Dear Editors,

Judith Schwarz's article and Lee Chambers-Schiller's review in Vol. IV, No. 1 of Frontiers are both excellent, yet I find myself in paradoxical agreement with Anna Mary Wells. Of course Wells' attitude is nonsense – it resembles Norman Mailer's contention that a man who by sheer willpower has managed to keep his hands off other men's bodies “has earned” the right not to be called homosexual. But something is crucially absent from both article and review, something certainly central to the subject of lesbianism, and that is erotic intensity between women. Or, in the vernacular, lust. Schwarz and Chambers-Schiller both de-emphasize it, Schwarz in clear reaction against the homophobic myth that homosexuals are sex-obsessed degenerates, and Chambers-Schiller (I think) because she is uncomfortably aware of possible homophobia in her readers.

Thus we have caring, commitment, affection, couples, emotional satisfaction (I'm quoting from both), alternative lifestyles, love, devotion, primary affectional ties, romantic attachments, fulfillment, a life together, partnership, shared lives, companionship, dyads, relationship, one “physical love,” one “attraction”, one “sexual intimacy,” one “sexual expression” (as if sex were always the adjective and never the noun!), and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's “sensual.” It is the prudish Wells who is quoted as saying “ardent”! How saintly and Victorian it all sounds.

I believe that all women, heterosexual and homosexual, still labor under a real terror of perceiving or honoring female appetite in a culture which denies it and punishes us for it. Our heritage, our anti-genital conditioning, and our adult experience all make it plain that women have no choice but asexuality or reactive heterosexuality. We are also aware that the latter is dangerous and dishonorable without love. Even feminists still find it hard to admit that women are sexual outside of “relationships” – not affectionate, not romantic, not loving, but impersonally and biologically appetitive. The very idea is terrifying. We don't even do it in talking about heterosexual behavior, but homosexual behavior? Two steps backwards and three to the right!

What's at stake is not lesbian history; it's the whole traditional double standard of sexuality, with its concomitant unfreedom, with its fear of parts of experience and the consequent fragmenting of identity, and all those bad things we're trying to get away from.