Category: 1980s

  • Lesbian fetishism is not lesbian acceptance!

    Lesbian fetishism is not lesbian acceptance!

    Lesbian fetishism is a power move resulting from the tension of uncertainty between hatred and acceptance. A trained attack dog, running on conditioned hate, will chase blood in the enemy. But there’s a space between the attack and the dog lying on its back in acceptance of its surroundings. Lesbian fetishism, like the fetishism of…

  • Flamboyance and Fortitude: Butch-Femme Relationships in 2024

    Flamboyance and Fortitude: Butch-Femme Relationships in 2024

    Butch-Femme relationships play an important role in lesbian history. What does the Butch-Femme relationship mean today?

  • Why lesbian separatism is not escapist

    Why lesbian separatism is not escapist

    There is a false narrative in the feminist community that lesbian separatism is escapist.  There are legitimate criticisms–utopianism, rigidity, alienation–but the belief that lesbian separatism is escapism, running away into the bush, leaving the rest of womankind behind to fend for themselves against patriarchy, seems to stick the most. Lesbian separatism is meaningful lesbian-centred action.…

  • Is lesbian separatism possible in 2023?

    Is lesbian separatism possible in 2023?

    Q&A style posts on LesbianHerstory.com are an opportunity for readers to ask questions that serve as prompting topics for LH to write about. Questions can be advice-based, about our hot takes, asking whether we’ll cover a certain event or figure from history, or about lesbian news and media – you name it. Send your questions/prompts…

  • Boston Marriages and the Language of Lesbian Relationships

    Boston Marriages and the Language of Lesbian Relationships

    Maybe it was two women in your history textbook. Maybe it was your unmarried great aunt and her live-in ‘best friend’. We are all familiar with the story: two women are designated close friends by historians, family members and society, despite the pair’s decision to unite and entwine their lives like any marriage between a…

  • How Should We Tell the Stories of “Bad” Lesbians from History in a Culture of Us vs. Them?

    How Should We Tell the Stories of “Bad” Lesbians from History in a Culture of Us vs. Them?

    How do we write on complex, even harmful, lesbians from history in the age of “us vs. them”? How do we present the facts in a way that doesn’t omit the person or the truth? Is writing on a person from history ever objective, considering the historian has their own interests, motives and interpretations, and…

  • The Male Gaze and Lesbian Censorship in Film

    The Male Gaze and Lesbian Censorship in Film

    It’s of little surprise to most sapphic movie buffs that Hollywood doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to positive lesbian representation. From the widespread trope of “bury your gays” to the equally widespread phenomenon of gay-baiting, it can be hard out there for a film loving dyke. Hays Code A lot of…

  • Today’s Lavender Menace: Why do lesbians support gay men?

    Today’s Lavender Menace: Why do lesbians support gay men?

    I received a lot of support after I wrote The Lesbian Pinball: Gay Liberation vs. Women’s Liberation in August 2021. Lesbian feminists from all over the world resonated with the conflict: we simultaneously support gay men and women but it is hard to navigate gay and feminist spaces without our intersectional experience, being both homosexual…

  • The Lesbian Pinball: Gay Liberation vs Women’s Liberation

    The Lesbian Pinball: Gay Liberation vs Women’s Liberation

    Lesbians are pulled between solidarity with gay men, because of homophobia, and straight women, because of misogyny. We have prioritised solidarity with gay men or straight women at different points in history, depending on the contextual concerns.