Thinking about queer history,
and why women’s life stories matter
by Jane Traies
In 2017 we celebrated 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 passed into law and homosexual acts between men were – at least in part – decriminalised. Last year, 2019, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York, which are widely regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement.
And, when I say ‘we’ are celebrating these events, I don’t just mean the LGBTQ community. A strange and wonderful thing has happened in much of Europe and the US in the 21st century: our queer history has suddenly gone mainstream Everyone wants a bit of it. Everyone wants to be part of the cool, liberal, equalities-supporting society we have recently become. And that’s great.
But, as the story of half a century of progress and liberation begins to harden into a generally-accepted historical narrative, it is important not to let LGBTQ history become homogenised, as if the story was the same for all of us. It wasn’t; and this is why individual life stories remain an important tool in the proper understanding of our shared past.
Lesbian relationships were never illegal, and so do not figure much in the story of 1967. Neither does the story of that iconic night outside the Stonewall Bar give lesbians much air-time. In fact, they don’t get much of a mention in many gay histories. They were always there, of course, and subject to the same social stigma as gay men; but their lives – like those of so many other women at the time – were ‘hidden from history’ then, and have to some extent continued to be so. My oral history research with lesbians born before 1950 has revealed some of the ways in which, in the second half of the 20th century, the lives of lesbian and bisexual women differed from those of gay men. We were never illegal – but we were second-class citizens nonetheless, in many ways.
The stories I collect offer a forceful reminder that the experience of stigma and discrimination is always gendered. For the women who tell me those stories, homophobia was always inflected by the institutionalised sexism of the time. In 1960s Britain a lesbian faced not only the opprobrium of society towards homosexuality in general, but also all the barriers to women’s equality shared by her heterosexual sisters. A woman without a man was still at a serious social and economic disadvantage, and that disadvantage was doubled for lesbian couples, where both partners shared the female fate of low incomes and limited job prospects. Equal pay and equal opportunities were still a decade away, and there was no redress against unfair dismissal on the grounds of either gender or sexual orientation. In 1967, women could not obtain mortgages, or take out hire purchase agreements unless a male relative signed the contract. Married women’s incomes were still taxed as if they were their husbands’ property. A lesbian was considered an ‘unfit’ mother who could – and often did – lose custody of her children if her sexual orientation was discovered.
In the second half of the twentieth century, then, lesbians still faced the ‘double whammy’ of homophobia and institutionalised sexism. Their experiences remind us that a truly intersectional and nuanced view of history is one that takes into account not only LGBTQ people’s collective difference from the mainstream, but also the diversity of experience within the LGBTQ ‘community’. Personal histories are a key tool in this project: they remind us of the individual humanity of every teller and of the intersecting influences that make each of us, straight or gay, unique.
So that’s why I do what I do.
Jane Traies
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lives-Older-Lesbians-Sexuality-Identity/dp/1349717649
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