becomes symbiotic: I'll protect you against your neuroses and you'll protect me against mine and together we'll....

Jan: Fall flat on your faces!

Karen: Right! Ugh!

f

Jan: When you're getting into your fifth and sixth years, I'm wondering if the same symbiotic relationship can go on in the way it does when it's new.

Pat: I think we're fairly symbiotic already. It's important to keep it from getting out of hand. I don't think you can be intimate for a long time and not get....

Interviewer: What I hear you saying is that you'd be too narrow, your lives would be too narrow. Pat: Right. We'd tend to get shallow.

Ellen: 1 feel like that sometimes. I'm no longer friends with a lot of people I used to know. The people that I think of as my friends are at home. When I have a choice of going to see them and relaxing with my feet up, I'm much more likely to choose being at home. My relationships with friends other than a few other couples have almost disappeared. I don't feel that I have any real close friends that are just my friends. Some of that is transitional; the close friends I had were all heterosexual and had some difficulty with my being gay. They stopped initiating. If I stopped calling, I'd never hear from them. Some of that happened about the same time that we moved in together. I haven't felt much like spending energy on developing friendships when they don't have any meaning. I have some acquaintances, but nobody with whom I would go out and spend time.

Jan: I don't feel that way, even though I'm living with Ellen. We have a monogamous relationship. I've maintained friendships, not daily contact, with two other women, whom I consider really good friends. I couldn't have any more than that...I don't see them as much as I want. It isn't just living together that does it.

Jan: You said earlier how the political impetus to become a lesbian has somewhat disappeared for you?

Pat: It never was political for me to begin with. My consciousness started at the other end. I was a lesbian long before I had any political consciousness.

Jan: Simone de Beauvoir says that anyone can be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual. Do you think that's true?

Pat: In theory. I mean in a pure state, I think everybody's everything.

Jan: Take it down to the real world.

Pat: It's unlikely that I will ever be....I grew up and was never, to tell the truth, heterosexual. I mean, I was heterosexual-oriented, but I never have been in a 'sexual relationship with a man in my life. I don't ever expect to, as a matter of fact.

Jan: You could comprehend the possibility; it's just that you don't particularly want to.

Pat: No. I really can't comprehend the possibility at this point. It's hard to say what I'd never do, but a lot that I've set in motion-fairly long-range stuff-doesn't have anything to do with primary relationships with men. It's nice to think that I might be able to have some male friends again. I figured that wasn't going to happen and there are two or three heterosexual couples that we do spend some time with. I can actually enjoy spending time with them. They're decent people; it's nice to know there are a few.

Jan: It's such a surprise! I would never have talked about it in any real way before...this couple...this man and woman are really nice to be around.

Karen: Being a lesbian also doesn't guarantee any kind of sisterhood with other lesbians. There are in fact somé heterosexual people that I would much prefer to live with than some lesbians I know. For me, I've got to talk about lesbian-feminists because beyond that issue, I have less in common with most lesbians than I do with others....

Pat: I used to' feel that, but it's larger than that now. Part of the reason that it's larger now is because I do feel hooked into and part of a fairly substantial community of alternative people in general. The whole world out there does not seem so overwhelming. I don't feel so isolated, period. There's just a lot more people who think like I do....I've sort of dug out my hole here and made space.

Jan: People like the ACLU and all the liberal middle-class people that we were putting down 5 to 10 years ago. That's who I am right now. Ellen: Welcome to the liberal establishment!

Pat: Most of what's going on in my life has more to do with age than anything else. I'm in my early 30's and so I'm thinking about different things. More than anything else, that tends to separate out who I spend time with and who I don't: within a given job category, of the people who have their heads together about a general political perspective, feministoriented, male or female. Beyond that, it doesn't really have anything to do with sexual orientation. I spend time with people who are doing the same things with their lives as I am. They're trying to get a handle on some economic power over their lives. They're buying houses, they're doing things that are more stable. That's who I'm spending time with.

Jan: That's what it's been for me, too....I imagine you both know, I've been fairly burned by what I perceived as the lesbian community as it's known to me, which is pretty limited, but there nevertheless. Until the very recent months my best women friends have not been lesbians, and I've always thought that was too bad. But I couldn't make connections. So the sexuality of my friends who are women isn't as important as the fact that they're women, I think.

Ellen: Actually, their sexuality isn't as important as the fact that there are certain kinds of people with whom you share what's going on in your lives in an honest and caring way. They have some sense of a broader political world that goes on around them.... That's what's been interesting for me...to come to the realization that... what really separates me from much of the rest of the world is not my sexuality but the way I think about what's going on in the world. It separates me just as much that I'm antinuke in the working environment made up of 22-26-year-old young women who haven't even thought about the consequences of radiation. That's just as separating as being a lesbian. I've been separate from my peer group in that way all my life. There's only a small group of people who share the kind of perspective I've talked about, about human values and about politics....It's never been such an overwhelming thing that I'm separate because I'm a lesbian.

Karen: I think it's fun, too. I think one of the things that's been happening to me lately and where I'm hooking into this conversation is, as I'm finishing up doctoral work, all of a sudden I'm coming to the end of a time when I feel like I've been paying dues, doing what parents expected. So all of a sudden I've got all these choices. OK, now the rest of it's mine. I'm needing and feeling real hungry for clearer value positions of my own. I'm out there

floating. I know I'm anchored in a socialist analysis of the world and feminism anchors me, too. But I feel not well enough grounded in any of that, nor well enough involved in a larger Cleveland community, to help enrich my vision....I'm trying to push my circles wider, so I can say I'm part of a larger community. I want to know more about the whole leftist movement in Cleveland—what's the history, where has it gone, who's out there doing different things. That includes men and women. I want to define myself in a larger arena than just a lesbian-feminist one. I also want to know how feminism hooks in. Interviewer: It's real important that you be there for those people as a lesbian. That hasn't been happening enough over the last 5 or 10 years. Both can be enriched by that association.

Jan: Because I felt like I couldn't make it in the lesbian feminist community, other doors had to be opened for me. But the same thing's happening to me [wanting a wider arena of involvement]. It feels organic; I'm not doing it because I'm angry or hurt. I need that extra stimulation, the other ideas, a more rounded view of the world. That's a middle-years phenomenon, too. You can see that everything isn't black and white; you can better sec gradations in things the more you've been butting your head against social change.

Pat: Even around my career, I'm making choices because I'm realizing that if I don't get certain things in my life together, I'm not going to make one dinky scratch in the dirt....I'm not changing anything at the rate I'm going. If I don't up my level of sophistication....

Karen: Also get basic survival needs met, so you're not worrying about if you're going to have money for next month's rent.

Ellen: The nice thing about the career path I'm on is I do it because I enjoy it. The fact is, it's having this great impact because everywhere I go, I'm a woman in a profession where there haven't been women. I just go about doing my stuff and meanwhile as a nice side benefit, people are exposed to a woman who's competent. It's like I can do my politics, and I don't even need to work on it! Just being there, that's the politics; being active in those male organizations is the politics because they haven't been exposed....

Pat: It's important to remember that, too. It's another reason I need to draw on others who are more in my life space, even, than lesbians are. It really is hard, damn it, I'm out there going to school and it's hard being a woman where I'm fairly isolated in my position. I need a lot of support for that, and I'm not going to get that from lesbians per se. I'm going to get that from anyone who's trying to do the same thing.

Jan: How about women in your profession? Are they there for you, are you able to make connections with them?

Pat: When I look around I don't see any other women who look anything like me. Most of them are pretty young and flirty....One of the statements I can make about being a long-term lesbian couple is that there are still some places where that is a particular issue in my life and there are other places where it isn't, where I'm not that different from anybody else my age living in this community....My lesbianism isn't that critical a factor. Or the ways in which it is are more subtle.

Jan: When you can't have it out there, it becomes critical issue.

Karen: It has so profoundly shaped my life. It's very clear there's no reason I would still be in Cleveland if I were not a lesbian. It has shaped all my choices...all my career choices..........I've decided to stay in Cleveland as I'm finishing school now, because of my relationship with Pat, the women's movement, and my commitment to women's issues locally. All that would have been different. I'm sure I would have blitzed in here, done a Ph.D. in maybe the same

(continued on page 11)

June, 19797What She Wants/Page 7