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Sexual activity has a long and creative history of being described and referred to by slang and euphemism. But when the source domain of the euphemism--the "literal" meaning--is an equally ordinary everyday action, the ambiguity creates problems of interpretation. And in a field like the study of historic same-sex relations, where there is a long tradition of going to some contortions to deny even the scraps of available evidence, euphemism has long been interpreted selectively depending on the genders of the participants. "They weren't, you know, sleeping together, they were just sleeping together."

This article examines one of those euphemisms in a context where both the wider use of the phrase and supporting evidence from the text argues for an unambiguously sexual interpretation. (The article also gives me a new historic text to try to track down.)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 19b - Interview with Ellen Klages - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/02/10 - listen here)

Heather Rose Jones: Today, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project is delighted to have Ellen Klages as a guest. Ellen’s fiction has included multiple finalists for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, and has had wins in the Nebula and World Fantasy. Welcome to the show, Ellen!

Ellen Klages: Thank you.

H: So, one of the reasons I hoped to get you on the podcast is to talk about your novella, Passing Strange, which is something of a love-letter to mid-20th century lesbian culture in San Francisco, as well as being steeped in the geeky world of pulp sci-fi, with something of a magical twist. It also has an incredibly gorgeous cover. What inspired you to write Passing Strange?

E: I started writing what eventually become Passing Strange in 1977, so 40 years ago. I was just out of college, I had just moved to San Francisco and I fell completely in love with the city. I started looking into its history and I discovered the, sort of, nascent gay bar scene, which was Mona’s, which was, I think, the first lesbian bar on the west coast. Fortunately, my past self actually saved the files and I had written four scenes of a story whose working title was The ’39 Fair. And every time, they were typed, and when I got a computer, I entered them into a file, and every time I got a new computer, I would switch it over, and switch it over, and switch it over. So, for 40 years this story has been following me around with these four, unrelated scenes and these two characters of Emily Netterfield and Loretta Haskel, and that was kind of all I had. But I would find it every once in a while, when I was gutting a new computer and I would go through files and I would go, “You know, one of these days, I’m actually gonna write that story.” And then Jonathan Strahan emailed me and said, I’m an acquiring editor for Tor.com, they’re doing a novella line, would you like to write a novella. And I thought, “Sure! Don’t know what… Wait! I could write the San Francisco story!” And so, I pulled out these 40-year-old files and did a whole lot more research and fell in love with it again.

H: And I think I saw somewhere that you have a short story with the same character who does the map folding magic, which we’ll have to explain in a second.

E: There’s a character named Franny, whose last name is actually Travers, but you don’t know that in any of the stories. And, yeah, there’s a story called “Caligo Lane” that came out on Subterranean Online in 2014, that is a sequel to Passing Strange even though I hadn’t written Passing Strange yet, that explains in great deal just exactly how Franny’s magic works. And because it came out first, in the novella I don’t explain how Franny’s magic works, because I already did that. There’s six characters in the novella, three of them are from other stories, three of them are brand new.

H: So, why don’t we give a little synopsis of the story.

E: It takes place in 1940 in San Francisco. There are six characters, they’re all women, which people have remarked upon as if its extraordinary, which I suppose it kind of is…

H: Well, it won’t be extraordinary to my audience.

E: If it had been military SF and it was all guys, nobody would have blinked, but it’s six women. There’s Franny and Babs, who are a couple. Franny is something along the lines of a witch and Babs is a math professor at the University of California. There’s Emily Netterfield, who is the black sheep of a fairly wealthy family on the east coast, who is working as a night club singer in drag. There’s Loretta Haskel, who is an artist who draws covers for Weird Tales, or the Weird Tales equivalent, draws covers for the pulps. There’s Helen Young, who is an Asian-American, although at that time she was just an Oriental, who is a lawyer, and because she can’t any jobs as a lawyer because she’s Asian and she’s a woman, dances in a night club called Forbidden City. And then there’s Polly Wardlow, who is a British refugee, because it’s 1940, so there’s a war in the rest of the world, but not in the US. And Polly actually also appears in a story called “Hey Presto” that came out in, it’s in a couple of ‘year’s bests’ from 2014, but that’s Polly’s origin story. So, those are my main characters.

H: And one of them the magical elements in this story is this map folding magic that enables people to essentially teleport. It’s sort of an in passing “this thing just happens.”

E: It lets them teleport, but only within the city, because it doesn’t work… Franny hasn’t figured out how to make it work farther than about a mile, so what she does is she draws maps and then she folds them into origami. And imagine taking a map of the US and if you folded it one way, New York would be on top of San Francisco and you could just walk from one city to the other. And in essence, that’s how Franny’s magic works, although it’s a lot more complex than that is and involves… yeah, it’s more complicated.

H: Then another element… magical element in the story is the artwork, which…

E: And, well Haskel has, from the beginning of the story, and I’m just going to do an aside here that I’ve had a lot of people complain that there’s magic at the beginning and there’s magic at the end and it seems tacked on. And my view of magic is that, if you actually had magic, it would be like that platter that you keep in the cupboard over the stove that you only get down at Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve. You know, it’s not everyday china, you don’t use it every day, so it’s special. So, they don’t talk about it through the entire novella, although people that are expecting high fantasy are disappointed by the fact that it’s mainstream in the middle. It’s a mash-up story. It is about the pulps, it is noire, it is historical, it is queer, it is fantastic, it was magic realism, but it isn’t all of those at the same time. So, the other element of magic is that Haskel’s grandmother comes from, we will call it “The Old Country” and has given Haskel a necklace as a high school graduation present. And Haskel’s necklace actually appears in every single chapter and at the end you find out that Haskel’s necklace is more than a necklace and that it will, because she’s an artist, it becomes pigment that becomes a painting that gets them out of a gnarly situation. And I won’t say anymore than that because that would be a spoiler. But there are several different kinds of magic.

H: I want to talk about the historical aspects of the story, and I know that a lot of what you write is historical in some fashion, you have a wonderful set of, I don’t know if they’re YA or Middle Grade, The Green Glass Sea.

E: They’re 9 and up and “up” that I know of is 96, so yeah, they’re published as children’s books.

H: That are set around a young girl whose parents are working on the Manhattan Project during WWII.

E: Yes, and she actually shows up in Passing Strange. She does a cameo and Babs, Franny’s lover, is her aunt. So, somebody pointed out to me, after the fact, something that I hadn’t quite put together, which is that this now means that Green Glass Sea, which is a completely different mainstream historical fiction, now exists in a world where magic is real.

H: (Laughter)

E: So, these things are all interconnected, but yeah… Yeah, I love, I love the past. A lot of people thing that science fiction is always set in the future or on another planet and, for me, the future… I have no interest in the future because I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s many forking paths. It could be anything. And I’m not particularly interested in speculating on one of the ways it could be, but I love going back and looking at the past and looking at what we know about the past and then trying to look around the corner at the stuff that didn’t get talked about, or didn’t get written down, or that was taken for granted at the time, or that we now take for granted, and trying to bring the readers who live in the present face to face with the realities of the past in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s really educational.

H: Yeah. Is there anything other than a general love of history that got you started writing historical stories?

E: I just love the past. I mean, I’ve always, ever since I was a kid, I would go to used bookstores and I would be drawn to the books, not the new books, but the older books. Flea markets, garage sales, I am drawn to things that existed before I was born and they just… you know, there’s something right about the colors of an old magazine or an old View Master reel or even old maps. So, since I was old enough to have an allowance, I have collected old stuff and everything from the past has a story. And I’m fascinated by the stories that didn’t get told.

H: So, I know that you’ve been very involved in lesbian culture yourself, but was there any particular challenge in writing lesbian characters in a historical era that you weren’t around for?

E: Yeah. 1940 is way before I was born. Most of the challenge… Well, there’s two challenges. One of them is not making their lives be extraordinary, because they aren’t. They are living ordinary lives but in a period in which their ordinary lives were illegal. Literally illegal. It was against the law to be gay. And trying to get that across to modern day readers, especially younger modern-day readers, who grew up in an era that is post-that, or at least in San Francisco, which is where I live. And the other challenge is trying to make the past come alive so that you feel like you’re getting the back-stage tour, like you’re not reading about history, you’re actually slipping through a little bit of time travel and going back and walking the streets and seeing what used to be there and what would have been. And a book part of the book is… There’s three settings, there’s Mona’s, which was a lesbian nightclub that was primarily for tourists? Which is why the police let it go, but it was also the only place in town where gay women could hang out and be themselves. And then there is the Chinese nightclub, the Forbidden City, where most of the performers were not actually Chinese. They were Japanese, they were Korean, they were Filipino, they were… one of them was Spanish. And then there’s the World’s Fair and a lot of people don’t know that San Francisco had a World’s Fair in 1939, they know about the New York World’s Fair. San Francisco actually built Treasure Island to have a World’s Fair in ’39 and ’40 to celebrate the opening the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge and then they were going to turn it into San Francisco International Airport. And then a war happened the Navy took it over. So, Treasure Island is still out there, but there’s no trace of the fair. And I have always found that particular fair just to be like, the most romantic thing…

H: I thought some of the buildings were still there.

E: No, there’s nothing. There’s one hangar and there’s a part of one fountain. And there used to be a Treasure Island museum, but they didn’t have any funding, so everything is boxed up in a warehouse someplace. But I have always, since I moved to San Francisco, found the idea that this really uninteresting island that’s two miles out in the bay, that the Bay Bridge goes through, that you pass through, had this fantasy land in it. And one of the things that I wanted to do was work as many fantasy elements and some science fiction elements into a mainstream story. So, it really was called “The Magic City,” Treasure Island was, the Fair was, and it was full of things that looked like they came out of something Arthur Rankin would have illustrated, or the cover of a science fiction pulp. You know, these buildings that would never exist in real life and larger than life stuff. And so I wanted to try to bring that to life, mostly for myself, because boy I really have always wanted to go there and, of course, it was gone 15 years before I was born, but also so the readers could go to this magical place that no longer exists.

H: Yeah, on the theme of time-travel as it were, I think you said this was your first story that was published, “Time Gypsy”? Which has an actual over time-travel element and is, again, connecting the modern lesbian experience with the 50s.

E: Yeah, that one is set in ’57 and it was my first story. And it got nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo, so apparently, I knew what I was doing. And again, the science fiction element is very slight. I have enough time-travel, I mean I read Stephen Hawking, figured out a way that there could possibly be time-travel.

H: And, as I understand it, it’s a modern physicist, I think?

E: Yeah, it’s a PhD in physics at Cal.

H: Who travels back in time to meet her hero or something and, why don’t you give a brief synopsis.

E: It’s a woman named Carol McCullough who has a PhD in the history of science, and she’s called into the dean’s office and said, “You know about this crackpot scientist from the 50s, Sara Baxter Clarke.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I did my PhD thesis on her…” And she’s worried that she’s like, going to lose her job because crackpot physicist. And he basically says, “Well, she was right. There is time-travel. We figured out most of what she was doing, but her last paper was lost when she died in this tragic accident the day, she was supposed to present this paper. We figured out enough that we can get you back there, but we can only do it once because the energy requirement is… and we think her paper can solve that. So, we want you to go back, make friends with her, get the paper and bring it back to us.” So, she goes back, meets Sara Baxter Clarke, they fall in love because it turns out that Sara Baxter Clarke was gay and had a beard as a boyfriend. Then they decide not to send the paper back and it gets very convoluted as they plan the accident that everybody knows is what killed her, but it doesn’t and it is, yeah. It was so much fun to write, and it was my first story. So, it’s really exciting. And it does harken back to a lot of the themes of Passing Strange. Of, really it was not ok to get caught being gay in the 40s, or the 50s, or the 60s, or, depending on where you lived, the 70s, 80s, or 90s. 

H: Uh huh. Yeah. So, I know that a lot of your books recently have been more aimed at the YA audience. Have you ever done queer characters for YA or are the two streams not really meeting?

E: I’ve got two novels that came out ten years ago that are middle grade and I just finished one… Some of the characters overlap, so if you want to find gay themes in the middle grade books, they’re there. If you don’t, they don’t jump out at you. The only novels I have ever written are middle grade novels for kids. They’re also historical fiction. Other than time… well, there’s usually women characters… Ok, there’s women characters in all of my short fiction. There are a lot of gay characters, but I don’t make a big deal out of it because I don’t feel that’s my job. It’s like, there are two women, they’re lovers, and this is what happens. So, Passing Strange was the first time since “Time Gypsy” that I think I’ve written a long piece that was overtly, overtly queer. And it’s not… I mean, eventually some grad student is going to put everything I’ve written together and find themes and that will amuse me, but they’re not separate, I don’t write under a different name, they’re just sort of out in the suburbs versus the stories that take place in the city.

H: Uh huh. So, would you like to let our listeners know where they could find information about your books online or do you have social media they could follow if they wanted?

E: If you’re on Twitter, I am @eklages, on Facebook, I think I’m just Ellen Klages. Passing Strange came out from Tor.com in January of 2017, you know, this is December, it’s the end of the year and a lot of very, very good things have come out this year. But you can go to Tor.com, your local, any bookstore that carries a decent collection of science fiction and fantasy, would either have it or be able to order it. You can go to the usual online places and, if you want a signed copy, contact Borderlands books in San Francisco, because they’re 10 minutes from my house and they will call me, and I will drive down and sign copies and then they will mail them off to you.

H: Yeah, I’ll put all these details in the show notes to make it easy for people. So, thank you so much for sharing your time with us here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.

E: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Show Notes

A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.

In this episode we talk about:

• The long incubation for the ideas that became Passing Strange
• Lesbian culture in mid-century San Francisco and the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island
• The hidden interconnectedness of Ellen’s novels
• The love of historic objects and texts
• Historical fiction as “time travel” for the reader
• Books mentioned
  • Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
  • “Caligo Lane” by Ellen Klages (originally published in Subterranean Online, Winter 2014, available in the collection Wicked Wonders Tachyon Publications, 2017)
  • “Hey Presto” by Ellen Klages (originally published in the anthology Fearsome Magics ed. by Jonathan Strahan, 2014, available in the collection Wicked Wonders Tachyon Publicaitons, 2017)
  • The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
  • “Time Gypsy” by Ellen Klages (originally published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (Overlook Press, 1999), also available in the collection Portable Childhoods (Tachyon Publications, 2007))

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Ellen Klages Online

• Website: Ellen Klages
• Twitter: @eklages
• Facebook: Ellen Klages

My friend Karen periodically holds a "backyard writing retreat" for a small circle of friends. The idea is to set aside the day for actual writing, not chit-chat (though we do some of that) or web surfing (though that happens too) or getting caught up on ancillary tasks (yup, check). So for this past Sunday's writing retreat, I committed to actually starting the revisions on Floodtide, which has been "fermenting" in messy first draft since...oh my goodness, since before last year's Worldcon? I'd have to check.

What do I mean by "messy"? In addition to a number of significant changes to specific plot points based on discussions as I wrote, there are still a lot of placeholders (**insert the conversation Roz has with the housekeeper about not getting her back pay when she's fired**). There are duplications where I still have both (or more) versions of what I drafted (#1 Nan sneaks out and tells Roz how they got caught; #2 the footman who's been macking on Nan comes out and tells Roz he got her fired; #3 Roz is left completely in ignorance of how they got caught and why Nan didn't get fired alongside her until a later point in the story). There are many characters to name (Roz's aunt back in Sain-Pol to whom she was sort-of-apprenticed to learn the laundry trade and who used her connections in Rotenek to get Roz her position...and for that matter I have no idea yet what Roz's surname is, and the housekeeper needs a different name because it's too similar to an existing character in the sereis). And all that is just in the first scene.

Sunday I started by making an official backup file of the draft-as-is (although Scrivener and TimeCapsule both have backups--I'm just a belt-and-suspenders-and-superglue sort of person). Then I skimmed through the entire file deleting or moving around editorial notes as necessary, stripping out the timeline framework from where it overlapped with Mother of Souls, deleting the files for scenes that never got any content, highlighting sections that I know for certain need to be entirely changed, moving some scenes around that I hadn't been sure where to place when I wrote them, and adding some reminders for things I glossed over in the first draft (e.g., Liv has a service dog that needs to be included in the casual description a lot more, not just when it's doing something plot-relevant).

Currently the file is 89,000 words. That's significantly shorter than any of the previous books (which all ended close to 150,000 words) but may actually be more than I end up with, if I'm ruthless. Floodtide is meant to be different in structure: more of a YA story, single point of view, and able to be read independently of the existing series. So the wordcount needed to follow multiple primary points of view, or to bring the reader up to speed on What Has Gone Before aren't going to drive the length (as much).

I've already made some changes to the original plan in support of that. For example, originally I had included Anna Monterrez as part of the "group of teenagers" that I wanted to focus the story on, but Anna really isn't part of that age cohort, as the overall series has evolved. She's one of the adults, for all practical purposes. And every time I got to a point in the outline where originally I thought she'd be intersecting the plot of Floodtide, it just didn't work. There was no plot-based reason for her to be present in Roz's life, and setting up who she was and what she was doing there would have taken the plot off sideways. She'll get mentioned tangentially in a couple of places, but she isn't on stage. (So some of the key things that are going on in Anna's life during this period are going to go into a shorter story focused entirely on her that primarily parallels the time-frame of Mistress of Shadows.)

One of the main things I need to clearly set up, in terms of structure, is exploding any sort of reader expectations that Floodtide is a "romance" in structure. And that's going to be hard, because my publisher has this notion that books need to be framed as romances to get people to read them. Never mind the grief I've gotten from readers who went into the books expecting the primary, dominant plot to be a HEA romance and deciding they were badly written books because that wasn't what they got.

Roz starts off being unwillingly separated from her girlfriend. Being a pragmatic (and red-blooded) sort, she gets over it and falls in love again...with near-disastrous consequences. She runs into her original girlfriend once more and they definitely do not get back together. She has a lot of interactions with another character that might end up romantic if this were a romance novel, but it never goes in that direction. And the primary emotional relationship she develops over the course of the book is not (currently) romantic and teaches her some important things about the breadth of possible relationships one can have in one's life and how not everything needs to be about pants-feelings. At the end of the book, Roz has a number of very strong bonds with people of rather different types, but none of them are (currently) erotic and she's ok with that for the moment. How do I set readers up to see that as a happy ending?

That's what I mean by "messy", from the trivial to the over-arching.

What's my plan? I'd thought that I needed to go through and layer in lots of editing notes so I wouldn't lose track of things, but as I skimmed though the file, I could feel the future structure coalescing under the current surface. I think I can just wing it as far as that goes. So my plan is to start from the very beginning and simply rewrite from start to finish. Not "rewrite" in the sense of opening a new file, but going through each and every bit of text and treating it all as mutable. The clay is there, but I'm not quite ready to fire up the wheel. I think this is still the stage of wedging and kneading. But I can see the shape of the pot already.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 39 (previously 19a) - On the Shelf for February 2018 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/02/03 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2018.

By the time you listen to this, the submissions for the podcast’s fiction project will be closed and I’ll be in the middle of the difficult task of sorting out which stories I want to buy. But at the time I’m recording, that deadline is still in the future and I have no idea what I have yet to receive. So you’ll have to wait for next month’s On the Shelf episode to find out what the results are.

I had a bit of a “duh” moment recently and realized that this monthly roundup should include mention of new releases of lesbian historical fiction. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier, since I’ve had a couple of author guests that I scheduled around new releases. But my excuse is that I haven’t been doing the weekly format very long and I’m still settling in. So here’s the deal: each month I’ll tell you about what’s new in the world of lesbian historical fiction that I know about. And that’s the catch. I can only talk about it if I know about it. I’ll be monitoring the websites of the lesbian publishing houses that I know have published historicals in the past. And I’ll keep my eyes peeled for announcements online. And I’ll put out a regular reminder on twitter and facebook asking people to send me information. But I can’t guarantee I’ll catch everything, so if you have a book or story coming out that you think my listeners would be interested in, let me know. The contact information is in the show notes. And don’t agonize too much about whether the book you’re telling me about counts as historic. Give me the information--the blurb and the description--and I’ll decide if it fits. I’ll definitely be including historic fantasy and alternate history and may include stories with settings inspired by historic cultures even if they aren’t technically set in real-world history.

While I’m doing general announcements, I’d like to give a shout-out to the Lesbian Book Bingo reading challenge that Jae is organizing.  This is a year-long fun challenge to read books fitting 24 specific themes (plus one free square) on a bingo card, with a chance for prizes for those who complete rows and squares and who participate in the book recommendations on her blog. One of the squares is for historical fiction, but a lot of them have to do with particular types of characters and plots, so you could fit a lot of historic titles in if you’re clever. I don’t know if I’ll manage to get any bingos, but I’ll be cheerleading for the challenge throughout the year. And as a special bonus, I’m writing a mini-story for each of the categories, all tied loosely together in a historic setting. Check my blog every two weeks for a new installment.

The New “History is Gay” Podcast

A few weeks ago, I saw on Twitter a notification for a brand new queer history podcast, and I have invited the proprietors of that podcast on to tell my listeners about it.

Gretchen: Yay, thank you so much for having us!

Leigh: Yeah, thank you so much!

Gretchen: This is exciting!

Heather: So tell my listeners who you are, and and what the name of your show is.

Leigh: I am Leigh.

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen.

Leigh: And our podcast that just launched is called “History is Gay.”

Gretchen : Where we are examining the underappreciated and overlooked queer ladies, gents, and gentle enbies that have always been there in the unexplored corners of history. ‘Cause history’s not as straight as you think, and we want to shed light on that.

Heather: And it looks like we have a fairly similar intent in the program except that you cover a much wider spectrum of the queer world.

Leigh: We were really fascinated by the fact that we have such a wide breadth of experiences and intersections in our community and a lot of other communities, and it’s sad that there isn’t a central place that we can go to talk about these things or find information. It’s a lot of digging around and piecing things together and creating kind of a global timeline and global community. And so we kind of want to look at all the different experiences we can and show people ways to find those commonalities and that comfort in knowing that what they experiences is not new.

Heather: Yes, it’s the “We are everywhen” phenomenon.

Gretchen: Yes!

Leigh: Ooh, I like that!

Gretchen: I like that too! Yeah, exactly. Like a huge part of why I first wanted to do this podcast, and led to a conversation between Leigh and I, was I had an interaction on Twitter where someone was going off on, like, you know, “All of these gender identities are all new,” and you know blah, blah, blah, whatever noise. And I said, like, “No, like, we’ve always existed. We’ve always been here. And it was at that moment that I realized that most people don’t know that. That there are a lot of people and--even within our own community--who were never told that Egypt had three genders, or--

Leigh: --that people you’ve heard stories about, and read their entire repertoire of work. Suddenly you’re like, “Wait, hold on. That person carried on a relationship with a person of the same gender for twenty years? And no one in school taught me this? No one anywhere, no book that I ever read said anything about this?”

Gretchen: Right.

Leigh: I was looking through one of our texts last night and--just flipping through the pages--and was like, “Wait! What?”

Heather: And I know that there has been an explosion of academic research in the field of history of sexuality in the last twenty years or so, but so little of it has trickled out to the general public.

Gretchen: Mm hm, exactly. And that’s really what we want to do, is like, we have the time and the energy and the interest and the training to look through all of these sources and find them all and compile them and then share them with people. And if we can make people happy, and help people understand that there’s a tradition, there’s a story that we can all connect to that tells us who we are, and we can situate ourselves in history, and in ourselves and our identity. Like that’s what we want to do.

Leigh: We also really want to make it accessible. The great thing about the internet and about podcasts and being able to make content like this is that everyone has a really easy time getting access to it, and these long, breadthy discussions aren’t locked up in an ivory tower of academia any more.

Heather: So, tell the listeners where they can find your podcast. I know you’re on iTunes because that’s where I’m subscribing. And what other places?

Leigh: We’re pretty much anywhere you can find podcasts. We’re on iTunes, Stitcher, any of the other podcatcher apps. We have an email: historyisgaypodcast@gmail.com. And we also have lots of different social media that Gretchen can tell you about.

Gretchen: Yeah, we are on Twitter as @HistoryisGayPod, on Tumblr as historyisgaypodcast, and you can always go to our website, which is historyisgaypodcast.com. And you can always listen there. Plus that’s where we have our awesome show notes and we’ll often have, like, images and poems and things that we can’t always have time to talk about. And we put all of that in our show notes on our website.

Heather: And speaking of show notes, I will put all of these links in my show notes so people can find you easily. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your show with us.

Both: Oh, thank you for having us!

Gretchen: We’ll have to have you on our podcast to talk about yours.

Heather: That would be fabulous!

Publications on the Blog

In January, the blog finished up covering the articles in the collection The Lesbian Premodern, which concluded with a series of considerations on the place of lesbian history in academia, and various approaches to how to study and write about it. This was followed by three articles from a collection centered around linguistics. Randy Connor looks at language used for homosexuals in 16th century France. Marie-Jo Bonnet tries to connect shifts in the terminology used for homosexual women in French with changes in social attitudes toward them. And Diane Watt looks at the phrase “clipping and kissing” (that is to say, hugging and kissing), used in a 16th century English translation of the story of Yde and Olive, and lays out the social context of whether and when these terms indicated sexual activity.

After those articles, I move on to a couple of publications about 19th century American actress Charlotte Cushman, who was famous for playing male roles on stage to the swooning delight of female fans, and who was the center of a colony of artistic woman in Rome, including several of Cushman’s lovers and various other female couples. This is one of those occasions where I’m coordinating the blog with the podcast essay, because at the end of February I’ll be doing a program on Cushman and her circle. I’ve come to the conclusion that we really really need a tv mini-series on Cushman and her social circle. So if you have any connections in Hollywood, see who you can poke to get the idea circulating!

Author Guest

This month’s author guest will be Ellen Klages. Ellen is known for stories that skim lightly across the fantastic and follow fascinating people caught up in unexpected events. She’s written about everything from the Manhattan Project, to women’s baseball leagues, to swamp monsters in Florida, and the focus of our interview, her 2017 novella Passing Strange, set in San Francisco at the time of the World’s Fair on Treasure Island during World War II. Listen to the interview to find out more about her stories.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

So what’s new in lesbian historical fiction that’s coming out in February?

There’s an anthology of queer young-adult historical stories coming out this month titled All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages, edited by Saundra Mitchell and published by Harlequin Teen. This covers a whole range of queer identities. The blurb reads: “Seventeen of the best young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens. From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, forbidden love in a sixteenth-century Spanish convent or an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten.” Kirkus Reviews notes that the contents focus heavily on the 20th century and the United States, although the casts are ethnically diverse. It’s hard to tell from the table of contents how many of the stories involve girls who like girls, but I see names like Tessa Gratton, Malinda Lo, and Dahlia Adler who might be good bets.

I’ve been hearing for a while about a blog titled The Comfortable Courtesan that presented the fictional memoirs of a Regency-era courtesan, whose interests are bisexual and whose social circle includes lesbian and gay figures. The blog is now being published in several volumes as The Comfortable Courtesan: Being Memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart (that has been a Lady of the Town these several years), by L. A. Hall, published by Sleepy Wombatt Press. Volume 1 is already out, and volumes 2 and 3 will be released shortly, or perhaps may be out already by the time you hear this. The book has a witty tone that matches the historic setting and looks to be a delightful read if you’re ok with a fairly pansexual approach to relationships.

I can’t believe I forgot about this next story and had to come back and splice this in! There will be a new Alpennia story coming out in the anthology Lace and Blade 4 edited by Deborah J. Ross. Set during the Napoleonic occupation of Alpennia, this is one of several planned stories about the early life of Jeanne Vicomtesse de Cherdillac. “In The Mystic Marriage, Vicomtesse Jeanne de Cherdillac tells another character, ‘I have loved—truly loved—only four women. One of them is dead. One never found the courage to say either yes or no. You were the third.’ When I wrote those words, I knew relatively little about those first two women, but I had the first inkling that Jeanne might have some interesting stories to tell. This is not the story of either that first or second love, but of the time between them when grief and regret had not yet been replaced by archness and a cultivated sophistication.” Lace and Blade offers a bouquet of sensual, romantic, action-filled stories.

There are works that are hard to classify as either being historical or not historical. I figure I’ll have three categories of publications that I include in my forthcoming books. The first will be strictly historical works. The second will be historical fantasy; stories that are set in a particular time and place in history but have fantastic elements of some sort. This would include stories with time-travel and alternate histories as well as stories with magical elements and that sort of thing. The third group would be what I call historically inspired fantasy. This includes stories that are clearly not anchored to our world, but where the world-building has drawn on elements of historic cultures. The last two works I want to mention this month fall in this category.

First is the ongoing serial Tremontaine, based on the Riverside novels by Ellen Kushner and written by a whole team of authors, with episodes coming out weekly during each run from Serial Box Publications. Riverside is both clearly based on a vaguely 18th century-ish Western Europe, and very clearly not a real-world historical setting. The serial is packed full of queer characters, with the majority of the female point of view characters having same sex relationships at some point (generally with each other). The story is packed with intrigues, politics, romantic adventures, and a great deal of sex of all types. The current season has just concluded, but you can still get all three seasons, either in text or audio format. I really enjoy listing to the audio version. Each episode covers one day’s commute listening very nicely!

Another historically inspired fantasy coming out this month is the second book in G. L. Roberts young adult “Shieldmaiden” series, title Jewel of Fire, published by Bella Books. The world of the setting draws on medieval European cultures of the British Isles and Scadinavia, but stitched together in new ways and with a splash of magic, as you might be able to tell from the blurb, which reads, “In the highlands of Alban near the waters of the Inbhir Nis, Lady Athebryn waits for her dragon to bring word of the enemy across the sea. At her side is her beloved Princess Thalynder. Once handmaiden to the Princess, Lady Athebryn now stands ready to lead the hastily gathered army of clanns and kingdoms to battle against the marauding Vík Ingr. If they are successful, Lady Athebryn will win the hearts and minds of all, uniting Alban under one banner. But if they fail, then all hope for a united Alban may be forever lost.”

If you know of books of interest coming out in March, or know of something I missed this month that I should come back and mention, please let me know. My contact information is in the show notes.

Ask Sappho

This month’s Ask Sappho question is another one from podcast fan Amy Herman-Pall on the Lesbian Talk Show facebook group. She asks, “I believe that your area of study and expertise is mostly European in nature, but I wonder if you know of any historical accounts of lesbians in other cultures, especially in Asia, or the Indian sub-continent?”

It’s true that my personal interests are focused primarily around Europe and the Mediterranean area. People have probably noticed that my coverage is a bit lighter even on American history. That’s just a natural consequence of the fact that I have to do the project for my own satisfaction to stay motivated. I’d always be happy to have other people contribute entries for publications on cultures they’re interested in.

But I have run across research on other regions of the world in the course of my work and I can give pointers to a few useful starting places. One thing to keep in mind when straying outside Western culture is that many of the organizing concepts of the study of homosexuality in history are very specific to Western culture and revolve around assumptions and interpretations that don’t necessarily make sense in other cultural contexts. So often the best and most reliable work in the field is being done, not by people who are looking for practices and lives that resemble those of queer people in Western culture, but those who are working within the dynamics of those cultures to understand varieties of sexuality and gender within their own cultural context. For example, although I’ve run across a few articles that discuss historic same-sex relations in sub-Saharan African cultures, I hesitate to recommend the ones I’ve seen as I have concerns about some of the racist and colonialist underpinnings in them that even I can identify. And this is another concern I have: my ability to read and summarize critically for cultures and topics outside my own field of knowledge. So I do my best to include non-Western cultures when I have confidence in the sources I’ve found, but I’m more cautious outside my expertise.

With that in mind, I have to say that one source I don’t recommend--which is a shame because it’s very ambitious in its coverage--is Leila Rupp’s Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women. Although she tries to tackle the entire history of the world, from the Ice Age to the present day, and covering every continent, her discussions feel very Western-centric and she has a habit of conflating modern traditional cultures with historic practices in a way that makes me very suspicious and uneasy. To some extent, the enormous scope of the work means that no particular culture can be covered in a nuanced fashion, but there are flaws even beyond that (which I go into in more detail in my blog entry on the book).

One region of the world that I have some excellant sources on is the Arabic-speaking and Islamic-influenced cultures around the Mediterranean Sea. And this is largely due to the excellent work of two specific academics. Sahar Amer has written some extensive comparative studies of medieval Arabic and French attitudes towards love between women, especially as depicted in heroic literature in her book Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. She has a number of other publications drawing on the same research. In the course of this work, she provides a detailed background of medieval attitudes towards woman and sex in the Arabic-speaking world.

The second writer that I was delighted to find working in this area is Samar Habib, who has put together something of an exhaustive catalog of pre-modern Arabic writings on love between women in her book Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality: 850-1780 A.D. In addition to the catalog of references to love and sex between women in historic Arabic literature, with a discussion on the historic, literary, social, and religious context of the material, she also provides an insider’s analysis of the problem of studying homosexuality in Islamic cultures when done from a European framework.

I have a couple of good insider sources on the Indian sub-continent. The two articles that I’ve covered in the project at this point are both by Ruth Vanita, who discusses lesbian-like themes in historic Indian literature and religious traditions. Vanita seems to be a major figure in this field because my “to be read” list for the project includes several other works and collections she was involved in, including Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History, and co-editing Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature with Saleem Kidwai. Let me pause a moment to order those. [pause] OK, I’m back.

Based on a few scraps I’ve seen, I’m fairly certain that there is interesting history to be uncovered from Chinese history--and of course many other cultures where I haven’t even found scraps yet--but I haven’t yet found a good entry point. One of the things about academic literature is that once you’ve found one good source, you can follow the trail of breadcrumbs in their bibligraphy to find out who else is working on the same topic, and then look at their bibliographies to find more sources, and so on, and so on. That’s one of the ways I find interesting new sources to track down. But because my starting point tends to be from works focusing on Europe, the branching bibligraphy trails tend to circle around the same topics. So I appreciate getting questions that push me outside those specific circles. Thanks, Amy!

As usual, all the publications mentioned here will be linked in the show notes.

Show Notes

Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.

In this episode we talk about:

• The fiction submission window is over
• Send us your upcoming release notices about lesbian historical fiction
• Lesbian Book Bingo
  • https://jae-fiction.com/lesbian-book-bingo/
  • My Lesbian Book Bingo stories http://alpennia.com/tags/lesbian-book-bingo
• A new queer history podcast: History is Gay podcast
  • Email: historyisgaypodcast@gmail.com
  • Twitter: @HistoryisGayPod
  • Tumblr: historyisgaypodcast.tumblr.com
  • Website: https://www.historyisgaypodcast.com
• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Articles focused on linguistics
  • Books on Charlotte Cushman
• Announcing this month’s author guest, Ellen Klages
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Through the Ages ed by Saundra Mitchell
  • The Comfortable Courtesan: Being Memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart (that has been a Lady of the Town these several years) Vol 1 by L. A. Hall  (See also the author’s website https://www.clorinda.org)
  • Tremontaine - Season 3
  • SHIELDMAIDEN BOOK 2: JEWEL OF FIRE by GL Roberts (Bella Books), Feb 2018
• Ask Sappho: Amy Herman-Pall asks, “I believe that your area of study and expertise is mostly European in nature, but I wonder if you know of any historical accounts of lesbians in other cultures, especially in Asia, or the Indian sub-continent?”
  • Rupp, Leila J. 2009. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women. New York University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-8147-7726-8
  • Habib, Samar. 2009. Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality: 850-1780 A.D. Teneo Press, Youngstown. ISBN 978-1-934844-11-3
  • Amer, Sahar. 2008. Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures.University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN 978-0-8122-4087-0
  • Vanita, Ruth. 2008. Same - Sex Love in India - A Literary history. Penguin Books, New York. ISBN 978-0143102069
  • Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, editors. 2001. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0312293246

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)