Category: Activism

  • 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.…

  • Why is lesbian culture and community important?

    Why is lesbian culture and community important?

    It is unequivocally healthy and normal to find a sense of belonging in your lesbianism. Many people grow roots in their marginalised cultures because the world is harsh to the oppressed and a relatable community heals us. 

  • 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…

  • Lesbian Visibility Week 2023: Female Homosexuality is Not Bigoted

    Lesbian Visibility Week 2023: Female Homosexuality is Not Bigoted

    For Lesbian Day of Visibility 2023, the team behind HER’s social media celebrated by calling lesbians bigots for only finding the female sex attractive. This should go without saying, for anyone who is not a raging homophobe: lesbianism is not a choice, let alone discrimination against the male sex. You would think this poor treatment…

  • 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…

  • Lesbian and Gay Nightlife in 1990s Northern England: An interview with Stuart Linden Rhodes

    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…