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

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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 texts at our disposal have often been written by power-holders representing an authoritarian agenda? 

“Harmful” and “problematic” are subjective when it comes to judging an individual person. That statement can be unfortunate–it’s natural to want an objective list of “bad people” based on what we personally feel is common sense–but, ultimately, it is a necessary price to pay for freedom. Many people, including myself, will agree that a “problematic” belief is something that systematically oppresses another human, but the solution is to attack the belief, not the person. We, if not already, are always up for persecution for our beliefs.

This article isn’t about what we should consider harmful. It’s about how research should be delivered when the writer discovers evidence about someone that they feel is “bad.” I considered an example of my own writing, and heard from other people interested in lesbian history, to interrogate a strategy for historians, writers and journalists to fairly report on humans in all their disgusting glory.

The case of Patricia Highsmith

Writing Patricia Highsmith: a Painful Lesson was… painful. I had no preconceptions about Patricia Highsmith beforehand. I loved the film Carol (2015), like so many lesbians do, and knew Pat wrote the book The Price of Salt (1952), which the film was based on. She felt like an integral profile for the new Lesbian Herstory website, especially considering how important Carol has been to lesbian culture in the past decade. Would I have written on Pat Highsmith if I knew what I was going to find? 

Once I discovered the endless accounts of Patricia Highsmith’s explicitly anti-Semitic beliefs, I was stumped. I wanted to write about her ground-breaking work, her contributions to lesbian culture, her gloomy, intriguing presence. But the storm cloud gathering above me wasn’t an alluring, complex problem I felt capable of solving. I was angry.

It was arduous: how can I report on this complex woman objectively, without demonising or glorifying her, while making it explicitly clear that anti-Semitism isn’t something we should just “look past”? How much space should I allocate to the unacceptable things, to demonstrate that there is no justification, before it becomes yet another oversimplification of a multifaceted person? 

I’ll admit I just wanted it to be over and that shows in the end result. Instead of binning the article and forgetting Pat Highsmith ever existed–which is cowardly–I took on the challenge of trying to understand the woman enough to present the facts. It proved impossible. This isn’t an English Literature site. I couldn’t just focus on her writing and forget what I’d found. That would be disingenuous. 

She is a part of lesbian history because being a lesbian isn’t a political belief. We aren’t a monolith, like grouping the LGBT together as “queer” suggests. It’s not right to dehumanise her or sweep her under the rug. It’s also not right to casually mention her anti-Semitic behaviour as if it’s something we can just “look past.”

Angel or Devil?

The last few decades have changed the way we treat, research, and write on people. It’s important to today’s society that we mention the unacceptable things people have done so we aren’t presenting them in a heroic light. The pressure to “mention it all” means the individual’s positive contributions are often sidelined – especially when it comes to women. David Bowie is still glorified as beyond human–“an alien, other,” according to The Guardian–and yet the guy was a pedophile-rapist. Why is Bowie excused? Because rape is. That’s what gave him the power to do it in the first place.

How do we treat the inexcusable things people have done when writing about them? We can’t omit the inexcusable things. But we also can’t omit the person. If the inexcusable things they’ve done overshadow the entire story then we’re not telling the truth, either, because people are multi-faceted. How do we capture who a “problematic” lesbian from history was, without glorifying or dehumanising them, in an age where people so easily become unmentionable? 

How can or should we, as a community interested in lesbian history, articulate the lives and contributions of controversial and/or problematic lesbians from history in a fair, engaging, honest, insightful way? I took it to the polls. I asked a set of questions on the Lesbian Herstory Instagram. About 1,000 people (mostly lesbians) responded. The YES/NO polls are highlighted as poll 6.

The general consensus (87%) is that “problematic” lesbians should be reported on. So they should make it to the page. Tick. The responders (96%) believe that it is dangerous to pretend someone hasn’t existed by barring them from being researched. Almost all (96%) believe it’s possible to talk about the important things a “problematic” lesbian from history has done without appearing sympathetic to her unacceptable views. 

But how? I asked, “how should we tell the stories of lesbians with harmful beliefs/actions?” Many advocated for making the unacceptable the focus; to educate the reader on why the historical figure is “bad.” That didn’t give me any insight on how to avoid “the bad” overshadowing “the good,” in developing a strategy for writing an honest, nuanced story on complicated, multi-faceted, sometimes harmful lesbians. Many weren’t afraid of posing them as villains. 

That’s a symptom of how our polarised society operates: people are “good” or “bad” and saying there’s an in between means you agree with the person in question’s harmful views. People readily position someone as all “bad” when it’s politically convenient, when it suits their agenda, even if they protect people in their own communities who do as much harm to others… or even worse.

The problem here is finding a middle ground between omitting the person and omitting the truth. Today, we’re expected to omit the person, which means we omit the complete truth. 88% of responders said that there’s a pressure to only report on contributions made by someone deemed politically “good.” Half said there isn’t enough room to discuss controversial topics. Almost all (96%) said that lesbians should be able to discuss controversial topics without deplatforming the opponent. 

That is heavenly, but out of reach in the culture of “us vs. them.” Sometimes there are two systematically oppressed groups arguing over an issue that affects them both respectively, where the polarised solutions lead to one or the other being further marginalised. Any discussion to create a non-polarised middle ground is dismissed as problematic because both sides will feel targeted. Compromise? What’s that?

Humans are naturally collaborative and conflicting. We originated in communities built off working out differences. Conflict isn’t bad. In fact, Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory is the cornerstone of my politics. But “Canceling” an individual omits the person as well as the chance for discussion, education, and understanding. It’s a performative gesture rather than a meaningful one. 

The threat of ostracisation leads to performative niceties, too. We see it played out in forced apologies for PR purposes. In its extreme, it leads to covert operations whereby your “enemy” organises and really does you harm. It’s easy to say “it’s us vs. them, we are nothing like them,” distancing yourselves by ostracising the “bad guy,” but that leads to authoritarianism. In history, it’s led to fascism. Everybody is capable of contributing to fascism, not just the far-right.

So how do we tell the story of complex, sometimes harmful lesbians from history, without glorifying or demonising them? One person said that putting a disclaimer at the top of the page would suffice. I like the idea, but isn’t writing on history a disclaimer in itself? Wouldn’t that mean everyone gets a disclaimer? Doesn’t the disclaimer of unacceptable inherently overshadow the person? On the other hand, does putting a small disclaimer at the top justify a story that omits it? Are disclaimers merely insurance and therefore performative?

The most common response was “objectively and honestly.” But can we ever write someone else’s story entirely objective, especially when it comes to history? My friends and family couldn’t write an accurate depiction of my life, let alone a stranger. Writing is communication. Nonfiction should be meta, rather than unquestionable. It is written by somebody or, at the very least, is agreed upon by a body of people. It always represents a point of view. That doesn’t mean what’s written is never the truth, or even fact, it just means that every extended piece of writing has elements of subjectivity because somebody stitched it together, chose significant words, and wrote it down.

History books are subjective because they have historically been written by power-holders. Literacy is power. It is a privilege. The oppressed have been excluded from expressing their historical truths because what’s decipherably written is given power and you can’t contribute when you’re illiterate, let alone the rest of the obstacles layered on what gets published and/or read even if you are. How many convicts, sent to Australia to do the empire’s imperial, colonial, genocidal dirty work, could spell their name, let alone non-English speaking Indigenous people who were massacred? So who wrote the story? The powerful.

There might be more accessibility to telling history today, but we’re still depending on old books written by old powers to find historical truth. I can never say I’ve written on a lesbian from history objectively, despite it always being my intention, because what I keep, add and omit depends on my subconscious navigation. We can never know everything. Especially when they’re dead. So how do we sum somebody up in a couple of thousand words?

Objectivity should be the goal because truth should be the goal, but I don’t think writing on lesbians who have done harmful things in the past is resolved by “being objective.” There’s a difference between goal and outcome. Honesty is often subjective. It’s an intention more than an absolute. You can honestly say something that isn’t objectively true. What’s considered “honest” and reliable depends on power, too. A woman is never believed as much as a man is. Who can lie for their own advantage and get away with it depends on privilege.

The rest of the answers were on two different trains: 1. “Humans are collective”: communicate this person’s character or story with the conviction that all humans are multifaceted and imperfect or 2. “Us vs. them”: Tell their story/character through a lens of learning – they were bad and this is what we can learn from them. 

Everybody, including those of us critical of deplatforming others, has two boxes of “bad” in their mind: the “we are all human, despite that person doing or believing a thing I disagree with,” and “that person is unforgivable.” The boxes are subjective. We can’t understand how others can forgive the things we can’t and some people’s “unforgivable” box seems very inclusive. “Us vs. them” is an extremely subjective strategy for telling history because we weren’t there.

One responder gave a good example of how Barbara Hammer tackled presenting the good and bad in a lesbian from history, Alice Austen, in her film The Female Closet. During the segment on Alice Austen, she ended with a brief discussion about Alice Austen’s xenophobia and racism. “It’s the last thing said about her and it is condemned by the film, so the viewer remembers it well,” the responder said. 

The example is still a disclaimer, but it doesn’t overshadow the person. The audience knows the person before they have reasons to condemn them. One argument is that this still reflects the tradition of glorifying or demonising figures from history: the good and bad are told in different sections, rather than entwined to form a complete picture from the start. Is the bad added performatively in this strategy, to demonstrate we’re aware of the bad as a side-note? If a disclaimer at the beginning is demonising, is one at the end too glorifying?

Perhaps the only way to sincerely express the multifaceted nature of lesbians from history is to work on our own discomfort first, make sure we’re not performing or omitting, and present the “good” and “bad” throughout the project. That can be difficult in a society hellbent on “us vs. them,” because what you include and omit creates suspicion about what side you, the writer, are on. Like a seesaw, if you spend too much time on the “good,” then it’s glorifying the person as a faultless hero which, in its own way, is an act of dehumanisation. But too much on the “bad” is an act of demonisation and dehumanisation; it encourages the performative culture whereby online, ravenous crowds are awaiting a new carcass to devour. 

This is my apology to Patricia Highsmith, the human.

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