Suffering Sappho!

BARBARA JANE BRICKMAN is an associate professor of media and gender studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of two books, New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in 1970s Film and Grease: Gender, Nostalgia and Youth Consumption in the Blockbuster Era, and is the founder and director of the Druid City Girls Media Program.

"[Suffering Sappho!] highlights how lesbian camp continues to flirt with discovery and rediscovery, signifying its enduring relevance in the years that follow. The overall result is a comprehensive exploration of the history and representation of lesbian camp across various cultural contexts."- Megan Volpert (PopMatters) "If, as Esther Newton has suggested, lesbian camp is a 'very rare bird,' Barbara Brickman has found the flock. At long last, we have a well-researched and incisive book that shatters the fragility of the claim that camp is the sole province of gay males. Brickman delicately balances the seriousness the subject demands with a fond lightheartedness that it deserves."- Bruce E. Drushel (Ph.D., chair & professor, Department of Media, Journalism & Film, Miami University) “Brickman provides an exhaustive view of the camp lesbian throughout popular culture. She deftly makes icons such as Tallulah Bankhead and Gladys Bentley come to life within the context of their own time, with accounts that are by turns hilarious and bittersweet.” - Peter B. Seely (professor of Communication Arts, Benedictine University) "Against the stereotypical image of the humorless no-frills lesbian-typically seen as yin to the gay male camp’s yang-Barbara Brickman convincingly charts a history of midcentury lesbian camp subjects, performance, and spectatorship. In analyses of Tallulah Bankhead’s radio shows, Eve Arden’s TV show, lesbian pulp fiction, vampire movies, Wonder Woman comics, and StormÉ DeLarverie's drag performance, among others, Brickman argues for a pre-Stonewall lesbian camp sensibility that helped lesbians negotiate and transmogrify postwar moral panics about lesbian identities and communities into humorous and theatrical play with sex and gender norms." - Pamela Robertson Wojcik (author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna)

• Introduction 1 The Big “Lesbian” Show in Postwar American Culture, a History2 Voyage to Camp Lesbos: Pulp Fiction and the Shameful Lesbian “Sicko”3 A Strange Desire That Never Dies: Monstrous Lesbian Camp at the Movies4 Spinsters, Career Gals, and Butch Comedy in 1950s Television5 Amazon Princesses and Sorority Queers, or the Golden Age(s)of Comic Lesbians6 Sexual Outlaw: Disidentification, Race, and the Postwar Lesbian Rebel Epilogue AcknowledgmentsNotesSelected FilmographyIndex