THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO LESBIANISM

LESBIANISM Created by Holly Firmin and Eva O’Flynn

The Female Husband ‘If you want to hear a bit of fun Oh listen unto me, About a Female Husband, The like you never see, Such a singular thing you never knew No not in all your life, As two Females to be wed, And live as Man and Wife So young women all a warning take, And mark what I do say, Before you wed, your husbands try, Or else you’ll rue the day The parties they were shown to bed, The bride sir, thought of that, But the bridegroom he was taken ill, Made everything look flat.

Now for Twenty years they lived, As man and wife so clever, Both ate and drank, and slept, And just these things together; If women all could do the same, And keep their virgin knot, Why the King and all his subjects, Would quickly go to pot.

So now my song is ended, I hope it’s pleased you all, This poor women had a husband, That had nothing at all.

So I do advise young woman all, To look before you wed, For if you should be so deceived, You will rue your marriage bed.

‘The

Body to the Soul’

You have dragged me on through the wild wood ways, You have given me toil and scanty rest, I have seen the light of ten thousand days Grow dim and sink and fade in the West.

Once you bore me forth from the dusty gloom, Weeping and helpless and naked and blind, Now you would hide me deep down in the tomb, And wander away on the moonlit wind.

You would bury me like a thing of shame, Silently into the darkness thrust, You would mix my heart that was once a flame With the mouldering clay and the wandering dust.

Shall not the dear smell of the rain-wet soil Through the windless spheres and the silence float?

Shall not my hands that are brown with toil Take your dreams and high desires by the throat?

Behold, I reach forth from beyond the years, I will cry to you from beneath the sod, I will drag you back from the starry spheres, Yea, down from the very bosom of God. You cannot hide from the sun and the wind, Or the whispered song of the April rain, The proud earth that moulds all things to her mind, Shall gather you out of the deeps again.

You shall follow once more a wandering fire, You shall gaze again on the starlit sea, You shall gather roses out of the mire: Alas, but you shall not remember me.

Eva Gore-Booth

WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF WOMEN WATCHING WOMEN

THE WELL OF LONELINESS (1928) Radclyffe Hall, or John, as she preferred to be called, lived with her partner Una Troubridge. She wrote The Well of Loneliness in the late 1920s, to much public uproar, particularly in the press. The publishers of the book were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1857. Ironically, the extent of the reaction to the book ensured its even wider circulation. The book was important not only in its depiction of a lesbian protagonist, but in stimulating debate amongst lesbians and non-lesbians alike.

‘The most important things were 1) simply that the book existed and 2) it suggested that somewhere I might find a community, if only a small and beleaguered one - someday. (Read in 1946 aged 15) ‘My mother gave it to me to read on a long bus ride. She said it was the first book about lesbians. I still don’t fully understand her motivations’ (Read in 1959, aged 14) ‘At the time, in the 1950s, I couldn’t identify with the short-back-and-sides, male -suited identity of being a lesbian. Although I was having my first lesbian affair, I felt I wasn’t a lesbian.’ (Read in 1953, aged 27) ‘I think it was Stephen’s character that gave the book its impact - not because she was masculine; but because she was innocent, guileless, honest. She wasn’t devious, as lesbians are supposed to be by nature. That may be why I believed in the book in spite of my own better judgement and why it has survived.’ (Read in 1965, aged 17) ‘I suppose I abstracted the sexual romance and the urgent plea for tolerance from it. I wrote in my diary at the time - or two years after perhaps? - about democracy and the rights of minorities. SO it was a political book for me as well as erotic.’ (Read in 1964, aged 14)

The Gateways Club (1936) It’s Friday night. Down the Kings Road, past Chelsea Town Hall where the hip young things are already ascending and descending their own private Jacob’s ladder to the lighted church windows of the ballroom…

This is the famous Gateways Club. It has been in existence since the thirties but the war affected a class revolution in lesbianism as it did in so many other fields of English social life. They wanted to dance; they were willing to spend. The jukebox ousted the piano and afternoon tea.

The juke box is kept constantly fed. Soon the numbers will grow to fifty, and then a hundred, and the serious enjoyment of the evening will begin… By now, the floor is rocking under the dancers’ feet. The tunes are those popular in the charts at the moment but there is a distinct preference for songs to and about girls. Lovers dance locked together to the slower records but the beat numbers are the most popular. Neither partner is committed except to the music. The floor becomes so crowded that it is impossible to do anything more than gyrate on the spot and by half-past ten nearly two hundred people will be packed between the bulging walls.

A club like the Gateways is not only the best place. For most people, there is nowhere else to go. ‘ Lesbian London,’ Maureen Duffy, 1966

Laura Jackson: The first time I walked in I was hit by how plush it was red carpets, chandeliers, a cocktail bar and a long bar. I was amazed. I’d not been to a night-club before. I had on loons, a cotton Tshirt with bell sleeves, my platform shoes and a velvet jacket, and I had very long hair and the usual eye-makeup. I was shocked by the butch lesbians and didn’t fit in at all really. Several of the women came up and asked questions about me and one of them asked me to dance. I was dead nervous. They asked if I was queer or bisexual, and because I hadn’t had a sexual relationship with a woman as an adult I said bisexual.

So they were quite hostile to me. I didn’t like the word queer and I was very surprised to hear gays and lesbians using the term: I thought they wouldn’t want to. I started using it too, of course, when I got into the gay scene. Most of the femmes were not available because if you were a femme you were hooked up pretty quick. Sometimes, in fact, I liked wearing contradictory clothes, so I’d wear lots of eye make-up and curl my hair, but wear a suit with a tie. The first night I watched the way that women with long hair didn’t get up and ask anyone to dance. Later on when I started going every night I’d ask women to dance and I really got told off. One femme gave me hell and said she wasn’t going to dance with me if she was paid! So I learnt the rules in that way. I could have cut my hair, but I liked it.

Myrtle Solomon: I’ve never moved in Lesbian circles. I’d no desire to go to a lesbian club. I don’t give a damn about ‘being a lesbian’ - it simply doesn’t worry me. It was the upheaval of loving so deeply and becoming so passionately involved that disturbed my life, not my choice of sex.

I was sorry to have upset my parents, but it never entered my head to try to change. … I had no desire to share my love life with a cause, but it was never shame that held me back. … Anyhow, remember me as I am, a happy and fulfilled woman.

Sharley MacLean: That was my first lesbian encounter and I really realized, this was it. I can honestly still remember it. It was a grotty bedsitter she had. We were all poor. Living conditions for everybody - unless you are well-heeled - were pretty awful in those days, post-war. I shall never forget it. It was right at the top with a slanting roof, the room, and this very narrow bed, and in the night you could hear the mice running and i’m terrified of mice, but being with her, it didn’t matter. And we talked a hell of a lot. It was quite amazing, one’s imagination, and how suddenly, you realize the possibilities of your body and another person’s body. It was marvellous. It was a Saturday and the following day we wandered into St James’s Park and it was a Sunday and we just lay there and we talked to each other. I suddenly realized I had become a whole person.

It all began in the Spring of 1965 in Knutsford, Cheshire. Some Arena 3 readers who had been informed of the existence of other local readers agreed to meet together. By the winter the group’s membership had risen from twelve to twenty -five Arena 3 readers and their friends in the Manchester area. Monthly meetings began to be held at a member’s flat in Manchester. Eventually, a pub room was hired for the Women’s Poetry Meeting’.

By summer 1966, a pattern had formed of monthly meetings where talking, gossiping, drinking and dancing took place. The numbers fluctuated at the twenty -five to thirty limit, which appeared to be saturation level. Most members were in the professional and middle-class brackets and seemed content with the exclusive society they had formed. Most had been A3 subscribers, but once within the security of the group tended to drop their subscriptions!

Two schools of thought began to emerge within the group. The ‘passivists’ - who thought they had got all that they wanted out of A3 - enough friends and a social life - seemed content to leave it at that. The ‘activists’, bored by this pattern, wanted speakers and more activities. Antagonisms developed between members, threatening to break up the whole group.

Aqueela I was very upset by Beverley’s death. I was on holiday in Spain for four weeks when she died and I really hated myself for not being here. I had begun to be involved with Black lesbian politics, but that was all very new. Pause. Beverley was always a hard studier - she got a First - and she didn’t use the time at college it the same way as me.

I was meeting other Black women, but she was totally isolated, She was a lesbian first and had felt very let down by the white lesbians. The Black lesbians I met saw me through the devastation of her death. I couldn’t ask the white lesbians about it. I think she took an overdose. All those white women treated the group like it was a big dyke’s party. They were into drinking and sleeping around. Their idea of feminism or activism was Greenham Common. Anything to do with Black people, like demos against racist attacks or the invasion of Grenada, didn’t interest them. These things were really important to me and Beverley. I just felt these women were in privileged positions and did not use it to try and change anything.

Aqueela, interviewed February 1986 by Allega Damji (Hall Carpenter Oral History Archives)

Megan Thomas I remember my first impression of boys was wondering what all the fuss was about. I was really disappointed because sex had been built up and was supposed to be a wonderful experience, but I would have preferred to be playing football or pool with them. I began to think it was me, so I screwed around a little bit more thinking it was just a question of finding the right bloke. But the actual look of a naked fella that I was supposed to feel attracted to just made me think, ‘My god, isn’t he ugly? Poor bastard, Imagine walking around like that? Even then I didn’t realize I might have feelings for other girls.

Megan Thomas, Interview on October 1986, Jayne Egerton

OWAAD (1981) In 1981, at the conference of the Organisation for Women of Asian and African descent, many of the women were furious that in a time of such hostility, a lesbian workshop would be considered important.

Many felt that issues of women’s oppression and sexuality should be subordinate to the needs of the wider Black and Asian communities. Others were afraid of being accused of lesbianism - BME men had frequently used this as a weapon against vocal BME women. But the lesbians calling for a workshop refused to be silenced. There was uproar. Insults like ‘mash ‘em up’, ‘chuck them out’ and ‘it’s disgusting’ were hurled at lesbian participants. Yet despite the hostility and anger, the lesbian workshop went ahead and kept filling up.

UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, introduces Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. The Act states that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

Diana Chapman: If this brief life comes across, at least in the early days, as bleak, it is no more so than that of thousands of gay women and men of my generation. Now, Thatcher's government, by way of infamous Section 28, is trying to push us all back to those pre 1960 days of ‘lies, secrets, silence’. At our age - we no longer have to cower in the shadows, fearful of our jobs, we have nothing to lose but our gains. My message to the grey homophobes at Westminster is simply this:

WE ARE NOT GOING BACK INTO THE CLOSET!

1989 - Stonewall founded (in response to Section 28.)

1992 - World Health Organisation declassifies same-sex attraction as a mental illness.

1997 - Angela Eagle becomes Britain’s first MP to voluntarily come out as a lesbian.

2000 - UK Government lifts the ban on lesbians, gay men and bi people serving in the armed forces. Section 28 repealed in Scotland, bill to repeal defeated in England and Wales.

2002 - Equal rights granted to same-sex couples applying for adoption.

2003 - Section 28 is repealed in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Employment Equality Regulations make it illegal to discriminate against LGB people in the workplace.

2004 - Civil Partnership Act passed, grants civil partnership in the UK. Act gives same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities as married straight couples in the UK. 2007 - The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 outlawed the discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities, services, education and public functions on the grounds of sexual orientation.

2009 - Stonewall conducts the first large-scale study of lesbian and bi women’s health.

2010 - A new offence of ‘incitement to homophobic hatred’ comes into force in the UK. 2014 - The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 officially comes into force, with the first same-sex marriages in England and Wales taking place on 29 March 2014.

becky shepherdson // eva o’flynn // holly firmin

harriet phillips // isabella leandersson // aisha farooq

georgina taylor // siyang wei // jessica murdoch

griffin twemlow // hannah dyball // amaya holman

‘This isn’t the whole story: this isn’t my statement. That was then. This is now, and as a lesbian, here I am.’

[Liz Naylor]

2017