Usually, this isn’t just applied to books about lesbians. Any sapphic book gets this treatment. While M/M books are considered to sell well and often go viral on BookTok, BookTube, and other bookish platforms, it’s rare to see a sapphic book receive that same level of popularity. (I think One Last Stop is the only one that comes close, and that is partly due to the success of the author’s previous M/M book.) Of course, queer men’s books aren’t treated the same as straight books, and I don’t mean to say they don’t deal with homophobia — the popularity of those books in mostly straight women spaces is a whole other subject — but they do get a lot more eyes on them then sapphic books. This isn’t because of a lack of quality from sapphic books, though, or even a lack of volume. There are several publishing houses that specialize in F/F romance and publish more than you could easily keep up with (Bold Strokes Books, Bella Books, Ylva Publishing, etc), and while traditionally published sapphic books used to be more rare, they now come out every week. I keep a running list of sapphic books I’ve read and can personally recommend, and there are hundreds of books on it! The problem is that sapphic books don’t get the same amount of attention and publicity as other books. Hmm, I wonder if there’s some reason that books that center women aren’t seen as legitimate in the same way that books that include men in starring roles are…I can’t think of any over-arching systems of oppression that might devalue stories that focus on relationships between women…(Fun fact: the Bechdel-Wallace test was originally about lesbian representation.) The part that really gets to me, though, is that it’s not hard to find good lesbian books. Sometimes I even hear “I wish I could find lesbian books that weren’t written by and for straight men,” but this is not an actual problem in publishing! It’s just not! It’s a problem in porn, sure, but there are very, very few sapphic books published that aren’t by sapphic women, because they aren’t seen as profitable, so it’s generally only queer women who have cared enough to write them. In fact, I don’t understand where people are even finding these books, because they are so few and far between that it’s ludicrous to act like they’re the majority. Some of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read have been lesbian or sapphic novels. You can’t tell me that Fingersmith is badly written or that Jeanette Winterson and Emma Donoghue are not skilled authors. Have you tried Butter Honey Pig Bread? Her Body and Other Parties? The Summer We Got Free? The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo? You’re telling me those are all poorly written? It just doesn’t add up. And that’s not even getting into the literal hundreds of sapphic YA books out there, many of them absolutely gorgeous works. It was untrue to say there are no good sapphic books ten years ago, but now I am drowning under the piles of ARCs I have of sapphic YA that I just can’t keep up with. There are more published every single week! (And if you want to keep up with queer new releases, might I recommend the Our Queerest Shelves newsletter?)
