Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (63 page)

15
. Elisabeth Craigin,
Either Is Love
(New York: Harcourt, 1937), pp. 45, 146. Diana Frederics, p. 119.

16
. Djuna Barnes,
Nightwood
(New York: Harcourt, 1937); Gale Wilhelm,
We Too Are Drifting
(1935; reprint, New York: Triangle Books, 1940), pp. 11, 14.

17
. Publisher’s ad for
The Scorpion
in
New York Herald Tribune,
April 2, 1933.

18
. Discussion of expurgation
of Club de Femmes
in
Time
(October 25, 1937, pp. 26–28.

19
. Theater censorship attempts discussed in Kaier Curtin,
“We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage
(Boston: Alyson, 1987), pp. 210–11. George Jean Nathan, “Design for Loving,”
American Spectator
(April 1933), pp. 2–3. Review of
Girls in Uniform
in
New York Morning Telegraph,
January 1, 1933.

20
. Robert Coleman, “Love of Women,”
New York Daily Mirror,
December 14, 1937.
The Children’s Hour
received a much friendlier critical reception than other lesbian plays of the decade, perhaps because Martha fulfills the maxim through her suicide that “the only good lesbian is a dead lesbian.” See Kaier Curtin’s review of the critical reception of
The Children’s Hour
in
“We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”.

21
. Interview with Anne Revere in Curtin, p. 201.

22
. Early studies of lesbianism in correctional institutions include Margaret Otis, “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
(June/ July 1913), 8(2):1 13–16; Charles A. Ford, “Homosexual Practices of Institutionalized Females,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychiatry
(March 1929), 23:442–48; Samuel Kahn,
Mentality and Homosexuality
(Boston: Meador, 1937). Study of slang: Gershon Legman, “The Language of Homosexuality” (1941), appendix in Henry,
Sex Variants.
Books such as
Imitation of Sappho
(1930) and
Diana
(1939) were tellingly bound in lavender. Lavender may have come to be associated with lesbianism through the play
The Captive
in which one woman sends violets to another, which resulted in a long popular association of violets and lesbianism. But in Mary Casal,
The Stone Wall
(Chicago: Eyncourt Press, 1930), p. 155, Mary sends Juno violets when she courts her in the early twentieth century, so such a gift may have been customary between women lovers even before
The Captive
brought it to public attention. Frederics, p. 123.

23
. Box-Car Bertha, pp. 65–67.

24
. Paul Yawitz, “Greenwich Village Sin Dives Lay Trap for Innocent Girls,”
New York Evening Graphic,
1931, in Lesbian Herstory Archives, files: 1920s and 1930s. Arno Karlen refers to lesbian bars in New York in the 1930s in
Sexuality and Homosexuality: A New View
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 311. Other information about lesbian bar life in the 1930s comes from
Lesbian Herstory Archives News
(December 1981), 7:16; the newsletter of the West Coast Lesbian Collections:
In the Life
(Fall 1982), 1:5; Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, “Lesbianism in the 1920s and 1930s: A New Found Study,”
Signs
(Summer 1977), 2(4):902; Box-Car Bertha, p. 65.

25
. Personal interview with Win, age 74, San Francisco, August 15, 1987. Lesbian bars were sometimes raided by police in the 1930s. A mid-’30s Chicago newspaper article headlined “Shut Two Nightclubs with Girls Garbed as Men” reported that women in masculine attire were nightly patrons. The article quoted the police major as saying, “Such places are a disgrace to the city, and they will not be tolerated in Chicago. Every place of such character will be closed”: New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1930s. On lesbian nightclubs in Berlin before 1933 see Adele Meyer,
Lila Nachte: Die Damenklubs der Zwanziger Jahre
(Cologne: Zitronenpresse, 1981). See also “Sixty Places to Talk, Dance and Play,”
Connexions
(Jan 1982), 3:16–18. For a discussion of lesbian bars in 1930s Paris see Brassai (Gyula Halasz), “Sodom and Gomorrah,”
The Secret Paris of the ‘30’s
(New York: Pantheon, 1976).

26
. Nucleus Club information in letter from Gean Harwood and Bruhs Mero, SAGE (New York), February 1989.

27
. Personal interview with Mary, age 68, Marin, Calif, August 12, 1987. Personal interview with Olivia, San Antonio, Tex., August 17, 1990. See Foster, ch. 10, for a bibliographic discussion of women’s institutions as a meeting place for lesbians during the 1930s.

28
. Personal interview with Mary, cited above.

29
. Personal interview with Sandra, age 77, San Francisco, August 9, 1987.

30
. Personal interview with May, age 82, Los Angeles, August 2, 1987.

31
. Craigin, p. 145.

32
. Richard Lockridge, “The New Play,”
New York Sun,
November 21 1934).

33
. For a discussion of middle-class lesbians’ rejection of the popular view of lesbianism see Bullough and Bullough. Henry,
Sex Variants,
pp. 771, 825, 839, 864, 867, 916.

34
. In
Surpassing the Love of Men
I explore male pornographic images of lesbians in fiction from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as well as the nineteenth-century sexologists’ discussions of lesbian sexuality. I also deal with Renee Vivien and her predecessors in that book. Mary MacLane,
The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself
(Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1902), p. 182. Radclyffe Hall,
The Well of Loneliness
(Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), p. 458.

35
. Casal, p. 185.

36
. Vida Dutton Scudder,
On Journey
(New York: Dutton and Company, 1937), pp. 224, 226, 211–12.

37
. Frederics, pp. 168–69, 210.

38
. Elisabeth Craigin, pp. 11, 15, 117. For earlier lesbian writing that dealt with the emotional aspects of love between women see my discussion in
Surpassing the Love of Men,
pp. 197–230, 297–313.

5. Naked Amazons and Queer Damozels

1
.  Fleischmann’s ad reprinted in Allan Bérubé,
Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II
(New York: Free Press, 1990).

2
.  Public impression discussed in Mattie Treadwell,
The Women’s Army Corps
(Washington, D.C.: 1954), pp. 625–26, 767.

3
.  For the effects of World War I on lesbianism see Compton Mackenzie,
Extraordinary Women
(1928; reprint, London: Seeker, 1932); for the effects of World War II, Frank S. Caprio,
Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism
(New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 134–35. Women comprised the bulk of the civilians who migrated to large cities in order to work during World War II. See William Chafe,
The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), chs. 6–8. Allan Bérubé points out that World War II was as crucial to the creation of a homosexual culture at that time as the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion was to a later generation, but its impact was lost in the tragedy of the war, and no gay movement or gay press could be developed in those years to record its history: “Marching to a Different Drummer,” in Ann Snitow et al., eds.,
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 88–99.

4
.  Personal interview with Mildred, age 58, Berkeley, August 10, 1987.

5
.  
Miami News,
May 20, 1942, quoted in John Costello,
Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 43.

6
.  For a history of women in the American military see Martin Binkin and Shirley T. Bach,
Women and the Military
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1977), and Jeanne Holm,
Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution
(Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982). For military policy toward homosexuals see
Newsweek
(July 9, 1947), 29:54, which notes the Army’s change of policy in instituting the “undesirable” discharge in 1947. See also Allan Bérubé and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians During the McCarthy Years,” Estelle Freedman et al., eds., in
The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 279–95.

7
.  Information on WAC psychological examination from written communication, H.P., age 68, accepted for WAC officer training in 1943 (Los Angeles, May 28, 1988). At the end of 1942 the adjutant general issued a confidential letter ordering recruiters to investigate women applicants’ “local reputations” to determine whether they had undesirable traits such as “homosexual tendencies,” but nothing came of this order since by that point women were desperately needed in the military. In fact, only a few months later the adjutant general ordered looser screening standards for women in order to meet unfilled quotas. Although other directives against lesbians were halfheartedly issued now and again during the war, they continued to have little or no effect on lesbians being accepted or retained in the armed forces. Finally only a minute number of women were discharged for lesbianism. The Army and Navy kept no record of such discharges; Marine records indicate that twenty women were discharged. Berube,
Coming Out Under Fire,
pp. 30–32, 147.

8
.  Sex Hygiene Course (for Officers and Officer Candidates, WAAC), War Department, Pamphletjio. 35-I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), see especially “Lecture V: Homosexuality.”

9
.  Personal interview with Mary, age 68, Marin County, Calif., August 12, 1987.

10
. Rita Laporte, “Living Propaganda,”
The Ladder,
June 1965, pp. 21–22.

11
. Berube, “Marching to a Different Drummer.” Although the investigative team could find no real “homosexual addicts” the brutal psychological techniques used by their psychiatrists to determine whether a woman was lesbian caused three women to be hospitalized by emotional stress. Berube,
Coming Out Under Fire,
p. 345.

12
. Personal interview with Elizabeth, age 66, Marin County, Calif, August 12, 1987.

13
. Pat Bond, quoted in Berube, “Coming Out Under Fire,”
Mother Jones,
February/March 1983, pp. 23–29 +.

14
. Harrison Carrol, “Miss Dietrich Defends Use of Pants,”
World Telegram,
January 17, 1932. Garbo headline quoted in Mercedes de Acosta,
Here Lies the Heart
(1968; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), p. 229.

15
. Rusty Brown, “Always Me,” in Marcie Adelman, ed.,
Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians
(Boston: Alyson, 1986), pp. 146–47.