The Power And The Pride

POP CULTURE: On March 10, an article about lesbian comedian Lea DeLaria appeared in the Los Angeles Times, saying, "'The Tonight Show' is off-limits. 'Late Night' won't touch her." Arsenio Hall, DeLaria recalls, figured that if the other shows didn't want her, she was probably right for him. She passed her audition only to encounter resistance from Arsenio's lawyers. They didn't want her to use the word dyke, which, says DeLaria, It was basically my entire act. Arsenio himself walked in and said, 'If she wants to call herself a dyke, then it's not our business'. So there she was, some three weeks later, in a man's suit, beaming out to America: "It's great to be here because it's the 1990s, and it's hip to be queer and I'm a big dyke."

The appearance of an openly gay comic on national television was a rare event, indeed. Though everybody knows the arts are fall of gays and lesbians, the entertainment industry has done its best to keep them in the closet. In the course of working on her forthcoming book on Hollywood, "But Wait a Second, We Haven't Finished Lunch," author Julia Phillips found that lesbians were particularly fearful about coming out. "It seems to me they're like where the guys were 30 years ago," says Phillips. "Hollywood is not really a brave kind of place anyway ... and lesbians are right at the bottom of the list in terms of power structure."

The entertainment industry's treatment of gay and lesbian themes has been a mixed performance. TV has become somewhat more willing to project what lesbians consider to be a realistic image of their lives. Lesbians salute recent episodes of "Roseanne" and "Seinfeld," which portray them as normal people. The movies have a more troubling track record. Male fantasy, lesbians say, drove the siniste portrayal in "Basic Instinct. "I don't know any lesbian icepick killers," says Ellen Carton. "Do you?" The film "Fried Green Tomatoes" left the nature of the relationship between its two heroines ambiguous; the novella on which it was based left no doubt that they were lovers.

Some of Hollywood's reticence comes from an assumption that mainstream America isn't ready for gay and lesbian themes. But a number of lesbian authors have demonstrated their crossover appeal. Little, Brown has published hardcover editions of Sandra Scoppettone's mysteries, which include homosexual love scenes. Novelist Allison was even a little surprised by the success of her earlier, lesbian-oriented books among the public. "Eighty percent of the people at my readings are straight," she says. "It bothered me at first because I wasn't sure if I was being understood. But they read me the way I want to be read, which makes me hopeful."

SEX AND SOCIETY: Legend has it that Queen Victoria asked her ministers, "What do lesbians do?" Many straights still don't get it, but, says psychotherapist JoAnne Loulan, the Dr. Ruth of lesbian sex," it is such a simple concept." For good or ill, lesbians have found it easy to "pass" because society accepts affectionate relations between women without assuming that they're sexual. Some straight men find the notion of two women together titillating. Others tend not to feel threatened by lesbians. because "they can't imagine women having sex without [their] aid," says San Francisco psychology professor John De Cecco.

In fact, the desire to sleep with other women is perhaps the only common denominator in today's extraordinarily diverse lesbian culture. The pluralism is relatively new: in the '70s, the prevailing outlook was separatist and even prudish. Nine years ago, Debra Sundahl and Nan Kinney started On Our Backs, a lesbian magazine intended as a rebuke to feminist orthodoxy. "Women were denying themselves sexual pleasure because of politics," says Sundahl. "If it was male-identified, they decided not to do it." Now, says Carol Queen, an owner of a sexual paraphernalia store in San Francisco called Good Vibrations, "the lesbian community has a somewhat different take on sexual adventuring." There is a vital "sex-positive" scene, with nightly dancing at places like the Clit Club in New York and San Francisco's twice-a-month sex clubs.