If you have ten spare minutes, this extract from the 1977 queer documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives featuring theatrical actress Pat Bond is well worth watching:
Pat Bond tells about how she joined the army during World War II because she was in love with a girl who wouldn’t fall in love with her, how widespread gay and lesbian soldiers actually were at the time, semi-tolerated when the army still needed them. She also talks about what happened when they weren’t needed anymore, the witch hunts that kicked everybody suspected of being queer out with a dishonourable discharge. She also tells about having to fit into a certain role even as a lesbian, that you had to be either butch or femme and how that was both a comfort (as long as you knew the rules you could act the part) and how she never felt herself fitting in her role. Slightly nostalgic as well for when being lesbian meant being part of an incrowd, different from the norm, something she felt had disappeared with the greater openness of the seventies. But she wouldn’t go back: “how can you be anything if you can’t be yourself”?
Prescient too in worrying that the new tolerance might not last. With the twin disasters of the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan presidency only few years away, it’s hard not to look at her worries as prophetic. The eighties really did saw a backlash against queer rights.
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