Lisa Ben

Author of Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine (1947)

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This interview with Lisa Ben was conducted by Paul D. Cain on April 15, 1995. We continue to use her pseudonym by her request.

Cain’s chapter on Ben can be found in Leading the Parade: Conversations with America’s Most Influential Lesbian and Gay Men, published by Scarecrow Press in 2002. A paperback version was released in May of 2007. A chapter on Ben can also be found in Vern L. Bullough’s Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historic Contexts.

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Coming of Age

Paul:

Where in northern California did you grow up?

Lisa:

I never did grow up. [Laughs]

Paul:

All right… Where did you spend your childhood years?

Lisa Ben

Young Lisa Ben
Born
Died:
Role:	Author/Editor

Lisa:

My childhood years were in Los Altos, California.

My parents owned a 33-acre fruit ranch and, when I was three years old, they moved from San Francisco to this fruit ranch in Los Altos. So I spent my childhood years from age three to 21 at the ranch. So I grew up with lots of animals. Not very many friends, but lots of animals. We had a nanny goat, and I had my own riding pony, lots of chickens and ducks, and there were turkeys. And I think at one time Mother even had some guinea hens, and mallard ducks, and of course lots and lots of different kinds of fruit, except the kind of fruit that I would have enjoyed associating with.

Paul:

The forbidden fruit. [Laughs]

Lisa:

Yeah. We had apricots mainly — pears, peaches, quince, figs, almonds, walnuts, plums. And we even had an olive tree, and Mother would pick the olives and pickle ’em in brine and fix black olives, and Mother did an awful lot of canning. So we had lots of nice home-canned fruit, things like that. It was a real country life, which was nice — I’m glad, in retrospect, that I grew up there rather than growing up in San Francisco or San Jose or some other place, you know.

Paul:

But you spent most of the rest of your life since then in larger cities, right?

Lisa:

Well, just — first, I — they got rid of me, and I lived in Palo Alto for 2-1/2 years. And then from there I moved down to L. A. because I wanted to kind of get away from them. Not that — it wasn't because of gay life, it was a… Well, anyway, that's another whole different story, and I don't think maybe you'd want to include that in your book. But, suffice it to say, it was sort of a fight over power. They wanted to keep me at home and rent me out as an office girl, and then take a third of my salary in gratitude.

Paul:

Well, that was one of things that I had read was that you had spent two years in college, then your parents kind of forced you to go into business school, and that you always hated office work.

Lisa:

That's true; I did. I hated it with a passion.

Paul:

And I guess what I wonder is: being such an adventurous spirit, if you hated to do it so much, why did you continue to do it for the rest of your life?

Lisa:

I wasn't an adventurous spirit! I was very cowed, very passive. I didn’t do anything — I mean, if I spoke back to my mother, she’d slap me across the face so hard! My dad never raised a hand to me, but he could make feel about two inches high with his putdowns. So I was — and I was the only child.

Paul:

Ah! OK.

Lisa:

So I was very, very much — I would have stayed with them if they hadn’t said, “Well, because of the war, we’ve decided that you might be safer in Palo Alto because there’s going to be a food shortage.” Well, I believed them. And this wasn’t true at all. I didn’t want to cooperate with them in contributing my salary to them because I hated the work so much, and my dad got angry and quit my music lessons because of that, which was terrible. I had always supposed I would be playing in a symphony orchestra.

Paul:

What did you play?

Lisa:

Violin. And I worked hard at that violin.

And when he did that, he lost all my love for him. I didn’t have much love for him in the first place, but, you know, that did it. So when they said we think you should move to Palo Alto, I thought, aha! At least there I can read the books I want to read from the library, and go to a mystery movie once in a while if I want to. They frowned on mystery movies, and you’d think that the books I brought home from the library were pornographic, the way they reacted. I would bring home a mystery story or a ghost story or something, and I liked to read it for fun — it didn’t affect me with nightmares, or anything. And Mother at the dinner table would say, “Show Daddy what kind of book you brought home from the library today.” And here I was 18 or 19 years old! You know, I mean —

Paul:

Goodness, yes — I can understand.

Lisa:

It wasn't as though I were 5 or 6 years old.

Paul:

Was there any kind of a religious background, or anything?

Lisa:

No — Mother used to force me to go to church — Daddy never went to church. But I didn’t want to go to church because — I mean, for that reason. I told Mother, “Well, I like the devil.”

Paul:

Oh, gosh! [Laughs]

Lisa:

Because, you know, it was the opposite, and she was horrified. [Laughs] Of course, there were no cults around, or anything like that, but I just took the opposite tack. Well, when I got a chance to move to Palo Alto, at their suggestion, I said, “Oh!,” and I just shrugged my shoulders, and then, “If that’s what you want —” Well, Mother drove me over there and got me a room to live in. And they were so careful about what I read, or what I saw in the movies, that I was just astonished they would do this. And they thought nothing of my hopping on the bicycle in my little shorts and halter, riding around the country roads alone, and it was lonely in those places — they never objected to that, nor to my riding my pony alone — but you’d think they would worry about! But they didn't.

Paul:

Parents are funny that way.

Lisa:

But reading and movies — oh, my. So, anyway, I just — I think — I remember my father saying, “I think you’ll find that it’s more expensive to live away from home — you should stay here.” And I thought, “That’s why they’re doing this — they're going to expect me to come back and say, ‘Please take me back,’ or ‘Daddy, can I borrow some money?’ or something.” Well, I never borrowed a cent from that person — from the day they put me out to Palo Alto. I starved to death, but I didn't borrow from them — I didn’t ask them for anything. And I was permitted to come home for Sunday dinner every Sunday. I could take the bus to Los Altos, and they would drive me back — wasn’t that nice of them?

Paul:

[Laughs]

Lisa:

So, being short of money, I used to hitchhike to Los Altos, and that horrified my mother.

Paul:

Right. I heard about that.

Lisa:

And I showed up at the ranch house, and she’d say, “How’d you get here?” “Well, I hitchhiked.” They didn’t like that, but they couldn’t forbid it.

So, anyway, they finally sold the ranch and moved to Menlo Park, close by. And I still lived in my — oh, I finally got a room where I took care of children at night, and I got a free room. Well, they didn't like that very much either. But what could they do? By that time, when I had a free room in someone else’s house, Mother couldn’t come up to the room and look around, or look in my closet and see if I had anything to eat, and all that. So that worked out real fine. And I'd be walking home from work, and I’d see Mother's old blue DeSoto trailing along, and she'd say, “You want a ride home?,” meaning where I lived, and I’d say yes. By that time I was down to 99 pounds — I mean, I was skinny. You wouldn’t believe it now, would you? So she’d take me home, and one day—I’ll never forget this — she said, “Have you had your dinner yet?” And I said no. And she said, “Aren’t you hungry? Wouldn’t you like to take Mother out to dinner?” And I said no, and I expected a slap across the face when I said that, but she didn’t say anything. But what cruel things to say!

Paul:

Parents can do the wrong thing.

Lisa:

So [I went through] about two and a half years of that. And I knew some people from the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society here, and one of the guys had a grandma who owned this flat, and I could stay there. He was in the service, so I — I just went and I told my parents what was going to happen; I didn’t run off. And oh, my mother thought that was terrible, you know, and my dad — they saw me off at the train — I bought my own train ticket. And my father said, “Oh, you're making a big mistake — you're making a big mistake.” And I thought, well, maybe I am, but I’ve gotta get out of this situation. And I knew I could find work down here that paid a hell of a lot more than I was making up there — I think I was making about $31 a week up there for an 8-hour day and half-days Saturday. I mean, so I came down here and I lived in rented rooms for a while, and then I bought my own little house, finally. I realized if I didn’t buy a house, I’d still be working at my age, you know. So I would go up to visit them on my summer vacation because I felt that it was my duty, you know — I was their only child, and I should do this for them, but I sure didn’t enjoy it.

RKO and the Launch of Vice Versa

Paul:

I’ll bet, I'll bet. Now I read that you worked at RKO Studios in the ’40s. Is that correct?

Lisa:

That’s true. Not very long, because Howard Hughes bought it and then we all went out. [Laughs]

Paul:

Did you find it to be at all glamorous? Did you ever see any of the stars, or anything like that?

Lisa:

Oh, yeah, I mean, by that — in that time, I was still impressed by seeing movie stars in person, you know. And I saw Robert Mitchum, and Cary Grant, and some of the girls — Jane Greer and Gloria Grahame, and some of these people have passed on by now. And I got a big kick out of that for a while. And then it began to pall on me, and I realized, “Well, gee, these are people like I am, you know —”

Paul:

Put their pants on one leg at a time…

Lisa:

Yeah. So what the hey — but for a while, it was fun.

Paul:

I’m sure. Did you get any sense with Cary Grant, when you met him, that he might be family? I’m Just curious…

Lisa:

No. Oh, I didn't — oh, Rock Hudson came later — that’s when I worked at another studio. But I loved working at RKO, even though I didn’t like office work. But of course that’s where I wrote Vice Versa.

And then when I went to other jobs, which were not studio jobs for a while — they were horrible jobs — I had to quit because there was no opportunity to type privately or anything. So that's why Vice Versa bit the dust.

Paul:

Right. I had seen in a couple of places that you had stopped it because the workload was too much, but I knew that wasn’t true from some other things I had read.

Lisa:

No, that's not true. I stopped it because there was no privacy. I would be in a room right next door to some — next table or desk to someone else who was typing, and I could read what they were typing and they could read what I was typing, so…I mean, you can’t do things like that! And then, too, the boss would come along and see you weren’t doing something that pertained to business. So that's why Vice Versa stopped.

Paul:

Right. One of the things I saw that you had mentioned was that as a result of Vice Versa it helped you to become a faster typist. Do you have any idea how fast you typed?

Lisa:

Yes. I have no idea. I just typed like a fiend! [Laughs]

Paul:

You bet!

Not Your Typical Gal

When you talked with Eric Marcus for his book, Making History, you described yourself as being very femme, which is obviously the case. Did you ever feel any pressure to be more “butch,” since you were so open?

Lisa:

No, that wouldn’t have worked with me because, well, for one reason, I thought, “Gee, if I were a butch girl, would I be attracted to another person who dressed in ties and shirts and stuff? No! I'd be attracted to a person who wore a dress and earrings.” And I’ve always been that way anyway, so I thought, “Why change?” I don’t feel — I don't feel that way — that’s not natural to me. It’s natural for me to be a girly girl, and I love it and I’ll never change!

And if they don't like it, they can lump it.

Paul:

But there was no outside pressure at that time?

Lisa:

No, no!

Paul:

OK, I was just curious. ’Cause often — some of the stuff that I’ve read seemed to indicate that a lot of the — a lot of the women, if you were open about being a lesbian, that they kind of tried to push you into a category.

Lisa:

I can remember dancing at a gay spot one time with a real handsome, tall butch, and she looked down at me, and said, “Are you here just to see how the other half lives?” And of course, here I was in my little dress with my jewelry and little high heels and everything, and I looked at her and I said, “No!” I said, “Why, I’m just as gay as you are. It’s just that I don’t like to wear men’s clothing.” And she kind of looked embarrassed, you know. But I’ve never felt the urge to be other than — dress other than I do.

Paul:

One of the other things that Eric Marcus quoted you as saying was, “I didn't think I was a pervert, or sick.” Don’t you think that most gay people at that time thought that they were, though? Wasn't there a lot of that sort of feeling?

Lisa:

Well, they might not have thought they were a pervert, but they thought perhaps they were mentally off, or they were quirky a little bit in some way. Because the stuff that they read from the psychiatrists…

Paul:

told them that they were?

Lisa:

…told them that they were. But I never felt that way. I knew what I wanted, and I wasn’t ready to conform to any other way of being. As a matter of fact, at one time, before I moved to Palo Alto, my father wanted to consign me to the state nuthouse. Not because he suspected I was gay but because I wouldn’t cooperate. And I didn’t want to be an office girl, and I didn’t want — I didn’t want to go outside the home and earn money, either. My mother and my grandmother were home ladies, and I — that's all I had to look to. My mother’s friends were all — they all had charge of their homes, and I couldn’t understand why they were putting me out to do this horrible office work and earn the money when they didn’t need the money. If they were poor, I would have gone out and worked my butt off for them. But they weren’t. I told them, I said, “You have more money than I’ll ever see in my lifetime — what’s the matter?”

Paul:

They must have thought it would be good for you — build character.

Lisa:

Well, they sure tore down my character — I don’t know how they expected me to build it up again. [Laughs] But anyway, that’s another story. I didn’t want to go out on my own and work. As my poem, “Dilemma,” told you, that tells you a great deal about the way I felt. I still feel it, too.

Paul:

I understand.

Lisa:

But I made it, and here I am.

Paul:

Sure, sure. One of the other things that Marcus quoted you as saying was, “I was a misfit all the way around, I guess.” Is that accurate?

Lisa:

Well, yes, I was, because I didn’t care for sports. Because I was left-handed and they changed me to right, and that loused up my reflexes. And in playing ball in elementary school or something, they’d throw the ball at me and I’d go like this [flinches] because I couldn’t catch it quick enough, and the children never wanted me on their team because I was slow — not mentally, Lord knows, but slow in reflexes. And I didn’t care about dating boys. I don’t know, I just didn't fit in to certain things that girls do in school.

Paul:

Did you feel that you fit in OK in gay society, though?

Lisa:

Oh boy, did I ever! [Laughs]

Paul:

So you did find your place!

Lisa:

Oh, yeah! When I made that remark, I must been talking about my elementary and high school years, because…

Paul:

That was what concerned me, is I wondered if going into gay life that you felt that you didn’t fit in there…

Lisa:

Oh, Lord, no! I mean, right away, I was just like hand in glove.

Paul:

I’m glad to hear that. That’s great.

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References

Interview by Paul D. Cain, edited by C. Todd White.

This page Copyright (c) by C. Todd White, 2008. All rights reserved. No portion of this interview can be reprinted without permission. Please contact Dr. White at todd@tangentroup.org to secure permission or to report errors or omissions.

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