'Queer women have been removed from history books for decades. I'm changing that.'

I came out at the end of 2017, a few weeks after the same-sex marriage survey results were announced. 

I wasn't entirely 'in' the closet that year, but I hadn't fully committed to a label until early spring. Funnily enough, it was student elections that pushed me to decide. I queued in the library for a voting ballot and then made my selections in a private corner.

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Once I reached the candidates for the student union's Queer Collective, I paused and read the small print: only vote if you identified as LGBTQI+. Did I? After thinking it over for a minute, I grabbed my pencil and nominated one candidate. I can't remember who I voted for, or whether they were elected, I just remember the moment as a small coming out to myself.

The ballot paper asked, are you gay? And I replied, yes.

Over the next two years, I developed crushes on women in my classes and wrote more queer characters into my stories. I was studying Creative Writing and History at the time, and while it was easy to explore my newfound identity through writing, I found it challenging to engage with queer stories in history. 

On an international level, there were multitudes of resources and books published on the long histories of homosexuality in Europe and the United States. When I turned closer to home, looking at Australia's past, I realised the literature was harder to access. The books I found and clung to were often released by academic or small, independent publishers and not easily available. I was lucky to be at university and have access to a wide-range of books, as well as not needing to pay for academic journal articles. Why weren't these resources available at local bookstores, I wondered — and more importantly, where were all the women?

Queer women in history seemed to be designated to a single chapter in books, hiding in footnotes, or spread out across webpages and academic articles. There wasn't one place to look and go there they are, because no one had written a history that exclusively focused on lesbians and bisexual women in Australia. Rebecca Jennings' Unnamed Desires (2015) is the closest to achieve this, and is an important work of research, but confines itself to Sydney.

Almost a year after I came out, I was sitting with a friend in Flagstaff Gardens. "I want to write the first history of queer women in Australia," I said to her. The seed for She and Her Pretty Friend was planted in the back of my brain.

At the beginning of this research journey, I felt directionless. Who was I to stamp labels on women's identities, ghosts of the past who have no autonomy or voice? Looking back through my notes, I found this gem of a sentence: I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going or how to get there. Is this a journey or a fumbling through time in an effort to create meaning somewhere, sometime? 

Potentially I was being overly ambitious in my quest, but I wanted to find meaning from the past — reassurance that queer stories are embedded in the fabric of time. After all, historians had been shoe-boxing dead men and women into the categories of straight and cisgendered for years with minimal evidence, treating heterosexuality as a default identity, so why couldn't I bring a queer lens to these stories of 'lifelong' friendships?

So, I began researching without limits, collecting stories in a cheap A5 Spirax notebook. I followed leads from previous historians' work and spent hours in archives, libraries, and on Trove. 

I discovered that there is no such thing as 'concrete evidence' when trying to research queer history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians can't always be lucky and stumble across a tell-all diary or a collection of love letters at the state library, but in some cases, the absence of primary source evidence leads to more nuanced questioning and investigation.

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Because I began researching queer history not long after I came out as queer myself, the writing of She and Her Pretty Friend ran parallel with many of my 'firsts'. The day after my first kiss, I was in the Baillieu Library borrowing books on Lesbia Harford for my honours thesis. On the night I met the woman who would become my first girlfriend, I told her about my research and she — tipsy from the wine we had consumed at the university pride ball — responded loudly with enthusiasm. When my first relationship turned into my first heartbreak, I distracted myself by returning to research. I had graduated from university and the thesis was complete, but I remained fixated on the women whose names were scrawled in that Spirax notebook. There were so many of them, and I wanted to discover more.

It seemed only natural to embed my experience into the book. Wasn't it fair to expose my vulnerability, when I was writing so intimately about women who have been dead for decades? The only difference was I held control over how my story was written, whereas the women whose histories I researched often had no voice. I did my best to portray them all with respect, appreciating the complexities of writing a life that was lived many years before I was born.

I can think of nothing more significant to my queerness, and how I see and present myself now, than the research I have dived into for the past five years (except, perhaps, dating women). What I've learnt has been equally moving and confronting, but more importantly, has given me a deeper appreciation of how far we have come in the advancement of LGBTQI+ rights. Everything we have now is due to the people who came before us, campaigning for liberation, decriminalisation, and respect. We should never take this for granted.

Now that the book has finished, I feel as though I've reached the end of a journey; fumbling through time to find meaning. It seems fitting to release the book at this stage in my life, when I am comfortable and fulfilled in my queer identity. I can close this chapter and turn to something new — I just haven't figured out what that is yet.

Image: Ultimo Press.

Danielle Scrimshaw is the author of She and Her Pretty Friend: The hidden history of Australian women who love women. Published by Ultimo Press, May 2023, RRP $35.99.

Feature Image: Supplied.