Authors Lise Weil and Renate Stendhal on Lesbian Desire and Liberation

When author and editor Lise Weil wrote about lesbian desire for the first time, it was in response to Sex and Other Sacred Games, a novel by Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal. Weil reviewed the book for Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, of which she was then editor. The year was 1991. Now some 28 years later, both Weil and Stendhal have published memoirs centered on lesbian desire: Weil’s In Search of Pure Lust recalls the 70s and 80s in the U.S., a time when lesbian desire was the throbbing center of an entire culture and a movement. Stendhal’s memoir Kiss Me Again, Paris evokes the same women’s culture at its height in Paris, when the entire city was suffused with lesbian eros. Their memoirs are “sister books” from across the Atlantic, both celebrating, albeit with different cultural inflections, a historical era Stendhal considers the lost “Golden Age” for women.

Read the full conversation here.