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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 300 – Where I Have Been, Where I Will Go

Thursday, November 14, 2024 - 07:00

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 300 – Where I Have Been, Where I Will Go - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/11/16 - listen here)

This is the 300th episode of the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. For several previous big-number episodes, I’ve celebrated by posting some bonus fiction, and I thought about recording another of my short stories to do the same this time. But the Project and the podcast are reaching something of a turning point in terms of directions, so I thought that I’d talk about that instead. About what we’ve done and what we plan to do.

I love numbers and counting things, so first let’s review some numbers. Although I’ve been collecting materials towards this project since the ‘80s, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project was officially launched on June 9, 2014 when I posted the first blog summarizing a publication. I somehow neglected to take note of the 10th anniversary of the blog a few months ago, so I think we can consider this episode to count toward that celebration. Cue the confetti and balloons! Ten years is a long time for any project in internet years.

Since then, I’ve blogged 444 individual books and articles, in a total of 700 blog posts. There’s no fear that I’ll run out of publications anytime soon, because my database has another 600 titles that I haven’t tackled yet, though I do find myself adding new entries at a slower rate these days. Perhaps some day I’ll be caught up…if I keep going that long.

I always have the illusion that the podcast came along significantly later than the blog, but in reality I started it about 2 years later. In the last 8 years, I’ve produced 84 shows about lesbian-relevant history, biography, and literature, 55 interviews, 35 episodes talking with people about their favorite books and movies, 31 fiction episodes, 87 monthly roundups of new books and news of the field, and 18 shows in the “Our F/Favorite Tropes” series. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the main topic of this episode: the future of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.

When I first conceived of the Project back in the ‘80s, I wanted to create a sourcebook of historic research to help people create lesbian characters in historic settings. I figured it would be a manageable project because, after all, how much information could there be? (Pause while I glance sideways at my database with over a thousand publications listed.) I started the blog 10 years ago when I concluded that a more rational approach was to create an ongoing annotated bibliography. It would start getting the information out there. It would give me an incentive to start reading and processing all the publications I’d been collecting. And people could search the Project for topics relevant to their own interests. The blog has always had two parallel functions. For those who want a general, high-level understanding, the summaries themselves are available. But for those who want to do their own in-depth research, the Project offers guideposts, bibliographies, and sometimes links to the original publications it’s based on.

In the last year or so, I’ve come back around to the conclusion that my original idea was viable after all. Or, at least, that some version of that sourcebook was a viable idea. I have enough material—between the blog and the podcast—to put together something approaching my original vision: a one-stop sourcebook for people who want information on lesbian-like characters in history. A lot of the text is already written, albeit in a form that will need considerable editing. So the next big step for the Project will be to create that sourcebook.

Since making that decision, I’ve started focusing the podcast essays on creating chapters to fill in the outline I’ve drafted. Soon, I’ll be looking for input and feedback on what potential readers want to see in a resource of this type. But for now, I thought I’d celebrate this podcast milestone by laying out the current vision.

One of my tragic flaws is tending to over-explain the purpose and context of my research, so of course the book will start out with an overly detailed introductory section where I talk about the purpose of the book—what it is and is not trying to do, the background of the project, a discussion of the terminology and vocabulary I’ll be using, and the basic philosophical framework.

One of the biggest philosophical issues in the study of queer history is the consideration of how modern gender and sexual identities relate to those in history—if they do at all. So the next section of the book will be exploring that concept and offering tools for thinking about how we can create characters who both reflect their own setting and also offer connection for modern readers. This will start off with my favorite metaphor: that gender and sexuality identities are like prepositions—every language is trying to describe the same physical reality, but speakers of different languages perceive and describe the relationships in that reality differently. It’s a really fun metaphor to explore, though probably no one else is quite as geeky about prepositional semantics as I am. The section will then review various historic models of gender and sexuality and talk about how they both reflected and shaped people’s understandings of their own lives.

After that, I move on to some useful specifics. What is the vocabulary that was used historically for women who loved women? How did the nuances of meaning change, even when the same words were used? Who used which words? What evidence do we have for specific sexual acts and techniques that female couples performed? How did people talk and think about them? For that matter, what did people categorize as “sex” in various times and places? Is sexual activity necessary to identify a character as lesbian?

I want to have a chapter specifically discussing the complex interactions of sexuality and gender presentation, both historically and as interpreted by modern authors and readers. In what contexts has cross-dressing been associated with lesbianism? How can we understand and deal with the ambiguities of female masculinity in a historic context? Which models of lesbianism invoke female masculinity and which ones don’t touch on it at all?

I have a section planned that explores the social context of identifiable same-sex relationships—the ways they were performed, perceived, and commemorated—as well as a look at the broader range of community structures and categories that interacted with lesbianism in different ways: religious communities, all-female spaces, the overlay of racial and class identities, legal considerations, and the useful parallels between lesbians and single women.

There will be an entire section of micro-biographies of historic figures who illustrate various ways of relating to the concept of lesbianism, as well as another entire section cataloging historic literature that portrayed same-sex desire in various forms.

And finally, I come to a very practical part of the book for authors: a discussion of the dynamics of historic romance tropes and character types when applied to female couples, and roadmaps for writing lesbian characters in specific settings. The tropes series is, of course, the place where I’m drafting out the former. The latter is going to take the most new work. There is no way to cover every possible time, place, and culture, even when I limit myself mostly to Europe and North America. Both the historic record and my own research limitations mean that I have large gaps for certain cultures and time periods. In the end, I’ll probably stick to a handful of specific, popular settings—such as the chapter I’ve already written on the English Regency. And, of course, I won’t be attempting to provide a complete historic guide to those settings, just the elements relevant to creating lesbian characters. There’s no substitute for doing the groundwork to immerse yourself in the time and place of your story.

The sourcebook will inevitably conclude with a massive bibliography, probably with brief notes about the content and usefulness of each title.

The intent with this reference is not to prescribe how people must depict lesbian characters in history, but to provide tools and information that can be used to do so. It isn’t going to be a restaurant serving up specific dishes, but a grocery offering ingredients. When interviewing authors of historic fiction on the podcast, the most common refrain I hear is, “I couldn’t find any research, so I just had to make things up.” And while there will always be gaps where making things up is inevitable, I’d like to reduce the frequency of this complaint.

I don’t have a solid timeline on when my sourcebook will be ready for publication. The serious work of turning the current raw text into something ready for prime time won’t happen until after I retire next May (and will be competing with my return to working on my own fiction), but I have hopes that maybe two years from now I can think of planning a release date. Two years from now will be the 10th anniversary of the podcast, and wouldn’t that be a nice way to commemorate it?

In the mean time, if you would like to celebrate 300 episodes of the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, the best way to do it is to tell other potential listeners about the show and encourage them to give it a try. The second best way is to leave a review on your podcast app, assuming that it takes reviews. (The Apple podcast site is a really useful place for reviews to result in visibility.) The third best way to celebrate our anniversary is to drop me some fan mail on social media and tell me what the show means to you. Podcasting is a lonely business and even one or two personal notes every year can mean a lot.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

  • A look back at what the Project has accomplished
  • Plans for publishing a research sourcebook
  • Outline of the sourcebook contents

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

Major category: 
historical