some kind of gay boat festival

Diana: A Strange Autobiography* by Diana Fredericks**

1939 novel about a young woman realising she's gay, trying to be straight, failing, sleeping her way across Europe, and having lots of relatable drama in the style of The L Word. I guess lesbians as a culture really haven't changed! We get one night stands that someone's girlfriend walks in on, going to The Wrong lesbian bar in Paris, being judgey about butches, U-Haul relationships, the hazards of dating a woman who isn't out to herself (which somehow leads to fake dating your ex-lover's lover's husband, as you do), and a lot of fraught feelings about money and societal recognition of relationships.

The book is often funny, and I liked Diana trying to figure out who she was, where she fit, and how she could make a relationship work while being in the closet (she worked in education). The book felt so modern I can hardly even say that I was in it for the period detail. I did find the endless love triangles a little tiresome, but the romances were quite sweet, and the feeling of, "Oh! She's pretty, and she likes me!" will never not be sweet. And the sort of 14+ smut is quite nice.

In terms of, Boy, this hasn't aged well: There is a lot of pathologising why someone is gay, with everyone reading too much Fraud (though there's a really sweet scene with her older brother trying to find positive lesbian representation for her to read). She's also really judgey of butches and any kind of gender play/variation, while dividing her own personality into things that are masculine and things that are feminine. Bisexuals are kind of not a thing.

However, the book was widely read in the '40 and '50s as one of the few lesbian novels with a happy ending,*** and on the whole I enjoyed it.

If you want to check it out, there's a slightly buggy but free copy at Archive.org, of you can get a cheap e-book as part of a lesbian pulp reprint series by SheWinked.

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*The book is fiction, though I very much suspect parts of it are based on the author's experiences. To get lesbian fiction pasts the censors in 1939, the author had to say it was totally true for realz and therefore of social importance. It even starts off with a publisher's note saying the contents are entirely factual, and a note from a Real Doctor about how important this book is and how lesbians shouldn't be punished or shunned, that concludes with the following:

The authoress lights a little lamp on the hidden altar of lesbianism. There is no danger that the woman biologically craving the male will seek that strange light. Only the sisterhood enters to remain, and those who are borne here on the harmonic tides of inversion, cannot by laws or maxims or ostracism, be kept from that dark temple.

(I admit that I have some doubts as to the existence of the medical doctor. Also Dark Temple of Lesbianism sounds like the sort of bar I'd like to go to.)

**According to PBS's History Detectives episode on the book (Diana), Diana Fredericks was probably a lesbian academic named Frances Rummell.

***Indeed, I first ran into a mention of this book in Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two by Allan Bérubé:

Similar interests brought many gay GIs together. When Elizabeth Freeman was stationed at Leemore Army Air Force Base in California, she discovered that the small library on base had the book Diana, a 1939 lesbian novel. To check it out, she had to sign her name in the back of the book. After she returned it, she was visited by a gay GI who subsequently had checked it out and noticed her name above his.

Which I'm going to get into a fic someday.