Queer History 121: Radclyffe Hall

“If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours.”

When you think of literary rebels, you might picture Hemingway with his whiskey or Kerouac on the road. But holy shit, Radclyffe Hall—a monocle-wearing, suit-sporting English writer—staged one of the most consequential literary rebellions of the 20th century simply by writing a melancholy novel about a lesbian character who wanted nothing more than dignity. Her 1928 novel "The Well of Loneliness" wasn't filled with sex scenes or even particularly radical ideas by today's standards, but it unleashed a cultural firestorm that would shape LGBTQ+ visibility for decades to come.

Let's be damn clear about something from the start: Radclyffe Hall knew exactly what she was doing. As an upper-class Englishwoman who openly identified as a "congenital invert" (the term used before "lesbian" became common), she deliberately sacrificed her literary reputation and social standing to publish a book that would force British and American society to acknowledge that lesbians existed at all. The legal ba…