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Journal of the History of Sexuality 16.2 (2007) 251-275

Free for All Lesbians:
Lesbian Cultural Production and Consumption in the United States during the 1970s
Heather Murray
University of Ottawa

The 1970s marked a moment when the meaning of being a lesbian took on a broader feminist significance, referring to more than simply a homoerotic attraction but a distinctive sensibility and culture. Some lesbian writers and activists had been part of an emerging gay culture expressed within the auspices of the gay liberation movement and its offshoots during the late 1960s and early 1970s that attempted to represent both gay men and lesbians. But many lesbians would come to feel that the gay liberation movement was dominated by the interests and needs of gay men, just as the feminist movement seemed dominated by the interests and needs of heterosexual women.1 One response of politically engaged lesbians was to [End Page 251] set themselves apart by fashioning a lesbian feminist movement, arguing that lesbians needed to organize and work separately from both gay men and heterosexual women. As such, lesbianism entailed a conscious political commitment, one that saw its expression in an outpouring of lesbian feminist creative writings, art, and music that emerged during the 1970s and continued into the 1980s.

As a political culture, lesbian feminism contained many different ideological strains and imperatives. As Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp have noted, some women came out as lesbians within the radical branch of the women's movement, which located women's oppression within a complex system of male domination. But lesbian feminism also mingled with cultural feminism and its emphasis that women's culture and values were different from those of men and potentially more loving and pacifist.2 One particularly provocative lesbian feminist suggestion was that if women were willing to love their female friends, they could also have physical intimacy with them. Lesbianism was not simply a sexual orientation, then, but a sexual preference and a chosen feminist philosophy.3 In this vein, theorists [End Page 252] conceived of what they called a Lesbian Nation, a separatist women's economy, institutions, cooperatives, values, and culture, a prospect that resonated with a larger intellectual and cultural climate of separatist or utopian endeavors during this period, including barter systems, back-to-the-land movements, and communes.4 For some lesbians this was a literal project; rural lesbian feminist communities, for example, sprang up in states such as Oregon during the 1970s and 1980s.5 However, as Arlene Stein points out, Lesbian Nation was often just as much a symbolic ideal.6

Lesbian political commitments, values, and longings could be expressed quite uniquely through production and consumption, which provided a sense of lesbian space, culture, and politics alike. In fact, cultural goods, creative writing, art, and music held a fundamental place in the articulation of lesbian feminism as a politics and identity: their production reflected a utopian striving for a kind of contemporary industrial republicanism, and their consumption reflected a desire for comfort, community, and even protection. This lesbian culture illuminates the yearnings of a group of women who did not fit into conventional society not just in their sexual preferences but in their work lives and creative desires. The lesbian feminist movement was not just about sexual experimentation or a consciously chosen sexuality but about the longing for a more satisfying work, leisure, and daily life as well as creative fulfillment.

The importance of creative production and consumption to lesbian politics, selfhood, and culture was somewhat ironic, because lesbian activists had been developing quite a trenchant critique of both consumption and [End Page 253] male-dominated capitalism during this period.7 And yet this critique gave a sense of cohesiveness to lesbian consumer culture, if only in providing an animating force for departures from broader patterns of consumption. In trying to preserve the uniqueness and authenticity of their creations, lesbian artisans, writers, and musicians constantly negotiated tensions...

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