Lillian Faderman

“When I came out into the ‘gay girls’ bar culture in the 1950s as a teenager,” says best-selling author and noted LGBTQ historian, Lillian Faderman, “there was no such thing as lesbian history. No one had dignified us with a history. All we knew was that what we loved was against the law.” Faderman changed this with two ground-breaking works, “Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present” and “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th Century America,” both of which made visible the long-neglected histories of gay and lesbian women. The former, which was written in 1981, was a product of the women’s movements of the 1970s. “I felt it was time to write the essays and books that would have made a difference in my life as a young lesbian.” She began writing and publishing prolifically and in two years she wrote six articles about lesbian history. “More than 40 years later, I’m still writing with a white-hot passion.” This passion has led her to become one of the most distinguished writers in her field. She has been awarded with numerous honors, including two American Library Association Stonewall Awards and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction Writing. Her most recent work, “Harvey Milk: His Lives and Deaths,” which explores how the gay icon’s Jewish upbringing in the mid-20th century shaped his understanding of the persecution facing the LGBTQ community, was released to critical acclaim in 2018.  —RK