Read A F*cking Book: The Right Side Of History
LGBT and queer history nerds rejoice, for the world has given us a new anthology! The Right Side Of History: 100 Years of LGBTQI Activism provides an indispensable summation of key activists and movements in the United States before and after Stonewall in a collection of third- and first-person essays and interviews.
Of course, it’s not a comprehensive work — instead, these 30 essays provide important context and understanding of individuals, movements and moments that formed the greater whole of a long fight for queer liberation, one that is far from over but which has made incredible strides in just a few decades.
The journey begins in 1922, when dancer Isadora Duncan announced her bisexuality during a performance in Boston. Beginning with the story of a bisexual woman gave me much confidence in the book — I knew right away that this would not be the one-dimensional, gay white man’s history of queerness. Throughout the book, you can read first-person essays by Miss Major Griffin-Gacy about the Stonewall riot and by NAMES Project Foundation CEO Julie Rhoad about The AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Julie Rhoad and Jill Biden view part of the AIDS Quilt. Via whitehouse.gov
Poet and biographer Neeli Cherkovski writes beautifully about the complicated contributions of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to homosexual and bisexual liberation. Brandeis professor Anahi Russo Garrido contextualizes the impact of Alfred Kinsey’s work in its time and today. Interviews, like that of Brooks with Judy Shepard, mother of hate crime victim Matthew Shepard, provide other points of entry to well-known topics. Most of the pieces are queer people writing about other queer people and the movements they were part of. Some are common knowledge, while other topics — like the 1934 Longshoreman’s Strike that led to launching San Francisco as an internationally known queer hub — were new to me. The writing is accessible, and the many different styles keep reading interesting and make each work feel like a different, important story.
This anthology would be a compelling read for someone deeply versed in LGBTQI history or someone trying to deepen their knowledge for the first time. After reading, I found I had speckled each essay with notes and highlight marks, reminders to look further into topics and questions that a piece had touched on. Most importantly, the book indicates a way forward — in which many more individuals will continue fighting for liberation by speaking out, creating art, and putting themselves on the line for their queer siblings. In a way, it offers much hope for what the next 100 years will bring.
Audre Lorde Project Hosts Vigil and Flashmob To “Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves”
On Monday evening, approximately 200 people gathered in Washington Square Park for “Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves,” a gathering to honor Black women and trans and gender non-conforming people who have been murdered by the police. As part of the 11 Days of Action called for by #ThisStopsToday, Free Our Sisters was held in solidarity with other protests against the Staten Island grand jury’s failure to indict officers in the killing of Eric Garner. Hosted by the Audre Lorde Project and several allied organizations (FIERCE, Streetwise and Safe, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Anti Violence Project), the event began with a large vigil and concluded with a tour of prominent sites of violence and resistance in the queer and trans struggle for prison abolition and police accountability.
In contrast with the vast and thundering NYC Millions March that originated from the same location just two days prior, Free Our Sisters was a reserved, community affair. At the start of the vigil, organizers gathered participants into a large circle, singing “we found love in a hopeless place.” Organizers discussed how that they had specifically chosen not to hold a march — rather, they wanted to give voice to resistance without risking members of the community being arrested, acknowledging that many in the space had survived violence.
This is what community looks like #FreeOurSisters #ThisStopsToday #11Days #LGBTQ pic.twitter.com/SAIiADDUJl
— AVP (@antiviolence) December 16, 2014
“To be clear, we are not here to change the system. We are here to shut it down,” said Audre Lorde Project member Simone. “Audre Lorde reminds us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And in this moment, this struggle is not about bad cops. This struggle is about all cops. This is about transforming the system of oppression that created and sustained the prison-industrial complex. Let’s not forget that police forces were originally built to control and murder indigenous and Black people in this country… We’re socialized to turn to social workers and police when things happen, but we have resilience and resistance, strategies that have always worked for us. Let us rely on each other.”
Supportive cheers resounded.
“In the words of Audre Lorde, ‘we must fight knowing we were never meant to survive,” said Cara Page, Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project. “We call upon the legacy of the Stonewall uprising. We call upon the legacy in the fight for our freedoms from the racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist, violent system. Tonight we will call out the names of some, not all — the ones that we know have been killed at the hands of the police, or from their neglect in upholding our safety. We cannot name all the names because often we are disappeared and not remembered.”
#FreeOurSisters! Here in Washington Square Park with @audrelorde. #TransLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/mOH2fzoqDq
— Naimah Hakim (@NaimahHakim) December 15, 2014
In tribute, Anti-Violence Project Community Organizer LaLa Zannell stood before the group and called out the names of victims of police brutality, including Yvette Smith, Eleanor Bumpurs, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tarika Wilson, Islan Nettles, Marlene Carey, Marsha P. Johnson, Latanya Haggerty, Margaret Mitchell, and Aura Rosser. Members of the crowd responded with “presente” and chimed in with additional names.
Following this, the group split into four sections where they received instructions to disperse, travel separately, and meet up flash-mob style in four locations around Greenwich Village: Stonewall Inn, the former Women’s House of Detention, the ICP Center, and outside of the old Barnes and Noble on the corner of 6th Ave and 8th Street. Once reassembled, participants were given a quick history lesson on the location’s relevance to the movement.
The Stonewall Inn.
In 1969, the Stonewall Inn became the site of one of the most important protests in LGBT American history. On June 28 and 29, crowds fought against the then-common police raids of the bar. Although this fact is frequently erased, the Stonewall riots were led by trans women of color.
Today, Black queer women are still frequently uncredited, even as they lead some of the most high profile social justice actions around the country. This includes Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the creators of #BlackLivesMatter.
Magically, a crowd appears @ former women's house of detention following footsteps of #stonewall warriors vs #NYPD pic.twitter.com/qpLx5kscL1
— Andrea Ritchie also @dreanyc123.bsky.social (@dreanyc123) December 16, 2014
From 1932 to 1971, the Women’s House of Detention was located in Greenwich Village. Many women were held here, including Angela Davis, who was incarcerated as a political prisoner for 18 months. (Later, she was cleared of all charges.) While inside the prison, Davis mobilized prisoners and initiated a bail program. When she left, Davis co-founded Critical Resistance, a grassroots prison abolition organization that popularized the term “prison-industrial complex.”
Chanting in front of IFC center ! pic.twitter.com/XlrdEqqRb5
— Audre Lorde Project (@audrelorde) December 16, 2014
In 2006, seven Black lesbians were arrested for defending themselves outside the IFC Center movie theater. After 19-year-old Patreese Johnson turned down several raunchy advances by Dwayne Buckle, he called her anti-lesbian slurs and jumped on another member of the group, Renata Hill. The friends stepped in and successfully defended her.
Although the attacker never received any punishment within the criminal justice system, the women themselves were painted as “gang members” and criminalized. Three of the women entered into plea agreements and received six-months in prison. The remaining four received initial sentences ranging from three and a half to 11 years in prison.
https://twitter.com/simongdunham/status/544646478703390721
Last May, Mark Carson, a black gay man, was murdered at the corner of 6th Ave and 8th street for simply walking on the street with another man. The killer, Elliot Morales, heckled the pair with anti-gay slurs, pulled out a gun and shot Carson to death.
To many, Carson’s death was particularly shocking because it had taken place in the middle of gay-friendly Greenwich Village. It brought to light a grim truth: for people who are both LGBT and Black, there are very few places of sanctuary.
For more, check out the Audre Lorde Project’s live tweets from the event at @audrelorde. They are also putting together a short documentary film.
The Radtastic Black Lesbians Who Changed LGBT History and Our Lives
Black History Month started in 1926 as “Negro History Week,” centered around the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and then expanded into Black History Month 50 years later during the nation’s bicentennial. Black History Month speaks to our need to preserve the lived realities, achievements and culture of black people in the United States who have seen our humanity obliterated by white supremacy for generations. This month, we seek to restore self-value and pride to oppressed communities while also hoping to correct some distorted histories.
When President Gerald Ford officially recognized the month of February as Black History Month in 1976, he encouraged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” But all areas within that culture have not been covered equally by the dominant culture. And because historically marginalized communities often imitate the same hierarchies in dominant cultures, so despite Black leaders championed the cause of uplifting Black communities through retellings of our experiences, the holiday legitimized the experiences and realities of the most socially acceptable members of African American communities — like those of Black cis-hetero men — while silencing other narratives. And of course said dominant culture does the same, and always has.
Often excluded from Black History? Black lesbians, womanists and lesbian-feminists. Obviously I’d say these lesbians were important to Black History simply because I think lesbians are always important, but my personal bias aside, these women provided serious contributions to political liberation movements and ideology. Understanding and respecting black history means examining these Black lesbians’ political and community work. So without further ado, let’s meet some bomb-ass Black lesbians and their organizations.
via scalar.usc.edu
The Combahee River Collective
In 1974, a group of Black lesbian-feminists in Boston, Massachusetts gathered together to form a seriously queer union of women dedicated to challenging systems of oppression in a multifaceted way. They named themselves the Combahee River Collective after Harriet Tubman’s military campaign where she freed over 750 enslaved people. (Notably, this 1863 Combahee River Raid was the only military campaign designed and executed by a woman in US history.)
The Combahee River Collective set out to dismantle sexism, racism, heterosexism (or the privileging of heterosexual relations, behaviors, and dynamics), and classism, employing what we can call today “intersectionality”. The historical context of this group’s formation is key to understand the members’ decision to organize themselves into a collective with certain goals in mind. The 60s and 70s saw a lot of movement and organizing within historically marginalized communities, but these communities did not always take into consideration the perspectives of members more socially disadvantaged than others. The women who ultimately participated in the Combahee River Collective were fed up with the racism in white feminist movements, the sexism in anti-racism and Black nationalist movements, and the disregard for issues related to sexual orientation and class in Black feminist movements, such as the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). It was at a New York regional meeting of the NBFO that author Barbara Smith and other delegates began doing the work to build Combahee, although initially their intent was just to form a Boston chapter of NBFO. But the more work they did, the more they realized the need to strike out on their own. In these women’s efforts to explore the different injustices they faced, the Combahee River Collective created an alternative space to explore what happens when you really hit the oppression jackpot. These Black lesbian-feminists got right down to business in their “consciousness raising” meetings and by April of 1977, they had published a group Statement. In their Statement, they refused to ignore the implication of their Blackness solely to gain access into white feminist movements. Here’s the first paragraph:
We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
They also acknowledged they can and must fight alongside Black men against racism, but also challenge Black men’s misogyny and sexism without assuming some kind of guilt for “betraying” their men. Most radically, they rejected political economic systems that preserve capitalism and imperialism at the particular expense of people of color. They held retreats in the Northeast, inviting black feminists to bring “copies of any written materials relevant to Black feminism—articles, pamphlets, papers, their own creative work – to share with the group… [to] foster political stimulation and spiritual rejuvenation.” After subsequent retreats, women were encouraged to publish in journals like Heresies, Frontiers and Conditions. Famously, in 1979 a Combahee member named Chirlane McCray published an article called I Am a Lesbian in Essence Magazine — McCray is currently married to New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio (we talked a little bit more about that here).
Although the organization disbanded by 1980, in its work, The Combahee River Collective changed the game in a really important way. The Collective believed that focusing political work on Black women, especially queer Black women, was a key to social liberation because the liberation of a group so disadvantaged on multiple levels would necessitate the liberation of all peoples. This idea that multiple identities create nuances in people’s life experiences that can compound or complicate the oppression those people face helped to give birth to the way we approach identity politics today. The Collective complicated the framework for political activism in the 1960s, and a lot of modern, social justice initiatives adopt and continue to adopt the Combahee River Collective’s approach, even 40 years after the group’s formation.
Salsa Soul Sisters meeting
African Ancestral Lesbians United for Social Change (AALUSC)
The AALUSC began as an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot… of a couple more offshoots. To find the roots of this group, we must go back all the way to the Stonewall Riots in 1969. After the police raid at Stonewall Inn that sparked a number of protests in response to the persecution of LGBT folks, many advocacy groups assembled to address the needs with various LGBT communities. Only weeks after the Stonewall Riots, queer activists organized the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that advocated for destroying social institutions in order to liberate queer people. Before GLF’s quick demise in 1972, members of the group split off and formed the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), an organization that wanted to focus on the single issue of securing basic human rights, freedoms, and dignities for homosexual people. From GAA came the Black Lesbian Caucus in 1974, who again splintered and changed their name to the Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc Collective. Salsa Soul Sisters is the oldest Black lesbian organization in the US.
Until 1990, Salsa Soul Sisters invited both Black women and Latina women, but it transitioned into an exclusively Black lesbian organization. Today, the group uses the name, “African Ancestral Lesbians United for Social Change.”
The AALUSC provided an alternative for Black women (and Latinas, pre-1990) to the lesbian bar-scene that had discriminated against lesbians of color in the past. It also focused on empowering Black women through their similar experiences while also encouraging Black women to embrace their differences. Continuing its legacy of offshoots, the AALUSC has given life to new groups such as the African Ancestral Society of Butch Women, Young Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Two-Spirit Women of Color, and Lesbian Parents. Where the Combahee River Collective influenced political rhetoric, the AALUSC touched upon the psychic and spiritual experiences of lesbians of color and tended to those community needs. The AALUSC definitely understands that spiritual uplift can facilitate a community’s ability to tackle oppression and enact social change.
The Black Lesbian Caucus at the 1972 NY Pride Parade
via pinterest
Presses and Publications
Many of these politically conscious Black lesbians understood that histories are most validated when documented. Literature and the written word are often the basis by which we define how legitimate a history is. As a result, it comes as no surprise that many of these Black lesbians assembled publishing companies and presses as a way to produce and distribute stories and memoirs that mainstream companies would not view as marketable or worthy of attention. For example, the aforementioned Salsa Soul Sisters published a quarterly periodical for Black and Latina lesbians called, “Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians.” The publication prided itself on its resistance to dominant cultures’ tendency and need to assess the worth of something through an arbitrary measurement of worth. Likewise, Salsa Soul Sisters also published “Salsa Soul Sisters/Third World Women’s Gay-zette” in the 1980s and formed another offshoot called the “Jemima Writers Collective” so that Black women could share their work with one another and negotiate damaging self-images.
Moreover, encouraged by the fabulous queer matriarch, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith started “Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” which reached across nationalities, ages, sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes and racial/ethnic heritages to engage the writings of other women of color — especially queer women of color — in conversation with one another. The press managed to publish works such as This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. and Audre Lorde’s I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities, which have now become important literary staples in higher education coursework. Not to mention that Kitchen Table Press became an advocacy group on top of its literary relevance!
Think back to your elementary school education during Black History Month. Did your read about Martin Luther King Jr. through the most sanitized narratives of his work? Was good ole’ Abe Lincoln a hero? Did the story ever change as the years progressed? Black History is not perfect; it often erases people and communities that are not as easily contained, explained away, or changed in an attempt to be more valid in the lens of white society. Just because Black lesbians often aren’t mentioned during Black History Month all the time does not mean that they did not influence and even transform Black and non-Black liberation practices. As this Black History Month winds down, let’s remember that reclaiming histories is not a one-shot deal. We must always work against the silencing that mainstream and dominant cultures attempt to enforce on marginalized realities. Let’s take time to be thankful for these lesbians who kept it queer and kept it real.
More Than Words: Gay Pt. 2 — Gay Cats
***This is part 2 of a 2-part series! Part 1 can be found here.
When we last left off, “gay” was suffering from a bad case of vertigo after a centuries-long roller coaster ride, and had landed temporarily on “sexually promiscuous” as its most common meaning. By 1800 or so, to hammer a metaphor, the word was also experiencing a sort of gender-based tilt. As Mr. Wainscotting over at MissingSparkles points out, gay-as-promiscuous took on different flavors depending on the gender it was referring to — just as the idea of promiscuity has always taken on different flavors depending on the gender it refers to — so while a “gay man” was a Don Juan, a “gay woman” was a sex worker. Over time, these two feelings of “bachelor” and “deviant” started to meld together, something that might have aided the definition’s trajectory. See, for example, Jane Gay, the “heroine” of a British comic strip from 1932-1959 — she was a single woman who was always losing her clothes.
THE FIRST JANE GAY STRIP. SHE ALSO LOVED DOGS.
Meanwhile, across the pond, “gay” was gathering entirely different connotations. Starting around 1893, “gay cat” was itinerant slang for — in the words of Leon Ray Livingston, aka “America’s Most Celebrated Tramp” — a good-for-nothing young loafer. A gay cat would “work maybe a week, gets his wages and vagabond about hunting for another ‘pick and shovel’ job… cats sneak about and scratch immediately after chumming with you and then get gay (fresh). That’s why we call them ‘Gay Cats’.”
Gay cats were looked down upon by other wanderers — as scholar John J. McCook described in 1893’s “The Public Treatment of Pauperism,”, they were like “a jackal following up the king of beasts.” The hierarchy was such that you could skip this step if you had started young (Jack London, for example, went straight from “road kid” to “profesh”). By the 1930s or so, gay cats were also known for providing sexual favors for more established itinerants in exchange for food and protection. A 1933 dictionary of “underworld and prison slang” defines “gey cat” as “a homosexual boy.”
THIS KIND OF GAY CAT REFUSES TO WANDER.
Meanwhile meanwhile, said “homosexual boys” and their adult counterparts were were also using the word to refer to themselves and each other. As usual with terms used mostly in private, the exact trajectory of this one is hard to pinpoint — closets are dark, and the flashlights of history are flickery. Luckily, enterprising writers and humorists were able to take advantage of the word’s many meanings (and therefore its attendant ambiguity) for nudge-nudge wink-wink purposes, so there are a few public examples we can use. A popular song in 1868 called “The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store,” written by William Shakespeare Hays, refers to a eyeglass-wearing moustachioed young man who is “nobody’s beau” even though he “smiles at all the girls he meets” (the association is kind of a stretch — and I can find no corroboration for the ubiquitous claim that the song was often sung by drag performers — but I couldn’t resist bringing yet another William Shakespeare into this).
MR. HAYS HAD A REALLY INTERESTING LIFE
Gertrude Stein’s 1922 prose poem “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” based on the real-life couple Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire, uses the word “gay” 136 times. Stein’s poetic technique famously made use of repetition in order to encourage readers to really hear words — “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is hers, too — and by hammering on a fraught and multifaceted word like “gay,” in the context of this love story between women, she encourages her readers to let it fracture into all its attendant meanings. (N.B.: No one excerpt does this poem justice, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.)
Even less ambiguous was Noel Coward’s song “Green Carnation,” from the 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet, a comical love story set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Coward never came out during his lifetime, he’s now a gay icon, and he clearly had his finger on the pulse. “Green Carnation” is an ensemble piece sung by “blase boys” describing how they are “exquisitely free / from the dreary and quite absurd / moral views of the modern herd.” The last line — “And as we are the reason for the nineties being gay / we all wear a green carnation” — cheekily reattributes the credit for the term “Gay Nineties,” and cites Oscar Wilde’s trademark flower as a symbol of a certain kind of art-loving gay man from that earlier era.
AND WE ALL SMOKE THE GREEN CAR-NA-TION
But Stein and Coward were both gay themselves — when did the word start showing up outside of its in-group? According to some, when Cary Grant yelled “I just went GAY all of a sudden” while jumping up and down in a women’s bathrobe in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, the word was in wide enough usage that it counted as a double-entendre — savvy audience members would pick up on the implication, while censors let it by because it technically just means extra-joyful. Psychologists began using the word (albeit in scare quotes) while writing about their patients in the late 1940s. As of 1955, British journalist and gay activist Peter Wildeblood defined the word as “an American euphemism for homosexual.” Around this time, the activist community — which, during the 1940s and 50s, had overwhelmingly organized around the word “homophile” — began referring themselves instead as “gay,” “lesbian,” “LGBT,” and other terms that have stuck around since. By the time the Stonewall Riots garnered the movement widespread attention, the switch was complete.
WHY ARE THEY CALLING THEMSELVES THE HAPPY LIBERATION FRONT? JUST DOESN’T MAKE MUCH SENSE.
Over the next few decades, this version of “gay” took off, joining the vernacular to such a degree that older meanings were overshadowed. It became (and remains) the preferred term for what it is — a 1991 report by the American Psychological Association recommends it over the more offensively clinical “homosexual,” and the more recent GLAAD Media Reference Guide agrees, adding that “queer” hasn’t caught up. But the roller coaster ride was not (and is not) over! Starting around the 1970s, kids started using it as a pejorative (i.e. “that’s so gay”). This kind of usage ramped up in the 1990s and continues today, to such an extent that some groups (the Apple dictionary; the BBC Board of Governors) consider it an entirely different and unrelated word (luckily, others recognize it as the microaggression it has been proven to be).
And so, centuries after its whirlwind beginning, “gay” continues to tug in and out of the mainstream. As of January 24th, President Obama had used the word on the record 272 times — fifty-six more than President Clinton (it might not be enough to earn him the title of First Gay President, though). That same week, Coca-Cola was called out for banning the word on some kind of virtual can-scribbling promotional website. It’s been a long journey for three little letters. It’s a good thing words don’t get worn out.
This has been the thirtieth installment of More Than Words, where I take queer words of all sorts and smash them apart and see what makes them tick. Every week I dissect a different word, trying to figure out where it came from, how it has evolved, where it might be going, and what it all means. It’s like reading the dictionary through a prism. Feel free to send word suggestions to cara@autostraddle.com.
Header by Rory Midhani
More Than Words: Gay Pt. 1 — We’re Going Gay
“Gay” was the first queer word I ever learned, and the first queer thing I ever called myself. Something about “lesbian” didn’t sit right with me, and I wasn’t yet aware of reclamation, of the bright side of pejoratives — the spark that happens when you turn a weapon on itself. Plus I liked the sneakiness. Gay meant happy, right? You could claim it while admitting nothing. It was a rainbow dream mask.
But even before it got the rest of its colors, this word blushed. Pleasure, joy, and other gaieties are perpetually societally fraught, and gay has the scars to prove it — it’s been punned on, leaned on, worn proudly, hidden behind, argued over, and ping-ponged across the net of respectability ever since it was invented. If words could break, gay might have a long time ago. Luckily it bent instead. Here’s the beginning of how it happened.
The most common etymology of the word “gay” has it rooted in the Proto-Indo-European root *gey- (“to go”). This evolved into *gheng- (“to stride”) which became the Proto-Germanic *ganhaz/*ganhwaz (“sudden”), and then the Old High German gahi (“quick, impulsive”). The move to Old French jai (“merry”) brought the recognizable definition and a nice modern jauntiness. Jai became gai likely due to the influence of Gothic gaheis (“impetuous”), and soon we had the Middle English gay, direct ancestor of the word we use today.
JAY, AS IN BLUE JAY, IS A COGNATE OF JAI. THIS JAY IS PRETTY JOYFUL.
Easy enough — except that etymology is an inexact science based on barely traceable exchanges that took place thousands of years ago, so not everyone agrees on what happened. Anatoly Liberman has an alternate theory that roots gay in Old High German wahi (“shining”/”beautiful”), based on a g/w interchangibility that we see borne out in word pairs like “guardian” and “warden,” or “guerrilla” and “war.” But he’s even more attached to a different explanation from the 19th century master Frank Chance. An “excellent etymologist, now almost forgotten,” Chance used to publish almost exclusively in Notes and Queries, a quarterly where scholars and hobbyists traded notes and asked each other questions — kind of like an early Formspring, but for linguistics and lexicography. In an 1861 Note, Chance took on “gay” via an analogy to the French gaîne, or “sheath,” which comes from the Latin vagina, also “sheath” (and also your bonus etymology-of-the-day).
“SON, WE SHALL NAME YOU FRANK CHANCE, DOOMING YOU TO A LIFE OF GAMBLING AND/OR ETYMOLOGY”
“The g in gaîne,” Chance explains, “corresponds to the v in vagina… In a similar way, I think, our adjective “gay” might be readily deduced from the Latin vagus, or perhaps from the corresponding Italian vago, which means both wandering, roaming, and pleasant, agreeable.” About a century and a third later, German linguist Harri Meier added some evidence to the pile, listing Italian cognates like svagarsi (“amuse oneself”) and svago (“diversion”).
I have also become attached to this theory, not only because it’s more fun, but also because it means that the start of gay’s backstory involves a gradual influx of positive feeling — what semantician Stephen Ullman calls an “amelioration of meaning.” As Liberman points out, the Latin vagus often meant “flighty” or “frivolous,” which, though not the worst possible things to call someone, aren’t as sunshiney as the merriment and joie de vivre implied by “gay” — see, for example, Propertius’s Elegy V, in which a “vagis puellis” is compared negatively to Cynthia, a “docta puella” or “learned girl,” and Propertius’s perpetual muse. So somewhere over the course of its initial leap into English, gay enjoyed a rise in reputation — a fine beginning for a word that would spend the rest of its life undergoing a roller coaster ride of semantic shifts.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
“Gay” first hit paper in 1325, in a transcription of a Middle English song called “Blow, Northerne Wynd.” When I started reading it, I thought it was about how the narrator would brave the northern wind to get to his beloved, who is described as semly and menskful and lossom (“seemly,” “worshipful,” and “lovely,” if you prefer boring new English words). But in the end, he’s actually asking the wind to blow his suetyng (“sweetheart”) to him, which honestly sounds kind of mean and lazy. Dave Wilton found the relevant stanza:
“Heo is dereworþe in day
graciouse, stout, ant gay
gentil, iolyf so þe iay
worhliche when heo wakeþ.
Maiden murgest of mouþ;
bi est, bi west, by norþ ant souþ,
þer nis fiele ne crouþ
þat such murþes makeþ.
Blow northerne wynd!
Send thou me my suetyng!
Blow northerne wynd! blow, blow, blow!”
(TRANSLATION: “She is precious in day / gracious, stout, and gay / gentle, jolly as the jay/ noble when she wakes. / Maiden merriest of mouth / by East, West, North and South / Neither fiddle nor crowd / Makes such abundance. / Blow northern wind! / Send me my sweetheart! / Blow northern wind! Blow, blow, blow!”)
THEY SING THIS SONG DURING PHOTOSHOOTS.
Gay is a nice-sounding, one-syllable word that rhymes with a lot of things — all the makings of a poetic mainstay. To the delight of decades of middle school English students, no one could get enough of it for centuries and centuries. Chaucer used it in 1385. Robert Mannyng used it in his “story of England,” in the late 14th century. The lyrics of “Deck The Halls” are from 1862. Shakespeare used it thirteen times in total. Here’s Iago, in Othello, written in 1603: “She that was ever fair and never proud / Had tongue at will and yet was never loud / Never lack’d gold and yet went never gay.” I’m trying to be mature here but Shakespeare makes it hard.
DON’T LISTEN TO HIM, DESDEMONA! YOU’RE BETTER OFF GOLD AND GAY
Over this time, though, “gay” began experiencing a “pejoration of meaning” — it’s the opposite of the aforementioned amelioration, and you use it when a word’s reputation starts going downhill. Some think this started as far back as the 14th century, but it was definitely established by the 17th, when, according to the OED, it was generally used to describe those “addicted to pleasures and dissipations.” Carefreeness had flipped back to frivolity. You can even see it in the above Shakespeare, as Iago uses “gay” to mean “flashy” and sets it in parallel with pride and loudness, two then-undesirable traits). This frivolity developed into a general lack of inhibitions, and often referred to sexual carefreeness — by at least 1799, a “gay man” was a womanizer, a “gay woman” a prostitute, and a “gay house” a brothel.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMING OUT (VIA PUNCH MAGAZINE ARCHIVES)
In a nice return to its roots, “to go gay” was to live a life of hedonism. For proper usage, see this sentence, from Edward Montague Compton MacKenzie’s Carnival, that was far ahead of its time:
“After dinner Jenny went back to Hagworth Street, and had a flaming quarrel with her mother, who accused her of “going gay”; demanded to know how she dared put in an appearance dressed in another woman’s clothes; insisted she was to come home immediately after dinner; forbade a hundred things, and had the door slammed in her face for the advice.”
While this meaning became more prevalent, another now-familiar one snuck up alongside it. Next time we’ll talk about when gay started meaning what it does now — and take another few dips up and down the semantic roller coaster.
This has been the thirty-first installment of More Than Words, where I take queer words of all sorts and smash them apart and see what makes them tick. Every week I dissect a different word, trying to figure out where it came from, how it has evolved, where it might be going, and what it all means. It’s like reading the dictionary through a prism. Feel free to send word suggestions to cara@autostraddle.com.
Header by Rory Midhani
Quist Brings Global LGBTQ History to Your Smartphone
I’ll admit that I’m one of those people that constantly knows where their phone is. On the metro? Lying around the house? Sitting at a bar earnestly hoping that I haven’t been stood up? You can bet your boots that my overpriced chunk of plastic is hidden within reach. But next time you’re twiddling your thumbs, maybe you (and I) can do something a bit more productive than checking out how many cat pics have been uploaded to Imgur. Like learning how far queer rights have come when our foremothers and forefathers stopped twiddling their thumbs.
Quist, a portable history of all things queer, launched their app on July 27th. Imagined as a This Day In History app for the LGBTQ population, the app allows users to rusers to peruse over 750 milestones in our global shared history with more events being added as the world changes.
This could be your phone via Quist
I spoke to founder Sarah Prager, a social media consultant living and working with non-profits in Maryland, about Quist’s inception.
As a young professional in the social media space, I feel that it is important not only to post information to a website, but to get it out there and meet people where they are. Mobile is growing exponentially as a medium to get information out there, so I wanted to create an interactive, engaging way to bring queer history to the next generation. The idea was in the back of my head for a year before I met an app developer at a marriage equality in Baltimore last year leading up to the ballot referendum we had here in Maryland. I took it as a sign that I had run into a gay app developer that it was time to take this project on.
Prager wants to remind people that no matter where they are, they’re not alone. While you can just use the app to find interesting water cooler factoids of the day, you can also look into the specific history of individual countries or American states. The stories are randomly sorted to ensure that everything gets read, but later versions may allow you to look at different categories, such as sports or law. But for now, the sleek layout ensures the app does its job of “bringing you today’s LGBTQ history.”
Exploring by country
Quist wants to get us talking about how far we’ve come as we continue forging ahead. The app highlights monumental events, whether they’re local or global, progressive or regressive, heart-warming or heart-breaking. Quist features our firsts and our milestones, our moments in the LGBTQ liberation movement, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the media evolution as well as the personal love stories hidden in the past few centuries. Prager and her team of family and friends have been poring over public libraries, the Lesbian Herstory Archives and internet sites to map out each story and provide the reader with a citation-filled springboard to discover more for themselves. They’ll continue updating their timeline with over a thousand stories in time for the American LGBT History Month in October and the European LGBT History Month in February.
Prager will return to her Connecticut high school in October to continue passing on the message about Quist and our evolving history. Teaching the next generation about our legacy is of the utmost importance and perhaps school partnerships can pique their interest. She’s already agreed to take on a member of her GSA as a researcher, possibly indicating that a mobile app can make curating our history a little bit easier. Let’s help this moment go down in history.
Also.Also.Also: When Transphobia and Whorephobia Collide and Other Stories We Missed This Week
Hello, new world order! Let’s check out the stories we missed while I was staring at the Tidal Basin. Over and over and over again.
The Times, They Are A-Changin’
+ The Community Safety Act could mean a better NYPD, and a more equitable city.
+ After the Labour MP in the UK was bombarded with rape threats for supporting putting Jane Austen on bank notes, Twitter will be implementing a feature to report abuse.
+ Pat Robertson: “there are men who are in a woman’s body. It’s very rare, but it’s true…or a women that are in men’s bodies…I don’t think there’s any sin associated with that. I don’t condemn somebody for doing that…it’s not for you to decide or to judge.” (Skip to 2:28 below.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWkMFDFMF2A?t=2m28s
+ Leiah Moser is trans*, Jewish, and fucking shit up.
+ Let my people in! To the jurors’ box, that is. Also: a feminist judge sounds amazing while we’re at it. And what about gay ambassadors? Where the fuck are they? Can a girl get a drink in here please.
Serious Business
This photo essay focuses on survivors and not-survivors of corrective rape and the practice’s impact on an entire region.
HILLARY CLINTON MOTHERFUCKING MINISERIES
In addition to the previously announced six-hour miniseries based on Cleopatra, NBC has ordered a four-hour miniseries based on former first lady Hillary Clinton starring Diane Lane…
Hilary will be written and directed by Frozen River‘s Courtney Hunt and will recount Clinton’s life as a wife, mother, politician and cabinet member from 1998 to the present. The script will begin with Clinton living in the White House as her husband is serving the second of his two terms as president. It will include her likely run for president. Busted Shark’s Sherryl Clark will executive produce alongside James D. Stern (Looper). Greenblatt told reporters following his presentation that the former first lady hadn’t yet heard of the project.
BAM.
This Week In Intersectionality
+ StaceyAnn Chin is a single, lesbian, artist, mom:
I tip my wilted hat to the women who keep a spotless house in the face of a full day of work at the office and more than one small child in the home. I would like to sit at their feet and beg them to teach me the secret of their super human abilities.
And I should pause from my woe-is-the-life-of-the-single-mama-rant to say I am really enjoying being a mom. I need to say it in anticipation of the new-age-positive-thinking-optimists who will say I am not at peace with the process because I am not channeling my inner Zen or tapping into the vast outer energies that balance planet Earth and its surrounding constellations, or those who will critique my frustrations as regret, or sorrow, or back-pedaling on the decision to have a child outside of a partnership. I. AM. ENJOYING. MOTHERHOOD.
I love the snuggling and the singing and the kisses. I love going to the park and watching her master the monkey bars or the big kid slide. I love the silly faces and the games we make up together. I love reading Click Clack Moo and Goodnight Moon. And there is nothing quite like the squeal of delight she lets out upon my return from a short sojourn elsewhere. I love the look of complete adoration in her eyes when we rise in the morning. (And yes, I know that light of adoration will dim as she ages, perhaps because she will begin to see me more clearly?) I love the kid. The kid loves me. We dig each other’s jokes. In these very early days, I get her. She gets me. I wouldn’t trade her for anything. She’s a keeper.
+ When a murder is “transphobic and whorephobic.”
+ bell hooks (FINALLY) speaks out on Trayvon Martin:
White supremacy has not only not changed its direction, it’s intensified as black people and other people of color have gained rights and have proved ourselves to be equal. In many ways the Zimmerman case is really a modern day lynching, it’s about racist white people reinforcing racialized power. The outcome sends a message to the world that global white supremacy is alive and well…
bell hooks: We can’t combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice. That’s why Dr. King was so vital because he used the transformative power of love as a force for justice.
Orange Is Still The New Black
No but really. Check out this interview with Lea DeLaria if you’re not sold yet.
Marry Me!
A majority of Americans (52%) would support a national referendum on gay marriage, which would make everyone’s life a helluva lot easier to be honest. Plus – now that gay spouses have the same ability to support politicians as their straight counterparts and Montgomery, Pennsylvania decided to just go ahead and give out gay marriage licenses without a lift of the state’s gay marriage ban, it’s becoming increasingly clear that if we don’t legalize gay marriage soon the world’s collective head will explode all over my unworn wedding dress. I’m kidding about the dress, though. That shit would be weird.
Queering Herstory
The Library of Congress just got a little gayer. Really.
The Library of Congress has acquired the papers, photographs, films and memorabilia of gay rights pioneer Lilli Vincenz, the nation’s largest library announced Thursday.
Vincenz joined the first gay rights protest in front of the White House in 1965 with group leader Frank Kameny and about 10 others, and she marched in annual July 4th demonstrations in Philadelphia.
Vincenz’s collection includes 10,000 items, the library said. It includes two rare 16-mm films Vincenz made of an early gay rights protest in Philadelphia and the first gay pride parade in New York City in 1970, one year after the Stonewall Riots. Her footage has appeared in other films and documentaries about the history of the gay rights movement.
Fat Shaming Is Nonsense
Having been a reader of fat-acceptance writers like Kate Harding for a long time, I can safely say that there are many people/commenters who are deeply concerned that if we don’t shame and insult fat people for their weight, they won’t be motivated to lose it. This “idea” was just dealt a major blow by researchers from the Florida State University College of Medicine, who that found that shaming fat people about their weight correlates to weight gain, not loss.
House of Homophobic Horrors
+ Russian neo-Nazis are using social media to prey on gay people, then attack them! Clearly Russia’s ban on gay propaganda did wonders for ending anti-gay discrimination in the nation. Maybe once we’re all done watching the Olympics we can worry about these trivial little matters, though. After all, athletics are everything.
+ Montenegro’s first-ever gay pride was interrupted with chants of “kill the gays” bc charming people.
F*ck Yeah Aubrey Plaza
Team Pick: Happy Anniversary To Canada’s First Gay Couple To Get Legally Married!
Kristen’s Team Pick
Most wedding announcements happen in small town papers and the word barely travels outside of the area code. But a decade ago when Michael Leshner exchanged wedding vows in Toronto, his “I do” echoed across the nation. Because this wasn’t just any marriage, this was Canada’s first gay marriage. So when Leshner took Michael Stark as his husband, they not only became The Michaels but the face of a social justice movement.
The Michaels had already been together for 22 years as a common-law couple when Halpern v. Canada (Attorney General) ruled that the traditional definition of marriage was unconstitutional. Leshner proposed when the law passed through a lower Ontario court, but on June 10, 2003 the couple signed on the dotted and line and crossed the threshold into Gay Marriage.
This is our gift to Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s gift to Canada and hopefully Jean Chretien’s gift. Because we are just two ordinary Canadians who love each other. We’re not a threat to anyone. – Leshner
After Ontario gave a thumbs up to the gays, British Columbia followed suit with Quebec, the Yukon, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick making their cases in the following two years. By the time the Civil Marriage Act made it to the Supreme Court asking for all Canadians to be granted the right to marry regardless of gender, public opinion had begun to swing in its favour. And by July 20, 2005 gay marriage was a thing. Paul Martin, Canada’s Prime Minister at the time, put it thusly.
We are a nation of minorities. And in a nation of minorities, it is important that you don’t cherry-pick rights. A right is a right, and that is what this vote tonight is all about.
Canada started as number four, but now eight years later eleven other countries have also opened the doors to their citizens. But even here, with ten years of progress under their belts, the Michaels know we haven’t made it yet.
The marriage case drove the stake through the heart of legalized homophobia. There’s so much to be thankful for but still so much to be very worried about… we have to be very mindful that in parts of the world gays and lesbians are being seriously physically harmed or worse.
But hopefully the next ten years of their marriage will see us fixing some of society’s flaws. Happy Tin Anniversary Michaels, you guys deserve it!
Herstory Live: The Lesbian Avengers School You On Their Ass-Kicking Roots
Join us on Saturday, October 13, from 3-6pm EST, as the Lesbian Avengers host a live-streamed roundtable and panel from Dixon Place in NYC. The panel will feature playwright and Avenger co-founder Ana Simo, performer Carmelita Tropicana, filmmaker and Avenger Su Friedrich, videomaker and Avenger Harriet Hirshorn, musician and Avenger Eve Sicular, and other special guests.
Explore the Avengers’ roots in the East Village of the ’80s and ’90s, which was a hotbed of dyke activism, dyke art, laboratory of queer identity, and flashpoint of a nationwide culture war declared by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention.
This is an incredible opportunity to chat with Avengers and hear their amazing stories, so don’t miss it!
There used to be a saloon next door run by this German-American anarchist Justus Schwab (1847-1900). All the radicals would hang out there, including Emma Goldman and Ambrose Bierce. I only know because they put up a plaque a couple months ago. Maybe I’ll put my own up here. “At this spot, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers were founded by resident Ana Simo and her co-conspirators Maxine Wolfe, Sarah Schulman, Anne-christine d’Adesky, Marie Honan and Anne Maguire.”
It was an iffy proposition, starting a lesbian direct action group, and required a good dinner and lots of wine, as most revolutions do. In the ’90s, lesbians fought against AIDS, and for abortion and women’s health care. They stood up for animal rights and sweat shop workers. But for lesbians, as lesbians? Not so much.
For this, the neighborhood made its contribution, almost as much as all the talent and experience in the room. Five of the six lived and worked in the East Village, perfectly matched to the cheap rent and rabid dissatisfaction apparent in the street. Every flat surface had a sticker on it, or flyer. Lampposts were perfect for pink triangles announcing Silence=Death, or posters advertising for an ACT-UP or WHAM (Women’s Health Action Mobilization) demo, or poetry slam. Ads weren’t always what they seemed. Sometimes they were advertising movies. Sometimes, if Dyke Action Machine was involved, they might be offering co-opted images of lesbian power.
It was a kind of evolutionary soup, a crucible of artists and queers, and activists, with an enormously long history of agitating immigrants. And since at least the late ’70s, when projects like the all-dyke Medusa’s Revenge Theater started up, it had been a laboratory of identity. If you weren’t careful, a bite from a radioactive Spiderwoman might transform the quirk of your sexual orientation that you thought was either a horrible tragedy or just a spare appendage, into an intrinsic, essential part of yourself. New superhuman powers included X-ray bullshit detection, and the instant assessment of the web of life.
That’s why ACT-UP didn’t just take on one hospital, one bigoted priest, but the entire church, the whole medical system, the government that supported it, the nation that held it all in place. And why at WOW, Women’s One World theater, lesbian performers like Holly Hughes, author of The Well of Horniness, Carmelita Tropicana, and later the Five Lesbian Brothers, didn’t just separate themselves off to the side, they re-envisioned the entire world.
I was still pretty fresh from the potlucks and softball dykes of Kentucky when my friend Amy Parker took me to see the Brothers at WOW. My god, they blew my mind. The intrigue, the sex, the hilarious, unmitigated muff-diving desire. They didn’t just put our dyke selves front and center. They reduced the outside universe to a mythology fainter than shadows on a cave wall. You could play with them, or laugh at them until your face cracked.
That’s what made queers so dangerous in the ’80s and ’90s. We were getting bigger and bigger. Indivisible. Taking up more space. Imagining ourselves as part of the city, of the country. In his essays written in the death throes of AIDS, David Wojnarowicz took on all of America. “My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.”
Poet Eileen Myles didn’t just stick to her poems but ran for president in ’92. If a bastard like Pat Buchanan could run for president, somebody like Myles had better, too. And just a couple weeks before the Lesbian Avengers’ first action, the failed presidential candidate Buchanan went to the ’92 Republican National Convention in August, and gave a speech declaring war, a Culture War, complete with a blitzkrieg campaign to divide and conquer those minorities increasingly encroaching on straight white male power. He set the “brave people of Koreatown” in opposition to the (black), welfare-ridden mobs of the LA riots, and unleashed everybody against the bra-burning feminists, tree-huggers, and homos.
“Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.” – Buchanan
It was good to have it spelled out. It confirmed the decision of those first six Avengers to go big, launch the group by taking sides on one of the most important issues in New York City: the Rainbow Curriculum. Its purpose was to teach school kids tolerance, mostly of racial and ethnic difference, but also of women and queers. But even though only a few of the 400 odd pages mentioned lesbians or gay men, the Christian Right used queers as a wedge in their D & C campaign, and attacked it as the “gay” curriculum. By getting involved, the Lesbian Avengers not only inserted a lesbian voice into the city, but entered the nationwide battle for the soul of the country.
The first action is still almost unthinkably daring. We didn’t chain ourselves to anything, or clash with cops. We stood outside an elementary school in Queens as open dykes, and gave balloons to school kids that encouraged them to, “Ask about Lesbian Lives.” Some of our tee shirts read, “I was a lesbian child.”
The rest is history. The Rainbow Curriculum got squashed, but not the Avengers. Dykes everywhere embraced our in-your-face mix of humor and anger, and the goal of lesbian visibility. Two years after that first action, the fire-eating Lesbian Avengers had become an international lesbian movement. We mobilized twenty thousand dykes for a march on Washington, and almost as many for the International Dyke March in New York. There were more than sixty chapters worldwide. As a legacy, we left behind Dyke Marches that continue from San Francisco to London, and a changing cultural space we helped expand. Especially inside dyke brains.
next: read an excerpt from Kelly Cogswell’s upcoming work, “Eating Fire,” describing the Lesbian Avengers’ first demonstration in front of an elementary school
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10 Great Places to Meet Lesbians If You Have a Time Machine
If you happen to find a Time Machine and have a free afternoon and are interested in making new lesbian friends, we’ve gathered some places you should check out. I mean, even though we’re not actively being stoned to death in a public square and sent to jail for wearing a tie in public these days, it can still be difficult to meet other queer girls in this weirdo world we live in, so why not just like, go back in time and see what’s going on? You know?
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10 Great Places to Meet Other Lady-Loving Ladies if You Have a Time Machine
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1. Mona’s 440 – San Francisco, CA – 1930s/40s
performers at mona's
Mona’s, San Francisco’s first lesbian nightclub, opened in 1934 on Union Street, later moving to Columbus Avenue. Mona Sargent and her husband had an idea for a bohemian artsy kind of place for writers, with sawdust-covered floors and singing waitresses. It was a hit! The singing waitresses eventually evolved into a cross-dressing drag show which was perfect for the reputation it had in local paper “San Francisco Life,” which ran racy ads for the place. Mona would take out quarter pages in SFL to advertise the male impersonators she hired out of Los Angeles and New York, and SFL referred to Mona’s as “bohemian” which was often code for “QUEER.” “Where to Sin in San Francisco” wrote about Mona’s that “the little girl waitresses look like boys. The little-girls-who-sing-sweet-songs look like boys. And many of the little girl customers look like boys.” Just like The Abbey!
If you’re the type to care deeply about the lives of Celesbians, then Mona’s performers will have a strong appeal. It would seem the Mona’s cross-dressers were some of the world’s first Celesbians —> “Patrons speculated about their lives, journalists followed their activities, and tourists had them pose for nightclub photos.”
Gladys Bentley
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2. The Clam House – New York, NY / 1920s
At The Clam House in Harlem during The Harlem Renaissance, the legendary lesbian singer Gladys Bentley — who always wore a suit, onstage and off — was all the rage at this mega-popular uptown gay bar. She played piano, sang in a glorious growling voice and was widely appreciated for making up dirty lyrics to popular songs. A self-declared “bulldagger,” she told a reporter once that she’d married a white woman in Atlantic City. This may or may not have been true. There were a shit-ton of bars and clubs in Harlem at the time featuring bisexual and lesbian singers like Ma Rainey, Lucille Bogan and Bessie Smith. Places like The Cotton Club attracted tourists as well as a mix of straight, gay and lesbian locals.
3. Garden of Allah – West Hollywood, CA/ 1920s-30s
In 1918, hugely successful (at the time) actress Alla Nazimova purchased a home in West Hollywood and converted it into a 3.5-acre paradise with a pool (in 1928, it was converted into a 3.5-acre paradise with pool and a hotel). All the smart artsy people went there and it quickly became known as a lesbian gathering place. Allegedly Marlene Dietrich liked swimming in the pool naked!
wishes she was swimming in the pool naked
Nazimova, who was in a “lavender marriage” with actor Charles Bryant for 13 years, had an affair in 1910 with the legendary Mercedes De Acosta (who threw plenty of her own lesbian parties) — way before The Chart got invented, Truman Capote used Mercedes De Acosta on his “International Daisy Chain” to link people together by shared sexual partners. “Mercedes was the best card to hold” in that game.
Despite not being a spectacular writer, Mecredes is still famous for her lesbian affairs with persons including Greta Garbo (who lived next door to de Acosta), Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Tallulah Bankhead, Adele Astaire, Eva Le Gallienne, Amy Lowell and Ona Munson. Mercedes de Acosta was basically the Shane of the early 20th century.
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4. The WAC/1940s
Desperate times called for desperate measures and World War II’s need for manpower caused them to open their militant arms to womenpower. To counteract the potential public assumption that the Women’s Army Corp was just an organized team of prostitutes serving Our Men in Uniform, the WAC girls were trained to seem chaste and asexual, which many lesbians preferred to how they’d been told to live their lives thus far, which was “chaste, asexual, and attractive to men.” Still, it was often dangerous to talk openly about being a lesbian, so it could sometimes take months for the Sapphics to find one another.
Being in the military enabled ladies to go out unescorted by men and the social networks that developed were intense, coded, and described by one enlisted lesbian as “hog heaven.” In the film Before Stonewall, printer Johnnie Phelps said “the battalion that I was in was probably about 97% lesbian.” After the war, many WAC women had acquired enough money to live without men, which was also awesome.
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5. Smith, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley – Northeastern US /Late 19th & Early 20th century
Smith College Basketball Team
“I should, I think, have committed suicide if I had to live with him. But my choice was made easy by the fact that in my generation marriage and academic career was impossible.”
– M.Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr
Between 1880 and 1900, only 10 percent of American women remained single. But about 50 percent of American college women failed to tie the knot, including 57% of Smith’s graduating class of 1884. Thus “Boston Marriages” became a thing, where women who decided they’d rather have a career than marry a dude and have kids would maintain same-sex households with another educated woman after college. Not only did these shack-up situations become what we’d call “a lesbian relationship,” but they also enabled the ladies to live freely of the gendered constraints placed upon them by a potential husband. A 1929 study by Katherine B. Davis talked to 1,200 female college graduates about their sex lives and found 50% had “experienced intense emotional relations with other women” and 19.5% had “intense relationships accompanied by mutual masturbation, contact of genital organs, or other expressions recognized as sexual.” This was like a middle to middle-upper-class white girl thing, though. Rich women had more restricting family expectations, most poor women couldn’t afford college, many poor women couldn’t get by financially without a father or husband, and most women of color still lacked basic human rights, let alone a a semester in Northampton.
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6. Rent Parties – New York, NY / 1920-1935
Private parties were still the safest places to meet other ladies during The Harlem Renaissance and “rent parties” were the most popular kind of private parties in which to do so. Rent Parties were huge in Harlem at the time, and some were very gay. The hosts provided bootleg liquor, dancing and jazz and charged admission (to help the resident pay their rent, which was astronomical at the time — many white landlords charged black tenants double what their white counterparts would pay). Fear-mongering local papers described lesbian-attended Rent Parties as “dangerous to the health of all concerned” because of their “combination of bad gin, jealous women and a carving knife.” (a.k.a. “dyke drama”)
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7. The Hull House – Chicago, IL / 1890s-1930s
Historian Jane Addams (the first American woman to ever win a Nobel Prize) met Ellen Starr in college and the two Special Friends opened Hull House together in Chicago so they could be together with other like-minded women and save the world.
The Hull House was “a settlement house in the midst of poverty where young, comfortably brought-up women who had spent years in study might now ‘learn of life from life itself.'” Women came to live and work at The Hull House, doing things like helping newly arrived immigrants adjust to America.
When not changing the world, there is strong evidence that they often made out with each other. Addams eventually broke up with Ellen and moved on to a wealthy woman named Mary Rozet Smith and they stayed together forever ever. Fun fact: The Jane Addams Hull House Association still exists!
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8. The Daughters of Bilitis – started in San Francisco, CA, then went nationwide / 1950s-60s
Founded in 1955 by legendary activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the homophile group began small in San Francisco, hosting three monthly functions in different member’s homes – a social, a business meeting and a discussion session for everyone to talk about their feelings. Then the DOB started publishing their own magazine, The Ladder. Every like-minded lez who got her hands on it flipped out and wanted to use the organization to meet other lesbos (sound familiar?). They’d just all gotten telephones so the sky was the limit, really. Many girls moved all the way to San Fran ’cause of what they’d read in The Ladder. Then individual chapters started forming all over the country (just like meet-up groups!). Here is one woman’s evaluation of the experience:
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9. Ralph Martin’s – Buffalo, NY/1940s
“The biggest gay bar in the city of Buffalo” and “unquestionably the most open gay bar of the 1940s” was one of a few places where women could actually dance with each other. Same-sex dancing could make a bar lose its liquor license, but Ralph’s had a bar in front and used a large room in the back for dancing to the jukebox. It was a mixed-gender crowd — a patron recalls “we were never segregated like they are now. There was never any question about a gay guy’s bar. There was no such thing. Really! We always went to the same bars.” Its patrons are described as “primarily well-dressed women, including showgirls and strippers, who gave the bar its distinctive reputation for action,” but also like many bars of the time, most lesbian couples there followed a strict butch/femme dress code.
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10. The Redhead, The If Club, The Open Door, The Sugar Shack, etc./ Los Angeles, CA (1940s-1950s)
Bars like The Gypsy Room on the Sunset Strip catered to a pretty specific socioeconomic class of lesbians, but after the war nightlife began getting a bit more diverse. Many American lesbians had come to Los Angeles for factory work during WWII, and a lot of women from Mexico and Hawaii were moving to LA in search of a more gay-friendly environment. Thus clubs for working-class women started popping up in lower-income neighborhoods and attracted a way more racially diverse clientele. The patrons at beer-and-pool table bars like The If Club, The Open Door, The Sugar Shack and Lakeshore were usually regulars. The Pink Glove charged a cover for straight people to discourage them from coming. And then there was The Redhead, which “welcomed only Mexican-American lesbians.” This one actually still exists — it was called Redz for a while and now it’s called Chuparosa. It still supports a mostly lesbian clientele (of all races, obvs).
Okay, time to get a snack and travel back in time!
References for this Post:
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in America, by Lillian Fadermen
Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, by Lillian Faderman, Stuart Timmons
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D.Davis
Out of the Past: Gay & Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, by Neil Miller
The Lives of Lesbian Elders: Looking Back, Looking Forward, by D. Merilee Clunis, Karen I. Fredriksen-Goldsen, Pat A. Freeman and Nancy Nystrom
Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, by Nan Alamilla Boyd
The Lesbian Community, by Deborah Goleman Wolff
Bisexuality & The Eroticism of Everyday Life, by Marjorie Garber
“Lavender Scare” Exposes The US Government’s Cold War Era Gay Witch Hunt
via The Lavender Scare
The Lavender Scare, a forthcoming film by Josh Howard, is the first feature-length documentary that looks at the United States government’s mass campaign to fire every gay person in government during the Cold War, ostensibly because they represented security risks.
According to the website:
“While the McCarthy Era is remembered as the time of the Red Scare, the headline-grabbing hunt for Communists in the United States, it was the Lavender Scare, a vicious and vehement purge of homosexuals, which lasted longer and ruined many more lives.
Before it was over, more than 10,000 Federal employees lost their jobs. Based on the award-winning book by historian David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare shines a light on a chapter of American history that has never received the attention it deserves.
It examines the tactics used by the government to identify homosexuals, and takes audiences inside interrogation rooms where gay men and women were subjected to grueling questioning. These stories are told through the first-hand accounts of the people who experienced them.
The Lavender Scare shows how the government’s actions ignited an anti-gay frenzy that spread throughout the country, in an era in which The New York Times used the words “homosexual” and “pervert” interchangeably, and public service films warned that homosexuality was a dangerous, contagious disease.
While the story is at times infuriating and heartbreaking, its underlying message is uplifting and inspiring. Instead of destroying American homosexuals, the actions of the government had the opposite effect: they stirred a sense of outrage and activism that helped ignite the gay rights movement.”
Brief history lesson time!
In the 1950s in the United States, Canada, and Britain, people did not think particularly highly of gay people. Gayness was still medically classified as a psychiatric disorder, which made the landscape for coming out and acceptance significantly worse than it is now (human rights legislation, anti-discrimination legislation, gay marriage, etc, when you start to look into them, are all depressingly recent developments). Because of this, and other reasons, governments believed that having gay people around was a potential breach of security.
According to Patrizia Gentile and Gary Kinsman in their book, The Canadian War on Queers:
“It was believed that homosexuals, who might otherwise have been considered loyal citizens, were unreliable. Therefore, homosexuals would continue to be viewed as security risks if they were put in compromising positions by Soviet agents interested in blackmailing public servants who had secrets to keep as well as access to Canadian, American, and British security information.”
In Canada, there was also an initiative called the fruit machine (I am not making this up), which was a “scientific” method for determining whether federal employees had “character weaknesses,” which was what they considered gayness. (The contemporary Czech Republic has one of these things, too).
While the height of the lavender scare, the Canadian war on queers, and whatever Britain calls their mass firings was in the 1950s, the impacts continue today. The United States government only stopped discriminatory practices (on paper) against hiring gay people in 1995, and only extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees in 2009. Frank Kameny, one of the men featured in the film, and who is believed to have organized the very first gay rights protest in 1965, went to the signing.
It is this contemporary presence that makes films like The Lavender Scare — of which there are very few — so important. Teachers have to fight to get gay history recognized in schools — and not even specific elements of gay history, such as, for example, the Stonewall riots, but generally, such as the fact that major historical figures can sometimes be queer. It is also incredibly easy to forget our own history, and to see the gay rights movement as something that has really only been effective in the last five, ten, twenty years. If it is easy for us to forget, it is even easier for everyone else.
The Lavender Scare is based on a book by the same name published by the University of Chicago, which is a good academic publisher that does peer-review, which makes the movie extra-promising, especially if you are into that. The book, which was written by David Johnson, was based on research in the National Archives, on government documents, and on interviews with former civil servants. The film will be released next summer. I am already excited.
Watch the trailer:
20 Years Ago Today in Gay History: The AB101 Veto Riots Would’ve Blown Your Mind
Yesterday the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco held a program called “All the Rage: Stories From the AB101 Veto Riot,” featuring a documentary short about the queer riots in San Francisco in 1991 and a panel with organizers of the event twenty years ago and eyewitness accounts. Called the AB 101 Veto Riot, it “ended with the police in retreat and a state office building in flames.”
I had never heard of the AB 101 Veto Riot before I got this press release, or the other two that accompany it in a trio, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966 and the White Night Riot of 1979. It occurs to me that maybe no one has told you, either. Most of us got through school without even hearing about Stonewall, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to hear about. In honor of the people who put their safety on the line so that our rights had to be recognized, let’s take a moment to remedy that.
1991 found the queer community, especially in San Francisco, full of rage after a decade of watching their loved ones, their families and their best friends mowed down by AIDS while Reagan’s administration stood by and did nothing, and straight America was mostly just concerned about the possibility of the epidemic spreading from the deviant subculture to their own — as far as they were concerned, the fate of the freaks and the sexually confused were a foregone conclusion. The whole decade was defined by a never-bef0re-seen level of queer militancy and a culture of outrage, especially in San Francisco. The White Night riot was a response to the ridiculously lenient sentencing of Harvey Milk’s murderer Dan White in 1979, which caused hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the area around City Hall. Over a dozen police cars were set on fire. Protesters fought back against police officers who covered their badges to avoid identification using tree branches, broken chunks of asphalt, and torn off parts of city buses. (You can read first-person accounts of a protester and a police officer at FoundSF, as well as at thecastro.net.)
LEAFLET FROM THE WHITE NIGHT RIOTS, VIA FOUNDSF.ORG
The Compton’s Cafeteria riot, which happened in 1966 and actually predates Stonewall, began when a group of transgender customers in a restaurant in the Tenderloin had finally had enough of police harassment and arrests (cross-dressing was illegal) and fought back against a raid by throwing the restaurant’s coffee cups and chairs, and shattering the windows of the restaurant that refused to serve them afterwards. (Check out the documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria and this great interview with its creators.) Both riots were historic in their bravery and, more importantly, in terms of achieving change. After the protest, Mayor Dianne Feinstein appointed a pro-gay Chief of Police to ease tensions between queer activists and the police force. And glbtq.com reports that “In the aftermath of the riot at Compton’s, a network of transgender social, psychological, and medical support services was established, which culminated in 1968 with the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit [NTCU], the first such peer-run support and advocacy organization in the world.”
The AB 101 Veto Riot came after both of these, and seems to be the least known. It came after Stonewall, after the other two major San Francisco protests, and after the deaths of innumerable beloved people from AIDS. It was in response to a bill that you’ve probably never heard of — searching for AB 101 today will point you towards a childcare bill — because it never got to become real. Had it passed, it would have guaranteed statewide protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by private employers — something that, twenty years later, many states still don’t have. Instead, Governor Pete Wilson vetoed it. As a moderate Republican, Wilson had generally been regarded as a good thing for the queer community — he was relatively liberal on social issues, and publicly supported abortion rights. But when AB 101 came across his desk, he responded “politically on an issue of principle” and vetoed it, although polls showed that a majority of Californians would support it. A later court decision, Soroka vs. Dayton Hudson, established that state labor code provisions did prohibit employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation and in fact brought harsher standards than AB101 would have (although a court decision doesn’t have the same weight or legal standing as a law). Wilson’s state government did accept and enforce the ruling, but the damage was done as far as Wilson’s credibility in the eyes of the queer community; he had played his hand as someone willing to throw them under the bus, the latest in a long, long line of people willing to throw them under the bus and then arrest them in a baseless raid.
The night the veto was announced, 50,000 people marched throughout the city, their protests recalling the direct action of ACT UP and Queer Nation during the 80s. The details of what happened next are obscure — there seems to be virtually no written or at least publicly accessible record of what happened between queer protesters and police that night. We know that the GLBT History Museum’s exhibit includes “the shoe lost by mayoral candidate Frank Jordan when he was chased from the scene of the Castro District protest that preceded the riot… [and] a fragment of stained glass from the shattered windows at the entrance of the Old State Building.” Some proof of the riots having happened at least exists in the DIY history of the movement: the queer punk radical zines. Issue #2 of Three Dollar Bill features a photo of the rioters released by the police in an attempt to have them identified.
What we do know is that the governor was “zapped” by angry queer protesters when he later spoke at UCLA, bringing riot police to campus for the first time since the Vietnam War protests, and earning the new nickname Pete “Pariah” Wilson. One of the only available pieces of archived news from the period (abstract, not a full article) describes activists “smashing glass doors, tying up traffic, disrupting a [Pete Wilson] speech at Stanford by throwing eggs and paper wads. When an orange was hurled at Wilson, he caught it (nice catch, governor) and promptly lobbed it back at the protesters. Invited guests cheered.” The protests went on in a variety of forms for a full two weeks. Today, California has active anti-discrimination laws for queers on the books.
The reason that people in marginalized groups can often grow up, even go their whole lives, without knowing their history or the incredible and awe-inspiring things they’re heir to, is because that history just isn’t there. It happened, but that doesn’t mean there’s any record of it, anything to prove that the rights we enjoy (or more accurately, put up with until we can be more than second-class citizens) didn’t just blossom out of the benevolence and fair-mindedness of the figurs of authority. There isn’t so much as a Wikipedia entry on the AB 101 Veto Riots. Even the surviving, internet-archived journalism around the veto (mostly from the LA Times and other LA-based publications), while disapproving of Wilson, makes little remark about the protests. In order to read journalist records of the riots, you need to pay at least $3.95 each for a “document purchase” from the LA Times.
When it comes to things like the AB 101 Veto Riots — or really, anything else — queer history initiatives and the existence of places like the GLBT History Museum is vital — this is how we know who we are. Without making a space for the people who were there to tell us what happened, to tell us our entire history, we have no way of even knowing what we don’t know. When you’re deciding how you feel about Obama, about the HRC, about how DOMA will end, about whether our activism is working, about whether “equality” is ever going to happen — do you know about this? Is this something you even have the option to find out about? What other parts of our history are living on only in our memories?
Well, not this moment, not anymore. Last night’s program at the GLBT History Museum saw a documentary short film on the riots released to the public with its creator Steve Elkins present. It also featured the experience and eyewitness accounts of organizers Lito Sandoval and Ingrid Nelson in a “living history panel” moderated by veteran activist Laura Thomas, as well as the work of Bob Ostertag, whose music composition “All the Rage” for the Kronos Quartet features audio from the riots. (You can listen to Ostertag’s piece on his website.) What’s more, the exhibit “No Apologies, No Regrets: The AB101 Veto Riot” will be on display at the GLBT History Museum until October 15th, featuring artifacts and documents about the riots and the people involved. Go see it if you can, and tell someone else in your life about it if you can’t. Remember what people you don’t know did for you and your family twenty years ago today, and keep remembering it as we take up the same struggle. Because if we don’t take responsibility for keeping our history alive, no one will.
Judith Butler 101: One Is Not Born a Queer Theorist, One Becomes One
Ladies and otherwise identifying persons, today I would like to talk to you about Judith Butler.
Sweet mother of pearl WHY, you ask? Because she is THE hero/ine of difficult-to-understand contemporary critical gender theory, and therefore VERY IMPORTANT to the radical lesbian feminist agenda and also to impressing that cute girl with the alternative lifestyle haircut who is always talking about the patriarchy. Also, she’s a lesbian, and there is a rule that says lesbians must always care about other lesbians. Here at Autostraddle, we are all about Lesbian Feminist Revolution and also impressing cute girls, so we want to help.
Chances are that you have heard of Judith Butler. Maybe you saw that she was included in the epic list of books to fulfill your feminist desires. Maybe you saw that she recently (and badassedly) turned down an award for Civic Courage at Berlin Pride saying that it should go instead to local feminist and queer organizations that promote anti-racism. Maybe, like me, you had a total nerdgasm over the description of Judith Butler as “the MacGuyver of queer theory.” Maybe you do/did feminism/women’s/womyn’s/gender/queer studies in college and enjoy arguing with strangers who try to hit on you about gender theory. If this is the case, we should probs hang out, just sayin’.
So here is the thing about Judith Butler: she is incredibly hard to read. Maybe you saw Gender Trouble on the Feminist Reading List and thought to yourself, “I find gender troubling, so I should obviously read this” and then you opened it up and were confronted with sentences like the following one:
Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms – that is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control and even ‘protection’ of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choice.
That kind of a sentence probably gave you some feelings, and in this YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I am a bigtime Butler fangirl, and I don’t find the experience of reading her particularly pleasurable. I alternate between being amazed/challenged by her ideas and wanting to throw the book at the wall.
So why do people bother to slog through it? Because Judith Butler’s ideas REVOLUTIONIZED the way we understand sex and gender. Gender Trouble was published in 1990, and all critical theory regarding gender since then has taken it into account.
So, what’s the big screaming deal? Performativity, my friend. Butler argues that there is no “prior truth.” It’s the repeated performance of gender which actually constructs the physical condition of sex while simultaneously hiding that construction. I know, I know, not that straightforward, but bear with me and I’ll try my best to explain.
To start, we’ll need to go right back to the basics, which means definitions:
SEX: the reproductive, chromosomal and hormonal organs and processes that place a body in the categories of male, female or intersex.
GENDER: the set of processes and practices that shape our understanding of sexed bodies; the way a sexed body becomes socially intelligible, that is, a “man” or a “woman,” “masculine” or “feminine.”
Whereas “sex” means having a particular kind of body that falls into one of two categories, male or female, “gender” is the way sex gains social meaning – the behaviors and processes that define someone as a man or a woman or somewhere in between. Implicit in these definitions of “man” and “woman” is the idea that society’s dominant understanding of masculinity and femininity is the normal and natural way for particular bodies to play out gender based on their sex.
Being male or female inevitably leads to the expression of a SPECIFIC KIND of “manliness” or “womanliness” – you know, “boys will be boys”? And it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know that these rigid understandings of masculinity and femininity don’t really fit everyone so perfectly. Everybody knows girls look HOT in menswear.
I know this is probably old hat for many of you, but language is SUPER IMPORTANT to Butler’s theories so we all need to be on the same page. Butler is heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (author of History of Sexuality) and other post-structuralist philosophers who argue that language is more than just a medium through which we understand the world; the world we understand through language is actually CREATED by the process of describing it in language. In other words, reality is discursively constructed, and there is no prediscursive reality – that is, there is no “reality” outside of its construction in language.
In Gender Trouble, Butler challenges dominant understandings of the relationship between sex and gender that view gender as naturally emerging from a sexed body. She argues that sex is always already a gendered category:
“Gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established.”
Gender, she argues, is the lens through which we understand the body. Our ideas that link penis with male and vagina with female are already gendered – they’re part of a binary system that divides human bodies into two distinct types of beings. We can’t, Butler argues, understand or relate to our human bodies outside of the central system of gender; therefore, bodily sex cannot exist prior to gender, as sex must be gendered in order for us to understand it.
Butler argues that since gender is a social construct and not a natural part of existence – and since we understand biological sex in terms of gender (male and female genitalia, for instance) – biological sex isn’t “real” either, at least not in the way we usually assume it is. Like gender, sex only exists as something that we create through language.
Is your brain hurting yet? Have a look at this cute kitten and process for a minute:
Okay! Let us continue along the path to brain explosion (the good kind, I promise).
So! If sex is always gendered and therefore can’t exist prior to gender, then it has to exist concurrent with or after gender – those are the only options left.
Butler argues that gender structures and creates the notion of biological sex, but how does it do this, exactly? Through a process that Butler calls “performativity“: a repeated series of acts, words, and discourses that create and define the notions of masculinity and femininity.
Gender is not something you are, it is something you do.
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In Butler’s words,“gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance.” The repeated performance of gendered expectations – everything from little things like the way you sit or walk to highly gendered practices like breastfeeding – cements these expectations as “normal.”
It’s this repetition that actually constructs the idea that gender is something you are: I am a woman, therefore I walk a certain way. Butler wants you to turn that on its head: I walk a certain way, therefore I am a woman.
It’s not quite as clear-cut as that, though. We’re exposed to gendered performance practically from birth, so it’s very difficult to exist in this world without adhering to some kind of gendered expectations. I’m a big Judith Butler fan, and I believe her argument, but it doesn’t change my understanding of myself as a woman; gendered identity is so structuring that I don’t know if it can ever be totally escaped. I certainly don’t think that I can escape it, even though I understand “woman” to be a social construct much like “homecoming queen” or “Jersey Shore.”
Let’s recap for a second, shall we? According to Butler,
1. Sex does not exist outside of gender. Our understanding of the sexed body is created by gendered language and expectations that separate bodies into two categories, male and female.
2. Gender is “performative.” “Masculinity” and “femininity” are actually constructed by the way we play out those terms with our own bodies. Gender itself doesn’t create the performance; it’s the performance that creates gender. In other words, “gender is an imitation for which there is no original.”
photo by arfism
Butler takes these notions a step further and argues that the ways that we perform gender “create the illusion of an interior and organising gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”
In English, this means that the repeated performance of gender allows the sexed body to be understood within the framework of gendered expectations, while simultaneously creating the notion that sex is the basis for gender, and that our differently shaped bodies inevitably lead us to perform particular expressions of femininity or masculinity.
And THAT, my friends, is performativity! Round of applause for JB!
But before we go, we need to talk about the magical world of drag! Judith Butler thinks drag is awesome and that we should all get our drag on. Seriously! Drag is a great example of what Butler talks about, because it involves a dislocation between anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance. She argues that drag “reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as it’s contingency.”
Drag contests the system of gender through consciously subversive performances of it, using the techniques of parody and pastiche to challenge the dominant notions of identity that structure our society.
So start queering gender in your everyday lives! Judith Butler says so! You’ll be helping to dismantle the patriarchy AND challenge heteronormative gender ideals. And doesn’t that sound like FUN?
(It is.)
Has your brain exploded? Are you hungry for more? You can buy Gender Trouble as well as her follow up, Bodies that Matter. If that’s not enough light reading for you, check out Foucault’s History of Sexuality as well!
Female Friends Forever: Looking at Adrienne Rich’s Lesbian Continuum, 30 Years Later
What’s wrong with feminism? Lately it seems like we’re getting it from all sides, including from inside. We’ve gone from “This is what a feminist looks like” to “I’m not a feminist, but…” Lesbian feminists have highlighted ‘mainstream’ feminists’ homophobia, while some heterosexual feminists have rushed to distance themselves from those “angry lesbians.” The feminist blogosphere, supposedly that great equaliser in feminist discourse, has often faced repeated charges from within and without of reinforcing oppressions such as racism, classism and heteronormativity.
These are not new challenges. Feminism’s growing pains have been well-documented. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, heterosexual, middle-class, cis, white Western women feminists have been repeatedly called up on centering their own issues and forced to recognise that their needs just might not necessarily be the needs of say, a Black woman, a lesbian woman, a trans woman, a Muslim woman or a disabled woman.
In 1980, Adrienne Rich wrote the essay ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’ as an answer to the rifts that were developing between women in the previous decade, as an attempt to reinforce the personal and political bonds between women. As this year is the 30th anniversary of this monumentally important, monumentally beautiful work, it seems fitting – even necessary – to return to Rich’s words to see what wisdom they may have for us today.
It was not Rich’s goal to encourage women to give up on men and sleep with women, nor is it mine. Her goal was to get women – both straight and lesbian – to reorient their lives around other women in ways that were available to some lesbian communities but not necessarily to other women.
“Feminism has not given most women a picture of a feminist society that could replace the one grounded in patriarchy and all of the myriad systems that combine to divide women from each other – from classism and racism, to ableism, nationalism, homophobia and transphobia.”
Lesbian feminism/political lesbianism has a fraught history and its relations with ‘mainstream’ and/or ‘hetero’ feminism have always been strained. In the 1970s, some revolutionary feminists, seeing the widespread violence and oppression that seemed, to some, inherent in heterosexuality, began calling on all women to be(come) lesbians.
A 2009 Guardian piece described the publication in 1981 of ‘Love Your Enemy: The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism’: “Love Your Enemy’ was authored by a group of Leeds feminists and said that “all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.” It goes on to say: “We think serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality.”
Political lesbianism came under fire, as to be expected, from feminists and non-feminists alike. Lesbian feminists experienced hostility from heterosexual feminists, who took offense at being placed on a “lower order” of feminism because of their sexuality, as well as from lesbians who feared hostility from heterosexual feminists and a subsequent rupturing of the feminist movement.
Others thought that the classification of lesbianism as a political decision was cold-blooded and did not adequately describe the real emotions and relationships of and between women. Bea Campbell argued, according to The Guardian article, that political lesbianism was founded not on the love of women but on the fear and hatred of men. And Lynne Segal said that the media pounced on ‘Love Your Enemy’ and its authors, seeing an opportunity to identify it with feminism as a whole and thus derail the whole movement.
Although there are still women who identify with political lesbianism and praise its philosophy, today most young women and feminists do not consider this kind of feminism a viable or helpful social or political tool.
Indeed, some young feminists take active steps to distance themselves from lesbian stereotypes.
I think, however, that if we strip lesbian feminism down to its core – to its advocacy of women-oriented female spaces, women-identified women, and an appreciation of the inequalities and violences that still permeate the heterosexual institution – we might find a lot of things worth keeping around. What Adrienne Rich’s work did was to strip away a lot of the misconceptions and pre-conceptions of what lesbianism was – that you had to hate men, that you had to have sex with women – and to expand the definition of lesbian to, simply, a woman who loved women. And what is a feminist if not a woman who loves women? If we want to save feminism, and I do think feminism needs saving, we’ve got to get back to that basic simple truth. Women have got to start loving women again.
Feminists have not been doing a great job of being “women-loving women”. Even the most cursory glance through current feminist discourse reveals deep ruptures in feminism. Earlier this year, Chloe Angyal wrote an article in The Guardian’s Comment is Free section entitled ‘You’re not a Feminist….but’, in which she describes, and criticises, the fear of the ‘F-word’ that has afflicted so many modern women. Women are busting balls and busting down doors, they believe in women’s rights and equal pay, they condemn violence against women – but they are unlikely to claim the identity “feminist”.
Why is this? “In the popular imagination,” Angyal says, “feminists are still the ugly, angry extremists who killed chivalry and who seek not gender equality, but world domination.”
Who would want others to think of them this way? Not I. Secondly, “Feminism demands a complete overhaul of how we think, how we behave, how we talk, where we work, what media we consume, how we vote and how we raise our families. For women and for men, feminism is a dramatic shift away from the way things have always been.”
In short, so many women aren’t “feminists” because they don’t identify with popular conceptions of what a “feminist” is and because identifying as a feminist means dismantling everything they know.
How women should organise their emotions?
Where – and to whom – do their loyalties lie? How should the family be organised?
I agree with Angyal. But I can’t really blame women who don’t identify as feminists. Women don’t turn away from feminism because they don’t identify with other “feminists” or because they’re afraid to make a splash; women turn away from feminism because the feminist movement, as yet, has not given most of them an alternative vision, a picture of a feminist society, a support network that could replace the one grounded in patriarchy and all of the myriad systems that combine to support patriarchy and divide women from each other – from classism and racism, to ableism, nationalism, homophobia and transphobia. Women do not have enough to identify with, or to turn towards, after they make, as Angyal says, the “dramatic shift away from the way things have always been”. They aren’t women-identified, they don’t have women-oriented spaces, and they still rely on heterosexual institutions to give them the love and fulfillment they need.
Wait, you might say: of course the feminist movement provides a woman-oriented support system. Well, read Renee Martin’s response to Angyal and you might change your mind. Martin explains that one of the reasons women eschew the term feminist is its history of white privilege. “I’m not a feminist”, she says, “because my life experiences led me to believe that feminism was not created for women like me.” That is, women of colour. Instead she chooses to identify with womanism, a term coined by Alice Walker as an alternative to feminism, on the basis feminism does not encompass black woman’s experiences (back in 1983, these are not new debates). Womanism values and recognises black woman’s experiences and relationships with one another, their relationships with black men, and, says Martin, comes from a place of self-love. According to Martin, when it comes to feminism, “sisterhood and camaraderie lasts only as long as you don’t insist on interrogating oppression from multiple sites” – in other words, as long as you don’t bring up issues such as race and class.
Okay, okay. But what, you might say, does any of this have to do with lesbianism? Well it does. Because what we’re really talking about – whether it’s how feminism should interact with race, with class, or with different sexual identities – is how feminism should be lived. And when you talk about how feminism should be lived, what you’re really talking about is how women should live with other women. What should the bonds between women look like? How women should organise their emotions? Where – and to whom – do their loyalties lie? How should the family be organised? What should they base their choices on? It’s not enough that we, as Angyal suggests, shift away from patriarchy – and other oppressions such as classism, and racism. We must shift towards something else entirely. It is in this respect that Adrienne Rich offers us a vision of feminist society in her concept of the “lesbian continuum”.
Heterosexual and bisexual readers, before you say: “Well I’m not a lesbian, this doesn’t apply to me”… read on.
Rich’s conceived of the “lesbian continuum” as a “political affiliation that can re-establish those lost same-sex loyalties by uniting women – heterosexual, bisexual and lesbian – in a mutual, woman-focused vision”. She wanted to do away with “male-identification” – or the casting of allegiances with men – and patriarchy – in such a way that men become the primary signifier of meaning, value and possibility culturally, socially, intellectually and politically. She quotes Kathleen Barry as describing male-identification as “the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves in credibility, status and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation…interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level.”
Right off the top of my head I can think of dozens of examples of male-identification that many women – and I include myself – do every day. There’s the need to be beautiful, sexy or desirable to a man to feel beautiful, sexy or desirable at all. There’s the valuing of romantic relationships over female friendships. Or the notion that you should make decisions about where to live, what job to take, when or if to have kids and how to raise them based solely on your spouse, instead of on your mother, your sister, your best friend. Or the drive to enter the male-world instead of transforming it, to achieve male-defined success instead of changing the definition of what a successful life is – for example, by rising up the corporate ladder by working 80-hour weeks, instead of changing the nature of paid work itself to be more family-life-woman friendly.
That being said, how can you expect straight women to act or to think any differently when so much of social, political and emotional life is organised around heterosexual institutions, including the nuclear family – to the detriment of other, enriching forms of social interaction.
Consider this: between 1985 and 2004 US citizens reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed important, intimate matters and fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, friends and neighbors. The only person with whom more people reported a tendency to discuss intimate matters was their spouse. Two-thirds of British married people would turn to a spouse first when they needed emotional help. Only 13% would turn to a relative or friend first. Stephanie Coontz reports that the number of people who depended totally on their spouse for conversations about intimate, important matters – i.e. who had no other close, regular emotional ties – doubled from 5% to 9.4%. The number of people who reported that they didn’t have anyone to talk to – even their spouse – tripled. The number of US people socialising outside of work has declined by 25% since 1965.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. According to Coontz, even up to the Victorian era “men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate…and upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.” It was the influence of Freudianism that caused society to begin to suspect, and discourage, powerful same-sex friendships. The cult of marriage that developed in the post-WWII era – the notion that all fulfillment, friendship and intimacy could come through the nuclear family – didn’t help matters much. Now Coontz says, as people “lose wider face-to-face ties that built social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down”.
The result of this is a real lack of places from which women can mobilise, politically and personally, against patriarchy. Using the Greek definition of the erotic as the “personification of love”, Audre Lorde argues that the erotic connects all women as women. It is patriarchy and heteronormativity, racism and classism that cuts these ties. In 2007, I produced a paper that studied the correlation between feminist identifications and social capital. I found that there was a strong link between having a strong social network of women – mothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, co-workers, friends – and identifying as a feminist. I was struck by how lonely the women who did not identify as a feminist were. They had far fewer regular contact with other women, who could act as role models or provide emotional support.
It seems necessary to me that we re-examine, as women, feminists or womanists, where our loyalties lie and how we organise our emotional life
Patriarchy has never operated alone. It has always used other oppressions such as racism and classism to subjugate women; one of the ways it has done so is to divide women from one another. Patriarchy throws divides up to distract women from its own operations and from the role it plays in creating those race/class divides. This is not to say that those divides aren’t real; rather, that they are constructed, that they have – in the most basic sense of the word – a his-story. We need to reorient our lives around women. As Rich says, woman identification is “a source of energy, a potential spring board of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality – the denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community, the forcing of such relationships into dissimilation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other.”
So where do we go from here? In sum, it seems necessary to me that we re-examine, as women, feminists or womanists, where our loyalties lie and how we organise our emotional life. We need to develop and maintain ties with other women. We need to develop our cognitive connections with other women, including women who do not share our beliefs or experiences, or who come from a different race, class, sexuality, nation, religion, or ethnicity.
If we sequester exclusively ourselves within our race, class, religion, sexual identity – or any of the other identities that keep women from one another – then we doom ourselves to continually re-enact the sad, violent histories that created these identities. Lorde says that “the considered phrase ‘it feels right to me’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic” for “the erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.” In other words, self-love yields self-knowledge, and self-knowledge yields love for others. My self-knowledge, my self-love, and my love for other women, as women, tells me that there is more that unites us than divides us. It just feels right to me.
‘Rainbow flag’ photo from the No on 8 rally at Boston City Hall, November 15, 2008, taken by Flickr user qwrrty. Picture of Audre Lorde, Meridel Lesueur, Adrienne Rich (1980) taken by Flickr user K. Kendall. Picture from Greenham Common from Flickr user Your Greenham.
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, 30 Years Later is republished with permission from The F-Word, an online magazine dedicated to discussing ideas on contemporary UK feminism. From their mission statement:
“This webzine exists to help encourage a new sense of community among UK feminists, and to show the doubters that feminism still exists here, today, now – and is as relevant to the lives of the younger generation as it was to those in the 60s and 70s.”
A.J. Conroy is currently pursuing a Masters in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
The Gay 2000s: Twenty Decade-Defining Lesbian Happenings
While the rest of the world is bemoaning our apocalyptic state at the close of the century’s first decade, us gays have quite a bit to be thankful for! Heaps of ladies have marched proudly out of the closet, we’ve acquired way more Civil Rights than we had in 1999 and overall our media visibility has skyrocketed. Granted, there’ve been many setbacks; like the death of Dana Fairbanks DOMA and many popular votes reminding us how unpopular we were in high school and um, hate crimes, and well really a lot of bad things. Anyhoo!
Let’s take a look back at some of the many defining events of this decade. These are in random order, and much like the producers of reality television programs so popular in this decade, this list is only a few hours of the 87,600 hours, many of which were probs important.
#10
BEST: For Kids, It’s Slightly More Okay To Be Gay
It’s a different world out there, kids. There’s the anecdotal changes, like an increase in “Gold Stars” amongst youngsters as young lesbians are feeling less pressure to “try boys” than most adult lesbians did at their age. Then there’s quantifiable changes, like rising numbers of GSAs and college campus LGBTQ groups as well as additional resources for homeless LGBT youth in urban areas. In 2001, 1,000 GSAs had registered with GLSEN. By 2008, the number was up to 4,000. And a recent New York Times magazine cover story reports that kids are coming out in middle school.
WORST: Gay kids are still being bullied
A 2007 GLSEN study showed that 9 out of 10 LGBT students (86.2%) had experienced harassment at school in the past year, three-fifths (60.8%) felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation and about a third (32.7%) skipped a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe.
#9
BEST: Rosie O’Donnell comes out (2002) and then proceeds to do a number of awesome things like yell at Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View. 
Guys have you ever been on an R Family cruise? It has changed the lives of thousands of families who can afford to take vacations and Riese has been on three for various reasons and she highly recommends it. Did you watch that documentary? Remember how awesome and sassy Rosie was on The View? Remember how Ro did us proud in the Hassleback smackdown? Remember how you were way sadder than you thought you’d be when it was clear she and Kelli were having problems? If you think her coming out didn’t matter to your life, think again — it was kinda a big deal. And she’s never compromised since.
The history of the country has been written by the rich white men who could afford to do exactly as they wanted whenever they wanted. The fact that women like Rosie & Ellen can afford to be honest means they’re in a unique position to be the catalysts of change in major ways.
WORST: “A Shot at Love” and Katy Perry
The Shot at Love franchise made every bisexual woman in America want to shoot herself, upping the ante in season three by replacing our Cyberstar Tila Tequila with the bisexual Ikki twins.
In 2008, Katy Perry released “I Kissed a Girl” and managed to reinforce every bisexual stereotype in the book. Oh, and Katy was put on the cover of OUT and given the headliner spot at Dinah Shore for it! What’s that about? We’ve kissed girls for real, but for some reason OUT hasn’t called.
#8
BEST: Lawrence v. Texas (2003)
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in this landmark case. Though lesbians aren’t exactly the most sodomy-saturated group, it was still super important. You can’t legislate in the bedroom folks! Although people are certainly still trying.
WORST: The Defense of Marriage Act & State Amendments Against Gay Marriage
It was passed in the 90’s, but we’re certainly still feelings the effects of DOMA. Efforts in this decade to overturn the act, which prevents a federal marriage equality bill, have all come to nothing. Even the Obama administration is still using it against us to deny benefits, despite our hopes to the contrary.
At the beginning of the decade, only one state had amended its constitution to restrict the legalization of gay marriage. Now, there are 29 states with such amendments. Not content to just remain neutral, those states had to make an actual statement against equality. Thanks, guys!
#7
BEST: Gay TV & Ellen’s Renaissance
This was the decade that launched gay TV into the mainstream. Queer As Folk ran from 2000 to 2005, making way for The L Word (2004-2009) which legitimately shattered the public’s stereotype of lesbians as hippie bushwackers w/guitars. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you know, it helps end symbolic annihilation etc.).
After having her second TV sitcom canceled in 2001 and following a rough coming out period in the mid-9os and subsequent depression, Ellen came back in a big way in ’03 with her daytime talk show. Since then, she has all but taken over the world and is the most famous lesbian ever. And really, we couldn’t ask for a better symbol of the lesbian community. Ellen is funny, she’s charming, she’s in love with her hot wife, and even mainstream America thinks she’s awesome.
LOGO (the first gay network) launched in 2005, here! launched that same year and Bravo became the gayest-network-that-isn’t-actually-gay. Lesbian characters popped up on mainstream shows like The O.C., America’s Next Top Model, Stargate Universe, South of Nowhere, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Top Chef, Greek, One Tree Hill, All My Children, House and so much more.
Familiar faces on the TV now include Wanda Sykes, Suze Orman, Rachel Maddow, Jenna Valez-Mitchell, Jackie Warner, Tabitha Coffey, Kim Stolz, and you know … so much more.
Worst: Women Still Face Barriers When Telling Lesbian Stories
The thing about The L Word is that while it was great to have queer lady storylines on TV, it still accounts for like 95% of the queer lady storylines on TV five years later. And I don’t know about you, but there’s only a certain amount of baby-kidnapping interrogation-taping swimming-pool-murder I can relate to. Why haven’t we heard more complex, more diverse, more real stories about our lives? It’s not because they’re not there; it’s because it’s really f*cking hard to get them out there — and not just for gay women, but for women in general (the biggest problem with lesbian stories, often, is that there are often men in the story)
9 percent of the 250 top-grossing domestic films of 2008 were directed by women and no woman has ever won an Oscar for directing. No woman of color has ever been nominated by the Academy for the Best Director category (more on this in this awesome bitch magazine article about female directors). From an NPR story on this topic:
Nia Vardalos says it’s no secret that female directors are treated differently by studios — even sometimes by their own crews. She says she had no sense of being an artiste — someone entitled to challenge the budget, the number of shooting days or the rules.
“One day my focus puller turned to me, and he said, ‘As a female filmmaker, you have one shot,'” she recalls, “‘and if you go over budget, that bond company will be here in a second, breathing down your neck. So you’re right to keep everyone on schedule.'”
Autostraddle faves Anyone But Me and We Have To Stop Now are fabulous shows that are produced in the form of webseries for a smaller audience that has to know where to look for them, and most gay and lesbian films are only shown in (admittedly awesome) gay and lesbian film festivals. Similarly this has often been the only avenue of opportunity for women of color (more on this in item #3).
What that means is that gay ladies who want to do us proud and make movies/TV/stories/art about our real-life feelings are doing it largely on their own and unsupported, without the funding of Hollywood studios or the backing of major producers or the budget of, I don’t know, Jersey Shore. The bad news there is that the people in offices behind desks haven’t been convinced yet that our stories are important and meaningful and interesting to the public; the good news is that it doesn’t even matter, because we’re just going to go ahead and do it anyways. ONWARD HO PIONEERS!
#6
BEST: Obama’s election (2008)
We finally saw a ray of sunshine in politics — a majority voting for a minority! That’s the spirit! Maybe this gay ray of sunshine will materialize some time in the next decade! Or we’ll just have a ridiculously attractive presidential family, as is evidenced in this photo!
WORST: Bush gets elected. Twice.
And our dreams of equality were squashed for eight whole years. Chris Rock said it best:
The beautiful thing about the gay marriage issue is the absolute only issue that the President will answer. The President don’t give a f*ck, he will give you a straight answer on gay marriage. “Mr President, what about the war, when’s it gonna end?” “Well, you never know, we’re talking to people, and we’re looking for stuff, and we might find it, we might not, and it’s out there, we’re gonna get it, you never know, how’s it going, yeah!” “Mr President, what about the economy, when’s it gonna pick up?” “Well, you never know, we’re talking to people, and economic indicators indicate that indications are coming to the indicator, you know what I’m saying, all right!” “Mr President, what about gay marriage?” “F*ck them faggots!”
The Lesbian Avengers – Time to Seize the Power & Be the Bomb You Throw!
Autostraddle is proud to present guest writer Vikki, known to the blogosphere as Up Popped a Fox. We persuaded her to write an article about her time with The Lesbian Avengers for us because we are obsessed. Now you will be too! Here’s Vikki!
In my years with the Minneapolis Lesbian Avengers, we defaced anti-choice billboards, participated in visibility actions at schools, constructed a giant paper machè bomb piñata filled with lube and dental dams, helped plan the first of many Dyke Marches, designed and built a boat out of milk cartons for the Aquatennial Milk Carton Boat Race (dubbed The “Lez Boat” and pronounced with a hard “z” – no mystery there) and ate fire on countless occasions. And yes — we did indeed wear capes. And let me tell you, those suckers got hot as hell in the summer.
The Autostraddle Roundtable: Is there a Lesbian Generation Gap?
1970 Christopher Street Liberation March, 2009 LGBT Pride Parade
“To many young gay people, the passage of Prop 8 was shocking but not alarming,” writes Mark Harris in New York Magazine‘s “The Gay Generation Gap,” published two weeks ago in the magazine’s special Pride Week Section. Harris continues: “It has jolted them into action, but one suspects it’s out of a Milk-fed belief that identity-politics activism can be ennobling and cool.”
Ouch! One suspects that one is being unfair to us! One suspects that if we’ve managed to make activism “cool,” then that’s a BIG SCORE! — but wait. Before you get too excited (as we did), there’s no need to be offended ’cause this shit ain’t about you, woman! There are no ladies addressed in Mark Harris’s article, or actually at all in the Gay Pride section of this issue. To be fair, the issue is dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots (the first time gays fought back with a vengence), and Stonewall was a gay men’s “Inn” frequented by only a handful of women. But as we seem encouraged to think of Stonewall as the turning point for the whole GL(and later, BTQ) movement, the lesbian exclusion from this article is not necessarily unfair, but certainly somewhat salty and definitely worth noting.