Lesbians Work to Shed Label as ‘Invisible Gays’ : Women: A spirit of activism is taking hold. But reaching consensus on a political agenda is difficult, groups find.

Chapters of a New York protest group, the Lesbian Avengers, sprout all over the country. Dozens of women gather in a Downtown Los Angeles hotel to mull over the lesbian agenda. There is talk of putting together a coalition of lesbian campaign donors to gain more political leverage. A fledgling “lesbian old-girls’ network” in Hollywood is wildly successful, attracting more than 600 members.

After years of complaining that they are the invisible gays, lesbians are doing something about it. From the separatism of the 1970s and the co-genderism of the 1980s, they are creeping toward a new political identity, eager to carve their own niche but not quite sure how to do it.

The past decade saw lesbians move into positions of power within the gay rights movement and rally around gay men in their struggle with AIDS. But the movement remains in many ways dominated by men and--women complain--men’s needs. There is a gathering lesbian chorus chanting, “What about us?”

“I think women are stepping up and saying our issues have been on the back burner for a long time and it’s time to bring ‘em to the front,” said Lorri L. Jean, Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center executive director.

This is not, she and others hasten to add, a return to the separatist Lesbian Nation of two decades ago--when radical gay women sought to build their own communities--or a disavowal of the more recent, AIDS-forged collaboration with gay men.

“We don’t have the luxury of being divided from each other,” said L.A. Weekly columnist and activist Robin Podolsky.

Rather it is a search for a lesbian voice and agenda by a group that exists within the larger orbits of a sometimes indifferent gay movement and a sometimes hostile women’s movement. It is also a recognition that the 1980s alliance with gay men was probably more beneficial for the men than the women.

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Stephanie Farrington-Domingue remembers trying to sell raffle tickets a few years ago at a gay pride festival. The proceeds were earmarked for women and children with AIDS. The tickets were cheap. But gay men didn’t exactly line up with money spilling out of their pockets.

“It was like, ‘I’d rather have a beer,’ she said. “It was so easy to say ‘No.’ And it pissed me off because of the amount of energy that women put into AIDS.”

Lately, Farrington-Domingue, co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has been organizing meetings of women at a Downtown hotel--away from the mostly male milieu of West Hollywood--to talk about the lesbian agenda.

“There’s a lot of energy around a lot of issues” in the gay community, she said. “But I haven’t heard anybody say one thing or raise one penny for the lesbian agenda.”

But just what is the lesbian agenda? For all their common ground with gay men and heterosexual women, lesbians say the confluence of gender and homosexuality fosters its own set of circumstances and problems that need tending to.

“We act a lot as if we’re all the same and we’re not,” said Liz Hendrickson, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, based in San Francisco. “We act as if the discrimination we experience is all the same. It’s not.”

When about 70 women gathered with Farrington-Domingue last summer, they noted that whatever the issue--money, health care or family law--it can play out differently for lesbians.

Women, as a rule, earn less than men, so lesbian couples tend not to be as financially secure as gay male couples. That can make lesbians more dependent on domestic partnership benefits--and less willing to be open about their sexual orientation.

Health research on lesbians is virtually nonexistent--even though there are indications that they may suffer from higher rates of breast cancer than do heterosexual women. (Childlessness is a risk factor for breast cancer.)

At the same time, lesbians are more apt to be parents than are gay men, putting them at greater risk of losing their children in anti-gay custody rulings.

Beyond such particulars, there is the public perception of the gay movement.

“When you think of the symbol for gay rights, you think of a white man,” Hendrickson said. “I think at its broadest, the lesbian agenda is to change that symbol.”

In the midst of this search for a more clearly defined lesbian identity, the media have pounced on lesbian issues this year as a hot story, slapping them onto magazine covers, pronouncing them chic and parading them onto TV talk shows more often than women who love too much.

“It titillates, particularly heterosexual men,” Los Angeles attorney and activist Carol Anderson says of the coverage--cheered by some and criticized by others for a certain breathless voyeurism fixated on attractive white lesbians.

This is not the first time lesbianism has flirted with chicdom. Lillian Faderman writes in her history of 20th-Century lesbian life, “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” that in the avant-garde circles of 1920s New York, “sex with other women was the great adventure.”

In an aura of social rebellion, the romantic friendships of the Victorian era gave way to erotic relationships. Drag balls--of both men and women--attracted thousands of spectators. At least in places such as Greenwich Village, women felt free to engage in bisexual experimentation.

But the Depression and social retrenchment of the 1930s put an end to that. “It didn’t lead anywhere much in the 1920s,” Faderman said. “I’m hoping it will lead somewhere today.”

For all the splashy coverage of lesbians this year, Faderman points out that the preponderance of attention given to gays still goes to men. Broadway has been full of gay-themed plays--about men. The controversy over lifting the military’s gay ban swirled around men, even though lesbians are kicked out of the armed forces at a much higher rate. Indeed, the larger discussion of gay rights revolves around men.

“The media continue to focus on what they’ve always focused on primarily,” Faderman said. “Men.”

But the greater visibility of gay men is not solely a function of selective coverage. It also reflects their greater role in the gay rights movement. Many lesbians are in prominent positions in gay organizations, but the rank and file remains largely male.

“You never see the numbers you can see at a lesbian dance, or the clubs or a softball game,” said Anderson, noting that she’s often spoken to gay organizations and been the only lesbian in the room.

Activists offer various explanations: Lesbians have a foot in the feminist movement as well as the gay rights movement. Gay men have had more money and time to devote to political organizing. And lesbians have the double challenge of being female and gay in a world that has preferred both to be silent.

Given society’s greater acceptance of close relationships between women, it is also easier for lesbians to pass as heterosexual than it is for gay men. Women who have been involved with other women don’t necessarily identify themselves as lesbians.

Moreover, lesbians say they haven’t always gotten a rousing welcome from gay men. “Most gay men have absolutely no interest in considering the lesbian viewpoint on anything,” said Ann Bradley, who has worked for Southern California AIDS agencies. “I’m not necessarily devastated by that at all. I just think there’s a certain ignorance on the part of gay men. . . . I get a little sick of people who want to think we’re a big happy family.”

Barbara Muirhead, coordinator of the Lesbian and Gay Leadership Federation of Orange County, said: “I know very few separatists, but I know a lot of women who think they really don’t get to participate, that they’re shined on” by gay men.

Regardless of whether they agree with that, lesbians are staking out territory of their own.

In Long Beach, Community Organization for Resources and Education, a 3-year-old lesbian service agency, has 5,000 women on its mailing list. A Southern California group, United Lesbians of African Heritage, is 4 years old. The long-established women’s committee of Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos is so successful that the men in the Los Angeles organization are following suit with their own group.

Twenty chapters of the Lesbian Avengers have formed in cities such as Austin, Tex., and Durham, N.C., since writer Sarah Schulman and five other women founded the group in New York more than a year ago. Most members are under 25.

“They have never been closeted,” Schulman, 35, said. “They’re really angry that they don’t have a place in mainstream culture. . . . The gap between what the media is telling them is happening and what they’re experiencing is a source of great indignation.”

Still, many other young lesbians would just as soon go to a club or coffeehouse as a protest.

“They see themselves first as human beings, second as women and third as lesbians,” said Rita Boyadjian, 23, owner of Little Frida’s, a lesbian coffeehouse in West Hollywood.

When K. Robinson formed Lesbians in Film and TV (LIFT) last year, she wanted no part of politics. “We’re interested in having a good time,” Robinson said. Yet by its very existence, LIFT is political. “In the past an organization like this would have never existed--never,” she said. “It’s the times that have allowed us to come to this point.”

Networking is also on the agenda of LIFT, which has a New York branch and about 650 women on the mailing list--from stuntwomen to deal makers.

“There really is a desire on the part of lesbians to give help to other lesbians in the industry,” Robinson said. “There’s a gay old-boys’ network but there really hasn’t been a lesbian old-girls’ network.”

Gwendolyn Baba, a longtime board member at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, is hoping to establish another kind of network: one that funnels lesbian-identified donations to political candidates.

“It’s just one more piece in our struggle to gain visibility,” Baba said. “We’ve never really had a very big seat at the table and when we’ve had it, we’ve done so with men. And our goals aren’t always the same.”

This year’s election of Jackie Goldberg as the first openly gay member of the Los Angeles City Council was a further impetus. “We’re coming off some successes that I think are really letting women understand we can do it,” Baba said. “We can support candidates and be candidates and win.”

Elsewhere, for instance, lesbian Christine Kehoe was elected to the San Diego City Council last month. And earlier this year San Francisco Supervisor Roberta Achtenberg was appointed an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Interest in asserting a lesbian identity is evident in other arenas as well. In academia, a new lesbian study series, “The Cutting Edge,” attempts to carve a path in the burgeoning gay studies field. “I wanted a series in which lesbian issues were not subsumed into gay male issues,” said Karla Jay, who edits the New York University Press project. “It is doing rather well.”

Just as lesbian chic is not entirely new, neither is the quest for a lesbian agenda and identity. It has alternately sharpened and faded. “We need leaders to emerge,” said Faderman, a professor at Cal State Fresno. “We need to articulate a clear lesbian message to remind young lesbians if they’re not vigilant, they’ll get swallowed up--it’s going to happen all over again.”