Couples The Lesbians Next Door

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Samantha, a consultant to a California nonprofit corporation, is invited to company events in which spouses are welcome, she brings her housemate, Jill, a college professor. The two women are rarely explicit about their relationship. They just assume that co-workers will infer, correctly, that they are lovers. "I never came out and told people at work I was a lesbian," Samantha says. "You don't come out and tell people you're straight. I felt it was up to them to figure it out."

By the standards of the homosexual world, Samantha and Jill are more than usually open, or "out." Their bond is no secret to their families or neighbors -- in fact, they discovered after moving into a suburban-style home that four other lesbian couples live on the same block. Their friends know too: one year the couple sent out a tongue-in-cheek Christmas card depicting them entwined in a romantic cliffside embrace. Yet they are still wary enough, with Jill's tenure on the line, that they refused to have their real names included in this article.

This relative invisibility, and their middle-class life-style, make Samantha and Jill typical of the estimated 6 million to 13 million lesbians in the U.S. If the higher number is right, about as many women are lesbian as are black and many more than are Hispanic. While a small, strident minority reject men altogether and advocate feminist separatism, most lesbians are fully integrated into mainstream American life. They can be found in locales ranging from Chicago and San Francisco to the rural enclaves of Northampton, Mass., and Brattleboro, Vt. In Finding the Lesbians, author Janelle Lavelle claims she and her friends have "managed to find other dykes in such alien places as: a Liberty Bible College rally (the campus Jerry Falwell calls home); a Jesse Helms-owned radio station; a Garden Club meeting . . . and working in the ladies' wear section of a K-mart store."

Yet unless they proclaim themselves vehemently, lesbians generally remain overlooked. While two men living together typically occasion comment, women living together don't. Simply being unmarried and of mature years can subject a man to scrutiny about his sexual preference -- it happened to David Souter after his nomination to the Supreme Court -- but an "old maid" more often faces just pity or condescension. Although most social scientists have rejected the view that homosexuality is far less common among women than men, the idea persists in the public at large. When homosexuals are discussed in the media, men are almost always the focus, with women at best an afterthought. The very word gay has come to imply male, and AIDS has ironically exacerbated that distortion, even as it helped propel women to the forefront of gay leadership because so many of the male leaders were sick or dying.

"Are we the gay wing of the women's movement or the women's wing of the gay movement?" asks Torie Osborn, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles. In truth, lesbians have often been made to feel unwelcome as either. Within the gay movement, men have stressed sexual freedom and increased funding to fight AIDS. When lesbians raise such issues as the pay disparity between men and women -- which hits lesbian couples doubly hard but, paradoxically, can benefit gay male couples -- they are often dismissed as irrelevant. In some corners of the women's movement, lesbians are still viewed as an embarrassment: their presence might buttress the conservative claim that feminism leads to the decline of family values.

The sense of not belonging can begin in adolescence or before. Even the most sensitive parents want to disbelieve a daughter's assertion of homosexuality and may dismiss their child's hard-won sense of sexual identity as "just a phase." Mary Falkner, 21, a senior at Queens College in New York City, recalls that when she came out to her mother, "she took it great. But she asked, 'Do you want to tell the rest of the family?' Without waiting to hear my answer, she said, 'Good, we won't.'

Despite this hint of shame, Falkner's experience was unusually easy. Many families reject lesbian daughters as they reach adulthood, and in turn, many lesbians do not reconcile themselves to their nature until after marrying and, frequently, having children. One Dallas-based businesswoman says she came out just a year ago, at age 65, after decades of unhappy marriage and raising four sons. In all, an estimated 1.5 million U.S. lesbians are mothers. Most bore their children while married, though adoption and artificial insemination are becoming increasingly popular among lesbian couples. Maria Cristina Vlassidis, 31, a Chilean-born law school graduate in Manhattan, has a son Erick, 8, from her former marriage, whom she is now raising with her lover, Marie Tatro, 29, a law student. Both women attend parent-teacher conferences; both support the child financially; they tell his playmates that they are both "Erick's Mom."

This life-style carries risk. "People freak out when they see us interact as a family," says Maria. Neighbors in their Hispanic district have escalated from hurling insults to flinging garbage to tossing firecrackers through an open window. Even in more tolerant communities, lesbians may face subtle discrimination. Angela Bowen, 54, a divorced, free-lance writer in Boston, has maintained a union with Jennifer Abod, 44, a media producer, for 11 years, but because the relationship has no legal status, Abod's health insurance will not cover Bowen or Bowen's daughter.

For most lesbians, however, being gay is basically a joyful experience. They seem to find lasting relationships more readily than gay men do. They face somewhat less harassment from strangers. AIDS does not haunt them as a constant personal threat. And many share a deep sense of community, bolstered by the philosophical and practical successes of feminism.

Happy lesbian couples with long-term relationships are not hard to find, though not many want to broadcast their existence beyond a circle of trusted friends and co-workers. Rose Walton, 53, and Marge Sherwin, 49, are more up front. Walton, who chairs a department at the State University of New York's School of Allied Health Professions, and Sherwin, a physical-therapy instructor at Suffolk Community College, have lived together, without much incident or fanfare, for 13 years, after meeting on a blind date. The women have exchanged rings and, says Marge, "absolutely would not go to a party the other is not invited to." She adds, "My father, who is 85, has never been sat down and told. But when my mother died, Rose spoke at the funeral, at his request." Says Rose: "Being gay has never been an issue with me. I was always a civil rights person. That doesn't mean I've worn a banner or carried a sign. I've simply lived my life."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles and Leslie Whitaker/New York