Books like Sapphistries by Leila J. Rupp

Stone Butch Blues follows a butch lesbian’s life in 1970s America, blending historical detail with personal experience to explore gender, sexuality, and community within the LGBTQ movement.

A groundbreaking memoir that blends personal narrative with rigorous theory, charting Maggie Nelson’s queer romance, pregnancy, and the politics of love and family.

A pioneering oral‑history study of Buffalo’s working‑class lesbian community from the 1930s to the 1960s, revealing how black and white women shaped social change through butch‑fem culture, work, and resistance.

This book argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill, these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all. This book explores this community as a site of a lived corporeal theology and political space. It reveals that religious institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church were founded in such bars, that traditional and non-traditional religious activities took place there, and that religious ceremonies such as marriage were often conducted within the bars by staff. It examines how these bars became not only ecclesiastical sites but also provided the fertile ground for the birth of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights before Stonewall.