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Sunday, November 21, 2021 - 19:30
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 216 – How to be a Lesbian in an 18th Century Novel - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/11/21 - listen here)
This podcast has always had two parallel purposes: to talk about historic people, ideas, and literature relevant to women who loved women, in a wide variety of interpretations, but also to talk about how to adapt and use that information when writing historical fiction today. When focusing on the first purpose, I put a lot of effort into presenting the information in its own context, to make clear distinctions between modern identities and categories and how people in history understood their own lives and those of their contemporaries. But as I move more into focusing on the second purpose—on bridging the divide between the reception of history and the production of fiction—that distinction will be more blurred.
Every author will need to make their own choices about what balance of history and invention to use. What language to employ for their characters’ thoughts and experiences. How to translate their historic setting to make it appeal to their readers. I certainly have my own strong opinions on some of these issues, but my purpose here is to spark ideas and make connections—maybe connections that wouldn’t have occurred to you before. In looking at characters and themes in historic literature that can help ground a fictional character, I’m not prescribing a particular understanding of sexuality in the historic sources. And, as always, when I use the shorthand of talking about “lesbian” characters, it isn’t meant to exclude the possibility that the same sources can inspire characters that offer connection and reflection to readers who use other words. Think of these types of podcast episodes as a grocery store. I’m offering ingredients, but you can choose the recipe.
The Novel
The novel, defined as a long work of narrative fiction, typically in prose, has a somewhat disputed history, perhaps rooted as early as the beginning of the common era, depending on exact definitions. But there’s a fair amount of agreement that the novel in Europe found its stride in the 18th century, braided together from strands that included romances, philosophical explorations, thinly disguised political satires, and picaresque adventures. This century saw the rise of the “sentimental novel” which explored the inner emotional lives of its characters. In the later 18th century, we begin to see a strain of the domestic, moral novel, intended to counter the perception (that genre fiction carries to this day) that reading novels was hazardous to the morals. In addition to this coalescence of genres and motifs, the 18th century was a time when printing technology and rising popular literacy meant that recreational reading expanded outside the educated upper classes and became a popular leisure activity at all levels of society.
Women were a prime market for novels (and considered particularly susceptible to the moral hazards of reading them). But the rise of the novel also offered women two opportunities that had previously been difficult to access. Writing novels gave educated women an opportunity to earn a living in an era when middle and upper class women had few respectable opportunities for independence. And novels were a context for exploring and expressing ideas about human nature and social relations, for critiquing the status quo and imagining other possibilities, for describing and challenging some of the realities of women’s lives that lay beneath the illusion of benevolent patriarchalism.
And novels were a place where authors of all backgrounds could hint at and explore modes of sexuality and identity outside normative paradigms, whether as utopian ideals or as dangerous transgressions or as satirical entertainments. Fiction of the 18th century will not reflect the candid, self-conscious internal realities of the lives of women who loved women. And such women understood their lives differently than we would today. But it offers glimpses of women who stepped outside that normative paradigm in some direction, and from there we can begin to visualize the wide variety of experiences that we might classify as queer women in our present framework.
So today, I’d like to take a tour though some of the people and plots in 18th century fiction that hold queer resonances for us today. These characters cannot truly be identified as “lesbian” as a recognized identity within their own context—even their fictional context, and even when there are suggestions of sexual activity. But as with the episodes on Shakespeare and Jane Austen, I’m showing how existing characters and plots in historic literature can be mined to adapt historic tropes for modern audiences.
A modern author need not take these themes at face value and either embrace or reject the character types “as is.” We can add emotional complexity and sympathetic back-stories. We can strip away the misogyny and look at sexually transgressive characters from a different angle. We can step behind the curtain of respectability and share the parts of their lives that were kept private between the original covers. And we can do all that without forcing our historic characters into modern molds.
To make sense of the wealth of 18th century literature, I’ve organized this tour according to several general types of characters depicted in the works.
Libertine Lives
The first character type is the libertine—the woman who unashamedly enjoys sexual encounters with other women. Ok, maybe sometimes she’s expected to be a bit embarrassed by it, but it’s a performative embarrassment. Just a bit of plausible deniability, as it were. It’s often a pansexual libertinism, though you get examples both of a strong preference for female partners and an attitude that women are just to “make do” when men aren’t available.
The libertine character may be a sex worker or a performing artist (which, in this era, were often conflated in the popular imagination). But she might also be a member of the aristocracy. One of the motifs that developed across the 18th century was an association of aristocrats with amoral behavior and sexual excess.
To represent this theme, I’ve chosen novels of three types: satires, sexual initiations, and sex clubs.
Delarivier Manley’s satirical works The New Atalantis (1709) and Memoirs of Europe (1710), were thinly veiled socio-political satires of recognizable figures of the English court during the reign of Queen Anne. Manley’s characters are depicted somewhat coyly, but unmistakably as enjoying romantic and sexual relationships with women. In some cases, their lesbian relationships exist alongside or in active conflict with their relations with men, complete with tales of stashing one lover or the other in a closet when the rival drops by unexpectedly. But the “New Cabal” social circle described in The New Atalantis requires members to restrict themselves to same-sex relations, except by special dispensation.
Manley’s novels are concerned with women of the aristocracy, although some recognizable models fall more in the demi-monde of courtesans and actresses—though these were permeable categories in an era when eccentric noblemen sometimes married their less well born mistresses. Because the sexual element in Manley’s novels is overt (even if not necessarily explicit), they enable us to see how a homosexual relationship could hypothetically lie behind ordinary and socially-acceptable friendships. Manley pokes fun at the superficial claims of these couples to avoid the company of men to protect their virtue, or that they are simply enjoying the pleasures of friendship and good company. Indeed, if you strip away the presupposition that a sexual relationship between women is inherently immoral, the ladies of the New Cabal are simply engaging in the type of intense, sentimental platonic friendships that were considered normal and expected for women of their time and station, even those that married men.
As Manley writes of the Cabal, “lamenting the Custom of the World, that has made it convenient (nay, almost indispensable) for all Ladies once to marry [they are required] to reserve their Heart, their tender Amity for their Fair Friend, an article in this well-bred, willfully undistinguishing age which the husband seems to be rarely solicitous of.”
Manley’s Cabal are an organized social circle of women with similar sexual tastes who support each other in their relationships, enjoy socializing together, and carefully preserve the secrecy of the nature of their bonds. Gender role play is not a significant element of their identities. Although one couple is noted as sometimes wearing male disguise to go out together to seek sexual adventures among the demi-monde, the default expectation is that members of the Cabal are femme women partnered with other femme women.
It is probably not entirely random that the libertine novels most sympathetic to the idea of women preferring women over men were written by a woman, despite the satirical intent. The motif of a same-sex sexual initiation in preparation for a career as a prostitute appears in a number of male-authored works. (Though, since female authors rarely touched explicitly on sexual activity in novels, the gender distinction is less meaningful than it might appear.)
Perhaps the most famous (or notorious) of these is John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The novel follows the sexual adventures of a young woman fallen into desperation who, after a long career as a sex worker in various contexts, is reunited with her first lover and settles down to being a respectable wife and mother. The story is primarily an excuse for many and varied descriptions of sexual activity, most of it heterosexual, thinly coated with a moral about the triumph of true love.
The lesbian episode is fleeting, at the very beginning of Fanny’s career, when she is being initiated in sex by another sex worker prior to being introduced to male customers. Fanny herself is depicted as enjoying the encounter but being eager to move on to the “more solid food” of heterosexual pleasure. But Phoebe, the woman who initiates her is described as specifically enjoying the opportunity. It is, the book notes, “one of those arbitrary tastes, for which there is no accounting.” Phoebe is solidly bisexual, enjoying her work with male customers, but she takes a special joy in sex with women.
A similar scenario appears in the novel Thérèse the Philosophe by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’Argens (1749). A young woman arrives in Paris with a so-far-theoretical erotic knowledge and falls in with an older woman who promises to set her up as a sex worker and takes her to bed as a prelude to this career. As with Fanny Hill, it is the more experienced woman who is depicted as being more inclined to lesbian sex (while also using it as a recruitment technique for heterosexual sex). While a character of this type might not feel very inspiring as a protagonist, what we see here is a depiction of sex workers as having experience in pleasuring women, and in some cases preferring women outside of their professional lives.
Perhaps the ultimate libertine representation of lesbian sex originates in the novel L’Espion Anglois by Mathieu François Mairobert (1777) which seems to be the source of the motif of the Anandrine Society, a Parisian sex club for women who love women. (I did an entire podcast on this topic, if you want more details.) Within a culture of secret societies, suspect political organizations, and rising interest in social equality, the fictional Anandrine Society promoted the idea that women’s natural allies and partners were other women. Women may be recruited for membership because they catch the erotic interest of a member, but the society sees its goals as the development of those recruits on an educational, philosophical, and cultural level. The stated ideals include communal sharing of property, charity toward those less fortunate, and the cultivation of sophisticated manners and behavior.
To be sure, the novel has a tinge of disbelieving satire in describing these ideals, and later fictional representation of the Anandrine Society offer a far more raunchy and less elevated image. But in employing the idea of the Anandrine Society in worldbuilding your novel, it can be treated either as fact or as a mythic touchstone through which your characters can explore their sexuality. The simple fact that it existed as an idea tells us useful things about 18th century lesbian possibilities.
Predatory women
The libertine view of sex did its best to be relatively non-judgmental. People were sexual beings and one could indulge that nature or not as one chose. But society definitely made judgments about certain types of people and certain types of desires, and so we move on to the next general category relevant to lesbian plots: the sexual predator. The idea of “the lesbian” as a specific defining category was still in its infancy in this era, so there wasn’t really a sense that a woman was inherently predatory simply due to being erotically attracted to women. Rather, there were other intersections that brought in the predator motif, with sex being the medium through which it was expressed.
The 18th century novels I include in this category follow three general themes: power for its own sake, the lesbian as ally to a male seducer, and the “mannish” woman as predator.
The novel Juliette by the Marquis de Sade (1797) might equally well fall into the libertine category. All the characters are sexually voracious and relatively indiscriminate in their tastes. Specific sexual acts are described purely for the purpose of shock and offence. The fact that the titular character focuses her attentions on other women is almost beside the point.
There is, perhaps, more coherent motivation behind the representation in Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun) (1796). This novel is part of a long tradition of anti-Catholic literature, which often picks up the theme that all-female societies are inherently perverse and will naturally lead to lesbian relations. A young woman who is perhaps fatally naïve about sexual relations becomes the erotic plaything of the abbess who takes advantage of her position of authority.
Both of these novels depict relations that exist only for the gratification of the user, but in the second subgroup the sexual exploitation (or threat thereof) is more a tool for the purpose of furthering the interests of a male character. Within the convoluted sexual intrigues of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782), the manipulative Marchioness de Merteuil idly speculates about seducing the innocent Cecile who is the pawn at the core of her plans for revenge against a social rival. The Marchioness has no particular commitment to sapphic relationships, but is willing to use them to further her political ends.
On a somewhat cruder level, in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), while the titular heroine is valiantly resisting the advances of her male employer, she must also contend with the more subtle attentions of his housekeeper, who is described as a “lover of [her] own sex.” The housekeeper is trying to further her employer’s goal to seduce Pamela, and sees her own act of seduction as a way of wearing down Pamela’s resistance.
In both these novels, the female predator acts as an ally to a male partner, having greater social access to the victim and knowing that after one step into sexual experience, the next step will be easier.
As noted earlier, the connection between lesbian desire and masculine performance is far from a predominant theme in 18th century literature. But there are examples where a specific connection is made between an aggressively “mannish” woman and erotic interest in women. Although that connection isn’t necessarily predatory, there are two novels that depict it as such.
In the fictionalized biography, Memoirs of the Life of Count Grammont by Anthony Hamilton (1713), Mistress Hobart is in charge of the maids of honor in the Duchess of York’s household and competes with men for the romantic attention of her charges. She is depicted as inappropriately using her position and access to make advances on the young women, and is described as masculine in behavior—to the extent that she is suspected of being a man in disguise or a hermaphrodite.
In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801), the title character is torn between the friendship of two women: one a conventionally feminine woman and the other the flamboyantly mannish Mrs. Freke, who rides around the country in male clothing, incites duels, and delights in discomfiting the women she takes an erotic interest in.
With only a slight shift in point of view, both Mistress Hobart and Mrs. Freke could easily be turned into sympathetic characters. They represent an archetype that is beloved of modern historical novelists: the gender-transgressive, physically active figure who openly flirts with women in the face of social disapproval. While it’s realistic for that social disapproval to be present in the setting, that doesn’t mean the character must surrender to it.
Friends Forever
It’s the nature of 18th century novels that sex positivity isn’t really a thing. There are novels with sex and there are novels that depict positive and loving relationships, but as a general rule you don’t find novels with both. Oh, you can interpolate the sex in a lot of novels, but that’s easier to do with heterosexual relationships where you have markers like marriage and pregnancy. And as I’ve often discussed, you run into the question of what the characters would define as “sex.” But let’s take it as a given that when we look for stories with overtly positive depictions of relationships between women, it’s going to be a separate set of books than those that unambiguously include sexual relations.
With that, the next set of 18th century novels we’ll be looking at are those that show women in passionate or romantic relationships with each other. While it would generally be an anachronistic leap to describe these women as lesbians in any but the most tangential sense, they provide excellent models for developing fictional characters that are intended to be understood as being in homoerotic relationships. Not all the relationships discussed here were enduring. Not all had happy endings. But they provide historically-grounded examples of how women met, developed connections, supported each other, and negotiated their lives together.
Let’s start with some books that simply take female bonds for granted. Someday I should do an episode all about author Eliza Haywood, whose books focused on women’s lives and situations. Haywood was a prolific author with over 70 works published during her lifetime across a variety of genres. In addition to being an author, she was also a playwright, an actress, and a publisher. Her early works were often angsty dramas of love and revenge. In her middle period, her work often had a feminist flavor with her female protagonists in conflict with men. Later in her career, she seemed reconciled to treating marriage as an appropriate happy ending. But throughout her career, connections between women were a continuing theme, and she often focused on plots that offered women an alternative to the heteronormative paradigm. Let’s take a very brief look at some of the characters and motifs in Haywood’s work that are most relevant to the present topic.
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) portrays erotic attraction between women, though it is not acted on. In The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) the character of Lady Fisk goes on a cross-dressed adventure in Covent Garden that ends in picking up a (female) prostitute (but also ends in Fisk being attacked when her sex is discovered).
The British Recluse (1722) begins with a “failed heterosexuality” motif, when the two protagonists are rejected by the same man. But this results in them resolving to retire from the world together, and part of the motivation is the strong attraction they feel for each other. Eventually they are divided when one accepts a marriage offer, however the narrative itself concludes at the point when they have decided to live together, allowing the reader to imagine a different path. A similar retreat from an overt depiction of women’s lives together occurs in The City Jilt (1726) in which a jilted woman enlists her female friend’s help for revenge against her former lover. After the success of this revenge, she “gave over all Designs on the Men, publickly avowing her Aversion to that Sex” and planning to live with her female companion. Unfortunately the companion had a prior (heterosexual) commitment, leaving their time together only a “pleasurable interlude”.
In The Rash Resolve (1724) and The Tea-Table (1725) women create supportive, emotionally-connected relationships apart from marriage structures (and often in direct contrast to them). The first book involves a complex adventure of love, betrayal, abandonment, and the struggle to survive, in which the heroine is alternately betrayed and supported by the women in her life. Passion between women is introduced in both negative and positive contexts, with the betraying woman encouraging the protagonist’s passionate response on behalf of a seducer, and later a patroness who “had taken a fancy to her and was resolv’d to have her” taking the protagonist into her household and creating a domestic partnership that more resembles a supportive marriage than any of the heterosexual relationships in the work. The eventual need to choose between this loving partnership and a return to the now-contrite seducer is avoided by the protagonist’s convenient death.
The Tea-Table describes a literary club or salon, with women sharing and discussing texts. The table of the name is a gathering place where the fictitious women create a supportive literary community. The members include a woman depicted as explicitly rejecting marriage who has “a long intimacy” with another woman of the circle. Although men are not entirely absent from the portrayed circle, there are no positive models of heterosexual relationships within it, only a variety of alternatives. These models include a poem they discuss that was written by one woman on the death of her female companion. Toward the conclusion of the work, the hostess of the tea-table receives a letter from a long-absent female friend and experiences a strong emotional reaction. She expresses joy that their long separation (seven years) is over and eagerly anticipates their reunion. The other guests recognize “by the writing of the one, and the Look and Manner of the other, that nothing could be more sincere and tender than the Friendship between them.”
The desire between women in Haywood’s works is never directly depicted as sexual, but is described through coded words of love, passion, and emotional connection. Within these limitations, the possibility for women to create and prefer strong emotional bonds and partnerships with other women is normalized, even when narrative conventions fail to allow for those partnerships to prevail. The characters and setting of The Tea-Table, in particular, offer an inspiration for situating female couples within 18th century English society.
The realities of 18th century life meant that marriage was often an imperative, but that didn’t necessarily preclude female companionship from being the central focus of a woman’s life. In the French novel Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby a Milady Henriette Campley son amie (Letters from Milady Juliette Catesby to Milady Henriette Camply, her beloved) by Jeanne Riccoboni (1759), the letter writer, having spent the entire novel rejecting and dismissing the efforts of a suitor to convince her into marriage is, in the end, tricked and pressured into the marriage and ends with a continued expression of longing for the friend who is the addressee of the letters.
The motif of the “mannish” woman with homoerotic inclinations shows up again in the context of a background couple in Charlotte Lennox’s novel Euphemia (1790). The Amazonian Miss Sandford and bluestocking Lady Cornelia are described satirically in the novel, but if the thick coating of misogyny is stripped away, we can see an archetypal lesbian couple: Miss Sandford in her military-style riding habit, riding to the hunt fearlessly and declaring her firm intention never to marry, and her close companion the “learned and scientific” Lady Cornelia who refuses to be embarrassed by the depth of her learning.
Several novels depict a close, and sometimes eroticized, bond between women with significant class differences, such as an employment relationship. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) tells of a woman abandoned by her husband who regains a stable life with the help of her devoted and cherished maidservant by setting up as courtesans. There is a certain indirect eroticism of their shared sex work.
A somewhat more intriguing relationship is depicted in Jane Barker’s The Unaccountable Wife (1723) in which a woman becomes passionately devoted to her servant (who had been her husband’s mistress) and, in an “unaccountable” role-reversal, begins serving her as if the servant were the mistress. The husband dismisses the serving woman but the wife leaves with her and they set up housekeeping together, remaining together for the rest of their lives through various adventures. Although the story is presented as nonsensical and illogical, all the contradictions are resolved if one reads it as a love story.
Pining
In all too many of the novels of female friendship, we endure endless pining with no happy resolution. Sarah Scott’s Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754) follows two devoted friends making their way through the world, one in male disguise, only to be separated at the conclusion by the marriage of one of the characters.
In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), the title character’s male suitor works to separate his target from all her support structures but especially from her friend Anna. And while Anna is willing to risk all to save her friend, Clarissa dithers and escapes the situation only via death.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761) follows the passionate friendship between two married women where it’s clear that the bond between the two of them is the most important emotional aspect of their lives, but one that coexists with the unalterable fact of their marriages.
Stories such as these, while frustrating for the reader who is secretly hoping for the women to end up together, establish the norms of female friendships in the 18th century. As writers, we are free to take characters such as these and reimagine other choices and other pathways.
The triumph of female couples
And 18th century novelists did imagine other endings for their female couples. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond: or the Secret Witness (1799), Sophia leaves her husband to be with her beloved childhood friend Constantia. And when Constantia’s suitor tries to interfere, she disposes of him. Furthermore, this isn’t simply a case of the two women having a special bond. Sophia regularly feels romantic attractions to other women she encounters.
The Dutch novel Het Land in Brieven by Elisabeth Post (1788) shows two women forming an idyllic marriage-like bond, explicitly rejecting heterosexual relationships. Similarly, the French novel Paul et Virginie by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1788) shows the two female protagonists deciding to form a family together after having been betrayed in various ways by heterosexual relationships. 18th century novels were able to imagine resolutions where the women ended up together, overcoming both social expectations and the economic realities.
The ultimate romantic triumph of our female protagonists, of course, is that bizarre and delightful novel The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu by Erskine (1744) in which our heroines, Arabella and Alithea, reject marriage, fall instantly in love on meeting, romp across Europe together in male disguise, regularly joke about how they would marry if only one of them were a man, and conclude by abandoning their gender disguise and settling down to live happily ever after together as a couple.
Feeling inspired?
And that seems like an ideal place to end this tour. What we see in 18th century novels is a wide variety of models for lesbian-like characters, with a similar variety of situations, challenges, plots, and resolutions. There is plenty of inspiration to be found that will ground your characters in the archetypes and understandings of the time. Almost every time I look at the material available for a specific century I find myself thinking, “What a wealth of ideas! You could spend your whole life writing f/f romances in this setting and never write the same story twice!” And I certainly hope some of you will go out and do that.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Motifs, characters, and situations in 18th century novels that can provide inspiration and grounding for the writing of f/f historical fiction.
- This works discussed here are mentioned in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here:
- Memoirs of Europe (Delarivier Manley)
- The New Atalantis (Delarivier Manley)
- Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland)
- Thérèse the Philosophe (Jean-Baptiste de Boyer)
- L’Espion Anglois (Mathieu François Mairobert)
- Juliette (Marquis de Sade)
- La Religieuse (Denis Diderot)
- Dangerous Liaisons (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos)
- Pamela (Samuel Richardson)
- Memoirs of the Life of Count de Grammont (Antoine Hamilton)
- Belinda (Maria Edgeworth)
- various novels by Eliza Haywood
- Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby a Milady Henriette Campley son amie (Jeanne Riccoboni)
- Euphemia (Charlotte Lennox)
- Roxana (Daniel Defoe)
- The Unaccountable Wife (Jane Barker)
- Journey Through Every Stage of Life (Sarah Scott)
- Clarissa (Samuel Richardson)
- Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
- Ormond: or the Secret Witness (Charles Brockden Brown)
- Het Land in Brieven (Elisabeth Post)
- Paul et Virginie (Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre)
- The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (Erskine)
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)
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Monday, November 15, 2021 - 07:00
Classical Roman views of female homoeroticism, though more numerous than the Greek references, can be just as hard to evaluate due to a tendency to displace discussions of f/f sex onto past eras and foreign locations. We've encountered some of the same difficulty in trying to interpret how mythological data can shed light on real-life dynamics. We also run into the problem of scholars projecting their preconceptions about f/f relations onto the Classical data and reading-in interpretations that may not be present in the data. Boehringer does a good job of calling out these interpretive additions (though sometimes they seem to be dismissed without significant discussion). In reviewing the Roman evidence, always keep in mind the critical importance in Roman social and legal dynamics of social status. "Male" and "female" are rarely the most relevant categories when evaluating actions.
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LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 3a: The Roman Period - Sappho in the Heroides
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
Classical Roman views of female homoeroticism, though more numerous than the Greek references, can be just as hard to evaluate due to a tendency to displace discussions of f/f sex onto past eras and foreign locations. We've encountered some of the same difficulty in trying to interpret how mythological data can shed light on real-life dynamics. We also run into the problem of scholars projecting their preconceptions about f/f relations onto the Classical data and reading-in interpretations that may not be present in the data. Boehringer does a good job of calling out these interpretive additions (though sometimes they seem to be dismissed without significant discussion). In reviewing the Roman evidence, always keep in mind the critical importance in Roman social and legal dynamics of social status. "Male" and "female" are rarely the most relevant categories when evaluating actions.
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For Rome as for Greece, the category of biological sex was secondary to status based on class (free versus unfree) and nationality (resident versus foreign). Sex had legal and social relevance primarily for the free-born citizen class. Sexual practices were judged and categorized based on social status and the nature (and roles) of the sexual act. This system did not generate any categories corresponding to “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality”.
Although there were parallels, there were also some significant distinctions between Greek and Roman sexual attitudes. For example, the age-difference relationships that Greek society licensed between free-born males, were viewed differently in Rome, where it was considered shameful for a future male citizen to be a sexual object. But although erotic attraction to adolescent boys was also a theme in Roman society, the only approved form was with non-citizen boys. At the same time, Romans idealized the Greek form of pederasty despite its contradiction with Roman mores.
For both men and women of the Citizen class, the driving factor in sexual ethics was the maintenance of pudicitia (roughly: modesty), which meant different things for men and women. The opposite of pudicitia was stuprum (roughly: shame).
For men, this meant not only limitations on what sexual roles were permitted, but a whole range of actions and restrictions that defined “manliness”. Engaging in sex with men was not stuprum as long as one didn’t engage in forbidden modalities and roles. Whereas relations with women might result in stuprum if certain boundaries were crossed.
For women, pudicitia meant restricting all sexual activities to permitted contexts and partners (specifically: one’s husband), but also restricted the possibilities for approved marriage partners. One can’t predict what Roman attitudes toward f/f sex would be by focusing on the sex of the partners, but some clues can be found by considering the structure of social categories and identifying the limited set of contexts in which the sex of both partners is relevant to how the act is classified. Just as there is no clear dividing line between licit and illicit sex for men based solely on the sex of the partner, one cannot assume that there was any sexual category for women defined solely by involving a female partner.
The earliest Roman sources—from the third century to late first century BCE—make no reference to sexual or erotic relations between women. The earliest such references that do appear (around the beginning of the first century CE) include the works of Ovid, as well as a reference in Horace.
The next section examines the Sappho poem in the Heroides, a series of works in which Ovid gives voice to the romantic complaints of a variety of women from history and legend. Boehringer’s approach here is to examine how Roman writers dealt with the image of Sappho as a lover of women, to map out a tradition of how Sappho's relationships were treated, and to see what that can tell us about Roman attitudes within their own culture.
The popular image of Sappho in Greek sources had shifted from an esteemed poet in the Classical era to the subject of comedies in the fifth and fourth century BCE, when she was depicted as having many male lovers. A later biography of the second century CE draws on this comic material, including a reference to her being a lover of women, but this characterization may well be a later addition. Positive references to Sappho’s poetry become common again in the Helenistic . But there is still no connection made to sex between women.
Sappho’s poetic works were well-known in Rome. She is referenced by writers, her works are imitated and adapted, and are recognized as erotic. When there is mention of the contents of her work by Horace, he notes that she “complained about the girls of her land” in her erotic songs, but the reference is neutral and not judgemental.
But Ovid’s Heroides moves Sappho from being a vaguely sketched historic figure to being a fully mythologized one, bringing in the Phaon myth and the motif of her suicidal leap.
Boehringer reviews the literary context and genre of the Heroides and compares the Sappho poem with the other items in the work. Ovid shows a personal identification with Sappho as the supreme poet of love, and plays with verse forms and imagery drawn both from Sappho’s own work and later legendary motifs that adhered to her, as he builds up her fictitious autobiography in the poem. He does not retain the comedic image of her as promiscuous with men, but establishes Phaon as her one male love. But he does extensively catalog the women that she loved, in the context of leaving those loves behind. By specifically comparing those relations to the love she now feels for Phaon, it leaves no doubt that her relations with women were erotic. (Keep in mind, this is depicting Ovid’s understanding or characterization of Sappho’s life.)
Boehringer challenges other interpretations of the work that see Sappho as being “masculinized” in the Heroides, and thus connected with the Roman category of tribas (on which more later). Rather, Boehringer sees Ovid’s Sappho as embodying an ideal of reciprocal love, which only appears “masculine” when set against Roman expectations of female passivity and of erotic relations as being inherently unequal.
Similarly, Boehringer challenges interpretations of the references in the poem to Sappho’s female relationships causing “reproach” as indicating condemnation of f/f sex specifically, pointing out that the context emphasizes how numerous and non-specific those relations were, suggesting that it is this element, and not the sex of her lovers, that is the basis for reproach.
Ovid’s Sappho is an inherently worthy and admirable (if tragic) figure. He uses her as an argument for how love poetry should be written. Her love for women is described in the neutral language of eroticism—the same used for male objects. Those loves were, at worst, unimportant, but not disparaged. Thus, although Sappho was not a contemporary Roman figure, her treatment by Ovid suggests that f/f love, per se, was not viewed as an act of stuprum.
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Wednesday, November 10, 2021 - 08:00
Whoops, I had this post all set up to go on Monday and here it is Wednesday and I somehow forgot to add the intro and post. Time passes both in the blog and in the subject of the books. The exploration of evidence from Greek sources is about to give way to the Roman material. And we begin to see shifts in Greek attitudes, although there isn't a linear progression from the open nonchalance of the Archaic Greek material to the anxious scorn of the Roman material. Although I haven't begun reading the Roman chapter yet, it appears Boehringer is setting up the argument that Greek and Roman attitudes are clearly distinct regarding f/f relations. This might not be entirely surprising as Greek and Roman attitudes toward m/m relations were also distinct, even though most historical studies treat them as part of a connected, continuous culture.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 2e: Classical and Hellenistic Greece – Changing Attitudes
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
The exploration of evidence from Greek sources is about to give way to the Roman material. And we begin to see shifts in Greek attitudes, although there isn't a linear progression from the open nonchalance of the Archaic Greek material to the anxious scorn of the Roman material. Although I haven't begun reading the Roman chapter yet, it appears Boehringer is setting up the argument that Greek and Roman attitudes are clearly distinct regarding f/f relations. This might not be entirely surprising as Greek and Roman attitudes toward m/m relations were also distinct, even though most historical studies treat them as part of a connected, continuous culture.
# # #
Comic drama of the fifth and early fourth century BCE do not touch on f/f relations, but a later fourth century comedy by Amphis has a humorous treatment of the myth of Artemis and Callisto. In his version, Callisto is unaware that the Artemis she had sex with was Zeus in disguise, so when the goddess demands an explanation for her pregnancy, she says the goddess herself is responsible. Artemis, enraged – not by the pregnancy but by Callisto’s insistence that she was impregnated by the goddess – changes her into a bear.
Like many versions of the myth, only a segment of the whole story is presented: the accusation and response. We know that the audience was meant to understand the argument as humorous, because that is the genre Amphis worked in. Even though the sexual encounter itself is (probably) not depicted on stage, the entire theme of the play revolves around the image of an innocent girl willingly engaging in what she believes to be sex with a woman, and believing that this could cause pregnancy.
Although comedies of an earlier era (“Old Comedy”) were rife with sexual humor, the works of that era did not include female same-sex themes. Boehringer infers that this means Athenians of the fifth century BCE would not have considered such relationships to be funny.
But in Amphis’s play, it isn’t the sexual encounter itself that provokes humor, but Callisto’s naïveté and innocence. Callisto is not presented as deviant or unfeminine in embracing f/f sex, only as ignorant.
And yet, this work signals a shift in how f/f sex is treated in public discourse. There is no longer silence. It is a subject that can be spoken of and treated in a comic context.
This is still far from the framing of f/f sex that we see in later Roman satire. But that shift may not be purely a Greek-Roman distinction. Boehringer sees evidence of a shift to a more negative view of f/f sex in the structure of a poetic anthology compiled by the Greek poet Meleager in the first century BCE, and how it handled the inclusion of Asclepiades’ epigram on the Samian women.
The creation of poetic anthologies that collected, selected, and organized existing works – perhaps with additions by the anthologist - was a common practice at the time. The treatment of the Samian women epigram across multiple anthologies shows how understanding of its subject matter changed.
Early collections didn’t treat the poem as distinct from the other epigrams of sexual frustration that Asclepiades wrote. But Meleager, working in the early first century BCE, paid particular attention to the organization of erotic poems in his collection, creating groups and sequences on particular themes.
Boehringer sees significance in how the Samian poem is preceded by several poems in the voice of marginal women (prostitutes and entertainers) making votive offerings, and is followed by one of Meleager’s own works in which he rejects having sex with boys and expresses his desire for women. This context, then, reinforces a sexual interpretation of the relationship between the Samian women, and juxtaposes it with a rejection of same-sex relations (though perhaps an individual rejecting by the author). Female same-sex love is removed from the realm of sexual variation and placed in the realm of rejected practices.
The chapter sums up the bare-bones of the Greek data. In the Archaic period, women’s same-sex relations were not included in the category of sexual relations, although they were considered erotic. During the Classical period, women’s same-sex relations are not a topic of public discourse or representation because they are not part of the social sphere. During the Helenistic period, women’s same-sex relations begin to emerge into public discourse and are recognized as sexual. But throughout these shifts, two constants are an absence of moral condemnation and a lack of differentiation of sexual or gender roles between the two partners.
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Sunday, November 7, 2021 - 13:59
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 215 - On the Shelf for November 2021 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2021/11/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2021.
I need to start with a small apology. My neighbor is doing construction work involving power tools and hammering, and it’s likely that some noise may occasionally leak through. Just in case you hear odd noises in the background.
There are all sorts of interesting things to talk about this month. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just made my first serious venture out into the world since the start of the pandemic, to attend the Sirens conference in Denver, Colorado. It’s a book conference focusing on women and non-binary people in science fiction and fantasy, both as authors and characters. It’s a smallish conference with a lot of interesting programming approaches and it felt good as my first return to public life. It’s going to be a long time before I’m comfortable wandering around in crowds unmasked, and it was unsettling to see that the masking culture I’m used to at home was not always the norm elsewhere. But travel: I think I’m ready for that again.
2022 Fiction Series
The big announcement for the podcast is that we’re definitely doing the fiction series again next year. I’ve put the Call for Submissions up on the website—see the link in the show notes—and will be working on publicizing it widely. You can do your part by sharing the announcement and link around on social media. I know that the word gets out well beyond my personal social media circles, so you’ve done a great job on this in the past.
As a reminder, we’ll be buying four short stories with a maximum length of 5000 words. The setting must be an actual real-world place and time from before 1900, although the story can either be strictly historical or can incorporate fantastic elements appropriate to the historic setting. It must center on characters who identify as women and whose primary romantic or sexual attraction is to women, within the scope of the story. But I’m not necessarily looking for romance stories, and if the story is a “girl meets girl” story, there should be something else going on in the plot as well. I’m looking for great writing, memorable characters and stories, and a diverse range of settings and plots.
Submissions are open during the month of January, so you have two months to get your work polished up to send in.
A Personal Announcement
And speaking of sending stories out into the world, on a more personal note, I’ve sold my queer fairy-tale novella “The Language of Roses” to Queen of Swords Press. It will be coming out in April 2022, so expect me to talk about it occasionally leading up to that. The basic premise is: what if an aromantic Beauty has to deal with an unredeemable Beast? But the complexities include lesbian secondary characters, themes of psychological abuse, chronic illness, and the continuing fallout of past dysfunctional relationships. With a happy ending, at least for some of the characters.
Other News of the Field
This podcast is mostly focused on books, with the occasional venture into movie commentary. But the other week when I was listening to the Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast, they mentioned an item more in the category of online game that might be of interest to my listeners. This is an interactive choose-your-own-plotline text game called If It Please the Court, that plunges you into the intrigues of 18th century Versailles and is specifically designed with a female or non-binary protagonist and all female potential love interests. Here’s how they describe the setting:
“You've been recruited from the slums of Paris into the Secret du Roi, Louis XV's league of covert emissaries and spies. As a spy for the court, you now have the power to change your life–and tip an unstable country toward transformation. It's one thing to lie for a living, but your love life demands honesty. And women all over Versailles are ready to lure your heart. Will it be the spymistress with a lifetime of secrets, the poet languishing in the shadow of the queen, or the double agent haunting your every move? No matter who you pursue, you'll have to survive a rival's hostile ambitions, and see that the crown doesn't crush yours. Love and loyalty are all that will be left when this house of cards falls. Who will you protect to ensure a better future, and who will you sacrifice? When your mask falls away, will anyone trust the person underneath?”
The game is written by D.E. Chaudron and is published by Choice of Games. There’s a link in the show notes. I’m not usually big on online games, whether text-based or video, but I bought this one and am looking forward to exploring it.
Publications on the Blog
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog finished up Emily Skidmore’s True Sex at the beginning of October then moved on to Sandra Boehringer’s Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, which I’ve very much been looking forward to.
One hope was that Boehringer would have turned up a few more bits of data than I’ve seen in other works on classical homosexuality, and there are some items I haven’t seen before. But much more than that, she does a detailed examination of the context of each reference and potential reference to love between women to tease out the meaning and implications.
When I blogged Dover’s (1978) Greek Homosexuality, I started off by quoting the author's own assessment: “That female homosexuality and the attitude of women to male homosexuality can both be discussed within one part of one chapter reflects the paucity of women writers and artists in the Greek world and the virtual silence of male writers and artists on those topics.” But the "paucity" of material isn't the only factor at play here. The more focused one's topic, the more scope there is for uncovering meaning from a deep assessment of the context that material exists within. When a historian defines their scope of interest at a broader level, there is a tendency for the result to reflect the proportions of topics in the data, rather than aiming for a balanced coverage of the target subject itself.
In a sense, this is why the field of women's history and the field of queer history and especially the intersection of those two topics are so essential. A study of history that assumes that the past exists as a reflection of the proportions of subjects covered in the surviving artifacts is a study of history that perpetuates and amplifies the biases and erasures of past societies. While it's certainly been the case that historians have often been seduced into operating from the viewpoint of the voices that dominate their source material, a good historian recognizes that temptation and acts to counter it. Until all historians are self-aware enough to recognize and account for their own biases in this line, we need to treasure and cherish the works that begin from a principle that it is vital to put in the work of addressing marginalized topics. Boehringer's study is just such a work to be cherished--and I say that even not having read it in its entirety yet.
I'm finding Boehringer's approach delightful in its depth of analysis and in cutting through the layers of more recent scholarship to ask, "what does the text/material actually say to us?" For example, even if you view Alcman's partheneia poems as conventional, ritual expressions of civic performance, it still remains that they present the idea of female voices expressing the experience of erotic desire for a female object in a context that sees this as a normal, accepted part of society. And that, perhaps, says more than a poem that was clearly a depiction of an individual, personal experience of desire could ever say about the place of female homosexual desire in Archaic Greece.
The thing I find most impressive about Boehringer's work (and the thing most often lacking in general studies of classical homosexuality) is the meticulousness with which she sets up the cultural, literary, and textual context of each piece of evidence she examines. She points out how many previous interpretations of references to f/f relations have taken them at face value, or as a genuine personal opinion of the author, or presented them without the context of the author's overall work. There is no way the blog can share with you the detailed analysis that builds up the foundations of Boehringer's conclusions. But whether or not you're interested in classical antiquity in particular, I highly recommend this study for the process and methods of analysis. It will rock your world.
Book Shopping!
Book shopping for the blog tends to come in boom or bust. There’s the occasional title that I pre-order when I first hear of it, of course. But since I’m rarely just browsing randomly in bookstores, most of my book buying happens when there’s an event like the medieval congress that sends me to comb through the academic press listings, or when I go online to track down a specific book and decide to go through my “want list” to see what might be available second-hand. The latter is what happened this month. I went online to track down some titles mentioned in Boehringer and ended up tracking down a number of older titles that happened to be available at reasonable used book prices.
In no particular order, the following items arrived in my mailbox in the last month.
Bridget Hill’s Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660-1850 is part of a regular interest I have in the history of women’s lives outside of heterosexual marriage, particularly those who never marry. Although many women who loved women in past ages also married men, I think modern authors and readers are often more comfortable with stories where they don’t. And yet, the normative view of women’s history that we consume often gives the impression that unmarried women had few, if any, options. So I consider it an important part of the underlying purpose of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to educate readers about the real options, regardless of whether the women involved were in same-sex relationships.
The motif of lesbian sex scandals in convents is a staple of pornographic literature, from the very start of the genre, which can make it tricky to sort out the realities of such dynamics. Hubert Wolf’s book The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal looks at one such episode in the mid 19th century.
Sometimes as I collect citations of specific articles to pursue, I realize that a particular collection includes enough relevant content that it’s worth picking up the book as a whole, rather than tracking down a library copy and photocopying. That was the case with Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson. While only two of the papers touch on homoeroticism, the collection as a whole looks at a wide variety of ways in which women connected socially. Once again, it’s an approach that is a good counter to the popular view of history that often sees women as isolated and lacking in agency.
I’ve been trying for some time to track down a copy of Jill Liddington’s study of Anne Lister: Female Fortune: Land, Gender, and Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833-36. I think it pretty much sold out during the height of the tv series Gentleman Jack. Rather than focusing entirely on the personal aspects of Lister’s life, Liddington takes a deep look at her place in the social, economic, and political context of the time.
The collection Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches edited by Ellen Greene, includes several papers that I’ve already covered, having turned them up in other contexts. But it made sense to get the collection as a whole for the other material.
The book that started this particular shopping expedition was the collection Ancient Sex: New Essays edited by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand. Several of the articles in it feature prominently in Boehringer’s introduction. Somewhat unusually for a work on this era, the articles are nearly evenly balanced between male and female topics.
And finally, the brand new collection Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern edited by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska revisits several of the gender-crossing people—both historic and literary—that I’ve discussed regularly, but from a specifically transgender lens.
So many books! And never enough time to catch up on reading them all! And speaking of which, let’s move on to the new and recent historical fiction listings.
Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction
Periodically, I give a shout-out to blogs and websites that are useful when I’m putting together the new books listings. Obviously if there were another resource that were already hitting the exact set of intersections I’m interested in, I wouldn’t feel I had to make my own list! But I can draw on new book listings that take slightly different angles and that may point me to titles that either don’t show up in my keyword searches or that I overlook because they don’t signal their content as clearly as I might like. One of those resources is the Reads Rainbow website which focuses on LGBT media in general. They do a new book release post every month, with titles grouped by genre and tagged by character representation. If you want a great round-up of new queer books with a much wider scope than simply historicals, I highly recommend following them.
So let’s look at seven new or recent sapphic historicals. I found one September book that I haven’t mentioned previously.
Stone Memory self-published by Aimée follows two parallel stories, one in the present time involving a scholar at Bristol University and the doctor who patches her up after an accident, and the other set in 1900 where a teacher at a women’s college in London encounters a pioneering woman doctor. The two couples and their developing romances intertwine across time.
The rest of the books are November publications. It turns out I made an error last month when I called Edale Lane’s book Missing in Milan the final book in her Nightflyer series. The series is, indeed, finished, but only with this month’s publication of the fifth book, Shadows over Milan, from Past and Prologue Press. Political intrigue, danger, and a near-fatal injury threaten the career of the Renaissance vigilante known as the Night Flyer. Worst of all is the threat to her future with the woman she loves.
The rest of this month’s books are set in the late 19th or 20th centuries.
Beulah Lodge by Cathy Dunnell from Bold Strokes Books has a Victorian gothic sort of feel, set in an isolated house in the Yorkshire moors. Ruth planned to stay with her strict and autocratic aunt only briefly before joining her fiancé in India. Eliza’s only plans are to keep her position as housemaid, no matter what she has to put up with. Both of their plans are derailed by the growing attraction between them.
Geonn Cannon’s steampunk fantasy series from Supposed Crimes hits its seventh volume in Trafalgar Versus Boone. Plot strands involving magical curses and secret societies come together in a crisis, but the two protagonists of the series have been torn apart and estranged. All that is about to change. I suspect there’s too much going on for new readers to enter the series with this book, but if you’re a series junkie and haven’t tried it yet, you might have a treat in store.
The last three books are all translations and, by some coincidence, are all fictionalized memoirs. The next title isn’t a recent book, as such, but is the first English translation of the 1901 French novel Idylle Saphique by the scandalous courtesan Liane de Pougy, translated as A Woman’s Affair by Graham Anderson, from Dedalus. The novel is based closely on de Pougy’s relationship with Natalie Barney and tells of the tempestuous and passionate affair.
Carla Guelfenbein’s One in Me I Never Loved, translated by Neil Davidson and published by Other Press is a collage of stories, combining fiction and memoir, that depict the personal lives of a wide variety of women, including several queer relationships, and blends them together to ask questions about the limits of freedom, love, and sex.
Finally, also from Other Press, is The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated by Lara Vergnaud, a coming of age story about a French-Algerian woman growing up in a repressed family in a Parisian suburb and her long journey to realize her identity as a lesbian.
So if you’ve been looking for something a little more serious and meaty to read, this month offers several possibilities.
What Am I Reading?
So what have I been reading? The non-fiction has taken up most of my time, but I did manage to fit in Stephanie Burgess’s Regency fantasy Scales and Sensibility which as you might guess is an Austenesque romantic comedy with dragons. The romance in this one is straight, though Burgess does occasionally write queer characters. I also did some light non-fiction reading with Susanne Alleyn’s Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer’s (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myths. The title amused me because I once presented a research paper on the topic of the symbolism of women wearing underpants in medieval art, so I was intrigued to see what Alleyn had to say. The book is entertaining, and even educational, but it can’t quite decide which of those it really wants to be. And although it presents itself as being a practical guide, it comes across a bit more as an insider gripe-fest where both author and reader are laughing at the silly mistakes that less knowledgeable people make. If I were a person who genuinely needed the advice in this book, I’m not sure that I’d be willing to sit through the snark long enough for it to be useful.
That’s always a hazard in historic education projects, which means it’s a hazard for this podcast as well. I’ve always had the most success, when educating people about history, by trying to infect others with the excitement and wonder I feel when I learn new things. I won’t claim that I’ve never participated in private snark over historical errors, but I certainly hope that the blog and podcast never come across as snarking at the people I want to attract as my audience. You’d let me know if I did, wouldn’t you?
Show Notes
Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.
In this episode we talk about:
- Call for submissions for the 2022 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
- If It Please the Court (interactive text game)
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
- Book shopping for the blog
- Hill, Bridget. 2001. Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660-1850. Yale University Press, New Haven. ISBN 0-300-08820-5
- Wolf, Hubert. 2015. The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. ISBN 978-0-38535190-4
- Frye, Susan and Karen Robertson, eds. 1999. Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511735-2
- Liddington, Jill. 2019 (2nd edition). Female Fortune: Land, Gender, and Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833-36. Rivers Oram Press, London. ISBN 1-85489-089-1
- Greene, E. 1996. Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. ISBN 0-520-20195-7
- Blondell, Ruby & Kirk Ormand (ed.). 2015. Ancient Sex: New Essays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015. ISBN 9780814212837.
- LaFleur, Greta, Masha Raskolnikov, Anna Klosowska (eds). 2021. Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. ISBN 978-1-5017-5950-5
- New and forthcoming fiction
- Stone Memory by Aimée
- Shadows Over Milan (The Night Flyer #5) by Edale Lane
- Beulah Lodge by Cathy Dunnell
- Trafalgar Versus Boone (Trafalgar & Boone Book 7) by Geonn Cannon
- A Woman's Affair (Idylle Saphique) by Liane de Pougy (trans Graham Anderson)
- One in Me I Never Loved by Carla Guelfenbein (trans Neil Davidson)
- The Last One by Fatima Daas (trans. Lara Vergnaud)
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)
Major category:
LHMPPublications:
The Language of RosesTuesday, November 2, 2021 - 08:00
After dithering for a while, I've decided to go forward with the podcast fiction series for a fifth year. The deciding factor (other than "five" being a nice number) was doing the proofreading of the remaining stories for this year and being reminded of the great work that people are entrusting to me to publish. For most of the stories we've included in the podcast, it's reasonable to say that they never would have existed except for having the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast as a market. That was one of my goals, although I'd also love to help stimulate a larger and more active market for commercial sapphic historical short fiction.
Just as in the last two years, the submission call is also open to certain types of historic fantasy (see the guidelines for a detailed explanation). I didn't happen to buy any historic fantasy stories for 2021, but that wasn't a deliberate choice. It was only that the best stories were all plain history. So don't let that mislead you.
In addition to the primary goal of choosing the best stories, I always have a goal of including a diversity of settings, plots, and characters. As an author, you can use this to your advantage, if you're deciding between several possibilities. Every year, about a third of the submissions are set in the 19th century, and most of those will be set in the UK or USA. So if you set your work somewhere or somewhen else, you already have an advantage in standing out. (Coincidences can happen, though. This year I had to choose between two excellent stories both with prehistoric settings. And while either would have made the cut, I couldn't see buying both of them.)
Another thing that gives your story a leg up (since we're assuming that it has solid writing, reserach, and characterization) is focusing around an interesting and not over-used plot. Find an event or situation that would make a great story on its own and then ask, "How would this be even more interesting if one or more characters were women who loved women?" That isn't to say that you can't get a great story out of circumstances specific to the sapphic condition, but the stories that start out by asking, "what sorts of things happened in history to lesbians" tend to be less varied than ones that start with "what sorts of things happened to people in history" and then add "but what if they happened to lesbians."
Last year I had some agonizing decisions to narrow the choice down to the number I could buy. Try to make my process even more agonizing this year!
Major category:
LHMPThe Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be open for submissions in January 2022 for short stories in the lesbian historic fiction genre, to be produced in audio format for the podcast, as well as published in text on the website.
Technical Details
- We will accept short fiction of any length up to 5000 words, which is a hard limit. We will be buying a total of four stories. (If we get some really great flash fiction, there’s the possibility of more.)
- We will be paying professional rates: $0.08/word.
- The contract will be for first publication rights in audio and print (i.e., the story must not have appeared in either format previously) with an exclusive one year license. (Exceptions can be arranged by mutual consent for “best of” collections within that term.)
- Instructions on how to submit are given below. NO SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED OUTSIDE THE SUBMISSION PERIOD OF JANUARY 2022.
What We’re Looking For
- Stories must be set in an actual historic culture--i.e., a specific time and place in history--and the plot and characters should be firmly rooted in that time and place. (No time-travel or past memories, please.)
- Stories may include fantastic elements that are appropriate to the historic setting. For example, they can include fantastic or supernatural events or beings that people of that era considered to be real. Or stories may be modeled on the fantastic literature of a specific historic era and culture. The limits to this will necessarily be subjective.
- Stories must be set before 1900. We’d love to see stories that reach beyond the popular settings of 19th century America and England unless you do something new and interesting in them. I try to balance a diversity of settings and if you aren't competing with the rest of the 33% of stories with 19th c Anglophone settings, you have an advantage. [Also: see sensitivity note below.]
- Romance is optional, and romance stories should have some other significant plot element in addition to the romance. A developing romance tends to take up a lot of plot space and we've all read a lot of "girl meets girl but they're the only two lesbians in the world." Think about things that can be done with existing couples, friendly exes, or networks of like-minded women.
- We are not looking for erotica. Sex may be implied but not described. (It’s difficult to include both erotic content and a substantial non-romantic plot in short fiction. I’d rather that stories focus on the plot and characters.)
- Stories should feature lesbian-relevant themes. What do I mean by that, especially given the emphasis the LHMP puts on how people in history understood sexuality differently than we do? This is where we get into “I know it when I see it” territory. The story should feature protagonist(s) who identify as women, whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or who have had relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story should focus on same-sex relations. Stories that involve cross-gender motifs (e.g., "passing women," "female husbands") should respect trans possibilities [see sensitivity note below].
- Stories need not be all rainbows and unicorns, but should not be tragic. Angst and peril are ok as long as they don’t end in tragedy.
- Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Marginalized authors are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background.
Please feel free to publicize this call for submissions.
Submission Information
- Do not send submissions before January 1, 2022 or after January 31, 2022. Submissions sent outside this window will not be considered (with allowance for time zones). Seriously. I had someone (twice!) send me submissions in mid-summer. I remember these things.
- Send submissions to alpennia@heatherrosejones.com
- Submit your story as an rtf or doc(x) file attached to your email
- The file name should be “[last name] - [story title, truncated if long]”
- The subject line of your email should be “LHMP Submissions - [last name] - [story title]”
- There is no need to provide a synopsis or biographical information in the cover letter.
- By submitting your story, you are verifying that the material is your own original work and that it has not been previously published in any form in a publicly accessible context.
- Submissions will be acknowledged within 2 days of receipt. If you haven’t received an acknowledgment within 5 days, please query.
- Based on previous years, I will generally have the submissions read and responded to within the first week of February. If you haven't received a response by mid-February, please query as the email may have gone astray.
Formatting
Use your favorite standard manuscript format for short fiction with the following additions:
- In addition to word count, please provide the date/era of your setting and the location/culture it is set in. (These can be in general terms, but it helps for putting the story in context, especially if it uses a very tight point of view where the time/place are not specifically mentioned in the story.) If you are including fantasy elements and think I might not be familiar with the historic background for those elements, a very brief note in the cover e-mail is ok.
If you don’t have a favorite manuscript format, here is a good basic format:
- Use courier or a similar monospaced serif font, 12-point size
- Lines should be double-spaced with paragraphs indented. (Use your word processor’s formatting for this, do not use tabs or manual carriage returns.)
- Do not justify the text, leave a ragged right margin.
- Margins should be at least 1-inch or equivalent all around
- On the first page, provide the following information:
- Your name (legal name, the name I’ll be putting on the contract)
- email address
- (standard formats generally require a mailing address but I don’t need one at this point)
- word count (please use your word processor’s word count function, rounded to the nearest 100)
- date/era of story
- location/culture of story
- Centered above the start of the story, include the title, and on the next line “by [name to appear in publication]”. This is where you may use a pen name, if you choose.
- Please use actual italics rather than underlining for material meant to appear in italics.
- Please indicate the end of your story with the word “end” centered below the final line.
As I will be reading stories electronically, there is no need to include page numbers or a header on each page. (If this is part of your standard format, you don’t need to remove them.)
Notes on Sensitivity
I strongly welcome settings that fall outside the "white English-speaking default". But stories should avoid "exoticizing" the cultural setting or relying on sterotypes or colonial cultural dynamics. What does that mean? A good guideline is to ask, "If someone whose roots are in this culture read the story, would they feel represented or objectified?"
What do I mean by "stories that involve cross-gender motifs should respect trans possibilities"? I mean that if the story includes an assigned-female character who is presenting publicly as male, I should have confidence that you, as the author, have thought about the complexities of gender and sexuality (both in history and for the expected audience). It should be implied that the character would identify as a woman if she had access to modern gender theory, and the way the character is treated should not erase the possibility of other people in the same setting identifying as trans men if they had access to modern gender theory. This is a bit of a long-winded explanation, but I simultaneously want to welcome stories that include cross-gender motifs and avoid stories that could make some of the potential audience feel erased or mislabeled.
A note on transfeminine characters: I am completely open to the inclusion of stories with transfeminine characters who identify as women-loving-women. This is a complicated topic for historic stories, though, as this is not a motif with much known historic grounding before the later 20th/21st century. (In all my research, I've found only one possible, fictional example that was not presented as gender deception for ulterior purposes, and no non-fictional examples of any type that don't involve intersex persons.) If you're submitting this type of story, you may have to work harder than usual on making it work in the historic context.
Monday, November 1, 2021 - 08:00
I know I keep repeating myself, but the thing I find most impressive about Boehringer's work (and the thing most often lacking in general studies of classical homosexuality) is the meticulousness with which she sets up the cultural, literary, and textual context of each piece of evidence she examines. She points out how many previous interpretations of references to f/f relations like this one have taken them at face value, or as a genuine personal opinion of the author, or presented them without the context of the author's overall work. There is no way I can share with you the detailed analysis that builds up the foundations of Boehringer's conclusions. But whether or not you're interested in classical antiquity in particular, I highly recommend this study for the process and methods of analysis. It will rock your world.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 2d: Classical and Hellenistic Greece – Asclepiades and the Samian Women
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
I know I keep repeating myself, but the thing I find most impressive about Boehringer's work (and the thing most often lacking in general studies of classical homosexuality) is the meticulousness with which she sets up the cultural, literary, and textual context of each piece of evidence she examines. She points out how many previous interpretations of references to f/f relations like this one have taken them at face value, or as a genuine personal opinion of the author, or presented them without the context of the author's overall work. There is no way I can share with you the detailed analysis that builds up the foundations of Boehringer's conclusions. But whether or not you're interested in classical antiquity in particular, I highly recommend this study for the process and methods of analysis. It will rock your world.
# # #
Asclepiades of Samos was a poet of the late fourth/early third century BCE, best known for his epigrams, especially those on erotic topics. The epigram as a poetic style, was just coming into popularity and an understanding of the conventions and forms of the genre are essential to interpreting the one epigram referring to f/f erotics.
The poem itself is short and straightforward in interpretation. The poet-persona calls our attention to two women from Samos (like the poet) who “do not wish to frequent the realms of Aphrodite in accordance with her laws, but they desert to other practices that are not appropriate.” He calls on Aphrodite to “abhor them”.
On the surface, this has been interpreted as a condemnation of f/f relations and as indicating that they were socially disapproved. Boehringer argues that the poem must be interpreted in the context of the whole series of related epigrams in which Asclepiades works through an entire catalog of women and boys whom he has desires but who have all, in some way, rejected him. As a whole, the epigrams are humorously self-mocking and the individual romantic failures do not involve condemning the actions or nature of the subject, but rather create the image of the poet-persona as a feckless loser. To the extent that the subjects are criticized, it is as a means of shifting blame from the poet’s ineptness.
Boehringer presents this case with an extensive discussion of the epigram as a genre, the overall nature of Asclepiades’ work, and a comparative study of his erotic epigrams as a unified sequence. She reviews the interpretations put forth by other scholars that the women are courtesans or prostitutes, or that their offense against Aphrodite involves taking a masculine role in sex with women. Each of these is shown to be unsupported, or contradicted by the overall picture, or to be an anachronistic interpretation for the era when they were written.
Her overall conclusion is that this poem is consistent with the image of f/f erotics indicated by Plato’s writings: that it was a known, accepted, and unremarkable possibility, and that it was not viewed as involving differentiated sexual roles, whether as active/passive (as for men) or involving masculinity (as we see in later eras).
To the extent that Asclepiades condemns the women’s preference, it is a personal, selfish condemnation that they do not prefer him. And yet he can characterize f/f relations as “not part of the norm” which is a shift from the more neutral (or at least indifferent) attitude of previous centuries.
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Sunday, October 31, 2021 - 18:23
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 214 – Moon River by Mandy Mongkolyuth - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/10/31 - listen here)
The pandemic has brought a lot of odd mental blocks. One of mine is that, after contracting this year’s stories for the fiction series, and after contacting narrators for most of them back in February, I failed in my original goal of getting all the fiction recorded way ahead of time and being able relax for the rest of the year. I missed releasing a story at the end of July, as originally scheduled, and was starting to panic that I’d blow past another target this month. But this past week I put my sense of failure behind me, contacted my authors and narrators, and got everything set up. I’ll be airing an extra make-up fiction episode in December, and then completing the currently contracted stories in January, as planned. I’m now feeling better about going ahead with another fiction series in 2022. I’ll talk about that more in next week’s “On the Shelf” episode.
One of the changes I most long to see in fiction is the normalization of queer content and queer characters to the point where I can read almost any story and entertain the possibility that it will include sapphic characters. We’re still a long way from that point, and it means that often we still find ourselves looking primarily to romance stories for a promise of representation. But one of the things I specifically wanted to do in the podcast fiction series was to have space for stories that allow for--but don’t require—romance in order to provide you with fiction centering women who love women. Stories where the characters can carry that possibility while still telling other types of stories.
Mandy Mongkolyuth’s story “Moon River” is one of these. Set in the late 19th century, during the violence of British colonial expansion in Burma, this is a story of young women caught between futures, between cultures, between expectations, between hope and fear.
Mandy Mongkolyuth was born in Thailand. She has lived in both the UK and the US, and is constantly finding a new place to be from. She is a policy analyst by day and spends the rest of her free time penning hopeful stories about people who don't exactly know where they belong. She can be found on tumblr at @mandiliorian. (Check the show notes for a link with the correct spelling.)
I will be the narrator for this story.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
Moon River
by Mandy Mongkolyuth
The fight was over. The final gunshot rang out and the last king bowed, his crown left to ruin on the floor.
It came down to rumors and hearsay. The British razed a teak forest. The Burmese violated some proceeding or another. Perhaps it was the other way around? In the end, it didn’t matter. The British were looking for any excuse to take Burma, and they would have done it over a sliver of wood.
Besides, gunpowder cared not for whom it was lit. Here, in 1885, the British had more of it, so victory was theirs.
And history cared not for a girl. A young woman suffocating under the unbearable sense of wrongness all over the place was an insignificant sight. Tara’s family was not of this land, but they reaped the fruits of it anyway. Her father was a member of the British Embassy, as of now, the government. She was told her mother died giving birth to her in India, but who knew if that was true? Her father did not tell her things.
A daughter simply didn’t inspire the same modicum of grace extended toward a son.
Tara was not told a lot of things, but she made up for it by taking in messages that weren’t meant for her anyway, the last of which compelled her to shear her hair and tie it with a ribbon, bind her chest with a long piece of cloth, and put on the guard's uniform she had been pilfering piece by piece over the last few weeks. Thanks to her father’s careful aristocratic breeding, Tara was much taller than most women around her. She’d supposed she had her mother’s side to thank for her complexion. With her cropped hair and olive skin, she could easily pass for a guard or a servant within the British compound.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the best way to carry out a cloak and dagger operation was to not use any illusion at all. People would notice a man skulking around in the shadow, but none would look twice at a resident’s guard striding to a post, so Tara took a calming breath, held her head high, straightened her spine, and began walking.
It wasn’t a difficult choice when all was said and done. She turned twenty this year and according to her father, had become far too old to be leeching off his estate. Some respectable naval officer or lord was going to marry her for her dowry and whisk her off to the civilized land of London society that sneered at her every time she set foot on its soil. In this magical scenario, she would be the new crown jewel of the city and get out of her father’s hair in the process.
The problem was, Tara was wholly uninterested in men, British men in particular.
They were invaders. Vermin. They were what remained when kingdoms rose and fell, ravishing the lands without regard for any blood sacrifice and Tara might have been a coward, as her former maid once said, but she wasn’t a monster. She would not stand tall as a conqueror while the people of this land suffered beneath her feet.
So she walked on. The residence was bursting at the seam despite the late hours. Messengers and diplomats mingled to exchange news of their new conquest, a new empire, so the sun may never set on British soil. How nauseating.
“Where do you think you are going?” A voice startled her.
“The south gate. My order was to stop anyone trying to get in.” This too, was well-rehearsed. The south gate opened up to the city proper, and an attack from disgruntled locals was likely to happen there.
“We do not need more men there. Let me see your papers.” The man spoke again. Tara took him in. She had seen him once or twice in her father’s presence, only in large official functions. Likely to be a mid-range officer then.
“Do you question the governor’s order? Take it up with him if you are so inclined. He directed my unit to the south gate and that’s where you will find me after your little talk.”
It was a roll of the dice. She had a knife, and she could probably wield it if need be, but that would draw attention and she couldn’t afford a derailment so early in the night. With the confidence of a king, she raised her chin once more and marched toward the south gate. If anything, the confusion would give her a few minutes to make a run for it.
Thankfully, the pseudo commander was just baffled enough to allow her to move away. From there, she blended into a group of men in identical uniforms and let darkness shelter her features. Tara kept walking, not too fast to arouse suspicion again, but her skin prickled with the fear of being trapped inside this compound, this world, for good.
She could see the south gate in the distance. Two hundred yards from her.
A gust of wind blew some dirt into her eyes, she ducked, blinked it away. A hundred yards now.
Fifty.
Twenty.
Ten.
She had to stop herself from sprinting the last few steps, and then she was out.
She was outside of her father’s residence by herself for the first time in over a year. No chaperones. No guards. The escape was almost too simple. The men were supposed to keep people out, anyhow.
Tara made her way toward the market, where she had bribed a dressmaker into finding her a passage to Siam. Burma might be falling into an invader’s hands, but the neighboring Siam was still hanging on by a thread. The country was fast becoming the only independent land in the Indochinese Peninsula, and Tara would seek her freedom there.
The street was a stone’s throw from her father’s headquarters, but it might as well be a world away. Inside the residence, people were gleefully celebrating while preparing for a counterattack. The street, however, was solemn. It was what happened when a whole city had resigned to its fate. It was fatigue and hopelessness that got to the people, not the blood on the street. And who could blame them? People have the right to choose peace without justice over being buried in an unmarked grave in the name of freedom.
No one bothered her as she advanced. The uniform combined with her height made her an imposing figure on the street. Women averted their eyes and men moved away from her path. Tara fought down her tears at the casual cruelty of it all. After all the atrocities she had seen and heard, it was the simple gestures of submission that would do her in, but she needed to focus. The market was harder to navigate at night; she had never been here alone, and she took a wrong turn twice before emerging at the correct street.
The street had become a plain, charred to the ground with no evidence of its glorious past.
The rickety dress shop had no hope against gunpowder and fire.
Tara is so, very, certainly, hopelessly fucked.
She had to find another way out, preferably soon. The market was the center of the city, but Taunggyi was a moderately important trade route. As the little sister of the Mekong River, the Salween made Taunggyi a critical halfway point between China and Siam.
Yes, the river.
The dock would be the natural port of departure for anyone wanting to leave the city anyway. Tara cursed herself for not thinking of the river sooner, but with limited windows to act, she had pinned her hopes on the dressmaker’s contact. She hoped the lady was not in the shop when the fight went down, but sent out a quiet prayer in the case that she was.
She had another go at wandering the vaguely familiar city. The smoke and shadow made for a nervous journey, but she had been to the dock with her father often and she knew a shortcut they would take to avoid beggars and overzealous tradesmen looking to curry favor with the British.
Tara strode on, certain of her destination, she turned into a small alley and broke into a run. At least she hadn’t been followed, her father was unlikely to notice her absence until the morning.
She should have stopped to knock on a piece of wood at that thought. As soon as she let her guard down, she heard footsteps and chatters. She quickened her pace and gripped the dagger in her pocket.
The first blow came entirely unexpected. A man seemingly materialized on her right, and a fist made contact with her temple. Tara swayed to the side, the breath knocked out of her.
“Bloody cockroach,” he spat as he lunged at her. “A British officer here, come on!” Three more people joined him, tackling her to the ground. She felt a kick to her side and the pain exploded all over her body. Blood and tears trickled down unprompted, temporarily blinding her. She could defend herself, but Tara against one man was a stretch and she had no chance against four of them. Several blows rained down on her stomach and a foot stomped down. Hard.
With the last of her strength, Tara freed her hair and begged in the local dialect. “Please, please, I ran away. I’m from here too, please let me go.”
That bought her a few precious seconds that unfortunately, wasn’t enough.
“No, you are not. You are one of them, and you will pay,” the first man snarled. He yanked her hair back, sending another blazing pain down her neck. “We’ll ransom her,” he said, dragging her up to her feet when a cry distracted all of them.
“Mama! Mama!” a boy of seven or eight wailed. He barreled into her and started sobbing into her coat. “We thought we lost you! Auntie is worried sick and Pim wouldn’t stop crying.”
Right on cue, a small girl who couldn’t be older than four came out screaming. She, too, begged Tara to come home. The girl turned her enormous eyes toward the four men and cried into their trousers.
“Did you save my mama? Thank you. Thank you, sir.”
The boy joined her, nodding vigorously. “She is all we have. Our father is dead, and we got separated at the market during the raid today.”
The men were shocked into silence and the children started dragging Tara away, telling her gibberish about a porridge and a warm bed at home.
As soon as they turned the corner, Tara regained her wits and stopped short.
“Are you lost? Are you looking for your mother? When did you last see her?”
A hiss sounded, and a slight figure rushed out from a corner, followed by two more children of various ages. She spoke in accented English, “Are you stupid? Bloody walk! Quickly before they change their damn minds and just take all of you.”
A young woman half dragged, half carried her along the path to the main street.
“Damn it, you are bleeding a lot. What in God’s name are you doing out here at this hour anyway?”
“Should you be swearing so much in front of these children?” Tara asked, genuinely struggling, either because of the physical pain or the shock or both, she wasn’t sure. They were moving into another alley off the main street; this one also bore the brunt of the attack earlier today. Half the shop fronts were destroyed, but the other half were still holding on through sheer force of will.
“Oh, Lord. We just rescued you from what would have been a fairly certain doom. The whole city was burned to the ground not five hours ago and you are worried about propriety?” her rescuer asked, incredulous.
“I know all the bad words already!” the little girl piped up.
The adult cackled involuntarily. “Yes, yes, Pim, as your teacher, I am very proud.” The gang maneuvered into a semi-intact structure, and another child was instructed to fetch clean water.
The children efficiently barred all the windows and the doors, then someone lit a candle and put it on the floor, leaving the space in semi-darkness.
“We don’t want anyone to see the flame and come to investigate, do we?” the woman said.
With some illumination, she realized that the woman was barely older than Tara herself, a girl, was a more appropriate term. She looked hardly old enough to be a childminder, let alone a governess to four children.
“What...just happened?” Tara ventured.
The other girl ruffled through a small valise and found a clean kerchief. “What happened was, we were minding our own business and we heard you shrieking from a street corner that, frankly, should not be visited by any sane person. We had to get you out, and we couldn’t exactly fight them off, could we?” She sighed and poured the presumably clean water out onto the cloth and dabbed it on Tara’s temple.
“Ouch! What is that?” It burned.
She sniffed the bottle and turned to the boy who fetched it. “What the devil, Bira? This isn’t water.”
“I couldn’t find any clean water and my da said rice wine is best for cleaning wounds. There were loads of bottles left on the street,” the child defended his choice. “Da would know, he was a boxer.”
“Oh blast it. Consider it the best we can do then. Now, hold on, princess, this is going to sting,”
“I am well aware of that,” Tara replied dryly. She gritted her teeth, but the process seemed to be finished before she had a chance to take in her surroundings. The children, while dressed in rags, were impeccably clean and polite. Pim, the youngest one, regarded her curiously but kept her distance. The semi-adult was obviously the authority here. She was nearly as small as the oldest child, but her wide stance, blazing eyes, and clear voice brooked no argument. Her raven hair was bound into a neat bun atop her head and her fingers were deft and callous, testaments to a life not comfortably lived.
“Now, I’m Chan and these are my students. You met Pim and Tien, who are siblings. Bira is the oldest at thirteen, and Nong here is eight,” the governess, Chan, gestured vaguely in the direction of her charges. “We are in a hurry, so here’s what you are going to do. You are going to tie your hair back up and march out onto the main street. Stick to the busy areas and get home. Good luck. Goodbye.”
“Wait! Can I repay you somehow? Where are you going? I can help!” Tara said, clinging on to Chan’s hand.
Chan, for that matter, gave her an unimpressed look. “We are leaving Taunggyi and we were the ones who had to liberate you earlier if you’d recall. I’ve got my hands full with these children and we can’t afford another delay. You are British, or somewhat British anyway, so just go, enjoy your privilege. Some of us have to try to survive the new dawn.”
Tara was being given a new chance and she wasn’t going to let it slip by. “I have money, matches, knives, jewelry that could be traded, and I pocketed a few silvers on my way out. A second adult in the group can’t hurt, right?”
“You don’t even know where we are going.”
“As long as it is anywhere but here.”
# # #
It was probably, definitely, a mistake to let a strange British girl tag along with them. Chan already had more problems than she cared to count. The children needed to walk faster. Their money needed to stretch enough. The men needed to not look twice at them. The list went on and on and now, voila! She had a companion.
The newcomer, Tara, was plainly wealthy and had at least one British ancestor. She was taller than most Burmese men, with bright green eyes, a straight nose and full lips. This was all a terrible omen. Average women didn’t draw anyone’s attention, striking women couldn’t escape it even if they tried.
Chan pressed the bridge of her nose. Hell, it was bad enough with four orphans, now she went and adopted a fugitive on the run. Tara couldn’t be anything but, since well-to-do British ladies didn’t just decide to pack up and face the unknown for no discernible reason. An abusive family or husband, most likely. It was a pity Chan had always been a reckless fool when it came to lost causes, so why not one more?
They slowly made their way to the dock. It was close to midnight, and the city thankfully drifted off to sleep. They kept their chatter to a minimum until they reached a long stretch of road without any structures. The group had been walking for two hours and the children begged for a short break and they found a small clearing off the side of the road, away from prying eyes.
“Tara, where did you come from?” Pim couldn’t hold her curiosity at bay any longer. The children stared at Tara, expectantly.
“You don’t have to answer.” Chan quickly sent a severe look out to quiet her students. “We don’t need to know anything about you, nor you us. We part as soon as we reach Siam safely.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Tara said airily. She did not have many friends growing up. Being dragged along from one continent to another would do that to anyone. It didn’t help that her father was a faithful follower of the children-must-be-seen-not-heard philosophy and had never thought to provide her with a playmate. She had never called someone a friend until Mei came along.
Forcing a wave of longing down her throat at that thought, she smiled broadly at the children and started, “I was born in India, just north of here. My mother was Indian and my father was a government officer from England. I moved to London when I was ten, then I lived in Java and Shanghai too. What about you?”
Chan interrupted the children’s chorus of replies, “Alright, we must continue. We still have to get to the pier before dawn.” She swiftly ushered the children up and started herding them out of the clearing, but she lingered in the back next to Tara.
“You are speaking too freely,” Chan muttered.
Tara, to her surprise, snorted an unladylike laugh. “You are a governess ushering a ragtag band of children to illegally cross the border to see their parents, I assume? What are you going to do after saving me? Signal a British guard to beat me up and drench me in rice wine again?”
Chan regarded her new companion. The girl was so naive; it was disconcerting to think of leaving her to fend for herself. “Here is what I don’t understand. You are clearly harmless, wealthy, pretty, and absolutely, unbearably delusional. What could have possessed you to want to come along with us?”
Tara was quiet for a moment, clearly weighing her answer before making a careful reply. “I am to be married off to a man I am certain I could not love, then I’d either live in this land as a thief or in England as an exotic ornament. I was too different here in the far east, too dark in the west, and I could never figure out where I belong. It all changed in the past year when I had a lady’s maid, Mei. She was kind and fearless and she taught me the value of standing up for myself. She showed me that I could be happy, that we all deserve to be happy.” She shook her head in an apparent effort to keep her voice steady. “She knew the city would fall and she was running away with her family and I begged and begged her to let me come. I could clean. I had money. I could help. But she wouldn’t budge. She wouldn’t be owned by an invader any more than she would die a slave, so off she went, but not before asking me if I could live as a conqueror in a foreign land forever. So, here I am, trying to find a place I belong.”
“You must be pulling my leg,” Chan exclaimed, disbelieving.
“What?”
“A place you belong? Who gives a toss about that? These children are orphans, Tara. They have no parents to speak of, and I wasn’t going to let them become indentured servants under the British rule just because I have been teaching them English at the church’s poor house. They barely had a chance here and crossing this cursed river was my last resort. Go back to your father. Pick a kind husband. You have the luxury of surviving here, so don’t risk it for some inane concept of belonging. No peasant has ever thought about belonging anywhere, I can guarantee you that. They are lucky if they have a roof over their head and a bowl of rice for a day.”
She could understand the impulse of running away when forced with the prospect of marrying a man. She had long understood that her attraction belonged firmly to the fairer sex, but plenty of people, men and women both, married not for love. If Chan’s alternative was a wealthy husband and a house she could keep her students in, she knew the choice she would make. By necessity and absolutely nothing else, she was forced to pack up and took a hammer to the church’s poor box on her way out. The chest was not exactly overflowing with actual charity, but it was enough to get them a safe passage to Siam and then some.
“But you belong with them,” Tara said quietly. Chan gave her a disbelieving glance and she spoke again, resolute, “The children formed a tight circle around you. They listened to everything you said but they do not fear you. I am on the outside looking in, and I thought, what wouldn’t I give to have someone love me so completely? I’m allowed to want that much, I think.”
Chan was not entirely convinced it was reason enough to play dice with the devil, but who was she to decide for Tara? Especially since she was also risking drowning for a chance of freedom? The rich girl was strangely resilient. She had kept the pace and hadn’t grumbled once about her bruises and cuts, which couldn’t have been comfortable and Chan begrudgingly respected her for it. She nudged Tara’s shoulder slightly with her own. “Well, keep being nice to the children and we’ll see about you belonging somewhere then.”
She felt rather than saw Tara trying to hide her smile.
They made it to the dock and Chan looked for her contact, a Siamese man named Manat. She had reasonable faith in the man’s desire to get the rest of his promised fee, but with Tara as an additional passenger, the price was certainly going to be extortionate. With an idea, she herded her little band of misfits to a small hill with a clear view of the dock.
“Bira, you come with me. Princess, you stay here with the rest.” The kids started protesting, and Pim’s lips were quivering with barely restrained terror, so Chan crouched down to level a look at them. “I just need to see if it is safe for us here. I will always come back for you, alright? Tara will tell you stories about England for a few minutes, yes?” Tara nodded tightly, understanding the gravity of the situation.
Chan made her way toward the promised tugboat. Manat was loitering with a few tradesmen, eager to make off with as much spoils as possible. Chan cleared her throat, and he jumped.
“Goodness, Chan, I asked you to stop doing that,” he said, throwing his cheroot to the ground. Chan swallowed her protest. In a fallen kingdom, no one took notice if the land was aflame.
“We are ready to go, but before that I--” she began, but Manat interrupted. “Just you two? This will make it a lot easier.” He whistled and two men emerged from the shadows. Before she could react, one enveloped her, and the other took Bira in his arms.
“Get off me! Damn you, we had an agreement!” Chan kicked and bit her assailant, gasping in vain for breath and reaching out for Bira. “Don’t hurt him! He’s just a child.”
Manat huffed a mocking laugh. “You were paying me a pittance to smuggle you and four useless children across the border, but that one is old enough to earn his passage. Farmers are paying pretty pennies for Burmese laborers, so you two can make yourselves useful. Think of it this way, now you don’t have to watch me drown the other brats.”
Chan still kicked and fought, but they stuffed her mouth with cotton. After a while, a strange calmness took over. At least Tara could take the children somewhere safe. She would have to figure something out for her and Bira, but they would survive. They always had.
They were dragged onto a tugboat and Chan tried to plead with the men not to tie Bira down when she felt the boat unmoor.
Then the ground shifted beneath them.
Screams came in from every direction.
Bira broke free and used his right hook to knock one of their captors off.
And the boat was flooded with flames.
# # #
Tara heard Chan’s scream when she realized what happened. The deal unraveled before her eyes and she could see Bira being carried off. Pim began to wail and she clamped her hand on the child’s mouth to silence her.
Think of something. Think of something. Anything.
Her own wounds were still throbbing all over and she wasn’t sure what she could do at the moment.
Bugger it.
“The rice wine, where is it?”
“What? Are you going to get drunk now?” Nong retorted, but she got the bottles out. Tara stuffed one bottle with her blood-stained kerchief and another with a torn piece of cloth ripped from her sleeve.
She turned to Nong and struck a match.
“How good is your aim?”
# # #
When the boat was ablaze and chaos reigned, they shouted for Chan and Bira.
Gambling with their voices in English, Tara and the children bellowed for them to swim, over and over again, hoping against hope to attract their friends’ attention and no one else's.
She spotted two figures wading the shallow water toward them and Tara looked around for another way out. The crowd was surrounding the spectacle, and some tried to put out the fire, while small paddy boats lay abandoned everywhere. She made for the nearest one, which was barely big enough to carry them all, but it was better than nothing.
They pulled Chan and Bira up and made their way downstream as soon as their hands could touch the oars.
“Quick! Quick! We have to get out of here,” Chan muttered furiously. She was completely soaked but was paddling as fast as she could.
“What in the devil’s name do you think we have been doing?” Tara shot back.
They made it to the river’s bend and the shouting behind them raged on.
Finally, they could breathe again. Chan gave her a disbelieving look and started laughing maniacally. The children looked around, then at one another, bewildered.
Once started, it was impossible to stop. Tara joined her and they all ended up holding onto their stomachs, fighting for breath. They were safe, somehow. They were on their way to Siam and they would get to start their lives anew in a few hours, battled and bruised, but free.
“Alright, alright, enough now.” Another chuckle was let out.
Chan turned to her and looked her firmly in the eyes. “Thank you, Tara. You miraculous, demented fool. You saved our lives. And thank you. All of you. I have never been more proud of my family.”
The children all tried to get up and embrace their teacher at once, nearly tipping the boat upside down. When the commotion died down, Chan turned to Tara once more, nodded, and placed a gentle kiss on her forehead.
“You are stuck with us now.”
Tara’s heart skipped a beat as she debated whether she should return the gesture or risk a more intimate one. In the end, she settled for lacing her fingers with Chan’s. They would have plenty of time to find out where this leads.
Her reverie was interrupted by Tien’s voice.
“We have to name this boat.”
“It’s barely a boat, more like a raft,” Bira said.
“She is our boat and she is a good one. It is bad luck not to name her. She is keeping us safe, and she needs a name,” Tien reiterated, sounding near hysterical.
Nong stepped in and broke the impending argument. “Moon River, obviously.”
“That is not obvious to me at all?” Tara replied, but Chan began to giggle like a student instead of their formidable governess. Being in the water was doing strange things to her.
“Our names. Tara means river in these parts of the world and Chan is just Burmese for the moon. So, here we are, Moon River.” Chan’s face softened under the starlight; all her worry lines smoothed out, and Tara’s chest tightened with unfamiliar emotions. Perhaps it was a feeling of purpose, a new hope for their endless possibilities, or a simple, assured sense of belonging.
“And I would not be anywhere else but here.”
Chan only clasped her hand tighter in reply.
Show Notes
This quarter’s fiction episode presents “Moon River” by Mandy Mongkolyuth, narrated by Heather Rose Jones.
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 Mandy Mongkolyuth Online
- Tumblr: @themandilorian
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LHMPMonday, October 25, 2021 - 08:00
Back in the Spring of 2017, I was invited to join a "girls go to Disneyland" trip by some local friends. At the end of the visit, a bunch of us took in the newly released live-action Disney "Beauty and the Beast." That got me thinking about how the B&B "script" is replayed time and again in media, even when people claim to be subverting the story, I got to pondering. And the pondering turned into some characters. And the characters turned into a story.
What if the Beast was simply...a beast? What if he was unredeemable? What if he never truly saw his interactions with people and the world around him as being a problem--except that he had been promised the possibility of redemption and now considered it owed to him?
What if Beauty never loved the Beast--not because he was a beast, but because she was aromantic? What if she did her best to placate and humor the Beast, but there was never any chance it would turn into love. Not the sort of love that could break a curse.
What if the rose was not simply and only a rose?
And what if the Beast had a sister?
So I wrote "The Language of Roses", not for any particular purpose, except that I wanted to get the story out of my head. When it was done, I felt it was (in my humble opinion) one of the best things I'd ever written.
And so I set out on a quest to find a publisher. Several years and multiple submissions later, I'm delighted and excited to announce that "The Language of Roses" will be published by Queen of Swords Press in the Spring of 2022. Queen of Swords is a relatively new press and has been putting out some highly praised (and oft-award-nominated) books. I'm proud to be in such amazing company. Expect me to be burbling over about this for some time to come.
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PromotionPublications:
The Language of RosesSaturday, October 23, 2021 - 06:56
No clever intro today, gotta run for Sirens programming.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2334
Chapter 2c: Classical and Hellenistic Greece – Presence and Absence
This section of the chapter looks at patterns of reference and silence across various types of media to try to interpret the absences of representations of f/f sex. Different genres had different implicit rules about what could or could not be depicted. For example, visual arts that depicted m/m sex invariably stuck to the “ideal” of a desiring older man and a passive youth. Human men were not depicted in scenes with deprecated sexual practices, such as performing oral sex, but such scenes might show a satyr performing the male role, “standing in” for the human man. Sexual scenes do not include persons identifiable as slaves or prostitutes. Female genitals are very rarely depicted and do not appear to have been a site of erotic interest for the expected male viewership. (Though the expected viewership could depend to some extent on the type of object displaying the art.)
Within the larger context, how do we interpret that extreme scarcity of depictions of f/f sex? Boehringer reviews several genres of art that have been interpreted as f/f eroticism and argues that some are regularly misinterpreted. For example, a review of artwork depicting women (or other figures) with an “olisbos” (dildo), when taken together with references to the object in textual material, undermines the theory that it is a signifier of f/f sexual activity, as opposed to solitary female sexual activity. (This discussion is extensive and detailed.)
Certain other individual artworks, such as an image of two women with one kneeling before the other touching her genitals, can be interpreted in light of other highly parallel examples where such an interpretation is impossible (as when the kneeling figure is a satyr). Scenes of naked women bathing together, or of drunken women walking arm in arm, are not clearly erotic. On the other hand, it feels like Boehringer is sometimes working fairly hard to exclude certain depictions, while silently ignoring certain features of the art, For example, a depiction of a seated woman and a standing woman facing each other, both holding garlands (previously noted as featuring in courtship scenes), with the seating woman touching the standing woman’s breast or shoulder is dismissed as difficult to interpret due to the ambiguity of which body part is being touched. An image of two maenads (characters who reject male sexual advances) holding a single cloak around them, is declared to be “not erotic” with no clear explanation, only a reference to another publication on the topic.
But certain marginal possibilities aside, it does seem to be the case that f/f sex in art is vanishingly rare. The overall interpretation of presence and absence in art with regard to sexual topics seems to be that art depicts how society chooses to see itself, rather than being a reflection of everyday reality.
Silence about f/f sex in “Old Comedy” (a genre of drama that often played on bawdy and satiric themes) is harder to make sense of, as the genre regularly indulged in sexual humor of all types, including mockery of non-normative m/m relations, and regular lampooning of women’s stereotypical over-sexualization. Even in a play such as Lysistrata where the women’s lack of access to men for sexual satisfaction is a lynch-pin of the comedy, there are no jokes about f/f sex taking the edge off. Boehringer’s conclusion is “pottery shows us the Greek men did not find sex between women erotic; the silence of comedy…shows ups that they did not find it funny, either.”
Though most genres of literature are silent on f/f sex in the classical period (history, poetry, drama, politics, law), Plato is not the only philosopher whose writings can provide information, if only tangentially. Aristotle was a contemporary of Plato and familiar with the Symposium, so any silence on his part is not ignorance of f/f possibilities. While silent on human females, he notes female same-sex courtship among doves, where he notes treading, billing, and egg laying without making a distinction of active/passive roles as worthy of note. He claims this only occurs in the absence of males, and notes that the resulting eggs are sterile. His interest seems to revolve around reproduction rather than abstract behavior.
Aristotle’s discussions on the relationship of eros and philia focus on m/m relations as the highest form, with sexual pleasure being only a means to achieve philia, not an end in itself. Eros, for its own sake, is not of interest to him. In discussing relations, he makes no distinction or judgment between m/f and m/m relationships, but does not include f/f examples in his discussions. Ero and philia are not exclusive of each other but phila is seen as a more virtuous goal. Women are considered incapable of the virtues that make philia possible (though they can engage in phila with a husband who has those virtues). But, by this reasoning, two women cannot engage in philia together.
This, then, may be the explanation for Aristotle’s failure to speak of f/f relationships: they operate only on the level of eros and therefore are not worth notice. [Note: Boehringer isn’t saying that Aristotle says this explicitly, only that it aligns with his reasoning.] Thus f/f couples are not of interest, not because the relationship is homosexual, but because it involves women.
Plato’s two references to f/f couples exist in a context where the author was developing comprehensive systems (of law, or regarding eros) and therefore chose to account for all possibilities. Aristotle, having a different purpose and program, had no similar need to be comprehensive.
Another meaningful “absence” in writing about f/f relations is the idea (present in later cultures) that there is an element of masculinity behind f/f relations. Women derived from primordial ff creatures were more feminine than women derived from mf creatures. There is no suggestion that they have a masculine appearance or behavior. In both the Symposium and the Laws, what distinguishes women in f/f relationships is their social behavior (attraction to women) or reproductive status (non-reproductive) but not any specific sexual activity. Plato’s f/f women are not “tribades” in the sense of being defined by a sexual act. To the extent that it may be meaningful, Aristotle’s discussion of doves also avoids making any distinction of categorization on the basis of specific sexual behavior.
There are classical Greek writers who describe women who adopt masculine behaviors, but no sexual interpretation is placed on this. Instead, the behavior is considered virtuous, though incapable of achieving the same status as men. Whether in histories or comic drama, Women acting in a masculine way are perceived as trying to “better” themselves, but with no sexual implications. In this, the Archaic and Classical texts are similar, and in contrast with later framings.
In the Classical era, f/f relations are not a cause for concern or condemnation because they are not seen as having any impact on social or political life. Thus, in contrast with some scholars, Boehringer proposes that the Classical Greek silence on f/f relationships, rather than reflecting a taboo driven by male anxiety, reflects and apathy due to lack of male anxiety. What did provoke anxiety are things like concerns about birth rates, as we see in the Laws.
Distinctions regarding sexual partners that were considered relevant in the Classical period included social status, the forms the sexual relations took, and conformity to gender expectations, but not the specific sex of the partners (except to the extent that at least one partner is male). But what set f/f relations apart such as to constitute an identifiable and meaningful category was that both (all) persons involved were female. This distinguished f/f relations from all other possibilities and created what might be thought of as a “proto-category” of female homosexuality in a context where neither “heterosexuality” nor “male homosexuality” were identifiable or distinct as categories. This proto-category is internally homogeneous with no distinction of behavioral role or distinction of moral judgment regarding what relations they might engage in.
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Friday, October 22, 2021 - 06:42
Although Boehringer doesn't touch on the question directly, I wonder how badly our image of f/f eroticism in Classical Greece is skewed by having two significant textual references filtered through one specific author (Plato)? There is a brief advisory in one discussion that Plato's opinions on the topic may not have been representative of the general public. But I also wonder to what extent Plato's opinions on anything were representative of his contemporaries. One of the things that struct me when I was reading Foucault's coverage of the same era and authors is how badly messed up the human psyche gets when asceticism and the devaluing of sensory pleasures is set on a pedestal. The pursuit of competitive asceticism is a game of chicken: the first person to blink loses the game but wins by living. If a culture buys into the idea that the greatest good is the derogation of physical pleasures in favor of abstract intellectual ideals, you end up with a bunch of sour old men making the "rules for living" that everyone else is evaluated against. While the discussion of Plato's Laws in this book doesn't go into the same detail about other topics than gender and sexuality, one does get the impression that life under the system as described might be economically and politically "successful" but perhaps not much worth living, regardless of one's individual desires. And given the material culture of Classical Greece that we see, it hardly seems likely that the average person on the street would consider it a desirable state of affairs.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 2b: Classical and Hellenistic Greece – Plato’s Laws
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
Although Boehringer doesn't touch on the question directly, I wonder how badly our image of f/f eroticism in Classical Greece is skewed by having two significant textual references filtered through one specific author (Plato)? There is a brief advisory in one discussion that Plato's opinions on the topic may not have been representative of the general public. But I also wonder to what extent Plato's opinions on anything were representative of his contemporaries. One of the things that struct me when I was reading Foucault's coverage of the same era and authors is how badly messed up the human psyche gets when asceticism and the devaluing of sensory pleasures is set on a pedestal. The pursuit of competitive asceticism is a game of chicken: the first person to blink loses the game but wins by living. If a culture buys into the idea that the greatest good is the derogation of physical pleasures in favor of abstract intellectual ideals, you end up with a bunch of sour old men making the "rules for living" that everyone else is evaluated against. While the discussion of Plato's Laws in this book doesn't go into the same detail about other topics than gender and sexuality, one does get the impression that life under the system as described might be economically and politically "successful" but perhaps not much worth living, regardless of one's individual desires. And given the material culture of Classical Greece that we see, it hardly seems likely that the average person on the street would consider it a desirable state of affairs.
# # #
The second topic in this chapter is another work of Plato, and once again a deep context is needed to interpret what the mention of f/f sex actually means for Greek realities. The Laws takes the form of a conversation between three men about what laws are needed for the governance of the ideal city. This is a different take than the one Plate put forth in the Republic. The Republic was more of an idealized thought experiment. The Laws is more of an exhaustive, practical plan of action (but still a purely hypothetical document).
Both texts are surprisingly inclusive of women’s participation in governance, and the Laws provides for a level of equal participation (within an assumption of physical inferiority) that would have seemed revolutionary within the realities of Athenian life at the time. But the well-regulated state that Plato envisions in the Laws is autocratic and more dystopian in its regulation and surveillance than anything a modern mind would consider as ideal.
This is the context for the attitude toward sexual relations in the Laws that provide the context for the two references to f/f sex. There is a strong focus on strict regulation of population for economic and social stability. There is also a very ascetic approach to physical pleasure. These combine in proposed laws that restrict all sexual activity to that which produces legitimate children within social-sanctioned marriages. Both m/m and f/f sex are prohibited on the basis that they do not produce legitimate offspring, but so is m/f adultery and sex between a citizen and a slave. Thus, there is no conceptual category of “homosexual sex” that is being banned, but rather a category of “illegitimate sexual activity” which is defined as everything outside of a fairly narrow category.
The other context for this prohibition is an attitude that non-procreative sex represents a failure to properly restrain passions and appetites that indicate moral weakness. It’s permissible for approved procreative sex to be enjoyed, because it is otherwise licit, but with no licit purpose, other forms of sex represent a lack of self-control.
These attitudes are very much out of line with the realities of Athenian society, as well as being in conflict with attitudes implicit in Plato’s earlier writings. So does this represent a seismic shift in his own attitudes toward sex, or does the difference lie in the specific genre and purpose of the Laws as a text? Boehringer seems to lean toward the latter. She also notes that the Laws do not include unrealistic, fanciful scenarios to address – the topics covered in the text are practical, real-life subjects that would need to be considered in designing a government.
The ultimate conclusion is that despite the superficially negative context in which f/f sex is mentioned in the Laws, the inclusion of the topic, and its neutral treatment vis-à-vis other types of prohibited sex, indicate that it was a reality of Athenian life that would need to be included in any comprehensive proposal regarding governance of sexual behavior.
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