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the once & future lesbian
gay american history
the lavender herring
lesbian connection
One of the most glaring areas in which we have been kept ignorant is lesbian history. All we have been able to learn about are a few lesbian writers and artists -- important though they are to us, we have felt the lack of a more complete picture of the lives of most lesbians.
The book Gay American History is a collection of letters, diary excerpts, articles and records edited by a gay man. The greater part of the material is about gay men; about a third of it is specifically about lesbians. Material about lesbians is harder to find, but Katz criticized himself in a recent interview in the Advocate for sexism for not trying harder. This is not a book to be ignored because it was edited by a man or because many of the documents are about gay men. It is an incredible, unparalleled historical record that helps clarify the lesbian life experience.
Much of the book is a record of oppression, from the days of the Puritans and Spanish colonists when any kind of sex between persons of the same sex was in some places considered a crime punishable by death, to more enlightened twentieth-century America in which psychiatrists only attempt to destroy the sexual orientation by nausea-producing drugs, electro-shock, x-rays, lobotomies, castrations, etc. -- this book documents all of the ugliest forms of oppression that are hard to face but necessary to understand if we are to analyse our political situation. A certain Dr. Potter of New York, writing in 1933, argued in favor of experimenting on gay people. "Some we would probably kill, "he said. "Others we would cure." We can think of many political and emotional reasons for separateness from gay men, but they, too, have had to deal with this sort of oppression.
But this book is not simply a record of horrors; most of the chapters are far more enjoyable to read than the one on "treatment." There is a whole chapter on women who tried to pass as men (and often succeeded) in order to survive, earn decent wages, marry their woman lovers, etc. One of the more amusing was a...