LESBIAN ART IN AMERICA: A CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
by Harmony Hammond
(Rizzoli) $50

The FIrst time I saw a woman who called herself a lesbian, I was in high school. I was at home alone, plopped down on the couch with a bag of Chee-tos and a can of fake, store-brand Dr. Pepper, watching TV. A talk show was on but I didn't change the channel: I stared. There was a woman on the TV who looked like Miss Hopkins, the smart, no-nonsense, excitingly strict sixth-grade math teacher I still occasionally had weird thoughts about. I couldn't take my eyes off her. Then my stomach was clutched and my scalp felt shrinky because the woman on TV was saying she was a lesbian. Partly I felt nauseated to hear her say that word. Thank god I was alone so no one could see how I was staring, open-mouthed and thrilled.

Then a few years ago, when I was reading an encyclopedia of gay and lesbian culture, I realized that this must have been the appearance, in l971, on The David Susskind Show, of a panel of lesbians. The woman who looked like Miss Hopkins--short brown hair; plain black glasses; dark, straight A-frame skirt; open-collared, short sleeved oxford shirt--was Barbara Gittings, the activist, editor, and, since the l950s, general all-around heroine of the American lesbian movement. She was the first person I had ever seen who said, out loud and matter-of-factly about herself as if it wasn't disgusting or sick, what other people only whispered snidely about women who looked like that: She was a lesbian.

It was one thing to secretly, snidely think someone was a lesbian; it was another thing to say it out loud, to confirm that the cool, smart women whom you thought were different were different that way. After I got over my nauseous recognition, one of the things I needed to figure out was, if that was what lesbians looked like, could someone who didn't look like that, someone, for example, who wore jeans and T-shirts (like me), also be a lesbian?

If there are still any girls in today's queer-aware culture who might wonder how lesbos look, two recent books could show them. Whitney Chadwicks' study of Romaine Brooks examines the not-so-secret clues dykes gave each other in the deliciously repressive pre-Stonewall years. Lesbian Art in America, by Harmony Hammond, shows the many different ways recent gay American women have represented themselves in the visual arts.

Romaine Brooks happens to be the first artist Hammond mentions in her survey. An American born in Rome, Brooks (l874-l970) spent most of her life in Paris. With her lover Natalie Barney (and many others'), Brooks presided over a salon of mostly lesbian artists, intellectuals, and performers. Despite numerous erotic distractions, Brooks managed to become not only a good painter but also a prolific one. Amazons in the Drawing Room reproduces a few dozen of her lithe, strange line drawings and 34 of the 40 nudes and portraits Barnes painted of her famous friends. My favorite portrait is called Peter, a Young English Girl, of the androgynous painter and millionairess, Peyter Gluck.

You can see a lot of Whistler's spare gray palettes in Brooks' work. You may also recognize similarities between Brooks and her near contemporary, John Singer Sargent. Both made portraits of and for the upper class, but Brooks concentrated on painting women; her portraits of strong female figures draped in voluminous drapes, standing alone in nature, and a series of the Russian actor and dancer Ida Rubinstein as a small-breasted reclining nude, created a modern visual vocabulary for the heroic feminine.

By the 1970s, as Hammond documents, lesbian-feminists were reacting against Brooks' depiction of lesbians as upper-class, politically conservative, female dandies. Instead, photographers like Ann Meredith and JEB (Joan E. Birren) portrayed dykes as working-class heroes: dirty-fingered white gals working on cars; T-shirted black women napping on the lawn. Tee Corrine did a series of black-and-white portraits of cunts as well as the notorious Cunt Coloring Book, which shocked, surprised, and thrilled viewers in the l970s the way the work of Catherine Opie, who calls herself "a kind of twisted social documentary photographer," does today. The iconography continues to change.