Free Stonewall by Martin Duberman Page B

“undesirable” women. 3
    One night in the Bagatelle, Yvonne and her friends Tootsie and Debby were talking together at the bar when a white woman sitting nearby tried to flirt with them. When they ignored her, she went upto the thug on the door and said the three women had been bothering her. He, in turn, told them that they would have to leave the club, but Yvonne and her friends were so outraged at the injustice that they refused. The thug then tried to evict them forcibly, a furious fight ensued, and Yvonne had to threaten him with a broken beer bottle before they could edge their way out of the place.
    The tough, divey Swing Rendezvous, and the Seven Steps on Hudson Street, were more likely to admit black lesbians than was the upscale Bagatelle, which, with its tiny dance floor, was the most popular mid-fifties lesbian bar in the Village. But even in the Swing, the scene was essentially the same: a few black women in a sea of white faces. Nor did black lesbians necessarily form bonds of solidarity. The writer Audre Lorde, Yvonne’s contemporary and later her friend, thought for a time that she was the only black lesbian living in the Village, and even after she met more black lesbians in the bars, they formed few friendships among themselves. In Lorde’s words, “We recognized ourselves as exotic sister-outsiders who might gain little from banding together. Perhaps our strength might lay in our fewness, our rarity.”
    For Lorde, part of the trouble was the tendency of black lesbians, even more than white, to get into heavy butch/femme roles. As a “kiki” (or “Ky-Ky,” as Lorde spells it)—that is, someone who refused to label herself in an either/or way—Lorde was considered unacceptably “AC/DC,” a confused “bluff” (a combination of “butch” and “fluff”), unwilling or unable to find a suitably clearcut identity.
    Yvonne was more comfortable than Lorde with the strict roles lesbian bar culture enforced, and herself leaned toward the butch side (her butch name was Vonne, short for Vaughan). As she put it years later, “I cross-dressed primarily to take on the power of the other gender; and also to make a clear statement to women what my preference was and a clear statement to men that I was not available to them.” Yet she shared Lorde’s misgivings, if not her vehemence, about the bar scene being a “reflect[ion of] all the deprecating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was a rejection of these roles that had drawn us to ‘the life’ in the first place … we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.”
    In the fifties and sixties, middle-class and upper-class lesbians relied less on the bars for a social life than working-class women did—just as they were less invested in butch/femme role dichotomies. Yvonne was again atypical in the way she socialized across class lines. She would sometimes be invited as a token black to an otherwise all-whitecocktail party of professional women, or to Fire Island, a summer playground that only wealthier lesbians could afford. And Yvonne would go, pleased to be part of so many different worlds. But she would deliberately dress down in sneakers and jeans, in those years decidedly déclassé, eschewing “respectable” Bermuda shorts.
    Nor did she often date across racial lines. Only once in these years did she get seriously involved with a white woman, and then it was with someone who traveled almost entirely in the black lesbian world. Not that Yvonne was much interested in settling down with anyone ; though intensely romantic, she was also intensely wary—a trait that often comes as second nature to those brought up in an alcoholic environment of erratic or excessive emotion that needs to be defended against. Yvonne would later describe herself as “frightened of intimacy,” unable to