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This chapter interrogates how “whiteness” shaped the ways in which the early chroniclers of gay and lesbian history considered the relationship between race and sex. It looks at several core features of the U.S. gay and lesbian past as it was constructed in historical writing between 1976, when the first book in the field came out, and 1989, when the first anthology was released. These publications mark the period of the field's initial formation and thus frame inquiry into basic assumptions and strategies that shaped the field at that important moment. Here the chapter argues that many of these early historians examined the experiences of people of color but often failed to see how their “whiteness” shaped their investigation of the past.

This chapter shows how Latin American lesbian feminist internet practices reflect their own circumstances and values. These have led them to focus their internet-based counterpublic work on privacy and visibility. They need a place for their private life, where they can find each other and build community away from the threat of violence and rejection that still, despite significant changes in their legal status, characterizes their daily existence. Yet they also need support for visibilidad lesbica, lesbian visibility, to confront exclusion, bringing the fact of their existence and their demands for the worlds in which they want to live to larger publics. In doing so, they have also reinterpreted internet applications towards their own ends, such as through the innovative project of a blog-based archive of lesbian history.

This chapter turns to the problem of sexual identity, which has facilitated the retrieval of a lesbian and gay past even as it elides the variations, deviations, and complications of actual lives of individuals who resist that fixity or who were unaccustomed to sexual self-reflexivity. Situating the “great scandal” surrounding the dismissal of the Hon. Violet Douglas-Pennant as commandant of the Women’s Royal Air Force in a recuperative mode of lesbian history satisfies the need for a knowable sexual subject, yet yielding to the explanatory force of a queer identity also makes it difficult to decipher how a woman like Douglas-Pennant saw herself or how others saw her in 1918.

The sensational divorce and libel trials of Hungary’s two most influential women during the 1920s is the subject of chapter four. Romantic love between women rarely emerged in the courts, ostensibly because in Hungary the Criminal Code covered only male homosexuality. As the sensational trials of Cécile Tormay and Countess Eduardina Pallavicini illustrate however, lesbianism was as a legally recognized reason to divorce. The “shocking” details of the scandal, such as the husband’s order of a peephole drilled into the ceiling of his wife’s bedroom to spy on her activities, offer novel insights into contemporary conceptualizations of female (homo)sexuality. The surviving court documents reveal the interrelationship between urban and rural servants’ understandings of sexuality. The highly charged contemporary politics of the trials moreover bespeak the fact that charges of sexuality were never just about sexuality.

This essay extends the history of lesbians in the military from the war years of the 1940s into the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Combining an interpretive introduction with documents, it provides a look at military policy as well as at the impact on and response of women in the service. Whereas the war years seemed to open up opportunities for self-discovery, community, and freedom of expression, the anticommunist crusades of the Cold War created a climate that favored crackdowns on any departures from the normative, whether involving political views or sexual and gender expression. Composed during the first Reagan administration and the early years of aids, the essay seems to carry the warning that progress can be reversed, that good times can turn to bad.

Using Cather and Lewis’s shared gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, as a touchstone, the introduction describes how biographers have approached the question of Willa Cather’s sexuality, how critics have applied queer theory to readings of her work, and how Lewis’s place in Cather’s life and creative process has been repeatedly ignored or misrepresented. The introduction lays out the terms on which this volume defines Lewis’s relationship with Cather and makes her visible again: it introduces Lewis’s role as Cather’s editor and suggests how models of the history of sexuality have failed to capture the persistence of the so-called Boston marriage into the twentieth century.

This epilogue turns back to the years immediately following Cather’s death to reveal how Edith Lewis was transformed from Cather’s domestic partner and trusted literary collaborator into a ridiculous specter. It focuses on, E. K. Brown, whom Lewis had commissioned to write a biography of Cather, and Willa Cather’s old friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher as they observed Lewis—or, more to the point, often failed to see her for what she was. When Brown died before completing the biography, a crisis briefly ensued. The epilogue argues that the mythology about Edith Lewis and her near vanishing from Cather biography emerged at this moment of crisis, which coincided with the Cold War panic over homosexuality. It closes with an analysis of Cather and Lewis’s New Hampshire gravesite.

This chapter reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s two decades of vacationing as part of an all-woman resort community of Whale Cove on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy. There, Cather and Lewis enjoyed outdoor recreation and the company of like-minded women, and they also worked intensively on the writing and editing of Cather’s fiction. They built their own cottage in the late 1920s, just as both women’s parents were declining and then died, making Grand Manan an important site for mourning and recovery as well. In the early 1930s, they invited women in their families to be their guests there. Finally, however, travel to the remote island became unsustainable, and they never returned after 1940.