Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy

Madeline D. Davis

"Soars on the plain yet eloquent voices of the women...A necessary and overdue addition to the archives of lesbian and gay history."—The Boston Globe. Chronicles working-class lesbians in Buffalo, New York from the 1930s through the 60s.

The History of a Lesbian Community

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

The gay-liberation model made the boundary clear by categorically including every woman who is attracted to a woman. But throughout the twentieth century there have been women who have spent some time in the heterosexual world and some in the homosexual world. Frequently the women’s movement is blamed for bringing out women who were not real lesbians and who in time went back to the straight life. But in fact women’s interest in joining and leaving the lesbian life is part of lesbian history. There have always been historical events which have loosened the hold of patriarchy on women’s lives and have allowed them to explore other alternatives. Most narrators were aware of these ambiguities and took them into account by speaking in terms of bisexuality, or the pure versus the less-pure lesbian.

Fems could and did function in the heterosexual world, but for myriad reasons preferred not to. However, in a homophobic society the concept of preference is always too simplistic and is generally dangerous in the analysis of lesbian culture. It encourages the idea that lesbians should be punished for capricious and immoral behavior and forced to conform. In protecting ourselves from the impact of such conservative visions of sexuality, we rob fems of some of their past dignity. Fems made a profoundly nontraditional choice even though they were not driven to it by deeply internal feelings of difference. The challenge lesbian and gay scholars face is to imagine sexual expression not as something that is immutably fixed at birth, or in childhood, but less flexible than a simple choice between equal alternatives. Only then will we have a better framework for understanding the determinants of fem life.

In a city such as Buffalo, where police harassment of the bars was intense during the 1960s, many of the bar lesbians who came out in the late 1950s went on to form the first gay organization in the city, which soon became part of the gay liberation movement. In lesbian and gay mythology the first person to take a swing at the police in the Stonewall Riots, thereby igniting the street battle, was a lesbian.1 Assigning a rough and tough lesbian a primary role in the launching of gay liberation is completely in keeping with her character. Her fighting back would not be the isolated act of an angry individual but would have been an integral part of her culture.

They pushed the boundaries of permissibility for women generally, not just for themselves as individuals. They indicated their difference through appearance, through avoiding marriage, and through making a home with women. They fostered sexual exploration and autonomy among women, and pursued satisfying and lasting relationships. 

The civil-rights, women’s, and antiwar movements did not generate gay liberation, but rather served as a catalyst to bring together and transform two different political tendencies already existing within the working-class lesbian community. On the one hand, the homophile movement, which was relatively small in number, used accommodationist strategies in order to develop dialogues with the straight world, thereby supporting lesbians’ entrance into the political arena. On the other hand, the tough bar lesbians, who were many in number and came from various racial/ethnic groups, refused to deny their difference, and used confrontational tactics to deal with the heterosexual world. In the late 1960s their pride and boldness, when meshed with the homophile strategies and organizations, generated a powerful movement.

Finally, butch-fem roles “worked” for organizing a stable culture of resistance and lesbians followed them. The powerful presence of butch-fem roles in the 1950s, despite the new understanding of lesbianism as based in attraction to women rather than gender inversion, is testimony to how effective butch-fem culture was for organizing lesbian resistance and lesbian eroticism. Lesbians chose to follow and reproduce it, whether it coincided or conflicted with their personal identities.

We are likely already in the midst of an historical process that makes identity less fixed and loving less polarized.

Furthermore, she has continued to go to church and to confession, but, on the advice of a priest years ago, does not confess homosexuality. At that time, she had a long discussion with him that culminated in his asking her if she thought homosexuality was a sin.

“I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’ve been this way all my life so God must have made me this way, I mean this is the way I was put on this earth.’ And he said, if you think something is a sin and you do it anyway, then for you it’s a sin, but if you don’t think it’s a sin, then it’s not.…’ He told me not to confess it anymore, and from that time on I never have.

Her memories include not being turned on by True Story magazine, and having a crush on a camp counselor. In addition, she remembers her interest in boys’ things—bikes, clothes. But in her mind, it was her nonconformity rather than her masculinity that marked her as different.

When the nun returned to Buffalo several years later, she invited Matty to visit her at the convent.

“[She] threw her arms around me and kissed me right on the mouth. And it shocked me more then, you know. … It was the summer I had graduated from high school. And she was really happy to see me. And then we saw each other and talked for a while, and she told me how disappointed she was. See I had told her when she left that if I had to join the convent to be with her I would. And she had gone to the Mother House in Philadelphia and she said every time they had new girls coming in she’d go down ’cause she thought sure I’d be there. At this time I was thinking of joining the service and I talked to her about it. And she said, ‘No,’ she said, ‘I know now it would have been a mistake for you to come into the convent and [it] would also be a mistake for you to go into the service.’ She said, ‘When you feel the way you do about women, you don’t go where you’re surrounded[…]”

Many narrators see the butch lesbian as the true lesbian. Other narrators consider anyone who stays with women and is part of the community a lesbian. 

Fems had to have contact with a lesbian community or a lesbian relationship to develop awareness of their difference. Most fems spent some time in the heterosexual world and attempted to be happy, but it didn’t work out. Moreover, they had more fun and better relationships in gay life. Although they consider themselves gay, their gayness is dictated more by setting and circumstance than by a sense of fundamental difference.

Furthermore, some narrators who were raised Catholic remember that their early training was filled with admonitions against fooling around with boys. Intimacies with women were so far from their parents’ minds that they never received warnings about sexual relations with girls.

In the case of many butches, their masculinity indicated their difference when they were quite young; for others, their masculinity is apparent to them in retrospect, and came to consciousness at the same time as their interest in women. The early and clear recognition of masculinity seems to correlate with a strong need to build gay community, for all such butches were central to that process. For other butches, interest in women was the primary definer of who they were, but was rarely completely separated from masculinity.

Since people went out regularly, any serious violence in the home was apparent to the community. Many fights actually took place in public, in the bars. Not only were there witnesses, but also observers would usually step in and interrupt a fight that got too bad. Ironically, lesbian feminist culture of the 1970s, by adopting the ideology that only men were violent, created an atmosphere in which violence in lesbian relationships needed to be kept a secret and many women lost the protection of community limitation.

“We went together five years and I thought, well, it’s not getting better and I don’t want to cheat, and I knew that in the Catholic Church for people of the same sex to have sex together was a sin, so I said, ‘Fine.…’ So I converted to Catholicism so that I wouldn’t want her.”

“All of a sudden one day as you start getting older you sit there and you think, ‘Where have you been and where are you going?’ and this is where a lot of kids, a lot of fems go straight, ’cause they want security … or they fall for the guy. ”

Narrators offer different kinds of explanations for why breakups were such a regular part of lesbian life. By far the most common is that, in the process of socializing, one member of a couple found someone else or that a third party intruded on a relationship. (The third party could have been a man or a woman.)

D.J.’s feeling that she didn’t want to be tied into something she might not like is echoed by others. Arlette explains that she had never really wanted to get married in lesbian life.

“No. Well truthfully speaking, I don’t know about going that far with anyone, ’cause I’ve never been with anyone that long. Because I don’t know if it’s my personality or how I am. Usually I can’t go too far with them in the courtin’ stage. To go to the marriage part. I think if I found a lady that was really mentally together, I probably would. What’s the difference? If we could get along.”

It is difficult to determine whether this attitude reflects defeatism born of oppression or the positive desire to maintain control over one’s life at a time when, for women, marriage often meant subjugation. 

In the heterosexist society of that time, women and men were obsessed by the sexual “goodness” or “badness” of women. Yet outside of these institutional confines, as early as the 1940s and perhaps even earlier, lesbians pursued casual and deep love relationships and integrated sex with both. We can either emphasize how creative and innovative this oppressed community was, or begin to contemplate how easy it is for women to express sex and love outside of institutionalized male dominance.

If a fem was particularly bold, she might ask the butch if she ever danced—not if she would dance with her here and now—but only in a general, noncommittal way, so ego was not on the line.

“Well, I think basically that I was the one, I used to see her looking at me, like when we were having dinner. We worked in the kitchen together too, but she was in a different part. I used to catch her looking at me a lot but she was a very attractive girl, and I used to watch her too and I just felt a very strong gut desire within me that I would like to be with this woman. ”

But Bell remembers the details of how she began a relationship in prison, and it is our guess that the butch-fem dynamics in the bars and house parties were quite similar. She saw herself as having chosen the butch she wanted. They both indicated their interest to one another nonverbally, then the butch took the first verbal step.

Love was powerful and created strong relationships without the aid of institutionalized forces such as religion or the state.

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold The History of a Lesbian Community

Highlights