Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 93
October 21, 2018
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 28c - Book Appreciation: Reading Outside Your Comfort Zone
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 28c - Book Appreciation: Reading Outside Your Comfort Zone - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/11/17 - listen here)
Every month you get to hear our guests talking about historical fiction with queer women that they’ve particularly enjoyed. But hey, what about books that I’ve enjoyed? In the past, I’ve talked about books centered on particular themes, like Civil War settings, or featuring highwaywomen, or Regency romances. And if you want to know what my personal all-time favorite books are, you can read the book reviews on my blog. But this time I thought I’d introduce you to some books that ask you to step outside your reading comfort zone--whether in terms of content, or in terms of the narrative style--but that will be well worth the effort if you choose to do so.
These three books all ask you to leave behind any lingering bi-phobia you might have, because they feature women who have relationships with women and with men. But they also present you with less common narrative forms that may not be what you’re used to. None of them are conventional romance novels, but all of them include romantic and erotic relationships between women as a significant element of plot or character.
Two of the books I’ll be talking about involve actual historic women. Somewhere in a file of possible story openings, I have a line that goes something like, “Any person’s life can be a comedy or a tragedy, it’s all a matter of where you end the story.” The shape of a biographical novel depends on which parts of the person’s life the author chose to focus on. And when a novel takes in the entirety of a life, it will inevitably end in death. But does that necessarily make it a tragedy?
The life of 17th century opera singer and swordswoman Julie d’Aubigny, known as Mademoiselle de Maupin, is the stuff of which legends are made and it’s a crime that so few authors and film makers have taken up the challenge of depicting it. I put her into my novelette “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer” and podcast guest Catherine Lundoff wrote her first published short story about Julie d’Aubigny. But the only full novelization of her life that I’ve run across so far is Kelly Gardiner’s Goddess.
So, that bit about leaving bi-phobia behind? Here’s the thing about queer historical fiction: the idea of sexual orientation involving an exclusive interest in only one sex has always been a minority position even in those eras when the idea existed at all. And that’s all to the good, because it means that there are vast swathes of history in which striking up a same-sex relationship was considered an ordinary possibility for pretty much every woman, not just for those who considered themselves separate and apart from the norm.
But it does mean that when you’re looking at women in same-sex relationships in history, most of them also had relationships with men at some point in their lives. Maybe it was that pesky problem that economics and social politics made marriage an awkward thing to avoid. But in most cases, those women in history had the same spectrum of interests as bisexuals do today. They might lean toward preferring one sex or the other, or enjoy them both equally. They might fall for specific individuals, or might appreciate them all. They might be in a position to focus their lives on a particular relationship, or might find that--just like those in heterosexual relationships--they had to find a balance between desire and practicality.
But the thing is: if you only want to read about women in history being exclusively lesbian in orientation then you’re either going to miss out on a lot of great stories, or you’re going to misrepresent history.
And Julie d’Aubigny would be an unfortunate story to miss out on. In my utterly biased opinion, anyone who encounters her biography and is not utterly fascinated by her needs to re-examine their life choices.
Goddess by Kelly Gardiner
I approached Kelly Gardiner’s novel Goddess with a combination of excitement and dread. It’s hard not to have mixed feelings when someone tackles the story of a real historic figure with whom one is already in love. That’s the first reaction many people have on encountering the biography of 17th century swordswoman and opera star Julie d’Aubigny, Mademoiselle de Maupin. The second reaction tends to be “Nobody would find her believable as a fictional character!”
Goddess is solidly in the literary fiction genre, as opposed to all the other possible genres the story might inhabit. While the historic setting is solid, the novel doesn’t have the feel of historical fiction--more like history is the vehicle rather than the focus. Gardiner enjoys playing games with voice and mode and does it well. The chapters alternate between d’Aubigny’s monologue to the priest who has been sent to hear her deathbed confession--which eliminates a certain amount of suspense for those not already familiar with her early death--and passages told in a third person present tense that fill in the details of her life. This technique sometimes plays at the edges of confusion, particularly when d’Aubigny’s disguises are presented externally through viewpoints that take the disguise at face value. But the alternations in voice always bring us back to the through-line.
It did take me a while to relax about how d’Aubigny’s sexuality would be portrayed. In the initial chapters, her relationships with men are the focus, though often based more on pragmatism than desire. Her desire for women is depicted either as tragically unfulfilled (in the escapade with her first girlfriend in a convent) or conveyed only through teasing innuendo in her narration to her confessor. But never fear, we get unambiguous descriptions of her relationships with women, from the Comtesse who taught her how to make love, to the close sisterhood of opera singers, to the Marquise who becomes the great love of her life. Yet the several men in her life who combine the roles of friend and lover are also sympathetically portrayed.
There is an air of the picaresque novel here—not at all surprisingly. A biography is hard to fit into the outlines of an over-arching plot, and it’s hard enough to turn the jumble of episodes from d’Aubigny’s life into a single coherent narrative without trying to find deeper meaning. Gardiner has nudged the story to somewhat greater coherence by means of combining two characters: the woman that d’Aubigny fought three duels over, precipitating her exile to Brussels, and the Marquise de Florensac, her greatest love. I think this combination is a fictional invention, but since d’Aubigny’s definitive biography has yet to be written in English, I’m not entirely certain.
Gardiner has done a masterful job of turning d’Aubigny into a believable, three-dimensional character. One who is flamboyant, unrepentant, and larger than life, but with flaws and motivations that unify the disparate elements of her life.
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
Next up is The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue. I've been a fan of Donoghue's academic works on the history of same-sex relations between women, but although I've collected up a number of her novels, it took me years to start reading them. One essential thing to know, going in, is that a Donoghue novel about romantic or sexual relationships between women in history is not a "lesbian historical romance." These don’t follow a romance formula with a happily-ever-after ending. They're fictional versions of the lives of real historic women. Messy, complicated lives that don't resolve easily into feel-good endings. But neither are they necessarily tragedies. Where Gardiner’s story about Julie d’Aubigny took the historical facts as a mere jumping-off place, Donoghue is writing more in the tradition of dramatizing, but not inventing, a set of historical facts.
The Sealed Letter interprets the life of Emily Faithful (nicknamed "Fido"), a 19th century English feminist, writer, and printer, who became tangled up in the scandalous divorce trial of a friend, alternately being accused of abetting the woman's infidelity and--by extremely veiled suggestions--of being part of the woman's infidelities. The setting of the story explores the precarious lives and careers of women who tried to expand the options for women in all fields of life, while having to dodge accusations of being "unwomanly" for doing so and struggling for the necessary financial support. There is also a great deal of exposition regarding divorce law in England at the time.
All this necessary exposition sometimes crosses the line between presenting historic research in the guise of fiction and providing a fictional story with the necessary background for the reader. I thought it kept the right balance, but as a fan of historical research I may have a fairly high tolerance in this area. To some extent the story works best as a mystery: doling out clues to how the present state of affairs came to be, through the lens of an entire cast of unreliable narrators. (I don't think there's a single viewpoint character who is entirely honest with the reader.) This unreliability delivers a delightful payload at the very end of the story when we're treated to one last tidbit about Fido and her divorcing friend that throws the puzzle pieces up in the air and leaves them to settle in an entirely new configuration.
The narrative challenge in this work is that the book is written in multiple first-person present-tense viewpoints. I stumbled over this technique in the first several pages because it left me confused and uncertain about exactly how the people and events that were being discussed related to each other. I had to re-read the first few pages several times to catch the rhythm, but then this aspect of the writing style faded to invisibility for me. But knowing the reactions I’ve seen other readers have to even a straightforward first person voice, you may need to open your mind a bit to give it a fair chance.
The shifting first person approach worked excellently to show the skewed and filtered understanding that each character had of reality, allowing the reader to build their own understanding of what might have happened. I thought this worked particularly well given how the story is based on actual fact--but a set of facts that are themselves incomplete and ambiguous.
Everfair by Nisi Shawl
The history lying underneath Nisi Shawl’s Everfair is the horrendous colonial brutality of the Belgian Congo in the later 19th century. And even though Shawl has turned her talents to wrenching it into an alternate timeline with a more positive future, she doesn’t soften the original facts.
The book is intricate and sprawling--if that isn’t self-contradictory. An alternate history of how key aspects of African politics might have evolved differently in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, given the right nudges. It also calls on steampunk themes and in the process critiques the often unexamined colonialism in that genre. Everfair makes the point that technology and gadgets do not change essential human nature and human relations.
The basic story is that British Fabian socialists raise the money to buy a chunk of the Belgian Congo to try to set up a political and social utopia, as well as a foothold for undermining what they (rightly) see as the exploitive hellscape that King Leopold of Belgium has created. This planned utopia, christened Everfair by its British founders, rapidly becomes central to a broad struggle that eventually wins against Belgium and shifts the balance of power in Africa against colonialism. This is made possible, in part, by the introduction of several of the darlings of the steampunk genre: dirigibles, creative use of small-scale steam power, and mechanical prosthetics. But it also brings in some more fantastic elements, such as what is clearly meant to be some sort of small-scale nuclear power, plus the assistance of a reluctant god-ridden warrior, and spying talents that are enabled by spirit transfer to animal bodies.
The worldbuilding is ambitious and stunning, though the large cast of viewpoint characters were sometimes hard to keep track of. Given that the story covered decades of action it sometimes took on the feel of a historical narrative and the overall shape of the plot is more diffuse than a typical novel.
So why is it here in a podcast on queer women in history? Because within that expansive cast of characters are several same-sex relationships that are grounded in historical reality. We have social radicals who believe in “free love” setting up polyamorous families. We have women brought together by activism struggling with the conflict between the personal and the political. and we have an unflinching look at how racism touched every interaction and relationship and how difficult people found it to step outside the attitudes they were raised with, even for the sake of love.
For all that romance is not the focus of this story, the many types of relationships that bind people together form a thread that connects the whole. Don’t look for happily-ever-after endings but find an understanding of new ways of being happy even when the world is burning around you.
Conclusion
These three books aren’t always easy reads, both in terms of structure and in terms of where the relationships go. But they all solidly take on the representation of queer women in historical settings, and they’re definitely worth giving a chance.
Major category: LHMPPublications: The Mazarinette and the MusketeerTags: LHMPpodcast
October 20, 2018
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 28b - Interview with Elizabeth Tammi
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 28b - Interview with Elizabeth Tammi
(Originally aired 2018/11/10 - listen here)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about
The mythological roots of Outrun the Wind
Balancing the mythic and historic
The Theoi Project (Greek mythology resources) http://www.theoi.com
Reclaiming Greek mythology for women’s stories
The challenge of writing alternating first person voices
The experience of selling your first novel in college
Elizabeth’s next mythological topic
Elizabeth’s tumblr blog about YA literature
Publications mentioned:
Outrun the Wind by Elizabeth Tammi
Percy Jackson Series by Rick Riordan
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Crowns Game Evelyn Skye
More info
Website:
http://elizabethtammi.com
Tumblr:
http://annabethisterrified.tumblr.com
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/elizabethtammi
elizabeth_tammi
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
October 17, 2018
Book Review: In the Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard
One of the reasons I anxiously anticipate every new Aliette de Bodard release is because I can just assume there will be casual queerness somewhere in every story. (Note: I’m not entirely fond of the wording “incidental lesbians” that has become popular in lesfic circles because I’m not interested in either the characters or their orientations being “incidental”--I want them to be essential to the story, just not in a way that makes orientation or identity itself the essence of the story. For me “casual queerness” better evokes the thing that makes me happy.)
In the Vanishers’ Palace not only has casual queerness, it has casual Vietnamese-rooted fantasy in a post-apocalyptic, post-colonial setting that evokes the experience of having had your entire world and culture trampled and ruined, without direct reference to specific historic events. But that’s only the context, not the story itself.
Yên is a failed scholar, trying to help her mother heal their fellow villagers of the myriad plagues left by the genetic tinkering of the departed Vanishers. Vu Côn is a dragon--a shape-shifting river spirit. Her healing assistance can be begged for a price. When Yên’s mother heals the daughter of an important family with Vu Côn’s help, her own life is that price and Yên is driven both by filial piety and despair to demand to take her place.
As the story is billed as a Beauty and the Beast take-off, one may easily (and correctly) guess where this is going, but beyond the theme of falling in love with a frightening creature, don’t expect the plot to follow the traditional lines. The in-story forces that keep Yên and Vu Côn at arms’ length rise out of the cultural setting: the social dynamics of status and respect, the power differential when supernatural creatures are involved, but with not even a hint that the same-sex aspect is a relevant issue. That’s what I mean by “casual” queerness. And as we delve deeper into the looming dangers of the Vanishers’ palace--a warped space of impossible geometries and fatal traps--the fantasy trappings merge seamlessly with science-fictional ones to create a genre that defies categories.
The happy ending never feels guaranteed, despite genre expectations, making it feel well-earned. In sum: I loved loved loved this novella, both for the exquisite writing that I’ve come to expect from de Bodard, and for the way I feel seen and included as a reader.

October 8, 2018
Book Review: Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer
There is nothing quite so frustrating to me as coming late to a wonderful book because the cover synopsis deliberately concealed the information that would lead me to put it on my TBR list. And given my reading habits, that usually happens when the publisher has decided to erase all but the vaguest hint of queer content.
I loved Molly Tanzer’s weird western Vermillion, so I’d idly glanced at Creatures of Will and Temper a few times in hopes of something similar, but put it down again thinking about the stacks of books already waiting for me that cheerfully embraced and telegraphed their queer female characters. Then, one day, I happened to encounter clear confirmation that some of the female characters were involved in a same-sex romance and found myself shaking my fist at the sky shouting, “Why did you think this was not important information?”
Ahem.
The book bills itself as inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, but other than the rather obvious naming of one character Dorina Grey, and the minor plot point of a painting that is not entirely what it seems, in a Victorian setting, I don’t see a particularly strong connection. Instead we get two ill-matched sisters: the beautiful free-spirited young aspiring art critic Dorina who is fond of smoking, scandal, and girls; and the older, plainer, more strait-laced Evadne who has just been Disappointed In Love and drowns her sorrows in fencing practice. (I love how my expectations were upended by making Evadne the dashing swordswoman.) Evadne becomes an unwilling companion on her sister’s jaunt to take in the sights of London, in care of their Uncle Basil the painter. And when Dorina becomes enraptured by Basil’s outrageously decadent friend Lady Henry, Evadne is only distracted from her growing protective outrage by the prospect of being welcomed into a prestigious London fencing school and winning the respect...and perhaps more...of one of the personable instructors.
And then there are the demons.
There are a lot of things to like about this fantasy adventure: the painfully realistic relations between the sisters in which neither is hero nor villain, The gradual revealing of who or what the demons are and the part they have to play in the eventual climax, but most especially the way the plot twists and turns and tumbles about. I was never entirely surprised that the twists happened, but I couldn’t predict what they were going to be. If I found any flaw, it would be that the climax felt ever so slightly off balance--not rushed, not slow, but like that last step that turned out not to be as tall as you thought it was.
If you want your paranormal Victorian demonic romp with a delightfully non-tragic queer encounter, this is your book. (There’s also a sequel, but I’m back to trying to guess whether it hits my “must buy” marks.)

October 7, 2018
Same-Sex Couples Everywhere Nor Any Drop to Drink
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This brings us near the conclusion of my mini-series on classical Roman sexuality and the bits and scraps it tells us about relationships between women. (Although I think I'll add another of my occasional primary source entries, with Iamblichos' Babylonaika and it's story of Berenike and Mesopotamia.) If you like the challenge of trying to reconstruct possible social systems from fragments, then there's both enough material to work from and enough empty canvas to paint on. But if you want a clear and unambiguous picture of the types of stories there might be to tell about women loving women in ancient Rome, then you'll be disappointed. This month's podcast tackled the question of trying to make sense of what we do know. But the largest challenge to our imagination is the very different conceptual framework the Romans were operating with. And even more so, the fact that so much of what we "know" has been strongly filtered through the attitudes and opinions of the elite male citizen class, who carefully constructed the sexual hierarchy with themselves at the top. Given those historic constraints, some may feel that there are no positive f/f stories to be told in this setting. I think that's not true, but I also think that we have to adjust our idea of "positive". Others may feel that with so little concrete knowledge about relations between women, we can invent what we like and it will be just as likely to be true as actual history. I think that, too, is not true. A modern person could not easily have invented the sexual system that applied to Roman men based purely on imagination. And we have a great deal of evidence for that system.
One of the historic novels kicking around in my files is one set in the 1st century CE, taking place in Rome and Brittania. Back 30 years ago, I actually sent it out of submission a few times. These days, I'm glad it didn't sell back then, because I have some far more interesting ideas of how to tell that story, who my characters are, and how they move through the world. (For example, I've decided that my Roman protagonist will be from an elite Egyptian family, to draw on the evidence and traditions we can find for that context.) I want to take up the challenge to find a way to tell a story that is both true to its times and emotionally satisfying to me personally. Like many of the historic stories I want to tell, it won't be a story about women who understood themselves to be part of a "lesbian identity". But it will be a story about women who exist within a cultural context of other women like themselves...whatever that means to them. And I think it will be a lot more fun to tell the story that's true to history, even with all the limitations.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #219 Hallett & Skinner 1997 Roman Sexualities
About LHMP
Full citation:
Hallett, Judith & Marilyn Skinner, eds. 1997. Roman Sexualities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01178-8
This is a collection of articles on various topics relating to sexuality in classical Roman society. When a collection like this includes only a small amount of material of direct relevant to the Project, I’ll usually blog the individual articles and then mention the ones I’ve excluded in an introductory statement. In this case, things are complicated because I’ve already blogged the most relevant article (by Judith P. Hallett) as a stand-alone, and because several of the other articles have small bits of interesting discussion. So I’m going to cover the collection as a whole in a single entry, and I’ll simply duplicate the Hallett commentary from the other entry. (This will mean the other articles aren’t listed separately in my index, but you can’t have everything.) A lot of the overall “big picture” is summarized in the Introduction, so I’ve blogged that in more detail than most of the articles themselves. All articles are listed, with an indication if I didn’t find any relevant content.
Introduction by Marilyn B. Skinner
This collection applies feminist analysis to local versions of a common Mediterranean sex/gender system. This introduction [as is typical for collections of this type] synthesizes the material into an overall understanding. Rome represents a distinct and discrete system within that common system, whose features in turn speak to other intersectional fields. As in Greece, the sex/gender system involved patterns of dominance and submission that don’t always align with biological sex. The central organizing concept is an understanding of intercourse as bodily penetration of an inferior which, taking as its prototype a male-female relationship in which the female is considered inferior, means that the penetrated individual in any coupling is “feminized”. Forms of pleasure experienced outside that framework were stigmatized.
This general pattern is pan-Mediterranean, but this collection focuses on Rome and its provinces during the period from 70 BCE to 200 CE, roughly the late Republic to the middle Empire. Changes in the position of the elite in political power structures changed their preoccupations from genuine political responsibility and power to concern with personal honor and autonomy in the face of barriers to upholding those states. The increasing incorporation of “foreigners” and former slaves into Roman society escalated prejudice along ethnic and class lines. Outsiders could gain support through personal connections (amicitia) while the old hereditary nobility responded in literature, projecting their anxieties.
Literary texts tended to reflect the elite who weren’t always aware of (or concerned with) regional differences or religious/cultural shifts in the understanding of sexuality. Elite men represented one core sexuality system, then extended that system to their dependents. Departures from the system are used as a tool for social control and commentary, often motivated by forces other than the specific sexual behaviors involved. For example, accusations of “effeminacy” could be used against any non-conformist sexuality. The grotesque descriptions of “the tribade” reinforced male images of superiority. Poetry uses “wantonness” as an expression of counter-cultural resistance.
Roman concepts of sexuality are inseparable from those of gender. “Woman” is set up as an affirming opposite to “man” but the dividing line doesn’t follow physiology. There is a discussion of different Greek and Roman attitudes toward women and their status. The Greek image and ideal was for women to be connected with the interior, private space of the household, to be a transferred property from one male to another, and to be the passive vessel for the generation of a male heir.
Roman society elevated the male control over the family to include adult children (including married daughters, in some circumstances). Women were a part of the display of the family’s status and therefore needed to be active and visible in the public sphere. The care of infants, rather than being one of the primary concerns of wives, was left to servants. Daughters could, in theory, be eligible to be their father’s heir (even if married). Women were expected to promote their birth family’s goals within their husband’s family. If the husband did not have manus (legal control) over his wife, he also had no legal control of her property.
As a class, Roman women might be “other” and inferior, but exceptional individuals might be praised as “masculine” for displaying virtue. Female sexuality was not inherently hostile to the dominant structures. Women’s ability to inhabit “masculine” characteristics reflected the gender permeability that also stigmatized any “feminization” of men.
Greek pederasty was, ideally, a relationship between men of the same class, distinguished by age and status. Roman attitudes, in contrast, considered any acceptance of a passive role to be incompatible with “manliness” (vir-tue). Therefore relationships with young male citizens were forbidden as involving shame (stuprum). Roman (male) sexuality partook more of violence and aggressiveness compared to the Greek concept. The discussion compares sexual dynamics to various types of public entertainments involving violence.
The prototypical man (vir) was the model from which all other categories diverged and by which they were defined. This took the adult male citizen as the central model. The word vir (man) was limited in application to this central model and was not applied to boys, to working class men, to slaves, or to “disreputable” people. Vir denotes not only a set of behavioral principles but also a defining set of privileges.
This central model can also be examined in terms of what lifestyles and acts were viewed as transgressive. In contrast to the Foucaultian view of sexual acts as licit or illicit, Parker’s article suggests a system of acceptable or perverse “sexual personas” based on whether the person’s status aligned with the role the played with respect to the penetrative hierarchy. Persons who acted counter to this alignment (the tribade or the cinaedus) are categorized as monstrous and stigmatized, and these are viewed as deviant preferences.
Several of the articles are concern with the instability of male status and identity. “Infamy” (infamia) is the participation in, or pursuit of, stigmatized sexual roles. But to what extend did these “infamous” roles represent actual personal identity, as opposed to being a social tool to shame or attack individuals and behaviors? Under what circumstances could a man adopt a “feminized” persona unscathed? For example, the authorial persona of a lyric poet complaining humorously of a controlling female lover? The “controlling mistress” could have “masculine” power attributed to her without becoming monstrous. This is compared to the relationship between client and patron (amicitia).
Men characterized women simultaneously as “other” within a dualistic system, but also as a source of “natural” power both generative and destructive.
Roman society was characterized by “perilously permeable” class, ethnic, and gender boundaries. These are conflated in various combinations to express elite anxieties, e.g., sometimes depicting foreigners as hyper-virile, sometimes as feminized. Imperial women seen to possess illegitimate political power were accused of sexual excess. Any female ambition could be seen as a desire to appropriate male sexual power.
The ultimate female transgression was being the active figure in penetrative sex. The tribas stood in for this inversion of sexual norms, but Roman society could only envision sex between women as pseudo-phallic, and expected it to be expressed physiologically (i.e., with a masculine physique and enlarged clitoris) as well as in behavior. The idea of the tribade was distanced from the Roman here-and-now by identifying her as Hellenic, as existing in the past, and/or as having masculine physiology. As a Roman reality, she is simultaneously empowered and negated. And yet, non-phallic sex between women is mentioned, as in Martial’s Philaenis, who must then be framed, not as monstrous for claiming male identity, but as a failed man for behaving against male sexual norms. Similarly, see Ovid’s depiction of Sappho in the Heroides who has rejected her previous love for women but fails at being a desiring (masculine) woman, no longer allowed even her talent as a renowned poet.
Finally we have a rare female voice in the poet Sulpicia who transforms traditional male-female tropes and imagines a different type of female sexuality as an agent, just as she claims poetic agency.
Part One: Unmarked Sexuality
1. Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought by Jonathan Walters
Phallocentrism meant that Romans found it hard to conceive of sex between women that didn’t involve either a natural (clitoris) or artificial (dildo) analog. Walters points out that the concept of “woman” in Roman discourse was a male construct, used by men to talk about men, not to talk directly about women.
Part Two: Wayward Sexualities
2. The Teratogenic Grid by Holt N. Parker
This article discusses alternate sexual maps than a binary based on similarity and difference (i.e. homosexuality and heterosexuality). Parker explores the Roman system based on an active/passive distinction and the nature of the penetrated orifice. Non-penetrative activities such as kissing, fondling, etc. are recognized as sexual, but do not participate in the construction of a sexual persona or role.
If the sex and/or status of the receptive partner in intercourse aligns with the official social hierarchy, then the act is licit.
Misalignment is anomalous and abnormal: for example, a woman in any “active” role, a “passive” man penetrating a vir, or the inversion of vaginal penetration by the act of cunnilingus (by a man). The desire to perform oral sex was seen as both “passive” and degrading, and as gender-neutral with regard to the “active” (receiving) partner. This creates the “joke” in Martial’s epigram 7.67, where the tribade Philaenis is being so “manly” that she butt-fucks boys, fucks girls, considers fellatio to be too unmanly for her to perform...but then (absurdly) enthusiastically performs cunnilingus.
The active-passive axis results in any sexual activity that does not involve inserting a penis into something being considered “unmanly”. For both sexes there is a hierarchy of “humiliation” with respect to the orifice being entered, going from least humiliating to most, it is vagina > anus > mouth.
Passivity was so expected for a woman that an indication of enjoyment was suspect. But though this was the supposed ideal, it is contradicted in literature, especially poetry, where men desire a woman who actively enjoys sex. The “abnormal” sexual roles for women exist on multiple axes, with any degree of “active” making her masculine, even simply desiring to be penetrated (especially desiring the wrong sort of person to do the penetrating). A woman can perform active sex with another woman either by rubbing (where a penetrative clitoris is assumed), or with a dildo (one penetrates the other), or by receiving cunnilingus. There are no references to mutual masturbation, though the textual data alone can’t distinguish whether it wasn’t done, or whether it was ignored due to not being part of the conceptual system. Active women are imagined to be physically masculinized, with an enlarged clitoris (regardless of whether they are engaging in sex with men or women). Clitoridectomy is described in medical texts as a possible remedy for this excess desire.
But Parker asks whether figures such as the cinaedus or the tribade as depicted actually existed, or whether they were social stereotypes used for rhetorical purposes, where actual practice and identity may have been fuzzier.
3. Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome by Catharine Edwards -- No comments.
Part Three: Gender Slippage in Literary Constructions of the Masculine
4. Dining Deviants in Roman Political Invective by Anthony Corbeill - No comments.
5. Ego mulier: The Construction of Male Sexuality in Catullus by Marilyn B. Skinner - No comments.
6. The Erotics of amicitia: Readings in Tibullus, Propertius, and Horace by Ellen Oliensis - No comments.
7. Reading Broken Skin: Violence in Roman Elegy by David Fredrick - No comments.
Part Four: Male Constructions of “Woman”
8. Pliny’s Brassiere by Amy Richlin - No comments.
9. Female Desire and the Discourse of Empire: Tacitus’s Messalina by Sandra R. Joshel - No comments.
10. Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature by Judith P. Hallett [originally blogged separately as entry #53]
This article looks at the disconnect between Roman literary considerations of female homosexuality and their everyday reality. The period covered is the 2nd century BCE through the 2nd century CE. Various mythic origins were attributed to homosexual desire. One example is the story of how a drunken Prometheus , when creating humans from clay, attached sexual organs to the “wrong” bodies, thus creating individuals whose internal preferences were counter to their external organs. One common theme in these literary discussions is to position homosexuality as foreign -- and especially Hellenic -- and as deriving from or belonging to an older era. These portrayals also represented female same-sex desire as being “masculine”, even to the point of involving male sexual organs (at least in symbolic form). This contrasts with the best-known Classical Greek reference to female homoeroticism: Plato’s myth of desire being based on originally dual-bodied individuals longing for their “other half” where the dual-bodied were composed of all possible combinations of male and female. The bulk of the article looks at the references to female same-sex desire in Roman literature that build up this “Hellenizing, archaizing, masculinizing” framing of the subject. With the understanding that these mentions are from male authors in a notoriously misogynistic culture, they provide a view -- though almost certainly a distorted one -- on everyday practice in that culture.
In the play Truculentus, a character puns on two similar-sounding words to suggest that a female character “fuck your mistress”, though the bit is a passing joke rather than a significant plot element. Seneca the Elder, in discussing how to speechify about unmentionable subjects, gives the example of a man who caught his wife having sex with another woman and killed them both, then needed to explain the matter when presenting his defense. Both of these examples draw from earlier Greek originals.
The normal word used by Roman writers for female homosexuals is tribas (meaning “one who rubs”), a Greek word and retained in its Greek form. But despite the root meaning of the word, Roman use typically implied masculine-framed activities such as penetration. The author notes that two of the three authors she cites who comment directly on contemporary Roman behavior do not use tribas.
Ovid also draws on earlier Greek material for his Metamorphoses in which the gender-disguised Iphis is in love with Ianthe and laments her desire as impossible and unnatural (until given a divine sex-change). Ovid has several passing references to Sappho and her love for women, but frames that love as shameful.
Seneca the Younger is one of the few Roman writers who comments on contemporary women who “rival men in their lusts” though the implication that it is lust for women is fuzzy. And in a longer passage, he similarly focuses on contemporary women taking on masculine habits and vices (such that they have “lost the privileges of their sex as a result of their vices”). The author notes that this “would seem to include same-sex love” but I’m not sure I’d take the allusions as conclusive.
Martial, famous as a writer of satiric epigrams, has three that address women identified as tribades. Two are addressed to a woman with the Greek name of Philaenis who participates in a great many masculine athletic activities and is rudely accused of being a sexual aggressor to both boys and girls. Martial says she correctly calls as “girlfriend (amica) the woman she fucks" and that she performs oral sex on women. Martial’s third example is similarly masculinized in his description of her sexual activity with women (even using a grammatically masculine noun for “fucker”).
Juvenal’s satires include one in the voice of a woman named Laronia who alludes to women performing mutual oral sex, but in the context of claiming that Roman women don’t do that.
Overall, it is questionable whether these examples accurately represent Roman women’s lives, but it can be assumed that they represent at least some men’s attitudes.
11. The Lovers Voice in Heroides 15: Or, Why Is Sappho a Man? by Pamela Gordon
Given the esteem in which the Greeks held Sappho, exhalting her in feminine terms as a muse, why were Romans less certain of her praiseworthy womanliness? This article looks at Ovid’s Heroides number 15 written in the voice of Sappho. The Heroides are a collection of elegaic poems attributed (probably correctly) to Ovid, which take the form of letters from abondoned heroines to the men who spurned them. [Note: while putting together this summary, it occurred to me that Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues, which takes the form of narratives of “fridged” girlfriends and wives of superheroes, is a direct homage to Ovid’s work.] In Sappho’s case, the letter is addressed to the young Phaon, who has abandoned the aging and no longer inspired poet for the girls of Sicily.
There are some questions about the provenance of the Sappho piece, given that it is not included in the earliest surviving copies of the collection, but begins appearing in 12-13th century manuscripts. (Gordon doesn’t come down solidly on the question, but does consider the work authentically Roman.) In the medieval context, the work is believed to be Ovid’s translation of an actual work by Sappho. Modern scholarship often focuses on the question of authorship but Gordon is more interested in what the work says about Roman attitudes toward sexuality.
Recent studies have suggested the poem offers alternative modes of sexuality to the traditional Roman model, while others counter that it follows the traditional model in the other poems of the collection in positing that “to be a heroine means to be abandoned.” Other scholars consider that the voice of the poem is a hybrid of Sappho’s poetic style with Ovid’s voice, upsetting the “male poetic order” but not entirely representing a feminine voice.
Considered in the context of the portrayal of female homoeroticism, the poem matches a recurring pattern in Roman (male) writing: the masculinization of tribades, both in their desires and their bodies. This “mythic mannish” Sappho (following the terminology of Newton 1984) is a product of Roman traditions, not Greek ones. How does this masculinization fit--not into general conceptions of gender--but into the gendering of other characters in the Heroides? In fitting Sappho into the category of “woman forsaken by a man” is this a deliberate “heterosexualizing” of her? (But see all the commentary on how the categories of heterosexual and homosexual are inapplicable in Roman culture.) Gordon feels that the gender elements are more complicated.
Unlike the abandoning lovers of the other Heroides, Phaon is not a hero or a king. He seems instead to be a sort of icon of youthful beauty, originally a mortal lover of Aphrodite. Phaon is mentioned in a fragment from Sappho, and Ovid may likely have had access to additional references. Scholars have reconstructed Sappho’s mention as touching on the motif of Aphrodite’s love for Phaon. In that context, the reference is part of Sappho’s unconventional approach to love between men and women. While her verses on love between women stress mutuality, the verse mentioning Phaon uses the model of a powerful goddess choosing a beautiful youth in a way that breaks free of usual male-female scripts. It imagines a dominant, desiring woman with a submissive but response man.
Ovid takes this scenario, maps it onto Sappho rather than the goddess, and sides with the dominant gender paradigm that Sappho rejects. Ovid didn’t invent the idea of Phaon being Sappho’s lover. The motif appears, for example, in the 4th century BCE plays of Menander. But Ovid takes this motif and turns it into a “conversion narrative” whereby Sappho doesn’t simply include desire for a man among the many women she desires such as Anactoria, but entirely rejects the love of women in favor of Phaon. There are also implications that she now considers her previous love for girls as disgraceful. Only in the context of 1st century BCE Rome does this framing of the story emerge.
This “conversion narrative” clashes with the Foucaultian assertion that Classical culture made no distinction in the sex of a sexual partner. Here Sappho’s love for girls and her love for Phaon are depicted as qualitatively different--as two entirely separate types of experience.
Although words derived from the name Lesbos were not yet used to denote sex between women in Classical Greek or Latin, there are a number of references indicating that the island was popularly associated with that practice. For example, Lucian’s choice of Lesbos as the origin for his gender-transgressive tribade Megilla/us.
Ovid’s other heroines are sorrowing not simply because of yearning for their absent lovers, but because their departure has created real social difficulties involving loss of status and honor. They are discarded “fallen women.” The other heroines describe their own beauty as a feature in their story, but don’t dwell on the appearance of their lovers. In contrast, Sappho describes Phaon’s beauty and then notes that at least she has skills to make up for her lack of the same. Phaon is passive compared to the other lovers: being, rather than doing. The other heroines don’t speak directly about sex, while Sappho boasts of her expertise.
The explicit language and desiring gaze of Sappho find their parallels in Ovid’s male voices. In Ovid’s stories, beauty is the cause of rape. The only male figures who are raped are similarly described as youthful and beautiful. Female rapists are punished by failure or loss, while male rapists go on their merry way.
Another aspect presented as masculinization of Sappho is in a passage where she describes an erotic dream about Phaon and admits “it all happens, it feels so good, I can’t stay dry (sicca).” But after a discussion of how sicca of a woman usually means “frigid or sexually unresponsive”, Gordon concludes that in this passige “not dry” refers to a masculine “wet dream” thus implying a penis. (This seems to overlook female secretions and emissions on arousal. But alternately, would that be something that Ovid would think to describe?)
Ovid’s Sappho has also lost the maternal devotion to Kleis that she shows in the Greek poetry and instead describes motherhood as a burden. These various features, taken together, align Ovid’s Sappho with his male characters, rather than his female ones. In this, she is reminiscent of the stereotype of the “mannish” lesbian of the early 20th century, who se identity is formed by attempting to imitate men.
Looking from the other side of the couple, why is Phaon a boy rather than an adult man? It’s because Sappho is required to be drawn to youthful beauty, just as any other vir would be. The active-passive alignment means that Sappho does not demand that Phaon love her, but rather that he allow himself to be loved. Phaon is the eromenos and Sappho the erastes. But as Phaon has grown to adulthood, he in turn is required to seek youthful beauty to love--to do, rather than to be. There can only be one “man” in a relationship, and as Phaon comes into manhood, he must reject man-Sappho.
Lucian’s female couple has one “man” (Megilla/us) and one “normal woman” (Demonassa). It is meaningful that Megilla/us is from Lesbos (the source of tribades) while Demonassa is from Corinth. Demonassa is not a tribade, only Megilla/us is.
Thus Ovid’s Sappho follows the pattern seen by Hallett (elsewhere in this collection) that women who engage in same-sex activity are seen in Roman literature as masculine, anachronistic, or Hellenic--she is made to be all three. While Greeks did not consider that a man must be “other” to love a man, Romans could only imagine same-sex love in terms of self and other. With regard to sex between women, it was not desire for a woman that made a woman a tribade, but rather the state of being a tribade made her desire women. Romans could not imagine that a woman could love a woman, therefore to love a woman, Sappho must have been a “man”.
The article concludes with a consideration of cinaei. Should we believe that they actually existed as an identifiable identity, given that the only evidence comes from hostile sources? Yet that evidence of existence can be retrieved from the textual silences. Similarly, the Roman attempts to deny the existence of women who loved women must be viewed critically. Gordon brings in comparisons from other eras when the “official” position was that to love women meant to be a man. If we disbelieve that assertion in other eras because we have counter-evidence, then why take the Roman claims at face value? Why accept the hostile definition of non-conforming women as necessarily “male” rather than understanding them as something else entirely. (The article ends with this question in the context of lesbian historical theory.)
[Note: I think there are some important cracks in the supposed “Roman sexual system” displayed here. If, as is argued for men, there is no moral distinction made with regard to the sex of a man’s partners, so long as he sticks to his approve role, then why should Sappho be depicted as seeing a qualitative difference between her relations with women and those with men? According to the “official system” perhaps Phaon should feel shame at being dominated by a woman, but there is no support in that system for Sappho feeling differently about desiring men than desiring women. To me, this leaves a lot of space either for doubting the ability of upper class Roman men to accurately depict women’s emotional lives, or for doubting that the Roman sexual system was a gender-neutral as some claim, at least when women were involved.]
Part Five: Female Construction of the Desiring Subject
12. Tandem venit amor: A Roman Woman Speaks of Love by Alison Keith
And, in fact, we have one solitary female voice, recording her own thoughts about sexual desire and her place in the Roman sexual system. This is a set of elegies by the poet Sulpicia, probably the daughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus, writing at the very end of the 1st century BCE. Keith considers Sulpicia’s voice in parallel with the depiction of Dido in the newly-written Aeneid (and with which Sulpicia was almost certainly very familiar).
Male elegiac poetry presented no model to a female author, being concerned with men rejecting the standard male career path for the life of a poet-lover. Virgil’s Dido offers a closer parallel. The treatment of Dido in the Aeneid corresponds closely to Augustan policies on morality, and Keith suggests a possible direct connection between the representation of Dido’s sexual transgression and Augustan attempts to regulate female sexuality. Dido is an anomaly in the context of Roman cultural norms as a female head of state. But she is controlled in the narrative by restricting her story to her sexuality and its consequences. The love/desire for Aeneas converts her from a leader to a lover, and at that, a lover who has abandoned loyalty to her late husband. The article goes into some detail of how Dido’s actions went against Roman ideals, and how that transgression was depicted as the cause of her downfall and death.
The elegiac tradition set itself up in opposition to those cultural norms, but from the point of view of men rejecting cultural expectations. Sulpica expresses how the admission of desire is inherently “improper” by those cultural norms, but that she considers concealing her desire to be more shameful than proclaiming it openly. There is a discussion of the concept of pudor (“what is seemly”) that is central to the text. Sulpicia simultaneously rejects conventional pudor and invents a new standard that requires being true to love, in parallel with male elegaic poets embracing nequitia (depravity). Sulpicia equates traditional pudor with deception and concealment. “It isn’t what you do, but what you’re known to have done.” In various ways, she expresses how her beloved is “worthy” of her love, which in turn require that she honor that love with public transparency. The sequence of poems includes several that seem to unveil events around Sulpicia’s birthday. The first takes on the motif of the separated lovers, but where she has been required to retire to the country by the man who controls her movements. (There is a description of various country “delights” that are unpleasing because they mean separation from the beloved.) This is followed by joy at the journey being postponed enabling their meeting, but he is busy, distracted. She laments that the greatest grief for a woman is to “yield to an ignoble lover”. And then finally there is a happy reuniting.
Sulpicia regularly reverses the expectations of morality--her lapses are concealment, or “false pudor”, her virtues are honesty about her (socially inappropriate) passion. Thus we get a female take on expected behavior within a romantic relationship and how it might be rejected, similarly to how male elegiac poets rejected the strictures imposed on them.
Time period: Classical EraPlace: ItalyMisc tags: cross-gender roles/behaviortribadeclitorissex between womensexual/romantic desirelove poetrysexual techniquesEvent / person: Metamorphoses: Iphis and Ianthe (Ovid)Epigrams (Martial)PhaedrusSeneca the ElderPlatoSapphoDialogues of the Courtesans (Lucian)JuvenalHeroides: Sappho (Ovid)
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Making Social Constructionism Make Sense
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

I think it isn't a big secret that I have issues with the "strong Foucaultian" position, that is, that sexuality is never an "inherent" characteristic but that sexual identity is entirely shaped by how a particular culture structures sexual categories and their meanings. But conversely, I'm quite convinced of the "weak Foucaultian" position that individuals will tend to channel and understand their inherent emotions and responses through the lens of the prototypes that society offers them. But I've never previously read an analysis of sexuality in classical Roman culture that made me feel like I truly understood what that meant.
Like so many historical studies (and one of the major defects in Foucault's theories), this book works almost entirely through the male gaze and through not merely male-centered, but male-dominated cultural understandings. While Williams acknowledges that lack in his sources, I think he could have gone further in interrogating the usefulness of the available Roman texts for saying anything useful about how Roman women understood their own sexuality. In working on this month's theme, I've run across references to some other articles that take up that challenge, such as an article by Sarah Levin-Richardson on sexual graffiti expressed in a woman's point of view (and argued by her to be written by women). It concerns me that the very few detailed texts exploring the theme of sex between women risk either being over-generalized or used to erase the very concept of sex between Roman women due to the ambiguities of the texts and the lack of multiple angles on the topic.
For example, two of Martial's viciously satirical epigrams and one of Lucian's similarly satirical dialogs of the courtesans form the core of unarguable depictions of sexual activity between women. All three of them adopt the Roman sexual system in viewing any sexual agency by a woman as making her "masculine". Within our contemporary discourse on gender and sexuality, there is a certain pressure to accept this depiction at face value and interpret Bassa, Philaenis, and Megilla/us as transgender men (particularly in the last case). And that to question that interpretation is to erase historic trans identity. But when examined in the context of the larger Roman sexual system, we see that it is simply not possible for someone with a stake in that system (which covers pretty much all the upper class literate men whose texts have survived) to conceive of active female sexuality as being other than masculine. In the same way that they could not conceive of "passive" male sexuality as being other than feminine. But even those scholars arguing that "passive" Roman men cannot reasonably be categorized as "homosexual" in modern terms are not arguing that they were all, instead, trans women, even though philosophical arguments like the one mythologized by Phaedrus could certainly be interpreted that way. (Some, of course, may have been, in the context of modern definitions.) Does it then make sense to accept the male-framed Roman cultural understanding that, in any sexual encounter of biologically female persons, one of them is, by definition, taking a male role, and therefore should be understood within a modern context as being a trans man? From a scholarly viewpoint, neither modern definition has validity, but withing popular culture, the two framings are set up as mutually exclusive.
In looking for an understanding of how Roman women might have understood sexual acts between women, we need to challenge the framings and interpretations put on them, not only by modern identity movements, but by their own male contemporaries. Was Martial's Philaenis simply absurdly inconsistent in her masculinized sexuality, in that she followed male sexual rules in everything except for performing cunnilingus? Or was she following a a different set of principles in which refusing to be a receptive partner for penetrative sex coexisted happily with performing oral sex on women? Was Megilla/us Roman culture's best example of a trans man? Or was that hyper-masculine social presentation the only cultural model offered that fit their desires and experiences? (And we shouldn't overlook Demonassa, also mentioned in the dialog, who also enjoys the sexual encounter with the courtesan without being masculinized in the description.)
Even with these flaws regarding coverage of female issues, Williams is the first book on this topic I've read that led me to begin to grasp how truly different the Roman understanding of sexual roles was, and how much of that understanding still lingers in Western culture today under the surface.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #218 Williams 2010 Roman Homosexuality
About LHMP
Full citation:
Williams, Craig A. 2010. Roman Homosexuality. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-538874-9
Williams ironically acknowledges that part of his entire program is to demonstrate that “Roman homosexuality” is an oxymoron, but that this can only be explained by taking an in-depth look at the topics and evidence that superficially appear to define that very topic. The rule of thumb holds true that any academic study written by a man that has the word “homosexuality” in the title will have only minimal passing reference to female homosexuality, but in this case that’s an inevitable result of the nature, focus, and authorship of the available textual sources. But in this case, more to the point, it’s because the “Roman sexual system” itself assumes the primacy of the dominant, penetrative man and defines all other persons and actions in relation to that concept. The very notion of sex with no man or male-analog present is nonsensical within the normative structures of classical Roman sexuality. But for that very reason, a consideration of the place of women’s relations with that system (as with a consideration of men who don’t fit the dominant paradigm) helps find the cracks and inconsistencies of the system.
Introduction
This book was originally published in 1999 and has been reivised and updated in this 2010 edition. It takes a similarly broad-based approach to that Dover (1978) did for Greek homosexuality. Williams notes that female same-sex desire is “not a central theme in [this] book” which is something of an understatement. But an understanding of how sexual relations between men in classical Rome fail to align with modern concepts of homosexuality also sheds light on ways in which relations between women might have been viewed.
This study interrogates the accepted premise of Roman relations between men, i.e., that the strict alignment of active and passive roles with status differences of the participants was considered a moral issue. That “passive” partners were universally ridiculed or despised. One key question is how sexual status hierarchies between men were distinguished from “heterosexual” relations (just as much a misnomer as homosexual in this context) in which the premise was that women are universally lower in status than men. Williams points out that textual data indicates that Roman men were not encouraged to evaluate or judge sex acts based on the genders involved, except in the case of acts between women which stood outside the expected paradigms. He challenges whether the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” have any historical meaning when applied to classical Rome.
In this analysis, it’s important to understand the contextual meaning of words like stuprum (debauchery, a shameful act), pudicitia (chastity, modesty), cinaedus (man who takes a passive role in sex). For that reason, the Latin words are used in this book to avoid adding irrelevant shades of meaning, and English terms will be used only as abstractions and not to talk about historic individuals. Williams takes a Foucaultian position that the categories “heterosexual”, “bisexual”, and “homosexual” and the impulse to assign all people to them is specific to contemporary Western culture, and that even in Western culture something identifiable as [male] homosexual identity did not emerged until fairly late, e.g., the 17th century in England.
[Note: It is a general flaw in Foucault’s work that it is based almost entirely on studying male relations, with a blithe and tacit assumption that women’s experiences were either parallel or of no particular importance.]
This drive to categorize all persons into a homo/hetero binary (and he considers “bisexual” to be “reserved for intractable cases”) is parallel to categorizing all persons into a gender binary. In many cultures, the central prototype [my phrase] for “man” may have sex with specific classes of assigned-male persons [again, my phrase], but if those “permitted partners” are contextually defined as “not members of the central prototype for man” then in what sense is the relationship homosexual as opposed to representing a type of heterosexuality within a multi-gender system?
And what about relations between women? Ovid’s Metamorphoses includes many stories that glorify romantic and sexual relations between men, but in the tale of Iphis and Ianthe, Iphis is given a speech about how impossible and unnatural love between women is. [Note: But in all these we are inevitably working through the male gaze. Ovid himself discusses his desire for woman and for “boys” but he is not capable of experiencing desire for a woman as a woman. So is his claim of “impossibility” a genuine reflection of Roman society, or simply a personal failure of imagination--and of a specifically male imagination? When considering what sort of evidence Ovid and other male writers offer about Roman reality--i.e., that love between women necessarily involves a butch-femme dynamic with transgender implications--how is that different from 20th century heteronormative expectations of lesbian relationships that one partner must “be the man”? And, as we’ll see, on a symbolic and rhetorical level, Roman sexual systems always considered the “passive” partner in an act to be feminized, regardless of their biological sex.]
This book covers texts from the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE and includes all genres: epigrams, graffiti, love poetry, rhetoric. Nearly all of it was written by men for a male readership and reflects a male understanding and experience of the world. These texts show the messy contradictions in relations between men because they focus on the whole range of experience and poke at those cases that don’t appear to fit the paradigm. But the nature of the texts means that there is not a similar impetus to explore how relations between women challenged the paradigm (because women’s sexual deviations did not call into question male status and privilege). Examining a wide variety of genres examines not only the lived experiences of Romans, but how those experiences were framed in texts and even how authors framed their own experiences and acts, either via poetic personae or for rhetorical purposes.
Chapter 1: Roman Traditions - no notes
Chapter 2: Greece and Rome
Even within the limited temporal scope, the possibility should be considered that there was change over time in sexual attitudes or practices. Roman texts portrayed a major wave of Greek influence around the 2nd century BCE with regard to pederasty (i.e., age-differentiated relationships between men with the older partner taking the “dominant” role), which in Greek culture was carried out openly and celebrated. But Roman texts show no actual change in the accepted sexual codes during the transition from the Republic to the Empire, only an increase in concerns and accusations that men whose social status required them to take only the active role were instead taking passive parts. Even so, there’s no clear evidence for a change in behavior, only the degree of rhetoric about it.
Chapter 3: The Concept of Stuprum
The official Roman sexual system was organized around penetrative acts and the orifice that was being penetrated (vagina, anus, mouth). The only exception to this penis-oriented system was cunnilingus, which was heavily stigmatized (and was considered to be a penetration of the mouth by the cunnus). The texts are unconcerned with non-penetrative sex acts (having defined oral sex as “penetrative” of the mouth) such as mutual masturbation, as well as ignoring non-sexual and emotion-based life partnerships.
Williams distills down three “rules” for the sexual behavior of the Roman vir, the high-status man. 1) He must only be the penetrator in sex, never penetrated; 2) Other than his lawful wife, he must never engage in sex with a member of the Roman citizen class, whether male or female; 3) The physical ideal for a partner is smooth and youthful. How do these rules apply to women of the same class? #1 is irrelevant, the Roman sexual system places women at the other end of the pole: never penetrating, available in every way for penetration. Rule #2 has some odd quirks. In theory, the citizen-class Roman woman should never engage in sex with anyone but her husband. But when you get to “degrees of badness” it’s worse for her to have sex with a non-citizen than a citizen. It’s unclear how #3 would apply, since we don’t have a significant body of evidence on what women were expected to consider attractive.
Chapter 4: Effeminacy and Masculinity
Other characteristics than simply playing a “passive” role in sex could be associated with effeminacy. The evaluation was not necessarily related to one’s sexual partner. “Feminine” was defined in opposition to accepted male virtues, not in relation to feminine virtues. So something could “feminize” a man that wouldn’t be considered virtuous in a woman. This included a concern with physical appearance and grooming, “softness” in general, walking delicately, particular ways of talking, wearing loose colorful clothing, using perfume, curling the hair, depilation, “foreign” luxuries, fine dining and drunkenness, excess emotional display, uncontrolled lust (of any type). Similarly, a man was “feminized” by performing cunnilingus without that implying that it was acceptable for women to perform oral sex on each other. It was the framing of oral sex as a “receptive/passive” role that aligned it with femininity.
What emerges in literature however is a clear thread of “counter-culture” of men rejecting or downplaying these rules by embracing otherwise deprecated behaviors and roles. [Note: what we don’t have to the same extent -- because that body of literature is unconcerned with women -- is the same sort of evidence for women rejecting the Roman sexual system, even if only symbolically in writing.]
Chapter 5: Sexual Roles and Identities
[Note: In filtering for information even vaguely relevant to f/f contexts, I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about oral sex here -- not necessarily because this was the primary form of sexual interaction between Roman women, but because it was the act that had implications within the “official Roman sexual system” so it’s the one that men wrote about.]
The basic Roman sexual system can be understood as a matrix with one scale for insertive/receptive and another scale for the orifice involved with “higher status” falling higher and to the left in the table. (Williams uses “insertive” and “receptive” rather than “active” and “passive”.) Obviously, the acts default to assuming the presence of a penis. The verbs (from which other vocabulary is derived) are as follows:
Vaginal - (insertive) futuere; (receptive) crisare (referring to moving the body in response)
Anal - (insertive) pedicare; (receptive) cevere (referring to moving the body in response)
Oral -(insertive) irrumare; (receptive) fellare
The corresponding nouns get somewhat complicated by the question of gender.
Vaginal - (insertive) fututor (m), fututrix (f); (receptive) woman (no special term needed)
Anal - (insertive) pedicator (m, not sure if any f. examples); (receptive) pathicus, cinaedus* (m), (no clear female equialent, though pathica may be used but is not necessarily specific to this act)
Oral - (insertive) irrumator (m, no f. equivalent); (receptive) fellator (m), fellatrix (f), cunnilinctor** (m, the f. would be cunnilinctrix but I don’t know that it occurs)
*cinaedus isn’t actually specific to this sexual role, but rather means “a man who doesn’t live up to the expectations of a vir.
**This is, of course, the exception to the assumption that there is a penis involved somewhere in the act.
The focus by male authors on penetration means that even when sex between women is mentioned, the question is “who penetrated whom?” often with the assumption of a dildo being used. Oral sex is something of an anomaly, but the framework for oral sex can be seen for fellatio which is still classified and treated as a penetrative act. The problematic position of cunnilingus in Roman texts is in part because of the inability to fit it neatly into a penetrative frame. Looking at the overall system, we can make sense of how oral sex was treated.
In description and especially self-description, the Latin word vir (man) emphasized a man who adhered to the official code and rules of Roman masculinity. Thus we can make sense of Martial’s epigram on Bassa, which frames her as behaving as a man (vir) by the simple act of engaging in sex with women. Or rather, that her genitals (venus) “falsely plays the man (vir)”. This implies penetration -- the defining characteristic of a vir. Considering the Roman sexual system as a penetrative/insertive system rather than an active-passive system helps in understanding. Lingo (licking) didn’t count as “penetration” no matter who did it, and despite the fact that it might be thought of as more “active” than the person experiencing the act. Even if only by analogy, the mouth was considered a receptive orifice. Thus, even if Bassa is having oral sex performed on her by a woman, being the recipient of the act inherently masculinizes her.
The default expectation was that a man might have preferences for particular sex acts, but it was not expected for him to prefer a particular gender as a partner. It was as unusual for a man to exclusively prefer female partners as for him to exclusively prefer male partners. Within this framework, all manner of personal preferences were recognized and even considered innate, but they were not considered to constitute some sort of personal identity in the same way that alignment on the insertive/receptive scale did.
Williams argues against viewing these preferences as “orientations” in the modern sense, but more equivalent to a preference for a particular body type or feature like hair color. A man might prefer blondes, but that doesn’t mean that all people can be categorized in terms of which hair color they’re “oriented towards.” So while Williams dismisses the claim by writers such as Boswell that descriptions of personal preference of this type are evidence of “sexual orientation” as we understand it, he grants that classical authors recognized the concept of an innate preference for certain types of sexual partners and certain types of sex acts.
Laws such as the Lex Scantinia, which touched on matters of sexual status and offense, were rarely actually invoked and had very limited scope regarding personal behavior, as long as stuprum was not inflicted on a freeborn Roman man or woman.
With regard to individual sexual preferences, it was implied that men who were known to be fellators (i.e., who habitually took the receptive role in oral sex with other men) were also likely to perform cunnilingus on women. This was considered even less reputable than accepting anal penetration. Performing oral sex of any type was considered “unmanly.” Romans considered oral sex to “foul” the mouth, and there are comments that a person who performs oral sex should not be kissed or share drinking vessels, or should wash their mouth out. The topic is discussed in the language of “impurity.”
Most textual references to oral sex are to fellatio (either m/m or m/f). Men who performed cunnilingus were the subject of as much or more stigma than a fellator. (According to the system, being on the receptive side of a sex act with a woman was more degrading than from a man because it inverted the assumed status relationship even more.) Oral sex was not treated as a mutual exchange between lovers. The poet Martial wrote a poem about a sexually eager female lover who agreed to accept all types of penetration from him but only if he would return the favor with cunnilingus, but he refused in disgust.
All of this brings us to Martial’s epigram on Philaenis, which frames her sexual activity in masculine terms. She penetrates boys and girls, she exercises at the wrestling school, she eats and drinks excessively [though note that excessive eating and drinking in a man would be “unmanly”]. She refuses to perform fellatio because it’s “unmanly” but Martial’s punchline is that she “thinks it manly to perform cunnilingus on girls.” The satire here is focusing on her upside down values. She, a woman, does all these masculine things, but fails because she embraces the most unmanly act of all. A man performing cunnilingus is framed as “submitting” to the woman.
[Note: This leaves open a lot of questions that one suspects the male Roman writers had no interest in. Would it be shameful for a free Roman woman to receive cunnilingus from an unfree or lower status woman? Did women care as much about the status dynamics of sex acts in the same way that men did, given that they were coming from an official position at the bottom of the ranking? Is it possible that Philaenis could, simultaneously, reject the role of fellator--sexually subjugating herself to a man--as part of her personal identity, and yet not consider performing cunnilingus to be a similar (or even worse) subjugation?]
Williams suggests interpreting the cinaedus (i.e., a man who habitually takes the receptive role in anal sex or in some other way goes against the expectations of virility) as a gender category rather than a sexual orientation. This is illustrated by the fable related by Phaedrus about how, when Prometheus was creating human beings, he drunkenly attached sexual organs to the wrong bodies in some cases. Thus the cinaedus was created by attaching a penis to a “female” body while the tribas was created by attaching a vagina to a “male” body. That is, their behavior is viewed as resulting from a type of gender dysphoria [my term] within an obligatorily heteronormative system. [Note: This must be distinguished from a theory of transgender identity as it assumes a fixed relationship of gender identity and preferred sex acts.] This system assumes that the partner of the cinaedus and the tribas are behaving “normally” in accordance with the sexual desires that their bodies dictate. This theory is echoed by the 5th century medical writer Caelius Aurelianus who suggests that molles (another term for cinaedus) and tribades also experience an excess of lust, which leads to other sexual vices besides taking the “wrong” role in insertive sex. He writes:
nam sicut feminae tribades appellatae, quod utramque venerem exerceant, mulieribus magis quam viris misceri festinant et easdem inidentia paene virili sectantur...
“Just as those women called ‘tribades’--because they engage in both kinds of sexual practice--seek intercourse with women more than with men and pursue women with almost a man’s jealousy...”
By this definition, a tribade might just as easily choose a passive man as her sexual partner. Her identity comes, not from the nature of her sexual partner (just as men’s nature is not determined by the gender of their sexual partner), but from the nature of the acts she desires to perform with them and the fact of taking the active role. Thus, Seneca describes masculine women as “drinking to excess and penetrating men” (apparently unconcerned with what they might be doing with women).
[Note: One fall-out from this understanding that I have seen in some writings on Roman sexuality is that it becomes possible to doubt the very existence of sexual acts between women unless the text is very explicit about it. This occurs in Adams’ The Latin Sexual Vocabulary where he dismisses same-sex interpretations of terms for sexually active women unless no other possible interpretation is available. This is something of a conundrum: within the context of the above understanding of the Roman sexual system, it’s true that terms like “tribas” or “cunnilinctor” or even “fututrix” do not automatically imply sex acts between women. But by the very same argument, there’s no reason why the possibility of a female partner should be dismissed. The flaw in Adams is not that he points out that a tribas might have a male partner, but that he requires a higher standard of proof that she might have a female one.]
Williams considers interpretations of the evidence that Rome had a “subculture” of male-male relations equivalent, for example, to the molly houses of 18th century England. These interpretations are based on references to men meeting in certain locations for sex, to particular fashions or habits associated with cinaedi, and so forth. But he argues that to have a subculture, you need to have people identifying as sharing an identity, and a social context where their interactions could not otherwise be engaged in freely or openly. This wasn’t the case in Rome. Rather than a "subculture" of male-male relations, his position is that male-male relations were simply part of the default culture.
Afterword to the Second Edition
Williams mentions as new data a Pompeii wall painting that Clarke (1998) thinks may represent sex between women. The image is part of a series depicting deprecated sexual practices.
Appendix 1: The Rhetoric of Nature
One of the contributions to later rhetoric about sexual morality comes from Roman texts about the concept of things being “according to Nature” or “against Nature”. Natura expresses not only what people believed existed but also how they believed they should be. Thus, the simple existence of something or some practice was not a defense against it being identified as “against nature.”
Seneca defines “vice” as anything that is “against nature” but includes clearly cultural practices among “nature”. But other authors--whether seriously or in satire--point out the arbitrary or ambiguous definitions of “nature.” For example, one could say that the design of an anus indicates that it’s “natural” for it to be penetrated.
Cultural fables like the one by Phaedrus about Prometheus assumes that molles and tribades have always been part of the human race, and therefore could reasonably be included in Natura. Seeking “nature” in the behavior of animals, we see Ovid’s speech given to Iphis where she claims [erroneously, as it happens] that no where among animals does a female desire a female. But at the same time, Ovid never questions the “natural” desire of men for boys.
Appendix 2: Marriage between Males
How are we to interpret various references in classical texts to marriages between men, especially as these are usually brought up in the context of political satire or personal attacks? Williams gives some credence to the practice of marriage between men, although in some cases the references were probably satirical. It appears that such marriages would not be entered into the official registry (but neither were all marriages between men and women). Marriages between men didn’t fit into the formal structures of Roman marriage because those structures were concerned with the begetting of legitimate freeborn children. Martial wrote a number of satires about “male brides” where the “bride” is made an object of scorn, but the marriage itself is not. Williams concludes that such marriages happened and the men considered themselves spouses, but the relationship was treated as anomalous and always involved treating one partner as being feminized by the relationship.
Appendix 3: A Note on the Sources -- no notes
Appendix 4: Pompeiian Graffiti in Context
Williams notes that among the wide variety of sexual “advertisements” in this genre, the only combination not attested is a woman unambiguously selling sexual services to another woman. However, there are references to a woman identified (possibly by herself) as a fututrix (a woman who fucks) which--by the normal understanding of the word--would imply a female receptive partner. (See discussion in Adams 1982.)
Time period: Classical EraPlace: ItalyMisc tags: cross-gender roles/behaviorsex between womenoral sexessentialismtribadeEvent / person: Metamorphoses: Iphis and Ianthe (Ovid)Epigrams (Martial)Caelius AurelianusPhaedrusSeneca the Elder
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October 5, 2018
Yes, the LHMP is Doing a 2019 Fiction Series!
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

As I hinted in last month's On the Shelf podcast and will be announcing officially in tomorrow's episode, The Lesbian Historic Motif Project and Podcast will be repeating this year's exciting audio fiction series in 2019! Please publicize this to anyone you think might be interested in submitting. There's a lot of buzz out there from readers who are hungry for f/f historical fiction. I'd like to do my part to give readers what they're clamoring for. As you can see from the selections we've published this year, I'm eager to support stories that take chances, stories that aren't the same thing you've read before, stories that embrace the diversity of queer women's experiences throughout history. Maybe you've been thinking of dipping your toe into historical fiction waters and just needed the excuse. Maybe you've had a story kicking around but didn't think there was a market for it. Maybe you've been reading the LHMP blog and listening to the podcast and been inspired by some real-life history. We want to see your stories so we can put together an even more stunning series in our second year.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast2019 Fiction Series
Call for Submissions: 2019 Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Fiction Series
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be open for submissions in January 2019 for short stories in the lesbian historic fiction genre, to be produced in audio format for the podcast, as well as published in text on the website.
Technical Details
We will accept short fiction of any length up to 5000 words, which is a hard limit. We will be buying a total of four stories. (If we get some really great flash fiction, there’s the possibility of more.)
We will be paying professional rates: $0.06/word.
The contract will be for first publication rights in audio and print (i.e., the story must not have appeared in either format previously) with an exclusive one year license. (Exceptions can be arranged by mutual consent for “best of” collections within that term.)
Instructions on how to submit are given below. NO SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED OUTSIDE THE SUBMISSION PERIOD OF JANUARY 2019.
What We’re Looking For
Stories must be set in an actual historic culture--i.e., a specific time and place in history--and the plot and characters should be firmly rooted in that time and place. (No time-travel or past memories, please. And no supernatural elements, just ordinary history.)
Stories must be set before 1900. We’d love to see stories that reach beyond the popular settings of 19th century America and England unless you do something new and interesting in them.
Romance is optional, and romance stories should have some other significant plot element in addition to the romance.
We are not looking for erotica. Sex may be implied but not described. (It’s difficult to include both a substantial non-romantic plot and erotic content in short fiction. I’d rather that stories focus on the plot and characters.)
Stories should feature lesbian themes. What do I mean by that, especially given the emphasis the LHMP puts on how people in history understood sexuality differently than we do? This is where we get into “I know it when I see it” territory. The story should feature protagonist(s) whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or who have had relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story should focus on same-sex relations.
Stories need not be all rainbows and unicorns, but should not be tragic. Angst and peril are ok as long as they don’t end in tragedy.
Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Authors from traditionally marginalized cultures are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background.
Please feel free to publicize this call for submissions.
Submission Information
Do not send submissions before January 1, 2019 or after January 31, 2019. Submissions sent outside this window will not be considered (with allowance for time zones).
Send submissions to alpennia@heatherrosejones.com
Submit your story as an rtf or doc(x) file attached to your email
The file name should be “[last name] - [story title, truncated if long]”
The subject line of your email should be “LHMP Submissions - [last name] - [story title]”
There is no need to provide a synopsis or biographical information in the cover letter.
By submitting your story, you are verifying that the material is your own original work and that it has not been previously published in any form in a publicly accessible context.
Submissions will be acknowledged within 2 days of receipt. If you haven’t received an acknowledgment within 5 days, please query.
I may begin responding to submissions during January as I read them, but final decisions will not be made until after the submission period is complete. If I haven’t responded by mid-February, please query as the response may have gone astray.
Formatting
Use your favorite standard manuscript format for short fiction with the following additions:
In addition to word count, please provide the date/era of your setting and the location/culture it is set in. (These can be in general terms, but it helps for putting the story in context, especially if it uses a very tight point of view where the time/place are not specifically mentioned in the story.)
If you don’t have a favorite manuscript format, here are the minimum essential elements it should have:
Use courier or a similar monospaced serif font, 12-point size
Lines should be double-spaced with paragraphs indented. (Use your word processor’s formatting for this, do not use tabs or manual carriage returns.)
Do not justify the text, leave a ragged right margin.
Margins should be at least 1-inch or equivalent all around
On the first page, provide the following information:
Your name (legal name, the name I’ll be putting on the contract)
email address
(standard formats generally require a mailing address but I don’t need one at this point)
word count (please use your word processor’s word count function, rounded to the nearest 100)
date/era of story
location/culture of story
Centered above the start of the story, include the title, and on the next line “by [name to appear in publication]”. This is where you may use a pen name, if you choose.
Please use actual italics rather than underlining for material meant to appear in italics.
Please indicate the end of your story with the word “end” centered below the final line.
As I will be reading stories electronically, there is no need to include page numbers or a header on each page. (If this is part of your standard format, you don’t need to remove them.)
October 3, 2018
Greek and Roman Texts
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Past-me wrote a promissory note for this introduction. Present-me needs to get in to the office and wants to get the blog up. So you'll have to be satisfied with the book summary itself.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #217 Hubbard 2003 Homosexuality in Greece and Rome
About LHMP
Full citation:
Hubbard, Thomas K. 2003. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-23430-7
This is an invaluable book that collects all manner of classical Greek and Roman texts relevant to homosexuality in a single volume. I doubt that it’s exhaustive, especially with regard to male homosexuality, but Hubbard seems to have made special efforts to include female-oriented material. The material is organized chronologically and by literary genre, with an introductory discussion in each section to provide historic context.
My presentation here will cover only the female-related material and will provide a summary of each item. But even though the percentage of the work involved would probably put full quotations within the scope of public domain, the variety of approaches to translation mean that the full context is important. For example, Martial’s epigrams are translated in a very colloquial, slangy style which--while it gives the emotional impact of the original--isn’t necessarily reliable for the technical content.
As an over-broad generalization, classical Greek and Roman society embraced an understanding that a preference for particular types of sex acts or particular types of partners could be an inborn, essential personal trait, either from a genetic, physiological, or astrological cause. But this understanding of “preference” was neither limited to the gender of the partner, nor expressed in a way that corresponds to modern ideas of “sexual orientation.” It was considered normal for a person to have an appreciation for the beauty of same-sex bodies, but the accepted contexts and modes for expressing that appreciation were different across the scope of this collection.
There is, of course, far more material relating to relations between men, due to the greater cultural focus on men in these strongly patriarchal cultures, and because of the effects of several layers of filtering on the material that survives for us: the filter of who had the literacy to record texts, the filter of what subjects were considered worth recording (and what attitudes towards them were popular), and the filter of which of those texts were considered worth propagating down the ages.
One significant difference between the Greek and Roman material is that the Greek tradition of pederasty as a life-stage experience (older men soliciting relationships with young men on the cusp of adulthood) was not part of the accepted core of Roman sexual morals. Roman attitudes viewed (male) same-sex sexuality through the lens of “active” and “passive” roles that were supposed to align with differences in status (men > women, free men > slaves, older > younger).
There is some indication of shifts in sexual attitudes -- or at least shifts in the rhetoric about sex -- in response to social and political upheaval. In particular, the transition from the Roman republic to the empire correlates with a number of changes in sex-related rhetoric. (Though there really isn’t enough evidence to know how this applies to women.)
[Note: there are several topics that are essential to understanding Greek and Roman sexual dynamics that are more or less assumed to be familiar to the reader. These include the relative legal status of women, and the nature of classical slavery and attitudes toward the legal and social status of enslaved persons.]
The introduction concludes with a discussion of various artistic conventions employed, especially in Greek art, that signal the nature of the relationships between the figures being portrayed. That is, given two people depicted in art, how can we know that they are being depicted as involved in a romantic or sexual relationship? The motifs specifically relevant to women’s relationships include: one person touching the chin of the other (a courtship gesture that continued with this meaning into the medieval period), two women wrapped in a single cloak, touching of the genitals. [Note: for more discussion on this topic and how to interpret such images, see Rabinowitz 2002]
Chapter 1: Archaic Greek Lyric (roughly 7-5th centuries BCE)
This is the genre in which Sappho’s poetry falls. Both for her and for a few other authors, the genre of “maidens’ songs” is particularly relevant. These were written to be performed by groups of young women, generally (it is believed) in a context of ritual initiations or marriage. Some of Sappho’s songs imply a context of a young woman leaving the homo-social company of other women, presumably for marriage, while others simply celebrate relationships within that company but usually with the implication of an age-difference relationship, as with male pederastic relationships. [Note: I caution the reader not to connect the word “pederastic” in this context with the modern meaning of “child molestation.” Although there was an age difference involved, the ideal age for the younger partner was the very beginning of adulthood, not pre-adolescence.] Some of the poems have been interpreted as reflecting age-mate relationships, as is the case for one of Alcman’s maiden songs which has been variously seen as either refering to relationships within the female chorus, or to a possible same-sex betrothal.
Alcman - First Maiden’s Song - Scholars variously interpret this as an initiation song or perhaps celebrating the betrothal of Agido and Hagesichora, the two (female) leaders of the choruses performing it. The content includes praise of the beauty and excellence of the two named women and depictions of the two together presiding over the feast.
Sappho - multiple works- Only a few poems are substantial enough to provide a detailed context for their content. Most express praise, admiration, love, jealousy, or longing for their female subject. Even aside from assuming either Sappho or a female chorus as the speaker, a few clearly indicate the emotions are being expressed by Sappho herself. In a number of the fragments, the context is clearly feelings expressed for a woman who is leaving for marriage, or other marriage-related content (such as dialog between a woman and her virginity/girlhood). These suggest the image of a life-stage association with the speaker acting as an admirer or lover. The emotion of loss is genuine, but expected. In other poems, there is no implication of marriage as the context, and the admiration may be implied to be mutual and continuing. The numbers are the standard reference numbers given to Sappho’s work. I’m only including the ones that have overt homoerotic content. For a detailed examination of the original language and its interpretation, I recommend Snyder 1997.
1. The “hymn to Aphrodite” in which Sappho (by name) beseeches the goddess of love, who promises to turn the heart of a female beloved toward her.
16. A litany of things that people find “most fair” including Helen, that ends with the poet identifying Anactoria as her choice.
31. Perhaps the most familiar of Sappho’s works “He seems like a god to me...” in which she describes the physical sensations of desire for a woman, when seeing her accompanied (perhaps being courted) by a man.
49. A couplet referring to her love for a woman named Atthis.
94. On the occasion of a woman unhappy at having to leave Sappho against her will, the poet reminds her of a number of sensual scenes from their past.
96. The poet consoles Atthis (perhaps the same as above) for the departure of a beloved friend.
Anacreon - fragment 358 - The poet complains that Eros has caused him to love a woman who, being from Lesbos, loves another girl instead.
Chapter 2: Greek Historical Texts (covering a wide time period)
Primarily (putatively historical) stories about male couples whose devotion inspired those around them.
Plutarch Lycurgus (a discussion of Spartan customs attributed to the lawgiver Lycurgus) - A brief excerpt that indicates that Spartan women may have participated in a system similar to male pederastic bonds. “[Male] lovers shared in the reputation of their boyfriends, whether good or bad. ... Love was so esteemed among them that girls also became the erotic objects of noble women.”
Chapter 3: Greek Comedy, Chapter 4: Greek Oratory - nothing in these sections
Chapter 5: Greek Philosophy (covering a wide time period)
A great many texts discussing love between men. The only one relevant to women includes them as part of the symmetry of the allegory.
Plato Symposium - A long extended myth about how erotic desire came about. The story begins with a claim that originally there were three sexes: male, female, and mixed, each with a doubled body compared to how people are now. In order to weaken them, the gods cut them in half, but now the halves naturally go seeking their “other half” and try to unite with it by embracing and trying to restore their original state. That people’s natural desire will be toward the sex that was their “other half” resulting in the whole array of men with men, women with women, and men with women. People may marry against this inclination for the sake of convention or to produce children, but it doesn’t change their true desires. This myth is often cited in a very simplified form, but the original text is extensive and goes into the nature of erotic love.
Hippocrates On Regimen - A pseudo-medical treatise, using a humoral-based theory to account for how the gender and sexuality of a person is determined, operating from the principle that both mother and father contribute a gendered essence, and that the proportions and the dominance of the parents’ contributions determine the sex and personal inclinations of the child. These inclinations are described more in terms of gender expression. Thus a particular combination of parental contributions can result in a woman who is bold and “mannish”, just as a different combination can result in a man who is “effeminate”. Preference for a particular type of sexual experience or partner is not mentioned in this section, but similar texts use it as an explanation of same-sex desire (on the part of the affected person, but not their partner(s)).
Visual Art
7th c BCE plate from Thera - A courting scene between two women holding crowns. One touches the other’s chin.
6th c BCE - Among a group of people, two women stand facing each other, with a single cloak draped around their shoulders.
6th c BCE - Two Maenads (followers of Dionysus) present an offering of a rabbit to Dionysus. They are standing closely with their arms around each other’s shoulders.
Attributed to Apollodorus (if so, 5th c BCE Athens) - Two naked women: one stands and holds a cup(?), the other crouches at her feet in front of her and touches her genitals. Several possible interpretations are suggested, including both sexual and personal care actions.
Chapter 6: Hellenistic Poetry (covers roughly the 4th to 2nd c BCE, though extended several centuries later in terms of literary influence)
During this period, love between women is less present as a theme than previously, and is not necessarily mentioned positively. The best candidate is the female poet Nossis, who claims Sappho as her model and proclaims love to be her theme, but fills her poetry with appreciation for women’s beauty and shows no interest in men. In the work of Herondas, a woman named Nossis from context, clearly the poet) is mentioned as having borrowed a dildo, which suggests that her contemporaries believed her to have sexual interest in women.
Asclepiades - An epigram accuses two Samian women, Bitto and Nannion, of being lovers, using the goddess Aphrodite as a symbol of specifically heterosexual love whom they disdain.
Nossis - An epigram about the sweetness of kissing Cypris. Two epigrams commenting on wall paintings of women she admires. A poem in the form of a grave inscription that makes reference to Sappho and Mytilene, a city on Lesbos:
Stranger, if you sail to the land of lovely dances, Mytilene,
To catch fire from the blossom of Sappho’s graces,
Say that a friend to her and the Muses, the Locrian land
Bore me. And knowing my name is Nossis, go on!
Herondas - A satirical dialog in which a woman named Metro asks her friend who made her dildo “the beautifully stitched red leather one” and there follows a discussion of a chain of borrowings of the item, given as a present from one woman to another. (It’s possible that it was intended for solitary use, but the context is clearly one of women collaborating in sexual activity that doesn’t include men.)
Chapter 7: Republican Rome (roughly the 5th through 1st centuries BCE) - nothing relevant
Chapter 8: Augustan Rome (defined by the political prominence of Augustus from 43 BCE to 14 CE)
Ovid Metamorphoses - The story of Iphis and Ianthe can’t be considered a realistic representation of female same-sex relations in Rome. The story is explicitly set elsewhere (Crete) and possibly elsewhen--a common device for distancing the motif of female homoeroticism from the author’s culture. On its face, Iphis and Ianthe is more of a transgender story than a lesbian one. Iphis is raised as a boy due to her father’s stated intention to kill any daughter. In that guise, she and Ianthe fall in love, but Iphis considers the fulfillment of their love as impossible and unnatural. (This is in contrast to Ovid’s casual acceptance of love between men.) On the eve of their wedding, Iphis’s mother prays to Isis to intervene and the goddess transforms Iphis into a man.
Chapter 9: Early Imperial Rome (roughly, the 1st century CE)
References to sex between women in this era are hostile and depict it as involving a “masculine” woman who performs penetrative sex on her “feminine” partner.
Seneca the Elder - Discussion of a legal case involving a man who found his wife having sex with a woman and killed them both. There is an implication that a dildo was used.
Phaedrus - A satirical myth about the cause of homosexuality, attributing it to a drunken Prometheus who, when creating humans out of clay, stuck the wrong gentalia on the figures.
Seneca the Younger - Discussing things that are “against nature,” he attributes women having male-associated medical problems like baldness and gout to their having taken up masculine sexual roles. The specific example given in the text, however, is of such women performing penetrative sex on men (not on women), thus upending “nature” even more.
Martial - Most famous for his bitingly satirical epigrams. He teases both men and women for their non-normative sexual exploits, but the ones directed at women feel nastier. The translations given in this book are very far from literal, aiming to mimic the emotional impact rather than the sense of the originals. The numbers are the standard reference numbers for his works and can be used to look up other versions.
1.90 Addressed to a woman named Bassa, he begins by suggesting that she is a virtuous woman since gossip has never associated her with a man, but then accuses her of “bringing two cunts together” creating the riddle “How can there be adultery with no man present?”
7.67 - Addressed to a woman named Philaenis, listing her masculine-style sexual prowess with both boys and girls, describing her as a glutton, and then insulting her with a particularly Roman twist. Performing oral sex was considered to be degrading--to be unmanly if one were male--but the epigram ends by claiming that Philaenis is “too manly” to suck dick but is happy to perform oral sex on women (which was considered even more degrading).
7.70 - Also addressed to a woman named Philaenis (either the same one, or an alias in both cases), he says that she fucks her girlfriend, using the verb that specifically meant penis-in-vagina sex.
Chapter 10: Later Greco-Roman Antiquity (roughly the 2nd through 4th centuries CE)
This section covers the last group of non-Christian texts associated with the Roman empire. There was a brief revival of Greek literature in the 2nd century and a series of Hellenophilic Roman emperors who enjoyed relationships with men, which at the very least gave philosophers and satirists a lot to talk about in the realm of male-male relations. The variety of texts giving evidence for relations between women expands, although without much change in the attitudes of the male writers to it.
Soranus, as translated by Caelius Aurelianus On Chronic Disorders - A medical manual that attributes non-normative sexual behavior to the suppression of modesty and an excess of lust. He discusses tribads as being sexually active with both men and women, but preferring women and pursuing them “like a man”. He claims that, as with other vices such as drunkenness, tribads bring other women to the practice in order to relieve their own guilt over their behavior. He considers same-sex sexual activity to be a displacement for some other mental or physical ailment and not a primary disorder itself.
Lucian Dialogues of the Courtesans #5 - These are satirical works in the form of conversations, but are not necessarily intended to depict specific contemporaries. The dialog between two courtesans (i.e., somewhat high-class prostitutes) describes how one was hired to entertain two women, Megilla from Lesbos and her wife Demonassa from Corinth. After the courtesan had entertained the two with music, Megilla instructed her to join the two of them in bed. Megilla presented as masculine, including an athlete-style shaved head, asking to be called Megillus (the masculine form of the name), and saying that she was born a woman but had “the mind and the desires and everything else of a man.” The courtesan accepted several expensive gifts as inducement and joined them for a sexual encounter but declined to give precise details other than describing kissing and panting.
Artemidorus Dream Analysis - This is from a manual of dream interpretation. In a section on dreams of a sexual nature, there are two relevant entries. The first interprets dreams of performing oral sex on someone as meaning that enmity will develop between them as oral sex was considered to be impure and it would result in “no longer being possible to share mouths.” An exception is given for those who earn their living from their mouths as with flute players or orators. The second dream type is when a woman dreams of penetrating another woman. It will either mean sharing secrets (if the other woman is someone she knows) or that she will undertake useless projects (if a stranger). But if a woman dreams of being penetrated by a woman, it means she will either separate from her husband or become widowed (but will learn the other woman’s secrets).
Egyptian Love-magic Texts - Two papyrus texts that contain spells to bind a woman to love or desire the woman creating the spell. These are specific texts naming individuals and giving other personal details about them. The intent is to “attract and bind the soul and heart.” The second is a bit more intense, calling down magical threats on a supernatural assistant to force their assistance to “inflame the heart, the liver, the spirit of [person 1] with love and affection for [person 2]...burn, set on fire, inflame her soul, heart, liver, spirit with love...forcer her to rush forth from every place and every house, loving [person 2]... [let her] surrender like a slave, giving herself and all her possessions...” amid much formulaic repetition, but always coming back to a demand for “love and affection.”
Pseudo-Lucian Forms of Love - Within an extended dialogue about various forms of love and which are preferable, one of the characters argues for love between women being equally acceptable to love between men. (The punch line is that it’s meant as a reductio ad absurdum argument against male-male love. Why, if you support that, the next thing you know you’ll claim that women can love each other!) “Let women too love each other,” he suggests. “Let them strap to themselves cunningly contrived instruments of lechery, those mysterious monstrosities devoid of seed, and let woman lie with woman as does a man. Let wanton Lesbianism--that word seldom heard, which I feel ashamed even to utter--freely parade itself, and let our women’s chambers emulate Philaenis, disgracing themselves with Sapphic amours.”
Firmicus Maternus Mathesis - An astrology manual that includes gender expression and sexual preference as possible consequences of one’s stars, but framed as clearly being “vices” and deviant from the desired state. Under the right stars “women will be born with masculine character, but men will become castrates or eunuchs or male prostitutes.” The implication is that gender identity is what is affected and that sexual expression may follow from that.
Time period: Classical Era1st c2nd c3rd c4th cPlace: GreeceItalyMisc tags: cross-gender roles/behaviorgender disguise f>mtransgender identityhomosocial environments/communitiescourt casecourtesanshermaphroditismemotional /romantic bonds between womenfemale husbandlove poetrymarriage between womenchin-chuck gesturecunnilingusdildokissingpenetrationsex between womenoral sexsexual techniquessexual/romantic desiretribadismartistic representationmagical textsmedical treatisesastrological textstribadeEvent / person: AlcmanSapphoAnacreonPlutarchPlatoNossisAsclepiadesHerondasMetamorphoses: Iphis and Ianthe (Ovid)PhaedrusSeneca the ElderEpigrams (Martial)Caelius AurelianusDialogues of the Courtesans (Lucian)pseudo-LucianArtemidorus
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Vulgar (and I do Mean Vulgar) Latin and Women's Sexual Experience
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Since I'm beginning a series of publications relating to classical Rome, it only makes sense to begin with a book that reviews the vocabulary of sex in Latin. It isn't a work that is of particularly direct use for the topic of love or sex between women, as the author gives away his attitude toward the topic with words like "abnormal." But especially given how difficult it is to extract reliable information about female homoeroticism from the surviving Latin texts, the need to understand Roman attitudes toward sex in general is unavoidable.
I should probably note that the entire series of publications that I'm covering this month will be strongly focused on the mechanics of sex as understood and discussed in Roman culture and that much of the language will be explicit and...well...vulgar. Content warnings apply.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #216 Adams 1982 The Latin Sexual Vocabulary
About LHMP
Full citation:
Adams, J.N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-4106-2
Content Note: This book's topic is the vocabulary of genitalia and sex acts. These will be discussed straightforwardly using language that might ordinarily be considered crude or offensive (especially when a crude term best represents the original sense in Latin).
Both the structure of this book and the author’s attitude toward the material work to erase any specific consideration of terminology relating to sex between women. The book is organized thematically, first considering vocabulary relating to specific body parts, then considering vocabulary for actions done with or to those body parts, with a briefer discussion of the sociological context at the end. There are scattered references to terms relating to sex between women, but in a few cases Adams discounts or dismisses homoerotic contexts in favor of focusing on potential male-oriented interpretations. (For example, he discusses two ambiguous instances of frictrix without any consideration that it gave rise to words unambiguously meaning “tribade” in later Romance languages and without discussing a homoerotic interpretation at all.)
This is the sort of book that assumes that, if you are reading it, you are fluent in Greek and Latin and therefore don’t need any of the contextual citations to be translated. While this avoids adding an interpretive layer from the author, it’s a somewhat old-fashioned approach to classical studies with a tacitly gate-keeping function. It’s also worth noting that the scope of the book is not “vocabulary relating to love and affection” and the scope of “sexual” is interpreted somewhat narrowly. For example, although some vocabulary relating to non-genital contact (touching, embracing) is mentioned, generally it is included when used as a euphemism for genital acts. I don’t think kissing gets discussed at all. So the vocubulary shouldn’t be taken as a roadmap to how Roman people experienced their romantic and erotic lives as a whole.
The general scope of the work is language used to describe or refer to sexual and excretory acts, either as the primary meaning of the words, as a standard euphemism, or as ad hoc metaphorical or poetic reference. From the context of usage, especially the nature and formality of the text, one can identify hierarchies of offensiveness. (For example, formal, neutral terms are less likely to show up in the graffiti on whorehouse walls, while crude, offensive terms are less likely to show up in love poetry.) The types of body parts and acts that appear in the texts, as well as how they are treated, provide evidence of cultural preoccupations. For example, classical Latin had an extensive and specific vocabulary to identify penetrative sex involving different orifices, distinguishing whether the act was viewed from the “active” or “passive” partner. This detailed specificity reflects the significance of social hierarchies of different roles and acts. The book primarily covers Classical Latin, but also looks at medieval Latin and vocabulary in Romance languages in some cases.
Numerically, the majority of the terms covered are metaphoric or euphemisms--suggestive rather than direct. The metaphoric language may be isolated examples reflecting an active underlying metaphor that has not yet settled into fixed expressions. In other cases, originally metaphoric language may have shifted to becoming the primary referential sense of the word, and may displace older standard language as it becomes considered dated or too offensive.
In addition to language directly about sex, or using sexual contexts for the purpose of insult or innuendo, obscene language might be used in ceremonial/magical contexts either to ward off evil influences or to invoke fertility.
The cultural focus on male sexuality (and the filtering effect of who did the writing and which writings were preserved) mean that the majority of the book is focused on terms for male anatomy and male involvement in sex acts. A great deal of the male-oriented material is preoccupied with the negotiation and maintenance of masculine status with regard to “approved” sex acts, especially when performed between men. Although it’s safe to say that an understanding of Roman attitudes toward gender and sexuality cannot but grasped without that male-centered understanding, I’ll be skipping over large amounts of that material and only touching on female-relevant vocabulary.
Gender-Neutral Genitals
The first set of terms are those that can be used for either male or female genitalia (which are listed at the end of the chapter of male genitals). Veretrum (derived from a root meaning “respect”) can be found occasionally for female genitals, but in other cases clearly is restricted to men. By the early medieval period, it seems to have become scholarly and obscure. Similarly neutral in tone is verenda (plural) meaning “that which inspires awe” which is found in late Classical Latin and medieval contexts, though somewhat rare. Verecunda has as it’s primary meaning “modesty” but can also be applied to genitals of any type with a neutral tone. In contrast, pudenda (shameful thing) is gender-neutral but conveys a sense of shame or disgust. The euphemism genitale, genitalia (generative parts) can be used in polite contexts but wasn’t typically used as a technical or medical term.
Other general euphemisms indicate the saliency of sexual organs: natura, naturalia (natural parts) occurs for both sexes but most commonly for women’s genitals in medical contexts; necessaria (necessary parts) occurs for both sexes; sexus (sexual part) is fairly rare but used for both men and women. [Note how many modern English technical terms were the ordinary words in Classical Latin.]
There is a disproportionate number of different terms referring to the penis, perhaps because writers felt freer to talk about that organ, or because it had greater cultural meaning. To understand the range of euphemisms, it’s important to understand the different concept of “modesty” in Roman culture. Casual public display of depictions of the penis reflect both a lack of generalized “shame” attached to genitals (as opposed to specific uses of them) and the use of the penis as a symbol of power. In contrast, female genitals were not used (either physically or symbolically) as a threat or boast in the same way that male genitals were. When female genitals were discussed in vulgar contexts, they were often associated with disgust or revulsion. Reference to the clitoris was typically in abusive contexts focusing on unnatural size.
Female Genitals
Vocabulary for female genitals may distinguish between the external genitals, the vagina, and the uterus, or may conflate some subset (especially the latter two) or all of those.
The basic and most common obscene term for the female genitals is cunnus. [Note: despite the similarity, there isn’t a clear connection with the germanic word that appears in English as cunt, although that is probably the best functional translation.] Cunnus can be derogatory or abusive, but occasionally seems to be neutral if used in a non-derogatory context, though it would not be used as a polite term. It appears primarily in graffiti and in satirical epigrams. [Note: the epigram was a short poem that usually satirized or poked fun at the subject. Although often written by “serious” poets, the tone of the language was typically vulgar.]
Animal metaphors can be found for male genitals but are less common for women, though this may be an artifact of the types of surviving texts. One exception is the use of porcus (pig), which seems to have been used by women to refer to the genitals of young girls in a sort of “nursery talk” register. [Note: my guess is that this is a image-metaphor based on the smooth, rounded appearance of the hind end of a female piglet.]
Agricultural metaphors with meanings like “field, garden, meadow” are common, not only inspired by visual appearance (i.e., pubic hair seen as vegetation) and the implication of fertility, but also in connection with using metaphors of ploughing and sowing of seeds for the act of sex. Some specific terms include eugium (having good soil, fertile), a Greek borrowing associated with the language of prostitutes and considered vulgar. Sulcus (furrow) also comes from this field of meaning and appears to have been inoffensive.
Similarly, from the image of interior spaces in the landscape, words like specus (cave--it could also be used for the anus), fossa (ditch), piscina (pool, fish pond), barathrum (pit, but with a negative connotation “abyss”), with the latter two mostly appearing in epigrams.
Household objects were another source of metaphor, especially ones relating to cooking. The external genitals might be called a hearth and the vagina or womb an oven. A round cookpot (olla) was another word used for “female parts” (though I wonder if the rounded shape might also be an allusion, not just the “container” aspect?). Referring to the female genitals as an altar (ara) seems to have been an ad hoc coinage rather than a standard term. Other “container” words used for the interior genitals include bulga (bag) and vas (vessel, container). [Note: somewhat surprisingly, the book does not indicate that vagina (sheath) was used for the organ with that name today, although vagina was used in a few cases as part of a metaphor for anal sex to accompany the more common euphemism of penis=sword.]
A few other metaphoric terms are mentioned that may be ad hoc coinages: the external genitals called a door (ianuam), the vagina a path or road, or a sinus (hollow space), and possibly one instance of female genitals called a ship (navis) but in a context of word-play.
Another technique of euphemism was to refer to a taboo organ with the name for some nearby body part. Thus the female genitals may be called a “lap” (gremium) or especially in Biblical Latin, a navel (umbilicus) or thigh (femur). Somewhat more pointedly, words used for the anus might be applied to the vagina as well (longuo, culus).
Similarly to some of the generic terms that could mean either male or female genitals, there are terms meaning “female parts” (muliebria, feminal) or simply “the place” (loca) or “the inner place” (interior pars, viscera).
Somewhat more crudely, we find words meaning “crack, fissure” (rima, fissa). The term hiatus (cleft, gap) appears in offensive contexts implying “a loose vagina" (presumably from excess use).
The term spurium is mentioned by classical authors as an obsolete term for the female genitals and is attributed to the Sabine or possibly Etruscan language. By the classical period, the sense had been transferred to “illegitimate (spurious) child”.
The remainder of the chapter on female genitals covers references to specific anatomic parts (whereas the above terms can have more general use).
Classical Romans understood the function of the clitoris in sex and envisioned tribades using it like a penis for penetrative sex. For this reason, identifying a clitoris as “large” was derogatory and implied pseudo-masculinity. The ordinary “proper” term for it was landica but in Classical Latin this was considered too indecent to use (although it survived into Old French). The Greek borrowing nymfe occurs but not in common use. The image metaphor nasus (nose) or crista (crest, [rooster’s] comb) appear in ad hoc use.
The labia might be called a mouth (orae) in medical literature. Terms meaning “wings” (pinnacula, pinnae) are noted as obsolete.
In addition to general terms that could be applied to the womb, the words uterus, venter, and aluus could mean either “womb” or “belly” generally. Of these uterus was the “proper” term but considered a bit too formal for everyday use. Aluus was somewhat obscure. Venter became the everyday term used in colloquial or vulgar contexts but was later replaced by more specialized words. Vulva eventually replaced uterus for everyday reference to the womb and both appear in formal poetry. Later, vulva became generalized to the female genitals as a whole. There’s an isolated example of vulva being used for the clitoris, identifiable because the object is described as tentigo (erect). In the late empire, medical works sometimes use matrix (“the breeding part”, derived from mater “mother”) for the womb.
Vocabulary for Sex Acts
[Note: Because of the way the book is structured, there isn’t a clear and separate discussion of vocabulary for sex acts between women. Also, the vocabulary of sex acts primarily focuses on penetrative sex and distinguishes the orifice, and whether the act is being considered from the point of view of the “active” or “passive” party, regardless of gender. I’m going to borrow from Williams Roman Homosexualities, which I’ll be covering shortly, to lay out the basic structure here. He uses “insertive” and “receptive” rather than “active” and “passive”. Obviously, the acts default to assuming the presence of a penis. The verbs (from which other vocabulary is derived) are as follows:
Vaginal - futuere (insertive), crisare (receptive)
Anal - pedicare (insertive), cevere (receptive)
Oral - irrumare (insertive), fellare (receptive)
[There are also nouns used for the receptive participant. Obviously, the usual noun for a vaginally receptive partner is “woman”. The case of the anally receptive partner is complicated and I’m going to skip it for now because it's mostly relevant to male-male relations. Note that both terms in the “oral” category are only referring to stimulation of the penis. See below for the complexity of cunnilingus, oral sex that stimulates a woman.]
The only context in which futuere (which can reasonably be considered equivalent to “fuck”) is used with a woman as the agent is when a woman is having penetrative sex with another woman. But Adams does a bit of reaching when considering the equivalent noun (fututor (m), fututrix (f)) in the feminine form. The entire discussion of this context is worth quoting, if only to demonstrate the author’s attitude toward the topic. I’ve added translations in brackets.
* * *
[quoted from book]
Except in the passive, futuo was not as a rule used of the female role. The woman in Martial [epigram] 7.70 (‘ipsarum tribadum tribas, Philaeni, / recte, quam futuis, uocas amicam’ [Philaenis, tribade of the tribades themselves, you rightly call the woman you fuck your ‘girlfriend’]) is a tribas who behaves like a man (cf. Seneca Epistle 95.21, where ineo [enter] is applied to the activities of similarly abnormal women); compare fututor at Martial [epigram] 1.90.6 (‘at tu, pro facinus, Bassa, fututor eras’ [But you, a crime, Bassa!, are a fucker]). But at Martial [epigram] 11.7.13 futuo (active) is definitely used of the female part in normal sexual intercourse: ‘quanto tu melius, quotiens placet ire fututum, / quae uerum mauis diere, Paula, uiro’ [Whenever you have a mind to go fuck, Paula, you prefer to tell your husband the truth]. There is no evidence that the supine was treated as indifferent in respect of voice. This example anticipates the intransitive use of fotre in Old French, of the woman. It is typically in the intransitive that verbs of this sense are transferred to the female role (cf. English she fucks).
There is also some evidence that fututrix had acquired a corresponding use (= ‘ea quae futuitur’ [she who fucks]): [examples skipped] Note too CIL IV.2204 Mula foutoutris [transcribed from Greek - Mola (female) fucker]. It is suggested at TLL VI.1.1664.61f that the reference here may be to a tribas, but that is unlikely: note CIL IV.2203 ‘futui Mula hic’ [I fucked Mula here], and for Mula see also 8185. CIL IV.4196 (‘Miduse fututrix’ [Miduse the (female) fucker]) and 4381 are impossible to interpret.
* * *
[Note: Observe how the author considers homoerotic interpretations “unlikely” or “impossible to interpret” without further comment. As well as the assumption that if Mula has been fucked (by a man presumably) she could not also be a fucker of women. The location of the graffiti in a brothel isn’t proof one way or another. The conclusion that fututrix cannot mean “a woman who fucks women” is simply assumed rather than demonstrated.]
Aside from the above examples, the vocabulary for penetrative sex acts are not relevant to this blog. So we’ll move on.
Lingo (to lick) can be used for any sex act performed with the mouth. It can default to being the standard term for cunnilingus but can be used for other acts when one wants to specify the part being stimulated (other than a penis, for which there is specialized vocabulary). The word order in the compound cunnilingo indicates that it was established early as a fixed phrase. Much less commonly, lambo is used with the same meaning for oral sex involving the cunnus, but it was not established as a standard sexual term.
The verb criso specifically meant “the movements made by a woman during vaginal intercourse” (and had a counterpart in ceveo for the movements of the receptive partner in anal intercourse). These are the basic meanings of the words in their earliest recorded examples, rather than being transferred from some other meaning. Their usage contexts indicate they were not particularly offensive. A less established term was crispo (to wave, brandish) which was used generally of lascivious movements but not associated with a specific sex act.
Metaphors for oral sex are unsurprisingly drawn from the act of eating. Many begin as vulgar slang but are then established in some of the less formal literary registers (such as epigrams). But eating can be applied to other penetrative acts where the receptive orifice “devours” the penis. This metaphor is expressed through the entire vocabulary of consumption rather than focusing on specific words.
Vocabulary for the experience of orgasm include generic verbs of accomplishment or reaching a goal. (It isn’t clear whether these apply only to male orgasm or to women’s experience as well.) These include patro (to accomplish [it]), perficio (to finish, achieve [it]), as well as more ad hoc metaphors such as sedeo (to sit, stay), pervenio (to arrive), ibo (to go), propero (to hurry), agito (to drive, impel).
Verbs referring to grinding (molo) or similar motions may be used in general for masturbation, but can also carry an implication of adultery “grinding your meal in someone else’s mill”. Similarly, to knead (depso) which appears in somewhat offensive contexts. [Note: interestingly, Adams appears to mention no examples of these verbs referring to sex between women, although cross-culturally, these activities appear regularly with that meaning. I don’t know if that sense simply wasn’t used in Classical Latin, or if examples simply didn’t survive, or if Adams has overlooked or ignored them.]
While the verb subigo (to master, subdue) was used only for the active role in penetrative sex, the derived form subigito had a more general sense of “fondle, lay hands on” as used in comic drama.
The lighter side of sex can be seen in the use of ioceri (to joke, play) as a sexual euphemism. Similarly ludo (to play a game or sport) can be used with any gender or role as the subject in contexts when sex is framed as a mutually pleasurable activity. These terms are often associated with youth.
Phrases that generically mean “to be/sleep/lie with” tended to have a neutral implication: esse cum (be with), dormio cum (sleep with), iaceo cum, con-cumbere (lie with, the latter being the source of “concubine”). Biblical Latin used phrases such as maneo cum (stay with) and noctem promittere (spend the night with).
The phrase co-eo (come together) was a standard term for the act of marriage but was also a euphemism for sex of all types and combinations (see: coitus). Verbs meaning “join” (iungo, coniungo) can be used with metonymic body parts (latus “side”, femur “thigh”, caput “head”) to refer to sex. Even more vaguely, verbs of holding and embracing (teneo, complector, amplector) can refer to sex.
As noted previously, verbs of rubbing or grinding can indicate a variety of sexual activities, not only intercourse. In addition to molo (to grind, mill) we find tero (similar in meaning but more general). Frico (to rub, the root of “friction”) is primarily used for masturbation. Adams expresses doubt that the female noun frictrix (woman-who-rubs) is (as generally assumed) a calque (i.e., literal translation) of Greek tribas and he appears to dismiss the possibility that it refers to sex between women (despite that being the dominant meaning in medieval Latin). [Note: it's also odd that Adams doesn't directly discuss tribas itself as used in Latin, despite including it in several quotations. If for no other reason, I have strong doubts that this book is a reliable guide to vocabulary specifically relevant to relations between women.]
The verb tango (to touch) is generally interpreted as “caress” but can also be used as a euphemism for intercourse. Verbs for the emotional experience of love could also be transferred to referring to sex acts: amo (love), libido (lust), venus (desire). There was sometimes a contrast between the use of venus as a neutral term for sex in contrast with stuprum which is the standard pejorative term for “shameful” types of sexual experience. But venus was an elevated word and doesn’t show up in this sense in vulgar literature.
Euphemisms for pleasure can indicated nuanced types of experience: deliciae (pleasures) had a fashion as slang for extramarital affairs, delecto (to please) referred to the pleasure a woman enjoys during sex, especially framed as something her partner does, and voluptas (pleasure) is the enjoyment that an active partner achieves in the act.
Derogatory euphemisms for sex include vitio (to spoil, violate) but doesn’t necessarily imply something imposed on a person, as Christian moral texts use it to indicate persons “defiling” themselves by participating in sex. Pecco (to sin) is also bound up with the emerging Christian view of sex. Under the Classical Roman moral system, the standard and common negative term for “shameful” sex was stuprum which originally meant something like “disgrace” in general but shifted in meaning to be specifically sexual.
Time period: Classical EraPlace: ItalyMisc tags: clitorisenlarged clitorisembracingpenetrationsex between womenoral sexsexual techniquestribadismfricatrixtribadevocabulary (miscellaneous)Event / person: Epigrams (Martial)
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September 30, 2018
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 27a - On the Shelf for October 2018
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 27a - On the Shelf for October 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2018.
Is it the fourth quarter of the year already? How did that happen! Just last week we released the third short story in our fiction project. Have you listened to it yet? I loved this early medieval story of older women finding love and comfort after a lifetime of putting other people’s needs first.
The Fiction Series
And as I mentioned in passing last month, it’s time to officially announce that the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be continuing the fiction series next year. I thought about maybe widening the scope of what sort of stories we’d be considering, but when it comes down to it, I’d like to continue focusing on supporting straightforward historic stories, without fantastic elements, so I’m keeping the same submission guidelines as last year.
The key points--and I’ll be posting the full call for submissions on the website for you to refer to--are as follows. Length can be up to 5000 words. Stories must be set prior to 1900 in an actual, real-world time and place. If you pick a very popular setting like Victorian England or the American West, you should be doing something new and interesting that stands out from the crowd. I love seeing stories from less used eras and cultures, but I want to see cultures treated knowledgeably and with respect. Romance is optional. Romance stories should have some other strong element in addition to the romance and I’m not looking for erotica.
Let me explain that a little, because last year some people tried to second-guess why I didn’t want erotic stories. The simple fact is that 5000 words isn’t much space to introduce characters, setting, and plot, and then come to a satisfying resolution. When sex scenes come into the mix, they tend to push the other elements aside and the rest of the story often becomes stage dressing for the sex scene. Sex may be implied in the story, but leave it off the page so you have room for the story itself.
And, of course, the story should center on lesbian themes. By this, I mean that it should feature protagonist(s) whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or who have relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story should focus on same-sex relations.
Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Authors from traditionally marginalized cultures are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background. Like last year, we’ll be paying industry standard professional rates of 6 cents a word--we pay our narrators industry-standard rates too. Check out the full details of the submission guidelines on the alpennia.com website and start brainstorming your stories. Submissions will be accepted during the month of January 2019. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets submitted this time!
Conference
Here’s an item that might be of interest to some. In March 2019 in France, there’s going to be an academic conference entitled “Sapphic Vibes: Lesbians in Literature from the Renaissance to the Present.” I heard about it through a call for papers, but by the time this podcast goes out the due date for submissions will be past. But if you happen to be in the vicinity of the Université de Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse) next March 14-15 and have a yen to listen to research papers on lesbian themes in historic literature (in English and in French), check out the link in the show notes for more details. It looks like they’re planning to hold a second conference on the theme in 2020 in Iceland. If I were the sort to pop off to Europe for the weekend for an academic conference, I’d be there (even though the papers in French would be lost on me).
Publications on the Blog
In September the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog covered several publications relating to the subject of last month’s essay, 17th century English gender outlaw Moll Cutpurse. And while I was on the subject of gender-crossing I decided to start this month with a delightful surprise that’s been lurking on my shelf for two decades: Mary Diana Dods: A Scholar and a Gentleman by Betty T. Bennett. This is best described as an academic mystery quest, tracking down the identity of two men mentioned in the letters of 19th century author Mary Shelley--she of Frankenstein fame--only to discover that the two men were the same person, and that person was a woman. I loved this topic so much, I’ve turned it into this month’s Ask Sappho segment.
For the rest of the month, and possibly into November, I’ll be working through some books and articles I’ve accumulated on sexuality in classical Rome. From which, you might guess that I’ll be finishing up the month with an essay on women’s same-sex relations in that historic context.
Book Shopping!
There’s only one new purchase for the blog to report this month. In fact, it’s actually a book that I ordered back in June but it never arrived and I only recently realized that and inquired. So I have a replacement copy now. The title is Same-sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts by Marie H. Loughlin. It’s a collection of excerpts and selections from a wide variety of genres, both literary and non-fiction. There’s a lot of redundancy with material I already have in other sources, but also some material that I’ve seen discussed but haven’t seen in the original previously.
No Author Guest
I don’t have an author guest lined up to interview this month. I’ve been putting out a lot of feelers but didn’t get any nibbles that panned out with the right timing. So rather than scrambling to try to nail down an interview at the last minute, I’m going to reprise a pair of shows on the Greek poet Sappho and her work that have been particularly popular.
This is my chance to remind people that I’m always looking both for authors to host on the show and for enthusiastic readers of lesbian historical fiction to talk about their favorite books. My contact information is in the show notes.
Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction
When compiling the list of new and forthcoming historicals, I’ve been rather dismayed at how few historicals--especially plain historicals without any fantasy element--are coming out from the major lesbian presses. I haven’t been doing these lists long enough to have a sense of what “normal” looks like, but the current state of the field is disappointing.
There was one book I had my eye on with an uncertain publication date that seems to have come out in August when I wasn’t looking. Devan Johnson’s Any Other Name is an erotic Regency romance with gender disguise and a marriage of convenience. I’m going to give a couple of caveats because the cover design is absolutely atrocious and it doesn’t say “Regency” at all to me. And reviews on Goodreads indicate that there are some problems with editing and narrative structure. But for those who are hungry for your Regency fix, here’s the blurb:
It’s 1834 England. Following the sudden and tragic deaths of her father, the Duke of Ashebourne, and her twin brother, Rose Marsden disguises herself as a man and assumes her brother’s identity and father’s title. Her deception works for almost a decade, but she knows that eventually she’s going to need to find a way to procure an heir. Lady Margaret ‘Maggie’ Clayton is in trouble; her fiancé has been killed, leaving her pregnant and unwed. If society finds out, she’ll be ruined. When the Duke of Ashebourne learns Maggie’s secret and reveals her own, the two women hatch a plan that may solve both of their problems: the ultimate marriage of convenience.
There are a couple of September releases that I hadn’t noticed earlier because they came out from mainstream YA imprints. As is usual for mainstream books, the queer content isn’t very obvious from the jacket copy, but I’ve confirmed it through sources. Monica Hesse’s The War Outside, published by Little, Brown Books is a YA historical rather than a romance, tackling political questions that are unfortunately relevant to us today. Here’s the blurb.
It's 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado--until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a "family internment camp" for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece. Haruko finds herself consumed by fear for her soldier brother and distrust of her father, who she knows is keeping something from her. And Margot is doing everything she can to keep her family whole as her mother's health deteriorates and her rational, patriotic father becomes a man who distrusts America and fraternizes with Nazis. With everything around them falling apart, Margot and Haruko find solace in their growing, secret friendship. But in a prison the government has deemed full of spies, can they trust anyone--even each other?
The queer content in Amy Lukavics’ Nightingale, from Harlequin Teen, is similarly obscured in the publicity, but present when you check out some of the Goodreads reviews. This one has a bisexual protagonist who has relationships with both women and men in the story. It wanders through the genres of horror and science fiction, as well as having a historical setting. Here’s the blurb:
At seventeen, June Hardie is everything a young woman in 1951 shouldn’t be—independent, rebellious, a dreamer. June longs to travel, to attend college and to write the dark science fiction stories that consume her waking hours. But her parents only care about making June a better young woman. Her mother grooms her to be a perfect little homemaker while her father pushes her to marry his business partner’s domineering son. When June resists, her whole world is shattered—suburbia isn’t the only prison for different women. June’s parents commit her to Burrow Place Asylum, aka the Institution. With its sickening conditions, terrifying staff and brutal “medical treatments,” the Institution preys on June’s darkest secrets and deepest fears. And she’s not alone. The Institution terrorizes June’s fragile roommate, Eleanor, and the other women locked away within its crumbling walls. Those who dare speak up disappear…or worse. Trapped between a gruesome reality and increasingly sinister hallucinations, June isn’t sure where her nightmares end and real life begins. But she does know one thing: in order to survive, she must destroy the Institution before it finally claims them all.
Another book that overlaps both history and speculative fiction is Jane Fletcher’s Isle of Broken Years from Bold Strokes Books. It starts out looking like yet another typical lesfic pirate adventure, but takes a sharp turn somewhere in the middle. The blurb sticks to the historic setting:
Catalina de Valasco’s parents have her future fully planned. The most important step for a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman being, of course, an advantageous marriage. Unfortunately, a series of setbacks has left Catalina unwed. On a galleon bound for the Americas and her latest husband-to-be, Catalina again finds her marriage plans frustrated. Pirates capture the ship, and she is held for ransom. The danger intensifies as they sail into seas which, one day, will become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Catalina enters a terrifying world that she could never have imagined or planned for. Yet of all the surprises awaiting her, the most unexpected one is love.
Rebecca Wilde’s Libertine, self-published through Amazon, is a very short erotic work about a highwaywoman in 17th century England. The blurb should give you a sense of what to expect.
In 1669, England’s first female highwayman robs stagecoaches, and hearts, throughout London. Armed with her flintlock pistol, the masked “Libertine” successfully seduces England’s female nobility while at the same time, attempts to rescue her longtime lover from the hangman’s noose. Join the notorious highwaywoman in her erotic adventures as she matches wits with both the local constabulary and the established criminal underworld, lending new meaning to the phrase, “Stand and deliver!”
Ann Aptaker’s Cantor Gold gangster series has a fourth installment with Flesh and Gold from Bold Strokes Books.
Havana, 1952, a city throbbing with pleasure and danger, where the Mob peddles glamor to the tourists and there’s plenty of sex for sale. In the swanky hotels and casinos, and the steamy, secretive Red Light district of the Colón, Cantor Gold, dapper art thief and smuggler, searches the streets and brothels for her kidnapped love, Sophie de la Luna y Sol. Cantor races against time while trying to out run the deadly schemes of American mobsters and the gunsights of murderous local gangs.
And to finish up the October listings, Tammy Lynne Stoner’s Sugar Land, from Red Hen Press, has a more literary feel. Here’s the description:
It’s 1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend―who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at the Imperial State Prison Farm for men. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Lead Belly, who sings his way out (a true story)―but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.
If you know about forthcoming historicals, remember to drop me a note, just in case they aren’t on my list yet.
Ask Sappho
I had so much fun sorting through the story of Mary Diana Dods, mentioned earlier, that rather than answer a listener question this month for the Ask Sappho segment, I thought I’d give you a run-down on her story.
Imagine all your favorite Regency romance tropes, then toss in a few more tropes as dessert. The bastard daughter of a Scottish earl. A false cross-gender pen name to publish plays and poetry. A glamorously beautiful unwed mother. A woman living as a man. A marriage of convenience. Parisian literary salons filled with brilliant and witty people. And in the middle of it all, Mary Shelley as matchmaker. Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein Fucking Shelley. If this were a historical romance novel, your editor would tell you to tone it down a bit to make it more believable.
Professor Bennett’s book on Mary Diana Dods is structured as an academic mystery, tracing the story from the first dangling threads all the way through the process of teasing those threads out and then tying them up neatly. But here’s the more straightforward story.
At the very beginning of the 19th century, Mary Diana Dods--known to her friends as Doddy--and her sister Georgiana were the illegitimate daughters of the earl of Morton, a prominent and wealthy Scottish aristocrat. They were brought up amidst luxury and privilege, though never publicly acknowledged as the earl’s children. Dods certainly had an extensive education and was fluent in French, German, Italian, and Latin. Dods also seems to have had some sort of physical disability, though it’s never described beyond being a “disproportion” of her body and references to a liver ailment. She had dark short curly hair, sharp piercing black eyes, was of small stature, and looked worn down from chronic pain--and no doubt chronic worry about finances as well. For when the earl of Morton finally married--a woman younger than either of his daughters--they were kicked out of the house with an allowance that was nowhere near enough to maintain the life they’d been brought up to expect.
Georgiana was married by that time, as Mrs. Carter, and living in India with her husband, but when she returned to England, a widow with two young sons, she and Dods found themselves endlessly struggling with debt, in part due to their father’s carelessness with regard to the regularity of payment of their allowance. The sisters did their best to find means to support themselves in line with the expectations for well-bred women of the Regency era. Georgiana tried to find a position as a paid companion to some wealthier woman. Dods set up a day school with her good friend Charlotte Figg and another woman to give music lessons and such like.
Like most single women of that era, they socialized primarily with other women and were part of a complex network of friendships and support systems that provided lodging, loans of money, professional references and leads, and simple companionship and emotional support. For Dods, part of that network included the writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and through her, entrance to a larger literary world that included Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and the London salon of Dr. Kitchener. Moving in literary circles, it’s not surprising that Dods decided to try her hand earning money from writing. And having seen the experiences of other literary women, it also isn’t surprising that, like many others, she decided to create a male pen name for the purpose. A male author would be taken seriously and paid accordingly. Female authors were treated as dilettantes when noticed at all. Thus, Mr. David Lyndsay was born. And Mary Shelley was happy to help Dods begin her career by writing letters of recommendation to publishers for Lyndsay.
Lyndsay had an initial burst of success, having multiple works published in Blackwood’s Magazine, over the course of a couple of years, and then a collection of dramas, also put out by Blackwood who was a prominent Scottish publisher and may have been influenced by the opportunity to feature a fellow countryman. But Lyndsay’s book flopped on the market. Blackwood lost money and therefore lost interest, though it took Lyndsay several years to get the hint when Blackwood failed to buy any more of his submissions.
When that pin finally dropped, Blackwood received a submission from another aspiring Scottish writer, one Walter Sholto Douglas, whose work was sent for consideration by his wife, Isabella Douglas. And now, we need to circle back and ask who Isabella was.
Isabella Robinson was generally acclaimed to be one of the most beautiful women in existence. Her father was a good friend of Mary Shelley’s father, Mr. Godwin, and the two families socialized regularly. Mary Shelley (who by now has been widowed by Shelley’s tragic drowning) doted on her, being on the rebound from a close romantic friendship with another friend whose marriage created distance between them.
And then Isabella Robinson became pregnant by a lover who decamped to America without having the courtesy to marry her. Having a child out of wedlock wasn’t entirely fatal--after all, Mary Shelley and any number of women in her radical circle had done so--but if there were no man in the picture, marriage or not, life became very difficult. And the lack of an assigned father for the child would be a significant handicap for its future.
In that age of the near impossibility of divorce, it was a normal--if not particularly common--practice for a woman to simply proclaim herself the wife of her current lover, adopt his name, and be accepted as such, with the assistance of geography, foreign travel, or simply the separation of non-overlapping social spheres. Official certificates of marriage or birth were useful, but one could manage without them with a bit of cleverness.
And so, somewhere around the time that Isabella’s pregnancy would have become evident, she went into seclusion away from London, began mentioning in correspondence with friends that she had married, and took up the role of Mrs. Douglas to act as secretary for the new pen name of Mary Diana Dods, that of Walter Sholto Douglas.
From the bits and scraps we know, it’s impossible to tell how long and how extensive they intended the fictitious marriage to be. In that era, pregnancy was uncertain and post-natal mortality was significant. If Isabella’s child failed to survive to birth or much beyond, it’s possible that Isabella would have returned to her London haunts remaining Isabella Robinson with only her immediate circle of friends the wiser. But her daughter Adeline was healthy and thriving, so some more long-term identity needed to be established. Mr. Sholto Douglas had a literary existence but not a physical one. For Isabella, one possible path might have been a convenient widowhood, but Dods was counting on Mr. Douglas as her new source of writing income.
And so, a daring plan was hatched. And Mary Shelley was in the middle of it. Shelley wrote to a friend of hers in London asking for a favor. She was about to travel to France in company with a group of friends: Mr. and Mrs. Douglas and their infant daughter, Mr. Douglas’s widowed sister Mrs. Georgiana Carter and her two young sons. It was inconvenient of them to travel to London to pick up passports, but passports must be picked up in person. The friend had a passing resemblance to Mr. Douglas -- could he find a woman with a similar resemblance to Mrs. Douglas and pick up the passports? Why yes, he’d be happy to. And in the mean time, Mary Diana Dods put on trousers and began practicing to be Mr. Walter Sholto Douglas.
If we were writing this as a romance novel, what follows would take a different path. But the Douglas’s marriage ran onto the rocks of some insurmountable difficulties. In particular, even though it was possible for an English couple to live more cheaply in Paris than in London, the Douglases still had the slimmest of incomes and yet wanted to move in the high-fashion society of Parisian literary salons. And the beautiful and engaging Isabella Douglas eagerly flirted with anything in pants. Anything except her husband, Sholto Douglas.
In October 1827, the Douglases move to Paris where they are accepted as what they appear to be--a married couple with extensive connections in English literary society. Two years later, Mr. Douglas is in a French prison for debt and in extremely poor health. Isabella Douglas has lost the friendship and support of her female friends with her romantic and sexual antics and returns to London the next year. Without her husband.
There is no trace of what happened to Mary Diana Dods, aka Walter Sholto Douglas. If Douglas had died in debtor’s prison, one might expect that the discovery of his underlying sex would have been worth a note in the archives. But possibly not. Or possibly friends took up a collection to cover the debts and then Mr. Douglas decided to disappear, along with Mary Diana Dods. The only later trace was that Mr. Douglas went down in historical records as the father of Adeline Douglas, a fact that most might consider relevant only because Adeline married a prominent enough man that she appears in biographical dictionaries.
Is there a love story anywhere within this tangle, much less a same-sex love story? Unclear. This is an era when romantic friendships between women were considered the norm, and the language Mary Shelley uses to talk about her relationship with Isabella is certainly emotional and romantic. Did Shelley convince her friend Dods to go to the extreme of living as Mr. Douglas for the sake of love? Dods--under the name of Lyndsay--left a manuscript poem written on the flyleaf of a copy of Lyndsay’s book that mourns a tragically dead beloved and speaks of being forever alone. But this was well before Douglas was invented and there is no clue to whether the poem’s subject was a real person or what gender they might have been, if so. Certainly Isabella seems to have had no particular emotional attachment to the person she presented as her husband, or if she did, she certainly didn’t act like it, though observers described Mr. Douglas as being devoted to her.
But if the life of Mary Diana Dods fails to provide us with a conventionally happy ending to this adventure, that doesn’t mean that we can’t see, in her life, the structures and themes of how two women might have constructed an adventure with just such a happy ending as we might crave. Just make it a little more believable than this true life story if you expect to sell it as a historical romance novel!
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Books Mentioned
The War Outside by Monica Hesse
Nightingale by Amy Lukavics
Isle of Broken Years by Jane Fletcher
Libertine by Rebecca Wilde
Flesh and Gold by Ann Aptaker
Sugar Land by Tammy Lynne Stoner
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