Lesbian Love

Eve Adams self-published her collection of stories, Lesbian Love, in February 1925 in an edition of just 150 copies. In 1926, her Greenwich Village "tea house" Eve's Hangout, one of the earliest lesbian & gay cafes in the village, was raided by police, and she was arrested for publishing an "indecent book." According to police transcripts, at the time of her arrest, she had only 10 copies left, all of which were confiscated and presumably destroyed. A year later, at her deportation hearings, her response was, "I admit having written a book entitled Lesbian Love, based on true acts and living characters of today ... I believe the book is not in any way immoral, indecent, or vulgar ... There is not one word in the whole book that is vulgar." This remarkable work from a remarkable woman features nine short stories of "lesbian love" largely drawn from Adams's personal history, and many of the characters are identifiable from her past. These intimate portraits predate Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, widely considered to be the first explicitly lesbian novel, by three years. Reprinted in full in *The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams* by Jonathan Ned Katz.