Girlfriends or Gal Pals? Decoding Intimacy Between Women in Old Photographs

Love between women has existed forever, despite the crumbs of documentation and the meddling with evidence. Homosexuality didn’t begin with gay rights awareness in the 20th century. However, society still denormalises same-sex love as a new trend. In style. A fad. An abomination. A political choice. An act of rebellion. Bow-bowww. They’re wrong. Women lovin’ women is as natural as leaves on trees.

Regardless of whether lesbian and bisexual women had a word for their sexual orientation, we existed before Sappho. While the word “lesbian” has been feared, stigmatised and fetishised in English – many lesbians choose to go label-free or identify out of it because of this – Indigenous languages, including of the Tiwi Islands, are known to include words for diverse sexual orientation. 

Art’s subtle communication

Luckily human communication isn’t limited to the spoken or written word. One way authentic, diverse experiences of history have been documented is through art. A picture speaks a thousand words. We all have a different dictionary of signs. Therefore, what thousand words we decipher from that one picture is as unique as each person’s experiences that, amalgamated together, form a personal, symbolic dictionary which shapes their perception. 

Visual art can fly under the radar when the written word, being too explicit, can’t. While a picture of two women sharing a look of love makes sense to lesbian and bisexual women – because we’re attracted to other women – a straight historian will probably say it’s just “gals bein’ pals.” In a way, that kind of heteronormative thinking has been helpful for the survival of (some) lesbian documentation in homophobic contexts. If lesbian art, including photographs, were confirmed to be homosexual, then it could – and most probably would – have been destroyed. 

Lesbian art is for us. We are its true audience. It’s perfectly fine if we apply our own stories to old photographs of women we perceive to be in love. It doesn’t matter if we are wrong. Lesbians have always existed. We deserve the space to assume romantic love between historical women without being accused of having a suspicious agenda. Especially when heterosexuality (and its codes) is automatically applied to absolutely every living (and non-living) thing.

Forgotten Likeness

I spoke to Chantel Paradis, the woman behind Forgotten Likeness, who specialises in “forgotten photos & outlived personal possessions from the Victorian Era.” I have followed the Forgotten Likeness Instagram for a long time and am always ecstatic to see found sapphic images from history. “The sapphic photos are my favorite to share and collect,” Chantel confesses.

Chantel “find[s] photos at antique stores, flea markets, and online auction sites.” Most of the pictures are without any caption or story attached. However, the way Chantel stages the vintage pictures with her “antique ephemera collection” creates a story. For the decorative collection, she collects “old letters, Valentines, and other 19th and early 20th-century tokens of love.”

Chantel uses her instinct to evoke a story through staging. “I play with the layout until it feels right. I imagine the women in the photos would’ve had similar items tucked in their desk drawer, lovingly tied with some kind of sentimental string or ribbon.” Contemplating the lives of these women is a matter of art and creativity. Such imagination has resulted in the thoughtful, deliberate way Chantel has accompanied photographs with particular decorations or tokens of love. Through intuitive art, a story is made.

Has Chantel found any clues, links, symbolism or patterns in sapphic pictures from history? “I was enrolled for a brief stint at The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising,” she said, “but sadly we didn’t learn about lesbian/sapphic flagging in the fashion history course I took (though I do remember a lecture mentioning Marlene Dietrich’s suits). I wish I knew of fashion clues to look for. I’ve noticed that most of the women are very feminine presenting. But I have discovered a trend in old photos in which one woman dresses in a suit and mock-proposes to the more feminine woman for the photographer. That said, I do have a few photos of very butch-presenting women, and it’s hard not to assume, through the lens of our 21st-century eyes, that they weren’t lesbians.”

How does Chantel tackle the question of “gal pal” versus romantic relationship in images that seem to depict love between women? “I can’t know for sure the sexuality of the women in the photos I share, but some couples certainly seem more romantic than others. I have a gorgeous gem-size tintype from the 1860s of two women pressing their foreheads together and tenderly holding hands. The pose is almost poetic—evocative of an affectionate affinity. As far as insights about lesbians in history, the photos I collect suggest a deep closeness and intimacy that we’re not used to seeing in today’s depictions of platonic friendships.”

“During the Victorian era, and possibly into the Edwardian era, romantic female friendships were encouraged by society as women weren’t seen as sexual beings. These friendships were thought to serve as a rehearsal for heterosexual marriage. So, yes, I do think that many of these ladies were merely “gals being pals,” but in a much dearer profound sense.

Many of these women probably went on to marry men, but I wonder if, like L.M. Montgomery, who longed for female friendship, and Virginia Woolf, who had lady lovers, these unidentified women kept their romantic friends close throughout their lives. I like to imagine they did.”

Many of these photographs were personal, private and, perhaps, were originally kept in houses where female “housemates” lived together. The women who partnered up in “romantic friendships” often cohabitated and did everything any straight couple would do together. Many of these relationships lasted a lifetime, like the Ladies of Llangollen.

“Romantic friendships” were tolerated because lesbian sex “wasn’t possible.” It still isn’t seen as legitimate. Men don’t view their wives or girlfriends being intimate with other women as cheating. The desexualisation of lesbianism meant we could fly under the radar when gay men couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean we were more accepted. We simply “weren’t possible.” If lesbianism isn’t desexualised then it’s fetishised. Today, men take ownership of lesbian sex by fetishising us; they turn us into a porn category for their own entertainment.

Pretending like we aren’t sexual at all is as untrue as the idea our sexuality exists as a performance for men. I have witnessed many lesbians publicly desexualise lesbianism for a multitude of reasons. Mainly survival. While some historians assert we can’t assume any “romantic friendship” was sexual, I refuse to believe that all of these women could sleep in the same bed with a woman they’re romantically connected with and not do what feels good. I refuse to believe women, including lesbians, were sexually unfeeling. Ahem, Ammonite?

These women trusted each other. It’s naive to expect a written admission that they had sex before we become open to the idea many did. Their entire relationship and living arrangement would have been destroyed if they advocated for “lesbianism is sexual!” They were allowed to maintain a fairly public relationship because women weren’t seen as sexual. Why wouldn’t they play the system so they could have freedoms some lesbians don’t even have today?

Chantel Paradis’ found photographs aren’t performances for men. The women in them are orchestrating what they want to see and how they want to be percieved. “What I find intriguing is that the women in these photos seem to be posing for themselves,” Chantel says. “The images are not for a male gaze; instead, they seem to be decidedly for themselves and their friends. This is especially true for the Edwardian pictures I have that were originally pasted in photo albums. These albums are usually accompanied by captions written by the women, like “making love” and similar sweet sentiments.”

I don’t think it’s worthwhile to mull over whether every pair of women behaving intimately in old photographs were romantic or platonic before we let ourselves imagine their love. There’s a high possibility that women behaving so intimately, beyond sisterly, are romantically connected… even if they didn’t label what was happening. “Platonic until proven otherwise” is never applied to men and women expressing intimacy throughout history.

The expectation we “know” whether they were romantic or not – when confirmation is usually impossible – is a matter of heteronormative policing. We shouldn’t require permission to imagine lesbianism in romantic photographs featuring two women. Homosexuality is not new. Questioning our instincts about romance and intimacy between women contributes to lesbianism’s denormalisation.

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