Women

WHAT'S A WOMAN TO DO?

by JEANNE CORDOVA

Although I have been a lesbian for seven years, and used to think I knew what being a lesbian meant, I must admit over the last year the feminist interpretation of lesbianism has thrown my political activity in the gay, lesbian, and feminist movement into a quandary.

Recently a friend whom I call a nouveau lesbian (because she recently came into lesbianism from heterosexuality via the Women's Movement) told me, "A lesbian is not a homosexual." Last week I read a button put out by a radical feminist/lesbian collective which read, "We are angry, not gay."

In 1968 B.F. (Before Feminism) I used to read in Webster's, "a lesbian is a female homosexual." A homosexual is one "who sleeps with his (her) own sex." In 1970 I read in that now famous feminist document "What is a lesbian?", "a lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion." Later in that same article I read, "But lesbianism is also different from male homosexuality, and serves a different function in society."

Clearly these are, if not conflicting, certainly different definitions. Clearly they come from different perspectives. The former is what men like Webster understand about us, the latter apparently what our het sisters saw in our lifestyle. In recent years I have come to understand that lesbianism is not like (male) homosexuality because in a sexist society such as ours no behaviour of women is the same as that of men. When women love (men or each other), they don't "love" like men do. What physical and emotional feelings women derive from sex, are not the same as those which men experience. When women work together, it is not the same experience as when men work "together"/compete. When women talk to each other, they don't talk about the things (money, status, power) that men talk about. Ad infinitum. Knowing this helps me understand that when women love each other and attempt to build a life around their love, they do not love or live as men who love het women and they do not love or live as men who love other men. After I got this through my consciousness I was still left with another sticky conflict which I am hoping to work out.

I was a woman-identified-lover-of-otherwomen for four years before I found the Women's Movement. During that time, I, like so many of my sisters who had the misfortune of falling into unteminist lesbianism, spent much time in 'the bars' and 'the roles'. Having left the latter I still

remember vividly the former, I still remember walking down the street and having men, and, yes, women, say or point queer I still remember the cops coming in and lining me up against the wall and throwing some other sisters into the wagon. I still remember when The Ladder used to say "we homosexuals deserve our democratic rights to live and love the same as heterosexuals." I still remember my father throwing my short-haired lover out of the house and saying, "Don't you ever bring a woman like that in this house again." I still remember him and others in my Abnormal Psychology classes saying, "We ought to take all those dykes and faggots and shoot 'em." I guess that means I remember what it means to be homosexual in this society.

In the last three years I have learned that to be woman in this society is just one step up from the bottom of that dung heap. Maybe being woman isn't even one step up, but I don't want to argue about which part of me (as if I wasn't whole) is more oppressed. It's all lousy. What I mean to say is this. I came into the Women's

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Movement, via the Gay Movement. I now realise that when society busts "a faggot" they are showing contempt for “a man who would be a woman" and when the courts take away a lesbian's children it is because she is not really a woman. For many years I have known that the "faggotswish male" and the "dyke-butch lesbian" come in for far greater oppression than the butch male and the latter-day "femme" lesbian. I know this is because the former are overtly breaking role behaviour and the latter are OK because they still look like real men and real women. Laying aside this crap, I as an activist, one who wants to help change things, question whether my place is with the movement which seeks to lift discrimination off my sexual orientation or the movement which seeks to redefine the one-down position of my gender. Does a lesbian belong working in the Gay Move ment or the Feminist Movement-or both? Or neither?

The ambiguities and oppression we suffer from both woman-baiting-sexism from the gay men and lesbian-baiting from the het women is I think the reason why so many

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