Voices From The Closet

The ability to live safely out of the closet is very much a modern phenomenon (still largely only possible in the Western world) that is within the living memory of the generation who first came out en masse, the Boomers. We must not forget the countless generations who preceded us and did not have that freedom, but who lived and loved as best they could under horribly oppressive conditions.

Here's a selection of those past voices from the closet --

 jarchivistsims

sometimes i think about gay people who lived centuries ago who thought they were all alone who imagined a world where they could live openly as themselves who met in secret spoke in code defied everything and everyone just to exist and i’m like..i gotta sit down. whew i gotta sit down

 l2g

this is why this sappho fragment hits me so hard

 mortuarybees

 phantom-tail

If this little book should see the light after its 100 years of entombment, I would like its readers to know that the author was a lover of her own sex and devoted the best years of her life in striving for the political equality and social and moral elevation of women.

“The Great Geysers of California” by Laura De Force Gordon, 1879, unearthed from a 100-year-old time capsule in San Francisco, 1979.

 katherinebarlow

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are.”

Gordon Bowsher to Gilbert Bradley, 1940s

I couldn't find any publication data on that book but a good summary of Gordon and Gilbert's wartime love affair is available here.

Another voice from the distant past -- a poem written by medieval Christian mystic St. Hildegard von Bingen to her beloved nun and muse Richardis von Stade:

I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse

I have gathered my myrrh with my spice

I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey

I have drunk my wine with my milk

Eat, o friends

Drink, yea drink abundantly, o beloved

I sleep, but my heart waketh

It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh

Saying, open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled

For my head is filled with dew

And my locks with the drops of the night.

And further to the Sappho fragment at the beginning of this post, there's a famous modern poem written in response to it which is the perfect way to conclude this post --

Sappho's Reply

My voice rings down through thousands of years

To coil around your body and give you strength,

You who have wept in direct sunlight,

Who have hungered in invisible chains,

Tremble to the cadence of my legacy:

An army of lovers shall not fail.

-- Rita Mae Brown