“Lesbian” as Keyword

“Lesbian wedding ceremony 1965, London” (Eve Arnold)

Libraries are not apolitical spaces. The same homophobia that makes it dangerous to live as a queer person makes queerness a difficult subject to find in the library. Until the 1960s, many libraries held books relating to homosexuality in restricted access areas: patrons, stripped of privacy and anonymity, had to request and read books under surveillance. “Homosexuality” was not authorized as a Library of Congress subject heading until 1946; “lesbian” was not authorized until 1954. Until 1972, both of these terms were classified under the broader subject heading “sexual perversion.” Literary archives were rarely catalogued as gay or lesbian, even if archival materials like letters or diaries contained explicit mention of queer relationships.

In 1971, the Task Force on Gay Liberation of the American Library Association began to fight the deliberate exclusion of queerness and queer people from the mainstream historical record. Though their work was groundbreaking, queer people—especially lesbians—are still underrepresented in the archive. As of February 12th, 2022, out of the ten million items recorded in Yale’s library database Orbis, only 1068 are catalogued under the subject heading “lesbian.”

The objects on this page all show up when a scholar searches “lesbian” in Yale’s library catalog. Though the types of sources are varied—we find books, photographs, magazines, stickers—an explicit mention of queerness appears somewhere in each object. To be catalogued as “lesbian,” an object must contain a clear and direct expression of lesbianism.

“The Lesbian Guide for the Breaking Up of Lesbian Couples”

5,000 of these posters were put up around New York City ca. 1997

Spring Fire (1952)

In 1952, Marijane Meaker (under the pseudonym Vin Packer) wrote the first bestselling lesbian pulp fiction novel Spring Fire. Hundreds of lesbian pulp fiction books were published between 1950 and 1969. They were cheap and sold millions of copies each. They all ended unhappily: Meaker’s editor told her Spring Fire could only be published if its end did not “make homosexuality attractive” in any way. Despite their flaws, lesbian pulp fiction books were groundbreaking, bringing queer fiction into the accessible mainstream. In 2004, Meaker described how although Spring Fire’s unhappy ending “may have satisfied the post office inspections, the homosexual audience would not have believed it for a minute. But they also wouldn’t care that much, because more important was the fact there was a new book about us.”

Many “lesbian” objects exist in archives with no accompanying context. In these cases, we can take material qualities of the objects as clues towards the desired audience or intent: we can imagine these undated stickers above, for example, plastered on telephone poles around town.

Until 1962, printed materials related to homosexuality were considered “obscene” and therefore unmailable under the Comstock Act. As lesbian and gay activists fought laws restricting the distribution of queer publications, a myriad of queer presses were born. If mainstream literary houses wouldn’t print books about the queer experience, queer people would publish themselves. Each of the magazines shown below were written by lesbians, for lesbians: writing produced without the straight censor in mind.

Back cover of ComingOutRage, May 1973

Azalea: a magazine by and for third world lesbians, Fall 1980

Connexions: An International Women’s Quarterly, Winter 1982