POSSANZA: I come from a really nerdy family of readers.

And I think the beach was somewhere to be free of that, especially if you could find a nude beach, if you could be in the water.ĭEPENBROCK: Possanza didn't grow up with many stories about lesbians, but, she says, they're right there, even when the word is not used, even when that part of their story is erased. Today we have drag bans in certain states, and before those existed, you know, before there was explicit terminology to ban these things, it was - a lot of it was based on what you wore. POSSANZA: One sort of unexpected thing that came up for me in writing is there's so much policing of what women, lesbians, queer people wore, and that policing actually became a way of just policing queerness in general. Another part is just what it means to feel free in your body.

She swims for a gay and lesbian aquatic team in New York. Part of that, Possanza says, could be her own bias. It's people who really kind of lived daringly and left some record of living a queer life.ĭEPENBROCK: There's also a surprising amount about swimming in the book. It's not, oh, here's the story of how Eleanor Roosevelt was secretly a lesbian, or here's the story of Emily Dickinson, who was maybe in love with her brother's wife. POSSANZA: And they're not, you know, traditionally well-known people. JULIE DEPENBROCK, BYLINE: Amelia Possanza is a part-time writer and a full-time publicist.ĪMELIA POSSANZA: So I like to think of this project as me taking on being the publicist for lesbians.ĭEPENBROCK: Her book, 'Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir In Archives,' focuses on seven couples, each representing a different era in the 20th century. So Possanza began a journey to uncover the romances and role models written out of history. But these stories were rarely about lesbians or lesbians in love. When writer Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn, she found herself, for the first time, surrounded by queer stories on historical placards, on her LGBTQ swim team and on her TV screen.

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