1904, Jacobus X, Crossways of Sex: A Study in Eroto-pathology, volume 1, page 2
Sexual Sense is the seeking for the sexual satisfaction in intercourse with individuals of the same sex, man with man, and woman with woman. […] There have also been women who loved other women. These are the Lesbians or Tribades.
1939, Elizabeth Macfarlane Sloan Chesser, Five Phases of Love, page 194:
WHAT HOPE OF CURE ? I have only known one Lesbian relationship develop out of a school love friendship and it ended in tragic fashion. In truth, Lesbians, women who are sexually in love with other women, are rarely happy people.
1940, Joel Augustus Rogers, Sex and Race: Why white and black mix in spite of opposition, pages 131-132:
The same is true of the women. The number of lesbians among white actresses is said to be large, some of whom have the reputation of being particularly fond of black women. […] Just as in the normal relations where some Negroes of both sexes care only for white people so there are Negro lesbians who do not care for others of their "race" but wish only white women, […] In penal institutions in the North there is said to be lesbianism between the white women and the Negro ones.
1999, Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960, University of Illinois Press (→ISBN), page 366:
Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue […]
2001, Gerard Sullivan, Peter A. Jackson, Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity, Community, Psychology Press (→ISBN), page 50:
As Chinese traveled outside and foreigners came in, the situation of Chinese lesbians and gays gradually became known to the outside world […]
2003, Women in French Studies:
Second, while the works of French gay men have gained a certain popular and critical recognition, the contemporary writings of French lesbians have remained, with a few notable exceptions, relatively speaking much more obscure.
2004, Marc Stein, Lgbt, Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America: Actors to gyms, Gale Cengage (→ISBN):
In the 1930s and 1940s, lesbians also went to the entertainment bars on Michigan Avenue […]
The same was not generally true for black lesbians or white lesbians from other classes.
2007, Ruth C. Engs, Women: Alcohol and Other Drugs: Alcohol and Other Drugs, Wipf and Stock Publishers (→ISBN), page 149:
One of these is that of viewing lesbians as belonging to a category which is separate and distinct from other women. Yet there are lesbians in every category of women alcoholics: professional women, housewives, grandmothers, teenage girls, ...
2010, Jerrold R. Brandell, Theory & Practice in Clinical Social Work, SAGE Publications (→ISBN)
Lesbians love other women; they do not by definition hate men. There is no such person as a typical lesbian. They do not all become aware of their loving and sexual feelings toward other women at the same time.
2013, Joanie Erickson, Jeanine Cogan, Lesbians, Levis, and Lipstick: The Meaning of Beauty in Our Lives, Routledge (→ISBN), page 136:
A lesbian who loves herself and her love of other women and does so without guilt, shame, and self-hate breaks another such rule, that of compulsory heterosexuality.
2013, Sharon K. Hom, Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays, and Poetry, Routledge (→ISBN), page 220:
It is of course “underground,” as it is still a taboo topic and Chinese lesbians hide their identities. They knew this topic would be discussed at the forum, so they wanted to compare Chinese lesbians with those from foreign countries.
2014, KG MacGregor, Anyone But You, Bella Books (→ISBN):
Most of them she'd met on SappHere, a mobile app for her phone that located lesbians nearby. It was simple to use. She could log in and check out the profiles of lesbians within whatever geographic range she set.
2019, Sonja J. Ellis, Damien W. Riggs, Elizabeth Peel, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, and Queer Psychology: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press (→ISBN), page 71:
Our reason for focusing first on cisgender lesbians and gay men is to highlight that, even among groups of people typically not viewed as 'gender diverse', there is considerable gender diversity.
2020, Ana Patrícia Hilário, Fábio Rafael Augusto, Practical and Ethical Dilemmas in Researching Sensitive Topics with Populations Considered Vulnerable (page 91)
Another Spanish-speaking respondent said that she does not identify as a lesbian because that is a term for women who like women, and as she does not like women, and so she cannot be a lesbian.
1995, Paula C Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution, NYU Press (→ISBN), page 112:
[A] woman who calls herself a lesbian although she feels attracted to both women and men and has had romantic or sexual relations with both women and men—a description that fits more than half of the lesbians who participated in this study. […] her definition of lesbianism has to include women who feel attracted to men and who have had heterosexual relationships. […] In contrast, a lesbian who has never had a heterosexual relationship and whose sexual feelings are exclusively for other women can afford to believe that bisexuality exists, and she can afford to define it broadly.
1996, Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Kenneth M. Cohen, The Lives of Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals: Children to Adults, page 239:
Others were in committed lesbian relationships and viewed themselves as having a bisexual orientation but choosing a lesbian identity. They identified themselves as bisexual lesbians. A second group of bisexual women described their process of identifying as bisexual in very different terms.
1997, Lindsy Van Gelder, Pamela Robin Brandt, The Girls Next Door, Simon and Schuster (→ISBN)
Meg Christian and even the bisexual Holly Near were out as lesbians, but most others (including the members of The Deadly Nightshade) simply didn't mention lesbianism. Of course, everyone knew, but in interviews, the L-word tended not to ...
2003, Linda Garnets, Douglas Kimmel (eds.), Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Experiences, page 138:
This conceptual framework contrasts born, primary, or exclusivelesbians with elective, political, or bisexuallesbians (Burch 1993; Ettore 1980; Golden 1996; Ponse 1978).
2011, Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender, page 109:
Mirroring Raymond's abhorrence of the femininity of transsexual women, Penelope echoes Martin and Lyon's portrait of the controlling bisexual femme forcing her butch to conform to heterosexual stereotyped behavior, arguing that passing (feminine/bisexual) lesbians are one of many sources of real lesbians' oppression.
2014, Michael L. Brown, Can You Be Gay and Christian?: Responding With Love and Truth to Questions About Homosexuality, Charisma Media (→ISBN), page 41:
[…] when LGBT college students, responding to a survey, identified themselves with descriptions like: “21-year-old genderqueer lesbian, senior”; […]
2015, Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent, Routledge (→ISBN), page 65:
"I have no proof one way or the other (nor does it really matter to me)," a gay male fan from the United States suggested. A female genderqueer lesbian, who also identified as butch and masculine, replied, “I believe Trent Reznor is out […]"
... and holding onto each other like we had over the end of winter break. I hadn't come up with anything. “I know at least one nonbinary lesbian,” I said.
2018, Lisa Houde, Serving LGBTQ Teens: A Practical Guide for Librarians, Rowman & Littlefield (→ISBN), page 109:
Girard has created an endearing character who will be recognized by other genderqueer lesbians—or anyone who's identifying as nonbinary. Read it for yourself, and definitely add it to the collection for your patrons.
2020, Kalish, Rachel, Young Adult Sexuality in the Digital Age, IGI Global (→ISBN), page 158:
[…] because, all of my friends on the internet are some sort of not-straight and usually not-cisgender, either. So that's like, you can just put in your Tumblr bio, like, “I'm nonbinary lesbian. Sup?” And then you all congregate. It's like, Thank God.
2020, Trixie Mattel, Katya, Trixie and Katya's Guide to Modern Womanhood, Plume (→ISBN), page 171:
[I] knew two nonbinary lesbians who announced their breakup on Twitter. My friend, let's call her Spike, revealed that she and her partner were going through a "conscious uncoupling."
2021, Ula Lukszo Klein, Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, University of Virginia Press (→ISBN):
[…] while others identify as gender-nonbinary lesbians, and so on. As this chapter explores the lives of people who could fall into many of these categories, it will become evident that these stories foreground the fluidity of gender and desires […]
2017, Riki Wilchins, TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists Took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Congress… and Won!, Riverdale Avenue Books LLC (→ISBN):
And, third, all of this was because trans issues were moving beyond transgender people, attracting broad-based support from within the women's community itself—particularly among the young genderqueer lesbians who would turn out to be shock-troops within feminist and LGB-but-not-yet-T circles in the struggles to come. It quickly became clear that these young lesbians weren't just allies, they understood gender non-conformity as their issue too. Following one particularly nasty shouting match inside the Festival, I thanked a young, genderqueer dyke for her energetic support. She quickly corrected me: "I wasn't supporting you. If you're not welcome, I'm not safe here either.".
2018, T. Jackie Cuevas, Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique, Rutgers University Press (→ISBN):
The idea that butch-femme entirely “works” in Chicano culture breaks down in Lemus's novels, however, in that the butch or genderqueer lesbians are rejected by or cast out of their families.
2000, Alexander Barnes, The Book Read Backwards: The Deconstruction of Patriarchy and the Wombanization of Being, page 110:
She goes to a bread and breakfast in the Pacific Northwest and suddenly on page 267 realizes even the cat is a lesbian.
2014, Fabio Genovesi, Live Bait, Other Press, LLC (→ISBN):
The answer comes from Cheryl, who, as always, is the kindest. “The tiger does it with other tigers,” she says. “Tigers stick together.” And Raffaella's such a moron that now she thinks all tigers are lesbians.
2014, Lee Harrington, Rex and the City: A Memoir of a Woman, a Man and the Rescue Dog Who Rescued Their Relationship, page 223:
“Actually, we think our dog is a lesbian,” a gay couple with a female pit bull announced. “She pees like a male, she humps all the female dogs, and if we let her loose she'd probably run down to Chelsea and buy a strap-on.”
I think that the woman who I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, who identifies herself as a lesbian bisexual, is deliberately acknowledging her own binocular vision. She is not necessarily an individual who is callously attempting to have ...
1979, United States National Park Service, Office of the Chief Scientist, Annual Report of the Chief Scientist of the National Park Service:
Comparisons of the territorial and courtship behaviors of male-female and female-female (lesbian) pairs revealed that lesbian gulls establish and defend nesting territories in much the same was as heterosexually paired females do.
1999, J. Robert Hatherill, Eat To Beat Cancer: A Research Scientist Explains How You and Your Family Can Avoid Up to 90% of All Cancers, Macmillan (→ISBN), page 35:
In California, lesbian gulls on Santa Barbara Island resulted when low levels of DDT were introduced into gull eggs. Environmental chemicals show the same kinds of results in altering male reproductive processes.
2014, George H Harrison, Birds Do It, Too: The Amazing Sex Life of Birds, Willow Creek Press (→ISBN):
Often, that's not a problem, because there are always mated males nearby who are willing to have an extra-marital fling and inseminate one or the other, or both. Sperm, after all, is about the only thing lesbian gulls need from males; ...
2002, Diane Richardson, Steven Seidman, Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, SAGE (→ISBN), page 65:
Needless to say, scientists who observed such behaviour, or the pairing of two animals of the same sex to hatch eggs ('lesbian gulls', for instance), have had a tough time; most commonly, they have tried to explain it all away ...
