["By the time of my interviews, only two of the women from my baby boom sample continued to identify themselves as separatists. Longtime activist and writer Andrea Brum was one of them, a self-described separatist who railed against those who "dabbled." "Lesbian identity," she stated, "isn't just a casual commitment, one among a smorgasbord of possibilities. It's a way of life." A firm believer in making membership requirements as stringent as possible, Andrea related her impressions of her visit to Spain when Franco was in power. Under fascism, she said, "only lesbians were lesbians. You were a lesbian with the knowledge that you risked your life." Andrea lamented that the end of fascism, and the revival of the left and feminism, has meant "more and more women are dabbling."
She and the others came to believe, against the claims of many feminists, that lesbians were in fact a clearly bounded minority group that stood outside of heterosexuality— or that ideally should. They questioned whether social constructionism, and the lesbian feminist ideology it spawned, could accurately understand lesbian experience and guide lesbian political activity. Equating political lesbians with consumerism's throwaway ethos, Julia Penelope, a separatist theorist, proclaimed, "my lesbianism was never a choice in the way that many speak of it now. My Lesbian identity has never really been a 'preference' for me; it's not an identity I casually selected from a Baskin-Robbins sexuality counter."
Like old dykes, many separatists saw individuals who experienced their lesbianism as a relatively fixed "orientation" as the only "authentic" lesbians. Fading were the dreams of liberating society by releasing "the lesbian in every woman."
Elaborate classification systems were sometimes created to separate the wheat from the chaff. Cindy Ross recalled being a member of a separatist group in the late 1970s that had a formal hierarchy in which "'butch' lesbians who had never slept with a man occupied most favored position: women who had been lesbians before the women's movement were in the second most favored position; 'femmes' who had prior heterosexual experience, and who came out during the women's movement, were in the third position; bisexuals were at the bottom." This blend of gender and sexual essentialism created a formal hierarchy of lesbian "realness." Here we see the emergence of a highly essentialist conception, a "reverse affirmation" of the medicalized account of lesbianism that attributes "most favored" status to those individuals who are considered in the dominant category to be the most pathological. However, for ideological separatists it was not enough to "be" an authentic lesbian; one also had to develop a political stance that separated one from the dominant culture.
As these comments suggest, separatism was in essence a defensive posture, whose meaning developed primarily in opposition to an "other" comprising men, straight feminists, and less committed lesbians. Its goal was the narrow the boundaries around the lesbian group and toughen membership standards. While cultural feminists blurred the boundaries between lesbians and straight women as they emphasized the fluidity of identity, separatists suggested that only biological women who do not sleep with men could claim the lesbian label. One woman suggested the following definition of lesbianism: "A lesbian is a woman whose value system is such that she can be fulfilled spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and sexually only in a romantic relationship with another woman." This definition excluded transsexuals, nonfeminist lesbians, practicing bisexuals, political lesbians, and even many "elective" lesbians.
Though directing their ire at patriarchal culture and male sexuality, separatists were as much concerned with regulating female sexuality as with shunning male sexuality. Indeed, one observer noted that separatism was, in effect, "a vehicle intended to establish the proper parameters of lesbian sexuality so as to diminish the possibility that lesbians will defect to 'male-identified' sexual expressions, whether these be s/m roles, or heterosexuality." Like ethnic separatists and fundamentalists of various sorts, lesbian separatists sought to construct an organic community within modern society, with boundaries that marked their community as separate from the dominant culture. They embodied the most radical version of a politics of identity, asserting a notion of group difference as real and not arbitrary and downplaying the differences within the group. The formation of a collective identity through such in-group/out-group differentiation assumed that the in-group possesses the truth, in contrast to the outsiders who suffer from error or display indifference.
Despite their relatively small numbers, ideological separatists were able to assert an enormous impact on lesbian political culture, particularly after the mid-1970s, because they were very well organized and very vocal. They were responsible for the border skirmishes around transsexualism, boy children, bisexuality, and other issues that divided many lesbian conferences, women's music festivals, and local communities in the 1970s through the 1980s. In the pages of Lesbian Connection, separatists railed against those who brought children to women's music festivals, who admitted to lingering bisexual urges, and those who suggested that men be allowed into women-only events; all were roundly chastised in the name of lesbian solidarity.
"Women who couldn't bear to be around men took it to absurd extremes," commented Joan Salton, as she told me a story about a woman who was invited to a feminist writer's conference in Chicago who in the late 1970s and who wouldn't stay in a house because there was a male dog on the premises. "Bizarre theories came up, to the effect, not only were women the superior sex, but men are mutants. Men are a different species." Shirley Alvarez recalled that on her communal farm, some women "didn't want to deal with machinery because it was man-made."
Separatists exemplified what Albert Melucci called "integralism," the yearning for a totalizing identity, for a "master key which unlocks every door of reality." They rejected a pluralistic attitude to life, encouraging people to "turn their backs on complexity" and become incapable of accepting difference. By the mid-to late 1970s the very qualities that were seen as the special contribution of the lesbian feminist movement were undermining its existence. Communities of intimacy, it turned out, were also communities of exclusion."]
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