LHMP #474 Faderman 1979 Who Hid Lesbian History?

This article is essentially a teaser for Surpassing the Love of Men (which she explicitly says in the author’s note at the end). Given that, I’m not sure how much value there is to blogging it in detail.

The article starts by reviewing how lesbian aspects of history were being treated before the 1970s, with those aspects either ignored, discussed in coded language, or arbitrarily assigned to some random man. Biographies of women in homoerotic relationships were a particular subject of historical gatekeeping, with even explicit romantic and erotic expressions directed toward other women being forcibly re-interpreted as actually meant to be understood as heterosexual, even if some unnamed hypothetical man needed to be invented to assign the role to.

Another technique was the careful editing of quotations (as was done in Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s edition of Emily Dickinson’s papers) to soften or redirect homoerotic language. Or the relabeling of romantic partners as “companions,” sometimes explicitly for the purpose of “saving” their reputation, even in contexts where illicit affairs with men were acknowledged blatantly. When unavoidable, same-sex relationships may be shrunk down to a brief mention while any possible scrap of evidence for heterosexual relations is elaborated in detail.

Anyway, this is basically a well-deserved rant against the historical erasure of lesbianism which may feel obvious and unnecessary 45 years later.