What is a Lesbian?

My broad non-definitive answer, and a book that's careless in its answer

Two Stories

Story One:

Eight years ago, I was telling a friend about a “women and women-identifying coliving house”. This was the second time I mentioned that house to the friend.

She snapped. “Why don’t you just say women?”

“Because the person who started it calls it that.”

“Oh. I’ve only heard you that term when you refer to that house.”

I nodded. I had not calling independently decided to call someone “women-identifying”, but the descriptor of the house was “women and women-identifying” from the person who started it. The person who started the house is (was?) transfemme, as was the friend who snapped at me. Both of them stopped speaking to me after I was assaulted. The lack of willingness to hear me out before reaching a definitive conclusion showed up in more harmful ways.

She never apologized for snapping at me. I didn’t ask. I’ll maintain that calling someone and their house by the terms they chose isn’t wrong.

Story Two:

When I finished started this newsletter, I posted about it in a “real literature” subreddit. Instantly I remembered why I don’t use Reddit: someone felt I should add Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, and I disagreed. They then proceeded to call me names, make all sorts of conjectures about my personality, and another folks joined in to agree. I didn’t stick around, deleted my post, and left.

I continued my archive.

What’s Lesbian Literature For the Purposes of This Newsletter?

I shared the two stories to show that people get upset when we say or do that which goes against their opinion. I don’t know if that’s a feature of the modern internet age, or always was. I think the former. I shared those stories because the questions I constantly ask myself when working on this newsletter are tangential: what is a “lesbian”; and what constitutes “literature”.

The easier question of the two: what’s “literature”. A book, I prefer them printed on paper. I appreciate the old, the forgotten, the obscure, the outcast, and less mainstream, the characters. I’ve opted not to add genre fiction. The archive/catalog is history, non-fiction (biographies, memoirs, essays), and literary fiction. When I started this project, I thought I’d run out of lesbian materials. Now, I’ve discovered more than I thought existed. I’m very pleased that when I describe this project to people, both in real life and people who have found me here…so many of those people tell me about books I haven’t heard of it. As I discover each new book, I’ll go down a small rabbit hole of researching said book and that usually leads me to discovering new books.

More controversial is what I’ve counted as “lesbian”. Webster’s dictionary defines lesbian as “of, relating to, or characterized by sexual or romantic attraction to other women or between women”. That dictionary definition is too imprecise for this newsletter. There are many authors that I’m uncertain about, some of which I’ve added and others of which I haven’t. Do I add Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name and/or Garielle Lutz¹, who are both (trans) women who came out within the last five years. I haven’t read their books (yet). My impression is no; neither are explicitly lesbian². I’ve added trans, explicitly lesbian authors, like Eileen Myles, who uses they/them pronouns, and said they are trans and lesbian in an interview³. I’ve also added Maguerite Radclyffe Hall, who use “Radclyffe” (a masculine name - her father’s first name) as her pen name. Radclyffe privately called herself “John”. In letters, Radclyffe signed her name as “John”⁴, her friends referred to her as John, and she had a very butch/masculine presentation. Was she trans? Well, she used feminine pronouns, didn’t know our modern understanding of pronouns, gender, or sexuality, and called herself an “congenital invert”⁵. Her The Well of Loneliness (1928) is widely considered a “lesbian classic”, so it’s in my archive. On the other hand, I’ve not added Daphne du Maurier, who said she felt like a boy, had a male name for herself (Eric Avon), and had affairs with women. What I’ve read of du Maurier reads very heteronormative⁶, though written by a queer woman (or not woman?). In the archive, I’ve added bisexual authors, such as Violette Leduc and Djuna Barnes as both had long term, passionate affairs with women and men. Leduc describes herself as more masculine/butch presenting. Barnes once said “I'm not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma [Wood]”. Yet, Barnes had affairs with multiple women, and befriended many lesbians (eg, Natalie Barney). Barnes made some strongly anti-feminist, homophobic statements later in her life⁷, though her earlier work was both feminist and full of homoeroticism; her earlier self feels like a fit for the archive.

My archive is of lesbians, as defined nebulously in the paragraph above, that write non-fiction about themselves, non-fiction about lesbians and lesbian history, and mostly, who write literary fiction that’s more modernist, character-driven, and there’s a strong element of lesbian in their writing. I’ve put a lot of thought and research into each author I’ve included, I’ll read interviews and thought pieces on them in addition to their books, and I include citations, sources, and footnotes in Chicago Manual style. That’s in addition to the work into discovering, reading, and reviewing each and every book that I’ve added. I sometimes go back and edit if something is incorrect. And then there’s each of these essays, ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 words (this one’s about 2,400 words), and I write three or four of them a week.

If you read my writing, you might notice that I will (occasionally) convolute language if it results in a more accurate, logically sound sentence (it’s the legal training). Yet, my definitions of the two key terms are not sharply definitive or concrete. They might upset someone, sometime…someone who believes homosexuality is a mental illness, maybe a self-proclaimed radical feminist who expends a lot of energy on arguments about biological sex, possibly one of those people who I’ve overheard both in real life and online that argue cis-lesbians are the worst and something about cotton ceilings. If or when that day comes, I’ll react the way I did in the two stories, the way I do when faced with real-life arguments from people who aren’t open to discussion: head down, keep going, illegitimi non carborundum.

On Leila J. Rupp’s Sapphistries

I’ve been pondering the definition of “lesbian” for the purposes of this newsletter, over a quote from Jeannette Winterson (in which Winterson asserts that she hates the term “lesbian”⁸), and after reading Leila J Rupp’s Sapphistries (2009). Rupp’s book is a synthesis of lesbian history. The scope of the history, to capture a general history of lesbianism across time and place, is grand and difficult. The existence of a project of that scope is wonderful. Yet, the book reads as a assorted facts and tidbits, some of them wonderful (eg, several paragraphs on the Amazon women), many of personal stories of lesbians, lesbian bars, and brief, disjointed sentences about non-Western lesbians scattered through the earlier chapters of the books.

If you read Goodreads reviews of Leila J Rupp’s Sapphistries (2009), Rupp’s gotten a lot of criticism for the book. I read it, thinking that opinions differ and perhaps the low reviews were based on that. Almost upon opening the book, I began to question it. In the preface, Rupp writes “It goes without saying that the mistake - and how could there not be many in a project of this scope - are mine alone.” For Rupp to assert that in the beginning, to preemptive declare reads like an excuse to make careless mistakes. Which the book contains in multitudes.

I cannot recall reading a work of nonfiction that is so error-prone. One of the Goodreads reviews asserts that Rupp’s understanding of ancient Chinese culture (the Han dynasty) and Buddhism is incorrect. Being of South Asian ancestry and knowing about my history, I can point out inaccuracies in Rupp’s understanding of South Asian history and culture. For example, she covers the hijra in a few sentences within a longer paragraph. She mentions they are castrated, and conversely venerated yet face prejudice. The castration isn’t always true⁹. The hijra sometimes consider themselves trans, non-conforming, but also are sometimes intersex. They do not necessarily have sex with women (some prefer men). Rupp leaves out the complexities, including they aren’t necessarily lesbians.

She also writes very briefly about the story of Mohini. In her single-sentence, Rupp describes Mohini as a goddess as an incarnation of Vishnu “as Krishna” who transforms himself into a woman to defeat a demon. Even that sentence contains an inaccuracy. Vishnu is a main character god in Hinduism, one who reincarnates into avatars to spare the gods and humanity from various trials and tribulations. He transforms himself into the beautiful woman called Mohini, to trick the (male) demons out of their share of amrita (the nectar of immorality). Mohini distributes the amrita only to the devas (gods), but only one of the demons disguises himself as a deva…and drinks enough of the amrita to become immortal. In anger, a god cuts off his head, but the demonic head obtained immortality, and the rest of his body did not. Occasionally, that head “eats” the sun or the moon, which is (supposedly) why we on Earth experience eclipses. During an eclipse, a good Hindu would stay indoor, out of view of the demon-head. Similarly, sometimes when a human is going through a difficult time, it could be that the shadow that demon has fallen on them. Think of it as a Hindu Mercury in retrograde, if you will. Mohini’s story as a male god who becomes a beautiful woman has led to her worship by some hijra and trans folks. The story isn’t related to Krishna as Rupp wrote, save that Krishna is another avatar of Vishnu, and Krishna and Mohini’s stories both appear in the epic Mahabharata. Also, now that you’ve read the story…do you know how it relates to lesbianism? Because I can’t see it.

Note that examples of inaccuracies are from Rupp writing about lesbianism in ancient Asia? Her misunderstanding likely comes from a lack of understanding and research into the cultures and traditions she’s written about, an inability to contextualize. And more. In the last chapter, when Rupp describes lesbianism and butch-femme dynamics in India and Thailand, she also theorizes that those cultures have borrowed butch-femme dynamics from the West and made them their own. Which is contradictory, since the first chapters of the book describe lesbianism and adoption of masculine/butch traits in women who loved women in ancient times and around the world. In India, homosexuality was (somewhat, and sometimes) accepted prior to the British Raj (colonization), so much so that the horrified British colonists passed a law against it. Rupp’s evidence for her assertion that modern female homosexuality came from the West to the rest of the world are anecdotal stories of lesbians from around the world and scattered historical tidbits isn’t back by evidence - without any larger sets of data or recent historical evidence¹⁰ or theoretical explanation of the process by lesbianism spread from the West rather than lesbianism arising of its own naturally.

That’s not what most of the negative Goodreads reviews are about. Those focus Rupp’s definition of lesbian and the last chapter or two chapters, on the modern history (last century) of lesbians. She includes transmasculine (transmen) lesbians, but not transfeminine (transwomen). So now, her inclusion of the story of Mohini is…more odd. What’s stranger is that Rupp begins the two chapters with butch lesbians then expands out to include transmen, as if she’s implying that transmen are just more masculine lesbians. Logically, I don’t follow her line of thought. One is gender identity (trans) and the other gender presentation (butch). She doesn’t explain why she’s left transwomen out of this history (eg, changing perceptions of gender and inclusivity), she simply…leaves them out. That lack of explanation, and given Rupp’s carelessness around non-Western cultures... Beyond that, those last chapters focus mostly on specific gender presentation, by which I mean butch-femme dynamics, without accommodating for lesbians who aren’t either butch or femme.

My impression isn’t that Rupp is a “bad person”, it’s more that she was careless throughout in writing her book. Sapphistries is questionable on multiple fronts: gender, race/views of the world outside the West, the exclusion of post-1920s lesbians who aren’t butch or lesbian. The book is also under 300 pages. That means it’s a very brief history of an enormous topic, with a lot of weight given to personal stories and an assortment of random facts that the author tries to fit into “lesbian”. Women’s voices and perspectives have been relatively quiet throughout history, so the evidence and facts such a book needs are more difficult to find, but not impossible if the author is more rigorous and thoughtful.

I hope someday, a more thoughtful author will write a more cohesive, inclusive, and less wildly unsubstantiated “history” of lesbianism.

EDIT: I’ve started receiving some trolls posting defamatory, libelous comments about me in their notes. Going forward, comments will paywalled to help prevent this.

1. Kolitz, Daniel. The Polymath of Pittsburg. The Nation. January 28, 2025. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/garielle-lutz-backwardness/

2. Lutz came out as a woman in 2021. All but one of their books predates their coming out. Sante has written one book post-transition, about transition (but not about lesbianism). While trans and lesbians are adjacent and overlap, I’m not the person to archive explicitly trans literature. There are trans literary writers on Substack:

Gnocchic Apocryphon

and

Naomi Kanakia

write about classic literature and culture, and

Transcendent

(Books) is more explicitly about trans literature.

3. Eno, Lydia. It Was Me and Not Me All the Time: A Conversation with Eileen Myles. Los Angeles Review of Books. May 1, 2024. Linked in article.

4. Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall. ed. Joanna Glasgow. pub March 1, 1999. NYU Press. Part of “The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series”

5. Sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Haverford Ellis coined this term, Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness (1928) in part to popularize their theory. The theory was that “inverts” had an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and dress and vice versa. This was used to explain sexuality as well as gender, as part of the “traits” were desiring someone of the same sex/gender, eg, a “masculine” women desired other women.

6. The arguments about the homoeroticism of Rebecca: that Rebecca has affairs with men and women (mentioned in one sentence), her maid might have been in love with her (but love isn’t per se romantic/sexual), the scene with Rebecca’s clothes and shoes (jealousy?)…it’s a stretch.

7. LaMonica, Martin. Djuna Barnes: the ‘lesbian’ writer who rejected lesbianism. The Conversation. May 26, 2017.

8. Jaggi, Maya. Redemption Songs. The Guardian. May 28, 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/29/fiction.jeanettewinterson

Note: my note on Substack quotes Winterson’s exact quote if you prefer avoiding reading the full article.

9. In theory, hijras were castrated using horse hair…not all hijras go through this.

10. In Rupp’s defense, I’d imagine these would be near-impossible to obtain. Yet, I also thought the amount of lesbian literature I’ve uncovered in three months and one week didn’t exist either - so I suspect that there’s more data exists, and a better general lesbian history book is possible.