havingbeenbreathedout:songstersmiscellany:victorian-crime:Lifting the veil on Paris’s lesbian café s
havingbeenbreathedout:songstersmiscellany:victorian-crime:Lifting the veil on Paris’s lesbian café societyDecades before the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) movement, lesbian women in Paris carved out a space for themselves in the shadow of the Butte Montmartre. Several women owned cafés that catered for an almost exclusively female and lesbian clientele.With its red curtains and discreet façade, Le Hanneton must have looked at first like any other Brasserie de femmes, a bar for men seeking female company. But Le Hanneton was a place where there was female company but where men were less than welcome.“You’d enter a small room with low ceilings and red curtains which reminded one of brasserie de femmes. But there, they are not seeking men but seeking each other,” writes the 19th century Guide des Plaisirs à Paris (Pleasure guide to Paris).“In the evening, members of the stronger sex were rare. Masculine women in charge of the place dine tête-à-tête at small tables. They then offer each other cigarettes, sweets and kisses.”Read MorehavingbeenbreathedoutOh this is fascinating, thank you for tagging me! Very Unreal Cities-relevant, and reassures me that the link between lesbianism and prostitution in A hundred hours is period- and setting-appropriate. And this is intriguing:There were no laws condemning female homosexuality, unlike male homosexuality. […] According to Albert, the authorities were in denial when it came to female homosexuality. It was a criminal offence to write about lesbian sex, but French authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to lesbian meeting places.“The courts condemned authors who wrote about lesbians and their physical relations because they feared the visibility it gave lesbians more than the so-called vice itself,” says Albert.Very interesting that there were laws against writing (or, more probably, publishing) about lady/lady sex, but no official ones against actually performing said acts. Also I wonder when those literary laws were struck off the books; certainly Proust and Colette were both writing and publishing about women-attracted women by the fin de siècle. -- source link
#history#lgbt history#lesbian history