LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
I mentioned in an earlier diary for this series that, in future diaries, I wanted to spend some more time discussing broader LGBTQ history books. From my explanation:
I know that many longtime readers of this series are probably well versed in LGBT history, but many others probably know little about it. That is not a judgment—indeed, even in 2018, it takes a certain amount of effort to learn about LGBT history, since it is so poorly taught (and, more often, not taught at all). For some readers, it might be good to offer a starting place rather than a deep dive into this or that historical episode. From time to time, I have spoken with students whose interest was piqued by the LGBT history I cover in class, and there are a few books that I tend to steer them toward as a beginning point for learning more. I would like to spend a little more time covering those kinds of books here at LGBT Literature, in addition to the more specialized monographs.
In that diary, I tackled one of my favorite surveys of LGBTQ history, A Queer History of the United States. In my next diary, I wrote about a survey of gay male history, The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives and Gay Identities.
For this diary, I’d like to follow in that trend and write about another survey history. I am aware that much of my own writing in this series is gay male-centric, which is undoubtedly due to my own identity as a gay male. I thought it would be appropriate to depart from this norm and use this diary to discuss a survey of lesbian history. And if I’m going to do that, there is no better book to turn to than Lillian Faderman’s essential 1991 book Odd Girls and Twilight Lover: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. And I do mean essential. Whenever somebody expresses an interest in learning more about American LGBTQ history, this is one of a small handful of books that I direct them toward. While we sometimes talk today about the gay and lesbian community as if it is a monolith, gay male and lesbian histories really have travelled on separate—sometimes parallel, sometimes crossing—tracks throughout the twentieth century, meaning that it is both helpful and often necessary to examine these histories separately. To study lesbian history, I think you need to start with Faderman.
I will say at the top of this diary that I am somewhat intimidated to write about Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, which is probably part of the reason I haven’t taken it on until now. Although it is not particularly long (just over 300 pages), Faderman does a lot in this book as she tracks a century of women who loved women. My goal in this diary will not be to fully summarize her work, but rather to introduce you to the book and some of the major topics explored in it, as well as give you a broad overview of the periods she examines.
If you’re curious about the title, by the way, it is taken from a couple of sensational mid-century pulp novel titles: Odd Girl Out and Twilight Lovers. Both of the titles indicate that there was something “odd” and secretive about female same-sex love in the middle of the twentieth century. As Faderman notes, it was not always that way, and it would not always remain that way. At its core, Faderman’s work is a story of change over time, of ebb and flow. We sometimes think of social progress as a linear thing—“the moral arc of the universe” and all that. Of course, that is simplistic no matter the topic, but it is particularly simplistic for something like lesbian history, which went through general periods of acceptance, repression, persecution, and acceptance again. That is one major thing to take away from Faderman’s work.
As an example, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers begins with an anecdote from 1843. Of course, this was before “lesbian” was even a word in common use, but the American author William Cullen Bryant wrote an Evening Post essay in which he describes a relationship between two women in Vermont that we might casually identify as “lesbian” today:
In their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for 40 years, during which they have shared each others’ occupations and pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other tenderly in sickness. . . . They slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each others relations, and . . . I would tell you of their dwelling, encircled with roses, . . . and I would speak of the friendly attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them.
As Faderman notes, such a newspaper article—had it been published in 1943 instead of 1843—would have probably resulted in a defamation lawsuit and a wave of letters to the editor’s desk about immorality. But in the mid-nineteenth century, this type of “romantic friendship” was both accepted and charming. Faderman explains:
What is apparent through this example and hundreds of others that have now been well documented by social historians is that women’s intimate relationships were universally encouraged in centuries outside of our own. There were, of course, some limitations placed on those relationships as far as society was concerned. For instance, if an eligible male came along, the women were not to feel that they could send him on his way in favor of their romantic friendship.; they were not to hope that they could find gainful employment to support such a same-sex love relationship permanently or that they could usurp any other male privileges in support of that relationship; and they were not to intimate in any way that an erotic element might possibly exist in their love for each other. Outside of those strictures, female same-sex love—or “romantic friendship,” as it was long called—was a respected social institution in America.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, things changed—especially as sexologists began to categorize and identify same-sex love and sex:
[T]here was no such thing as a “lesbian” as the twentieth century recognizes the term; there was only the rare woman who behaved immorally, who was though tot live far outside the pale of decent womanhood. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the category of the lesbian—or the female sexual invert—was formulated. Once she was widely recognized as an entity, however, relationships such as the one Bryant described took on an entirely different meaning—not only as viewed by society, but also as viewed by the two women who were involved. They now had a set of concepts and questions (which were uncomfortable to many of them) by which they had to scrutinize feelings that would have been seen as natural and even admirable in earlier days.
What followed this shift was not only the decline and ultimate demise of “romantic friendship” as a cherished institution, but also the beginning of a long period in which most opportunities for affection between women were closed off in respectable society. However, it was also the beginning of the complex “lesbian” identity, which the sexologists spawned but women soon began to mold for themselves:
[Lesbian] identity is peculiar to the twentieth century and owes its start at least partly to those sexologists who attempted to separate off women who continued to love other women from the rest of humankind. The sexologists were certainly the first to construct the conception of the lesbian, to call her into being as a member of a special category. As the century progressed, however, women who agreed to identify themselves as lesbian felt more and more free to alter the sexologists’ definitions to suit themselves, so that for many women “lesbianism” has become something vastly broader than what the sexologists could possibly have conceived of—having to do with lifestyle, ideology, the establishment of subcultures and institutions.
And that is the heart of Faderman’s work in this book: How did lesbian identity start and change over the course of a century? The answer is complicated and nonlinear, and the topics explored in the book are vast:
I focus particularly on the gradual establishment of lesbian subcultures in large cities; the relationship of class to the nature of those subcultures; the effects that all-female environments such as women’s colleges, the military, and women’s bars have had on the development of lesbianism; the ways in which feminism and gay liberation changed the view of love between women, both for lesbians and for society in general; and the forces that have moved female same-sex loving from the status of romantic friendship to sickness to twilight lovers to women-identified-women, and that are gradually destigmatizing it, so that while it is not yet viewed as positively as romantic friendship was, it is becoming far more socially neutral, even as recent opinion polls indicate.
Do you see yet why I was intimidated to write about this book?
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, in the “essentialists vs. social constructionists” debate, Faderman is unapologetically social constructionist (a camp that I count myself a part of, as well). Social construction is, at its core, what the entire book is about:
As will be revealed in the pages of this book, in the debate between the “essentialists” (who believe that one is born a lesbian and that there have always been lesbians in the past just as there are lesbians today) and the “social constructionists” (who believe that certain social conditions were necessary before “the lesbian” could emerge as a social entity) my own research has caused me to align myself on the side of the social constructionists.
[...]
Before women could live as lesbians the society in which they lived had to evolve to accommodate, however grudgingly, the possibility of lesbianism—the conception needed to be formulated; urbanization and its relative anonymity and population abundance were important; it was necessary that institutions be established where they could meet women with similar interests; it was helpful that the country enjoyed sufficient population growth so that pressure to procreate was not overwhelming; it was also helpful that the issues of sexuality and sexual freedom became increasingly open; and it was most crucial that women have the opportunity for economic self-sufficiency that would free them from the constant surveillance of family. The possibility of a life as a lesbian had to be socially constructed in order for women to be able to choose such a life. Thus it was not until our century that such a choice became viable for significant numbers of women. This book traces the ways that happened.
Faderman relies on a wide, rich variety of sources, ranging from archives, journals, and other published materials to 186 interviews of a diverse array of women aged 17 to 86 (white, Asian, African American, Latina, and Native American, in addition to women across the socioeconomic spectrum). The oral histories, in particular, are extremely important to the kind of social history Faderman is doing in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.
As I said, I am not going to attempt to fully summarize the book—there is just too much, and I want to leave it for you to discover if you so desire. However, I would like to briefly explain the major periods explored in the book.
The first chapter, of course, covers romantic friendship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the second chapter discusses the role of sexologists in defining love between women and “creating” the category of “lesbian.”
Then, the cycles of repression and acceptance begin. Of course, the descriptions that follow are overly generalized—no period in American history can accurately be described as either fully accepting or fully repressive, and that nuance can be found in Faderman’s work.
One of the more interesting chapters to me is the third, which discusses sexuality in the 1920s. The 1920s were, in many ways, a feminist decade, and they were also a sexually liberal decade by many standards. Largely because of the sexologists—including the popularization of Sigmund Freud—there was a greater desire to understand the sex drive, and lesbian and bisexual experimentation also inevitably occurred. The earliest “lesbian communities” began to form, and the norms of Victorianism began to fall as erotic exploration flourished.
Then, the Great Depression hit. Faderman notes at the beginning of the fourth chapter (on the 1930s):
Perhaps if the move toward greater sexual freedom that was barely begun in the 1920s had not been interrupted by the depression, erotic love between women might have been somewhat less stigmatized in public opinion in the 1930s and a lesbian subculture might have developed more rapidly. Instead, whatever fears were generated about love between women in the 1920s were magnified in the uncertainty of the next decade as the economic situation became dismal and Americans were faced with problems of survival. This aborted liberality, together with the narrowing of economic possibilities, necessarily affected a woman’s freedom to live and love as she chose.
Then came World War II, which is the subject of the fifth chapter. This, as has been identified by multiple scholars (including Allan Bérubé, whose work I’ve previously written about), was a period of huge and rapid change for gay men and lesbians, both in military service and on the home front. What limited acceptance World War II brought would, of course, not last for long:
During the war years that followed [the repressive 1930s], when women had to learn to do without men, who were being sent off to fight and maybe die for their country, and when female labor—in the factories, in the military, everywhere—was vital to the functioning of America, female independence and love between women were understood and undisturbed and even protected. After the war, when the surviving men returned to their jobs and the homes that women needed to make for them so that the country could return to “normalcy,” love between women and female independence were suddenly nothing but manifestations of illness, and a woman who dared to proclaim herself a lesbian was considered a borderline psychotic. Nothing need have changed in the quality of the woman’s desires for her to have metamorphosed socially from a monster to a hero to a sicko.
The sixth and seventh chapters both examine the 1950s, which was simultaneously a decade of intense anti-gay persecution in the form of McCarthyism (see also: The Lavender Scare) and a decade in which lesbians built communities, subcultures (which differed considerably based on women’s age and class), and identities.
The eighth chapter discusses lesbian identity during the period of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of unprecedented sexual liberalization that established a lesbian consciousness in the United States. This gave way to lesbian-feminism and radical lesbian separatism in the 1970s, which is the subject of the ninth chapter. Finally, Faderman discusses lesbian identity during the “sex wars” of the 1980s, a time of both division among lesbians as well as greater societal acceptance.
As you can see, a great deal of material is covered in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers—far too much to do justice to the individual topics in this diary. This is a rich social history that established a foundation for understanding lesbian history in the United States. If you are interested in learning more about LGBTQ history more broadly, I recommend turning to Faderman as one of your first resources. Whatever you think of Faderman’s theoretical perspective (I understand that social constructivism is sometimes still controversial today), the history she recovers is both fascinating and vital.
Lillian Faderman is also the author of the following books that you might also want to check out, some of which may be the subject of future LGBTQ Literature diaries (this is an abbreviated list):
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981)
To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America—A History (1999)
Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians (2006, co-authored with Stuart Timmons)
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (2015)
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February 24: OPEN
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November 24: OPEN
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As always, we are looking for writers! Either comment below or send Chrislove a message if you’d like to contribute to the series and fill one of our open dates.
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