LHMP

I’ll confess that I thought this article was going to be a lot more relevant to lesbian history than it was, given the inclusion of “Tommies” in the title. I’m including this brief summary because I already had the article scheduled, but the content is solidly focused on male issues and topics. In that context, it’s a fascinating look at shifting images of masculinity and the part that institutionalized male homoerotic encounters and relationships played in those images. But the reference to "tommies" is minor and entirely in relation to male desires.

This article started out feeling a bit like Clark came up with an interesting metaphor and then went searching for contexts to apply it. That feeling faded as I read further. I think she has hit on a useful concept for a diverse type of experience that falls between the cracks of many of the existing theoretical approaches.

Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) is commonly referenced as the "first" novel of lesbian identity, and in my generation that resulted in no small amount of trauma if we failed to recognize our lives and dreams within its pages. But Aimée Duc's Sind es Frauen? (Are these Women?) (1901) would have been a far more hopeful, sympathetic, and introspective introduction to the place of women who love women in the literary canon.

It's always interesting to see how shifts in philosophical thinking occur in waves across interconnected cultural traditions. Europe always had a diverse set of attitudes toward non-normative sexuality. But you can see specific concepts take hold and spread, either integrating with, or replacing, the existing local attitudes. These sorts of shifts are easier to see in more recent centuries.