So I was talking about Victorian sexuality with a friend of mine last week and she brought up the fact that in the 19th century and earlier, sexual experimentation between young female friends was considered perfectly normal and okay, and not any reflection on their sexual orientation. Like, two young girls/women would take off some or all of their clothes and snuggle up in bed together and talk and giggle and touch each others’ bodies and not only was this not really a big thing as far as anyone was concerned, it was considered a normal part of being close friends in many cases. It was understood that girls had sexual desires and curiosity, and experimentation between female friends was considered a socially acceptable way to explore that which didn’t lessen a girl’s purity before marriage.
It wasn’t talked about a whole lot but at the same time it wasn’t considered improper either. In mainstream period literature, you see references to female friends kissing passionately on the lips, caressing each other, clutching each other to their bosom. This was thought of as normal. Sometimes these sensual or sexual friendships were lifelong, even. Still normal. As long as they presented as feminine and acted in a socially mandated way, they were not considered to be actual lesbians (i.e., scary unwomanly man-haters who wanted to dismantle the patriarchy.)
This made me think, and I realized something. We still have a remnant of that in our cultural mindset today, and it’s coming out as a sort of erasure of queer women. Have you guessed what I’m talking about?
Yep. The “just gals being pals” thing. What that used to mean was that the gals in question were sharing normal, healthy sexual experimentation, but that was just part of friendship between young women, and basically, don’t worry, they’re still going to marry men and become wives and mothers and fulfill their proper social role. Don’t worry, this is a socially acceptable behavior and they’re good girls. So nowadays, with a lot of the older generation struggling to normalize open queer relationships, what have they fallen back on?
Deep down, they still find actual queer romantic relationships threatening. It’s not the actual sexuality that bothers them so much as the change in the social order of things (women no longer just marry men and become wives and mothers.) So they say what their grandparents did: “Okay, maybe they seem remarkably close and are touching and kissing an awful lot, but that’s just what young women who are close friends do. They seem like nice, feminine girls, so of course they’re still going to grow up to marry men. This is just friendship, closeness, maybe a little private experimentation but ultimately just a part of Gals Being Pals.”
(Mind you, this was different than the euphemistic use of “friend” to mean same-sex partner, which was also very much a thing. You could tell friend from “friend” because it was said with a certain emphasis. I know this because it is still very much in use in the American South, where I’ve lived for the past three years, mostly among the older generation. The fact that you can’t properly put the emphasis in writing has led to this sort of hilarity (warning: nsfw. Link leads to a post showing a painting of Sappho being given oral sex by a woman while other girls frolic naked in the background, with the official caption: “Sappho and her friends”))
So yeah. I thought I’d share these musings with you guys, I don’t really know what to do with them, but yay for promoting understanding of historical sexual culture and how it effects LGBTQ erasure today, right?
If anyone has actual historical sources or additional comments/thoughts, feel free to add to this.