Anything seemed possible. This was 1977, less than a decade after the Stonewall riots, in New York, which had marked the rise of the gay-rights movement in America. Any sense of gay life as normal life was relatively new and still flimsy. Until 1961, there were sodomy laws in every state, which made gay sex illegal. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973. (Previously, despite Freud’s belief that homosexuality could not be “cured,” there had been a robust industry in the treatment of lesbianism as an ailment. According to a psychoanalyst quoted in Time in 1956, ninety per cent of homosexuals could be healed—and should be, because there were no “healthy homosexuals.”)

But now lesbianism had been transformed from a criminal activity practiced by the mentally ill into a radical political gesture embraced by the women’s movement. In her book “In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution,” the feminist Susan Brownmiller describes a “coming-out fervor akin to a tidal wave”: “I was bewildered by the overnight conversions and sudden switches in overt orientation by many of the activists I knew.” Many feminists who weren’t even particularly attracted to women were drawn to lesbianism, convinced that it was “not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy,” according to the début issue of The Furies, a publication put out by the separatist collective of the same name.

The feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson went so far as to claim that her brand of celibate “political lesbianism” was morally superior to the sexually active version practiced in her midst. Atkinson was not alone in this martyred line of reasoning; a 1975 essay by the separatist Barbara Lipschutz entitled “Nobody Needs to Get Fucked” urged women to “free the libido from the tyranny of orgasm-seeking. Sometimes hugging is nicer.” This argument was never particularly compelling to the lesbians in the movement who were actually gay.

Lesbianism—or the pretense of lesbianism—became so pervasive that Betty Friedan notoriously labelled it the “lavender menace.” In a 1973 article in the Times Magazine, she suggested that the C.I.A. had sent female homosexuals to infiltrate the women’s movement as part of a plot to discredit it. Friedan was right in one way: the Van Dykes and their separatist comrades had ideas that made those of the National Organization for Women look like an appeasement policy.

Lesbianism in the seventies promised its practitioners a life of radical rebellion and feminist empowerment. Separatism was supposed to be an antidote to all the altruism that women had been afflicted with since time immemorial. Now, when the phrase “lesbian mom” is a commonplace, it’s hard to imagine a time when female homosexuality was imbued with a countercultural connotation so potent that women were drawn to it by ideology rather than by desire. Similarly, if you are a young gay woman today, it can be difficult to understand the idea of organizing your entire existence around your sexual preference.

The first time I laid eyes on the last of the Van Dykes, I knew it was her before we exchanged a word. She looked like Johnny Cash but bigger, tougher, sitting in a leather jacket at the back of a bookstore in Seattle, where she has lived since she pulled into town in her van in 1980, fed up with driving, non-monogamy, communal assets, radical feminism, and the name Heather. As a child, she used to say, “I’m Hedy Lamarr, the movie star!,” over and over, because she’d heard the name somewhere and liked the sound of it. She told that story to a woman named Bear when she first got to town, and Bear said, “Your name is Lamar.” She has been Lamar Van Dyke ever since.

Van Dyke is an unusually large woman. People often stare at her on the street. She isn’t fat, but she’s built broad and stands six feet tall. She has an imposing presence. “If you look at me, there’s no question about it: I’m a dyke. I am gay,” she said. “If you don’t think so, there is something really wrong with you.” She has short, dark hair and tattoos winding up and down both arms, some of which she made herself during the eighteen years she owned and ran a tattoo parlor. I was nervous when I met her.

If I weren’t female and gay, I doubt very much that she would have spoken to me. “Your generation wants to fit in,” she said. “That’s your deal: I want to be just like you. The last thing I want to be is just like you.” Nevertheless, Van Dyke took me back to her house, which has a metal placard that says “LADIES” on the front door and is decorated with neon tubing, bowling balls, paintings she made of bird-people, Chinese lanterns, an old-fashioned barber’s chair, a large purple crystal geode with a crown on top, and a huge sculpture of a kimono that she fashioned out of scrap metal after she envisioned it in a dream. “One time, my mom looked at me and said, ‘I just don’t understand how you ended up the way you ended up—you’re just so flamboyant!’ ” Van Dyke said, sitting on a leopard-print couch in her living room. “I said, ‘Mom! Who dressed me up when I was three years old and gave me a Tonette and had me sing little songs for her friends at her parties? Who wanted me to be Shirley Temple? Who took me to tap-dancing classes? What do you mean, you don’t understand? What’s wrong with you?’ And she just started laughing.”

Lamar Van Dyke was born Heather Elizabeth Nelson in Canada in 1947, and grew up in Buffalo, New York. Her mother was a homemaker and her stepfather, a pipe fitter, “was a very staunch, German, patriarchal guy who said, ‘You will not do this, you will not do that, you will not leave the house.’ We were totally at war the whole time I was a teen-ager. It was some kind of Freudian thing: I grew breasts and he lost his mind.”

At nineteen, she left home. She got pregnant after a one-night stand with a Black Panther named Arnell, and went to San Francisco, where the weather was warmer and the culture was looser, to have her baby—a girl, whom she put up for adoption. “I didn’t really have a lot of qualms about that,” Van Dyke said. “I’d helped my sister raise her kids, so I knew what was involved and I knew I couldn’t do that. It’s like, no: this child’s going to have a good life and she’s got to have it someplace else.”

Heather got married three times in the six years after she gave birth. She met husband No. 1 while she was still in the maternity ward, where he had come to visit another woman. But Heather decided, “I’ll have him, I’ll take him.” He was a psychiatrist running a halfway house for ex-convicts, and Heather stayed there with him for about six months. On a visit home to Buffalo, she met up with husband No. 2, a biker named Skip Broome, who was a member of a gang called the Road Vultures. She showed me a faded newspaper clipping from 1968, picturing her with long brown hair, standing with Broome and his motorcycle, both of them looking gleeful and wild. (Broome was eventually imprisoned for selling pot and ended up in Attica during the riots.) In those early relationships, Van Dyke said, “It was about the thrill of catching them. It was the thrill of ‘Hey, you look good. I wonder if I can get you.’ Well, yeah. That’d be yeah. I mean, men’ll stick it in central vacuuming.”