LJ Idol Week 17: Salad Days

[babydramatic_1950]

 

When I met Betty, she had been actively involved in a Lesbian video group.  This was in the mid-1970s and to the group’s knowledge, up to that time there had not been one. Video in those days meant carrying huge cameras to your location and shooting film that would later be played for viewing on old reel-to-reel devices. Those videos represented the pinnacle of Betty’s creative achievement, but were never in her possession. When the group broke up and the work was discontinued (and many of the women had stopped speaking to each other), Betty feared that the person who had possession of these fragile tapes had not stored them properly, a topic that she would refer to intermittently over the years, sometimes angrily, and sometimes sadly.  Then miraculously, sometime in the early Millennium, the tapes were rescued and a few remaining members of the group began the arduous task of converting them to a digital format. They now reside somewhere on a Web page accessible through, among other portals, Facebook. Of course Betty did not know about any of this because she has never been computer literate. And I did not know about it because I was never personally friendly with those people.

A few years ago, two old friends of Betty’s from the group contacted me out of the blue (I think they had heard through the grapevine of Betty’s decline) and asked me if they could come visit Betty and show her the newly converted videos on a laptop that they would bring with them. They also wanted to interview her and record it.  Of course I said yes.  If nothing else, I knew that she would welcome the company. During my conversation with these two women, they gave me the link for viewing the old videos on my laptop at home.

Although I was not in any of the videos (I had gotten involved with the Lesbian Pride movement a few years later) viewing them elicited an enormous wave of nostalgia.

Mostly, I was struck by the youth and innocence of it all.  There was a fairy tale quality to this life, which I think is what drew me in all those decades ago. Of course in the immediate sense, what drew me in was Betty, but quite aside from the transformation of self that occurs when one is in love, I was fascinated by this world that seemed to exist totally apart from “reality” as I knew it: office jobs, nuclear families, middle class “homemaking”, traditional rules of dress, and most of all, contact with one’s parents.

Here was a group of women, I see now mostly white and middle-class born, and mostly under 45 (Betty was one of the oldest) who had found a way to live, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, in a never-never land. I don't think I had ever quite envisioned anything of this kind. Several years earlier, when I had initially discovered my own Lesbianism, my hero[ine] had been Elinor Eastlake from The Group (too smart and glamorous to bother with men, and snapped up like arm candy by a rich cross-dressing baroness, but nonetheless moving in conventional society) and most of the Lesbians I knew in real life, although often frequenting gay bars, or socializing with each other in places like Provincetown, otherwise pretty much existed alongside of everyone else, working in ordinary jobs and attending family functions.

In many ways, these Lesbian-Feminist-Separatists reminded me not only of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, but also of all the orphan children in novels by Dickens and the Bronte sisters who had fascinated me throughout my adolescence. These putatively adult women were like girl-boy children who seemed not to have grown up and who managed to live a life quite apart from "adults".  Most of them were on strained terms with their own parents if they communicated with their parents at all, which many did not, mostly because their parents disapproved of their “lifestyle”. My mother, on the other hand, did not particularly care if I was a Lesbian, but I found her to be so soul-crushingly overbearing and suffocating that my new life seemed as good an excuse as any to “divorce” her, at least for the moment.

 The world I now inhabited had its own choruses, printing presses, art schools, coffee houses, food coops, movers, painters, exterminators, and others.  We had our own holiday celebrations (including a "solstice party" in late December, to avoid mention of "patriarchal" holidays). We had our own doctors and lawyers, too, but these were the "bridge" figures: they were of us but also of the world.

And there was our "Wendy".  Not me.  I was a token "pretty girl" but most of my clothes still came from thrift shops and I was not a successful professional nor did I have a middle class home.  "Wendy" was a pretty, blonde schoolteacher, a "bar femme" from the era when Lesbians were sexy, not political.  (She had once been hauled off to jail with her butch lover, wearing a red baby doll nightie). She adored butches of all sorts and in exchange for their flirting outrageously with her she allowed them to sponge off of her. (I remember one of them musing once “I wonder if Wendy will buy me a sweater this winter.”)

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Of course it was not all a sweet fairy tale to remember with fondness.  As I have  often recalled with bitterness, it was these very women who discouraged me from trying to seriously pursue an opera career (if I would even have been able to at the late age of 26 with no music degree and poor health habits, but who knows; with different influences and a true "champion", maybe I could have).  They told me not to "invest myself in a patriarchal art form like opera."  They made me so phobic about straight men that I was unable to act the roles I should have been singing.  (Actually I was not afraid of straight men; I was afraid of these women’s disapproval.)        

How different things are now!  Upwardly mobile professional Lesbians of subsequent generations are all marrying, finding high tech ways to procreate (don't ask!), and being house proud. They are less angry, and on the whole much mentally healthier that the "Lost Boys." Maybe because the world of the trans continuum has siphoned off most of the would-have-been butches, and possibly some of the women who swore that they would never take a job, even a dream job, where they would have to wear a skirt, most of the Lesbians I meet now appear to be indistinguishable at first glance from most of the straight women I meet, comfortable wearing dresses and socializing with straight men (I see this at the Lutheran church where I sing for example.)

But I miss Never-Never Land.  Eventually it vanished, and I was left as a middle aged woman who had never really grown up, scrambling to make something of myself in the economically ruthless world of the twenty-first century.