Tom Bliss: Hi, Lillian. Thanks for sitting down with OUTWORDS.

Lillian Faderman: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Tom Bliss: We always start out with the same two questions. Could you please say and spell your name?

Lillian Faderman: My name is Lillian Faderman. That's F-A-D-E-R-M-A-N.

Tom Bliss: And where and when were you born?

Lillian Faderman: I was born in the Bronx in New York in July 18th, 1940.

Tom Bliss: What are your earliest memories?

Lillian Faderman: I remember the street that we lived on, which was Fox Avenue. I read about it as an adult, Alfred Kazin wrote an autobiography, and his family was very poor, he grew up in the Bronx, and he said in the autobiography, "At least we didn't live on Fox Avenue." My mother and I lived on Fox Avenue, so it was considered one of the poorer neighborhoods in the Bronx.

Tom Bliss: And what was the living situation like with your mother?

Lillian Faderman: My mother worked in the garment industry. I went to a nursery school, as it was called in those days, I guess we call it daycare now. I must've been in the nursery school from probably the age of four until I started school at six. And then I would go to school, but I would 00:01:30return to the nursery school because school would be over at three o'clock and my mother couldn't pick me up until after 5, 5:30 or something like that. So until we left for Los Angeles, I was in school and I was in nursery school as well.

Tom Bliss: Can you tell me about your mother?

Lillian Faderman: My mother was an immigrant from Latvia, from a 00:02:00shtetl in Latvia, Prail or Preili as it came to be called, when the Latvians got their independence from Russia. She came to the States in 1914, just before World War I broke out in Europe. She came at the age of 17. She was sponsored by her brother-in-Law. Women, in those days, couldn't sponsor someone 00:02:30to come. The sponsor had to say that they would be willing to take financial responsibility so that the immigrant wouldn't be a charge of the state, an immigrant wouldn't have to be on relief, as it was called in those days. She had seen her sister, it was a half-sister, only once. The sister was 20 00:03:00years older, and my mother would tell me that, I guess it was when the half-sister and the brother-in-Law were getting ready to come to America, they came to see their father and her only memory was this woman wearing gloves, which was a step above the Shtetl existence that my mother knew. So 00:03:30she was sponsored by her half-sister and the half sister's husband. It was understood that, as soon as she came to America, she would get a job in the garment industry. And that's what she did from the time she was 17 until she married my stepfather when she was 54 years old, she was quickly alienated from the half-sister I suspect, because my mother just wanted to ... 00:04:00She was 17, she wanted to enjoy life in America as a young person. She wanted to go to the movies, the silent films, in those days. She wanted to go to the dance halls that were opening up for working class men and women. She wanted to just walk the streets and see how people lived. I think that her 00:04:30half-sister and the half sister's husband really disapproved of that kind of behavior as she was supposed to work in the shop and then come home like a nice girl. My understanding is that they told her she wasn't welcome there anymore, so she found people to be roommates with. She was on her own pretty 00:05:00young. She was about 18, I guess, when she was separated from her half-sister. In 1923, just before the quota immigration was imposed on people from Europe, my aunt, her full sister, came to the States. My mother had a 00:05:30relationship with a guy who was my father, I think beginning probably about 1932. He wouldn't marry her. She had two abortions, she told me at one point. He wanted me to be the third, and she was already almost 43 years old. I 00:06:00think she realized that if she was ever going to have kids, she couldn't abort me, so she didn't, and he would not acknowledge me. She couldn't work, she was on relief, as welfare was called in New York in those days. And the 00:06:30person from the relief agency who would come to check up on her and me said that she had to have a paternity suit against the guy who was my father. I don't know what happened in that suit. I did research, I tried to find the transcripts. I found a docket slip that said that the case had been appealed, which 00:07:00probably meant that she won and he appealed it. In those days there was no such thing as DNA testing, so you could prove non-paternity, but you couldn't definitely prove paternity. But I think he gave her some money for me, which must have been court ordered. And of course, once we left New York, he stopped. And my mother didn't even understand that she could insist that he 00:07:30continue to give her money for me. I saw him twice. Once, I must've been about five, I guess. And I remember we met on the street. She had a date with him, but she brought me, and it was a big surprise to him. I remember his saying, why did you bring her? They spoke Yiddish. And that was my first language. At 00:08:00one point, my mother said, "Say hello to your father." I hated that guy the minute I saw him. But I did say, "hello, father." And I remember his saying, "I'm not your father," whatever that meant. Whether he never believed 00:08:30that he was my father or he didn't acknowledge me as his child, I don't know. Another time that I saw him, we were already in Los Angeles and went back to New York for the summer. I was 12. I think my mother had the crazy delusion that he would finally make an honest woman out of her. She never got over him. 00:09:00She knew where to find him because she knew where his mother lived, my grandmother, presumably, my paternal grandmother. So we went to the mother's apartment. She wouldn't look at me, but she did give my mother the address where she could find him. It was a factory. My mother, and my aunt was with 00:09:30us, my Aunt Ray, the three of us went into the factory. He wasn't on the floor, and my mother asked somebody who was working there where he was, and the guy said, just a minute I'll call him. And Moishe, as my mother used to call him, walked out. I was 12, but I knew that this guy was not a worker. He 00:10:00was very pompous. I knew he was either the manager or the owner. And sure enough, as I found subsequently, he was the owner. The reason I found out that he was the owner subsequently is when I was doing research for the book about my mother, My Mother's Wars. I went to New York and I tried to find as much about him as I could. One of the first things I did was look for a business 00:10:30license in his name, and there was no business license in his name. I did find the court manifest. I found the census ... I'm sorry, let me start that again. I did find the ship's manifest. I found the census. I knew his parents' name, presumably my grandparents. I knew that he had come to the states 00:11:00from Poland with a younger sister. I knew her name. I tried to find her. I couldn't. And I was teaching at that time. So I had spent several weeks in New York and I had to get back for the start of the semester. And I hired a private investigator who also saw the ship's manifest with the sister's name, she started with that, and the sister's name, it was a Yiddish name, it 00:11:30was Faigeleh. The private investigator said, what does Faigeleh translate to? I said, I don't know, maybe Faye. A few days later, she called me and she said, I discovered Faye, who was no longer alive, but I found her marriage license. I found out when she had married, and I found out that she had a son. I 00:12:00said, I'm coming to New York to meet this guy who was presumably my cousin. By the time I got to New York, I told her I was going to stay at the Edison Hotel, and she took the dates I'd be there. And she called me at the Edison and she said, you have a half-sister. Anyway, I met with my half cousin or cousin or whatever he was to me. And he too told me about my half-sister. And 00:12:30as it turns out, by the time my mother and I went back to New York in 1952, that summer, he had married, he'd married shortly after we left New York. We left in '48. I think he married in '49, and my half-sister was born in '51. And I couldn't find a business license because he was estranged from my 00:13:00half sister's mother, his wife, and in order not to pay a lot of child support, he transferred the name of the business to his sister. He was a real creep. My half sister didn't get an inheritance from him, and of course I got nothing, and I needed nothing from him. But she wasn't his heir either. But that's 00:13:30probably more detailed than you want.

Tom Bliss: Did you stay in touch with your ...

Lillian Faderman: Yes, we speak often. At one point we were actually talking every single week. I went to Florida and she came here. We speak now, I'd say, about every three weeks or something like that. She's lovely. I really wanted to do a DNA test, and she seemed to be very upset when I 00:14:00suggested that, so I dropped the idea. Phyllis says she sees a physical resemblance between Linda, my half-sister, and our son Avrom. I don't see any physical resemblance between us. But she actually did show me some pictures when she was younger, and I think when I was younger and she was younger, there was some resemblance, some vague resemblance. Anyway, she's a lovely 00:14:30person and I'm really happy she's in my life, whether or not she's really my half sister.

Tom Bliss: What was it like growing up in poverty, fatherless, with a mother who still dated him and who had a lot of pain from that relationship, and going through that alone for so long, and then meeting someone else who grew up with the same father and the same experience? What was that like for you?

Lillian Faderman: I think my mother really pined for him, certainly until she married my stepfather, and maybe afterwards. I was 14 when she married my stepfather. Before that, she supported us by continuing to work in the garment industry. It was very hard for her. She was also not only mourning, 00:15:30but having ... I wouldn't call it psychotic breaks because it was never dubbed that by a psychiatrist. She didn't see a psychiatrist, but she developed obsessive compulsive behavior. And a lot of it was around her 00:16:00brother. Her family, the family that remained in Latvia, had disappeared in the Holocaust, and Hitler never wrote letters saying, "I regret to inform you," so she didn't know what happened to him. I found out subsequently, what happened to him, because I did research. But I think she felt great guilt about him more than the other members of the family because she was very close 00:16:30to him before she left. And her obsessive compulsive behavior, it would have to do with if she did one thing, it meant that he was alive. If she did something else, it would mean that he had been killed. Sorry.

Tom Bliss: What did her obsessive compulsive have to do with?

Lillian Faderman: If she did one thing, it meant that he was alive, and if she did something else, it meant that he had been killed. It was magical thinking, that she could control what had happened to him. And so for instance, in the shop, the garment factory where she worked, she had a coworker whose brother, it was found out by the coworker, had been killed by the Nazis in 00:17:30Hungary. The women used to bring the apron that they wore in the factory to work with them. On the bus, they would wear regular clothes, and then they'd put on the apron. And the coworker would bring the apron that she wore to work in a May Company bag, May Company was a big clothing store in the 00:18:001940s and 50s, lasted longer than that. And my mother had this thing about a May Company bag. If she brought her work dress to the shop in a May Company bag like the coworker did, it meant that her brother had been killed, but she 00:18:30didn't want to think that, so she would put the garment in the May Company bag, and then she'd walk around a circle and pull her hair and she would take it out and she'd put it in again. It would be just this terrible anguished thing that she would go through over the May Company bag. There was no such thing as anti-psychotic drugs in those days, but sometimes she would go to the 00:19:00local doctor who would give her a shot of something to calm her down. As an adult, I found this astonishing, despite the fact that she had to deal with this obsessive compulsive behavior, and it manifested itself in various ways, the May Company bag is just one way it manifested itself. Despite that, 00:19:30despite the anguish she was in, despite the fact that she would pull her hair and run around circles and tear her clothes off, she went to work every single day, five days a week. She supported us. She didn't go on welfare, she didn't give me up for adoption as my beloved Aunt Ray wanted her to do very 00:20:00early on when I was first born, she didn't give in to her psychotic episodes by saying, "I can't do this," and let me be taken away and put in an orphanage. When I was a kid, I met some other children, a girl and her two brothers, that I came to know who had been put in an orphanage. It was a Jewish 00:20:30orphanage in Los Angeles called Vista del Mar. And that was the nightmare of my childhood, how awful that would've been if my mother had put me in an orphanage or given me up for adoption. Despite all that, she was strong enough to not do that. I think it took my being an adult and thinking back on her in 00:21:00those days to make me really appreciate the strength that it must have taken to have a baby out of wedlock, as it was called in those days, to hang on to me, to resist the pressure from my beloved aunt to give me up for adoption, to not give into her mental illness and put me in an orphanage, as it was called in those days. That was remarkable. That was really remarkable. And I didn't 00:21:30come to appreciate it until I was an adult, until in fact, I wrote my memoir and really had to think about her and about the terrible challenges that she had. And by the time I wrote my memoir, she was no longer here. Of course, I had to feel this great anguish that I didn't appreciate her enough when she 00:22:00was alive. But wow, what inner something or other, strength or fortitude or ... I don't know how to describe it, but it was really admirable that she hung on to this little kid who was me. Even though I grew up in a furnished room, even though I was anguished with her psychotic episodes, she made me know 00:22:30that I was the most important thing in the world to her, and I was the most important thing in the world to my Aunt Ray. I think that gave me a strength that never left me. If she had put me in Vista Delmar or given me up 00:23:00for adoption, that wouldn't have been me. I wouldn't have had that strength.

Tom Bliss: You write about your childhood in your first memoir, and you talk about ... I'm curious about your place in it and your attitude, your perception of it, because you write a lot about people commenting on your cleanliness, throughout your life.

Lillian Faderman: My filthiness as a kid.

Tom Bliss: Right. Can you talk about that? It doesn't seem like you felt that way.

Lillian Faderman: Yeah. So in the Shtetl, they didn't have indoor plumbing. I don't think they knew about brushing their teeth. My mother came here when she was 17, but she lived in furnished rooms until 1954. She came in 00:24:001914. She lived in furnished rooms until 1954. And when I was born, I lived in furnished rooms with her until she married my stepfather when I was 14. I didn't know that you brush your teeth. I think in school they actually had some kind of unit on brushing your teeth, but it flew by me. It didn't make a 00:24:30dent. And so by the time I was 12, I had a mouthful of cavities. I didn't know that you were supposed to take a bath daily. I can remember looking at my fingernails that were always absolutely filthy, but it just didn't occur to me that you don't have to have filthy fingernails. You could wash your hands and get a nail file and get the dirt out or take a bath. Just didn't 00:25:00occur to me. I think it first occurred to me when I had my first lover at 16, the first time we got together, she said, well, you take a bath. And I realized, yeah, that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to take a bath. You're supposed to be clean. That was the first time I realized that, and I was 16 years old.

Tom Bliss: Talk about your life in Los Angeles and the Theater Arts Workshop. If you could talk to me about Eileen.

Lillian Faderman: In my memoir, I call this woman that I was madly in love with when I first met her at the age of 11 and a half, I call her Irene. Her real name was Eileen, and she was the executive director of Theater Arts Workshop in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. Boyle Heights, when I first got 00:26:00there in 1948, had been half Jewish and half Mexican American, roughly. There was a very rapid white flight. I guess I got there in the second 00:26:30grade, so the class was half Jewish and half Mexican American, approximately. By the time I graduated, I think there were three Jewish kids at Evergreen Elementary School. It was a very poor school. It was a poor neighborhood. And suddenly in 19 ... must have been the start of 1952, I was still 11 00:27:00years old, I was 11 and a half, on Wabash Avenue, which was one of the main streets in Boyle Heights, there was a sign that a new business was opening in ... it was a storefront place sign that Theater Arts Workshop would open soon. My mother, from as long as I can remember, she had told me that I had 00:27:30to rescue her from the shop. It was a fantasy. I didn't know how I, a child, could rescue my mother from the shop. Once, I asked how, and she said, "Become a movie actress," because Shirley Temple had been very popular in those days. I remember on the train to Los Angeles from New York in 1948, she told me that Hollywood was part of Los Angeles. And she really meant it. She 00:28:00really did want me to become a movie actress. And I can remember doing a shuffle up and down the train and singing off-key, because I sing terribly, I have an awful ear, and I'm sure really annoying the other passengers, but thinking that maybe there'd be a Hollywood producer on the train who would discover me and I would become a movie actress. Once I got to Los Angeles, I would 00:28:30check books out of the library and I would dramatize them. I would dramatize Dr. Seuss's To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and I would dramatize Longfellow poems. Then suddenly in early 1952, there was this sign on Wabash Avenue that a place called Theater Arts Workshop would be opening up. 00:29:00And I thought, this is my chance. They would train me to become a movie actress, just like my mother wanted me to. Anyway, I remember one day the door was open and going inside, and there was this beautiful woman, I had never seen anyone so glamorous outside of the movies, and I fell madly in love with her. I was with Theater Arts Workshop for three and a half years, and she was my 00:29:30first crush. At one point, she asked if, and I'm sure it was illegal because I was a minor, but if I would sit behind the desk in the front office on Saturdays and take the money that the parents gave for their little kids to study ballet or whatever classes they were taking and write receipts for the money 00:30:00that I was given. I would sit behind the desk and very often she would leave her sweater on the chair that I would sit on, and it was an orlan sweater and a couple of colors, a couple of sweaters, I guess. And she would wear Emir perfume, which was probably a very cheap perfume. And I can remember sitting at that desk writing receipts for the money that the parents gave me for 00:30:30their kids' ballet and tap lessons. And when I didn't have to write receipts, I would run my arm up and down the sleeve of the sweater because I was just so madly in love with Eileen. And I would inhale her Emir perfume. And then I got very confused about it because I was absolutely obsessive. There were a couple of times that my mother and I went to the beach. You could take a 00:31:00couple of buses or a trolley to the beach. And I remember writing her name in the sand and thinking, what if she came upon it and wondered who was in love with her. I was so disturbed by it that ... I was a literary kid, I would memorize poems and prose things, I went to the library a lot, the 00:31:30Malabar Library on Wabash Avenue, right across the street from Theater Arts Workshop. I was so disturbed by my crush that I found psychology books in youth psychology, and I would look for things like crushes. I read the term homosexuality, but I didn't want to quite believe it of myself. I was 00:32:00relieved when it said that it was normal for girls to have crushes on other girls or adult women. I remember one psychology book said, and sometimes there are unscrupulous adult women who would seduce girls. And I remember thinking, oh, if Eileen were just such a woman, but she wasn't, alas.

Tom Bliss: Can you tell me about your next theatrical experience? Geller Theater?

Lillian Faderman: Yes. So because I was so troubled by my crush on Eileen, which it was an absolute obsession, and suddenly it scared me. And I had actually met a boy who was three years older than I was, he was a drag queen, and 00:33:00he did lip sync. He would dress in drag, and he did lip sync of women's singers, and he wanted to perform them, so he wanted to become part of the Theater Arts Workshop troupe. And I think Eileen let him do that for a couple of shows. But Eddie told me that he was a homosexual, and so I knew the term, 00:33:30but it really sort of scared me. By the time I was ... I guess I must've been almost 15, then I thought, I really better stop this. I better quit Theater Arts Workshop and get hold of myself. I found out that on Wilshire 00:34:00Boulevard, right across the street from, there was a May Company actually there, a May Company across the street on one side, and I think it was a Thrifty Drugstore. On the other side, there was a place called Geller Theater that was also a school. I lied about my age and I went to the head of Geller Theater and I told him I wanted to take acting lessons. And he said I could do 00:34:30that if I would be willing to work in the office, it wouldn't cost anything. So I became part of Geller Theater. But to do that, I had to take several buses across town from Boyle Heights to the Wilshire Fairfax area, and my aunt was very upset, my Aunt Ray. She told my mother that we all had to move, including my stepfather, to the Beverly Fairfax area, and we did. By that time, 00:35:00I had just started high school, I guess I was 15, so I started Fairfax High School. After school I would go to Geller Theater to take classes and to rehearse for plays. I had no interest in high school, so I would 00:35:30hardly ever go. The truant officer would come after me because I couldn't get up in the morning. I'd stay out until two o'clock at night. After rehearsal, we would go to Tiny Naylor's and have coffee and cheesecake, and I couldn't get up in the morning. So the truant officer would come after me, and I would tell my mother, "I'm sleeping. I'm in bed. Don't let her talk to me. You talk to her." And my mother would. I figured out that finally the truant officer 00:36:00would figure this as an immigrant woman, and I was 15, and the next year I could drop out of high school anyway. And so she stopped coming around, she just gave up on me, despite the fact that there was a statewide test that everyone in California had to take. And I'm sure I did lousy on the math part, but I think I scored in the 99th percentile on the English part. I was getting all 00:36:30D's and F's in high school, and she never said to my mother, look at this, she scored in the 99th percentile. She could go to college. You have to make her stop being truant. She never said that. She just simply gave up on me. Anyway, I got all D's and Fs at Fairfax High School, and then we moved that summer to ... it was very close to Hollywood High School, which is on Highland. We 00:37:00moved to, it was a court bungalows off of Fountain Avenue, and I went to Hollywood High School. But before I did that, there was the whole summer, and I had just turned 16. Just before I turned 16, Eddie, the gay boy, who continued to be in my life, called me one day and said, "Do you want to come out with me?" And he came over and he said, "I found these places, and they're 00:37:30called gay bars and they're for men." I hadn't thought about my crush on Eileen for a while. In fact, I had encountered, with friends from Geller Theater, we went to some beach in Los Angeles and passed what must've been a 00:38:00lesbian bar. They told me that those women out front were lesbians, and they scared me because some of them looked very butch. I remember one was walking her poodle and said, "Come to Papa." Really scared me. So I hadn't thought about homosexuality for a while except that I was scared of it, but not with Eddie, because he was my buddy and he was gay and he was a boy. I remember 00:38:30his telling me, when I expressed surprise about ... because he was having sexual relationships, I must have said, "What do two guys do?" And he said, "Two men can do together everything that a man and woman could do together." And I still didn't quite get it, but it must've made an impact on me because I remember it to this day, which was many, many years later. Anyway, he said that 00:39:00he had a phony id and he could get me one if I wanted to go out to these men's bars with him. I was adventurous. And I said, sure. And so we went to a couple of bars for gay guys, and then he said, "And you know there are bars for girls like this too." I said, "oh, really?" And he took me to a place called the Open Door on Eighth and Vermont. And we walked in and I remember 00:39:30my first impression thinking, why is he saying that this is a bar for girls? There are boys here too. And then realizing that the boys were really girls, they were butches, and then there were femmes, and it was a working class lesbian bar. And suddenly things crystallized for me. I realized that 00:40:00yes, this is what I want. This is where I want to be. I should say that that year too at Geller Theater, there was a guy who said he wanted to be an agent, and we sort of became friends. He said, if you're going to pursue an 00:40:30acting career, you have to have photographs to take with you on auditions. I said, "I can't afford photographs." And he said, "Well, I know a photographer who will do these photographs for you, if you'll pose for him for a pin-up session." I said, "Sure." And so I began doing modeling, and I did go 00:41:00out on auditions, I was really sort of disgusted by ... they used to call it the casting couch in those days, it scared the hell out of me, and the fact that agents would make passes and be surprised when I said no. Anyway, it really turned me off certainly to heterosexuality. I remembered how in love 00:41:30I had been with Eileen and the Open Door just, wow. I just, yeah, I thought, this is it. This clarifies my whole life.

Tom Bliss: I want to go back just a little bit, the pin-up world. So did you do movies as well?

Lillian Faderman: I did.

Tom Bliss: What was the pin-up world like, and how did you like seeing yourself in pin-up photos?

Lillian Faderman: Yeah, so I did pin-up, I did girly films. The censorship laws were very stringent in those days. And so you could never show the pubic area, for instance, although there are girly films on the net of me as Gigi Frost, and I'm not ashamed of them. It was my way of figuring out how to get 00:42:30out of poverty. It was my ambition to be an actress. And then I gave up that ambition. But it seemed to me a very

Lillian Faderman: logical step. And I guess as a lesbian, it was a job. It cost me nothing. It cost me nothing, emotionally.

Tom Bliss: Did you celebrate your body? I mean, I imagine there was a lot of the male gaze. So what was it like as a lesbian to be in the pin-up world?

Lillian Faderman: It was simply a job. It had no emotional price tag 00:43:30that went along with it.

Tom Bliss: Can you tell me about the lesbian bar scene of the 1950s?

Lillian Faderman: Yes. Eddie introduced me to The Open Door, and I went back often, which meant that I had to take buses, and very often I would meet someone who would give me a ride home. The Open Door was very much a working 00:44:00class scene. My first lover was ... she was actually a pimp who wanted to turn me out. And when I resisted, we broke up. But I met other women there who were really lovely, but they had jobs. I remember one was a cashier in a market and another was a filing clerk. It was very much a working class 00:44:30lesbian bar. I met one, who became a friend even years after, who worked in a factory making boxes. She would joke about that because of the slang meaning of the term boxes. She said, I make boxes. But it was her wonderful sense of humor. When I started taking school seriously, I was sort of afraid to 00:45:00go to that lesbian bar. I was never caught in a bar raid, but a cop did stop me and Jan, when we were jaywalking from The Open Door to the If Club and made her get out of the car, he parked, told her to get out of the car and 00:45:30stand by that tree. It was a little scary, but he certainly didn't do anything improper to me except he said, that person is bad news, and you're going to get in big trouble if you keep seeing her. So he kind of lectured me, and then he just let us both go. But once I started taking school seriously at Hollywood High School, I was afraid to go to a place like The Open Door and the 00:46:00If Club, and I had discovered other places where you could dance women. There was the Paradise Club and the Star Room. These were pretty much all working class places. But at one point, when I was a student at Hollywood High, I met a man through gay boy friends. And why he hung out with gay boys, I don't know, he was not gay. He told me he was in love with me. I was with Frankie at 00:46:30that time. Frankie was a very interesting person who wrote her own memoir, sort of a novel memoir, called a Crystal Diary. But he understood that Frankie was important in my life. But one day he said, there's a new bar that I hear opened up in the valley, and it's very upscale, very high class, I think he 00:47:00called it. It was called The Club Laurel on Ventura. He said he would take us there. It was nothing like the Open Door. The entertainer was Beverly Shaw, who was a fabulous singer who would sit on this piano bar, and she would dress in, it was a man's jacket, a la Marlene Dietrich, with a bow tie. But 00:47:30because drag was ... By then, the impersonating law had been challenged, but I don't know that a lot of people knew it was challenged. In 1951, there were two court cases where women were arrested for what was called in those days, impersonating the opposite sex, and they took it to court and they 00:48:00won their cases in Los Angeles.

Tom Bliss: Really. So you write in your memoir, and I think you write about it so beautifully, can you talk about the differences between working class and middle class lesbian bars?

Lillian Faderman: The Club Laurel felt safe because it wasn't a working class bar. I somehow assumed that if the Vice Squad had even discovered it, 00:48:30it was affluent enough that they'd be paid off or something. I'd never heard of a raid at the Club Laurel. The women who went there weren't in obvious butch femme couples, although I'm sure that in every couple there are similarities to who's more feminine and who's more masculine. But it wasn't apparent 00:49:00through the way many of them dressed. I remember being there one night shortly after Christmas, and two women came in and they were wearing floor length fur coats, and they said they had just bought those coats for each other for Christmas. But that kind of thing wouldn't have happened at The Open Door or the If Club. I mean, these were obviously more affluent women. And I 00:49:30think that at the Open Door and the If Club women thought of themselves more as outlaws, certainly under the law, the women who went to the Club Laurel were outlaws. Everyone in California and all over the country at that time was a presumptive outlaw if you were gay or lesbian, because sodomy laws 00:50:00were on the books in every single state of the country in the 1950s. But I think that many of the women at the If Club and the Open Door and the Paradise Club and the Star Room had more of a feeling of being outlaws than the women at the Club Laurel and later, another bar that was kind of upscale also in 00:50:30North Hollywood, Joani Presents. And do you want me to talk about the history of bars like that? I interviewed women who went to bars in the 1930s, and they told me about places on the Sunset Strip that were very much like the Club Laurel and Joani Presents. There was something, a place called Tessa's 00:51:00International Club where the movie stars would hang out, and they had a crossdresser, couple of cross-dresser entertainers. One was Tommy Williams, another was Jimmy Renard. And there was a legend that I'm sure was based on fact that Marlene Dietrich would show up. And people who went there, including someone that I interviewed for one of my books, said that everyone 00:51:30remembered the night that Tommy Williams, crooned to Marlene Dietrich, and apparently people who were gay friendly, like James Cagney would hang out at places like that. And into the 1940s on the Sunset Strip, there were really upscale nightclubs that were gay and lesbian or just open to adventurous people. In the 1950s, the first places I was introduced to were very 00:52:00different from the places that had been around in the thirties and forties on the Sunset Strip. But the Club Laurel, and then later Joani Presents sort of harked back to those older, very fashionable, romantic kinds of places.

Tom Bliss: So you were talking about your first night at Club Laurel.

Lillian Faderman: So the Club Laurel was so different from The Open Door and the If Club. Beverly Shaw was so beautiful and so glamorous. And of course, I developed a huge crush on her, as did practically every woman there. She sang several sets a night, and for each set, she would pick out one woman in the audience and croon to her through the whole set. And I know all of us were thinking, "choose me, choose me," because she was so incredible, just 00:53:00really beautiful and romantic. And her style was so Marlene Dietrich-esque, I'm sure she consciously copied Marlene Dietrich. She would sit on the piano bar with her legs crossed. She wore a tailored jacket and a bow tie and a starched white shirt and a skirt and high heels. She would cross her legs on 00:53:30the piano bar and the skirt would lift up to about her knees. She had these gorgeous legs, and all of us would be swooning.

Tom Bliss: And that first night, I think was the night you met Mark.

Lillian Faderman: Wasn't the first night. I went back with Frankie and our friend Al, to the Club Laurel, and at one point he looked across the 00:54:00room and he said, I know that guy. And he went over to this very nice looking man who was with a younger man, and it was Mark. He called me over and introduced me to Mark, who I thought was just really beautiful. A nd 00:54:30we hit it off right away. I hit it off with a lot of gay guys, so that didn't seem to be unusual, but we had an even deeper connection. He took my telephone number and he invited me out to dinner, and he took me to my first classical music concerts. He was much older than I was. In fact, twice my age. I was still 17, and he was 34. He was a child psychologist at Children's Hospital 00:55:00on ... I think it's on Vermont in Los Angeles. And he was absolutely delightful and cultured. I thought, yeah, I want to be like this guy. I want to be sophisticated like this guy. My mother thought that we were dating, that we were a heterosexual couple. And so at one point, I said, jokingly, to him, 00:55:30something like, "I told her you were going to propose eventually, and we were going to get married." And he said, "Let's." And we did. It wasn't unusual in those days. There were a lot of front marriages, particularly in Hollywood. I think that part of his thinking, although he never told me that, but 00:56:00now in retrospect, I assume that because he was a child psychologist, he thought it would be good to have a wife, to have a front marriage. And it was understood that that would be our relationship. In fact, he once wrote me this very sweet letter about how in our relationship, we would reach out to each other with one hand and to others with the other hand. And that seemed quite all 00:56:30right with me at the time. Anyway, the marriage didn't last that long because it became complicated for a number of reasons, including his drinking. But that was just one reason. But that was very plausible in the 1950s that gay men and lesbians would marry each other and present themselves to the world 00:57:00as a heterosexual couple.

Tom Bliss: You followed Mark to Mexico, and then .

Lillian Faderman: I did. Do you want me to go into that story?

Tom Bliss: Yeah. Mark and UCLA and the Berkeley. Yeah.

Lillian Faderman: Yeah. I was still in high school when we married. I had a few more months left of high school. We married in March. I graduated that June. I turned 18 in July. But before I turned 18, he said that he had an 00:57:30offer to be a lecturer at the University of Mexico to teach there for, I think it was a semester. And the system was the reverse of ours; there was school during the summer, our summer, but there was no school from December to March. That was the first time I'd ever been out of the country. I had already been accepted at UCLA, but I went with him to Mexico. And after a couple 00:58:00of months, he said that they had offered him a renewal of the contract and he would stay. And I said, but I was just accepted at UCLA and I want to do my freshman year. And he said, well, why don't you do your freshman year and then we'll see what happens. So I went back to Los Angeles and I did my freshman year, he came to join me from December to March, but he wanted to 00:58:30return because he had been offered, I think a permanent job. And the understanding was I would do the whole year and I would join him in Mexico. But a month or so later, I met Tracy, whom I called D'Or in my memoir, Tracy wasn't her real name either. It was Shirley Ann Rappaport, but she wanted to be known as Tracy. She lived in San Francisco. She was obsessive compulsive 00:59:00like my mother. And I'm sure it was psychological, but I thought, "I couldn't rescue my mother, but I'll rescue Tracy." So I decided I would transfer from UCLA to UC Berkeley. We would live in San Francisco together, and I would support us. In the beginning, my aunt sent me checks, and then she 00:59:30said, I'm not going to send you any more checks. You have to come back to Los Angeles. And I didn't want to leave, so I got jobs to support us. I think my first job was at Big Al's Hotsy Totsy Club where I was a waitress and the bubble bath girl. And so whenever it got really crowded, I would have to go on stage in a skimpy outfit. I don't remember how I did it exactly, but I would 01:00:00get in this tub and it wouldn't be real bubble bath, but it would be ... looked like bubbles that rose in the air and would cover me while I took off whatever I entered on the stage with. It was a little platform. And then I would sit down and presumably I would be nude, but I wouldn't really be nude. And 01:00:30then I would do my act, just putting a leg out and putting an arm out and just taking a bubble bath. I think Lily St. Cyr, who was a stripper did something similar. And that's probably where Big Al got the idea. And then I would go put my robe on, negligee, it was, I guess, and then go off into the wings and put on my outfit to be a waitress again. I did that; and I was also a 01:01:00waitress in a corset and net stockings, all of the waitresses dressed that way at a place called Goman's Gay Nineties, not at all gay, very heterosexual, but named after the Gay Nineties. Then I decided that this is taking too much time to be a waitress, and I really needed to be studying more. There was 01:01:30a burlesque house, probably one of the last burlesque houses in the country. I first got to the Bay Area in '59, by now, it might've been 1960. The burlesque house was called the President Follies. And I had an idea that there were all of these pictures of me, pin-up pictures and some covers of men's 01:02:00magazines. And so we dressed Tracy up in high heels and a nice coat, and she had a leopard skin hat. She looked very businesslike, and she took the pictures of me, put them in kind of portfolio thing, and went to the guy who was in charge of the President Follies and said ... No, I'm sorry, there was 01:02:30something before that. Should I back the story up? What was before that was that I went myself to the President Follies. Should I just keep going or should I back the story up?

Tom Bliss: You can back the story up. Yeah.

Lillian Faderman: Okay. I decided that it just was taking too much time, and I should be studying, to work in these cocktail places like Big Al's and Goman's Gay Nineties. There was a burlesque place, so I went with my modeling 01:03:00pictures to the President Follies, and the guy who was in charge, who I assume was the owner, said, this doesn't mean anything. I have to see what you can do on stage. I wasn't prepared to dance, but I said, how much does it pay? And he said, chorus jobs, $55 a week, which was a lot more than I was making 01:03:30at, I guess it was Goman's Gay Nineties at that time. But I thought it wasn't that much more to be willing to do burlesque, so I said, I'm not interested. About ... I don't know, it was maybe less than a year later, we had this idea of dressing Tracy up, we put her in a nice coat and she had a leopard skin hat, and she took a portfolio of my pin-up pictures, she went to the 01:04:00President Follies, and what she would say to them was that I was a stripper and I would be willing to come here because I wanted to be in San Francisco for a little while. I'd be willing to come for $150 a week, and they hired me for, I think it was three weeks. Then the three weeks were up, and I told 01:04:30Tracy to go back and say I wanted to stay in San Francisco, and I would stay for half that amount, for $75 a week. By then, the man that I had first encountered the year before was no longer there. His wife was in charge, and he had died, and she agreed that she would hire me to be a regular at $75 a week. That's what I did for a couple of years off and on. I was a feature act and in 01:05:00the chorus at the President Follies. And what was so great about it is that, unlike Goman's Gay Nineties or Big Al's Hotsy Totsy club where I would have to work whole evenings, I did 17 shows a week, but each time I was on stage for just like five or six or seven minutes, and the rest of the time I would be backstage studying. So it was an ideal job for me. And before I took that job, I had actually tried to see if I could get a job at Berkeley, at UC, 01:05:30Berkeley, not having to do waitress work. I went to the library and it paid $1.64 an hour. I was putting books back on shelves, I guess. And I tried it for a few days and I thought, this is ridiculous. It's taking all my time and I can't study, and I'd rather do what I could do and make more money. 01:06:00And that's how I ended up at the President Follies.

Tom Bliss: What was the burlesque scene like? Were there any other lesbians in the club? ?

Lillian Faderman: I had heard that there were a lot of lesbians in burlesque, and I once met one couple who came to the President Follies. They'd been at a Sacramento burlesque house, and they came to the President Follies from there. And then one summer I came back to Los Angeles and I worked at a 01:06:30Sunset Strip club called The Largo, and there was another lesbian at The Largo who did a fabulous act. Her name was Elektra, a classic name from, of course, the Greeks, Romans. She was on a drum and fake flames would come up, 01:07:00they'd do it by wind with scarves, and she would dance on the drum. And her introduction would say "a page out of Dante's Inferno." But she was the only other lesbian that I met at the Largo. So there weren't that many of us. Or if there were, they didn't talk about it openly. She did. And the two women who came from Sacramento talked about it to me, because they spotted me 01:07:30somehow. But if there were other lesbians, they kept it a secret. And I'm sure there must have been some who were at least bisexual, but it wasn't everyday talk at the President Follies and at the Largo. It was only Elektra who was brave enough to say that she was a lesbian. And I wasn't brave enough to say I was a lesbian at the Largo, so they never knew about me. So I'm sure there were others that they never knew about as well.

Tom Bliss: You got your BA, and then you went to Los Angeles again, got your MA and PhD. How were your relationships at this time? Were you starting to come out more?

Lillian Faderman: Well, I realized that I could not rescue Tracy and I wanted to go to graduate school, and I wanted to go back to Los Angeles where my mother and aunt still were. I only knew to apply to one graduate school, and 01:08:30miraculously I was accepted, that was UCLA. I decided for a brief period that I would be straight. That must have been about 1963 and part of 1964. And then

I decided that, no, I am not straight and I don't want to be straight. And once I was open to it, I met a number of other lesbians in graduate school in the English department. And we loved it because we were out to each other and nobody else had a clue. I had a good friend that I really loved, just as a friend, she was straight,

and it seemed that all of her friends were lesbians, but she didn't know. We would often just sort of be wondrous with each other, how did Sandra not know that? There were at least six of us that she really loved, and we really loved her, and we never shared that with her, and she never understood that we were lesbian. So we were closeted at UCLA, but we knew of each other,

and we knew of faculty members who were gay. One of my good friends actually had an affair with a woman faculty member. But that was only for us to know about.

Tom Bliss: I also read that when you entered as a freshman originally

Lillian Faderman: At UCLA.

Tom Bliss: That you had to write a test and that the dean ... Can you tell me about that?

Lillian Faderman: I'm not sure what you mean by a dean, but all of us had to ...

Tom Bliss: an article.

Lillian Faderman: Oh, yes. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. So all of the entering freshmen at UCLA in 1958 had to take a series of tests. And one was, I guess it was a personality test, and there were many, many questions, but there was one question that was repeated in various ways, and it asked things like, have you ever been in love with a person of the same sex? Have you 01:11:00ever dreamt of kissing someone of the same sex? I mean, it was obvious what it was getting at, and it was just rephrased, sprinkled throughout the test in different language, but always wanting to see if you were homosexual. Of course, all of us who were homosexual knew to answer 'no' to those questions. It was years later that I was doing research for one of my books, I think it 01:11:30was Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, and I happened to come across this article that was written in 1954. Now I was a freshman in 1958, so the article was written four years earlier, and it was by the Dean of Students and the Assistant Dean of Students. And the whole point of the article was that it was the responsibility of deans of students to ferret out the homosexuals among the students and make sure they either got psychiatric treatment to 01:12:00change their ways, and if they refused to do that, were expelled. And so that's why they wanted to do that test. They wanted to discover us. But of course, all of us who were gay knew by then that you had to say 'no' to those questions. Of course, you didn't say, "yes, I dream of kissing someone of the same sex," or "yes, I'm in love with someone of the same sex." We knew that that would be dangerous.

Tom Bliss: After school, you started working at Cal State Fresno and you were tasked with setting up a woman's studies program.

Lillian Faderman: Yes. So I got to California State University Fresno in 1967. I came there with Barbara. I never made announcements, although some people knew that Barbara and I lived together. In 1969, we decided that we wanted 01:13:00to go back to Los Angeles. In those days, property in LA was nothing like it is now, so for two years of being an assistant professor, I earned enough money that I could make a down payment on a house in Laurel Canyon. It was a little house, it was dinky, but it was a house in Laurel Canyon, and we 01:13:30found it during spring break. I'm sorry, it was 1970. In 1970, I found this house in Laurel Canyon. I went back and I announced to the chair after spring break that I was leaving at the end of the semester, and he said, "Oh, don't do that. We've just promoted you to associate professor." And I thought, 01:14:00well, maybe I'll stay one more year. And I commuted. I went back and forth every weekend between Los Angeles and Fresno, and at the end of the year I was going to quit. There was an election for chair of the department. This must have been early '71, and they elected me chair. I had been the first woman, the 01:14:30only woman in the English department when I started in 1967. And I guess those guys really took seriously ... I was a feminist and I did a television program, a 15 week television course the previous year about, I called it "Women's Liberation and Literature," and those guys took feminism seriously and they elected me chair. I thought, okay, I can't leave now. I have to stay 01:15:00another year. I told Barbara I would continue to commute back and forth between Los Angeles and Fresno. I would just fly in Friday afternoons and fly out Monday morning. And that's what I did. I had a meeting for women faculty the first year I was chair. I called together the women faculty. It was a very small 01:15:30meeting because I had announced it as women faculty who want to do something about the position of women on campus. Most of the women on campus were in areas like women's PE and nursing and social work. And that was about it. There were just a few women scattered. There was a woman in anthropology, there were a couple of women in music. I think about eight women showed up to that 01:16:00meeting. One was Phyllis Irwin who was in the music department, and she said that as a result of the meeting, it made her brave when the new vice president of the university put out a call for applications for assistant vice presidents. And so Phyllis applied to be assistant vice president and she got the 01:16:30job. The next year she was assistant vice president. I was in charge of the English department and the vice president said that he had either heard or seen the program that I did, the 15 week program that gave students college credit, "Women's Liberation and Literature." And he said to Phyllis, "that Dr. Faderman in the English department is interested in women's studies things, 01:17:00and I would really like to have you start a women's studies program, so why don't you get together with her and see if you could figure out how to start a women's studies program". We got together in all sorts of ways, and she still my partner 53 years later. That's how we started the women's studies program, which is still going 52 years later. And we're still going strong as well.

Tom Bliss: We're at meeting Phyllis. And everything's good?

Astra Price

Yeah.

Tom Bliss: Okay. Tell me about Phyllis and your romance.

Lillian Faderman: Phyllis was a music professor and is a pianist, and she was a horse woman and she had a ranch and she actually invited me to dinner 01:18:00on the ranch. I am so unhorsey and un-rural that I thought that this was wonderful that she did it, but this isn't my environment. But as she was making ... it was lunch or dinner, I was standing in the doorway watching her in the kitchen, and I just had this powerful irresistible urge to put my 01:18:30arms around her, to just be close. I didn't do it. I was with Barbara and I didn't want to do it, and I didn't. I was still commuting between Fresno and Los Angeles, and the fog in Fresno can be terrible in the wintertime. One day the plane couldn't fly in, it flew in instead to Merced and we were 01:19:00on our own. I didn't know how the hell I would get to campus, and I had a meeting that afternoon. I called Phyllis and I said, "Can you pick me up, please? I'm in Merced." And she said, "I'll be right there." It was an hour away from Fresno, from campus. She picked me up ... I had told her that I really wanted to have a baby, and I told her that Barbara wasn't that interested. Barbara said, "Well, I never wanted to be anyone's mother, but maybe 01:19:30I'll be like an aunt to the baby." And I couldn't imagine how that would work. I had told her that. On the way back to Fresno, Phyllis said, "I've been thinking a lot about what you said about wanting a baby, and I know I would make a good other mother." She gave me an offer I couldn't refuse and I didn't 01:20:00refuse it. Our son is 49 now. She's made a wonderful other mother.

Tom Bliss: Beautiful. Can you tell me about the process of getting married? And at one point, I know Phyllis adopted you.

Lillian Faderman: When our son Avrom, we call him Vrom, was in school, I started getting a lot of invitations because my book, Surpassing 01:20:30the Love of Men, had come out, came out in 1981. He was born in 1975. I started getting invitations to speak and I wanted to do that. I really wanted people to know about that lesbian book. But every time I left town, I would 01:21:00have to give her a note saying that she had the right to take him to the doctor. If there was an emergency or, God forbid, a hospital an emergency, she had no tie to him. We lived together. She was there from the beginning, from the beginning of my pregnancy, before my pregnancy of course. And so we decided that one way to give her a tie to Vrom was for her to adopt me. In those 01:21:30days, there couldn't be second parent adoptions in California, but there could be adult adoptions. And that meant that if there was a 10 year difference between two people, one could adopt the other. There's an 11 year difference between us. And so she adopted me and presented herself as Vrom's grandmother, and he called her his grandmother, which in the early 1980s probably 01:22:00made it a lot easier for him in elementary school, to be able to call her his grandmother. So she was my adoptive mother. And as soon as we could have domestic partnerships, we had a domestic partnership. As soon as we could marry in California, we were able to marry. Very briefly, there was a six 01:22:30month period in 2008 when same sex couples could marry, we immediately got married. And then I wrote my book, the Gay Revolution that came out in 2015. And I was interviewed by someone from the New York Times, because also, in 2015, same sex marriage became legal nationwide, and Elon Green for the New 01:23:00York Times wanted to do an article on couples who had had same sex adoptions and then got married. So Phyllis and I did an interview with Elon Green, and at one point he said, "And when did you undo the adoption?" Well, before we got married in 2008, we actually went to a lawyer and we asked if we had to undo 01:23:30the adoption. And she said, wrongly, as long as there isn't consanguinity, you don't have to undo the adoption. So I told the reporter that we never undid the adoption, you don't have to. And he said, "Oh, I think you're wrong." A week later, after the article came out, I spoke in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Public Library, and a lawyer that I knew slightly came up to me and said, "All of us gay lawyers are talking about that article. I think you're in 01:24:00trouble. You have to undo the adoption and get married again, and I'll undo the adoption for you." And she did. We got married again. I was no longer Phyllis's adopted daughter, she no longer had any kind of legal connection to our son, so he said, "Don't you want to adopt me?" And she said, "Of course, I do." And now you could have second parent adoptions, it's called, and she adopted 01:24:30him. And so we have more legal ties than anyone on the planet, the family of the three of us.

Tom Bliss: You write beautifully about why you wanted to have a child and how that was related to the family line. Can you talk about that?

Lillian Faderman: My wonderful Aunt Ray never had a child, I was her child in effect; my mother's half sister never had children; and the children that my mother's other siblings had in Latvia were all killed in the Holocaust. So I was it, in my generation, I was the only one out of that big family. 01:25:30There was just me. I wanted to preserve their genes by having a baby, and that was my initial impulse. Once he was born, my initial impulse wasn't that important, I just loved him. But I don't know if I would've thought of having a baby if it hadn't been for that.

Tom Bliss: And what an act that was, of defiance against the final solution.

Lillian Faderman: It felt as though I was speaking directly to that disgusting, horrifying final solution of Hitler and the Nazis by contributing another Jewish kid to the planet. So that was important to me for that reason.

Tom Bliss: I want to talk about publishing your first book, how that came about, and in the climate where we were at then in our queer community, what 01:26:30the significance of that was for you.

Lillian Faderman: So when I came out in 1956, I would've given anything practically to know that we had a history, that we didn't invent this stuff at the Open Door. As a literary kid, as I'd always been, when I finally decided to come out, I thought I'd see what historians said about us or what 01:27:00books said about us. I already knew that there were books by psychiatrists that said that homosexuality was abnormal, but I read, I think for the first time, Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and they both said terrible things about how it was a congenital taint, about homosexuality was diseased 01:27:30in effect, it was a morbidity. There was nothing about us in the history books. The only other books that dealt with us were the pulp novels, which I loved, which I devoured because those were the only places that you could read about women making love to other women. But of course, the pulp novels all had to end tragically. The characters either had to die in a well of loneliness 01:28:00or commit suicide or be converted to heterosexuality. I would've loved to have done my dissertation in the 1960s on lesbians, but you couldn't, there's no way at UCLA that I could have dealt with lesbian literature, lesbian history, but slowly things began to change. There was the Stonewall Rebellion, of course, and there was the rise of the feminist movement. And by 1970, there were 01:28:30women's newspapers and eventually women's magazines. And when I say women's, they called themselves women's newspapers and magazines, but they were lesbian newspapers and magazines. Slowly, there were lesbian bookstores that call themselves women's bookstores, and lesbian publishing houses. And by 1975, I realized I could start writing about what I wanted so much to read 01:29:00about when I first came out. I did my first research in 1975. My first paper was on Emily Dickinson. I had always suspected, from many of her poems, that she was in love with a woman who was her sister-in-law. Finally, I did research into her letters, and that was my first lesbian paper, Emily Dickinson's 01:29:30letters to Sue Gilbert, which were love letters before Sue Gilbert married Austin Dickinson. And it just sort of grew from there. I started doing research into late 19th and early 20th century popular fiction, which was filled with expressions of love between women, romantic friendships and Boston marriages. I was just in such a white heat within the space of two years, I 01:30:00published six articles. That's unheard of. And they were published, most of them, in professional scholarly journals. Then I took a sabbatical because I thought maybe I would put those articles together in a book and maybe expand them. I came to San Diego, I had to do more research, but it was mostly interlibrary loan stuff. I would go to UCSD practically every day and 01:30:30call for other interlibrary loan books, and the librarian there would say, "oh, there's somebody here who's working in your area. She just got her dissertation and I'll give you her telephone number, call her and have coffee. You'll be interested in her." She was an unemployed PhD, and every time I came to the interlibrary loan office, I would be asked by this librarian, have 01:31:00you called Sandy Dykstra yet? And just to stop the librarian from asking, I called this person, called Sandy Dykstra, and we got together for coffee and we decided we would start a writer's group in San Diego. We did. There were six of us. And after a few months, Sandy said, "Well, I want to try to get my dissertation on Flora Tristan published. So I'm going to go to New York, and if anyone wants me to bring their work with them and see if I could get 01:31:30a publisher, I will." I didn't pay any attention. Two days before she left, she called me and she said, "Won't you give me your manuscript and I'll take it with me?" And I thought, okay, what do I have to lose? I quickly put some stuff together. I gave it to Sandy, this unemployed PhD, no job, no prospects for a job. She went to New York and she called me after four days and she 01:32:00said, "I got you two offers from big New York publishers, but they think I'm your agent." And I said, "Sandy, be my agent." And she said, "Okay, I'll do that." And I just knew from her personality that she could be a great agent, and she sold the book, sold it to the highest bidder, which was William Morrow, which was a very good company, and she became an agent. And now she's 01:32:30an agent of all sorts of major writers like Amy Tan and Lisa See, and she's the most powerful West Coast agent. She sold, I think 12 of my books and we're good friends and have dinner very often.

Tom Bliss: I love that. How was the effect of having published the first a major lesbian book and being one of the pioneers of this field, which grew 01:33:00enormously, but just especially meeting your audience after that book was published.

Lillian Faderman: After Surpassing The Love of Men was published, I was asked often to speak at various universities, and it was a world that I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams in 1956, that lesbians on campus could 01:33:30get money from the administration to invite another lesbian speaker to come to campus, that there were women's studies programs all over that would be interested in somebody who wrote about lesbian history. It was remarkable how much we had progressed from the 1950s to the early 1980s, and it was 01:34:00thrilling to think that I was in any way a part of that.

Tom Bliss: You wrote 11 books. I believe

Lillian Faderman: I wrote 16 books altogether.

Tom Bliss: You had two memoirs. What was it like publishing your first memoir, which is a vulnerable ...

Lillian Faderman: My first memoir came out in 2003. I started writing 01:34:30it in 2000 when I had just turned 60, and I felt that finally I could be honest about who I was. I was a middle aged woman, deep into middle age, and I wasn't ashamed of my past, but it really felt that it would be awkward for my students to know that a younger woman had been a stripper or a pin-up model, 01:35:00but surely looking at a 60-year-old woman, by the time it came out I was 63, looking at a 63-year-old woman standing before you, you didn't have images of her being a pin-up model or a stripper. I thought I could be perfectly honest as I was afraid to be, in print, in any case, when I was younger. It felt good to be able to be honest. And it just felt important to me to revisit 01:35:30my life, certainly for me, but hopefully for my readers too, who had been familiar with other works that I did, such as Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers or Surpassing the Love of Men or Scotch Verdict.

Tom Bliss: I mean, you really focus on the experiential aspect of what you went through. So there were so many times reading it that I just 01:36:00forgot that I was reading a memoir, and I was really gripped by what's happening next. I felt like I was experiencing it with you.

Lillian Faderman: Oh, that's good to hear.

Tom Bliss: Yeah. What kind of response did you get from people?

Lillian Faderman: Well, I was a little disappointed in the response because every review would begin, or even headline, with the fact that I'd 01:36:30been a stripper, and that was a part of my life, but there was so much more to my life. There was the fact that I was writing a pioneer book, Surpassing the Love of Men. I had started writing that book when the memoir ends in 1979. There was the fact that I was probably the first lesbian to get pregnant 01:37:00through donor insemination. There was the fact that I had a wonderful relationship with Phyllis. There was the fact that I came from the working class and managed to get a PhD. There was so much that could have been focused on, but every headline, I think, said something like "Ex-stripper" whatever, or "Faderman Bares All" or whatever. Even the New Yorker, it was so 01:37:30thrilling that the New Yorker wanted to have a portion of the book in their pages, but what did they choose? They chose how I became a pin-up model, which was not the most important part of my life. And I got a call from Oprah's people, they wanted me on, and I said, wonderful, what will we talk about? And they said they were having several people who had dark secrets that 01:38:00came to life. Well, the dark secret was that I'd been a pin-up model and a stripper, and that wasn't what I wanted to focus on, so I said I wasn't interested, which probably lost me the sale of millions of books, but nevertheless it wasn't what I thought the memoir was about. So I was disappointed in that response.

Tom Bliss: Why do you think people focus on that?

Lillian Faderman: It's sensationalistic. I think people like sensationalism, and that was the most sensationalistic part. And to me, that wasn't the most important part of my life. To me, being a stripper and a pin-up model was a means to an end, and it's a means to an end that I have never regretted. But that was all it was for me. I learned through reviews of the book, 01:39:00that that was what was particularly interesting to other people about my life.

Tom Bliss: Can you talk about, in your work, the intersection of feminism and lesbian perspective?

Lillian Faderman: Do you want me to ...

Tom Bliss: Or activism in a way even? Yeah, but what's the intersection of those two aspects?

Lillian Faderman: I was so interested in doing a huge history of love between women from the Renaissance to the present because I recognize that women who were, what we would call lesbian today, very often were the ones who were the movers and shakers, because they had less to lose, historically. They 01:40:00were the pioneers. In fact, I did one book that my original title was What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History. The publisher didn't like that as the leading title. So the leading title became To Believe In Women. The subtitle was What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History. But I begin in the mid 19th century, and I end in the first decades of the 20th century. And the 01:40:30point that I make is that the pioneers in getting women the vote; in getting women into medicine; in getting women into other professions like the law; in getting women into the social work profession, indeed the founding of social work, all of that was done by women that we would call lesbians today, certainly would've called Lesbian when the book came out in 1999. Maybe young 01:41:00women would call them queer, although I think the women I write about would not be happy with the word queer. They wouldn't have been happy with the word lesbian either, incidentally. They had no word for who they were, but they were feminists, and they were people that we would have identified in later decades as lesbian. So I think there's a huge intersection between pioneering feminism and lesbians.

Tom Bliss: We're wrapping up. I've got four questions that we end with. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to?

Lillian Faderman: We've covered so much of my life. If you want to talk more about my work, I'm happy to, or anything you want to talk about, I'm happy to talk about.

Tom Bliss: Well, I knew Stuart Timmons. What was it like? That was your one collaboration, I believe.

Lillian Faderman: Not my only collaboration. My first book was actually, no ... my second book was a Chicano anthology From The Barrio, came out in 01:42:001973, and I worked with a Chicano poet by the name of Omar Salinas. And then Phyllis and I did a book, a mystery, Ghost Trio. Oh, and on my first book, I collaborated with Barbara, Speaking for Ourselves, a multi-ethnic anthology that came out in 1969. So Stuart wasn't my first collaborator. I think he 01:42:30was my third, and Phyllis was my fourth.

Lillian Faderman: It was really important for me to work with the gay man because I wanted us to cover all of lesbian and gay history, and Stewart had done a wonderful book on Harry Hay, and at that time when we first began working together, he was the director at the One Archives. So it was an 01:43:00important collaboration, I thought.

Tom Bliss: What book, when you went in to go research it, you maybe had some idea of navigation where you might end up. What's the one book where you ended up in completely new terrain that really changed you, I would say, from what you discovered?

Lillian Faderman: I don't start writing a book until I've done a lot 01:43:30of research, until I really know where I'm going. And I think that's been true of most of my books, of all of my books, I think. I outline really extensively based on a huge amount of research. And so it's never been the case that in the writing process, I go somewhere different from where I thought I would go. In the initial process, I might think I'm going to write about one 01:44:00thing and I end up writing about something else. In my book, Scotch Verdict, for example, I was focusing on an early 19th century Scottish trial between two women who opened a boarding school for daughters of the wealthy, and one of their students has a very bad time with them and at the school, and 01:44:30tells her grandmother that they're carrying on in bed at night. That was going to be my focus, but I got so interested in my research for the book and my discussions with Phyllis about what my research was about, that I decided that I would bring our discussions in. And so that's what I did. Part of the book is set in the 1980s when the book was written, and the other part is set 01:45:00in 1810 when most of the incidents happened in the book. I think that was the big book where I thought I would do one thing and I ended up doing something else. But in most of my books, before I write a word, I think I know where I'm going.

Tom Bliss: Any other books that you want write?

Lillian Faderman: Well, one came out last year, and it was a huge 01:45:30book, came out. It's called Woman: The American History of an Idea. It came out with Yale University Press. What I've been doing since then is just little articles. I've contributed to several collected or edited volumes. I've done the afterword for a volume. I've done consulting on several projects. That feels good for right now. And I keep reminding myself that my beloved is 95 01:46:00and I shouldn't get involved in something that will take me five years of research and writing at this point. I want to be there more for Phyllis. Sandy is a wonderful agent, she keeps coming up with book ideas, and I keep saying, I don't think so. For the time being anyway, I'm not going to take on 01:46:30another book.

Tom Bliss: You had a wonderful anecdote about your Aunt Ray at her last days, and she had a moment with Phyllis.

Lillian Faderman: Yes. Where do I write about that? When she says, take care on Lily and the baby?

Tom Bliss: You told me.

Lillian Faderman: Oh, I told you. Okay. I didn't think I wrote about that.

Tom Bliss: Do you want to share that?

Lillian Faderman: Sure. Yeah. So my Aunt Ray, who is still so present 01:47:00to me, she died in 1984, but she was just such a wonderful, powerful figure in my life. She had tried to convince my mother when my mother got pregnant again to give me up for adoption. And she told me that, saying all this in Yiddish, of course, that was her main language, when I was a baby, she held me to her heart and I crawled right in and I never left. Wow. Every baby, every kid 01:47:30should be told something like that. And she would also tell me, "first God, and then you." Something else every kid should be taught, I think. At one point I told her I love women, when she was nagging me to get married again, I said, "I'm never going to marry a man. I love women." She said, "Don't be 01:48:00silly. There's no such thing." Did I tell you the story about her first husband? You don't want me to go into that though.

Tom Bliss: Sure. I mean, it's a short story. Yeah.

Lillian Faderman: She had gotten married in New York. In fact, that's the reason she left New York and came to Los Angeles, to divorce her first husband. I only knew him as a little kid, but I thought he was absolutely wonderful. But I finally asked her when I was an adult, why she divorced him. And 01:48:30she said because when he was young, he had to do with another man, and that spoiled him for women. So she knew of such things about men. She knew men could be homosexual, not a term that she knew or would use. But when I said that I loved women, she said, "Don't be silly, there's no such thing." She would never acknowledge Phyllis as my real partner. I don't know who she 01:49:00thought Phyllis was, my maid or my chauffeur or the cook or whatever. But she'd never really acknowledged her, except she would see that Phyllis was Avrom's other mother, that Phyllis took responsibility for VRom as I did, but she would never admit that. But when she was dying, we visited her in the hospital and for some reason I was out of the room and Phyllis said that the 01:49:30last thing that my aunt Ray said to her was, "take care on Lily and the baby." VRom was 10 years old by then, he wasn't a baby, but she always called him a baby. And she used to call me a baby until I was about 12, too, to my mother, "Take care of the baby," she would always say.

Tom Bliss: Final four questions. These are all a little short. If you could tell your 15-year-old self anything, what would it be?

Lillian Faderman: That I could be gay and it's okay, and I wouldn't always have to feel like an outlaw and things will get better and society will get so much better. If someone had told me when I came out at 16, and actually I 01:50:30wasn't quite 16, I was still 15. By came out, I don't mean make a public announcement, but acknowledged myself as a lesbian. If someone had told me that a day would come when we could get married or when there would be positive movies about us or when we would be heroes and newspapers would say 01:51:00good things about us, I would've thought that person was smoking too much pot. Never, never could something like that happen. The women that I hung out with at the Open Door would've thought that that was insane. That of course we would always be outlaws. And yet we're not. I know that there are people in our community, young people who long for the outlaw days, but some of us 01:51:30don't. It was hard. Yeah.

Tom Bliss: Do you think there's such a thing as a queer superpower? And if so, what would it be? And remember to use that question in your answer.

Lillian Faderman: Maybe I should answer that by responding to what I think of queer, and I'm going to be on a panel, in about 10 days, that's about precisely that. The word queer, to most of my generation, certainly to me, 01:52:00"them is fighting words." It's not a word that I could ever be comfortable with. That was the word that was used to insult us. And I know that in the 1970s, lesbian feminists purposely adopted the word dyke to reclaim the word, and I know that African-American people adopted the word black to reclaim 01:52:30the word, because those used to be words of insult. But it doesn't feel like queer is reclaimable to me, to my generation. But I'm a historian, so I know language always changes. And I know too that the word lesbian would've been totally unacceptable to people like Jane Addams or Mary Rozet Smith, her partner of 30 some years, or Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley, the president 01:53:00of Mount Holyoke and her lover of 50 years, who was a professor in the English department at Mount Holyoke. They never would've used words like lesbian for themselves, so language changes. In fact, that generation wouldn't have had a word they were comfortable with. "Homosexual" emphasizes sexual, they wouldn't have liked homosexual. It was the predominant term outside of the gay 01:53:30community when I came out. "Sexual invert" was a pathological term, they wouldn't have liked that. They wouldn't have liked "lesbian" because "lesbian" would've reminded them of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, Flowers of Evil, in English, and the lesbian was exotic and evil, and they wouldn't have been comfortable with that term. There was no term that they would've been comfortable with. And "lesbian" I'm comfortable with. My favorite 01:54:00term is "gay," because that was the term that we all were in the community when I came out in 1956, whether you were a gay male or what we later called lesbian, or people that we now call trans or gender non-binary, we were all gay in the 1950s. So language keeps evolving. I recognize that young people are 01:54:30comfortable with "queer." I recognize it as an umbrella term, but it's not the umbrella term for my generation.

Tom Bliss: I'll say, I think when we first started using it, it didn't feel like it had structure to it. It wasn't a foundation to build on that term. But in the course of using the alphabet, someone is angry that we don't include their identity.

Lillian Faderman: Of course. And I could give you a whole monologue on the alphabet, but I'm not going to do it.

Tom Bliss: Yeah. But do you think there is a gay superpower or lesbian superpower?

Lillian Faderman: I don't even know what that means.

Tom Bliss: Like a special almost shamanistic gift for that

Lillian Faderman: No, I think we're so diverse, and some of us are very gifted, and some of us are the opposite of gifted. No, we're as diverse as 01:55:30the straight world. And I think any generalization that's made about us has huge exceptions. I know you just interviewed Nicole, who probably told you he used to be a Republican. He's not now because he's certainly not a Trumpite. But yeah, as a historian, it's my obligation to recognize that diversity. I 01:56:00did--a few years ago, it's not up anymore, but it ran for two and a half years at the San Diego History Center--it was an exhibit of L-G-B-T-Q, San Diego. I was stuck with that term, but I've made very sure that we had things on Stonewall Democrats and the gay Republicans and just the huge diversity, the fact that yes, there were very important gay radicals that started 01:56:30the ball rolling, but the ball was rolling before that with things like Daughters of Bilitis that did not want to be political and was very middle class. I want to tell the whole story, where we are as diverse in terms of class and in terms of race and in terms of socioeconomic identification as 01:57:00the straight world. And I think it's a mistake to try to paint us as being any one thing.

Tom Bliss: Sounds like a good subject that Sandy could pitch that why is it important to tell your story?

Lillian Faderman: I wish that when I was a young woman, first realizing that I wanted to be a lesbian, that I was gay, that older people had told us their stories. If you went into a place like the Open Door or the IF Club, 01:57:30you really would've thought that once you turned 30, if you were a lesbian, you died. There was nobody there over 30. There was me, I was a teenager, but most of the people there were in their twenties. So what happened to those people after they were in their twenties? I wish someone who was in her thirties or forties or fifties or eighties, as I am, had said, "you could live as 01:58:00a lesbian and you live a long life. Lesbians don't disappear in their twenties, and you have to plan for living a long life. You might be around for another 50 or 60 years." Nobody told us that. And maybe that's why there was so much alcoholism and despair in places like the Open Door and If Club, and even at the Club Laurel, because we didn't think we'd make it. And we do now, we 01:58:30know we can make it. And so I want to tell young people, you can make it. Here I am at 83 and you could be 83 someday, or 95 as my partner is.

Tom Bliss: And if you could talk about organizations like OUTWORDS who capture the stories and then turn them into educational content. What's the importance of an organization like OUTWORDS? And if you could use the OUTWORDS 01:59:00in your answer.

Lillian Faderman: It's so important for an organization like OUTWORDS to exist, to get on film the stories of the older generation for the younger generation now and younger generations in the future, to know the history, to know that they didn't just invent this, to know that whatever progress has been made, that's just it, it's progress and it's been made because people worked very hard to make that progress. It didn't simply happen. I think you have to 01:59:30listen to the stories of the generations before you to know where we've been. I think it was George Santayana who said, "if you don't learn from history, you're destined to repeat it" and not in a good way. So I think young people have to know that there was a huge struggle and huge successes. I know it often seems if you're young that things are terrible. We have so much work left to 02:00:00do, but things used to be so much worse. We made so much progress. You need to know that history to know how far we've come.

Tom Bliss: Thank you very much, Lillian.

Lillian Faderman: Thank you.