原书名：Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement

作者：Marcia M. Gallo

“We were fi ghting the church, the couch, and the courts.”

These are the words of activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. They are describing a time, fifty years ago, when a handful of lesbians challenged the widespread demonization of female same sex love by American religious leaders, psychiatrists, psychologists, lawyers, and lawmakers. The two women still insist that they did not intend to start a revolution. In September 1955, when Martin and Lyon accepted an invitation to meet with three other lesbian couples in San Francisco, the main topic of conversation was forming a social club for “gay girls.” Out of their discussions grew the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first national lesbian rights organization in the United States.

The story of DOB provides a unique example of women’s activism during a time in contemporary U.S. history often portrayed by historians as socially and politically quiescent. DOB’s particular style of mobilizing lesbians—what historian Marc Stein has termed “militantly respectable” organizing— provides examples of strategies that have been effective in repressive political climates.

To fully understand DOB, we must place it in its cold war context. As historian Ruth Rosen has written, “the fifties were an age of cognitive dissonance: millions of people believed in ideals that poorly described their own experience. The decade quarantined dissent and oozed conformity” (1). Although Alfred Kinsey’s postwar studies of human sexuality showed the prevalence of homosexual attraction for “normal” American women and men, gay men and lesbians were dismissed from federal employment, fi red from private industry, and deprived of custody of their children, just because they desired the “wrong” sex. They were regularly harassed, and often arrested, by local vice squads at gay-friendly bars and restaurants, then humiliated when their names and addresses were printed on the front pages of hometown newspapers. “Homosexual” was synonymous with “pervert” and “subversive.”

Initially, the Daughters performed a careful balancing act between visibility and secrecy. One of their first programs was a series of living- room discussions on issues of interest to lesbians. They called the informal coffee- fueled gatherings “Gab ‘n’ Javas.” A woman did not have to identify herself as gay to attend; membership was open to all females interested in learning more about the “problems” of homosexuality. Even the name the Daughters chose for the group provided shelter from unwitting exposure. By using the title of an obscure nineteenth century erotic poem (Songs of Bilitis), supposedly written by a mythical female lover of the legendary Greek teacher and poet Sappho, they could signal that they were a gay group to those women who were “in the know” yet shield themselves from unwanted attention from society at large.

They also quickly established themselves as a non-profit organization, with by-laws, letterhead, and membership cards. The external symbols of corporate credibility helped them see themselves, as well as be seen by others, as a legitimate group. They opened their first office at 693 Mission Street in San Francisco in January 1957, sharing space with the Mattachine Society, an organization of gay men. The few women who were determined to find some sort of community sought out DOB in the Bay area, or found the New York office on lower Broadway. Kay Tobin (Lahusen) remembers, “I was so nervous! I mean, here I was, going to this lesbian group—and they had an office. I was so intimidated . . . until I got there” (2). What she found was a cluttered, claustrophobic space in which half a dozen women had gathered, but it was enough to convince her to join. For the next two decades, the tiny group of Daughters functioned like a highly structured women’s club and sometimes felt like a dysfunctional family. From 1958 to 1970, it was a national organization with local chapters, biennial conferences, and a membership averaging 200 women annually. In addition to San Francisco, there were active DOB groups in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. Other U.S. cities—such as Dallas, Detroit, and New Orleans—as well as Melbourne, Australia, also had chapters for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Which lesbians were Daughters? While the organization’s membership was overwhelmingly white, it was not exclusively so. There were two women of color—a Filipina and a Chicana— among the initial organizers. A few African American women assumed positions of leadership within the organization at both national and chapter levels, such as Cleo Glenn (Bonner) and Pat Walker in San Francisco, and Ernestine Eckstein in New York. Bonner became the president of the national organization and led it for three years in the mid-1960s, the first woman of color to head a national gay rights group. Cuban-born Ada Bello was a leader in DOB’s Philadelphia Chapter in the late 1960s and Jeanne Córdova, of Irish and Mexican descent, helped revitalize the Los Angeles Chapter in the early 1970s. Artists like Nancie Gee and Alice Kobayashi contributed to DOB’s magazine, The Ladder. “Unlike many other groups in the 1950s,” remembers early member Billye Talmadge, “there were no color bars in DOB.” She goes on to note that “there were not just African-Americans, but Asians, Latinas . . . the driving force was that we were gay women” (3).

According to an early DOB membership survey, the first administered by lesbian activists themselves rather than professional researchers, a majority of the women in the organization were teachers. Some of them held professional positions in business or were employed as clerical workers, others had factory jobs or were unemployed. Most of the women who joined DOB in the late 1950s had gone to college; only a handful had served in the military in World War II or afterward. Most had at least some sexual or emotional involvement with the opposite sex. There was a fair amount of geographic mobility as well, and DOB members often moved to a different part of the country for work or a new love interest. Sometimes the result would be good for the Daughters personally and politically—when “Sandy” (Helen Sandoz) met and fell in love with “Sten” (Stella Rush) in 1957, she moved to Los Angeles so they could be together. The next year, they founded the Los Angeles Chapter.

Creating Lesbian Identity and Visibility

The Ladder may be one of the things that the Daughters is best known for. The same compact size as many academic or literary journals, the 25- to 60-page black-and-white magazine was the first ongoing monthly publication in the United States created by lesbians for lesbians. From 1956 to 1972, it was handed around among colleagues at work, at home, and at the bars; unfortunately for the organization’s meager treasury, most readers “borrowed” rather than paid for their copies. Repeatedly, lesbians who are now in their late 50s, 60s, and 70s describe their amazed reaction to finding a copy at a friend’s home or at one of the dozen newsstands and “alternative” bookstores around the country that sold it. “One day Audre (Lorde) and I stopped at our favorite newsstand on 8th Street in the Village and saw this little magazine. For lesbians! And there was an article in it by Iris Murdoch. We were thrilled,” remembers Blanche Wiesen Cook (4). For historian Cook, the groundbreaking biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, and writer Lorde, the first black lesbian to be named New York’s Poet Laureate (1991), the discovery of The Ladder was further enhanced by its inclusion of the acclaimed British novelist. Iris Murdoch was renowned for her intellectually rigorous, provocative writings on moral and ethical issues in the 1950s and 1960s.

The changing cover and content of The Ladder illustrate the lesbian movement’s evolution. The magazine initially featured pen-and-ink drawings of women but in 1964, under the editorship of Barbara Gittings, The Ladder began showcasing photos of lesbians taken by Kay Lahusen.  Gittings also added the words “A Lesbian Review” in boldface type to the front of the magazine. The content was always lesbian-centered yet eclectic. In addition to providing information on the growing homophile movement, The Ladder promoted female poets and writers—from Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jeanette Howard Foster to Valerie Taylor and Rita Mae Brown—to an appreciative audience. A monthly review of any and all lesbian-themed publications, “Lesbiana,” written by longtime Ladder contributor and final editor Gene Damon (Barbara Grier) was one of the innovations The Ladder introduced in 1957. Another was the letters to the editor column, which featured correspondence from around the globe for the next fourteen years. Among the early riches to be found in its pages are two long, thoughtful pieces, signed “L. H. N., New York, New York,” which were sent to the editor within a few months of the magazine’s debut. Offering congratulations for the new group’s undertakings, the letters were printed in their entirety; within a few years, their author, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (who added her married name, Nemiroff, to her signature), would cause a sensation with her searing drama on American race relations, A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

DOB leaders also used their publication to recruit research participants. Florence Conrad (Jaffy), DOB’s longtime Research Director, believed passionately that the best way to change public perceptions of lesbians was by changing what was written about them in the established medical and scientifi c literature. DOB, Jaffy argued, could help researchers find healthy, functioning, noninstitutionalized lesbian subjects for study. By the mid-1960s, however, some DOB leaders such as Gittings rejected the suggestion that the organization rely on anyone but its members in defining the mental health of gay women and men. “Emphasis on research has had its day,” she headlined in The Ladder. It was time to take action (5).

Within ten years’ time, strategic disagreements as well as geographic differences influenced the Daughters’ organizing decisions. In 1965, on the East Coast, Gittings, Lahusen, and Eckstein were three of a handful of lesbians who joined early gay public protests. They picketed federal buildings in Washington, New York, and Philadelphia for the rest of the decade, challenging government policies as well as the shadowy stereotypes of gay people so popular with the media. In San Francisco, Martin and Lyon, along with Talmadge, Bonner, and Walker, recognized the importance of exorcizing the “sin” of homosexuality and focused on religious leaders. Working with Ted McIlvenna, a sympathetic minister who aided runaway youth in the city’s poor Tenderloin district, they helped create the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in 1965. The allies they made within mainstream churches helped develop support for gay rights legislation. In Chicago, DOB leaders like Barbara McLain worked with Mattachine activists to call attention to the harassment and violence that plagued their communities. This step led to the founding of one of the first police brutality monitoring networks in the country, which continues to operate today.

Feminism and the Fall of The Ladder

The interplay between “the personal” and “the political” in DOB’s programs and goals is evident from the organization’s beginnings. Women who came to the get-togethers mainly to meet a new girlfriend often got more than they bargained for. For example, the “Gab ‘n’ Java” gatherings provided sites where women could talk about issues they had never before dared to express openly. As one woman’s story after another was shared and validated within the safety of the small group, DOB members realized that it was not just their own sense of self-esteem but society’s attitudes and policies that needed to change. Their magazine also helped DOB members defi ne their awareness of gender differences between lesbians and gay men, and stress their solidarity with heterosexual women on the need for gender equality. The Ladder was one of the few national publications where essays critiquing women’s second-class status in society could be found in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it regularly printed poetry, short stories, and reviews of fiction and nonfiction with a decidedly feminist slant.

However, the appeal of women’s liberation to some of DOB’s most prominent activists in the late 1960s, and their desire to utilize respected resources like The Ladder to promote feminism, caused a split within DOB’s leadership that by 1970 was irreparable. That summer, one month before DOB’s biennial convention, national president Rita Laporte took the magazine’s mailing list and production materials from San Francisco to her new home in Nevada so that she and editor Barbara Grier could publish The Ladder privately.

DOB’s longtime leaders, including Lyon, Martin, Gittings, and Lahusen, were infuriated by this action. The loss of The Ladder caused a crisis of faith and friendship that has yet to be resolved. What Grier describes today as an effort to save a valuable publication from the death throes of a weak and ineffectual organization, other former Daughters insist was nothing less than theft. They assert that Grier and Laporte caused DOB’s demise by “stealing” their prized publication, which was the organization’s most valuable asset. Grier argues that The Ladder by 1970 was increasingly functioning as its own entity. As editor, she wanted the freedom to expand its feminist orientation and build on its legacy as the only established American lesbian magazine with a significant distribution network and publishing history.

Unfortunately, The Ladder could not survive without the organization that had given it life. Over the next two years, Grier recruited up-and-coming as well as well-known feminist writers and expanded the magazine’s circulation to nearly 4,000. The increase in readership, however, caused financial problems. “The simple truth is that we couldn’t afford to keep printing and mailing a high-quality magazine without accepting ads our readers wouldn’t want,” she said in 2003 to explain why she stopped publishing The Ladder in 1972 (6). With her partner Donna McBride and two other women, Grier then founded Naiad Press, a successful women’s publishing company. She used The Ladder’s mailing list to announce the new enterprise.

Through the 1970s DOB continued to provide a home for lesbians, at least on the local level. Chapters were granted autonomy and the right to continue organizing under the “Daughters of Bilitis” name in 1970 and many continued their work for the rest of the decade. The Boston Chapter was active until 1995. Then, as in 1955, DOB was many things to many women. It was where a lesbian could go to meet a new girlfriend, begin to heal a broken heart, or find validation for her life. It was a circle of friends to share good times and bad, a network of peer counselors who offered support and guidance, a resource center for questions about homosexuality. It was an arena for social action. The Daughters’ mix of personal support and political debate brought women to activism who never would have defined themselves as agents for change.

Despite the dominant culture of conformity so characteristic of the cold war years, the Daughters educated and organized lesbians, advocating for their inclusion in U.S. society. They adapted the postwar rhetoric of integration and equality to challenge their society not only on its homophobia but on its sexism.

Endnotes

1. Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How The Modern Women’s Movement

Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 8.

2. Kay Lahusen, interview with author, April 23, 2002.

3. Billye Talmadge, interview with author, March 30, 2002.

4. Blanche Wiesen Cook, discussion with author, September 5, 2004.

5. The Ladder 10 (October 1965): 10.

6. Barbara Grier, interview with author, December 29, 2003.

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Videos

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