Getting Us Here
scrappybadger August 30th, 2008
Lots of things have been trying to get me back to this blog lately — the Democrati
c Convention, thoughts about how to sort out my hectic life, a friend’s blog. It took a piece of sad news to make it happen, though. Piig emailed me a very short news clip about Del Martin’s death this past week. I did a quick Google search, and to my surprise, lots of news outlets had picked up the 
story. Few of them, however, said anything more about her than that she married her longtime partner Phyllis Lyon this year and that together they had formed the Daughters of Bilitis. That hardly sums up the life of a woman who came to mean so much to so many lesbians.
Both Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon worked tirelessly for lesbians specifically and women in general. What started as a small social network called the DOB became a national effort to link together lesbians who found themselves isolated by a sexist and lesbophobic society. Martin, Lyon, and
women who worked with them insisted that lesbians be visible, that our histories be uncovered, and that we be able to form strong social connections with one another. The Ladder, the print periodical developed by the DOB and initially edited by Lyon, did just that.
Perhaps the most important, or the most visible, aspect of Martin’s and Lyon’s lives for lesbians of my generation is their more than half century 
long relationship. Indeed, their relationship itself is iconic. Many lesbians and gay men have looked to Martin and Lyon as an example of the lifelong bonds that same sex partners can have. Sexism, homophobia, and the kind of 
poverty experienced by many lesbians (and, to a lesser extent, gay men) all contribute to making decades-long relationships even rarer for lgbt people than they are for our heterosexual counterparts. The not-so-cynical part of me has always found some happiness in the idea that patriarchy, and all of its accompanying garbage, couldn’t destroy something that was good.
In one of my Women’s Studies classes this week my students read the essay “A Day Without Feminism,” and we talked about how many things we owed to feminists. I am thankful for the many things they did to make my 
life easier, and I am particularly thankful to lesbian feminists who made the world better for me in a multitude of ways. Their work is neither underappreciated nor forgotten.
Notes:
1. Photos stolen from various websites that stole them from various other websites, etc.
2. I couldn’t find any pictures of one woman without the other.
3. Equality California has done a nice job of detailing Del Martin’s activist contributions.
Hey, there, great post!
Do you think that it’s because of our various persecutions that L-G relationships are often shorter than het ones? I have suspected that many more hets would do more “serial monogamy” if it weren’t for the obnoxious legal entanglements of marriage, kids/custody, mortgages, etc. For lesbians, until the recent imperative of GAY MARRIAGE!!!!, it’s always been pretty easy to pull up stakes if things weren’t working out well, and honestly I’ve thought of that as a strength. I don’t know that I’m cut out to spend 50 years with the same person.
Ah, you caught me, Amy. Actually, I feel pretty ambivalent about long lasting monogamous relationships. On a gut level they feel unnatural and when examined logically, looking at the numbers of people who actually manage to stay together for very long periods of time and remain happy, they feel downright impossible. Those things make me agree with your theory about hets staying together because of legal and social pressures. That would make it seem, then, that lesbians and gay men, like you say, merely move on easier than straight people. I can’t help but think though that dealing with homophobia day in and day out messes with a person, adding to the stress of everyday life in ways that negatively impact close relationships — be they romantic/sexual ones or otherwise. It’s like friendships between women. I think that they are hard to maintain in a world that still tells women that they shouldn’t trust one another.
When it comes right down to it, though, I’m not sure if this is just me wanting to cling to some romantic ideal of relationships. That in itself is problematic I know since it was probably an invention of heteropatriarchy designed both to create babies and regulate that creation at the same time. Regardless, there is a part of me that wants to hang on to the idea despite the fact that I often find the idea of being for one person for half a century ludicrous.
I am, as always, a big ball of contradictions it seems.
Somewhere I read recently something like, “The opposite of a great truth is also true.” You’ve probably heard that before. So, it’s probably some of both — lack of legal/structural forms might let us walk more easily, but internalized lesbian-hating might make us walk sooner than we might have if we were able to work through problems with community support. Because for sure there are lots more brief and cufked up lesbian relationships out there, than there are long-lived ones (cufked up or no). I have personally felt, at different times, both an unjustified irrational panic about long-term intimacy, and the bullshit “pride” and sense of achievement that my lesbian loves have lasted longer than some (many?). So maybe, as per Kya’s favorite and most aggravating (to me) saying, “It’s a mix.”
I wish you blogged more. You are very thoughtful and the blogosphere needs more of that.
I definitely think you’re right about it being a little of both. And of course we’ll never actually know anyway since homophobia has forever changed the landscape of same-sex relationships. It’s like a conversation I had in one of my classes today. Several students were giving me the “It ain’t like it used to be. We aren’t racist anymore, so why dwell on the past” speech. Seriously, though, how can 150 years, a relatively short time, erase from everyone’s minds (and all of our institutions) something like slavery? It reminds me of the half-life of plutonium or something. It just hangs around forever and ever. It decays, which seems like a good thing because it is going away, but it creates all sorts of other bad stuff in the process.
And thanks for the compliment. I wish I blogged more, too. And by that I mean that I wish I had more time to write AND read. There are so many really great women blogging out there, but I can’t keep up with all of it on top of work. It really sucks. I do enjoy these abbreviated exchanges, though.