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The story of the Amy Morris Homans Cotillion is little known outside the circles of those who founded and attended the event. In this article, we detail the origins of the Cotillion from its inception in 1982 to its final iteration in 2014. This underground social event provided a safe space for women to connect and create a lesbian community of joyful sisterhood with long-lasting professional and personal relationships. At its peak, the Cotillion gathered hundreds of women, inviting them to drink, dance, and dream of a better world. We place the Cotillion in the context of the historical development of women's physical education and the field of kinesiology and use oral-history interviews with women who founded, organized, and regularly attended the Cotillion to create a narrative of the origins of this event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amy Morris Homans Cotillion and Pre-Cotillion created unique and liberatory spaces for many lesbian and allied women attending the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) convention between 1982 and 2014. In this article, we draw on feminist and queer theories to consider the multiple meanings embedded in Cotillion goers' lived experiences. Memories of planning and participating in these events linger for attendees decades later. The impact of attending ranged from lighthearted appreciation to profound gratitude. The Cotillion events disrupted the oppressive status quo at the AAHPERD convention and within kinesiology in favor of community building, joy, and the celebration of lesbian identities. We explore the disruption of heteropatriarchal norms and the creation of alternative community spaces to learn better from the past and to help create liberatory futures for practitioners and scholars in kinesiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about a conversation between Phyllis Nagy and the interviewer regarding their experiences as lesbians during the late 1970s and early 1980s, exploring the political, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of their identities. Topic include Nagy reflects on growing up as a lesbian in New York City, discussing the political awareness, aesthetic influences, and sense of community she experienced during that time.

The article informs readers about Netflix's series "The Ultimatum," which introduces a unique social experiment where committed couples face ultimatums regarding marriage or separation. Topic include the focus is on the show's format, which applies pressure to couples to either marry or move on, highlighting the normative yet intriguingly lesbionic aspects of the series, contrasting the accelerated tempo of intimacy demanded by the show with conventional coupling norms.

In recent decades, it has become increasingly important to reevaluate certain literature and figures in history to discover what was being communicated in the midst of, and through, the silence of minority groups. My particular focus is on the tradition of white female silence and the ways in which Anne Lister and her diaries (as separate entities) contributed to conversations about silence by establishing other methods of communication despite restrictions placed on women's voices at the time. As the main focalizers in the creation and depiction of her societal and sexual identity, I discuss Lister's "crypt hand" diaries, her self-presentation, her inheritance of Shibden Hall, and the contrast they offer between voicing and silencing. Although I argue that through these focalizers Lister does present a certain level of voicing or speaking out, ultimately this is done by using various methods of silence such as coding and implication. I also offer particular analysis of Lister's conceptualization of her own sexuality compared with that of the women she sleeps with and how her inability to fathom their queer identities contributes to a narrative of oppressive patriarchal silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Post-lesbian" discourse has posited that the increasing popularity of queer identity has challenged the endurance of lesbian identity. Using 16 in-depth interviews collected between 2019 and 2020 with people who identify as lesbian and queer, I offer empirical examples of why lesbian identity endures and the utility of the identity's specificity. While several recent publications have also demonstrated the durability of lesbian identity, this study offers a unique portrait of this identity project in its portrayal of why some moved away from lesbian identity and why they have returned to it. I argue that there is a cultural opening for reinvigorated understandings of lesbian identity, and that it is crucial to understand this opening in order to resist the declaration that lesbian identity is in decline. To do so we must grapple with lesbian critiques of queerness, as well as the continued political relevance of lesbian. The shifts in personal identities of participants is emblematic of shifting community understandings of these identity terms over time, indicating a generational shift in perception of identities.

In the United States, the Lesbian Nation in the late 1960s and '70s was not one place or thing. Communities throughout the land, in cities large and small, on both coasts and in the middle, were linked by networks of activists, newspapers, musicians, and conferences. This is an examination of the Iowa City lesbian community based on oral histories conducted by the author in the 1980s, by community members themselves at a reunion held in 2017, and many personal collections at Iowa Women's Archives at the University of Iowa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an instructive moment in the archive of Feminary, a periodical that began in 1969 as a local feminist newsletter for the Triangle region of North Carolina. In 1979, the editorial collective announced a shift in focus toward "a feminist journal for the South emphasizing the lesbian vision." I argue that through this turn, the Feminary Collective experiments with lesbian and southern as discursive laboratories for shaping what I refer to as backward-onward community-formation—a praxis that requires confronting and acknowledging historical specificity and experiential limits while also imagining new possibilities for social movement. Instead of framing southernness and lesbianism as fixed identities, the Collective treats them as multivalent, slippery markers that resist closure, produce ambivalence, and contain vast relational and political potential. Moreover, this article discusses the Collective's configuration of the U.S. South as a spatial and temporal avenue for confronting the experiential and institutionalized afterlives of slavery and for critiquing the white-washed classism of literary conventions. The article's methodology includes close readings of material from the Collective's nationally-circulated journal, as well as discussions of excerpts from the oral histories of two former members of the Collective, one of which was conducted for the purposes of this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legitimacy of the term and identity "lesbian" has long been contested, but has come under renewed scrutiny, with some suggesting it is exclusionary and dated. Along with these suggestions is the implication of a generational divide. Supposedly, older women—unaware of contemporary queer discourses—are more likely use the term "lesbian," whereas younger women are more likely to choose queer affiliated identities. In this paper we draw on survey data investigating why some women might seek to retain the identity "lesbian." These narratives complicate simplistic accounts of a generational divide. We discuss themes of cross-generational continuity in participants' sense of historical connection; connection to politics; lesbian visibility; and specificity and boundaries. The theme of lesbian community demonstrated discontinuity: participants of all ages agreed on the importance of lesbian community, but there was generational discontinuity in the access that participants had to it. Our respondents were aware of, and reflective about, current debates situating the category "lesbian" as problematic or obsolete, and nonetheless found utility and meaning in the term. Through their analysis we hope to destabilize discussions about a generational divide defining the use of the term "lesbian" with corresponding questions around ongoing relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on reflections on AIDS activism and representations of AIDS in US culture and conversation exposing the deep ambivalence about the gay and lesbian community feeling towards the New York Times.

Depression is a significant mental health issue for bisexual women. While theory and research indicates that sense of belonging is important for mental health, limited research has investigated this in relation to bisexual women belonging to the LGBTQ + community. Existing research indicates that identification and involvement with the LGBTQ + community is not protective for the mental health of bisexual women. The protective nature of the extent to which bisexual women feel valued and needed within the lesbian community has not been examined. The current study examined the relationships between sense of belonging to the lesbian and heterosexual communities and depressive symptoms among bisexual women. A sample of 306 Australian self-identified bisexual women completed the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the psychological subscale of the Sense of Belonging Instrument. Results indicated that sense of belonging to each community was related to lower levels of depressive symptoms. Further, levels of belonging to each community interacted, indicating that sense of belonging to the lesbian community was protective for bisexual women with lower, but not higher, levels of sense of belonging to the heterosexual community. Results imply that increasing belonging to the lesbian community is important for bisexual women who do not feel they belong in the heterosexual community. The challenge is how to increase sense of belonging of bisexual women in the lesbian community, where they are exposed to negative attitudes about their sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this article is to analyse the appearance of women's football in Spain in the 1970s and to show the links between the sport and the creation of a lesbian community in the city of Barcelona. The study will examine the ways in which the construction of women footballer's sexual identities was shaped by their participation in this sport, given the repressive context of the era. Oral interviews constituted the main method used in the study. This historiographical technique allowed us to gather oral histories from a number of women footballers, most of them lesbians. The information provided by these first-hand sources was also enriched and corroborated through the use of additional documentary sources (both from the sporting press and from other publications), which placed the first-hand testimony in the proper context and served to confirm some of the information collected in the interviews. By way of conclusion, the study established that, in the context of the lack of visibility of female homosexuality in the era and the hostility of the authorities and the public institutions under the dictatorship, women's football provided a valuable space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two leading southern urban centers, Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia, are connected by their competing notions of metropolitan identities as put forward by city leaders. Both serve as home to lesbians who define themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings. In 1970s Charlotte and Atlanta, lesbian feminists established spaces, formed organizations, held conferences, created print media outlets, and worked to define a visible community essentially linked to the urban identity of each city. This article demonstrates that while Atlanta is often recognized as the primary location of southern women's activism, equally important and enduring lesbian-feminist action took place in Charlotte. A small but overlooked group of activists in Charlotte left a permanent mark on the collective lesbian-feminist landscape, and by examining the development of lesbian-feminist groups in these two cities, we understand the significance of southern lesbian action on the national stage of women's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbians engaged in a debate over motherhood as a source of women's oppression. Although fundamentally a fight between lesbians, these discussions addressed a crucial question in most women's lives: could women combine caregiving with political and community engagement? Because they have more control over reproduction than most women, lesbians make an excellent case study for feminist debates about the place of caregiving in women's lives. Focused on creating women-only communities, lesbian separatists argued that lesbians should not raise sons, and perhaps not mother at all, because the labor involved limited their ability to devote themselves to the community. Lesbian mothers countered that mothering, and particularly the mothering of sons, furthered the feminist revolution by disrupting unhealthy sex roles and forms of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the study of contemporary lesbian communities by examining the management of internal diversity on a lesbian 'subreddit' (i.e. a sub-section of the popular social news media website Reddit) in relation to the parallel conceptual categories of 'post-gay' and 'post-lesbian'. Drawing on data obtained via virtual ethnography of this subreddit, it argues that contemporary lesbian communities have diverged significantly from their history of suppressing internal diversity in order to produce a stable category of collective identification. Rather, members of this community drew upon ideals typical of the post-gay era by celebrating internal differences made real through a 'minoritising' logic of multi-'ethnicity'. The article closes with implications for future research into (post-)lesbian communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between photography and feminism that emerges through the pages of the lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs (1984–2006). The San Francisco-based magazine represents an exceptional archive of images made in the context of lesbian community. Returning to the photographs that were published in early issues of the magazine, the article argues that On Our Backs, whilst explicitly addressed to a paucity of available images of lesbian culture, reflects a complex engagement with the meaning of the photographic image in dialogue with contemporaneous feminist debates. Through the work of Tee Corinne, Morgan Gwenwald and Honey Lee Cottrell, a desire for pictures renders the image a site of fantasy in which different ways of inhabiting lesbian identity form in dialogue with a community of readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its undeniably important role in shaping individual and collective queer identities, anti-gay violence is a relatively under-analyzed or overlooked subject for historians and public historians. Nevertheless, the physical sites of these events remain a valuable, if emotionally complex tool for providing insight into the ways in which use of the built and natural environment has led to conflict and violence between queer and heteronormative communities. Analyzing two of Boston's most popular cruising spots, the Charles River Esplanade and Back Bay Fens, this paper explores the intersection of visible queer land use and a significant increase in anti-gay violence in the city during the 1970s and 80s. Instead of crimes of opportunity or robberies, this work draws direct connections between gay-bashing, the symbolic meanings of queer land use, and the heterocentric political and law enforcement instruments used to address the violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]