From: steven@cray.com (Steven Levine)
Subject: Lesbian Myths
Summary: No lesbians in 19th century Scotland 
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 17 Nov 92 14:03:57 CST

[Polly Powledge (in an article that has expired at my site --
so no references or consistent header) spoke of the
book _Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers_.]

I am also reading this book, but in chunks.  I find history books
with lots of footnotes to be a bit dry to read all at once.  Perhaps
if I could be less compulsive about reading every single
footnote when it occurs this would be less of an issue.

This is not in direct response to Polly's summary of some of
the points in _Odd Girls..._ -- perhaps it has no connection
at all -- but it sort of relates to the issue of lesbian
visibility and identity in other times.

I recently read Rebecca West's _Family Memories_, a collection
of some pieces of family biography she worked on sporadically
for the last 15 years of her life.  She brings up the topic
of homosexuality (by which she means male homosexuality,
as in her discussions she seems curiously unaware of lesbians --
which is part of my point here) in connection with a story involving
her Uncle Joey.

The incident occurs in Edinburgh in the 1880's.  Her Uncle Joey
was invited to dinner at a public house that he did not
know was a male homosexual "brothel."  (Or so Rebecca
West relates.  I read her description of the incident and
see no reason to believe that her Uncle did not know exactly
where he was and what he was doing, and that the public
house was not a "brothel" at all, but the 19th century
equivalent of a gay bar.)  While he was there, a brawl
in another room brought the police around, and public attention
to his presence.  This was such a great scandal that he
had to go abroad, to America, lest his entire family be tainted
and destroyed.

    ...the situation was worse a hundred years ago, when
    the ordinary man either loathed or pretended to loathe
    homosexuality so that he did not dare or care to mention
    it, and the knowledge of it reached no respectable
    women; although at the same time it was in fact so little
    loathed that it was widely practised...

    ...my grandmother and none of the female members of the
    household in Heriot Row had the slightest idea of what
    had been going on in the enigmatic eating-house.  My mother
    was quite certain that her mother went to her grave unaware
    that men ever had sexual relations with each other; she
    herself was unaware of such a practice until, more than
    ten years after he marriage, Oscar Wilde was prosecuted,
    and my father gave her not very explicit but relevant
    information...

    ...Old Tyrian Purple [the family doctor] and the family
    lawyer ... blinked and looked down their noses and told her
    that the eating-house was a place where nameless abominations
    were committed, odious practices condemned in the Bible, but
    it was no use her asking them to indicate the texts; no
    decent woman would have understood them.  Had she done so,
    she would herself have become distraught, and she would have
    been for ever after repellent to all respectable citizens
    were it known that she had grasped this horrible information.
    There was the further danger in the family situation that
    were it suspected that the information had somehow seeped
    through to the young women of the family, it would be better
    for them if they had never been born.  Not for anything in
    the world would any man think of marrying a young woman whose
    mind had suffered this pollution.

These paragraphs say a great deal about societal feelings 
(and hypocrisy) about male homosexuality.  But what is relevant
to the current discussion is the absolute and complete
invisibility of lesbianism -- both in the attitude of the time
and even in Rebecca West's filter.  Male homosexuality
is repellent beyond imagining, but female homosexuality
just doesn't exist.

In the society in question -- and it is the society from which
ours sprang -- women are systematically prevented from acquiring
any knowledge about the existence of homosexuality.  In such
an environment, how could the concept we know as "lesbian"
develop?  The men certainly didn't know or care aboutlesbians,
and the women were kept ignorant on the subject of homosexuality
in general -- almost conspiratorially, in Rebecca West's
view (elsewhere expanded).  Did the women of that time and
place -- whatever they actually felt emotionally or did sexually
-- have the vocabulary and conceptual framework for any sort of
lesbian self-awareness?

How many generations does it take to go from this level of
extreme invisibility to a survey that accurately reflects
the percentage of lesbians and gay men (to bring this
back around to this thread's starting point)?  Men were handicapped
by the vicious societal disapproval of male homosexuality.
Women were handicapped by the pervasive societal disregard
of female homosexuality, as well as ignorance of many sexual
matters.  With disapproval you have a starting point
of self-awareness (painful as that may be).  With invisibility,
you lack the structures to develop that self-awareness.

I do not believe that this invisibility is an artifact of the past --
but that's a different post.

-Steven Levine
 steven@cray.com


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