Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History by Rebecca Jennings (review)

In Unnamed Desires, Rebecca Jennings has produced an important study of lesbian lives as they were lived in Sydney, Australia, in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. She describes a variety of life stories: those who lived openly and those who lived secretively; those who identified as lesbians and those who used other terms or none at all; those who set out to transform society and those who were content to live quietly, if they could; those who went out and those who stayed home. It is an important contribution to our understanding of lesbian history, queer history, and Australian history. It is a work that helps us to see the world more clearly.

Historians of male homosexual life have long relied on the public records of those lives to tell the stories—court records, scandal-mongering newspapers, and the like. Thanks to the silence surrounding lesbianism, historians of lesbian life have had to try harder—and the result is often, as it is here, all the better for that. Jennings relies a great deal on oral histories, reporting and analyzing the words of women who agreed to speak with her. Inevitably, this skews the story somewhat, as the author acknowledges. She found few women who were out and about in the period before the 1950s and few non-Anglo, or Indigenous, women. And there are no very young women—the youngest was born in 1960. But this is less of a problem than it might seem. Unnamed Desires is not a sociological study but a historical one. If it does not tell all possible stories, it tells the one that it does with sensitivity, nuance, and rigor. Jennings structures her argument through several overlapping themes. She discusses the silence that surrounded lesbian desires and behaviors and its impact on society and on women’s lives and the “twilight moments” where women actually lived lives whose very possibility was denied or unthinkable. She also tracks the “double lives” of women who carefully and selectively revealed themselves to some family, friends, and workmates but not to others, usefully demonstrating that later notions of “closeted” and “out” are inadequate for grasping the realities of many women’s lives. These are well-established ways of thinking about lesbian (and indeed other kinds of) lives, but they are deployed here with subtlety and to great effect. This is a serious scholarly work, but it drapes its academic skeleton in the rich flesh of human lives.

The social transformations of the past forty years have profoundly re-shaped the life choices presented to lesbians, but Jennings is aware that at any given moment there are many options in play—that lesbian identities coexist and succeed each other. Paying careful attention to informants’ stories, Jennings argues that identity is not the only choice: “Some of the complexities of sexual desire and practice can be lost in narratives structured by questions of identity, while the stories of those individuals who elude categorization can be silenced altogether” (xxii).

It is important to be clear that this is a study of one city in one country: Sydney, Australia. If today Sydney likes to parade itself as the capital of queer Australia, that has not always been the case. The lesbian cultures and lives of Sydney were, in the past, very much more unlike those of New York or London than they are today. In part this is due to facts of demography. The largest city in Australia since about 1900, Sydney had a population of merely 1.5 million at the start of Jennings’s story, and it was not until the 1960s that camp-friendly venues started to open (“camp” being the preferred term of self-description for most Australian homosexuals until the 1970s). Size matters, but so does politics. Australia remained under the thumb of conservatism much longer and offered fewer niches for nonconformists than Western European and North American countries. On the other hand, Sydney had an edge over similarly sized Melbourne...