Tag: lesbian

I can’t count how many times I have been told that our family will not be whole,
Simply because our children will not be half of each of us,
Or because our children will not have a father,
But rather two mothers that love them more than words.
It breaks my heart
That for some people
Family means blood alone.

Our family will be made up of bedtime stories and squeaky voices,
Late nights and sleepless months,
Fuck ups and practise and trial and error,
And a whole lot of kisses and I love you so much’s.
We will be stitched together with hard work and scraped knees and bubble baths,
And our children will never wonder if they were truly wanted.
If that is not a whole family,
I really truly do not know what is.

Two mothers.

To go to bed and to wake up again day after day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other—not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat—but like sunlight, day after day in the regular course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.

Audre Lorde

When I am looking at my moonfaced girl,
my beautiful black-eyed thing,
and I smell her like smoke all around me
and the handsome rasp of her voice strokes my ears
and my rough-skinned hands are permitted
to settle in the soft curves of her hips
and trace the lines of her fine-wrought thighs
and she nudges her smooth nose
neckwards to smell my cologne;

this is when I know
I am the luckiest dyke in the world.

“Femme,” I.M.E.

They really fear lesbians. Because in some strange level, let us never forget the ever-expanding gaseous state of the male ego. Which is men still believe that women do everything in response to them. Therefore, for a lot of these guys, a woman’s a lesbian because she hasn’t had him. He will change this dolorous experience and she will of course love men because of him. The truth is, women aren’t lesbians because of men. Women are lesbians because of women: they love women! And that’s what drives them crazy, they don’t want to accept that central fact of lesbian life, which is it has nothing whatsoever to do with men. And never will.

Rita Mae Brown, The Celluloid Closet

To try to write the literary history of lesbianism is to confront, from the start, something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or “whiting out” of possibility…Given the threat that sexual love between women inevitably poses to the workings of patriarchal arrangement, it has often been felt necessary to deny the carnal bravada of lesbian existence. The hoary misogynist challenge, “But what do lesbians do?” insinuates as much: This cannot be. There is no place for this.
It is perhaps not so surprising that at least till 1900 lesbianism manifests itself in the western literary imagination primarily as an absence, as chimera or amor impossilbilia- a kind of love that, by definition, cannot exist…The literary history of lesbianism, I would like to argue, is first of all a history of derealization… One woman or the other must be a ghost, or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited, only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized. The vision is inevitably waved off. Panic seems to underwrite these obsessional spectralizing gestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility of women breaking free- together- from their male sexual overseers. Homophobia is the order of the day, entertains itself (wryly or gothically) with phantoms, then exorcises them.

Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture