True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships

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The textuality of the lesbian body, the diverse texts of fictional and/or corporeal lesbian bodies, even the writing of lesbian erotica are all at issue here. Yes to activism yes to cultural upheaval—but more profoundly what we believed could change everything from the bottom up (it could be I’m just speaking for myself here) was loving women… In a world in which woman hatred was endemic and foundational this was the most subversive the most life-affirming response.

We had discovered, entered, and occupied this territory body and soul–or, as you might say, body and thought.

To describe just one way that lesbian Desire operates in literary texts entails teasing (a) theory directly from the texts themselves, and I do seek to connect—at least in theory—the often divergent realities of (lesbian) words and deeds, coincidentally suggesting some ways we lesbians enact our Desire(s) in the world. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. That’s one of the reasons why the worlds we are writing about in these books matter so much, why it feels so important that they not be forgotten.

The discovery of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein as our woman-loving ancestresses; the discovery of all the silenced, conveniently forgotten artists–from Artemisia Gentileschi to Meret Oppenheim and the women of Surrealism. Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Michèle Aina Barale, Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. Expanding the film's generic antecedents to consider the flapper as a discursive figure of 1920s American culture, I situate The Wild Party within developing modern female kinaesthetics and spectatorships, during a period in which Hollywood was also systematizing its commodification of femininity and the production of heterosexual romance narratives. Oh I knew how to make love to women, to want want want women… but when it came to loving in a way that was sustainable…to “loving with deep recognition” (which is what I decided early on feminism had to be about) I had everything to learn and in fact had a lot of things stacked against me.

The show followed the lives, loves and daily dramas of a group of lesbians living in West Hollywood. And for both of us there was a poignancy in writing about that culture/movement because it has all but disappeared, is on its way to becoming a forgotten piece of our history. Whilst placing the sapphic gaze at the centre of the narrative, the following two foreign-language films are historical period dramas that subvert genre conventions by portraying a queer feminist love story and a female saviour trope rescuing upper class heroines from their patriarchal shackles. In its susceptibility to analysis, to deconstruction, no text may be trusted as a repository of stable truth (see note 3). We all seem to have periods of intense sexual arousal, yet that seems to fade within months of the onset of a new relationship.

What we were able to see we saw because we were women inhabiting our bodies in a way that had not done since possibly Sappho’s time. Renate Stendhal sweeps out the old myths about bed death, the notion that lesbian couples tend to be too close to maintain sexual desire.

The world of L Word disavows the old flawed cliche that lesbians are anti-men – they are just not that interested in them. But when that sexual aspect of a relationship is no longer present, partners are more like roommates. Sex becomes an afterthought in many lesbian relationships when the initial passions wane and shared intimacy starts to move away from being physical. It felt especially important to do this because young lesbians and queer women today generally have no idea about our lives, and the tremendously rich–if flawed–culture that emerged from them.