Happy birthday to bisexual composer, author, and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth! Ethel was actually born April 22nd, 1868, but her family preferred to celebrate on the 23rd, to match up with the date Shakespeare is also thought to have been born.
In 1912, Ethel was arrested for throwing bricks through the windows of anti-suffrage politicians’ houses. She spent two months in prison, where she was once spotted leading a rousing chorus of her own composition, Song of Freedom, for the other women imprisoned with her. They marched around the exercise yard while she conducted the performance from a window with her toothbrush.
Ethel was given a damehood in 1922 for her work as a writer and composer. She passed away in 1944, aged 86.
Mark Ashton died on this day, the 11th of February, in 1987.
Mark
was born on the 19th of May, 1960 in Oldham, but grew up in Portrush, Northern Ireland. He moved to London in 1978, where he worked in
a bar in King’s Cross, in drag as a barmaid with a blonde beehive.
In
the 1980s, he volunteered for London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard,
campaigned for CND and joined the Communist Party, becoming the first gay secretary of the Young Communist League. Though Mark transformed the Party’s approach to LGBT rights, he and Mike Jackson, who he’d met through Switchboard, wanted to be active as openly gay people. They formed
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) when they collected donations for miners on strike at 1984 Gay Pride.
In the evening of 1984 Pride, a miner spoke at a rally, and they were struck by the similarities between the two struggle, of LGBT rights and the Miners’ Strike. Having collected about £150, they advertised a meeting in Capital Gay. 11 people turned up and from the meeting they made a leaflet to launch LGSM - the leaflet was accepted except with an amendment to ‘one in ten miners is gay.’
As LGSM, they supported the miners as lesbian and gay people. At the second meeting, they decided to focus on one community, of the Dulais Valley, as one of the members, Hugh Williams, was from there. They then met David (Dai) Donovan, who also had thought through the similarities of their struggles and how LGSM could help. A month later, 27 lesbians and gay men, arrived at Onllwyn village in Dulais Valley.
Other than some hostility (and confusion towards vegetarianism), they experienced warmth, friendship and solidarity. LGSM raised £20,000 for families of miners on strike, and based on The Sun writing that “a group of perverts” were “supporting the pits,” they organised the Pits and Perverts concert in December, 1984, headlined by Bronski Beat. The miners marched with LGSM at Gay Pride in 1985.
Mark was admitted to hospital on 30th January, 1987, and died 12 days later from pneumonia, aged 26. At his memorial, there were banners from the Communist Party, Anti-Apartheid, anti-nuclear, Caribbean and community groups, as well as from LGSM. The Mark Ashton Trust was created to support individuals
diagnosed with Aids; Mark is also remembered on the UK Aids Memorial
Quilt and by Terrence Higgins Trust, with the Mark Ashton Red Ribbon
Fund and a plaque at their London headquarters. In 2017, on what would have been his 57th birthday, he was honoured with a blue
plaque above Gay’s The Word bookshop.
[Images: 1. Mark Ashton at Gay Pride 1981. 2. Mark Ashton at Gay
Pride
1985, wearing a LGSM t-shirt and holding a pink “Communist Party” banner
with the words “pinko commie queers.” 3. Blue plaque reading: “Lesbians
and Gays Support the Miners. Mark Ashton 1960-1987. Political and
Community Activist. LGSM met at Gay’s the Word bookship on this site
1984/5.”]
Nobuko Yoshiya! Out and proud lesbian! Author of lesbian lit
& stories with titles like “Husbands Are Useless”! What’s not to love about
her?
Her middle-class, conservative background did not
necessarily predispose her to become the lesbian icon she’s known as today, but
Nobuka Yoshiya never quite seem to fit the role of the good, dutiful wife she
was supposed to take on. She developed early on a love of reading and writing
that came in the way of her learning domestic skills (who can relate?). When
she moved to Tokyo in 1915, she started breaking away more visibly from gender
norms and expectations: she adopted a more androgynous style, cutting her hair
short (thus also emulating Western fashion of the 20s), she traveled
extensively, and she’s recognized as one of the first Japanese women to own a
car and a racehorse. She loved horse racing and golf, and designed her own
house, which became the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum after her death (but if
you want to go see it, make sure to plan in advance: it’s open only twice a
year, in early May and November, for three days each time).
Even though she was one of 20th-century Japan’s
most popular, commercially successful and prolific writers, there’s not a whole
lot of scholarly work on her or translations of her writings, at least in the English-speaking
Western world – perhaps because the bulk of her writing was serialized romance and
teen girls’ novels, and thus not seen as a contender for the ‘serious
literature’ category. Even so, she enjoyed an especially broad readership among
young women; she pioneered the Class S genre – which refers to literature dealing
with strong friendships and romance between schoolgirls – and was influential
in developing shōjo (schoolgirl) anime,
manga, and literature.
Yoshiya was in a lifelong partnership with Chiyo Monma, a
math teacher in Tokyo whom she met in 1923. Their life together was no secret,
and Yoshiay openly talked about it in personal essays and magazine interviews. Their
relationship was both romantic and professional, as they worked together as
author and secretary. Since same-sex marriage was not possible in Japan,
Yoshiya adopted Monma in 1957: this was the only legal way that made it
possible for lesbians to share property and make medical decisions for each
other – in short, to be recognized as family for each other. Their relationship
only ended with Yoshiya’s death in 1973.
(I STILL can’t get over the “husbands are useless” thing.)
On this day in 2016, the film Baka Bukas was first released in the Philippines
at the Cinema One Originals Film Festival. Baka
Bukas was the directorial debut of lesbian filmmaker Samantha Lee, who says
that the film is “the story of what happens when you fall in love with your
best friend.”
For its English-language distribution, the title of the film was changed to Maybe Tomorrow (x).
Inspired by the director’s own
life experiences, Baka Bukas follows
two girls named Alex and Jess. Alex, played by Jasmine Curtis-Smith, is a semi-out
lesbian with a successful career as a social media manager. Despite having a
family who embraces her sexuality, the one person she has yet to come out
to is her best friend Jess – played by Louise delos Reyes. Things become
complicated when Jess learns that not only is she the only person who Alex is
not out of the closet to, but that Alex is also secretly in love with her.
Unlike other films which deal with friendships between lesbians and straight
girls, such as Almost Adults, Baka Bukas follows Jess on her own journey
of sexual self-discovery as she realizes that she too may have been in love
with Alex this whole time.
The film became a finalist at the
Cinema One Originals Film Festival and won the overall awards for Audience
Choice, Best Actress for Jasmine Curtis-Smith, and Best Sound. It eventually
got a wide release in March on 2017. In an interview with CNN Philippines, director
Samantha Lee said, “I conceptualized the film because I wanted to see a
representation of the LGBT community that went beyond the portrayals that are
shown in mainstream media. The characters in this film are fully flawed
functional human beings. They are more than just an accessory to the plot, they
are the plot.”
Hello again queerlings! Happy Asexual Awareness Week from your friendly History is Gay hosts.
To our ace, aro, & anywhere in between listeners, we love you and hope you have all the delicious cake you can get this week! Each day this week, we’re bringing you short factoids about some people in history who likely could have identified as ace!
Today’s #AsexualAwarenessWeek highlight is illustrator Edward Gorey!
Gorey’s quirky & morbid works may have occasionally featured sexual themes, but he himself viewed his identity as a sexless one.
In an interview, he was once asked about his sexuality and he responded:
“I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something … I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t … what I’m trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else …”
American labor union organizer and workers’ rights activist. Born in Lithuania, Newman had to fight for her early education. The public schools would not accept Jews, and the Jewish schools would not accept women, so she begged her way into her father’s classes, then proceeded to question his teachings on gender segregation. When her father died in 1901, she and her mother emigrated to New York City, and Newman—still a child—began working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Depressed by the terrible conditions there, she found solace in discovering socialism through a Yiddish newspaper. As a teenager, she organized an after-work leftist book club at the factory, a precursor of her career to come. When she was 20, Newman led a group of independent women to organize a rent strike in the tenements of the Lower East Side. 10,000 families refused to pay their rent on January 1, 1908, the largest rent strike the city had ever seen, which sparked decades of tenants’ rights activism. The following year, she organized a strike of 40,000 female garment workers. The attention earned her the title “east side Joan of Arc” from the New York Times, and a Socialist Party nomination for New York secretary of state, even though women did not yet have the right to vote. She was also appointed the first female general organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and worked with the Women’s Trade Union League. Her greatest fears were realized in 1911, when a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killed 146 workers, including many of her friends. She joined the resulting commission to inspect factory conditions, and shifted her attention towards politics and legislation. By the 1920s, Newman found herself part of the circle of women, mostly lesbians, who surrounded Eleanor Roosevelt at her cottage Val-Kill. This gave her access to politicians, who frequently sought her advice. Also part of this circle was her partner, Frieda Miller. They had met in 1917 while Miller was a teacher in Philadelphia, and in 1923 they moved to Greenwich Village where they raised Miller’s daughter together. They remained a couple for over 50 years, until Miller’s death. During that time, Newman worked as educational director for the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Health Center. She lived her final years with her adopted daughter, seeing the rebirth of feminism in the 1970s, and being rediscovered as an early feminist hero.
Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.
“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”
From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.
ive recently found out that in the 80s lesbians who were more interested in cuddles and kisses rather than sex were called bambi lesbians
it’s such a cute thing omg let’s bring this term back
the love ace lesbians found for this post warms my heart mind body and soul and spirit
reblog to make an ace lesbian feel happy
Okay, so I hate to be a Debbie-Downer here because I would love to use this term for myself. But I went back and tried to look into how accurate this is and honestly? The only source for the term is literally OPs. Everyone who mentions “bambi lesbians” always points back to this post. I even went into archived text and lgbt magazines SPECIFICALLY in the 80s and it never came up. I sure as hell found every other kind of lesbian category (I could even tell you when they started to trend in the community) but not that one.
Sorry, OP is either lying or got lied to. But hell, use the term anyway because lgbt slang is always evolving. Make it a thing. Just don’t keep quoting it was a thing in the 80s because there’s no evidence and its misinformation.
This has been loitering in our likes for a while, and ace awareness week seemed like a good time to bring it out, and share some good news - there is actually some evidence suggesting this might be true! We found it while researching for our podcast on queer slang: on p.60 of the second edition of The Alyson Almanac, you’ll find the entry:
BAMBI-SEXUALITY. Physical interaction centered more about touching, kissing, and caressing than around genital sexuality.
The Alyson Almanac describes itself as “a treasury of information for the gay and lesbian community”, and was first put out by the Boston-based queer publishing house Alyson Publications in 1989. I can’t find the first edition online, or determine how different the second edition, published in 1990, was to the first, so I can’t confirm that bambi-sexuality was mentioned in this book in the 1980s, but I am willing to hazard a guess that it didn’t appear in a book in the very first year it was spoken - which would suggest it was being used in the 1980s. And while this doesn’t confirm the existence of the term “bambi lesbian” at that time, it definitely points in that direction. If anyone knows more, let us know!
