LESBIAN CELIBACY

The final political celibacy/asexuality I will consider is that of lesbian celibacy, which was central to early lesbian feminist articulations of separatism. Rita

Mae Brown, who also penned the well-read lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), along with Charlotte Bunch and others, organized in 1971 one of the leading lesbian feminist collectives of the era, The Furies, which focused on communal living, feminist politics, and separatism.¹³⁵ Lesbian feminism took off after the Lavender Menace action organized by the New York–based group, Radicalesbians, at the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, at which “The Woman Identified Woman” paper—which identified lesbianism as based on bonds between women rather than on sex between women—was dis-tributed.¹³⁶ Addressing the homophobia in the women’s movement, the action consisted of women in “lavender menace”–stenciled T-shirts taking control of the stage and engaging in a two-hour discussion that sought to legitimize lesbianism through arguing that it was not solely a “bedroom issue.”¹³⁷ Lesbi-anism emerged in this historical moment less as a sexual orientation and more as a political choice, a political strategy integral to feminist organizing and to the separatist energy of forming communities outside of male supremacy.

As Ginny Berson of The Furies wrote, “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.”¹³⁸ Les-bianism became central to feminism and it became, as Echols identifies it, the

“quintessential act of political solidarity with other women.”¹³⁹ With the goal of imagining a feminist politics that seeped into all elements of life practice and challenged male supremacy, an erotic and asexually infused lesbian feminism was born.

The Furies, based in Washington, DC, drew on the energies of The Femi-nists’ and Cell 16’s distancing from sex, explorations of alternative life prac-tices, and queer questioning of heterosexual coupling. Comprised solely of white women of working-class and middle-class backgrounds, The Furies focused on sex-based oppression as it related to class-based oppression and the oppression of lesbians. They published a lesbian newspaper, The Furies (1972–1973), and developed communal lesbian living strategies based on a socialist pooling of resources.¹⁴⁰ In practice and theory, The Furies saw sexism as the root of all oppression, wanting to see the end of lesbians’ and wom-en’s oppression as a strategy for also undoing capitalism, imperialism, and racism.¹⁴¹

Crucially, lesbianism was identified as a political orientation and not as something that was fundamentally about sex or sexual desire for women.

The newspaper itself never included poetry or fiction about sex or images of nudity so as to challenge the idea that lesbianism is only about sex.¹⁴² The desire, instead, was for an erotic coming together with other women toward challenging sexist and homophobic society—it was the desire for revolution.

Channeling energy away from men and toward other women and feminist organizing fed fluidly into a lesbianism laced with asexuality, wherein femi-nists formed erotic bonds with each other that did not always include sex and did not focus on sexual desire.

Lesbian feminism was thus potent with political celibacy/asexuality.

Because sex was deemphasized both to gain credibility for lesbianism within the feminist movement and also because sex was understood in part as in service of the hetero-patriarchal regime, lesbianism was not bound to a sexual practice or sexual desire; it was a tool for freeing women from sexism. If any-thing, lesbian feminism was articulated in distinction to sex and as sensuality.

For example, Sue Katz wrote:

For me, coming out meant an end to sex. It’s dead and gone in my life.

I reject that institution totally. Sex means oppression, it means exploita-tion. . . . Physical contact and feelings have taken a new liberatory form, and we call that “sensuality” . . . gay feminism now is a fantastically sensual rience for me. . . . Physicalness is now a creative non-institutionalized expe-rience. It is touching and rubbing and cuddling and fondness. . . . Its only goal is closeness and pleasure. It does not exist for the Big Orgasm. It exists for feeling nice. Our sensuality may or may not include genital experience . . . There is no set physical goal to our sensuality. There is no sex. The whole language is oppressive. It is white male-oriented and heterosexual. . . . Sen-suality is formless and amorphous. It can grow and expand as we feel it. . . . The sensuality I feel has transformed my politics, has solved the contradic-tion between my mind and my body because the energies for our feminist revolution are the same as the energies of our love for women.¹⁴³

Katz indicates here, first, the rejection of sex as an institution that she associ-ated with keeping hetero-patriarchy alive. While it could be argued that Katz is simply arguing for lesbian sex as opposed to sex in straight contexts, she is also gesturing to something bigger, broader—an erotics. She grounds erotics in sensuality, in creative and not necessarily sex-based forms for relating to others intimately. These erotics are about the feeling of revolution grounded in spending time with other women toward building communities of resistance.

Erotics surface here as rooted in a praxis of asexuality/celibacy that enabled vital erotic energy for other pursuits, including the making of a revolution.

Or, as Sue Negrin describes: “gay feminism [was] the only space in which to develop nonsexual sensuality.”¹⁴⁴ As such, lesbianism was being argued on asexual grounds, not necessarily desexualized so much as imagined beyond sex, which was associated with coercive, exploitative, and nonpleasurable

het-ero-patriarchy. Speaking broadly to a dissatisfaction with sex—its meaning, practice, and social function—the origins of lesbian feminism and women’s communes of the era were imagined, in part, as a break from sex:

We have been taught that sexual relationships are the primary form of human relations. . . . Many women have become alienated from the sexual functions of their bodies because sex has been used to keep us in our place.

As a step toward wholeness, mustn’t we withdraw from the oppression of sexual mindfucks and build all female collectives? Some may include sex between women, but for many, these collectives will probably be a period of celibacy—probably the first time in most women’s lives.¹⁴⁵

Invoking “wholeness” in a way parallel to the antiracist celibacies I exam-ined earlier, celibacy is articulated as a means for gaining self-knowledge and, drawing on Lorde, increased awareness of one’s erotic powers. Celibacy emerges as a distinct practice for erotic self-knowledge, for breaking with het-ero-patriarchy, as well as an opportunity for redirecting one’s erotic energies to relationships with women. An ulterior sensuality emerges in these accounts that is informed by political celibacy/asexuality and resonant with an erotics intent on exploring other forms of intimacy between bodies than sex per se, and other bonding energies than sexual desire. The desires of these articu-lations of sisterhood are in excess of sex and sexual desire and are perme-ated with a politically motivperme-ated asexual erotics. While critiques of lesbian feminism commonly assert that lesbianism was desexualized or sanitized so as to make it more palatable, or that it was in fact all about lesbian sex at its core, I am suggesting that this does not account for the feeling flows that informed lesbian feminist formation. Asexuality and celibacy facilitated erot-ics and lesbianism rather than preventing either. While there was certainly a strategic advantage to be gained from making lesbianism less about sex and more about feminism in that it made lesbianism more palatable politically in a homophobic historical context, the crucial insight is that sex and feminism were somehow felt as distinct from one another, and that asexual lesbianism traveled further, affectively speaking, among feminist women, than a strictly sexual and sex-based lesbianism could have. In this sense, lesbian feminism is informed not only by the political celibacy/asexuality of groups such as The Feminists and Cell 16 but also by the very feeling that somehow, inexplicably, something about sisterhood felt asexual. Erotics emerge here as not bound to and by sexual desire but as grounded in the energy of women being together away and apart from heterosexuality. Women were drawn to each other eroti-cally rather than strictly sexually in the pursuit of carving out revolutionary

worlds. Political celibacy and political asexuality, in turn, facilitated the devel-opment of a lesbian erotics.