Dalloway by Virginia Woolf The Persian Boy by Mary Renault A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood Olivia by Dorothy Bussy Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Another Country by James Baldwin The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Color Purple by Alice Walker Women in Love by D. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews The Gallery by John Horne Burns Sister Gin by June Arnold Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram Naked Lunch by William Burroughs The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan Three Lives by Gertrude Stein Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov The Passion by Jeanette Winterson Lover by Bertha Harris Moby Dick by Herman Melville Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Satyricon by Petronius The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell Special Friendships by Roger Peyrefitte The Changelings by Jo Sinclair Sheeper by Irving Rosenthal Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis The Gaudy Image by William Talsman The Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester Was by Geoff Ryman Gemini by Michel Tournier The Children's Crusade by Rebecca Brown The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin Riverfinger Women by Elana Nachman Dykewomon Closer by Dennis Cooper Miss Peabody's Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai Wasteland by Jo Sinclair Sea of Tranquillity by Paul Russell Autobiography of a Family Photo by Jacqueline Woodson In Thrall by Jane DeLynn Sita by Kate Millett.
In fact, these relationships were promoted as alternatives to and practice for a woman's marriage to a man. I put in your lovers, for I don't allow it possible for a man to be so sincere as I am. When Sneyd married despite Seward's protest, Seward's poems became angry. However, Seward continued to write about Sneyd long after her death, extolling Sneyd's beauty and their affection and friendship.
Writing to another woman by whom she had recently felt betrayed, Wollstonecraft declared, "The roses will bloom when there's peace in the breast, and the prospect of living with my Fanny gladdens my heart: A Fiction , in part, addressed her relationship with Fanny Blood. Perhaps the most famous of these romantic friendships was between Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, nicknamed the Ladies of Llangollen.
Butler and Ponsonby eloped in , to the relief of Ponsonby's family concerned about their reputation had she run away with a man [60] to live together in Wales for 51 years and be thought of as eccentrics. Some of it was written in code, detailing her sexual relationships with Marianna Belcombe and Maria Barlow. Romantic friendships were also popular in the U. Enigmatic poet Emily Dickinson wrote over letters and poems to Susan Gilbert, who later became her sister-in-law, and engaged in another romantic correspondence with Kate Scott Anthon.
Anthon broke off their relationship the same month Dickinson entered self-imposed lifelong seclusion. Around the turn of the 20th century, the development of higher education provided opportunities for women. In all-female surroundings, a culture of romantic pursuit was fostered in women's colleges. Older students mentored younger ones, called on them socially, took them to all-women dances, and sent them flowers, cards, and poems that declared their undying love for each other. Nicholas , and a collection called Smith College Stories , without negative views.
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Women who had the option of a career instead of marriage labeled themselves New Women , and took their new opportunities very seriously. For some women, the realization that they participated in behavior or relationships that could be categorized as lesbian caused them to deny or conceal it, such as professor Jeannette Augustus Marks at Mount Holyoke College , who lived with the college president, Mary Woolley , for 36 years.
Marks discouraged young women from "abnormal" friendships and insisted happiness could only be attained with a man.
From the s to the s, American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney held a weekly salon in Paris to which major artistic celebrities were invited and where lesbian topics were the focus. Combining Greek influences with contemporary French eroticism, she attempted to create an updated and idealized version of Lesbos in her salon. Berlin had a vibrant homosexual culture in the s: Clubs varied between large establishments so popular that they were tourist attractions to small neighborhood cafes where only local women went to find other women. Homosexuality was illegal in Germany, though sometimes tolerated, as some functions were allowed by the police who took the opportunity to register the names of homosexuals for future reference.
The novel's plot centers around Stephen Gordon, a woman who identifies herself as an invert after reading Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis , and lives within the homosexual subculture of Paris. The novel included a foreword by Havelock Ellis and was intended to be a call for tolerance for inverts by publicizing their disadvantages and accidents of being born inverted.
The publicity Hall received was due to unintended consequences; the novel was tried for obscenity in London, a spectacularly scandalous event described as " the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian subculture" by professor Laura Doan. Newspaper stories frankly divulged that the book's content includes "sexual relations between Lesbian women", and photographs of Hall often accompanied details about lesbians in most major print outlets within a span of six months.
When British women participated in World War I, they became familiar with masculine clothing, and were considered patriotic for wearing uniforms and pants. However, postwar masculinization of women's clothing became associated with lesbians. In the United States, the s was a decade of social experimentation, particularly with sex.
This was heavily influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud , who theorized that sexual desire would be sated unconsciously, despite an individual's wish to ignore it. Freud's theories were much more pervasive in the U. With the well-publicized notion that sexual acts were a part of lesbianism and their relationships, sexual experimentation was widespread.
Large cities that provided a nightlife were immensely popular, and women began to seek out sexual adventure. Bisexuality became chic, particularly in America's first gay neighborhoods. No location saw more visitors for its possibilities of homosexual nightlife than Harlem , the predominantly African American section of New York City. White "slummers" enjoyed jazz , nightclubs, and anything else they wished. Some women staged lavish wedding ceremonies, even filing licenses using masculine names with New York City. Across town, Greenwich Village also saw a growing homosexual community; both Harlem and Greenwich Village provided furnished rooms for single men and women, which was a major factor in their development as centers for homosexual communities.
Bohemians —intellectuals who rejected Victorian ideals—gathered in the Village. Homosexuals were predominantly male, although figures such as poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and social host Mabel Dodge were known for their affairs with women and promotion of tolerance of homosexuality. The existence of a public space for women to socialize in bars that were known to cater to lesbians "became the single most important public manifestation of the subculture for many decades", according to historian Lillian Faderman.
The primary component necessary to encourage lesbians to be public and seek other women was economic independence, which virtually disappeared in the s with the Great Depression. Most women in the U. Independent women in the s were generally seen as holding jobs that men should have. The social attitude made very small and close-knit communities in large cities that centered around bars, while simultaneously isolating women in other locales. Speaking of homosexuality in any context was socially forbidden, and women rarely discussed lesbianism even amongst themselves; they referred to openly gay people as "in the Life".
Homosexual subculture disappeared in Germany with the rise of the Nazis in The onset of World War II caused a massive upheaval in people's lives as military mobilization engaged millions of men. Women were also accepted into the military in the U. Unlike processes to screen out male homosexuals, which had been in place since the creation of the American military, there were no methods to identify or screen for lesbians; they were put into place gradually during World War II. Despite common attitudes regarding women's traditional roles in the s, independent and masculine women were directly recruited by the military in the s, and frailty discouraged.
Some women were able to arrive at the recruiting station in a man's suit, deny ever having been in love with another woman, and be easily inducted. As women found each other, they formed into tight groups on base, socialized at service clubs, and began to use code words. The most masculine women were not necessarily common, though they were visible so they tended to attract women interested in finding other lesbians. Women had to broach the subject about their interest in other women carefully, sometimes taking days to develop a common understanding without asking or stating anything outright.
The increased mobility, sophistication, and independence of many women during and after the war made it possible for women to live without husbands, something that would not have been feasible under different economic and social circumstances, further shaping lesbian networks and environments. Lesbians were not included under Paragraph , a German statute which made homosexual acts between males a crime. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stipulates that this is because women were seen as subordinate to men, and that the Nazi state feared lesbians less than gay men.
However, the USHMM also claims that many women were arrested and imprisoned for "asocial" behaviour, a label which was applied to women who did not conform to the ideal Nazi image of a woman: These women were labeled with a black triangle. Many lesbians also reclaimed the pink triangle. Following World War II, a nationwide movement pressed to return to pre-war society as quickly as possible in the U. Homosexuals were thought to be vulnerable targets to blackmail , and the government purged its employment ranks of open homosexuals, beginning a widespread effort to gather intelligence about employees' private lives.
Attitudes and practices to ferret out homosexuals in public service positions extended to Australia [] and Canada. Very little information was available about homosexuality beyond medical and psychiatric texts. Community meeting places consisted of bars that were commonly raided by police once a month on average, with those arrested exposed in newspapers. In response, eight women in San Francisco met in their living rooms in to socialize and have a safe place to dance.
When they decided to make it a regular meeting, they became the first organization for lesbians in the U. The DOB began publishing a magazine titled The Ladder in ; inside the front cover of every issue was their mission statement, the first of which stated was "Education of the variant".
It was intended to provide women with knowledge about homosexuality—specifically relating to women, and famous lesbians in history. However, by the term "lesbian" had such a negative meaning that the DOB refused to use it as a descriptor, choosing "variant" instead. The DOB spread to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, and The Ladder was mailed to hundreds—eventually thousands—of DOB members discussing the nature of homosexuality, sometimes challenging the idea that it was a sickness, with readers offering their own reasons why they were lesbians, and suggesting ways to cope with the condition or society's response to it.
As a reflection of categories of sexuality so sharply defined by the government and society at large, lesbian subculture developed extremely rigid gender roles between women, particularly among the working class in the U.
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Although many municipalities had enacted laws against cross-dressing, some women would socialize in bars as butches: Others wore traditionally feminine clothing and assumed a more diminutive role as femmes. Butch and femme modes of socialization were so integral within lesbian bars that women who refused to choose between the two would be ignored, or at least unable to date anyone, and butch women becoming romantically involved with other butch women or femmes with other femmes was unacceptable.
Butch women were not a novelty in the s; even in Harlem and Greenwich Village in the s some women assumed these personae. In the s and s, however, the roles were pervasive and not limited to North America: Many wealthier women married to satisfy their familial obligations, and others escaped to Europe to live as expatriates. Regardless of the lack of information about homosexuality in scholarly texts, another forum for learning about lesbianism was growing.
A paperback book titled Women's Barracks describing a woman's experiences in the Free French Forces was published in It told of a lesbian relationship the author had witnessed. Gold Medal Books was overwhelmed with mail from women writing about the subject matter, and followed with more books, creating the genre of lesbian pulp fiction. Between and over 2, books were published using lesbianism as a topic, and they were sold in corner drugstores, train stations, bus stops, and newsstands all over the U.
Most were written by, and almost all were marketed to heterosexual men. Coded words and images were used on the covers. Instead of "lesbian", terms such as "strange", "twilight", "queer", and "third sex", were used in the titles, and cover art was invariably salacious. Bannon, who also purchased lesbian pulp fiction, later stated that women identified the material iconically by the cover art. As a result, pulp fiction helped to proliferate a lesbian identity simultaneously to lesbians and heterosexual readers. The social rigidity of the s and early s encountered a backlash as social movements to improve the standing of African Americans, the poor, women, and gays all became prominent.
Of the latter two, the gay rights movement and the feminist movement connected after a violent confrontation occurred in New York City in the Stonewall riots. The sexual revolution in the s introduced the differentiation between identity and sexual behavior for women. Many women took advantage of their new social freedom to try new experiences. Women who previously identified as heterosexual tried sex with women, though many maintained their heterosexual identity. A militant feminist organization named Radicalesbians published a manifesto in entitled " The Woman-Identified Woman " that declared "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion".
Militant feminists expressed their disdain with an inherently sexist and patriarchal society, and concluded the most effective way to overcome sexism and attain the equality of women would be to deny men any power or pleasure from women. For women who subscribed to this philosophy—dubbing themselves lesbian-feminists —lesbian was a term chosen by women to describe any woman who dedicated her approach to social interaction and political motivation to the welfare of women.
Sexual desire was not the defining characteristic of a lesbian-feminist, but rather her focus on politics. Independence from men as oppressors was a central tenet of lesbian-feminism, and many believers strove to separate themselves physically and economically from traditional male-centered culture. In the ideal society, named Lesbian Nation, "woman" and "lesbian" were interchangeable.
Although lesbian-feminism was a significant shift, not all lesbians agreed with it. Lesbian-feminism was a youth-oriented movement: The Daughters of Bilitis folded in over which direction to focus on: As equality was a priority for lesbian-feminists, disparity of roles between men and women or butch and femme were viewed as patriarchal. Lesbian-feminists eschewed gender role play that had been pervasive in bars, as well as the perceived chauvinism of gay men; many lesbian-feminists refused to work with gay men, or take up their causes.
In , poet and essayist Adrienne Rich expanded upon the political meaning of lesbian by proposing a continuum of lesbian existence based on "woman-identified experience" in her essay " Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence ". Such a perception of women relating to each other connects them through time and across cultures, and Rich considered heterosexuality a condition forced upon women by men.
Female homosexual behavior may be present in every culture, although the concept of a lesbian as a woman who pairs exclusively with other women is not. Attitudes about female homosexual behavior are dependent upon women's roles in each society, and each culture's definition of sex. Women in the Middle East have been historically segregated from men. In the 7th and 8th centuries, some extraordinary women dressed in male attire when gender roles were less strict, but the sexual roles that accompanied European women were not associated with Islamic women.
The Caliphal court in Baghdad featured women who dressed as men, including false facial hair, but they competed with other women for the attentions of men.
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Highly intelligent women, according to the 12th century writings of Sharif al-Idrisi , were more likely to be lesbians; their intellectual prowess put them on a more even par with men. Women, however, were mostly silent and men likewise rarely wrote about lesbian relationships. It is unclear to historians if the rare instances of lesbianism mentioned in literature are an accurate historical record or intended to serve as fantasies for men.
A treatise about repression in Iran asserted that women were completely silenced: To attest to lesbian desires would be an unforgivable crime. Although the authors of Islamic Homosexualities argued this did not mean women could not engage in lesbian relationships, a lesbian anthropologist in visited Yemen and reported that women in the town she visited were unable to comprehend her romantic relationship to another woman.
Women in Pakistan are expected to marry men; those who do not are ostracized. Women, however, may have intimate relations with other women as long as their wifely duties are met, their private matters are kept quiet, and the woman with whom they are involved is somehow related by family or logical interest to her lover. The United Nations estimate for the number of honor killings in the world is per year. Many women's groups in the Middle East and Southwest Asia suspect that more than 20, women are victims of honor killings in the world each year.
Some Indigenous peoples of the Americas conceptualize a third gender for women who dress as, and fulfill the roles usually filled by, men in their cultures. In Latin America , lesbian consciousness and associations appeared in the s, increasing while several countries transitioned to or reformed democratic governments. Harassment and intimidation have been common even in places where homosexuality is legal, and laws against child corruption, morality, or "the good ways" faltas a la moral o las buenas costumbres , have been used to persecute homosexuals.
Six mostly secret organizations concentrating on gay or lesbian issues were founded around this time, but persecution and harassment were continuous and grew worse with the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla in , when all groups were dissolved in the Dirty War. Lesbian rights groups have gradually formed since to build a cohesive community that works to overcome philosophical differences with heterosexual women.
The Latin American lesbian movement has been the most active in Mexico , but has encountered similar problems in effectiveness and cohesion. While groups try to promote lesbian issues and concerns, they also face misogynistic attitudes from gay men and homophobic views from heterosexual women. In , Lesbos , the first lesbian organization for Mexicans, was formed. Several incarnations of political groups promoting lesbian issues have evolved; 13 lesbian organizations were active in Mexico City in Ultimately, however, lesbian associations have had little influence both on the homosexual and feminist movements.
The lesbian movement has been closely associated with the feminist movement in Chile, although the relationship has been sometimes strained. Lesbian consciousness became more visible in Nicaragua in , when the Sandinista National Liberation Front expelled gay men and lesbians from its midst. State persecution prevented the formation of associations until AIDS became a concern, when educational efforts forced sexual minorities to band together.
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The first lesbian organization was Nosotras , founded in The meetings of feminist lesbians of Latin America and the Caribbean, sometimes shortened to "Lesbian meetings", have been an important forum for the exchange of ideas for Latin American lesbians since the late s. With rotating hosts and biannual gatherings, its main aims are the creation of communication networks, to change the situation of lesbians in Latin America both legally and socially , to increase solidarity between lesbians and to destroy the existing myths about them.
Cross-gender roles and marriage between women has also been recorded in over 30 African societies. The Hausa people of Sudan have a term equivalent to lesbian, kifi , that may also be applied to males to mean "neither party insists on a particular sexual role". Lesbian relationships are also known in matrilineal societies in Ghana among the Akan people. In Lesotho , females engage in what is commonly considered sexual behavior to the Western world: Since the people of Lesotho believe sex requires a penis, however, they do not consider their behavior sexual, nor label themselves lesbians.
In South Africa, lesbians are raped by heterosexual men with a goal of punishment of "abnormal" behavior and reinforcement of societal norms. Corrective rape is reported to be on the rise in South Africa.
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The South African nonprofit "Luleki Sizwe" estimates that more than 10 lesbians are raped or gang-raped on a weekly basis. China before westernization was another society that segregated men from women. Historical Chinese culture has not recognized a concept of sexual orientation, or a framework to divide people based on their same-sex or opposite-sex attractions. Outside their duties to bear sons to their husbands, women were perceived as having no sexuality at all. This did not mean that women could not pursue sexual relationships with other women, but that such associations could not impose upon women's relationships to men.
Rare references to lesbianism were written by Ying Shao , who identified same-sex relationships between women in imperial courts who behaved as husband and wife as dui shi paired eating. The liberty of being employed in silk factories starting in allowed some women to style themselves tzu-shu nii never to marry and live in communes with other women. Other Chinese called them sou-hei self-combers for adopting hairstyles of married women. These communes passed because of the Great Depression and were subsequently discouraged by the communist government for being a relic of feudal China.
In Japan, the term rezubian , a Japanese pronunciation of "lesbian", was used during the s. Westernization brought more independence for women and allowed some Japanese women to wear pants. In India, a 14th-century Indian text mentioning a lesbian couple who had a child as a result of their lovemaking is an exception to the general silence about female homosexuality. This invisibility disappeared with the release of a film titled Fire in , prompting some theaters in India to be attacked by extremists. Terms used to label homosexuals are often rejected by Indian activists for being the result of imperialist influence, but most discourse on homosexuality centers on men.
Women's rights groups in India continue to debate the legitimacy of including lesbian issues in their platforms, as lesbians and material focusing on female homosexuality are frequently suppressed. The most extensive early study of female homosexuality was provided by the Institute for Sex Research , who published an in-depth report of the sexual experiences of American women in More than 8, women were interviewed by Alfred Kinsey and the staff of the Institute for Sex Research in a book titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , popularly known as part of the Kinsey Report.
The Kinsey Report's dispassionate discussion of homosexuality as a form of human sexual behavior was revolutionary.
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Up to this study, only physicians and psychiatrists studied sexual behavior, and almost always the results were interpreted with a moral view. Single women had the highest prevalence of homosexual activity, followed by women who were widowed, divorced, or separated. The lowest occurrence of sexual activity was among married women; those with previous homosexual experience reported they got married to stop homosexual activity. Most of the women who reported homosexual activity had not experienced it more than ten times. Fifty-one percent of women reporting homosexual experience had only one partner.
Cassa, of course, is determined to fight back. Featuring on-the-page bisexual boy representation, as well as a fat asexual girl character! Happy is a year-old obsessed with Paris although she currently lives in Brisbane. Things start looking up when she wins a French essay competition. Winning the contest throws her in the paths of a fun assortment of other people: But when Happy follows her heart and ends up kissing them both, things start go downhill again. This YA featuring another pansexual! They involve Laila pushing way past her boundaries, taking risks including experimenting with sex and drugs all in order to live her life in a way that will translate to her fiction.
How far will she go, and it truly in the service of her writing? Look for this one out in June! This companion novel to the beloved Simon Vs. And with college and prom on the horizon and changing dynamics, her friend group is fracturing. This came out in April, so enjoy now! Well, get excited about multiple bi girl characters in this one, as well as a pansexual genderqueer character and a bi boy character!