This piece was inspired by Shane Murphy’s piece ‘Five Pieces of Queer Content to keep you going after Pride Month’, which you can read here.
The patriarchal influences which continue to oppress minorities have also been institutionally effective in the marginalisation of the voices of women, POC and members of the LGBTQ+ community within the publishing industry. To LGBT women and LGBT women of colour, the impact of white, heteronormative dominance can be felt as a double (for the former) or triple oppression (for the latter). The term ‘triple oppression’ owes much of its influence to its promulgation by leading Black socialist Claudia Jones, and relates to the conjunctive power of the patriarchy for oppressing Black women through race, class and gender stratification. Ann Allen Shockley, who focuses heavily on Black lesbian experiences in her writing, instrumentalises this terms to describe the reality of Black LGBT lives. Though Pride Month 2020 is over, it is important to recognise the way in which many of perceivably archaic forms of LGBT oppression continue to manifest, and to celebrate these voices all year round and avoid performative engagement with queer culture. The following are five books centred on the experiences of LGBT women you should read:
1. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (1982)
Perhaps Lorde’s most famous work, this poetic autobiography instantly absorbs the reader with its controlled, intricately constructed but free-spirited poetic-prosaic style. Lorde powerfully pulls us through her childhood into adulthood, providing an intimate portraiture of herself and the women around her – to whom the work is dedicated. Imbedding the texts with anecdotal moments of her mother’s and her own Carriacou heritage, its predominantly American context is interwoven with apparitional moments of magic from life on the island. It should be noted that Lorde invents a new genre for Zami, the biomythography, as a substantiation of her story. Lorde approaches the mode of the autobiography through the lens of historicising her own life, while mythologising elements of truth with her own brand of fictional alchemy. Lorde’s insurmountable place within the lesbian canon, and the Black lesbian corpus, is inauguarated by this text which not only shows her immense technical skill but also her intellectual prowess as she embeds her writing with its own ideological strength. The piece is an achievement of style and substance in every respect.
2. Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
Jeanette Winterson’s breakout classic was a dazzling success, receiving a coveted BAFTA-winning BBC drama adaptation of the same name. The story is a semi-autobiographical work following young Jeanette, who is adopted into an evangelist group as part of the Elim Pentecostal Church. We follow Jeanette from childhood into her experiences as a teenager and a young woman, parallel realisations of her gayness and her commitment to the church, and her ‘destiny’ to be a missionary, manifesting along the way. The relationship between Jeanette and her intensely matriarchal and religious mother is centralised, and its tumultuous presence becomes an uneasy anchor as Jeanette slowly self-realises her life as a lesbian, and thus her incongruity with the environment of her childhood. Equally matter-of-fact and personally introspective, the prose of Winterson’s breakout work holds a consistently strong voice, effectively utilising the motif of oranges invoked in the title in her metaphorical exploration of similarly unfurling female queerness.
3. Nancy Garden, Annie on my Mind (1982)
A wholly charming story of two schoolgirls who fall in love, Annie on my Mind is a dreamy YA novel for any seeking to expand their LGBT reading portfolio. Garden’s storytelling is compelling, but manages to succeed in striking the difficult balance between its lightness of style with themes of emerging young self-hood and homophobia in the eighties. The mentioned ‘lightness’ imbues the story of Liza and Annie with a joyousness historically uncommon in lesbian fiction, a genre which only saw its first ‘happy novel’ in 1952 with Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, later renamed and more famously known as Carol. A story of young love with a undeniable sense of prettiness to it, Annie on my Mind is a perfect introductory text to lesbian fiction for any looking to wet their toes before diving right in.
4. Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
While this article has had a predominant focus on LGBT female work with a historical legacy, it goes without saying that contemporary LGBT works continue to pioneer and work to de-centre the heteronormative experience. Bernandine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other has been making headlines due to its top ranking in the UK fiction charts, and its importance to modern fictional discourse on race should not be ignored. What it also does, however, though less explicitly than its counterparts on this list, is interlock her stories with discussions of Black LGBT life as well, some of its most recognisable recurring characters being Black gay women or non-binary people. Its resonance on the Black LGBT experience shouldn’t be ignored considering the necessity of intersectional discussions in dialogues surrounding systemic forms of oppression. Evaristo uses a poetic and non-conformative prose to tie the thematic realism to a more surreal style of semantic expression. Its wording is compelling, strong and beautiful, and the interweaving stories of characters are tied together within a framework of genius originality. Though it is not one of the more explicitly LGBT works by a Black author in the last few years by far (Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez, for example, was released this summer), its recent resurgence after its tied Booker win last year prompted my discussion of some of its overlooked LGBT-representative elements.
5. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973)
A seminal piece of lesbian writing by any standards, Rubyfruit Jungle is an insatiable and rugged text, driven forward energetically by its female lead Molly Bolt, an autobiographical stand-in for Brown herself. It follows Bolt’s childhood in the South, her move to Florida and then her move to New York to pursue her directorial dream. The strength of Bolt’s voice, her self-assuredness in her sexuality and the text’s unveiled approach to lesbian sex makes Rubyfruit Jungle a striking reading experience and, despite its casual prose style, its tonal strength is never undermined. The only text on this list to be consistently comedic, it provides a refreshing nuance to many stereotypical approaches to lesbian writing.
