A. J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World is a history of independent LGBT bookshops, from the under-the-counter days to open, out-and-proud institutions. It follows the shops and booksellers who got banned books onto shelves and supported their communities through the AIDS crisis, Section 28 and book bans. The list of shops is long … Read more
Here’s a question that sounds simple: when did lesbians begin? Not when did women start loving women. That’s always happened. The question is when people started thinking of it as an identity, a type of person with a name, and how that idea changed over the following decades. That’s the question at the centre of … Read more
If you watched Gentleman Jack, the BBC and HBO series with Suranne Jones striding across the Yorkshire moors in a top hat, you met Anne Lister as a confident woman in her forties. She was a landowner and diarist who had already loved and lost several women by the time the show begins. Emma Donoghue’s … Read more
Let’s address the obvious question first. Room isn’t a lesbian novel. There’s no lesbian romance in it, no queer subplot, nothing that would get it shelved in the LGBTQ section of your local bookstore. So why is it in the Lesbian Bibliography? Because of who wrote it. Emma Donoghue is one of the most important … Read more
Picture a spinning wire rack in a 1950s drugstore. Among the westerns and the hard-boiled detective novels are paperbacks with titles like Women’s Barracks, Odd Girl Out and Spring Fire. The covers show two women in slips, one leaning toward the other with a meaningful look. The cover lines promise something shocking about “a love … Read more
Every year, somebody has to read hundreds of erotic stories and pick the best ones. It sounds like a dream job, and it’s harder than it looks. For Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 3, that somebody was Sacchi Green. Cleis Press published the volume in 2018. It’s part of a long-running tradition. The … Read more
Before we get to the book, a quick history lesson. In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, feminists fought a long, bitter argument that came to be known as the sex wars. On one side were activists who saw pornography, and much of sexuality as it was then practised, as a tool of male … Read more
Every December, a certain kind of movie takes over the streaming services. A woman with a big-city career problem, a small town or snowy cabin, a fake relationship, a family that’s a little too nosy, and a kiss under the mistletoe right before the credits roll. For decades the couples in those movies were straight. … Read more
You’ve probably seen the movie. In 1991, Fried Green Tomatoes became a surprise hit, with Kathy Bates as a frustrated housewife, Jessica Tandy as the storyteller in the nursing home, and Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker as Idgie and Ruth, the two women at the heart of the story. People still quote it. Some … Read more
If Tipping the Velvet is Sarah Waters throwing a party, Affinity is Sarah Waters turning off the lights and telling a ghost story. The /books entry, quoting a review by Kerry Fried, makes the comparison directly. Waters’s debut was a lesbian romp with a utopian socialist streak. Her second novel, first published in 1999, is … Read more