The World Split Open (34 page)

Invited by a friend in NOW to the Congress to Unite Women, one feminist began to realize how scared some feminists were of lesbians. “I went to the Conference with much curiosity. I had high hopes of seeing a Lesbian. And I did . . . and they didn't look very different from anyone else except that they seemed stronger, more articulate, more attractive, more powerful, and funnier than the other women.”

Rita Mae Brown was the first up-front lesbian I ever saw. She was marvelous. Small, beautiful, strong, wearing a “Super-Dyke” T-shirt which she had dyed Lavender. . . . When she asked for women in the audience to join their Lesbian sisters at the front of the auditorium, I jumped up, eager to be counted as a sister traveler. A friend sitting with me, who I knew to be a Lesbian, would not join us. When I asked her why, she said it was too dangerous. That made me want to be a Lesbian even more. After all if Kate Millett and Anselma Del'Olio were not afraid to be lesbian-identified, why should I be? Besides, I thought the Lavender Menace take-over of the conference was done delightfully and humorously. . . . They had seized the time and created a Lavender Happening.
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Between 1970 and 1975, countless women's liberationists made the “political choice” to live life as lesbians. By describing lesbianism as a political choice, these activists reframed female homosexuality as something other than sexually deviant behavior. The American Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders provided legitimacy for such a position. But to women who already considered themselves lesbians, these “political lesbians” seemed strange. One young feminist “decided” that she was going to have sex with a woman.

Even though I had not yet had sex with a woman, I was sure that it would be far superior to sex with men. Politically, I wanted my energy to be going to support wimmin and to building a feminist revolution together, not to struggling with individual men.

When she met an older lesbian, she was scared to tell her that

I had never slept with a woman, afraid she would not be interested in me because I was so inexperienced. She was very surprised and taken aback by my hesitant admission of Lesbian virginity. A dyke of ten years, out long before there was any such thing as feminism, she could not understand how I could be so militantly Lesbian before I had even made love with a woman!
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In 1972, Robin Morgan found herself caught in the crossfire between lesbian and heterosexual feminists. The First Lesbian Feminist Conference in Los Angeles had invited her to give its keynote address. Criticized and questioned by lesbian feminists as to why she—a wife and a mother of a son—was going to address the fifteen hundred lesbians at the conference, she responded that she was an engaged activist in the movement who supported lesbians. In New York, Radicalesbians had recently warned her, “Don't you dare call yourself a lesbian—you live with a man and you have a child.” Like other women, Morgan was discovering that in such an environment, you could not, after all, simply identify yourself as a “political lesbian.”

Tired of what she called “vanguarditis,” Morgan later described the absurd fragmentation of the movement:

There were lesbians, lesbian-feminists, dykes, dyke-feminists, dyke-separatists, “old dykes,” butch dykes, bar dykes, and killer dykes. . . . There were divisions between Political Lesbians and Real Lesbians and Nouveau Lesbians. Heaven help a woman who is unaware of these fine political distinctions and who wanders into a meeting, for the first time, thinking she maybe has a right to be there because she likes women.
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Many heterosexual and lesbian feminists shared Morgan's sentiments, but just as many felt intimidated by some lesbians' moral self-righteousness. In 1974, a member of a Kansas City women's liberation movement wrote that “she and other heterosexuals felt uncomfortable with lesbians—not because they were deviant, but because they felt their entire lives judged to be as inadequate, inferior, backsliding, not feminist enough.” She still felt like a novice, she explained, and had “not come far enough along for a lesbian love relationship right now.”
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But it was not just political pressure that turned some feminists' attention to other women. Nor did all lesbians feel a need to politicize their sexual orientation. “Nouveau Lesbians,” a term used to describe the newly converted by those who had been lesbians before the women's movement, made their exodus from heterosexuality seem immensely appealing. More than one feminist discovered that life as a lesbian quickly resolved the painful conflicts between her feminist convictions and heterosexual relationships. “I think that part of it was dealing with issues like pornography,” the novelist Valerie Miner explained. “It was very hard to go from [these kinds of revelations and discussions] to home to a man at the end of the day. . . . I felt that I would be able to have more time for women and feminist activities if I were involved with a woman.”
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In personal conversations, in testimonies, in feminist fiction, and at meetings, new lesbians gushed euphorically, thrilled by their newfound sexual passion. Women, they said, were better lovers. They took their time, they snuggled, they teased, they wove sexual and emotional intimacy into a seamless passionate experience. And, better yet, they didn't need a guided tour of women's anatomy. Given the self-evident superiority of such relationships, they asked, how could women still sleep with men?

Women who had married early, doubtful of their attraction for men, sometimes discovered that they were actually attracted to women. “I
really had no identity of my own,” wrote one married woman. “I was somebody's wife, mother, lover, friend, daughter and so on, ad infinitum. I blended. I accommodated. My theme song was, ‘tell me what it is you want me to be and I'll be that.'” The woman's movement freed her to see “her sexual preference” no longer as a handicap, or a “crippling disease.” “My life changed dramatically in a relatively short time from Mrs. Straight White Suburbia to Ms. Alternative Lifestyle.”
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As a result of the women's movement, wrote Sara Lucia Hoagland,

forgotten dreams became possibilities as my first feminist perceptions, having snatched my attention two years earlier, now settled solidly in my gut. I had never quite buried my childhood rage at grown women acting like two-year-olds around men.

At the time, Hoagland didn't think she was physically attracted to women but had begun to argue that “political Lesbianism was a legitimate alternative.” Soon she experienced sex with a woman. “It was the most natural thing in the world. I wondered where I had been all my life, yet I did not regret one moment spent in arriving. To this day I wonder why it is not called, ‘coming home.' For the first time I was at ease with being a woman, body and soul were united—healed—or was it completed?”
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Beverly Toll could hardly believe the love and passion she now experienced with another woman. “The best way I can describe it,” she wrote, “is to say that this is the only time in my life when making love was completely spontaneous. I didn't think about it; if I had I would probably have pulled away from this kind, gentle womyn that was touching me. It didn't occur to me to question what was happening. There were no decisions to be made. I thought of nothing, experienced for the first time in my life, the tender, satisfying love of a womyn.”
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The difference seemed astounding to women who had rarely enjoyed sex with men. “Suddenly you aren't alone anymore. This closeness, this sharing with another womon amazes you. This could be a womon you've known all your life, you know each other so well. You can't believe that all this happiness has descended upon you in the form of this blue-jeaned thick-shoed womon.”
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Some lesbians feared straight women's disapproval. And many straight women feared lesbians' condemnation. In such an atmosphere, fear turned into self-righteousness, and by 1972, a “gay-straight” split
affected nearly every women's liberation group. Only in small cities or less-urban settings did gay and straight feminists continue to cling together, given the common enmity they faced. By the end of the decade, some heterosexual women clearly felt defensive. As one straight woman quipped, “The women's movement is the only place in the world where women have to come out of the closet as a heterosexual.”
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Not surprisingly, idealizing lesbian relationships created its own problems. Some feminists ended their relationships with men only to discover the predictable reality that all intimate relationships are laced with emotional land mines. Between lesbian feminists, who were students or middle-class, and “bar lesbians,” who were predominantly working-class, lay even deeper cultural and political differences. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, lesbian feminists at first criticized bar lesbians “for mimicking heterosexuality” by adopting butch-femme roles. These new lesbians, committed to equality between themselves, argued that the butch-femme relationship replicated heterosexual power relations, turned women into sex objects, and they criticized the bar lesbians for not participating in feminist activities. Over time, these differences diminished. By the late seventies, a local lesbian bar hosted feminist fund-raisers. Lesbian feminists, for their part, began to recognize how bar culture had allowed prefeminist lesbians to survive and began to mute their critiques of butch-femme subculture.
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In some regions, at particular moments, the pressure to identify as a lesbian grew fierce. Naomi Weisstein, in Chicago, recalled, “Everybody I knew experimented with lesbian relationships—the openness to lesbianism was really very strong.” One day, she went to a meeting and found two women colleagues naked on the sofa. “In those days, it was really uncool to go ‘hey, you're naked and I'm coming for a meeting.' There was an acknowledged social protocol, which was ‘congratulations, how are you?'”
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Barbara Haber remembers moving to Boston in the early seventies as lesbian feminism was just emerging as the political choice du jour. Two of her close friends were having their first lesbian love affair with each other while most of her other friends and acquaintances had already become lesbians. “Many of them,” she observed,

have returned to heterosexuality since that time; others have not. But at that moment it was impossible to be heterosexual. Even if you didn't become a lesbian, you couldn't be a heterosexual.
There was definitely a recoil from heterosexual relationships. If you want to talk about the roots of the women's movement, you have to talk about the roots of that “recoil.”
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Pressure for separation grew increasingly strong. Jill Johnston's book
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution
(1973) gained a surge of media publicity unavailable to most lesbian feminist writers. Based on a series of articles in the
Village Voice
, New York's alternative newspaper, Johnston's book reported on living at the edge of New York's avant-garde art scene and rejected the idea that lesbians were simply women attracted to other women. Such a sexual definition, in her view, was too narrow, even in its focus essentially pornographic, because lesbians were revolutionaries and subversives. “Many feminists,” she argued, “are now stranded between their personal needs and their political persuasions. The lesbian is the woman who unites the personal and the political in the struggle to free ourselves from the oppressive institution [marriage]. . . . By this definition lesbians are in the vanguard of the resistance.” By sleeping with the enemy, heterosexual feminists were, she believed, undermining the revolution against patriarchy.
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The urge to separate not only from men, but also from the nonlesbian women's movement sometimes seemed irresistible. Small groups of lesbian feminists began to found separatist communes, urban as well as rural, some of which even excluded male infants or male children. The Furies, a Washington, D.C., group, became one of the most influential lesbian separatist groups in the country, partly due to the power of their writings, first published in
Off Our Backs
and then in
Quest
, a new magazine they founded.

Before she joined The Furies, Charlotte Bunch, already a veteran activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, had been married. After sleeping with a woman, she chose complete separatism from heterosexual women as well as men. Later, she explained why the Furies had separated from the women's movement:

It [was] because it has been made clear to us that there was no space to develop a lesbian feminist politics and life-style without constant and nonproductive conflict with heterosexual fears, antagonism and insensitivity. . . . The Furies was not just an “alternative community,” but a commitment to women as a political group.
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In 1973, Bunch reemerged from this separatist period. The Furies had made important breakthroughs, but after a year, she reported, “the positive intensity of our interaction threatened to deteriorate into destructive cannibalism.” Still, she wanted heterosexual women to understand that “our time as lesbian feminist separatists . . . allowed us to develop both political insights and concrete projects that now aid women's survival and strengths.” An original thinker with a strong flair for organizing, Bunch would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s as a leading organizer of the international movement to redefine women's rights as “human rights.”
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The gay-straight split fragmented “the sisterhood,” creating various kinds of hierarchies that excluded many women. The emphasis on sexual orientation scared away some women fearful of unfamiliar and unconventional relationships, as well as an alien alternative culture. On the other hand, the rise of lesbian feminism infused the movement with new ideas and theories that helped feminists—and later scholars—to consider the social and cultural construction of gender, as well as the biological nature of sex.
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Lesbian feminists also contributed a disproportionate amount of dedication and energy to the movement. They were the women who worked in the trenches, the women responsible for staffing the growing network of self-help institutions that crisscrossed the country. All over the country, lesbians sustained shelters for battered women, rape crisis hot lines, and health clinics used by women who wouldn't have known the difference between NOW and The Furies, but welcomed the refuge and services that they received. Heterosexual women frequently found it difficult to integrate this mushrooming women's culture into their jobs and families.