Although most of the lesbian pulp writers focused on contemporary lesbian experiences, other writers sought to create a lesbian past. The necessity of narrating a lesbian past is an important issue in Isabel Miller's novel, Patience and Sarah, first published as A Place for Us in 1969, a text that examines the lives of two lesbians in early nineteenth-century New England. Along with The Well of Loneliness, Miller's novel is one of the literary works most frequently cited by lesbian readers for its prominent butch-femme couple.

Sarah, a young woman who wears men's clothing, cuts her hair short, performs tasks commonly associated with males, travels around the countryside masquerading as a man, and complacently announces that she is "Pa's boy," falls in love with Patience, who engages in more traditionally feminine activities, such as needlework, and has a more stereotypical female appearance.

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When faced with the hostile reactions of others toward their relationship, Patience and Sarah set out for rural New York to begin a farm. As in many lesbian novels, a butch-femme relationship is portrayed very positively. Patience and Sarah, rather than merely mimicking male-female roles, however, actively seek to create their own identities. For them, their relationship offers an escape from the often stultifying traditional roles available to heterosexual farm women in the early 1800s.

In addition, this novel attempts to build up a lesbian history of "what might have been," an activity that is particularly important for the lesbian novelist, given the scarcity of materials available about lesbians in the past.

The Reaction of the Feminist Movement

Unlike Patience and Sarah and the many other lesbian novels and short stories that discussed butch-femme relationships as a central experience in lesbian life, many literary works written by lesbians in the late 1960s and early 1970s turned away or even rejected completely the butch-femme couple.

Instead, lesbian writers, influenced by the feminist movement, sought to escape the widespread assumption that all lesbians were either butch or femme. Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown is only the best known of many literary texts that focus on lesbians who give little attention to which lesbians identify as butch, femme, or neither.

Renewed Interest in Butch-Femme Relationships

After the rejection of butch-femme roles by many lesbians in the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in such roles in the 1980s, an interest reflected in the literature of the period. Authors tried to portray butch-femme roles in ways that were affirming, rather than negative.

For example, in her fiction Lee Lynch portrays butch-femme relationships as enjoyable and exuberant. In books such as The Swashbuckler (1985), Old Dyke Tales (1984), and Toothpick House (1983), Lynch frequently focuses on butch-femme roles and relationships in working-class communities. She has a special fondness for depicting the struggles that working-class butch lesbians confront.

For instance, Annie Heaphy, the main character of Toothpick House, who drives a cab, must struggle with how to combine her socioeconomic background with her developing interest in the feminist movement, where her butch attitude and class background at first make her feel unaccepted.

In The Swashbuckler, Frenchy prides herself on the fact that she walks like a butch and considers herself a bulldyke, yet she must confront the daily reality of dressing in her "straight clothes" for her weekly work as a cashier at a grocery store.

Like the literary work of many lesbian writers, Lynch's novels and short stories try to grapple with how lesbians manage to bring the different parts of their lives together as they strive to survive in both heterosexual and homosexual environments.

Pat Suncircle's short story "Mariam" (1981), like Lynch's fiction, explores the problems confronting butch women who do not blend into heterosexual society. In this story, Mariam is a black woman who is "enfolded in butch like a bat inside its wings and upside down." Despite the stares and double-takes that people give her, Mariam retains her leather vest and coat, cowboy boots, and swaggering walk, even when her friend Phoebe, a much less obvious butch, becomes uncomfortable.

Phoebe slowly learns that Mariam, rather than someone to be embarrassed by, is someone to admire and respect for her "graceful, proud lumberjack" walk and her unbending pride in her own identity. As Phoebe realizes, loving Mariam "is to be unable to lie."

Mariam, like Stephen Gordon, is unwilling to give up her self-image in order to find acceptance in the heterosexual world. It is exactly this refusal that establishes her as a heroine for other lesbians.

Conclusion

For well over half a century, lesbian writers have included butch and femme roles in their own personal lives or have struggled to write about such roles in a way that insightfully explores the complexities of such multifaceted identities. By writing about these roles and by proclaiming them as viable alternatives for women, lesbian writers have made an invaluable contribution in showing readers that butch-femme relationships were not the "warped, perverted" relationships that mainstream heterosexual society proclaimed them to be.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Although sometimes coded as romantic friendship, both gay male and lesbian attractions are reflected in nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction, including works by such major figures as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

Butch-femme identities are controversial and difficult to define with precision, but both roles subvert prescribed gender and sexual expectations; ultimately, the butch-femme dynamic is a unique way of living and loving.

In literature, the gay male cross-dresser and the lesbian cross-dresser are depicted quite differently.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Despite the stereotyping of their cover art and their pathologizing of lesbianism, the American pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s subverted the social and political prohibitions against homosexual expression during the McCarthy era.

In a series of five interlinked pulp novels set in Greenwich Village and its homosexual bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bannon provides an important record of lesbian life in a period when few women dared speak openly about homosexuality.

The most popular artist of nineteenth-century France and a renowned painter of animals, Rosa Bonheur lived in two consecutive committed relationships with women.

Lesbian poet and novelist Rita Mae Brown, best known for the highly successful Rubyfruit Jungle, resists neat categorization.

One of America's premier literary artists in the earlier twentieth century, Willa Cather reflected her own lesbianism in the creation of strong women characters and in the exploration of male homosexuality.

The popular English novelist Marie Corelli is now known chiefly as a camp figure who inspired E. F. Benson's Lucia.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

Political organizer, grassroots historian, and accomplished writer, Leslie Feinberg is a pioneer of transgender activism and culture.

Lesbian local colorist Alice French wrote coded stories that celebrate independent, financially self-sufficient, women-centered women.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

The carefully detailed case studies of nineteenth-century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing shed light on the sexual habits of a wide spectrum of men and women.

For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.

San Francisco artist and satirist Mabel Maney spins lesbian adventure tales out of perky feminine archetypes from the 1950s and 1960s.

The fiction of Isabel Miller explores and celebrates relationships between women, often across class lines.

Through her writing, teaching, editing, and activism, Joan Nestle has devoted her life to promoting awareness of glbtq culture and advancing glbtq equality.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.