For the Love of Separatism*

By Anna Lee

(As published in Lesbian Ethics Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1988)

*While this paper is loosely based on "A Black Separatist" which will appear in the separatist anthology, For Lesbians Only (London: Onlywomen Press, in press), I have retitled this paper to minimize confusion. I want to thank the many lesbians who have encouraged me over the years to rethink some of my analyses. I want to thank Tara Ayres who loves me enough to continue to argue with me even when I am my most stubborn. I want to thank Julia Penelope and Sarah Hoagland for continually inspiring me with their writing and their willingness to critique my writing. I want to thank Lee Evans and Vivienne Louise who listened to my ranting and raving and offered helpful suggestions that pulled me from my dilemmas. Finally I want to thank Noel Furie, Selma Miriam, Betsey Beaven and Denslow Brown who have always challenged me to explore further what separatism means to me. Of course, I take responsibility for the arguments found in this essay.

Separatism is focusing on each other as lesbians and minimizing the energy given to males. As a separatist, when I focus on lesbians, I include all lesbians who choose to focus on lesbians. The previous two statements define the separatist ideal. Obviously the diversity (of race, class, age and so forth) among us is not as complete as it could be, but it is a fact that the lesbian community is more diverse than any other existing community. While it is important not to romanticize the lesbian community, we too often denigrate our accomplishments and intentions. I will return to what blocks that diversity later in my discussion. I want to discuss first how I came to identify as a separatist and then how the unacknowledged bond between women and men prohibits racial diversity among lesbians.

Coming Out Separatist: Kinda

I embraced the theory of separatism very slowly. While other separatists accepted separatism almost simultaneously with coming out, I gradually began to understand and accept separatism over a number of years. I have also heard that the separatist lifestyle was adopted by some prefeminist lesbians. While this community may have adopted the lifestyle, from my observations, ideological justification or theory was not important to prefeminist lesbians. All of this is to say that my journey is not necessarily the same as that of other postfeminist lesbians nor my separatism the same as that practiced by prefeminist lesbians. My journey is mine, to which I’ve added my perceptions of others’ journeys.

I came out in 1969, believing that my loving a woman was happenstance and that our love for each other was no different than heterosexual loving. To say I loved a woman because she was a woman was too "queer."(1) In 1969 no one was talking about women loving women; information was hard to find and the analysis was pretty unsophisticated. While the 60s are perceived as a free, loving and liberating period, it is sometimes forgotten, especially if the observer had not participated in those years, that the free-love and liberation were male focused and directed. Women were the objects. Even though a woman loving a woman was a departure from "predator"(2) heterosexual relations, self-identification as a lesbian was outside the constraints imposed by hip males. As I said, loving a woman because she was a woman was too queer. As there was silence in the 60s around women loving women, so too interracial relationships were becoming tolerable but not quite acceptable. As a black woman I loved a white woman. It would be four more years before Daughters in 1973 published Rubyfruit Jungle, which celebrated coming out gay and depicted an interracial relationship (though not one between lovers) as acceptable.

I stepped into that void in a small midwestern town with four other queers. And we believed we were the only ones in the land. In fact, we felt we had attained nirvana. That others were not so enlightened explained why heterosexuals exhibited the self-hatred of choosing partners unlike themselves. Nineteen years later Katherine Forrest would write a short story describing homosexuals as possessing intelligence, sensitivity and creativity. Heterosexuals no longer had those characteristics and so were becoming extinct. The homosexuals explained to each other that heterosexuals’ knowledge that they were becoming extinct was the reason they had persecuted homosexuals throughout history.(3)

Believing we were superior to heterosexuals led me to my next step: the realization that I loved my lover (a different woman from the first) because she was a woman. The idea of separating from males was still totally foreign to me. While I believed that it was significant that I loved a woman because she was a woman, I believed that my love for a woman was no different than a woman’s love for a man or a man’s love for a man. The early D.O.B. (Daughters of Bilitis) sought toleration for female homosexuals, even encouraging lesbians to dress in drag. In this case, "drag" meant dressing as if one were a heterosexual feminine woman. D.O.B. argued that female homosexuals needed to make ourselves acceptable to heterosexuals through our dress and behavior. By the early seventies, D.O.B. and particularly its publication, The Ladder, had begun to question the female role and to use the word lesbian. Coincidentally, as The Ladder became independent from D.O.B., the use of the word lesbian became more acceptable and in fact the norm in The Ladder. However, the context in my small midwestern town remained similar to the civil rights approach advocated by D.O.B. in the early 50s.

The ability to resist is in part dependent on the context within which one finds herself. If a feminist or visible lesbian community had existed in my town, I would have perceived myself as a follower of those who had preceded me instead of a pathfinder who had to make it (whatever "it" was at the moment) up as I went along. But the context is only a part of the ability to resist heterosexual domination. The other part is the individual wherewithal to resist "normalcy."(4) I believe the pressure to be normal is what so many lesbians are referring to when they say it is a miracle that any of us are able to come out.

So, not having a social context or a political analysis which challenged my acceptance of heterosexuality as the norm and my search for tolerance from heterosexuals, I continued to fall in and out of love for a number of years. I certainly had a fledgling feminist consciousness but I didn’t examine the way I participated in relationships as lover or friend. When I moved to the east coast a whole new world opened for me.

Here I was able to observe a larger mixed group and examine the "normalcy" of heterosexual relationships. The context was not predominantly gay, as had been my previous experience with the four other queers in the midwest. I met white socialists; previously I had interacted with black nationalists and socialists (a separate group from the four other queers). It was the late 70s. I was amazed that a whole group of people could speak in and write pages and pages of marxist rhetoric. I thought that that rhetorical ability was limited to the college radicals I had known. With concentrated effort, I could do only a few sentences and then would forget what my point had been. I had a large group to observe at the Worker’s World Party meetings I attended. I noticed some characteristics similar to the black nationalists and socialists. One was the speaking in tongues or jargon. Two was the fact that the leadership was primarily male, and the women concerned themselves with women’s issues and recruiting women.

I had many lively arguments with my lover at the time and with my friend from the midwest who had also moved to the east coast. I knew something was wrong although I didn’t have a political analysis for it. I mentioned to my lover that the Worker’s World Party discussed rape only in terms of black males being unfairly accused. We both agreed that black males were disproportionately accused, prosecuted and convicted. We disagreed about women’s always being disbelieved about our experiences. She believed that after the class revolution, women would not be raped or forced to accept subservient roles at any time. She held this belief even though all the significant roles within the Party were performed by males. I had seen this same refusal to name relationships as harmful within the black nationalist movement. I would later come to learn that mixed groups encourage women to believe that our issues are less important than the issues with which males are concerned.

Coming Out Separatist: Truly

My lover did introduce me to a feminist business which allowed me to perceive the world from an entirely different perspective and which gave me a context for understanding what had troubled me about the various movements in which I had been involved. I was also introduced to a world which was truly women identified. That women identification encouraged my examination of my relationships with women and engendered a refocussing away from male actions.

The group who ran the feminist business valued women. Each woman in the group believed that women’s work and ideas were important. They wanted a woman owned, operated and identified collective. They made mistakes, but their intent was to create a world of women who challenged, inspired and nourished themselves and other women. So in 1979 I embarked on my greatest adventure, wherein all the things I had taken for granted were questioned. I had to rethink almost every assumption I had made about how the world operated and what my part in it was. I also had the opportunity to interact with other women, particularly lesbians, in a context that assumed we could change the world and that our movement was growing. I had choices that I had never had.

The choices concerned both resistance to males and connection to women. We never considered women who would want to involve males in our community as part of our community. The lesbians and the few straight women who were involved in our community considered women-only space as a given. Women energy and relationships were primary for both groups. Separatism was valued by both groups. The issues that were seen as secondary by male dominated groups were examined as if our lives depended on it. In fact, our lives did depend on understanding the ways males sought to control us through violence. Male violence against women ranged and ranges from defining who we can be to killing us.

The Man in Our Head Or in Our Lives?

Because males defined the acceptable ways racism could be discussed, lesbian ability to develop anti-racist postures was undermined. Our ability even to perceive racism between women was minimal. Racism was concerned with black males as if black women did not exist. Big Mama Rag, a now defunct Denver newspaper, argued that women should support national liberation struggles. Women should support national liberation struggles even though the males who participate in them define women’s issues as secondary to the liberation of the country or community.(5)

For a number of years and even today, the male-defined scope of racism has meant that if males including black males are excluded then an act of racism has occurred. In 1987 a black male hit a white lesbian after she excluded him from viewing her sculpture, and the organizers of Sisterfire, the festival at which this incident occurred, argued the white lesbian had provoked the incident. As a result the organizers suggested that mutual violence had occurred. Their argument is that hitting as violence = exclusion as violence. Is there anything wrong with this equation? What is wrong with this equation is that racism is defined as the exclusion of black males. The white lesbian did exclude white males but not black women from viewing her sculpture. The organizers of Sisterfire ignored black women in their definition of racism and what counts as a racist act. Big Mama Rag in a similar vein discounted the interests of non-european women in their advocacy of national liberation struggles. Whether it was the intent of Big Mama Rag or Sisterfire, the result is that women bond with white males under the guise of protecting nonwhite males. The following discussion will demonstrate how the real bond is with white males.

The original radical analysis of rape by organizers of rape crisis centers was replaced (often along with the original organizers) with organizers’ acceptance even desire for police participation in preventing the crime of rape. Rape crisis center organizers eagerly sought police involvement even though police had never demonstrated a concern with or success in finding the male rapists of black women. The police, however, have shown a willingness to rape black women.(6) In fact, white feminists’ analysis of rape discounted the experiences of black women. The police have also shown a very successful record of protecting white men from facing the penalties for their rapist acts, while, as I commented earlier, black males are disproportionately targeted to pay the penalty for the crime of rape. Who benefitted from police involvement with rape crisis centers? Not black women. Not black men. But white males did benefit. While white feminists’ agenda may not have been articulated, their desire to bond with white males was not unnoticed. In the example of Sisterfire, the organizers’ claim is that coalition building is important and essential. The coalition building is the bonding with males, who numerically are white males.

Another example of the bond between white lesbians and white males is the almost wholehearted endorsement of the need to support males dying of aids. Jeanette Silveira said to me in conversation that she considers the non-involvement in aids work as a litmus test for separatism. I agree with her that aids is not a separatist issue, but many white lesbians both separatist and nonseparatist claim that because black women are dying of aids, lesbians should be involved in that struggle. It is true that black females and males die from aids. It is not true that aids is transmitted through the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is transmitted through sexual contact with someone who has aids and through blood exchange with someone who has aids. Because of the way aids is transmitted, lesbians are a low risk group. In order to induce lesbians to work on aids, the definition of lesbianism is diluted to include women who have sexual contact with men. Who then is a heterosexual woman?

It does not matter to me whether the lumping of lesbians and heterosexual women is intentional; what does concern me is the masking of white female-male bonding by claiming that aids is significant to lesbians because black women are dying from aids. It is not the first time that white women have used black women to advocate an agenda which results in a stronger bond between white women and men.

This bond between white women and white men is motivated by white women’s desire for power and white male desire to recapture women’s attentions (as I discuss in more depth in my paper on new age spirituality(7)). I have had to re-examine my relationship to black males. I’m not sure white lesbians have examined their relationship to white men. I’m not sure because the bond between them goes unspoken but manifests in many ways. Some of which I’ve described.

I am very clear that my brothers hold the power of the penis. Any man regardless of class, income or race holds power in the world. Truly, some males have more control in the world than others. But each has, if nothing else, a woman or woman-substitute as his slave, e.g., his wife, mother, girlfriend and so forth. A male regardless of his status in the world can exercise his power over at least one woman virtually without interference. A cursory examination of the statistics concerning males battering women or raping their daughters demonstrates these actions are seldom punished. But the women and daughters who object to these male activities are severely punished.(8)

What all of us, especially white lesbians, must be clear about is the difference between power and revokable privilege. Power-over is the necessary resources to decide what the outcome of a situation will be. Revokable privilege is the ability to carry out someone else’s decisions and their agenda. Privilege can be wielded as long as someone else’s decisions and agenda are followed. White women have revokable privilege. When they serve white male interests, resources are made available to them. When they do not, the availability of resources decreases. When battered women’s shelters hire out-lesbians or make services available to lesbians who have been battered, funding from city, county, state or national government is canceled. It is important to males that women be patched up and returned to them. It is not important to them that lesbians be patched up and returned to a lesbian battering situation.

White lesbians or feminists may, in fact, know that the availability of resources is dependent upon making the male givers of the resources comfortable, or they may not want to examine the gift horses’ mouths too closely. When certain actions result in predictable, consistent outcomes then the actions not the rhetoric must be examined. I’m still waiting for white lesbians to question their bond with white men and what that bond means to creating a diverse lesbian community. The bond between white lesbians and men is currently a stumbling block to the creation of meaningful race and class diversity.

Black Lesbian Introspection

The accepted definition of black culture is also a stumbling block. We as black lesbians are allowing black men to define the meaning of our blackness. While I will specifically discuss the need for black lesbians to promote our own definitions of blackness, I believe all of our communities of origin need to be examined for the female centeredness of each community to determine what qualities we can bring to the lesbian community that enhance lesbian lives.

Within the black community, I grew up with strong women role models. These models were not lesbian but the women understood that their survival was dependent on their ability to move through the world without a male intermediary. They know that they could not depend on males. Black women in my community created networks of women so that we could call on each other. It did not surprise me that the women around me encouraged me to rely upon myself or believed in me. What those strong black women nourished in me was a strong egoism. An egoism sufficient to survive in a world which would not necessarily look kindly upon me, a world which too often hated me. That black female community taught me loyalty to myself and others. It also taught me to face the truth. For not only would the truth set me free, it would insure my survival. If I didn’t like the truth I found, then I should change that truth, not pretend it didn’t exist. Middle class pretensions were reserved for those who could afford them. Middle class pretensions would not save my hide.

Even though most of us grew up with strong black female models, even though we learned that we could never be white and therefore acceptable, we have refused to take black lesbian interactions seriously. We deny our female centeredness and get caught up in accepting black male definitions of blackness. The closer an activity is to black males the more the activity is seen as black. In a conversation, a sister supported the black muslims even though she could not be one herself and even though the black muslims insist that women be subordinate to men. In another conversation, a sister perceived a black woman who performed from a heterosexual position as more professional than an openly lesbian black woman who performed in a woman-identified context. In each case black lesbians were not valued. It is a common world view among any oppressed group that what we create among ourselves is not really worth having and lacks the professionalism and validity that are possessed by the oppressor and his lackeys.

Black lesbians reject whites defining who we can be but accept black males defining who we can be. Until we can value what we create, we will not exist except in the distorted house of mirrors at the carnival. Since we have not seriously considered our position in the world as black lesbians, we are too often concerned more with our appearances than with developing a political analysis that begins with us. A political analysis which makes black lesbians central to understanding the world and our relationship to the world. I am certainly not suggesting that black lesbians are mindless or do not think. What I am suggesting is that the definitions we use of who we are have not been created by us. We have some hard work ahead of us. It is necessary we do that work.

Separating from black males is scary. It is scary because we are stepping into a void. It is a void through which even the strong black women role models we have known cannot help us. The strong black women can provide an impetus to seek our answers but not the answers themselves. The creation of ourselves can be exciting. Excitement is leaving the familiar and comfortable. Bernice Reagon(9) has suggested that coalition work is difficult because we must go beyond the safety of the comfortable. On the contrary, coalition work resembles our communities of origin, because males are valued members of the coalitions she wants to create. It is creating lesbian community which is unfamiliar to us. Or at least to most of us, since very few of us grew up in a lesbian context. Coalition work is a return to what is known.

Separatism Is Where It’s Happening

In the 70s we faced this void named lesbian centrality with only the barest hint of how to create it. We have made some serious mistakes and we will probably make many more. Yet it is within the context of lesbian separatism that we have achieved our greatest accomplishments. We have created spaces in which to know each other. We have developed an analysis which utilizes lesbians as the base. We have acknowledged our differences and sought to value our differing ableisms. We have created economic lesbian networks. We have developed lesbian skills in carpentry, music, production, printing, selling, and so forth. These abilities, skills, analyses flourish in a lesbian context. We have surpassed our wildest dreams.

The dreams are not ashes, although there was a hiatus in the 80s. We must acknowledge our past dreams and vistas. The next step must address how we interact with intimates. By intimates I mean all lesbians to whom we relate. For lesbian community is no more than how we relate with each other. Lesbian community requires our participation in order to exist. I hope our lesbian community never becomes so institutionalized that we as individuals consume it but do not have to contribute anything for it to continue. Once community becomes institutionalized it becomes fossilized. Something fossilized is unable to nourish the joy of creation. It just is. It is unchangeable and unchanging. It is dead.

Lesbian community is a diverse collection of intimates. It is our challenge to establish intimacy with those who grew up different from us. Even within groups whose members could be classified as similar there will be differences among us. So each of us must stretch herself to value differences in intimate relationships. It is fairly easy to value differences from afar. It is much harder to include differences in our intimate circles. It is even harder to seek out those who are different, but we must, because we need those differences in our own lives in order to grow, to be challenged, and to create realities we have not yet dreamed.

Notes

1. Julia Penelope, "The Mystery of Lesbians," LE 1:2. While Julia discusses how her overt lesbianism made her the target for anti-lesbian violence, it was not fear of violence which made me reluctant to use the word queer. It was the fear of moving beyond the pale of male-defined acceptable beliefs.

2. Sarah Lucia Hoagland. Lesbian Ethics: Toward a New Value. (Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988). This book explains Sarah’s concept of predator-protector.

3. Katherine Forrest, "The Test." Dreams and Swords, Naiad, 1987.

4. Ruston, Bev Jo, Linda Strega, "Heterosexism Causes Lesbophobia Causes Butchphobia. Part II of the Big Sell-Out: Lesbian Femininity," LE 2:2, 22-43.

5. Elaine Henrichs, "A Call to Resist," Big Mama Rag, May 1982. In her discussion of forming coalitions with national liberation struggles, note the absence of women in the policy making bodies of those struggles. In addition, the traditional role of women in African countries is undermined or eliminated when u.s. agriculture policy and national liberation struggles foster subservient roles for women. Whose interest is being served?

6. A conversation with Lee Evans.

7. Anna Lee, "New Age Spirituality Is the Invention of Heteropatriarchy." Paper given at National Women’s Studies Association, Minneapolis, June 1988, as part of a panel on Lesbian Theory organized by Sarah Hoagland.

8. Note the case of Karen Newson, who went to jail for six weeks in an attempt to protect her child from being sexually assaulted by the father. The father was awarded custody of the child. off our backs, October 1988, p. 3.

9. Bernice Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," in Home Girls, Barbara Smith, ed. (New York: Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press, 1983), 356-368.