How Out Do You Need to Be to Count?
Sunday, June 29, 2025 - 09:00
In the group of articles I've been reading lately, there are two interesting meta-topics: scholars talking about the process of research and their relationship to their subjects, and philosophical questions about the nature of "romantic friendship." I have some thoughts on the latter, which I'll put in the comments that display with the entry itself.
Major category:
Full citation:
VanHaitsma, Pamela. 2019. “Stories of Straightening Up: Reading Femmes in the Archives of Romantic Friendship” in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol. 6, No. 3:1-24
Debates over the relationship of "romantic friendship" and "lesbianism" tend to feel rather personal for me. As someone who identifies equally strongly as a lesbian and as asexual, the scholars who get hung up over the question of "did they engage in something we would classify as sexual activity?" feel like I'm being erased from history. At the same time, I solidly support the position that not all women who participated in romantic friendships, if trasported to the present time and given the current cultural background, would identify as lesbian. But I resist the notion that the key factor is sex. And that rather doubles down on the "we can't ever know" position that gets sneered at a lot by my contemporaries.
My personal take is that we should separate out the concepts of "romantic friendship" (and "Boston marriage" and all the other related concepts) from the concept of "lesbian even if they didn't use that word or an equivalent." For me, they are overlapping but independent historical concepts. A romantic friendship is certainly a context in which erotic relations could easily have occurred without leaving a documentary trace. The lack of a documentary trace is not proof that the women involved were heterosexual, any more than the lack of documentary evidence for opposite-sex erotic relations for those same women is proof of homosexuality. But whether or not they engaged in sex is, for me, a separate question from whehter they lived lives that I identify with as being lesbian. (I won't fall back on Bennett's "lesbian-like" label, because Bennett's category by definition would include all romantic friendships.) At the same time, I acknowledge the importance of sexual activity as part of what constructs the fuzzy, complicated, contested category that is the thing we study when engage in "lesbian history." So in a way, I'm simultaneously saying, "Yes, sex matters, but sex doesn't matter."
Because I have a background in cognitive category theory, this isn't a problem for me. It's the same thing as saying, "Yes, flight is a key characteristic of the category 'bird' but there are many birds that do not fly and they are still birds." Maybe some romantic friends are penguins. Maybe some are fledglings. Maybe some had a broken wing that healed badly. And maybe some are bats. My metaphor is getting away from me. I just wish that the debates over this topic spent less effort on the subtext that I'm not a real lesbian. The present paper--though it's inspired by thoughts around lesbian invisibility--doesn't entirely escape that message.
# # #
The central topic of this article is “femme invisibility” when researching queer women’s lives in archival material. The difficulty in identifying and researching historic persons who “read straight” due to conforming to gender expectations is paralleled by the author’s experiences as a femme (i.e., straight-passing) queer woman who repeatedly found herself calculating the risks of coming out to archival personnel who could potentially gate-keep access to material based on attitudes toward the type of research being done.
The specific project the author was pursuing involved archival materials related to two white women from 19th century Virginia (Irene Leache and Anna Wood) who shared lives and careers and described their relationship as an “opulent friendship.”
The larger part of the article concerns the author’s interactions with archives: the ways that indexing practices and selective creation of metadata shape the types of research that are enabled, the types of assumptions (warranted or not) that both sides may make about the other’s motives and prejudices, and the pressures on queer researchers to self-censor the nature of their projects when applying for funding, proposing projects, and strategizing for career success. Even when there is no animosity involved, the pressure to avoid anachronistic identity labels in the indexing process works to erase evidence of queer lives.
Just as the coming-out process can involve reading subtle signs of potential reception, the author was concerned about approaching archival material when the existing expert on the subject had described the two woman as “celibate lovers” and rejected the possibility that they had anything but “the purist alliance”—framings that the author read as indicating hostility to a potential lesbian framing of their relationship. At the same time, the author notes that stereotypes of archivists as hostile gatekeepers are just as dangerous to good relations with historians of all types.
Skipping past the author’s biographical musings, this process of reflexively “straightening” one’s presentation can be a confounding factor in researching the lives of romantic friends. Early historians of romantic friendship tended to emphasize that the romantic aspects were conventional, sentimental, and devoid of any erotic aspect. Whereas more recent scholarship has complicated the subject by identifying a wide range of relationships with more variable reception from their contemporaries. As a gross oversimplification, historians see what they’ve been trained to see in the data, just as contemporary people have been led to believe that “you can always tell” a lesbian by her gender performance.
Returning to the evidence for Leache and Wood’s sexuality, the author notes that—contrary to some assertions that 19th century women would be ignorant of lesbian possibility and therefore would not recognize it in themselves—these women discuss an artistic depiction of Sappho, identifying a “blending of the intellectual and the passionate,” discuss woman-woman love in Greek myth (as well as man-man love), and compare their own relationship to that of Ponsonby and Butler.
While none of this is proof of any specific reading of their sexuality, it offers a context in which they could have had models for a more erotic understanding of romantic friendship, even if they never recorded specific evidence for posterity. The author discusses the potential for 19th century women who did have erotic relationships to use the commonly accepted understanding of romantic friendships as non-sexual as cover for relationships that didn’t fit the non-sexual model. Such a strategy need not have been purely pragmatic, but could partake of its own pleasure in having a secret that the world didn’t share.
In the end, other that some tantalizing details of Leache and Wood’s lives, this article is more about the process of research than about history itself, but it speaks to shifting fashions in historic interpretation and the dangers of taking surface presentations for granted.
Time period:
Place:
Event / person:
View comments (0)