Lesbian lit which I lovingly refer to as "clit lit" is a rich, fertile orgasmic body of work that spans the ages and can trace it's masturbatory roots to the era of 600 BC when lesbianism and it's bisexual bi-product split the atom of same gender love and ushered in the pre-atomic ancient age of explosive works of the gender bending genre of homosexual "boys will be girls" and lesbian "girls will be boys" prose and poetry. The fallout of this kaliedescopic mushroom cloud of rainbow colors survived the centuries well into the repressive Victorian age where it transitioned into lesbian pulp fiction books, magazines and the dime novels of the 19th and 20th Century. Its impact created an exciting girl on girl eruption equal to the heat given off by a hot, flowing lava filled vagina. It was to be a sexual Journey to the Center of the Earth where the libido was fuel injected and lush labias blossomed in a land of verdant vulvas.
If God is a Woman, and most likely SHE is, then surely Sappho was her daughter, making a few changes in the heavenly mantra...(In the name of the Mother, the daughter and the Holy Hymen) who came not from Nazareth (which is really a cool group by the way!) but from the Isle of Lesbos where the men were men, the women were women, and they loved to camp it up with each other without interference unless by invitation to ramp it up as a threesome for a real triangular tempest in a sexal teapot. In the beginning....there dwelled on the Isle of Lesbos, a beautiful personification of womanhood named Sappho....No she was not born in Bethlehem, if she had she surely would have gone to bed with someone in town named Beth! Ahem....
Sappho as far as we know was born on the Club Med Isle of Lebos, somewhere around 600-ish BC. She was a beauty by all accounts who attracted both sexes and was the female Ernest Hemmingway of Hymens in her heyday. Breasts and bravado combined to fashion a rare and ravishing beauty with a talent for sexual conquest and was completely open about it...remember these were not the days of Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Hell..she told all and you didn't even have to ask!
In addition to her many big breasted chamber maids and she also had chamber boys on the sideas she wasn't picky about penis passion either. In between orgasisms she managed to crank out an explosive amount of poetry and prose dealing with same sex love and passion from the Greek perspective (and she wasn't as "anal" about it as her homosexual male contemporaries) however, as far as we know, the bulk of her clit lit has been lost over the passage of passion and time. Enticing fragments have survived and other pieces written about her and her works have also survived, so at least we have a glimmer of a glimpse of her life as it pertained to her penchant for female passion. The term lesbian obviously is derived from her birthplace of Lexbos, but interestingly enought it was not used to describe female homosexuality until the 19th Century.
Most of her works are thought to be autobiographically graphic and are highly descriptive of her flaunted infatuations for fertile females and the physical acts associated with lesbianism. It was high end homoerotica that shared the literary stage of the times with Alcaeus and Pindar both of whom wrote from the male homosexual aspect of the bonds that exsited between Greek males...and some say...sheep...
She lived in Sicily for awhile and returned to Lesbos where she eventually died. Her poetry were posthumously published on parchment and compiled into nine books in the third century BC. She was described by Alcaeus as "A violet haired, pure, honey smiling woman." Later descriptions referred to her as "small and dark" and her female encounters were a match for the male encounters of the philosopher Socrates...Ok, accordting to Bill and Ted in their most excellent adventure..he was So-crates!
Today, her influence is reverberating in a yin-yang world of same sex marriage approval on the one hand and homophobic violence on the other. Transgedered females and males alike are part of the new society...Transsexuals and transvesites rock and roll on stage, female impersonator s do Liza while male impersonators do Johnny Depp...I think..or should anyway with all the eyeliner he likes to wear..even he said when Pirates first came out..."I look like a cross between Keith Richard and a Female Impersonator...
Here's to you Sappho...today in most cases and it is no longer chic to be bi-coastal as it is to be an admitted bi-sexual..that way you can enjoy the fruits of both ends of the Sexual Garden of Eden..jut flip a coin...you can't loose ..it's either "heads" or "tails". As the Kinks said in the song "Lola" ..."boys will be girls and girls will be boys.." You go girl!
Radclyffe Hall's Heavenly Hymen Foreplay and the Dead Mans Waltz
The first legitimately lesbian novel in the English language is thought to be Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" published in 1928. Yes, a masculine sounding first name at first glance, but further examination reveals that Radclyffe Hall is actually Marguerite Radclyffe Hall born in 1880 during the purple haze of the Victorian Age where saucy sexcapades were kept covertly secretive and under the cloak and dagger dark under the covers of a fearful society through the condom of censorship. Heterosexual sex was one thing, but the bombshell of lesbian sex not only tore the roof off of Buckingham Palace but also created a mad desire to remove the frilly knickers of young repressed females by other females who wanted to explore the vast landscape of the continent of forbidden homosexual relationships...Dr. Labia Livingstone I presume? Of course there were masturbatory males wanted to get their kink on who also read this classic of clit lit page by page with astounding eagerness.
An in depth study of Radclyffe herself is an interesting voyage into the life, times and bedroom of one of cliterature's labia luminaries. She was a poetic purveyor and practioner of same gender love. College educated, she left staid but Jolly Olde England moving to cabaret Germany where she described herself as a "congenital invert" a term taken from turn of the century "sexologists" to describe homosexuality....yes, there was more than Freudian slips to meet the methaphors.
It was the jazzed up age of jism and a generation that was found lost in the salons of Gertrude Stein and others. Hall spent most of the Roaring 20's roaring, perusing and pursuing women. By the year 1907 her hymen found heaven in Homburg in a heat generating relationship with Mabel Batten, a cabaret singer and firtatious vixen who went by the stage name of Ladye who was 51 to Hall's 27, not exactly a May-December romance but they generated enough heat that was a raging campfire that set their sexual forest on fire. To add to the sexual fuel, Ladye was married at the time and had a daughter, but, the two fell in madly in love and after Ladye's husband died, (coincidence?) they set up housekeeping together where Ladye named Hall "John" which she used for the rest of her life.
Then things turned into the stuff that lesbian legend was made of when Hall fell in love with Ladye's cousin Una who was an artist and also the wife of a Vice Admiral. Una too, was the mother of young daughter. The following year Ladye died (hmmmm?) and Hall and Una set up housekeeping, a relationship that lasted until Hall's death, however, she did heat up the besheets and had numerous other affairs at the same time with a diverse sexual cornucopia of promiscuous partners that included a Russian Princess and blues singer Ethel Waters.
The Well of Lonliness is an extraordinary exploratory jaunt into the world of sexual inversion or homosexual love as it was referred to, set against the backdrop of World War I that merely and purely said to the public in an era of social isolation and rejection..."give us also the right to our existence" as a natural state of sexual affairs. Lawsuits were filed and the Brit courts judged it obscene as it defended "unnatural acts between women, however it won legal battles and all challenges. Don't fuck with a lesbian writer! All the lawsuits made for wonderful copy in the press and the exposure resulted in explosive sales of the book on both sides of the Atlantic!
It seems Radclyffe had a penchant for married women with young daughters and in the final analysis that alone would make for a great clit lit adventure. Thnk about it...it's the stuff that sexual dreams are made of...Mrs. Robinson and Lolita in the same bed with a sexy female writer, followed by two husbands who happen to die during the relationship after the sultry author entered into their lives and bedroom. Talk about a foray into forensics complete with heaping helpings of hymen foreplay and vaginal sex with older women and their jailbait daughters, with a side order of murder...all speculation, but then again, literature at best is speculative, and in this case sexually suggestive anyway. It's also the foundation for the creation of the era of lesbian pulp fiction that exploded like an atomic orgasm in the decades to follow!
The Second Coming and Lez-Erection
As the Victorian Age faded into the past, swallowed whole by it's own deep purple repression of sexuality, the American western bang bang shoot 'em up dime novel of the 19th Century had matured into crime magazines and pulp fiction novels. The subject matter was usually about white slavery, drug addiction and of course, everybodies favorite form of mayhem...good old fashioned who done it murder. Although mostly heterosexual in nature there was an underground movement and undercurrent of lesbian pulp fiction in magazines and novel and it was time for clit lit to cross the river Jordan of cliterature and the land of milk and honeydripping pussy pulp.
The hymen hit parade of clit lit reigned supreme in the early to mid 20th Century when lesbian characters in relationships began to emerge from the literary womb of women writers. In 1935, Gale Wilhelm's "We Too Are Drifting" was published that explores the life of a female artist who falls out of love and bed with one lover and into a relationship with another female. The ending is not a happy one as this time our artist is dumped by the new love in favor of another...what goes around comes around even in the world of lesbianism. In "Pity for Women" published in 1937 there is another sad ending where one of the lovers goes insane at the end, but finally there was light at the end of the vaginal tunnel with the publication of Gale Wilhelm's "Torchlight to Valhalla" where a young girl "comes out" of the dark and into the light of female foreplay when a young female writer falls in love with a 17 year old girl four years her junior. Both characters it is interesting to note have somewhat adrogynous names..Morgen and Toni, a first in lesbian literature.
In the aftermath of World War Two publishing moved into the mainstream officially known as pulp fiction..production costs of pulp were down making it relatively inexpensive to publish large numbers of novels and magazines..the pulpsters saw a good thing when it came knocking at the door and pulp was cranked out in an avalanche of crime and sexual fiction that boggles the mind. It was literally the Second Coming and Lez-Erection of the pulp gods. Pulp books now replaced pulp magazines of the early 20th Century as the main read of the masses.
Lesbian literature was not censored at first as the lit cops felt it wouldn't be eaten by the populace, however, they miscalculated the pulp hungry proletariat that post war prosperity fostered along with a need to enjoy life after years of bloodshed and war...what better way to explore this brave new world then to explore our own sexuality...so with a kick to the balls of the prudish hundreds of lesbian titles were published and millions of copies eaten up by a ravenous public between 1950 and the late Sixties. Women at the time who purchased them kept them well hidden and read only in private until their own sexuality exploded and of course, remedial reading while heating up the hymen heavy bedsheets became part of the contact sport of of the Labia Olympics.
One of the first bonafide post war paperback books ws Womens Barracks a fictionalized autobiographical account of Tereska Torres and her WWII experiences in London during the war. I sold over 4 million copies and in 1952 while the Senate was looking commies under American beds and in Hollywood, the House Select Committee on Pornographic Materials was investigating this book and it's author and others to follow. Feds in beds and bedrooms dictating morality and sexual mores'...as Thomas Jefferson said, "The People Should Not Fear their Government, the Government Should Fear It's People"...I always say.."Go for the Headshots!"
"Spring Fire" by Marijane Meaker as another exploration into modern lesbian relationships however the story ends with suicide and insanity, sort of Sisters Grimm Fairy Tale of modern times. where Hansel and Gretl end up in the witches oven! The Fifties were the age of the Red Scare and it was serious business and as Lesbian clit lit was considered pornographic and a lot of books were purchased via mail order they could be subject to government censorship and possibly prosecution so the publishers usually had the endings culminate in death or the or the characters somehow "went straight"and ended up in bed with a male...of course other books sold through the mail depicting the rape of women by males did not have to play by the same rules.
One of the books that was a major carnal Magna Carta influence in the gay rights movement was "The Third Sex" published in 1959 and written by Artemis Smith or actually 1950's gay/feminist activist and author Annselm Morpurgo. In addition to sexual relationships, this book also was laden with politics and it was Artemis who coined the phrase.."come out of the closet" and linked the gay rights movement to other rights movements.
The golden age of lesbian pulp was between 1955 - 1965 but in the Sixties started to decline in popularity due to the fact that lesbianism was on the rise as an accepted form of love and relationships and other periodicals began to emerge to spread the word such as newsletter, alternative newspapers and clubs. Today there is social networking, lesbian characters on television shows, lesbian shows and everyday someone is "coming out" in droves.
As you can see...Sappho was the Christ-girl of lesbian love and through the centuries her works have not only survived but encouraged other writers and poets to explore the literary possibilities so that others could explore the physical and emotional possibilities of lesbian relationships...in effect..coming out no longer has a stigma attached and coming out is a badge of honor...in this the Age of the Second Coming and Lez-Erection!