Domestic Violence and Violence against Lesbians
A mere “sounding board” was not always what callers needed from LSWB, and it became clear as the years passed that many women who called were desperate, facing life-threatening situations and a dearth of resources to deal with them: not just suicide, but also rape, domestic abuse, and police violence. In May 1979, a staffer noted that a woman had called in looking for a referral: “she was raped last night.” The staffer then went on to note that “this fucking SWB has no decent Rape info.” Her note in the call log did not pull any punches, accusing the Switchboard of failing women like the one who had called that night: “There is something very fucking wrong with a SWB that doesn’t give a shit to put maximum effort into providing basic survival/crisis info. You can all laugh your fucking heads off about arranging papers & keeping ‘tidy’ until a real emergency comes up & you can’t find a fucking thing. Not every one [sic] who calls here is some drunk looking for a bar.”[1]
Indeed, as this staffer’s note suggests, there were many women who called LSWB as they were recovering from violent assaults or were under continued threat of violence. Sometimes, the threat of violence was implied, as when a woman from the Bronx called in August 1972, wanting to find a way to cruise for women at the beach. She was married with children, and was, according to the call log, “not free” and had to “be very secretive.”[2] That same month, a woman called in on the topic of “companionship,” and while she was talking with the staffer, a man (denoted by a ♂ symbol in the notes) “grabbed phone and she screamed.” Then, “He said ‘you dirty lesbian and slammed down phone.”[3] Unfortunately, such phone calls were commonplace for the staffers of LSWB, who were keenly aware that telephones—though potentially less risky than in-person meetings—were not always as private as callers or staffers hoped.
One seventeen-year-old girl, for example, called the Switchboard for help after her parents caught her in bed with her girlfriend and beat her up. She explained that she could not get out of the house to seek counseling. Before she could talk further with the staffer about her troubles, she “had to hang up.”[4] Like this young caller, many women who called LSWB over the years hung up before ever speaking to a staffer. Sometimes, they hung up halfway through the phone call for fear of being discovered. Their calls were often noted in the logs as a simple “click” on the phone line. Though the motivations of these callers can never be determined, their silences speak as loudly as their words. Lesbian culture and identity were far from mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s: speaking the word lesbian aloud, even over the telephone, put many women at risk.
The violence apparent in the records of LSWB is striking—not only evidence of homophobic and misogynist attacks against women and lesbians, but also evidence of rape and domestic abuse among lesbians. Because LSWB offered peer counseling services as well as information and referrals, women called the Switchboard to share traumatic stories, ask for advice and support, and bear witness to forms of violence and abuse that society at-large refused to legitimate (despite manifold cultural narratives depicting lesbians as threats to straight women and children). As sociologist Claire Renzetti explained in her 1989 article on the topic of lesbian partner abuse, empirical research on abuse in lesbian relationships remained scant at the end of the 1980s, even though, according to one 1986 study on the topic, 25% percent of lesbian respondents said they had been physically abused by their female partners in committed relationships, compared with 27% of heterosexual respondents.[5]
The Lesbian Switchboard was one of the few anonymous peer counseling and information hotlines that catered specifically to lesbians, making it a potentially safer space for revelations of intimate partner abuse among lesbians than traditional domestic violence resources. If research on the topic of lesbian intimate partner violence was lacking in scholarly studies, representations of such violence in mainstream culture and even mainstream domestic violence programs was equally scarce. As Phyllis Goldfarb described in her pathbreaking article about domestic violence in the lesbian community, despite feminist activists’ success in calling public attention to the pervasiveness of domestic violence in the 1970s and 1980s, “these activists suggested that the entire problem of battering consisted of male violence against female intimates,” thus silently inscribing “heterosexuality into the meaning of battering.”[6]
As one woman described in a 1991 commentary on lesbian battering in the feminist magazine Off Our Backs: “Sometimes I know that the women who would give voice to the pain of lesbian battering are silenced from within our own community. We are so good at celebrating our love. It is so hard for us to hear that some lesbians live, not in paradise, but in a hell of fear and violence.”[7] The author was horrified to admit that she had even talked to women whose batterers were themselves volunteers in battered women’s shelters, a testament to the fact that feminist and lesbian communities often struggled to identify the signs of abuse within their own circles.
Some women called LSWB seeking information and resources after experiencing violence, while others called to talk through and understand what had happened to them, struggling to find language for what they had experienced. Over a six-month period in 1977, for example, staffers logged several calls related to sexual violence. On September 19, 1977, a woman called and explained that she had been shot by a woman she knew for years. She wanted a list of lesbian attorneys she could contact, because she had had trouble finding an attorney to take her case. LSWB gave her information on two organizations, Lambda Legal Defense and Identity House, as well as the name of an attorney.[8] This was a straightforward exchange with a relatively simple request for information and ended with the caller saying that she would send LSWB a check (presumably as a donation to their ongoing work). But many calls were not so straightforward.
The next day (September 20, 1977), a woman called and explained that she had been seduced by her female cousin, described in the call log as “very domineering & one-sided.” The caller talked through her feelings about this, “(it’s not normal, etc.),” but just as the staffer was starting to “get somewhere” with her, the caller hung up.[9] Unfortunately, this happened with many callers, for whom there was no easy answer or solution to the violence they had experienced. On October 5, 1977, a woman called to talk about an ex-lover. The caller was: “Very depressed. She let her ex-lover in & and was beaten up & raped. Yet she loves the woman; She’s [sic] feels uninterested in doing a thing to get out of her depression. Tried to talk with her—but she was too depressed. She finally hung up.”[10]
The staffers at LSWB were not equipped to counsel such callers in the manner of trained social workers. The Handbook advised that “simply talking to someone who is calm, confident and willing to listen can release the tensions created in a crisis situation,” but of course this was not always the case.[11] Though we cannot know exactly how each staffer responded to crisis calls or what kind of support or advice they offered, the frequency with which such violence and abuse appeared in the call logs attests to the fact that survivors of lesbian intimate partner violence and sexual violence more generally were desperately in need of resources specific to the lesbian experience. They turned to LSWB not just to report what had happened to them, but also to understand the meaning of the violence they had experienced.
[1] May 10, 1979 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[2] August 12, 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[3] August 2, 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[4] August-September 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[5] Claire M. Renzetti, “Building a Second Closet: Third Party Responses to Victims of Lesbian Partner Abuse,” Family Relations 38, no. 2 (1989): 157–63, 157. The study cited by Renzetti is Pamela A. Brand and Aline H. Kidd, “Frequency of Physical Aggression on Heterosexual and Female Homosexual Dyads,” Psychological Reports 59 (December 1986): 1307–13.
[6] Phyllis Goldfarb, “Describing without Circumscribing: Questioning the Construction of Gender in the Discourse of Intimate,” George Washington Law Review 64, no. 3 (1996): 582–632, 589.
[7] Lisa Shapiro, “Lesbian Battering: Romance to Ruin,” Off Our Backs, November 1991, JSTOR, 16. I am grateful for Carmen Maria Machado’s work to excavate the history of lesbian domestic abuse in her memoir In the Dream House, A Memoir (Graywolf, 2019), which led me to many of the sources cited here.
[8] September 19, 1977 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[9] September 20, 1977 call log, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[10] October 5, 1977 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[11] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook.