Legitimacy of Women Loving Women

"Towards the end of 1892 Lautrec was commissioned to produce decorations for the salon walls of the Rue d'Amboise brothel, and he decided to design 16 panels in the style of Louis XV, each one centring on an oval portraits of one of the girls. It was during this time that Lautrec had the opportunity to study their lifestyle at close quarters.

He was fascinated to discover that many of them were deeply in love with each other, and he frequently made these couples the subjects of his paintings. He thereby succeeded in portraying the genuine depth of these lesbian relationships without exposing the girls' tenderness and helplessness to voyeurism.

The woman half turning away in the foreground was known by the name of Gabrielle, and she modelled for Lautrec in a number of his paintings. It is not certain whether she was a prostitute or a model, or both, and it is therefore not clear whether the scene portrayed here was one observed by chance in a brothel, or a pose set up in the studio. It is possible that Lautrec was simply hinting at the current fashion in the brothels for guests of both sexes to pay to watch the lesbian love-play of the prostitutes."¹

Given the infinite misogyny entwined in history, it is not surprising that relationships between women have been dismissed and undermined across centuries. If women are not full people, then two women together are inherently not a full relationship, and their feelings and interactions will not be treated as such. Consider "Boston Marriages" in the 19t century, where 'single' women lived together, independent of men: whether these relationships were gay in nature, or were romantic and sexual, is often unknown, since interaction between women could certainly not be sexual or romantic (full of the full spectrum of emotions that men could experience).¹ To assert that women who love women "have a history, not as a map of pathology but as a record of people, is to challenge sacrosanct boundaries."² It asserts these women are full people who have the capacity to make and live their choices.

In these paintings, Toulouse-Lautrec captures the depth and tenderness of these loves between women--and between women who are, additionally, prostitutes. Despite their duel deviant identities, Toulouse-Lautrec does not portray them as "queer" or as abominations. Instead, their conversations, their touches, their emotions, are all painted as valid and even beautiful. Their bodies and their lives were not meant only for men (whether the social wed-ding or the sexual pleasure, which kept prostitutes "valid") despite their immorality. While "[b]oth dykes and whores have a historical heritage of redefining the concept of woman"³--women who are not clean or chaste or dependent or "moral"--these women have never had anything wrong or inhuman about them. Tthese images are a brief look into those grand yet forbidden relationships.

^{1. Angelowicz, A. (2012, September 12). A brief history of “Boston Marriages.” Retrieved May 12, 2016, from The Frisky, http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-09-12/a-brief-history-of-boston-marriages/↩}

^{2. Nestle, Joan. (Eds.). (1987). Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (First ed.). Pittsburgh: Cleis Press. p. 232 ↩}

^{3. Nestle, Joan. (Eds.). (1987). Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (First ed.). Pittsburgh: Cleis Press. p. 234↩}