Surpassing the Love of Men by Lillian Faderman

I did not know enough to be intimidated by my vast subject. If I had been an academically trained historian, I would no doubt have believed from the start that what I wanted to do was not do-able but my UCLA doctoral training in literature had accustomed me to range widely through texts and broad areas of literary history. While my early articles had focused primarily on love between women in 19th- and early-20th-century America, Surpassing the Love of Men became much broader, as my unbridled enthusiasm for my subject and what I was finding sent me to explore love between women throughout western Europe as well as in the United States, and took me all the way back to the Renaissance and all the way forward to the late 1970's. I was finally able to express the convictions that went into the writing of those five initial articles because the gay rights and radical feminist movements in the late 60's and early 70's had gifted me with a righteous belief in our innocence and made me feel I had something I needed to say both to those in what had been the hidden world and to those who were outside of it. They had begun to form when I happened into a 'gay girls' bar as a teenager with a phony ID in 1956-when I realized, first of all, that I was seeing a hidden world to which I wanted and needed to belong and, secondly, that if I joined that world I would be claiming an identity that was universally despised.

The feelings that went into my words had been fermenting for the two decades that preceded my setting them down. As I recall their writing now, it seems to me that in those pre-monitor-and-cursor days each word was jabbed onto the page with a pen as pointed and passionate as a weapon.

Those articles-on 19th-century literary and epistolary expressions of female same-sex love, the rise of sexological theory that pathologized love between women, and the ways in which conscious lesbian identity was formed and deformed-were all written between 19. IT has been over twenty years since I published the five articles on love between women that eventually became the basis of my 1981 book, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.

Lillian Faderman's books include Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (1992).

Surpassing the Love of Men by Lillian Faderman