This paper examines letters written to American cartoonist Alison Bechdel by fans of her now beloved comic, Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF; 1983-2008). These letters, written over the course of the ...strip's long run, offer fascinating insights into readers' reactions and emotional attachments to DTWOF, the diversity of the strip's appeal, and the potential political consequences of fans' deep affective investments. The letters show that the comic connected with readers from a variety of backgrounds, who responded to its sympathetic and multifaceted representation of lesbian lives for myriad reasons. The letters reveal how DTWOF was able to forge a heterogenous audience through fans' affective bonds, and potentially transform ontologies and political views. Though rarely the object of investigation-particularly when dealing with a "low" cultural form like comics-these fan letters illuminate the meaningful roles seemingly ephemeral cultural products play in people's lives.
In this article, I provide a micro(oral)history of Cynthia Reid, one of only five women who founded the Minorities Research group-the first known lesbian organization in Britain, in 1963. Such ...activism paved the way for further lesbian liberatory action and the group did a great deal to combat the isolation experienced by many queer women across the country. They provided social opportunities as well as advice, and made more public calls for greater social acceptance. The group has been central to the interests of 20th-century queer historians, especially as the Minorities Research Group also produced the first lesbian magazine in Britain Arena Three. As a microhistory Cynthia's story informs many threads within queer history, including conceptualizations of masculinities, community, and change; while also challenging dominant notions that families and medical professionals were consistently unsupportive of queer people in the 1940s-1970s. In doing so, this article amplifies Cynthia's story in a way that means not only does it contribute nuance as a micro(oral)history to the broader field of queer scholarship but it also acts as a resource to stimulate further research.
Queer pilgrimage is a journey made by an individual or a group to a location, permanent or transitory, which bears relevance to the lives, cultures, and politics of queer people. It is undertaken for ...the pilgrim/s to feel an affinity with the space itself through emotional and/or physical proximity. Since Gentleman Jack first aired in 2019, acts of queer pilgrimage have increased substantially to key sites associated with Lister, including to Shibden Hall (her ancestral home), Halifax, York, and beyond. In this article I draw upon two forms of queer pilgrimage in relation to Anne Lister. The first is this substantial increase in tourism and attraction to sites associated with Lister. The second is the queer pilgrimage Lister herself undertook in 1822 to the Ladies of Llangollen at their home, Plas Newydd.
In drawing out these two comparatively, I propose that historical and contemporary forms of queer pilgrimage have more in common than may initially be apparent, namely a commonality between the queer pilgrims of the 19
th
and 21
st
centuries around a desire for community.
Queer Lives across the Wall examines the everyday lives
of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and
public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay
and lesbian ...liberation movements of the 1970s.
Andrea Rottmann explores how certain spaces - including homes,
bars, streets, parks, and prisons - facilitated and restricted
queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that
characterized both German postwar states. With a theoretical
toolkit informed by feminist, queer, and spatial theories, the book
goes beyond previous histories that focus on state surveillance and
the persecution of male homosexuality.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of predominantly white, working- and middle-class women from across Europe, Australasia, North America and elsewhere travelled across the globe, establishing ...short or longer-term residence in rural and urban separatist communities. This article explores the role of these women in disseminating post-68 feminist ideas and literature, as well as in the creation of transnational lesbian feminist networks. Drawing on oral history interviews and feminist literature, this work traces these networks and explores some of the central ideological concerns of rural women's lands and the ways in which these differed between specific locations in Australia, Wales and Denmark.
We explored articulations of lesbian styles, fashions, and ways of dressing in mainstream fashion and media outlets within the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based ...upon our findings, we propose that there was trending ambivalence and multiple assemblages across space and time where the mainstream media did not necessarily perpetuate a single stereotypical or essentialist way of conceptualizing fashionable lesbians or lesbian fashions. However, we also noted across time a divide between representations of celebrity lesbians and the contemporary lived experience of ordinary lesbians. Though the press acknowledged this divide on occasion, they also established, circulated, and reinforced this difference. According to the press, while lesbians have been 'chic' since the 1990s-whether they embraced a butch or femme esthetic-the best way to be lesbian was to be rich, white, and fashionably dressed.
This paper examines differing articulations of proto-lesbian identity in the long nineteenth century, in which educated, middle-class white women emulated the figure of Sappho in their writing and ...formulated Sappho-inspired communities through creative salons, societies, clubs, and social/literary networks. It maps the progression from the romantic friendships of the eighteenth century to the Boston marriages of the nineteenth century, to the beginning of the twentieth century, when love between women went from noble and virtuous to deviant and morbid sexual 'inversion'. The question is not only treated chronologically but geographically, the position of American-based women writers juxtaposed with the opportunities afforded by specifically 'Paris-Lesbos'. The following study maps these Transatlantic communities as early forms of 'Lesbian Nations' through their use of the 'Lesbian' poet. It engages in a form of Sapphic 'remembering,' questions how and who we remember, and contributes to current understandings of a 'lesbian' historical past.
The Gibson House Museum, located in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, has a significant track record of acknowledging and incorporating LGBTQ history into its programs, presentations, and tours. Yet ...this history is complex. The museum, a kind of Victorian time capsule, was founded by Boston poet Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874–1954) in the mid-twentieth century as a literary monument and shrine to himself; however, family members and the early board of directors were never really comfortable with Gibson’s eccentricity and sexual identity and in the early years sought to “eradicate his problematic presence” from the museum’s collections, tours, and presentations. Reckoning with the museum’s engagement and disengagement with issues of race and class is still an open question. By the end of the twentieth century, the museum began to explore and incorporate LGBTQ history, as well as race, class, and gender, into its interpretive framework. Yet the narratives the museum has crafted to engage audiences and express its own history and identity reveal ongoing tensions within the institution as a social, cultural, and ideological space. These interlaced narratives, backchannel negotiations, pregnant silences, and even shadow stories were often implied or insinuated rather than stated directly. In particular, reckoning with the museum’s engagement and/or disengagement with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality is still somewhat tentative and very much an open question. Blending critical museology and interdisciplinary history and contextualizing the museum and its founder, this essay explores the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion that inform and yet fragment the museum’s self-fashioning and ongoing reimagining.
Wide-Open Towntraces the history of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco from the turn of the century, when queer bars emerged in San Francisco's tourist districts, to 1965, when a raid on a drag ...ball changed the course of queer history. Bringing to life the striking personalities and vibrant milieu that fueled this era, Nan Alamilla Boyd examines the culture that developed around the bar scene and homophile activism. She argues that the communities forged inside bars and taverns functioned politically and, ultimately, offered practical and ideological responses to the policing of San Francisco's queer and transgender communities. Using police and court records, oral histories, tourist literature, and manuscript collections from local and state archives, Nan Alamilla Boyd explains the phenomenal growth of San Francisco as a "wide-open town"-a town where anything goes. She also relates the early history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement that took place in San Francisco prior to 1965.Wide-Open Townargues that police persecution forged debates about rights and justice that transformed San Francisco's queer communities into the identity-based groups we see today. In its vivid re-creation of bar and drag life, its absorbing portrait of central figures in the communities, and its provocative chronicling of this period in the country's most transgressive city,Wide-Open Townoffers a fascinating and lively new chapter of American queer history.
Nestle pays homage in ideas and images to the bodies, both familial and communal, that have informed her life's work-an exploration of the mid-twentieth-century American fem-butch community by ...creating an archive of primary sources, faces and words, that challenge prevailing national and sometimes communal narratives of what is history and what is absence.
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