"Someone like Debby": (De)Constructing a Lesbian Community of Readers

Many scholars agree that the 1940s saw dramatic changes in the way that Americans conceptualized same-sex erotic love. Allan Bérubé has examined the changes in homosexual identity and community that occurred in the military. Charles Kaiser and George Chauncey have looked into the formation of male homosexual subcultures in New York City, while John D'Emilio has traced the development of homosexual communities in the military and has briefly discussed the opportunities for same-sex contacts among women on the home front. ¹ Although much more work has been done on the history of homoerotically inclined men than on that of homoerotically inclined women, several historians have begun to trace the development of twentieth-century female homoerotic identities and communities. In her important article "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong,'" Martha Vicinus describes some female homoerotic figures from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Fast-forwarding to the middle of the twentieth century, she explains how "the politically and economically turbulent 1930s narrowed women's sexual options." In the next paragraph Vicinus asserts, "By the 1950s everyone knew what a lesbian was; she had been assigned a clearly defined role." ² This claim raises two contentious issues. First, what had happened in the intervening decade of the 1940s to disseminate this knowledge so widely? Second, did "everyone" really "know" the same thing about the figure of the "lesbian"?

The 1940s did see shifts in cultural conceptions of female homoeroticism, and historians have begun to document these changes through examinations of texts and through oral history projects based on interviews with people who lived through this time. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis investigate the development of a lesbian bar culture and a circuit of house parties in Buffalo, New York. Leila J. Rupp discusses female couples active in the early- to mid-twentieth-century women's rights movement. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Lillian Faderman explores social changes affecting young women in two wartime contexts: in the military itself and in urban centers where industrial jobs opened up to women, affording them the economic independence necessary to live apart from men and from their families. Faderman describes the consolidation of a lesbian subculture in the units of the armed services and in the bars and friendship networks that appeared in urban centers. ³ All of these studies, in fact, center on the formation of lesbian identities in a specific location where women gathered: bars, the military, women's colleges. Although these scholars have made invaluable contributions in writing histories of homoerotically inclined individuals and communities, their focus on geographically concentrated, visible cultural spaces such as the military and the bars leaves room for studies that investigate other locations of identity construction.

In seeking to trace the genealogy of nascent twentieth-century lesbian identities, I have begun to identify another site of sexual identity formation, that of a community of lesbian-identified readers and writers as it calls itself into being through correspondence with writers of literary works that represent homoerotically inclined female characters. Unlike the construction of identity through association on military bases or in gay bars, the formation of identity and a sense of community through networks of reading and writing does not depend on a physical location. Isolated in their homes or workplaces, many women who were erotically interested in other women first learned through reading that there were others who shared that interest. In the private moment of reaching out to an author in correspondence, a move toward forging a new identification can be traced. Letters written to Jo Sinclair in response to her early depiction of a "lesbian-like" character provide a close-up look at the lives and ideas of some mid-twentieth-century North American readers as they participate in the tentative construction of a form of lesbian identity. ⁴

Many scholars have noted the...