Recorded at the 1974 Gay Academic Union Conference at NYU, this panel, The Lesbian in Literature, features Janet Cooper and Cynthia Secor, chaired by Virginia Apuzzo. Cooper critiques the erasure of female affection, emotion, and intimacy in children’s literature, tracing it to the influence of early 20th-century librarian Anne Carroll Moore and her control over publishing standards that suppressed depictions of female relationships. Secor’s paper analyzes Gertrude Stein’s feminist and lesbian aesthetics, comparing her to James Joyce while celebrating Stein’s rejection of patriarchal literary traditions and her creation of new forms of expression rooted in female consciousness, identity, and language. Together, the talks explore censorship, literary history, and lesbian representation within both children’s and modernist literature.
