Laurie says:
Riese from Autostraddle curated this remarkable and thoughtful collection of lesbian portraits for June’s Herstory month. As an artist who does portraits, I am very impressed with the sense of personality that imbues many of these photographs. They run from Victorian times til the present and also give a vivid sense of the flow of history. And I am grateful to her for all the time, energy and skill that went into this.
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…I wanted to see an evolution of our community, how we’d grown and changed over the years — and not just in a montage of famous out actresses and models, but pictures of actual people, pictures of women who were active in the community — regular human beings, writers and social activists.
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So I started collecting them. I scoured tumblr, discovered regional library archives online and visited websites like fuck yeah queer vintage, the new york public library digital archives, out history, and know homo. Unsatisfied with the racial diversity present in the imagery I found online, I began scanning books, screenshotting google books and even screenshotting documentaries. It took months, but every time I look at this post and the faces after faces of queer women throughout history… I get really excited!
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Four quick disclaimers: 1) Obviously it’s impossible to verify the sexual orientation of some of the subjects of earlier photos I found on tumblr, the pre-1920s photos especially. But because I found them on vintage queer tumblrs, etc., I went ahead and used them, but some of these photos may just be of cross-dressers or super-close friends. 2) Obviously it’s also difficult to find photos of women of color prior to the 1950’s, because America sucks. 3) I focused on America because doing the entire world is really hard/impossible. It’s possible pics from Canada or The UK [ETA: or France, apparently!] found their way in here, though. 4) I’ve tried to credit where I found these photos and who took them. Unfortunately, because I’m an idiot, I erased the text-edit document where I was keeping track of photo credits. If you see anything here that is improperly credited or if you can identify the origin of any photos that weren’t credited at all, please email me and let me know! (riese [at] autostraddle dot com).
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There are about 150 photos in her collection. They are all worth seeing!