Get Used to It: Ep. 2, "Lesbians and Feminism"

[Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi i'm sheila kuhl welcome to another edition of get used to it a discussion show about issues that are important to the lesbian and gay community we are on cable once a month and this week i'm really happy to tell you that our topic has to do with homophobia or i should say lesbian phobia i guess in the women's movement feminism lesbianism and all kinds of wonderful issues and i have three wonderful guests i'd like to introduce you first gene conger who is executive director of the los angeles women's foundation and was national secretary and on the national board of now and was special assistant executive assistant sorry to the president of now during the era ratification campaign next to her abby jane liebman who is one of the managing directors of the california women's law center and also a board member of the women lawyers association of los angeles and next to her and to my left but not very far to my left it's really hard to be very part of my left uh is jenny faut who is the executive director of caring for babies with aids and as you know i think at one point jenny was president of california now and was also active for years in national now we added up our years in the women's movement just before we started this show and discovered that it's almost 75 years collectively we won't tell you how many each one has but gene i want to start with you this is this is a topic that's getting some attention this year i think because so many more lesbians are out and talking about uh being lesbians but wanting to work and be identified as feminists and be in the women's movement do you think there is or has been homophobia in the women's movement and how did it manifest itself well i think one of the things that i like to do is sort of distinguish between or discriminate between uh homophobia and heterosexism and i i look at them as two different things uh homophobia the word phobia having its base in fear i think is is a real almost a conscious fear maybe a little subconscious but mostly conscious whereas heterosexism i think is kind of an insensitivity uh kind of an assumption that people have that well everybody is like me uh straight as it is is like the majority unless they tell them otherwise so how would that manifest itself differently in terms of you know you and i go to a to a meeting of the women's movement incorporated um why why would it be different okay i think where it would be different would the heterosexist part would be the fact that uh they would assume that we were straight that we were not lesbian that we were just just like just like everyone else just like normal people unless unless we said something then i think the homophobia would come in if we said something depending on people's reactions and i think if someone's reaction was fear or or discomfort even discomfort i think would be um evidence of homophobia whereas i think heterosexism would be more the discounting of of anything that wasn't like them well but abby let me ask you when when people talk about the women's movement they're not necessarily talking about you know a meeting that you and i go to or some local whatever um do you see it as different in terms of sort of this being a national homophobia or heterosexism or just you know the way friends react well the easy answer is probably that women are people too and so women carry all of the same isms that the rest of the world did and what what may be more compelling around this discussion is that perhaps there was a presumption that because it was not only a movement about women that it was meant to be inclusive of all women especially perhaps lesbians because they were such a part of the leadership that this may have been a place where lesbians felt safe and they thought that this was a place where they would be accepted to and that we we didn't we women didn't also have a movement around gay rights or around the notion of embracing people for who they are so we came in with all of those isms as well and didn't start from a place of having the gay movement first and then of course oh everybody was welcome everything's wonderful and there are all kinds of issues around race and i would say around sexual orientation as well that surfaced in the women's movement because we also embraced what the majority culture did it's an interesting point about expecting to be safe and now let me ask you jen um early on in the women's movement was that did it feel as though of course i don't know whether you know eugene or jenner or even me whether we were out to ourselves you know in those years that's a question that we haven't even talked about but early on did it seem like this was a place where lesbians thought they would be safe and then there was a disappointment sort of like a a rejection from people you really thought it was going to be okay with of all the people in the world i think the answer is a yes and a no to that because i think there were certain parameters and lines that that you didn't cross certainly i believe that lesbians felt very comfortable in the women's movement as long as the issues that they were speaking for were pertaining to lesbian issues or as long as they were not uh trying to take a leadership role in areas which were very public leadership roles and i think this year i mean we can look at the national organization for women and this year they have you know uh this was actually last year elected their first woman who may or may not whichever point in her life be or be not a choice she's a pro-choice choice kind of person and it's the first time that that has ever been a public now whether someone is before that has you know been a lesbian private life it certainly has not been out lesbian and i think that was real clear throughout not only now but through uh all other you know sometimes those of us who are now think that now was the only uh women's movement it certainly was the largest women's movement but i think that all if you look back through the early organizing days um where where women were um not accepted if they were out lesbians in certain parts of the country and then in other parts of the country they were but certainly the leadership roles were reserved for those who were the either not out lesbians or who were uh uh closet reserved by by who i mean how did it manifest itself that that happened i think it was more a feeling of of it was never out said out loud as far as in my presence but it was always you knew that who you were is something that could damage the image of what the women's movement was 1982 after the era campaign um i was still working for now and i left and moved out here and a num i'd been working all across the country so a number of people had been urging me to run for president the presidency of now at that point and speaking with some people who were lesbians who were very powerful in the women's movement here in los angeles and they said i don't think so yes you're perfectly qualified oh yes you'd be fine but you're a lesbian and you need to think about that so what did they mean by that they made it what they meant was you shouldn't run or you'd never not run no what they meant was i should not run because i would be damaging now by being a visible person who was a lesbian see that i think there's some there's something that's very interesting about this in the context of even though the larger culture and some things that we see now but the notion that whoever you are when you are the outside when you are the other is that you are an ambassador for all the others that are like you and therefore the leadership of now i think was looked to to be reflective of all women or that this is who the movement was about and if the leadership was about lesbians then was the movement about lesbians and of course knowing that that is probably the worst thing you could probably call anybody in our culture because that's like how you damn anything you try to like marginalize it as much as you can and that would be being a lesbian because it's so so really a threat to the movement in a sense and even lesbians what i heard from eugene is that even lesbians felt that the movement itself was so fragile at that point and even now maybe but i don't think the fragile is the word for it i think if you look at the evolution of the women's movement the women's movement started in the street and although you know many of us know that burning of the bras was really a myth it did start as a street movement it started where no one would uh would ask you to go to any kind of of a political function or anything like that and the movement evolved and became mainstream it went from a street movement into a mainstream movement it went from having radical uh separatists and radical uh straight separatists uh running the movement to having betty ford as a spokesperson so the movement evolved and when that evolution happened i think that it became more oppressive to lesbians during that evolution period because now we wouldn't play in peoria but the statement of purpose of now from 1966 on was to bring women and men in equal partnership into the mainstream so i mean that was right in the statement of purpose so i think that was very clear there was a real desire to integrate to integrate into the mainstream society and lesbians that's always the problem with the movement we were talking about it when we did a show here about the election about sort of how you do your own organizing how you need to validate yourself have pride you know we were talking about this earlier look a certain way so that everybody would know you're out your clothes say you're out you know we don't have little l buttons to wear so we're going to be we're going to have an identity right and then the ambassador notion even from the lesbian and gay community which is are you an acceptable i mean we face it now are you an acceptable kind of queer people say oh don't send anybody from queer nation because they'll make the wrong impression and they all can be exactly the writing but they do but they also say they do it they do it to us too right they also say that you don't look gay enough you know somehow you're trying to pass rather than saying i'm being who i am you know this is who i am uh this is how i'm comfortable but this also happens even say with women who are straight women that are involved in the women's movement is whether or not you have you earned the right to say that you're really a radical or what does a radical look like and that you know i don't dress the way you know it's like i'm not radical chic in the sense of you know but you know i wear makeup and i wear earrings and i'm just and you know i don't look like a woman who's wearing you know or my hair is not you know all natural and and that would there was an image there was a stereotype image but we also helped to to sort of perpetuate that image of this is what a woman who is a radical feminist looks like and then that became a pejorative term and we all either wanted to move away from the label or what i would prefer to do is to say no this is what a radical feminist looks like and that's part of this whole the whole image making pc the whole pc business you didn't have your if you didn't have your blue jeans and your birkenstocks that's right that's absolutely right but i think there was a confusion at the beginning about what it was to be a feminist which was to be a not what we had been in the past okay it was like a all we knew to do at the beginning was to reject something now for lesbians who were already rejected and separate we had an identity we had a look or whatever for the the next group who were wanting to be feminists and not separatist yet really i think there was a confusion about how to do that among straight women and lesbians because it looked like we had to reject male things you know there's another element there though too and that is that there were women who were married who had families who had children who came out in the women's movement now some of them may have felt all of their lives that they were lesbians some of them didn't and some of them went back to being straight again i mean i don't know i think lesbian is self-defined quite frankly so i i there's no litmus test for it but i think that added a very confusing element to people as to quote who are the real lesbians will the real lesbians stand up i mean there were people who were saying i'm a political lesbian you know no seriously and there was a lot of a lot of straight baiting going on too that that women who slept with men were you know this is the only moment that they were sleeping with the enemy we were sleeping with the enemy you know all of that kind of thing so it was it was a very exciting time a very heady time but it was also i think a very confusing time for a lot of people i think i think another point that you're just making is is i think one of the important things was that the lesbians in the movement were looking for equality in a different way than heterosexual women were looking for equality their equality uh their first thought for equality it was equality within their structure of their home life we were not looking for that quality within the structure of our home life we were looking for more of a global equality and and i think that that sometimes that put us at cross purposes and i think it caused some of the problems within the movement when the movement was accused of not taking on issues like child care uh in strong enough ways or taking on issues as as domestic violence and strong enough and early enough within the movement and i think and what happened with that it was of course because there were too many lesbians in the movement and they didn't care about child care but the other thing is that when women i mean that was the mythology excuse me i just want to clarify it was really the sort of the more middle-class people who interested in the workplace equality that weren't valuing the family but you're saying it worked out as a mythology that there were so many dykes in the movement who of course didn't care about children because we were invisible as parents we've become all these parents but also there was i mean part of this mythology too was the fact that now didn't care about child ear because very early on it did cooley did not make this the focal point of the movement and then also we have to go back to jenny's point about whether or not now was the focal point of the movement or whether it was just one of those places where things were happening was one of the more visible it was one it was probably the strongest national i mean when we look at the movement the movement is really made up of a lot of different groups but this was the the most visible national group but the point i was trying to make is that i think all of that business about choosing to be lesbians or being political lesbians heightened the homophobia as well because you don't choose to be an african-american you don't choose to be an asian you don't choose to be a male or choose to be a female but if this is something you can choose that's pretty scary to people right okay how the time flies when you're having a good time we'll be right back after this hey come here i want to talk to you yeah i i don't want any trouble you got a problem i'm not gonna fight you oh yeah [Music] welcome back to get used to it my guests gene conger abby liebman and jenny faut well i don't know if they remember what we were talking about or if we remember we were talking about one of the things i was thinking when you were talking about what the movement was concentrating on sort of early on it felt to me as though there was a lot of concentration on getting into the workplace having careers equality sort of in the public sphere but i heard you say not as much concentration on the private sphere did that make a difference in where lesbians were or what they cared about or because maybe there was a division between the middle class lesbians who wanted jobs and the you know the uh downwardly mobile dykes who were talking about other issues for women i to be honest with you i don't think that i think there was um a difference but i think it was more at a local level versus a national level rather than a division along you know sexual orientation lines uh i think at the local level there was a lot more emphasis on home and family issues on consciousness raising i mean there were consciousness raising groups at the national level it was like none of that belly button gazing let's get out there and organize you know let's break that class let's get out there and and do that so i think also uh one of the things we were talking about is that the fundraising was the era for example was a wonderful fundraising and organizing tool a political organizing tool and it was it was absolutely marvelous and i think we were quite open about that then other issues i think during the end of the era campaign for example all the other issues took a back seat even even abortion rights reproductive rights which were still very very hot issues but they all took a back seat to the equal rights amendment and and lesbian rights did also and it was a much it was a much safer issue who could argue i mean obviously plenty of people yeah but who could argue who knew everyone was going to be equal and not the era it was such a nice clean issue it wasn't you know lesbian and gay rights it wasn't anything it wasn't killing babies it wasn't doing any of that it was a nice place but i think it's i think it is important to remember that at the point in time when it was first raised it wasn't so clean i mean this is like a radical concept i mean this was a radical movement because it was not accepted it wasn't part of the mainstream you know now in hindsight a generation later we think about the fact that it seems amazing in some respects i think people who are very young think how could that possibly be it must have been we must have screwed it up somehow i mean how could they not have passed this and when you think about how absorbing that era campaign was and how much energy had to go into it and how difficult it was there is in some ways a good explanation as to why it was that these other issues began to become peripheral because a we had to do this in b we couldn't even get this but you know it was interesting that's when i saw a lot of lesbians either being forced out or dropping out of this national thing saying what's the era got to do with us this is a middle-class women's issue i mean i think the first thing i ever read that tori osborne wrote was about why dykes should care about the era i mean it was it was an article when she was working for you in san francisco and it was because there were so many lesbians that said this is not our issue we're going to do the battered women's movement i mean this we care about violence against women what is this equality stuff what we care is about women's stuff family stuff so i wonder if that's also what you meant by the local level i think that's i think that's probably probably true although when i was working in my chapter at the local level i wasn't out as a lesbian so we were dealing with those you know a lot of those issues we didn't have any lesbians in our chapter now why was that jesus why was that well i think because it was it was obviously not a safe place to be out i mean i can remember my first thought the first meeting i ever missed the first now meeting i ever missed was one that was on we had a group of lesbians who came to talk about lesbian i was like lesbian rights that what kind of feminist issue is that you know i had a terrible headache that night but in any case uh having been shortly thereafter what that's sort of news to me i'm thinking about the particular chapter we're thinking about it's sort of interesting it's not it's not it's on the east coast not a chap that you know but in any case i think that i think that um lesbians i think there was a a fear of lesbians being visible in the movement because it was something i mean that's what i call real that really was homophobia the fear that lesbians would somehow further marginalize this this whole movement that already was somewhat marginalized when i was a teacher for example this is in the early 70s working on the era married with children and so on one of my fellow teachers just despised me because i was trying to take away her husband's job after all women didn't have to have jobs you know you were taking away the jobs of men who had to support families and and that's really some of what was going on then we were as feminists very marginalized in the early to mid 70s it was only toward the end of the 70s that that feminism and and the equal rights amendment even became something that looked possible so do you think that's changed i mean do you think it's two questions i guess is it safer for the women's movement now to say yeah they're a bunch of lesbians in this movement so what well i think it is safer in some ways but i think you have to go back just a step when you become part of a movement you believe that everyone in that movement wants the same thing and once you get past understanding that that's not really true then it's a lot easier to work within the movement i think that that we amongst ourselves in in the lesbian community have done some of the things that have have caused the women's movement to i think we need to take some of the blame i guess is what it is a very little teeny part of the blame but some of the blame when gene and i or a group of my friends are together and we're together in a group uh in which there are also straight women presence present there's kind of a camaraderie among us that we share a common thread that's not necessarily present in in the um in the heterosexual women together and it's kind of like a bond and even if you've newly met the people who are in that group there is kind of that bond that i don't believe exists in the heterosexual women because heterosexual women have been far more competitive uh towards each other i think than than lesbian women i don't know i don't i don't agree with that either i i think it has more to do with what what um people bond together in oppression okay and there is you know you recognize each other it's it's if if you are a small group in a large group of people who are different from you and who are viewed you know in a sense as the oppressor you d you tend to bond together you recognize each other and you and you instinctively support each other and have that kind of camaraderie i i just think i don't know i i i don't i don't like to say i mean i don't take the blame for that i really don't i don't i don't even if you're the majority in the group that your particular group that you're in there still is that kind of bonding that separates you from being well but i don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing well abby you know you're you're on the women lawyers board and to my knowledge i'm the only leader i just went off but it's okay i'm the only lesbian that's ever been on that board and certainly the only one who's ever been president as far as we know right right but it felt like a very comfortable group to me i don't know what's i mean why where are you why were you the only lesbian who was on that board or the only lesbian who was ever president of the board well this raises some of those issues of whether you where you want to put your activism and if as a lawyer what you wanted to do was to identify with the women lawyers group or do you want to identify with the gay lawyers group and there are a number of lesbian lawyers who have a much more definitive identification with the gay lawyer lawyers for human rights and this raises issues about people of color involved in the women's movement about why it was that they weren't there was it that they weren't welcome was it they felt a greater identification with issues of color than they did of issues of gender and the complexity of those questions may have to be decided on an individual basis i don't know and um i think there are more options now than there were there wasn't uh a lawyers for human rights there wasn't uh southern california women for understanding you know in the in the early 70s there wasn't a place for people to go but abby's point really saying there's somewhere for people to go doesn't belie the fact that the women are choosing to go there lesbian and gay bar association rather than women lawyers and why is that i don't know are they not it's hard for me to say because i felt i wanted to do my work in feminism that's where i wanted to go and there was never i never felt anybody going well don't just don't tell anybody you're a lesbian because well i think there is sort of these hierarchy of groups too is that those groups that don't want to think that they're homophobic right and then there's groups that don't care if anybody thinks that they're homophobic or if they are homophobic and so we have these layers and i think that women lawyers of la is one of those groups that wants to believe it is not homophobic whether or not it is in terms of its board or its membership is a question that really hasn't been pursued of course you know there's a critical mass question too well what if we had 15 lesbians on the women's lawyers board and eight straight women there might begin to be a concern about the way women lawyers were viewed by all the major law firms you know this credibility and it was what you talked about earlier well we don't have anyone on the board so we don't have to worry about diversity on any of the boards that we sit on now or in any of the groups that we're we're trying those of us who who are have a consciousness are trying to reach out so i guess it's maybe not what abby is saying that they went to other groups i could say that you know there there are no african-americans on this board why because they belong to the naacp i mean that that's not an answer for why there are no lesbians on that you know on that board um or or in any other in any other maybe it's just more subtle maybe instead of saying don't come out because everybody's going to hate us because we've got too many dikes in this group they're not saying it but maybe we still see ourselves you know let me let me ask this question which may be an unpopular question earlier jenny had said that perhaps there were issues that the lesbian community within the women's movement felt differently or saw as different set of priorities from what straight women within the movement may have thought and if straight women are perhaps reacting to that now we're reacting to the idea that that's not our agenda you guys have an agenda where we have a shared agenda yeah let's go do it together where we don't we don't want this now i don't know if that's a part of this or not but that would be that's a street women's movement that's right yeah and i don't know that that isn't true i i don't there there are also i mean look at some of the issues look at the issue of choice it took a long time to really make as far as i'm concerned the gay and lesbian movement understand that choice was as important to the gay and lesbian movement as it was to women as it was to straight women that it's a body sovereignty yes it's about it's about you know control of your body it took a long time for lesbians to believe and understand that there was violence by lesbians against lesbians and it's only recently that the the the better women's movement has been doing any kind of consciousness raising or any work uh with with lesbian battering and you know so i mean the issues are are more complex i think than right we can't fit them all into little boxes right you know i hate to stop this but we only had a half an hour and we went really fast so i want to thank all three of you very much and hope that we'll go on for years and years and years and you'll be back on the show and uh i know i'm going to see you at dinner anyways it doesn't matter thank you for joining us this was get used to it and we hope that you'll tune in and watch us again good night [Applause] [Music] do [Music] you