For a list of Sapphic Circle meeting dates this fall, please click here.
We meet on specified Sundays at 12-1:30pm PT/3-4:30pm ET/7-8:30pm UTC.
Sapphic Circle is a space for lesbians to come together for thoughtful discussions on a variety of topics. We seek to build lesbian community through engaging in lesbian ideas, politics, media, and more!
This past spring, in our discussion about Lesbians in Pop Culture, our conversation turned to books, but we ran out of time. This week, we're going to chat about our personal herstories with lesbian literature. Whatever age we come out, it's often books that we turn to, when we want to feel understood or hopeful about our futures. For so many sisters, their feminist or lesbian awakening can be tied to a specific book. Listed here are some of the most influential or popular books, but they're just the tip of the ice berg.
Fiction
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)
“If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours."
The Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Ann Bannon (1957-1960)
“She didn't want to be an out-and-out character any more than she wanted to be one of the herd, so Beth beat herself a path between the two.”
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (1978)
“The most revolutionary thing you can do is to be yourself, to speak your truth, to open your arms to life including the pain. Passion. Find your passions."
The Dykes to Watch Out For Series by Allison Bechdel (1986-2005)
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)
“If I'm not with a butch everyone just assumes I'm straight. It's like I'm passing too, against my will. I'm sick of the world thinking I'm straight. I've worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian.”
Nonfiction
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution by Jill Johnstone (1973)
"Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man."
Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians by JEB (1979)
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich (1980)
“The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.”
“Love between women could take on a new shape in the late nineteenth century because the feminist movement succeeded both in opening new jobs for women, which would allow them independence, and in creating a support group so that they would not feel isolated and outcast when they claimed their independence. … The wistful desire of Clarissa Harlowe’s friend, Miss Howe, “How charmingly might you and I live together,” in the eighteenth century could be realised in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If Clarissa Harlowe had lived about a hundred and fifty years later, she could have gotten a job that would have been appropriate for a woman of her class. With the power given to her by independence and the consciousness of a support group, Clarissa as a New Woman might have turned her back on both her family and Lovelace, and gone to live “charmingly” with Miss Howe. Many women did.”
Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Rosemary Curb & Nancy Manahan (1985)
“Ironically groups of nuns or lesbians are often mistaken for one another today, since we often travel in female packs oblivious to male attention or needs. Eschewing the cosmetics and costumes of the commercially promoted feminine mystique, both nuns and lesbians are emotionally inaccessible to male coercion. Time and energy which heterosexual women devote to catering to men can be focused on private or communal projects. Despite similarities, a male-defined culture which moralizes about "sins of the flesh" and the pollution and evil of women's carnal desires sees both nuns and lesbians as "unnatural" but at opposite poles on a scale of female virtue.”
Cats (and their Dykes): An Anthology by Irene Reti & Shoney Sien (1991)
Questions To Consider
- What was your first lesbian book? What significance did it hold for you?
- Do you prefer fiction or nonfiction, when it comes to lesbian literature? Why?
- Have you ever read a lesbian book you really disliked? What about the book left a bad taste in your mouth?
- Which book, or books, do you think every lesbian should read?
FAQs & Code of Participation
If you have questions, please read over Sapphic Circle's Frequently Asked Questions and review our Feminist Code Of Participation.
