Lesbian Life Comparison through the decades

[*Anya*]

Originally Posted by theoddz

I'm really enjoying reading all of the posts here. It takes me back to some really fond memories of good times and good friends. I was serving in the USMC back in the late 70's/early 80's, in Southern California. My/our (a large group of gay Women Marines) "stomping grounds" were mainly in San Diego and L.A.. We had sooooo much fun then, and it made coming out so much easier being around such good friends.

Peanuts, in LA, as was Que Sera (to a lesser extent, however), was a major party place for all of us, though we didn't go up there to LA nearly as much as we partied in San Diego, at places like The Club, The Brass Rail, The Apartment and Diablo's, among many others. After The Club closed, places like The Box Office opened up, but most were just flashes in the pan, so to speak.

I do remember, though, being told by a few of the older members of our group that there was another group of lesbians that never socialized in the bar scenes. These women, as I was told, were those who couldn't afford to be seen in the lesbian bars because of their professions (many were military officers and career military members) positions in society or fears of being outed to their families. Because of this, they met each other through other means and socialized together outside of the bars. It was all a dark and mysterious culture to me, at that time. I was young and into the bar scene.

It's been a long road for me, since those times and those places, and it just serves to remind me of how far I have come, and how deep my roots are in the Lesbian community. It's such a big part of my life and who I am now. Abandoning it would be like tearing a piece of my heart out.

~Theo~

Oh Theo! Just think, we could have danced side by side at one time or another and never knew each other!

That mysterious group you were talking about was Southern California Women for Understanding, or SCWU, for short.

My ex and I joined for a few years. They had dances, potlucks, casual activities and we met for picnics at parks with our children and things like that. Those were the days that lesbians did not have children to the degree gay women do now! To find an organization where other women had children, helped mine to not feel so alone to have a gay mom.

I recall that there were a lot of teachers in the group. I believe SCWU was founded sometime around *1978-1979. Teachers were understandably worried about job loss due to being lesbian, so they truly felt like they had so much to lose if they came out or were found out.

I guess lesbians in the military were really in the same position. Imagine the stress of hiding but it was so normal to hide for lesbians of the 50's, 60's and 70's! It is still the same in parts of the USA, other countries and with some jobs today.

There also was the Briggs Initiative back then and lesbian teachers really and truly were threatened with the loss of their jobs! It was scary for a professional woman.

I was in nursing school and my ex worked in the jail at the time, so we were less worried about exposure than the women that had achieved a level of status in their jobs.

Oh my, I feel like an elder lesbian stateswoman now! I guess that I kind of am.

*I looked online and according to the June Mazer collection:

Southern California Women for Understanding (SCWU) collection, 1975-1999

The Southern California Women for Understanding (SCWU), was an educational non-profit organization, formed in 1976 and dedicated to “enhancing the quality of life for [the lesbian] community and for lesbians nationwide, creative and positive exchange about homosexuality, [and] changing stereotypical images of lesbians.”

SCWU emerged in the midst of the civil rights, gay rights, and women’s movements when many marginalized social groups organized en masse to demand recognition and rights. SCWU was one of the earliest known lesbian organizations. At its height, SCWU reached membership of 1,100 and in 1982, Lesbian News hailed it as the “largest lesbian support group in the country.”

The collection contains the operational records of Southern California Women for Understanding (SCWU), one of the earliest lesbian non-profit educational organizations in Los Angeles, California.

http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/...standing-scwu/

[theoddz]

Anya, we very well may have been rubbing elbows at that time and not knew it!! As I so vividly recall, I was soooooo very cautious about talking to people I didn't know, out of fear that they were undercover military "narcs" or NIS (Naval Investigative Services, at that time, who were charged with outing and/or pursuing gay and lesbian military members) agents. It really put a damper on getting to know other lesbians who were not already known to me. You just had to be careful what you told other people about yourself, too. When you're drunk, you lose a LOT of "filters", so to speak, so a lot of women I knew were outed, then discharged from the military, as a result of partying in the bars.

It was a scary time to be LGBT in the military, then. NIS agents would sit in parked cars outside of the known establishments who catered to the LGBT community and look for cars with military/DoD stickers on the windshields. Once they had that sticker number, they had the name registered on base with it. The witch hunts would then begin, and let me tell you.......there were a LOT of them!! The discharges they gave to gay/lesbian/queer/bi military members back then were not "Honorable", either. Even in the best of circumstances, what a lot of people got was a "General Discharge under Honorable Conditions". You still lose some Veterans benefits with that one.

~Theo~