A Radical Lesbian Reading List
An Approachable List of Literature by Lesbians
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Frank Skipworth, A Roman Holiday (1889)
I started this Substack back in November 2024. It was meant to be a resource for lesbian literature, by which I mean literature focused on lesbians. The idea was that literature written by women who love women, literature about women.
My Substack remains a love letter to woman, through my effort to educate, reduce gender-based oppression, and to improve material conditions of women. That original list still exists on my Substack. Now, if you look at that original list, it offers up dozens of titles and links to reviews. It’s overwhelming, I’d imagine, …so I offer you this shorter list. It’s a sampling of different categories of books by and about lesbians.
It’s still, I believe, in theme with feminism. Because lesbianism is included in intersectionality feminist, and lesbians offer feminist thinkers many lessons.
In feminist thinking and writing today, there’s a lot of chatter about the unequal division of household labor. So many women are not only in the workforce, but women are graduating from college, medical schools, and law schools at higher rates than men now. Women have ambitions outside their households, and they do not want to be held back in their efforts to achieve those ambitions. Here, lesbians and queer people offer women in heterosexual relationships many lessons: it is possible to have households where the default isn’t that the bulk of labor falls on the feminine. The lessons lie in what those alternatives look like.
In another part of feminism, there’s also chatter about competitiveness among women, in women knocking other women down and/or aligning themselves with men to better achieve their ambitions, or for other personal benefit. Lesbians — as women who love women — aren’t incentivized to align themselves with men. It goes against the very ethos of lesbianism.
And so, lesbians necessarily center women. Love women, live with women, make our lives about women, and we cater to the female gaze. One good way to decenter men? Read about women who center women. The fiction on this list would pass the Bechtel test — at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. To state the obvious: reading books by and about lesbian immerses the reader in a world of women.