Excerpt from “Notes of a Radical Lesbian,” by Martha Shelly, 1969

(originally published in a gay liberation magazine)

Martha Shelly, former president of the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis, an older conservative lesbian organization, found herself radicalized in the late 60s with the resurgence of feminism and the beginnings of gay liberation.

Lesbianism is one road to freedom – freedom from oppression by men.

To see Lesbianism in this context – as a mode of living neither better nor worse than others, as one which offers its own opportunities – one must abandon the notion that deviance from the norm arises from personal illnesses . . . .

For women, as for other groups, there are several American norms. All of them have their rewards, and their penalties. The nice girl next door, virginal until her marriage – the Miss American type – is rewarded with community respect and respectability. She loses her individuality and her freedom, to become a toothpaste smile and a chastity belt. The career woman gains independence and a large margin of freedom – if she is willing to work twice as hard as a man for less pay, and if she can cope with emotional strains similar to those that beset the black intellectual surrounded by white colleagues. The starlet, call girl, or bunny, whose source of income is directly related to her image as a sex object, gains some financial independence and freedom from housework. She doesn’t have to work as hard as the career woman, but she pay through psychological degradation as a sex object, and through the insecurity of knowing that her career, based on youthful good looks, is short-lived.

The Lesbian, through her ability to obtain love and sexual satisfaction from other women, is freed of dependence on men for love, sex, and money. She does not have to do menial chores for them (at least at home), nor cater to their egos, nor submit to hasty and inept sexual encounters. She is freed from fear of unwanted pregnancy and the pains of childbirth, and from the drudgery of child raising.

On the other hand, she pays three penalties. The rewards of child raising are denied her. There is a great loss for some women, but not for others . . . .

The Lesbian still must compete with men in the job market, facing the same job and salary discrimination as her straight sister.

Finally, she faces the most severe contempt and ridicule that society can heap on a woman.

When members of the Women’s Liberation Movement picketed the 1968 Miss America pageant, the most terrible epithet heaped on our straight sisters was “Lesbian.” The sisters faced hostile audiences who called them “commies,” and “tramps,” but some of them broke into tears when they were called Lesbians. When a woman showed up at a feminist meeting and announced that she was a Lesbian, many women avoided her. Others told her to keep her mouth shut, for fear that she would endanger the cause. They felt that men could be persuaded to accept some measure of equality for women – as long as these women could parade their devotion to heterosexuality and motherhood.

A woman who is totally independent of men – who obtains love, sex, and self-esteem from other women – is a terrible threat to male supremacy. She doesn’t need them, and therefore they have less power over her.

I have met many, many feminists who were not Lesbians – but I have never met a Lesbian who was not a feminist. “Straight” women by the millions have been sold the belief that they must subordinate themselves to men, accept less pay for equal work, and do all the shitwork around the house. I have met straight women who would die to preserve their chains. I have never met a Lesbian who believe that she was innately less rational or capable than a man; who swallowed one word ot he “woman’s role” horseshit.

Lesbians, because they are not afraid of being abandoned by men, are less reluctant to express hostility toward the male class – the oppressors of women. Hostility toward your oppressor is healthy, but the guardians of modern morality, the psychiatrists, have interpreted this hostility as an illness, and they say this illness causes and is Lesbianism.

If hostility to men causes Lesbianism, then it seems to me that in a male-dominated society, Lesbianism is a sign of mental health . . . .

I do not mean to condemn all males. I have found some beautiful, loving men among the revolutionaries, among the hippies, and the male homosexuals. But the average man, including the average student male radical, wants a passive sex-object cum domestic cum baby nurse to clean up after him while he does all the fun things and bosses her around – while he plays either bigshot executive or Che Guevara [Latin American revolutionary] – and he is my oppressor and my enemy.

Society has taught most Lesbians to believe they are sick, and has taught most straight women to despise and fear the Lesbian as a perverted, diseased creature. It has fostered the myth that Lesbians are ugly and turn to each other because they can’t get that prize, that prince, a male! . . . .

Freud founded the myth of penis envy, and men have asked me “But what can two women do together?” As though a penis were the sine qua non of sexual pleasure! Man, we can do without it, and keep it going longer, too!

Women are afraid to be without a man’s protection – because other men will assault them on the streets. And this is no accident, no aberration performed by a few lunatics. Assaults on women are no more an accident than are lynchings of blacks in Mississippi. Men have oppressed us, and like most oppressors, they hate the oppressed and fear their wrath. Watch a white man walking in Harlem and you will see what I mean. Look at the face of a man who has accidentally wandered into a Lesbian bar.

Men fear Lesbians because they are less dependent, and because their hostility is less controlled.

Straight women fear Lesbians because of the Lesbian inside them, because we represent an alternative. They fear us for the same reason that uptight middle-class people fear hip people. They are angry at us because we have a way out that they are afraid to take.

And what happens to the Lesbian under all this pressure? Many of my sisters, confused by the barrage of anti-gay propaganda, have spent years begging to be allowed to live. They have come begging because they believe they were psychic cripples, and that other people were healthy and had the moral right to judge them. Many have lived in silence, burying themselves in their careers, like name-changing Jews or blacks who passed for white. Many have retreated into an apolitical domesticity, concerning themselves only with the attempt to maintain a love relationship in a society which attempts to destroy love and replace it with consumer goods, and which attempt to completely destroy any form of love outside the monogamous marriage.

Because Lesbian has become such a vile epithet, we have been afraid to fight openly. We can lose our jobs; we have fewer civil rights than any other minority group. Because we have few family ties and no children, for the most part, we have been active in many causes, but always in secret, because our name contaminates any cause that we work for.

To the radical Lesbian, I say that we can no longer afford to fight for everyone else’s cause while ignoring our own . . . . Our kind of love is a svalid as anyone else’s. The revolution must be fought for us, too, not only for blacks, Indians, welfare mothers, grape pickers, SDS people, Puerto Ricans, or mine workers. We must have a revolution for human rights . . . .

Maybe after the revolution, people will be able to love each other regardless of skin color, ethnic origin, occupation, or type of genitals. But if that’s going to happen, it will only happen because we make it happen – starting right now.