A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexuality or same-sex attraction. The concept of "lesbian" to differentiate women with a shared sexual orientation evolved in the 20th century. Throughout history, women have not had the same freedom or independence as men to pursue homosexual relationships, but neither have they met the same harsh punishment as gay men in some societies. Instead, lesbian relationships have often been regarded as harmless, unless a participant attempts to assert privileges traditionally enjoyed by men. As a result, little in history was documented to give an accurate description of how female homosexuality was expressed. When early sexologists in the late 19th century began to categorize and describe homosexual behavior, hampered by a lack of knowledge about homosexuality or women's sexuality, they distinguished lesbians as women who did not adhere to female gender roles. They classified them as mentally ill—a designation which has been reversed since the late 20th century in the global scientific community.
Jeanette Winterson is an English author.
Anna Seward was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield. She benefited from her father's progressive views on female education.
Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ+ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ+ literature. The awards were instituted in 1989.
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian novelist, screenwriter, playwright and literary historian. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
A "Boston marriage" was, historically, the cohabitation of two wealthy women, independent of financial support from a man. The term is said to have been in use in New England in the late 19th–early 20th century. Some of these relationships were romantic in nature and might now be considered a lesbian relationship; others were not.
A romantic friendship, passionate friendship, or affectionate friendship is a very close but typically non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in contemporary Western societies. It may include, for example, holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, or sharing a bed, without sexual intercourse or other sexual expression.
Lesbianism is the sexual and romantic desire between women. There are historically fewer mentions of lesbianism than male homosexuality, due to many historical writings and records focusing primarily on men.
Lillian Faderman is an American historian whose books on lesbian history and LGBT history have earned critical praise and awards. The New York Times named three of her books on its "Notable Books of the Year" list. In addition, The Guardian named her book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History. She was a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, which bestowed her emeritus status, and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She retired from academe in 2007. Faderman has been referred to as "the mother of lesbian history" for her groundbreaking research and writings on lesbian culture, literature, and history.
Nobuko Yoshiya was a Japanese novelist active in Taishō and Shōwa period Japan. She was one of modern Japan's most commercially successful and prolific writers, specializing in serialized romance novels and adolescent girls' fiction, as well as being a pioneer in Japanese lesbian literature, including the Class S genre. Several of her stories have been made into films.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian.
The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.
Joan Nestle is a Lambda Award winning writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which holds, among other things, everything she has ever written. She is openly lesbian and sees her work of archiving history as critical to her identity as "a woman, as a lesbian, and as a Jew."
Class S, or S kankei, abbreviated either as S or Esu (エス), is an early twentieth-century Japanese wasei-eigo term used to refer to romantic friendships between girls. The term is also used to designate a genre of girl's fiction which tells stories about the same, typically focused on senpai and kōhai relationships wherein one girl is senior in age or position to the other. The "S" is an abbreviation that can stand for "sister", "shōjo", "sex", "schön", and "escape".
The Silver Moon Bookshop was a feminist bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London founded in 1984 by Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth, and Jane Anger. They established Silver Moon Bookshop to share intersectional feminist rhetoric with a larger community of readers and encourage open discussion of women’s issues. The shop served both as a safe space for women to participate in literary events and a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives. The owners of Silver Moon Bookshop eventually expanded into the publishing field through establishing Silver Moon Books, as well as creating the store newsletter Silver Moon Quarterly.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America is a non-fiction book by Lillian Faderman chronicling lesbian life in the 20th century. In 1992, it won the Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction and was selected as the "Editor's Choice" at the Lambda Literary Awards. In September 2011, Ms. magazine ranked the book 99th on its list of the top 100 feminist non-fiction books.
The Girls in 3-B is a classic work of lesbian pulp fiction by Valerie Taylor which was published in 1959 by Fawcett. Its happy ending for a lesbian character was unusual for the time period. It was one of the first three novels of any pulp fiction genre to be reprinted in 2003 by Feminist Press.
