Written by Lulu Shasha
The Moment of Recognition
“I knew something was up” — a phrase I’ve heard repeatedly when queer women talk about the moment they began to acknowledge their sexual identity.
The language used is often one of abnormality and otherness: “I was different” or “I was weird.” Whether it’s on podcasts, in conversations with friends, or through my own mother’s stories, this theme echoes again and again. And what always follows is a reflection that these feelings of dissonance often arose from a lack of representation.
My mother once explained to me that, for her, growing up without seeing anyone like herself meant there was no mirror to hold up. Without a reflection, she couldn’t even recognise herself within herself.
Finding Ourselves in Flawed Reflections
This reminded me of a scene in Radcliffe Hall’s famous 20th-century text The Well of Loneliness. In the book, the protagonist Stephen Gordon discovers a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in her father’s library. This book, a widely known text of the emerging popular field of sexology, famously classified and named homosexual, bisexual, and other non-heteronormative identities as medical pathologies. Yet, for all its clinical coldness and damaging language, Psychopathia Sexualis identified and spoke about other non-prescribed sexual practices. For many, including Stephen, this was the first time they saw themselves reflected in words — however flawed those words might have been. In that moment, Stephen feels a rush of joy, a sense of recognition, of not being alone. In seeing herself in the pages, she feels represented.
That moment of recognition, of seeing oneself, however imperfectly, in the words of others, is complicated. Sexology, the field that produced Psychopathia Sexualis, was deeply damaging in many respects. It framed queerness as deviance, as a medical abnormality to be studied and treated. But for many, it also gave a name to what had previously been unnameable. It made visible what had been cloaked in shame or silence.
The Suppression of Queer Voices
So why then throughout history has this been so difficult to come by? The history of queer women has purposely been more hidden, and representations suppressed.
Radclyffe Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness to expose the pain of living as a queer person in a world without visibility or acceptance. Yet the novel was swiftly banned after publication. James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, called for its immediate prohibition, his hatred and disgust unmistakable when he wrote:
“I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.”
Shortly after, Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks demanded its removal from circulation, deeming it “gravely detrimental to the public interest“. As a result, the book was banned in 1928 and would not return to shelves until 1949.
The very conversation the novel aimed to start was silenced — precisely because of its power to make the invisible visible.
Erasure Through Reinterpretation
The earliest known queer voices have continued to be denied or distorted. Sappho, the ancient Greek poet often hailed as the original lesbian icon, wrote about her love and desire for women. Yet over centuries, her words have been repeatedly reinterpreted as mere expressions of platonic friendship, a move that erases the reality of female same-sex love and reframes it as something more socially acceptable.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Queer women have written about their lives, desires, and identities, but often had to cloak their truth in metaphor or disguise it within coded literary forms. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway hints at suppressed female desire, shaped in part by Woolf’s own quiet relationship with Vita Sackville-West. The stream-of-consciousness style allows Woolf to move beyond conventional narrative and into the inner currents of thought, creating space for moments of queer feeling to appear. Clarissa recalls a kiss with another woman as “the most exquisite moment” of her whole life, her language charged with intimacy and eroticism. Yet this desire is never named directly, and instead it sits beneath the surface, present in metaphor, and carefully veiled to avoid being too visible to the everyday reader.
Contemporary Misrepresentation
In contemporary media, when queer women are represented at all, it’s often through damaging or reductive stereotypes: unstable, sociopathic, tragic, suicidal, or dead. Alternatively, their relationships are commodified — packaged as ‘girl-on-girl action’ to titillate heterosexual audiences or used as a virtue-signaling tool in advertising. Very little of it reflects the actual, nuanced experience of being a queer woman in the 21st century. Think of Killing Eve, where the central queer relationship is defined by violence, and dysfunction, or Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a film directed through the gaze of a heterosexual man, criticised for reducing a tender queer relationship to prolonged, voyeuristic sex scenes designed for the male gaze. Even in more genial portrayals, queer women are often relegated to side characters, their stories secondary to the narratives of others.
The Power of Visibility
So it’s no wonder queer women have struggled to recognise themselves. There’s a long history of erasure. Visibility has been policed and punished so that any deviance from a created sexual norm is made to seem as something worth fixing.
This Saturday 12 July, Bristol Pride will fill the streets with colour, music and voices. For queer women and other marginalised identities, visibility has always been hard-won — and easily taken away.
Pride is just one space to celebrate the present, as well as to remember those who have been missing from public life and recorded history. Pride, with all its colour, joy, vitality, and visibility, is very necessary.
For those wanting to explore these personal histories in more depth, Lesbian Lives Across Generations: Lesbian History & Resistance in Bristol, hosted by Bristol Women’s Voice, takes place on Saturday 19 July — a chance to hear the stories, struggles and resilience of lesbian communities in the city.
