Columns
Women Like That
| Women Like That Proud Traditions |
by Francesca Susanna
In order to contribute to the theme of Pride for this month’s issue of our fine newspaper, I at first thought to search out some lesbian who had been present at the Stonewall Inn the night of the infamous raid. Rumor has it that several were there, but they seem apparitional at best.
All the better, I thought, when I couldn’t find a specific woman to write about. It was hardly the beginning of the Gay Rights movement after all, it was hardly the first gay bar raid, it was not even the first time the patrons of a raided bar fought back (a raid on what was termed a “molly house” in London in1725 was met with “determined and violent resistance”).
The lesbian rights movement has its roots in the women’s movement, which first gained real momentum in the mid-1800s. Unfortunately, the beginning women’s movement had no room for “immoral women” – unmarried mothers, divorcees or homosexuals – and the more radical factions broke away early on. Some leaders such as Anna RŸling and Emma Goldman wanted to join forces with the gay men’s groups which began forming in Germany in the late 1800s, and spoke ardently in favor of gay rights.
In 1953 two women, Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin, founded the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian group, in San Francisco. They took the name from a French novel by Pierre Louy which included some lesbian love poems. The membership of the Daughters of Bilitis remained small, less than a dozen, until they began to produce a newsletter called The Ladder, edited by Phyllis Lyons, who, for the first three issues, used a pseudonym.
Women from all over discovered The Ladder and turned to the DOB in desperation. These women were living in complete isolation with no idea why they felt as they did, or that there was anyone else like them. In the 1950s, the U.S. was still largely rural, and it was easy for a girl growing up in a town of a thousand people to have no idea that what she was feeling was even possible let alone common.
“Every one of them felt like she was the only voice crying out in the wilderness,” Billye Talmadge, an early member, remarked in a 1990s interview. The newsletter attracted many new members, and the DOB formed chapters in other U.S. cities and even one in Australia.
DOB gave lesbians information that would help them navigate through a homophobic world. Many gay people thought that being homosexual was a crime, but it was only certain sexual acts that were crimes. So the DOB let their members know that they should not plead guilty just because they were arrested in a gay bar. Also, the term ‘homosexual’ legally referred to a gay man, so the DOB suggested that a lesbian say no if a policeman or court official asked whether she was a homosexual.
One of the main missions of the DOB was to provide gay women with a meeting place other than the bars. The bars could be a dangerous proposition: they were continually raided, and the names of those arrested were put into the newspaper, alerting families and employers, often with serious consequences.
Billye Talmadge hosted ‘gab ‘n’ javas’ in her home where she would introduce a topic and keep the conversation going. One topic was “how to make a butch into a dolly. It was about how to accommodate to a given situation. ...You have to remember how dangerous the world was then.”
Assimilation was an important ideal to the Daughters of Bilitis. America in the 1950s was a dangerous place to stick out. There were no legal protections to fend off discrimination and almost no acceptance among those who were not gay. The May 1966 issue of The Ladder featured an article on how to “select the most heterosexual answers” on personality tests used by potential employers.
In 1956 Barbara Gittings attended her first DOB business meeting. She was amazed to find herself in a room – in a house, not a bar – with a dozen other lesbians. She had made her way to California on a vacation searching out the gay movement. Two years later, Del and Phyllis asked her to start a chapter in New York, even though she was living in Philadelphia. “I guess they had sized me up as someone who would take the bit and run a little,” Gittings said in a later interview. “They were right.”
By the 1960s, Gittings and her partner, Kay Lahusen, who had also helped found the New York chapter of the DOB, were tired of the assimilationist position taken by the DOB and the gay movement as a whole. A friend of theirs, Frank Kameny, put forward a new direction for the gay movement: gays should no longer fade into the woodwork, no longer wait for the researchers and psychologists to give them a clean bill of mental health; it was time for the gay movement to declare itself gay and proud.
The Daughters of Bilitis could not go with this view. They had been working with the psychologists and researchers to prove that homosexuals were as well-adjusted as straight people, and they wanted to continue this track. Gittings was then the editor of The Ladder, but between her dissatisfaction with the organization and the distance – she was on the East Coast, the publication in California – she eventually ended that role and broke away from the Daughters of Bilitis.
The Daughters of Bilitis are essentially defunct now. The Stonewall Riots marked an important turning point for the gay movement and the early groups, Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, did not survive the shift in thinking from pre- to post-Stonewall.
It is important to remember that without these first groups, founded by incredibly brave women and men, there would not have been fuel for the Stonewall riots, for the Gay Liberation Front, for the gay marriage fight, for the hundreds of college campus GLBTA’s, the Gay-Straight Alliances, the Pride marches and festivals, for the RU12?’s. It is their shoulders upon which we now stand.
For further reading:
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, by Barry D. Adam, Twayne Publishers, 1995
Making Gay History, by Eric Marcus, Harper Collins, 2002
Francesca Susannah is a writer interested in lesbians through history. She lives in Burlington.