When the Lesbians Came to Television

In 1971, seven lesbians appeared on a TV talk show. What happened next?

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The lesbians on The David Susskind Show. From Left to Right: Barbara Gittings, Rachael Parker, Lilli Vincenz, Lyn Kupferman, Magora Kennedy, Anna Salvato, and Barbara Love. Via The New York Public Library.

In 1971, The David Susskind Show aired an episode titled “Women Who Love Women,” which featured seven lesbians discussing their lives. This marked the first time a group of lesbians appeared on national television in the United States. (Technically, it was not the first time any lesbians appeared on television. Two of the show’s guests, Barbara Gittings and Lilli Vincenz, appeared on The Phil Donahue Show in 1970.)

Several guests were well known within the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements. Barbara Gittings, the most senior of the women, founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and was a longtime editor of their magazine, The Ladder. She also fought the ban on gay people being hired by the government, and at the time of the interview, was involved in an organization working to expand the materials about gay people in libraries.

Barbara Love, another longtime activist, worked with the National Organization for Women (NOW), pushing them to be more accepting of lesbians. She also co-wrote a book called Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism. Lilli Vincenz was the first lesbian member of the Mattachine Society of Washington and co-founded the newspaper The Washington Blade. Magora Kennedy was a Universal Life Church minister and Black Panther, and the only black woman on the panel.

Last week, we discussed Pam Walton’s 1986 short documentary, Lesbians. In it, Walton asks her lesbian guests purposefully narrow-minded and offensive questions, seemingly in an effort to mimic the kind of questions lesbians would get if they were on a straight-oriented show. (Notably, Walton’s documentary is also somewhat humorous in nature.)

The David Susskind Show is an example of the kind of program that earnestly asked Walton’s facetious questions. “Women Who Love Women” captures lesbian guests on a TV show hosted by a straight man who doesn’t particularly understand or accept them. Though Susskind isn’t overtly hostile to the women and tries to keep things light, his questions most often reflect a prejudiced point of view.

Susskind addresses his first question to Lyn Kupferman, a young woman who smokes a cigarette for the entire two-hour show (see above). “Why are you a lesbian?” he asks. “I love women,” she responds. When asked if she dislikes men, she gives the program’s first (of many) cheeky responses: “No, I don’t dislike men at all, some of my best friends are men.”

With that, these lucky lesbians are off to the races. Gittings, the most articulate of the group (though they’re all quite intelligent), gets straight to the point and refutes one of Susskind's – and the general public’s – questions. She argues that being a lesbian is not a choice. Instead, the choice is choosing to be who you truly are rather than keeping quiet about it. We can draw a direct line from Gitting’s argument to the Born This Way maxim of the 2010s, though it seems unlikely Lady Gaga has done a lot of reading about the Daughters of Bilitis.

Moments later, Gittings makes one of the most incisive statements of the episode, declaring that "Homosexuals today are taking it for granted that their homosexuality is not at all something dreadful – it’s good, it’s right, it’s natural, it’s moral, and this is the way they are going to be!"

Kennedy, who never holds back, tells Susskind her life story, and his head almost explodes. She told her parents she was gay at 9 years old. She got married at 14 due to family pressure, and she got married again at 16, but this time, her husband was a gay man. She has five children and plans to start a gay congregation in New Haven.

A significant portion of the discussion centers on psychology, and in particular, the APA’s conclusion that homosexuality was a mental illness, as defined in the DSM. Both Barbaras were working to get the APA to drop that designation during this period, which they finally did in 1974. (However, that year’s DSM still included a diagnostic code called ego-dystonic sexual orientation, which referred to individuals distressed by their sexual orientation.)

Gittings makes a salient point about psychologists' conclusions, noting that psychological patients are not a good sample size because they are already experiencing mental distress. The conversation then turns to the family. When asked what he would do if one of his kids were gay, Susskind says he would be very upset, as he agrees with the APA’s conclusion that homosexuality is a sickness. Love says her piece about family dynamics, noting that homosexuality can’t come from the home, as parents everywhere try and condition their kids to live a “normal,” heterosexual life.

Debates about science continue later in the episode, when Gittings makes several analogies that Susskind rolls his eyes at. She brings up the example of left-handedness, which used to be beaten out of children but has now become an accepted physical characteristic and is much more common. She turns to Galileo, explaining that while everyone else thought the Sun revolved around the Earth, we now believe his once-radical idea. Love chimes in with a reminder that just because the masses accept something doesn’t mean it's true, inciting cheers from the studio audience. Susskind remains unconvinced

The conversation turns to another hot lesbian topic: gender roles. Susskind asks them about power dynamics, sharing his observation that there is usually a more dominant woman and a “softer” woman in lesbian relationships. They attempt to disabuse him of this notion, and when he tells Kennedy that she seems like she would be the “husband” in a relationship, she takes great offense.

The lesbians do try to explain the presence of the butch/femme dynamic within the community. Kupferman, the youngest of the group, suggests it's a generational trend that younger lesbians don’t buy into anymore. Kennedy says that these roles are oppressive, and it's a good thing people are moving away from them. Gittings describes her experience coming up in the 1940s, when she didn’t see herself represented in either of these roles. They come to a consensus that butch/femme roles were influenced by straight society, and that in a more liberated world, these roles are becoming less prevalent.

What’s interesting about these perspectives is how, in some ways, they differ from research done about gender roles during this period. Today, some of the most widely circulated research on this topic alleges that butch/femme relationships were partially an economic issue. Working-class lesbians, some of whom passed as men, could work factory jobs that paid more than “woman’s work,” while the femmes might hold secretarial jobs. During the mid-century bar scene when it was risky to patronize these venues, lesbians often had to “look the part” to get past the bouncer, increasing the imperative to dress along the butch/femme lines.

Though butch and femme style went out of fashion around the time this episode was aired, these ideas returned in the 1980s and 1990s, when lesbians were more willing to experiment with gender pressentaion more playfully. Some of this experimentation continues today, including on Gen-Z-focused platforms like TikTok.

These lesbians’ arguments about butch and femme roles are part of a larger discussion about categories and labels in general. “You keep trying to put us into your boxes,” Gittings tells Susskind. “The whole point of our movement is that we’re making our own boxes if there are to be any boxes whatsoever. We are no longer going to live by your expectations and your value systems and your demands for us.”

Susskind doesn’t take this point to heart, and later asks the women if they are as promiscuous as gay men – another assumption that they refute. The lesbians keep coming back to Susskind’s perspective on the matter. “There’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. The only thing that’s wrong is that you people are upset about it,” Gittings alleges. The women want to know why Susskind thinks the way he does, and several of them begin chanting “WHY, WHY, WHY” in unison, though he appears unperturbed by this outburst. (Shortly thereafter, he suggests that gay men are more accepted than lesbians because they have a more “functional” role in society.)

The “Women Who Love Women” episode of The David Susskind Show follows a group of lesbians countering assumptions made about them and claiming their right to live openly. Though Susskind disagrees with their lifestyle, the audience adds another element to the show’s overall tone. The studio audience seems to be composed mostly of gay people; they cheer when one of the lesbians has a good comeback, and boo when Susskind says something wrongheaded.

Notably, this marked the first time multiple lesbian perspectives had ever appeared on national television. Previously, lesbians had existed in the public sphere primarily through the words of others, including the psychologists often referenced in this show. In this instance, lesbians entered the public sphere not precisely on their own terms, but with the space to explain themselves.

It’s hard to conceptualize the impact a program like this would have had – at first, there was nothing, and then there was something. Gittings had one experience after the episode aired that might help illuminate this for us. As described in the book Before Stonewall, “At the supermarket a week later, a middle-aged couple recognized Barbara from the show and the wife told her, ‘You made me realize that you gay people love each other just the way Arnold and I do.’”

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