supporter Roberta Achtenberg for the position of assistant director of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Achtenberg, an openly lesbian lawyer and lesbian rights advocate, had served on the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco from 1991 to 1993. Her selection to a position in the president’s cabinet required the approval of the Senate, making her the first openly gay or lesbian nominee ever to face the Senate confirmation process. Because she made no secret of her sexual orientation, Achtenberg and her supporters anticipated some resistance to her candidacy from conservative senators. However, the battle began sooner and more brutally than expected, with Senator Jesse Helms’s statement to the Washington Post that the Senate should refuse to confirm “a damn lesbian.” Many of Helms’s colleagues condemned his outright bigotry, yet the issue of Achtenberg’s sexual orientation became a key point of attack for her mostly Republican opponents.
Colonel Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer had been a highly respected nurse in the United States National Guard for twenty-seven years when she began preparing to apply for the War College to enable her to compete for the position of chief nurse of the National Guard in 1989. During the routine questioning required for top secret security clearance, Cammermeyer revealed that she was a lesbian. As a result of the military board hearing that followed, and despite a flawless record of service, in 1992 she was not only refused the promotion but was also separated from the National Guard, stripped of her rank, and denied a number of the benefits of her long tenure. Cammermeyer subsequently filed a civil discrimination suit against the military and was reinstated by a district court judge in 1994.1 Nevertheless, the battle left its scars. Cammermeyer was denied her lifelong dream of attaining the rank of general, serving as chief nurse of the National Guard, and retiring with full military honors. Instead, she spent the culminating years of her distinguished career embroiled in legal battles against the institution to which she had dedicated her life, fighting against the people and the country she had defended and loved.
INTRODUCTION
Since the 1970s, the feminist and lesbian/gay rights movements have made substantial progress in advancing their struggles for equality.2 At times, the two movements’ goals have coincided, and they have joined together to pursue mutually beneficial ends. These include challenging gender stereotypes, broadening narrow gender roles for women and men, and affirming the right of all individuals to control their own bodies. On other occasions, the two groups have worked with a complete disregard for each other or even at cross-purposes. At such moments, each has been insensitive to the oppression experienced by the other and to the ways in which each has participated in and benefited from the other’s oppression. Caught in the middle are those women who belong in, yet are frequently marginalized by, both movements: gay women, or lesbians, whose existence has often been disregarded or concealed by the leaders of both social movements.
To examine the status of lesbians within and between these movements is to engage feminist theory, gay studies, and public discourse at a powerful and controversial crosscurrent. The feminist movement continues to raise many of the major ongoing debates of our time, forcing public confrontation of issues as broad-ranging as rape, domestic violence, abortion, sexual harassment, and the feminization of poverty. Anyone who doubts the dissent that still rages around feminism need only observe the broad-based support for the current conservative Republican Congress or the vast radio and television audiences who avidly follow Rush Limbaugh’s diatribes. As the right-wing backlash continues to spread, the perceived feminist attack on “family values” is overshadowed by a group seen as even more threatening: gays and lesbians. The gay and lesbian claim to equal rights has produced one of the most explosive public debates in progress today.
The arguments surrounding gay and lesbian rights constitute crucial public debates, not only because they are conducted through public channels and institutions but also because they directly engage questions about the relationship between public discourse and minority identities. As the military’s current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy attests, the very formation of identities is based in part on their assertion: who we are depends in part on how we represent ourselves, and on how others represent us, through language and visual images (Shotter and Gergen 1989, ix). The point is not simply that giving the name to gay or lesbian individuals and communities affirms our existence. More broadly, by highlighting certain facets of gay and lesbian lives and obscuring others, the discussions produced by gay and lesbian rights controversies help constitute identities. They do so by providing particular frameworks within which gays and lesbians may be seen and understood, by ourselves and by others.
In relation to these frameworks, lesbians occupy a tenuous position that places us both within and outside the feminist and lesbian/gay rights movements. We are multiply silenced, our existence doubly erased. First, we are negated by a dominant culture for whom we are emphatically “Other” by virtue of being neither men nor heterosexual. Second, we are often forgotten or ignored by groups of gay men and heterosexual women, for whom we are neither wholly insiders nor outsiders. For lesbians who are also marginalized with respect to race, class, age, physical ability, or other elements of identity, experiences of exclusion are further intensified through a dynamic that has been called “multiple jeopardy” (King 1988).3 Perhaps because of this multiple marginality, even those scholars who specifically set out to reclaim silenced or “lost” public voices have frequently neglected the study of lesbians.
Among scholars who study communication, for example, attention to women’s speech or “women’s issues” has gradually grown more prevalent and more accepted, although this change has occurred at a painfully slow pace. Nonetheless, these scholars by and large continue to ignore the prodigious public discourse on gay and lesbian rights generated in this country in recent years. While the American public and the mass media in particular widely debate the implications of gay and lesbian rights struggles, those who study public discourse have remained unusually silent on the subject.4 Such neglect is striking in relation to an issue that currently constitutes one of the most widespread topics of public debate in this country and is likely to become even more contentious in the coming years.
If communication scholars have been reluctant to address gay issues generally, however, they have been hesitant to the point of nearly unbroken silence to broach the specific issues of lesbian speech or lesbian rights struggles. Those wishing to research any facet of communication about lesbians often find themselves scanning the indexes of books with gay, feminist, or women in the title, hoping to find an entry for lesbians. Frequently, they find none. In fact, those wishing to do lesbian scholarship are immediately confronted with a number of obstacles. First is the fear of discrimination and prejudice against one’s work or oneself when one pursues a research project about lesbians, regardless of one’s own sexual orientation. Second, materials are often not easily accessible, as much of the writing that does exist is published by alternative presses or small journals that are unavailable even in the libraries of large research institutions. Finally, the considerations of publishing and academic job security discourage scholars from writing about lesbians. As both a marginalized and a stigmatized minority, lesbians are considered at best a “special interest group” and at worst a threat to family values and the American social fabric.
The neglect of lesbian issues within speech communication has persisted despite growing bodies of lesbian feminist work in related areas such as literary studies, cultural studies, history, and psychology.5 Because these fields have led the way in developing lesbian studies, their disciplinary perspectives predominate in this emerging field. The result has been a relative flourishing of scholarship that focuses on fictional accounts, personal narratives, and other artistic and cultural endeavors, highlighting self-expression and the sharing of personal experience. Still needed, however, is another framework, crucial to any movement for social change: a method for examining public expression as communication, representations as political strategies, and messages in terms of their effects.
Such a framework would highlight self-identification as a distinct mode of communication. Declarations of identity serve several functions: they are at once
