In my June 21st post, I reviewed Dr. Lillian Faderman’s book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, which does an excellent job of documenting the history of lesbianism from the acceptable romantic friendships of the 19th and early 20th centuries through the 1990s. Faderman is, as I said in that post, “a scholar and an academic with a natural talent for taking an intense reasearch topic and translating it into a fascinating and entertaining read that you won’t want to put down.”

Some time ago I had read the book, Gay New York and I had planned to review it for this blog today. The historic vote this past weekend by the New York State Legislature to allow same sex marriage prompted me to post my review of that book on Sunday. That left me with a dilemma…what to review for today? I decided to go ahead and give my review of the book Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians which I intended to show as a counterpoint to the history outlined in Gay New York. Because I also read Gay L.A. some time ago, I had forgotten that it too is the work of Lillian Faderman (and co-author Staurt Timmons). Now I had a new dilemma; should I go ahead and review another Faderman work so soon, or should I review something else?

Dr. Faderman’s books are superbly written, well researched glimpses into our collective GLBT history. She’s one of the most influential documenters of our past. I decided that the best course of action would be to provide a brief overview of several of her books. I’ve actually read all of these that I’ve listed and I’ve found them all to be very worthwhile reading. Further, those that I’m recommending all scored 4 stars or higher in Amazon reader reviews. I’ll spare actually “reviewing” them myself and just give you the Amazon or publisher synopsis of each book.

 Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

Description (from Amazon.com):
A classic of its kind, this fascinating cultural history draws on everything from private correspondence to pornography to explore five hundred years of friendship and love between women.Surpassing the Love of Men throws a new light on shifting theories of female sexuality and the changing status of women over the centuries.

Amazon.com Review:
First published in 1981, this feminist classic began modestly as an academic essay on Emily Dickinson’s love poems and letters to her future sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert. In her original introduction, Faderman recalled her surprise at finding these records of an erotic attachment between women that showed no evidence of guilt, anxiety, or the need for secrecy. Yet 60 or 70 years after they were written, the original letters had been bowdlerized by a niece of Dickinson’s, who clearly found them too shocking for publication. Why, Faderman wondered, was passionate love between women, once almost universally applauded in the Western world, now almost universally condemned? She learned that the love between Dickinson and Gilbert had many precedents, and that it was only in the late 19th century that medical literature and antifeminism combined to rank women who loved women “somewhere,” as she puts it bluntly, “between neophiliacs and those who had sex with chickens.” For this new edition, Faderman explains that she has resisted the urge to update her text, hoping that her exploration of romantic friendship, from French libertine literature through the dawn of feminism through the lesbian panic of the 1920s will still serve as “solace and ammunition” for those hoping to find “a usable past.” –Regina Marler

 Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Between Men–Between Women) - Please see my June 21st review.

 To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America – A History

Amazon.com Review:
Taking up where her 1981 classic, Surpassing the Love of Men, left off, Lillian Faderman reveals that many of the early leaders who fought for women’s suffrage, higher education for women, and women’s entrance into “male” professions would in today’s parlance be called lesbians: “women who lived in committed relationships with other women.” Unencumbered by the duties of marriage and motherhood, they were more likely to have the time, energy, and freedom to work for women’s rights. In fact, they were more or less obliged to try to better women’s lives, Faderman argues, for there was no man to represent them at the polls or support them financially. (Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s husband and seven children failed to distract her from the cause, her friend Susan B. Anthony used to help her with the children and housework before they settled down for political strategy meetings.) During the Depression, when women’s social and economic gains began to dwindle, it was these “single” women who kept professions open while married women were being fired in favor of men. Faderman gracefully surveys a century of advancement and retreat, shedding light on America’s debt to women-loving women. –Regina Marler

 Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir

From Publishers Weekly:
While Faderman (To Believe in Women) is well known as the foremother of gay and lesbian studies, few would suspect she was the illegitimate child of a guilt-obsessed single mother, that she tried to please her mom by becoming a movie star or that she worked her way through college as a pin-up girl. Faderman’s mother and aunt left Latvia in 1923 to work in New York and send back money to their family. They did, but neither could save their loved ones from Hitler’s Holocaust, which tormented Faderman’s mother endlessly. Mother and daughter moved to Los Angeles, where they supported each other’s fragile mental health with a single dream: Lillian could become a movie star. She took acting classes, suffered various crushes and even endured advances by her mother’s suitors, all in a blind stumble to find herself, or at least to escape the burden of her mother’s unhappiness. While a guidance counselor steered Lillian back to school, she still had to fumble her own way to a sexual identity. Pre-liberation, this meant cop hassles, job paranoia and fake marriages to gay men, as well as the usual broken hearts. Still, by the end, Faderman became a bigwig at Cal State, with a baby and a lover and a gay studies program. Exceedingly honest, endearing and profound, Faderman truly shows readers the distance she’s traveled, from “little momzer” to esteemed academic.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

And finally,

 Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians

From Publishers Weekly:                                                                                                            This social, political and cultural history of lesbian and gay life in Los Angeles by two seasoned historians is easily the subject’s definitive work. Presenting a wealth of fact and analysis, Faderman (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers) and Timmons (The Trouble with Harry Hay) breeze through the highlights of L.A. gay history. They begin with the suppression of Native Americans’ sexual and gender expression by 16th-century Spanish missionaries, before exploring how gender-bending Hollywood stars such as Garbo and Katharine Hepburn shaped popular culture in the 1930s; the emergence of gay public places during the ’40s and ’50s; and the influence of gay religious groups in the 1970s. While much gay history has centered on white gay men, the authors add important material about the vital role of lesbians and people of color, such as Helen Sandoz and Anne Carll Reid, who worked to bridge the gender gap in 1950s homosexual politics. Although this popular history doesn’t strive for academic comprehensiveness, it’s filled with illuminating facts—such as that gay men rioted and protested for several days after police raided the Black Cat bar in 1967, two years before the Stonewall Riots in New York. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

And From Booklist:
Focusing on Los Angeles, Faderman and Timmons fill a gap in American gay history. Archival sources dating back to the nineteenth century; interviews of 250 people, many now elderly; recovered court transcripts; private mementos; scrapbooks; and many other resources, public and private, furnished the raw materials for their informative, detailed account, which finds that “historically, more lesbian and gay institutions started in Los Angeles than anywhere else on the planet.” The work spans from the 1800s, when invading Euro-Americans came to outnumber southern California’s Indian population and quash its sexually ambivalent and tolerant culture; to the 1920s, when “the lesbian cavortings of silent film stars . . . were Hollywood’s open secret”; the 1950s and the LAPD’s entrapments of gays; and the 1960s and the extraordinary growth of LA’s out gay male population; to the present, when L.A. continues to set fashion and social trends (Western-wear sales are soaring, thanks to Brokeback Mountain). This meticulously researched, very readable text merits a place in sociology, gender–studies, and urban-history collections. Whitney Scott ~Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved