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Today the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast interviews author Catherine Lundoff about her historical and historically-inspired fiction featuring women-loving-women. Catherine also writes some great science fiction and fantasy and has started a new publishing house: Queen of Swords Press. Find out more about her projects in the interview!

* * * Now, with transcript! * * *

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 14 (formerly 13b): Interview with Catherine Lundoff - transcript

(Originally aired 2017/08/12 - listen here)

(Transcript commissioned from Jen Zink @Loopdilou who is available for professional podcast transcription work. I am working on adding transcripts of the existing interview shows.)

Heather Rose Jones: Today, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project is talking to one of the talented authors who are writing queer women into historical fiction. Catherine Lundoff writes fantasy and science fiction as well as historic stories and blends of those genres. And she has an alter-ego who focuses on erotica. Welcome, Catherine.

Catherine Lundoff: Hi, Heather. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

H: I particularly wanted to talk to you about some of the fiction in your new collection, Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories, such as your take on Shakespeare’s fictional sister. But there’s another story I remember very fondly based on the operatic swordswoman Julie D’Aubigny. Why don’t we start there; how do those come out of your historic interests?

C: Well, I have a background in history. It’s one of my BAs, so it’s one of the things I studied when I was in college. And I’ve always been fascinated by historical figures. I’ve also always been fascinated by the kind of people who get written out of history. It’s been something that’s kind of been an ongoing thing. The story that you’re referring to is a story called “M. Le Maupin,” which is actually my first published story, that was part of a magical interlude in which I used to be a bookseller. I had closed up my bookstore and I was attending law school. Law school and I were not sympatico in a way that made me telekinetic and, really, I broke things with my mind. It was a very scary time. My partner at the time, now wife, suggested that I try my hand at writing a bit of fiction. So, I sat down, and I wrote that story, I sent it out the door, and it got accepted. It got accepted for a magazine that no longer exists, unfortunately, called Lesbian Short Fiction. Alicia Austin, who’s a famous fantasy [artist], was, at the time, dating the editor, and she did the front cover based on my story. Which, I gotta tell you, was the coolest thing ever.

H: Yeah, I think they were partners at the time. I remember Lesbian Short Fiction very fondly.

C: Yeah, they were.

H: They bought a story of mine and, unfortunately, it was never published when the magazine folded. We were almost magazine sisters.

C: Almost, almost. One of the things that I got really interested in was looking at how women, in general, but queer women in particular, had presented themselves, had survived, had had adventures, had gone and done things. Alexandre Dumas was the way I maintained my sanity when I was a child living with my family. I read a lot of Walter Scott, I read a lot of Howard Pyle, I read Robin Hood things, but Alexandre Dumas was the guy.

H: And none of them had enough women.

C: None of them had enough women. But Dumas had Milady and Milady, of course, does not come to a particularly good end. I don’t that’s much of a spoiler for your audience. But she’s a fascinating character and she’s actually based on a real person. There was a spy in the Caribbean who was actually doing some of the things Dumas based that character on. There are all these fascinating women who got written out of history. There are the women who were able to disguise themselves as men and go on sailing ships, some of them for years at a time. There were the women who fought in the Napoleonic armies and some of them presented as men, some of them actually came to regard themselves as being male and would be called trans at this point in time. Some of them were, in fact, straight and they were there for their lovers but then they were having such a great time, like Deborah Sampson during the American Revolution, they just stuck around. There are some fascinating things out there. One of the ways I got into discovering some of these women was a book by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, The Encyclopedia of Amazons.

H: Yes.

C: I started there and then a press that no longer exists, unfortunately, called Conari Books, did a whole series of Wild Women. There was Wild Women of the West…

H: Oh yes, I have those.

C: Wild Women of Medieval Times, or… (cross-talk)

H: They’re not very well-cited, but they’re fascinating to read.

C: No, no, but they’re very inspirational. If you’re just looking for, “Wow, I want to do this,” it’s a lot of fun to play with. And the reason I got into, you know. I’ve had a couple of other historical stories that are not in Out of this World, which is the new collection, they will be in a later collection. I’m working on another collection that will be more historical fiction.

H: Oh, good.

C: And I do some other things outside of that. I’ve been doing mysteries, and gothic horror, and a number of other things that play with that. The protagonists aren’t necessarily queer, although you could read my story, “A Splash of Crimson,” which is in an anthology called Respectable Horror that just came out a couple of months ago, as queer because she’s a governess and she’s very obsessed with her dead mistress. It’s a ghost story, but it’s got all that Du Maurier Rebecca-ish theme going on.

H: I was about to mention Du Maurier.

C: Yes. It was just part of the inspiration. One reason I started writing about Judith, Shakespeare’s presumably apocryphal sister, was that I had read Virginia Woolf’s essay, and I was looking at it again and Connie Wilkins, who is a prominent editor in the field, who also edits as Sacchi Green. She does erotica under Sacchi and she does other kinds of fiction under Connie, had asked me to come up with an alternate history story. So, I was looking at Virginia Woolf’s essay that day and it was like, “Ok, so what if this was a real person.” You know, what are some other things that could have happened to her instead of what… Woolf sets her up where she’s basically going to go to the city and because she’s a woman she’s going to fail. It’s like well, “What if she didn’t present herself as a woman?” And I’m also fascinated by Christopher…

H: I was going to say, and it’s irresistible to bring Kit Marlowe in.

C: Yes. Well, Kit Marlowe, for those who many not be as familiar with him as you are, is sort of the great gay playwright of Elizabethan England, and he was, among other things, also a spy. He’s commonly believed to have been assassinated in a tavern in Deptford as part of a connection to some of his spy work. But he was also gay, he was atheist, he ran around with Sir Walter Raleigh and some of the other members of the Elizabethan court who were subsequently disgraced because of their lack of religious beliefs, among other things. And he was a really fascinating character and I had just, I think, finished, right around the same time, I’d finished reading Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford. Which is one of those historical novels that I would probably give an internal organ I wasn’t using to have written. I mean, it’s amazing. The whole thing, he never breaks out of dialect. It’s all in Elizabethan dialect, it’s absolutely gripping. In part because you’re working so hard to read it. But it’s beautifully written, and it’s fascinating, and it brings up a lot of really interesting things about Marlowe. And I went on to read some of the other biographies and so forth afterwards, but Burgess really pulled me in and made him come alive. Once I put it together as Judith Shakespeare – Christopher Marlowe, wacky hijinks ensue! I came up with that particular story which is called “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms.” And it’s from a line that Shakespeare wrote about Marlowe’s assassination. Because the official story about Marlowe’s death was that he was killed over the reckoning, the bar bill, in this tavern in Deptford. One of the things that Shakespeare says at one point in one of the plays, I would have to check this one, which one it was, but he says in one of the plays that, “A rumor kills a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” Just a beautiful line. And if you don’t know the history behind it, it’s just kind of, “Oh, that’s interesting.” But that’s actually what he’s referring to, is Marlowe’s assassination because they were colleagues and they were probably, to some extent, friends. Of course, recent scholarship has suggested that Marlowe did, in fact, write some of the plays that are now attributed to Shakespeare. It’s all fascinating.

H: Yes.

C: But I also write Regencies. I have a story called “[Regency] Masquerade” and I’ll be doing another Regency that I’m working on now. I love Regencies. Regencies are fun.

H: Regencies are irresistible somehow.

C: That’s true.

H: There’s just, you know, it’s almost the same as fanfic where there’s this existing world to play in that you don’t have to recreate from scratch.

C: It is true. Yes. If I had to pick my absolute two favorites it would probably be Regencies and Pirates. If I could blend the two I would, but I think its going to consist… stick with Regencies and Pirates. But I’m also working on a… I’ve written one story so far and I’m looking at writing a sort of continuation, a sequel, and do it as more of a serial about a couple of women, who were real women in the Caribbean who were spies and pirates, and how they all intersected with each other. So, that’s a new thing that’s kind of bubbling away right now.

H: So, you mentioned that you have an academic background in history?

C: Mmhmm.

H: Could you tell a little more about that?

C: I have a couple… two BAs. And one of my BAs is in history and the other is in Anthropology. And the reason being that when I started college, I thought at one point I wanted to be a medievalist. And then I found out what actually went into being a medievalist and then I got over that very quickly. It’s still fascinating, it’s just not for me. I started out in history and was most of the way to my degree and I had started taking some Women’s Studies classes. And I had reached that point of wondering what exactly everybody who wasn’t a white dude was actually doing during these time periods. Oh, excuse me, a white dude or an exception, because they’re always an exception.

H: Yes, yes.

C: You know and that’s women, that’s people of color, you know, that’s people with disabilities. It’s all kinds of things, they’re always an exception. I got curious about all the exceptions, so I started taking anthropology classes. I really got into those, so I got to the point where I ended up with two BAs, one in each major, and I spent several years working as a professional archeologist. That was what I did until I went to grad school and I went to grad school in Feminist Anthropology, which is a blend of Women’s Studies and Anthropology. But history has always been kind of an ongoing hobby. And a lot of my interest in it is… I should mention my father actually was a history professor, but he died when I was very young. But I had this fabulous history teacher in High School, who had been in the Hungarian Cavalry in World War II and was a Hungarian refugee living in New York and teaching history. He was amazing! He was this great, great guy and I learned so much from him. He was the one who got me very excited about things. That was originally how I got into it. But I also always had a real fondness for historical fiction. It was a magical, magical day when I realized that Dumas had actually based a lot of his novels on real people. Once I got into that, Dr. Kari Maund has a really great book, she wrote it with another author, called The Four Musketeers, that’s a history of where Dumas drew his influences, and who he based which characters on, and how they all mesh together.

H: Yeah, she’s a major Dumas fan, I can tell.

C: Yes, yes, she is. That was a lot of where that started, but the thing about it is that, as with fanfic, at a certain point you’re like, “Well, I don’t feel like I’m a part of this story.” What would have to change so that I, as a woman, I, as a, in my case I identified as bi, but as a queer woman, how do I fit myself into this so that I’m a part of the adventure? Because even as a child, even reading stuff… I would read stuff and go, “But there’s no girls!” How come there are never any girls? And that’s usually kind of the basic point that a lot of people start with is, if they’re outside the dominant narrative, why is there nobody like me in this?

H: I think that’s one of the answers to a question that I always think is a silly interview question, which is, “So, why do you write this type of character in this type of story?” And I always think, but, but… it’s because I want to see myself there.

C: Yeah, yeah. When you look at just the sheer wealth of, just focusing for a moment on queer female characters who are villainous, dead, suddenly discover they’re straight, and on and on and on, lose their loved ones, all of the other things that go into that. To get queer women, bi-women, lesbians, trans-women, written into narratives as protagonists is a major thing. And to be able to do it with somebody who really existed, whose story is not very well known, it is… it’s a gift. I mean, it’s a wonderful opportunity to be able to celebrate at least a version of who that person might have been.

H: How do you feel that having a formal background in history has affected your fiction writing other than giving you a running head-start on the research?

C: I think it actually really does impact how I do research. I put myself through graduate school as a research assistant, hired myself out to various professors, and would run around and research things that might or might not be germane to anything I was personally interested in. But learning to go through, and learning the difference between, primary and secondary sources, learning how to evaluate what you’re reading and how it compares to other sources at the time, or other interpretations you can find, has really been very helpful. I mean, that’s how I got into a lot of it. One of the things that I read for fun is social histories and biographies. There are just some amazing things that are coming out now for, again, people who weren’t that well-known, or were well-known, but mysteriously don’t have a contemporary biography. I’m thinking of Aphra Behn, the playwright, who’s the first woman who is known to have supported herself through her writing. And she was an English-woman who lived during the Restoration. Janet Todd, who’s an English historian, has just re-released her fabulous, fabulous biography of Aphra Behn, called The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Among other things, Aphra Behn was also a spy, by contemporary standards she was probably bi-sexual. She wrote plays, she hung out with all the great rakes of the Restoration court and they had these wild times together. Just a fascinating, fascinating character. One of the points that Janet Todd brings up in this very, very large biography …. Of Aphra Behn.

H: Yes, I know, I have it.

C: Love that book… is how little is really known about her. So, you have like these signposts where she publishes something. She wrote and published a play, which eventually did get performed, called Oroonoko, which is about an African prince who’s enslaved. It was read, even at the time period, as being an early abolitionist work because she makes him a very noble character. You have a signpost for Oroonoko, and you have a signpost for when she left Surinam, but nothing about why she left Surinam or was there to begin with. And then you have The Rover and a couple other things and then she dies. But there’s like nothing about the details in between there. And one of the things I think historical fiction does is the opportunity to fill in those spaces.

H: And she did a certain amount of fictionalizing of her own life as well, is what I got the impression. So, that muddies the waters even more. Muddy waters are a great place to find treasures though.

C: It is true.

H: So, what projects that you have coming up would like to tell us about?

C: Well, one of the things that I’m doing right now is, in January, I launched my own small press. This has been in the planning stages for a couple of years now. It’s called Queen of Swords Press and, eventually, what I want to do is to have one of the imprints focus on historical fiction with fantastical elements. So, alternate histories, what’s known as manner-punk, which is kind of like, Regency fantasies, but it’s not strictly Regencies, it kind of spills over into other time-periods. All the different permutations of that… Time travel… There’s a whole subset of fantasy literature that has no explicit fantastical elements but it’s very historical. I’m thinking of things like Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and some of Delia Sherman’s work, and some other authors. I love that stuff. That stuff’s really fun. Your Alpennia series is another example, Ruritanian romances, so there’s all these things that are out there, that really engage me. Ultimately, I want to have an imprint that focuses on that. There’s going to be other imprints as well. Right now, we’re still in the launch phase, so I’m going through my own back-list and I’m re-releasing things in different packaging, and different covers, with different edits, and so-forth. There will be a subset that will be LGBT science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I would like to get to a point where I’m publishing some authors that are otherwise not getting much play right now, who I think are unjustly forgotten, or don’t get quite the publicity that they really have earned with their work. I’ve got some big plans for it going forward. I think it will probably be next year before I’m even ready to start looking at other peoples’ book proposals and queries and so-forth. Right now I’m talking to somebody else who does editing and we’re talking about co-editing a project. We’ll probably be doing that at the beginning of next year. That’s kind of the on-going big thing. With that, I’ve just re-released my lesbian menopausal werewolf novel, Silver Moon. Which is a coming-out novel. It ended up, when it came out originally in 2012, it finalled for both the Goldie Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Bisexual Book Awards in Science Fiction and Fantasy, which I found kind of interesting. It was nice to know that it spoke to a broad audience. I’m working on a sequel for that… The long-promised sequel that people occasionally send me peevish emails about. I’m working on it.

H: In addition, how can people contact you or follow you on social media?

C: I am out on twitter as @CLundoff, Queen of Swords also has its own twitter feed, and then Emily Byrne has her own twitter feed. All of which you can pretty much find off my twitter feed. I have a Facebook author page, I’m also out on Facebook. Presumably, if one doesn’t want the political rants, then I have a Facebook author page where it’s just about books. Queen of Swords also has its own Facebook page and its own website. I do update all of the things that I am personally doing in my various personas in the Queen of Swords Press Newsletter, which is free, and you can sign up for it on the Queen of Swords website, which is, oddly enough, www.queenofswordspress.com.

H: Thank you so much, Catherine, for sharing your time with the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.

C: Thank you, this has been a lot of fun.

Show Notes

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

In this episode we talk about:

• How Alexandre Dumas and quitting law school started Catherine’s writing career
• Sources of historic inspiration
• Her favorite genres
• Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare’s fictional sister
• Her aspiration to blend Regency romance and pirates
• Catherine’s academic background in history and feminist anthropology
• Queen of Swords Press and other projects
• Plans for publishing historical fiction with fantastic elements under Queen of Swords Press
• Books mentioned
  • Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories by Catherine Lundoff.
  • "M. Le Maupin" in Lesbian Short Fiction, edited by Jinx Beers. Vol 3, Fall, 1997. Tantra Publications.
  • The Encyclopedia of Amazons by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
  • Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons, and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era by Autumn Stephens
  • “A Splash of Crimson” by Catherine Lundoff in Respectable Horror, ed. Ian Burdon. Fox Spirit Books, 2017.
  • “Shakespeare’s Sister” in A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. 1929.
  • A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess. 1995.
  • “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms” by Catherine Lundoff (in Out of This World)
  • "Regency Masquerade" by Catherine Lundoff, reprinted in Kissed By Venus, May, 2008. Originally published in the Harrington Park Lesbian Fiction Quarterly. Vol. 3 (1), Alice Street Editions, 2002. (Historical Romance). (Mentioned in the interview as “Bath Masquerade”)
  • The Four Musketeers: The True Story of D'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis & Athos by Kari Maund and Phil Nanson. Tempus, 2005.
  • Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Janet Todd. Fentum Press, 2017. (reprint of the 1997 edition The Secret Life of Aphra Behn)
  • Silver Moon by Catherine Lundoff

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 Catherine Lundoff Online

• Website: Queen of Swords Press, Catherine’s newsletter, and the History of LGBTQ Speculative Fiction column “Out of the Past”
• Twitter: @clundoff
• Twitter - Queen of Swords Press: @qospress
• Twitter - Emily L. Byrne (pen name for erotica): @emilylbyrne
• Facebook: Catherine Lundoff
• Facebook: Queen of Swords Press
• Facebook: Emily L. Byrne

I don't seem to have taken any pictures yesterday -- need to remember to do that today. The convention officially opened, though I had something else opposite the opening ceremonies so I can't report on them. There is evidently a certain amount of "victims of their own success" going on with much higher at-con membership sales than expected, so the popular events and panels are jam packed. So maybe I wouldn't have gotten in to the opening ceremonies anyway. The main "large panel" space has four breakout rooms, and originally the largest panels were going to be in a the combined A/B section, but for the one thing I attended there -- the Tea & Jeopardy podcast live interview with George R R Martin -- they'd opened up the entire A/B/C/D combined space. (Back before the convention, the podcast had arranged for podcast Patreon supporters to sign up for special reserved seating, which I did, but when I got there it was clear that any plans of that sort had gone out the window. Or at least none of the crowd control folks knew anything about it.) The convention has put out announcements that they're scrambling to arrange for more function space with the convention center, and they've had to close down one-day memberships. I've heard bits of grumbling about basically not being able to attend anything back-to-back both because of traffic flow issues and the need to queue up well in advance to get into anything. It will be interesting to see if things settle out or escalate.

I didn't have any programming yesterday, and no must-do events other than the initial File770 social meetup and the Escape Artists meet-up (Escape Artists runs a series of fiction podcasts, including Podcastle.org which has bought two of my "Merchinogi" short stories.) The layout of the convention center is great for sitting down in one of the cafe areas and watching people go by (or wandering by people hanging out in the cafe areas), which is how I immediately ran into Irina Rempt (also on my list to visit after the con) and her friend Eleanor, then later once again bumped into Praisegod Barebones & The-Girl-from-Ankyra (with whom I'd had coffee the day before) at which we exchanged gifts (I brought a stack of chapbooks of "The Mazarinette and the Musketeer" for gifts), and others who are slipping my mind. Briefly bumped into Kari Sperring (whose schedule didn't work out for an after-con visit) and dropped by the Accessibility Point to wave hi to a couple friends who were staffing it.

As noted, I did got to the Tea & Jeopardy live recording, which worked very well as a stage presentation (including the singing chickens...who were simply too shy to come out from behind the curtain). Good audience participation schtick too. Then I went to a panel on "The Medieval Mind and Fantasy Literature" looking at contrasts between actual medieval history and culture, and the version that tends to show up in fantasy. (Generally good, though marred slightly by one of the panelists have a problem with taking 100 words to present a 5-word thought.)

In the mean time, thanks to the wonders of social media, I'd responded to a dinner-fishing post from Catherine Lundoff and her wife Jana with a suggestion to merge in my existing dinner plans with Sarah Goslee and husband Thorvaldr (I'm going to mix names from different spheres based on what I can remember most easily), to which Catherine had added Paul Weimer, Charlie Stross, and oh-crap-I'm-blanking-on-Charlie's-partner's-name-sorry! Dietary specifications landed us in a tiny vegan Vietnamese place where our moderate-sized party took up half the tables. Lovely conversation that wasn't all politics (though politics featured significantly), nor all about writing (though writing featured significantly), with most of us continuing on to a brew pub that it turns out was just a block away from my hotel.

This morning's hotel breakfast landed me with a group I'd seen yesterday, where I valiantly struggled to hold up my end of a discussion of current SFF television and movies. And now, in addition to writing this up, I'm reviewing my notes for my morning panel on historic fantasy (for which the moderator has sent out a somewhat over-structured outline for the discussion, but I'm sure it will go fine). Other than that, the fixed items on my schedule are three more social meet-ups (two of which conflict, so I may have to triage, since one is at the convention center and the other downtown for a loose dinner group). And beyond that, whatever programming I can squeeze myself into. See you on the flip side!

This will be an irregular chronicle of My Summer Vacation, beginning in Helsinki, Finland. Seeing all sorts of online friends reporting late planes and missed connections, I have to count myself lucky at getting a non-stop flight (though we were delayed an hour taking off, so good thing I didn't have a connection to miss). I spotted several other Worldcon-bound fans in the waiting room for my flight, in some cases due to strategic use of the "Helsinki 2017" bright blue t-shirts, but in some cases because it was someone I actually knew (waves at David Peterson). The flight was wonderfully non-full, and far more comfortable than economy class typically is. (I swear that the seats reclined farther than usual, but this may be an illusion because they certainly weren't any farther apart than usual.) By a judicious use of half a sleeping pill and my audiobooks, I managed as much sleep as I normally do, which meant I woke up just about when they were serving breakfast, a couple hours out from landing.

Of course, landing was at 4pm local time. It's possible I would have done better to get less sleep on the plane and been more tired last night, but I'm not going to complain. I navigated the airport, customs, and catching the train into the city as if I knew what I were doing. The one glitch so far is that my planned roommate (Liz Bourke) called in sick, having come down with something at the conference on Byzantium in SF last week. (The tweets coming out of that conference made me a bit envious of those who attended, but one can't do everything.) I'm a bit sad, because I like using room sharing at cons as a way to get to know people I might not have spent time with before. It's always awkward offering up room space for those in last minute need because of issues around being choosy.

Anyway, after checking in at the Hotel Arthur, I went out for a long walk to get acquainted with the downtown, find something to eat (a light smoked salmon sandwith at the Kappeli cafe in the esplanade park), and generally get in enough physical activity to reset my body a little. It was one of those times where it would have been nice to bump into other fans and do some socializing, but I wasn't up to figuring out how I would manage that. Sleep was decent enough that I think I'm well on track to get through the jet lag.

The hotel has a complimentary breakfast buffet with some interesting (and occasionally cryptic) choices. I mostly settled on muesli with yogurt-like-substance and fresh mixed berries. Then took in a walk through the botanic gardens which back up on the hotel. I have a 10:30 date to meet some online friends for coffee, and after that I'll improvise. Maybe even take some time to put together notes for the panels I'm on, which I haven't had the brainspace to do yet.

Starting this month, the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast is expanding from monthly to weekly! Originally I was hesitant to try an expanded schedule because I didn't think I could produce enough new material to match that demand. The key was trying some new episode types. And it all ties in with promoting the general idea of lesbian historical fiction. Basically, I'll be adding author interviews, and people talking about their favorite lesbian historical fiction. And the first episode of every month (like this one) will be a hodge-podge I'm calling "On the Shelf", talking about the publications that I'm covering on the blog, announcing who the month's author guest will be, and having a listener Q&A and feedback segment I'm calling "Ask Sappho". This month's question asks for an overview of the legal status of lesbianism across the centuries.

Has the podcast only been going for a year? There were twelve numbered episodes under the monthly schedule, not including the cross-over October special episode I did with Susie Carr. I've learned a lot about recording and editing, and am beginning to get the hang of recording interviews via Skype. (Now I want to pick the brains of all the multi-person shows I listen to for more tips.)

At this point, I still have the freedom of doing pretty much any sort of show I want, because I don't get much feedback on what people would like to hear. (About the only solid piece of criticism that's been passed on is that I talk too fast! I'm working on it, believe me. Hey, did you know there's an editing effect in Audacity that will decrease the speed of your recording without affecting pitch? Ask me how I know.) But with the expanded format, I need more listener feedback. What sort of random questions would you like me to talk about in the "Ask Sappho" segment? Is there an author you'd like me to try to interview? (No promises, but suggestions are welcome.) Is there a topic you'd like to see in the long-form episodes? I keep a list of prompts to inspire me.

Keep in mind that "free" entertainment online still needs your support if it's going to continue. At the very least, leaving ratings and reviews on your podcast site of choice helps bump the show up in visibility. And if you especially like my history series, please say so, in your reviews or directly to the Lesbian Talk Show management. As in everything I do, my work is about 97 degrees out of sync with the field I'm operating in, so it's important to let people know that you like my work in particular, not just the show as a whole.

Now with added transcript!

* * *

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 13 (formerly "13a" - On the Shelf August 2017  - transcript

(Originally aired 2017/08/05 - listen here)

Introducing new format

Welcome to the new, expanded schedule and format for the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast! Starting this month, the podcast will air weekly on Saturdays, with a rotating series of features. But don’t worry, the historic essays that have been the heart of the podcast up to this point will still be the main event.

The first week of every month, we’ll start with an episode I’m calling “On the Shelf”. It includes a round-up of what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog has been covering recently, as well as what publications we’re planning to cover in the near future, plus a brief sketch of what you can expect from the podcast for the rest of the month. And I’m adding a feature I call “ask Sappho” for reader questions and feedback. So start thinking about the questions about lesbian history you’ve always wanted to ask.

The second week we’ll have an interview with an author who writes historically based fiction featuring lesbians or bi women. This can include historic fantasy as long as it’s rooted in an actual historic period. The same author is invited back in the third week to provide an appreciation of one or more historic stories by other authors that they’ve particularly enjoyed.

Then the fourth week is our usual in-depth historic essay. And if there’s a fifth Saturday in the month, we’ll have some sort of special feature.

Are you ready for the August On the Shelf episode?

On the Blog

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog has spent July doing a feature on Catalina de Erauso, a 17th century Basque woman who ran away from the convent and lived as a man to go adventuring in the Spanish colonies of the New World. Last week’s podcast provided a summary of her life and excerpts from her memoirs.

The blog covered an English translation of those memoirs by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto, a study by historian Sherry Velasco of how Catalina has been turned into a fictional character in popular media, starting during her own lifetime and continuing up through the present day. Her story has been featured in plays and novels, in sensational news tabloids, and in the twenties century in several movies and graphic novels.

Sherry Velasco is also the author of the book what fills out the rest of July and will continue on through August. This one is titled Lesbians in Early Modern Spain and looks at a wide variety of types of evidence for romantic and erotic relationships between women in the 16th and 17th centuries. There are chapters covering medical theories, prosecution records, religious institutions, literary images, and more.

As always, the blog posts for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project can be found at Alpennia.com or follow the link in the show notes. You can read the blog on the website or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Author Guest

This month’s author interview will be with Catherine Lundoff, who writes a wide variety of queer science fiction, fantasy, and historical stories. She will also be our Book Appreciation guest this month.

Historic Essay

The August essay feature is a topic that may be a bit controversial. The title is: Beguines, Boston Marriages, and Bed Death - Historic Archetypes of Asexual Lesbianism. So look forward to learning more about that at the end of the month.

Ask Sappho: When was it legal and illegal to be a lesbian?

And now, let’s move on to the Ask Sappho feature. Our inaugural question comes from Sheena, our fearless leader here at the Lesbian Talk Show. She asks: “I would like a kind of breakdown of when it became illegal and legal to be lesbian. What I am finding interesting is that it wasn't always a big taboo what changed?”

This is a complicated question. I suspect that half my answers to the Ask Sappho questions are going to start that way! You’ll often find claims in English-language works on the history of lesbians that -- unlike for male homosesexuals -- lesbianism was never technically illegal. But usually this statement is made in a context that assumes we’re talking about English history, and even in that context the answer is complicated.

In the first place, it’s kind of difficult to have a law that says it’s illegal to “be” a lesbian. All that laws that we’re going to talk about are targeting some sort of action. But the actions they focused on don’t necessarily line up with our idea of what it means to be a lesbian. What we’re dealing with is a patchwork in time and space affecting specific acts and behaviors that differed not only across cultures but depending on the personal context of the individuals involved.

For example, take the question of specific sex acts. There were a number of times and places in European history when it was illegal to engage in what was classified as “female sodomy”, that is sodomy committed between two women. Frequently, conviction called for the death penalty, although even then it might be reduced due to mitigating factors. But legal experts varied greatly over exactly what constituted “female sodomy”. Some held the opinion that it was any sort of genital stimulation engaged in between women. A more narrow view held that only penetrative sex could be called sodomy. So often a woman’s life might depend on whether she’d used a dildo or not, regardless of what else she got up to.

A comprehensive look at laws covering lesbian sex acts in pre-modern Europe can be found in an article by historian Louis Crompton titled “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791.” I’ll have a link in the show notes to my summary of this and other articles I mention.

Sex acts that didn’t fall under secular law codes might still be punished with religious penance if a women confessed to them. Since pretty much any sexual activity that wasn’t penis-in-vagina sex in the context of marriage has been considered a sin at some point, these penalties weren’t really targeting lesbians as such, so it isn’t clear whether they count under the terms of the question.

To a large extent, the legal offence wasn’t that a woman loved a woman, but that a woman was usurping the privileges of a man, including the use of a penis. For the same reason, for a woman to pass as a man in order to have a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman was considered a much greater offence than if both partners presented themselves as women. Again, the crime isn’t being a lesbian, the crime is daring to try to be a man. I’m side-stepping the very complicated question of whether it’s possible to distinguish between a woman passing as a man and a trans man in pre-modern cultures. That’s another entire topic.

Even in cultures where “female sodomy” wasn’t in the law books, the law often pursued passing women who entered into same-sex domestic partnerships or even marriages as a type of fraud. Sometimes the question of fraud was raised because the femme partner claimed not to have known their partner was a woman. But there are cases in England of passing women being tried for fraud in same-sex marriages even when their partner didn’t bring a complaint.

Regardless of sexual orientation, there have sometimes been laws against wearing clothing associated with the other gender. This is one type of law used against lesbians in 20th century America. In pre-modern times in Europe, prohibitions against cross-dressing were more often enforced by social pressure than by law, although in times and places when religious authorities carried significant legal weight, Biblical prohibitions against wearing garments belonging to the opposite sex were often cited and enforced.

Let’s take a look at some specific examples of what women might be tried for and what the results were.

In 1477 in Germany a woman named Katerina Hetzeldorfer was tried, convicted, and executed for having sex with several women, while disguised as a man, and using an artificial penis. Katerina pretty much hit the trifecta in terms of offence: cross-dressing, performing penetrative sex, and apparently concealing her biological sex from at least some of her partners.

As a strong contrast in circumstances, less than half a century later, another German woman named Greta von Mösskirch was investigated for loving other women (though it’s unclear exactly what physical acts may have been involved) and appears to have received no penalty at all, but in this case there was no cross-dressing and no artificial instrument involved.

In 1295 in Italy, a woman named Bertolina was accused in court of having -- or at least boasting of having had -- sex with women using an artificial penis. But there was a complicating factor in that she was also accused of practicing magic, both to secure lovers and for fortune-telling and other purposes. But this wasn’t a criminal case, rather it was brought before the court as a civil accusation by a personal enemy. The outcome was that she was fined, although a parallel accusation of sodomy against a man would likely have resulted in the death penalty. Note that in this case there was no gender disguise involved.

In England, the motif of same-sex marriage where one partner was presenting as a man was so well fixed as a concept that it had its own name: a “female husband”. There are any number of law cases when female husbands were unmasked, but the nature of the charge was either fraud--that is, that they were deceiving their spouse about their gender, generally with the implication of monetary gain--or somewhat more confusingly, bigamy, in the event that the female husband had previously been married to a man. I say, confusingly, because a charge of bigamy indicates that the marriage between the two women was in some way considered valid, otherwise the question of bigamy wouldn’t apply. One of my previous podcasts talked about a marriage and lawsuit of this type between two English women in the 17th century.

Jumping around considerably to 19th century America, in 1857, a woman was arrested in San Francisco for cross-dressing as a man and successfully challenged the charge on the basis that there was no law against what she had done. The political authorities decided this lack clearly needed to be remedied and passed a law in 1863 against a person appearing in a public place “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” That San Francisco law was not removed from the books until 1974.

So the big take-home lesson regarding the law and lesbianism is that there is no clear progression or dividing line between legal and illegal. The question of whether you could be charged, arrested, convicted, and punished -- including everything up to execution -- for lesbian activities depended on where, when, and who you were, and on exactly how your sexuality was being expressed. Conditions swung back and forth from harsh penalties, to benign neglect, to carefully targeted gender policing, to a head-in-the -sand attitude of not wanting to admit that women might do something like that, to a determination that the law could find something to punish if it was bound and determined to do so.

Business

If you have a question about lesbians in history, or a comment on one of these episodes, you can either e-mail me at the address in the show notes, or on my website and Alpennia.com, or you can bring it to my attention in the Lesbian Talk Show Chat Group on facebook.

I’m also interested in suggestions of authors to interview. I’m particularly interested in people working in eras earlier than the 20th century and cultures outside of America and England, and I’d love suggestions of authors of color to invite onto the show. Please send interview suggestions by e-mail.

I hope you like the show’s new format.

Show Notes

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

In this episode we talk about:

• The organization of the new weekly schedule li>
• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Stepto, Michele & Gabriel Stepto (translators). Catalina de Erauso. Lieutenant Nun -- Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8070-7073-4li>
  • Velasco, Sherry. 2000. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso. University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-78746-4
  • Velasco, Sherry. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. ISBN 978-0-8265-1750-0
• Announcing this month’s author guest, Catherine Lundoff
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • (The new and forthcoming fiction segment starts in a later month.)
• Ask Sappho: Sheena asks: “I would like a kind of breakdown of when it became illegal and legal to be lesbian. What I am finding interesting is that it wasn't always a big taboo what changed?”
• The following sources provide more information on the discussion topics:
  • Crawford, Patricia & Sara Mendelson. 1995. "Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of Two Women in 1680" in Gender and History vol 7, no 3: 362-377.
  • Crompton, Louis. 1985. “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791” in Licata, Salvatore J. & Robert P. Petersen (eds). The Gay Past: A Collection of Historical Essays. Harrington Park Press, New York. ISBN 0-918393-11-6 (Also published as Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 6, numbers 1/2, Fall/Winter 1980.)
  • Lansing, Carol. 2005. “Donna con Donna? A 1295 Inquest into Female Sodomy” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History: Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Third Series vol. II: 109-122.
  • Puff, Helmut. 2000. "Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477)" in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies: 30:1, 41-61.
  • Sears, Clare. 2015. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5758-2

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)