The economic status of same-sex couples from the nineteenth-century until now has drastically shaped the individuals’ living choices and, in some periods, even sense of LGBT identity. Belonging to a certain socioeconomic status brings with it not only differences in financial flexibility, but also tendencies concerning how one relates to the surrounding community. People of the working-class are more deeply embedded in their local communities because of socials networks which foster an interdependent view of self that create a reliance on family and friends, while people of the middle- and upper-classes are part of a culture that fosters the success of the individual. People who express same-sex desires are not immune to these trends, with economic status limiting options for how one can live and with whom as well as affecting a sense of belonging to a community of other people with same-sex desires. In the nineteenth century, women from the middle- and upper-classes were able to foster same-sex friendships in isolation from wider family and friends and, if they desired, would be able to financially support a same-sex domestic partnership due to their class background and educational achievements. For gay men in the 1920s and 30s, the culture of their respective social classes, more so than actual economic limitations, created two gay sub-cultures along the lines of class association and the respective feeling of belonging or not belonging to the gay community at large. Similarly, in the 1950s and 60s, lesbian culture formed which also had a differentiation based on class and the sense of community belonging. These trends illustrate how the economic status of individuals not only imposed financial restrictions on individuals and their potential partnerships but also how these socioeconomic associations imbued cultural patterns that lead to a differentiation between working-class and middle-class LGBT identity.
Female Friendships and Financial Failings
Same-sex attraction in the nineteenth century was primarily documented in the journal entries and letters of middle-class white women who forged close ties with other female friends. The closeness between women is not surprising given that “American society was characterized in large part by rigid gender-role differentiation within the family and within society as a whole” (Rosenberg, 9), which created an environment in which women could only receive emotional and social support from other women. Intense friendships often formed out of the constant contact women had with one another over single-sex schooling, child-rearing, marriage, etc., from which love and emotional dependence eventually sprung. This love was seen as benign and not carnal since there was a separation of the physical from the emotional. During this century, the love for a woman supplemented the natural love for a man since the two types of love were seen as “distinct, emotional capacities which may be coexistent in one heart” (Freeman, 189). For many women, men would be unable to provide emotional support since men and women were socialized apart from each other their entire lives. Marriage was seen as, quite literally, marrying into a new species and adjusting to a foreign environment, thus these same-sex friendships were there to ease the transition into marriage and supplement loving a man by fulfilling the woman’s emotional needs that men would never be able to satisfy.
For these predominantly white women, their lives were spent between a narrow range of female-dominated institutions. During the nineteenth-century, “women lived within a world bounded by home, church, and the institution of visiting” as well as boarding schools for most of the middle-class (Rosenberg, 10). Already, we see that these well-documented romantic friendships are strongly rooted in class-identity given that they are fostered in the leisure class with the assumption that women will marry, attend schools, and then spend their free time socializing by visiting one another. These middle-class women were able to remain separate from men and the wider community, since visiting was a task only performed by women to other women and their boarding schools were filled only with other girls and female professors. Schools marked a transition from one women-filled context to another, since they were meant to “wean the daughter from her home, to train her in the essential social graces, and, ultimately, to help introduce her into the marriage market,” providing skills for these girls to entertain other women and act femininely for men (Smith-Rosenberg, 17). In this white, middle-class society, women were kept separate from the realm of men and it was in this closed world that their relationships would form.
Such relationships were rarely seen by the outside world, with few men having a substantial glimpse into love between women since after marriage such intimacy was sustained via private letters and visits when husbands were away. In adulthood, love for other women could be surpassed by love for children and their family, thus men missed the adolescent window in which love formed that would be “surprisingly long lasting and devoted” and featured girls sleeping together (Smith-Rosenberg, 21). Faderman notes that romantic friendships were sustained in all aspects of society, but that passions were “encouraged even more strongly in an academic setting” (Faderman, 20). These isolated settings provided the most intense friendships, thus the true extent of these passions were kept apart from men and the wider society, which meant they were more private and subsequently not observed or criticized by outsiders. Apart from these institutions, women wrote letters to one another, thus maintaining the intensity of their relationships even without close proximity, but more significantly, still maintaining privacy which sustained the feeling of intimacy fostered in these close all-female spaces.
This contrasts sharply with a lesser-studied subset of women friendships in the nineteenth-century, that of working-class women of color. Letters between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, two black women living in the North, reflect a different setting for the origin of their relationship. Instead of forming within an isolated female world, the relationship between Brown and Primus sprung up while both women were “embedded in an extensive network of social and economic relationships” (Hansen, 218). This reliance on other people is reflected not only in aspects of economic life where “people shared food, loaned money, traded goods and services, ran errands, and conducted business with one another” but in other aspects of social life as well (Hansen, 223). The “intense romantic friendship between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus was recognized, facilitated, and sanctioned by their kin and friends within the African American community [emphasis added]” (Hansen, 222). This language suggests that, unlike middle-class women who were able to form and endorse their relationships in the realm of isolated communes and networks that they formed (like schools and friends), working class individuals like Brown and Primus answered to a larger community to endorse their relationship. Though both are part of networks, white women’s networks came from institutions they created. Brown and Primus do not have a choice whether or not to live in the black community, while white women can choose whether or not to socialize with their former schoolmates and other imagined, artificially-crafted communities. This accountability to the community is part of a social contract that forms precisely because of these economic institutions that fosters reciprocation between working class individuals and the people in their surrounding communities, which is in sharp contrast to middle-class friendships which were sustained in isolated, all-female contexts.
This class divide created different environments in which these same-sex relationships could be formed and developed, but beyond affecting relations with the outside community, belonging to one class or another dictated whether or not one could sustain same-sex domestic partnerships. White middle- or upper-class women were able to depend on their education level and social status to both financially support such a living arrangement and ward off accusations of gender deviance over their relationship. Black women and other women in the working class of the time would not be able to support themselves financially and lacked the privacy or reputation in society to avoid receiving labels that, in modern terms, would equate to being lesbian. From these differences in financial as well as social capital, only middle- and upper-class women were able to forge domestic partnerships that went unquestioned by society.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, educated women found positions for themselves in the realm of social reform which allowed “many early professional women” the chance to be “doctors, professors, ministers, union organizers, social workers, or pacifist lectures together—and ‘lovers evermore’” (Faderman, 22). Due to a newfound niche for educated women in the realms of social advancement, women were able to secure jobs that would allow them to be financially independent and, for some, then live with the women they wanted to be “lovers evermore” with. Through creating this niche for themselves, women who were interested in same-sex relationships “achieved the economic freedom […] to live as what the later twentieth century would consider lesbians” (Faderman, 23). By achieving the economic ability to avoid marriage, these women—provided both were equally educated—were able to “make a life together,” in romantic friendships that came to be known as “Boston marriages” (Rupp, 45). This alternative to heterosexual marriage allowed women who could financially support themselves to not live with kin as had been the practice for unmarried women in the past.
Though an expansion of job opportunities greeted college-educated, middle-class white women, no such improvement of economic prospects greeted working-class, black women. Despite economic prosperity for towns in the North, “black women found few jobs open to them outside of laundry and domestic service” (Hansen, 217). At the time, “women engaged in wage labor had to struggle to eke out an independent livelihood” (Hansen, 227), thus unlike wealthier, white women who could advance an independent existence, working-class women like Brown were forced to live with other people—either their own family or the men they would marry. Brown and Primus would have liked to “marry” (rather, live with) each other, but Brown “recognized the limits of her narrow horizons” (Hansen, 217), aware that “African-American working women who did not marry suffered economic hardships throughout their lives” (Hansen, 227). Despite their desire to live together, both realized they had to marry men since they, like most women of the time, “did not have the option of choosing a female partnership over heterosexual marriage” (Hansen, 227), thus both sought out marriages as if they were financial agreements, not romantic ventures (Hansen, 225). Due to limited financial ability, working women were unable to “marry” each other and thus had to marry men in order to sustain themselves, lacking the luxury of sustaining a domestic partnership like wealthier women.
Though economics limited their chances to live together, Primus and Brown would have also faced stronger opposition to their living arrangement than white women engaged in “Boston marriages” would have due to the limited social capital they carried with them. As shown above, economic ties to their community also produced greater community surveillance and policing of their relationship which occasionally manifested itself in disapproving sentiments. Brown and Primus engaged not only in an intense, emotional friendship, but also a sexual relationship, practicing “bosom sex” (Hansen, 219), which would have been suspect to others if they knew, though many assumed this was the case. A neighbor questioned whether or not it was appropriate for their relationship to exist between two women instead of between a man and a woman to which Mrs. Primus said that “if either one of [them] was a gent [they] would marry” (Hansen, 222). Though the mother’s statement expresses support of their lesbianism, both comments reflect that the relationship between the two was known to be (or at least questioned to be) romantic and not entirely platonic.
This high level of questioning existed for these two women despite the fact that they did not even live together, yet for many wealthier, white women, domestic partnerships could last for years without eliciting public accusations of romantic interest or even raising suspicion at all. Though decades later, romantic friendships in the early twentieth-century had this same type of shielding for the upper-class. Eleanor Roosevelt engaged in a “world of coupled women” that acted as companions to each other and her, but “it was their respectability, their class privilege, their ladylike pearls that protected them” from any accusations of deviance (Rupp, 154). Boston marriages at the turn of the century no doubt elicited the same response from passersby who perhaps could not fathom that white women engaged in social work or teaching could have any semblance of a sexual relationship. Given “assumptions about women’s asexuality” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what went on in private was assumed to be innocent, yet for working class women there was no privacy to retreat to since they lived with other individuals. Perhaps because of this, working-class individuals’ intimacy was perhaps visible to others which aroused suspicion for couples like Primus and Brown but—given the middle-class penchant for domesticity—wealthier women may have been able to hide any affection that would arouse suspicion by retreating to their individual homes and thus maintain the illusion of asexuality that the publicly-regulated and high-visibility working class lesbian relationship could not.
“Public Prostitutes” and “Artificial Aesthetes”: Gay Male Class Antagonism
But it is not just finances that dictate how belonging to a certain economic class will shape one’s experiences as an LGBT individual. Certain cultural values exist for the working- and middle-classes that permeate how one interacts with others in their community. Professor Hazel Markus examines the different approaches to views of self that people of different socioeconomic statuses take, noting that working-class individuals are more likely to be interdependent than middle-class individuals are. Part of this interdependence springs from the reciprocation mentioned above in the case of Primus and Brown, since relating to others is a “useful strategy for surviving when there are two few resources to go around” as was the case in black and other working-class communities in late nineteenth-century New England (Markus, 92). Interdependent selves begin to view themselves as part of a whole, relational and similar to others in some group, which contrasts with independent individuals who believe they are unique and independent from other people (Markus, xiii). This difference between interdependent and independent selves can be seen in the close communities that working-class gays and lesbians form in the early and mid-twentieth century and the reactions towards that group culture from wealthier LGBT people who feel apart from that culture.
The earliest gay male culture to form in large cities came about in red-light districts in the 1930s where gay men began to assume feminine roles that would later be known as “fairies.” These gay men acted as women in their movements and gait, which lead to an adoption of the feminine, penetrated role in sexual intercourse with men. These traits meant that they were assuming “the status of a woman or even a prostitute” (Chauncey, 100). Such men formed the basis of the gay world that was “remarkably integrated into the life of the working-class neighborhoods in which it took shape” (Chauncey, 44), thus working-class communities became the centers of fairy life and male prostitution. By growing out of these working-class spaces, the gay scene of the time became linked with this working-class community that it took physical place in as well as drew constituents from. These fairies came from these working-class backgrounds and thus viewed these gay communities as their homes since the gay community was forging an even tighter community within tight-knit, working-class villages that most of these individuals already belonged to.
Men that did not come from these working-class areas felt distanced from the gay community which was forming, which they associated with “working-class degeneracy” because of the prominence of the fairies who, given the high number of prostitutes, they saw as “male degenerates” (Chauncey, 36). The gay scene was taking place in red-light districts which many viewed as degenerate and dangerous, thus few gay men of the middle- or upper-classes wished to join these districts. Fairies became the public face of what being gay meant, yet the high visibility of this group went against “middle-class gay culture” which “tended to be more circumspect, as was middle-class culture generally at the turn of the century” (Chauncey, 45). Most of the gay men who felt apart from the community sought more discretion than was afforded in the fairy communities—which at the time represented the entirety of what it meant to be gay. This lead to the creation of the queer movement, which was a group of men that did not feel gender deviant and possessed more masculine qualities than fairies. Middle-class values were more clearly espoused in the queer movement, including the “middle-class preference for privacy, self-restraint, and lack of appeal” (Chauncey, 106). This explanation suggests that the values of this queer movement were closer aligned to successfully balancing one’s position in the public sphere and public advancement, since fairy displays were seen as brash or sill. Many many men believed that acting so gender deviant “automatically preempted social advancement” (Chauncey, 106). For advancement in early twentieth century America, feminine demeanor would have been inappropriate in the work place, thus queer preference for subtlety may be a response to pronounced gender deviance in the existing gay community and an interest in achieving later individual social advancement.
Given that working-class individuals have a greater emphasis on community and relationships, the public, gay life they lead would have been seen as a way to foster ties within their (gay) community, while the middle-class often espouses values that separate one’s personal life from one’s public or work life, thus by hiding actions and behaviors that were deemed gay (i.e. effeminate in this point in time, due to the prevalence of the fairy image), queers were able to maintain one’s public image in its best shape for eventual social advancement. Middle-class individuals often look out for themselves more than they would their community or family, thus the preference for comparative social isolation from the gay community and self-restraint of gender deviant behaviors in exchange for greater potential of individual success would be outweighed against the interdependent desire to do good by belonging to and strengthening the gay community. In its earliest years, “the culture of the fairies provided remarkable support to men,” thus fostering a sense of community among these gay men (Chauncey, 99), but this did not attract independent middle-class men in the way it did interdependent working-class individuals. Craving such support is something that is needed by working-class individuals which is precisely what happened in the 1930s and 40s when the culture appealed mostly to this class demographic. Middle-class men did not flock to the movement perhaps because they did not need community support for their gay identity, which aligns with the independence that middle-class culture fosters. Additionally, since queer men would act in more feminine ways in private, gay settings, but would not publicly act in this way as fairies would, this suggests that their motivation to avoid the gay community at the time was not due to fundamental, ideological opposition to the gender deviance of fairies, rather their desire for social advancement (by maintaining an illusion of heterosexuality) rather (Chauncey, 105). By publicly rejecting the values that were prevalent in the gay community at the time (gender deviance), queer men were opting for more discretion which would lead to individual advancement instead of seeking a sense of belonging to a community based on gay identity.
These middle-class queers eventually created their own culture that served as a counterpoint to the low-class, degeneracy they saw in the fairy culture. Queer culture included embracing higher forms of culture such as art and theater with the intention of being able to pass what was once read as effeminate behavior instead as mannered and ambiguous behavior that hinted at sophistication. Anglophilia in the style of Wilde became widespread, which deflected suspicions of gender nonconformity to differences in taste or style. Because the new queer culture they were forming was rooted in the class background and interests of the high class, any accusations leveled at them of gender nonconformity could be dismissed “as a sign of lower-class brutishness” (Chauncey, 107). Beyond providing a shield and cover for effeminate behavior, this shift towards this elite, sophisticated behavior may have also further entrenched the class divides between queers and fairies. Only middle-class gay men would have had the background to feel comfortable in these predominantly middle-class or upper-class cultural institutions of theater and literature given that they would require more education to comprehend and discuss fluently. Institutions would soon form around these queer interests, with fancier vacation spots that catered to a gay audience forming in the 1950s, which were part of “an exclusive world, open only to white, middle- and upper-class people loosely connected to the world of the arts” (Rupp, 147). This meant that working-class individuals would be barred from participating in such scenes because they would lack the financial means and cultural capital to participate in them.
These two gay subcultures were formed because of a fundamental incompatibility in how working-class and middle-class gays viewed a commitment to community. Fairies felt that it was essential to forge an identity-based community while queers desired individual advancement which required them to resist participating in any gay community that had the potential to limit them in mainstream society—which belonging to the fairy community clearly did at the time due to overt gender deviance. Over time, queers would form a culture rooted in middle- and upper-class values that would further entrench these two communities. This was done by restricting access on both sides, since the cultural knowledge required to participate in the queer community barred working-class people from the middle-class gay scene, while the juxtaposition of queer life and fairy life demonized the working-class gay subculture for being rooted in sex and cultural depravity—in direct opposition to the bourgeois social capital that queers possessed which left few middle-class people willing to “stoop” to participating in fairy life.
“Butch Bars” and “Pristine Parlors”: Lesbian Class Antagonism
The creation of the public image of the American lesbian faced a similar battle over representation along class lines, since the prominent image of lesbianism in the public’s eyes featured the earliest lesbian bars whose patrons were mostly working-class women. The formation of this scene began in the 1940s and, again, fostered a community for these women who often had few places to socialize with other women publicly given that this was a time when it was unsafe for women to even be outside alone. During this era “bars were the only possible place for working-class lesbians to congregate outside of private homes” since open spaces subjected women to male surveillance and the home subjected them to the surveillance of close family (Kennedy & Davis, 30). Women who lived on their own had apartments too small for company, which left bars as the only possible gathering space.
Seeking out bars was an unorthodox choice given that at the time it was uncommon for women to be in bars at all, thus this choice of gathering space hints that their was a significant “drive to find others like themselves” and “to come together and build community” (Kennedy & Davis, 31), which ties into the principle that working-class individuals strongly desire to be among their own kind due to their interdependence. Lesbians around this time believed “finding the bars was often synonymous with finding a named identity and community” thus these spaces reflected lesbian culture at large instead of being mere physical spaces for lesbians to meet (Franzen, 896). Given that there was no public image of lesbianism in the 1940s, bar culture, though rooted in a working-class environment, began to express what it meant to be a lesbian generally instead of representing what it meant to be a working-class lesbian.
Working-class women were the ones least able to socialize with other lesbians safely, thus they sought out and formed gathering places for lesbians within their physical communities, but still outside of the home. Because these spaces formed in their communities, these bars were located in “rough sections of the city” (Kennedy & Davis, 44), which, in addition to attracting the working-class lesbian community it was trying to foster, attracted clientele from the criminal underworld. In Lillian Faderman’s memoir, she describes a girlfriend having “chats with a long procession of pimps and prostitutes and addicts and johns” in these bars, which reflects the prevalence of criminals and a disregard for laws that was rampant in such bars (Faderman, 152). Beyond merely encountering such individuals, Faderman’s girlfriend counted such people as her friends, once “gloating about her cronies” that “they’re as crooked as corkscrews” (Faderman, 152). Such interactions show the relative ease with which such questionable figures were encountered, suggesting that these bars were relatively unsafe. Police harassment was also prominent at such institutions, with Lillian’s girlfriend telling her to not be upset over one case of harassment since “it happens all the time” (Faderman, 156). Though less prominent for lesbians, police harassment was a feature of nightlife in such bars due to the high concentration of lesbians and criminals which made attending these bars more risky for young lesbians.
This lack of safety or protection from harassment did not deter working-class women from attending bars since there were no alternative lesbian social space for them, but upper-class women crafted alternative spaces in which to meet, like their own homes. The danger of the parts of the city that had bars deterred these wealthier women since money “did not provide them protection in less reputable sections of the city” but it could buy them spaces to meet in private (Kennedy & Davis, 44). These wealthier lesbians “mostly socialized in posher straight places or at home” which were two alternatives unavailable to working-class women since they required a high income, larger home, and relative privacy (Rupp, 149)—none of which working-class lesbians possessed. Additionally, “upper-class women did not welcome working-class women into their parties” which meant that there was no potential for mobility from the working- to upper-class lesbian scene (Kennedy & Davis, 44). As will be shown later, upper-class lesbians were unwilling (beyond the safety issue) to attend the working-class bars, thus there was little mixing of the two lesbian class-based subcultures that formed. Faderman’s experiences in 1970 reflect this same idea, since wealthier lesbians from Los Angeles would have parties in Manhattan Beach with “a circle of friends who were nothing like the women [she’d] know at the Open Door” which was a lesbian bar (Faderman, 313). These parties occurred either at restaurants or in private homes on the west coast in 1970, much as was the case in New York in the 1940s and 1950s for Buffalo, reflecting that these trends were part of two national, competing subcultures for lesbians that grew in parallel from the 1940s to at least the 1970s.
The question of whether or not one could maintain social respectability as a patron of these lesbian bars also arises, since “bar culture developed well-defined norms and modes of dress and behavior” (Rupp, 150) that often featured sharp delineations of butch and fem women. One patron was described as being “dressed in typical male working-class attire as much of the time as possible,” which shows that bar culture heavily emphasized gender deviance and being “out” about one’s sexuality (Rupp, 150). This visual image became so prominent that it was what most people associated with the word lesbian by the 1950s and 60s.
Because of the clear image and style associated with lesbian bars (and the clear statement of lesbianism that this was associated with), Rupp argues that around 1960, “it was not class but willingness to be ‘out’ about one’s sexuality that distinguished bar-going lesbians from those who stayed away” (Rupp, 149). I believe this point is accurate in that the bars had so clearly adopted a lesbian atmosphere that associations with it would automatically out one as a lesbian, but I disagree that this has nothing to do with class. Just as queer men were unwilling to pursue a fairy life style because effeminacy would limit their individual advancements and job prospects, I believe that middle-class lesbians were less willing to be out because of their economic position. Kennedy and Davis suggest that “middle-class women did not go to the bars, because they were afraid of being exposed and losing their jobs” (43). This fear was more prominent for middle-class women because they did not want to lose access to jobs that women had just been able to secure for the first time in the 1940s and 50s. Maintaining respectability is more important for these women since, unlike the working-class women who, in attending the bars, are still within their own community, middle-class women would have to leave their middle-class space to attend such bars which subjects them to greater scrutiny since they are leaving their safe space.
Additionally, losing respectability poses a greater risk for middle-class jobs like being a secretary or teacher than working-class jobs such as factory worker or seamstress since middle-class jobs emphasize the traits and morals of the individual practitioner while working-class jobs depend little on the traits of the worker given that they are just anonymous workers performing labor tasks in most cases. Faderman notes the prominence of these wealthier lesbians in her autobiography, since the private lesbian circle they form in Los Angeles consistent of women who “were teachers, social workers, nurses, real estate agents” meaning they were “serious members of the few professions that had been open to females ten or twenty years before” (Faderman, 313). Faderman’s emphasis on them being “serious members” of these professions leads me to believe that their choice of not being out has much to do with an unwillingness to taint their individual reputation that they had accrued in their respective fields. Being outed would cause them to lose their job, which would not only be a setback for the individual but also be a setback for all women in the middle-class workplace, which I believe provided extra motivation for more of these middle-class women to maintain discretion. Thus, contrary to what Rupp asserts, in the 1960s the choice of whether or not to attend bars was more than just a question of whether or not one wanted to be out—since this is a question that factors in the nature of the individual’s work which is rooted heavily in one’s class background.
Out of this conflict over representation, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) formed to attempt to expand the image of what it means to be a lesbian in the United States. Four couples formed a social club whose original purpose was to create “an alternative to the bar scene” which dominated lesbian social life and the mainstream population’s understanding of lesbians (Rupp, 163). Since the bars had “limited appeal” to these couples, they attempted to craft an image contrary to this through their magazine, “The Ladder,” which spoke out against the gender deviant, bar-attending image that most people had of lesbians, instead advocating for adorning traditional feminine clothing (Rupp, 163). This approach was rooted in an assimilationist policy since they “worked to prove the respectability of lesbians and to win acceptance within mainstream society” (Rupp, 163).
I contend that the assimilationist goal is one that aligns closely with the desire to be part of the economic middle-class since, as one DOB leader suggested “if you weren’t willing to dress up at that time you couldn’t get a decent job” (D’Emilio, 106). This aligns with the composition of its constituents who were “for the most part white-collar semiprofessionals” (D’Emilio, 106), yet for many lesbian factory workers, they did not desire to join this middle-class culture. Even though “involvement in the bar subculture may have restricted the options of its participants” for many, “it also sustained among patrons a strong sense of their identity as lesbians” (D’Emilio, 107), which is why few desired to leave their posts as factory workers in exchange for other low-paying jobs since it meant sacrificing gender deviant clothing and, subsequently, giving up ties to the only lesbian community they had. Gaining these new, middle-class positions was not sufficient enough of an improvement “to outweigh the estrangement from the one group in which they found acceptance” for these working-class women (D’Emilio, 107). Given how few working-class women joined DOB, this shows that for working-class women the sense of identity as part of a community was more significant than achieving economic success, while for the middle-class, this chance at individual success was precisely what motivated people like the members of DOB to act out against the bar subculture since such a culture had the potential to limit them. Middle-class women opted to avoid the lesbian community in exchange for better chances at individual achievements which is contrary to the interdependent, working-class desire to remain in a close community—highlighting the ideological differences fostered in these two socioeconomic groups.
Conclusions
In the early nineteenth-century, only the wealthiest lesbian partners were able to live together in partnerships. One hundred years later, wealthier gay men separated from the predominantly working-class fairies. Several decades later, wealthier lesbians separated from the predominantly working-class bar dwellers. These transitions signal important moments in the formation of an LGBT identity, since these earliest partnerships laid the groundwork for later lesbian couples while the twentieth-century forged the first public images for what it meant to be a gay man or a lesbian woman in the United States. The role of class in these pivotal LGBT events has long been overlooked since economic status limited what was financially possible for these individuals but it also shaped their willingness to be part of a larger community.
Financial limitations played a larger role in the female friendships of the nineteenth centuries since the majority of women were dependent on men for finances in the early part of the century. There was a shift as educational opportunities allowed wealthier women to earn an independent living, however, this economic shift to female financial independence did not manifest itself in working-class communities, thus only the wealthiest women could forge domestic partnerships. Access to privacy was also greater for wealthier women both because of the physical separation they could afford by owning their own apartments or homes, but also because of social status, which made maintaining a lesbian relationship more feasible for people who were not of the working-class since they were less susceptible to outside monitoring.
Class cultures also played a role in where and how gay identity formed. Due to working-class interdependence, the earliest gay or lesbian communities that formed in the twentieth-century were rooted in these close-knit, working-class areas. Wealthier individuals who did not relate to the people in these spaces possessed the financial means to create less public, more discrete LGBT-friendly spaces either in wealthier, “straight” public spaces or in their own private homes. The response of wealthier individuals to these early, working-class LGBT communities reflects an unwillingness to give up independent desires for the sake of an interdependent whole and sense of belonging to a group. Both the gay male image and the lesbian image of the mid-twentieth century reflected deep gender nonconformity and participation in such networks would immediately “out” the participant. This would preclude any social advancement which left independent, wealthier individuals less willing to join such organizations for fear of losing their jobs. This was a larger concern for middle- and upper-class people since their jobs relied more on personal characteristics, but also, due to their independent backgrounds, they did not view the benefit of being part of a community as outweighing the harm that would be done to their personal social status. Interdependent working-class individuals saw the sense of community belonging as more significant than potentially gaining any social standing by staying away from other gays or lesbians, thus they opted to remain part of these communities.
Out of such cultural differences between the two economic classes sprung distinct gay and lesbian identities that became deeply entrenched as institutions sprung up to support each of them. Wealthier individuals created resorts and a culture of refinement that was unattainable to the working-class, while the widespread belief in the depravity and gender deviance of the working-class cultures placed a social stigma that prevented the participation of the middle-class in these working-class gay or lesbian communities. By ignoring the culture that different classes create, scholarship has ignored the cultural and social limitations that restricted what types of gay identities were available to individuals in these various points of history. Financial obstacles to living together or participating in a certain type of institution were clearly noted in research, but the mindset fostered by one’s socioeconomic status plays just as significant of a role in shaping whether or not a person feels compelled to join a predominantly working-class community at the risk of losing social status.
Works Cited
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Faderman, Lillian. Naked in the Promised Land. Madison: U of Wisconsin, 2003. Print.
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-century America. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.
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