Gay Old Girls [Paperback]

Zsa Zsa Gershick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1998

An excerpt:

Jane Stevenson

South San Francisco, California

Following Jane Stevenson's directions, I take the South City exit off 101 South and drive along a boulevard that runs parallel to the freeway for a few miles. Then I turn off the large, four-lane thoroughfare onto a quiet residential street and begin my climb up through a hilly suburban settlement of split-level 1950s homes. It is a Saturday, and children are playing in their front yards while young men in ball caps wash and work on their cars or water neatly cut lawns. There are no broken Thunderbird bottles or bums sprawled out on the sidewalks. There are no traffic jams, no blaring horns as there are in my inner-city neighborhood. Except for an occasional plane passing overhead, it is quiet.

In one of these houses lives a woman who was once--by all appearances--a typical, attractive, postwar American housewife. She baked cookies, attended PTA meetings and made a warm and loving life for her brood, with one important difference: She had a husband and a wife.

Jane, 65, is a soft-spoken woman. She is reflective, emotional, unrehearsed. As she talks, some of what she recalls makes her cry.

She shows me photographs of Grace, her partner of nearly 20 years. Grace is good-looking, with strong, Katharine Hepburn cheekbones and a daring expression in her eyes.

Jane also shows me photographs of her husband. In the first one, George "Steve" Stevenson appears in his dress police uniform. He is all boot polish and starched blues--a strapping, macho male. Jane hands me another photo of Steve as he looked at home: He's wearing a white knit skirt and a top, with a big, red bow perched atop a light-brown pageboy wig.

These three--along with Jane and Steve's son, Mike--lived together in an extended family that was far more '90s than '50s. They were avant-garde. To the public, their neighbors, and the guys on the force, they were the perfect American family, just like Ward, June, Wally, and the Beav. They read together, ate together, shared a home and their lives together. Most importantly, they supported, protected, and loved each other. They were, indeed, the perfect American family-with just a little twist. Or, as Stevenson de

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This collection of nine life stories can be seen as part of the larger project instituted by Joan Nestle and others to gather an oral history of lesbian life in America in the 20th century. Although some of the memories here stretch back to the 1920s, most date from the repressive postwar years and describe the difficulties of finding community--let alone lovers--when there were no safe, established meeting places for gay people. Many of the women interviewed ended up marrying men as a cover or to make their lives easier, while some married before they realized they were lesbian, the most remarkable of whom is Jane Stevenson, a California housewife and mother of two, whose suburban household in the 1960s came to include her female lover as well as her transvestite husband. Their need for secrecy and their joy in finding each other kept them happy together for many years, yet her story is countered by several in which the women never found lasting love, or grew so discouraged that they stopped trying. Although not all of these interviews are intrinsically interesting, they offer an essential glimpse of a dark past and spur on the struggle for civil rights. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Zsa Zsa Gershick served as a reservist in the U.S. Army from 1978 to 1982. She is the author of Gay Old Girls as well as a series of articles for The Texas Observer and The Texas Triangle profiling high-achieving service members who had been cashiered merely for being gay. She lives in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Alyson Books; 1st edition (November 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555834760
• ISBN-13: 978-1555834760
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #979,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable, January 19, 1999

By 

Shari L. Dworkin ([e-mail]) (West L.A.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gay Old Girls (Paperback)

Gay Old Girls by Zsa Zsa Gershic is a gift not only for the lesbian and gay community, but for anyone who dares to peek at its bold, moving, and frank stories. Zsa Zsa Gershic interviewed nine amazing women ranging in ages from 60 to 85 who opened up and shared what it was like to come out and love women in the 1920's-1960's. The stories are full of the exhilaration and wounds that come with love, and the pains and joys of courageously rejecting heterosexuality. The stories are about the power of the closet, leaping out to the world (and arms) that awaited these women, and the need for gay establishments which provided a (sometimes) safe respite from the often hostile outside world of churches, work, the military, and more. Like many "good women" who followed the societal rules of the time, many of these women had husbands and children before coming out (e.g.reminding us of Adrienne Rich's article entitled "Compulsory Heterosexuality"), yet there were also those who never dated a man. There were classic stories of boisterous butches with hair slicked back and fashionable femmes who waited to be asked to dance at the bar, but there were also those who wrote steamy lesbian novels and never stepped foot into the "scene." One woman found the love of her life one day during a gynecology exam--others traded love away after years of being together. Some didn't meet anyone for a long time and had a simple light bulb go off as to their sexuality as they did their hair one day in the mirror. A few women seemed to slide through life untouched by the difficulties that life can easily amass, while others struggled immensely with their loved ones moving, having surgery or cancer, leaving them for other women or men, or even killing themselves. But all of the women have something in common--they all display a remarkable resilience and hope, coupled with a profound integrity to be themselves. These lives reveal lesbian history in an up close and touching way that is a refreshing departure from thick historical or academic texts. It is filled with wisdom, humor, tears, and humanity. Go ahead--pick it up and allow these Gay Old Girls to tell you their stories--you won't be able to put it down.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellant and informative., December 16, 1998

By 

Regina Lark ([e-mail]) (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gay Old Girls (Paperback)

"Again, there was no place to go but the bars."

It is a clear, sunny day in Los Angeles. My steaming cup of coffee, prepared by the dyke behind the counter, waits on her next lesbian customer as I move past the crowd to a small table outside this lesbian-owned coffeehouse in West Hollywood. The book before me, Zsa Zsa Gershick's "Gay Old Girls," seems to underscore the distinction between lesbian lives of the past and the one I am living today. Not only were bars the only venues where lesbians could meet in the not too distant past, but finding these bars required determination and a particular longing to be among one's own.

The elderly women whose stories come alive on the pages of "Gay Old Girls" are humorous and sad, poignant yet titillating, tragic but true. From informant Margaret Kennedy's personal account about the dearth of lesbians in San Francisco in 1940 (she could not find a single one!), to the bawdy tales told by some others about P-Town through the 1950s, we learn about growing up lesbian in the 20th century beginning around the 1930s.

Gershick, a lesbian journalist, provides her readers with an intimate account of the challenges faced by the nine lesbians she interviews in the twilight of their golden years. One by one we discover how each of these women came to embrace their sexuality, despite and in spite of the myriad of obstacles laid before them. At the tender age of 14, Murial W. read 1940s psychology books seeking confirmation about her strong feelings for girls. Rather than corroboration however, she finds that not only was homosexuality considered inherently sinister, but thought of as a male-only domain.

In the spirit of Audre Lorde's "Zami," whose biomythography highlights the bars scenes intrinsic to lesbian city life, the women in "Gay Old Girls" describe for us the ways in they came to recognize each other. Pinky rings and jade wedding bands were clues to whether a straight-looking female was in the life or not. Since the heterosexual community served as the only role-model for how couples related to one another, femme/butch roles became the norm in lesbian relationships.

The ladies in this book came out as lesbian through the post-Freudian decades when same-sex relations between women were suspect. Before Freud, according to historian Carol Smith-Rosenberg, lesbians engaged in "Boston Marriages," where professional women in the Victorian period could love and care for each other in peace. After all, the experts claimed, what could be the harm in two old maids sharing living expenses and companionship? Freud's ruminations about lesbians brought a halt to these safe arrangements and "single" women became targets for straight people's fear of homosexuality. Informant Trudy Genovese tells chilling stories about the "street sweeps" in New York during the 1950s where "anybody who looked different" were swept off the streets by police officers and remanded to jail for unspecified crimes. Trudy, beaten and raped by a female guard, said that the violence against her body "didn't cure me," and philosophically examines the guard's cruel behavior as a "power thing."

Many of the women who spoke with Gershick reminisced about their sense of community and commonality that they eventually found in their lives. In some ways they begrudge the women's liberation movement for ostracizing lesbians, and the subsequent exclusion by lesbians toward women of any sexual orientation seeking shelter from the storms of the patriarchy. One informant, Valerie Taylor, castigates both NOW's exclusionary rhetoric, as well as the separatist attitudes of her lesbian sisters.

Gershick's sample of interviewees is small, making it difficult to make broad generalizations about lesbian life through the 1960s. Still, we ought to examine why so few stories appear in this book. As Gershick explains, and as becomes evident in the stories, too many dykes in these decades remained hidden from the mainstream -- they "passed" in the straight world only to return home to the arms of their female lovers. For some, the aging process has not been enough to loosen the shackles of the fear of being discoverd. Now, as elders of our community, these women maintain their silence, as most of them still live among uninformed or ignorant heterosexuals. This particular aspect of their lives is a call to action for us "younger" lesbians (my 40-year-old self included) to work toward the restructuring of the institutions that house these senior citizens.

Although Gershick's transcriptions give voice to a group of heroes heretofore silenced, I would have enjoyed the book more if she wrapped their stories around a broader historical framework. We catch glimpses here and there of historical moments and people, but my training as an historian longed for a critical perspective of the social and cultural events of the decades. My other critique is that the stories are far too short! Since Gershick's interviews take place over a ten-year period, a postscript about these elderly lesbians would have tied up some loose ends. While I'm positive Gershick had more material than she could use, I'm also sure that fiscal and space constraints by the independent press limited the scope of the work. Nonetheless, Zsa Zsa Gershick does honor to the women in her book and "Gay Old Girls" should hold a special place on our bookshelves. After all, we too will be gay old girls one day ourselves.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Visiting with these grande old girls is time well spent, December 7, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Gay Old Girls (Paperback)

This collection allows us to visit with the kind of women we wished we could meet with when we were growing up and coming out, to get answers to the question 'what was it like when you were young?' from people who really knew. The women in this rich collection are drawn from a vast range of backgrounds and ages. Gershick takes care to invite us into these women's lives, with descriptions which really enhance the interviews which follow. It is comforting to know that some of the problems these women faced have disappeared forever, and to know that the search for love succeeded in conditions far harsher than we could know today. The style of the book makes you feel as if you a friend has taken you to visit with these very well-lived women; women who you won't forget. Time very well spent.