Lesbian Non-Fiction Books
Lesbians in the media are becoming more present, more diverse and more accepted as the years go back. Accessible internet across the globe has seen a surge in Lesbian Web Series which are a great Indie option to enjoy lesbian and LGBTQIA+ storylines. We also managed to devise a list of 130+ Lesbian Movies and over 60+ Lesbian TV Shows if you’re looking for an animated fix of inclusive media.
For fiction fans, we have a list of Lesbian Fiction Books too as well as a collection of Lesbian Documentaries.
After lots of research and a lengthy bout of reading, we have devised a list of 44 Lesbian Non-Fiction books we could find for fans of strong inclusive factual media.
The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan
Sappho was an iconic lesbian figure active in the year 630-570 BC. She was an archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos writing lyric poetry on love and women, though the book isn’t primarily focused on Sappho herself, it looks at the history of Hollywood and lesbian covering the tightly interwoven lives of Hollywood goddesses, Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Tallulah Bankhead.
This book lifts the veil from the lives of Hollywood’s most powerful and uninhibited goddesses.
Buy ‘The Girls: Sappho Goes To Hollywood’ on Amazon
Natalie and Romaine by Diana Souhami
The Natalie and Romaine book is an account of the life and love of Natalie Clifford Barney and Romain Brooks. Natalie Barney was both a poet and a prose writer, who was famous for her weekly salons, which gathered together many of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and writers from the Western world.
She is celebrated for openly living and writing as a lesbian during a time when women’s behavior was closely circumscribed. Barney is also known as “the Amazon,” a nickname given to her by the poet Remy de Gourmont after she made headlines for riding a horse astride, rather than sidesaddle, which was customary. In French, “l’Amazone” means both horse rider and Amazon, the warrior women of Greek mythology. A good lesbian non-fiction for creative art and history.
Buy ‘Natalie and Romaine’ on Amazon
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
Anne Lister (1791–1840) was a well-off English (Yorkshire) landowner, diarist, mountaineer, and traveler. Throughout her life, she kept diaries that chronicled the details of her daily life, including her lesbian relationships, financial concerns, her industrial activities and her work improving Shibden Hall. Her diaries contain more than 4,000,000 words and about a sixth of them listed the intimate details of her romantic and sexual relationships and were written in code. The code, derived from a combination of algebra and Ancient Greek, was deciphered in the 1980s.
Lister is often called “the first modern lesbian” for her clear self-knowledge and openly lesbian lifestyle. Called “Fred” by her lover and “Gentleman Jack” by Halifax residents, she suffered from harassment for her sexuality and recognized her similarity to the Ladies of Llangollen, whom she visited. Anne died at the aged of 49 of a fever. One of the best lesbian books from Britain. James Kent directed a movie “The secret diaries of Miss Anne Lister” based on the novel.
Buy ‘The Secret Diaries of Miss Ann Lister’ on Amazon
Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter
A revealing account of how the Stonewall riots in New York City changed gay rights forever.
David Carter not only gives the definitive examination of the riots but lists an absorbing history of pre-Stonewall America, and how the oppression and pent-up rage of those years finally ignited on a hot New York night.
Buy ‘Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution’ on Amazon
The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo
The Celluloid Closet is a non-fiction lesbian book that was also turned into a documentary back in 1995. This documentary highlights the historical contexts that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders have occupied in cinema history, and shows the evolution of the entertainment industry’s role in shaping perceptions of LGBT figures.
The issues addressed include secrecy, which initially defined homosexuality, as well as the demonization of the homosexual community with the advent of AIDS, and finally the shift toward acceptance and positivity in the modern era.
Buy ‘The Celluloid Closet’ on Amazon
Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore
A 1956 American novel written by Pamela Moore. Originally published in 1956 when Moore was eighteen years old, the novel gained notoriety from readers and critics for its frank depiction of teenage sexuality, and its discussion of the taboo topics of homosexuality and gender roles.
The plot focuses on fifteen-year-old Courtney Farrell and her destructive upbringing between her father, a wealthy Manhattan publisher, and her mother, a faltering Hollywood actress.
Buy ‘Chocolates for Breakfast’ on Amazon
Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok by Roger Streitmatter
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) was not only the longest-serving American First Lady (1933-1945) but she was also as one of history’s most politically impactful, a fierce champion of working women and underprivileged youth. Her personal life has mostly been the subject of lasting controversy.
In the summer of 1928, Roosevelt met journalist Lorena Hickok, whom she would come to refer to as Hick. The thirty-year relationship that ensued has remained the subject of much speculation, from the evening of FDR’s inauguration, when the First Lady was seen wearing a sapphire ring Hickok had given her, to the opening up of her private correspondence archives in 1998. Though many of the most explicit letters had been burned, the 300 published in “Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok” — at once less unequivocal than history’s most revealing woman-to-woman love letters and more suggestive than those of great female platonic friendships — strongly indicate the relationship between Roosevelt and Hickok had been one of great romantic intensity.
Buy ‘Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok’ on Amazon
The Lillian Trilogy by Mary Meriam
Mary Meriam, found an anchor in The Lillian Trilogy, which combines in one volume her three recently published poetry collections: Word Hot, Conjuring My Leafy Muse, and Girlie Calendar.
The poems use a wide variety of poetic forms to capture and command relentless buckets of loss and heartache, revealing the untold horrors of her life and turning them around in a magnificent blossoming of longing, lust, sadness, and wit. A great and unique Lesbian Non Fiction book in our list.
Buy ‘The Lillian Trilogy’ on Amazon
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical.
It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her. Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.
In this classic autobiography, Audre Lorde combines elements of history, biography, and myth to tell her own story.
A young black girl grows up in thirties Harlem, a teenager lives through Pearl Harbour, a young woman experiences McCarthyism in fifties Greenwich Village. In and out of this lyrical chronicle move the women – mothers, lovers, friends – who are zami: ‘Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon on me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me – so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognise her’.
Buy ‘Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’ on Amazon
Surviving Madness by Betty Berzon
Eleanor Roosevelt, Anais Nin, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Hooker, Paul Monette—such luminaries are only some of the fellow trailblazers whose paths intersected with Betty Berzon in this amazing memoir of the life of one of the most vital and fascinating of our LGBT pioneers included in this lesbian non-fiction novel!
Surviving Madness unveils the dramatic story of an emergence from mental breakdown and suicide attempts to coming out as a lesbian at age forty, followed by the discovery of life-long love, the triumphant rise to becoming a groundbreaking therapist and a courageous, passionate, resolute activist–and the pioneering author of such classic books on lesbian and gay relationships as Permanent Partners and Positively Gay.
Surviving Madness is the transcendent story of a woman central to the reach for LGBT civil rights in the twentieth century, whose drama-charged life changed forever our own lives today.
Buy ‘Surviving Madness’ on Amazon
The Stone Wall: An Autobiography by Mary Casal
The Stone Wall is something of a landmark in American LGBT history, perhaps the first autobiography in which the author openly acknowledges her attraction to another woman and their long and happy partnership. Born and raised on a New England farm to a family with deep Puritan roots, Casal recalls having to defend herself from sexual assault from hired hands and other men while still a teen.
She began to realize her feelings towards women early on and had her first physical contact (kisses and hugs) with another woman while in college. She felt great pressure to conform to conventions and even married a man, an entirely unsatisfying experience that ended in divorce after she gave birth to a stillborn child and, in her grief, fled to New York City. There, she came to peace with her feelings for the first time: “My city contact had caused me to look at myself less and less as a sexual monstrosity.” She writes candidly of the practical difficulties of finding ways to spend time with another woman in public, given the rigid social customs of the time, let alone taking the risk to express her feelings. It was not until she was in her thirties that she met her long-term lover, Juno, and they set up house together in an apartment in Greenwich Village.
Buy ‘The Stone Wall: An Autobiography’ on Amazon
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Alice B. Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein.
Although Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas both grew up in California, they met in Paris in 1907. By that time, Stein had been living in Paris with her brother, artist Leo Stein, for four years; their flat at 27 rue de Fleurus had become home to a remarkable collection of modern art, as well as a lively salon. It was during these early years in Paris that Stein began to write, publishing her important early work Three Lives (Dover Thrift Editions)
(1905).
When Stein and Toklas met, the connection between them was immediate, and Toklas soon moved in and became Stein’s partner. The two presided over one of the most famous salons in Paris, and their home became a gathering place for avant-garde writers and artists. Stein helped to launch the careers of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among others, and she attempted to translate their experiments in art into writing. Much of her work, therefore, rejects traditional linear narrative structure in favor of a more fractured form. Although Stein was a formidable figure among the Paris modernists and highly regarded among the writers who visited her, most critics and audiences found her work too dense and difficult. It was only with the publication in 1933 of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that Stein reached a wider audience, and she and Toklas became literary celebrities.
In 1998, Modern Library ranked The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Buy ‘The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas’ on Amazon
Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster by Joanne Passet
In 1956 a former librarian of the Kinsey Institute published the pioneering bibliography ‘Sex Variant Women in Literature’, listing “2,500 years worth of writings about love and sex between women.” Editions later, Jeannette Foster received a 1974 Stonewall Book Award for what is considered a cornerstone of gay-studies collections.
In her detailed biography of Foster, Passet thoroughly explores the circumstances for gays in mid- to late-twentieth-century America, revealing, as may be expected, a not-always-pretty picture. Foster chose the term sex variant consciously, to “help in destigmatizing women who chose to live as bisexuals, cross-dressers, and lesbians,” and as a reaction to the Library of Congress’ policy then of assigning the subject heading sex deviate to works such as hers. (That cataloging policy no longer obtains, and LC’s online database yields no hits, not even from the “old catalog,” for sex deviates as a subject.) As a story of an important figure in gay literary studies as well as librarianship, this is a desirable title for many collections.
Buy ‘Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster’ on Amazon
A Woman Like That by Joan Larkin
The act of “coming out” has the power to transform every aspect of a woman’s life: family, friendships, career, sexuality, spirituality. An essential element of self-realization, it is the unabashed acceptance of one’s “outlaw” standing in a predominantly heterosexual world.
These accounts — sometimes heart-wrenching, often exhilarating — encompass a wide breadth of backgrounds and experiences. From a teenager institutionalized for her passion for women to the mother who must come out to her young sons at the risk of losing them — from the cautious academic to the raucous liberated femme — each woman represented here tells of forging a unique path toward the difficult but emancipating recognition of herself. Extending from the 1940s to the present day, these intensely personal stories, in turn, reflect a unique history of the changing social mores that affected each woman’s ability to determine the shape of her own life. Together they form an ornate tapestry of lesbian and bisexual experience in the United States over the past half-century.
Buy ‘A Woman Like That’ on Amazon
Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan
Originally published in 1985, this lesbian non-fiction book brings accounts of 51 lesbian nuns who discuss their lives in and away from the convent.
The book reveals their inner struggle to reconcile an unconventional sexuality with religious devotion and the sanctity of their vows.
Buy ‘Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence’ on Amazon
Paris was a Woman by Andrea Weiss
A dazzling portrait of the creative community of women writers, artists, photographers and editors who flocked to Paris in the early decades of the 20th century, when Paris was the undisputed cultural capital of the world. Using groundbreaking research and newly discovered home movies, ‘Paris Was a Woman’ uses intimate storytelling to weave interview with an anecdote. The film recreates the mood and flavor of the female artistic community in the City of Light during its most magical era.
Included in this milieu are authors Colette, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, poets HD and Natalie Clifford Barney, painters Romaine Brooks and Marie Laurencin, editors Bryher, Alice B. Toklas, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, photographers Berenice Abbott and Gisele Freund, booksellers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, and journalist Janet Flanner.
Buy ‘Paris was a Woman’ on Amazon
The Lesbian Path by Margaret Cruikshank
For this new edition of her landmark collection of lesbian lives, Margaret Cruikshank has added an interview with May Sarton and texts by Beth Brant, Elsa Gidlow, Judy Grahn and Jane Rule. Praise for the first edition: “The Lesbian Path to self-affirmation is a journey of adventure, excitement, and passion.
These stories provide entertainment, escape, reassurance, and a well-marked trail of shared experiences. A most positive, enjoyable anthology of true stories from lesbians’ lives.
Buy ‘The Lesbian Path’ on Amazon
Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema by Andrea Weiss
The story of lesbians and the cinema is a love-hate affair in which the invisible becomes visible in fascinating and surprising ways. The lesbian vampire, for instance, cinema’s most persistent lesbian character, acts out male fantasies of sexual challenge and titillation, but she is also an agent of female desire that is both dangerous and excessive. Gossip and camp have enabled the stars, Dietrich, Garbo, Hepburn to hold particular, magical appeal for lesbian filmgoers.
Andrea Weiss follows the lesbian character in Hollywood films, from Dorothy Arzner’s The Wild Party, through The Children’s Hour, Rebecca, Silkwood, and The Color Purple. She explores lesbian sexuality in European art cinema and modern independent work by lesbian filmmakers. With wit, insight, and liberal illustration she brings into her discussion a wide range of films, both popular and forgotten, as well as the work of contemporary directors Chantal Akerman, Su Friedrich, Ulrike Ottinger, and many others.
Buy ‘Vampires and Violets: Lesbian in the Cinema’ on Amazon
Queerly Beloved by Diane & Jacob Anderson-Minshall
Imagine if, after fifteen years as a lesbian couple, your partner turned to you and said, “I think I’m really a man.” What would you do? How would you respond? For Diane and Jacob (née Suzy) Anderson-Minshall this isn’t a hypothetical question. It’s what really happened. Eight years later, the couple not only remains together, they still identify as queer, still work in LGBT media, and remain part of the LGBT community.
How did their relationship survive a gender transition? The authors explore this question and delve into their relationship to reveal the trials and tribulations they have faced along the way. In doing so, they paint a portrait of love, not only to each other, but to the San Francisco Bay Area, LGBT publishing, and the queer community. Queerly Beloved is a love story that flies in the face of expectations and raises questions about the true nature of identity, sexuality, and love.
Buy ‘Queerly Beloved’ on Amazon
Paper Cranes by Dinah Dietrich
“I write for those women who do not speak,” said Audre Lorde. But in the case of Paper Cranes, Dinah Dietrich writes as a lesbian speaking for herself, with delicacy and honesty, about her journey from silence to speech. The poems are situated in a diminished present, remembering childhood and family, painful and pleasurable moments, like the red paper crane of the title poem which gave her “the gift of experience / the gift of memory.” With the utmost economy, a small stanza can evoke a lifetime of deprivation: “In my room at home, / I struggle for light. / The plants strangle / at the small window.”
With a fine ear and a light touch, Dietrich courageously charts a course back to life from the brink of death. For those of us who have been to this outsider’s hell, it’s a comfort to hear the voice of a sister traveler. Published by Headmistress Press.
Here Lies the Heart by Mercedes De Acosta
Mercedes de Acosta (March 1, 1893 – May 9, 1968) was an American poet, playwright, and novelist. In 1960, when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and she was in desperate need of money, she published her memoir, Here Lies the Heart.
The book was well-received by critics and many close friends praised the book. The book’s implied homosexuality resulted in the severance of several friendships with women who felt she had betrayed their sexuality. Eva Le Gallienne, in particular, was furious, denouncing De Acosta as a liar and stating that she invented the stories for fame. Four of de Acosta’s plays were produced, and she published a novel and three volumes of poetry. She was professionally unsuccessful but is known for her many lesbian affairs with famous Broadway and Hollywood personalities and numerous friendships with prominent artists of the period. As far as lesbian non fiction goes, this is a good one!
Buy ‘Here Lies the Heart’ on Amazon
Leaving Normal: Adventures in Gender by Rae Theodore
A literary memoir that takes an unflinching, humorous and sometimes heartbreaking look at living as a masculine-centered woman in a pink/blue, boy-girl, M/F world.
It’s a story for anyone who has ever felt different, especially those living in the gender margins without a rulebook.
Buy ‘Leaving Normal: Adventures in Gender’ on Amazon
An American Queer by Lee Lynch
This collection of Lee Lynch’s columns chronicles over a quarter century of queer life in the United States, from the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
“From the beginning of my writing career, I just wanted to write about lesbian/gay life as I experienced it. Like so many, I came from a place of great isolation. At the same time, being gay filled me with great pride and joy. Writers Jane Rule, Isabelle Miller, Radclyffe Hall, Valerie Taylor, Ann Bannon, and Vin Packer gave me inspiration and even the lesbian companionship I needed as a baby dyke.
More than anything, I want to give to gay people what those writers gave me. And I want to do it well enough that my words might someday be considered literature and, as such, might endure because, as open as some societies have become, there are always haters, and cycles of oppression. Our writers strengthen us, offer a sense of solidarity and validation that we are both more than our sexualities and are among the best that humanity offers.”
Buy ‘An American Queer’ on Amazon
An Intimate Wilderness: Lesbian Writers on Sexuality by Judith Barrington
Essays, stories, and poems explore questions of definition, vocabulary, history, possibility, and meaning, bringing together many of the best contemporary lesbian writers.
Described as “a refreshingly honest treatment of a complex subject.” by Library Journal, the reason it made the list of our best lesbian books.
Buy ‘An Intimate Wilderness’ on Amazon
Passions Between Women by Emma Donoghue
This book brings stories of lesbian desires, acts, and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the 19th century. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women in this period was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a ‘hermaphrodite’, denounced as a ‘tribade’ or ‘lesbian’, revered as a ‘romantic friend’, jailed as a ‘female husband’ or gossiped about as a ‘woman-lover’, ‘Tommy’ or ‘Sapphist’.
Through an examination of a wealth of new medical, legal and erotic source material, together with re-readings of classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue uncovers the astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities described in British texts between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in an intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and loves.’Controversial, erotic and radical, Emma Donoghue’s lesbian voyage of exploration outlines an astonishing spectrum of gender rebellion which creates a new map of eighteenth-century sexual territories and identities.
Buy ‘Passions Between Women’ on Amazon
A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle
A proud working class woman, an “out” lesbian long before the Rainbow revolution, Joan Nestle has stood at the forefront of American freedom struggles from the McCarthy era to the present day.
Available for the first time in years, this revised classic collection of personal essays offers an intimate account of the lesbian, feminist, and civil rights movements.
Buy ‘A Restricted Country’ on Amazon
Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp
From the ancient poet Sappho to tombois in contemporary Indonesia, women throughout history and around the globe have desired, loved, and had sex with other women. In beautiful prose, Sapphistries tells their stories, capturing the multitude of ways that diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and place.
Leila J. Rupp reveals how, from the time of the very earliest societies, the possibility of love between women has been known, even when it is feared, ignored, or denied. We hear women in the sex-segregated spaces of convents and harems whispering words of love. We see women beginning to find each other on the streets of London and Amsterdam, in the aristocratic circles of Paris, in the factories of Shanghai. We find women’s desire and love for women meeting the light of day as Japanese schoolgirls fall in love, and lesbian bars and clubs spread from 1920s Berlin to 1950s Buffalo. And we encounter a world of difference in the twenty-first century, as transnational concepts and lesbian identities meet local understandings of how two women might love each other.
Giving voice to words from the mouths and pens of women, and from men’s prohibitions, reports, literature, art, imaginings, pornography, and court cases, Rupp also creatively employs fiction to imagine possibilities when there is no historical evidence. Sapphistries combines lyrical narrative with meticulous historical research, providing an eminently readable and uniquely sweeping story of desire, love, and sex between women around the globe from the beginning of time to the present.
Buy ‘Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women’ on Amazon
Your Story Matters … (Tell It) by Linda Bunker
In 1958, a girl of sixteen met a woman of twenty-four. Against all odds and self-inflicted restraints, they selfishly allowed themselves to fall passionately in love.
Fifty-five years later they find themselves still sharing this “secret” love. They have decided that now is the time to come “out of the closet.”
Buy ‘Your Story Matters’ on Amazon
Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic is a 2006 graphic memoir by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’. It chronicles Bechdel’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father.
The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one’s family, making it stand out from others in lesbian non-fiction. Writing and illustrating ‘Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic’ took seven years, in part because of Bechdel’s laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.
Buy ‘Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic’ on Amazon
Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement by Marcia M. Gallo
Nearly fifteen years before the birth of gay liberation, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was the world’s first organization committed to lesbian visibility and empowerment. Like its predominantly gay male counterpart, the Mattachine Society, DOB was launched in response to the oppressive anti-homosexual climate of the McCarthy era, when lesbian and gay people were arrested, fired from jobs, and had their children taken away simply because of their sexual orientation.
It was against this political backdrop that a circle of San Francisco lesbians formed a private club where lesbians could meet others in a safe, affirming setting. The small social group evolved over the next two decades into a national organization that counted more than a dozen chapters, and laid the foundation for today’s lesbian rights movement.
Different Daughters chronicles this movement and the women who fought the church and state in order to change not only our nation’s perception of homosexuality, but how lesbians see themselves. Marcia Gallo has interviewed dozens of former DOB members, many of whom have never spoken on record. Through its leaders, magazine, and network of local chapters, DOB played a crucial role in creating lesbian identity, visibility, and political strategies in Cold War America.
Buy ‘Different Daughters’ on Amazon
Lesbian Origins by Susan Cavin
Lesbian feminism has often been scorned as a marginal political dogma. Susan Cavin, a lesbian feminist sociologist, advances a new theory of women’s oppression and women’s liberation, based on cross-cultural data. She holds that original human societies were woman-centered, with females greatly outnumbering males; men occupied a marginal position.
When armed men overthrew women’s societies they integrated themselves into society, breaking women’s power.
Examining the sex ratio of societies across the globe, Cavin challenges conventional wisdom about the “natural” numerical balance between the sexes. She finds a frequent occurrence of societies with a high-female sex ratio (54% or more female) among Africans, Pacific islanders and Native Americans (in both North and South America). Moreover, she finds that these cultures tend to subsist by hunting and gathering, with extended-family households centered around mothers’ kin-groups, and a lack of sharp social stratification in the culture. She thus hypothesizes that original human society had a high-female sex ratio. Cavin also finds that lesbian relations have existed in pre-industrial societies at every level of economy and subsistence pattern, with woman-to woman marriage practiced in several African and Native American cultures. Her investigation provides a sociological basis for lesbian feminism.
Buy ‘Lesbian Origins’ on Amazon
The Femme Mystique by Lesléa Newman
A fascinating and insightful look at the world of femme identity within the lesbian community.
Written by femmes, former femmes, future femmes, femme wannabes, femme admirers, and of course, femmes fatales, The Femme Mystique explores what it means to be a femme and a lesbian in a society that often trivializes the feminine.
Buy ‘The Femme Mystique’ on Amazon
Out: A Courageous Woman’s Journey by Lou Anne Smoot
Lou Anne fell in love with Karen in 1956 when they were both 17 and freshmen at Baylor University. Her parents told her the relationship was sinful and unacceptable. Seeing no other option, she followed their direction, married, and remained faithful to her husband for 37 years.
At age 60, after an incident in her Baptist Sunday School class, Lou Anne could no longer pretend to be straight. Her struggles to reconcile her faith with being gay take her into the depths of depression. After divorcing and coming out, Lou Anne remained in her Baptist church for an additional fifteen years both to be true to her faith tradition and as an example of a gay Christian. She emerges as an outspoken advocate for gay rights.
This story of a retired teacher, mother of four, grandmother of six is told in an unprecedented, brutally honest manner.
Buy ‘Out: A Corageous Woman’s Journey’ on Amazon
When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution by Jeanne Córdova
A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals.When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s.
Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is “to the revolution” -to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life, she becomes an investigative reporter for the famous, underground L.A. Free Press and finds herself involved with covering the Weather Underground, Angela Davis; exposing neo-Nazi bomber Captain Joe Tomassi, and befriending Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army. At the same time she is creating what will be the center of her revolutionary lesbian world: her own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide, destined to become the voice of the national lesbian feminist movement.
By turns provocative and daringly honest, Cordova renders emblematic scenes of the era–ranging from strike protests to utopian music festivals, to underground meetings with radical fugitives–with period detail and evocative characters. For those who came of age in the ’70s, and for those who weren’t around but still ask ‘What was it like?’ -Outlaws takes you back to re-live it. It also offers insights about ethics, decision making and strategy, still relevant today.
With an introduction by renowned lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, When We Were Outlaws paints a vivid portrait of activism and the search for self-identity, set against the turbulent landscape of multiple struggles for social change that swept hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.
Buy ‘When We Were Outlaws’ on Amazon
Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology (The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series) by Celia Kitzinger
Women today are being instructed on how they can raise their self-esteem, love their inner child, survive their toxic families, overcome codependency, and experience a revolution from within. By holding up the ideal of a pure and happy inner core, psychotherapists refuse to acknowledge that a certain degree of unhappiness or dissatisfaction is a routine part of life and not necessarily a cause for therapy. Lesbians specifically are now guided to define themselves according to their frailties, inadequacies, and insecurities.
An incisive critique of contemporary feminist psychology and therapy, Changing our Minds argues not just that the current practice of psychology is flawed, but that the whole idea of psychology runs counter to many tenets of lesbian feminist politics. Recognizing that many lesbians do feel unhappy and experience a range of problems that detract from their well-being, Changing Our Minds makes positive, prescriptive suggestions for non-psychological ways of understanding and dealing with emotional distress.
Written in a lively and engaging style, Changing our Minds is required reading for anyone who has ever been in therapy or is close to someone who has, and for lesbians, feminists, psychologists, psychotherapists, students of psychology and women’s studies, and anyone with an interest in the development of lesbian feminist theory, ethics, and practice.
Buy ‘Changing Our Minds’ on Amazon
Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature by Dorothy Allison
A fantastic collection of essays, autobiographical narratives, and performance pieces, including updated versions of earlier groundbreaking material with provocative new work by the lifelong feminist activist, controversial sex radical, and Southern expatriate writer with an attitude who brought us Bastard Out of Carolina, Trash, and The Women Who Hate Me.
Funny, passionate, and compelling prose on what it means to be queer and happy about it in a world that is still arguing about what it means to be queer.
Buy ‘Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature’ on Amazon
Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall by Marie Cartier
‘Baby, You Are My Religion’ argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th Century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall — when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill — these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all.
‘Baby, You are My Religion’ explores this community as a site of a lived corporeal theology and political space. It reveals that religious institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church were founded in such bars, that traditional and non-traditional religious activities took place there, and religious ceremonies such as marriage were often conducted within the bars by staff. Baby, You are My Religion examines how these bars became not only ecclesiastical sites but also provided the fertile ground for the birth of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights before Stonewall.
Buy ‘Baby, you are my Religion’ on Amazon
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman
Lillian Faderman tells the compelling story of lesbian life in the 20th century, from the early 1900s to today’s diverse lifestyles in this lesbian non-fiction classic.
Using journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, news accounts, novels, medical literature, and numerous interviews, she relates an often surprising narrative of lesbian life. “A key work…the point of reference from which all subsequent studies of 20th-century lesbian life in the United States will begin.”— San Francisco Examiner.
Buy ‘Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers’ on Amazon
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis
This ground-breaking lesbian non-fiction book traces the emergence and growth of a lesbian community in Buffalo, New York, from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s.
Based on thirteen years of research and drawing upon the oral histories of forty-five women, authors Kennedy and Davis explore butch-femme roles, coming out, women who passed as men, motherhood, aging, racism, and the courage and pride of the working-class lesbians of Buffalo who, by confronting incredible oppression and violence, helped to pave the way for the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold captures the full complexity of lesbian culture; it is a compassionate history of real people fighting for respect and a place to love without fear of persecution.
Buy ‘Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold’ on Amazon
For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology by Sarah Lucia Hoagland
One of the best lesbian non-fiction books for real-life activism.
These essays from more than 70 contributors: novelists, musicians, poets, philosophers, academics and seriously, rowdy dykes document 20 years of lesbian activism.
Buy ‘For Lesbians Only’ on Amazon
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman
A classic of its kind, this fascinating cultural history draws on everything from private correspondence to pornography to explore five hundred years of friendship and love between women.
Surpassing the Love of Men throws a new light on shifting theories of female sexuality and the changing status of women over the centuries.
Buy ‘Surpassing the Love of Men’ on Amazon
Tea Leaves by Janet Mason
In this forthright personal memoir, author and poet Janet Mason reflects on the factory-worker lives of her mother and grandmother in working-class Philadelphia while she copes with her mother’s final illness.
Her mother’s feminist example and unwavering support of a lesbian daughter become increasingly poignant as Janet explores the choices not open to her mother that she made for herself.
Equally pressing is the sheer labor of dealing with medical misdiagnosis and subsequent treatment of her mother, and the toll it takes on her own relationship as she spends increasing hours in conversation with the woman who gave her life.
Tea Leaves is about daughters, mothers and women, their choices, and the never-ending circles of their entwined lives.
My Girl’s Green Jacket by Mary Meriam
Recalling the sonnets of John Donne and the religious ballads of Christina Rossetti, Meriam’s assured poems pulse with a channeled intensity, leading us as readers through an emotional and intellectual landscape.
A collection as brilliant as it is emotionally nuanced, My Girl’s Green Jacket offers us a complex imaginative mirror to hold up against our current reality.
Buy ‘My Girl’s Green Jacket’ on Amazon
Just Lucky I Guess: From Closet Lesbian to Radical Dyke by Elaine Mikels
Elaine Mikels is not a professional writer, which makes her wonderful book of memoirs, ‘Just Lucky I Guess’, all the more truthful, unadorned and moving. Mikels lived through crucial epochs in lesbian history: The McCarthy era (in which she lost her job because she was a lesbian) the butch-femme bar scene of the 1950s, the rise of feminism and lesbian-feminism in the 1960s and ’70s and the changes those movements wrought in the ’80s and ’90s.
Throughout the last half-century, her lesbianism came together with her life as a social activist and a world traveler. In her seventies, Mikels looked back on her rich and diverse adventures, on her triumphs through adversities, on all that she has learned and as the title of her memories suggests, can characterize her lesbian life as “lucky”. She is truly a hero. Elaine Mikels passed away on Feb 16th, 2004 and these copies of her book will be the last sold.
Buy ‘Just Lucky I Guess’ on Amazon
Like our list of the ‘Best Lesbian Non-Fiction Books’? Pin it!
Did we miss something from our list of Lesbian Non Fiction books? Let us know in the comments below.
