Watching Lefties on BBC4 last night, which documented the rise of the revolutionary-feminist-political-lesbian-separatist movement and its subsequent splintering and dispersal - blamed by Sheila Jeffreys on the forces of reaction, and by various other contributors on fractious proles, blacks, jews and wheelchair-users (“identity politics”). The program focussed rather on the personalities involved, at the expense of any detailed treatment of the analysis behind the movement; and this was perhaps understandable, given the vividness of the personalities involved.

Julie Bindell recalled getting cross with fellow-travellers who refused to make a total commitment to political lesbianism on the grounds that they were, actually, straight - as if these people had no awareness of how sexuality is, like, totally socially constructed. She sounded like she still believed this. At one point it was suggested that the planet should be divided into two hemispheres, one for men and one for women. I seem to remember encountering this proposal in Burroughs’s Women: A Biological Mistake?, which lays out a male homosexual separatist agenda that uncannily mirrors that of the Leeds rev fems. Burroughs would not have said that sexuality was a social construct. He preferred, as I do, the thesis that heterosexuality is an alien parasite, a body-and-mind-controlling virus of extra-human origin, that can only be thwarted through through total asceticism and radical experimentation.

What the lesbian separatists had going, for a while, was a successful program of asceticism and experimentation. They unhooked themselves from an entire apparatus of social approval, an entire system of dependency and reward. Abstinence from “penetration” was both a concrete and a symbolic commitment, aimed at establishing a sphere of physical and psychological autonomy. I forget already which of the contributors to last night’s program complained that the GLC effectively funded the movement out of existence, but she was no doubt correct: the separatist moment came to an end when the Emperor converted (so to speak) and the movement was awarded grant-maintained status. One wonders whether this was also when the problems with “identity politics” really started: to what extent was the real issue one of competing claims for limited resources?

I am looking over my shoulder here at k-punk’s recent posts on nihilation, antagonism and Nietzschean aristocratism. Was not “political” lesbianism a kind of elective moral aristocracy? What would be interesting would be the true universalisation of lesbian separatism: if not only “sexuality” but also “gender” are held to be “socially constructed”, then why not have a political lesbianism for all, irrespective of “biological” sex? (Radical feminism’s perennial difficulties over the moral status of transgender people already indicate this possibility). That is, if the real transgression of lesbian separatism was to present lesbianism as a political orientation (in spite of the frequent pathos and absurdity this produced, by all accounts), then why not universalise that commitment: reject the Holy Family, the Venusian sex/death-trap, the Garden Of Delights, the entire heteronormative apparatus - come and join the new Elect!

Not one word about the late Andrea Dworkin throughout the entire program, which I thought was a bit sad. Nor about the later fracas over S&M, which was perhaps just as well (although the author of Anticlimax must surely have been in a position to give them a few good quotes)…