

In fact, this emphasizes the desire that these women have to for the feminine body-not to be feminine but to command the sexual love of the feminine woman. Beebo (and others like her) are shown to have performed the search that many lesbian women must do, and have found and realized her deepest desire to act in that domineering manner toward women. This overpoweringly masculine role goes beyond the level of mere self-discovery into an assuredly male persona.

She is described as being one who sits at the bar and lights up a cigarette, holding out the match to another woman expecting her to blow it out. This butch/femme role is highlighted in the novels written by Ann Bannon, and Beebo falls staunchly into the butch role. The promiscuity that is possible even to heterosexuals under the blanket of city life is also granted to Beebo, and she becomes a butch character playing the role of the male in many short lesbian affairs. She uses the facilities that the relative anonymity of the city grants to lesbians-gay and lesbian bars and apartment life, and this facilitates the unleashing of her hidden desire for other women. In the Beebo Brinker chronicles, the big city referenced is Greenwich Village, and the life that Beebo leads after she finds the courage to “come out” to her gay roommate is possible only in that city. This marginalization drove lesbians to the cities where people were much less concerned with the business of others as compared with small towns. The fear that society inspired in the lives of lesbians drove them to underground haunts and secret lifestyles that marginalized their existence in American society. ’ As easy as it might be if you were a young woman in today’s generation to think that was exaggerating, it wasn’t. I’d have to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. She continues: “I had been extremely low profile, very proper, very Victorian wife… I thought, ‘Well, that would do it. She writes that while being in a gay bar in the evenings, she would have extreme fair of it being raided and of herself being taken to jail. While the violence of lesbian repression might not have been overtly performed, all the women (lesbian or not) were aware of the intense pressure put on anyone who held those feelings or performed those actions.Īnn Bannon describes her own wretched experience during that time and the suicidal feelings that necessarily accompanied the tendency toward lesbianism in the 1960’s. While the desires of the woman to have more freedom were repressed, any homosexual tendency was crushed violently. However, the desires of the woman to dress as comfortably as a man and perform the roles that were traditionally given to men were repressed during that time.

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