Lesbians at Home: Letter Writing and Making Meaning of Intimacy

Private homes long provided one of the few places in which lesbians could freely express themselves, and often not even the home provided such comfort. Few sources offer insight into the central spaces where lesbians expressed their feelings and shared their lives. Personal letters were products of these spaces and a window through which to glimpse lesbian intimacy. They offered a way for women to share their lives with one another, but also functioned as a means understanding and shaping the experiences of their sexuality. Close readings of lesbian correspondence, exchanged from the 1950s through the 1970s, reveal individual and collective processes of making meaning of lesbianism.

I demonstrate that personal letters expose a period in transition but also one in which change was inconsistent and slow to reach many women. While the postwar decades witnessed increased visibility of queer lives and the rise of a liberation movement, lesbians throughout the country struggled to find positive models and trustworthy information about how lesbians made their lives together. Isolation extended beyond rural spaces and reached well into the 1970s. Letters were thus a vital tool in easing seclusion and erasing distance, a means of constructing one’s belonging to a lesbian world. Ultimately, experiences of the intimate and the mundane that we glimpse in private exchanges reveal that the home must to be considered alongside lesbian feminist politics as a critical site of constructing lesbian identity, affection, and belonging.