Who Tells Our Stories?

Abstract

Who Tells Our Stories? Marcia M. Gallo (bio) Lauren Jae Gutterman. Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 328 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780812251746 (cl). Jaime Harker. The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 239 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469643342 (cl); 9781469643359 (pb); 9781469643366 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 592 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469641096 (cl); 9781469641102 (pb); 9781469641119 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; ISBN 9781478005902 (cl); 9781478006534 (pb); 9781478007241 (ebook). Four recent books on female same-sex, bisexual, and “quare” desire provide rich opportunities for complicating contemporary accounts of lesbian and feminist history.1 In particular, the three authors reviewed here rely on a diverse set of sources—correspondence, oral histories, family albums and archival documents, journalism, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and LGBTQ+ studies—to expand the life stories we can access. For that alone, we owe them thanks, because all three authors bring to the fore an impressive array of people too often missing from our accounts of women who love women, from the mid-twentieth century through the first decades of the twenty first. Lauren Jae Gutterman is cohost of the “Sexing History” podcast and assistant professor in the American Studies and History Departments at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, received the 2019 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians award for a “first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality.” Jaime Harker, the owner of the Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi, is a self-described “gay bookstore connoisseur” who operates her business as an especially welcoming place for members of LGBTQ+ communities. [End Page 183] With the publication of her first book in 2018, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, she aims to provide readers with “a literary history of a group of writers who, when remembered at all, tend to be approached in isolation” (16). The author of both Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History and Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women, E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of Northwestern University School of Communication and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African American Studies at Northwestern. He also was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson’s first book, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003), examines how Blackness is appropriated and performed both within and outside African American culture. His second book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008) is an ethnographic oral history of the lives of Black gay men in the US South which received the Stonewall Book Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. Utilizing these oral histories, Johnson also created “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales,” an evocative and spellbinding one-man show which he performed at numerous venues from 2006 to 2013. All three of the authors bring their own experiences to bear on their work, but they all focus on the women whose stories they tell. As a group, they utilize familiar sources to ask new questions about female same-sex desire and enrich the existing archives with new and complex narrators. Three of the books focus specifically on the US South, and all incorporate a range of eras, geographies, races, ethnicities, and class statuses to remind us that social institutions such as marriage connect many women’s lives. Lauren Jae Gutterman’s Her Neighbor’s Wife relies on a number of archives, including the treasure trove of materials in the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Collection at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. She also makes good use of oral histories—such as those collected by lesbian scholar Kelly Anderson at...