Lesbian Romance, Cross Dressed Wedding Performance, and Queer Self Fashioning, c. 1920

Lesbian

Photograph

[LGBT] Lesbian and gender-nonconforming photo archive documenting flirtation, staged romance, and cross-dressed performance from the early twentieth century through 1946, preserving direct visual evidence of female same-sex intimacy and gender play during a period when such relationships were socially stigmatized and seldom recorded with this degree of ease before the camera. The group includes five real photo postcards depicting Sapphic love, two from the 1920s addressed to Mademoiselle C. Cottare, together with later vernacular photographs by unidentified photographers, and its strongest images center women presenting themselves not as incidental companions but as affectionate couples, theatrical partners, and participants in coded queer play. Across the archive, embraces, entwined arms, cheek to cheek posing, and masculine costume elements establish a recurring visual language of intimacy and self-fashioning that aligns with the fragmentary but increasingly prized photographic record of lesbian life before and just after World War II.

Photo archive of 19 black and white photographs, including 5 real photo postcards and 14 silver gelatin snapshot photographs, ranging from 3 x 2 to 6 x 4 inches, France and unidentified locations, circa 1900s to 1946. The postcards include French-language versos, postage stamps, and manuscript addresses, with one hand-colored postcard reading “Bonne Année” above two women locked in a close embrace and another bearing a French address to Langogne, Lozère; three printed French postcards show women posed in openly romantic or allegorical pairings. The vernacular photographs intensify that intimate register: one shows two women seated together indoors with hands placed on one another’s arms; another shows two women reclining in tall grass under an open parasol, one stretched across the other’s lap; another, dated 1946 in green ink, shows two women clasping one another in a wooded setting. Three snapshots record a mock wedding in front of a brick wall, with participants in dresses, hats, bouquets, and comic masculine costume, including top hats and applied facial hair; one image isolates two couple from that scene, while another widens to include the full wedding party. Additional photographs show women in paired poses outdoors, a woman riding on a motorcycle with another woman seated behind her, and a playful cross-dressed portrait identified en verso as “Mathew + [Jamie],” and another of a crossed dressed individual with masculine attire and mustache.

The archive spans a period in which female same-sex desire circulated through cryptic gestures, private performance, friendship iconography, and occasional theatrical gender inversion rather than open public declaration. Spanning sentimental postcard culture, playful masquerade, and informal snapshot evidence of women choosing to picture themselves as lovers, companions, or gendered counterparts outside normative heterosexual framing. Light surface wear and occasional corner wear, with minor album residue or scattered handling marks to some versos; overall very good condition. A compact but unusually pointed grouping in which romantic pose, physical closeness, and gender play recur across multiple formats and decades.

Item #23135

Price: $1,750.00