Lillian Faderman: September Portrait of the Month

Lillian Faderman, 1994

Scholar Lillian Faderman was born in 1940 in the Bronx, NY, and was raised by her mother, a single parent, garment factory worker, and Jewish immigrant from Latvia. While Faderman was in elementary school, her family moved to East Los Angeles. She earned a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962, and attended graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), earning a Ph.D. in literature in 1967.

Faderman devoted her scholarly work to history as a way to uncover the hidden past of lesbian life, writing numerous books and articles on the topic over her acclaimed career. Her book Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present was published in 1981 and won a Stonewall Book Award. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America was published in 1991 to great critical praise, receiving nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and earning a Lambda Literary Award, a Stonewall Book Award, and a place on The New York Times Notable Books of the Year list.

In 1994, Faderman compiled the anthology Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the 17th Century to the Present. Her work on ethnic history includes I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience (1998), an oral history of 36 immigrants displaced from Laos during the Vietnam War. Faderman’s memoir, Naked in the Promised Land, published in 2004, earned her the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from The Publishing Triangle. My Mother’s Wars (2013) chronicles her mother’s turbulent life as a Jewish immigrant in New York in the 1930s.

Faderman is a retired professor of English from California State University, Fresno, and a former visiting professor at UCLA. Her new book The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, on the fight for LGBT civil rights, will be published later this month.