“Someone to Love”: Same-Sex Desire and Female Adolescence in Postwar America

Social histories of lesbianism in the postwar period have revolved around the twin pillars of nascent political movements (ie, homophile organizations and resistance to police harassment) and bar-based working-class subculture.  Because including or admitting juveniles put members of homophile and bar communities in jeopardy, adolescents are nearly invisible in these historical and historiographical records.  At the same time, social science histories of homosexuality tend to focus on men, missing what is arguably a defining feature of professional and popular understandings of lesbianism in the 1940s-60s: the persistent association of female homosexuality with childish immaturity. 
    Working to rigorously interpret a fragmented and often highly mediated source base, this paper explores the meanings of same-sex desire for adolescent girls, as well as the meanings of adolescence for experts about female homosexuality.  I argue that so-called “experts” tended to explain and to describe lesbianism, but not male homosexuality, through metaphors of age.  The concepts of childhood, youth, adolescence, and (im)maturity pervaded depictions of lesbians in fiction and nonfiction alike.  The message was that lesbianism was immature, that girls and young women who failed to embrace the cornerstones of postwar social life—marriage and motherhood— were stunted in their psycho-sexual development, frozen in a kind of permanent adolescence.  By juxtaposing various sources, including social work interviews, memoirs and oral histories, and lesbian-authored pulp fiction, I suggest that many lesbians understood that they were associated with immaturity and irresponsibility and that they attempted, in fragmented ways, to represent themselves and their relationships as adjusted, satisfying, and mature.