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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING
Novel Approaches to
Lesbian History
Linda Garber
Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
Series Editors
Gina Wisker
International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt
University of Bath
Cambridge, UK
Denise deCaires Narain

University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
This monograph series aims to showcase late twentieth and twenty-first
century work of contemporary women, trans and non-binary writers in
literary criticism. The ‘women’ in our title advocates for work specifically
on women’s writing in a world of cultural and critical production that can
still too easily slide into patriarchal criteria for what constitutes ‘worthy’
literature. This vision for the series is avowedly feminist although we do
not require submissions to identify as such and we actively encourage sub-
missions that engage directly with different definitions of ‘feminism’. Our
series does make the claim for a continuing imperative to promote work
by women authors; it remains essential for our field to make space for this
body of literary criticism. Further, our series makes a claim that serious
inquiry on late twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing
contributes to a necessary, emerging and exciting research area in literary
studies.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15978
Linda Garber
Novel Approaches
to Lesbian History
Linda Garber
Women’s & Gender Studies Department
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA, USA
ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
ISBN 978-3-030-85416-4 ISBN 978-3-030-85417-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85417-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
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Cover image © Micha Klootwijk / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Barbara, my love
With affection and gratitude for my fairy godmothers, Peg and Lillian
And dedicated to the memory of Muriel, Helen, and Mildred
Acknowledgments
As a younger woman I was fortunate to be taught, mentored, and

befriended by four giants of lesbian studies: Peg Cruikshank, Lillian
Faderman, Estelle Freedman, and Bonnie Zimmerman. To them I owe my
career. Without them, this book would not exist.
Many thanks to friends who read parts of Novel Approaches to Lesbian
History over the years: Michelle Burnham, Pamela Cheek, Bridget Cooks,
Lisa Hogeland, Sharon Page Ritchie, Mairead Sullivan, Peg, and Lillian.
Thanks, also, to friends who supported this project in so many ways,
among them: Shay Brawn, Erin Carlston, Laura Ellingson, Eileen Elrod,
Noreen Giffney, Jonathan Hunt, Liz Hutchison, Carisa Showden, Marilyn
Wann, and the Fingersmiths—Sharon, Judie, Ruth, and Duffy. And to my
sisters, Neila, Beth, and Susan, who make everything bearable with grace
and humor. Too many friends to mention here encouraged me over the
years, and I’m grateful to all of them.
It helped enormously to discuss my ideas with receptive critical audi-
ences at meetings of the Modern Language Association, Popular Culture/
American Culture Association, and Western Literature Association.
Likewise, the D.C. Area Queer Studies Symposium, the University of
Leeds Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, the University of
Auckland English Department, and especially the Lesbian Lives
Conferences in Dublin and Brighton provided important venues to share
and discuss my work in progress. I’m grateful for Esther Rothblum’s stew-
ardship of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, which in 2015 published my
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
essay “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and

Fiction.”
The Interlibrary Loan staff of the Santa Clara University Library made
my research possible, especially during the pandemic lockdown of
2020–2021. Two sabbaticals from my position in the Women’s and
Gender Studies Department at SCU facilitated reading all of the novels,
most of which came from the national treasure that is Powell’s City of
Books in Portland, Oregon.
Last, and most, I thank Barbara Blinick, who has lived with Novel
Approaches for so many years.
Contents
1 Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother 1
2 H(a)unting the Archives 19
3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex*

*But Only in Historical Fiction 41
4 Tomboys and Indians 77
5 Unsafe Seas for Women111
6 The Usual Suspects145
Epilogue: Failing That, Invent165
Lesbian Historical Novels by Category167
Key to Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels171
ix
x Contents
Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels173
Name Index179
Subject Index185
CHAPTER 1
Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother
When I was twenty-one years old and had been living as a lesbian for just
over a year, I came out to my mother. She looked at me and said, “I’m
glad you finally felt like you could talk to me about it.” I was both delighted
and dumbfounded. Years later she told me she “knew” that I was “differ-
ent” from an early age. The day I came out my mother gave me a priceless
gift, a story about a lesbian in the past. “You remember my friend Mildred,
from Liberty?” she asked. It turns out that Mildred, my mother’s best
friend at least since junior high school, had left the Catskills in 1950 and
moved to New York City, where she lived with her female lover—or
“friend,” as my mother probably put it. She didn’t seem sure why I was so
delighted to hear the story, nor why I was so upset about two things: that
I hadn’t known the story when I was younger, and that Mildred’s lover
left her after ten years to marry a man. But my mother intuitively knew
one thing, that I needed to hear the story.
By that summer when I came out to my family, I had begun collecting
lesbians in history through research, chance encounter, and gossip. My
experience was common, at least in the 1970s and 1980s. It seemed that
any time the name of a famous woman came up—Virginia Woolf, Bessie
Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt—someone in my feminist and increasingly les-
bian world would say, “You know, she was ‘family’…” Leaving aside for
the moment our propensity to collect bisexuals under our enthusiastic
lesbian banner, the practice was still noteworthy for what it says about our
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Garber, Novel Approaches to Lesbian History, Palgrave Studies in
Contemporary Women’s Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85417-1_1
2 L. GARBER
need for history. We certainly speculated about living women—from Tracy

Chapman to a couple of high-profile professors on campus—but the past
had an irresistible draw. We desperately needed to know that we had been
there in the past. We wanted to know “What Lesbians Have Done for
America,” later the subtitle of Lillian Faderman’s book To Believe in
Women (2011).
To the lesbian scrapbook that began with my mom’s friend Mildred, I
soon added a couple of dyke standbys, a high school PE coach who came
out to me when I was in college, and a former camp counselor whose
name turned up in a gay newspaper as the head of a national LGBT rights
group. In time, I would gather a queer family album: two cousins, a dis-
tant relative in South America, and my uncle’s brother. My friend Ruth
has a literal photo album of the great aunt who raised her mother, and her
great aunt’s “friend.” Another lesbian friend, raised by her mother and
aunt, sees them as an emotional lesbian couple—though not sexual, still a
story of her lesbian family origins.
Why did I so badly want these stories when I was young? Why do I trea-
sure them so today? And what do I have in common with all those other
lesbians who seem to feel the same way? The gossip mill that I remember
from my college days—which we perpetuated at the women’s bookstore
where I worked in graduate school, and which in some ways is my stock in
trade as a lesbian studies professor—is a widely shared, almost compulsive
activity. We want our lesbian celebrities (Tracy, Melissa), our dyke forbear-
ers (Gertrude and Alice, the Ladies of Llangollen), our lavender histories.
Certainly, uncovering lesbian history was a major project of lesbian
feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, both its academic and activist sides. It
was in that era that the monumental Lesbian Herstory Archives was begun
in the Manhattan apartment of Joan Nestle and Deb Edel, and the collec-
tion of historical lesbians continues apace today, in books, archives, and on
line. Deciding whom to name a lesbian in the past is a question with which
lesbian historians have struggled from the outset of the lesbian-feminist
academic project.
In her book A Desired Past, Leila Rupp (1999) tells the story of her
aunt and her aunt’s friend, who “were just like a married couple” (1).
Rupp explains that she never knew for sure if they were lovers, and that
they certainly didn’t call themselves “lesbian.” For her, their ambiguous
story raises vital questions about the knowability of lesbian history. Lesbian
history has always been a self-aware field of historiographical creation as
much as historical discovery. Unanswered questions dominate the
1 WHO KNOWS, WHO CARES, AND WHY BOTHER 3
landscape: What is a lesbian in the first place? What constitutes evidence of

lesbianism in the past? How much does it help to recast “lesbian” as a
continuum, or an adjective, or a question instead of an answer?1 The his-
torical records, if they exist at all, frustrate as often as they inform. Spotty,
written by men, open to multiple interpretations—traces of a recognizably
lesbian past run aground on the rocky shoals of the history of sexuality
itself.2 Some people argue that the search for “lesbians” in a pre-homosex-
ual era is not only futile but wrong-headed. As a great deal of historical
scholarship points out, it’s unlikely that many cross-dressing and/or
women-loving women in history would recognize themselves as the “les-
bians” they are claimed to be.
But who cares, really? I pose this question both flippantly and in all
seriousness, not least because I myself care. Scholars strive for understand-
ings of the past that are nuanced and intellectually rigorous, relying on
theoretical principles that make the recovery of recognizably “lesbian”
history difficult. The majority of people, however, want the validation that
comes with identification. So, like most histories, lesbian history has
spawned a genre of imaginative fiction. As early as the 1930s, novelists
began to project clearly identifiable lesbian imagery into the past.3 The
number of lesbian historical novels increased dramatically in the 1980s,
roughly simultaneous with the rise of the Foucauldian insistence that
homosexual identity didn’t exist before the late nineteenth century.4 Laura
Doan and Sarah Waters (2000) sum up the dilemma of lesbian historical
research in the light of postmodern insight: “[T]he lesbian past grows
increasingly insubstantial the nearer one draws to it; ultimately, perhaps,
there is no ‘it’ to be recovered” (24). We could date the rise of lesbian
historical fiction to the era when lesbian-feminist history ran into a theo-
retical brick wall. Without much concrete evidence of sexual activity
between women in the past (in most cases, Anne Lister notwithstanding),
and with a widespread understanding of “lesbian” as a recent historical
category, what more could be said that wasn’t speculative?
Enter the lesbian protagonist in period costume and setting, manifesting
our desire for a history without which it is difficult to envision a future.
Based on traces of evidence, provocative images, cherished gossip—or noth-
ing at all but fantastical desire—lesbians writing in English in more than 200
novels and a handful of films depict a wide-ranging cast of marauding
pirates, Civil War scouts, Western bandits, homesteading pioneers, suffrag-
ists, schoolteachers, wealthy ladies, working class servants, prostitutes, and
shopkeepers—all of whom enjoy fabulous, orgasmic sex with other women.5
4 L. GARBER
And lest anyone mistake them for merely eccentric, many of the characters
understand their identity to be different from most other women.
As much as the term and identity “lesbian” are under pressure today,
these novels make clear that it remains an idea with some force. I’m not
unaware of the debates, and I find various arguments about the limits and
misuses of the term persuasive, from Judith Butler in the early 1990s to
many of my contemporaries thirty years later. Even the Journal of Lesbian
Studies issued a call for papers in 2020 on the topic “Is Lesbian Identity
Obsolete?” But I still find myself agreeing with Terry Castle’s unfashion-
able statement from 1993: “If in ordinary speech I say, ‘I am a lesbian,’
the meaning is instantly (even dangerously) clear: I am a woman whose
primary emotional and erotic allegiance is to my own sex” (15). While the
term is debated among us—scholars, activists, queers of many stripes—in
the workaday world it carries a vitality that it never enjoyed before, having
become more widely speakable in the context of marriage and other rights,
even in the dubious, omnipresent invocation of June’s annual LGBTQ
pride as a marketing strategy. The death of “lesbian,” as the saying goes, is
greatly exaggerated. I would go so far as to argue that challenges to the
term “lesbian” highlight its longevity and, if we play our cards right, its
productive elasticity.6
Whether or not the term survives in the long run, the role of what I’m
calling lesbian historical fiction remains the same for women, broadly
defined, who love women. Lesbian historical novels weave lesbians into
the fabric of recognizable historical eras and events; if they were a political
slogan, it would be “We were everywhere.” Novels that depict ordinary,
daily life in a historical setting seem to say, “We’ve always been just like
everyone else,” though we’ve had to hide and/or fight for our right to
exist. Many writers take advantage of popular mythologies—of the Old
West, say, or swashbuckling pirates—to insinuate lesbians into the stories
a culture likes to tell about itself. If pioneers in Conestoga wagons are
American as apple pie, lesbian pioneer tales can interpolate lesbians into a
nationalist identity. Of course, assimilation cuts both ways; among other
things, American pioneers were colonizers.
For good or ill, iconic historical settings are marketable, the literary
equivalent of the hugely successful American Girls doll franchise.7
Frequently, a historical novel’s setting allows its lesbian protagonist to
engage in a valiant struggle for justice: fighting slavery, protesting for
workers’ rights, organizing for suffrage. If historical fiction provides an
avenue to assimilation, seen from another angle it carves out territory to
be different—even heroic—in a comfortably recognizable and marketable

past. It says, we could have been there, and if we were, we certainly would
have contributed to a righteous cause.
For most lesbian historical novelists and filmmakers, the nuances of
scholarly historiography take a back seat to some mixture of archival
research, reasonable speculation, and wish fulfillment. Emma Donoghue
(2006) distinguishes between writers “who make it all up” and those like
herself who conduct research “desirous of having some historical reality.”
She notes that it’s “often best to only find a few” facts, since they can
“spur” but also “fetter” the writer (“Picking Up Broken Glass”). All con-
temporary novels, irrespective of genre, include a statement designed to
protect their authors and publishers from liability, declaring the books
works of fiction, “any resemblance to actual events or people” being
“coincidental.” About a third of lesbian historical novels also include
author’s notes explaining their stories’ grounding in historical fact, which
raises the question along with Donoghue of the role of the intervention
performed by lesbian historical fiction “at still a relatively early phase of
digging up—or shall we say creating” the lesbian past (“Picking Up
Broken Glass”).
Like Donoghue, a small number of lesbian historical novelists devote
considerable space to the available historical evidence about their charac-
ters. Most of the others who provide notes state the bits of historical fact
on which they base an elaborate yarn, or the truth of the general subject
matter, such as the existence of women-loving women on the North-
American western frontier or women, often cross-dressing, forming rela-
tionships with women during the U.S. Civil War.8
Some notes address the deliberate liberties authors take with the his-
torical record and their reasons for doing so. Anne Cameron’s preface to
the Canadian frontier novel The Journey (1982) says, in part, “When one
is re-inventing the world one cannot be concerned with minor details, and
when one has become convinced, over a number of years, that the privi-
leged patriarchal perspective is sick, one looks for alternatives.” Cameron’s
statement in 1982 responds to Adrienne Rich’s lesbian-feminist call a
decade earlier for “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh
eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction,” which Rich
called “an act of survival” (“When We Dead Awaken,” 35). Cameron
makes clear that the text she set out to rewrite is the popular Hollywood
Western, in which “The boys could identify with the heroes. We had Dale
Evans. She was the one with no guns, the one on the slower horse, who
6 L. GARBER
rode behind Roy just in time to catch the mud flying from his gallant
steed’s hooves.”
Cameron’s further reminiscence hints at the racist, colonialist mess of
appropriation into which the lesbian historical novel almost invariably
steps when it Goes West: “[B]ecause I had long hair, worn in pigtails, and
the stereotype did not allow me a six-gun, a rifle, or a knife, I spent many
hours tied to trees, the captive Indian.” Cameron had become convinced
“over a number of years” that history must have been different than the
skewed story told and retold through biased popular culture, so she
penned her own version starring heroic lesbians battling violent white
men—sadly replete with the same Chinese and Native American support-
ing cast found more widely in Westerns, running the gamut of stereotypes
from sneaky laborers to benevolent healers.
Most lesbian historical novels are written by white women, and far too
many bear some version of the Western’s racist stereotypes. A handful of
significant exceptions are written by and feature lesbians of color and oth-
erwise ethnically nondominant women-loving women. Among them are
Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo (2009), Judith Katz’s The Escape
Artist (1997), Samar Habib’s Rughum & Najda (2012), Jewelle Gomez’s
The Gilda Stories (1991), Elana Dykewomon’s Beyond the Pale (1997),
and Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996)—all works that
illuminate both the intersections and dissimilarities between sexual and
racial or ethnic identities.
The corpus of lesbian historical fiction, warts and all, illustrates the
novelist’s freedom to invent where the historian must research. The bal-
ance between evidence and imagination has been as much under consider-
ation in mainstream academia as it was in the heyday of lesbian-feminist
community activism. John Demos (2005) envisions historical fiction exist-
ing in a “borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” that
joins history and fiction” (329). And this borderland is rife with political
possibilities; as Jerome DeGroot (2013) puts it, “Historical novels critique
the hegemonic structure of a totalizing, explaining past” (57). Richard
Slotkin (2005) argues in “Fiction for the Purposes of History” that his-
torical fiction goes beyond “stimulating interest in the study of history…
If properly understood, the writing of historical fiction can be a valuable
adjunct to the work of historians in their discipline” (222). He contends
that fiction allows historians to explain what they “understand,” which is
often “more…than can be proved according to the rules of the discipline,”
leading to a choice “between knowledge and understanding: between
telling the whole story as [the researcher] has come to understand it; or
only what can be proved, with evidence and argument” (223).
This may be what Patricia Duncker means when she writes in the after-
word to The Doctor (1999), a novel about the life of a cross-dressing
nineteenth-century physician, “As to the inner reality of James Miranda
Barry’s life, here we can only guess at the truth, for there is very little evi-
dence. And it is here that the novelist will always have the edge over the
historian” (375). Detailing the sources she used to write Life Mask (2004),
Donoghue acknowledges that “For the private relations between” the
characters, “of course, I’ve had to rely on educated guesswork” (606).
Isabel Miller’s 1969 classic Patience and Sarah is based on scant evidence
about an early nineteenth-century painter and her female companion. In
an afterward, Miller writes, “We are provoked to tender dreams by a
hint” (203).
Like Cameron in her prefatory note, a number of lesbian and queer
historians embrace “telling the whole story,” entertaining the alternative
history that “reasoning, if not documentation, persuades us must have
been” (Laskaya 45). Lesbian historical researchers have long debated
whether same-sex affection and erotic behavior in the past can be consid-
ered “lesbian” in the sense that we currently use the term. At least since
the 1990s, transgender scholars and activists have cautioned against claim-
ing cross-dressing or passing women as lesbians, which can ignore trans as
an identity and historical phenomenon.9 Still, many lesbians outside of
academe follow Cameron, who notes that “Dedicated critics and commit-
ted historians will quickly find that this novel does not pay particular atten-
tion nor give much respect to the recorded version of history. Pickypicky!”
Instead of ignoring evidence, scholars tend to advocate viewing it dif-
ferently than it has been, and they frequently disagree about the appropri-
ate uses of terminology. Ruth Vanita (2002) makes a compelling argument
that all vocabulary is culturally bound and presentist, not just the word
“lesbian” (4-5). Anne Laskaya (2011) concurs, “Some terms elicit ener-
getic interrogation … while others remain less scrutinized … the extensive
defining, confining, and qualifying that pervasively occurs with the term
‘lesbian’ also points to the power of our own culture’s homophobic resis-
tance” (36). Valerie Traub (2007) argues for “a new methodological para-
digm for lesbian history” that takes seriously the similarities researchers
and others perceive among women-loving women, particularly as they
“recur, intermittently and with a difference, across time” (125-26).
8 L. GARBER
Queer theorists exploring temporality make similar claims; “queer time”

in Carla Freccero’s (2011) formulation, can productively “confound the
temporalities we call past, present, and future” (68). Following Walter
Benjamin, Freccero posits history as “a political project for the present …
For those seeking, in the present, a history that does not tell the story of
the naturalness of one kind of erotic affectivity, it is important to rescue the
dead from the enemy, because, if not, the dead risk never having been,” a
dire prospect with consequences for the future. Freccero thus advocates
“anachronistic desire … queer in its reading of history for the pleasures of
identification” (62-3). This is a simultaneously postmodern and identitar-
ian goal, both academically queer and clearly, politically, lesbian. Laura
Doan (2013) states plainly that “history is always in the service of the pres-
ent (this is not a problem of history, it is a condition of history)” (89).
Doan’s insight notwithstanding, historians have rarely gone as far as
literary scholars and cultural theorists. Even as the protagonist of Stevie
Davies’ Impassioned Clay (2000) informs her students in an Oxford his-
tory class that “Without imagination…you will never be historians,” she
admits that “this heresy was not approved by the department” (42). In
1990 the historian Judith M. Bennett first provided lesbian studies with
the extremely useful, and careful, term “lesbian-like,” to describe “women
whose lives might have particularly offered opportunities for same-sex
love; women who resisted norms of feminine behavior based on hetero-
sexual marriage; women who lived in circumstances that allowed them to
nurture and support other women” (9-10). Bennett makes clear that she
wants “to participate in the creation of histories that can have meaning for
those women who today identify as lesbians, bisexuals, queers, or other-
wise” (4).
Doan distinguishes between two genealogical “modes of history writ-
ing,” which she calls ancestral and queer:
What energizes ancestral genealogy is its confidence in—and political com-

mitment to—the possibility of finding family resemblances to (or dissimilari-
ties from) a largely stable modern homosexual. This is an object that queer
genealogy, while acknowledging ancestral efforts as a necessary early stage in
the historiography of homosexuality, ultimately dismisses as theoretically
naive, untenable, and even mired in transhistorical ‘nostalgia.’ (58-9).
Doan herself favors a third mode, “queer critical history,” whose “value is
not to provide a usable past but to explain aspects of the sexual past that
resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). To most garden-

variety lesbians, Doan’s distinctions may appear arcane and Bennett’s
“lesbian-like” simply doesn’t go far enough. Monique Wittig’s novel Les
Guérillères (1969) exhorts women to “Make an effort to remember” in
the face of history’s silences, “Or, failing that, invent” (89). The unspeci-
fied mythic time of Les Guérillères is embodied in the queer-time, lesbian-
historical Sappho—both Lesbian (geographic/ historical) and lesbian
(sexual/political)—who promises in Fragment 60, “Someone in / some
future time / will think of us.” The only way for modern lesbians to
assemble a complete picture of our past has been to search out the frag-
ments and inventively fill in the blanks.
Sarah Waters talks about employing historical settings not only to cor-
rect inaccurate and partial histories, but to think “about how we write
about history… still very much aware that the past is absolutely teeming
with untold gay stories, or stories that aren’t popularly known” (Armitt
120-21). On the strength of her six novels, Waters has garnered numerous
accolades, including being short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three
times and the Orange Prize twice, being named Stonewall Writer of the
year twice, and winning an unprecedented three Lambda Literary Awards
for fiction. Four of her novels have been adapted into films, and her work
has been translated into thirty languages. In 2009 she was elected to the
Royal Society of Literature, and in 2019 she was presented with an Order
of the British Empire for services to literature.
Unlike many famous writers who scorn identity labels as mainstream
attempts to marginalize their work, Waters claims the title “lesbian author”
repeatedly in interviews. She speaks of “living as a lesbian” (afterellen.
com), names herself “a modern lesbian feminist writer” (Dennis 44), and
says it “makes sense to call me a lesbian writer in the sense that I’m a writer
who is a lesbian—and also a writer for whom lesbian issues are at the fore-
front of what I’m doing” (qtd. in Palmer 72). Speaking on an author tour
for The Little Stranger (2009), a slightly abashed Waters apologized to
lesbians in San Francisco that the book has a male protagonist and no
lesbian characters (afterellen.com).10
Waters’ talent, prominence, and contributions are unquestionable, but
she’s not alone. Along with Emma Donoghue and Jeanette Winterson,
she is one of a triumvirate of prominent, best-selling lesbian historical
novelists with both lesbian and mainstream audiences, each of them taking
a different approach to the genre. On the strength of her first three novels,
all set in the nineteenth century, Waters is best known as a neo-Victorian
10 L. GARBER
writer. Neo-Victorian scholars discuss Donoghue as well, but her contri-

bution to the genre is predominantly archival. Jeanette Winterson repre-
sents a postmodern approach, invested in the concept of time as much as
history.
All of Waters’ novels are historical, set in either the nineteenth century
(Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith), the 1920s (The Paying
Guests) or the 1940s (The Night Watch, The Little Stranger). She explains
in interviews that she began writing novels to explore historiographical
questions arising from her doctoral thesis, “Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian
and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present,” which “examines the
role of historical reference in the representation of homosexuality in British
literature since the late nineteenth century” (2). As an extension of her
graduate work, Waters’ novels engage literary questions at least as cen-
trally as historical ones: “the sorts of issues…literary departments are
interested in talking about,” “playing around with literary tradition”
(Armitt 125), and “nineteenth-century form” (Broughton 5).
Not surprisingly, a fair amount of scholarly ink has been spilled in the
field of Neo-Victorian Studies analyzing Waters’ work. Like other neo-
Victorian novels, Waters’ first three books are set in the nineteenth cen-
tury both historically and stylistically. In other words, they carefully set
lesbian stories in the recognizable world of nineteenth-century novels.
Jerome de Groot argues, for example, that “Waters makes a clear historio-
graphic intervention in her work … largely expressed through her engage-
ment with the possibilities of the historical novel genre” (58). Put another
way by Mariaconcetta Costantini, Waters knows that “both history and
fiction consist of plural representations, none of which is objectively, unde-
niably true. It is only by merging them together that we get a better sense
of the ‘reality’ of past ages and, in so doing, detect affinities with the pres-
ent, which help us rethink our role and identity” (19).
Waters herself explains that “a novel like Fingersmith was very deliber-
ately written in the tradition of the Victorian novel of sensation” (Armitt
117), that her nineteenth-century novels are “like a celebration of the
Victorian novel itself” (Dennis 46). Kate Mitchell goes so far as to term
Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) “‘faux’ Victorian fiction” in which
Waters “speaks with the language of Victorian fiction in order to invent a
tradition of nineteenth-century female homosexuality, writing it into our
cultural memory of the Victorian literary tradition by a fictional sleight of
hand” (10). In doing so, Waters creates for lesbians something like the
literary legacy uncovered for gay men by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her
groundbreaking study Between Men: English Literature and Male

Homosocial Desire. Waters’ Neo-Victorian novels explore the lesbian
potential implicit in the nineteenth-century British novel, deftly raising
questions about sexual identity, class, and other contemporary political
issues without calling attention to the revisionary and historiographical
work she performs under the cloak of period-perfect literary reenactment.
Like Waters, Emma Donoghue is a scholar of lesbian literature and his-
tory. She has published novels both contemporary and historical, clearly
lesbian and not. Among her sixteen books are a survey of “British Lesbian
Culture 1668-1801” (Passions Between Women, 1993), a biography of the
Victorian lesbian writing couple Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (We
Are Michael Field, 1998), and a study of “Desire Between Women in
Literature” (Inseparable, 2010). Donoghue’s research skills show up to
great effect in her four lesbian historical novels: Life Mask, about the eigh-
teenth-century British sculptor Anne Damer; The Sealed Letter (2009),
about a scandalous divorce trial in 1860s London; Frog Music (2014),
about the murder of cross-dressing Jenny Bonnet in 1870s San Francisco;
and The Pull of the Stars (2020), set in the Dublin influenza epidemic
of 1918.
All four of these novels include extensive author’s notes explaining the
research sources and known facts behind the literary plots. At the end of
both Life Mask and The Sealed Letter, Donoghue devotes several pages to
describing the extant historical records about the novels’ respective main
characters, the eighteenth-century sculptor Anne Damer and the
nineteenth-century feminist Emily “Fido” Faithfull. Donoghue explains at
the end of Life Mask, “This novel is fiction, but the kind that walks arm in
arm with fact” (605). While The Sealed Letter has been discussed by Neo-
Victorian studies scholars, by and large Donoghue’s historical fiction aims
more straightforwardly for placing lesbians in and through archival history
rather than literary tradition.11
Waters revels in historiographical questions; for example, “On what
terms does history appeal to the lesbian writer and how is the past negoti-
ated in lesbian literary production?” (Doan and Waters 13). Meanwhile
Donoghue is keen to publish stories demonstrating that love between
women existed in the past, that we were there. She explained as much to a
newspaper reporter in 2008:
Imagine living in a city where there are no monuments, no buildings from

before 1970, no proof that you had grandparents or parents, no history at
12 L. GARBER
all. Wouldn’t that make you feel like you were just a passing fad, that you
could be blown away like leaves? … for any community to feel substantial
and able to change without losing themselves, a history is absolutely crucial.
(qtd. in Lawlor)
Grounded in archival research, Donoghue’s lesbian historical novels pro-

vide that history. Even her collections of short stories—for example, The
Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), Three and a Half Deaths (2011),
and Astray (2012)—feature actual people or incidents found in the archives,
marked as such in author’s notes. Like Waters, Donoghue is a literary
celebrity, having won the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction, the Stonewall
Book Award (twice), and the Lambda Literary Award. Her screenplay for
her novel Room (2010) was nominated for an Academy Award, and she has
been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize.
Many of Jeanette Winterson’s books, whether lesbian or not, are con-
cerned in some way with history—her own (Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?), or her characters’
(The Daylight Gate, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry), or western civiliza-
tion’s, in that particular form of cultural history alternately called mythol-
ogy and religion (Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, Boating for
Beginners). Winterson’s vast learning is everywhere evident, but the
archives are nowhere to be seen, and she masterfully plays fast and loose
with details and chronologies. Her queer novel Sexing the Cherry (1989)
is announced on its back cover as taking place in “a fantastic world that is
and is not seventeenth-century England.” Her lesbian masterpiece The
Passion (1987) relies on thoroughgoing knowledge of Napoleon’s Russian
Campaign and the history and lore of Venice, but like nearly all of her
novels the book is, finally, about love and time, not the particulars of the
historical setting. “The past is magnetic. It draws us in,” says the narrator
of Winterson’s novel The Powerbook (2000), but “History is a madman’s
museum” (157, 287). Time, throughout Winterson’s work, is figured as
“eternally present” (The Passion, 62), a concept about which there are
many lies (enumerated in Sexing the Cherry, 90). For Doan and Waters,
Winterson’s style is exemplary of “a sophisticated treatment of lesbian his-
toriographical issues and contradictions, one that problematises the very
categories with which sex and gender are constructed” (25).
Winterson both has an avid lesbian following and, like Donoghue and
Waters, is much lauded in the literary mainstream. Among other honors,
she has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn
Rhys Memorial Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the E.M. Forster
Award, and her books have been published in eighteen countries.12 In 2006
she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to
literature. But lesbian community and politics have always been collabora-
tive affairs, more socialism than oligarchy. Amid the recent mainstream
popularity of historical fiction, the success of only three lesbian writers
points out the limited space in commercial publishing for lesbian historical
stories, and perhaps lesbian stories full stop.13 To build the historical back-
ground required by a diverse lesbian culture necessitates the dedication of
an independent feminist, lesbian, and/or queer publishing industry.
It has been, and remains, my perverse scholarly passion to pore over
lesbian books known to relatively few people—my people—lesbian read-
ers, for whom the corpus of lesbian historical fiction serves at least two
purposes. To entertain, certainly, but also to undergird contemporary les-
bian identity by providing it a historical, if speculative, grounding. The
majority of lesbian historical novels do exactly what Doan and Waters
accuse them of doing: purveying “nostalgia” masquerading as “histori-
cism” in the service of “an appealing, romantic rhetoric” (19, 15). But
Kate Mitchell is also right, that “nostalgia might be productive, giving
voice to the desire for cultural memory to which these novels bear wit-
ness,” including Waters’ own (5). Novel Approaches to Lesbian History
critically examines historical literature written by and for—and read pri-
marily by—lesbians, in the spirit of a movement that has evolved and
changed over the last half century while retaining a focus on a central tru-
ism: We are indeed everywhere, including the past. However speculative
or spurious or unreliable our sources, knowing so enables us to survive in
the present.
***
(Ring. Ring.)
Barbara: Hello?
Muriel: Honey, I lied to you.
Barbara: Auntie Mur? What you are you talking about?
Muriel: I always loved Helen.
Barbara’s aunt Muriel was phoning from her hospital bed. She thought
she was dying of congestive heart failure, and she needed to set the record,
well, lesbian. We had asked her years before, flat out, if she and Helen were
lovers, life-long partners like we are, and she had said no. Despite her
14 L. GARBER
many stories and photographs of their fifty-two years together, and despite
her acknowledging me as a member of the family, a lifetime of cautious
habit had led her to lie to us. Faced with her own mortality, she needed to
tell us the truth. Auntie Mur didn’t die that day, or that week, and over
time she told us her story. Like my mother, and not unlike lesbian histori-
cal novelists, Auntie Mur knew that we need our histories.
Notes
1. For “continuum” see Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence”; for “adjective” see Faderman, “A Usable Past?”; for question
instead of answer, see Ng.
2. Problems of interpretation are as thorny in gay male, bisexual, and trans
history. Women’s historical lack of access to literacy and power in most
cultures makes finding depictions of women (and hence, lesbians) particu-
larly difficult. Worldwide, the historical archive of images and descriptions
of men loving men is much larger than the archive of women loving women.
3. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show and Maude Meagher, The
Green Scamander were both published in the 1930s. Sarah Waters wrote
her doctoral thesis on Meagher’s novel; an essay version titled “Wolfskins
and Togas” was published in Women: A Cultural Review.
4. Elsewhere I have termed this insight “the Foucauldian Orthodoxy” and
pointed out its limitations, particularly in transnational context. See
Garber, “Where in the World Are the Lesbians?”
5. Compiling an exhaustive list of lesbian historical novels published in
English is a nearly impossible task, since library catalog headings are not
helpful, and because so many titles are out of print. Over the course of
some twenty years I have identified more than 200 titles whose stories take
place before 1930. Of these, only six were published before 1980; twenty-
two were published in the 1980s, thirty-five in the 1990s, and the rest
between 2000 and 2021.
6. My thinking on this subject has been most recently and productively influ-
enced by reading Mairead Sullivan’s insightful, provocative book Lesbian
Death: Disruption and Attachment between Feminist and Queer, forthcom-
ing from University of Minnesota Press, and by conversations with
the author.
7. My thanks to Pamela Cheek for suggesting the comparison. For some
examples of academic writing on American Girl dolls and books, see Osei-
Kofe, Chatelain, and Davion.
8. For a discussion of novels set on the western frontier, see Chap. 4: Tomboys
and Indians. Lesbian Civil War novels include, among others, Dunne,
Ennis, Radclyffe, and Thompson.
9. See, for example, Halberstam and Feinberg.
10. For representative interviews, see Mitchell, 129; Armitt, 125;
Broughton, 4-5.
11. For analysis of Donoghue’s work in Neo-Victorian studies, see O’Callaghan
and Pettersson.
12. www.jeanettewinterson.com. Web. 8 August 2016.
13. On the popularity of historical fiction, see for example Bourke, Crosby,
Dee, and Dukes.
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Garland, 2000.
CHAPTER 2
H(a)unting the Archives
The protagonist of Daphne Marlatt’s 1988 novel Ana Historic asks, “What
if … we live in history and imagination?” (139). Certainly, she does, an
exemplary heroine of a subgenre of lesbian historical fiction that features
characters who search the historical record aware of its limitations, whose
stories highlight the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of lesbian his-
tory. Suzanne Keen (2001) calls these “romances of the archive” (139).
They have in common protagonists looking for material or documentary
evidence of times past, and the passion of their quests stands as a metaphor
for the desired past that gives rise to the entire genre of lesbian historical
fiction. Seeming to rebut postmodern skepticism of the knowability of his-
tory, romance-of-the-archive plots purport to “answer questions about
what really happened, though … without surrendering [the] license to
invent” (Keen 3). Such books are less frequently studied than the post-
modern novels that Linda Hutcheon (1988) notably termed “historio-
graphic metafiction,” which “openly assert that there are only truths in the
plural, and never one Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just others’
truths” (109). Marked by “provisionality and indeterminacy,” historio-
graphic metafiction is less interested in finding the truth than in question-
ing “whose truth gets told” (111, 123). Similar concerns are frequently
explored, or at least implied, by lesbian historical fiction, but the desire for
a lesbian past—and the conviction that it must have existed—lends itself as
well to the convention of the realistic novel that provides a generally usable
past. Employing a sexual metaphor well suited to lesbian studies, Stevie
Davies puts it this way, “The historical record arouses without satisfying.
What answers it provides are seldom those our questions solicit. Fiction,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Garber, Novel Approaches to Lesbian History, Palgrave Studies in
Contemporary Women’s Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85417-1_2
20 L. GARBER
through its dissemblings and guesswork, can satisfy not only by faking
evidence but also through mirroring those dissatisfactions” (Davies
2003, 29).
Marlatt’s novel satisfies both concerns, providing an avenue to a usable
lesbian past while simultaneously dissecting the biases and limitations of
traditional historical research. Marlatt illustrates the lesbian historical fic-
tion project through her protagonist Annie, a married white Canadian
writer who tells a different story from the official record, one that makes
her own present and future possible, and her past legible. Throughout
Marlatt’s novel, Annie researches the life of a “Mrs. Richards” in the local
archive, dubbing her “Ana,” imagining herself in the past as she creates
Ana as a character for a novel. Marlatt’s acknowledgements at the end of
the book explain, “this is a work of fiction; historical personages have been
fictionalized to possible and/or purely imaginary lengths” (n. pag.) Annie
can find very little documentation of Mrs. Richards’ life because, as she
knows, “history” is “the story … of dominance. mastery” (25). Annie
learns that Mrs. Richards arrived in a small logging town in British
Columbia in 1873 to take her first teaching post, that she claimed to be a
widow, that she bought a piano and taught in the one-room schoolhouse,
and that she soon married, becoming Mrs. Ben Springer—“the sweep of
that part of her life summed up” in a text from the period written by a
Major Matthews. Annie understands that “history is the historic voice
(voice-over), elegiac, epithetic. a diminishing glance as the lid is closed
firmly and finally shut. that was her. summed up. Ana historic” (48).
At first Annie is uncertain how far to go in filling the gaps of Mrs.
Richards’ story, which she had begun researching for her husband’s aca-
demic project. Throughout the novel, Annie carries on an internal conver-
sation with her deceased mother Ina, a woman stifled by her role as
mid-century wife and mother, robbed by electroshock treatments of her
“imagination,” her “will to create things differently” (149). Seeking to
understand and escape her mother’s fate, Annie explores plausible alterna-
tives for Mrs. Richards’ story, because she realizes that “something is
wanting” (48). Her pursuit is guided by a question she poses to her
mother: “whose truth, Ina?” Annie provides a veritable map for future
lesbian historical fiction when she responds to her own query: “when
you’re so framed, caught in the act, the (f) stop of act, fact—what recourse?
step inside the picture and open it up” (56).
Annie has dutifully internalized a traditional version of what history is
supposed to be, as personified by her husband Richard (Dick!), her former
2 H(A)UNTING THE ARCHIVES 21
professor and “a good historian” (134). She argues with her mother/
herself that she isn’t merely “telling stories” when she imagines a flirta-
tion, perhaps an affair, between Ana Richards and Birdie Stewart, “that
other enterprising woman who, flying in the face of family and church,
establishes her house that same year” (108). Rather, Annie is “untelling”
the horrific story of her mother’s life, the frightening tale of her own con-
ventional life, and the official history of Ana Richards’ life, in favor of
“true stories and real” whose telling depends upon “a monstrous leap of
imagination” (28, 141, 67, 135). Annie’s work is “a testimonial to wom-
en’s struggle to make room in history for their stories,” according to liter-
ary critic Marie Vautier (1999), “because to make room for their history is
to make room for themselves” (27). Marlatt herself explains that she “as
Annie … invented a historical leak, a hole in the sieve of fact that let the
shadow of a possibility leak through into full-blown life … Mrs. Richards
is a historical leak for the possibility of lesbian life in Victorian British
Columbia” (Marlatt, “Self Representation,” 15).
Annie takes a leap of lesbian imagination in her own life, urged on by
Zoe, into whose lesbian arms Annie literally leaps in the last pages of the
book—not an ending but a beginning, “the reach of your desire, reading
us into the page ahead” (n. pag.) Annie will survive and thrive by telling a
story about Mrs. Richards that defies “good” history by giving her research
subject/protagonist a first name, investing her with skills and opinions,
and exploring the possibility that she was unmarried and secretly took a
woman lover. She can only do so by writing a novel, ignoring the call of
scholarly history: “come back, history calls, to the solid ground of fact.
you don’t want to fall off the edge of the world—” (111). In an interview,
Marlatt makes clear the necessity of invention, exploiting the “historical
leak,” when she explains,
that scene that Annie writes between Birdie and Anna … is entirely con-
cocted. It’s entirely an invention and the book is quite clear about that, but
it’s an invention that allows the narrator to take that step that she’s having
trouble doing all through the book. It allows her suddenly to translate her-
self … She begins seeing the lesbian potential through the scripts of hetero-
sexual romance she’s grown up with, and through all the constraints of
Victorian sexuality, because that’s what she’s dealing with: the residue of
that as it’s passed down through the generations. (Curran 115)
22 L. GARBER
Marlatt and her protagonist perceive both the limits of the historical
record and the potential of historical discourse.
By understanding the limitations of Ina’s life and perceiving the lesbian
possibility of Mrs. Richards/Ana Historic, Annie Richardson can recreate
herself, Annie Present, and reach her full potential as the lesbian Annie
Future. Or, to quote Jeanette Winterson in The Passion (1987), “I’m telling
you stories. Trust me.” In Winterson’s fantastical historical novel, the char-
acter Henri explains that in a literal struggle for survival, “Stories were all we
had” (5, 107). Doan and Waters (2000) describe the brilliant historiograph-
ical turn of Winterson’s postmodern novels, which “mark a break with the
unwillingness of [most lesbian historical fiction] to abandon limiting para-
digms, and the beginning perhaps of a more inventive use of history” (20).
That is, novels of queer rather than ancestral genealogy.
Nevertheless, the sheer and increasing number of historical novels pro-
vide material testimony to Henri’s/Winterson’s statement, even when
they take more prosaic routes to the telling of lesbian historical stories.
Writing lesbians into recognizable—even cliché—versions of the past
seems to intone, “We exist, we exist, we exist.” I would go so far as to
argue that the dichotomy of postmodern versus realist lesbian historical
fiction is an unproductive one. Readers and writers know that the lesbian
historical novel is a flight of fancy, whether or not its historiographical
mechanisms are laid bare. Meanwhile, Marlatt and Winterson provide a
sophisticated depiction of the machinery at work—at the same time as
they satisfy readers’ cravings for historical representations of lesbians.
Mockumentary
Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996) provides an example
of archive-romance that illustrates my point. Like Marlatt’s novel it simul-
taneously provides the sought-for historical lesbian and pulls back the cur-
tain to reveal her invention. Dunye’s film is particularly important for its
exploration of the intersections and divergences between historical recla-
mation projects focused on race and sexual identity. The film’s protagonist
is “Cheryl,” a young, Black, lesbian filmmaker played by Cheryl Dunye (a
young, Black, lesbian filmmaker). Cheryl has three on-screen relation-
ships: one with her best friend Tamara, an African-American lesbian;
another with Diana, a white lesbian who becomes her lover; and a third
with the focus of her documentary project, Fae Richards, an African-
American actress from the 1930s who was credited in films only as “The
Watermelon Woman.” As Cheryl researches her film within the film, paral-
lels between her life and Fae’s come into focus. Both face racism and
homophobia, and both encounter disapproval from African-American
friends for taking white lovers. Cheryl develops a clear sense that she needs
to understand her relationship to history, through Fae, in order to con-
tinue with her work in the present.
But everywhere Cheryl turns for information about “The Watermelon
Woman” she finds partial answers and particular forms of resistance. No
one she interviews on the street has ever heard of the actress. A gay Black
film memorabilia collector specializes in “race films” and Black Jazz Age
nightclubs in Philadelphia, but he admits that “women are not my spe-
cialty.” At the library, Cheryl tells her friend Tamara, “It’s not like I can go
and ask for information about the Watermelon Woman.” When she does,
the white male librarian tells her to “check the Black section in the refer-
ence library.” Cheryl responds, “Well, how about Martha Page. She was a
white woman director in the 1930s.” The librarian directs Cheryl to the
“film section,” as if she hadn’t already thought of it, then tells her, “The
only thing that’s coming up is Martha Page. She is coming up in several
non-reference titles on women and film. No, no Watermelon Woman.”
While Martha Page, who directed films starring the Watermelon Woman,
can be found in books and articles about “women in film,” the Watermelon
Woman repeatedly turns up lost between volumes on women, presumed
to be white, and Black people, presumed to be men.
The history of African-American film alone, or lesbian film alone, can’t
satisfy Cheryl’s needs, since they have been constituted primarily as two
separate histories.1 Lesbian/queer history privileges whiteness, African-
American history privileges heterosexuality, and the parallels are compli-
cated by structural and historical differences between the studies and
experiences of sexuality and race. Saidiya Hartman (2019) is right, “Every
historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved
is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the
limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who
is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor” (xiii). It’s
also the case that histories of different dispossessed groups face distinct
challenges. Reclamation projects of historically recognized groups—by
race, ethnicity, gender, class, and the like—demonstrate that a community
survived and contributed, and that people’s lives have been as misrepre-
sented as their ancestors were mistreated.2 Lesbian/queer history strug-
gles first to establish group identity, the valid historicity of its subject.
24 L. GARBER
Facing objections and dead ends while researching a historical project with
overt racial and sexual dimensions, Dunye ingeniously presents a docu-
mentary within a documentary that is actually a feature film. With her
genre choices, Dunye seems to say along with Winterson, “I’m telling you
stories. Trust me.”
Matt Richardson (2005, 2011) discusses The Watermelon Woman as an
instance of “Black Queer Signifying Practice” (“Critical,” 8): “documen-
tary film is another historiographical tool and a method of signifying on
the gaps in written history, not a replacement for history” (“Our,” 8) but
rather a repetition of “cultural norms with a distinct, and analytical differ-
ence” (“Critical,” 8) Film scholar Alexandra Juhasz, who produced The
Watermelon Woman, classifies it as a “fake documentary,” a type of film
that “make[s] use of (copy, mock, mimic, gimmick) documentary style
and therefore acquire[s] its associated content (the moral and social) and
associated feelings (belief, trust, authenticity) to create a documentary
experience defined by [its] antithesis, self-conscious distance.” As a “pro-
ductive” fake, The Watermelon Woman “mirrors and reveals the sustaining
lies of all documentary, both real and fake, producing the possibility for
the contesting of history, identity, and truth” (7). Certainly the film func-
tions on this level—but only for the viewer who reads the credits at the
end, where Dunye reveals the fiction of the otherwise straightforward-
appearing documentary. It is entirely possible to view The Watermelon
Woman as a successful “hoax,” as Thelma Wills Foote (2007) explains,
because to “spectators who presuppose the veracity of documentary form,
The Watermelon Woman becomes a prank at their expense.”
At the end of the film, Cheryl presents the documentary within the
feature, introducing it as, “What you all have been waiting for, the biog-
raphy of the Watermelon Woman, Fae Richards, Faith Richardson,” con-
sisting of black-and-white film clips, stills, and Cheryl’s voice over.
Curiously, screen credits appear only a minute into the documentary.
Attentive viewers raise an eyebrow by the second such credit, which lists
the actors, including Cheryl Dunye as “Cheryl,” and Lisa Marie Bronson
as “Fae ‘The Watermelon Woman’ Richards.” The credits flash by fairly
quickly, several of them noting production, direction, cinematography,
and the like in typical fashion. The eleventh credit screen is the big tipoff,
for someone paying close attention, because it acknowledges the creator
of “Photos and Home Movies of the Watermelon Woman,” the contem-
porary photographer Zoe Leonard. Foote explains that “many film specta-
tors” at a pre-release screening believed in the veracity of Cheryl’s
documentary even with the hints in the credits, failing to see the film as
Dunye’s fiction—or “fake,” or the director’s favored term, “Dunyementary”
(Foote). So Dunye added a final credit screen that reads, “Sometimes you
have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction. Cheryl
Dunye, 1996.” Because the announcement is made quietly at the very end
of the film, The Watermelon Woman can function as both a hoax and a
productive fake. As Juhasz (2006) states clearly, “a fake documentary
unmarked,” or one that’s so subtly marked, “is a documentary” (10).
Like Keen’s “romance of the archive,” the hoax/fake documentary sat-
isfies by doing two things at once, providing a historical lesbian character
and her story in a recognizable narrative format (the documentary), and
drawing attention to the historiographical complexities of lesbian research.
In other words, even though Juhasz and Foote are right about the com-
plexities of the fake documentary as it points to historiography and prob-
lems of history, the faked documentary of the Watermelon Woman and of
Cheryl’s search for her still satisfies the desire (or nostalgia) for “what you
all have been waiting for”—Black lesbian history—just like straightfor-
ward romances do. Foote explains,
With the campiness of a sophisticated drag performance, Dunye’s faux doc-

umentary film mocks the sobriety of classic documentary films about the
past and their nostalgia for the lost ancestor. Yet, Dunye’s mock-documentary
does not deny the meaningfulness of the past, nor does it overlook the epis-
temic violence perpetrated by the erasure of the black homosexual from the
historical record. Rather, the film affirms self-determining acts of making a
living and open history from a past whose meaning is forged by the mediat-
ing capacity of the creative imagination to traverse historical knowledge
and desire.
Maybe The Watermelon Woman is such a successful hoax not only

because of formal considerations, nor even audience desire that it be true,
but also because its African-American archival story is inseparable from the
lesbian one. Foote points out that The Watermelon Woman is a particularly
devastating hoax because the character Cheryl is conflated with Cheryl
Dunye, and audiences trust a Black lesbian to tell the truth about Black
lesbians. It’s less possible to deny outright the existence of people of color
in various historical situations because there is incontrovertible evidence
that they were there. Dunye skillfully combines faked movie clips and stills
of her character Fae Richards with pictures of African-American celebrities
26 L. GARBER
such as Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, and Louise Beavers; she

knows that most viewers can’t see the difference between the fictional
Black lesbian actress Cheryl has discovered and the historical actresses they
may or may not recognize.
Using a similar technique in her novel The Escape Artist (1997) Judith
Katz interweaves her magical-realist lesbian plot with the known history
of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Pale of Eastern Europe and their connec-
tion to an underground economy of Jewish prostitution in Buenos Aires.
Many white lesbian authors include cross-dressing women in their his-
torical fictions; we know they existed, too, and we have documentation
that some of them married women—even though “lesbians” are not sup-
posed to have existed until the medical establishment invented the idea in
the late nineteenth century. In Lesbian Romance Novels, Phyllis M. Betz
(2009) points out “the importance of incorporating accurate architec-
tural, decorative, and fashion description” into the historical fiction nar-
rative to “create the requisite fantasy element essential to the romance”
(86). The Watermelon Woman achieves its verisimilitude through depic-
tion rather than description, relying on Zoe Leonard’s still photographs
and “home movies” of Fae Richards as portrayed by actor Lisa Marie
Bronson.
Near the end of the film Dunye reveals her motivation for making The
Watermelon Woman, when Cheryl looks into the camera and states that
she needs to tell her version of the Watermelon Woman’s story to enable
her own life and creative work as “the one who says, ‘I am a Black, lesbian
filmmaker’”—an identity she had claimed only tentatively at the beginning
of the film. But Cheryl isn’t the only person who needs Fae’s story, and
not all interested parties need it for the same reasons. June Walker, Fae’s
lover for more than twenty years after she left the movies, leaves Cheryl a
letter and a packet of photographs and memorabilia she hopes will correct
the record on Fae, including Cheryl’s misinterpretation of her life. Cheryl
had been thrilled to find out that Fae and the white lesbian director Martha
Page were lovers, and she soaked up any and all images she could find of
Fae on film, however racist the scenario or depiction of Black female char-
acters. Having learned that, June writes, “I was so mad that you men-
tioned the name of Martha Page. Why did you even want to include a
white woman in a movie on Fae’s life? Don’t you know she had nothing
to do with how people should remember Fae?” Finding no alternative
views, save the silence and scant evidence of the official record, Cheryl had
been all too happy to claim the parts of Fae’s life with which she could
identify. She is thoroughly schooled by June, in a voiceover narration that

plays behind still shots and home movies of June and Fae. “She did so
much, Cheryl. That’s what you have to speak about. She paved the way for
kids like you to run around making movies about the past, and how we
lived then. Please, Cheryl, make our history before we are all dead and
gone. But, if you are really in the family, you better understand that our
family will always only have each other.”
While June knows more about Fae than others do, ultimately Cheryl
makes clear that June’s version, like all others, tells an invested story. The
truth is that Cheryl needs Fae for her own reasons. Like all documentari-
ans, Cheryl created the subject of her film. And in case viewers don’t
understand the importance of her story, Cheryl/Dunye states it clearly. In
order to live her Black, lesbian life in the present, she needs to believe in a
Black lesbian past. Dunye seems to say, with Winterson, “I’m telling you
stories. Trust me.”
We Are Family
In Stevie Davies’ Impassioned Clay (2000), lesbian “family” is biological
family, and the hunt is archaeological and spiritual as well as archival. The
novel opens with the discovery of a historical artifact under the parched,
root-laced soil of the protagonist’s backyard. Fifteen-year-old Olivia is
helping to dig the grave for her mother in the garden of the “straggling
homestead” that her “mother’s people have agelessly inhabited” when her
uncle’s spade strikes bone (4, 7). The digging becomes a project for a
team of university archaeologists when it becomes clear that the bone
belongs to a seventeenth-century skeleton, a woman hanged to death and
buried with the “scold’s bridle” that had mutilated her mouth and jaw.
Fifteenth or so in an odd line of Quaker women to inherit the land, Olivia
becomes obsessed with the skeleton and with the secrets of her undemon-
strative mother, whose intentional Quaker reserve faded to silence with
her death. Grief-stricken and bookish throughout her adolescence, as an
adult Olivia becomes a scholar of—what else?—history.
Olivia realizes her desire “to know” the skeleton woman is more than
academic curiosity. The body is discovered in “the web of roots” beneath
Olivia’s ancestral land, which is “rock-hard” from drought, watered now
by the grief of her father’s “forbidden tears” (6). Olivia’s university
research into the skeleton of her maternal line is personal in more ways
than one. She acknowledges that it draws her “with the kind of thrill most
28 L. GARBER
people of twenty keep for sexual discovery” (34), hinting at both the erot-
ics of lesbian historical research and the importance of the research to
Olivia’s growing knowledge of her own erotic leanings. At the same time,
Olivia meets Faith, the only other woman in the history department, who
becomes her first real friend. As Olivia pieces together clues about the
skeleton woman, she draws closer to Faith; her jealousy over Faith’s rela-
tionship with a male colleague leads her to her “latterday discovery of the
obvious,” her own attraction to women (57). Meanwhile, she learns that
the skeleton belonged to one Hannah Emmanuel, a persecuted, perhaps
mentally ill, renegade Quaker preacher who had a woman lover
named Isabel.
Olivia feels unable to speak her love to Faith, despite her growing iden-
tification with Hannah, who was violently silenced by her community
because she wouldn’t shut up about her belief in herself and other women
she considered holy. When a forensic archaeologist “scientifically” recon-
structs Hannah’s face, and she turns out to be a dead ringer for Olivia,
Olivia dives deeper into her research to discover all she can about Hannah
Emmanuel, and thus herself. Denied intimacy with a mother who believed
in the sanctity of silence, who died when her daughter was only fifteen,
Olivia digs into the suppressed truth of her maternal line. Following a pat-
tern established in her youth, she shrinks into a private world of books,
peopled by “the dead [who] spoke to me, with such vehement voices that
when I looked up, my contemporaries seemed blurred and dull” (32).
While her classmates “all wanted a good shag,” Olivia wants only knowl-
edge: “Carnal knowledge: I understood that biblical use of the verb to
know” (33).
Olivia’s archival sources include the ravings of a main-line minister who
persecuted Hannah, the self-serving testament of a contemporary and
rival of Hannah’s, a secret memoir written by Isabel, and finally Hannah’s
own manuscript, “Wilderness of Women,” which Olivia’s mother had
transcribed, redacted, and then hidden from Olivia. Olivia realizes that
each source reflects its author’s own agenda with respect to Hannah’s life.
Over the course of the novel, Olivia develops and learns to articulate her
own goals: to “shatter” the scold’s bridle and its “jagged mouthpiece,
with its rusted prongs to spike her tender tongue” (159, 131) and thus
deliver Hannah “from her long silence” (68). Olivia fulfills them by telling
Hannah’s story, ultimately collecting her bones from the museum and
reinterring them with dignity so that “She is free” (222).
Over the near decade since Olivia first discovered the skeleton, she has
learned lessons about the shortcomings and promises of history itself,
which turn out to be extremely relevant to her personal and professional
development—and thus to lesbian identity and the creation of lesbian his-
tory. “History, gagged and branked” like Hannah herself, is a salvage
operation, and “Everything salvaged lies upon a boundless hinterland of
lost information” (141, 106). What is not lost, it turns out, has been hid-
den. Isabel’s testament had been hidden because Hannah’s descendant
four generations later was “forbidden” by her father to preserve anything
related to Hannah (96). Olivia’s mother presumably hid Hannah’s testa-
ment to protect Olivia from her inheritance, a foremother she considered
“a fairly unbalanced character … a dangerous … stray cannon.” Olivia
realizes, “My mother had seen and regretted in me the same inability to
toe the line” (156). In addition to hiding the manuscript, Olivia’s mother
had edited its transcription, leaving Olivia determined to “heal the wounds
in Hannah’s text” (159). Olivia knows, because she has “lived and
breathed” it herself, that her mother censored Hannah and Isabel’s love-
making from the text. Olivia, who forsook God and religion at an early
age, vows to “read the forbidding silences as my holy places” (174). She
understands that “all portraits are self-portraits” (119), that in order to
draw a picture of Hannah’s (and thus her own) history, she must follow
the advice she gives her students: “Imagine what you think you know;
show it like a film, checking back to the documents as you run the
spool” (120).
Olivia’s uncanny resemblance to Hannah provides the skeleton for
Davies’ tale of “lesbian-like”-ness. Olivia is and is not like Hannah, just as
Hannah’s partnership with her “loving yoke-fellow” Isabel is and is not
like Olivia’s lesbianism. For starters, the forensic reconstruction of
Hannah’s face shows an irrefutable physical likeness, their two faces
“twinned” (75). And then, of course, they are kin, genealogically and as
Quaker Friends. But Olivia has forsaken belief in God, while Hannah’s
heretical belief in Her defined her life and led to her persecution and
death. Hannah made a public spectacle of herself in the service of beliefs,
whereas Olivia seeks mostly “to vanish into the woodwork” (189)—
unaware that her “butch” appearance and mania for Hannah have made
her into “a standing joke” according to her rival, Faith’s husband (187).
Both, however, live(d) out of step with the world around them, in a strong
sense making Olivia “one with [Hannah] across time” (73). While the
mainstream of Olivia’s department may have had her “down as a freak”
30 L. GARBER
(188), Hannah’s historical context meant she was condemned, brutally

persecuted, and finally violently executed for her eccentricity, which was
lesbian-like as well as doctrinally heretical.
When Isabel met Hannah—her “only beloved,” “dear one,” and “yoke-
fellow”—Hannah was dressed in men’s clothing, “what we call in our
country a will-jill” (99–101). Despite their abiding spiritual and physical
love, (the fictional) Hannah also fell in love with the charismatic, ulti-
mately condemned (historically real) Quaker leader James Naylor, with
whom she had a child. Nevertheless, Hannah consistently lived, traveled,
and suffered persecution with Isabel, not James, and they considered
Hannah’s daughter Grace to be the miraculous child of their love (102–3).
For Olivia, living in an era in which lesbian identity exists, the sexual like-
ness to her woman-loving ancestor stops short of violent silencing. Across
the gap of centuries and the development of the concept of sexual identity,
Hannah and Olivia share Faith in Love—Hannah’s theology “love is the
only law” (104, 171) made flesh in Olivia’s love for her friend Faith, the
only person she trusts enough to share Hannah with, in both spirit
(Hannah’s manuscript) and flesh (when they re-inter Hannah’s bones at
the end of the novel). Love and faith—and Faith’s loving if chaste friend-
ship—are what Olivia needs most, to heal from the death of her mother
and to enter the physical world of human interaction.
Hannah, who lived primarily in her own spiritual world, releases Olivia
from the abstract world of books to live in the present and the flesh.
Hannah, who was violently denied her voice, gives Olivia her own. Olivia
uses her newfound agency to bring Hannah home—literally by re-interring
her bones, and figuratively by bringing her story to light. She gives Hannah
back her voice with empathy, filling in the details so judiciously censored
by her mother. For Olivia, “History, gagged and branked” turns out to be
the key to living a fulfilled lesbian life in the present.
Supernatural Interventions
By their very genre, some lesbian historical fictions are much more obvi-
ously “stories” than Dunye’s convincing mock documentary or Davies’
grisly romance of the archive. If the “apparitional lesbian” is the ghost in
the machine of modern culture, as Terry Castle (1993) argues, it should
come as no surprise that actual ghost stories are not uncommon plot
devices for lesbian historical novels. The least academically inclined reader
knows these are fantasies and can grasp the ways in which they reveal the
constructedness of history as well as its usefulness to the present. I would

argue that the obvious contrivances of ghost stories and their kin, time-
travel plots, at least tacitly point to both queer and ancestral genealogies in
Laura Doan’s (2013) sense. Supernatural gothic and science-fiction
devices figure prominently in lesbian historical fiction, allowing protago-
nists the actual interaction with historical lesbians that Dunye’s character
Cheryl craves. Paula Martinac’s ghost story Out of Time (1990) and
Brenda Adcock’s pirate novel The Sea Hawk (2008) are romances of the
archive that mobilize genre fiction devices in the service of lesbian history.
Both feature lesbian characters who desperately need guidance from role
models in the lesbian past, and their authors are not afraid to employ
supernatural devices to give it to them. As Toni Morrison (1987) demon-
strates with devastating brilliance in Beloved, fantastical plot devices can
reveal historical truths beyond the reach of the realistic novel.
The protagonist of Martinac’s Out of Time is a lesbian graduate student
in New York City whose life is at loose ends. At age thirty, Susan Van Dine
is in debt, unsure whether to move in with her lover, and bored with her
doctoral program in English—her third graduate degree. One day while
Susan is walking down the street, she takes refuge from a sudden rain-
storm in an antique shop she has never noticed before. Inside, she is mys-
teriously drawn to a photo album chronicling the friendship of four
women in the 1920s who called themselves “The Gang.” Susan feels con-
nected to the women, who seem to look directly at her from their photos,
“peer[ing] out at me seductively,” she thinks, “beckoning” (6). Unsure
whether the album is for sale, Susan takes it while the shopkeeper’s back is
turned and leaves a check for what she considers a fair price (7). Exhilarated
and surprised by what she has done, Susan becomes obsessed with The
Gang. She falls in love with the women, fantasizing that she is the photog-
rapher interacting with them as they pose (15). Soon the women in the
pictures start speaking to Susan. When she wonders silently, “How did I
find you?” Harriet, the most flirtatious of The Gang answers, “‘Silly girl …
we found you’” (16). By the fourth chapter Harriet’s ghost caresses Susan
as she falls asleep; in Chapter Seven, Susan finds out firsthand “what a kiss
was like in 1926,” and in Chapter Eight Harriet seduces Susan, convincing
her, “It’s for your education … Tell yourself it’s for history” (55).
Susan takes a leave of absence from graduate school and then quits
altogether to work at an antique shop aptly called “Out of Time” and to
focus her attention on The Gang. Confused, fearing she may be losing her
mind, Susan shares only a little of what is happening with her level-headed
32 L. GARBER
lover, Catherine, a school teacher and self-taught community historian.

Catherine’s archival research about The Gang’s four members turns up
dates, news articles, even political writings by one of the women, but it
leaves Susan cold. She far prefers first-person research to more traditional
methods: “It all seemed like a lot of work to me, because I was convinced
they would tell me their stories eventually and far more accurately than
written records could” (19). Susan feels that Catherine’s factual research
is “cluttering things up” (45), because her “fascination with precise facts
and dates left no room for intuition or imagination. Or romance” (48).
In historian Richard Slotkin’s (2005) terms, Susan seeks to understand,
unsatisfied with what Catherine can prove “according to the rules of the
discipline” (223). When Susan finally tells Catherine about what’s hap-
pening, she explains, “I’m having this historical experience” (72). The
couple continues to pursue the history of the Gang in tandem, with
Catherine grounding Susan and Susan urging Catherine to push boundar-
ies. Martinac presents the haunting as real, leading the reader to accept
Susan’s version of events, tempered and contextualized by Catherine’s his-
torical facts. In other words, the reader participates in the historiographi-
cal debate that in an important sense is the subject of the novel.
While Catherine’s interest in history is both academic and political,
Susan’s is personal. She needs lesbian history in the form of elders and
foremothers to teach her how to navigate her own life. Harriet’s ghost
seduces Susan into examining the past, but it is the ghost of Harriet’s lover
Lucy who teaches Susan what to do with what she learns. Lucy’s ghost
literally places in Susan’s hands one of the novels she wrote, an artifact that
leads Susan to explore a box of Lucy’s papers that she had acquired from
Lucy’s niece, based on information Catherine had uncovered at the les-
bian archives (40, 66). The box contains letters, packages, and notebooks,
“All precisely packed away. For history” (85). It also holds a fountain pen
that Susan eventually realizes was Lucy’s first gift to Harriet (136, 143).
When Susan picks up the pen, she hears Lucy’s ghost repeat the words
Lucy had said decades ago to Harriet, “Write me something beautiful with
it” (89). When Susan agrees to, she gets the first clue in answer to a ques-
tion she will soon pose to herself, “Why me? What did they want of me?”
The answer, as it reveals itself over the rest of the novel, gives Susan a clear
direction for her life at long last.
At first Susan thinks Lucy wants her to write a novel about the The
Gang (164). When her attempt fails, Lucy’s ghost leads Susan to her out-
line for a novel from 1929; Susan “only had to read a few lines to know it
was the novel [she herself] had been trying to write” (166). Catherine is
skeptical about Susan’s plans to finish Lucy’s novel without further
research, reigniting the tension between Susan’s yearning for lesbian fore-
mothers and Catherine’s reverence for historical accuracy. Catherine’s
accusation that Susan “just want[s] to make up the story, your story, the
way you see it” rings true, even to Susan’s ears (167). Although Susan
promises Catherine that she will “get the whole story” before she writes
the novel, Susan knows she’s not alone in her need to interact with the
past on an emotional level. In case Martinac’s readers don’t consciously
register the same pull in themselves, at a particularly enlightening juncture
in her research Susan thinks, “This would be a novel about love and loss
and remembrance … Lesbians would eat it up. I’m not the only one, after
all, with fantasies about true and perfect love” (205).
It turns out that Lucy’s ghost seeks Susan’s help in publishing a finished
manuscript titled Our Time, Our Place, which will bring lesbian history to
life for others in the same way that haunting has brought it to life for
Susan. The manuscript turns up in a box of Lucy’s papers at the apartment
of her former nurse—another lesbian who becomes part of Susan’s friend-
ship circle (216). Lucy’s ghost, who had empathized with Susan’s difficul-
ties as a kindred writer (162–63) plays midwife to Susan’s professional
writing career. Susan writes the introduction to and publishes Lucy’s
novel, which stops both the haunting and Susan’s writer’s block. In the
closing pages of Martinac’s novel, Susan begins writing a historical novel
of her own and takes on the longer-term project of editing Lucy’s journals
and short fiction for publication (218–19).
The literary ambitions and mentorship of Lucy’s ghost help Susan in
more ways than one. Susan gains focus as a writer, but her haunting by
The Gang, especially Lucy, also leads Susan back to Catherine after a
period of estrangement (144–45). If Susan and Catherine don’t have
“true and perfect love,” in the end they have a strong relationship and a
future together, warts and all, just like Harriet and Lucy had. Susan learns
from Lucy’s journal that Lucy, too, questioned her relationship, wonder-
ing about its long-term viability (186). Lucy’s ghost makes the connection
clear when she explains that she stayed with Harriet despite her infidelities
for the same reason that Catherine and Susan recommit to each other:
“Because you have something together other people can’t see, don’t want
to see” (181). This parallel, once voiced by Lucy’s ghost, makes Susan
realize she has been on the right track: “That,” she responds, “is what I’ve
felt all along! Why the facts didn’t matter so much to me! It’s something
34 L. GARBER
else, something … deeper” (181). In other words, Susan’s needs in the

present, which compelled her pursuit of The Gang and gave rise to her
relationships with ghosts, turn out to provide a useful impetus for under-
standing the past. She couldn’t have done it without Catherine’s level-
headed research, but Catherine could not have understood history fully
until she came around to believing in Susan’s personal knowledge.
By the end of Martinac’s novel, Susan and Catherine are living together
in a house recently vacated by the death of Elinor, another member of The
Gang. Elinor’s nurse Fleck lives on the bottom floor; they are frequently
visited by Tuttie, Susan’s trusted employee at the antique shop; Susan has
weekly lunches with Lucy’s lesbian niece Bea, who owns the shop where
Susan initially found The Gang’s scrapbook; and Susan has become friends
with Lucy’s nurse Sophia and her lover. In short, over the course of her
“historical experience” Susan has put her relationship on a solid footing
and assembled “[her] own gang” (193), bringing the novel full circle as
lesbian community is reinvented for the present generation of lesbians
through the intervention of their foremothers.
In several lesbian historical novels, spectral visitation provides the nec-
essary ingredient for the fictional researcher to accomplish what Lisa
Hogeland (2009) calls “speculative knowledge production,” an endeavor
vital to lesbian history. Terry Castle demonstrated some years ago that the
“apparitional lesbian” is a staple of western literature from the eighteenth
century onward. First used to stigmatize actual lesbianism, later to invoke
it, the lesbian specter wafts through mainstream culture until it is embraced
by contemporary lesbian writers who “have succeeded in transforming her
from a negating to an affirming presence” (65). As Paulina Palmer (1999)
explains in Lesbian Gothic,
The protagonist’s encounter with the spectral figure, while involving her on
a psychological plane in a confrontation with a ghostly double who reflects
aspects of her own personality, also furnishes her, in terms of woman’s quest
for origins, with an entry into the lesbian past. The encounter, though emo-
tionally disturbing, is nonetheless represented as instructive. (64)
In Palmer’s terms, the lesbian ghost is a perfect vehicle for “personal and
psychological” explorations of history (19).
If dead lesbians won’t or can’t visit contemporary protagonists, in some
novels protagonists travel to the past to visit them. At the start of Brenda
Adcock’s The Sea Hawk, marine archaeologist Julia Blanchard has reached
the limits of academic research into the shipwreck of the Georgia Peach.
Like Susan in Out of Time, Julia’s personal life is in shambles, “the perfect
life she thought she was living … unexpectedly gone” (1). Julia’s fault isn’t
too little research, but too much; her lover is straying with other women
because Julia is “always working.” Confronted by Julia about her infidel-
ity, Amy retorts, “Did you expect me to be waiting for you to come home
from your little sea adventure, wearing an apron and stirring a pot of soup
to warm you like a good little mariner’s wife?” (8).
Workaholic Julia literally drowns her sorrows in her work. She heads
out to sea alone and is stranded in open water when modern-day pirates
steal her research boat (2–4). Dehydrated and nearly dead, after several
days Julia finally “sobbed and gave herself to the sea” (17), then wakes to
find herself somehow miraculously rescued by a British frigate in the early
nineteenth century (21). At first certain that she is dreaming, or has been
rescued by a ship and crew performing an elaborate historical reenact-
ment, Julia slowly concludes that she is “stuck somewhere in the past”
(28). When the frigate is attacked by French privateers, Julia is captured—
and captivated—by the striking female captain of the Faucon de Mer,
Simone Moreau (30). Fierce in battle, ruthless in ship’s discipline, and
accepted as a woman-loving woman by her crew, Simone is immediately
attracted to Julia as well. The plot twists through travels (Martinique),
wars (the Battle of New Orleans), jealousy (of Simone’s lover), flirtation,
and avoidance until Julia and Simone finally declare and consummate their
love—only to lose one another at the brink of a happy ending. When Julia
is pitched overboard in a storm, she cries out, “I love you, Simone! Never
forget that!” She has just revealed to Simone that she is from the future
(156), and as she loses her grip on Simone’s hand, she says, “I can’t [hang
on], I don’t belong here” (158–59).
Be that as it may, Julia has discovered a great deal about the past, and
herself, during her time with Simone in the nineteenth century. For one
thing, she learns that the ship she had been calling the Georgia Peach is
actually the Faucon de Mer, and she knows about the ship’s exploits and
daily life on board in great detail. The fact that Simone’s ship sunk off the
coast of Georgia, scuttled by a cannon shot from inside the hull, leads Julia
to understand that Simone lived the end of her life where she knew Julia
would live in the future (176–77, 191). More important than archaeo-
logical facts, Julia learns a life lesson in love, as she tells her parents after
she is rescued, “The sea … revealed the meaning of love to me … timeless
love does exist. I never thought I would know that kind of love” (167).
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face so close to hers. “That’s inherent in the design of all really fast
machines . . . and we simply don’t know any way of getting away
from it. . . . Why? What has that to do with the case?”
“A lot—I hope. When I was working in a flitter I had to wait up to
half an hour sometimes, for the sigma curve to stabilize enough so
that the equations would hold valid will give a longer valid
prediction.”
“Stabilize? How? I’ve never seen a sigma curve flatten out. Or
does ‘stabilize’ have a special meaning for you vortex experts?”
“Could be. It’s what happens when a sigma becomes a little more
regular than usual, so that a simpler equation will give a longer valid
prediction.”
“I see; and a difference in wave-form that would be imperceptible
to me might mean a lot to you.”
“Right. It just occurred to me that a similar line of reasoning may
hold for this seemingly entirely different set of conditions. The less
unstable the curve, the less complicated the equations and the
smaller the volume of actual data. . . .”
“Oh!” Joan’s thought soared high. “So Margie may work yet, if we
wait a while?”
“Check. Browning can’t take the ship away from you, can he?”
“No. Nobody can do anything until the job is done or I punch that
red ‘stop’ button there. D’you suppose she can do it? Storm? How
long can we wait?”
“Half an hour, I’d say. No, to settle the point definitely, let’s wait
until I can get a full ten-second prediction and see what Margie’s
doing about the situation then.”
“Wonderful! But in that case, it might be a good idea for you to be
looking at the chart, don’t you think?” she asked, pointedly. His eyes,
at the moment, were looking directly into hers, from a distance of
approximately twelve inches.
“I’ll look at it later, but right now I’m. . . .”
The ship quivered under the terrific, the unmistakable trip-
hammer blow of propellant heptadetonite. Unobserved by either of
the two scientists most concerned, the sigma curve had,
momentarily, become a trifle less irregular. The point of the saw-
tooth wave had touched the zero line. Margie had acted. The
visiplate, from which the heavily-filtered glare of the vortex had
blazed so long, went suddenly black.
“She did it, Storm!” Joan’s thought was a mental shriek of pure
joy. “She really worked!”
Whether, when the ship went free, Joan pulled Storm down to her
merely to anchor him, or for some other reason; whether Cloud
grabbed her merely in lieu of a safety-line or not; which of the two
was first to put arms around the other; these are moot points
impossible of decision at this date. The fact is, however, that the two
scientists held a remarkably unscientific pose for a good two minutes
before Joan thought that she ought to object a little, just on general
principles. Even then, she did not object with her mind; instead she
put up her block and used her voice.
“But, after all, Storm,” she began, only to be silenced as beloved
women have been silenced throughout the ages. She cut her screen
then, and her mind, tender and unafraid, reached out to his.
“This might be the perfect time, dear, to merge our minds? I’ve
been scared to death of it all along, but no more . . . let’s?”
“Uh-huh,” he demurred. “I’m still afraid of it. I’ve been thinking
about it a lot, and doing some drilling, and the more I play with it the
more scared I get. It’s dangerous. It’s like playing with duodec. I’ve
just about decided that we’d better let it drop.”
“Afraid? For yourself, or for me? Don’t try to lie with your mind,
Storm; you can’t do it. You’re afraid only for me, and you needn’t be.
I’ve been thinking, too, and digging deep, and I know I’m ready.” She
looked up at him then, her quick, bright, impish grin very much in
evidence. “Let’s go.”
“QX, Joanie, and thanks. I’ve been wanting this more than I ever
wanted anything before in my life. But not holding hands, this time.
Heart to heart and cheek to cheek.”
“Check—the closer the better.”
They embraced, and again mind flowed into mind; this time with
no thought of withholding or reserve on either side. Smoothly,
effortlessly, the two essential beings merged, each fitting its tiniest,
remotest members into the deepest, ordinarily most inaccessible
recesses of the other; fusing as quickly and as delicately and as
thoroughly as two drops of water coalescing into one.
In that supremely intimate fusion, that ultimate union of line and
plane and cellule, each mind was revealed completely to the other; a
revealment which no outsider should expect to share.
Finally, after neither ever knew how long, they released each
other and each put up, automatically, a solid block.
“I don’t know about you, Storm,” Joan said then, “but I’ve had just
about all I can take. I’m going to bed and sleep for one solid week.”
“You and me both,” Storm agreed, ungrammatically, but feelingly.
“Good night, sweetheart . . . and this had all better be strictly hush-
hush, don’t you think?”
“I do think,” she assured him. “Can’t you just imagine the field-
day the psychs would have, taking us apart?”
In view of the above, it might be assumed that the parting was
immediate, positive, and undemonstrative; but such was not exactly
the case. But they did finally separate, and each slept soundly and
long.
And fairly early the next morning—before either of them got up, at
least—Cloud sent Joan a thought.
“Awake, dear?”
“Uh-huh. Just. ’Morning, Storm.”
“I’ve got some news for you, Joanie. My brain is firing on ten
times as many barrels as I ever thought it had, and I don’t know what
half of ’em are doing. Among other things, you made what I think is
probably a top-bracket perceiver out of me.”
“So? Well, don’t peek at me, please . . . but why should I say that,
after having studied in Rigel Four for two years? Women are funny, I
guess. But, for your information, I have just extracted the ninth root
of an eighteen-digit number, in no time at all and to the last
significant decimal place, and I know the answer is right. How do you
like them potatoes, Buster?”
“Nice. We really absorbed each other’s stuff, didn’t we? But how
about joining me in person for a soupcon of ham and eggs?”
“That’s a thought, my thoughtful friend; a cogent and right
knightly thought. I’ll be with you in three jerks and a wiggle.” And she
was.
Just as they finished eating, Vesta breezed in. “Well, you two
deep-sleepers finally crawled out of your sacks, did you? It is
confusing, though, that ship’s time never agrees with planetary time.
But I live here, you know, in this city you call ‘Vegiaton,’ so I went to
bed at noon yesterday and I’ve got over half a day’s work done
already. I saw my folks and bought half of my uncle’s bank and made
the no-gambling declaration and I want to ask you both something.
After the Grand Uproar here at the ’port in your honor, will you two
and Helen and Joe and Bob and Barbara come with me to a little
dance some of my friends are having? You’ve been zo good to me,
and I want to show you off a little.”
“We’ll be glad to, Vesta, and thanks a lot,” Joan said, flashing a
thought at Cloud to let her handle this thing her own way, “and I
imagine the others would be, too, but . . . well, it’s for you, you know,
and we might be intruding. . . .”
“Why, not at all!” Vesta waved the objection away with an airy flirt
of her tail. “You’re friends of mine! And everybody’s real friends are
always welcome, you know, everywhere. And it’ll be small and quiet;
only six or eight hundred are being asked, they say. . . .” she paused
for a moment: “. . . of course, after it gets around that we have you
there, a couple of thousand or so strangers will come in too; but
they’ll all smell nice, so it’ll be QX.”
“How do you know what they’ll smell like?” Cloud asked.
“Why, they’ll smell like our crowd, of course. If they didn’t they
wouldn’t want to come in. It’s QX, then?”
“For us two, yes; but of course we can’t speak for the others.”
“Thanks, you wonderful people; I’ll go ask them right now.”
“Joan, have you blown your stack completely?” Cloud demanded.
“Small—quiet—six or eight hundred invited—a couple of thousand or
so gate-crashers—what do you want to go to a brawl like that for?”
“The chance is too good to miss—it’s priceless. . . .” She paused,
then added, obliquely: “Storm, have you any idea at all of what Vesta
thinks of you? You haven’t snooped, I’m sure.”
“No, and I don’t intend to.”
“Maybe you ought to,” Joan snickered a little, “except that it
would inflate your ego too much. It’s hard to describe. It’s not exactly
love—and not exactly worship, either god-worship or hero-worship. It
isn’t exactly adoration, but it’s very much stronger than mere
admiration. A mixture of all these, perhaps, and half a dozen others,
coupled with a simply unbelievable amount of pride that you are her
friend. It’s a peculiarly Vegian thing, that Tellurians simply do not feel.
But here’s why I’m so enthused. It has been over twenty years since
any non-Vegian has attended one of these uniquely Vegian parties
except as an outsider, and a Vegian party with outsiders looking on
isn’t a Vegian party at all. But we Storm, will be going as insiders!”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Positive. Oh, I know it isn’t us she wants, but you; but that won’t
make any difference. As Vesta’s friend—‘friend’ in this case having a
very special meaning—you’re in the center of the inner circle. As
friends of yours, the rest of us are in, too. Not in the inner circle,
perhaps, but well inside the outside circle, at least. See?”
“Dimly. ‘A friend of a friend of a friend of a very good friend of
mine,’ eh? I’ve heard that ditty, but I never thought it meant
anything.”
“It does here. We’re going to have a time. See you in about an
hour?”
“Just about. I’ve got to check with Nordquist.”
“Here I am, Storm,” the Lensman’s thought came in. Then, as
Cloud went toward his quarters, it went on: “Just want to tell you we
won’t have anything for you to do here. This is going to be a straight
combing job.”
“That won’t be too tough, will it? A Tellurian, sixty, tall, thin, grave,
distinguished-looking . . . or maybe. . . .”
“Exactly. You’re getting the idea. Cosmeticians and plastic
surgery. He could look like a Crevenian, or thirty years old and two
hundred pounds and slouchy. He could look like anything. He
undoubtedly has a background so perfectly established that fifteen
thoroughly honest Vegians would swear by eleven of their gods that
he hasn’t left his home town for ten years. So every intelligent being
on Vegia who hasn’t got a live tail, with live blood circulating in it, is
going under the Lens and through the wringer if we have to keep
Vegia in quarantine for a solid year. He is not going to get away from
us this time.”
“I’m betting on you, Nordquist. Clear ether!”
The Lensman signed off and Cloud, at the end of the specified
hour, undressed and redressed and went to the computer room. All
the others except Joe were already there.
“Hi, peoples!” Cloud called; then did a double-take. “Wow! And
likewise, Yipes! How come the tri-di outfits didn’t all collapse, Joan,
when those two spectaculars took up cybernetics?”
“I’ll never know, Storm.” Joan shook her head wonderingly, then
went on via thought; and Cloud felt her pang of sheer jealousy. “Why
is it that big girls are always so much more beautiful than little ones?
And the more clothes they take off the better they look? It simply isn’t
fair!”
Cloud’s mind reached out and meshed with hers. “Sure it is,
sweetheart. They’re beauties; you can’t take that away from
them. . . .”
And beauties they certainly were. Helen, as has been said, was
lissom and dark. Her hair was black, her eyes a midnight blue, her
skin a deep, golden brown. Barbara, not quite as tall—five feet
seven, perhaps—was equally beautifully proportioned, and even
more striking-looking. Her skin was tanned ivory, her eyes were gray,
her hair was a shoulder-length, carefully-careless mass of gleaming,
flowing, wavy silver.
“. . . they’ve got a lot of stuff: but believe me, there are several
grand lots of stuff they haven’t got, too. I wouldn’t trade half of you
for either one of them—or both of them together.”
“I believe that—at least, about both of them,” Joan giggled
mentally, “but how many men. . . .”
“Well, how many men do you want?” Cloud interrupted.
“Touché, Storm . . . but do you really. . . .”
What would have developed into a scene of purely mental
lovemaking was put to an end by the arrival of Joe Mackay, who also
paused and made appropriate noises of appreciation.
“But there’s one thing I don’t quite like about this deal,” he said
finally. “I’m not too easy in my mind about making love to a moll who
is packing a Mark Twenty Eight DeLameter. The darn thing might go
off.”
“Keep your distance, then, Lieutenant Mackay!” Helen laughed.
“Well, are we ready?”
They were. They left the ship and walked in a group through the
throng of cheering Vegians toward the nearby, gaily-decorated
stands in which the official greetings and thank-yous were to take
place. Helen and Babs loved it; just as though they were parading as
finalists in a beauty contest. Bob and Joe wished that they had
stayed in the ship and kept their clothes on. Joan didn’t quite know
whether she liked this kind of thing or not. Of the six Tellurians, only
Neal Cloud had had enough experience in public near-nudity so that
it made no difference. And Vesta?
Vesta was fairly reveling—openly, unashamedly reveling—in the
spotlight with her Tellurian friends. They reached the center stand,
were ushered with many flourishes to a reserved section already
partly filled by Captain Ross and the lesser officers and crewmen of
the good-will-touring Patrol ship Vortex Blaster II. Not all of the
officers, of course, since many had to stay aboard, and
comparatively few of the crew; for many men insist on wearing
Tellurian garmenture and refuse to tan their hides under ultra-violet
radiation—and no untanned white Tellurian skin can take with
impunity more than a few minutes of giant Vega’s blue-white fury.
Of the ceremonies themselves, nothing need be said; such things
being pretty much of a piece, wherever, whenever, or for whatever
reason held. When they were over, Vesta gathered her six friends
together and led them to the edge of the roped-off area. There she
uttered a soundless (to Tellurian ears) whistle, whereupon a group of
Vegian youths and girls formed a wedge around the seven and drove
straight through the milling crowd to its edge. There, by an evidently
pre-arranged miracle, they found enough copters to carry them all.
Chapter 16
▂▂▂▂▂▂VEGIAN JUSTICE
THE NEARER THEY got to their destination the more fidgety Vesta
became. “Oh, I hope Zambkptkn could get away and be there by
now—I haven’t seen him for over half a year!”
“Who?” Helen asked.
“My brother. Zamke, you’d better call him, you can pronounce
that. The police officer, you know.”
“I thought you saw him this morning?” Joan said.
“I saw my other brothers and sisters, but not him—he was tied up
on a job. He wasn’t sure just when he could get away tonight.”
The copter dropped sharply. Vesta seized Cloud’s arm and
pointed. “That’s where we’re going; that big building with the landing-
field on the roof. The Caravanzerie. Zee?” In moments of emotion or
excitement, most of Vesta’s sibilants reverted to Z’s.
“I see. And this is your Great White Way?”
It was, but it was not white. Instead, it was a blaze of red, blue,
green, yellow—all the colors of the spectrum. And crowds! On foot,
on bicycles, on scooters, motorbikes, and motortricycles, in cars and
in copters, it seemed impossible that anything could move in such a
press as that. And as the aircab approached its destination Neal
Cloud, space-hardened veteran and skillful flyer though he was,
found himself twisting wheels, stepping on pedals, and cutting in
braking jets, none of which were there.
How that jockey landed his heap and got it into the air again all in
one piece without dismembering a single Vegian, Cloud never did
quite understand. Blades were scant fractional inches from blades
and rotors; people were actually shoved aside by the tapering
bumpers of the cab as it hit the deck; but nothing happened. This, it
seemed, was normal!
The group re-formed and in flying-wedge fashion as before,
gained the elevators and finally the ground floor and the ballroom.
Here Cloud drew his first full breath for what seemed like hours. The
ballroom was tremendous—and it was less than three-quarters filled.
Just inside the doorway Vesta paused, sniffing delicately. “He is
here—come on!” She beckoned the six to follow her and rushed
ahead, to be met at the edge of the clear space in head-on collision.
Brother and sister embraced fervently for about two seconds. Then,
reaching down, the man broke his sister’s grip and flipped her
around sidewise, through half of a vertical circle, so that her feet
pointed straight up. Then, with a sharp “Blavzkt!” he snapped into a
back flip.
“Blavzkt—Zemp!” she shouted back, bending beautifully into such
an arch that, as his feet left the floor, hers landed almost exactly
where his had been an instant before. Then for a full minute and a
half the joyous pair pinwheeled, without moving from the spot; while
the dancers on the floor, standing still now, applauded
enthusiastically with stamping, hand-clapping, whistles, cat-calls,
and screams.
Vesta stopped the exhibition finally, and led her brother toward
Cloud and Joan. The music resumed, but the dancers did not.
Instead, they made a concerted rush for the visitors, surrounding
them in circles a dozen deep. Vesta, with both arms wrapped tightly
around Cloud and her tail around Joan, shrieked a highly
consonantal sentence—which Cloud knew meant “Lay off these two
for a couple of minutes, you howling hyenas, they’re mine”—then,
switching to English: “Go ahead, you four, and have fun!”
The first two men to lay hands on the two tall Tellurian beauties
were, by common consent and without argument, their first partners.
Two of the Vegian girls, however, were not so polite. Both had hold
of Joe, one by each arm, and stood there spitting insults at each
other past his face until a man standing near by snapped a few
words at them and flipped a coin. The two girls, each still maintaining
her grip, leaned over eagerly to see for themselves the result of the
toss. The loser promptly relinquished her hold on Joe and the winner
danced away with him.
“Oh, this is wonderful, Storm!” Joan thought. “We’ve been
accepted—we’re the first group I ever actually knew of to really
break through the crust.”
The Vegians moved away. Vesta released her captives and
turned to her brother.
“Captain Cloud, Doctor Janowick, I present to you my brother
Zamke,” she said. Then, to her brother: “They have been very good
to me, Zambktpkn, both of them, but especially the captain. You
know what he did for me.”
“Yes, I know.” The brother spoke the English “S” with barely a
trace of hardness. He shook Cloud’s hand firmly, then bent over the
hand, spreading it out so that the palm covered his face, and inhaled
deeply. Then, straightening up: “For what you have done for my
sister, sir, I thank you. As she has said, your scent is pleasing and
will be remembered long, enshrined in the Place of Pleasant Odors
of our house.”
Turning to Joan, and omitting the handshake, he repeated the
performance and bowed—and when an adult male Vegian sets out
to make a production of bowing, it is a production well worth seeing.
Then, with the suddenest and most complete change of manner
either Cloud or Joan had ever seen he said: “Well, now that the
formalities have been taken care of, Joan, how about us hopping a
couple of skips around the floor?”
Joan was taken slightly aback, but rallied quickly. “Why, I’d love it
. . . but not knowing either the steps or the music, I’m afraid I couldn’t
follow you very well.”
“Oh that won’t make any. . . .” Zamke began, but Vesta drowned
him out.
“Of course it won’t make any difference, Joan!” she exclaimed.
“Just go ahead and dance any way you want to. He’ll match your
steps—and if he so much as touches one of your slippers with his
big, fat feet, I’ll choke him to death with his own tail!”
“And I suppose it is irrefutable that you can and will dance with
me with equal dexterity, aplomb, and insouciance?” Cloud asked
Vesta, quizzically, after Joan and Zamke had glided smoothly out
into the throng.
“You zaid it, little chum!” Vesta exclaimed, gleefully. “And I know
what all those words mean, too, and if I ztep on either one of your
feet I’ll choke my zelf to death with my own tail, zo there!”
Snuggling up to him blissfully, Vesta let him lead her into the
crowd. She of course was a superb dancer; so much so that she
made him think himself a much better dancer than he really was.
After a few minutes, when he was beginning to relax, he felt an itchy,
tickling touch—something almost impalpable was creeping up his
naked back—the fine, soft fur of the extreme tip of Vesta’s ubiquitous
tail!
He grabbed for it, but, fast as he was, Vesta was faster, and she
shrieked with glee as he missed the snatch.
“See here, young lady,” he said, with mock sternness, “if you
don’t keep your tail where it belongs I’m going to wrap it around your
lovely neck and tie it into a bow-knot.”
Vesta sobered instantly. “Oh . . . do you really think I’m lovely,
Captain Nealcloud—my neck, I mean?”
“No doubt about it,” Cloud declared. “Not only your neck—all of
you. You are most certainly one of the most beautiful things I ever
saw.”
“Oh, thanks . . . I hadn’t. . . .” she stared into his eyes for
moments, as if trying to decide whether he really meant it or was
merely being polite; then, deciding that he did mean it, she closed
her eyes, let her head sink down onto his shoulder, and began to
purr blissfully; still matching perfectly whatever motions he chose to
make.
In a few minutes, however, they heard a partially-stifled shriek
and a soprano voice, struggling with laughter, rang out.
“Vesta!”
“Yes, Babs?”
“What do you do about this tail-tickling business? I never had to
cope with anything like that before!”
“Bite him!” Vesta called back, loudly enough for half the room to
hear. “Bite him good and hard, on the end of the tail. If you can’t
catch the tail, bite his ear. Bite it good.”
“Bite him? Why, I couldn’t—not possibly!”
“Well, then give him the knee, or clout him a good, solid tunk on
the nose. Or better yet; tell him you won’t dance with him any more
—he’ll be good.”
“Now you tell us what to do about tail-ticklers,” Cloud said then.
“S’pose I’d take a good bite at your ear?”
“I’d bite you right back,” said Vesta, gleefully, “and I bet you’d
taste just as nice as you smell.”
The dance went on, and Cloud finally, by the aid of both Vesta
and Zamke, did finally manage to get one dance with Joan. And, as
he had known he would, he enjoyed it immensely. So did she.
“Having fun, chum? I never saw you looking so starry-eyed
before.”
“Oh, brother!” she breathed. “To say that I was never the belle of
any ball in my schooldays is the understatement of the century, but
here . . . can you imagine it, Storm, me actually outshining Barbara
Benton and Helen Worthington both at once?”
“Sure I can. I told you. . . .”
“Of course it’s probably because their own women are so big that
I’m a sort of curiosity,” she rushed on, “but whatever the reason, this
dance is going down in my memory book in great big letters in the
reddest ink I can find!”
“Good for you—hail the conquering heroine!” he applauded. “It’ll
do you good to have your ego inflated a little. But what do you do
about this tail-tickling routine?”
“Oh, I grab their tails”—with her sense of perception, she could,
of course—“and when they try to wiggle them free I wiggle back at
them, like this,” she demonstrated, “and we have a perfectly
wonderful time.”
“Wow! I’ll bet you do—and when I get you home, you
shameless. . . .”
“Sorry, Storm, my friend,” the big Vegian who cut in wasn’t sorry
at all, and he and Cloud both knew it. “You can dance with Joan any
time and we can’t. So loosen all clamps, friend. Grab him, Vzelkt!”
Vzelkt grabbed. So, in about a minute, did another Vegian girl;
and then after a few more minutes, it was Vesta’s turn again. No
other girl could dance with him more than once, but Vesta, by some
prearranged priority, could have him once every ten minutes.
“Where’s your brother, Vesta?” he asked once. “I haven’t seen
him for an hour.”
“Oh, he had to go back to the police station. They’re all excited
and working all hours. They’re chasing Public Enemy Number One—
a Tellurian, they think he is, named Fairchild—why?” as Cloud
started, involuntarily, in the circle of her arm. “Do you know him?”
“I know of him, and that’s enough.” Then, in thought: “Did you get
that, Nordquist?”
“I got it.” Cloud was, as the Lensman had said that he would be,
under surveillance every second. “Of course, this one may not be
Fairchild, since there are three or four other suspects in other places,
but from the horrible time we and the Vegians both are having, trying
to locate this bird, I’m coming to think he is.”
The dance went on until, some hours later, there was an unusual
tumult and confusion at the door.
“Oh, the police are calling Vesta—something has happened!” his
companion exclaimed. “Let’s rush over—oh, hurry!”
Cloud hurried; but, as well as hurrying, he sent his sense of
perception on ahead, and meshed his mind imperceptibly with
Vesta’s as well.
Her mind was a queerly turbid, violently turbulent mixture of
emotions: hot with a furiously passionate lust for personal, tooth-and-
claw-revenge; at the same time icily cold with the implacable,
unswervable resolve of the dedicated, remorseless, and merciless
killer.
“Are you sure, beyond all doubt, that this is the garment of my
brother’s slayer?” Vesta was demanding.
“I am sure,” the Vegian policeman replied. “Not only did
Zambkptkn hold it pierced by the first and fourth fingers of his left
hand—the sign positive, as you know—but an eyewitness verified
the scent and furnished descriptions. The slayer was dressed as an
Aldebaranian, which accounts for the size of the garment your
brother could seize before he died; his four bodyguards as
Tellurians, with leather belts and holsters for their blasters.”
“QX.” Vesta accepted a pair of offered shears and began to cut
off tiny pieces of the cloth. As each piece began to fall it was seized
in mid-air by a Vegian man or girl who immediately ran away with it.
And in the meantime other Vegians, forming into a long line, ran past
Vesta, each taking a quick sniff and running on, out into the street.
Cloud, reaching outside the building with his perceptors, saw that all
vehicular traffic had paused. A Vegian stood on the walkway, holding
a bit of cloth pinched between thumb and fingernail. All passersby,
on foot or in any kind of vehicle, would pause, sniff at the cloth, and
—apparently—go on about their business.
But Cloud, after reading Vesta’s mind and the policeman’s,
turned as white as his space-tan would permit. In less than an hour
almost every Vegian in that city of over eight million would know the
murderer by scent and would be sniffing eagerly for him; and when
any one of them did find him. . . .
Except for the two Vegians and the six Tellurians, the vast hall
was now empty. Vesta was holding a pose Cloud had never before
seen—stiffly erect, with her tail wrapped tightly around her body.
“Can they get a scent—a reliable scent, I mean—that fast?”
Cloud asked.
“Zertainly,” Vesta’s voice was cold, level, almost uninflected.
“How long would it take you to learn that an egg you started to eat
was rotten? The man who wore this shirt is a class A Triple Prime
stinker—his odor is recognizable instantly and anywhere.”
“But as to the rest of it—don’t do this thing, Vesta! Let the law
handle it.”
“The law comes second. He killed my brother; it is my right and
my privilege to kill him. . . .”
Cloud became conscious of the fact that Joan was in his mind.
“You been here all along?” he flashed.
“In or near. You and I are one, you know,” and Vesta’s voice went
on:
“. . . and besides, the law is merciful. Its death is instant. Under
my claws and teeth he will live for hours—for a full day, I hope.”
“But officer, can’t you do something?”
“Nothing. The law comes second. As she has said, it is her right
and her privilege.”
“But it’s suicide, man—sheer suicide. You know that, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily. She will not be working alone. Whether she
lives or dies, however, it is still her right and her privilege.”
Cloud switched to thought. “Nordquist, you can stop this if you
want to. Do it.”
“I can’t, and you know I can’t. The Patrol does not and cannot
interfere in purely planetary affairs.”
“You intend, then,” Cloud demanded furiously, “to let this girl put
her naked hands and teeth up against four trigger-happy gunnies
with DeLameters?”
“Just that. There’s nothing else I or any other Patrolman can do.
To interfere in this one instance would alienate half the planets of
Civilization and set the Patrol back five hundred years.”
“Well, even though I’m a Patrolman—of sorts—I can do
something about it!” Cloud blazed, “and by God, I will!”
“We will, you mean, and we will, too,” Joan’s thought came
forcibly at first, then became dubious: “That is, if it doesn’t mean
getting you blasted, too.”
“Just what?” Nordquist’s thought was sharp. “Oh, I see . . . and,
being a Vegian, as well as a Patrolman, and the acknowledged
friend of both the dead man and his sister. . . .”
“Who’s a Vegian?” Cloud demanded.
“You are, and so are the other five of your group, as you would
have been informed if the party had not been broken up so violently.
Honorary Vegians, for life.”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing!” Joan exclaimed, “and I
studied them for years!”
“No, you never did,” Nordquist agreed. “There haven’t been many
honorary Vegians, and to my certain knowledge, not one of them has
ever talked. Vegians are very strongly psychic in picking their off-
world friends.”
“You mean to tell me that that bleached blonde over there won’t
spill everything she knows fifteen minutes after we leave here?”
Cloud demanded.
“Just that. You can’t judge character by hair, even if it were
bleached, which it isn’t. You owe her an apology, Storm.”
“If you say so, I do, and I hereby apologize, but. . . .”
“But to get back to the subject,” the Lensman went on, narrowing
his thought down so sharply as to exclude Joan. “You can do
something. You’re the only one who can. Such being the case, and
since you are no longer indispensable. I withdraw all objections. Go
ahead.”
Cloud started a thought, but Joan blanked him out. “Lensman,
has Storm been sending—can he send information to you that I can’t
dig out of his mind?”
“Very easily. He is an exceptionally fine tuner.”
“I’m sorry, Joanie,” Cloud thought, hastily, “but it sounded too
much like bragging to let you in on. However, you’re in from now on.”
Then, aloud, “Vesta, I’m staying with you,” he said, quietly.
“I was sure you would,” she said, as quietly. “You are my friend
and Zamke’s. Although your customs are not exactly like ours, a
man of your odor does not desert his friends.”
Cloud turned then to the four lieutenants, who stood close-
grouped. “Will you four kids please go back to the ship, and take
Joan with you?”
“Not on Thursdays, Storm,” Joe said, pointing to an
inconspicuous bronze button set into a shoulder-strap. “We both rate
Blaster Expert First. Count us in,” and Bob added:
“Joan has been telling us an earful, and what she didn’t tell us a
couple of Vegian boys did. The Three Honorary Vegian Musketeers;
that’s us. Lead on, d’Artagnan!”
“Bob and Joe are staying, too, Vesta,” Cloud said then.
“Of course. I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you myself about being
adopted, but I knew somebody would. But you, Joan and Barbara
and Helen, you three had better go back to the ship. You can be of
no use here.”
Two of them were willing enough to go, but:
“Where Neal Cloud goes, I go,” Joan said, and there was no
doubt whatever that she meant exactly that.
“Why?” Vesta demanded. “Commander Cloud, the fastest
gunman in all space, is necessary for the success of this our
mission. He can, from a cold, bell-tone start, at thirty yards, burn the
centers out of six irregularly-spaced targets. . . .”
“Nordquist! Lay off! What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
Cloud thought, viciously.
“I don’t think—I know,” came instant reply. “Do you want her
hanging on your left arm when the blasting starts? This is the only
possible way Joan Janowick can be handled. Lay off yourself!” and
Vesta’s voice went calmly on:
“. . . in exactly two hundred and forty nine mils. Lieutenant
Mackay and Lieutenant Ingalls, although perhaps not absolutely
necessary, are highly desirable. They are fast enough, and are of
deadly accuracy. When either of them shoots a man in a crowd,
however large, that one man dies, and not a dozen bystanders. Now
just what good would you be, Lieutenant-Commander Janowick?
Can you fire a blaster with any one of these men? Or bite a man’s
throat out with me?”
For probably the first time in her life, Joan Janowick stood mute.
“And suppose you do come along,” Vesta continued relentlessly.
“With you at his side, in the line of fire, do you suppose. . . .”
“Just a minute—shut up, Vesta!” Cloud ordered, roughly. “Listen,
all of you. The Lensman is doing this, not Vesta, and I’ll be damned if
I’ll let anybody, not even a Lensman, bedevil my Joan this way. So,
Joan, wherever we go, you can come along. All I ask is, you’ll keep a
little ways back?”
“Of course I will, Storm,” and Joan crept into the shelter of his
arm.
“Ha—I thought you’d pop off at about this point,” Nordquist’s
thought came chattily into Cloud’s mind. “Good work, my boy; you’ve
consolidated your position no end.”
“Well, what do we do now?” Joe Mackay broke the somewhat
sticky silence that followed.
“We wait,” Vesta said, calmly. “We wait right here until we receive
news.”
They waited; and, as they waited the tension mounted and
mounted. Before it became intolerable, however, the news came in,
and Cloud, reading Vesta’s mind as the ultra-sonic information was
received, relayed it to other Tellurians. The murderer and his four
bodyguards were at that moment entering a theater less than one
city block away. . . .
“Why, they couldn’t be!” Helen protested. “Nobody could be that
stupid . . . or . . . I wonder. . . ?”
“I wonder, too.” This from Joan. “Yes, it would be the supremely
clever thing to do; the perfect place to hide for a few hours while the
worst of the storm blows over and they can complete their planned
getaway. Provided, of course, they’re out-worlders and thus don’t
know what we Vegians can do with our wonderful sense of smell. Of
course they aren’t a Tellurian and four Aldebaranians any more, are
they?”
“No, they are five Centralians now. Perfectly innocent. They think
their blasters are completely hidden under those long over shirts, but
now and again a bulge shows—they’ve still got blasters on their hips.
The theater’s crowded, but the five friends want to sit together. The
manager thinks it could be arranged, by paying a small gratuity to a
few seat-holders who would like to make a fast credit that way . . .
he’ll place them and it’s almost time for us to go. ’Bye, Joanie—stay
back, remember!” and she was in his arms.
“How about it, Helen?” Joe asked. “Surely you’re going to kiss
your Porthos good-bye, aren’t you?”
“Of a surety, m’enfant!” she exclaimed, and did so with
enthusiasm. “But it’s more like Aramis, I think—he kissed everybody,
you know—and since I’m not hooked like Joan is—yet—don’t think
that this is establishing a precedent.”
“Well, Babs, that leaves you and me.” Bob reached out—she was
standing beside him—and pulled her close. “QX?”
“Why, I . . . I guess so.” Barbara blushed furiously. “But Bob . . . is
it really dangerous?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. Not very, really, I don’t think. At least I certainly
hope not. But blasters are not cap-pistols, you know, and whenever
one goes off it can raise pure hell. Why? Would you really miss me?”
“You know I would, Bob,” and her kiss had more fervor than either
she or he would have believed possible a few minutes before. And at
its end she laughed, shakily, and blushed again as she said, “I’ve got
sort of used to having you around, so be sure and come back.”
They left the building and walked rapidly along a strangely quiet
street to the theater. Without a word they were ushered up a short
flight of stairs.
“Hold up, Vesta!” Cloud thought sharply. “We can’t see a thing—
wait a couple of minutes.”
They waited five minutes, during which time they learned exactly
where the enemy were and discussed every detail of the proposed
attack.
“I still can’t see well enough to shoot,” Cloud said then. “Can they
give us a little glow of light?”
They could. By almost imperceptible increments the thick, soft
blackness was relieved.
“That’s enough.” The light, such as it was, steadied.
“Ready?” Vesta’s voice was a savage growl, low, deep in her
throat.
“Ready.”
“No more noise, then.”
They walked forward to the balcony’s edge, leaned over it, looked
down. Directly beneath Vesta’s head was seated a man in Centralian
garb; four others were behind, in front of, and at each side of, their
chief.
“Now!” Vesta yelled, and flung herself over the low railing.
At her shout four Vegians ripped four Centralian shirts apart,
seized four hip-holstered blasters, and shouted with glee—but they
shouted too soon. For the real gun-slick, then as now, did not work
from the hip, but out of his sleeve; and these were four of the
coldest, fastest killers to be found throughout the far flung empire of
Boskone. Thus, all four flashed into action even before they began
rising to their feet.
But so did Storm Cloud; and his heavy weapon was already out
and ready. He knew what those hands were doing, in the instant of
their starting to do it, and his DeLameter flamed three times in what
was practically one very short blast. He had to move a little before he
could sight on the fourth guard—Vesta’s furiously active body was in
the way—so Joe and Bob each got a shot, too. Three bolts of
lightning hit that luckless wight at once, literally cremating him in air
as he half-crouched, bringing his blaster to bear on the catapulting
thing attacking his boss.
When Vesta went over the rail she did not jump to the floor below.
Instead, her hands locked on the edge; her feet dug into the
latticework of the apron. She squatted. Her tail flashed down,
wrapping itself twice around the zwilnik’s neck. She heaved, then,
and climbed with everything she had; and as she stood upright on
the railing, eager hands reached down to help her tail lift its burden
up into the balcony. The man struck the floor with a thud and Vesta
jumped at him.
“Your fingers first—one at a time,” she snarled; and, seizing a
hand, she brought it toward her mouth.
She paused then as if thunderstruck; a dazed, incredulous
expression spreading over her face. Bending over, she felt, curiously,
tenderly, of his neck.
“Why, he . . . he’s dead!” she gasped. “His neck . . . it’s . . . it’s
broken! From such a little, tiny pull as that? Why, anybody ought to
have a stronger neck than that!”
She straightened up; then, as a crowd of Vegians and the
Tellurian women came up, she became instantly her old, gay self.
“Well, shall we all go back and finish our dance?”
“What?” Cloud demanded. “After this?”
“Why certainly,” Vesta said, brightly. “I’m sorry, of course, that I
killed him so quickly, but it doesn’t make any real difference. Zamke
is avenged; he can now enjoy himself. We’ll join him in a few years,
more or less. Until then, what would you do? What you call ‘mourn’?”
“I don’t know . . . I simply don’t know,” Cloud said, slowly, his arm
tightening around Joan’s supple waist. “I thought I’d seen everything,
but . . . I suppose you can have somebody take that body out to the
ship, so they can check it for identity?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll do that. Right away. You’re sure you don’t want to
dance any more?”
“Very sure, my dear. Very sure. All I want to do is take Joan back
to the ship.”
“QX. I won’t see you again this trip, then; your hours are so funny.
I’ll send for my things. And I won’t say good-bye, Captain Nealcloud
and you other wonderful people, because we’ll see each other again,
soon and often. Just so-long, and thanks tremendously for all you
have done for me.”
And Vesta the Vegian strode away, purring contentedly to herself
—tail high.

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Novel Approaches to Lesbian History

How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to

Modern Deep Learning for Tabular Data: Novel Approaches

The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,

Computational Approaches for Novel Therapeutic and

Seeing Comics through Art History: Alternative

New Approaches in History and Theology to Same-Sex Love

History Making a Difference : New Approaches from

Comparative Approaches to Program Planning – Ebook PDF

Denise deCaires Narain

More information about this series at

ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Cover image © Micha Klootwijk / Alamy Stock Photo

As a younger woman I was fortunate to be taught, mentored, and

essay “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and

1 Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother 1

2 H(a)unting the Archives 19

3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex*

4 Tomboys and Indians 77

5 Unsafe Seas for Women111

6 The Usual Suspects145

Epilogue: Failing That, Invent165

Lesbian Historical Novels by Category167

­Key to Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels171

Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels173

Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

need for history. We certainly speculated about living women—from Tracy

landscape: What is a lesbian in the first place? What constitutes evidence of

be different—even heroic—in a comfortably recognizable and marketable

Queer theorists exploring temporality make similar claims; “queer time”

What energizes ancestral genealogy is its confidence in—and political com-

resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). To most garden-­

writer. Neo-Victorian scholars discuss Donoghue as well, but her contri-

groundbreaking study Between Men: English Literature and Male

Imagine living in a city where there are no monuments, no buildings from

Grounded in archival research, Donoghue’s lesbian historical novels pro-

Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of

———. The Little Stranger. Virago, 2009.

H(a)unting the Archives

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

With the campiness of a sophisticated drag performance, Dunye’s faux doc-

Maybe The Watermelon Woman is such a successful hoax not only

such as Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, and Louise Beavers; she

identify. She is thoroughly schooled by June, in a voiceover narration that

(188), Hannah’s historical context meant she was condemned, brutally

constructedness of history as well as its usefulness to the present. I would

lover, Catherine, a school teacher and self-taught community historian.

else, something … deeper” (181). In other words, Susan’s needs in the

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1 Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother 1

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3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex*

4 Tomboys and Indians 77

5 Unsafe Seas for Women111

6 The Usual Suspects145

Epilogue: Failing That, Invent165

Lesbian Historical Novels by Category167

Key to Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels171

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resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). To most garden-