Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (45 page)

Although most lesbian-feminists were middle class by virtue of their education, which tended to be much higher than that of women in the general populace, class became a major divisive issue among them. As radicals, lesbian-feminists generally shared the intellectual Left’s romance with the working class. Women who had the skills to make a living at nontraditional jobs—carpenters, house painters, welders—were far more politically correct than professionals, who were seen as having to compromise themselves in the system in order to advance. A mystique developed that could be used as a guilt-inducing bludgeon on those who had been raised in the middle class.

Class was determined not by the usual American indicators such as schooling or even present salary. “You can have a college education, but you don’t stop being working class,” “working-class” women (many of whom had been to college) attested with pride. They observed that women who tried to stop being working class and sought upward mobility risked oppressing women who could not be anything other than working class. As one lesbian-feminist writer lamented about her earlier behavior when she left the working class into which she was born, “The most oppressive attitude I had accepted was that because I had become middle class, worked my way ‘up,’ I was better than other working-class women who were still down there.” The working class was seen as superior to the middle class, at least partly by virtue of its poverty, which attested to its moral innocence in a corrupt society. Lesbian-feminists who had been raised in the middle class and had been willing or unwilling beneficiaries of their fathers’ corruption were regarded among “working-class” lesbian-feminists in the same way that light-skinned blacks were during the era of black militancy: their past was not quite honorable.
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Middle-class lesbian-feminists were thus constantly on the defensive. “You are an enemy of lower-class women,” they were reminded early in the movement, “if you continue destructive behavior based on your sense of middle-class superiority.” “Destructive behavior” might even consist of using big words that would show off a superior education. When one lesbian-feminist writer admitted her pleasure in “the art of conversation,” she felt she must hasten to add, “Lest you think I’m suspect, my father was a barber, my mother a housewife, and I only pay $1.00 for my food stamps.”
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Since they generally adhered to radical ideas about the corruption of hierarchy, many “middle-class” lesbian-feminists acquiesced to the burden of guilt and felt they had to drop out of the middle class. They became
nouveau pauvre
or at least downwardly mobile.

Another major source of conflict within the movement came from those who wanted to push radicalism even further than other lesbian-feminists were prepared to go. Lesbian separatists were at the forefront of this battle. Borrowing from the example of black separatists who believed that blacks were impeded by any relationship with whites—even the most liberal and beneficent-seeming—lesbian separatists argued that Lesbian Nation would never be established unless lesbian-feminists broke away not only from men but from all heterosexual women as well. They believed that now, while they awaited the millennium when a true Lesbian Nation would be born, they must establish outposts to the future, tribal groupings of a fugitive Lesbian Nation, and not vitiate their energies, in trying to reform the present hopeless structure of patriarchy. They put out a call to all lesbian-feminists to “explore with fact and imagination our dyke/ amazon culture of the past, before there were parasitic male mutants, and to work toward our dyke/amazon culture of the future, when only xx’s exist.” They had blind faith that their withdrawal from heterosexuals in itself would hasten the dissolution of the patriarchy and the advent of a Utopian dyke/amazon world.
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Although many lesbian separatists had come to lesbianism through feminism, they quickly dissociated themselves from the feminist movement, which was involved in issues the separatists believed to be irrelevant, such as abortion, child care, and shelters for battered wives. In impassioned rhetoric they exhorted other lesbians:

Quit begging our straight sisters to let us be their niggers in the movement, and stop taking all the insults and shit work the pussy cats and their toms can heap on us. If we can step forward, we should do so with the intention of working for
our own cause.
Either way, we Lesbians are going to get it right between the legs in a sex war unless we realize soon the folly of our Pollyanna relations with straight sisters and gay brothers and especially Big Brothers.

The separatists felt they had to be perpetually alert to other lesbian-feminists’ confused priorities and commitments, which would vitiate their program. They wanted to impose a purity of vision on the community by refusing energy not only to straight women, but even to lesbians who befriended straight women. Lesbians’ needs had to come first, they insisted, even if it meant giving up relations with heterosexual relatives that one might love. To avoid psychic contamination the separatists demanded women-only spaces, both at home and when they went into the community for social or political events.
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Some lesbian separatists formed living and working collectives in the cities. But since it was harder to be purist in their practices if they lived in a city, many separatists established communal farms and became, as one of their 1970s journals called them, country women. The country was, anyway, preferable to city living, they said, because the city was a man-made world where lesbians’ energy was diverted in a struggle to survive and live true to their principles. There were even attempts to establish land trusts that would be available to all women “at all times, forever,” and there was a “women’s land circuit,” which consisted of individual women-owned farms where lesbians could drop by to work and stay for days or months or even years.

Their Utopian quests were reflected in women’s science fiction novels written in the 1970s in which the characters usually took refuge in distant countrysides, away from the evils wrought by men, who had mucked up most of the world so it could not be lived in anymore. In Sally Gearhart’s
The Wanderground,
women are able to wander the grounds in the country under the protection of nature, unlike in the city, where they are men’s prey. In Rochelle Singer’s
The Demeter Flower,
nature obliges the women by wiping out the civilization of men “because it threatened her and her children” and women can start from scratch.
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But starting from scratch in real life was not easy. Most of the separatists had been city women without even the basic country survival skills such as splitting wood, plumbing, or planting. They had to learn quickly, often with no help. Their problems could be intensified by the isolation of their chosen situation. They had no outside input to aid them in mediating conflicts that arose within the commune. Rough spots in relationships were not smoothed over by consanguinity or legal ties as in a heterosexual family, and a bad quarrel could easily break up a collective. Although the women often made noble efforts, most of the country communes that were established in the 1970s died before the next decade.
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Perhaps some lesbian separatist communes did not enjoy longevity for the same reasons that the many hippie communes which preceded them were not long-lived: in an isolated situation, where none of the measuring sticks and brakes of the outside world had relevance, listlessness and anomie set in. As they awaited the birth of Lesbian Nation, the members found themselves becoming diverted from their high purpose, and the realization that Utopia was not within easy grasp became disillusioning and frightening. As Suzanne remembers her experience on a commune outside of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the mid-1970s:

Some women got a hundred acres in the country with a house and some small buildings, and about twelve of us started living on the land. It was great in the beginning, but after a while I felt I was getting too far out. We were all doing hallucinogens and coke. I had no idea where people got the money, but the drugs were always there. No one had jobs. We just did odd jobs once in a while. We just worked to get by. We were doing vision quests (spiritual seeking), being in touch with nature. My cat was a psychic traveller. We grew fat. I finally got a dog just to keep me grounded. Then I left.
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But although like Suzanne many women left the communes and separatism with some disillusionment, they often recognized that they had gained from the experience. Separatism allowed them to immerse themselves in women’s culture in a way that for many of them resulted in “an overwhelming positive sense of congruency” that was “a powerful healing force,” as one 1970s separatist describes it. They were not forced to feel split and disoriented by working in the heterosexual world by day and the lesbian-feminist world by night, as many women were. Separatism had value, too, in that it sent a dramatic message to heterosexual feminists and homosexual men who cared to listen that lesbians believed that their interests were being overlooked in the feminist and gay movements and that they had some grievances that needed heeding before they were willing to become political allies. For some women, separatism became a political tool, a dynamic strategy that they could move in and out of whenever they felt their interests were being ignored in the larger movement or they needed more space to develop their insights.
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Separatism as a permanent way of life, however, as most of the separatists discovered, was easier in science fiction than in reality.

The grievances lesbian separatists had toward the larger movements were analogous to the grievances lesbians of color had toward white lesbian-feminists. Although radical doctrine enthusiastically encouraged the inclusion of lesbians of color in the lesbian-feminist movement, few participated. They too felt that their interests had been overlooked and it would not be to their advantage to try to integrate into a predominantly white movement.

Racial and ethnic minority homosexuals saw that lesbians and gay men were scorned in their parent communities, because at the height of civil rights movements it seemed that suddenly homosexuals had popped up and were trying to steal the minorities’ thunder by calling themselves a “minority.” But even before that source of conflict, homosexuals were generally more outcast in those communities than in many white communities, because the minority racial and ethnic communities tended to be working class and particularly rigid about machismo and sexuality. One black writer attributes homophobia among blacks to the black movement’s attempt to offset the myth of the black matriarchy by enhancing the image of black manhood. She observes, “Naturally the woman-identified-woman, the black lesbian, was a threat not only to the projection of black male macho, but a sexual threat, too—the utmost danger to the black man’s institutionally designated role as ‘King of Lovers.’” While black women on the whole may have found more freedom than white women to participate in sex, such freedom was limited to heterosexual sex.
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The black lesbian was safest in the closet. Other racial and ethnic minorities shared that antipathy toward lesbianism. Perhaps lesbianism was in such disfavor among minorities because on American ground they had often fought to preserve their own culture, which might dictate that women be unquestioningly obedient, and lesbianism is the epitome of sexual and social disobedience.

To compound the problem, socially aware racial and ethnic minority lesbians frequently felt that at a time when their people were finally organizing to demand rights, it was their inescapable duty to give their allegiance to their parent culture. They believed they needed to fight side by side with heterosexual men and women of their group in order to alleviate the kind of discrimination and oppression they had experienced even before they became lesbians. To them their parent culture seemed to have the greater need, and they felt they could not fight in two armies. Many believed that compared with the problems of their ethnic and racial groups, lesbians’ and women’s problems were insignificant. “We are fighting for survival—jobs, housing, education, and most importantly struggling for a sense of dignity in a country dominated by whites,” one Puerto Rican woman wrote after resigning her brief membership in a group called Lesbian Feminist Liberation: “Our problems are immediate, not long range. We as women in the [ethnic] community in order to be effective must accept their priorities as our own. We must put aside our lesbian-feminist perspectives and work within the framework that exists.” As minority members in a racist society, they also believed that there was a danger in attributing patriarchal corruption to biological male-ness. Any kind of argument based on biological determinism was bad, they recognized, since it had often been used by racists to “prove” the inferiority of minorities. They felt greater solidarity with “progressive” minority men than with white lesbian-feminists who, it seemed to them, were denying that race could be as much a source of women’s oppression as sex.
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Although the lesbian-feminist community tried to welcome them, even those minority lesbians who were not involved in civil rights struggles often felt alienated from lesbian-feminism. They believed that in a pinch it was their parent community that they would have to rely on for survival. They continued to live lives not significantly different from those of lesbians in earlier eras, frequently in butch/ femme role relationships or without social contacts among other women who loved women. For them there was nothing relevant or comfortable in lesbian-feminist life. Leslie, a Native American woman who had had an eighteen-year relationship with a black woman, a mother of two children, explains that throughout the 1970s: “Because of the children we didn’t have any lesbian friends. We didn’t want the kids to have to suffer in school. And we didn’t have anything in common with the lesbian community around here anyway. I didn’t want to go in the street and hold up signs and march in parades.” They socialized with other minority people who were heterosexual. Lesbian-feminism seemed like a strange and distant world to them.
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