Going Global, Getting Personal: Transnational Lesbian Organizing and Relationships in the Long 1950s

My presentation is part of a larger project that explores how through forging of a transnational lesbian culture, women who self-identified as lesbians participated in transnational lesbian activism and strove to form personal connections across national, cultural, social, and ethnic/racial borders. Based on my research at The Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the International Gay Information Center Collection at the New York Public Library; and the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, I ask how creating transnational coalitions has provided opportunities for lesbians to find and form relationships with each other as they also worked toward political and social change.
Beginning with the early 1950s U.S. and European homophile organizations that also included women, I explore how through becoming part of the transnational homophile movement, discussing the positionality of lesbians in various contexts, and publishing news about lesbians worldwide, the women who participated in these organizations worked to form transnational coalitions and contacts. I am particularly interested in how the lesbians wanted to form personal relationships with others from different countries and parts of the world.