Lesbian History Quotes

“The less that women are visible as a research subject, the less we are likely to learn about lesbians.”
― Bonnie J. Morris, The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture

“La grande courtisane, la petite sainte.”
― Natalie Barney

“The difference between the butch and the queen is rooted in the system of male supremacy. Gay male camp is based not simply on the incongruous juxtaposition of femininity and maleness, but also on the reordering of particular power relationships inherent in our society’s version of masculinity and femininity. The most obvious cause for the minimum development of camp among lesbians was that masculinity was not and still isn’t as incongruous as femininity in twentieth century American culture and therefore not as easily used as a basis for humor. Concomitantly although individual women might be able to sexually objectify a man, women has a group did not have the social power to objectify men in general. Therefore, such objectification could never be the basis for a genre of humor with wide appeal. But why didn’t camp develop and thrive within the lesbian community itself? Because the structures of oppression were such that lesbians never really escaped from male supremacy. In lesbians’ actual struggles in the bars or out on the streets, authority was always male. For queens to confront male authority was a confrontation between two men, on some level equals. The queen was playing with male privilege, which was his by birthright. For women to confront male authority is to break all traditional training and roles. Without a solid organization of all women, this requires taking on a male identity, beating men at their own game. Passive resistance or the fist is most appropriate for the situation, though not a very good basis for theater and humor.”
― Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader

“I'm in a town where twenty years ago a dyke couldn't buy a dildo but this hadn't ket some mighty queer fucking from going on.”
― Minnie Bruce Pratt, S/He

“Gay-male history is shaped by the privilege of men just as lesbian history is by the oppression of women. Lesbians not only have to resist lesbian oppression in order to have erotic relationships with women but also had to struggle to function autonomously from men.”
― Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community

“On the table behind the built-in bar stood opened bottles of gin, bourbon, scotch, soda, and other various mixers. The bar itself was covered with little delicacies of all descriptions: chips, dips, and little crackers and squares of bread laced with the usual dabs of egg salad and sardine paste. There was a platter of delicious fried chicken wings and a pan of potato-and-egg salad dressed with vinegar. Bowls of lives and pickles surrounded the main dishes, along with trays of red crabapples and little sweet onions on toothpicks. But the centerpiece of the whole table was a huge platter of succulent and thinly sliced roast beef set into an underpan of cracked ice. Upon the beige platter each slice of rare meat had been lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex. The pink-brown folded meat around the pale cream-yellow dot formed suggestive sculptures that made a great hit with all the women present. Petey– at whose house the party was being given and the creator of the meat sculptures– smilingly acknowledged the many compliments on her platter with a long-necked graceful nod of her elegant dancer’s head.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Margaret Anderson (1886-1973): I already knew that the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don’t want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do. Jane [Heap] and I began talking. We talked for days, months, years… Jane and I were as different as two people can be…. The result of our differences was– Argument. At last I could argue as long as I wanted. Instead of discouraging Jane, this stimulated her. She was always saying that she never found enough resistance in life to make talking worth while– or anything else for that matter. And I had always been confronted with people who found my zest for argument disagreeable, who said they lost in any subject the moment it became controversial. My answer had been that argument wasn’t necessarily controversy…. I had never been able to understand why people dislike to be challenged. For me, challenge has always been the great impulse, the only liberation.”
― Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader

“Over thirty years ago, in a dark room on the Lower East Side of New York, a passing woman named Esther whispered to me, "Darling, raise your hips," and as I did, she slipped a pillow under me so that her lips and tongue could give me and her the pleasure we both sought. In that moment, this book was born.”
― Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader