Cherchez la Lesbienne

The other day at the public library book sale I picked up a charming book I've been wanting to read for a long time: Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend (Firebrand Books, 1988) by Yvonne Zipter, an informal look at lesbians and softball.  I just finished it, and enjoyed it all the way through.  Zipter, a freelance journalist and poet, had found softball a helpful community builder and enjoyable recreation, so when a friend suggested she write about it, she came up with this book.  It's not a monograph, but she did read up on women in sports, circulate questionnaires, and interview people.

Zipter spends some space on friction between jocks and feminists, though one of the book's virtues is that Zipter recognizes that the groups are not mutually exclusive, and is more interested in doing justice to the variety of views and politics among lesbians rather than finding a unifying essence despite everything.  (After all, the dyke cartoonist Alison Bechdel -- several of whose drawings illustrate the book -- has celebrated lesbian softball as played by her strongly feminist characters.)   But I was brought up short by this quotation excerpt from one of the questionnaires:

Stephie: "What do you mean by feminist?  When I think of feminists, I think of hairy armpits, hairy legs, ERA all the way ... I believe in equal pay, yes.  [But] if I was straight and went out on a date with a guy, I'd still want the guy to open the door for me.  I don't think I'm a feminist.  I believe in equal rights -- don't get me wrong -- and I believe in equal pay, but ... I know some women are feminists but I'm not like that" [139].

Hairy armpits?  Hairy legs?!  Why, they sound like a bunch of lesbians!

Let me remind the reader: the person quoted here is herself a lesbian.  Yet she deploys the crudest and most laughable stereotypes of lesbians to distinguish and distance herself from feminists.  (Her evident assumption that "ERA all the way" is an extreme radfem slogan is equally wack: the Equal Rights Amendment was a liberal-feminist project.  And. of course, it was meant to enforce the "equal rights" that Stephie claims to support.)  I wonder who holds the door for whom when Stephie goes on a date with another woman?

My first thought as I tried to resolve the cognitive dissonance this quotation ignited was that Stephie was an unreconstructed femme, but she could just as easily be a butch with hairy armpits and hairy legs herself.  One happily effeminate gay man I met in my first year in a gay community said, when he learned I was involved in the campus Gay Liberation Front, said to me: "The GLF? Aren't they all -- you know -- [hand wiggle] effeminate?"  He promptly burst out laughing, acknowledging his own queeniness, and I have never been able to decide whether Reggie was serious or was just performing one of his little comedy routines (he had several).  Later, though, I met other less-than-butch gay men who denounced other GLB student organizations in the same terms: Oh, they're all just a bunch of screaming queens.

If Stephie were a straight woman, even a straight feminist, she might use the same stereotypes to establish firmly that she's not a lesbian.  (The trope about holding the door open is still, astonishingly, with us, and invoked by women as well as men.)  Zipter also discusses the anxiety of women athletes trying to fend off the stereotype that they are lesbians -- even when they are lesbians.  That's the irony of Stephie's remarks: she's not really talking about feminists, she's talking about lesbians, even if she shaves her own legs and armpits.  It's a fascinating example of someone tripping over her own stereotypes, and of the difficulties people have with thinking about principles and politics.

Born to Be Picked On?

Yesterday I read Different Daughters: A Book by Mothers of Lesbians, edited by Louise Rafkin, originally published by Seal Press in 1987 and then in updated editions in 1996 and 2001.  I read the second edition, which I found at a library book sale.  It consists of short essays by about thirty women, mostly of my parents' generation, telling how they came to terms with the discovery that their daughters were lesbian or bisexual.  It's familiar territory to me, since numerous books of this kind have been published, but it was good to brush up, and to be reminded of the attitudes lesbians faced in the first decade or so after Stonewall.

The book also nudged me toward thought on some secondary issues.  Many of the contributors told of agonizing over what they might have done to make their daughters turn away from men, and this passage stood out for me:

I remembered with guilt a debate I had many years before with [my ex-husband's] therapist, a woman, about the children's independence and their learning to do things like change their own bicycle tires.  She said I was going to raise daughters that no man would want to live with [66].

This would have been sometime in the 1960s, I believe.  Similar ridiculous ideas were expressed by other psychiatrists, according to these mothers, which is a reminder that psychiatry and therapy generally have often been hotbeds of reaction.  Seriously: changing her own bicycle tire would render a woman intolerable to men?  But yes, traces of this attitude persist to this day, and though it was never true that all men required incompetence and dependence from their wives, enough men are threatened by competence and the independence it may signal to be a problem -- especially when the official culture endorses their attitude.

But also:

One day at a beach someone threw a bottle at one of my daughters and yelled "dyke" [61].

This set me thinking.  A young woman might be assaulted by a random bigot on the beach or anywhere else whether she is lesbian or not, simply because she's a woman.  She was born that way, of course. The same would be true of people of color who are subject to harassment by white supremacists simply because of the inborn color of their skin.  Why, I wonder, do so many gay people believe that if we could just prove that we're Born This Way, bigotry would simply evaporate, when everybody knows that inborn conditions are the basis of discrimination, hostility, and violence?

Stage Frights

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I'm rereading Emma Donoghue's excellent book Passions Between Women (Harper, 1993), and finding lots of good things in it.  For one thing, I located this delicious tidbit I keep thinking of but wasn't able to quote accurately before:

One librarian, Mrs Lord, was accused by certain Dublin men of lending obscene novels to their daughters; she responded by assuring them that she underlined all the dirty bits so the girls would know what to skip [15].

We should all have such librarians.

But what I like about Passions Between Women is Donoghue's ability to remember that people differ from each other, have different reasons for what they do, and probably have more than one reason for what they do.  In the chapter on Female Husbands, for example, she acknowledges that women who adopted male dress and identities, and pursued romances with other women may have had numerous reasons for doing it that way.  (It wasn't necessary to pass for male to find a girlfriend.)  She also shows that the "deceived" wives of the female husbands may not have been deceived after all, or may not have minded the deception.  When their husbands were caught, the wives often came to their defense.  The memory of Donoghue's discussion had a lot to do with why Stewart Van Cleve's account of a passing woman in 19th-century America annoyed me so much: like several scholars Donoghue criticizes, Van Cleve made unwarranted assumptions about women's motives for taking on male identities.

After the female husbands, Donoghue moves on to "breeches parts":

Female crossdressing was central to British culture in this period [1668-1801], but it was a site of contradiction and double standards.  While female husbands such as Mary Hamilton were being whipped and jailed for male impersonation, women were playing "breeches parts" in roughly a quarter of all plays.  Individual attitudes too were inconsistent and unpredictable; as Terry Castle has pointed out, Henry Fielding could denounce female transvestites in his translation of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, yet as a theatre manager hire the crossdressing actress Charlotte Charke to play male roles.  Hostility to female crossdressing does not seem to have borne any relation to the completeness of the disguise: some female soldiers who successfully passed as men were lauded for it, while other women were attacked for riding unfeminine riding habits.  The figure of the crossdresser was read in many different ways, depending on the circumstances, what her motives were thought to be, and how much she seemed to threaten the powers of men over women [87].

Donoghue says that historians, including queer ones, tend assume that the spectacle of women playing men on stage was intended to titillate male audiences, but this wasn't always the case:

Richard Steele's The Tender Husband [1705], which includes a scene of a female transvestite wooing another woman, was so popular with women that it played on Ladies' Nights (dates on which women could request the performance of a particular play) on average every two years during the first half of the eighteenth century.

And:

The most uncomfortable moment in one such play is when Sylvia, the crossdressed heroine of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer (1706) flirts and eventually spends a night with her nurse's daughter, Rose, who emerges next day in bewilderment, complaining "I don't know whether I had a Bedfellow or not."  Neither do we.  The obvious joke is that, though Rose doesn't know it, she has not had a "Bedfellow" in the sense of a male heterosexual partner.  But the audience cannot be sure what is being implied; what has happened to Rose in the night to make her so unsure about the nature of sex, about what being "Bedfellows" means?  [89]

This isn't a particularly subtle reading, but it seems to me that many scholars, whether historians or literary critics, have trouble recognizing or analyzing such ambiguities.  Donoghue stands out for her sensitivity to these realities and ambiguities.