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Page 12/What She Wants/November, 1980

Conversations (continued from page 9)

for a heterosexual woman to stay heterosexual? 1 think the pull away from that is very strong because there are so many good feelings, and not just sexual energy. There's a lot of comfort, a lot of support-and lots and lots of straight women are becoming lesbians.

LS: One day someone said, "Why are you straight when all of your friends are gay?" I didn't even realize it. But that was key for me, the amount of support.

ST: I thought I was being "pure" by becoming a lesbian, and that kind of integrity is important to me. But I now feel there's another dimension that has to be struggled with, and who you sleep with is not the issue as much as what you allow relationships to do to you. So if there is such a thing as purity, it's not so much heterosexual or lesbian anymore, but it's me as a single person, a person able to function at my fullest.

LS: I've been involved with [straight] women on feminist issues who feel they are not a part of the feminist community. They can be women who are working at Rape Crisis Center and very active, but they feel they're separate. I've been wondering who is deciding that and where that is coming from. The feminist movement is the women who are active, and if they are active, they are a part of it. What don't they feel a part of? They see gay feminists as more radical and as what they're separate from, and therefore they feel they're not a part of the women's movement. I see the women's movement as this big thing, but there are a lot of people going around saying they are not a part of it.

ST: The women's community-no one has ever clearly defined it, but everybody knows who's outside it. Only a few are inside. It's an amorphous body that floats around,

LJ: Don't you think that some of that separateness is perpetuated by a kind of arrogance of some lesbians that they are purer? I feel that sense sometimes at women's events; it goes beyond celebration to almost, "We are better because we're lesbians". WB: It's like nationalism.

LJ: I think a lot of it is a reaction. For a long time it was not cool to be a lesbian, even in women's organizations. And now it has sort of swung the other way-among certain segments of the women's movement it's really quite "the thing" to be a lesbian. There is a lot of pressure to be pure—to be a real feminist you need to be a lesbian. I think it's a reaction to the initial rejection of lesbians in the movement. At some point it's going to have to even out again, where we start accepting people's choices, even though they may be different from ours.

ST: 1 think it's true that the women's movement made it okay to be a lesbian, but some lesbians don't feel that way and they still don't come to the events. Straight women feel pressure to be lesbians and lesbians feel pressure to be political.

DV: It's because oppression doesn't breed purity and nobility. If you've been oppressed, you swing over for a while towards dehumanizing the people who have been oppressing you.

JV: That raises an issue for me. When I talk to lesbian women who are strong separatists, I feel that they exclude me because 1 associate with men. That makes me feel sorry, because I'm a woman and they should be able to be friends with me.

DH: I always feel-a generalization-that straight women can always get up and get married and disappear from my life. If I count on them to be there, they may not be.

LG: It's a matter of trust.

DH: Yes, and yet lesbians do that all the time. They just get up and disappear from your life, and it's awful.

ST: I do have very strong relationships with

straight women and I have not felt betrayed. I've always felt a lot of support.

DV: What's painful is when you have a friend who gets involved with a man and just shuts you out of her life.

ST: I've worked on a lot of different activities and the only place where I'm not patching up the shit that men do is in the women's community or with lesbians. I will work on issues of interest to straight women. I've always worked on abortion. I've always worked on supporting battered women's activities and supporting Cleveland Women Working. But when it comes to straight women supporting lesbian issues-no!

LG: What would we define as straight issues and lesbian issues? Abortion-a straight issue.

JV: Doing women's culture-a lesbian issue. DH: Women-only spaces; women-identified culture; women-only-owned land.

WB: See, there's a line that separates us. None of you would probably want to be involved on the land project because men can't go there.

ST: Most straight women didn't support Oven events. All of those hundreds of women who are not there want me to march for abortion. They want me to put tons of energy into ERA. I've put in thousands of hours and sent thousands of dollars. But when it comes down to my wanting a place I can go-one little place-l don't get their active support.

JV: The tragedy of that is that all of those women are missing their own culture, because what you're talking about is culture.

WB: It's been buried for so long-that's the tragedy.

4

JH: 1 think feminist straight women have to be aware that when you're a lesbian there aren't that many places where you can go and say you're a lesbian.

ST: You know, I really don't think that the lesbians at the Three of Cups were being obnoxious about the straight women until they started hearing things like, "Don't hold hands. Don't slow dance". It was when that stuff started coming down that the lesbian women really started getting pissed and felt they didn't want to have to put up with these straight women and their men.

JH: Because they had to put up with them all the time.

DV: The point at which I get uncomfortable is not lesbians feeling good and being open about being lesbians, and it's not excluding men, because I don't think men should be allowed in a women's bar-I think there have to be places where men aren't allowed. It's that point where I feel-and this doesn't always happen-that somebody's dumping on me for relating to men when I'm not bringing them there. I'm there because I want to be with women. This is all very new, it's a new movement; we have a lot to undo and unlearn.

ST: When you were saying that you start feeling put down for relating to men, even though you're in an all-woman environment, both you straight women just sat there and went, mm-hm, mm-hm.

JV: Well, that's one reason why I was real happy we were doing this tonight. Thinking over what we would talk about, I thought how I feel excluded sometimes, but maybe that's how you feel towards me: that I'm excluding you from my life by spending too much time with men and by living in a house with men. Maybe you feel less comfortable just coming over, or socializing with me. And that in itself is a choice that I made that you feel excludes you. Those are the kind of things that, if you don't say them out loud, become assumptions that may or may not be real.

ST: I went through a very strong separatist period, (continued on next page)