lesbians in twentieth-century portugal: notes towards history
DESCRIPTION
Judith TeixeiraCecilia BarreiraIrene LisboaMaria Conceição VilhenaDicionário no FemininoOlga Moraes SarmentoManuela AmaralBaroness Hélène van ZuylenMovimento de Libertação das MulheresIdentificação-Documentação-MulheresOrganaLilasLesbians in PortugalLesbian HistoryLesbofobia in PortugalLesbian Pride in PortugalTRANSCRIPT
Lesbians in Twentieth-Century Portugal: Notes Towards History*
Dee Pryde
“Há uma espécie de asma mental, em que sufoco.”
[There is a kind of mental asthma, in which I suffocate]
Luís Miguel Nava1
“Some people are [lesbian]. Get over it.”
The 2008 slogan used by the London-based
equal rights organisation Stonewall.
(“Lesbian” replaces the original “gay”.)
There are, there always have been, lesbians in Portugal. However, there is no published
research by Portuguese academics on their history and culture.2 Likewise, there is a dire paucity
of translations of lesbian-themed literature, if one excepts Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, published
in the 1990s and avidly read seemingly by every Portuguese lesbian in Lisbon. Popular public
and cultural political figures do not have their lesbian relationships acknowledged in the
obituaries and other writings that appear after they die. There is a very real sense that being a
lesbian dooms a woman to the sidelines of public esteem, that her sexuality diminishes, even
cancels out, the work for which she was applauded in life.
A very obvious example of this, in the early decades of the twentieth century, was Judith
Teixeira, the poet and lesbian who “flaunted it” to the extent that she attracted the attention of
such young fascists as Marcello Caetano. In the turmoil that was the First Republic, the Lisbon
Civil Government, egged on by these future pillars of Salazar’s Estado Novo [New State] and
their fellow-travellers, decreed a mini Kristallnacht avant la lettre of entartete writers. Thus it
1
was that Teixeira had the distinction, along with two male writers, of having her books
condemned to public burning. Teixeira’s poetry, while not on the whole overtly lesbian, does,
however, include one poem, “A Minha Amante” [My (Female) Lover], ostensibly, if its epigraph
is to be believed, about morphine, which is an admirable, sensual portrayal of the lesbian sex act
(Teixeira 62-63). In addition to the poetry she managed to publish, Teixeira did have other works
planned. However, the advent of the fascist New State effectively silenced her, and little is
known of her from then on.
Less flamboyant lesbian writers were active at the same time. One, a poet I am not
allowed to name, led a far more low-profile life and wrote far more restrained poetry. Unlike so
many other lesbians of her time, including Teixeira, she never married or had children and
moved in female and lesbian circles. Her indirect descendents hold letters which, I am told, are
so explicit that no one, except her biographer-to-be, is allowed to see them, much less make use
of them in a biography or research. The biography, when it is published, will make coy reference
to “close friends”, on the assumption that readers can read between the lines. It is not altogether
fanciful to expect that these letters will, at some stage, be destroyed for posterity. It is a sorry
state of affairs that in this day and age, when the difference between “friend” and “lover” is clear
and everything else is a euphemism, there will be no Margaret Forster-style disclosure, in her
recent biography of Daphne du Maurier, of the writer’s hidden sexuality, which was ultimately
accepted by du Maurier’s own children. The only living relative of a lesbian active in the world
of twentieth-century Portuguese theatre threatens, through her lawyers, to sue anyone who
publicly identifies the deceased woman’s sexuality, despite the fact that the latter lived in a long-
term relationship with another woman; these threats have effectively cowed and silenced those
who knew the couple well. The only lesbian identified as such in Cecilia Barreira’s study
2
História das Nossas Avós [History of Our Grandmothers] is, inevitably, Judith Teixeira, whom
few authors feel able to ignore, no matter how perfunctory the treatment dispensed. Teixeira is,
however, classified by Barreira in terms of “homossexualidade latente” or “hermafroditismo”
and “androginia” (164-65), clinical diagnoses that are never substantiated. An attempt to elicit
from a lesbian academic information on lesbians she is likely to have encountered during the
course of her research met with refusal.
Other writers who should be properly researched include Irene Lisboa. In conversation
with a man involved in making a documentary on Lisboa’s life, in which the writer’s “close
female friend” was extensively interviewed, I learnt that the latter had preserved Lisboa’s room
clearly as a “shrine” (his word). It was obvious to my interlocutor’s mind that Lisboa and her
friend were more than “friends,” for all that the latter did get heterosexually married. The
documentary was never broadcast and, according to my interlocutor, vanished. Such unmaking
of history is even more robustly undertaken in the case of two Azorean writers and activists,
Alice Moderno (1867-1946) and Maria Evelina de Sousa (1879-1946). In her 1987 study of
Moderno, Maria Conceição Vilhena furtively refers to the “strong bonds” linking these two
women. By 2001, all reference to a relationship between them had vanished from Vilhena’s
second book on Moderno, while João Esteves’s respective two entries in the recent voluminous
Dicionário no Feminino fail to rehabilitate their relationship . Olga Moraes Sarmento (1881-
1948) is another case in point, as Dicionário no Feminino goes to equally great lengths to
“ghost” her (Castle 6). Whereas it is quite easy to ascertain that Sarmento lived in Paris for 30
years (Sarmento 238), the same João Esteves, although aware of her memoir, has her spending a
mere “some years” there, with no further elaboration, while the Portuguese Wikipedia page
reduces her decades in Paris to “she lived in Paris during WWI.” Sarmento’s memoir is in fact
3
quite revealing and points rather clearly to her being a lesbian “ghost” in need of academic
exorcising. Sarmento gives as her reason for leaving Portugal behind “o meu eterno conflito com
as convenções, com os preconceitos portugueses” [my never-ending conflict with Portuguese
conventions, with Portuguese bigotry] (233) and states, out of the blue, that “não me seduziria
ser … Renée Vivien” [I do not feel at all inclined to be Renée Vivien] (245). Given Sarmento’s
friendships with known lesbians, among whom Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, and especially given her
30-year relationship with Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, née Rothschild, who was involved with
Vivien from 1902 to 1907, it is not unlikely that Sarmento knew Vivien and, through Delarue-
Mardrus, perhaps even Natalie Clifford Barney and her salon. However, her “friendship” with
the Baroness must have been altogether closer: in later years it was Sarmento who saved the
Jewish Baroness’s life from the invading Nazis, fleeing with her first to Lisbon, then to New
York. The question might well be asked: why did it fall to Sarmento to save van Zuylen’s life,
not to the powerful Rothschilds? Additional snippets of evidence raise suspicion and clamour for
further research: the fact that, despite her renewed “constante e ansiosa vontade de evasão” [my
constant and anxious desire to get away] (354) from Portugal, Sarmento settled in Lisbon after
the war because the Baroness did not wish to return to Paris; that she dedicated her memoir to the
Baroness in rather effusive terms (e.g., the mention of her “saudade inconsolável” [she misses
van Zuylen “inconsolably”]); the latter’s notorious lesbianism; Sarmento’s estrangement from
the “servidores mais directos da Religião e da Igreja” [the more direct servants of Religion and
the Church] (363); her mention of the “[m]uitas coisas [que] deixei de escrever nestas páginas”
(364) [much (that) I have omitted in these pages] because of what appears to have been the
censor in her life, one Fr. Francisco; finally, her grave musing at the end of the memoir on her
status as a “pecadora” [sinner] who will rely on God’s mercy alone.
4
If the Portuguese First Republic was not particularly kind to lesbians, the fascist New
State clamped down on anything that smacked of subversion, not even having to bother to
rename Avenida da Liberdade [Liberty Avenue]. Lesbians, perhaps the most subversive of social
categories in their withdrawal from heteronormativity, had to a very large degree been forced by
societal and family pressures to get heterosexually married. Marriages of convenience – in which
the husband was very often a gay man – became even more necessary under the fascist
dictatorship. However, survivors of that era testify to the existence of parties held in such
makeshift households, which were very often raided, with hosts and guests being hauled to jail
for the night, to be admonished, and no doubt to provide titillation for the policemen. For the
cognoscenti, there were bars and night clubs where lesbians and their friends could go (Almeida
18-19) 3. In so doing they courted danger – of exposure to their families and other hazards. But
the human spirit is irrepressible, and the parties did not cease. Under the fascist State, censorship
was rife and ready. Manuela Amaral, the author of a number of self-published books, saw several
poems in her Hino Proibido stamped as “Poema Anulado por ser considerado impróprio” [Poem
Annulled as unfit] 4. It must be noted that the poems targeted by the stamp contain not a murmur
of anything that might be construed as lesbian. However, the censor knew where to cancel out.
The military take-over of 25 April 1974, although not allowing electoral democracy 5,
did, however, bring long-overdue freedoms, especially for women. Enthusiasm over the so-
called Revolution of the Carnations obscured the fact that the flowers, besides being of a single
species, were monochromatic. Early attempts to form the equivalent of a Gay Liberation Front
petered out. In the immediate wake of the 1974 coup, a Women’s Liberation Movement
(Movimento de Libertação das Mulheres) was formed. Lesbians flocked to it, as they later would
to Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo’s bid for the Presidency of the Republic. Like the American
5
NOW, the MLM was not particularly welcoming of lesbians; the fact remains, however, that
many women discovered their submerged sexuality there. The MLM’s reach and influence were
short, being mostly active in Lisbon and never succeeding in creating a lasting, grassroots
organization. The organization’s public event, the controversial demonstration in Parque
Eduardo VII in Lisbon, did not even get off the ground: when the MLM women arrived, they
were met by cohorts of men, several with their pants down to expose their genitalia. The women,
numbering about 20, who had planned on burning the symbolic objects of their oppression (toy
versions of kitchen utensils, etc.), had to flee the site. The facts of this fiasco are not widely
acknowledged, if at all. However, a participant’s recollections are recorded in “Entrevista com
‘Ofélia’” [Interview with “Ofélia”] 6. In the mid 1980s, the rump of the MLM was ensconced
behind an anonymous solid iron door in a little frequented side street on the fringes of Lisbon
proper. This rump, which adopted the somewhat mystifying name of IDM-Identificação-
Documentação-Mulheres [Identification-Documentation-Women], comprised about 20 women,
more than 90% of whom were lesbian. Even so, utter denial of lesbian sexuality reigned in the
organization. In conversation with one of these women, I learnt that the group’s extreme
lesbophobic self-censorship stemmed from a higher vocation not to “scare away heterosexual
women,” which precluded even the slightest public display of affection between partners. IDM
had published four issues of a magazine, Lua, in which there was not a whisper of the “l-word.”
Either because the farce was unsustainable or the money ran out, there were no further issues of
Lua. There were also virtually no visitors to IDM: the group did not publicize itself.
At about the same time, there was a discussion programme on Portuguese state
television’s Channel Two which tackled controversial and taboo subjects. One of the daring
subjects planned for an episode of this programme was “homosexuality.” High farce and deep
6
fear mingled in the invitation extended to and accepted by one of the IDM lesbians: she was to
speak as the heterosexual mother of a lesbian daughter. No matter that it was she, the mother,
who was lesbian and all her daughters were heterosexual. The unflappable mother appeared to
have no qualms about defending the issue concerned, but it is not easy to forget the fear and
apprehension which gripped her lover and friends, lest viewers see through the charade.
There was good reason to be afraid. In 1984, a court case was heard concerning an adult
who had had lesbian sex with a minor, an occurrence which is of course utterly to be condemned.
What was outrageous, however, was the judges’ written ruling. The latter was headlined “O
lesbianismo também é crime” [Lesbianism, too, is a crime.] This statement reveals several
layers: a) women and their doings had been invisible and were only now being discovered; b)
women had been held in such low esteem that, until this ruling, a little lesbian dalliance had not
been viewed as threatening; c) since love between women was not criminalised by law, there
was, at best, a linguistic mismatch between what the judges thought they were saying and what
they actually said. These demiurges appear not to have been very well versed in law, since the
body of their ruling holds much in common with the ramblings of nineteenth-century Portuguese
last wills and testaments. With unimpeachable bigotry, lesbianism itself, as opposed to the actual
crime committed, was categorized as follows: the minor was placed “em grande risco moral,
dados os desvios da sexualidade normal em que foi induzida” [in grave moral risk, given the
deviation from normal sexuality to which she was lured]; the ruling goes on to describe
lesbianism as “comportamento sexual socialmente vergonhoso e moralmente reprovável”
[socially shameful and morally condemnable sexual behaviour] 7.
These sentiments were hardly the product of extensive years of education, learning and
legal training. They were, in fact, the atavistic fear and loathing which permeated Portuguese
7
society as a whole, from whose loins these judges had sprung. In post-coup Portugal, there was a
convention that interviewers asked lesbian (or gay) interviewees what they thought about
“homosexuality.” This was the case of an interview with Ana Zanatti, a popular female TV
presenter who had long been the face of Portugal at important cultural events and who did
nothing in her private life to conceal her sexual orientation and life-style 8. When, in the mid-
1990s, Portuguese television held debates on homosexuality, the panel invariably included a
Roman Catholic priest and a psychiatrist. The priest was eventually dropped, much later.
All this subterfuge and sacrificing for a higher cause – that of heterosexual women and of
the public face of female sexual mores in Portugal – was shattered by the advent of the first post-
coup lesbian publication, Organa. The lesbian couple involved in this venture were of a far
younger generation and had been extensively exposed to non-Portuguese feminist and lesbian
influence. This publication was unashamedly and realistically samizdat: A4 photocopies folded
into A5 format and stapled. Their efforts were not without difficulty. Seeking to advertise
Organa, they were met by the outright refusal by mainstream newspapers even to consider
printing the word “lesbian” in their advertisements. The women of Organa, who had in the
meantime grown in number, also organized lesbian and feminist consciousness-raising meetings
in that blissful dawn.
Organa published from 1990 to December 1992. Close upon its heels, in March 1993,
there followed Lilás, so named as the nearest Portuguese equivalent to the term used in Betty
Friedan’s infamous “lavender menace” remark. The original title floated for this publication had
been “Lesbiário” [Lesbiary], but this was felt to be too strong for Portuguese stomachs. Even so,
the words “lesbian publication,” prominently displayed on the front cover, caused quite a stir
even in lesbian circles. People simply were not accustomed to the word. Indeed, a significant
8
number of more timorous lesbians used the quaint expression “feminine homosexuals”. Lilás’s
target audience was most emphatically the lesbian who lived in a ghetto of one – herself –
located in small towns and villages, some of which lacking even street names; or even in the
larger villages which comprised lesbian Lisbon. The publication was unabashedly triumphalist,
validating and Pride-ful, sweeping away self-loathing and disinformation. To this day, Lilás’s
“news in brief” section remains invaluable, covering as it did lesbian and gay-related events from
all over the world. It also made a concerted effort to record, in the form of interviews, the life-
stories and the histories of lesbians young and old. The magazine was able to place small
advertisements in one of the more enlightened newspapers but relied very heavily on word-of-
mouth. Its circulation cannot be determined with any degree of certainty, as each issue was
extensively lent around lesbian circles.
This bandying about of the “l-word” caused a flutter of interest in the newspapers. An
article published before Lilás appeared on the scene, in which common sense seems to have been
in abeyance, taxonomised lesbians as lovers and collectors of antique furniture. Interviews with
Lilás’s editorial board and other women now began to appear, especially in the form of “how-I-
got-to-be-a-lesbian” accounts. In an interview given to the newspaper O Público 9, the women of
Lilás placed lesbianism firmly where it belonged and belongs: in the political sphere. In other
interviews of the time, however, the phrenological urge on the part of interviewers was
practically impossible to withstand.
This interest spread to the book-publishing world. The title of one offering, A
Homossexualidade Feminina [Feminine Homosexuality] by Teresa Castro d’Aire, lured the
reader into a bookshop only to find that, rather than a dissertation on lesbianism, there was a
mismatch between the title and what was on offer: a slight volume of 137 large-print pages,
9
containing coming-out-type interviews, at least some of which involving a pseudonym, as was
customary. Not to be outdone by all this lesbian activity, João Alves da Costa published Mil
Lésbicas Submarinas [A Thousand Lesbians Under the Sea, a play on the title of Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues under the Sea], a story involving two “lesbians” doing their utmost to bed a
football player. The Vatican-inspired Daniel-Ange, having finally realised that same-sex sexual
activity is anything but unnatural in the natural world, exhorted readers of his Homossexual:
Quem És Tu? Para Onde Vais? [Homosexual – Who Art Thou? Whither Goest Thou?] to turn
away from same-sex love, proclaiming in bold upper-case letters: “You are not an animal!” (91)
(i.e., “thou shalt not be ‘homosexual’” 10.
Undeterred, other lesbian and LGBT organisations began to appear. I single out Clube
Safo [Club Sappho] and Rede ex-aequo, which are still active. The lesbian Clube Safo was not
Lisbon-based; it published a newsletter, Zona Livre [Free Zone], organized debates and other
meetings in different Portuguese towns, and had its annual, much attended, camping week in the
summer months. Ex-aequo, which published very useful, informative booklets on LGBT matters,
was directed at young people between the ages of 16 and 30. It is by no means its fault that
youngsters under the age of 16 were and are left to fend for themselves, in what can only be
described as a particularly unfriendly environment.
The last year of the 1990s ended on a sour institutional note. On January 6, the Conselho
Superior de Estatistica [Higher Council for Statistics] published its table of “deficiencies” (as
“disabilities” are still known in Portuguese). One such deficiency was the “deficiency of the
heterosexual function” (see Andrade 38). It would have made sense for lesbians and gay men to
line up for their disability pensions to make the state put its money where its mouth was.
However, instead of this rather pleasing fantasy, an uproar ensued, with prominent intellectuals
10
lending their voices to it. The noise reached France and grew even louder. Even so, it took two
long months for the responsible body to withdraw its table of deficiencies. With hindsight, it was
the heterosexual population who stood to lose the most from this taxonomy: centuries of hetero-
love poetry, not to mention just about all of Hollywood’s output, had been reduced to a mere
“function.” Clearly, the umbilical link between sex and compulsory procreation had not yet been
severed. In this context, one remembers with fondness Natália Correia’s lightning-speed,
corrosive poem (involving the activity of “truca” [a no-nonsense, slangy reference to the sex
act]) written and read out in the heat of a parliamentary debate on abortion (1982).
The no longer fledgling twenty-first century has ushered in some improvement, notably
the banning of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. That came in 2004,
interestingly the same year which saw a teenage girl kicked out of her home by her parents, who
found out about her sexual orientation from a TV documentary, which did not name names or
show faces (the parents recognised their daughter’s shoes, however). She was not the first to
suffer such treatment, nor, I fear, will she be the last. In any event, the state itself, in insisting
that marriage must be between a man and a woman, has all the while been breaking its own anti-
discrimination laws. Another mismatch.
The hyper-active, ubiquitous lesbophobia of the New State has, as already intimated, slid
with the greatest of ease into post-coup, now twenty-first century Portugal. If elsewhere lesbians
are “ghosted” (to echo again Terry Castle’s diagnosis), in Portugal their very ghosts are
exorcised to oblivion by means of ruthless and skillful sculpting of the facts. Such an example is
to be found in Fernando Cascais’s article “Diferentes como só nós” [Different as only We Can
Be], in which the author is anxious to prove that “GLBT” organisations in Portugal sprang from
the AIDS epidemic. His first step is to make “the left” monolithic, which enables him completely
11
to ignore the lesbian and gay GTH – Grupo de Trabalho Homossexual [Homosexual Working
Group], whose work, starting in the late 1980s, was as extensive as it was precious and who met
in the premises of the PSR [Revolutionary Socialist Party]. (The group disbanded in 2003.) Lilás
is also excised with surgical precision from Cascais’s account. An obscure reference to
“separatists” is made, as if separatism were even possible in a country like Portugal where
traditional male occupations remain as male-dominated as ever: any would-be separatist would
be hard put to find a female plumber, a female carpenter, etc., etc. Even a charge of misandry
among Portuguese lesbians – possibly what Cascais meant – would be difficult to substantiate. In
conversations with lesbians who had been raped by males and with those who had endured
childhood sexual abuse by male relatives, I never detected traces of man-hating: sadly, there was
self-hatred. (I suspect we are here faced with the age-old problem of foreign terms, concepts and
events being imperfectly understood in Portugal.) However, those many activists who remember
the actual events can easily testify to the fact that the group at the centre of Cascais’s “history”
was a small gathering of men, understandably concerned with the AIDS crisis but by no means
representative of anything other than themselves. These gatherings eventually organized
themselves into an association, under whose auspices a number of lesbians produced the
newspaper-type Trivia. Quite soon, the order came for publication to cease: exactly three
numbers of Trivia were produced.
It is not just this particular instance of what might strike one as “homo-patriarchy” that
marked the noughties of this century. Hetero-patriarchy has not been idle. Around 2007-08, what
appeared to be a concerted effort at (hetero-)sexualising everyday Portuguese life made itself
felt. The Yellow Pages sported a gracefully ageing hetero-couple on its cover; Flora margarine
tubs chose a young man and young woman in coupledom interaction; Weetabix, the breakfast
12
cereal, followed a similar path; the state-owned mortgage provider advertised its services on its
ATMs with a Flora margarine-type couple; the Post Office still prominently offers a children’s
book titled O Grande Livro da Sexualidade [The Great Book of Sexuality] with a cover
displaying two naked children, one with a ‘boy’s’ haircut, the other with a ‘girl’s’ hairstyle,
holding hands and looking over their shoulders at the malleable young reader 11. At the other
extreme, FNAC, which owns the only adequately stocked bookshops in Lisbon, has in its Chiado
outlet a small portion of a shelf headed (in English) “Lesbian and Gay”. Expressing this label in
a foreign language hints loudly at squeamishness and effectively distances all things lesbian and
gay from Portuguese reality. But even more striking are the contents on display: pornography
and “erotic” literature, including Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, simply because it is “erotic” and
unmindful of the fact that it is heterosexual in content. For a long time, FNAC-Chiado resisted
placing the recently published anthology of Adrienne Rich’s poetry in Portuguese translation,
Uma Paciência Selvagem [A Wild Patience], on this shelf portion. The reason given was that
Rich’s book was “poetry,” the inference being that it could not therefore be “lesbian” 12.
Portugal is not, indeed, the worst possible country for lesbians to live in. That honour
must go to a host of other countries. To my knowledge, no Portuguese lesbian has ever asked for
political asylum in the United Kingdom, for instance. However, many of the more financially
privileged lesbians (and gay men) seek cultural asylum in London every weekend, and others
save up to go for a week’s holiday in Amsterdam for a proper Pride Parade. Furthermore,
through the careful suppression of the lesbian past, a spirit of omertà appears to stalk the
Portuguese academic land. To counter this (not so) new censorship, I now say that a multi-
pronged intervention is needed. I only hope we will not have to rely on the type of rescue
envisaged by Margaret Atwood at the end of her The Handmaid’s Tale.
13
NOTES
* I wrote this article for A.P., who would have been pleased. I am deeply indebted to Anna M.
Klobucka for, among other things, introducing me to Olga Moraes Sarmento. All translations are
mine.
1. In Relâmpago. Revista de Poesia 1 (1997). A propos of Nava and other “queer” Portuguese
writers, Mário César Lugarinho states that “Portuguese academic criticism refuses to identify or
discuss questions of sexual difference or homoerotic desire, and instead focuses on form and
stylistic effects” (287).
2. Anna M. Klobucka’s paper “Summoning Portugal’s Apparitional Lesbians: A To-Do Memo”,
invaluable in and of itself, is even more so in this context.
3. São José Almeida’s article, “Homossexuais Perseguidos no Estado Novo” is rich in detail in
this regard. Almeida has also written about the lesbian couple who were Communist militants
and anti-fascist resisters, Julieta Gandra and Fernanda Paiva Tomás (Público, 22 October 2007).
Her fresh-from-the-press Homossexuais no Estado Novo [Homosexuals in the New State] breaks
ignored and untouched ground. She is much to be lauded, and readers will eagerly await her
forthcoming publications.
4. The book may be consulted in the Portuguese Biblioteca Nacional (Shelfmark L. 18345 V.);
the date of its “Depósito Legal” [Legal Deposit] stamp is 10 May 1967. I am indebted to
Catharien Hamerslag for drawing my attention to this.
5. The first democratically elected Prime Minister took office as late as 23 July 1976.
6. Maria Andrade, Lilás 3, 1993, 23/27.
7. Acordão da Relação de Lisboa, 31/10/84, IV-155.
14
8. Zanatti has recently come out, but as “homosexual,” the word preferred by Portuguese women
of a certain age. See Público, 12 June 2009.
9. Tereza Coelho, “As mulheres que gostam de mulheres”, Público Magazine, 28 November
1993. Coelho, among the most gifted of her generation of journalists, went on to facilitate the
publication in O Público of articles by the pseudonymous Maria Josefina Silva, of the Lilás
collective.
10. This is a translation from the French.
11. The fourth edition of this book (translated from Spanish) was published by Didáctica Editora
in November 2007. I am not aware of a Portuguese translation of Heather Has Two Mommies.
12. This selection of poems (translated by Maria Irene Ramalho and Monica Varese Andrade and
published by Cotovia in 2008) was overwhelmingly ignored by reviewers and was always
extremely difficult to find in bookshops.
WORKS CITED
Almeida, São José. “Homossexuais Perseguidos no Estado Novo”, Revista Pública (supplement
of Público) 12 July 2009.
---, Homossexuais no Estado Novo. Porto: Sextante Editora, 2010.
Andrade, Maria. “Os passos de uma deficiência” [The Steps of a Deficiency]. Lilás 24 (Abril
1999): 38-40.
Ange, Daniel. Homossexual: Quem És Tu? Para Onde Vais? Lisboa: São Paulo, 1993.
Amaral, Manuela. Hino Proibido. Lisboa: n.p., 1967.
Barreira, Cecília. História das Nossas Avós: Retrato da Burguesia em Lisboa 1890-1930.
Lisboa: Colibri, 1992.
15
Cascais, Fernando. “Diferentes como só nós. O associativismo GLBT português em três
andamentos.” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 76 (Dezembro 2006): 109-26.
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Costa, João Alves da. Mil Lésbicas Submarinas. Lisboa: Temas da Actualidade, Lisboa, 1996.
D’Aire, Teresa Castro. A Homossexualidade Feminina. Lisboa: Temas da Actualidade, 1996.
Dicionário no Feminino. Eds. Zília Osório de Castro, João Esteves et al. Lisboa: Livros
Horizonte, 2005.
Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier. London: Arrow Books, 2007.
Klobucka, Anna M. “Summoning Portugal’s Apparitional Lesbians: A To-Do Memo.” Paper
presented at the conference of the Association of British and Irish Lusitanists, Maynooth,
September 2009.
Lugarinho, Mário César. “Al Berto, In Memoriam. The Luso Queer Principle.” Lusosex. Gender
and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, Eds. Susan Canty Quinlan and
Fernando Arenas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002. 276-
99.
Rich, Adrienne. Uma Paciência Selvagem. Trans. Maria Irene Ramalho and Monica Varese
Andrade. Lisboa: Cotovia, 2008.
Sarmento, Olga Moraes. As Minhas Memórias. Tempo Passato, Tempo Amato. Lisboa:
Portugália, 1948.
Teixeira, Judith. Poemas. Lisboa: &etc, 1996.
Vilhena, Maria da Conceição. Alice Moderno, a Mulher e a Obra. Angra do Heroismo: Direcção
Regional dos Assuntos Culturais e Secretaria Regional da Educação e Cultura, 1987.
16
—. Uma Mulher Pioneira. Ideias, Intervenção e Acção de Alice Moderno. Lisboa: Salamandra,
2001.
17