Category: 1990s
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1993: Sundays at Café Tabac, THAT Vanity Fair cover, Melissa Etheridge coming out… and my birth.
1993. It’s a “pivotal year in lesbian activism,” remembers Wanda Acosta, who co-hosted a weekly lesbian-focused event called No Day Like Sunday at Café Tabac. “[1993] included the first Dyke March, The Lesbian Avengers, LGBTQ March on Washington, as well as lesbian visibility in the arts, music, film and media.” “We saw the Vanity Fair…
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Raised by Butch-Femme parents in small-town 1960s USA: Pam’s story
Pam was 2-years-old when her mother found her life partner and co-parent: a Butch lesbian Pam affectionately refers to as ‘Pap’. Pam, who is gay herself and was named after her mother’s former lover, describes a happy, normal small-town childhood that was both attacked by straight society and embraced by some friends with kind hearts.…
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Lesbian perspectives on “queer”
Being a lesbian is the least weird thing about me. An integral part of overcoming internalised homophobia many moons ago was recognising that homosexuality exists in many mammal species and throughout human history. Perhaps that’s why I started the lesbian_herstory Instagram in the first place: as a place to remind myself and other lesbians that…
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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…
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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?
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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…
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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…
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Lesbian and Gay Nightlife in 1990s Northern England: An interview with Stuart Linden Rhodes
Stuart Linden Rhodes is a photographer and writer who captured gay and lesbian nightlife in 1990s Northern England. Stuart’s Instagram account @linden_archives features hundreds of posed and candid shots from a time and place in lesbian and gay history that, without it, would be unseen today. In fact, Stuart’s Instagram account was discovered by director…
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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…
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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…