Items

• Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present
  Academic Lillian Faderman (1940-) uses literary and documentary sources to present a history of romantic love between women, one of the first comprehensive studies of its kind. Following initial research on poet Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Faderman expanded her scope to consider a period of five hundred years and the lives of many women (including those featured in the ‘Scotch Verdict’ case explored in another Faderman work seized during the raids). The book describes how societal attitudes to love between women moved from tolerance (albeit not to women who dressed as men), to prejudice and eventually, to liberatory lesbian feminism. The book, dedicated to Faderman’s partner Phyllis Irwin, is shown here in the UK edition, although it is likely to have been the US William Morrow edition that was seized from Gay’s the Word.
• The front runner
  After the Stonewall Uprising, many mainstream publishers realised they could have commercial success with gay fiction. ‘The Front Runner’ was the first bestselling novel of this era, selling millions of copies when first published in 1974 by William Morrow. The story concerns Billy Sive, a young, gay athlete training for the 1976 Olympics, and his relationship with his older sports coach. Patricia Nell Warren (1936-2019), who was also an athlete, considered the novel’s publication to be a step in her own coming-out process. Latterly, Warren self-published lesbian fiction under the Wildcat Press imprint, fought online censorship laws and was one of the initial fifty nominees for the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor in New York City. The edition seized was probably the 1975 Bantam Books paperback rather than the one on display here.