To get the answer to the question posed in the subject line of this newsletter out of the way: Yes, Virginia, lesbians do exist. But so do sapphistry skeptics.
I was recently flipping through Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices From the 1950s and 1960s—ONE, of course, being one of the first gay-rights organizations in the U.S. and the name of its monthly publication—when I came across this amazing missive, which was published in the October 1955 issue of the magazine:
Santa Barbara, California
To all you MEN:
I just read your magazine for the first time—and I want to tell you how horrible you all are. You know very well all homosexuals are men, and there are not any women homosexuals. How dare you have a “Feminine Viewpoint” section when the only feminine viewpoint comes from the feminine men? I see lots of homo men but never in my life have seen a homo woman. I’ll bet that Ann Carll Reid is a man and you’re just trying to fool the public. Why don’t you leave women alone and out of your lousy magazine. You don’t have any respect.
Mrs. B.
For some Brits, this attitude will bring to mind Queen Victoria, who, the story goes, caused lesbians to be left out of an 1885 law that criminalized male homosexuality, because, she declared, “Women do not do such things.” Consequently, U.K. Pride parades and other queer celebrations sometimes design their routes to include a stop at a statue of Queen Victoria. (Most towns have one somewhere.) Sometimes they even pause to lay a wreath there.
Unfortunately, like a lot of the best stories, this “Queer Victoria didn’t believe in lesbians” stuff is what the Brits call a bag of bollocks. Jason Loch, a historian of the British constitution, didn’t use that kind of language, but he did demolish the myth:
From a constitutional standpoint, the story is impossible. It seems to assume that the British monarch had a line-item veto similar to that found in the US, but this has never been the case. Not even Henry VIII could cherry-pick provisions from a bill and veto them—legislation must be approved or rejected in toto. In fact, the Sovereign doesn’t even see the final text of a bill. Instead, the Lord Chancellor submits the necessary Letters Patent accompanied by a list of all the bills that have completed their parliamentary journey.
I’m sorry to say that’s the last mention of Letters Patent, which as a stationery addict, I’m supercurious about, but Loch did have more deets on what really happened:
The Criminal Law Amendment Act didn’t mention homosexual activity at all until a Liberal MP named Henry Labouchère successfully moved an amendment to the bill. It allowed the courts to punish “gross indecency” between two men with a prison sentence of up to a year, with or without hard labor. A glance at Hansard reveals that lesbian activity was never part of Labouchère’s amendment, so there would have been no provisions for Victoria to object to.
It would be a very messed-up Pride parade that would include a stop at a statue of Labouchère!
RECOMMENDATIONS: It’s techo kaigi time! Techo kaigi is, of course, the process of looking back at your planner system from the previous year and deciding if any adjustments need to be made for the upcoming one. Right now, I am trying so hard to stop myself from buying more notebooks. I literally—and I promise I know what literally means—have thousands of them in our pretty small apartment. Whatever the number is, I certainly don’t need any more. And planners are just un-blank notebooks, right? Despite all those good intentions, there are some really cool planners out there, and 365 days to make plans in. So far, I have three planners lined up for 2022: An A6 Muji version of the Hobonichi Weeks, which is to say a vertical weekly view on the left side of the spread, with grid paper on the right; a Traveler’s Notebook passport-size weekly diary; and a PLOTTER Bible-size monthly planner (aka “personal rings” if you think stationery hails from anywhere other than Japan). We’ll see if I can resist adding more. Help me out by telling me how your techo kaigi shook out!
LISTEN TO ME: I joined Dana Stevens and Stephen Metcalf on the Slate Culture Gabfest, to talk about Spencer (good), Yellowjackets (great), and Stephen Sondheim (genius).
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