Newton, Esther. “Just One of the Boys: Lesbians in Cherry Grove, 1960-1988.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 528-541.
In this essay Newton writes a historical account of three separate lesbian populations who inhabited Cherry Grove, a largely gay male summer community in the New York Metropolitan area, throughout various years in the twentieth century. One of the elements that makes this a particularly rich text is the in-depth interviews Newton conducted as part of her research; her informants’ voices are deftly integrated throughout. Although she begins with a brief description of the first group, the “ladies” who came to the Grove from 1945-1955, Newton spends the majority of her essay describing those that followed, the “dykes” who came in the 1960’s and the “postfeminists” who came in the mid-1980’s. She demonstrates that each “generation” of lesbians who came to the Grove differed from one another in regards to class and politics, and moreover each had their own unique relationships to the space of the Grove as well as its other inhabitants.
It is these lesbians’ diverse ways of inhabiting the Grove, which are central in Newton’s essay, that is most relevant to cultural landscape studies. For example, one main difference Newton cites between the “ladies” and the “dykes” is their class status, the “ladies” being affluent and the “dykes” being from blue collar backgrounds. This class disparity meant that the “dykes” worked in the Grove whereas the “ladies” had not, and also that the “dykes” were not as readily able to buy Grove housing as the “ladies.” A second main difference between the “ladies” and the “dykes” was their relationship to the Grove’s gay male community. The “dykes” socialized with their gay male peers less than the “ladies” had, and actually were seen as “intruders and treated as such” by the Grove men (531). It was primarily after establishing themselves as home owners that the “dykes” gained more equal footing with the Grove men, both sharing an investment in Cherry Grove. These are but two of Newton’s many examples that demonstrate how factors such as class and gender influenced perceptions of, access to, and uses of the Grove by various lesbian inhabitants. [J. Sapinoso]