Get Used to It: Ep. 99, "Voices of Our Lives: Lillian Faderman"

(typewriter banging) (upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to "Get Used to It" I'm Sheila Kuehl, your hostess, entrepreneurial guide, whatever you want to call me as I am each month or week, or whenever you watch the show. And as you may know or may not know, we have an occasional series that we call "Voices of our Lives", in which we interview a person who has been particularly important to the gay or lesbian community, just to see sort of what their lives were like and how they've lived. And often it's the first time that you have the opportunity to hear from such an individual about their life. It's not the case with Lillian Faderman, who's our guest today. Lillian Faderman is a well known author, lesbian historian, who as far back as I think maybe 20 years ago, published a book called "Surpassing the Love of Men," that may, if I may say so, was read by just about everyone I ever heard of in my life. A very, very important tome for many of us to find our own identities. And of course she didn't stop there, wrote a wonderful history of lesbians from our cultural point of view called "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers." And then just a few years ago, a book called "To Believe in Women," which had as its subtitle, what lesbians have done for America. And just this year to our good fortune, has published what I would call an autobiography, but I'm sure it doesn't even begin to cover all the life. So she's calling it a memoir called "Naked in the Promised Land." Welcome, Lillian, thank you for being here. - Thank you for asking me. - I'm very, very happy to be able to share your story with the people who watch our show around the country, because it's a very important story, very different in its own way and yet very familiar, I think, to a lot of people who've gone through so many phases in our life. So generally, I'm just sort of a start-at-the-beginning-and-let's-hear-the-story kind of person. So if you don't mind, tell us a little about your childhood and growing up. - I've just been so happy to meet readers of this memoir who have told me that so many of the things that I write remind them of their own life, because it seemed to me before I started writing, that my life in so many ways was peculiar, so different from perhaps even most lesbians. And yet it's been so affirming to hear over and over again from my lesbian readers and even gay readers that what I've written is so familiar to them. So to begin at the beginning, I was born in the Bronx in New York to an immigrant woman, she came from Eastern Europe, Lavia. My mother was unmarried, she had an eight-year relationship with the man who was my father, although I never saw him through most of the time we remained in New York. I saw him once when I was seven and a half. My mother worked in the garment industry and it was very difficult for her, it was really virtually sweat shop labor. And through the years that I was growing up, when we were in New York, she would come home exhausted and she would always say something like, "Rescue me from the shop." And once she said, "Rescue me from the shop, Lilly," that is, she addressed me and I was about five or six years old, and I said, "How mommy, what should I do?" I took it very seriously. And she said, "Become a movie actress." And that became my ambition. I knew the movies well, even at the age of five or six, because she loved the movie. She spoke very little English, it was her second language and she never learned it perfectly, but she absolutely loved the movies and she would take me with her. And of course I had these images of Shirley Temple for instance, or Margaret O'Brien, and I thought that that's what I was going to do. When I was seven and a half, my aunt enticed us to California and I was certain because my mother had agreed to go to California, that that's what she had in mind for me. We were going to Los Angeles. She told me that's where all the movie stars were and I was going to become a child star in Los Angeles. And that kind of set up much of my childhood and my young years. I took acting lessons, in fact, that was the occasion of my first very passionate crush on a woman. When I was 12 years old I fell madly in love with the woman who was the director of the studio, where I took lessons. In the book I call it Theater Art Studio, although that wasn't its its real name obviously. She represented a sort of ideal for me and I think that even at that young age at 12 and 13, 14, I left when I was 15, but she gave me my political notions, she probably represented for me the ideal of what's beautiful. But of course it was very disturbing to me at that age to realize that I was madly in love with a woman. So disturbing that... Yes. - I just wanna ask why. I mean, there are many answers I know, but why- - I had never heard of such a thing and I would imagine first love is disturbing for anyone heterosexual or homosexual. Now here I was 12, 13 years old and it absolutely overtook me. So I was very disturbed by it and I was a literary kid, I was really reading seriously by then. I remember going to the library and trying to find a book that would tell me about that because of course there were no images of it on the silver screen that I loved so much. I loved to listen to radio, there was never mention of it in on the radio. There was never mention of it in my immediate environment, not at school. The word queer was banded about, but I had no idea what it meant and I'm sure the other kids had no idea what it meant in 1952 or 1953. In any case, I went to the library and tried to find books on adolescence. And I discovered in some of those books that according to the writers, what I had was a quote, perfectly normal adolescent crush. And that kind of eased me, but then I found another book by a writer by the name of Dr... I think it was W. D. Corner, it was called "Attaining Womanhood: A Doctor Talks to Girls About Love and Sex." And in that book, he said, "Sometimes there are women who love only other women, and that becomes their way of life. And society finds that very disgusting but we have to realize that we shouldn't have that view of them." That a society shouldn't have that view of them, instead, they should be treated as sick." And of course, that devastated me. I was either disgusting or sick. It went on to say something to the effect of, "And sometimes these women take an interest in girls and they like to hug them and kiss them and get close to them." And I can remember thinking fondly, Irene were such a woman, but alas, she was not. But of course it frightened me, it would frightened anyone. And so I put it out of my head for a period of time. Not my crush on her, but the meaning of that crush. - Now, you said that she was an ideal in a way, and someone that you may have wanted to emulate. And certainly we do, I think, get crushed out on people, not just because of the way they look, but who they are, especially at this age. And you said, in a political way as well. And I wonder what you meant by that. - Well, I'm sure that I formed my notion of liberal politics, for instance from her early notions of politics. And she thought reading was important and so it made it even more important to me. She had a lovely voice and I remember my voice had been high and squeaky, and I realized that I had to lower my voice to sound like her because that was much more attractive than a high and squeaky voice, it seemed to me. So yeah, she was very influential in my early life. - And did you indeed go on to be a movie star? - No. (both laughing) No, I didn't go on to be a movie star, but I kept trying. I left theater art studio, there was a place in Los Angeles at that time called Yellow Theater and School of Dramatic Art, and I joined that lying about my age. I was only 15 at the time, I told them I was 18 or 19. I stayed with Gala Theater for about a year and then at one point, I realized I wasn't getting anywhere and I had no idea of how you do get somewhere in Hollywood. There was a young man there who said that he was studying to be an agent and I asked him what I was supposed to do in order to break down the doors of Hollywood. And he said, "Well, the first thing you have to do is get publicity pictures." And I knew that there was no way I could afford publicity pictures, I was a high school student, my mother was poor, by then she had married my stepfather, but our economic situation wasn't much better. And so I told him that that was out of the question and he said, "Well, don't worry, I know a photographer who will take publicity pictures for free, if you do some pin-up modeling for him." And thus my career as a pin-up model began. And so I did that on and off for a while. I realized, I think fairly quickly, that Hollywood was a dead end for me and was very lucky to have met a social worker, really happens who just at the time, when I thought I would drop out of school and I despaired, I had no idea where I was going. He convinced me to stay in school and he gave me direction and I became a freshman at UCLA, thanks to him. I'm sure I would have gone off on a motorcycle to New Orleans with this butch that I was enamored of at the time, if I hadn't met this social worker. - And so had you kind of come to grips with your sexuality by this time, even though it was not necessarily a time that everybody was flagrantly out? - Yeah. Yes and no, I think. As I said, I was very disturbed by the crush on the woman that I call in the book Irene, not her real name, obviously, but I also tried to date in junior high school and in high school as well. I was simply confused about who I was, I think. There were boys that I found perfectly attractive, but somehow something didn't click. I discovered in Hollywood from the photographers that there was something called the casting couch and I found myself constantly fighting the photographers off. I realized that in so many ways, heterosexuality was not something that I found attractive. And then I happened to have a friend, a young man who was three years older than I was, I call him Eddie in the book, he was gay and he did drag and I love to watch him do drag in those years, he was really terrific. When I was about 16 he said, "I've got a phony ID for you," he was still a minor too, but we're gonna go to some gay bars, and first he took me to a couple of men's gay bars. And then he said, "There are girls gay bars too," as he called them, and I said, "Oh, really?" And I walked in and my first view of the place, because everyone was either butch or fem and the women who were in butch drag were very convincing. I thought that it was half men in the bar and then I realized that no, those are women. And somehow that terrific crush on Irene that I hadn't thought about for a couple of years came back to me and it was remarkable how the vision of these women together in not only a public situation, but somehow in the couples they formed and the way they related to each other, a private situation too. I hate to get dramatic or religious about it, but it was like an epiphany. Suddenly I understood that this was a way I could live that this was feasible. And of course, as I learned more about the life and became involved with a woman that I met at the Open Door, it was a bar on 8th and Vermont in Los Angeles. As I learned more about the life, I learned that there were dangers in 1956. The Open Door and the If Club, which was right across the street were often raided for instance, I was very lucky to, on a number of occasions, miss a raid by just the skin of my teeth. Like it had happened 20 minutes before I got there, or I left and an hour later there was a raid there. So I was never in a raid, but I certainly heard from my friends in those bars about the raids. There were other kinds of dangers. Leaving the bar you were in danger, especially if you looked butch or if you were with a butch woman, because there were tufts who thought it was great fun to beat up the dykes as they called us. - Now, were you living with your mother at this time? - I was living with my mother, yes. - Others who have told stories about this time have talked about sort of keeping their regalia in the car, leaving on some errand from home, changing clothes in the car, going to the bars, was that your experience? - When I did interviews for my book, "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers," a number of women told me stories just like that. It wasn't my experience because the way I would always dress would be to be a Hollywood starlet. And what I discovered is that's the way the fems dressed in the bars too. Not that I was a fem, I discovered after a while but- Now in the beginning- In the beginning, it served me in good stead. That was sort of my Open Door, If Club uniforms. - So the fear or whatever that you might have felt in reading this sort of analysis about, we were either disgusting or sick, after this epiphany, this recognition that not only this is who you are, but how something is even possible. Did you feel safe and comfortable in? - I didn't feel safe. I certainly never felt safe there, but in an odd way, I felt comfortable. I knew that this was what I needed in my life. It made me make sense out of my life as my life had not made sense before in an intimate kind of way, that aspect of my life. I realized so strongly by that time, by the time I was 16, that there was no way I could live a heterosexual life. And here was this possibility that I hadn't dreamed of before, despite the awful stuff that I'd read in book, and despite the fact that I understood that Eddie was, as he told me in the beginning, a homosexual, but I didn't dream of that possibility for women until I walked in the Open Door and had that epiphany. - And were you in college at this time? - No, I was 16 years old. It was the summer that I was 16, I had had an absolutely miserable freshman year in high school because I was hardly ever there. I was rehearsing at Yellow Theater for a play or going out for coffee till one or two o'clock in the morning and then I couldn't get up in the morning to go to school. I was certainly lost in that way, I had no notion, as I said, of what I wanted to do with my life. It was at the end of the summer when I thought I was going to drop out of high school and maybe go off on a motorcycle with Jan to New Orleans that I met this social worker who redirected me. - And so you began at UCLA probably around the same time I did? - Yes, I started UCLA in 1958, when did you start? - 57. (both laughing) I love the parallels. I mean, my mother was also a garment worker, but when she was orphaned at the age of 11 is when she started working and we came to LA and I actually did have a career in television for a while. And that ended because they discovered I was gay. So it's, I don't know, it's so interesting. But it took me a lot longer than it took you in my life, to sort of come to grips with how to deal with this. - Yes, I think so much of it is chance. I think if I hadn't met Eddie in 1956, if he hadn't taken me to this gay girls bar, I probably would've experimented unhappily with heterosexuality for a while longer. And I know how much longer I would've experimented with heterosexuality until 1970. And then it would have stopped because I would have found another entree into lesbianism, and that was the feminist movement which I discovered in 1970 and was so excited about. Again, another time in my life, the feminist movement was sort of like walking into the Open Door for me, it was like coming home. Everything that feminists were saying in those days was as though that they'd read my deep soul. Yes, yes, finally someone else is saying what I've been thinking all of these years. - Absolutely, absolutely. But between beginning college, well, actually I lived with a woman for 12 years, but didn't think there was anyone else like us, so never talked to anyone about it from the time I was 17. Not that you and I have had the same or even a similar life, but the reason I think that so many of us resonate to your story and what you write and your thoughts about our lives is that we were so inarticulate about them and many ways still, trying to figure out how we got from there to here and kind of who helped us along the way. But between your starting college and 1970, what happened? - Well, I fell madly in love again with a woman and went off with her to San Francisco. It was a woman who had obsessive compulsive disorder and she couldn't keep a steady job. Her father had been sending her money, but that summer that we fell in love, her father died and she had no more source of income. But at the end of my year at UCLA, she said, "Why don't you come to San Francisco with us?" What I didn't figure out was who was going to support us in San Francisco. For a little while I became a student at UC Berkeley, and I worked as a library assistant in the Berkeley library, shelving books for whatever the minimum wage was at that time, about $1.25 an hour. It was 20 hours a week, which was taken away from my study time. And I was a very serious student, I knew that if I didn't get a college degree, I would be in trouble because I had two choices in life. I could be like my mother was, I could be a garment worker, or I could be a pin-up model for as long as that would continue. But in any case, I was a serious student. I really found it difficult to take a full load and work 20 hours a week. On top of that, we couldn't pay the rent on the San Francisco apartment, which in those days was $75 a month. It sounds like nothing, but if you're making $1.25 an hour, you barely clear 75 a month. So I realized I had to do something, I had to find another job. I looked in the San Francisco Examiner want ads and I saw a job, an ad for chorus girls. And so I thought maybe I could do that. And I went to the theater, it was a burlesque theater, the President Foley's, it was called, that wasn't it's real name. I sat in the back row and I saw that not only were there chorus girls, there were feature acts. And I was sure that they made a lot more than the chorus girls. And so we dressed my lover, Dora, I call her in the book, that was an agent, and I said, "Go in and tell them I'm a professional exotic dancer and tell them, I need 500 a week." And she did it, she got me not 500 a week, but 250 a week. And so I did 17 shows a week at the President Foley's on and off for three years, I sat in my dressing room and read George Elliott and Theodore Dreiser and John Keats, and in the daytime, I went to UC Berkeley and took 15 units a semester. That was my job until I graduated from Berkeley. - And how was that as an experience? There are people wondering, you know. - In the beginning, it was difficult for me. I sat in the back of the auditorium and I was worried, there were a lot of single men there, there were some same sex couples. And yet I realized that you do the job, in the footlights, you don't even see the audience, you do the job. Burlesque in those days was actually fairly tame, there were all sorts of censorship laws. And after you're on stage for your seven or eight-minute act, you go back to the dressing room and you read George Elliot. It wasn't awful. - Combating mythologies about how women who are strippers sort of feel about it. And one of the mythologies is, oh, it's so sad and everyone hates themselves, and the other mythology is, it's the best freedom in the world. I imagine- - For me, it was neither one in fact. To me it was a job that enabled me to get through UC Berkeley with good grades and support the woman that I was in love with and live in San Francisco. I think if I hadn't been a college student, I might have been sad about it because of course, it's a dead end job. You lose your figure, which happens fairly early. You're 35 and you can't keep being a stripper. But I realized that it was temporary, that I would graduate from Berkeley and go on to graduate school and I would be all right. But you know, in terms of feeling exploited, I have to say that I really felt exploited at $1.25 an hour shelving books in the library. I felt much less exploited at 250 a week, which gave me all that time to sit in the dressing room and study. - Right, all but the seven minutes of 17 shows. - [Lillian] Yes. Right. - So did that take you all the way through college? - Took me all the way through my undergraduate years. And I did it off and on. There were points at which my wonderful aunt Ray that I write about extensively in "Naked in the Promised Land," there were points at which she said, "Don't work anymore, working's bad for your health if you're trying to go to school," she had no idea what I was working at, but she sent us enough money for periods of time to pay the rent and then she would say, "I'm not gonna send you money unless you come back to Los Angeles where you belong and get married," and so I would go right back to the President Foley's until I graduated from UC Berkeley. - And so then what turn did your life take? - Then I became a graduate student at UCLA. Very briefly I thought I would try heterosexuality again, partly because the relationship with Dora had not been a happy one as I write about in the book. But it didn't last very long, I fell in love once again with a woman and that was the last time that I tried heterosexuality. At UCLA, I really had some sort of feminist awarenesses before the advent of feminism. I started graduate school there in 1962. It was a faculty in English of about 50 men and two women on that huge faculty. Half of the graduate students in English were women. And yet I realized, where are they going to go? What's gonna happen when they get their PhDs? And of course, I suppose part of the time I thought, well, these two women made it, maybe I'll make it. But I learned very quickly that in the early 60s, early and mid 60s, it was gonna be very hard for a professional woman, the jobs were just not available to them. - Right. And had you thought of, well, of course, writing isn't thought of as much of a job, I guess, in a way, 'cause you think- - [Lillian] You gotta make a living. - Yeah, no one tells you, hey, you should be a writer and you'll be able to support yourself. They certainly didn't go together in the English department at UCLA. - [Lillian] Yeah, sure. - Although I think all our professors were thinking that they could make a living and none of them did either, they were all teaching. - Yes. I think that, of course professors are expected to write, they're expected to write the sort of thing that will advance them academically. In some ways I was very lucky about where I finally did get a job. I took a job as soon as I finished my PhD in 1967 at California State University in Fresno. In those days, it was called Fresno State College. I was incidentally even there the only woman in the department. Women were just not getting academic jobs at that time. Maybe in junior colleges or maybe as temporary teachers, but it was just so rare for a female to get a tenure track academic job. But it turned out to be a real blessing that I was at California State University Fresno because in those days, all you had to do for tenure was to teach well, to show an interest in your students and to get good student evaluations. You didn't have to publish as you did in the Ivy leagues or the UC system. - [Sheila] And the publish or perish schools. - Right, it wasn't a publish or peris school. And so it left me wonderfully free to do whatever I want. I didn't have to write, but I wanted to write. And what I wanted to do in 1967 was I was very interested in multiethnic questions. And so my partner at that time, I call her Binky in the book, she and I put together what I think was the first multiethnic college textbook in the country, it came out in 1969. But I was free to do it, I was free to do anything that I wanted, and that was just the wonder of being at that university. In 1973, I worked with a Chicano poet, Omar Salinas, and we put together an anthology of Chicano writers and that too was pioneering at the time. And again, I have my university to thank for giving me that sort of freedom, for virtually supporting me and permitting me to do any sort of research that I wanted. But that meant in the mid 1970s, that I could also start to think about another kind of research. I wanted to do lesbian studies. And there was just the bare beginning of that kind of thing in the country. Nobody had done a book of lesbian history yet. There were a few wonderful articles by that time, but that was the extent of it. And I realized, and my partner now with 31 years, made me realize too that I was in an ideal position to do it. I knew what research was about, I had an academic job that gave me some time to write, particularly in the summers, I had a real passion for my subject, I didn't have to publish for advancement, so why shouldn't I write lesbian history? - But why have been a problem with source materials? I mean, in a way, writing history, one thinks not so much of the interview, the documentary that becomes a book or whatever. Of course that's not the way people think about history, they don't think about interviewing living people about history, but I would imagine that sort of what traditional source material might there have been for you. - Yeah, it's wonderful how one source leads to another. I began by reading Emily Dickinson's letters. That was the first article that I published in 1976, I believe it was. It was Emily Dickinson's love letters to Sue Gilbert, the woman who later became her sister-in-law. The reason I went to those letters is I found them quoted in biographies of Emily Dickinson, and the authors would just totally skip over their meaning. They weren't interested in the passion of the letters, they weren't interested in saying, "Susie, the most wonderful thing in my life is how deeply you love me," they passed over that. And that was of course what interested me. And I realized that there had to be a huge source there, there was a huge cache of them in fact, these wonderful love letters that Emily Dickinson wrote to Sue Gilbert. Finding that gave me the clue that I needed to look at other relationships in the 19th century. And there was a wonderful article that had been published in 1975 by Carol Smith Rosenberg that suggested that there was indeed good archival material that I needed to look at that showed women's passionate relationships with other women in other centuries. And so it gave me a hint to start looking in archives, to start looking at people whose names I knew who never married women that I thought might be likely candidates. And so I found this vast amount of material. I published in just a few years, about eight or nine articles about women's love relationships in other centuries. And then in 1981, I published "Surpassing the Love of Men." I have to say that of course I was really nervous about how my department would treat this stuff. - Yeah, we're thinking Fresno. - Yeah, and Fresno in 1976- - And maybe the campus is not the same as Fresno, but the idea of it and for viewers who don't live in California and don't know it's sort of the central valley and an agricultural place, and don't think they still have a woman on the bench of their county courts, they may have one now, I'm not sure, but it was not the friendliest arena, at least one would think so. - And that was my assumption. And so in the 1970s, when I was publishing these articles, I sort of comforted myself by thinking, well, don't be nervous, they never read New England Quarterly or Massachusetts Review or Journal of Homosexuality. But despite this little bit of fear that I had, I went ahead and "Surpassing the Love of Men" came out and it got a huge review in Atlantic Monthly, and they do read Atlantic Monthly. And the chair of my department without even asking me, photocopied the review and put it in everyone's box in my department and I was really nervous, and their response was to throw a big party for me. - "Hey, the Atlantic Monthly," they all said. - And then, really because of that publication, I received the biggest award you could get on the campus, which is the Outstanding Professor Award, and some women from the campus went to the mayor of Fresno and said, "This is the first time a woman has received that award, I think you should acknowledge that." And the mayor of Fresno named a day after me. (both laughing) - Not having read the Atlantic Monthly report. - Yeah, right, I'm sure he had no idea what my publication was about, but anyway, May 1, 1982 was Lillian Faderman day in Fresno. - Well, that's wonderful. - But it just showed me that... I think that frequently one isn't brave enough. I was so worried and there was no reason to be worried. Maybe it was because my university felt that it is a conservative community and so the university has a job to be sort of this last bastion of liberalism, and maybe that's why they supported me as much as they could. - And good scholarship. I mean, some campuses are not tolerant, but many really think, well, good scholarship is what we're after, good teaching is what we're after, let's take the first amendment seriously and let's see if people do good work. - Yes, and I think that is certainly true today. I know other campuses where that would not have been the case. And that's what I began the story by telling. I know that if I had been in the Ivy leagues at that time, we're talking about the 1970s, or if I had been in the UC system, there was probably no way I would have dared to publish things like that, those articles that I did in the 70s, and then "Surpassing the Love of Man." - And I imagine suddenly you were more famous than you had ever been. Because the book was widely read, I don't know if it was widely read right away, I can't remember exactly when it first came into my consciousness, but I'm sure it was early in the 80s. - It was widely reviewed as soon as it came out. - And you must have then, I mean, there's a different attitude about an author who has captured something that so speaks to people, and this was not a position you had been in. I would think from the articles, a few people would read the articles, et cetera, but now suddenly something new has happened to you, hasn't it? - Yes, yes, yes. And they were wonderful to me. I have to say that I absolutely never experienced homophobia on my campus in the 70s or when the book came out in the 80s. This was long before there were university policies against it. But I really think it might have been because that university felt that they had to defend someone who was different precisely because the community was as conservative as it was. So for me, that was just such an interesting paradox, how you can live in a conservative town and yet flourish, because I had the protection of the university at that time. - And then how did you choose to proceed in terms of following on after this book? Different things that got your interest. - Well, what I very much wanted to do, and I think that that's been most of my career, I did one other book in ethnic studies, came out in 1998, because it was a subject that passionately interested me. I did an oral history with Southeast Asian people, the Hmong people. But outside of that, my passion has really been to help recreate lesbian history, to give the community a past. And maybe that's meant so much to me because I remember what it was like coming out in 1956 when we had no past, when nobody would dignify us with a history. And I think I understand what the uses of history are. History is never, never objective despite what we're taught in high school or junior high school, it's never objective, it's always told from a particular angle. There's always some kind of chauvinism in selecting the angle from which you tell history. And nobody wanted to be chauvinistic for us, for lesbians. And I thought that that was really necessary when I began my work. And it's still been my passion. I want to recreate our past, it seems to me that it's important to know your past, to know that you're not the only one who's ever lived this way, to know that people have managed to make decent lives in the past, people who were gay and lesbian. And to know also that there are models for how you can behave to be successful if you're lesbian or gay. And I think that's what I wanted to do in most of my works, it's certainly what I wanted to do, to believe in women. The subtitle, as you've said, was what lesbians have done for America. I really felt that it was important to look at what lesbians have done for America, what they have contributed to being pioneers in education, pioneers in the profession, what they contributed to the social system as we know it, how they were pioneers in early social work, for instance. And the point that I wanted to make in that book was one of the strengths of these pioneering feminist women was that most of them lived in these nurturing long term domestic relationships with other women. They did their work in spite of their lesbianism, as I feared I would have to do in the 1950s, but really precisely because of their lesbianism. - Well, I think a number of people have also opined. It's interesting when you talk about, it's important for us to know our past, I think very much the way as an individual, you get to a point in your life where your past begins to make sense to you when it was really a collection of photographs in a drawer that you really didn't have a through line. And I know probably writing your memoir, you saw these photographs together and something begins to make sense. - And that that's exactly what I wanted to do in "Naked in the Promised Land." It seemed to me that I had these three parts of my life. And in fact, I divide the book into three sections. I was once Lilly, the child of this unmarried immigrant woman who worked in the sweat shops. And then I became Lil, this tough adolescent who became a pin-up model and later a stripper, and who frequented the very rough butch fem bars in Los Angeles. And then I became Lillian, this PhD, who wanted to do lesbian scholarship. And I needed to figure out coming to my age. And I started thinking about this a couple of years before I knew I was gonna turn 60 soon. I needed to figure out how this diverse life came together. How did all of those parts make up whoever I am now? That's what I try to do in the book. But I try to do it, I think not just as me, but it's sort of a universal statement That is, all of us have diverse parts of our lives. Where is the core? How do you find the core of whoever you are? And that's what I hope the book speaks to, finding the core. - Well, I think it very much does. Those of us who are, I guess, political is the word now, it's not a very good reputation as a word, but the notion of being engaged in the politic or the activism or whatever, I was thinking, when you were talking about what lesbians have done for America, even though many of the women you identified lived in these nurturing relationships, I also got the feeling that growing up as an outcast cuts you free in a way to critique society, to say, no, here's what we need in the social welfare work, in education, in theory about all kinds of social movement. - Yes, if you're not a part of the system to begin with, if you stand on the periphery, you can really see the system much more clearly than you can if you're right in the middle of it. And I think that's why these women that I wrote about in "To Believe in Women" had these revolutionary ideas about how you reform things, about the needs for what came to be called social security. It's those women who were outside the system to begin with who could say, this is what you need and I want a little bit of power, I want to have a foot in that system so I can reform it. And they became these wonderful pioneers who really changed society, not only for women, but for everyone in America. - Well, we are certainly finding though currently that we can't take any of that change for granted. Do we have the kind of leadership? I see a great surge of leadership in our community, in communities of color, and even more hopeful, and I think you've knit this together in your own work, sort of coalitions and recognition of the similarities that we sort of face the same things. But all of these programs, all of these notions about what I would call community, that is, we do have a responsibility for each other, whether we're talking about education or social justice or social work or welfare. And I still see many, many times lesbians in leadership in these areas. As you look at the present day, do you see the same sorts of our community coming up into these positions? - I certainly do see many lesbians in those areas, but I've been happy too to see that heterosexual women have had because of the feminist movement and certainly in good part because of lesbian energy and the feminist movement have had the freedom now to enter these areas. Society has changed drastically in so many ways since the start of the feminist movement. And so much of it, so much of the good stuff is due to feminism. But what breaks my heart is I have many women's students who sit in my class and tell me they're not feminists. What I wanna tell them and often do is that you wouldn't be sitting here in a university if it weren't for feminists in the first wave of feminism in the late 19th century, who agitated for higher education for women. You wouldn't be thinking of having a career now, even though you're married, if it weren't for the second wave of the feminist movement, when feminists were saying that it's all right to have a career, to work outside of the home and to not just be a homemaker and chew on Valium all day long. It's so sad to me that young people very often don't understand the history and that goes back to my passion for history. - But feminism has been demonized purely, not purely, but particularly by the threat of being identified with lesbianism. I mean, that has been one of the great clubs. It doesn't work so much at the college level anymore, which is sort of where we've gotten in terms of knowing it. But junior high and high school, if you're a smart girl, if you think that girls ought to be able to play sports, God forbid you must be a lesbian, and that is a bad thing to be supposedly. So we still have work to do. - The most wonderful thing that happened in the 1970s with regard to that was it was at the point when Betty Friedan was complaining about what she called the lesbian menace in KNAU. And at the next big meeting of KNAU, everyone heterosexual women, as well as lesbians wore lavender arm bands. That was just so moving because heterosexual women were saying, so what? So what, what does that word mean? Why is it treated in that negative kind of way? So what if people think I'm a lesbian? And unfortunately, that wonderful moment passed and yes, I think you're right, very often young junior high school students or high school students, girls who love athletics, for instance, still have that kind of fear. If only they could take that so what attitude that those wonderful women in KNAU did. - [Sheila] And many of them are. - And yes, of course, many of them are, yes. - But you know we also face that, I like being the same as most people, I want you to see how normal my relationship is, this and that. But on the other hand, it's important as you have shown us, to understand our own significant and very individual history, our culture, "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers," where we can recognize how we, when we couldn't be out here, we formed this culture and it's real and not necessarily well-known. And we can have both of those things. But I think it's important for us to appreciate our past and to know it. - Yes, absolutely, yes. I think assimilation is wonderful, but if one is totally assimilated, if one forgets one's past, then you really set yourself up for danger for a possible time when society might not be as open as it is now. And then where do you run? Who are your friends? - It's true. So are you writing now? Do we see the next thing coming? - Well, "Naked in the Promised Land" has just come out within the last few weeks. I have some other ideas, but now I'm going around a lot talking about "Naked in the Promised Land" and so I haven't yet settled down to my next project. - I wouldn't say you're taking a breather because I can imagine what going about the country and probably even internationally will be like for you, and of course you still have your duties, but I'm very, very pleased that you spent an hour with us here on the show. - It was my great pleasure, thank you. - Well, it's very important to capture this oral history as it were, this biography. We have a few minutes left and I wonder if sometimes I've forgotten to ask the big question or the right question, if there's any words you would leave us with or anything you wanna tell this audience? - Well, I think you've asked wonderful questions. There are a couple of very important parts of my life that somehow got left out, and that is that in 1974, my partner, Phyllis and I decided that we wanted a child in our life, and so I had a child by donor insemination. Our son is 28 years old now and he is just a wonderful young man. And I would hate to- - Leave him out of this. - Not say that. - Absolutely. Well, that is very important and a very full life and meaningful for us. Thank you very much for your work, thank you for joining us. Remember, you also are traveling your own road and no matter what anybody else says, I bet you will get used to it. (bright music)