Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
They founded enduring institutions, wrote some of the most famous works in English literature, served in Congress and won the Nobel Prize. All of them were lesbians, and while their sexual orientation was often obscured from the public in their own time, today the full character of their lives can be celebrated. Portraits in Lavender presents 15 of the world’s most accomplished women who loved women (and one very notable ax murderer ~ just to show lesbians aren’t perfect, either).

No matter whether you’re newly out, questioning or a longtime out lesbian, Portraits in Lavender will change the way you see lesbian history ... and your own place in it.

BOOK REVIEW:
Portraits in Lavender (subtitled Flash Biographies of Some Famous Lesbians for the Newly Out Lesbian) is a historical biography with a double purpose. First of all, the goal is to reach lesbians who are newly out, whether young adults, adolescents, or chronologically mature women just stepping out of the closet. Second, the book intends to bring out of the historical closet the lives of fifteen divergent figures whose actions have marked civilization, yet whose orientation has either been overlooked or deliberately obscured. Included are famous writers, activists, a President's First Lady, and even a notorious "criminal."

Portraits in Lavender is not intended as a book of erotica nor as a call to lesbianism, but rather is an awakening for readers ~ gay and straight alike ~ to understand the lives of historical figures whose sexual orientation only deepened, not denigrated, their achievements. Some of those mentioned are widely known but others may be new to the reader.

The importance of this book is to alert readers to a depth of history previously unexplored, and to inspire them to investigate further into the lives of these individuals, and to commemorate their accomplishments, both public and private. This reviewer, for example, is intrigued to read further into the works of some of the very special writers mentioned in this collection. The short biographies are easy but thought-provoking reading for all of us: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or straight.

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