The Personal and the Political: Canadian Lesbian Oral Histories, 1970 – 2010 by Janet Lee Trainor B.A., University of Victoria
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Personal and the Political: Canadian Lesbian Oral Histories, 1970 – 2010 by Janet Lee Trainor B.A., University of Victoria, 2008 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of History © Janet Lee Trainor, 2015 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis cannot be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. Supervisory Committee The Personal and The Political: Canadian Lesbian Oral Histories, 1970 – 2010 by Janet Lee Trainor B.A., University of Victoria, 2008 Supervisory Committee Dr. Annalee Lepp, Department of Women’s Studies Supervisor Dr. Lynne Marks, Department of History Departmental Member Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Annalee Lepp, Department of Women’s Studies Supervisor Dr. Lynne Marks, Department of History Departmental Member Based on first-person interviews and lesbian archival documents, this thesis explores the stories of eleven white, middle-class, self-identified lesbians who were born between 1949 and 1960 and who come of age beginning in the 1970s. It traces their life trajectories and examines such themes as the coming out process as it related to family, religion, and other life events; the cultural and political environment that influenced them; their involvement in various forms of lesbian feminist political activism; their varied professional contributions, and their reflections on the future of “the lesbian” as an embodied gendered, sexual, and political identity. In documenting their narratives, my aim is to add their voices and their experiences of struggle, survival, and accomplishment to the Canadian historical canon. Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ……………………………………………………..................... ii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………..................... iii Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………….. iv Acknowledgement …………………………………………………………..................... v Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 Methodology ………………………………………………….............................. 8 Chapter Summaries ………………………………………………...................... 13 Chapter One: Historiography ………………………………………………................... 15 Lesbian Bar Cultures ……………………………………………………………16 Beyond Bar Cultures: Lesbian Lives and Geographies ………………………... 23 Lesbian Political Organizing …………………………………………………... 28 Lesbian Knowledge Production: Lesbian Newsletters/Feminist Periodicals ….. 32 Lesbians in Mainstream Print Media …………………………………………... 35 Lesbians and the State …………………………………………………………. 37 Chapter Two: The Personal ……………………………………………………………. 43 The Participants ………………………………………………………………... 43 Who or What is a Lesbian? …………………………………………………….. 44 Coming Out Stories: Context, Responses, and Influences …………………….. 46 Nearer, my God, to thee? ………………………………………………………. 76 Summary ……………………………………………………………………….. 83 Chapter Three: The Political …………………………………………………………… 86 Foundations for the Revolution ……………………………………………....... 86 Feminist Activism, Lesbian Culture, and Knowledge Production …………….. 92 Not the Church …………………………………………………………………102 Women and Sports ……………………………………………………………..108 And Not the State ………………………………………………………………112 Same-Sex Adoption Rights …………………………………………………….117 She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not …………………………………………….125 Summary ……………………………………………………………………….137 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..139 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...144 Appendices Appendix A: Recruitment Script ………………………………………………………158 Appendix B: Interview Questions ……………………………………………………...159 Appendix C: Participant Consent Form ………………………………………………..160 Appendix D: Participant Reference Chart ……………………………………………..164 Acknowledgements This work honours the women in my life who have inspired and continue to inspire me: my grandmother, Annabelle Plestid McDonald got to me early and encouraged my life- long love of learning; and my mother, Mrs. Rita Trainor encouraged me to excel always in school. Dr. Mary O’Brien taught me that learning in later life is exhilarating, and that brains and bridge-playing are highly compatible and Sarah Norton kept me focused and in command of the Oxford comma. I honour and thank my advisors, Dr. Annalee Lepp and Dr. Lynne Marks, for their patience and encouragement. I thank Dr. Georgia Sitara and Dr. Janni Aragon whose energetic facilitation and challenging curricula kick-started my undergraduate interests in history and political science at the University of Victoria. I thank the women of the No Hat No Glove Ladies Who Lunch (NHNGLWL) who made me laugh and made life easier as we supported each other in our postgraduate endeavours. I thank the narrators who opened my eyes to their quiet persistence, courage, and achievements and paid me the great honour of sharing their lives with me. I thank my partner, Dr. Nancy Poole, for her support in every way. Victoria, British Columbia June 2015 Introduction History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in … I read it a little as a duty but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.1 Scholarship in the field of lesbian history in Canada is growing, but continues to be relatively sparse. This situation offers historians an opportunity to historicize Canadian lesbians and supplement the historical ‘canon’. The oral histories shared by eleven self- identified lesbians born between 1949 and 1960, which serve as the main primary source for this study, contribute to the broader project of rendering lesbian lives, bodies, and desires visible in the Canadian historical narrative. As Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez have argued, “oral history with subaltern or historically undervalued communities entails making historical and generational discontinuities explicit. It necessarily disrupts historical paradigms that do not or will not acknowledge the existence of bodies, genders, and desires invisible to previous historical traditions.”2 The desire to examine lesbian oral histories emerged from a question asked by a retired Women’s Studies professor: “Are lesbians going extinct?”3 This question pre- supposed the existence of lesbians, while at the same time placed lesbians in a continuing spiral of going-to-extinctness. As a historian and … wait a minute… a lesbian, her 1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 123-4. 2 Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “Close Encounters: The Body and Knowledge in Queer Oral History,” in Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, ed. Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-2. 3 Debby Yaffe, “My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory and Practice: Discuss the question ‘Are Lesbians Going Extinct?’ as if your life depended on it,” Trivia: Voices of Feminism 10 (February 2010): n.p., accessed August 26, 2013, http://www.triviavoices.net/archives/issue10/index.html. question precipitated other queries. How will we know lesbians were here? Before they left, did lesbians leave a legacy? Many of the Canadian lesbian historical studies produced to date by scholars in such fields as history, sociology, and cultural geography have examined such topics as lesbian identity politics and community dynamics, but the primary focus has been on urban lesbians and lesbian bar culture in the period between 1955 and 1975. Relying on oral accounts, the yellow press, and police and court records, historians have explored the intersections of class, sexuality, and gender in the bars and taverns of ‘red light’ districts in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. After reading the social histories of Canada’s working-class lesbians who frequented these venues, you might assume that they were a dissolute and shiftless, yet mythical, lot whose lives were played out against the inelegant backdrop of the Vanport in Vancouver, the Coral Reef in Ottawa, the St. Charles in Toronto, the Mardi Gras in Winnipeg, the Cecil in Calgary, and Madame Georges in Montreal. As various scholars have argued, however, within the context of the entrenched heteronormativity of mid-twentieth-century Canada, these spaces were important sites of visibility, refuge, courtship, community building, employment, and sociability. 4 While 4 The Canadian scholars who have examined public bars/private clubs as sites where lesbians went to meet each other and where, it is argued by some, that the lesbian community was formed include: in French Canada, Line Chamberland, “Remembering Lesbian Bars: Montreal, 1955-75,” Journal Of Homosexuality 25 (1993): 231-269 and Mémoires Lesbiennes : Le lesbianisme à Montréal entre 1950 et 1972 (Montreal: Les Éditions du remue-ménage, 1996); in English Canada, Aerlyn Weisman and Lynne Fernie, Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1992); Becki Ross, “Dance to ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’, Get Churched, and Buy the Little Lady a Drink: Gay Women’s Bar Culture in Toronto, 1965-1975,” in Weaving Alliances: selected papers presented for the Canadian Women's Studies Association at the 1991 and 1992 Learned Societies Conference, ed. Debra Martens (Ottawa: Canadian Women’s Studies Association, 1993), 267-87; Carolyn Anderson, The Voices of Older Lesbian Women: An Oral History (PhD diss., University of Calgary, 2001), http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq64850.pdf; Elise Chenier, “Rethinking Class in Lesbian