Lesbian History Research Articles

Clandestine Existences and Secret Research: Eliminating Official Discrimination in the Canadian Military and Going Public in Academia

The 1990s was a notable decade for lesbians and gays in the Canadian military. Two important changes were the 1992 elimination of the official policy permitting discrimination against homosexual service members, and the 1996 introduction of benefits to same-sex partners. These changes radically influenced the psychological day-to-day reality of lesbian and gay military members. Yet, given the military culture, lesbian and gay members only began to come out in significant numbers at the turn of the century. This article presents an overview of our experience with researching the history of lesbians and gays in the Canadian military during the late 1990s and early years of the new century. It reveals the early clandestine nature of our research, and recounts some of the trials, tribulations, resistance, and successes we encountered when dealing with ethics boards and funding sources. It also describes our relationship with the media and how the military actively took steps to stall our efforts. We draw parallels between our experiences as researchers, and those of the lesbian service-members we were interviewing.

Alcaeus on the career of Myrsilos: Greeks, Lydians and Luwians at the east Aegean-west Anatolian interface

AbstractThis paper examines the evidence for the life and career of the Lesbian tyrant Myrsilos. Following an examination of the ancient testimonia for Myrsilos in the text of Alcaeus and later sources, the name Myrsilos is then considered in relation to the Hittite royal name Muršiliš, Myrsilos as an alternate name for the Lydian king Kandaules and various toponyms in Lydia and Caria that appear to be derived from the same underlying name or title. The consequences of the distribution of these names is then considered in the cultural and historical context of the Aegean-Anatolian interface, with implications for early Lesbian history and cultural continuity from the Late Bronze Age down to the Archaic period.

Gatsby's Mentors: Queer Relations between Love and Money in the Great Gatsby

This essay examines relationships between men and the role patriarchal capitalism plays in the construction of sexuality in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), a novel written during a critical period in the history of sexuality, as well as of gay and lesbian history. The ambivalence about male bonds—in particular the simultaneously loving and abusive dynamics of mentoring—depicted in this canonical work of American literature reveals the author's unease about his relationship with Catholic priest and teacher Sigourney Fay and provides insight into the author's well-known lifelong anxiety about his gender and sexuality.

Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories , and: On Joanna Russ , and: Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories, and: On Joanna Russ, and: Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader Erin Clair (bio) Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories by Julie Abraham. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 213 pp., $110.00 hardcover, $22.50 paper. On Joanna Russ edited by Farah Mendlesohn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009, 285 pp., $85.00 hardcover, $29.95 paper. Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader edited by Maren Linett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, 464 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $37.00 paper. Since the 1990s boom of scholarship rediscovering lesbian authors and themes in literature, scholars have been searching for a history of lesbian literature. Such a task is not easy, since sexual identity, as Michel Foucault and others inform us, did not exist as we know it before the nineteenth century. Some scholars see the task as either futile or harmful, as searches for a lesbian literary history risk applying twenty-first-century Western sexual politics onto other times and places, or they fear that focusing specifically on the figure of the lesbian can lead to further entrenchment of the gay/straight binary and thus oversimplify the myriad of desires people feel, while risking further marginalization of queer authors. Uncovering a history, though, is a political act that connects people and their struggles to a past. The question is, how has the project of lesbian literary history been going? The three books under review here all tackle this history in notably different ways: One finds lesbian history in authors' techniques, one does not seem to want to find it at all, and one finds it in an author's form. Together, these three books show a field continually redefining itself. When the first edition of Are Girls Necessary? was published by Routledge in 1996, Julie Abraham was writing amid the first big flush of publications about lesbian literature. Twelve years later, the University of Minnesota Press has reprinted Abraham's study, which gives us a moment to examine what has and has not changed in lesbian literary studies since its original publication. Like many of her colleagues in the field in the mid-1990s, Abraham was searching for a clearer idea of what we mean when we say "lesbian literature." Does this mean literary art by lesbian authors? Does it mean literature about romance between women? Abraham feels that it is more than either of these. Her study seeks to find a lesbian literary history not within the romantic content of a novel nor [End Page 257] the sexuality of the characters nor the author, but within the very structure of the novels themselves. By doing so, Abraham helped carve a space for scholars to talk about queer sexuality outside of the authors' own lives and helped pave a way to think about the possibility of a lesbian literary history. Through analyses of works by authors like Willa Cather, Mary Renault, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf, Abraham traces how lesbian writing repeatedly resists the plot of heterosexual romance that was de rigueur for women's novels at the beginning of the twentieth century. To circumvent the heterosexual romance plot that writes the lesbian as deviant, these modernist authors turned "to the discourse of 'history,' to merge the personal and the public as a way of constructing narratives beyond the heterosexual limits of literary 'reality'" (29). For example, in Nightwood and her other fiction, Barnes rewrites the historical narrative to include outcasts—lesbians, gay men, circus performers—and "records a lesbian desire for and fear of other women that is inextricable from desire for and fear of representation" (xxi). In Woolf's Between the Acts, this turn toward history allows the author to examine the contradiction between Miss La Trobe's sexuality and the historical content of her writing. More conservative authors like Cather and Renault found a place for the narrative of heterosexual romance through their male characters. The conflating of male and female experience that this last move involves, though, is where her argument has taken the most flack. Nearly all the reviewers of the 1996 edition of Are Girls Necessary? felt uneasy that, for...

OutHistory.org: An Experiment in LGBTQ Community History-Making

Abstract This article describes OutHistory.org, the public Web site on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) history hosted by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. OutHistory.org uses MediaWiki software to compile community-created histories of LGBTQ life in the U.S. and make the insights of LGBTQ history broadly accessible. Project Coordinator Lauren Gutterman explains how the public history project employs digital history to collect, advance, and project LGBTQ history, and how it serves as a model for other interactive history Web sites.

“We Were the Town's Tomboys”: An Interview with Raukura “Bubs” Hetet

This article is based on an extensive oral history with Raukura Te Aroha “Bubs” Hetet (1940–1993), a Māori woman from a small town in Aotearoa/New Zealand, who was aware of same-sex attraction from an early age, living in lesbian relationships for most of her adult life. She was seen as a tomboy in her small town, and describes some cross-dressing episodes when she was a teenager. Later, Bubs identified as butch in her social life and in her relationships. She worked for the New Zealand Post Office, joined the Women's Royal New Zealand Air Force, and made her home in the city of Auckland. The interview provides a rare opportunity to consider a life seldom documented in lesbian histories.

Charlotte Wolff and Lesbian History: Reconfiguring Liminality in Exile

This article considers the “liminality” of the psychologist Charlotte Wolff, MD (1897–1986). Always living openly as a lesbian since her school days in Danzig, Wolff trained as a doctor—also pursuing a parallel interest in poetry and in philosophy. As a Jewish person, she was forced to leave the Berlin Health Service and flee Germany when the Nazi regime came to power. Having moved to Great Britain in 1936 after three years in France, Wolff reconfigured “exile” beyond the literal experience of emigration and immigration, as a form of “marginality” or “liminality” always involved in artistic and scientific endeavors. In her life and work she negotiated several liminal areas—from her gender presentation to her standing in the academic and scientific community (she was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, to which she bequeathed her papers and the copyright to her work, but at the same time she was not an eminent psychologist), to her membership of sexual minority organizations (she conducted pioneering research on lesbianism and bisexuality, but some resented her connection with the psy-professions). In the spirit of Wolff's “liminality” as a strategy and creative zone, and along the lines indicated by Morawski (1994) as regards the transformative possibilities of feminist psychology as a liminal science, we argue for a reappraisal of Wolff's life and work that, in negotiating the borderlands between lesbian history and history of psychology, could enrich both disciplines.

All the Immigrants Are Straight, All the Homosexuals Are Citizens, But Some of Us Are Queer Aliens: Genealogies of Legal Strategy in Boutilier v. INS

Until recently, the fields of U.s. immigration history and U.s. queer history seemed content to ignore each other. canonical works of immigration history such as Oscar handlin’s The Uprooted and John Bodnar’s The Transplanted had nothing to say about gender and sexual “deviants” and did not interrogate the gender and sexual hierarchies institutionalized in immigration policies and practices. Groundbreaking works of gay and lesbian history, including John d’emilio’s Sexual Politics and Martin duberman’s Stonewall, identified particular individuals as immigrants but did not regard immigration as a key aspect of the history of homosexuality. More recently, scholarship by Margot canaday, eithne luibheid, susana Pena, horacio n. roque ramirez, nayan shah, siobhan somerville, Jennifer ting, daniel tsang, William turner, eric Wat, Judy Wu, and others has created a productive dialogue between immigration history and queer history. some of this work focuses on immigrants classified as gender and sexual deviants; some addresses immigration discourses and practices that constituted and regulated gender and sexuality; and some attempts to queer immigration history by deconstructing immigrant heteronormativity and homonormativity. this essay brings immigration history and queer history together with a focus on Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, a 1967 U.s. supreme court decision. Boutilier upheld a provision of the 1952 immigration and nationality Act that authorized the exclusion and deportation of aliens “afflicted with psychopathic personality” at time of entry. in 1965 congress amended the legislation to provide for the exclusion and deportation of aliens with “sexual deviations,” but Boutilier concerned the earlier “psychopathic personality” provision, which the immigration and naturalization service (ins) interpreted to apply to aliens classifiable as

The Lesbian Art Project

Critics and artists influenced by the tenets of queer theory have dismissed much of the artwork made in the 1970s from a lesbian feminist perspective. The result has been very little being known or written about this pioneering work. This article is concerned with exploring an often overlooked aspect of lesbian art history: the activities and events associated with the Lesbian Art Project (LAP) founded by Terry Wolverton and Arlene Raven at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles. I argue that what is most significant about the LAP is the way in which the participants articulated lesbian identity and lesbian community through performance, art making, and writing.

The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (review)

Reviewed by: The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance David Krasner The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. Shane Vogel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 257. $60.00 (cloth). In this bracing and keenly observed book, Shane Vogel examines Harlem Renaissance cabarets in order to illuminate gay and lesbian history. He uses the cabaret’s sexual openness as a prism by which to view his theoretical template: the “Cabaret School.” The cabaret school, Vogel contends, is an alternative history to the generally perceived idea of the Harlem Renaissance as “Racial Uplift.” Both the cabaret and the racial uplift schools of thought sought to reshape the narrative of black identity, cutting against the grain of minstrelsy by highlighting new perceptions of blackness in popular consciousness. However, according to Vogel, gay and lesbian activists used the cabaret “to critique the racial and sexual normativity of uplift ideology and to imagine alternative narratives of sexual and racial selfhood” (3). To queer the Harlem Renaissance, Vogel stresses the cabaret as a social and literary scene “where lines of sexual and racial identifications might be frustrated or undone and new social and psychic alignments made possible; spaces and practices that exceed and expand identity, rather than contract it” (22). During the Harlem Renaissance black homosexuals faced enormous obstacles, not the least of which were legal sanctions and social labeling beyond racism. Living required imaginative means of self-expression, and one key outlet was the cabaret. “Cabaret” surfaced in the early twentieth century as an overarching rubric for afterhour clubs, jook joints, and other illegal oases flourishing below the radar. Afterhours clubs, then as now, yield a sexually egalitarian environment. Vogel looks to the history of this scene not in order to document who was there and how often performers succeeded, but rather, as he puts it, “to outline a provisional understanding of cabaret performance that can address the conventions of intimacy that have shaped its historical experience, [and] to deepen our understanding of the role that performance and public intimacy plays in black and queer cultural histories” (41). Each chapter has a specific focus: the cabaret’s rise in popularity; the cabaret writings of Nella Larson’s Quicksand (1928), Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929); Langston Hughes’s subterranean, blues poetry; Claude McKay’s sociological writings; and Lena Horne’s restrained cabaret performances. Chapter one surveys cabarets broadly, where the “word nightclub was itself a neologism that gained currency in the 1910s as a clever loophole used to circumvent in the statutory regulations on closing time,” and describes “not only those large nightclubs with elaborate revues but also the speakeasies, basement dives, and improvised cabarets that honeycombed Manhattan and provided small ensembles, the occasional singer, and space for social dancing” (56). Time and space take on new meaning in these illegal clubs (indicated by the very term “afterhours”), where darkness and defiance surround the spectator and performer in acts of transgression against the law and bourgeois respectability. The modality of performance in afterhours clubs brings the performer into intimate contact with the audience, making the shared space tight, contentious, and exotic. For Vogel, “It is this interplay of closeness and distance, acceptance and refusal, connection [End Page 445] and disconnection, concentration and distraction that shapes the cabaret as an intimate formation, the perpetual disorganization and reorganization of sound, bodies, sightlines, and feelings as the performer competes with the audience itself for attention” (70). In chapter two, Vogel establishes several binaries that foreground the cabaret’s uniqueness. The book’s principal comparison is between the cabaret and the uplift school of literature and performance, while also taking into account segregated versus all-black cabarets. Each coexists in what Vogel calls a dialectical relationship, which provided Harlem Renaissance performers, writers, and artists with ways of negotiating racism. But Vogel quickly adds that when these categories become “fixed or cease functioning generically, they foreclose a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of racial performances that shaped both of these spaces and obscure the dynamic that occurred within and between them” (89). Chapters three and four analyze “how the...

Love belongs to those who do the feeling: New and Selected Poems (1966–2006) (review)

Reviewed by: love belongs to those who do the feeling: New and Selected Poems (1966–2006) Anis Shivani (bio) Judy Grahn. love belongs to those who do the feeling: New and Selected Poems (1966–2006). Red Hen Press. Judy Grahn takes us back to the raw energy of early second-wave feminism. Today’s post-post-feminist poetics has radically downshifted to accommodate the failures (real and imagined) of the women’s movement, but Grahn returns us to the thrilling point of origin, as dreams were being hatched, patriarchy was being clubbed to death, and a new world seemed within grasp. In love belongs to those who do the feeling, Grahn’s poetry is rooted in the most essential old English rhythms. Hers is verse worthy of memorization; it is not prose masquerading as poetry set off by haphazard line breaks. Every rhyme, every break, every surge, every pause is earned. Grahn’s prosodical skill results in a high-energy verse fused with its political aims. This is a faithful marriage of high art with political purpose, a potent combination sorely missed today. Grahn’s style, fortunately, has not shifted for the worse as the fortunes of the feminist movement have ebbed. She remains as hypercharged a bard at the end as at the beginning, giving nothing to cynicism and lassitude. In “Some Ways of Knowing This Is a ‘Judy Grahn’ Poem” we are told that “it has craft and musical sensibility, meant both to stand well on the page and to be satisfying to read out aloud or perform.” From the oral vitality of Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1966–70) to that of the late poems “Forest, forest” and “News” there is no lapse. “A History of Lesbianism,” an early poem, sets the Grahn pattern, a dialectic that works by composing the subterranean voice as the inveterate enemy of ideology. Thus, How they lived in the world, the women-loving-women learned as much as they were allowed and walked and wore their clothes the way they liked whenever they could. They did whatever they knew to be happy or free and worked and worked and worked. The women-loving-women in America were called dykes and some liked it and some did not. [End Page 167] The gritty ordinariness—working-class lives persisting despite invisibility —is dynamited by the ending: “The subject of lesbianism / is very ordinary; it’s the question / of male domination that makes everybody / angry.” In “the big horse woman,” we read: “red was above the mountain / and red was in her eyes / and red the water running / on the big horse woman’s thighs,” but the poem concludes: “this poem is called / how Naomi gets her period,” again a disruption of the comforting rhythm by descriptive rationality, a pointer to one way we undermine spirituality by relentless classification. When the “Vietnamese woman speaking to an American soldier” says: “make children play / in my jungle hair / make rice flare into my sky like / whitest flak / the whitest flash,” we hear a voice that we’ve never heard before. The Common Woman Poems (1969) are seven of the classics of American poetry. The common woman is common as “a nail,” “a thunderstorm,” “the reddest wine,” and in the most famous poem, “Vera, from my childhood,” she is common as “the best of bread / and will rise / and will become strong—I swear to you / . . . on my common / woman’s / head.” The second of these poems, “Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80,” reads in its entirety: She’s a copperheaded waitress, tired and sharp-worded, she hides her bad brown tooth behind a wicked smile, and flicks her ass out of habit, to fend off the pass that passes for affection. She keeps her mind the way men keep a knife—keen to strip the game down to her size. She has a thin spine, swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies. She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers if they should complain. She understands the necessity for pain, turns away the smaller tips, out of pride, and keeps a flask under the counter. Once, she shot a lover who misused...

Introduction

Abstract At the American Historical Association's 2010 meeting in San Diego, CA, historians honored the multifaceted life and work of Blanche Wiesen Cook. Jane S. De Hart examines the circumstances and choices that shaped Cook and the generation of young women historians who came of age as young PhDs and would create new fields. Lawrence S. Wittner traces Cook's half-century of peace activism from her undergraduate days at Hunter College and graduate work at Johns Hopkins University through her work as a peace historian to the blending of her interest in peace and feminism in more recent work. Paula J. Giddings, focusing on the Eleanor Roosevelt biography, provides a “biography of a biography,” noting appreciatively the nuanced text and rich portrait provided of E.R.'s relationships with men and women. Former students Debra Schultz and Marcia Gallo celebrate not only Cook's pioneering work on women whose global consciousness and intimate female networks promoted progressive change, but also her role as mentor to younger historians eager to “out” lesbian history and further LGBT rights. Linda K. Kerber adds that no celebration of Cook's career is complete without recognition of the extraordinary institution—John Jay College of Criminal Justice—at which she has long challenged New York City “cops” to put into practice what she teaches.

A Review of Gay and Lesbian Themed Early Childhood Children's Literature

ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF THE downtown library, my world began to open up. It was in the gay and lesbian literature section that I began to reclaim my life. I would spend nights alone, sitting on the floor reading coming out stories, sections of fiction, gay and lesbian history, and anything else I could find. Those nights on the third floor, alone on the cold cement floor, were where I took my first breaths of life. It was where I discovered that I would survive. It was literature and literacy that helped save my life. William DeJean (2001)

Celebrating diversity

This February sees the annual celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) history month. Until recently, many LGBT people preferred to avoid attention, for fear of negative stereotypes, discrimination and feeling undervalued or excluded in society. And unfortunately some people still do.

Accounting for the Unaccountable: Lesbianism and the History of Sexuality in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

AbstractWhat is the history of sexuality a history of? This article provides an overview of scholarship in the field of 18th‐century studies and the history of sexuality, paying particular attention to the exemplary case of female same sex desire in order to explore the hermeneutical problems faced by this area of study. Unlike, for example, the history of women which has its object of study defined within its title, the history of sexuality is, in many ways, a history without a proper object. Is it a history of sexual practices such as prostitution, homosexuality or adultery? Is it a history of sexual identities like the sodomite, the sadist or the virgin? This essay argues that it is a history of ideas and ideologies surrounding sexuality’s discursive significance and reads how what we know about the past is grounded in our present cultural understandings of sexuality. Concentrating on the history of lesbianism and the emergence of a bourgeois discourse of heteronormativity in the 18th century, the article demonstrates how what we know about sex in the past is determined by who speaks, from where, and when.

Introduction: A History of “Lesbian History”

This is a short history of “lesbian history,” a field of study that became explicitly possible after the 1970s and the development of lesbian-feminism. From early articles published in lesbian and feminist magazines, academic interest developed and historians began to publish journals and books on lesbian history. Frontiers and Signs produced issues on lesbian history, and groups including the London-based Lesbian History Group and the Lesbian Oral History Group wrote articles and carried out research on lesbian lives. Lesbian archives now provide valuable resources for historians to develop this work. The author concludes that “lesbians in history” may include women who are also part of transgender and women's histories, bisexual histories, and national and occupational histories. Inclusion in one set of histories does not preclude inclusion in others.

Matt Cook, with Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach, and H. G. Cocks. A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007. Pp. 256. $49.95 (cloth). - Rebecca Jennings. A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007. Pp. 227. $49.95 (cloth).

Matt Cook, with Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach, and H. G. Cocks. A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007. Pp. 256. $49.95 (cloth). - Rebecca Jennings. A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007. Pp. 227. $49.95 (cloth).

Her Husband Was a Woman! Women's Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Cultureby Alison Oram�Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-War Britain, 1945-71by Rebecca Jennings

Her Husband Was a Woman! Women's Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Cultureby Alison Oram�Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-War Britain, 1945-71by Rebecca Jennings

A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1600

A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1600

Theorising Feminist History: a thirty‐year retrospective

Since the second wave of feminism, women historians have challenged, debated and transformed the way history is, and should be, written. This has produced a rich and self‐reflexive feminist historiography. This article examines some of the major theoretical shifts and turning points in feminist academic scholarship, focusing on four main areas of discussion—early theoretical developments in feminist and gender history, feminist history’s response to the ‘linguistic turn’, lesbian history, and the concept of ‘difference’ as examined in the writings of black feminists, post‐colonial critics and Third World scholars. The author argues that in rewriting historical narratives through the insertion of women’s stories, feminist history must continue to attend to its own need for reinvention and transformation and retain its fundamentally subversive stance through the perpetual interrogation of dominant historical concepts and categories