Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

ODD GIRLS AND TWILIGHT LOVERS

Between Men ~ Between Women

Lesbian and Gay Studies

LILLIAN FADERMAN

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

New York              Oxford

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 1991 Lillian Faderman

Paperback edition, 2012

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53074-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faderman, Lillian.

Odd girls and twilight lovers: a history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America / Lillian Faderman.

p. cm.—(Between men—between women)

ISBN
978-0-231-07488-9 (cloth : alk. paper)  
ISBN
978-0-231-07489-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Lesbianism—United States—History—20th centtury. 2. Lesbians—United States—History—20th centtury. I. Title. II. Series.

HQ75.6.U5F33 1991

90–26327

306.76‘63’0973—dc20

CIP

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at
[email protected]
.

Between Men ~ Between Women
Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies

Terry Castle and Larry Gross, Editors

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS

Claudia Card

John D’Emilio

Esther Newton

Anne Peplau

Eugene Rice

Kendall Thomas

Jeffrey Weeks

Between Men ~ Between Women
is a forum for current lesbian and gay scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The series includes both books that rest within specific traditional disciplines and are substantially about gay men, bisexuals, or lesbians and books that are interdisciplinary in ways that reveal new insights into gay, bisexual, or lesbian experience, transform traditional disciplinary methods in consequence of the perspectives that experience provides, or begin to establish lesbian and gay studies as a freestanding inquiry Established to contribute to an increased understanding of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, the series also aims to provide through that understanding a wider comprehension of culture in general.

Contents

Introduction

1.  “The Loves of Women for Each Other”: “Romantic Friends” in the Twentieth Century

The Educated “Spinster”

The Metamorphosis of Romantic Friendship

“Poets and Lovers Evermore”

Lesbian Sex Between “Devoted Companions”

2.  A Worm in the Bud: The Early Sexologists and Love Between Women

Sexual Inversion and “Masculine” or Transvestite Women

Feminists as Sexual Freaks

The Attack on “Romantic Friendship”

The Dissemination of Knowledge Through Fiction

Why Some Lesbians Accepted the Congenital Invert Theory

3.  Lesbian Chic: Experimentation and Repression in the 1920s

The Roots of Bisexual Experimentation

White “Slumming” in Harlem

Black Lesbians in Harlem

A Note on Working-Class Lesbian Communities Elsewhere in America

Lesbians in Bohemia

The Heterosexual Revolution and the Lesbian in the Woodpile

4.  Wastelands and Oases: The 1930s

Kinder, Kuche, Kirche and the “Bisexual” Compromise

The View from the Outside

“In the Life”

Lesbian Sex in the 1930s

5.  “Naked Amazons and Queer Damozels”: World War II and Its Aftermath

Armies of Lovers

A “Government-Sponsored” Subculture

The Heyday of the Lesbian “Sicko”

Curing Lesbians on the Couch

6.  The Love that Dares Not Speak Its Name: McCarthyism and Its Legacy

“Are You or Have You Even Been a Member of a Lesbian Relationship?”

War in the Cold War Years: The Military Witch-Hunts

A Sad Legacy

7.  Butches, Femmes, and Kikis: Creating Lesbian Subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s

Working-Class and Young Lesbians: The Gay Bars

Working-Class and Young Lesbians: Butch/Femme Roles

“Kiki” Lesbians: The Upper and Middle Classes and Subculture Clashes

8.  “Not a Public Relations Movement”: Lesbian Revolutions in the 1960s Through ’70s

The Gay Revolution: Quiet Beginnings

The Gay Revolution: Explosion

Love Between Women in a New Light

The Lesbian-Feminist Revolution

Splits, Coalitions, and Resolutions

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

Blueprints for a Lesbian-Feminist Culture

Culture Building: The Media

Taking Care of Our Own: Body and Soul

Being “Politically Correct”

Factions and Battles

10. Lesbian Sex Wars in the 1980s

Lesbian Sex and the Cultural Feminists

The Struggle to Be Sexually Adventurous

The Attraction of “Opposites”

11. From Tower of Babel to Community: Lesbian Life in the 1980s

The Shift to Moderation

Validation of Diversity

Unity

A Note on the ’90s: Queer Nation?

Epilogue: Social Constructions and the Metamorphoses of Love Between Women

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

A book of this nature could not be written without the generous help of many people and institutions. For assigned time to pursue my research and writing, I wish to thank the English Department at California State University, Fresno, and the former dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, Dr. Joseph Satin. For opening their doors to me, even at hours not always convenient to them, I am grateful to the staff of the Blanche Baker Memorial Library of the One Institute, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Collection in Los Angeles and the New York Lesbian Herstory Archives. My special thanks go to Degania Golove and Joan Nestle. For invaluable photographic and computer assistance I am grateful to Phyllis Irwin and Avrom Faderman. For arranging numerous interviews for me and often providing transportation and lodging and always support and encouragement, I thank Clare Freeman, Tracy Rappaport, and Peg Cruikshank in San Francisco; Sonia and Allison in New York; Olivia Sawyers, JoAnn, Margaret, and Ann in San Antonio; the women of Bookwoman and Dede in Austin; Sharon Young, Suzanne Valery, and River Malcom in San Diego; Alice and Jacki in Los Angeles; Mary Ann and Dena in Carson City; Sari Dworkin and Nancy in Fresno; Judy Carlson in Kansas City; Marsha Pelham and Tomi in Boston; Joy Letta Alice of Commonwoman Bookstore, and Kathleen Wingard in Lincoln, Nebraska; and Muriel Rada and Rhonda in Omaha. For their wonderful support when I needed it most, I thank my agent Sandra Dijkstra and my editor at Columbia University Press, Ann Miller. I am especially grateful to the women across the country who were willing to talk to me about their lives and gave me so many hours of their time.

Introduction

In 1843 the American author William Cullen Bryant wrote an essay for the
Evening Post
in which he glowingly described a trip to Vermont, where, among nature’s beauties, he had the opportunity to observe a beautiful “female friendship” between two revered “maiden ladies.” Bryant was not alone in his boundless admiration for the pair and the peaceful and loving relationship they established together, as he said when he gave their history:

In their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for 40 years, during which they have shared each others’ occupations and pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other tenderly in sickness…. They slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each others relations, and … I would tell you of their dwelling, encircled with roses, … and I would speak of the friendly attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them.
¹

If such a description of love between two women had been published in an American newpaper a century later, surely the editor’s desk would have been piled high with correspondence about immorality in Vermont (slept on the same pillow!) and the two women in question would have felt constrained to sue Bryant for defamation of character in order to clear their good names. In 1843, however, the two ladies were flattered and the newspaper’s readers were charmed.

What is apparent through this example and hundreds of others that have now been well documented by social historians is that women’s intimate relationships were universally encouraged in centuries outside of our own. There were, of course, some limitations placed on those relationships as far as society was concerned. For instance, if an eligible male came along, the women were not to feel that they could send him on his way in favor of their romantic friendship; they were not to hope that they could find gainful employment to support such a same-sex love relationship permanently or that they could usurp any other male privileges in support of that relationship; and they were not to intimate in any way that an erotic element might possibly exist in their love for each other. Outside of those strictures, female same-sex love—or “romantic friendship,” as it was long called—was a respected social institution in America.

What went on in secret between two women who were passionately attached to each other, as William Cullen Bryant’s friends were, is naturally more difficult to reconstruct than their contemporaries’ attitude toward what they thought they were seeing. There were few women before our era who would have committed confessions regarding erotic exchanges to writing. Trial records indicate that females of the lower classes who were vulnerable to harassment by the criminal courts sometimes had sexual relations with each other, but there is no comparable record in America for “respectable” women. One might speculate that since they generally lived in a culture that sought to deny the possiblitity of women’s autonomous sexuality, many of them cultivated their own asexuality, and while they might have kissed and hugged on the same pillow, their intimate relations never crossed the boundary to the genitally sexual. But surely for some of them kissing and hugging led eventually to other things and their ways of loving each other were no different from what the twentieth century would describe with certainty as “lesbian.”

However, such a description of love between two women would have been unlikely in earlier times because the concept barely existed. While some outrageous, lawless women might have stooped to unspeakable activity with other females, there was no such thing as a “lesbian” as the twentieth century recognizes the term; there was only the rare woman who behaved immorally, who was thought to live far outside the pale of decent womanhood. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the
category
of the lesbian—or the female sexual invert—was formulated. Once she was widely recognized as an entity, however, relationships such as the one Bryant described took on an entirely different meaning—not only as viewed by society, but also as viewed by the two women who were involved. They now had a set of concepts and questions (which were uncomfortable to many of them) by which they had to scrutinize feelings that would have been seen as natural and even admirable in earlier days.