International Lesbian Visibility Day is not a day of commemoration or celebration of a precisely datable event, but an internationally agreed day and individually organised strategy and campaign for countering a serious experience faced by lesbian women worldwide. Of course, no one is actually invisible. In this case, seeing is an exercise of power. Invisibility means a lack, partial or complete, of social and cultural capital such as recognition, appreciation, and access to resources. Even though lesbian women represent at least half of all homosexuals, they are generally viewed as ‘the other homosexuals’. Their needs are marginalised or the responsibility for ending inequality is shifted from their identity as lesbians to their belonging to the broader group of ‘women’. Thus, lesbianism remains trapped between sexism and homophobia, and lesbians are discriminated against both as ‘women’ and as ‘homosexuals’.
Criticism of this posited ‘invisibility’ of lesbian women was already advanced at the end of the 19th century by the poet and author Emma Trosse, who was the first person to publicly and scientifically address lesbian sexuality. The journalist Anna Rüling (a pseudonym) also debated the causes and consequences of the invisibility of female homosexuals in the world’s first – as far as we know – lesbian political speech, held in Berlin in 1904 before the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WhK). Rüling argued ‘…. that in general, when people talk about homosexuals, they only think of the urnish men and overlook how many homosexual women there are, who are of course less talked about because they – I would almost like to say “unfortunately” – do not have to fight an unjust criminal law paragraph that is the result of false social mores.’
The different forms of persecution suffered by homosexual men and women inevitably led to a rivalry between two groups of victims spanning several governmental system and decades. These groups were unable to stand side by side in solidarity as equals due to the different injustices they had suffered, remaining instead within a ranked hierarchy of ‘homosexuality’. This conflict continues to this day. Lesbians are not recognised for their own, heterogeneous history of persecution and discrimination, despite the gradually improving yet still precarious availability of historical sources. The emergence of an historical and social scientific canon of works is thus prevented, or at most regarded as an almost superfluous niche within the field of homosexual research.
For example, memorial plaques commemorate victims of the National Socialist persecution of homosexuals, yet these refer solely to the gay and bisexual men and trans women persecuted under Paragraph 175, and not to lesbian and bisexual women or trans men. Until the late 1980s, the West German Bundestag still officially referred to ‘homosexuals and lesbians’. It is thanks to the political and strategic foresight of Jutta Oesterle-Schwerin (now Jutta Schwerin), then a member of the Green Party in the Bundestag, that the different positions became more clearly defined. She ensured that the terms ‘gays’ and ‘lesbians’ could be used to formulate needs more precisely and make differences visible. It has in the last few years finally become possible to historically and politically analyse the systematic withdrawal of custody rights that lesbian women almost inevitably suffered when separating from their husbands. When the homosexual victims of the Nazi dictatorship were commemorated in the Bundestag for the first time in 2023, gay and lesbian victims were represented equally and with the same respect.
That lesbians be viewed favourable is essential in many ways. In many countries, gays and lesbians continue to be persecuted, murdered, and executed by the state. In some of these countries, only male homosexuality is a criminal offence. However, this does not mean that lesbian women are not also affected by violence; state, social, and familial control make it impossible for them to live as they choose from the outset. A lack of awareness (or interest) in this situation leads, for example, to lesbian asylum seekers having worse chances of being granted the right to stay in Germany, instead being deported to their countries of origin, where they are threatened with forced marriage, rape, and familial imprisonment.
When on 26 April, lesbians and their allies come together in many places to demand ‘lesbian visibility’, it is never a purely self-interested campaign for more inclusion. Rather, they also do it in the awareness that visibility, being seen, is a prerequisite to being politically productive and effective in acts of solidarity with all marginalised groups of people! Lesbians are everywhere, and lesbian history is everywhere.
