It has long been assumed - starting in antiquity and running right up to a recent episode of Friends - that straight men fanaticise about lesbian sexual encounters. Lesbian images appear in Penthouse and Playboy and in advertisements for clothing and scotch. But although - or perhaps because - these images are omnipresent, they have received very little critical or academic attention.
Men and Lesbianism, a special issue of GLQ, shines scholarly light on the male attraction to lesbianism, drawing from a multitude of sources and time periods. It reconfigures Freud’s question: “what does a woman want?†into “what does a man want from women who want other women?†or, even, “what does a man want from a woman that he can get only as a woman?†The answers may complicate the mission of those in lesbian studies who are committed to finding an “authentic†lesbian culture. Some of the articles tackle the legacy of salacious imagery created by men, while others address the connections between male constructions of female homoeroticism and lesbian self-representation. In “Daughters of Bilitis†Gretchen Schultz examines the fact that the first American lesbian organisation took its name from a late nineteenth-century soft-core literary hoax. “Male Lesbianism,†by Naomi Schor, and “Rodin’s Sapphic Couples,†by Brigitte Mahuzier, both posit that men - Flaubert and Rodin in these cases - actually identified with lesbian images and characters as viable subjects rather than just as objects. These articles remind us that the male interest in lesbianism is more complex than mere voyeurism.