333 notes &

Before any kind of feminist movement existed, or could exist, lesbians existed: women who loved women, who refused to comply with the behavior demanded of women, who refused to define themselves in relation to men. Those women, our foresisters, millions of whose names we do not know, were tortured and burned as witches, slandered in religious and later ‘scientific’ tracts, portrayed in art and literature as bizarre, amoral, destructive, decadent women. For a long time, the lesbian has been a personification of feminine evil.