Reflections in a Rearview Mirror
Teya Schaffer
2025, 54 pages
$10.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Teya Schaffer’s short volume of prose and poetry begins with a piece called “Appreciations.” It’s a conversation between an unnamed narrator and a street woman she calls Valerie—aka the “dog lady”—that takes place as the two sit on a curb in San Francisco circa 1970 or 1980. As the two talk companionably about the Free Clinic, women’s land, and animal rights, they are interrupted not once but twice by a man who aggressively approaches and insults them, excoriating the narrator for her masculine appearance. Her friend Valerie ignores the man. Our narrator takes Valerie’s lead, and the man eventually goes away.

I read “Appreciations” decades ago in a journal called Common Lives/Lesbian Lives in issue number seven, Spring 1983 (65-68). It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a vivid picture of that San Francisco street life. But it also strikes me as a vivid reminder that attacks—verbal and physical—on our queer bodies are not anything new.

Other stories in this slim collection explore difficult and important relationships. “A Letter to San Francisco” is a painful correspondence between a woman who finds her lesbian footing in San Francisco and her closeted, married lover, originally published in Sinister Wisdom: 31 Winter 1987 (67-71). “With Love, Lena” is an aging Holocaust survivor’s reminiscence of her secret lover in New York City on the occasion of her death. It is a powerful story about survival in all of its forms, and though it was first published in Sinister Wisdom: 29/30 The Tribe of Dina, A Jewish Women’s Anthology (157-158) last century, it still is as powerful today.

The poems and stories in Reflections in a Rearview Mirror talk about illness, motherhood, and widowhood—all within the framework of what it means to be an out lesbian—in the late 1900s and now, in the early 2000s. They are frank, powerful, and moving reminders—a kind of historical document but also a road map of what it still means to be a lesbian, a mother, an ex-lover, a widow, and a wife, even now, in this perilous and treacherous time.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Season of Eclipse
Terry Wolverton
Bella Books, 2024, 292 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Lucy Soth

I couldn’t put down Season of Eclipse by Terry Wolverton. In the novel, a famous author witnesses a terrorist act and must go into hiding. She finds herself fighting for her life against a vast and powerful conspiracy. While drawn in by the novel’s suspense and page-turning intrigue, I came away appreciating its quieter and more complex questions of identity and personal fulfillment.

Marielle Wing is a fifty-one-year-old author who pours herself into her work. While she has reached heights in her career, she lacks fulfillment in her personal life. We meet her disappointed, returning from a conference after losing a book award and engaging in a meaningless, self-destructive tryst with a much younger woman. At the airport, she witnesses an explosion and photographs the alleged perpetrators. Taking photos may seem an odd, detached choice in the wake of a near-death experience, and Marielle’s choices occasionally seem improbable. However, we soon realize that Marielle’s experience of life is fundamentally disconnected. She is overly preoccupied with her looks and her writing talents and very concerned with her public image. She lives in self-imposed isolation, with only her ex-girlfriend’s cat as a close companion. The narration is critical of Marielle, foregrounding her faults with biting clarity.

Soon after the attack, an FBI agent visits Marielle and informs her that she must enter witness protection to ensure her safety. Her death is announced to the public, and she is forced to assume a new identity as a humble Midwestern school teacher named Lorraine Kaminsky. Marielle must contend with the death of her public persona and the loss of everything that made her exceptional. This is an interesting premise in itself, in which a famous egoist must adopt an anonymous and ordinary life, and the strength of the novel lies in Marielle’s internal narrative during this rupture. Her vanity, impulsivity, and ego fight against the life-or-death demand of anonymity. Her flaws are deeply human. Most sympathetic is her unfulfilled need for connection—an open wound that she seems unable to acknowledge fully. Marielle is as multifaceted and realistic as she is occasionally frustrating. Unable to accept her circumstances, she fantasizes about her splashy return to public life. But her humdrum existence doesn’t stay ordinary for long, as she’s soon faced with new threats against her life—and still others against her legacy, as her publishers announce the pending release of a posthumous novel, one that Marielle didn’t write.

Marielle is not an immediately likeable character, and that’s what makes her growth so compelling. Over the course of the novel, she can only ensure her survival by letting go of every aspect of her identity. As readers, we bear witness to her metamorphosis, in which her exposure to grave danger forces her to become a new person, one who must accept vulnerability, who must trust and depend upon others, and who can finally be open to true connection.

Lucy Soth is a writer, researcher, and dog walker based in Washington, D.C. In her free time, she makes lampshades and undertakes ambitious beading projects.

Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience
Curated by Rae Theodore and edited by Nat Burns
Flashpoint Publications, 2024, 174 pages
$16.95

“And think about / How much I love / Butches / And the people / Who love them”

(“Butch 4 Butch,” Beck Guerra Carter, 72).

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Swagger is a celebration and an exploration of the identity, history, and community of butch lesbians. Whether you identify as butch or simply want to understand butchness in its multifaceted glory, this work offers great insight and connection. The work begins with artwork such as “Gender” by Ash, and unfolds into retellings and stories from elder butches and poetry that captures the spirit of butch existence. One of the earlier sections written by Merril Mushroom—a name familiar to many Sinister Wisdom readers—announces the book’s intention to define, complicate, and joyfully celebrate butchness, beginning with a non-rigid definition of ‘butch.’ Her words set the tone for the rest of the compilation of voices adding to the conversation on being butch, and reminding readers that defining butchness can be both simple and complex.

The book continually grapples with key questions: What does it mean to be butch? How do we see, define, or know it within ourselves? The explorations in Swagger are as varied as the individuals writing them, but every work has some exploration of these questions, and many presented answers! Georgie Orion lets us know that butches can be anyone—“Lesbians from Girl Scouts. Lesbians from camp. Lesbians from church. Lesbians from school. Basically every grown-up lesbian I had ever met. And they all showed up” (21). Understandings of the intersection between community and the celebration of a shared, comfortable, normalized identity were present all through the work. In addition to descriptions of building a shared community, the topic of self-creation features in several pieces.

The question of masculinity and the boundaries of emulation versus reclamation, which I have always considered a distinctly butch expression, is a recurrent theme. Virginia Black writes,

“While I have emulated men and masculine presentation, I have never wanted to be one, nor felt the need to defend my space as a lesbian against a man…unless he was trying to manspread on public transportation, so I did it first to prove a point. How straight men perceive me doesn’t shape my self-definition” (26).

Cindy Rizzo’s “City Butch” grapples with the insecurities that accompany socially constructed butch stereotypes and reaffirms the confidence to define oneself. She writes, “How far could I stray from a stereotype so I could be true to myself?. . . I knew in spite of everything that I was a butch” (28). The answer to the questions of identity definition and constructed lines aren’t explicit, but several pieces set out that identity can be self-determined and fluid. Virginia Black closes their work by noting the possibility inherent to her self-determination of butchness. How should she define herself and her butchness? They write, “Exhale. / However I want” (27).

Swagger honors the vibrant past of butchness while embracing the ever-evolving diversity of butch identity (and ever-evolving understanding of butch identity). Several authors in the collection touch on trans identity and butchness, which is important in a collection like Swagger. As Audre Lorde writes, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (Sister Outsider, 138). Transphobic rhetoric persists, even in queer communities, erasing the contributions of the people at the forefront of the fight for liberation. Transness is celebrated in this work, too. Swagger sets up a conversation to challenge misconceptions that masculine presentation determines gender or that gender identity and gender performance are inherently the same. The collection also makes it clear that socially drawn lines can become tools of resistance and experimentation.

Finally, I loved reading the authors’ biographies at the end of the work, not only because it gave me insight into the identities of the people creating but also because it provided information on connecting. If you couldn’t tell from my earlier havering on community and connection, I consider it a vital aspect of the queer community, so it was lovely to find these incredible people compiled at the end of the work. Swagger embodies queer community and connection in a really beautiful way. Every butch joyfully existing is evidence of a queer future, so I’ll leave you with Victoria Anne Darling’s rallying words, “Don’t, don’t, don’t / Tone it down” (33).

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom and manages a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse. They’re exceptionally bad at keeping lavender plants alive. . . one could say they’ve become a lavender menace.

The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Edited by Marisa Crawford
Feminist Press, 2024, 264 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Darla Tejada

With the resurgence of books, largely due to readers on social media, an integral part of the literary ecosystem seems to have been neglected: the literary magazine. The Weird Sister Collection—a book edited by Marisa Crawford—is a timely homage to that particular species of the literary and art magazine: the blog.

The collection begins with a foreword by Michelle Tea, dyke queen of the countercultural 1990s lesbian literary scene. Tea writes, “Something that had felt so private and obscure to me had also been found and claimed by others” (xii), a feeling I’m sure was shared by each one of us upon discovering Sinister Wisdom, whether in its inception back in 1976 or doom-stumbling onto its Instagram account in 2024. Here, as in the Weird Sister book and blog, we write about “(our) feminist history, (our) places in the past, and the feminism we’re all making right now” (xii). Lovers of literary magazines will feel at home in the eclectic—yet cohesive—mix of art critique, politically engaged personal (or personally engaged political) narratives, and cultural commentary found in this collection. Though divided into seven thematic categories, including “Talking Back to the Canon,” “Double, Double Pop Culture Trouble,” and “Performance, Identity, and Public Space,” each piece fuses high and low art as well as popular and obscure cultural references to capture the feminist millennial milieu of its writers.

Sam Cohen’s “I am Jenny Schecter, Please Love Me” was a vindication, not just for Jenny, but for all the LAGs (lesbians after graduation) like her. How after a certain age, the certainty of one’s queer identity is expected, with those still dis/uncovering their queerness seen to be lagging behind. “We Were There: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at the New Museum” by Hossannah Asuncion was an institutional critique through “the care of the (Black woman’s) body” (200). In naming all of the artists involved, through their text Asuncion extends the reclamation of cultural space that is often denied Black women artists—a continuation of the care underpinning the collective’s actions. Similarly, Megan Milks’ piece on Barbara Grier’s pseudonyms also contends with (literary) space. At the same time that they acknowledge Grier’s contributions to lesbian literature, Milks points out how Grier’s plethora of pseudonyms led to her monopolization of lesbian/queer space. On the other hand, Soleil Ho’s piece—also involving a nom de plume—is a searing reminder of the pitfalls of tokenistic diversity and inclusion. The title, “Yi-Fen Chou and the Man Who Wore Her,” shows how easily our marginalizations can be appropriated and weaponized against us, echoing the long history of the white man’s abuse of our bodies.

The Weird Sister Collection is an eclectic concoction of essays and narratives. Inside its pages, feminist and queer readers and activists will find writing that will both comfort and challenge them.

Darla Tejada is an emerging arts writer and student based in Naarm.

A Map of My Want
Faylita Hicks
Haymarket Books, 2024, 94 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Dot Persica

During my very first very long lesbian relationship, I gifted my then-girlfriend a copy of The Essential June Jordan. In it, I wrote something along the lines of “this book is mine which means it’s yours which means it’s ours.” This year, I got it back neatly packed in a big cardboard ramen box with (some of) my clothes, my old DS, and some other books. Which means it is now mine alone. As is my copy of A Map of My Want, by Faylita Hicks.

“I blinked and we were in love—
then out of love—

then child-shaped again—then not.
Then both of us alone. Together.
The both of us crying into the empty
of our kitchen sinks.

Jesus—how did we
get here, again?”

(Hicks, “BONFIRE BRIDES,” 29).

June Jordan’s work first taught me that poetry could be something else entirely, beyond rhymes and form, that the idea that one might have to sacrifice content for form is entirely false. June Jordan taught me to see poetry as a weapon.

Reading Faylita Hicks, I held June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Emily Dickinson close, as tools to better comprehend what I was interacting with. Lorde and Dickinson are quoted in the book, along with a variety of other writers—Jordan and Giovanni are voices I heard echoing through some of the pages even without them being named. It is their irreverence that I found again in Hicks’ work.

Readers are immediately pulled into Hicks’ world: there is no time for pleasantries, the urgency of Hicks’ voice and the vivid descriptions of images, smells, textures, and specific scenarios create an inescapable sensory trip from the very start. The book is divided in four sections: ALCHEMY, LIFE, LIBERTY, and THE PURSUIT. The omnipresence of the erotic is palpable throughout the book, with the erotic being a natural phenomenon:

“Staring out into this abyss of bush I counted

millions of solar flares, each of them fingering
the ultraviolet of evening, a tinted mimosa

pressing its silk mouth to my swollen knees”

(Hicks, “CHIRON’S BEACH,” 9).

Hicks writes unabashedly about sex and gender, explicit without shame, “What if I was heavy between the legs? What would it feel like to hang my body from a machine—to feel the trickle of time between my skin and shift?” (Hicks, “STEEL HORSES,” 5).

“Who I am now—a kind of boi traveling south//southwest: as far as the stars will
take me

into the land coughing up all of my names, the skin of the road warm (...)”

(Hicks, “ON BECOMING A BRIDGE FOR THE BINARY,” 6).

Parallels are drawn between nature and the body, where one is a metaphor for the other, because they are ultimately the same; borders, frontiers, jails: attempts to contain a body that is meant to be free. Similarly, life and death are also companions who give and take from each other.

Natural disasters are very present in this collection, since Hicks is from California and central Texas, and frequently draws from their experience. Storms and fires are both metaphor and reality, both political and personal—one of the biggest manifestations of the damage done by capitalism, and especially interesting because they don’t discriminate. While the most exploited countries and populations are the ones paying the price of Western climate terrorism, eventually these disasters will catch up with their perpetrators and not even the richest among us will be spared.

Protest in all forms is also an all-encompassing theme, and on these pages the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland appear, sparking deeper analyses about America’s constant attempts to disappear Black life, be it by murder, imprisonment, or both. Hicks writes about their life during and after their captivity in the Hays County Jail, and the mental toll of imprisonment.

“For weeks, I forget what the sun felt like.
I forget I was once loved. I forget affection”

(Hicks, “RELEASE||RELEASE,” 58).

One truly cannot imagine what it means to be imprisoned in America if one has not lived it, and Hicks’ courageous voice forces readers to look right when they would rather close their eyes. It is necessary to see these evils if we are to eradicate them.

Hicks’ work is furiously loving, filled to the brim with hope for their communities, their comrades, their friends, their loved ones, love of their latinidad, love for revolution.

“my city is a river
of college students destined to be
swallowed by the rural expanse
of the Guadalupe.

En protesta, we comrades float
outside of the federal building,
—the county jail where I was buried—
En la lucha! against
the waves of the recently shipped,
the waves of the soon to be drowned,
and the waves of white faces swimming
happily in and out of the front doors”

(Hicks, “DO NOT CALL US BY OUR DEAD NAMES: A DOCUPOEM,” 60).

Hicks unites nature, sex, protest, race, gender, justice, and remembrance in this collection, which will speak to anyone who feels strongly about freedom in its many definitions.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with some dance training; they have experience directing opera, helping out on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a cofounder of the italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA* with which they have organized community events, raised funds, published zines and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.

Interview with June Thomas on A Place of Our Own

Cassidy Hunt: In the book, you discuss six spaces that are historically important to queer women. How did you decide on these six spaces?

June Thomas: Oh goodness, some of them were obvious—lesbian bars, for example. Bookstores too, they’re my happy place. They’re the places where I learned, and discovered the possibilities of what life could be like as a queer person. Softball was a tricky one because I like sports, but I’m not sporty myself, so I’d never even been to a softball game, but I knew how important that was. Lesbian land was another tricky one because I knew how much important stuff had happened there, and still is, but at the same time I do have issues with some of the trans-exclusionary politics that are involved with some—not all—of these spaces. When I was writing this book, though, I wanted to make accessible to people information about lesbian history, and so I wanted to cover things that are really important, regardless of whether or not I liked how they turned out. Sex toys, well, I have a real sense of how sexual liberation is so important to queer liberation. At this point, I also had a sense of how business was going to be a running theme throughout this book and, well, vibrators, dildos—they’re a good business! But of course, capitalism still has its ways of getting its claws in. And finally, having gone to so many queer vacation destinations in the US myself, I just thought it was so important, especially now that they’ve become so much more expensive, and have become such a privilege. I wanted to highlight that these places exist, and that they’re so important to our culture.

Cassidy: Were there any others that you wanted to include, but didn’t make the cut of the book?

June: There were definitely a couple of contenders before the end. One of them was definitely women’s studies programs, because these were places you could learn, you could meet people, you could share ideas, but then at the same time—it’s college. It’s not something that anybody can do, to just get together and start a women’s studies program. I also thought about television, or maybe online spaces and the ways that people respond and react to television communities, but I didn’t want to break too much from these in-person spaces. So in the end it felt like there wasn’t too much competition.

Cassidy: You talk about lots of different places in your book, but is there any one specific space that you first felt a queer connection with?

June: Oh absolutely, I actually think the first queer space where I found what I was looking for was a tennis tournament. I just had a sense that tennis was the queer women’s sport at the time, and so I bought tickets, and I was right! And that tournament really helped me make contacts, and that was one of the centers of my queer community. Again, when I moved to the US, I found Lammas bookstore—it was in my town, and it was feminist, and I could just pop down to the store and meet people, make friends, find out about other events in town. It felt so special because it had all of these amazing ideas, and all these amazing people, and every time I went there, there was something new. And the woman who owned the store at that time was somebody who every lesbian in town knew and loved, wanted to talk to and see, and seeing somebody like that who seemed to be so successful was incredible.

Cassidy: You say in your book that you “lesbian for a living.” When did you first discover that lesbian history was such a passion of yours?

June: Well, I was probably about thirty-five before I had a job that wasn’t in the women’s community, whether it was working at Lammas, or at off our backs, or the Outwrite collective in London, and all that was wonderful. They paid terribly, if anything, but at the same time, you were doing the thing you most wanted to do, and at the same time you were surrounded by all these amazing people from different backgrounds. And this was much more doable than it is today, because the world was less expensive! Back then, people always talked about their “straight jobs” and their “movement jobs,” so a woman could be a bicycle courier by day, and a feminist bookseller by night. So it almost felt sometimes that we were removed from the outside or mainstream world. But then, later on, I think it was around 2014 when the debate surrounding marriage equality was gaining momentum, and a lot of straight people around me seemed to realize that they had no education or understanding about queer culture. And so I thought, all of these things that are so central to my life, I wanted to share both with people who have never thought much about the culture of queer people who are very close to them, and also younger lesbians and feminists who want to delve more into their own history. That was definitely an inflection point that made me think, yeah, people will definitely be interested in this.

Cassidy: You talk about a lot of changes in the lesbian community that you’ve noticed in the last couple of decades. What would you say is the biggest change that you’ve noticed about lesbian spaces?

June: Well, interestingly, one of the main reasons that I wanted to write this book was that I felt there was this really strong narrative of “disappearance;” that lesbian bars are disappearing and lesbian spaces are disappearing. And, yes, there are fewer lesbian bars, that’s not disputable, but as somebody who’s been living in this community for decades, it just seems crazy to me to say that there are fewer places for the community now. Yes, there are fewer spaces that meet this narrow definition of ‘lesbian bar,’ but there are so many places we can go! Not necessarily lesbian bars, but other spaces for queer women and the queer community. It feels like there are many more spaces where queer women feel comfortable existing, but that they’re less likely to be labelled explicitly as ‘lesbian’ spaces. So, I suppose in a way the queer spaces themselves have changed a lot, alongside the community.

Cassidy: What do you think are the main challenges that lesbians face with regard to declining lesbian spaces in the last decade or so?

June: Well, I think the problem ultimately is capitalism. When I was writing the book, I tried to be practical and research all of the different spaces separately, but the overarching theme was that people wanted a community center. They wanted a community space for lesbians, but to have one they were usually forced to open a business! So, one of the things I think we should move away from is this culture of self-sacrifice, women working themselves to the bone and sacrificing themselves—which of course, I understand the motivation! But, we have to find ways of making projects sustainable within capitalism.

Cassidy: How are these challenges different to the ones that dykes were facing in the 1970s and 1980s?

June: I’ll just talk about bookstores. When feminist bookstores started in the 1970s and 1980s, people really appreciated this new space that was available to them. They wanted to be there, and they could socialize with other lesbians, but then the 1990s hit and the chain bookstores came in, and then later, amazon.com came in. People realized, you can get your books cheaper there, but they don’t care about you. To them, it’s just a category in a bookstore and doesn’t matter anymore than a bible, or a cookbook—and that’s the nature of capitalism! But that’s not the same as what we want, or what we as a community of people who are trying to build a better world are trying to achieve. So right now, we have the gift of hindsight to know how important it is where we spend our money, and we’ve certainly learned from our errors in the past.

Cassidy Hunt conducted this interview on December 16, 2024.

June Thomas, a journalist and podcaster, is the author of A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture. After 40 years in the US, she now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Cassidy Hunt is a Philosophy and Politics graduate from the University of Edinburgh. She volunteers at the Lavender Menace Queer Books archive, based in Edinburgh, and interns for Sinister Wisdom.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
Fannie Flagg
Random House, 1987, 416 pages
$9.99

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Growing up queer in a small Georgia town, I was always searching for glimpses of myself in the stories around me. Representation wasn’t just hard to come by—it often felt impossible, especially in a community steeped in religious traditions where queerness wasn’t something openly acknowledged, let alone celebrated. Enter the 1991 film adaptation of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I didn’t read the book until this year when it was kindly gifted to me, but the book and the film are quite similar.

The story deeply resonated with me as a teenager, offering a rare depiction of what I identified as sapphic love. The bond between Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison was unlike anything I’d seen on screen before. Before I watched it with my family for the first time, my mother described it as a “movie about two friends who start a café together and kill an abusive husband” (sorry for the spoiler there about the husband, but the book and movie have been out since the nineties, my friend). As soon as Idgie and Ruth interacted in the film, I already doubted they were just besties. Talk about a “historians will call them friends” moment—those women were not straight.

The novel makes their love clear. When Ruth first comes to visit the Threadgoodes, Idgie’s mother tells her siblings that Idgie has a “crush” on Ruth and that no one ought to laugh at her (81). The author describes Ruth and Idgie as “happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be” (87). Ruth’s description of Idgie as her “bee charmer” (87) is a sweet pet name to me—no different from calling my partner “darling.” When Ruth leaves to marry Frank, Idgie tells her she can’t go—that Ruth loves her, not him (90). It’s baffling to me that people often reduce this relationship to platonic friendship; maybe that says something about the reluctance to recognise queer love in media.

However, Fried Green Tomatoes only centres the relationship for a small portion of the work, and the work as a whole necessitates serious critique. Watching the movie as a white, queer teenager, I didn’t engage with the pretty blatant racism and focused solely on the queer relationship. There’s a lot wrong with the portrayals of Blackness. There’s a split in the book of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white people. The ‘good’ white people could be the wikipedia entry for ‘white savior.’ Even the ‘bad’ white characters are barely and rarely bad, except Frank, who is portrayed as ‘bad’ primarily because he’s a rapist first, racist second. Grady is a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), yet Idgie remains close friends with him.

The author writes Black characters as loyal servants happy with subservient positions. Ninny and Evelyn treat Black people as some sort of strange ‘other.’ Throughout the book, the descriptions of Black characters’ physical appearance, speech, and behaviors are terrible. Their appearances often directly correlate to their characters’ supposed morality (particularly how ‘light’ or ‘dark’ they were (pp. 73-75). Fried Green Tomatoes is a fictional work—any argument that the work is trying to ‘reflect reality’ is selective; remember that the book portrays an openly sapphic relationship in Alabama in the 1930s. The stances presented are of the author’s own volition. The work seemingly only considers racism to be racism when it crosses a constructed line—one that separates a KKK member from a white woman’s othering of Blackness; but both hold the same racist ideologies.

Fried Green Tomatoes gave me representation that felt personal and tangible, watching Idgie and Ruth live, love, and build a life together—raising a child, running a café, and supporting each other—gave me a lot of validation during a time when I didn’t get to see much of myself in the world around me. But Fried Green Tomatoes reiterates a narrative of whiteness and white saviourism that we cannot and should not ignore. I encourage you to read “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe aka A Little Old Lady’s Charming and Sweet and Racist Memoir” by Marcie Alvis Walker for a more pointed explanation of the issues, with text examples, in the book and film.

For those considering reading Fried Green Tomatoes because it’s a southern lesbian classic, I would urge you to explore and invest your time and money in a different sapphic classic—one that doesn’t downplay racism or pretend colorblindness is a viable form of anti-racism. You can find a post here by Katrina Jackson about some great queer romance recommendations. If you’re interested in reading explicitly southern queer love stories, I’m working my way through Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History by E. Patrick Johnson and like it so far, but if you’re looking for something a little more story-like, you may like Johnson’s Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) works in the UK non-profit sector. They enjoy a good duck-watching session on weekends and a nice oat milk latte.

El Círculo Sáfico: Lesbianismo y bisexualidad en el Madrid de principios del siglo XX
Paula Villanueva
Levanta Fuego, 2024, 288 pages
18,00 €

Reseñado por Angela Acosta

Read this review in English

Las mujeres sáficas que vivían a caballo de los siglos XIX y XX formaban un núcleo de escritoras y artistas vanguardistas en España y, tras una dictadura y varios métodos de censura y silenciamiento, por fin las podemos nombrar y conocer en pleno siglo XXI. El Círculo Sáfico es el primer libro de carácter didáctico escrito para lectores que aún no conozcan las historias de las lesbianas y mujeres bisexuales que fueron llamadas “invertidas” en aquel entonces. Así es, el tercer volumen de las memorias de la dramaturga lesbiana Victorina Durán, y las investigaciones de Vicente Carretón y Eva Moreno Lago sobre dicho Círculo Sáfico madrileño y el que existió en el exilio bonaerense sirven como los puntos de partida del presente volumen sobre las redes epistolares, románticas y de amistad entre escritoras y artistas sáficas.

Paula Villanueva reivindica la presencia de nombres y textos sáficos, algunos ya aparecidos en los documentales de Las Sinsombrero de Tània Balló (2015, 2019, 2021), a través de una exploración de los espacios de encuentro y el “quién es quién de las bisexuales y las lesbianas” (119) que comprende la mayoría del libro, nombrando a la Condesa Gloria Laguna, Ángeles Vicente, Elena Fortún, Victoria Kent, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Rosa Chacel, Victorina Durán, Carmen Conde y las parejas de estas. Estas mujeres sáficas se integraban en el ámbito cultural modernista junto con Federico García Lorca y Luis Cernuda, los intelectuales queer más célebres de su generación, pero todavía resulta difícil encontrar evidencia de ellas en los archivos y los manuales de literatura sobre la llamada “Generación del 27” y la “Edad de Plata” de la literatura española.

Si bien es cierto que todas estas mujeres eran blancas y la mayoría provenían de familias acomodadas, las mujeres destacadas en este ensayo representan un abanico de experiencias y expresiones de género y sexualidades de tal modo que Villanueva hace hincapié en la importancia del asociacionismo femenino en su capítulo sobre el Lyceum Club Femenino y la Residencia de Señoritas. Estas instituciones brindaban educación y amistades que apoyarían a estas mujeres por vida, a pesar de que cerrarían después de la guerra civil.

“A mi juicio, esta asiduidad o costumbre es lo que crea el Círculo y no la previa consideración del Círculo Sáfico como una asociación fundada, registrada o semi-institucionalizada. Que las mujeres sáficas se han necesitado y buscado a lo largo de la historia es una obviedad—igual que los hombres gais o bisexuales—, y por ello considero que es aquí donde debemos poner el foco” (88).

El Círculo Sáfico recapitula los frutos de las investigaciones contemporáneas sobre las mujeres modernas de forma accesible, tanto en términos del lenguaje como en la presentación del marco histórico y cultural. Los capítulos preliminares sirven como una introducción a la mujer moderna y el asociacionismo femenino, contextualizando a estas mujeres vanguardistas que “atentaba directamente contra las visiones dicotómicas y binarias del mundo” (43) dentro de las conversaciones sobre la patologización de la sexualidad en el contexto occidental y la modernidad sáfica en el mundo angloparlante con Gertrude Stein y El pozo de la soledad de Radclyffe Hall.

El libro no es una mera reseña bibliográfica, sino un estudio pormenorizado sobre los desafíos personales y profesionales a los que se enfrentaron las mujeres lesbianas y bisexuales (incluso cuando los propios familiares negaban las relaciones que tuvieron con otras mujeres) que al mismo tiempo cuestiona por qué no se ha considerado la sexualidad en algunas investigaciones sobre ellas. Los apartados reúnen a nombres ya reconocidos como Victorina Durán y Elena Fortún junto con nombres de mujeres poco mencionadas aun en el ámbito académico, como la Condesa Gloria Laguna cuyo “lesbianismo, fue una íntima amiga suya” (125). Estos perfiles de mujeres sáficas logran un buen equilibrio entre la discusión de textos sáficos como Zezé (1909) de Ángeles Vicente y Oculto sendero (escrito entre 1939 y 1948) de Elena Fortún y cómo estos textos fueron inspirados por las tertulias y las relaciones epistolares que nutrían las vidas de escritoras y artistas sáficas.

La voz de la autora está presente de principio al fin, guiándonos por el Madrid de los años 20 y 30 y el Círculo Sáfico de Buenos Aires establecido por Durán durante su exilio bonaerense. Sobre todo, agradezco el cuidado con el que Villanueva cuenta las historias de amor en tiempos de guerra, de esposos celosos como Antonio Oliver quien destruyó varios poemas de Carmen Conde y de “la bisexualidad no declarada y conflictiva” (239) de la actriz Margarita Xirgu.

“Todas necesitamos olvidarnos, al menos durante unas horas, de las violencias del mundo; del mismo modo que necesitamos habitar una burbuja en la que nuestras vidas pueden ser plenas, junto a amigas y amores con las que compartir luchas, construirnos políticamente y cuidarnos” (238).

Me conmueve mucho cómo el libro resalta la solidaridad y la hermandad entre las mujeres queer: desde los compromisos políticos de la abogada Victoria Kent y la poeta Lucía Sánchez Saornil hasta la valentía con la que Victorina Durán, Rosa Chacel y Elena Fortún escribieron sobre las redes sáficas de su generación. Espero que estas mujeres modernas nos inspiren a sumar más nombres y voces diversas a estos “antecedentes tribadistas” (89) mientras les rendimos homenaje en nuestras investigaciones y versos.

Dra. Angela Acosta es profesora asistente de español en la Universidad de Carolina del Sur. Sus poemas han aparecido en Yellow Arrow Publishing, Heartlines Spec y Apparition Lit. Es coeditora con la Dra. Rebecca Haidt del número especial de Feminist Modernist Studies sobre la modernidad sáfica española (vol. 7, no. 3).

The Sapphic Circle: Lesbianism and Bisexuality in Madrid at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Paula Villanueva
Levanta Fuego, 2024, 288 pages
$19.60

Reviewed by Angela Acosta

Lea esta reseña en español

Sapphic women in Spain who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries formed a core group of avant-garde writers and artists, and after a dictatorship and various methods of censorship and erasure, we can finally name and get to know them in the twenty-first century. The Sapphic Circle is the first educational book written for a general readership who don’t yet know the histories of lesbian and bisexual women at the beginning of the twentieth century, then called “inverts.” The points of departure for this volume on the networks of epistolary correspondence, romance, and friendship among sapphic writers and artists are lesbian playwright Victorina Durán’s Así es (That Way), the third volume of her memoirs, and Vicente Carretón’s and Eva Moreno Lago’s research on the Sapphic Circle of Madrid and the circle that existed among women exiled in Buenos Aires.

Paula Villanueva recovers sapphic women’s names and texts—some of which already appear in Tània Balló’s Las Sinsombrero (The Hatless Women) documentaries (2015, 2019, 2021)—through an exploration of female gathering spaces and a “who’s who of bisexuals and lesbians” that comprises most of the work (119; All translations in this review are my own). These names include Countess Gloria Laguna, Ángeles Vicente, Elena Fortún, Victoria Kent, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Rosa Chacel, Victorina Durán, Carmen Conde, and their partners. These sapphic women were vital contributors to the Spanish modernist milieu along with Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda, the most famous queer male intellectuals of their generation. But it remains difficult to find evidence of these women in archives and textbooks about the “Generation of 1927” and “Silver Age” of Spanish literature.

While all of these women were white and the majority came from well-off families, the women discussed in this book represent a diverse range of experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality. To this end, Villanueva emphasizes the importance of social institutions in her chapter on the Female Lyceum Club and the Unmarried Women’s Residence in Madrid. These institutions provided education and friendships that would support their members for life, despite later closing due to the Spanish Civil War.

“In my opinion, diligence or custom is what created the Circle, rather than the previous view of the Sapphic Circle as an association that was [formally] founded, registered, or semi-institutionalized. The fact that sapphic women have needed and sought each other throughout history is obvious—just like gay or bisexual men [have done]—, and for this reason I consider that this [unstructured creation of the Circle by upper-class women seeking community] is where we need to focus” (88).

The Sapphic Circle brings together the fruits of contemporary scholarship on modern women in an accessible way, both in terms of language and in the presentation of the historical and cultural background. The preliminary chapters serve as an introduction to the concept of the modern woman and women’s groups. Villanueva contextualizes these avant-garde women who “directly challenged dichotomous and binary worldviews” (43) within conversations about the Western pathologization of sexuality, while also considering sapphic modernity in the English-speaking world as represented by works by Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

The book is not merely a literature review, but a detailed study of the personal and professional challenges faced by lesbian and bisexual women (including when their own relatives denied the relationships they had with other women), that at the same time questions why their sexuality remains unmentioned in some research studies. The book’s sections bring together already well-known names like Victorina Durán and Elena Fortún with women hardly mentioned even in academic conversations, such as Countess Gloria Laguna, for whom “lesbianism was a close friend” (125). These profiles of sapphic women strike a good balance between discussing sapphic texts—like Ángeles Vicente’s eponymous Zezé (1909) and Elena Fortún’s Oculto sendero (Hidden Path), (written between 1939 and 1948)—and discussing how these texts were inspired by the tertulias (social gatherings) and epistolary relationships that nurtured the lives of sapphic writers and artists.

The author’s voice is consistently present, guiding us through Madrid of the 1920s and 1930s and the Sapphic Circle of Buenos Aires that Victorina Durán established during her exile. Above all, I appreciate the care with which Villanueva tells love stories in times of war, describing jealous husbands like Antonio Oliver who destroyed some of Carmen Conde’s poems, as well as the “undeclared and conflicted bisexuality” (239) of actress Margarita Xirgu.

“We all need to forget, at least for a few hours, the violence of the world; in the same way that we need to inhabit a bubble in which our lives can be full, alongside friends and loves with whom we can share struggles, construct ourselves politically, and care for one another” (238).

I am deeply moved by the resounding solidarity and sisterhood among queer women on display in this book: from the political commitments of lawyer Victoria Kent and poet Lucía Sánchez Saornil to the courage with which Victorina Durán, Rosa Chacel, and Elena Fortún wrote about the sapphic networks of their generation. I hope that these modern women will inspire us to add more names and diverse voices to those of our “tribadic predecessors” (89) as we pay tribute to them in our research and poetry.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Yellow Arrow Publishing, Heartlines Spec, and Apparition Lit. She is co-editor with Dr. Rebecca Haidt of the Spanish Sapphic Modernity special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (vol. 7, issue 3).

The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies
Maggie Cooper
Bull City Press, 2024, 49 pages
$12.95

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

Maggie Cooper’s The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is a short book of stories, or more accurately, portraits, of a wide variety of fictional environments formed around women. Each story is just a few pages long but depicts an intricate world that is vividly and beautifully imagined: a convent that specializes in making jams, a vast system of caves and the women exploring them, a ship of female pirates who leave their old lives behind, a lush, growing island formed by bodies. Although some stories have characters who develop and change, for the most part, it is entrancing enough just to watch each world unfold and discover its inner workings. It was with reluctance that I moved from story to story, wishing I could remain longer in each.

Cooper masterfully moves between genres, styles, and tones, with each story having a unique voice. Some stories are fantasies, some are dystopian, and some are more grounded in reality with hints of magic or the supernatural. Some read like fables, and some are blunt and conversational. The overall effect is a rich and rewarding reading experience that kept me excited to see what would come next.

Often, one brief detail adds a huge amount of depth and imagery to a story. I found these details often—details like the mention of a cathedral ceiling in “The Cure,” which introduced a huge amount of new context and implications, or a brief remark made by a jaded tour guide at the end of the titular story, which flipped my perception of how much of the tour was officially sanctioned and how much was just commentary. These worlds easily stretch beyond the limits of the pages and raise many unanswered questions, creating opportunities to think more deeply about each story after reading. In this way, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is an immensely rewarding and thought-provoking read.

What is The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies trying to say, though? The blurb on the back of the book indicates an intention to “point to the ways that narrowly defined femininity feeds exploitation and violence, inviting readers to consider the breadth of ‘woman’ as a category with a wide-ranging history, present, and future.” This is most successful in “The City,” which at first presents a society of women that seems almost utopian but gradually reveals its limitations and narrow, exclusionary nature, as well as a bit of context about the outside world. Without giving too much away, this story deals with queerness in a way that is interesting and unexpected and leads to more speculation once the story ends.

Of the other stories that more overtly address the theme of narrowly defining femininity and the harm this causes, many depict environments where women are reduced to the acts of giving birth and raising children and where those who don’t—or can’t—face consequences. Other stories center on the harm and exploitation women uniquely face and depict environments that harness this exploitation for a variety of purposes. For the most part, though, these themes aren’t explored in a particularly innovative way or one that differs from other media that addresses these same ideas. Like “The City,” many allude to or overtly address queerness with a broader understanding of the category of ‘woman’ than this book’s older counterparts. However, the motif of queerness generally isn’t factored into the plot or worlds in a significant way—for the most part, it often feels like an added detail without which the story could have easily existed.

But in the end, nothing detracts from what makes The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies a truly memorable, intriguing, and beautifully-written read. What will stay with you is the sticky feeling of jam and sun in vineyards, the dark, damp echo of an ancient cave, the creak of limbs twisting into a tree, the sulfurous scent of a pool of water, and the taste of a red cherry shake.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and educator living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive. She has previously worked with Sinister Wisdom on A Sturdy Yes of People: Selected Writings by Joan Nestle.