I’ve had this in my bookcase for a while now. I always meant to read it, but when a fiction and a non-fiction book are on a shelf next to each other, I’m always going to reach for the fiction first. Finally this summer I forced my own hand by packing all my other books in preparation for the move. I started reading it a minute or two after finishing The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, perched next to M on a rock overlooking a waterfall where teenagers from my hometown go cliff jumping in the summer. Sun filtered through leaves and every few minutes I brushed a daddy long legs from my arm. If I got bored, I thought, I could wander around, eat the sandwich I packed, throw stones in the water. I don’t think I even glanced up for the next two hours. 

Lillian Faderman’s writing is so clean and smooth and she unfolds the century with narrative ease that makes it impossible to turn away. So much of queer history as I’ve learned it and as has been available in mainstream media has been about gay men. I don’t think it’s necessarily sexism—male homosexuality was just more visible. There were sodomy trials, molly houses, brothels, an endless number of all-male spaces, and established practices of male eroticism dating back to Rome. These are things that can be recorded and put in a history textbook. Who’s going to remember that Mr. Smith’s wife and Mr. Taylor’s wife were very close friends? 

It sometimes made me sad that while my male counterparts have thousands of years of history and legacy, I—who am so preoccupied with history—have only the last century. But as Faberman describes so succinctly, it’s not that women didn’t have romantic and sexual feelings for other women (it’s a bit silly to label them as lesbians when the modern definition of the word did not exist and these women lived in an entirely foreign cultural context, but nonetheless I will do so) they just had little opportunity for visibility, which could be both an asset and an inhibitor. There were virtually zero all-female spaces in Western Europe and colonized Americas, except for a convent or a brothel, both of which could still be entered by men. Men could go to work, to war, to the alehouse, to the sea. Women were isolated in the home, among children and older relations, where it was difficult to form a distinct subculture of women who desired culturally transgressive sexual relations with someone of the same gender. Yet homosocial and homoromantic behavior was tolerated and seen as normal and healthy among women. As the first women’s colleges in the US were being founded and middle class women had access for the very first time to all-female spaces, they were shielded by the cover of Victorian attitudes about women and sex. Women were pure, angelic, asexual beings who merely tolerated their husband’s advances. What would they want from each other besides harmless companionship? In popular legend, it is Queen Victoria herself who said that lesbianism should not be banned because it was an impossibility. It was only in the 20th century, when the writings of European sexologists finally penetrated the American awareness that what was once merely “romantic friendship” now ran the risk of characterization as “lesbian”. 

Faderman’s exploration of the first nine decades of the 20th century (it was published in 1991) shows how both demonization and fetishization allowed and forced the birth of a distinct lesbian subculture and identity. It was exciting to see how pivotal texts I’ve read had been in our history such as The Well of Loneliness, to learn about the preserved evidence of sapphic love from figures I’d long suspected but rarely seen mentioned in this context such as Emma Goldman and Jane Addams, to read about phenomena I’d seen only in fiction such as butch-femme bar etiquette of the 1950s, and to learn about figures and themes entirely new to me. One section I found of particular interest was the vibrant and explicit lesbian community of 1920s Harlem. I made a playlist with some lesbian blues singers mentioned in the book that I’ve been listening to a lot. I also appreciated the time given to class and how at any given time there were three incredibly distinct ways of engaging with lesbianism based on what your economic background allowed. 

As fascinating and illuminating as this book was, it was not without its faults. Faderman came out in the rigid butch/femme 50s, and sometimes her judgement of the following decades and the generations that didn’t have to survive McCarthyism shone through. She seems wary of bisexuals, makes almost no mention of the transgender community, and writes predominantly about the white lesbian experience. Though she tries valiantly to overcome her own biases and makes it a point to include the criticisms lesbians of color voiced about their white peers, one can’t help but feel that only half the picture is present in the book and lesbians of color are included often only in relation to white lesbians. It’s a shame considering Faderman herself highlights the failure of white lesbians of the 1970s to win the trust or confidence of the women of color they claimed to be in solidarity with.

Overall, I would say this is by no means a definitive picture of lesbian life in the 20th century, but it is a wonderfully enlightening and well-written overview of the origins of the movement and the cultural contexts that allowed its birth. A great starting point for further research.