Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

Feminism Is a Lesbian Plot

Responses to this shirt, and to the slogan on it, range from “Yes!” to puzzled to “What a terrible thing to say!”

True, without context, it does sound right out of the Pat Robertson quote book. He’s the white televangelist who very famously said that “the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

To which my stock response has long been “I never had a husband to leave, ‘kill your children’ is total BS, and the last three are fine with me.”

Need I say that many feminists don’t practice witchcraft, oppose capitalism, or become lesbians, but over the decades the feminist movement has encouraged women to explore and develop religious traditions that don’t put men first; pay closer attention to how current economic systems support patriarchy and white supremacy (and vice versa); and come out and/or become more visible as lesbians.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, the overwhelmingly white, straight, middle-class-and-up leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other mainstream feminist organizations didn’t want to hear it. Opponents were accusing them of being man-haters, socialists, atheists, and dykes, among other things.[i] Straight feminists, led by Betty Friedan, in their efforts to persuade the general public otherwise, threw lesbians under the bus and called us the “lavender menace.” To them we were, at best, a fifth column within the women’s movement. At times it seemed they had a hard time acknowledging that lesbians were women.

Radical feminists and lesbians from NOW, the Gay Liberation Front, and other groups rose to the occasion. Calling themselves the Lavender Menace,[ii] in May 1970 they disrupted the NOW-sponsored Second Congress to Unite Women, which despite its name had excluded all lesbian-related items from the agenda, by appearing in matching LAVENDER MENACE T-shirts and passing out copies of “The Woman-Identified Woman.” This manifesto/essay is now widely acknowledged to be a key document in U.S. feminist and lesbian history.

So in 1977 I came out into a community that was well aware of that history, many of whose members had played major and minor roles in making it. Before long I was learning and embracing it, partly by osmosis and partly by reading. My copy of Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young (1972),[iii] has my name and “August ’77” written on the title page. It includes “The Woman-Identified Woman” and also Radicalesbians’ 1970 essay “Leaving the Gay Men Behind,” which over the next few years I came to agree with 100%. The latter, by the way, includes the line, in all caps, “WOMEN’S LIBERATION IS A LESBIAN PLOT.”

To me in the late 1970s — and, come to think of it, in 2021 — this made good sense: who has more to gain from women’s economic, legal, and political equality than women who are less likely to benefit from the cultural assumption that heads of household (etc.) are, and should continue to be, male? When I said that women’s liberation is a lesbian plot, it was at least partly tongue-in-cheek, because “plot” suggests something sneaky and clandestine. From the Lavender Menace action onward, we were not.

The T-shirt, however, says “Feminism is a lesbian plot” because “Women’s liberation” was too long to fit without a weird line break. The two aren’t quite synonymous, but for they’re close enough. The shirt — which is unique, and the only tie-dye in my collection — was made for me by a D.C. housemate, the endlessly creative Beverly.

Beverly was pursuing her master’s in African studies at Howard and working for a Catholic women’s organization. She played the mandolin, favored long colorful skirts when most of us dressed urban dyke casual when we weren’t at work, and was handy with tools. She rescued a small table from a Mount Pleasant alley, installed dowels between its legs to stabilize it, and gave it to me. It’s the perfect height for kneading bread on, I’ve still got it, and that’s what I use it for.[iv] Beverly also created the “I’d rather be reading Adrienne Rich” sticker that’s on one of my old file cabinets.

She managed to procure one of the “Someone in Your Life Is Gay” posters that were then appearing on D.C. buses. She stuck it up on a wall in our second-floor hallway, and we surrounded it with news photos depicting male public figures embracing, holding hands, or kissing each other. (The Gay Activists Alliance had to go to court to get WMATA, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, to accept advertising featuring the poster.)

We were feeling our way toward what it meant to be a woman in a world where “woman” was defined entirely in terms of, and in relation to, “man.” Hence the importance of language: the recognition that “mankind” really did not include us, masculine pronouns were not inclusive, and lesbians really had to be not only included but recognized and acknowledged in the National Organization for Women. We were discovering and inventing all the “ways a woman can be,” as singer-songwriter Teresa Trull sang it. This took, and still takes, plenty of practice, and the practice has to happen in the midst of unrelenting hostility and suspicion and confusion.

Individual lesbians are far more visible in “the mainstream” (some sections of it anyway), and often more readily identifiable in our local communities, than they/we were four decades ago, but lesbian culture and politics are harder to find. In large part I attribute this to the dearth of women-only and lesbian-friendly spaces, including bookstores, music festivals, and publications. Not coincidentally, in the popular mind “lesbian” seems to have become an either/or proposition: either you are or you aren’t, and it’s almost entirely about sex.

So it’s invigorating to go back to the writings that shaped my worldview in the 1970s and 1980s, like “The Woman-Identified Woman.” Now as then its first answer to the question “What is a lesbian?” — “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” — strikes me as, well, hyperbolic. What follows, however, is golden: “She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society — perhaps then but certainly later — cares to allow her.”

Judy Grahn’s poem “A History of Lesbianism” is spare and decidedly undramatic — until the very last lines:

          The subject of lesbianism
          is very ordinary; it’s the question
          of male domination that makes everybody
          angry.

The great lesbian singer-songwriter-activist Alix Dobkin died earlier this month, on May 19, three weeks after being stricken with a ruptured brain aneurysm and stroke. In those three weeks, a mostly lesbian, virtually all-women vigil sprang into existence on the CaringBridge website. Across decades and generations, we shared our memories of Alix and how her music had saved and challenged and changed us. I’ve never stopped playing Alix’s music, but during those three weeks I played it almost nonstop.

So I’m closing this post with something she wrote in the liner notes for her 1992 retrospective CD, Love & Politics: A 30-Year Saga, about a line in her song “View from Gay Head” (yeah, it was written in that Gay Head, now Aquinnah). When she sang “Any woman can be a lesbian,” some took it to mean that every woman should be a lesbian. To which she wrote: “All I really meant was that every woman has some capacity for deep self-love and primary love for women, which is what being a Lesbian meant to me then and means to me now.”

What she said. Blessed be, Alix.

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Notes

[i] In the popular mind these are still commonly conflated, and a few decades ago the conflation was epidemic. I could go on about how erroneous this is, but instead I’ll offer a counter-suggestion: that what angers, terrifies, and/or confuses many men, women, and patriarchal society in general isn’t that lesbians hate men but that we manage to do pretty well without their approval and support.

[ii] The Lavender Menace action is covered in She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a crucial documentary about the early “second wave” of U.S. feminism, 1966 to 1971. It’s available for home viewing on DVD (check your library), and at the moment you can find it on YouTube.

[iii] New York University Press published a 20th anniversary edition of Out of the Closets in 1992, with a new introduction by the editors and a foreword by historian John D’Emilio. Still in print, it remains a wonderful intro to the lesbian and gay ferment going on in the late 1960s and very early ’70s — and a reminder that many of these issues are still with us.

Bread bowl with batter rising

[iv] Beverly also gave me the big beige-and-brown McCoy bowl that I’m still using to mix and raise dough in. Another housemate gave me Beard on Bread, which I’ve used so often that it’s now held together with strapping tape. Over the years, housemates, neighbors, and friends have come up with many ways to encourage my bread-baking habit.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

The Cost of Comfort

This Washington Area Women’s Center T-shirt was created when I was no longer even tangentially involved with the center, probably after I started working at Lammas in 1981. At that point my center of gravity moved from Northwest D.C. to the southeast and northeast fringes of Capitol Hill. The old Sumner School was no longer within easy walking, biking, or even busing distance. Just as important, the written word was coming to dominate my life — editing, writing, and bookselling — and to draw me into circles and networks of similarly committed women.

This T is more sedate, easier to wear in “polite company” -‑ that is to say, non-feminist, non-lesbian company — than the first WAWC shirt. The labyris symbol is retained but discreetly: only those in the know will recognize it as the head of an ax, or understand what that ax symbolizes.

What catches my eye now is the line under the center’s name: “Creating Unity From Diversity.” Variations of this slogan have become ever more popular in the decades since. It’s conventional wisdom among feminists, liberals, and progressives. It rolls so trippingly off the tongue that we forget how difficult it is.

Part of the Women’s Center’s mission statement declared our intent “to create a space where all women could be comfortable.” My experience taught me that the achievement of this goal was, at best, a long way off. This was my epiphany:

The rap group, of which I was one of the regular leaders, attracted some regulars who came every week and occasional participants who came for the week’s topic. As with other Women’s Center activities, the majority were usually lesbians, but sometimes as many as half the participants were straight women. (Not every woman identified herself, but if someone bent over backwards to avoid giving any clues, the chances were good she wasn’t straight.) Discussions were friendly, everyone seemed comfortable, but it gradually became apparent that the comfort was conditional.

Often several of us would decide to continue the discussion elsewhere after the center closed for the night. There were several reasonably priced options within walking distance where we could get a drink, or coffee, or a bite to eat and talk. Two of them were frequented mostly by gay men but known to be friendly to women (this was not a given with establishments that catered to gay men).

A pattern emerged: When the group mind settled on one of those gay-friendly places, the straight women who’d been ready to come suddenly remembered they had other obligations, or they were just too tired to go out. When we picked one of what we thought of as neighborhood pubs or cafés, everybody went.

These “neighborhood” venues were considered neutral, but of course they weren’t. They were frequented by male-female couples and straight men. At one, the men would be gathered at the bar watching sports on TV and cheering or groaning loudly as the game progressed.

In other words, the lesbians were willing to put up with the discomfort of being in a place where heterosexuality was the norm, and the straight women weren’t willing to do likewise in a place where it wasn’t. This was not surprising, since lesbians and gay men lived most of our lives in places dominated by straight people, starting with our families; they might not be exactly comfortable, but they were certainly familiar. For the straight women, gay-friendly places were anything but.

Women’s Center volunteers talked a fair amount about how to attract more straight women to our activities, like Women’s Nite Out and the rap group and our various classes. How to make straight women more comfortable at the center. I was coming to the conclusion long since reached by some of my sister collective members: that the only way to make most straight women comfortable in a mixed lesbian-straight milieu was for the lesbians to “tone it down”: talk less about our relationships, disguise pronouns when we did, and so on. To make straight women more comfortable, we had to make ourselves less comfortable. Since our comfort options at the time were so limited, this didn’t look like a great alternative.

A few years later, in her great essay “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” (based on a speech given at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival in 1981; in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith [New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983]), Bernice Johnson Reagon — scholar, activist, and longtime founder-leader of the black women’s a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock — nailed the whole matter of comfort and discomfort, extending it to encompass all the power differentials in our culture: black and white, female and male, middle class and working class, and so on and on. And especially how these categories intersect: Kimberlé Crenshaw didn’t coin the word “intersectionality” until the end of the 1980s, but feminists were already working on it, with women of color generally leading the way.

Sweet Honey did an anniversary concert every year. I attended most of the ones when I lived in town. This one has the date on it: November 19 & 20, 1982.

Reagon draws the key distinction between coalition and home: Coalition work, she says, “is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. . . . In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time.” We all need some sort of home, a place we can be comfortable enough to recharge before we “go back and coalesce some more.”

Diversity is more abstract than coalition, but it makes some of the same demands. Don’t expect to be comfortable all the time. Pay attention to who does expect to be comfortable, especially if it’s you, and who’s expected to “tone it down.”

This issue has never been more important. If all of us, especially the more privileged among us, aren’t willing to learn to live with some measure of discomfort, I suspect we’re all doomed.

In practice, the Women’s Center created events where all women could be comfortable as long as they were comfortable in women-only spaces. As expected, a significant majority of these women were lesbians, but not all: some identified as bisexual, some as heterosexual, and some were in transition or uncommitted. The Full Moon Cruise in 1980 was more ambitious than the usual Women’s Center event, which is why it got its own T-shirt. Women’s Nite Out happened regularly on the third floor of the Sumner School, and every so often we threw a women’s dance at All Souls Church.

All Souls, the Unitarian Universalist church at 16th and Harvard, N.W., was then as now a hotbed of culturally and politically progressive activity. It was also a stone’s throw from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, home to multiple lesbian group houses, and easily reached by public transportation. Long before rainbow flags started flying from liberal churches and synagogues, All Souls welcomed our events, at some risk to themselves. D.C.’s human rights act, like many such laws, saw no difference between men excluding women and women excluding men, or white people excluding black people and black people excluding white people: justice may not be blind, but when it comes to power imbalances in society, it certainly is myopic.

The threat of being sued wasn’t strictly hypothetical either. Around this time, I was editing as a freelancer a bimonthly newsletter for a non-smokers’ rights group. Its principal, a George Washington University law professor, brought a sex discrimination suit against a D.C. restaurant for requiring men, but not women, to wear jackets. I had zero doubt that he and other legal eagles would thrill to bring a suit against the Women’s Center for excluding men from a dance, and against All Souls for renting us space to do it.

So we were careful. We created the fiction that these were ticketed events, and tickets had to be purchased in advance. PR was largely by word of mouth or very limited circulation media like In Our Own Write. If a man insisted on coming in, we were supposed to let them in, but I don’t recall this ever happening. What I do recall is our delight in appropriating the men’s room, where there was never a line.

Our best protection was that lesbians weren’t just invisible to the heterosexual world; we were literally unimaginable. Only a few years earlier, after all, I had gone to women’s dances at Penn without registering that most of the women there were, if not lesbians, then not exactly straight. The idea of women voluntarily excluding men from any part of our lives, and especially our events, is still problematic. But the distinction that Bernice Johnson Reagan made between home and coalition is still valid. All of us working in the rough-and-tumble wider world need places to regroup and recharge.

Tellingly, it was in this women-only, mostly lesbian world that I started paying much closer attention to the differences among us, and the other ways we were different from the wider world. We were mostly white in what was then a majority-black city, and the age range from youngest to oldest couldn’t have been more than about 15 years. Class-wise, however, we came from a variety of backgrounds, and some of us had had grueling experiences with the mental health establishment, male violence, and/or the legal system. In this women-only space, we talked about things we had never felt comfortable discussing anywhere else.

I picked up this T at a women’s conference at West Virginia U., where Lammas was selling books and records. Probably 1983 or 1984. (Maya Angelou was the keynote speaker.) We dreamed of a universal sisterhood, of “unity from diversity,” but making it happen in real time was far harder — and asked more of us — than we often wanted to acknowledge.