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Dressing for Sex

One of the most telling examples of the way kinship rules were suspended as a crisis response is the relative tolerance shown lesbians in the military and defense sector during the war. Both the plants and the services attracted large numbers of lesbians. Others who joined the effort discovered they were attracted to women by being in all-female work groups and military outfits. In the port cities and factory towns, cohesive lesbian communities developed, each with a coherent pattern of dress and behavior. However, once the war was over, the efforts to police both gays and lesbians resumed at a level of viciousness unseen before the war.

The most publicly visible sign of the lesbian subculture was the dress of the masculine-identified lesbian, or "butch." Several discrete symbols were part of the adult butch look in the 1940s: very short hair; either blue jeans or a man-tailored suit; boots, loafers, or sneakers. Butches claimed the desire to wear these items came from within, an expression of self:

I have always considered myself butch identified. I have never felt feminine. I wore dresses because my mother bought my clothes, but as soon as I drew my first paycheck at age seventeen, I paid down on my first suit. Over the years women have asked why I dress so mannish. My response has been that I like wearing man-tailored clothing; it's the way I choose to express myself.

Aside from expressing gender orientation, this behavior was, importantly, a means of communi-cating sexual desire to other lesbians. As one butch described it: "Dress for yourself. I like me butch, I know me butch, I know how to act butch. Be butch and dress for sex.”

The butch look was designed specifically to signal to a feminine-identified lesbian, the “femme,” and was often a conscious attempt to attract or seduce. Femmes dressed in a way that was not only hyper-feminine and sexy, but often rather formal. Silks and satins, spaghetti straps and high heels, these symbols appear repeatedly in the accounts of the early femmes. Comparisons are often made to women in the movies--not to Katherine Hepburn, but to glamour girls like Rita Hayworth. The femmes wore makeup, something that attracted and intrigued the butches: “I love women in makeup. I want to know what's underneath but without removing the pancake, mascara, lipstick. No, they're not dolls. They are actors in an ancient theater, real people playing fantasies, actors playing characters wearing comic or tragic masks. I am as fascinated by the mask as I am curious to remove it.” The femme lesbian, therefore, did embrace the feminine aesthetic of appearance, but, in their choice of sex partners, refused to accept the culture’s restrictions on sexual behavior. Thus, the butch's counterpart, the femme, was also a transgressive persona.

The femme finely tuned her display of self into an image of the feminine that, while recognizable as a stereotype, was aimed straight and specifically for the butch. Though the femme wore heels and slinky dresses, she was not trying to attract a man. She was trying to attract a butch. So, she has to be recognizable as a femme and not just as feminine. That necessitates a subtle difference in the cues, much like the one that makes a woman in pants a butch rather than a man. The ethic of this display is to give what has previously been forbidden or elusive for the butch--the experience of being with a feminine woman. The femmes also became sensitive to the signals of the butch, whose characteristic smells, sights, and touches became highly eroticized in their imaginations: “. . . I was thinking about Bobby, remembering her sitting, smoking, squint-eyed, and me looking down at the way her thighs shaped in her jeans.”

Butches "dressed for sex" were easily identifiable to the ordinary American: "Even though many of my butch buddies 'pass' on the street, most of us, me included, couldn't hang out safely with the boys at the pool hall without breast reduction and a handgun." Writing today, butches sometimes brush off their identifiability with the explanation that, in those days, women didn't wear pants. Some even claim that trousers and suits for women were unavailable. But the ads and editorial material in the women’s magazines show that trousers for women were available in a range of options, including even tailored suits. So, it wasn't just the trousers that made the butches so clearly identifiable. Instead, “butch” was a highly cultivated look, in which the slightest mistake could result in exclusion and disappointment.

One "baby butch" went from the suburbs into New York wearing a skirt, but carrying men's clothing in her purse. She changed in an alley, stashed the skirt and purse in a locker, and slicked her hair back into a duck's ass: “A tough-acting woman in man's clothes was called a butch diesel. I desperately wanted to be a butch diesel. This would be a great accomplishment for a sixteen-year-old suburban kid, cruising weekends in the Village. I had been in 'the life' on the streets--it wasn't enough. I wanted to go into the butch diesels' bars, to be accepted as one of them. They were tough, cocky, sure of themselves. They intimidated by their very existence." She had already been watching the bar she wanted to go in. Though a friend had told her the "men" going into the bar were actually women, she had a difficult time believing it: "You couldn't tell unless you heard them talk, and even then sometimes I wasn't sure. I had finally accepted the truth and had watched them go in, alone or with snazzily dressed women. But I had never dared enter; it was out of my league. Well, no longer--I was ready!" She went into the bar. Everyone turned to look at her. Conversation stopped. This was a common occurrence in the gay bars: the crowd "sized you up" to see whether you were a policeman or a misfit. She waited in agony to see whether she would be accepted:

The silence was broken by a voice: 'Oh my God, Millie,' someone said, 'it's Prince Valiant!' And everyone roared with laughter, and I knew, I knew. My hand reached up to find that my baby-fine hair had shed the beer glop and had drifted down and forward to hang limply about my ears. I reached for the flask, then re-alized it was too late. What would I do with it? Pour it on my head? I just held it on the table, too numb to move, too embarrassed to speak or even lift my head. I would love to say “And then everyone came over and said, 'Welcome,' and we all lived happily ever after.' It didn't happen. I ate the burger, left the fries, and split. Then they spoke: “Good night, sweet prince. A valiant effort.”

The baby butches who got lucky found a mentor, like Leslie Feinberg's Butch Al, who took Leslie "under her wing and taught me all the things she thought were most important for a baby butch like me to know.” Al taught Leslie to tie her tie, how to treat women, and even how to use a dildo. The tenor of their relationship has a father-son quality that is almost stereotypic, but sincere: "She was gruff with me all right. But she peppered it with mussing my hair, hugging my shoulders, and giving my face something more than a pat and less than a slap. I liked it. I appreciated the affection in her voice when she called me 'kid,' which she did frequently.”

Butch Al and her girlfriend, Jackie, spent hours grooming and dressing Leslie:

They took me to secondhand stores to get me my first sport coat and tie. Al combed the racks, pulling out sport coat after sport coat. I tried each one on. Jackie would tilt her head, then shake it, no.

Finally the perfect sport coat was selected. Jackie smoothed my lapels and nodded in approval. Al gave a low whistle of appreciation. I had died and gone to butch heaven!

Then came the tie. Al picked it out for me: a narrow black silk tie. "You can't go wrong with a black tie," she informed me solemnly. And, of course, she was right.

So being butch, like being feminine, required an array of dress items, cut in a certain way and put together in a certain way, as well as a particular temperament to be expressed through manner and speech. To do it well required focus, effort, and a sense of style. It also could inspire a very energizing vanity.

Tonight all the jokes will be funny I will be the entertaining, laugh-a-minute, woman-of-the-world butch. I will be the writer with the funny anecdotes, the witty comments. I will be barbed and bristling, busy, busy with my butch performance. I will stand at that bar and select my femme, who picked me out moments beforehand anyway, and I will dance my butch's dance for her. I will be dapper and aching to please this woman, who spied the shark and reeled her in with a hand line.

Having established cues for signaling each other, recognition and seduction was enjoyed by both parties:

I remember years ago, the day I started working at the plant and you had al-ready been there a few months, and how your eyes caught mine and played with me before you set me free. I was supposed to be following the foreman to fill out some forms, but I was too busy wondering what color your hair was un-der that white paper net and how it would look and feel in my fingers, down loose and free. And I remember how you laughed gently when the foreman came back and said, "You comin’ or not?"

I couldn't believe it the night I went to that new club on the West Side (a new bar almost every other week). There you were, leaning up against the bar, your jeans too tight for words and your hair, your hair all loose and free.

And I remember that look in your eyes again. You didn't just know me; you liked what you saw. And this time, ooh, woman, we were on our own turf. I could move the way you wanted me to, and I was glad I'd gotten all dressed up.

In this courting ritual, the grooming and showing of oneself to the other is stimulation and stimulating, build-up and denouement. The mating dance the two potential lovers choreograph is a complex putting on and taking off of masks, of asserted power and revealed vulnerability:

There was a woman once for whom I danced my butch's dance. And she danced her femme's dance for me and showed me what was underneath the mask. She was soft and curvy and as hard as flint, and she showed me that the mask was not a lie, not hers of apparent soft femininity nor mine of seeming steel and bluster. She taught me the excitement, the meaning of contradiction--not a flat nega-tion of mutually exclusive opposites but the energizing of mole-cules oscillating constantly from one extreme to the other, always in flux.

And she initiated me, as surely as any high priestess, into the wonders of women's power. Hidden strength, deceptive power, always beneath the tranquil sur-face, a mask of apparent vulnerability and powerlessness. But with one swift movement women's power lashes out of the soft curves and slaps you in the face with startling muscularity, a punishment for simplistically and impu-dently believing that the looked-at have no power.

It's ironic that this butch, who put together her own appearance with constant awareness of how she would look to the femmes, would think of them as the ones who are "looked-at" and implicitly exclude herself from that category. A consistent feminist objection to erotic representations of women is that a woman, by becoming something "looked at," is reduced to an object, and thus rendered powerless. The butch and the femme, like a man and a woman, both show themselves to each other and look at each other in the course of seduction. Part of the butch's role is to be “the one who looks.” The femme certainly is looking (and their partners know it), so she feigns the affect of being only looked at. It is clear that the femmes derived a certain sense of power over the butch from all the orchestration and display. And, the femme, though feminine, was not necessarily seen as powerless by the butch.

The highly erotic dance of dress that constituted the lesbian courtship of the forties and fifties must have been a powerful draw because, after the war, the butches of that day endured arrests, rapes, civil rights violations, and daily harassment as the price for becoming part of that subculture. Police brutality was frequent. Butches were also chased, mugged, and stoned by "civilians." The narratives they tell are horrifying, akin in many ways to the racial harassment stories of the Deep South. Yet the butches also took chances that seem almost to invite disaster. There was a rule in New York, for example, that if a woman wasn't wearing at least three items of "woman's clothing," she could be arrested for impersonating a man. It seems like an easy way to deal with such a rule would be to dress like a butch, but wear some kind of women's underwear--not a bra, but maybe panties or a garter or stockings or something. Instead, they were butches right down to the skin: they wore men's underwear. The police would strip them, humiliating in itself, and find BVD's. Then, they were likely to be jailed, which often led to beatings.

The butches' insistence on wearing men's underwear, even under threat of violence and arrest, is instructive. Consider that if the objective was to "dress for sex" and the climax of this mating ritual was the butch and femme undressing for each other (also deemed important in heterosexual encounters), then the effect would be substantially dampened by the sudden appearance under the butch's carefully groomed exterior of, say, a garter belt. A lot of effortful seduction could go down the drain at that point. Furthermore, if we apply the discussion of the use of material objects to realize the self, as well as express it, then the underwear was important to the butch's whole construction of herself as a sexual subject.

The lesbian, like the heterosexual female, performs her inner experience of gender using the terms of the culture--boots and jeans or heels and satin. That's because culturally-inscribed objects are the only kind we have (and the only kind we will ever have). We now know that human sexuality generally is not a set of poles, but a continuum that may be acted out using a set of otherwise polarized signs. From the perspective of a multivocal continuum—rather than a “them” and “us” categorization—we can see that various orientations and individual identities are expressed in different combina-tions of gendered artifacts and practices.
Through the activism of the 1970s and 1980s, the lesbian community eventually overcame the repressive efforts of 1950s culture to put them back in their invisible place in the kinship system. Though the efforts of Second Wave feminism reintroduced dress restrictions for lesbians (a point that will be addressed in a later chapter), the culture at large began to display a remarkable mix of gendered signs by the end of the 20th century. Basketball Player Dennis Rodman wore eye makeup and a pink boa to book signings with remarkably little comment from his team. K. D. Lang, a very popular lesbian singer, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair dressed very “butch” and being “barbered” by supermodel Cindy Crawford. The kinds of dress restrictions actually put into law during the postwar period would be simply impossible now. However, one segment of the spectrum is still precluded from expressing itself without condemnation from feminists: the feminine, heterosexual woman is still presumed to have no agency in the performance of gender, regardless of her transgressions in work, sexuality, or politics.

Human beings need to create a sexual world in which to realize their desires. To the extent that gendered signs are used to express desire and preference, thus bring the love and satisfaction we crave, asking people to give up signs of dress condemns them to celibacy. For feminists who deal with the constraints of gender by becoming asexual, this may seem perfectly acceptable. To others, it is merely another harsh injunction to accept sexual passivity as the price of being female.

Postwar Post Mortem

The American kinship system and its attendant rules about work, dress, consumption, and sexuality were permeable at many levels during the war, not just at the level of women's work. The system itself seems to have demanded much of this “crossover” effect as the cost of protecting the community. Once the threat was over, there were actions on every front to close the gaps that opened up during the crisis. Not only were women encouraged to go back home, but a New Look was presented by fashion designers that rearticulated femininity in an exaggerated way with cinched waists and big skirts. Though popularized Freudianism increas-ingly presented women as creatures of sexual appetite, the only accepted mode for female sexual expression continued to be marriage to a male. Lesbians and gays who had gone relatively unmolested during the war years were thrown into jail, beaten, and taunted on the street. Even the popular pin-ups came under fire in renewed efforts to enforce censorship laws after the war. When we consider all these things along with the employment phenomenon that sent women back home, the kinship system—which denied women the right to control their own sexuality as part and parcel of their economic role—seems to be at least as much at fault as capitalism.

An enormous blossoming of new households was produced by the emphatic return of the traditional family, putting a strain on existing housing and fueling the postwar economy into overdrive. And so, G. I. Joes married retired Rosies, got their home loans, and settled in to repopulate the kinship system. After the experience of war, Joe and Rosie were not inclined to tolerate either sexual or political rebellion. Little did they know that in the cradles of America grew the seeds of both.