“KEEP THEM IN THE CLOSET”: Lesbian Involvement in Second-Wave Feminism, Queer Advocacy, and the Fight against HIV/AIDS

Queer agitators intended for the 1968 Stonewall Riots to harken the beginning of the end of homosexual silence. Activists hoped for the death of the old orthodoxy that gay people were to hide deep within the closets of their own shame. Although the male leaders of the gay rights movement sought to push their own out of the closet, they simultaneously, through dominance and ignorance, pushed their lesbian peers into the shadows. The lesbian rights movement spent the rest of the 20th century searching for its place in a society that reviled lesbians at every level for their gender and sexuality alike. Going from being second-wave feminists to female separatists to radical leftists, lesbians consistently missed out on the visibility and openness supposedly promised by Stonewall. Gay women in America did not receive this respect until the crucible for the queer community that was the AIDS crisis. From 1971 to 1992, the lesbian community underwent a gradual sociocultural migration from homosexuals within the women’s movement to women within the gay movement, setting the stage for a united queer front against the AIDS crisis. Both gay men and straight women spurned lesbian voices within their movements, but the equal footing between lesbians and gay men provided by the AIDS crisis allowed for the birth of a unified queer movement.

In 20th-century queer history, the disjunction of gay men and lesbians was an anomaly. Since the 1920s, the two groups depended on one another for beards, a form of social insurance against homophobia that kept gay men and lesbians in close quarters for the better part of the 20th Century, especially during the “Lavender Scare” of 1950-1956, during which suspected homosexuals were expelled en masse from government jobs at the behest of anti-communist moral crusader Senator Joe McCarthy. Moreover, in 1956, America’s first lesbian rights association, the Daughters of Bilitis, received funds from the era’s leading gay male activist group, the Mattachine Society, to publish The Ladder, a lesbian advocacy magazine. Additionally, the radical activism of the 1960s brought gay men and lesbians together under the common cause of “free love”; most politically-involved openly queer Americans, then called “homophiles,” leaned heavily to the left, and the queer activist space was able to mostly unite in favor of Black civil rights and against US involvement in the Vietnam War. This integration, however, masked profound internal schisms within the queer community. The eventual political isolation of lesbians, part defection and part ostracism exemplifies the extent to which few 20th century movements accommodate intersectionality. Two societal overtones prompted the collapse of gay-male/lesbian concord in the years following the Stonewall Riots of 1969: sexism and feminism, a push and a pull factor respectively.

Gay male misogyny in the late sixties incited antipathy with lesbians. A year before the Stonewall Riots, radical feminist Valerie Solanas, whose writings encouraged women (perhaps ironically) to “destroy the male sex,” attempted to assassinate the gay pop artist Andy Warhol, leaving behind a menstrual pad at the scene of the shooting. Other radical feminists interpreted this attack as a protest against the casual misogyny and entitlement of bourgeois gay men like Warhol. This tension came to a head on August 26th, 1970, when the Daughters of Bilitis and associated lesbian groups protested a general meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) held on the same day as the National Women’s Strike. Lesbian feminist Del Martin recounted the rumpus at the conference in a pamphlet entitled If That’s All There Is: “They [gay men] decried the segregationist organizations which we represented, but would not address…the underlying reason for…separate women’s organizations — that the female homosexual faces sex discrimination not only in the heterosexual world, but within the homophile community.” By “segregationist” Martin referred to the rising tide of “lesbian separatism,” an ideology that advocated the decoupling of lesbian life from all-male society, heterosexual and homosexual alike, and sometimes, more radically, from straight women’s spaces as well. Most separatists did not adopt such an anti-straight-women bent, as mere separation from men was more compelling due to the fear of male violence. Working alongside straight women did not offend lesbians, emphasizing the pull factor that stopped the gay-male/lesbian coalition from making it out of the sixties—lesbian involvement in second-wave feminism.

Around the turn of the 1970s, lesbian activists manifested their discontent by becoming second-wave feminist foot soldiers. Concrete policy achievements like the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and the promulgation of battered women’s shelters around 1968 gave feminism more mainstream credibility than ever, especially with upper-middle-class straight White women who may have been otherwise wary of the radical, sex-positive youth movements that defined the decade. Lesbians saw straight feminists as a more widely tolerated group than gay men, and in the early seventies, second-wave feminists were amenable to National Organization for Women (NOW), the seventies’ most influential feminist group, “adopt[ed] a resolution declaring lesbian rights a ‘legitimate concern of feminism,’” although historian Diane Perrault posits that this resolution included a stealthily homophobic caveat: the “plank…was euphemistically entitled ‘sexual Preference,’ with the word ‘lesbian’ carefully avoided, reflecting the emphasis on sexual orientation as a choice.” Despite these latent conservative elements of the movement, most lesbian activists migrated into mid- to high-level roles within mainstream feminist organizations. Compounded with elevated frustration over gay male sexism, the allure of mainstream feminism harkened the end of the united queer front and largely dissociated lesbians from their male counterparts. Queer historian and postmodernist philosopher John D’Emilio labels this period “the gendered seventies,” emphasizing that lesbian and gay male neighborhoods grew farther away from one another throughout the decade. Dr. Emily Hobson, a sexuality scholar, challenges the “gendered seventies” framework in her book Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, but the only examples of gay-male/lesbian solidarity she cites in between the Stonewall Riots and the AIDS crisis are immigrant communities, who united for other reasons, and the White Night Riots, which took place in San Francisco, a notable exception to the physical segregation of gay and lesbian neighborhoods. Elsewhere in America, according to lesbian AIDS activist Torie Osborn in a 2011 interview, “lesbian-feminists created new woman-identified spaces in the public sphere where they could congregate, organize, and socialize. Women-centered coffee shops, bars, clubs, restaurants, bookstores, sports teams, parks, health clinics, and shelters popped up… during the second boom of feminism, in large part due to…lesbian feminists.”

Problematically, however, these lesbian feminists had joined a movement plagued with a fundamental ideological divide between radical and liberal feminism. Gender history professor Martha Rampton believes the second wave represented “an effort to demonstrate that race, class, and gender oppression are all related,” illustrating the continuation of sixties radicalism present across feminist thought. Conversely, legal scholar Rachel Moran argues in the Hofstra Law Review in 2004 that “second-wave feminism forgot the single woman” and focused too heavily on merely tweaking patriarchal institutions like marriage and capitalism. In many ways, the ideological rift present within feminism at the time formed a hole that was jarringly lesbian-shaped. Social historian Christine Bedikian believes that female homosexuality is the answer to some intra-feminist tensions: “If society as a whole is being dependent on male culture to define and control the definition of a lesbian, no woman can really be free. Heterosexual male culture should not be able to define womanhood.” Of course, many straight feminists objected at the time to identifying with lesbians. At a NOW conference in 1969, Betty Friedan, the group’s founder, called lesbian activists a “lavender menace,” asserting “that outspoken lesbians were a threat to the feminist movement.” Friedan partially retreated from this rhetoric during the 1970-71 lesbian migration into the mainstream women’s movement and ended up working alongside NACHO dissenter Del Martin and her partner Phyllis Lyon, the first lesbian couple elected into leadership positions at NOW, but dissatisfaction with lesbians never truly vacated second-wave feminist organizations. Bedikian argues that lesbians were “blatantly discriminated against and excluded from the women’s liberation movement” even after Friedan’s backpedaling. National leadership may have tolerated lesbians during the “gendered seventies,” but lower-level advocacy groups broadly failed to make the same shift. In fact, when “sexual preference” came to the table at national women’s caucuses in 1976, the Mississippi delegation hoisted banners bearing a less-than-liberationist slogan: “KEEP THEM IN THE CLOSET.” Much of this backlash was a continuation of straight feminists’ distaste at being compared to lesbians. In its seminal 1970 manifesto The Woman-Identified Woman, queer agitation group Radicalesbians derided liberal feminists’ skittishness to join arms with their lesbian sisters: “[a]s long as the label ‘dyke’ can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand…keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family–then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture.” This self-identification crisis, however dormant amongst the top brass at NOW and its contemporaries, propelled much of the eventual lesbophobia that would come to haunt liberal feminists. Even so, lesbians won several foundational feminist victories during the seventies, Unfortunately for mainstream feminism’s new footsoldiers, the return of “family values” on the right and “assimilation” at the center did not spare the women’s movement. According to lesbian feminist Jill Johnston in a 1982 reflection on her experiences within second-wave feminism, the “politics of assimilation has dominated feminism since 1975,” a reframing that inspired liberal feminists to turn their backs on lesbians.This pivot especially affected upper-middle-class straight White women, who, by the middle of the decade, had arguably consummated the (admittedly meager) goals they had set: no-fault divorce and credit independence aided intramarital balance, and the Equal Pay Act brought American women closer than ever to respect in offices. Accordingly, the question remained: why would upper-middle-class women resign themselves to victimhood when they could maintain their power as mothers, as community leaders, and as otherwise privileged Americans? Many would argue that their fight was not over or that such a perspective disregarded doubly oppressed women, but White women by and large had made their decision: the group swung 18 points rightward from the 1976 to 1984 Presidential Elections while their Black female counterparts swung emphatically leftward. A turning point for increased reactionary sentiment among White feminists came at the 1977 National Women’s Conference.

Federally funded under executive order by Jimmy Carter, the NWC sought to draw up 26 “planks,” suggested feminist federal and state policy reforms. The hot ticket item was Plank #11, the Equal Rights Amendment; conference organizers thought the convention could galvanize public support for the constitutional sex-nondiscrimination edict, which required ratification from only three more state legislatures. The amendment never passed, the event’s traction being mostly filched by the “Pro-Family Rally,” antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly’s counter-event held just sixteen miles across Houston on the second day of the NWC. The Pro-Family’s keynote speakers, Schlafly and Republican Congressman Bob Dornan, attacked “lesbian privileges” and “sexual perversion” respectively in their responses to the NWC, and many liberal feminists blamed Plank #23 for Schlafly’s outmaneuvering, many even siding with Schlafly. In the coming years, Schlafly’s ideas about lesbians would become a powerful tool for pulling women rightwards.

This ideology of fear drove White women’s repatriation into the Republican Party circa 1980. As gender theorist Andrea Dworkin describes in her 1983 book Right Wing Women, “[t]he only dignity and value women get is as mothers…[w]ithout [motherhood], women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means having nothing.” This urge to cling to the lone vestige of social power for traditional women motivated much of Schlafly’s activism as well: she described the Equal Rights Amendment as “depriv[ing] wives and mother of [their] rights,” as it would allegedly obliterate motherhood by eroding heterosexual marriage. Additionally, the sublimation of women’s fear of male violence onto passive lesbian subjects resolved some psychological discord many conservative or moderate women felt about the men closest to them. “For women, the world is a very dangerous place,” Dworkin points out, “the Right then manipulates the fear”. Intimate partner violence, especially against housewives, peaked in the 1980s. However, if leaving an abusive husband meant renouncing the role of homemaker, the only traditional archetype that validated women’s personhood, then the fear of domestic violence was displaced onto a foreign body. During the Reagan Revolution, that body was lesbians. Dworkin attended the NWC and recalled how “Right-wing women consistently spoke to [her] about lesbians as if lesbians were rapists… [of] women and girls…She [the lesbian] was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand change.” The rehabilitators’ “family values” during the late seventies and early eighties manipulated the genuine dual threats of patriarchal sidelining and male violence into reactionary hatred for “lesbian privilege” and “lesbian rapists.”

As a new conservative dawn broke over America, lesbians found themselves increasingly politically homeless. Spurned by the people for whom they had fought the hardest and self-segregated from their gay male opposites, lesbians could no longer rely on self-sufficient separatist communities, either. Lilian Faderman explains in her 1992 article “The Return of Butch and Femme,” that “The 1980s gave birth to new attitudes toward butch/femme relationships among many lesbian radicals,” attitudes that more closely resembled the gritty “cruising culture” of the era’s gay men, a far cry from the egalitarian, polyamorous love Faderman found so endemic in the seventies. Separatism was on the wane at the same time as the lesbian community’s traditional allies were nowhere to be found, so gay women arrived at a profound internal crisis that Jill Johnston called a period of “weak…lesbian identity.” During this cultural exile, the most important queer issue of the late 20th century appeared in the United States: HIV/AIDS.

The AIDS epidemic ravaged the gay community, killing 100,777 Americans, mostly queer men, between 1981 and 1990 and hundreds of thousands more in the following decade. The Reagan administration laughed off the plague, and when AIDS patients protested the federal government for access to healthcare in 1987, “[p]olice carried out rough assaults and expressed disgust for people with AIDS by wearing bright-yellow rubber gloves,” signifying the level of popular contempt HIV+ people faced at the time. Lesbians, however, defied this stigma by stepping up to operate gay men’s health centers at a time of rampant medical discrimination and to form joint gay/lesbian AIDS advocacy groups after over ten years of separation, helping found the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), the most prominent American queer political group of the 1990s.

Historians have contended that gay men welcomed their lesbian guardian angels with open arms. This analysis oversimplifies the transition of lesbians into AIDS advocacy roles: while many gay men did display tolerance, gay women had to fight topline lesbophobia to find their place within the movement. AIDS activists divided themselves into two camps, which Hobson delineates as the “‘treatment’ and ‘social action’ agendas,” representing top-level, lobbying-focused gay people and community-focused mutual aid activists respectively. The “increasingly conservative-minded” lobbying-oriented gay men of the time saw lesbians as a poisonous distraction from earning the favor of the straight politicians who controlled AIDS drug funding, wanting “to get rid of those at the margins of the gay world.” Moreover, Hobson chronicles the entitlement that characterized well-off White gay men’s AIDS activism, noting “the sense of betrayal of privilege present” at an ACT UP demonstration in 1987. Privileged gay men were pursuing the same strategy many liberal feminists undertook in the late seventies, a strategy of apathy towards all causes but one’s own that Hobson calls “single-issue politics”; the most influential male-only “treatment agenda” AIDS groups, if not most of the larger movement, trafficked in single-issue politics before widespread lesbian entry into anti-AIDS roles, making said entry far from seamless. Nonetheless, lesbians eventually achieved in the queer movement what they could not in second-wave feminism: institutional respect and political reciprocity. That difference emerged due to the style in which lesbians integrated themselves into AIDS organizing.

The political strengths of lesbian activists in the mid-to-late eighties complemented those of gay men. Torie Osborn recalled that lesbians “cut their teeth on the women’s movement,” equipping them with what historian Maggie Shackleford refers to as the “grassroots, organizing, leadership skills, and direct-action radicalism” to accompany and strengthen the “social action agenda” wing of the burgeoning queer movement. The lesbian assumption of care roles during the AIDS epidemic, however, did not spring from a coordinated surge of compassion for gay men but rather from a straightforward need for the precise skills learned by lesbians in their fight for women-centered spaces; Osborn stated that women “took their rifle places next to [gay] men because they needed us. They needed our grassroots organizing skills; they needed our policy skills; they needed our health, education, research…and medical skills.” In her thesis “Unsung Heroes: Lesbian Activists in the AIDS Epidemic in North Carolina and California, 1981-1989,” Shackleford maintains that “lesbian activists faced little sexism from gay men and easily moved into positions of power in previously male-dominated work environments,” but her analysis misses two key points. Firstly, many gay male activists in such positions of power succumbed to AIDS by 1990, leaving roles available for lesbians. Additionally, the more nuanced, multi-issue politics that sprung out of AIDS-era radicalization meant that lesbians wound up welcome in bottom-up anti-AIDS spaces but not in top-down ones. On account of the close proximity to bottom spaces offered, lesbians and gay men began to define themselves by their relationships with one another for the first time since the 1960s.

The connotations attached to lesbians by both themselves and others took on a distinct tenor around the early nineties. According to Shackleford, “the actual experience working in the AIDS crisis that made lesbian activism […] simultaneously a professional and personal commitment,” that the gay-male/lesbian bond grew because of AIDS crisis centers. This sociocultural shift extended far beyond friendships with gay men; it redefined how lesbians interacted with one another. Primarily, increased collaboration with gay men all but obliterated political lesbianism, which gradually lost its appeal. Around 1989, radical feminist Jinx Beers lambasted lesbian AIDS activists in an article for Lesbian News, accusing them of “betraying [their] people” and “no longer putting lesbians first.” Separatist objections, however, were receding rapidly at the time, putting Beers decidedly in the minority. The majority of lesbians adopted a new image, one of dramatic disruption and performance politics, the very qualities from which lesbian groups, before partnering with AIDS patients, shied away.

In the early nineties, lesbian activism shifted away from a struggle of isolationist commune-building to a campaign of radical visibility, grabbing society’s attention and demanding that it give lesbians the respect it had previously denied them. In 1992, six lesbians established the Lesbian Avengers “to fight for lesbian survival and visibility.” Lesbian separatists had the luxury of being culturally irrelevant, but the new lesbians of the nineties needed the acknowledgment of popular culture as a pulpit from which to preach for their rights. In the Avengers’ founding document, the “Dyke Manifesto,” the group urged America’s gay women to “get out of the beds…and into the streets,” a mandate that could not have been more different from the behind-the-scenes organizing of the gendered seventies. Lesbians learned from the over-the-top demonstrations typical of gay male activists that to “ignite” and “fight,” as the Manifesto put it, garnered a sense of begrudging respect and acknowledgment that allowed for the negotiation of rights. The anonymously distributed pamphlet “Queers Read This” said the same: “being Queer… is about the freedom to be public.” As this new-age activism came into play, lesbian health organizating helped reduce AIDS casualties until the disease became treatable in 1998. Simultaneously, gay-style advocacy helped lesbians gain a cultural foothold, with journalist Martha Gever calling the mid-nineties “the entry of lesbians into our collective consciousness,” fighting ignorance and systemic lesbophobia in the process. Lesbian involvement in fighting AIDS saved not only the lives of thousands of patients but also the future of the lesbian movement itself.

Homosexuality, in theory, rooted in affirming one’s love, nevertheless appears in the eyes of heterosexuals to be a denial, whether of morals, of childbearing or of the mainstream. In the highest act of affirmation, lesbian activists edified their own community’s strength and helped gay men at their most vulnerable. The triumph of the human spirit over the HIV/AIDS epidemic was the greatest queer victory since Stonewall, and the lesbian compassion that contributed to that victory was a direct rebuke of both the gay sexism and female homophobia that tried to resign lesbians to the shadows. Lesbian AIDS activism affirmed lesbian pride, exposing a vital truth of social justice advocacy: no group can win liberation while tolerating their own degradation at the hands of other activists.