Lesbianism: Affirmation of Women

The letter speaks of fear and ignorance and even hate.

The writer signs only her first name and asks that any further contact be through a mutual acquaintance.

“I can’t follow my instincts and trust completely that my name or address or phone number won’t get into the wrong hands,” she writes.

The woman, who is a mother and the owner of an Orange County child care center, says she feels compelled to write because the words just wouldn’t come in a personal interview.

“On a daily basis I guard and edit my thoughts, words and actions so I won’t accidentally disclose my preference for women and thereby be exposed to being blackmailed, losing my income, being accused of being a child molester, having my license to do business revoked (and) losing my business reputation,” the letter says.

“I have spent many years building a reputation of excellence in my field in my community. I work hard and I am good at my job. And you need to know that all that can be destroyed in a day if an unsympathetic, fearful or ignorant person finds out I am a lesbian!”

Fears Not Unique

In an era of unprecedented political action by gay rights groups, this woman’s fears are not unique. Millions of lesbians across the country would never dream of marching in a gay rights parade or revealing their sexual preference to anyone outside a trusted circle of friends.

And while the risks of “coming out” are often overwhelming for gay men and women, many lesbians say they feel a double oppression of being female and homosexual in the United States.

In the corporate world, these women say, the “glass ceiling” that may block a woman’s rise to the top is lowered even further for them. As mothers, they fear homophobia may wrest custody of their children from them. And as citizens, they say that what society views as their deviant sexual orientation taints all other aspects of their lives.

“It’s like this,” explains a successful Los Angeles attorney, a partner in her own firm. “In my field, often you’ll hear someone say, ‘I want to refer you to an attorney. He’s black, but he’s very good.’

“It’s the same for me. I get referrals from lots of people, judges, other attorneys. And I can just hear them saying, ‘Oh, she’s a great attorney, but you should know that she’s a lesbian.’ ”

Such attitudes, lesbians say, often force them to lead double lives. Unlike the thousands of homosexual men who have gained political clout from the male-dominated gay rights movement, lesbians, with only a handful of exceptions, have remained invisible and isolated.

(In a fledgling attempt to break that isolation, lesbian rights activists held the first California Lesbian Leadership Conference on Sunday in Irvine. Scheduled to speak were Karen Clark, a state legislator from Minnesota, and attorney Roberta Achtenberg, a Democrat who lost her bid in last week’s special election for an Assembly seat from San Francisco.)

Although many professional women have joined gay organizations, they say that the issues of chief concern to them --sexism, job equity and violence against women, to name a few--have been given short shrift.

Members of the Southern California homosexual community say open antagonism between gays and lesbians is fading with the AIDS epidemic, but the two groups remain largely separate from each other. Some lesbians also resent sharing discrimination based on the fear of AIDS. Gay women are in fact among the lowest-risk groups for contracting the disease.

Issue Endures

“It’s not a question of man-hating,” says Jean Conger, executive director of Southern California Women for Understanding, a 1,200-member lesbian organization with headquarters in West Hollywood. “It’s women affirming.”

Yet within mainstream women’s organizations, lesbian and heterosexual women alike say the issue of lesbianism endures as one of the most divisive and threatening to the feminist movement as a whole.

Although in 1975 the National Organization for Women made lesbian rights one of its four priority issues--along with the fight against racism, passage of the equal rights amendment and reproductive rights--executive vice president Patricia Ireland concedes that, on the local level, “often we will find that they are very much afraid of the issue.”

Because the word lesbian tends to conjure up negative, antisocial images, feminists argue that “lesbian-baiting” remains one of the best ways of preventing all women from standing up for their rights.

“(Lesbian baiting) is designed to say that any woman who wants to be equal is not a real woman,” Ireland says. “That makes us defensive and embarrasses us and triggers any insecurities in our own mind.

Looking for Success

“The status quo says that women who support and love other women are queer, odd ducks,” she says. “Until we live in a society where the threat of being called a lesbian does not inhibit women, we are not going to succeed.

“It has to be safe (for lesbians). Then if they start to bait feminist activists . . . we can just laugh.”

That day, however, appears distant.

Even within their own community, lesbians say, there are many women who still prefer the term gay woman, simply because of the negative images that lesbian brings to mind. Others are equally adamant about calling themselves lesbian as a measure of self-respect.

“People think that a lesbian chews nails, spits rust, drags her knuckles on the ground and drives a Harley-Davidson,” says Pat Callahan, co-chair of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange, a gay and lesbian political action group.

Callahan, 35, a staff research associate at UC Irvine, says that although today she proudly calls herself a lesbian, she says that for years the stereotype of a lesbian convinced her that it could not possibly apply to her.

“I saw that homosexuals had second-rate relationships,” she says. “It was icky. It was wrong.”

New Attitudes

While lesbians believe that most gay women today have moved beyond feeling shame about their homosexuality, opinion polls suggest that the vast majority of Americans still believe it is morally wrong.

A December, 1985, poll by the Los Angeles Times, the latest such survey of U.S. attitudes toward homosexuals, found that 73% of the respondents nationwide felt homosexuality was wrong. Eighty-nine percent said they would be upset if their children grew up to be homosexuals.

Attitudes were most closely divided in San Francisco, where 49% said homosexuality was wrong and 44% said it was not wrong. In Los Angeles and New York, majorities of better than 60% called it wrong.

The strong vote of disapproval comes as no surprise to lesbians. But depending on whether they have come out of the closet or not, they interpret such results differently.

Some say it indicates that lesbian “invisibility” only encourages negative stereotypes. While they concede that the personal cost may initially be high, they urge women homosexuals to come out of the closet to dispel those negative images and eventually, remove the personal stress associated with living a double life.

“I think it is important that people come out in the workplace, with their families,” says Trish McGraw, a registered nurse. “That way people can see them as human beings.”

“What is so frustrating is that until women come out, until they are willing to come out, nothing is going to change,” says Joan Ariel, Women’s Studies librarian at UC Irvine.

“One of the reasons we came out is because we are privileged and we feel compelled to speak for women who are silenced,” says UC Irvine history librarian Ellen Broidy, who with Ariel, was hired by the university as an openly lesbian couple in 1981.

Rare Situation

But Broidy and Ariel are the first to concede that their situation is rare. The University of California is one of a minority of employers with a non-discrimination hiring clause that includes homosexuals. Among the few cities that have similar guidelines on the books are Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and West Hollywood.

Perhaps more typical is the lesbian woman who believes that her job security hinges on her ability to “pass” as a heterosexual.

“In banks and I think in most corporations, the dominant point of view of upper management is heterosexual and male, and also white,” says a 32-year-old marketing officer at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.

“The lesbian is the total freak in that kind of culture,” she says, “and if you want to rise through the ranks, you have to keep your lesbianism completely to yourself.”

The owner of a firm that supplies industrial materials to clients throughout Southern California believes it would mean financial and political ruin to publicly disclose her lesbianism.

Active in community and business organizations, the 30-year-old woman, who did not want her name used, says she plans to run for a city council seat as a precursor to a spot in the Assembly.

Although she recently ended a five-year relationship with another woman, she says that even her parents do not know she is gay.

And with her clients, all men, she sometimes talks of imaginary boyfriends.

“There is no way that I would run for political office as an open lesbian. I want to have a good image, not be labeled.”

Older women and those who grew up in conservative areas say they faced even more restrictions than today’s career women and for years either denied to themselves that they were lesbians or lived in fear that an outsider would somehow discover how they felt.

Many married men--some simply for appearance’ sake, others to have children and still others, because they felt they had no other option.

A ‘Respectable’ Name

The 43-year-old director of a Westchester rehabilitation program for motorists convicted of drunk driving has been legally married three times--the last to a homosexual in an attempt to give a “respectable” name to her four children.

Her latest union, a woman she “married” in a gay church in Long Beach, has lasted five years.

But she says she and her children have paid for her liberation. When her children were younger, they found the word lesbian scrawled across their school lockers. Inside were pictures torn from pornographic magazines of women together.

“I’m talking about why women are closeted,” she says, “because of their children. You protect that which is living with you. So women are not as obvious as men.”

But although lesbians say that the majority of gay women find intimacy to be the most satisfying aspect of their relationships with women, they add that heterosexuals’ image of lesbians focuses almost exclusively on sex.

“It’s like the old joke about the dinner party,” says Leslie Millerd, director of the Women’s Resource Center at UC Irvine. “A guest walks in, asks the host who everybody is. ‘Well, he says. She’s an attorney. She’s a dress designer. He’s a bank president and she’s a lesbian.’ It’s an old joke, but it proves the point.”

Even today, says Jean Conger of Southern California Women for Understanding, because women are not widely perceived as being sexual, it is not assumed that women living together are lesbians. The same is not true of men.

Conger says that when she recently went looking for a house to buy in Manhattan Beach, the real estate agent asked if she would be living alone.

“No, I said, I’ll be living with my children and another women and her children,” Conger recalls.

“ ‘Oh, just like “Kate & Allie!” ’ the agent said.”