True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships

Product Information

Gutterman’s research brought her to the papers of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the United States. In them, she found an extraordinary repository of letters to the founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and to the organizational newsletter, The Ladder. Many of the letters were from married women who were seeking and finding romantic connections to other women in the midst of their outwardly conventional lives. Lesbian sexuality in this configuration is presented as an erotic playground for heterosexual women – to titillate their male partners. I wasn’t expecting it,” said Gutterman. “What I expected was either women who went to lesbian bars, or women who felt entirely trapped and unable to act on their desires.” By observing changes in the representation of women’s same-sex sexuality in women’s magazines over time, new parameters within which lesbian desire is socially sanctioned become apparent.

This eroticisation of women’s same-sex sexuality appears to have ebbed somewhat in contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan from 2013, replaced instead by the frequent use of the term “girl crush”. Even when husbands suspected or found out what was going on, Gutterman writes, that didn’t always spell catastrophe for the marriage. Many husbands were willing to look the other way to keep the marriage together. Others were willing to grudgingly tolerate their wives’ romances as long as they were kept sufficiently covert. Some husbands were even supportive. Routsong’s husband, for instance, had known that she was attracted to women from the beginning of their marriage, and was tolerant and even encouraging of her relationship with Deran. “Perhaps he felt relieved that Betty had finally been able to pull Alma out of years of depression,” Gutterman writes, “or perhaps he was just thankful that their affair had made it easier for him to pursue his own extramarital romance.” The two divorced only after Deran forced the matter, moving away from Illinois for a job with the U.S. Treasury Department in D.C. Routsong agonized about it, but ultimately chose to follow. In the contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, the phrase is used in a way which suggests all women can participate in the “girl crush”. An interview with Zooey Deschanel in the July 2013 edition of Australian Cosmopolitan asks the actress to name the celebrity she has “a total girl crush on”. Routsong, in other words, is an unsurprising person with whom to begin a history of gay liberation in America. Gutterman starts her own book not in 1969, however, or in 1972. She begins almost a decade earlier, when Routsong is a writer of heterosexual novels and is married to a man. Even Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the Daughters of Bilitis co-founders who in the past had expressed a great deal of compassion for married women, began to condemn rather than sympathize. Gutterman quotes a passage in their 1972 book Lesbian/Woman that describes women who stay married despite their lesbian desire as having “swallowed, hook, line and sinker, society’s male-imposed dictum that the role of woman is to serve man as his wife and mother of his children.”

Bound (1996)

This perhaps underscores a lingering anxiety around women’s same-sex sexuality. It can even work as a form of veiled homophobia analogous to the use of the phrase “no homo” among young men wishing to distance themselves from homosexuality. Besides being a genuinely considerate movie with some thoughtful meditations on religion and culture, it has the added thrill of having super erotic sex scenes, made possible because: Instead, these letter-writers, some of whom Gutterman would later interview, found each other at church, on the PTA, in the office, on the softball team, some- times right next door. And while forming and sustaining romantic relationships with other women in such contexts wasn’t easy, it wasn’t always that hard either. Women were already expected to live so much of their domestic lives in the company of women, while their husbands were at work or the bar or the golf course. When Gutterman was able to interview some of the women whose letters she’d read in the Daughters of Bilitis archives, she was surprised by how sharp the pain of these struggles still was for most of them, even decades later.

The increased level of comfort with lesbian sexuality embodied in the casual use of the phrase “girl crush” in contemporary mainstream women’s magazines might look like a sign that attitudes towards lesbians and gays have lightened up. I'm not about to put Kissing Jessica Stein in this category, because it's too weak of a queer film to be even considered. There's also Mulholland Drive, which had some very brief hot queer moments relative to its era (2001). Heavenly Creatures (1994) served the queer goth community particularly well. Sadly, that community is relatively small. In an article from the October 1993 edition of Cleo, “lesbian chic”, or the phenomenon of “Ostensibly Heterosexual” women (often celebrities) dabbling in lesbian desire is described as “the new sexual revolution”. The magazine calls it the latest “fashion statement” – with “a gorgeous pouting gal-pal” labelled the hottest new “designer accessor[y]”.As a queer woman myself, I was mostly concerned that the two female characters ate a whole plate of spaghetti without brushing their teeth before commencing intercourse.

to identify as lesbian or bisexual, but they had really complex and really negative memories about that period of their lives. They felt regret and sadness. I was expecting a liberation narrative.” I also love the way Sebastián chose to shoot it. It was storyboarded. All the wetness, the spitting in the mouth, the pubic hair, the vaginas, but also leaving some of it to the audience to imagine. Where is the other woman’s mouth, where are her fingers? It was important for him to focus on our faces to really capture that desire. There’s something very spiritual about their sex. I’m really proud of it." I feel like we have oversimplified these women, branded them as closeted or cowardly, when they are dealing with emotional issues that are so complex,” says Gutterman. When Gutterman got to the dissertation phase of her study, she began looking for a topic in gay or queer history that drew on archives but was not focused on the male experience. It was tough going. “A lot of the focus has been on bars, public meeting places, public sex,” she said. “In these spaces, men’s stories predominate. There is some evidence from women’s bars and arrest records, but their numbers are very limited.” to the male sculptor Fumio Yoshimura. “Say it! Say you are a lesbian!” demanded an activist at a book event for Millet’s then-recently published Sexual Politics. Millett said yes in the moment, but subsequently struggled with how to honor and represent her complex commitments, which included lesbian relationships and lesbian feminist activism as well as her marriage to Yoshimura, which would last well into the next decade.The main history in Her Neighbor’s Wife ends in 1989, before the extraordinary advances in gay rights of the last few decades. In a brief epilogue, however, Gutterman comes to the present, and argues that for everything that has changed, the challenge of the “lesbian wife” has not wholly disappeared. Women who desire other women still marry men, and women who marry men still discover, after marriage, that they have desires for other women. This seems like it shouldn't be a victory. And yet, the list of movies who've accomplished the same feat is painfully abbreviated. Don't talk to me about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie made famous for its extended, impractical sex scenes and allegations of harassment by its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche reportedly bullied the two female protagonists as well as his staff, forcing them to work 16-hour workdays under extreme pressure. Critics further accused the director of creating "voyeuristic" sex scenes intended to solicit the male gaze. If complexity is the dominant melody of Gutterman’s book, its counterpoint is compassion. She writes compassionately of husbands and children who suffered when their wives and mothers left for other women, as well as of lovers who suffered when wives chose to stay in their marriages. There is compassion for lesbian feminists who were struggling to figure out how to exist and act in a transformed world. Above all, there is compassion for the struggles of married women with lesbian desire, torn between romance and obligation, committed to exploring their same-sex desire but not ready to wholly reject their more conventional families and communities.

She hit dissertational gold only after her adviser suggested she look into the genre of post-war lesbian pulp novels, bodice-rippers that masqueraded as morality tales. She began reading, and reading about, the novels, becoming fascinated by the recur- ring figure of the “lesbian wife,” who was both an erotic fantasy and a cautionary tale, an object of desire for the readers and a symbol of the supposed moral decadence of the post-war affluent society. Recognizing these similarities, says Gutterman, can alter our perspective from both directions. It makes gay romance in post-war America seem more familiar than we may have imagined. At the same time, it destabilizes our stereotypes of post-war domesticity. “The big takeaway, in a nutshell, is the way in which Lauren queers the home,” says Janet Davis, professor of American studies at UT Austin. “She totally reframes these spaces in cold war America, like the suburbs, that we usually think of as the models of heteronormative behavior. She’s a really exciting thinker.”

Paris Was a Woman (1996)

This term is not restricted to the realm of women’s magazines. It is strewn throughout popular culture. A glance at social media or fashion blogs confirms the term’s currency, while its Urban Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary Online entries demonstrate its ubiquity.