Bonus Content: Lillian Faderman | LGBTQ+ Scholar

We interviewed Lillian Faderman at the very beginning of this process, before covering any of the bars. Lillian is a longtime scholar of lesbian and LGBTQIA+ history. She published her first book on the subject in 1981, Surpassing The Love of Men. Her most recent book came out in 2018, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death. Lillian has been going to lesbian bars since the 1950s.

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Transcript

SARAH: HI LISTENERS, AND WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER BONUS EPISODE OF CRUISING. WE INTERVIEWED LILLIAN FADERMAN AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THIS PROCESS, BEFORE COVERING ANY OF THE BARS. LILLIAN IS A LONGTIME SCHOLAR OF LESBIAN AND LGBTQIA+ HISTORY. SHE PUBLISHED HER FIRST BOOK ON THE SUBJECT IN 1981, SURPASSING THE LOVE OF MEN, AND HER MOST RECENT BOOK CAME OUT IN 2018, HARVEY MILK: HIS LIVES AND DEATH. BUT ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING THINGS TO US, IS THAT LILLIAN HAS BEEN GOING TO LESBIAN BARS SINCE THE 1950s. LET’S GET INTO IT. 

LILLIAN: As a teenager, with a phony ID, I was taken one evening by a gay male friend who was, he was three years older than I was. So he was a teenager too. He was 19. I was 16. And he got me a phony ID. And he wanted to introduce me to gay life as he knew it. I had heard the word gay, but it didn't resonate. Not that I didn't have crushes on women, even as a 12 year old but--it didn't resonate. So he took me to a couple of gay male bars. And he said, and there are bars for girls like this, too. And I said, Oh, really? And he said, I'm gonna take you to one. And it was The Open Door in Los Angeles. And I walked in with him. And I looked around. And first I thought, What, what's he talking about there are boys here. And girls, too. And of course, the boys were butches, as I figured out very soon. And it was like, it was like an epiphany. You know, I realized-- verything came together, this was what my crushes on this woman when I was 12 years old, seemed to be all about and, and so I started to come back by myself. And it was, I don't know if you know, Los Angeles, but it was some distance. And so I had to take buses to, to get there it was on Eighth and Vermont, and I lived in the Beverly Fairfax area at the time. And I met my first lover there. It was very scary, because I knew that those places were raided and I was a minor. And not only would I be in huge trouble, but I would be endangering the owners. It was a mom and pop with Yiddish accents. And they recognized something about me. And so they were very friendly to me. And I felt like of course, I couldn't tell them anything about myself because I was a minor. But I felt like I had a connection to them. And so I felt very guilty about going because I knew it endangered them, but I couldn't stop.

SARAH: Around that time, there were multiple lesbian bars in your area that you could have gone to?

LILLIAN: Yes, there were multiple bars. I knew best, The Open Door. And the bar across the street, the If Club both on Eighth and Vermont, which was a not very good neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was mostly a business neighborhood--little stores, but they were all closed in the evening. And it was it was kind of scary to even go to those places just because the neighborhood was kind of scary in the evening. But there was also a place called The Paradise Club where there was dancing. There was a place called The Star Room where you could dance. And then later on beginning in 1957, this wonderful upscale cocktail lounge it was, rather than a bar, opened in North Hollywood, the Valley area of Los Angeles. And there was a singer by the name of Beverly Shaw who dressed a la Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, except that she didn't want to get arrested obviously for masquerading. So, you know, in Morocco, Dietrich wears a bow tie, and she's actually wearing a tux. So Beverly Shaw would wear a men's jacket and a bow tie, a formal men's jacket and a bow tie and a man shirt, but she would also wear a skirt and high heels, she would sit on the piano bar and sing, she had gorgeous legs and, and I think all of us were madly in love with her and, and she would very cleverly pick out one woman for a set of songs and sing to that one woman, while the other patrons would just drool, and it was very romantic. And, and that was what we had. I mean, there were, so there was Beverly Shaw. The Club Laurel It was called, and Beverly Shaw, because here we were sitting together as as lesbians watching a beautiful lesbian performer. And where else could you do that if not in a lesbian bar in 1957, ‘58, ‘59? And then another place opened up that was kind of upscale, called Joanie Presents, also in North Hollywood, in the valley. And Joanie was actually Joan Hannon, who was a drummer. And she was the drummer in the all girls band in Some Like It Hot. And that too, was just, you know, so exciting for us. And so romantic. And she was very beautiful. 

SARAH: Was it always the case around that time that there were separate lesbian and lesbian bars and bars for gay men?

LILLIAN: Not always, but mostly. As is I said, Edie took me first to these gay male bars. And there were hardly any women around, there were a couple, I guess. And then to The Open Door, which was all lesbian except for a couple of men. And the men, there weren't a lot of them. But they were what was called Fish Queens. Terrible term. But a little later on, there were also bars where there were men and women, there was a place in Los Angeles called the Canyon Club. And they, they call themselves a private club, and you had to pay I don't know, like $5 to get in. You were supposedly a member when you pay the $5. But even--and there were men and women. And even there, they were afraid of raids. And so the legend was that whenever they suspected a police raid was forthcoming, lights would flash on the dance floor. And the male couples would find female couples, and they would break up into heterosexual couples on the dance floor to avoid the place being closed down because there was same sex dancing. And this was in the late 50s and early 60s. So yeah, there there were some places where there were both gay men and lesbians. But those weren't the favorite places of most lesbians because you could actually dance in some of those bars. And then the legend was that at some of the lesbian bars where you could dance, the owner would go around and say, I got to be able to flash--she'd flash a flashlight at a couple and say, I've got to be able to see my beam on the other side, you're dancing too close. The experience I had with that was actually at the Club Laurel, I was there with another woman. And I just I put my arm not around her and it wasn't sexual, but around her chair, and Beverly Shaw came up to me and said are you trying to get me closed down? And so I immediately removed my arm from her chair. This was in the early 60s already. Anyway, you get the point, I think, about how dangerous the bars were, and yet how important they were to us when there was no other game in town virtually.

SARAH: Was that the case throughout a lot of the country at that time that there were--

LILLIAN: In big cities, obviously, in tiny cities or towns or rural areas, there weren't bars, but in big cities, there were bars all over the country. Yeah. Yeah. Where else would you go in 1956 to, to meet other lesbians? You had to have these bars, it was just a desperate connection for us. It was kind of a desperate lifeline. And I think that's the way it was for, for young women and working class women who, for the most part, couldn't have their own apartments or houses where they could have parties and invite other lesbians and meet new lesbians. And so there, there were the bars, and there were the softball teams that were often sponsored by the bars. And that was about it. So different from the choices that you guys have today. I mean, there was no such thing obviously, as the internet. No such thing as as a lesbian press, that developed in the 1970s. And periodicals like "lesbian connections" where you could make connections with other lesbians all over the country, all over the world, even. The the only publications about us were, of course, the medical books, Krafft-Ebing and have Havelock Ellis and terrible sexologist that classified us with other pathological diseases. There were the pulps, which I devoured, which in those days, you could get on on drugstore book racks for 25 cents. And I devoured them because it was one of the few places where you could--not one of the few, the only places where you could read about love between women. And the whole idea was not pathology, but actual relationships. But they had to end tragically. Either the woman had to commit suicide, or drown in a well of loneliness, or be converted to heterosexuality. They could never end happily. And, and the tragic ending in the 1950s and early 1960s was always considered the, quote, redeeming social value. That's the way these writers could get away with writing about lesbians. And those books were very popular. So I don't know who the hell was reading them. But you know, some of them sold millions of copies. Were there really millions of lesbians in the 1950s? The idea was incredibly exciting to me. But I sort of doubted it. So I imagined that all of these housewives fulfilled their fantasies by reading those pulp novels as well. So I don't know. You know, the main point that I want to make with this story is we did not have many choices in the mid-20th century. And so the bars were hugely important. They were almost the only game in town. That and softball teams and I don't know how else you would meet other lesbians if it weren't for, for those two venues.

SARAH: When do you feel like that started changing where there no longer were so many, in the big cities? 

LILLIAN: You know, I think the change was, was gradual. But beginning in the 1970s, lesbians had other choices, as we didn't in the 50s and the 60s, and the other choices had to do with lesbian feminism, and radical lesbian feminists, the publications. And that was really quite incredible, too. Suddenly there were what they called women's bookstores, but the women's bookstores were invariably lesbian bookstores, and there were these lesbian publishers and there were so many of them. You could find so many lesbian newspapers. It would have been inconceivable in the 1950s that there were lesbian newspapers. But for the most part, for most women, there just there were no choices until the 1970s. And then the choices really proliferated. And I think that proliferation made the bars, it was the beginning that made the bars less necessary. And lesbian culture came more and more into the open. And I'll never forget picking up some lesbian publication and looking at the want ads, and actually crying because there are so many choices in these classified ads. You could you could find a group for lesbian mothers, you could find a group for lesbian hikers, you could find a group for lesbians interested in talking about politics, and wow, it's just such a different world. And I--it's not that the bars disappeared in the 1980s. And there were some wonderful bars, but they were--I think women felt less desperate about having to have the bars as the only place where you could meet other lesbians. 

SARAH: Do you think that today there is still value or a need to call bars, lesbian bars or to identify them that way?

LILLIAN: Well, you know, my, my impression and the research that I did, particularly for my book, The Gay Revolution, is that there's just so much more fluidity in the way the younger generation identifies these days and some of the, your generation and even younger, some call themselves lesbian, but so many more call themselves non-binary. Or polyamorous, or even even refusing to limit themselves to the term lesbian. So maybe that's another reason why bars that that have called themselves lesbian bars couldn't continue to make it into the younger generation, into more recent times. Makes me very sad, but I think that fewer and fewer women are identifying as lesbians and more and more are calling themselves gender non-binary or are refusing to limit themselves to the notion of lesbian, it's become a sort of a problematic term, as I'm sure you know.

SARAH: So why is it that that makes you sad? 

LILLIAN: Only for sentiment. You know, I think anyone, as they get older, is a little sad. To think that the, my way of life is dated, it's out of fashion. As a historian, of course, I feel much more objective about it. And what I understand is that nothing lasts forever. And, you know, I wrote so extensively about women couples of other eras. Wven in the 17th century, in the 18th century, in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, they wouldn't have called themselves lesbian. Even when I came out, lesbian was not a term that was usually used, we were gay girls. I interviewed one woman who told me that, that lesbian was a bad term for for another term that was used in that era, homosexual women. You could be a butch, you could be a femme, and a lesbian was someone who didn't know what she was. I think language is, is always evolving. Lesbian wasn't the term of choice when I came out, it was the term of choice in the 1970s. And it excited me because that was the era where finally I felt I could breathe freely because there were all of these wonderful lesbian bookstores and lesbian publications. And it was no longer the love that dared not speak its name as it had been in the mid century. And so I have a sentimental attachment to the term. But what I recognize so well as a historian is that it was a term that was okay for just a brief period in time, and it was not the term that historically most women use to describe same sex relationships. 

RACHEL: What, um, what do you think the term lesbian means to you today? 

LILLIAN: I think it's, it's a term that that for many women, has become dated in favor of genderqueer, or nonbinary, or polyamorous. I think some women and certainly, even some young women, still identify with the term but I think many young women find the term too limiting and maybe maybe historically outdated. How do both of you identify?

RACHEL: I identify, I identify as a lesbian, or, depending on the day either like a lesbian or a queer woman. But it's definitely, I don't know, I do think that the, the language in general is so slippery, and I know that I'm not interested in being with a cisgender man. And so to me, that's what lesbian means. That's what I mean when I use that word, but I know that's not what it means to everyone. So.

LILLIAN: And how do you identify Sarah? 

SARAH: I identify as pansexual or queer. 

LILLIAN: Yeah. And, you know, for my generation, and again, as a historian, I recognize the importance of the word queer, but for my generation, and personally, queer will never be an acceptable term. Never. Because it was a term used to insult us. And it is it's not a term that we can resonate with emotionally. I've recognized the importance of the term since it, it came into being. I understand what was behind the reclamation of that term, but it's still it's still--emotionally it's troubling to me. And so I have never used that term about myself. Writers have used that term about me, in articles about me, they call me queer. 

SARAH: So how would you define a lesbian bar? Now?

LILLIAN: The few lesbian bars that exist now? 

SARAH: I mean, there are a few that still self identify as a lesbian bar. 

LILLIAN: Yeah. I think it's, it's heroic for them to continue to identify as a lesbian bar. I'm, personally I'm very touched that they want to continue to identify that way. But I don't know how long they could continue to exist if they identify as an exclusively lesbian bar, with women who identify as queer. What does that mean? Can you go to an exclusively lesbian bar if you're queer? I don't know.

SARAH: So yeah, you started talking about this a little bit, but why do you think the the number of lesbian bars have decreased so drastically?

LILLIAN: Well, you know, I, I think it's happened for a number of reasons. One is there are a million choices that women who like women now have, and they didn't have in other eras. I think that, that a lot of women who like women would find the term lesbian too limiting. And if the bar were really limited to lesbians, they would find it offensive, they would say, what about queers? What about genderqueers? What about nonbinary people? What about trans people? So it would be very interesting to me to discover that a bar could continue for a number of years, calling itself an exclusively lesbian bar. What do you think? 

SARAH: Ah, just about about lesbian bars? I think. I mean, I think they're great. At least in our research, it doesn't seem like they're, they are places that are not accepting of all kinds of queer people and even straight people. So I think that they want to use that term still as kind of a historical nod in the way that you are saying that. Like, it's just, like, kind of you have an emotional tie to that identity. I think that that’s---

LILLIAN: --that they are accepting of people who don't call themselves lesbian. And yeah, so yeah, it's it's, it's touching that they call themselves a lesbian bar, but in fact, they're more like a queer bar or a gender non-binary bar. Yeah.  The the big question is, is it is it economically viable to have an exclusively lesbian place? And I kind of doubt it's economically viable these days.

SARAH: So what do you think that these bars need to do? What's the key to surviving for lesbian bars? Or queer bars like this?

LILLIAN: I think people vote with their feet. And I think if, if lesbian or gay bars or bars in general were vital to the community, they would exist, there would be more of them, they wouldn't be disappearing. I think they're disappearing because the huge alphabet soup of our community has so many choices now and it may be fun to go to a bar once in a while, but bars can't keep going if people come only once in a while. It's not like we had to go to meet other people like us when the bar was virtually the only game in town. There are a lot of distractions now. A lot of places to meet other people like LGBT, whatever the huge acronym alphabetism is now. So I guess I'm not I'm not hopeful about the continued existence of of bars that call themselves lesbian bars. It's not that I think it's a bad thing that they exist. But, you know, as I say, I think people vote with their feet. And clearly they're not voting for lesbian bars. 

SARAH: When was the last time you went to a lesbian bar? 

LILLIAN: I have gone in more recent years for research. 

SARAH: Do have other means of--

LILLIAN: We have a big circle of lesbian friends. They--I think everyone, everyone we know who they're, you know, in our age range. And we all call ourselves lesbians. Sometimes we call ourselves gay, but mostly lesbians.

SARAH: What we're really trying to dive into is lesbian bar culture and the history of lesbian bars. So do you feel like there's anything else that is important for us to know in doing that?

LILLIAN: Even in the late 19th century, in, in New York and Los Angeles, in big cities, there was an underground culture of both men and women who wouldn't have called themselves homosexual, gay, or lesbian. Actually, they might have called themselves gay because it was a term that was around beginning in the late 1890s. But there there were dance halls where they would meet. Mostly men, but women, too, would go to those places. And of course, it was dangerous. And it was known because I first found out about it through a guy who wrote about underground New York, who was an observer. Unpublished papers, but he wrote about WalHala Hall (sp?) in New York. And then I did a book called with a gay man, we did a book called Gay LA. And I discovered that in the early 20th century in Los Angeles, there were halls where homosexuals would meet. So there were these public places. But for the most part, its language is so interesting, there's no way to find a term that would have been acceptable through through the ages, I'm going to use the term homosexual because that term was around. For the most part, homosexuals wouldn't have gone to public places in the early 20th century or the late 19th century, it was much too dangerous. There, there's an interesting biography, that I quoted in a couple of my books by Mary Casales (sp?), which was not her real name, she called it The Stone Wall having nothing to do with the Stonewall Inn, but she was a middle class woman who was a lesbian. The book came out in the 1930s. But she looked back on her long relationship with another woman by the name of Juno, in the late 19th and early 20th century. And she talks about having gone to a place like what I'm describing, and she calls them sexual inverts. And how, how bizarre they were to her and how different from her relationship with Juno. I mean, these were, quote, respectable, middle class ladies, and they had nothing to do even though they had sex with one another and live with one another for 12 years, they had nothing to do with these sexual inverts who were in this this bar they went to, and she was so disgusted with those people. So the class distinctions were certainly huge and in earlier eras, and even when I came out, the class distinctions were huge. The working class bars that I first went to and the Club Laurel, which was definitely not a working class bar. And then the women that I met as a graduate student at UCLA, who certainly wouldn't have called themselves working class. So I think that, you know, class distinctions are really kind of disappearing in the LGBTQ etc, community but, but for a long time, they remained huge in, for want of a better term, the lesbian and gay community in other eras. 

SARAH: CRUISING IS REPORTED AND PRODUCED BY RACHEL KARP, JEN MCGINNITY, AND ME, SARAH GABRIELLI, WITH MUSIC BY JOEY FREEMAN. FOLLOW US ALONG ON OUR ROAD TRIP AND SEE PICTURES AT OUR WEBSITE: CRUISINGPOD.COM OR FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA @CRUISINGPOD. THAT’S C-R-U-I-S-I-N-G-P-O-D. 

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