Centring Lesbians: LGB History Month

By Daisy Haynes

It is apt, I think, that as I sit down to write this, I have just set aside a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Just the other day I had thought that Clarissa should’ve dumped Richard and married Sally Seton, who famously kissed her on the lips in a moment that would live on in Mrs Dalloway’s memories until we meet her in her fifties, and presumably beyond. And then I remembered: Mrs Dalloway is Mrs Dalloway at least in part because she could never have been Mrs Seton. I forget, sometimes, from my modern position of relative safety, just how different things were for my sisters such a short time ago. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t lesbian relationships in Woolf’s time (and long before it!) Woolf herself had an intimate relationship with Vita Sackville-West, the subject of her novel Orlando. Many of the Suffragettes were engaging in sexual relationships with other members of the votes for women movement, according to the diaries of Mary Blathwayt. Although homosexuality between men was criminalised in the buggery act of 1533, enacted under the reign of Henry VIII (the punishment for which was death) homosexuality between women was never criminalised in England. New legislation introduced under Queen Victoria’s reign in 1861 maintained that homosexuality between men would still be illegal, but the death penalty was removed. Again, lesbian relationships were omitted. Many believe that this was a consequence of Queen Victoria’s reluctance to acknowledge that women engaged in homosexual relationships, but as Dr Kate Lister argues, the fictional literature of the period featuring lesbian affairs suggests that the Queen was well aware of the existence of lesbian women. She posits, instead, that the lawmakers were so entrenched in ‘phallocentric culture’ that they couldn’t conceive of sex that didn’t involve a penis. Broadly speaking, this is what we’d now refer to as Lesbian erasure, where the focus of sexual intimacy is centred around the need to cater to the male gaze. 

Perhaps one of the most abhorrent examples of inequality faced by LGB people is the pathologisation and subsequent medicalisation of homosexuality. Arguably the most familiar story is that of Alan Turing, the man responsible for cracking the enigma code and catalysing the victory of the allied forces in the second world war, who was prosecuted and subsequently chemically castrated in 1952 for homosexual acts. What is less often spoken about, however, is that during the 1960s, clitoridectomies were performed on American lesbian women in order to attempt ‘cure’ them of their sexuality. This practice has a long history of seeking to eradicate women’s libido, having been prescribed in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century to all women whose sexual appetites were deemed ‘excessive’. However, the procedure continued long afterwards for the purpose of converting lesbians into heterosexual women- unsuccessfully, I hasten to add. 

Since the 1950s, treatments used to convert gay and lesbian people in the UK, issued by the NHS, included electric shock aversion therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, oestrogen treatment to reduce libido, religious counselling, hypnosis, and psychodrama, as well as the suggestion that men use prostituted women to practise having sex with. There is even a record of a woman having been treated with deep insulin coma treatment in the 1950s. It was during this time when Audre Lorde was writing her earliest poetry, published in New Negro Poets and black literary magazines, and focusing her efforts on activism on issues relating to civil rights, black lesbian feminism, and anti-war concerns. In 1970, she would commit her sexuality to paper in her poem to Martha. In the same year, Lavender Menace, a group of radical feminist lesbians, formed to protest the exclusion of lesbian women and their concerns from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to Unite Women. Mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organisation for Women (NOW), the phrase that became their namesake was coined by Betty Friedan, who believed that the association with lesbian feminists threatened the wider aims of NOW. Friedan argued that the ‘man-hating’ lesbians minimised their claim to seriousness in a way that would damage their credibility as a movement. 

During this decade, lesbian separatism became a key concept within lesbian feminism. In 1971, a lesbian commune was formed by a group calling themselves The Furies, who published a monthly newspaper. Whilst the commune ended in just a year later, the ideas disseminated by The Furies remained a constant within lesbian feminism, although individual members had different ideas about the extent of its usefulness or purpose. Some felt that it was an initial step affording them the ability to take action in a way that was meaningful, and others felt that separatism was a lifelong commitment, necessary to ensure the safety and dignity of women. It is around this time that nascent political lesbianism is burgeoning, and in 1981, Sheila Jeffreys co-writes Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism with the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group. They advocated for women ridding men “from [their] beds and [their] heads”, arguing that liberation for women could not be achieved as long as they were complicit in their own oppression, collaborating with their oppressors in the home. This branch of feminist analysis was built upon by Adrienne Rich, who argued in 1981 that heterosexuality is a political institution which supports the hierarchy of male superiority. The institution, she says, is a compulsory facet of sexuality because the continuation of the patriarchal rule is dependent upon its enforcement.

By this time, women are beginning to tentatively come out of the closet, and in 1981 this is exactly what Martina Navratilova did, identifying herself in an interview with New York Daily News as a bisexual woman, asking that they respect her decision and delay publication until she was ready to come out; she would later confirm that she is a lesbian. In 1992, she became involved in LGB activism, having participated in a lawsuit that contested Amendment 2, a ballot proposition in Colorado that prohibited sexual orientation from being a protected characteristic. A year later, she spoke publicly at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. She has since been a fierce advocate for protecting women’s sports.

In 1991, Julie Bindel and her partner, Harriet Wistrich founded Justice for Women (JFW), a feminist law-reform group created for the purpose of campaigning against the discrimination women face in cases involving domestic violence perpetrated by male partners. It was a natural progression for Julie, having spent much of her working life researching violence against women, campaigning against specific cases, such as the Free Sara Thornton campaign, which would ultimately grow into the JFW that remains in operation today. She has since campaigned against prostitution, raised awareness of the abysmal prosecution rates in rape cases, and identifies herself as a political lesbian feminist. Throughout the rest of the decade, lesbian representation in popular media began to take off, and the “lesbian kiss episode”, a subgenre of the media portrayal of lesbianism emerged. The cliche outlines a straight woman and a bisexual or lesbian character kissing on screen, but ultimately the encounter flopped thereafter. The phenomenon would later be critiqued as exploitative, offering a cheap resolution to what essentially amounted to low ratings. Marti Noxon, who navigated a terrain of resistance when propositioning a long-term lesbian relationship in Buffy the Vampire Slayer said in an interview that ‘You can show girls kissing once, but you can't show them kissing twice… because the second time, it means that they liked it.’ Ellen Morgan made TV history when, in the 1994 episode of her hit TV show entitled “Puppy Episode”, she came out as a lesbian, paving the way for LGB representation in mainstream media, including Will and Grace (1998), The L Word (2004), and Ugly Betty (2006). In 2003, The Ellen DeGeneres Show aired for the first time, further contributing to a much-needed normalisation of LGB people in mainstream media.

Now, in the 21st century, there have been many gains worthy of mention made in the fight for LGB rights; for instance, same-sex adoption rights (2002), employment equality (2003), protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (2007), the protection of freedoms act (2012), and same-sex marriage legislation (which has since been enacted in a number of countries all over the world, including England and Wales in 2013). However, in spite of these advances, violence and discrimination on the basis of sexuality continues. In 2019-2020, 15,835 hate crimes were recorded against LGB people. It is indisputably clear that homophobia persists in the UK, and I worry about the extent to which this continues to impact the lives of LGB children, whose families may still harbour prejudice towards same-sex attracted people. 

It seems utterly unthinkable that homosexuality would still be a crime in some parts of the world, and yet this is the situation. In Indonesia, gay and lesbian sex is criminalised, the maximum punishment for which is eight years imprisonment and one hundred lashes. In Afghanistan, the maximum punishment is death. In most parts of Africa, extending out through the Middle East, as well as in Guyana, and many countries in the Far East, homosexuality is still a crime punishable by imprisonment, usually accompanied by a fine. At the time of writing, conversion therapy remains legal in the UK; whilst a petition that garnered over 250,000 signatures was closed in September of last year with the promise to rectify the situation, it was highlighted by Catherine McKinnell MP and Elliot Colburn MP that two other substantial petitions were raised in previous years. Further, they noted that legislation had failed to appear in spite of the Government’s pledge to this end in their 2018 LGBT Action Plan. Boris Johnson said that the practice was “absolutely abhorrent”, pledging to ban it once the government completes a study outlining the parameters pertaining to the issue. 

As we navigate the present, creating the LGB history of tomorrow’s world, the future looks uncertain and, at times, bleak. Whilst we continue to battle the ever-present mechanism of lesbian erasure, it becomes increasingly important to platform the voices of the women whose stories are so often overlooked, rewritten, and whose sexual identities are threatened with redefinition. Exciting activism is taking place all the time, whether it’s Get The L Out staging protests, the LGB Alliance, whose permanent focus, amongst other things, is amplifying the voices of lesbian women, Lesbian Strength marching, or brave young activists such as Keira Bell singlehandedly taking on huge organisations to bring about change. Please share your favourite lesbian content creators, activists, writers, poets, and artists with your friends. It has never been more important to centre the voices of lesbian women; showing support and solidarity won’t rectify the new, frightening history being made every day, but solidarity in sisterhood is the fuel behind the fight. Together, we are stronger. Together, we’re unstoppable.

Image by Patricia Román from Pixabay