Thinking About Boy Children, December 1989

I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of boy children since a really ugly incident erupted at the East Coast Lesbian Festival over the Labor Day weekend, 1989. The festival brochure stated ‘girlcare’ was available, a positive way of saying this is a female-only event. Two Lesbians, co-mothers of an 18 month old boy, circumvented the organizers’ intention by caring for their boy themselves and being discreet about his gender. Their subterfuge was uncovered, revealed to all in a most unpleasant way. The mothers awoke on the last morning of the festival to find their cabin covered with signs: Pricklet Go Home; No Males In Lesbian Space; No Pricks Allowed… Needless to say, the mothers were furious. They asked for support, and they got it.

A contingent of pro-boy Lesbians demanded mike time on the stage before the final concert at noon. The organizers, Lin Daniels and Myriam Fougere, demurred, citing lack of time for public discussion, voicing concern for the performers’ feelings and their valuable equipment, in place on the stage. ‘We are going to read a statement from the stage,’ they announced. ‘You can have it peacefully, with no danger to the equipment; or we can storm the stage. It is your choice.’ Because of the threat, the organizers gave in. The statement, filled with generalizations about love and peace and ‘lets respect our diversity,’ was received with cheers and applause by most of the Lesbians present.

In the meantime, Myriam and Lin drafted Julia Penelope to make a pro Lesbian-only, women-only space statement. She spoke and was booed. She was hissed. She was yelled at. She was called names. 'If it wasn’t for your father, you wouldn’t be here,’ screamed the Lesbian behind me, followed by roars of approval from others around us. Hundreds of furious Lesbians, their faces distorted by rage, shook their fists in the air. 'You don’t speak for me,’ they shouted, forgetting in their passion for the rights of boys and their mothers, that Julia belonged to the Lesbian diversity they were respecting moments before.

Most of the festival goers were under forty years old. They haven’t known a time without a visible Lesbian community. Most of them have not experienced their Lesbian life without the presence of Lesbian organizations and groups, newsletters, bookstores, books, records, concerts, festivals; doctors, therapists, psychics, chiropractors; Marches on Washington; Gay Pride Day, DESERT HEARTS and LIANNA in their consciousness, if not their own town. In fact, the Lesbians booing Julia Penelope, for reminding us how little Lesbian-only or women-only space there is on the planet and how much of what we did have is gone, haven’t known a time when there was no turkey-baster or physician-supervised 'artificial’ insemination for Lesbians at all.

As for Julia Penelope, she is one of those 'Older Lesbians,’ those 'before Stonewall’ Lifelong Lesbians, the kind of Lesbian that younger Lesbians say they 'need’ as role models, that they 'admire’ for their courage. She is also the Lesbian who brought us one the Lesbian community’s most loved books, the original Coming Out Stories. She is one of the countless Lesbians who created the visible Lesbian community, wresting Lesbian space from the homophobia in the Women’s Liberation Movement and the sexism in the Gay Liberation Movement. She did her share of demonstrating, organizing, confronting, teaching, writing, editing, speaking out for Lesbian rights, helping to make Lesbians visible to ourselves and others. Yet she was booed from the stage by hundreds of Lesbians for trying to remind us how precious Lesbian space is, booed by Lesbians who have never really been without it.

It was a dreadful experience for me, one I have thought about and discussed often since it happened. I was stunned by the fury unleashed upon Julia. Why were so many Lesbians so passionately angry? I talked to some of them at the time. They said they were angry at the Lesbians who sneaked in the night and tacked the signs on the cabin. They hated the signs, too, said they were 'hateful.’ They hated the way mothers were treated. They seemed to see no incongruity between their delight in being at a festival that was bravely billed as a LESBIAN, rather than as a WOMEN’S event and their rage at Julia for supporting the organizers’ boy-free as well as man-free policy.

None of the Lesbians who defended the right of boys to attend a Lesbian event gave a thought to the right of girls to enjoy a few days free from the teasing, bullying, name-calling and ridicule that is common to boys in a group.

I thought about the two mothers who assumed they had the right to bring their boy to a Lesbian, male-free event. They are part of the growing numbers of Lesbians who are taking advantage of changing cultural attitudes, and are becoming mothers outside of licensed, state-supported sexual reproduction. They are the avant-garde in the world-wide movement toward the separation of the erotic from the reproductive in human life. They are the new Lesbian mothers, insisting they will raise a new generation of boys, non-sexist and caring about the rights of women.

Yet the attitude of these mothers was positively reactionary. They could use Lesbian-only, woman-only spaces as opportunities to teach their manchild that women have the right to limit male access to our spaces, our persons. Instead, they chose to allow hundreds of Lesbians to champion his right to erase a brief time of woman-only space for us all. That is male privilege, alive and flourishing in the heart of a Lesbian feminist community, and this particular innocent baby had already experienced it. The experience will be intensified for him, and for all the other boy children like him, every time their mothers, and their many supporters, challenge woman-only space at events they attend, and every time they angrily absent themselves from woman-only events, complaining about 'reverse sexism’ and discrimination.

In trying to understand the why of such behavior, I found myself thinking of our female problems with boundary and access issues of all kinds. When I hear Lesbian mothers say they have been excluded from a woman-only space because their boy children cannot attend, I have to believe they are having trouble establishing boundaries between themselves and their children. They are fusing with the children, responding as if they and the children are one. The irony is that the Lesbians who are supporting them also see them as fused, and are supporting that fusion.

This kind of Lesbian motherhood sounds to me like a minor variation of pre-Women’s Liberation Movement oppressive motherhood, when mother was expected to put a child and HIS interests first before all things that might be necessary, important, pleasurable for her. When children have, or 'know’ they should have, unlimited access to their mother’s time, space, resources, person, boy children learn that mothers/women exist to take care of them, while the girls, even those who grow up to be Lesbians, learn to be the caregivers of men. 

I am beginning to think that the Lesbians who created this particular uproar in favor of male access to woman-only space, and the countless other feminists and Lesbians who did the same in the past, are acting out of their unconscious, internalized, female oppression, out of the training they received to be 'women,’ that is to be mothers and wives of men, their caregivers, in the system of dominance and subordination we call the patriarchal family. Because of our training, we are unable to be 'selfish.’ We can’t put our interests and needs, and those of our oppressed sisters and the organizations dedicated to freeing us, ahead of the needs of men. We are still passionately committed to fulfilling the needs of men, whether they are our AIDS afflicted Gaymen brothers, our abusive 'misunderstood’ fathers, or our blameless boy children at a Lesbian event. And we are ready to trash any Lesbian sister who tries to stop us. 

P.S. Kay Hagan has written a small, brilliant pamphlet, 'Codependency and the Myth of Recovery; A feminist scrutiny,’ which bridges the space between feminist analysis of the family and twelve step programs approach to family.