Who's Calling?
The meaning of lesbian identity and politics was continuously shaped and reshaped through conversations between callers and staffers. Many callers explicitly asked for help defining “lesbian” for themselves or others. One frustrated caller, for example, wrote the Switchboard a letter in 1978 after being unable to reach a volunteer on the phone during weekly open hours. In her letter, she asked for guidance from the women of the Switchboard when it came to embracing her own lesbian identity. She explained: “I am becoming lesbian from a radical feminist point of view. My feeling [sic] are not very homosexual at all; nevertheless, I have made a decision to make the transition.” The woman then asked for a recommendation of a book on lesbian identity to give her heterosexual psychiatrist.[1] It is notable that she did so in the form of a handwritten letter, rather than continuing to call the Switchboard. Though we can’t know why she chose this form of communication, it reminds us that the Switchboard was a well-known clearing house for lesbian information in New York City, not just as a telephone line, but as an activist collective.
In the process of “becoming lesbian,” the letter-writer sought both advice and affirmation of her lesbian identity from the women of the Switchboard. The detail about her “heterosexual psychiatrist” is particularly revealing given the context of the time: LSWB staffers tended not to recommend professional therapists or psychiatrists for fear of homophobia and harmful treatment. They preferred community-led health initiatives by and for lesbians. Indeed, it was only in 1973, one year after LSWB’s founding, that the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality from the list of psychiatric disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a major win for lesbian and gay activists. Nonetheless, the belief that homosexuality constituted a reversible disorder remained commonplace among the nation’s psychiatrists well into the 1990s, lending credence to lesbian activist’s fear of institutionalized mental health care.[2] The woman who wrote to the Switchboard in 1978 was seeking lesbian information from staffers not merely for her own edification, but also to contextualize and describe her identity in a clinical setting with a professional psychiatrist. In this way, the women of the Switchboard were recognized as experts in the eyes of some callers, even if the collective’s organizing principles eschewed expertise in favor of communal knowledge.
Over the years, calls poured in from women like these, women who had questions about their own sexuality and hoped that the Lesbian Switchboard would be the best place to explore these topics without judgements or consequences. LSWB staffers often were involved in difficult and complex conversations with callers about their identities. Notes in the call logs ranged from a woman “wanting to find out if she is a lesbian” to a caller asking, “Can a ♀ have a loving relationship with another ♀ that doesn’t involve sex?” or “How will I have to behave as a Lesbian what will I have to know to make love.”[3] These calls came in during the first years of the Switchboard’s existence, in the early 1970s, at a time when many women were discovering for the first time the political, social, and sexual possibilities of lesbian identity through the feminist movement. For some callers, an LSWB staffer was the first openly lesbian woman with whom they had ever talked.
Bisexual women were also frequent callers to the Switchboard and were met by a range of reactions from staffers. For example, on October 27, 1977, a staffer noted a call from a bisexual woman: “I discussed the notion, which she seemed most frightened by, that she need not sign a contract or make a commitment to being gay or straight. I informed her that she was not alone in being uncertain; that the best way to find out where one is at is to experience the scene.”[4]
While some women called for help in grappling with realizations of their sexual attraction to women, others reached out to explore the role of patriarchal oppression in their lives. One such exchange occurred on August 26, 1972, when a staffer noted a “rap from woman who is through w/ men, tired of ‘furious celibacy’ wants to talk abt [sic] lesbian. Is in ♀ movement.”[5] Another call, one that surprised even the staffer, involved a woman seeking advice on sex toys: “♀ where can I get an artificial dildo—then got into discussion on dykedom and feminism. I think her boyfriend was ‘sick’ and couldn’t get it up—she was pretty nice & I think got lots of xtra info. That she dug—I could’ve gotten disgusted at first question & cut her off but as it was I think we might’ve gotten a new ♀ interested.”[6]
These calls make it clear that the mission of the Lesbian Switchboard was much more than simply connecting women who already identified as lesbian to lesbian resources and community. The staffers of LSWB were trying to carve out a space where feminist, lesbian, bisexual, and even straight women could benefit from the political, social, and sexual innovations of lesbian feminism. By choosing to remain autonomous from the Gay Switchboard, and by serving only women (a boundary that was inconsistently maintained, but at times violently enforced against trans callers), LSWB tacitly distanced themselves from a version of homosexuality that was centered on same-sex desire without regard to gender. To become lesbian, the call logs implied, was to orient oneself toward women, specifically—toward women’s bars, women’s bookstores, women’s culture—and away from men, whether that meant romantically committing to women or simply questioning received wisdom about men, heterosexuality, and gender roles.
Political lesbianism—understood as a political choice to identify as lesbian and cease sexual entanglements with men—was only one avenue into lesbian feminism for women who were not explicitly or exclusively attracted to women.[7] Staffers of LSWB received calls from women who were emotionally but not sexually attracted to women, who were sexually attracted to both women and men, who were sexually attracted to men but preferred to center women in their lives, who had identified as “lesbian” and then went “straight,” and everything in between. Lesbian consciousness-raising, then, was less about discovering or professing sexual desire for other women, per se, and more about developing a social and political orientation toward women that de-centered and disempowered men through an emphasis on woman-identification and lesbian community.
[1] Letter to Lesbian Switchboard, April 12, 1978, Box 1, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[2] Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis.
[3] July 20, 1972 call log; October 28, 1972 call log; December 9, 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[4] October 27, 1977, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[5] August 26, 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[6] October 18, 1973 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[7] See Victoria Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013).