2022 marks ten years since I first came out as a lesbian. I could - and almost certainly will, at some point- wax lyrical about what it means to be a dyke in a time where both queers and women are under attack across the world and across the political spectrum. But there is a heatwave and I’m on holiday and so my brain has resorted to its most basic, mindless loves: women and books - not necessarily in that order.
And so, readers, I thought I’d introduce you to my favourite queer women / sapphic / dyke reads.
For when you want hot dyke novels
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder remains one of my favourite novels and is one I’ve gone back o time and time again. At its core, it’s about the religious observance of diet culture, of calorie counting passed from mother to daughter as a sacrosanct act. It’s also about Jewish dykes, nourishment and really hot, quasi-forbidden sex. It is definitely a book I would be wary of if you have a history of disordered thoughts and practices about food and your body but at least for me it made me feel like I was slightly more normal. If you’re interested in other Jewish lesbian novels, Disobedience by Naomi Alderman is a good shout.
“The heart gets wounded—so what? I thought. I’d seen all the plays. I should have been prepared. Love goes. But what I hadn’t known was how good the love would feel when it was there, like a hymn moving through me all the time.”
Girls, Visions and Everything by Sarah Schulman is a book my wonderful friend Gemma managed to source me an original paperback copy of Girls, Visions and Everything two years ago and it remains just about one of the best presents I’ve ever received. I love Schulman - The Gentrification of The Mind is a must-read for anyone with an interest in New York & the art world after the AIDs crisis. Girls, Visions and Everything is something else entirely: thematically, it’s an account of the destabilisation of the community as the East Village metamorphosed in the 1980s. On a page-by-page basis, it’s filled with lesbian sex, humour and sex. As someone who has never had a close-knit community of lesbians living around her (hell, this book might even be considered fantastical for that), this book is everything.
As an aside, it always bemuses me how gay sex is considered somehow perverse, or that it might corrupt the children, as though Mills and Boon's novels haven’t been sold next to the sparkly pencil cases in W H Smith since forever...
For when you’re done with men.
“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.”
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner is a book I never saw on shelves till last year; seemingly, there’s been a sudden boom in the popularity of Townsend Warner’s work, as we look back and reflect not only on overlooked women’s writing but overlooked queer women’s writing. A member of the Communist Party, she spent her life in the company of Bright Young Things - Edwardian euphemism for ragingly camp homosexuals - writing by the sea and having passionate affairs with women. It’s hard not to love her.
Lolly Willowes was her first major success, telling the story of Lolly, an unmarried woman who has grown tired of men, the city and her life. She flees to the countryside after the death of her father and as you do, sells her soul to an affable devil and begins practising witchcraft. It’s a gorgeously rich text, dry in its humour and I’m yet to meet a single lesbian who doesn’t relate. It’s the book I always recommend as the first people read when it comes to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work (the last, incidentally, is Mr Fortunes Maggot because people erroneously assume it’s pro-colonial attitudes rather than satirising them).
For when you want a little-known gem
Despised and Rejected by Rose Allantini was first published in 1918 before promptly being censored for not only it’s anti-war sentiment but also it’s acceptance of homosexuality and specifically lesbianism in addition to fervent critiques of binary gender roles. What begins as a light social comedy set in a holiday hotel in Devon quickly becomes a much more serious novel about the toxicity of conflicts: internal, interpersonal and raging on battlefields across Europe. Just 800 copies were sold over the summer of 1918 and in September the remaining 200 copies were seized and destroyed. It’s an important piece of literature but also lesbian history, only I am grateful Persephone Books have republished, even if it does remind me that we’ve been arguing about the same things for the past 100 years.
“We want more light, more breathing-space, more tolerance and understanding: not this narrow-minded wholesale condemnation and covering-up; this instinctive shuddering and turning away from a side of nature that, like every other side, has its right to a hearing, its right to open discussion.”
For when you fancy some nonfiction
I first picked up a copy of Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name by Audre Lorde the best part of a decade ago at which point it was still printed in a bright orange, slightly cumbersome to carry edition. Written in 1982, Lorde wrote her biomythography to explore her life from her childhood in Harlem, growing up in New York and in Mexico during a time in which the struggle for civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights alike were fraught. I’m someone who has always been fascinated by how great figures who rise to prominence become themselves: Zami is by far from Lorde’s most popular work, but it is instrumental in explaining and exploring why and how Lorde became one of the most prolific Black, lesbian writers and activists not only of her own generation but for generations to come.
For when you fancy some YA
I have very mixed feelings about YA as a genre; when it does it well, it’s phenomenal. When it’s poor, it gets away with it with the dismissal of ‘well, it’s for teenagers. Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Cho is thankfully brilliant.
Lily Hu is a Chinese-American teenager living in San Francisco in 1954. She’s determined to be the “good Chinese girl” but both her queerness and desires to pursue her education are anathema to that. And when she does find her crowd at The Telegraph Club, she is shunned for her Chinese heritage, fuelled not only by anti-immigrant sentiment but also Red Scare paranoia which also threatens her father’s hard-won citizenship. The pacing was a tad slow for me in parts, but I stayed not just for the story but for the characters, too.
For your next holiday read
The Split by Laura Kay is a text I’ve finished this week. Being broken up with out of the blue, returning to your hometown and cutting out your previous life whilst also pining for what was? Scarily relatable. It’s been a fantastic holiday read, though perhaps not for the reasons I expected; rarely do I get to see friendships between gay men and women depicted in literature and if they do, they’re a source of conflict and not healing. If nothing else, it served as a love letter to healing with a small h and the power of friendship to aid that process.
I’d love to know what you’ve been reading (queer or otherwise) and whether you’ve got any good recommendations for reads for when there’s a heatwave / the world is burning?
I’ve just started Pretty Baby: A Memoir by Chris Belcher and next on my list is Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz!