GLR September-October 2025

ESSAY The French Evolution of Identities V ERNON R OSARIO

T HERE HAS LONG BEEN evidence of women loving women, often as domestic companions: the Ladies of Llangollen, Boston Marriages, and “ro mantic friendships.” As Lillian Faderman argued in her groundbreaking Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers , before the 20th century, as long as the women were discreet they could be quite public and respectable. The French had many (not polite) words for women who have sex with women, such as tribade , fricatrice , anandryne , and saphiste . Eighteenth-century texts described counterrevolutionary anandryne (anti-male) secret societies dedicated to undermining the patriarchy. Rumors and pornography about Marie Antoinette’s tribadism circulated so freely that the queen herself wrote to her mother: “They have been liberal enough to accuse me of having a taste for both women and lovers.” However, the “lesbian”—as a per

ing hundreds of primary and secondary sources. Although her book is about “ becoming lesbian”—the construction of lesbian identity and culture in 20th-century France—she documents the most indubitable and glorious lesbian culture. Chaplin argues that gender and sexual fluidity were far more common in this early 20th-century period, before the sharper binarization of sexuality into hetero- and homo- categories. There were certainly women who fit the stereotype of the “man nish invert” that preoccupied sexologists. Some sported the more tomboy or androgynous look of the garçonne. The inter war period saw a rise of single young women in cities, with new career opportunities after the death of so many men in the Great War. Free from the inquisitive eyes of provincial families, young women had the chance to experiment stylistically and sexually. Chaplin documents the period’s explosion of women-oriented

and women-owned cabarets with all-female staffs, musicians, and en traîneuses (serving girls and some times sex workers). The “sapphic cabarets” mushroomed on the Left Bank and the Right, in working-class and upper-class neighborhoods alike. Some even survived the Nazi occupa tion of Paris. They welcomed Black patrons and performers, including Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt. Based on extensive interviews and police records, Chaplin documents the role of cross-dressing and the emer gence of butch-femme role comple mentarity. This was cleverly poetized by Monique Wittig and her partner Sande Zeig:

sonal and political identity—only emerged in the late 19th century. As far as I know, “ lesbienne ” first appears in print with its current denotation in neurologist Jules Cotard’s Études médicales (1870). He was part of a wave of European neuropsychiatrists obsessed with the “sexual perver sions,” including “sexual inversion.” Historian Tamara Chaplin opens Be coming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France with this 19th-century context for the emergence of lesbian identity. However, her rich documen tation of Belle-Époque dance halls and women’s cabarets brings to life a world of lesbians who bypassed the

Album cover: Prede présente une soirée au Carroll’s , 1956.

shaming pathologization of homosexuality. Perhaps it was be cause many of these were working-class women who never read sexology textbooks to learn that they were “neurodegenerates.” They were among the throngs of young Parisians out for a fun night of drinking, dancing, and cabaret. Their libidos just hap pened to lead them into the embrace of another woman. Historians rightly bemoan the fact that queer history is dom inated by publications on gay men or that lesbians have been hidden from the record—even more so than women in general. Some queer scholars sniff out same-sex desire in whatever texts turn them on. Chaplin, on the other hand, does the hardcore sleuthing of a historian: inhaling paper dust in the archives, se ducing candid recollections from scores of informants, scouring countless hours of television and radio broadcasts, and digest Vernon Rosario, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is the author of The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity.

Si tu es pauvre / Tu es une jules, Si tu es riche / Tu es saphique Mais si tu n’es ni l’une ni l’autre / lesbienne, lesbienne, / c’est bien ça que tu es. [If you are poor, you are a jules (butch), if you are rich, you are sapphic, but if you are neither one nor the other, lesbian, les bian, is what you are.] Chaplin argues that a mannish or garçonne look was sometimes adopted for purely professional reasons to draw clients (par ticularly by the entraîneuses ). It then became an increasingly popular and public way of standing out as a lesbian. Chaplin’s scrutiny of police records is a sobering reminder that “gay Paree” was not without repression. Vice squads surveilled the cabarets and kept files on “adepts of Lesbos,” particularly butch ones. One entry notes: “ Lesbienne active , small stature, a very decidedly masculine type ... wears only masculine clothes.” Besides police harassment, lesbians also faced a largely ho mophobic, family-oriented Catholic culture, as well as dis

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