The Life of a Switchboard Volunteer
Staffing the Switchboard could be as life-affirming as it could be exhausting. The same night that a staffer excitedly referred callers to lesbian CR groups or spread the word about lesbian dances, she might also receive a call from a woman in a desperate situation whose life was on the line. Staffers dealt with many calls from women in crisis, for which they often felt ill-equipped. A common issue faced by staffers was the frequency with which women expressed suicidal ideation during calls. Staffers were encouraged to refer these callers to other hotlines, but this was not always possible. One Saturday in November 1972, a staffer received one such call, which she summarized later in the call log:“♀♀ called to talk. Her lover of 3 yrs left without ‘even saying goodbye,’ she was upset & said she wanted to talk about something else—we rapped for a few minutes, then she said ‘I JUST TOOK 20 SECONALS A HALF HOUR AGO. GOODBYE’ There’s no one here but me ([name redacted]) and this has FREAKED ME OUT, SISTERS!’”[1]
Though staffers were advised not to be “discouraged if a call has been unsuccessful” and were “not expected to solve most problems with a single phone call,” interactions like the one above took an emotional toll.[2] At one monthly meetings in October 1977, a staffer suggested that everyone get together once a month to talk about difficult calls and “air problems.” In response, another staffer mentioned the problem of suicide calls, especially around the holidays. This topic seemed to strike a chord with other staffers, and they began brainstorming solutions to help ease the stress of receiving such calls. Two staffers agreed to reach out to some women they knew, who were experts in counseling people with suicidal ideation. Someone else suggested a role-playing game to help staffers prepare for difficult calls. Toward the end of the discussion, a staffer chimed in to give her own personal advice on the matter: “Let the person talk. They need a sounding board.”[3] Over the years, the problem of crisis calls was never totally resolved, and general meetings remained a forum where volunteers vented about difficult or unsuccessful calls. After all, LSWB was not a professional counseling service and its ability to handle suicidality and mental health crises was limited.
In the early years of the Switchboard, perhaps because of the continued threat of legal action against the fledgling collective, staffers were particularly wary of phone calls that were sexual in nature, even when those were made by lesbian women asking for advice on lesbian sex. Despite the handbook’s guidance that “no caller’s problems should be condemned or condoned” and that calls “need to be handled with kindness and concern for well-being of the caller,” it seems that some staffers struggled to implement this advice when it came to sexually explicit calls, calls from bisexual women, and calls from trans women and men.[4]
If women called in with questions about sex, staffers often recommended that these callers either discuss the matter with their lover or consult books on the topic of lesbian sex, such as The Joy of Lesbian Sex, Loving Women, and What Lesbians Do.[5] Some staffers feared that these callers would take advantage of phone calls about sexual topics to “get off,” as sometimes happened both with women callers and with male “crank” callers. When staffers did discuss sex with callers, the advice they gave tended to privilege cunnilingus over penetration, tacitly stigmatizing sexual intercourse that involved a phallus or phallus-like object, especially in the 1970s. Sometimes staffers’ notes made it quite clear that they did not approve of penetration, as in the following note from 1973: “♀ who wanted pointers on how to make love to another ♀. Asked if a frankfurter or banana would help--told her to get a real prick if that’s what she wanted. Told her of cunnilingus.”[6] As with most notes in the LSWB call logs, the tone of this conversation is hard to discern from the archives alone. Was the staffer joking with the caller? Was the caller trolling the volunteer? Was the staffer angrily dismissing the caller’s genuine desire for penetration?
In other situations, callers challenged staffers’ sex advice and complained about LSWB’s policy of avoiding explicitly sexual calls. In 1973, a staffer told a caller identified in the call log as a “playboy bunny” that “all women are lesbians.” When the caller later admitted that she wanted to have sex with women but “can’t bear to think of being in love with a woman” and worried she was “oversexed,” the staffer responded: “no way.” The caller, however, complained that the staffer was “playing down the sexual” by dismissing her fears. The conversation ended with the caller saying she would go “to the firehouse” and the staffer saying “[I] don’t think you have to choose,” presumably between emotional and sexual attachment to women.[7]
Though the caller was clearly attracted to women, she seemed lost when it came to determining what this attraction meant and what action, if any, she should take as a result. The caller seemed especially conflicted when it came to the difference between fantasizing about sex with women, longing for women friends, and being in love with a woman. When the staffer told the caller that she didn’t have to “choose,” she was tapping into a flexible definition of lesbian identity popular among lesbian feminists at the time. It was a definition that went beyond sexual attraction to encompass a broad spectrum of platonic, romantic, and sexual relationships among women (what Adrienne Rich called the “lesbian continuum”).[8] According to this capacious definition of lesbianism, even such a simple gesture as smiling at a “pretty girl” constituted a lesbian interaction. Sex was not the core of politicized lesbian identity in the context of women’s liberation. Instead, proximity to other “women-identified-women” was the key to lesbian belonging, but it also was a source of exclusions.
[1] November 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[2] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook.
[3] October 19, 1977 meeting minutes, Box 1, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[4] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook.
[5] Marilyn Gayle, What Lesbians Do (Godiva,1975); Nomadic Sisters, Loving Women (The Sisters, 1976); Emily L. Sisley and Bertha Harris, The Joy of Lesbian Sex: A Tender and Liberated Guide to the Pleasures and Problems of a Lesbian Lifestyle (Pocket, 1977).
[6] February 1973 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive
[7] January 16, 1973 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[8] Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60.