As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

In this candid and revelatory memoir, Erin O. White shares her hunger for both romantic and divine love, and how these desires transformed her life. In the late 1990s, she spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and Sunday mornings in Catholic confirmation classes. But when the Church closed its doors to her, she was faced with a question: What does a lesbian believer do with her longing for God? Given Up for You explores these yearnings with bittersweet conviction, plumbing the depths of heart and soul.

Genet's sensual and brutal portrait of World War II unfolds between the poles of his grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. Elegaic, macabre, chimerical, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death.

This unique book sheds new light on the most invisible members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Hidden from view by a combination of prevailing cultural assumptions and their own unwillingness to be seen, older lesbians have been consistently under-represented in both popular culture and research. This ground-breaking study, based on an unprecedentedly large research sample of nearly four hundred lesbian-identified women between the ages of 60 and 90, offers a fascinating insight into the lives of older lesbians in the UK. Drawing on data from a comprehensive questionnaire survey and illustrated with vivid personal testimonies, it explores both the diversity and the distinct collective identity of the older lesbian community, arguing that understanding their past experience is crucial to providing for their needs in the future. It is essential reading for scholars in the fields of women's studies and genders and sexualities, and will also appeal to sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, social and cultural historians, and experts in ageing, gerontology, nursing and social work.

The product of many years of research, this unique book presents fascinating perspectives on contemporary lesbian life in India and unravels some of the history of lesbian desire from centuries past. Through detailed examination of mythology, cosmology, ancient art and artefacts and her exegesis of ancient Sanskrit texts, Thadani constructs a tapestry of feminine kinship, genealogy and sexual or erotic bonding between women (sakhiyani) in ancient India. The author offers an historical perspective on the effect of colonization upon lesbian identities in India, showing how women were viewed by Western imperialists either as soft victims or as sexually dangerous, possessing an overgrown clitoris and in need of heterosexual domestication. The second half of the book focuses on contemporary lesbian realities and issues, including lesbian marriages, suicide pacts, forging lesbian space, lesbian human rights, lesbophobia, sexual exile and the different construction of gender, family and possible kinship alliances.

Take Stage! is the first comprehensive "how-to" book for lesbians wanting to produce or direct lesbian theatre. Controversial and anecdotal, Take Stage! is written for the lesbian with no previous experience with theatre or lesbian organization. In addition to chapters on auditioning, rehearsals, selecting the script, booking space, and assembling a staff, the book includes chapters on issues of special interest to lesbians. Take Stage! includes information on how to challenge the "isms"-lookism, racism, classism, ageism, and other prejudices with which lesbian culture is currently engaged. It also looks at problems of accountability in non-hierarchal structures, boundary-setting among all-volunteer staffs, sabotage via hidden agendas or disassociative behaviors, horizontal hostility, and internalized homophobia. The appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms, light plots, budgets, and schedules. From the decision to produce the play to opening night and touring, Take Stage! covers all the bases and provides a healthy dose of moral support.

"Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer have put together an excellent collection of original articles which demonstrates the range of lesbian literary scholarship as a field and the important nuance and insight it is contributing to our knowledge of Woolf's life and writing in particular."--"Woolf Studies Annual"

The last two decades have seen a resurgence of critical and popular attention to Virginia Woolf's life and work. Such traditional institutions as "The New York Review of Books" now pair her with William Shakespeare in promotional advertisements; her face is used to sell everything from Barnes & Noble books to Bass Ale.

Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings represents the first book devoted to Woolf's lesbianism. Divided into two sections, Lesbian Intersections and Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels, these essays focus on how Woolf's private and public experience and knowledge of same-sex love influences her shorter fiction and novels. Lesbian Intersections includes personal narratives that trace the experience of reading Woolf through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Lesbian Readings of Woolf's Novels provides lesbian interpretations of the individual novels, including "Orlando, The Waves," and "The Years,"

Breaking new ground in our understanding of the role Woolf's love for women plays in her major writing, these essays shift the emphasis of lesbian interpretations from Woolf's life to her work.

The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested. Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian and gay press, and examining the recent growth of a self-consciously political bisexual movement, Paula Rust addresses a range of questions pertaining to the political and social relationships between lesbians and bisexual women. By tracing the roots of the controversy over bisexuality among lesbians back to the early lesbian feminist debates of the 1970s, Rust argues that those debates created the circumstances in which bisexuality became an inevitable challenge to lesbian politics. She also traces it forward, predicting the future of sexual politics. Paula C. Rust is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College.

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research traces the women's lives in sharp detail. Charity Bryant was born in 1777 to a consumptive mother who died a month later. Raised in Massachusetts, Charity developed into a brilliant and strong-willed woman with a passion for her own sex. After being banished from her family home by her father at age twenty, she traveled throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends, and becoming the subject of gossip wherever she lived. At age twenty-nine, still defiantly single, Charity visited friends in Weybridge, Vermont. There she met Sylvia Drake, a pious and studious young woman whose family had moved to the frontier village after losing their Massachusetts farm during the Revolution. The two soon became so inseparable that Charity decided to rent rooms in Weybridge. Sylvia came to join her on July 3, 1807, commencing a forty-four year union that lasted until Charity's death. Over the years, the women came to be recognized as a married couple, or something like it. Charity took the role of husband, and Sylvia of wife, within the marriage. Revered by their community, Charity and Sylvia operated a tailor shop employing many local women, served as guiding lights within their church, and participated in raising more than one hundred nieces and nephews. Most extraordinary, all the while the sexual potential of their union remained an open secret, cloaked in silence to preserve their reputations. The story of Charity and Sylvia overturns today's conventional wisdom that same-sex marriage is a modern innovation, and reveals that early America was both more diverse and more accommodating than modern society imagines.

"The Well of Loneliness" is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was published, it was deemed obscene in a British court of law for its defense of sexual inversion and was forbidden for sale or import into England. Its author, Radclyffe Hall, was already well-known as a writer and West End celebrity, but the fame and notoriety of that one book has all but eclipsed a literary output of some half-dozen other novels and several volumes of poetry.In "Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing" Richard Dellamora offers the first full look at the entire range of Hall's published and unpublished works of fiction, poetry, and autobiography and reads through them to demonstrate how she continually played with the details of her own life to help fashion her own identity as well as to bring into existence a public lesbian culture. Along the way, Dellamora revises many of the truisms about Hall that had their origins in the memoirs of her long-term partner, Una Troubridge, and that have found an afterlife in the writings of Hall's biographers.In detailing Hall's explorations of the self, Dellamora is the first seriously to consider their contexts in Freudian psychoanalysis as understood in England in the 1920s. As important, he uncovers Hall's involvement with other modes of speculative psychology, including Spiritualism, Theosophy, and an eclectic brand of Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Dellamora's Hall is a woman of complex accommodations, able to reconcile her marriage to Troubridge with her passionate affairs with other women, and her experimental approach to gender and sexuality with her conservative politics and Catholicism. She is, above all, a thinker continually inventive about the connections between selfhood and desire, a figure who has much to contribute to our own efforts to understand transgendered and transsexual existence today.

Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.

This book, the first full-length study of its kind, dares to probe the biggest taboo in contemporary Arab culture with scholarly intent and integrity - female homosexuality.

Habib argues that female homosexuality has a long history in Arabic literature and scholarship, beginning in the ninth century, and she traces the destruction of Medieval discourses on female homosexuality and the replacement of these with a new religious orthodoxy that is no longer permissive of a variety of sexual behaviours.

Habib also engages with recent gay historiography in the West and challenges institutionalized constructionist notions of sexuality.

The Lesbian Revolution argues that lesbian feminists were a vital force in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). They did not just play a fundamental role in the important changes wrought by second wave feminism, but created a powerful revolution in lesbian theory, culture and practice. Yet this lesbian revolution is undocumented. The book shows that lesbian feminists were founders of feminist institutions such as resources for women survivors of men's violence, including refuges and rape crisis centres, and that they were central to campaigns against this violence. They created a feminist squatting movement, theatre groups, bands, art and poetry and conducted campaigns for lesbian rights. They also created a profound and challenging analysis of sexuality which has disappeared from the historical record. They analysed heterosexuality as a political institution, arguing that lesbianism was a political choice for feminists and, indeed, a form of resistance in itself. Using interviews with prominent lesbian feminists from the time of the WLM, and informed by the author's personal experience, this book aims to challenge the way the work and ideas of lesbian feminists have been eclipsed and to document the lesbian revolution. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of women's history, the history of feminism, the politics of sexuality, women's studies, gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as to the lay reader interested in the WLM and feminism more generally.

Prairie Fairies draws upon a wealth of oral, archival, and cultural histories to recover the experiences of queer urban and rural people in the prairies. Focusing on five major urban centres, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary, Prairie Fairies explores the regional experiences and activism of queer men and women by looking at the community centres, newsletters, magazines, and organizations that they created from 1930 to 1985. Challenging the preconceived narratives of queer history, Valerie J. Korinek argues that the LGBTTQ community has a long history in the prairie west, and that its history, previously marginalized or omitted, deserves attention. Korinek pays tribute to the prairie activists and actors who were responsible for creating spaces for socializing, politicizing, and organizing this community, both in cities and rural areas. Far from the stereotype of the isolated, insular Canadian prairies of small towns and farming communities populated by faithful farm families, Prairie Fairies historicizes the transformation of prairie cities, and ultimately the region itself, into a predominantly urban and diverse place.

This volume explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of "homosexuality" in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the articles examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophes, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualized same-sex relations and connected them with more general concerns about order and disorder. The contributors--Elizabeth Colwill, Michael David Sibalis, Victoria Thompson, William Peniston, Vernon Rosario II, Francesca Canade-Sautman, Martha Hanna, Robert A. Nye, and the editors Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. and Jeffrey Merrick--use the methods of intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, literary studies, legal and social history, and microhistory. This collection shows how the subject of homosexuality is related to important topics in French history: the Enlightenment, the revolutionary tradition, social discipline, positivism, elite and popular culture, nationalism, feminism, and the construction of identity.
Given the role of gays and lesbians in modern French culture and the work of French scholars on the history of sexuality, this collection fills an important gap in the literature and represents the first attempt in any language to explore this subject over three centuries from a variety of perspectives.

Looking Queer: Body Image in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities contains research, firsthand accounts, poetry, theory, and journalistic essays that address and outline the special needs of sexual minorities when dealing with eating disorders and appearance obsession. Looking Queer will give members of these communities hope, insight, and information into body image issues, helping you to accept and to love your body. In addition, scholars, health care professionals, and body image activists will not only learn about queer experiences and identity and how they affect individuals, but will also understand how some of the issues involved affect society as a whole. Dismantling the myth that body image issues affect only heterosexual women, Looking Queer explores body issues based on gender, race, class, age, and disability. Furthermore, this groundbreaking book attests to the struggles, pain, and triumph of queer people in an open and comprehensive manner. More than 60 contributors provide their knowledge and personal experiences in dealing with body image issues exclusive to the gay and transgender communities, including: exploring and breaking down the categories of gender and sexuality that are found in many body image issues finding ways to heal yourself and your community discovering what it means to "look like a dyke" or to "look gay" fearing fat as a sign of femininity determining what race has to do with the gay ideal discussing the stereotyped "double negative"--being a fat lesbian learning strategies of resistance to societal ideals critiquing "the culture of desire" within gay men's communities that emphasizes looks above everything elseRevealing new and complex dimensions to body image issues, Looking Queer not only discusses the struggles and hardships of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, but looks at the processes that can lead to acceptance of oneself. Written by both men and women, the topics and research in Looking Queer offer insight into the lives of people you can relate to, enabling you to learn from their experiences so you, too, can find joy and happiness in accepting your body.Visit Dawn Atkin's website at: http: //home.earthlink.net/ dawn_atkins/

Holly Hughes is one of the most popular and controversial out-there-and-in-your-face writer-performers around, and in this collection of some of her greatest hits she describes her career as an "escape" artist: how she escaped her conservative upbringing in a part of the country "where silence was the first language" to become an award-winning performance artist and playwright as well as a central figure in America's culture wars. As the Los Angeles Times observed, "Holly Hughes is everything you always wanted in a lesbian performance artist-and less."

This book demonstrates that everyday interactions and struggles over the right words to use are at the heart of the experience of those in same-sex marriages. At a time when same-sex marriage is on the cusp of becoming legal across the United States, the authors demonstrate through in-depth interviews and rich survey data how the use of relationship terms by married lesbians is tied to a variety of factors that influence how their identities are shaped and presented across social contexts. Via rich anecdotes of how married lesbians navigate the social sphere through their varied use or avoidance of the use of the term wife, this volume is provides groundbreaking insights into how social change is being constructed and made sense of through an examination of real-life interactions with family and friends, on the job, and across service and casual encounters. The authors introduce us to the concept of contextual identity to explain how history and social context inspire cultural change. This first-of-its-kind analysis demonstrates how the first lesbians to marry have navigated acceptance and rejection, insecurity and political strength through their use of language in daily interactions. This book will surely resonate with anyone interested in understanding how married lesbians are presenting themselves at this historical juncture where social change and linguistic nuance are colliding.

Americans have long held fast to a rigid definition of womanhood, revolving around husband, home, and children. Women who rebelled against this definition and carved out independent lives for themselves have often been rendered invisible in U.S. history.

In this unusual comparative study, Trisha Franzen brings to light the remarkable lives of two generations of autonomous women: Progressive Era spinsters and mid-twentieth century lesbians. While both groups of women followed similar paths to independence--separating from their families, pursuing education, finding work, and creating woman-centered communities--they faced different material and cultural challenge and came to claim very different identities.

Many of the turn-of-the-century women were prominent during their time, from internationally recognized classicist Edith Hamilton through two early Directors of the Women's Bureau, Mary Anderson and Freida Miller. Maturing during the time of a broad and powerful women's movement, they were among that era's new women, the often-single women who were viewed as in the vanguard of women's struggle for equality.

In contrast, never-married women after World War II, especially lesbians, were considered beyond the pale of real womanhood. Before the women's and gay/lesbian liberation movements, they had no positive contemporary images of alternative lives for women. Highlighting the similarities and differences between women-oriented women confronting changing gender and sexuality systems, Spinsters and Lesbians thus traces a continuum among women who constructed lives outside institutionalized heterosexuality.

Candid, compassionate, authoritative--a rich source of insights, information, and practical guidance. ""The first major work on the topic."" --Gay Community News ""A much needed comprehensive study of what happens to husbands, wives, and children during the coming-out crisis. --The Reverend Jane E. Vennard, founder Task Force for Spouses of Gays and Lesbians ""The new enlarged edition adds important factors, especially children's reactions to a parent's coming out. Well-researched and insightful."" --Fritz Klein, M.D., author of The Bisexual Option ""Anybody practicing in this area would be well advised to read this book."" --Professor Arthur S. Leonard, New York Law School In two million marriages, one spouse is gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Having a spouse or parent disclose his or her same-sex attraction is a shattering experience fraught with pain, confusion, anger, and a profound loss of self-esteem. Amity Pierce Buxton spotlights this exploding phenomenon and reports constructive coping strategies that spouses and children have used to resolve problems of sexual damage, family breakdown, deception, and homophobia. Illustrated throughout by riveting personal narratives, this expanded edition of The Other Side of the Closet traces the family's journey from initial trauma to eventual transformation. This invaluable source of information for spouses, families, and professionals is based on Dr. Buxton's eight years of research, including interviews with 1,000 straight spouses and children, her own personal experience, and her counseling work with spouses of gay, lesbian, and bisexual partners.

In My Butch Career Esther Newton tells the compelling, disarming, and at times sexy story of her struggle to write, teach, and find love, all while coming to terms with her identity. Newton recounts a series of traumas and conflicts, from being molested as a child to her failed attempts to live a "normal," straight life in high school and college. She discusses being denied tenure at Queens College and nearly again so at SUNY Purchase. With humor and grace, she describes her introduction to middle-class gay life and her love affairs. By age forty, where Newton's narrative ends, she began to achieve personal and scholarly stability in the company of the first politicized generation of out lesbian and gay scholars with whom she helped create gender and sexuality studies. Affecting and immediate, My Butch Career is a story of a gender outlaw in the making, an invaluable account of a beloved and influential figure in LGBT history, and a powerful reminder of only how recently it has been possible to be an openly queer academic.

In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnees," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the Belle Epoque. Lesbian Decadence, now available in English for the first time, provides a new analysis and synthesis of the depiction of lesbianism as a social phenomenon and a symptom of social malaise as well as a fantasy in that most vibrant place and period in history. In this newly translated work, praised by leading critics as "authoritative," "stunning," and "a marvel of elegance and erudition," Nicole G. Albert analyzes and synthesizes an engagingly rich sweep of historical representations of the lesbian mystique in art and literature. Albert contrasts these visions to moralists' abrupt condemnations of "the lesbian vice," as well as the newly emerging psychiatric establishment's medical fury and their obsession on cataloging and classifying symptoms of "inversion" or "perversion" in order to cure these "unbalanced creatures of love." Lesbian Decadence combines literary, artistic, and historical analysis of sources from the mainstream to the rare, from scholarly studies to popular culture. The English translation provides a core reference/text for those interested in the Decadent movement, in literary history, in French history and social history. It is well suited for courses in gender studies, women's studies, LGBT history, and lesbianism in literature, history, and art.

Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, all carnalities.

Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from National Velvet to Marnie; discuss figures of the lesbian body from vampires to tribades to tomboys; uncover 'virtual' lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinised and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard.

Sexy Bodies makes new connections between and amongst bodies, cruising the borders of the obscene, the pleasurable, the desirable and the hitherto unspoken rethinking sexuality anew as deeply and strangely sexy.

Members of social groups, including communities, routinely exert subtle forms of social control on others. The Web: Social Control in a Lesbian Community is a sociological study examining the effects of informal social control_the response to behavior or people regarded as deviant, problematic, threatening, or undesirableDin everyday life. The context of this study is a lesbian community situated in the heartland of the United States. Based on interviews, participant-observation, and document sources gathered over a period of nine years, the book analyzes the effects of social control on relations of power (based on race, class, and sexual identity) among diverse members of a lesbian community. Although much of what is represented in this book is unique to this lesbian community, the forms and functions of social control analyzed here can be found in any human community.