You may remember Porpentine Charity Heartscape from Vesp: A History of Scaphic Sapphism, the interactive fiction head-trip we published earlier this year.
|
|
In 1921, Lord Birkenhead, the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, had opposed a bill that would have criminalised lesbianism on the grounds that "of every thousand women ... 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices".Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 132–136. In reality, awareness of lesbianism had been gradually increasing since World War I, but it was still a subject most people had never heard of, or perhaps just preferred to ignore.Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 25.
|
|
2005 p. 77Caroline Gonda, John C. Beynon: Lesbian dames, Sapphism in the long eighteenth century. 2010 p. 127 It is notable for an early use of the word lesbian in the modern sense.
|
|
Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 27, 193. Lesbian journalist Evelyn Irons – who considered Hall's style of dress "rather effeminate" compared to her own – said that after the publication of The Well, truck drivers would call out on the street to any woman who wore a collar and tie: "Oh, you're Miss Radclyffe Hall".Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 113, 123. Some welcomed their newfound visibility: when Hall spoke at a luncheon in 1932, the audience was full of women who had imitated her look.
|
|
The mannish appearance, uncharacteristic (in photographs) half-smile, and the knowing look in the picture has caused later commentators to wonder whether Dolores was signalling that she was a lesbian, but there is no evidence to suggest that she was and her appearance at this time may simply have been a fashion statement. The photograph appeared, slightly changed, on the cover of Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture by Laura Doan in 2013.Doan, Laura (2013). Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture.
|
|
Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 124–125. But in a study of lesbian women in Salt Lake City in the 1920s and '30s, nearly all regretted the publication of The Well because it had drawn unwanted attention to them.Bullough, 897.
|
|
James Douglas illustrated his denunciation of The Well with a photograph of Radclyffe Hall in a silk smoking jacket and bow tie, holding a cigarette and monocle. She was also wearing a straight knee-length skirt, but later Sunday Express articles cropped the photo so tightly that it became difficult to tell she was not wearing trousers.Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 185–191. Hall's style of dress was not scandalous in the 1920s; short hairstyles were common, and the combination of tailored jackets and short skirts was a recognised fashion, discussed in magazines as the "severely masculine" look.Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 114–117 and passim.
|
|
Marie Laurencin's decor, according to Garafola, had "the same ambiguous blend of innocence and corruption" as the ballet. It opens in a flood of pink light that is "voluptuously feminine". A host of taboos are explored: "narcissism, voyeurism, female sexual power, castration, sapphism". Garafola a few pages earlier mentions the career importance of her years in Kiev "fired by the Revolution's brave new art".
|
|
A detailed discussion of the US trials can be found in Taylor, "I Made Up My Mind". Publicity over The Well of Lonelinesss legal battles increased the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture.See Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, chapter 5. For decades it was the best- known lesbian novel in English, and often the first source of information about lesbianism that young people could find.
|
|
Johannes Kneppelhout circa 1865 Before the last decades of the 19th century words like uranism, homosexual, sapphism, lesbian and transvestite didn't exist. Being called a true Sappho of Lesbos was a high compliment for female poets, without sexual connotations.Meijer 1998, Introduction pp. 1-23 Words like sodomy, pederast and hermaphrodite existed and had their Dutch-language counterpart, but only very partially covered what would become LGBT (Dutch equivalent: holebi) in a more modern understanding.
|
|
Upon her return to Korea, Gong began working as a model. She appeared in advertisements, notably the "Happy to Death" commercial for telecom 700–5425. After a year and a half of modeling, she made her acting debut in a supporting role in Memento Mori. Co-directed by Kim Tae- yong and Min Kyu-dong, the horror film reinvented its genre with its fresh approach on teenage femme sexuality and its destructive force, melding sapphism and the supernatural at a girls' high school.
|
|
Hall describes The Well of Loneliness as "The first long and very serious novel entirely upon the subject of sexual inversion" She wrote The Well of Loneliness in part to popularise the ideas of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who regarded homosexuality as an inborn and unalterable trait: congenital sexual inversion.Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 126. In Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), the first book Stephen finds in her father's study, inversion is described as a degenerative disorder common in families with histories of mental illness.Rule, 82.
|
|
Rumors about her relationships with women circulated in pornographic detail by anti-royalist pamphlets before the French Revolution. In Victorian England, biographers who idealized the Ancien Régime made a point of denying the rumours, but at the same time romanticised Marie Antoinette's "sisterly" friendship with the Princesse de Lamballe as—in the words of an 1858 biography—one of the "rare and great loves that Providence unites in death." By the end of the 19th century, she was a cult icon of "sapphism." Her execution, seen as tragic martyrdom, may have added to her appeal.
|
|
During this era, lesbian sexual practices became meeting the rapidly rising trend of "sapphism", which were created all in the name of pleasure. This included, but was not limited to the act of frottage, cunnilingus and mutual masturbation. Chinese homosexuals did not experience persecution which would compare to that experienced by homosexuals in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, and in some areas, particularly among the merchant classes, same-sex love was particularly appreciated. There was a stereotype in the late Ming dynasty that the province of Fujian was the only place where homosexuality was prominent,Brook, 232.
|
|
For accounts of the British trial and the events leading up to it, see Souhami, 192–241, and Cline, 225–267. For a detailed examination of controversies over The Well of Loneliness in the 1920s, see chapter 1 of Doan, Fashioning Sapphism. An overview can be found in the introduction to Doan & Prosser, Palatable Poison, which also reprints the full text of several contemporary reviews and reactions, including the Sunday Express editorial and Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron's legal judgement. In the United States the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.
|
|
In a central European castle, two young girls are summoned to learn about a will making them heirs to the property, on condition that they stay there for a full year. They are received by the hostess, an austere-looking woman named Wanda, who organizes satanic lesbian rites at night that celebrate, in sex and sapphism, the vampire Varga. Coincidentally, on the same day an anthropologist studying local superstitions and her brother were victims of a road accident and asked for accommodation at the castle. Wanda turns out to be the descendant of a vampire baroness, Varga, burned alive centuries ago by the villagers for vampirism.
|
|