The Power And The Pride

Others don't have the energy to party they're the "vanilla lesbians," home with their kids. There have always been lesbian parents, but in previous decades they tended to be women who discovered their sexuality some time after marriage and motherhood. Increasingly, there are lesbian couples who are becoming mothers together. Eileen Rakower, 33, and her partner their daughter; each had a child by artificial insemination Washington march from the same unknown donor. "We have created a family this way, as out lesbians," says Rakower, a lawyer. Interestingly, some of the deepest resistance the two women encountered came from older homosexuals. "What we saw," she says, "was a real self-doubting, self-hatred. We don't get that anymore from people who know us and know our kids," now 4 years old and 20 months old.

Lesbians are well aware that their new prominence brings with it the risk of backlash. Polls about gays suggest that are most tolerant of sexual differences when they don't have to confront them. Many lesbians worry they'll become scapegoats for ultraconservatives-a fear exacerbated by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms's reported attacks on Achtenberg as a "damn lesbian." "The abortion issue has been lost. Now they're looking for a new target," says Dr. Dee Mosbacher, daughter of George Bush's secretary of commerce and a lesbian psychiatrist in San Francisco. "We fit the bill." Such concerns have long kept lesbians in the closet. But since the first salvo of the gay revolution in 1969, homosexuals have stressed the importance of coming out, and visibility remains the most pressing item on today's lesbian agenda. "More and more of us are starting to feel we have no choice," says Washington lobbyist Rosen, "and probably nothing to lose." At the very least, lesbians can claim some of the attention they say has so long, and so unfairly, eluded them.

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