I came out around gay men–and quite a “classic” type of gay man at that: My earliest lessons in queer culture mostly involving learning to tell the difference between June Christy and Blossom Dearie, Barbara Cook and Ethel Merman, and distinguishing Verve-era Ella from Pablo-era Ella. Consequently, it was a bit of an adjustment when I moved to the States and had very little contact with men of any kind, including gay fans of musical theater, the golden age of Hollywood, and camp interior decor.
I suspect that’s pretty typical. Once you move beyond college friendship circles, gay men and lesbians tend to go their own ways for political organizing, activism, and socializing. (A couple of important exceptions to this tendency are AIDS activism and the fight for marriage equality. As Sarah Schulman’s great book Let the Record Show makes clear, ACT-UP New York was a broad coalition, at least in part because its meetings were held at the Gay and Lesbian Center, a known location that lots of people went to for their own reasons and that wasn’t thought of as a “men’s place” or a “women’s place.” And since marriage brings such clear financial benefits in the U.S.–I’m thinking about health-care coverage, taxes, etc.–it makes sense that everyone would be equally sick of being denied them.)
Still, I’m curious about the roots of what I shorthand in my notes as “the great divide.” (Just as in my other great journalistic interest–dentistry–I’m fascinated by when and how dentistry, medical care for the mouth and teeth, got separated from medical care for the rest of the body.)
In the days before gay liberation, gay men and lesbians often cooperated for mutual benefit by helping each other pass for straight. David K. Johnson’s book The Lavender Scare includes this lovely anecdote:
“We found gay guys and we paired up because when you’re in your twenties and thirties you have to be dating,” Cassidy explained. “You have to show up at social gatherings from your office with a guy if you are carrying security clearances.” Even when socializing privately, Cassidy’s circle included a careful mixture of gay male and lesbian couples. Cassidy remembers such a dinner party at the home of a lesbian couple. All the same-sex couples were sitting together around the table when the mother of one of the hostesses rang the doorbell. “By the time her mother walked in the door,” Cassidy recalled, “we were boy/girl, boy/girl, with the guys’ arms draped over the back of the women’s chairs and the women leaning toward them.” They had made “the switch” instinctively. “We hadn’t said a word, we just did this automatically.”
In the earliest days of the homophile movement, men and women networked in interesting ways. Joanne Passet’s book Indomitable, a biography of Barbara Grier, notes that pioneering activist Barbara Gittings used to take the train from her home in Philadelphia to New York City, “where she attempted to use books as vehicles for connecting with other lesbians.” I love that phrase, which Passet doesn’t really explain, but I guess anyone who has spent vacation days madly searching used-book stores knows what she means. In one of those book store visits, Gittings came across a copy of Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America. She got in touch with Edward Sagarin (Cory’s real name), met up with him in Manhattan, and he told her about the Mattachine Society and ONE, Inc. This provided Gittings with a reason to travel to the West Coast, and while in San Francisco in the summer of 1956, she went to a Daughters of Bilitis meeting, met Del Martin, and later acted upon Martin’s suggestion that she set up a New York branch of DoB. Daughters of Bilitis was a lesbian group, and I daresay a woman with Gittings’ research skills would have learned about it anyway, but finding Cory/Sagarin’s book and then tracking him down got her to the West Coast a little sooner.
After Stonewall, there was a flowering of gay organizing–so much so that within six months of the riots, there had been at least one schism, with the Gay Activists Alliance splitting from the Gay Liberation Front. (The seven founding members of the GAA included just one woman: Kay Tobin Lahusen, who was Barbara Gittings’ partner for 46 years, until Gittings’ death in 2007. Lahusen died on May 26, 2021, at the age of 91.) The GAA was one of the rare groups that had a physical headquarters that could be used for meetings but also for social activities. The GAA Firehouse famously hosted dances that were aimed at “fostering Gay solidarity and understanding through social contact among all members of good will in the gay community.”
What I would do for such a place today! But it wasn’t quite so paradisical for the women who hung out there. Toby Marotta’s 1981 book The Politics of Homosexuality contains some descriptions of the frustrations women faced: “Few men welcomed the lesbians or encouraged them to speak. When the leadership of [the Lesbian Liberation Committee] complained, some men made insulting remarks about “oversensitivity” and “bitchiness,” while others offered sympathy and promised help but lacked the influence to change things. The more often they attended membership meetings, the more the lesbians felt dismissed.” Communications styles were different: “The men talked too loudly to suit the lesbians; they seemed either overly assertive or artificially abashed; and they were always more concerned with making decisions than with making sure that each member of the group felt involved in the decision-making process and comfortable with the outcome.”
Some women reported feeling uncomfortable at “mixed” dances held in the Firehouse. According to Marotta, “When both men and women were invited to parties, the women inevitably clustered together and ‘got off’ on one another. Their exhilaration reached a peak in April 1970, when they ran an all-women’s dance-partly to demonstrate growing feminist awareness, partly to reach out to lesbian radical feminists who refused to attend activities including men, and partly to provide an alternative to the two seedy lesbian bars in the Village.” An article with the amazing title “pigmafiapigmafiapigmafia” in Rat (a publication with a fascinating history that I’ll save for another time) exalted at the fabulousness of that all-women event:
The dance was a huge success–we had several hundred women–radical gay women, so-called “bar” lesbians, and women’s liberation people. And despite our differences, everyone related to each other. We danced fast, we danced slow, we danced Greek-style, we danced in circles and pairs, we rapped, we were stoned on joy. We were all women, all in love with each other, and we had a tremendous sense of power in our self-sufficiency. Yes, men, not only can we do everything ourselves, but we can enjoy ourselves at it too!!
Sounds pretty great, right?
RECOMMENDATIONS: Thinking about Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen reminded me of some fantastic episodes of the podcast Making Gay History. This one from Season 1 features them both, as does this one from Season 2.
LISTEN TO ME: I subbed in for a vacationing Steve Metcalf on the Culture Gabfest the last two weeks. On Aug. 18, Karen Han, Marissa Martinelli, and I discussed CODA (with fabulous guest Sara Nović), the video game Boyfriend Dungeon, and the great Slate podcast One Year. On Aug. 25, Marissa, Ben Frisch, and I talked about the board game Wingspan, the new, three-part adaptation of The Pursuit of Love (one of my favorite novels), and the bonkers movie Annette. On Working, I talked to Isaac Butler, with whom it is always so much fun to chat, about his interview with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu.
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