Lesbian History Research Articles

There's No T in Fair?

Abstract The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History's scholarly Making the Framework FAIR report (2014) recommends substantial revisions to California's K–12 History–Social Science Framework in order to bring it into compliance with the FAIR Education Act. The law, passed in 2011, mandates inclusion of the roles and contributions of LGBT Americans and people with disabilities in the state's primary and secondary school US history education. To date, efforts to get state agencies, school districts, and educators to fully implement the FAIR Education Act have been insufficient, particularly in relation to transgender history. As the state undergoes History–Social Science Framework revision, it should adopt the transgender-inclusive changes suggested by Making the Framework FAIR report for grades two, four, five, eight, and eleven. This represents a golden opportunity to create comprehensive and lasting change across elementary, middle, and high school, in California and beyond.

Understanding and teaching U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history

Understanding and teaching U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history

The Demand to Progress: Critical Nostalgia in LGBTQ Cultural Memory

This article argues that, while representations of tragic lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) histories are disseminated widely, positive aspects of the past must be largely pushed out of the cultural imaginary to support a vision of the present in which sexual rights and freedoms have been achieved. It proposes that this view relies on a linear progress narrative wherein the experiences of LGBTQ people are held as consistently improving over time. In considering the construction of cultural memory through popular media and art, it claims a nostalgic turn to the past as a useful political tool for dismantling the pacifying aspects of the present.

Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction

The contested field of lesbian history exists along a continuum, with undisputed evidence on one end and informed speculation on the other. Lesbian historical fiction extends the spectrum, envisioning the lives of lesbian pirates, war heroes, pioneers, bandits, and stock romantic characters, as well as the handful of protagonists examined here whose quests specifically highlight the difficulty and importance of researching the lesbian past. The genre blossomed in the 1980s, just as the Foucauldian insistence that homosexual identity did not exist before the late nineteenth century gained sway in the academy. The proliferation of lesbian historical fictions signals the growing desire for more thorough (if not completely factual) historical underpinnings of the burgeoning lesbian identities, communities, and politics set in motion in the 1970s.

Canonizing Homophile Sexual Respectability

This essay considers the archival practices, historiographic habits, and political orientations that might explain the resistance to or rejection of the notion that sex radicalism, defined broadly to include various challenges to sexual respectability, was an important component of US homophile activism in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the essay asks why important historical and archival projects, including the early work of Jonathan Ned Katz and John D'Emilio and the recent EBSCO LGBT Life digitized database, have paid little attention to Drum, a widely circulating homophile movement periodical that promoted gay sexual liberation, and instead have highlighted the significance of more respectable periodicals such as ONE, Mattachine Review, and the Ladder. In exposing the historical erasure of North America's most popular homophile movement periodical of the 1960s, this essay suggests new ways of thinking about gay and lesbian history, queer memory, and sexual archives.

Trading Credit for Debt: Queer History-Making and Debt Culture

Once you start to see bad debt, you start to see it everywhere, hear it everywhere, feel it everywhere.-Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black StudyIf you had gone to the opening of Rare & Raw: Queer History Then and Now at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian History in New York City on February 15, 2013, you would have seen among the small selection of artworks exploring the themes of history, visibility and notions of representation (Rare & 2013) twenty-seven framed photographs from Zoe Leonard's The Fae Richards Photo Archive, originally created for and coanimated by Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film, The Watermelon Woman (Fig. l). Returning to the museum a few days later, you would have found the photos removed from the exhibit and in their place what looked like a foreclosure notice, or what we came to think of as the foreclosure installation: four documents taped to the wall, a record of the loan agreement between the museum and the Eileen Harris Norton Collection, which owns one of the three copies of The Fae Richards Photo Archive and which, on the day of the show's opening, the loan agreement such that there would be no loan at all (Fig. 2). With regrets for the unfortunate timing and difficult circumstances, the loan was deemed too high risk and revoked, it seems, because of concerns about the material fragility and value of the photographs (Shim-Boyle, 2013).1The story of this amended installation is compelling to us for a few rea- sons. Most immediately, as dykes of a certain age, we have an affective, aesthetic, and intellectual attachment to The Fae Richards Photo Archive and to The Watermelon Woman; in fact, both of us became committed to the kinds of recuperative and critical feminist and storytelling that Leonard, Dunye, and their many collaborators in the project were for(a)ging in the early 1990s. Furthermore, this transaction situates the Leslie-Lohman Museum and the Rare & Raw exhibit (and its project of history-making) as unreliable borrowers; that is, the foreclosure installation advertises bad credit and both the museum and the exhibit get thrown into the subject position reserved in U.S. history for African Americans and other minoritized groups figured as socioeconomically delinquent. Moreover, the capital (not) exchanged in this transactionThe Fae Richards Photo Archive-is a series of images signifying the forgotten or abandoned African American lesbian histories that Dunye and her collaborators work to repossess and revalue in The Watermelon Woman, a repossession that might be said to expose the violence of (cultural) capital itself, a system that has historically devalued the lives and work of African Americans and queers. And finally, this story is compelling for us because in the moment of encountering that familiar scene-cheap paper printed with legal text, contradictorily taped both haphazardly and with forceful, binding purpose across a prominent wall (usually the front door of a repossessed property)-we were reminded of the ways in which so much history-making negotiates the strained relationship between good credit and bad debt. That is, the eloquent shock of this foreclosure installation activated our thinking about history-making through debt as a mode of inquiry, as methodology, as queer hermeneutics and black study (Crosby et al. 2012, 130) that runs in every direction, scatters, escapes (Harney and Moten 2013,61).Here, we propose that the repossession of The Fae Richards Photo Archive effectively resituates The Watermelon Woman and Rare & Raw into the context of debt culture. As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva remind us, this is a culture embedded in the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist accumulation of land (conquest and settlement), exploitation of labor (slavery, indentured labor, forced migration), appropriation of resources, and ultimately the very meaning of debt in what Walter Mignolo calls the modern/colonial world system' (Chakravartty and da Silva 2012, 364). …

Unghosting Apparitional (Lesbian) History

Unghosting Apparitional (Lesbian) History

Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War. By Laura Doan

In 2008, I visited the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London to listen to a paper given by Laura Doan. Doan was then in the middle of a new project on queer identities and the First World War, work which was something of a departure from her earlier, formative work, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (2001). Entitled ‘On the Limits and Possibilities of Lesbian History’, what Doan delivered was less a paper and more an outpouring of ideas on the thorny issue of how (or not) to categorize sexual identities. In hindsight, I now understand why Doan was uncharacteristically lacking in conviction and clarity that day. Her paper at the IHR represented the very start of her musings on ‘queer critical history' and the ‘conceptual impasse' that historians of sexuality were confronted with, yet thus far, had been unable to cross. Disturbing Practices represents Doan's attempt to bridge that impasse, and what's clear throughout is that it marks the culmination of years of both introspection and critical engagement with the troublesome relationship between history (and, by extension, gay and lesbian history) and queer theory, the latter a disruptive force, which seeks to upend the comforting linearity that sits at the centre of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) ‘recovery' agenda. Both strands of what Doan calls the ‘genealogical project’, described as either consciously ancestral or avowedly Foucauldian, have been at odds ever since the cultural turn in the 1970s. However, Doan believes that queer theory has much to offer the practice of writing history and she uses Disturbing Practices to suggest a new approach, one that fuses the professional rigour of the historian with the critical fluidity of the queer theorist. Doan calls this ‘queer critical history’, and it is an idea that hinges on unknowability and queerness as method rather than as identity.

Queering Ireland, In the Archives

On June 16, 2008, the National Library of Ireland officially accepted the Irish Queer Archive, a community-based archive of lesbian and gay historical and cultural materials, a transfer both literal and symbolic, marking the importance of lesbian and gay history to the nation's history. This essay briefly examines the issues associated with this transfer of materials to an institutional home, a transfer that confers legitimacy and authority but also raises questions about access and inclusion (particularly gender inclusion), as well as questions about the nature and purpose of queer archives. To illustrate some of these questions, the author offers a number of textual and visual materials: a small archive project of Irish queer history, concentrating primarily on literary materials (that have not been published or have limited availability) and organized around four broad categories of history, space, language, and performance. Included here are: excerpts from Sea Urchins, an unpublished but historically important play by Aodhan Madden, a play inspired by one of the most important public protests in Irish gay and lesbian history, the 1983 Stop Violence Against Gays and Women March; an unpublished English translation of one section of Micheál Ó Conghaile's groundbreaking novel, Sna Fir; examples of lesbian visual culture; a collection of poems from community journals (suggesting, perhaps, the importance of artistic expression to political activism); and imagery from Alternative Miss Ireland and the Emerald Warriors gay rugby club.

Thinking About "Lesbian History"

forum: Lesbian Generations ThinkingAbout "Lesbian History" LeilaJ. Rupp At the 2011 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, which took as its theme "Generations," seven scholars from different gener ational, chronological, geographical, and disciplinary positions came together for a roundtable to consider "Lesbian Generations." In prep aration, we collectively posed a series of questions: What makes someone part of "lesbian history"? Is the answer different for different times, places, and groups in a society? How has female same-sex sexuality changed over time in different places? What "lesbian generations" can we identify? How do we deal with the problems of global translation of Western categories of sexuality? Can the term "lesbian" be used as an umbrella term for female same-sex sexualities across time and space? How do we make sense of female same-sex sexualities in a global ized world? FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 357 358 Forum: Lesbian Generations How has the writing of "lesbian history" changed over time? What generations of "lesbian historians" can we identify? How do we address the contentious borders between lesbian and trans gender identities, between passing women and transmen, between gender identity and sexual identity? What might be new, productive frameworks for thinking about sex uality and, in particular, lesbian historiography? How does lesbian history differ from gay or queer history? Should it? Our essays in this issue reproduce and elaborate on the comments we offered at the session. I would like to begin by providing my take on what makes someone part of lesbian history and when the term "les bian" should be used. I have laid out my position on these questions in my book, Sapphistnes} I chose as my title and concept a made-up word that describes not women but representations and stories about women who desired, loved, and made love to women; the word was a way to avoid labeling as lesbians women who could not or would not have embraced that term. I meant it as a capacious term that no woman or group of women have claimed as an identity, although it still refers to Sappho and her homeland on the island of Lesbos. Sappho does have historical and cultural resonance beyond either her origins in the ancient Mediterranean world or the modern Western concept of the lesbian. The only term with more transhistorical and transcultural reach, I argued, is "tribade," because many languages and cultures conceptualize women who desired and had sex with women as engaging in the rubbing of bodies that in English is known as tribadism. (As an aside, I would like to say that the correct pronun ciation of the word "tribadism" has never been clear to me. I have always said try-badism, with a long "i," and only recently found in the Oxford EnglishDictionarythat it should be a short "i." I am resisting this, since I reject the association with "trivial." I am reminded of the fact that there seems to be no agreement on how to pronounce "clitoris." Some put the accent on the firstsyllable, clit,others on the second, tor. Why is it that we never wonder ifit is pen-is rather than peen-isT) But back to the point. The only title that would have been more inclusive for my global history since the beginning of time would Forum: Lesbian Generations 359 have been "tribadie" or "rubbing through time," but I went with "sapphistries" as more elegant. For me, because "lesbian" is an identity that is only sometimes available or sometimes available and not chosen, we should not use it to describe the whole range of women who erotically loved other women. Which brings me to the question of who belongs in the story of what I am calling sapphistries. For me, same-sex desire, erotic love, and/or participation in same-sex sexual acts are necessary for a woman to be included, although of course we do not always know about women's desires, the nature of their love, or what they did with their bodies. But I do reject the notion that female bonding or resistance to patriarchy or gender crossing for the purposes of social or geographic mobility is sufficient...

Playing the Field

Forum: Lesbian Generations 365 they were mixing up the terms, and it was not clear when lesbian as an identity (or shorthand for community) became useful to them. In the end, it was unclear under what conditions the term lesbian was deployed, but I do know that it was deployed. And I do know that a lot of people contributed to its deployment and thus played a role in les bian history per se. And while I really wanted to be able to historicize the utility of the deployment of the identity-based category "lesbian" around a specific set of political ideas, I couldn't. But I tried. And I guess what I want to say is that I tried, I wanted to historicize the idea of the lesbian as a historical actor, especially in relation to gender transgressive identities and behaviors, but what I got was the history of a community that engaged with these ideas in different ways. Also, as I mentioned earlier, when ideas, such as the concept of the lesbian as a particular type of person, are deployed really effectively, they take on a kind of materiality and cultural weight. The idea of the lesbian as a kind of person becomes a common sense way of human izing historical actors in a way that's very difficult to challenge or his toricize, but I think it's worth it. I think it's important to keep the his tory of the idea in mind when researching and writing the history of the community. Playing theField Ruth Vanita The issue of the global translation of Western categories of sexu ality has preoccupied many in recent times. It is worth emphasizing, all the same, that many contemporary problems are not entirely new but rather that people have been debating them, or questions very similar to them, for centuries. In our focus on the current wave of FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 366 Forum: Lesbian Generations globalization, we tend to forget that the world has been globalized for many centuries, even millennia (consider Alexander's conquests or formations such as the so-called Silk Road). The degree has changed, the speeds have changed, and some of the locations have changed. But Indian cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Bañaras, and Hyderabad in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were intensely cosmo politan places where people from all over western Asia and Europe rubbed shoulders in the streets, goods from many parts of the world could be found in the markets, and words and ideas from different cultures were assimilated into language and culture. Interracial mar riages and relationships flourished. In an early nineteenth-century verse romance by Lucknow poet Sa'adat Yar Khan, (whose pen name was Rangin, meaning "colorful"), a prince of Bulgar marries a prin cess of Kashmir, and their wedding outfits incorporate items from many parts of the world—European gauze, Dhaka muslin, Banar asi silk. In another poem a woman teases her female friend about a crush on a European woman: "Ever since you heard the sound of the organ, /You've been obsessed with that foreign woman." In this perspective, the current debate about using Western terms in non-Western contexts is interesting, but I suggest that our anxiety around it is somewhat inflated. This anxiety springs from the fear that these terms are neocolonial or imperialist imports, and that Eng lish itself is an instrument of oppression. However, we often forget that Indians have been speaking, writing, and reading English for two hundred years, and English is now one of India's twenty-four official languages. In fact, India is now the country with the largest number of English speakers in the world. Even though English speakers are a minority of the Indian population, they still outnumber English speakers in England and the United States put together. These Indian speakers of English wield the language very comfortably for their own purposes, and the vast majority of them do not worry about English being a colonial import. The underlying assumption of our anxiety regarding Western influence on the non-West is that formerly colonized countries are subordinate to colonizer countries. It is...

Preface

preface Norms create categories, and categories create norms. Such pro cesses are circular, communal, and inflected by history and culture, as this special issue of Feminist Studiesillustrates with respect to sexu ality and gender. One roundtable of scholars debates lesbian history, turning the discussion of identities into a debate on the place of les bian studies, and sexuality studies more broadly, in contemporary US universities. Another roundtable queries future directions for wom en's studies and sexuality studies; this forum becomes a lively discus sion on the political effects of names and labels. Major essays in this volume advance our understanding of the possibilities present in non solidified categories, such as gender identities formed by Thai women living in urban dormitories, or the increasingly expansive de-medical ized understanding of asexuality. Categories are also layered by histor ical and political contexts: an insightful review essay on "Queer Ethnic and Indigenous Studies" traces links between this new field of study and prior feminist theories and critical race studies. The ideas of Mary Daly, a pioneer of woman-centered theology in the United States, are re-examined for their subterranean streak of Roman Catholicism and even Mariolatry. The psych ward looms in another essay as a place where friendships among women are intersected by medical and bureaucratic lines of authority, while the poetry of women of color configures an additional perspective on feminist history and the texts 327 328 taught in gender studies courses. A poem in this issue, "Researcher as Hostess," riffson a graduate student's multiple roles, while fluid identities influence even the art essay focused on the work of photog rapher Laura Molloy, the blurred faces of whose subjects remain as evocative as they are indefinite. This issue begins with an essay that questions the blanket use of the category of "lesbian" for all female same-sex eroticism, as Megan Sinnott demonstrates the importance of using the categories of her subjects themselves. Relying on over two decades of her ethnographic research in Thailand, she analyzes the visibility or invisibility of female eroticism among women who live in communal settings. Such settings reshape the categories of public and private, destroying the binary that connects them with separate masculine and feminine spheres. More over, she questions the assumption that queer behaviors are invari ably disruptive of heteronormative institutions such as marriage and the family. Thai parents who feel apprehensive about young women engaged in factory work or attending schools away from the family home often believe that in dormitory settings their daughters will be protected from male violence and premarital pregnancy. Many of their daughters form couples with one another that may be roman tic and/or sexual. Some fall into gendered polarities between mascu line "Toms" and feminine "Dees," but many such couples avoid these roles and labels, and their members may or may not enter heterosexual marriages later. The very lack of specific labels or categories for most of these women facilitates fluid possibilities for homosocial bonding, sexuality, and romance throughout the course of their lives. Contributors also take on questions of identity in the "lesbian generations" forum in this issue. The essays in this cluster emerge from a roundtable of the same name held at the 2011 Berkshire Con ference of Women Historians. Contributors offer their reflections on a series of collectively generated questions concerning lesbian, trans gender, and women's history; lesbian and transgender identity; and same-sex and same-gender sexualities in a global context. Their aim is to point to better frameworks for thinking about sexuality, sexual and gender identities, and lesbian historiography. Many essays also speak to the tensions and overlaps between lesbian and transgender identities and histories within postcolonial global contexts. 329 Leila J. Rupp, the panel organizer, lays out a set of introduc tory suggestions for how to think historically about the category of women who erotically focused on women. In invoking her own term "sapphistries," Rupp points to the "complex and complicated interaction" of the eroticization of "sameness and difference" as crit ical "patterns" for understanding these diverse stories. Nan Alamilla Boyd's essay is concerned with the vexing question of distinct modes of identification—individual versus community—and she proposes...

Elizabeth Kennedy’s Oral History Intervention

Elizabeth Kennedy’s Oral History Intervention Nan Alamilla Boyd (bio) To discuss Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy’s contributions to the field of oral history is not to detract from her role as a dedicated mentor, inspirational teacher, and creative scholar.1 Indeed, she has functioned in all of these roles for me personally. Liz has patiently mentored me for over a decade: she has written countless letters of recommendation; she has thoughtfully responded to my work; and many times, she has helped me to figure out how to manage being a women’s studies program director and department chair, especially at a public university during a period of economic collapse. One thing that stands out and stretches across all of Liz’s accomplishments is her exceptionally fine-tuned ethical compass. Liz has high standards for herself and others, and she communicates these standards without apology. At the same time, she is always reaching to grasp all sides of a situation. I have learned a lot just listening to Liz mull things over. She has a wonderfully intuitive sense of fairness, but also the capacity to appreciate people and situations in all their messy complexity. These qualities make for a good scholar, but they also make for a good colleague and friend. In this essay, I focus on the role Kennedy has played as an oral historian and the great impact her work has had on the field of LGBT/queer history. I remember reading Madeline D. Davis and Kennedy’s 1986 Feminist Studies article “Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940–1960” in an undergraduate course taught by historian Mary Ryan at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. At the time, this article seemed scandalous; it talked openly about lesbian sex, and I was spellbound. The content itself was, well, juicy, but the method and analysis seemed revolutionary. In fact, I remember where I was sitting when I read this essay—like a moment frozen in time. In it, Kennedy and Davis explain their commitments to both working-class lesbian history and oral history. As a working-class lesbian history, the subject of their study is a community of women centered around lesbian bars [End Page 84] prior to the emergence of the gay liberation movements of the 1970s. They had a hunch that these women, who had been stereotyped as “low-life societal discards and pathetic imitators of heterosexuality,” might actually have contributed to forging a “pre-political” culture of resistance that shaped the development of gay pride and contributed to larger political movements (7). To research this history, they chose oral history as a method, because “the women who patronized the lesbian and gay bars of the past were predominantly working class and left no written records” (ibid.). But their method led them to an unlikely place, as they explain: Our original research plan assumed the conceptual division between the public (social life and politics) and the private (intimate life and sex), which is deeply rooted in modern consciousness and which feminism has only begun to question. Thus we began our study by looking at gay and lesbian bars—the public manifestations of gay life at the time—and relegated sex to a position of less importance, viewing it as only incidentally relevant. As our research progressed we came to question the accuracy of this division. (ibid.) Through the life stories of over forty butch and fem narrators, mostly white but also African American, they found that working-class lesbian life in Buffalo during the 1940s and 1950s was indeed pre-political, and the political commitments expressed by their narrators could be best understood through shifts in the social meaning of sex and sexuality. Still, without print documents to verify these shifts in consciousness, they were difficult to measure in any objective way. By listening carefully to their narrators, however, Davis and Kennedy found that they could measure change over time through the way central figures in the community expressed and policed social norms and expectations about butch and fem sexual practice. Moreover, it was through these expressed social norms (that is, instructions on how to have sex with your...

The gay games: a history

The Gay Games is an important piece of new social history, examining one of the largest sporting, cultural and human rights events in the world. Since their inception in 1980, the Gay Games have developed into a multi-million dollar mega-event, engaging people from all continents, while the international Gay Games movement has become one of the largest and most significant international institutions for gay and lesbian people. Drawing on detailed archival research, oral history and participant observation techniques, and informed by critical feminist theory and queer theory, this book offers the first comprehensive history of the Gay Games from 1980 through to the Chicago games of 2006. It explores the significance of the Games in the context of broader currents of gay and lesbian history, and addresses a wide range of key contemporary themes within sports studies, including the cultural politics of sport, the politics of difference and identity, and the rise of sporting mega-events. This book is important reading for any serious student of international sport or gender and sexuality studies.

DEAR MARG

This creative-critical work takes the form of a letter using informal address to discuss issues of subject formation, particularly in relation to a ‘hidden’ history of lesbians and feminists in Australia, questions of place and memory. The work discusses the possible forms that autobiography might take when attempting to write radically as well as live radically.

Whatever Happened to Chapter Four of Three Billion Perverts?

This article approaches queer history by offering a salutary corrective to dominant cultural and subcultural forces enjoining us to remember. The life-enabling and properly revolutionary effects of actively forgetting the past and, in particular, the legacy of previous generations, are first outlined in readings of Nietzsche, The Aeneid, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari. The localized exercise of an active forgetting is proposed as a response to one especially problematic case of intergenerational (non-)transmission in recent French gay and lesbian history: a collective act of self-censorship by the team responsible for the 2002 internet republication of the 1973 ‘cult’ special issue of Recherches, entitled Three Billion Perverts. While the article does not seek to contest the decision to censor these thirty-two pages headed ‘Pédo-Philie’ from the republication, it does take issue with the assumptions underlying the way in which the decision was presented. The article suggests that this act of self-censorship typifies the way in which younger gay and lesbian people of the early twenty-first century are placed in a schizogenic ‘double bind’ by their immediate forebears, radical gays and lesbians of the 1970s, the generation of Guy Hocquenghem and the FHAR; members of the younger generation are told simultaneously to remember and that what they are being told to remember cannot be conveyed to them. The ascesis of an active forgetting is presented as the only way out of this impasse and a necessary emancipating prerequisite for new life and new possibilities.

Enacting FAIR Education: Approaches to Integrating LGBT Content in the K–12 Curriculum

The FAIR Education Act (SB 48) was signed into law in California in July of 2011, amending the Education Code by requiring representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons in the social sciences. In this article, the author uses James Banks’ model of the Four Levels of Integration of Multicultural Content to suggest ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender content could be located in the K–12 curriculum. Examples are provided at each of the levels including topics such as Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History Month, the Gay Rights Movement, Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, Matthew Shepard Act, It Gets Better Project, Gay Straight Alliance, and Stop SB 48 campaign, among others. The examples are offered to education boards and others to initiate conversations around ways to appropriately integrate the roles and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons into the curriculum, emphasizing places where such issues are already latent in social science content standards.

When the Erotic Becomes Illicit

Museums often embody the public sphere, central sites where the display of sexual materials becomes a stage for debates over how and when the erotic is illicit. This essay explores how one mainstream museum struggled with these questions while mounting an exhibition on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history in Chicago. Debates appeared over displaying sexually explicit materials in the gallery, and whether the exhibit would encourage visitors, particularly youth, to become sexually nonnormative or promiscuous. The museum embarked on a process of sharing authority with visitors to help navigate questions around displaying the illicit, which posed both opportunities and challenges. While the visitor panels supported the museum's process of making LGBT sexuality nonnormative, they also served to reinforce some sexual practices as being illicit. Ultimately, the exhibition opened up conversations about LGBT history and how LGBT people and practices have been defined as illicit and have at the same time resisted such labels.

Out in the Classroom: A Lesbian History Professor in a Community College

In 1976, at the age of 18, I realized I was a lesbian but did not tell anyone. Eighteen years, two husbands, and a PhD later, I finally came out to everyone in my world, including my students.

Preface

preface The collaboration, thoughtfulness, intellectual energy, and enthusiasm that our editorial collective puts into each issue almost always ensure that we feel a great deal of pride when it goes to print. All the same, we feel a special sense of pride this time. This issue com memorates the scholarship of our former editorial director Claire Gold berg Moses and her pioneering innovations in feminist publishing. Many of the essays here were specially prepared for our "35 Years of Feminist Scholarship Conference" held in April 2011 to celebrate Claire on her retirement. The conference convened current and former Fem inistStudieseditorial board members and other colleagues for a day of scholarly exchange, reflection, and celebration. We include tributes paid that day by former editors Deborah S. Rosenfelt and Suzanne Raitt, relat ing how Claire's stewardship steered Feminist Studiesto become a journal of national and international repute and how a feminist sense of egal itarianism and shared ownership guided her commitment to build ing an editorial collective. It is only fitting that an issue that pays tribute to Claire Moses finds as its thematic center a series of reflective considerations on the state of the field and its key disciplinary shifts. We begin with a genealogi cal interrogation of sorts. In "The History of Lesbian History," Martha Vicinus draws on her disciplinary location as a historian to review the last thirty years of scholarship on lesbian history and its associated theoretical paradigms. Vicinus revisits her earlier reading of Havelock Ellis's StudiesinthePsychology ofSex, Volume2, Sexual Inversion. Vicinus turns the reader's attention to Ellis's own contradictory ambivalence in his 551 552 Preface efforts to attach meaning to the word "lesbian." Vicinus points out that this conceptual ambivalence finds parallels in later understand ings of the category "lesbian." The piece offers an insightful and tex tured engagement with the relevance of the term "lesbian," the role it has played in expanding our understanding of women's friendship and intimacy, and the ways in which race and class have fractured and expanded mainstream analyses. JudithKegan Gardiner's "Female Masculinity and Phallic Women — Unruly Concepts" becomes a perfect companion piece for Vicinus's "The History of Lesbian History." While Vicinus explores the last thirty years of scholarship on lesbian history, Gardiner turns her analytical lens to a selective discussion of the last fortyyears of theorizing on the category "female masculinity." Moving from the 1970s to the present, Gardiner's discussion engages Robert Stoller's Splitting: A Case ofFemale Masculinity, Judith (Jack) Halberstam's Female Masculinity, and Judith But ler's "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" as well as Henry Rubin's sociological study Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men. Gardiner's interrogation offers a lucid analysis of the shifting nomenclature for and understandings of female mas culinity. The piece critiques earlier psychoanalytic studies in which female masculinity was considered a psychological syndrome, as well as contemporary gender queer expressions of female masculinity that potentially make space for nonmisogynistic expressions of the phal lus, FtM trans expressions of masculinity, and masculine expressions of femininity. One of the questions guiding Gardiner's analysis of the scholarship is the extent to which, despite the expanded expression of gender variance, the codes of what constitutes masculinity remain fairly intact. She argues that despite the desire to separate masculin ity from maleness, masculinity as an idea continues to be reified and cautions us to ask how "progressive" contemporary theories of gender variance really are. Leisa D. Meyer's "'Strange Love': Searching for Sexual Subjectivi ties in Black Print Popular Culture during the 1950s" pivots on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's characterization of the 1880s to 1920s as marked by a "politics of respectability," wherein black women's sexual restraint and moral reform were seen as integral to the well-being of the com munity at large. Rather than embracing the silencing effects that result from the pursuit of "respectability," Meyer provides persuasive Preface 553 evidence to show that there was a great deal of public talk about sex and sexuality within the black community. Meyer examines a range of periodicals published out of Chicago in the 1950s, including the ChicagoDefender, Ebony,Jet, and Tan...