Table Of ContentLesbian Death
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Lesbian Death
Desire and Danger
between Feminist and Queer
MAIREAD SULLIVAN
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
A different version of chapter 2 was previously published as “A Crisis
Emerges: Lesbian Health between Breast Cancer and HIV/AIDS,”
Journal of Lesbian Studies 22, no. 2 (2018): 220– 34; Taylor & Francis Ltd.,
http://www.tandfonline.com. Portions of chapter 3 were previously
published in “Kill Daddy: Reproduction, Futurity, and the Survival of
the Radical Feminist,” in “Survival,” special issue, WSQ 44, no. 1/2
(Spring/Summer 2016): 268– 82; copyright 2016 Mairead Sullivan.
Copyright 2022 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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ISBN 978- 1- 5179- 1001- 3 (hc)
ISBN 978- 1- 5179- 1002- 0 (pb)
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and
employer.
UMP BmB 2022
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Lesbian Disruption 1
1. Lesbians Killed the Lesbian Bar: Lamentations of Loss 25
2. Marked for Life: Breast Cancer and Lesbian Biopolitics 49
3. Murderous Lesbian Separatism: Killing Daddy 67
4. Lesbian Bed Death: Danger, Desire, and Killjoy Feminism 91
5. Killer Lesbians: Reading Aggression from the
Lesbian Avengers to the New Jersey 4 113
Conclusion: We Are Not Post- Lesbian 139
Acknowledgments 147
Notes 151
Bibliography 163
Index 181
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Preface
In the winter of 2020, as I was completing the first draft of this manuscript
and Covid-1 9 was barely on our radar, Showtime was in the midst of a queer
lesbian revival of sorts. The long-a nticipated L Word: Generation Q brought
the stylized high life of Los Angeles lesbians back to our Sunday nights.
When the first L Word came out, I was a young queer living through the
harsh winters of Boston with my own stereotypes about life in LA. Nearly
every Sunday across the show’s six- season run, I crammed into a friend’s
living room or sidled up to a packed bar to watch, and also to lament, what
felt like the impending end of queer politics and the mainstreaming of gay
and lesbian life. So, it seems apt that I would be completing this book—
now a middle-a ged queer living in LA—w ith just enough time to mention
The L Word’s newest iteration. Even more striking for this project, however,
is the new queer drama that immediately followed Generation Q’s Sunday
night slot: Work in Progress.
Work in Progress offers a stark contrast to the glamour and drama of
queer life in Los Angeles’s eastside neighborhoods, Generation Q’s new
locale.1 The show’s main character, Abby, is a middle-a ged, self-d escribed fat,
butch, queer dyke living with obsessive-c ompulsive disorder and a plethora
of depressive and anxious symptoms. In the first episode, Abby gives her-
self six months to overcome her sense of despair before ending it all. She
counts out 180 almonds, lays them out on her counter, and begins her
commitment to her own suicide. In a short time, however, Abby’s life takes
an upturn when she begins dating twenty-t wo- year- old trans man Chris.
After mistaking Chris for a cute baby dyke, Abby quickly falls into the new
rhythms of queer and trans identities that Chris and his friends represent.
vii
viii Preface
In episode 2, Abby ventures out with Chris to a queer sex club, referred
to in the episode notes as a “queer wonderland” (Mason 2019). The club
pulses with electronic music and queers of all manner of gender presenta-
tion and sexual interest fill the space. The sides of the dance floor are lined
with art for sale, booths with homemade leather and kink goods, and a
rotating showcase of queer performance art. Abby knows she has been to
the venue before but cannot quite place it. When she orders her next drink,
she asks the bartender about the bar’s history. It has been many things, they
report, including, perhaps, once a lesbian bar. Abby immediately flashes
back to a previous iteration of the space, simply called “The Lesbian Bar.”
In the Lesbian Bar, the lights are turned up and friends gather in small
masses. The space is bland, and the night’s entertainment is two white,
feminine women with guitars playing slow, weepy music. One singer’s
tank top is clearly emblazoned with a Dyke March logo. The music fades
into the background of the scene but one line from the music clearly rings
out: “I’m begging you to be so careful with me.” Around the room, cou-
ples slowly sway, some gently making out. The juxtaposition of the queer
sex club, pulsing with public sex, leather, and bondage, with the Lesbian
Bar situates the show’s premise within a number of lesbian logics that
I take up in this book: the lesbian is gone, subsumed by queer’s expan-
sions; that lesbian is dowdy, unstylish, unsexy. I was shocked, then, when a
sub title marked the year of the Lesbian Bar as 2007. I am far closer in age
to Abby than Chris, but I have never marked myself on that side of the
lesbian–queer divide.
I have never perfected the elevator pitch for this book. For strangers
and outsiders to queer politics and queer studies, when I report that I am
writing a book about the panic that no one wants to identify as lesbian,
they quickly report that they know many lesbians! For myself, when I
share with other queers and academics that I am writing a book about the
lesbian question, I rush to assure that I am taking to task a virulent strain
of anti- trans rhetoric that has taken up the lesbian as in need of protection
from “trans.” I am quick, too, to promise I am not trying to save the lesbian
or recuperate lesbian in any way. But I am also struck by how much I
and many others find deep pleasure in naming the lesbian as part of our
culture— indeed, our politics—e ven if we do not claim lesbian as an iden-
tity. That I find it so anxiety-p roducing to create a project on the lesbian
is precisely why I have written this book. I have written this book because
I am not a lesbian. I have written this book because associating my work
Preface ix
with lesbian makes me endlessly nervous. I have written this book because
I find so much richness in lesbian histories and lesbian culture. I have writ-
ten this book because I have spent endless hours in archives of lesbian
activists, and I have loved every minute. I have written this book because
lesbians have saved me, gave me a home, gave me language, showed me a
future. I have also written this book because lesbian has been weaponized,
used to instigate, justify, and perpetuate anti-t rans violence and vitriol. I
have written this book because I want the generations that worry that
lesbian has been or is being forgotten to know that we remember. I have
written this book because I feel myself holding on to the political and iden-
tarian commitments that served me but no longer serve my students. I
have written this book because I feel scared to be branded as a lesbian
scholar (rather than a scholar of the lesbian). I have written this book
because I cannot let lesbian go. Mostly, I have written this book because I
really do love lesbians.
