The Great Lesbian Wars

Throughout the 1960s class tensions were brewing in the lesbian community. This was a time of social reform movements and a kind of radical liberalism that attracted many groups, like the lesbian and queer community at large. And with these new radical opinons came divides. Lower-class lesbians, or "working-class dykes", felt keenly that economic reform needed to happen and that they specifically could start that from within the community. Middle and upper class lesbians often supported these ideas theoretically but were hesitant or even directly oppositional to implementing informal policies that would negatively impact their own wealth, policies like redistributing money to those in the community who needed it so that the community as a whole could thrive.

When lesbians from different class backgrounds did live together in communes or other housing situations in order to break from the mainstream way of living and existing in a capitalist country, issues still cropped up. The fundamental mindsets that are formed through diffferent economic experiences created points of friction even among those who had similar ideas of how to live. So by the time the Political Lesbians came onto the scene, the lesbian community was ripe for destabilization along class lines.

The Political Lesbian movement was a subset of the new wave of mainstream feminism that was gaining ground in the 1960's. These women decided that in order to truly dedicate themselves to the feminist cause they had to entirely break from relationships with men. Those who took to this new movement did so with a fervor that branded the entire feminist movement, whether or not they agreed, as fanatic gender seperatists. In the process of redefining themselves as political lesbians, they shoved their way into spaces that lesbians had made for themselves. This was a radical change in mindset for a group of feminists to make. Though the queer community had a long history of starting in the feminist movement and supporting it before moving to identify more strongly with the queer community, mainstream feminism has not had a long history of the same kind of interraction with the queer community. It was common for lesbians individually, as well as in groups, to approach feminist organizations and be turned away. Mainstream feminism was primarily a white, striaght, middle-class movement that actively alienated those who did not fit that description.

Some in the lesbian community welcomed the new political lesbians and the fresh blood and sexual opportunities they brought to the community. In a community as insular as lesbian communities, it is common to date emebers of the group and run out of people that you are interested in. It is a common experience even today for a lesbian to go to a lesbian space with the intention of meeting someone and run into all of their exs. New women coming into the community wanting to have the real lesbian experience would have ceratinly been welcome on some level.

On a larger scale, the encroaching political lesbians disrupted the established community mindset. Suddenly the lesbian community was being invaded by middle-class women who had previously shunned them. This pushed class tension to an all-time high as the original lesbian community reacted against their presence by venerating the "working-class dyke" as the True lesbian to distinguish their identity from the new political lesbian identity. Because the queer community is made up of individuals from different backgrounds, the queer identity is more consciously constructed and experimented with and can and does adapt rapidly in the face of external influences. This communal identity already in flux was interrupted by political lesbians.