Happy distracting meme time: Top fives

[auroracloud]

Here's a meme stolen from thisbluespirit because we can all use some easy happy distracting content:

Ask me my top 5 of anything and I'll answer.

My note: These can be fannish or non-fannish, but if non-fannish, please nothing related to personal life(e.g. work, people, places, life events, studies), as this is a public post and I want to remain careful about what I post publicly. If fannish, also rare and obscure fandoms are welcomed, even if you and I are the only people who know about the said fandom!

Note: I've had some issues with my eyes hurting from looking at the computer screen too much, so if I take some time to answer, that may be why.

Comments

[auroracloud]

Hmm, the thing about my love for historical lesbians is that it's more being interested in the topic generally than it is some specific people... So I read and listen about a lot of people who don't really stand out as one specific example, but paint a really interesting and varied picture altogether. But there are a bunch of interesting ladies I also know more about, so here goes. There are probably many other deserving folks who could be on this list, but I don't know enough about them yet or am not remembering them right now.

Also, I'm going with the more historical definition of lesbian just as a woman who has romantic and/or sexual relationships with other women, regardless of what their feelings and relationships with men were. So some of these might by today's terminology count as bi, but who cares, not I, this is not a gold-star-lesbians-only list.


1. Tove Jansson (Finnish author and artist best known for the Moomin books). Because as an amazing, imaginative and perceptive Finnish* writer and artist and generally badass original lady who lived on an island with her female partner for decades, she's been such an important role model. I did have to think a while on whether I count her as historical, because she was still alive for a part of my lifetime, enough that I remember when she died (I must have been around 10 years old then). But the bulk of her work and her life and relationships happened before my time, so I'm counting her.
2. Selma Lagerlöf (Swedish author), because when I heard about her some time in high school and learned she'd had long-standing female lover and nobody realized it because it was so normal for unmarried women to live together, it was the first time I realized how many queer people could hide in the pages of history just like that, without needing to have been persecuted or sentenced for indecency or something like that
3. Sappho, because of course The Original Lesbian has to be on the list, regardless of how little we actually know about her. Her cultural impact has been enormous enough.
4. Charlotte Gushman, a 19th-century actress known for playing male roles, who had an extensive circle of female friends and lovers
5. Emily Dickinson, maybe? I love her poetry and have been really interested to learn about this side of her and also how much people tried to rewrite her history afterwards. I'm also tempted to say the Ladies of Llangollen (Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler) who eloped together and lived together all their lives in this romantic friendship that was Totally Admirable And Not Indecent And Wordsworth Wrote Poetry About It... but they're two people so I don't have room for them. (Looks like I slipped them in, anyway. ;-))

* Tove Jansson was a Swedish-speaker in Finland, so she didn't write in Finnish originally, but she's from here anyway.

[used_songs]

Thank you for such a long and thoughtful answer!