LILLIAN FADERMAN burst onto the scene of GLBT scholarship in 1981 with a book titled Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. Here she advanced the novel argument that romantic friendships—an exclusive and passionate, albeit nonsexual in most cases, relationship—was an accepted institution in many pockets of Western civilization up to the 20th century.
This year marks the re-issue of a book first published by Dr. Faderman in 1991, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, which documents the diverse array of lesbian subcultures that emerged in various American geographies starting in the 1920’s. The book was originally published by Columbia University Press. A year later, in 1992, Viking Penguin bought the paperback rights and kept the book in print all these years. Penguin’s agreement with Columbia University Press was for twenty years, so Columbia took the rights back this year and has just come out with their own paperback edition, published on Valentine’s day, 2012.
Among her eight books are 1999’s To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America and (with Stuart Timmons) Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (2006). Her memoir, Naked in the Promised Land, was published in 2003.
This interview was conducted by telephone in early March.
Mary Meriam: How did lesbians first begin to find each other? Where did they go, and what did they do?
Lillian Faderman: I think it depended so much on who those lesbians were, especially in terms of class. For instance, I’ve discovered in my research that even in the late 19th century, in some big cities like New York and L.A., there were night clubs—in New York, for instance in the Bowery; in Los Angeles, in the Skid Row area of downtown. There were these clubs where lesbians and homosexual men and other “disreputable” types would go. So the working-class lesbians might have found each other that way.
The situation was very different for middle-class lesbians. I found a really interesting memoir by a woman by the name of Mary Casal called The Stone Wall, published in 1930. But she was talking about the turn of the century. She saw herself as a very middle-class woman, and she had a lover named Juno, also very middle-class. One night they went down to the Bowery and into one of those disreputable places. She wrote very openly about the importance of their physical relationship, but made a real distinction between herself and “those women” at that club in the Bowery, who were the sexual “inverts.” She saw them as disreputable and scary and as having nothing at all to do with her. I think that was probably a fairly typical view of a middle-class woman, even in the late 19th century. I think middle-class lesbians often found each other the way probably middle-class lesbians do today. They found each other in college or they found each other in a job that they might have had. There were certainly middle-class lesbians who peeked into those bars in the early 20th century, but I don’t think they made a habit of going there.
MM: So what was going on in Harlem and Greenwich Village in the 1920’s?
LF: In the 1920’s, New York was a jumping place for homosexuals, for both gay men and women. There was certainly a gay African-American culture in Harlem in the 1920’s. White homosexuals went there as well. And I think it’s because sometimes they told themselves that black people—“Negroes” was the word—were so accepting of difference, but from my research, I don’t think that was the case at all. I think tourism was not discouraged because of economic need, but it was almost a kind of white colonialism, as white gay men and lesbians felt that they could go to these clubs in Harlem and be accepted because “anything goes in Harlem.” They went “slumming” in Harlem. There were clubs that weren’t usually exclusively lesbian clubs or gay male clubs, but rather places where everyone went if they wanted a good time, or just the excitement of the more open kind of sexuality.
I think homosexuals and heterosexuals went to those clubs together. As I say in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, very often the lines blurred. Somebody might have gone in thinking they were heterosexual. If it was a woman and there was a very attractive woman who asked her to dance, it seems that she didn’t say no. The same was true of men who might have gone in there thinking they were heterosexual and found an attractive man. One couple goes in thinking they’re straight, and the woman dances with another beautiful black woman, and the man is attracted to two rather feminine “brown boys,” as Dos Passos calls them. So there was not only mixing in terms of sexual orientation, but in terms of race in these clubs in the 1920’s.
In Greenwich Village, as well, people were often encouraged to be sexually open, and that meant not only heterosexually open, but homosexually open, too. Which is not to say there wasn’t any prejudice about homosexuals. For instance, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay had an affair with the writer Floyd Dell, and apparently he said to her before their affair started, “I know about you, you had these trifling little lesbian relationships, but you never had the real thing. I’m going to show you the real thing.” But I think homosexuality was kind of titillating for many bohemians, and they saw themselves as super-sophisticated when they were open to homosexuality.
What I discovered in the course of my research is there were lesbian and gay circles outside of big cities like New York, L.A., and Chicago. For instance, I came across a group of lesbians who lived in the 1920’s in Salt Lake City, Utah. There was no lesbian bar that they could go to, but these were middle-class professional women. They had dinner parties. They met each other at work. They introduced one another so that their circle would expand. So it was this fairly big group of middle-class lesbian women in Salt Lake City of all places, in the 1920’s and the early 30’s.
MM: You’ve argued that Freudian thinking had an influence on lesbian self-perceptions at this time. How so?
LF: This was the era when everyone was talking about Freud and psychoanalysis. In Odd Girls, I quote Susan Glaspell, who says that you couldn’t go out to buy a bun without hearing someone talk about their complexes. In the 1920’s, it was very chic to pretend that you knew all about Freud’s attitudes towards homosexuality. Freud was obviously very complex. For instance, he wrote a letter to an American mother who had contacted him to lament the fact that her son was a homosexual, and his response was there’s really nothing wrong with it; don’t be so upset; what’s important is that he make a good adjustment. Then there was his paper on a case of lesbianism, and though he’s certainly not moralistic or condemning, he presents her homosexuality as being due to difficult parental relationships, and her inability to make a mature sexual adjustment.
That’s what the Freudians really pounced on. They forgot all about Freud’s letter to an American mother when they talked about homosexuality as arrested development, about women becoming lesbians if they’re overly close to their father or have a problematic relationship with their mother. I think they presented homosexuality in much more pathological terms than Freud did in most of his writing. The Freudians were truly destructive for homosexuals with their attempts to cure them through a long and expensive course of psychoanalysis, which generally did nothing for homosexuals except enhance their feelings that they were pathological and create an awful lot of misery.
MM: What were some of the best and worst experiences of lesbians in the military?
LF: I don’t know that there were great experiences if lesbians tried to be openly lesbian. The experience of the women I interviewed was really dependent on the time they were in the military. When they served during a war, whether it was World War II or the Korean War or the Vietnam War, the higher echelons usually had a policy of looking the other way. The military did not want to get rid of women who were trained at great expense while a war was going on. I know of instances where it was found out that there were two women lovers working in a particular unit. But instead of getting rid of them, instead of even discussing it with them, they were separated.
After the war, in the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s, the witch-hunts in the military were absolutely merciless. I interviewed one woman, for instance, who told me that inspectors found a ring with a woman’s name engraved inside. It was her mother’s ring and name, but they confiscated the ring as evidence against this woman. The authorities felt that they had a right to do that, to prove the lesbianism of an enlisted woman. I interviewed several women who told me horrific stories about being mercilessly grilled by the Office of Special Services and forced to give the names of other women who were lesbian. Then they were all kicked out of the military with less than honorable discharges.
In contrast, I interviewed a number of women who were nurses during the Vietnam War, and they told me in the hospitals where they worked, they were openly lesbian. Everyone knew that they were lesbian, to my great surprise. I interviewed eight or nine nurses at a Texas military base, and when I asked why they weren’t kicked out, they said, “It costs so much to train us, and they needed us so much that there’s no way they would have gotten rid of us no matter what we did, short of something obscene on the floor, or doing something terrible to the patients.” But they were permitted to conduct their own private lives as they wanted to.
MM: So in what way did attitudes about lesbians shift before and after World War II?
LF: Well, I think that before the War, except in sophisticated big cities, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of awareness of homosexuality. I interviewed a woman for Odd Girls who told me that she had taught at a school with another woman for many years. She was positive that the other woman was a lesbian, and she thought the woman knew she was a lesbian, but they never used that word. One time they were at a store shopping for party favors, and there were those little paper umbrellas that you find in drinks, and she opened one and it read “Let’s be gay,” and she gave it to her friend. That was the beginning of their being able to talk about the fact that they were both homosexuals. This was already in the 1960’s, and “gay” was still an inside word, one that the straight population didn’t know.
After World War II, with the McCarthy era, there was a period of terrible witch-hunting on the job. It began, of course, with homosexuals who were employed in the federal government beginning in 1950. There was a witch-hunt for all federal employees who were gay. That spread quickly to local and state government. Of course, middle-class lesbians were quite likely to be employed in local or state government as teachers or social workers or nurses. No matter who you were, if you were gay in the 50’s and in the 60’s you really had to be looking over your shoulder all the time.
MM: How did lesbians learn to survive these oppressive tactics?
LF: Some lesbians didn’t survive. I came out in the 1950’s, and I can remember being at my first lesbian bar—a gay girls bar, we called them in those days. And I was sitting next to a bunch of lesbians who had just gotten back from a funeral for a lesbian friend who had just killed herself. There was just too much pressure out there. It must have been the second time I was in that bar, and you can imagine how scary that story was to me.
I think some lesbians felt compelled, as we talked about before, to go to a shrink, a psychoanalyst or a psychologist, to change their nature. I think many lesbians were very secretive. I think many didn’t dare go out. It was such a relief to go to my corner drug store and find on the book rack there, a bunch of lesbian books [pulp fiction]. So wonderful to read those lesbian books. That was kind of a survival.
Another way to survive was to be very hidden. I remember interviewing a woman who told me she was a physical therapist, and she and her lover worked in the same hospital, and they lived together, and they only had one car. They would drive to work together. And when they approached the hospital, the one who wasn’t driving would get all the way down on the floor, beneath the driver’s seat, and hide, and the one that was driving would of course pull the car into the hospital parking lot and get out and go to work. And then the other one would wait fifteen minutes and kind of peek up and look around and make sure nobody was around, and then she would go out of the car, and she would go to work. Crazy tactics like that that people had to use.
Another method of survival—and I did it myself when I was a young lesbian—was to pretend that you were heterosexual by showing up at various places with a man, usually a gay man. Or they had front marriages. And the front marriage meant that two homosexuals, a male and a female, would get together and marry, and so for the whole world, they were man and wife. But the understanding was that they would have their own life with same-sex lovers.
Or they simply told no one. They—the person they loved and often lived with—were often secretive and had very few friends. Or they had friends, but they had friends who were discreet. I interviewed a number of people who told me about how worried they were even to have house parties.
There were other types of camaraderie that were happier. I know that working-class and young women in particular very often played softball, and that was a big thing in the lesbian community. It wouldn’t be as likely that you would get busted if you played softball as if you went to a lesbian bar, a gay girls bar. So that was another way to survive. To find a recreation where you could be with other women and still not be in danger.
MM: How would you characterize lesbian feminism?
LF: In the 1960’s, there was the feminist movement, and as a result of that, many women had consciousness raising, and in those consciousness raising sessions, I think a lot of feminists realized that they could love women. They could make a choice to love women. They didn’t have to be stuck in heterosexuality, particularly since in the radical feminist movement, men were seen as being chauvinistic and bad for women who wanted egalitarian relationships.
So, I think through radical feminism, they often came to love other women and then came to identify themselves as lesbian feminists. On the other hand, I had been a lesbian long before feminism came along, but I too identified myself as a lesbian feminist because I was a feminist, and I was certainly a lesbian. In some cases, I think lesbian feminism was a political identity. In other cases it was more than that. I think they genuinely fell in love with another woman. So for some of them, it became a lifelong choice. For others, I think it was sometimes an experiment.
MM: What were some of the positive contributions of the lesbian-feminist movement?
LF: lesbian feminism was fabulous. It was really great fun in so many ways, and I think its contributions were huge. What serious lesbian feminists wanted to do was start a lesbian-feminist culture. They did that. They had wonderful bookstores that focused on women’s books and lesbian books. They had wonderful publishing houses that were specifically lesbian feminist, and I think they created some terrific writers in their day who saw themselves as lesbian feminists. I know this in a very personal way. I had published a few college textbooks, but I began writing seriously once I came to lesbian feminism. It’s that I was so excited about the ideas, and I knew also that lesbian feminism provided an audience for me. So I began doing lesbian research, and I published about half a dozen articles in the 1970’s which led to my book, Surpassing the Love of Men.
There was wonderful lesbian-feminist music at that time, with terrific singers and huge audiences. There were music festivals that attracted thousands of women who were the audiences for lesbian-feminist singers and lesbian-feminist comics. It was a whole culture that I think was so encouraging for many women and really showed women that they could do things for themselves. They didn’t have to rely on male-dominated publishing houses, or on bookstores that very often were geared towards male readers, and not particularly interested in books that were focused on speaking to other women.
They created their own newspapers. They created such a vibrant and exciting culture. A number of lesbian feminists returned to the land, creating these interesting self-sufficient lesbian-feminist communes. These things didn’t last very long, but while they were going, they were really quite extraordinary.
Mary Meriam is the editor of Lavender Review.
