After I finish up Charity and Sylvia, the numbering on the LHMP entries may get jumbled for a while. I realized that I'd skipped a run of numbers and need to go back and fill them in. (I also realized when doing some database housekeeping that I'd failed to assign a number to a work that I'd blogged in a non-standard fashion.) And the book that I've already assigned the next (catch-up) number to (Gay American History) may well take longer to process than the remainder of the current book, so if I want to carry through with blogging every day for Pride Month, I need to do 3 more quick items to stay on track.
Why is Gay American History taking so long to review when it's basically an anthology of excerpts from historic documents? Normally those just involve typing up a list of the relevant contents. Ah, but I've started on another side project: a database of key vocabulary in primary sources. So working on a publication that's rich in primary source material means spending a lot of time creating vocabulary records. At some point I also want to go back and pull vocabulary from the hundreds of publications I processed before I dreamed up this side project, but that's a task for future-me. The idea is to know how people talked (or at least wrote) about erotic activity between women, how they described women engaging in such activity, and to a lesser extent, how they described relevant aspects of gender transgression. (The original idea was just to focus on sexual vocabulary, but there's been a little scope-creep.)
I've written on parts of this topic before, as in the podcast episode "When Did We Become Lesbians?" and the discussion of historic usage of "lesbian" versus "Sapphic". But there's a lot more nuance than the usage of one or two specific words. Some of the language is overtly hostile, some is vaguely euphemistic, some is technical jargon, some is gutter slang. But all together it can provide a picture of how your historic characters might have described themselves and their activities, or how they might have heard others talking about them. And let me assure you, there was always some way to talk about women who loved women, even in contexts where that was not understood as a fixed category.
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