The Making of the Modern Homosexual Panel
Featuring Bert Hansen, Karla Jay, Joe Interrante and Gayle Rubin.
Moderated by Greg Sprague.
2 July 1982 in Jorgensen Hall
Transcript
Greg: … this, for a long time to give us an overview of this somewhat complex historical controversy and outline what the different issues have been in this new field of history. Then we’ll have Karla Jay, who is co-editor with Allen Young on three anthologies of gay liberation, including Out of the Closet, After You’re Out, and Lavender Culture, and she’s also the co-author of The Gay Report, and she’s about to leave for Paris to assemble a new slideshow on the lesbian feminist tour of Paris. I wish we could all go with her. Sounds exciting. [audience laughter] She will be talking about one of the institutions that have developed over the years in the lesbian community, and that’s [the] lesbian bar. And she’s looking at it in a unique way, through the use of the gay, the lesbian bar in literature, lesbian literature. And her [paper is] entitled “Life in the Underworld: Lesbian Bar as a Metaphor.”
Then we will turn to Joe Interrante, who is a graduate student in American history at Harvard and is slowly trying to [laughs] unlearn the habits of academic professionalism. That’s right. [audience laughs] He is a member of the Boston area Lesbian and Gay History Project and is also an editor of Radical America, an independent, socialist, feminist journal of culture and politics. And he will be talking about the interrelationship between masculinity and sexual identity.
Finally, but not least, is Gayle Rubin, who is the author of The Traffic in Women, and of an essay on Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien. She’s a member of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, and right now is preparing a dissertation in San Francisco on the gay male leather community. She will speak on the general trends in lesbian history. Okay. We’ll first start with Bert, and I think he will take the podium. Bert Hansen. [audience claps]
Bert Hansen: Thank you Greg. I first have one brief announcement that this afternoon’s presentation by the Buffalo Lesbian Oral History Project, there were some drawings that were passed around in the audience and we got one set back but we didn’t get the second set back. It’s possible someone thought they were a handout and we would very much like to get them back. So if you have them or if you notice someone who walked off with them by mistake, tell them to get them to one of us, this evening or tomorrow morning at the session. Something like that. [flipping pages] My task here in the first fifteen minutes to open the panel is simply to give a sketch, an outline of a new view of sexuality and history, specifically, lesbianism and homosexuality, but as you’ll see from my remarks, it also affects the way we conceive heterosexuality in history and in a very deep way the way we think about sexual possibilities in any time and place, including the present.
There are a number of phrases or titles that are possible for what I am simply often going to call the “new view.” And by “new view” I don’t mean that it has replaced the old view by any means. I think that it is growing in support and in evidence for it, but it by no means has taken the field. One phrase we use is the making of modern, the making of the modern homosexual. Sometimes we talk about the emergence of the modern homosexual. And, when, what you have to keep in mind is a similar phrasing … we might say the modernizing of the modern homosexual, would be a misreading of the thesis, of the argument. Basically, the argument is that homosexuality as we experience it in the twentieth century in the West is something fundamentally different than has ever existed at any other time and place, and that one of the important characteristics of this novelty, the novelty that emerges in steps in various places, and we’re trying to plot out that step by step growth over the last century and a half, perhaps. One of the most important characteristics is that people can think of themselves, can experience their lives, their sexuality, and other parts of their lives, that they are a kind of person. And I think that’s true for, probably true for certainly all the lesbians and gay men in this room. And it’s, it’s largely an urban thing and it’s a Western thing. It’s a growing thing.
Now that sense that there are by and large two kinds of people, straights and gays, even if we say there are also bisexuals, there are people who change back and forth that aren’t so well defined, nonetheless our culture and the culture as we have taken it in and it’s been, become, part of our psychology, it’s not just a social structure out there. It’s part of the way we feel our bodies. The way we give meaning to physical acts in sexual expression is that it ties into our being a kind of person and that by and large people in the world are of one of those two major types, straight and gay. Now, it’s hard for us because we experience that as a gut feeling. And most of us at some time coming out, what was wonderful about coming out was the sense of coming home, that something finally fit, that we could act out who we were, there were no masks, there wasn’t any parade, we could finally be honest. We could be honest publicly, we could be honest with ourselves and be true to our bodies.
Since we have felt that from our gut—we experience it as an internal thing, as an interior thing, a psychological thing—many of us resist the idea that this kind of experience is something that has emerged in time, and that it does not match with something that has always been there. I think most of us want to resist this new view for a number of reasons. One is that we feel it’s so basic, it feels so natural, and when some historians come along and say but it’s only been here a hundred years and only in the West, that there are lots of seemingly negative implications of that view. And after I summarize this position a little more, I’ll come back to the reasons I think people resist it and some of the implications, the political implications, of the new versus the old view. But at its heart, it argues that there is a novelty in the strongest possible sense of novelty. [flipping page]
If we glance at … what I’ll call the received view, it is that when we look at homosexuality in history, we find that it has its ups and downs. That, in parts of Greece it seems to have been acceptable, perhaps even praised, at least for citizens making it with non-citizens, or male, well, citizens is clearly male. We find that it was perhaps tolerated in the early middle ages—some of the new work suggests that in the later middle ages it turned into a major sin. Has an uncertain status in the early modern period—perhaps it was tolerated at some courts, perhaps among artists and poets. And that then in the last fifty years, that most of us are more familiar with, the sense is that it underwent a series of changes in evaluation, changes in attitude, that is, by and large, we all say went from being a sin, to being regarded as a sickness, to being regarded as a lifestyle. Now beneath that view, that the history of homosexuality is really the history of attitudes toward homosexuality, and the sense is that even though the vocabulary has changed over the centuries, the “it” is the same thing in a fundamental way. That Plato and I, because we have some behaviours in common, have a fundamental common experience, is the assumption of that view. For him it’s called paederasty and is only done for certain periods of his life. For me, it may be something I do all my life. But the assumption is that what the anthropologist and historian should study is really a study of attitudes, of names, you know. Among the Indians they call it berdache, among the Greeks they call it paederast, and, and we should study these little variations. Well, the view that we’re presenting is, is a direct challenge to that view in a very deep kind of way. One of the things about it is to notice that that view allows the history to be nothing but the history of names and attitudes, and perhaps questions of repression and liberation. But repression and liberation of something that we know is there, an “it.” Now, one of the problems with that view is that we, we look over the sweep of history, there’s not a lot of evidence for homosexuality, and the easy answer is, since they didn’t like it they destroyed it. And that could be the case. But as a historian, I am suspicious of something that perhaps occupied the time of roughly ten percent of the population, for a good three thousand years of recorded history in Europe and North America, and there’s so little evidence. I have to say, at least, let’s hold off and maybe there’s another way to see this phenomena that will make more sense as a total picture.
Now let me state some of, at least, my premises in the view, and I think these premises are shared by other people that hold variations this view. And you should keep in mind that I’m trying to do the very schematic view and there are differences in the panellists on this and there are definitely differences in the people in the audience that there isn’t a well worked out consensus on this. But my first premise that comes into this in a very important way is the quote from a nineteenth century historian, a slogan that I like, that people make their own history but they don’t choose the conditions that they make it in. And I use that as a reminder to challenge any historical analysis which is simply a history of things coming top down. The doctors called us sick and that was good or bad, better than the church calling us sinful. I think labelling is an important part of our history, but I’m discontent with any historical picture that doesn’t give a primary role to people, little people as well as big people, carrying out actions.
But the second part of that says they don’t choose the conditions to make it in. Right? We do know we are limited by the material conditions and the ideas that are available in our culture. I mean, for example, take an odd example, perhaps. Today in Canada, a woman can think, a Jewish woman could think “I would like to become a Rabbi.” Now, she can’t do it in, say, Orthodox, but there are reformed possibilities. There is, there is a possibility, there is that alternative today. There are times in the past when that could not be a realistic aspiration. Okay? So that way we acknowledge the way structures and ideas and possibilities which come to us through the social fabric become part of even what our aspirations, even what our most utopian ideas might be.
The second assumption that I have is that, especially when talking about sexuality but probably for most kinds of behaviour, that the same behaviour will have very different meanings in different societies. And that meaning is socially and historically constructed, even where it is experienced as psychological or personal or spontaneously from the gut. And that any historian of sexuality must reckon with not simply what people do in bed, and that’s not easy to find out, but even when we find that out we don’t know very much unless we also understand what the meaning of that behaviour is for the participants. [flipping page]
Now, how do these guiding principles affect the emergence thesis, or the social constructionist thesis? First of all, we keep in mind that homosexuality, if we even want to allow a general term like that, is definitely not the same as homosexual behaviour. And secondly, we have to distinguish between the possibility of someone being called and thinking of themselves as a homosexual person, a type of person, and a person who acts out a certain behaviour. Now, because you and I live in a world where in common language those are the same things—a homosexual is a person who does homsexual things—some of us could acknowledge that there were times perhaps earlier in our life when we kind of knew we were homosexual even though we were perhaps a virgin. But by and large, those blend for us. And I wanna say that when we look at other times and places those may be quite different. And that it’s the nineteenth century that sees the construction of the homosexual as a kind of person.
There are a number of reasons why this seems to happen in the nineteenth century. One of the factors is that the late nineteenth century in Europe and North America is a time when other types of persons are coming to be recognized or claimed to be types of persons. The history of criminal behaviour and the treatment of criminal behaviour in Europe, was that acts were criminalised and people were persecuted for doing certain acts. But doing the act did not make you a kind of person. And when we look carefully at both when someone was, was punished for stealing something, or when someone was punished, for example, in the American colonies for committing a sodomitical act, they were not thereby regarded as a criminal in the full sense that that word can have after the biological theories of the late nineteenth century. After [Cesare] Lombroso helps us believe that there is a criminal type who perhaps has it in his or her genes, that this is a personality derangement that has biological correlates, that it’s fundamental. In the past many acts, antisocial acts, were punished and that was the resolution of it. You didn’t, by doing an act, sometimes even repeating it, become a kind of person, a criminal or a homosexual. That people did acts that we would label as homosexual without becoming in their own mind or in the society’s experience, a kind of person. [flipping page]
Now, in analysing this change … another thing we should keep in mind is that arguing that the homosexual or the lesbian is something new in the last century and a half, we shouldn’t see that it’s thereby artificial. That would be a misreading of this claim. And we shouldn’t think that we’re saying that only that it’s the historians who were creating this label. We wanna argue that it’s lived experience, and maybe an analogy would help. I think people can accept the idea that we can talk about wage labourers or workers and a working class in the modern industrial world, capitalist world. And we can use the term like worker or working class saying that this only happened, this only came into being at a certain time in history. Now, that doesn’t mean that people in cave person days didn’t do work. But it says that we wanna recognize that a certain act, a certain behaviour, is not the same as carrying out that behaviour in certain social institutions in a certain historical context. And if someone wants to say, well, working class is meaningless because there’ve always been people who did labour, it would be a misunderstanding of the language.
Now, to sketch in the briefest possible way, what the emergence thesis says, it requires us to look at four variables that are interwoven. One is identity. The idea that a person feels they are something. Probably very few people in this room today think of themselves, have a very strong identity, as a layperson. Our culture acknowledges there are clergy and the rest of us are laypeople. But in our society these days, that’s not a terribly important distinction even though one can make it. Right? We could probably sort people into people who eat spinach or people who don’t eat spinach, but it’s not an important social category. The people who have homosexual sex and those who don’t is an important category for us today. And part of that is that people in our experience can identify with the label, can take it on and feel that it is something interior to them, not something imposed from outside. So identity is one of the factors. Social role: that there are expectations in the society. Behavioural, primarily behavioural, that there are ways to behave that you are recognized as a homosexual. Now these have varied considerably over the last hundred years, but they exist. If we look at the last hundred and fifty years, we cannot see behavioural expectations around a kind of person before that.
The two other variables are institutions and community. That there are in institutions in the very simple sense as I’m using it now is that there are meeting places that there are various kinds of social structures that allow for interaction. And community seems to be a result of some of these things interacting—the interaction between identity and institutions. But let me point out an example that I think will work to show that, although we experience these four things together conjoined, as lesbians and homosexuals, they don’t have to be together. If we imagine just for a moment, an urban bar where heterosexual prostit- or prostitutes meet johns for heterosexual, purchased sex, we could acknowledge that there are social roles of prostitute and of john, there are certain expectations of how people behave and what the [contract] is going to be. We could acknowledge that that is an ins- that far as an institution that supports certain kinds of interaction, buys off the police or whatever, we could acknowledge that the prostitute probably has some identity as a prostitute. Besides the social role that’s being acted out, there is some recognition that, at least for a time, whether not probably these days a day probably for a year or more, there is that identity. And to some extent, there’s likely to be some community among the prostitutes. When we look at the other people in that very small environment, we can say that the johns are not as likely to have a sense of identity as a type of person, that is “I’m a john.” They may act out the role of john for that night, but not too many of them probably carry that with them as a twenty-four hour identity that “that is who I am,” right. Even if they do it a lot, the identity is probably very minimal although the social role that they act out is very real and is acted out and is recognized. The johns seem to not have a community. So here we have a little microcosm that allows us to see these four variables, people interacting very intimately, and yet with very different meanings to that behaviour in terms of how they understand their life.
Now, the sweeping view of the emergence of the modern homosexual is, it seems to me, that in the nineteenth century and wage labour, people being able to survive outside of the family as single people, some people have the opportunity to create a lifestyle around homoerotic feelings and behaviour. So it seems that—and we do- this is where our data is rather short—but it does seem that there are people who are starting to act out some sort of lifestyle, some social role around their sexuality, around a homosexual sexuality. But these are not necessarily large numbers of people, and at first they have no obvious community. They have no names for themselves, they don’t connect up with similar people in a way and have that sense of, sense of community, but gradually that grows as like-minded people create institutions. Molly bars, which we know go back to the eighteenth century, where people did some crossdressing and men met for homosexual sex, seemed to have been institutions that provided something to some of these individuals. But it’s not clear whether the people who went to those molly bars for the sex are something like modern gay men who, who have an identity as a gay man, going to a gay bar. I think it’s not that, I think it’s more like the john going to pick up a prostitute at the right locale today, who is going for a certain kind of behaviour, but does not have a sense of community or identity.
But as these people in different ways—quite different for men and for women, crossdressing is one element in this passing women, women who gain certain privileges by, by passing as men, and there were large numbers of these in the nineteenth century. We used to think there were about a dozen of them. We now know that they come in the hundreds and perhaps the thousands or tens of thousands. There were four thousand women in the Union Army in the American Civil War that passed as men in uniform. That’s not for a week or a month, that’s for several months. Four thousand. And then we do know of many many from civilian life. That’s one of the options for creating space in the society to act out sometimes sexual, sometimes other kinds of variance.
But as these people grow in numbers, discover each other, gradually form institutions or modify existing institutions to serve their needs, they run into the authorities. And it’s not accidental that the doctors in the 1880s seemed to discover a new species of person. Right? Now at first we used to read those doctors’ reports that said “you know, I’ve got the fifth known case of a homosexual and let me tell you about it.” Right. It sounded totally presumptuous if we were ten percent of the population. What kind of ideological blindness on the part of the doctors. My reading now is that though that’s not so naive or so blockheaded on their part, that they were in fact encountering a new phenomena. And the people who came to them to sometimes to find out who they were, were finding out “Are there other people like me, is there a name for this, am I unique, how’ve other people dealt with it?” And what they got from the doctors, we find at first glance, repressive, agonising to see the morbid labels placed on these people. But we have to see that that labelling both by the jurists, the legislatures, and the doctors, is part of a dialectic between this behaviour. People make their own history, and interaction with other social institutions, labelling is one very important interaction, and that labelling allows those people to go further in changing the label, creating new institutions, recognizing themselves, having a name to call people together under a banner, and that, that we then see a step wise process of people creating [and/or] modifying their life coming to interact with these other forces and responding to them. So the task of this new view of homsexuality is to look at the last two hundred years and see: can we find the documentation, can we find the evidence to show us these things step by step? Can we see identity formation as it happens? Can we see how that labelling is produced by new phenomena and how the labelling changes the phenomena and things move on and that kind of a dialectic?
I said I would close by commenting on the political implications. I just wanna say that I think part of the resistance to this view is that the slightly older view of gay history was that we had this wonderfully long heritage. And Plato and Leonardo were really our ancestors, Sappho really was our ancestor, and we not only had ancestors we had martyrs, we had all those people burned in the middle ages, and then Boswell came along and showed us those, those monks with the homoerotic poetry, and those were our ancestors too! And this new view seems to be saying you can’t take those people’s ancestors. And my feeling is that, in some sense, we are deprived of a naive view of those people as our ancestors. We’re deprived of a kind of linear genealogy that they were just like us wearing different clothes and different labels, but they were really in their hearts very much like us. It gives us a more complex ancestry, but it doesn’t deny the importance of seeing how societies have regulated homoerotic behaviour which probably is very widespread, if not universal, and how people have changed institutions to serve their needs. It also, I think, is politically useful because it gives us a perspective on change in our own lives in the future. It doesn’t tell us what the future will be, but it gives us a sense that we perhaps shouldn’t do our politics based on an assumption of unalterable, perhaps genetic, destiny that we are here, we always have been here, and that’s fundamental and it will not change. With that I will close and the other three panels will give more specific views of parts of this and we’ll have a free for all and a discussion afterwards. Thank you. [audience clapping]
Greg: Next we’ll have Karla Jay. Please welcome Karla. [audience clapping]
Karla: This is really a heavy topic, the making of the modern homosexual. I certainly was glad, though, to find out this wasn’t going to be a knitting contest up here. [some laughter from the audience] But [Karla laughs] You know the joke “my mother made me a homosexual, well if I give her the wool, will she make me one too?” [audience laughter] And I’m, I’m not a professional historian. I gained my doctorate in comparative literature, finishing the last draft, I hope, of my dissertation on Natalie Barney and Renee Vivien, and I’m political, and I come to give you some information on, particularly, the lesbian bar in literature. If anyone has never heard of a gay bar or lesbian bar, to misquote a Canadian author: “this is not for you.”
[pause in the audio]
… out of it, and I start historically.
I think it’s time for all of us to admit that if we cannot praise the lesbian bar, so to we are never going to bury it. Much as in the day before the current gay liberation movement, bars play a large part in the lives of lesbians and gay men. According to The Gay Report, only fifteen percent of the lesbians surveyed in 1977 and 1978 said that they had never met anyone in a bar. Far from being obliterated by gay liberation, the subcultures of the bars has proliferated in the years since the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. There are bars, bars everywhere and plenty to drink. [audience laughter]
For some people, the lesbian bar is a world within our world, replete with its own cast of characters, governed by its own rules, maintaining its own rights and rituals, and even comprising its own special geography. As for the last, I remember once being given a tour of a bar, and shown exactly where to stand if I were part of a couple or looking for some action, and also the pose I should take if I were butch or femme. I felt somewhat as I had back in high school: a bit lost and not remembering which side I was supposed to wear my virgin pin on to prove I was a virgin. [audience laughter] Remember those little circle pins? [audience laughter continues]
In any case, like Edward Alby’s Tiny Alice, the bar represents a world within a world within a world. And if we look at the lesbian bars represented in the novel, then we are dealing with a world within a world within a world, or a world apart from a world apart from a world apart from a world, depending on your politics and semantics. [audience laughter] If such is the case, it’s no surprise that at least two lesbian novels—Maureen Duffy’s The Microcosm, and Marie-Claire Blais’s Nights in the Underground—-take place almost exclusively in lesbian bars. And then almost all of the lesbian novels from the pulp tales of Valerie Taylor to a recent novel by Neuretta Cortes, I don’t know if I’m mispronouncing her name, contain a requisite lesbain bar scene. For the women in our bars mirror our best and worst qualities, both the heroinic and the demonic. Thus, through the smoke—the murky smoke and the dim lights—we see mirrors of our lives, some accurate and some of funhouse quality.
First, a little herstory, no one knows exactly when the first lesbian bar appeared on the horizon, or more likely in someone’s basement. [audience laughs] It is probable that the first bars began operating at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when lesbianism itself and homosexuality in general was emerging as a lifestyle, not merely a sexual act. One of the earliest accounts and one of my favourite accounts of a lesbian bar that I know of, anyway, in literature, is in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. She [writes] “there was also a cell in Montmartre that welcomed these uneasy women haunted by their own solitude, who felt safe within the low-ceilinged room beneath the eye of a frank proprietress who shared their predilections, while an unctuous and authentic cheese fondue sputtered and the wild contralto artist sang to them romantic ballads.” [some audience laughter] How little have the scenario, language, and barely edible food changed in the past century! [audience laughter] As for the quality of the entertainment, I was recently in a bar in Maine that seemed to have the American version of Collette’s entertainer. Her ballads were of such poor quality that the bar charged admission when she stopped singing. [audience laughter]
If anything is truly amazing, then, it is how little the bars have changed since Collette’s era until today. For instance, according to pulp Sappho experts Fran Koski and Maida Tilchen, many of the so-called trashy novels written in the 1950s included a gay bar scene. As in contemporary lesbain bars in New York, every one of which seems to have a cigar toting woman or man named Harry sitting on a stool at the front door (or outside the front door, weather permitting). Valerie Taylor’s Whisper that I Love has a bar with “a seamy faced little old man who always seemed to be sitting on the doorstep.” The lesbian bar in Valerie Taylor’s novel, I don’t know how these mics work here, let’s see if that’s better. The lesbian bar in Valerie Taylor’s novel is like the lesbian bar in novels and also in real life, that is it’s just like a seedy straight bar except perhaps its worse. The Club Marie in Whisper That I Love “looked like a dozen cheap joints the protagonists had walked past, quickening her step and turning her face away from the smell of stale beer and the bursts of laughter.” By 1966, things had changed very little according to the description of the bar The Club, the setting for Maureen Duffy’s classic novel The Microcosm. “Push open the door, shoulder aside the curtain of smoke, the moult savour of spilt beer that hangs before the threshold, thick woven with the tensions that are already strung across the evening.” Things hadn’t improved much in the post Stonewall era. When Rita Mae Brown described The Duchess, New York’s local bar come [unclear] dungeon decor, thinly disguised and in her day as the queen’s [unclear]. Dressed up, Adele and Carol go slumming into a bar “where New Jersey meets the Bronx and lives happily ever after [audience laughter] and where the toilets overflow every night at midnight and they still do.” [audience laughter]
Let me add, further North, Marie-Claire Blais Nights in the Underground is set in Montreal. A city apparently populated with bars, including “the Moon Face, where splendid night fauna sometimes unfold its wings.” As in The Underground, the primary bar in the novel, or in the bijou de Paris, where young East End working girls took over the dance floor. There are many other night, midnight dens catering to assorted sexual preferences, such as Chez Madam Jewel, which mainly sheltered “tender green seedlings, transvestite women, and indecisive students.” [audience laughs] The Moon’s Face owner is a female Harry. “Tiny Sigh,” her name is, she would undo one of the thick ropes marking the border between stairs and ballroom, which let her scrutinise her “people” before letting them in. When her brawny hand lifted the braided rope into the air, it was as if a path had been cleared under the impact of her liberating fist, a border crossing between the outside world and the land of forbidden fruit. Going into a lesbian bar for the first time is always a right of passage, an initiation into the underworld of lesbian life. I still remember my first trip into the Sea Colony, which dates me a bit, my palms sweating, wondering whether cameras were secretly taking my photo, marking me an outcast for life. I was appalled by the dinginess and the glaring appraisals from the women posing against the bar, their hands on jutting hips. I never thought I would overcome the feeling of being an outsider in a world supposedly my own—and I never have.
Of course, first one has to find the bar in which, which can be a problem in and of itself. I remember a story of a friend of mine, where she once stayed over a lesbain bar in Chicago and she couldn’t find it. [audience and Karla laugh] In The Microcosm, Kathy thinks she’s the only lesbian in the world, a very common situation in novels and real life, until she meets George, who knows she isn’t the only one, but who isn’t much wiser than Kathy is when it comes to locating a lesbian bar. Kathy asks her “How do I find then these clubs,” that’s their grammar, “can anyone just walk in?” George replies “I don’t know! Look, there’s a pub I go to every Friday night. There’s some of the girls get in there sometimes, why don’t you come with me this friday?” At the club, which is called The Club, Kathy and George stand apart, Kathy looking “very unhappy, very unsure.” Matt brings them over to a table and Kathy quickly becomes involved with David. Obviously this is no bar for those not decidedly butch or femme. How many butches are there in the novels? Let us count their boots. [audience laughter]
Liberation rhetoric would like to relegate these leather clad butches with slicked back hair to the dark ages of the fifties and think of these characters like Matt, Steve, David, and George of The Microcosm, who refer to themselves and to one another with masculine pronouns and who don’t like their femmy “wives” to work, as relics of a distant past. But the macho women still reign on, in Nights in the Underworld. Renee, for example, still refers to herself as “he” and other butches as “petite frere,” little brothers, and she sports a host of ties and drag costumes. This novel takes place about 1980, by the way. Another bar regular, Big Yellow, swaggers over to and makes unwanted advances to any lucky woman who attracts her drunken attention. As recent articles in Heresies and other magazines have pointed out, these eccentric figures should be remembered, for they were the ones who dared to defy convention, to stand out at a time when it was dangerous to be gay. And even today, our bar butches will be the first to be recognized and feel the backlash of oppression. Thus, the mirror of the novel, magnifies some of those we would rhetorisize into oblivion.
The fictional lesbian is not at all repelled by these denisons of the underworld. In fact, she’s usually so thrilled to find others like her, and so entranced with the new world she has discovered, that she exits only to bring others into its grasp, thus becoming a sort of reverse Orpheus. In Nights in the Underground, Genevieve returns to the bar night after night and studies the women in it with the intensity and passion she usually reserves for her vocation, which is sculpture. The beautiful hair of individual women, or of those coupled in dance, replaces the imagery of Rodan’s sculpture or of Dutch paintings. The smoky air is breathed in as she inhaled the rarified air of a museum. Genevieve and others like her are not trapped within the bar because it is smaller than life, but because it is more real and larger than life. The shades of the underworld become more meaningful than the people on the outside world just as the shadows on the wall were more lifelike to the inhabitants of Plato’s mythological cave. The bar becomes the arena where “life is transformed into theatre” as Blake puts it. Alcohol, like the drugs that sometimes accompany it, magnifies emotions and situations. Under its influence, a casual look becomes the flame of passion, or a passing interest in a third party can arouse the seething jealousy in a lover. Casual disputes unleash violence. The bar’s the stage on which participants can play out their roles and their relationships in front of an alternately bored and interested audience. But in any case, their lives are not ignored. It is the one theatre where the actors can play themselves, for it is in the outside world that they wear masks and play strange parts. Steve is a schoolteacher, Matt a gas station attendant, and Lolly a cancer doctor.
Paradoxically, the bar is illusionary as well as real. Genevieve falls in love with Lolly, an elusive figure drinking alone at the bar, because Lolly resembles a painting by a Dutch master. Worshipping Lolly from afar, she envies other women Lolly so casually picks up on her way out with her coat. As is so common in the lesbian novel, Genevieve is finally introduced to Lolly in the bar by a third party, Marielle. And then it is Genevieve’s turn to play out her affair with Lolly in front of The Underground’s audience. The denisons of the underworld have ambiguous feelings about the couples they form. On one hand, they vicariously share the untarnished romance of every new couple. On the other hand, they fear the new couple may flee the underworld, taking away the joyous new spectacle. The fears are groundless, however, for the new couple basks as much in the adulation of the crowd as they do in one another. They reign as queens of the underworld until others take their place. “That was how Genevieve lost Lolly. The stranger they’d seen laughing alone at her table got up and marched resolutely up to Lolly, drawing her out of the group, carrying her off boldly to the dance floor. In an instant, the woman had received everything Lolly took so long to refuse: the soft consent of her smile. No one would see ‘Lolly and Genevieve’ again, but ‘Jill and Lolly’, because this new couple already existed.”
Thus, relationships are born, thrive, and die and are sometimes rekindled all within the bar. The actors become spectators and vice versa, but they do not, cannot leave the theatre. For like Persephone, once they have tasted the bitter fruit of the underworld, they must remain. The webs that hold them seem so thin for what do the denisons have in common but the gossamer threads of lesbianism and alcohol? Yet this net firmly holds such disparate women together for the alcohol allows them to see or create in others whatever they wish to. The illusion free from illusion-shattering daylight. At the end of her affair, Genevieve knows little more about Lolly than she did at the beginning, for she projected onto her all the perfection she expected a Dutch masterpiece to have, and she read love for herself and to gestures Lolly extended to one and all.
Only a strong pull from the outside world can occasionally free a woman from the underworld. Matt, offered a position on an archeological dig in Italy, finally frees herself from the confines of the London club and from her unhappy love affair that takes place within it. Genevieve, sparked by a new woman Francoise in Paris, can perhaps free herself from the underground and its influences. But for the majority, the bar is a world without exit. A dim but complete world, barely lit by the liberation movement unless it is considered an improvement to be accepted or rejected because of your sun sign instead of because of your sex role identification. Other than these slight changes in typing people and in dress, the bar remains a world without change, where the sirens still sing a most alluring tune. Perhaps the bar of the lesbian novel serves as an eerie metaphor for some of the aspects of our lives. We often become trapped by things which we were once overjoyed to discover. The avenues of freedom themselves become traps where roles and games are played and replayed. We remove our masks only to find ourselves in a theatre. We degenerate the denisons of the bar only to discover that they are us. Thank you. [audience applause]
Greg: Our next speaker is Joe Interrante.
Joe Interrante: Is this on? Yeah, okay. I’m gonna talk from down here, I have too many papers scattered around. Somewhat like Whitman, I can presume to think. [some audience laughter]
I’d like to start with a little anecdote from some of my teaching experience which has to do with what it’s like to try to teach some of this gay history to just general classes in school. And I’d like to talk a little bit about the case of teaching Horatio Alger. Now, I don’t know whether you know who Alger is, we’ve just gotten a U.S. stamp of Alger, which I think is a great ironic history, but Alger is basically a staple of nineteenth century American history. He appears as the popular author of juvenile literature, as the formulator of what’s called “the country boy myth” in American culture, as a promoter of the ideology of social mobility, and as a figure in urban moral reform in the nineteenth century. His novels are used as source material in the history of industrialization, urbanisation, middle class culture, and immigration.
Now, Alger began his literary and reform career after he was expelled from the unitarian church in Gloucester, Massachusetts for what, in his congregation’s words, were “the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.” You can find the documents of this record in Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History. This event does not appear in any of the biographies or almost any of the biographies about Alger or the interpretations of his work. In fact, one of the most widely used biographies, one that has been used continually in one of the courses that I teach about Alger’s novels, contains a biography which actually recounts a series of totally fictitious unsuccessful heterosexual relationships. Two of the works which do mention Alger’s homosexuality (or “the Brewster Incident,” to be historically specific) pass over it with surprise and embarrassment or treat it as a scandalous skeleton in his closet. None of the biographies suggest that there is any relationship between Alger’s private behaviour and his public achievements: his work in boy’s welfare reform, his ambivalent view of the city as a large and anonymous but also a free and exciting environment. Indeed, most of the books that do mention the Brewster Incident argue implicitly that his private habits are redeemed because of his public achievements. Now, being fed up to about here with this type of interpretation, I xeroxed and handed out the documents from Johnathan’s book one year to my class, and said here read these along with the biography and I want you to think about what they mean. So the next week I came into class and I said, “So what do you think about this material?” And one of the students is in the back of the class raising her hand. I say okay, and she gets up and she says “Well, I don’t care what type of perversion he was into, he was still a great writer! ” To which I said: “wrong on both counts.” [audience laughs]
In some senses, that reflects the problem which we’re still confronting as lesbian and gay historians: the tendency to privatise all sexual experience and consider it either irrelevant or of secondary importance to a person’s public achievement. It’s in that context that I think that this new work on lesbian and gay history is very important for us, especially because it’s motivated by the emergence of the community and it’s a self-conscious reflection of where we are as a community. It is directed to our concerns, the concerns that are important to us, as well as to establishing a public and visible place for the understanding of lesbian and gay history in all institutions. And that’s very important, I think, to emphasise.
It’s sometimes, you know… one of the reasons why this is so exciting for us is that we’re all isolated all over the country and never get a chance to talk to one another. We’re fighting these continuous battles in the midst of these friendly and polite, but deep down hostile, other historians who would rather forget about the subject than even talk about it, and I think that the issue of the struggles and the conflicts that are still going on in the historical profession is an important one to emphasise. After years of struggle, they finally acknowledge the fact that there are lesbian and gay historians in the American historical profession and they’re starting to have panels. You still go to archives and you can’t get ahold of materials because of their dubious morality or they would impinge upon the reputations of some of these peoples whose papers are in the archives. Or most historians simply consider that this is really a matter of prurient interest, that it’s not really important, and that you’re really degrading a person’s reputation to talk about their sexuality. So it is important, in that context, I think, to keep that in mind when we talk about this stuff.
The reasons, I think, that this new literature on homosexuality and lesbianism is important is, as I said, because I think that it’s just like the movie that we saw last night, Track Two. This new work is a reflection of where we are as a community. It’s a reflection of our growth as a community to the point where we can stand back and reflect upon our own experience and say: what’s important about it, what does it mean, how do we wanna understand it and what are the implications for it in terms of how we go further in the development of the bonds that which form a community and allow us to have a conference like this, okay? So that’s very important.
The second thing I’d like to say is that I think there are actually two schools involved in this new work on the making of the modern homosexual. Bert Hansen talked about one of those schools, which is principally organised around the formation of what’s called discourse, and this work I would principally associate with the work of Michel Foucault and Jeffrey Weeks. Principally what this work is in very important ways a critique of the view of homosexuality as a trans-historical and cross-cultural fixed essence, as Bert said. And this has been very important for challenging that idea that it exists unchanged throughout time.
But there’s another school, I think, of research, much of which is represented at this conference, which I think is a little different than its emphasis and that, rather than talking about it at the level of theory about homosexuals, it tries to trace out the formation of a sense of identity, a group identity and a sense of connectedness to others, the formation of a community by us. And I would identify in that school the work of Allan Bérubé, John D’Emilio, who isn’t here, Jim Stakely, Gregory Sprague, Jonathan Katz. These are not in conflict, these two schools, but I think that in fact the most exciting and important stuff for us really is the second school of group identity and formation. In some senses, the more work that I do on this, the more I’m convinced that these ideas developed by doc- well, two things. Most of the work on this discourse, these ideas developed by doctors, by lawyers, by all of these, these professionals, the regulation of behaviour, I think the more we look into this, I think the more we’re going to find that to a great degree, these new ideas about homosexuality that are developed around the turn of the century are to some extent an actual response to the beginning, the first, well, the earliest visible emergence of subcultures in cities. That’s certainly true of the United States, I think, to some extent. For example, some of these doctors begin to examine, they get delivered to them or individual cases or patients of people who are arrested, and they start investigating and asking them questions and they find out that these people know a whole bunch of people and that they are able to recognize other “inverts” or “Uranians” or homosexuals on the street, and they say “hmm, if they can, there must be something innate about these people because clearly they have some sort of sixth sense and they can recognize each other.” And, you know, a whole range of things.
So that to some extent, I think that I’m beginning to wonder how much that the dis- the amount that first school that Bert talked about, in fact, I think can even be subsumed within this larger history that these other historians are doing on the development of subcultures and communities, and that in fact the idea of homosexuality as a new way of regulating sexual behaviour of men and of women is in fact the response, in part, to the development or the initiative of our ancestors to begin to carve out lives of their own located within a particular historical context. Some of the reasons why subcultures are able to develop in cities, it seems, in the … well, to some extent in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, seem to be related to the growth of cities, the growth of splits between public and private spaces; you have a large and anonymous city where people are not … where it’s not necessary, for example, to live within family centred heretosexual families, that you have industry where people are hired individually as wage labourers or free labourers, and that production is not organised upon a household model. This in particular is part of the work of John D’Emilio, and I think his book is going to be, should be, his work should be forthcoming within the next year or two, I think, from the University of Chicago Press, in, I think, next spring. Next spring. And I think it’ll be very important in that sense.
… The third point I think I want to make about this is that there’s one, I think, assumption or misunderstanding about a lot of the stuff on the homosexual role which leads people to have a gut reaction against it, which is the idea that the assumption, I think, the mistaken assumption that before the development of a homosexual identity or a homosexual role, our ancestors had no sense of difference and I don’t think that that’s true. I think that a sense of difference precedes, certainly among some of our ancestors, precedes the formation of a specific homosexual identity. The question that’s posed by this new work is that if you can’t use words that aren’t even invented to describe what these people’s sense of difference is, how do you understand it? Okay. I’d like to suggest that in part, what this new work in gay history on the homosexual role suggests … is that it’s raising questions for us about issues of masculinity and male sexuality in historical context by placing the homosexual role within the context of seeing it as a way of organising male sexual behaviour.
Let me give you a couple of examples on that. First, I think any of us in this audience could, would probably, certainly my experience in people that I’ve talked to and interviewed and probably for a lot of people in this audience, [there is] a sense of difference in words that we hear. We hear a range of words before we even necessarily hear about homosexuality or what a homosexual is. Words like sissy, fairy, fruit, pansy, a whole range of other words. These words in themselves are historical in their meanings. Let me just give you a couple of examples. If I can find them here.
First, sissy. In the middle of the nineteenth century, sissy refers to a younger sister. A little girl. That’s what the meaning of the word is, at least, in written language. By the 1890s, sissy has come to mean an effeminate man or boy. There’s a change in the meaning there which is, which I think can, as we probe deeper, understand in terms the development of this homosexual role.
Take the word fairy. Its original meaning is, of course, the inhabitants of fairy land wherever that is. By the eighteenth century, again it refers to a delicate or finely formed individual and it’s usually used in reference, almost always used in reference, to a small or young woman. By the early twentieth century, fairy has come to be used as a euphemism for a cademite. Okay, do you know what a cademite is? Okay, it’s a, the technical definition of that is a boy used for unnatural purposes
… words from making reference to women specifically to being used for men also refers to the development of a concept of homosexuality incorporating the concepts of effeminacy. Now, the question arises, why does this particular meaning occur at this time? And it’s interesting if you start looking at the history of masculinity, in taking masculinity as a specific area of focus. That in fact many men at the turn of the century in the United States are particularly concerned about the problem of effeminization. They’re concerned about it in work, where they’re finding women entering the workplace, in things like secretaries and the clerical workforce. They’re finding it in colleges, where women are entering graduate education, and there’s this great fear that colleges are going to become effeminized. You’re finding it, you find the development of this, there’s a concern that there’s too much mother influence on sons and you get the development of a range of boyhood institutions, such as the Boy Scouts and other paramilitary organisations—a whole range of institutions which are designed to socialise boys in a way to develop what are perceived of as the proper characteristics of masculinity. And I think that it’s been in that context that we’ll come to understand the concepts of a heterosexual and homosexual dichotomy as part of that process of reorganising male behaviour, masculinity, and male sexual behaviour within this particular crisis, a crisis which is not solely economic. It is not solely related to economic forces or those that are part of them, but is also specifically related to sexual politics as well. Let’s see. [flips page]
Let me make one other point before I turn it over to Gayle. And that is that I think that the other reason why this new work, which I think is heading toward the problem of looking at questions of masculinity, and trying to understand how some of our ancestors, like Alger or like Whitman, for example, come to understand their feelings of difference in terms first of the standards or the norms of masculinity and they define themselves against or through or in a whole range of ways around that is that these types of questions also are not… what they do is they allow us to connect some of the concerns that we have today in terms of the building of community bonds to historical questions. Questions of relationships. I don’t know whether any of you have seen Taxi zum Klo. I know that it’s not allowed to be seen in Ontario, I guess, because its regarded as obscene, but it has been shown in the States and in fact that’s a very important film, I think, about gay men’s relationships with one another and how our fantasies and how our imaginations and the things that we’re trying to redefine and build and react against and react through are, in fact, tied very much to the experiences that we have had as boys and men. And that all of us have grown up and been socialised through a process of learning and, in fact, as we all know, I think somewhere deep in our hearts or our souls that coming out is the beginning of a process of unlearning and redefining ourselves. And that, in fact, I think this new work is specifically directed toward helping us to raise questions and examine the historical background for some of those issues. Okay.
So that returns, I think, to that first point that I made, that this history in itself has to be seen as a reflection of where we are and … what we’ve reached—the stage that we’ve reached as a community, and that’s where it comes from and that when some people react against this stuff as attacking the view, I think that they’re missing that important point of the historical basis of the work itself. [audience applause]
Greg: The next speaker is Gayle Rubin.
Gayle Rubin: I’m not sure how close I have to get to this thing. I’ll figure it out. What? How’s this? Can’t get to my notes.
What I wanted to talk about a little bit is, is some other aspects of this new view in, in gay history that Bert and Joe have been discussing, and I wanna say a little bit about what I think the impact of this has been generally. I actually think that the new gay history, incorporating all of the people that have been mentioned, has been a paradigm shift of no small consequence not only in gay history but in a lot of other academic disciplines. And I think it’s had extremely important ramifications far beyond even the issues that we would be interested in as gay people. For instance, I think it has helped to spawn a new interest in the history of sexuality per say, which was an almost unknown field five years ago. It is also creating pressure for new and more sophisticated models of sexuality in other fields and I think has been a primary kind of intellectual challenge to the hegemony of medicine over the whole field of sexuality. And it is, I, I really think it’s kind of an intellectual revolution in the scientific paradigms of sexuality that’s not unlike what Kuhn describes in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it’s really quite important.
Ironically, however, this new gay history has had very little impact on the field of lesbian history. And there’s been almost no equivalent effort to write the history of the making of the modern lesbian. And I consider this quite curious, and in fact something of a scandal, and I think that some of the reason that this has happened is attributable to some of the more unpalatable developments in lesbian feminist political ideology. However, what I wanna do tonight is mostly to sketch out, first of all, my own sense of the emergence of lesbian communities and identities in the last century, and secondly to describe and criticise the rather different models which currently dominate lesbian history and I think have hegemony within it. [flips page]
As was the case for male homosexuality, the institutional structure of lesbianism was transformed in Western Europe and the United States during the process of capitalist industrialization and urbanisation. To be a little bit simple about it there was a general shift from prohibited acts punished with varying severity and intensity to personal identities, and while there are certainly lesbian acts in the sixteenth century, a lesbian identity in the sixteenth century is unthinkable. So is a lesbian bar. While there were probably social situations which provided more favourable environments for lesbain activities to take place, there were no lesbian communities in the modern sense.
Lesbians, like gay men, have in the last century or so taken on many of the sociological characteristics of ethnic minorities, particularly urban minorities. We have favoured neighbourhoods, we have urban territories, we have developed identities, we have low social status, we’re periodically persecuted, and we have a very high rate of migration from rural areas in smaller towns to more urban areas in larger towns. Because women generally have less social mobility, drastically lower incomes, and fewer economic resources than men do, the development of lesbian communities has been, on the whole, I think, slower and less elaborate than that of our gay male counterparts. But as early as the 1890s there is evidence that there were cafes and cabarets, I wouldn’t really call them bars—because I think that’s a bit anachronistic—but cafes and cabarets in Paris which did have a regular lesbian clientele. [Henri di] Toulous-Lautrec painted many lesbians who lived and worked in the neighbourhood around Pigalle, Paris—many were prostitutes or women who worked in the dance halls of the neighbourhood. And Colette wrote several beautiful descriptions of these places as she experienced them around 1910, and much of some of that’s in The Pure and the Impure, and a lot of the rest of it is in a good collection called Earthly Paradise, which was edited by Robert Phelps. Some of the women in this world were upper class, others were poor and working or working women. And Colette describes, among other things, cross-class relations between some of the wealthy, often butch patronesse and their protegees who were often working class actresses, dancers, and singers.
Also, by 1900 there were apparently well-defined cruising areas for lesbians in Paris. Natalie Barney was known to cruise regularly in the Bar de Balone and pick up women there. And also by 1900, there were women like Barney and Vivien, among others, who had quite strong self-identities as lesbians. These women were part of a first generation of self-aware, identifiable, uppity dykes, and they were … although they were different from us today, it’s not that history stopped in 1900, but there was some very important structural shift at that point that makes them more like us than they were like the people before, although, in fact, we are at this point quite different from them. But I see those women, women like Barney and Vivien, as being something like the female counterparts of men like Edward Carpenter and Magnus Hirschfeld and John Addington Symonds.
After World War I, these nascent and somewhat rudimentary public urban lesbian worlds began to become more elaborate. And the cafes and cabarets of Paris and Berlin in the twenties and thirties are, of course, famous or infamous. The best documented, one of the best documented was Le Monocle in Paris and that was the one where the pictures in Brassai’s book The Secret Paris of the ‘30s were taken, and it beautifully shows the women who were there. Lesbian life, like gay male life, began to take on the character of an urban settlement much more dramatically after World War II, particularly in the United States, and some of the evidence for that, some of the better evidence for that, is actually in the lesbain pulp novels. For instance the Ann Bannon books where she talks a lot about the bars in Greenwich Village. And both the lesbian world and the gay male world, I think, experience quite a radically, a radical demographic explosion in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I think the sheer number of lesbian bars and gay male bars and other public institutions, if we could do the demographic comparisons, we would find that they exploded around the, the period around the end of the 1960s in the United States.
Also for that first generation, women like Barney and Vivien, and later women like Radclyffe Hall, there was very little in Western culture from which to draw images for identity. Barney and Vivien were inspired by the Greek classics and also by nineteenth century French erotic fiction and poetry, and later the better sexologists, especially the work of people like Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld, also helped women to develop self-concepts, and Radclyffe Hall is a very good example of that.
So to me, this point at which lesbianism becomes an identity where lesbians begin to occupy territory and when there are increased opportunities for overt genital lesbian sexual activity is a great leap forward. By contrast, most of current lesbian history considers the period of this transition and some of its characteristics to have been a giant step backward and that’s what I wanna talk about for the rest of my time.
The alternate scenario goes something like this. In the nineteenth century, a type of romantic friendship between women flourished. Since genital sexuality for women was not thought of, these relationships were mostly non-genital. But as a consequence, they were not actively suppressed. These non-sexual friendships were, according to this view, a pure and less socially repressed form of lesbianism. Whereas, twentieth century lesbianism seems to be mostly a devolved, less noble, and more socially repressed form. Around the turn of the century, the nasty sexologists informed everyone that women could and were sexual—could have sex and were sexual—and a campaign was instigated to wipe out these romantic friendships because people were afraid that something nasty might happen in them. After this, nothing much good happened until the emergence of lesbian feminism in 1970. [audience and Gayle laugh] This scenario is somewhat a vastly oversimplified description of the scheme proposed by Lillian Faderman in her most recent book Surpassing the Love of Men, which has been touted a lot as the book in lesbian history. But it is not unique to Faderman and it is common in various versions through a whole school of lesbian history.
In a wonderful review essay in the current issue of Feminist Studies, Martha Vicinus notes that there are two schools of lesbian history which she describes as the “romantic” and the “butch/femme.” [audience and Gayle laugh] And I have a little… I would, I would amend that a little bit, I think it, we, we should call them the “romantic friendship” school because I think a lot of the focus is on friends, and maybe the “bar school,” because I think butch/femme is a little narrow. But the difference, the main difference is a focus on private friendships versus a focus on public institutions. And I want to elaborate a little bit on these schools.
The first and, and at this point dominant school was inspired originally by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s essay The Female World of Love and Ritual, and this school includes, I would think, Blanche Cook, Nancy Sahli, much of the Frontiers issue on lesbian history. I think that this school finds a very coherent theoretical expression in Adrienne Rich’s article on compulsory heterosexuality in Signs. And that it has reached a kind of apotheosis in Lillian Faderman. It is characterised by an emphasis on female friendship and nostalgia for the world of middle- and upper-class women in the nineteenth century. It focuses on private relationships rather than public institutions. It tends to underplay, or actively disapprove of, overt sexuality between women. It disdains lesbian bars as lowlife and butch/femme roles as non-feminist. Now, the second school of lesbian history, I think at this point, is emerging more strongly, but is right now less developed and has less legitimacy in the lesbian movement, I think. And that school is more interested in seeing lesbians as an emergent erotic minority. I identify with this school and I think Joan Nestle’s work on butch/femme roles in the fifties and also lesbian bars in the fifties would be included, and above all the work of the Buffalo Lesbian Oral History Group. Also there’s a theoretical piece that’s a response to Adrienne Rich by Anne Ferguson in the autumn issue of Signs of last autumn, which I suppose would be a kind of a theoretical member of this school. And what characterises this school is a positive evaluation of, and a lot of curiosity about, public lesbian space, lesbian bars, roles, and sex. For instance, the Buffalo Group decided not to focus on private relationships, but on the development of public lesbian institutions, and as a consequence they have reproduced this absolutely splendid account of the changing bar scene in Buffalo over a thirty year period, which if you missed this afternoon, you should regret. It’s wonderful.
I’m rather partisan about all this, for both historical, and both for historical and political reasons prefer the bar school or the emergent minority perspective. And for the remainder of my talk, I want to explain why by describing and criticising some of the underlying assumptions of the romantic friendship school. The central problem with the friendship school of lesbian history from Smith-Rosenberg to Faderman, I think, is their definition of what is a lesbian. And in all of these articles, the definition of lesbians as women who were sexually attracted to women or as women with a sexual preference for other women is explicitly rejected. They don’t want to do that. And in the place of that kind of more sexual orientation or sexual preference definition is a much broader category in which sexual orientation is either buried or subsumed on the one hand or eliminated altogether at times. For instance, in Smith-Rosenberg’s article, she includes in her female world of love and ritual a vast range of behaviours from supportive relations among female kin to more clearly lover-like relationships. And she uses the normalcy of supportive female kinship to argue against psychiatric theories of lesbianism. But in the course of moving so easily between the kinship relations on the one hand and her criticism of psychiatry on the other, the distinctions between familial affection and lesbian passion simply evaporate.
Similarly, Blanche Cook’s insistence that any primary supportive relationship among women be considered lesbian blurs the distinction further. In her essay on compulsory heterosexuality, Adrianne Rich presents one of the clearest codifications of this merging of categories in her notion of the lesbian continuum. Both Rich and Faderman clearly are implying a definition in which either kin-like support or feminist consciousness take primacy over erotic inclination. Thus, Rich can include in her lesbian continuum economic connections between West African trading women, while excluding many “lifelong sexual lesbians who are male identified.” Rich’s lesbian continuum contains many otherwise heterosexual women who meet her criteria by having either proper feminist attitude or close sentiment relations with kin or, or friends, while butch/femme lesbians, SM lesbians, and bar dykes are relegated to the margins.
Faderman notes with obvious relish that the early lesbian feminist “questioning the view of lesbians as a group with a particular sexual preference, women are lesbians when they are women id- women identified. Never having had the slightest erotic exchange with another woman, one might still be a political lesbian. Such definitions afflict both lesbian politics and lesbian history.” Now, this making the definition of a lesbian have very little, if nothing to do with sex, I think, reflects another problem with this school, which is that it seems to be deeply, sometimes explicitly, anti-sexual. Sex is either in this view unimportant or actually bad and in this regard I think Lillian Faderman’s book is the worst offender. Surpassing the Love of Men is often anti-sexual, and at several points Faderman apologises that in this post-Freudian era, we can hardly be so innocent of the sexual implications of our passions as we might have been once upon a time.
She is very nostalgic for this lost innocence of nineteenth century women who were ignorant of the sexual possibilities. And some other of the articles in this school, one of them is in Nancy Sahli’s essay “Smashing Women’s Relationship Before the Fall,” and has the same kind of nostalgia for these innocent relationships before the nasty sexologists came and told us that we could do it. [light audience laughter] The passing of that world of innocent, non-sexual friendships is seen as a disaster—the fall—whereas it was precisely at this period that it was becoming increasingly possible to live out a more developed sexual lesbian existence with identity and self-knowledge to find these, these nascent emergent public spaces, to label oneself, to find partners, and to not be stuck in these very covert relationships. I, for one, vastly prefer the expansion of women’s sexual knowledge and the range of activity that we now have to that lost world.
Another corollary of both the definition of lesbianism and the attitude towards lesbian sex in this school of lesbian history is the way in which this kind of material evaluates the sexologists. Since they brought labels and knowledge into this Eden of erotic ignorance, they are considered villainous. While the role of sexology vis-a-vis gay men and lesbians is certainly complex and not altogether marvellous, it is certainly not that grim, and many of the sexologists were in fact quite pro-gay and quite progressive and some of them were gay. One of the finest, Havelock Ellis, is considered by Faderman to have been one of the worst, which is one of the most baffling parts of her analysis. But it’s interesting that, according to her, one of his crimes was that he encouraged his wife Edith to pursue an active lesbian sexuality instead of leaving her in innocence. And she says that in one of her footnotes, she calls Edith Ellis a victim of Havelock Ellis’s sexology because he told her that he thought maybe she was interested in doing it with other women.
Now, like all categorizations and generalisations of this sort, my notion of these two schools of lesbian history is not airtight and there are many articles that do not fit comfortably within it. One such is a forthcoming piece by Martha Vicinus on Constance Maynard, which she’s going to be giving tomorrow afternoon, and I recommend that you all go hear it. This paper is a classic study of an intense romantic, of a series of intense romantic friendships, but it does not make any of the exaggerated claims so common to the genre of these studies. That is, it does not romanticise these relationships as a lesbian version of the Garden of Eden. It brings alive a type of experience and illuminates a way of living. And it shares the subject matter, but not the assumptions, of this romantic friendship school. My final point has to do with politics. In one sense, I object to the Faderman type of lesbian history because it often seems to substitute politics for scholarship, but I also object on political grounds. I think it displays bad lesbian consciousness by rejecting or treating with contempt so much of lesbian sex and lesbian culture as insufficiently pure, noble, and elevated. I also think it’s bad feminism. The nineteenth century worlds a female love and ritual were not all the same, but they existed in part as an accommodation to a society that was highly segregated, in which women’s domains were severely restricted, in which female chastity and purity were compulsory, and in which male power was extensive. It is important to see how women cope with this kind of world and to know that women’s existence in it was not uniformly bleak. It is also important to see how some women did develop lesbian relationships in those contexts, and how others formed committed relationships as intimacy substituted for family and kinship ties. But to mistake that world for some kind of lesbian or feminist paradise is nonsensical. Thank you. [audience applause]