In the 1910s-'30s they had what were known as child study groups. Basically, a group of mothers (and sometimes fathers) would gather to hear about the latest research into child development and discuss some assigned reading. I've found some minutes from a New York City group dating from 1931. The discussion topic: homosexuality. One member of the group worried, "Young people today say, 'We don't think anything [negative] about these people. They are just as good as anybody else and some of the greatest geniuses have been homosexuals.' " The task was disabusing the kids of that notion. "The whole idea can be gotten across to the growing child that if there is someone in difficulty it is not our business to stone them but to understand what the difficulties are and to see whether we can help them," explained the leader. "In that way you take away any feeling of exaltation in regard to these people[.]" Hey, no more stoning! Yay!
And "exaltation," yes indeedy. Throughout the minutes of these meetings, the members repeatedly refer to the "glamor" [sic] of homosexuality (sometimes called inversion). In Gay New York, George Chauncey discusses "mainstream" fascination with "the fairy" in the first half of the twentieth century. It's still an amazing read, nearly fifteen years after it was first published. But naturally, he doesn't write about lesbians, because lesbians are "invisible," damn it! I'm sure he tried really hard to find them. Nonetheless, it was very surprising to me that life for gay men in New York was ever anything but life in the closet. It wasn't true. There were African American drag balls discussed in "straight" newspapers and so forth. "Fairies" were visible all over the urban landscape. So what I've found is that in the 1930s the kids also knew about the gays and were cool with it. Adults couldn't shield their eyes from it. (Was it Walter Pater or John Addington Symonds who came up with the line about genius? No matter.)
OK, long quotation time! The members of the child study meetings I am talking about discussed many things about homosexuality, but they were especially concerned about warning signs. And lo and behold, they talked more about girls than boys. Take that, gay male historians! Invisible, my ass. Here's how the leader of the group explained "crushes."
A mother in one of our study groups was very much concerned because her daughter wanted to go to a friend's house to stay all night where the two girls would have to sleep together. The daughter was fifteen and a half and had plenty of boy friends and was perfectly normal but the mother was afraid to let her sleep with her friend. Girls have always slept together but they didn't necessarily become homosexuals.
But suppose we have a girl who by and large does not find much companionship and she likes to sit by herself and do things by herself. She doesn't see boys and they don't see her, but she begins to find pleasure in girls and gets so she worships some girl or woman. I know of one girl who stopped biting her nails because she dedicated one hand to one loved girl friend and the other hand to another. Don't you see what a different picture this is than the two normal girls who just wanted to spend the night in each other's homes? With one picture we should be concerned and not with the other.
Wow, the fingernails! That's the kind of detail historians kill for. It raises so many questions about the nature of affection between teenage girls at that time in history and provides so many clues about things like parent-child relationships and girls' culture. Like, how did this woman's daughter come to tell her mom about her new fingernail habits? I'm guessing that she was a compulsive nail-biter and one day suddenly stopped, and her mom noticed and asked her why. I wonder if the cessation of nail biting was just the girl's idea, or whether all her friends were doing it too—doesn't it sound like one of those school fads? It also might speak to the nature of how people understood "compulsions" in relation to homosexuality. The women in this group were definitely up to date with the latest in psychoanalytic theories, one of which was that nail biting was an oral fixation that betokened an arrest of sexual development. So in the popular understanding, maybe nail biting could lead to homosexuality. Modern parenting: it's always been one big hairball of anxiety.
I don't want to speculate about the answers to all of these questions—that's not my job. I've read enough to know that in some cases girls were just sleeping in the same bed and in others they were "sleeping" in the same bed, if you get my drift. But do girls now sleep in the same bed when they sleep over? If not, that also represents historical change. It could be that parents got the homosexual-panic bug at some point and came to forbid it. It also occurs to me that as people moved to the suburbs, houses just got bigger, and there might have been room for more beds. That's the kind of thing that will take more research.
People always want to know for sure what girls were doing in those beds. A generalization, I think, is impossible, and also pretty pointless. Although I've been tempted to do otherwise, I prefer to let it go unsaid.
