have reason to look primarily to each other for comfort and unity. But the interracial picketing helped to dispel the impression that racism was ubiquitous in the larger lesbian community.
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Other minorities, such as disabled lesbians and fat lesbians, continued the battle that they began in the 1970s for recognition and regard in the lesbian community. They organized groups such as Fat Dykes and published magazines such as
Dykes, Disability, and Stuff.
They adapted the psychology and rhetoric of the gay liberation movement, calling themselves “differently abled;” referring to “fat liberation;” and proclaiming, “The space I take up is the space I deserve.” Because the basis of lesbianism as a lifestyle is a challenge to accepted notions about what is normal, they felt that the lesbian community, more than any other group, was obliged to understand and help them fight their own battles against stale perceptions of “normal” regarding appearance or abilities. They demanded that the community continually renew its commitment to pluralism and non-discrimination and that it invent new and better ways of treating one another, lest it mirror the injustices of the outside world. For example, when a fat lesbian was fired from a counterculture food collective in 1988, she not only brought the case to the Fair Employment Commission but also called on the lesbian community to boycott the collective and write letters of protest against “fat phobia.” Throughout the ’80s splinterings continued among lesbians with special interests. However, they invariably grappled for acknowledgment as organized parts of the lesbian community, and they demanded support that would prove the community’s devotion to the principle of diversity-within-unity.
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The visible lesbian community also became more diverse in the ’80s with regard to age. While in earlier decades it often seemed like a youth culture because as lesbians got older they would drop out of the visible community, in the ’80s new resources and particularly encouragement of diversity caused older lesbians and even old lesbians to remain and take an active part. Like other lesbians with differences, by the end of the 1980s they began to organize on their own, often clarifying their position to themselves and others with angry rhetoric. But the larger community took some care to assure them of a place despite differences, consciously opening up to include not only middle-aged lesbians, but old lesbians as well.

In the 1980s old lesbians undertook for the first time to organize. They held gatherings such as the West Coast Conference and Celebration by and for Old Lesbians. The conference participants militantly preferred the term “old” for the same reason that other minorities have preferred to call themselves “black” or “dyke”—to defuse its power to sting and to reject trivializing euphemisms. The keynote speaker at the first conference set the tone with an angry volley charging her audience to confront ageism in lesbian and feminist groups, which, she said, is covered up as respect for older women. As one conference participant observed, “This was the birth of the angry old woman [cf. the “angry young man” of the 1950s]…. To walk in and see two hundred white haired dykes, all ready to stand up and assert themselves, was mind-boggling.” Like other minority lesbians, they looked to each other for a sense of solidarity, but at the same time they demanded visibility within the larger lesbian community. At the 1988 San Francisco Gay Pride March a contingent of old lesbians chanted as they marched, “2, 4, 6, 8, how do you know your grandma’s straight?”
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Younger lesbians took seriously old lesbians’ criticism which was being voiced in books such as Barbara McDonald’s
Look Me in the Eye
and Baba Copper’s
Over the Hill.
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Some of the younger women who were social workers (a time-honored profession among lesbians) focused their interest on lesbian gerontology. They helped start groups such as Gay and Lesbian Outreach to Elders (GLOE) and Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE), which attempted to encourage old lesbians to be a part of the visible lesbian community, offering services such as visiting homebound or isolated seniors, organizing lesbian senior citizen dances, and providing information regarding housing, health, and legal matters. The presence of old lesbians in the community served to remind younger lesbians that they could not simply sit and dream about the Lesbian Nation of the future. They had some responsibility to deal with those who were here now.

The increased presence of children served a similar purpose. There had always been mothers within the lesbian community, but they usually became mothers through marriages that antedated their lives as lesbians, and they sometimes made other lesbians uncomfortable, since children were seen as antithetical to an all-women environment. In the ’80s, however, a growing number of women chose to have children after they established themselves as lesbians. One study of lesbians at the beginning of the 1980s indicated that 49 percent had considered motherhood since they became homosexual. The community generally supported such a choice by the 1980s. There was even a spate of books and films aimed specifically at lesbians that discussed getting pregnant outside of heterosexuality and being a lesbian parent.
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Thus not only had the visible community become chronologically older, but many more lesbians opted to raise families, further challenging the public image of lesbianism as a youth culture that was carefree and without lasting ties. It was also another indication of the growing acceptance of diversity within the community that lesbian motherhood was no longer seen as a contradiction in terms and women were not so quick to claim, as they had been in the past, “I became a lesbian because I didn’t want children in my life.”

While in earlier eras the choice to get pregnant and raise children outside of heterosexual marriage was unthinkable for most women, including lesbians, the 1970s had taken the sting out of single parenting. For lesbians, who had seen examples in their community of women who had had children in marriage and then were forced into traumatic, disheartening court battles over custody, it was especially important to find ways to have children without men. Those ways were not so difficult to envision in the ’80s when heterosexual women were taking for granted the fact that intercourse did not necessarily lead to having a child; lesbians felt the right to assume that having a child was not necessarily the consequence of intercourse. Since working mothers also became more acceptable in the larger culture during the 1970s, lesbians by the ’80s were more easily able to envision undertaking the responsibility of having children and working to support them without the help of a man. Some chose to adopt or become foster parents in the states where they could do so; there have even been court-approved joint adoptions by openly lesbian couples in recent years. But most of those who felt the need for motherhood chose donor insemination (often self-administered with the help of a turkey baster). That choice was made easier during the 1980s not only by the numerous sperm banks set up originally to service heterosexuals, but also by the establishment in some large cities of sperm banks for the primary use of lesbians, which promoted a minor baby boom in the lesbian community.
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The community generally encouraged women who wanted to be mothers. For example, in 1987 the San Francisco Lyon-Martin Women’s Health Service and the Lesbian Rights Project co-sponsored a well-attended “Parenting Faire.” There were not only numerous lesbian mother support groups in big cities such as Latina Lesbian Mothers, Lesbian Couples With Children, Lesbian Moms of Young Children, Lesbians Parenting Adolescents, Gay/Lesbian Parenting Group, Lesbian Mothers Problem Solving Group, and Lesbian Parent Counselling, but even play groups for children of lesbian mothers. Lesbian newspapers ran articles that would have been found only in
Family Circle-type
magazines a decade earlier, exhorting prospective lesbian mothers: “Well, if you’re trying right now, take heart. It almost always happens…. Honor yourself and keep on!” Lesbian mothers marching in the 1988 Gay Pride parades chanted, “We’re here and we’re gay and we’re in the PTA.”
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The 1980s saw the birth of the first generation of openly gay parents. Against considerable odds, the lesbian community became one that included many children. Not only was more tolerance demanded from the childless, but also a more moderate approach to life (which parenthood demands) had to be developed by lesbians who chose to become mothers.

In accepting into their fold a wide range of people, the most visible lesbian community demonstrated for the first time that unity was possible even though it had become much too large to hope for uniformity. The extent of lesbian diversity was really dramatized when a conservative institution such as Yale University, which had not one
admitted
lesbian twenty years earlier (when it first began admitting women), had in the late 1980s what the
Wall Street Journal
described as “a growing number of special-interest [lesbian] factions,” including the “lipsticks” (Yale’s “radical chic lesbians”), the “crunchies” (“granola dykes who have old-fashioned Utopian ideas about feminism”), a “Chicana lesbian group,” and the assimilationists (“who don’t want to draw attention to their sexuality”).
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Such diversity was multiplied myriad times over in the lesbian communities across America.

The lesbian-feminists of the 1970s attempted to create a transcendent lesbian identity in which all lesbians looked alike, ate alike, thought alike, loved alike. Since lesbians had never been uniform, lesbian-feminism’s ideological rigidity generally doomed it to failure. But lesbian-feminists were successful in that they drew a good deal of public attention to lesbianism, usually without disastrous results, since the liberal ’70s permitted differences. This meant that less radical lesbians began to feel that it was safer to come out than it had been in the past, and it also meant that the visible lesbian community could become much more diverse than ever before. By the end of the ’70s the proliferation of small groups fraught with mistrust for other groups seemed to signify the death of any hopes for a strong lesbian community. But as the ’80s progressed, because moderation replaced ideological rigidity, it began to seem that the community could learn to deal with diversity and that a politics of coalition was possible when desirable, as symbolized through the tremendous numbers of diverse lesbians who appeared for the many Gay Pride parades and the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

Unity

Coalitions within the lesbian community were more than symbolic. Obviously not all the issues that divided the community and made a unified Lesbian Nation impossible to attain in the 1970s disappeared entirely in the ’80s, but they were usually met with less passion. Although the very real splits between groups such as the cultural feminists and the sexual radicals cannot be discounted, the ’80s brought significant truces which suggested a healthy semblance of unity in the visible community.