January 6, 2024

An Introduction

Hello reader,

On Thursday I finished reading The Price of Salt and promptly put down the book, picked up my phone, and posted a quick Instagram story proclaiming it a crime that Highsmith's lesbian classic isn't more widely read. Within an hour or two a friend responded with the following:

Right away, the idea seemed like just the thing: a low-stakes creative project, an excuse to make more time for reading, and even a personal ad of sorts. After all, just that morning my therapist had suggested that I should make a habit of going to lesbian bars, book in hand, occasionally looking around the room in hopes of encouraging someone to cast their line in my direction. What better book to set down next to my glass of beer than Carmilla, Orlando, or Chelsea Girls?

On a more serious note

I spent most of my life subconsciously avoiding queer media, particularly media about lesbians. Queer YA was just entering the mainstream when I was a teenager, yet I read precisely one YA novel featuring a prominent lesbian storyline during those years.¹ I regularly watched Degrassi, but when commercials for South of Nowhere featuring the show’s female leads in a romantic relationship appeared in between episodes, I felt a kind of vertigo that told me I was standing at the edge of a terrifying, but enticing precipice. I didn't jump. Even in college, where my peers signed up for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies² classes and read Audre Lorde, I kept to my language courses and skated across the surface of any readings that engaged with sexuality or queerness.

It wasn’t until my mid-20’s that I started seeking out media about lesbians. Without meaning to, I made a habit of going to see the latest lesbian movies—Carol, Disobedience, Portrait of a Lady on Fire—alone, and then not really speaking about them with anyone. Then in the summer of 2019, I read Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis, a gorgeous novel about a group of women finding love and community amid the political turmoil of 1970s Uruguay. I vividly remember turning the final pages and knowing I had approached that precipice once again, but this time I was already in midair, leaping. In retrospect, that was the day I started coming out.³

TL;DR, I've spent a lot of my life reading, and very little of that life reading lesbian books. I can’t know if I would’ve come out sooner had I picked up Annie on My Mind or been introduced to Jacqueline Woodson at a formative age. What I do know is that there’s no time like right now to read the books I want to and to engage with a canon that speaks to me directly.

What is a lesbian classic

I'll be using the words "lesbian" and "classic" loosely here. Both terms are highly contested⁴: , but if a book has been read and embraced by people who call themselves lesbians, I'm considering it a lesbian classic for the purposes of this project, whether or not the author or the characters would refer to themselves as such. Chances are I’ll end up writing about some more recent lesbian books too, particularly if I continue to consume F/F romance novels at my current rate. That being said, there are more than enough agreed-upon, canonical works of Lesbian Literature to get me through a year.

A tentative and very incomplete list of books I'm considering reading

• Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa

• The Beebo Brinker series by Ann Bannon - a particularly famous series of lesbian pulps, I'm interested in comparing books from this genre to contemporary romance novels

• Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

• The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel - I've already been paging through this one bit by bit for about a month, I'm enjoying reading it slowly

• Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin - my understanding is that you have to work a bit to get to a queer reading of this one, but I'm up for it

• Females by Andrea Long Chu - frankly I'm more interested in reading fiction than nonfiction or god forbid theory, but I love Chu's reviews and essays, so this might be worth a shot

• Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman - a fantastic work of history that's been languishing half-read on my nightstand for a year

• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Frannie Flagg

• Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden - I'm interested in thinking about the current explosion of queer YA and would love some recommendations for lesbian YA of decades past

• The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez - after reading Carmilla earlier this year, I'm ready for more lesbian vampires

• The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall - reading this book in 2021 put me off lesbian classics for a while, maybe it needs to be revisited?

• The Bostonians by Henry James

• Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis - I've seen this one recommended as a good place to start re: the historical origins of butch/femme dynamics

• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

• Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

• Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller

• Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles

• Electra's Complex by Emma Perez - tip of the hat to Lupita

• Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

• Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule

• Diana by Frances V. Rummell - the cover of which I'm using as my icon for this newsletter, I've been kind of obsessed with the illustration since I saw it in the Lesbian Herstory Archives a few months ago

• The Female Man by Joanna Russ - I am decidedly not a science fiction reader, but I'm willing to try

• If Not, Winter by Sappho/Anne Carson - yes I find the current obsession with the word sapphic annoying, but I shouldn't hold it against her

• Loving Her by Ann Allen Shockley

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

• Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torrès - a 1950s bestseller and a groundbreaking work of lesbian pulp about volunteer French forces during World War II

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker - this book would be on my list regardless, but I'd like to read it ASAP so I can catch the current movie adaptation while it's in theaters

• Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf

• anything you suggest to me

• any interesting paperback I encounter in a used bookstore

With that out of the way

My next letter will have some thoughts about The Price of Salt. Until then, here’s Therese Belivet’s take on what makes a classic:

“What do they say makes a play a classic, Therese?”

“A classic—” Her voice sounded tight and stifled. “A classic is something with a basic human situation.” (Highsmith, 2004, p. 131)

With love from Emily, your local lesbrarian

Works cited, etc.

Highsmith, Patricia. (2004). The price of salt. W. W. Norton.