Media portrayal of lesbians
[1] During the twentieth century, lesbians such as Gertrude Stein and Barbara Hammer were noted in the U.S. avant-garde art movements, along with figures such as Leontine Sagan in German pre-war cinema.
During the 1950s and 1960s, lesbian pulp fiction was published in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, often under "coded" titles such as Odd Girl Out, The Evil Friendship by Vin Packer and The Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Ann Bannon.
Rita Mae Brown's debut 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle was a milestone of this period; Patience and Sarah, by Isabel Miller, became a cult favorite.
Molly Bolt in Rubyfruit Jungle has numerous romantic and sexual relationships with other women,[4] and she confronts the "hypocrisies of both heterosexual and homosexual societies.
Written in deadpan, academic prose, closely paralleling previous psychiatry-journal articles on homosexuality among women, this paper inverted prevailing assumptions about what is normal and deviant or pathological.
[citation needed] Happy Endings Are All Alike, in 1978, became the first novel with a "clearly lesbian main character," named Jaret Taylor who comes out in the book's first line.
One well known painting from the 19th century is Gustave Courbet's Sleep which openly depicts two women asleep after love-making (indicated by the broken pearl necklace); and Dominique Ingres' Turkish Bath in which, in the foreground, one woman can be seen with an arm around another and pinching her breast.
[15] Lesbian characters rarely appear in opera; Countess Geschwitz in Alban Berg's Lulu is one exception, but Charles Gounod's Sapho portrays the poet as straight.
All About Eve (1950) was originally written with the title character as a lesbian but this was very subtle in the final version, with the hint and message apparent to alert viewers.
Dunye's inspiration came from her frustration with the lack of information about black actresses in early films, which led her to create a fictional character named Fae Richards and construct an archive for her.
The film's protagonist, Cheryl, is an aspiring black lesbian filmmaker who becomes fascinated with an actress listed only as "Watermelon Woman" in the credits of a movie called "Plantation Memories."
Speaking at the Bombay Academy of Moving Images, Nisha Ganatra revealed that Bend It Like Beckham was originally intended to have a more overt lesbian theme by Gurinder Chadha.
After years during which the only portrayals of lesbians on television were negative, stereotypical, or both, NBC aired "Flowers of Evil" a 1974 episode of the series Police Woman.
Torchwood's first series involved brief lesbian encounters for both Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) and Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori), but in each instance alien intervention was responsible.
Ellen was recently granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, for her courage and her help pushing the country in a direction of justice by President Barack Obama.
[46][48][49][50][51] Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara Maclay's (Amber Benson) relationship in the supernatural series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) became one of the first prominent portrayals of a lesbian couple on American primetime television.
[53] Meanwhile, the relationship between Jessie Sammler (Evan Rachel Wood) and Katie Singer (Mischa Barton) on the ABC drama Once and Again (1999–2002) became the first teen lesbian romance depicted on network television.
Netflix's comedy-drama series Orange is the New Black (2013–2019) featured a significant number of non-heterosexual female characters, and has been praised for confronting many lesbian stereotypes throughout its run.
[65] The Canadian-American supernatural series Wynonna Earp (2016–2021) has also been praised for its refusal to allow its lesbian and bisexual characters to fall into common tropes.
Lexa's death after having sex with Clarke caused immediate outrage from the character's large LGBTQ fanbase, who saw it as contributing to a wider pattern commonly known as the "Bury Your Gays" trope.
However, some very notable corporations, such as "Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, Levi's, Banana Republic, American Express, Miller, and Absolut now commonly use gay media.
Nowadays, you have postfeminist women who want to be free from labels, experiment sexually, and use fashionable lesbianism in advertising as it does not affect their heterosexual ways.
An example was in the 1938-39 edition of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates: one of the main villains, Sanjak, has been interpreted by some as a lesbian with designs on the hero's girlfriend, though this is not openly stated.
[88] Gay Comix (1980) included stories by and about lesbians and by 1985 the influential alternative title Love and Rockets had revealed a relationship between two major characters, Maggie and Hopey.
A relationship between the female Marvel Comics characters Mystique and Destiny was only implied at first, then cryptically confirmed in 1990 through the use of the archaic word leman, meaning a lover or sweetheart.
[91] Previously, WildStorm's Image Comics had featured Sarah Rainmaker of Gen13 as a character with an interest in other women, and had openly depicted homosexual relationships between the members of the Authority, such as Jenny Sparks and Swift.
In Miyuki-chan in wonderland, for example, Miyuki is constantly trying to escape the attention of scantily clad female admirers; while Tomoyo in CCS is famous for her ostensibly innocent but rather suspect obsession with playing "dress-up" with the lead character, Sakura.
is a mild Japanese lesbian game for PlayStation 2 featuring romance amongst a group of female students living in a common all-girls' boarding house atop Astrea Hill.
The party member Juhani in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a video game, is lesbian, though bugged coding on the initial release allowed her to be attracted to the player character regardless of gender.
In subsequent patches, she reverts to same-sex preferences, with her and another female Jedi were also heavily implied to be lovers, making Juhani the first known gay character in the Star Wars universe.
