Lesbian and Gay History
Lillian Faderman was born on July 18, 1940, in the Bronx, New York, of Jewish ancestry. Her mother, a single parent, worked in a garment factory. Faderman began school in the Bronx, then finished elementary school and junior high school in East Los Angeles. She attended Hollywood High School. She participated in the Theater Arts Workshop in East Los Angeles from 1952 to 1955 and counts an interest in the theater as one of her important early influences.
Faderman attended the University of California at Berkeley, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962. As a graduate student in literature, she attended the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a master’s degree in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1967. Faderman also attended Harvard University, earning a certificate from the Institute of Educational Management in 1974.
Lillian Faderman was motivated to become a historian because she wanted to “discover for myself what no sources would tell me about women’s intimate relationships in other centuries.” Her work reaches both scholarly and popular audiences as she deftly, as one critic puts it, “brings lesbian life out of the archives and onto the streets.”
From 1967 to the present, Faderman has taught at the University of California at Fresno, where she is professor of English. From 1989 to 1991, she was visiting professor of English and women’s studies at UCLA. While at Fresno, Faderman has chaired the English department, designed and co-founded the Women’s Studies Program, and served as acting dean for the School of Humanities.
The author or editor of seven books, fifteen articles, and numerous commentaries and reviews, Faderman is known as an award-winning interdisciplinary scholar, bridging the fields of literature, history, and ethnic studies. Her most recent work, Chloe plus Olivia: Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present , received the Lambda Literary Award for Best Anthology and was named a finalist for the Best Lesbian Studies Book. A previous work, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America , was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and received great acclaim, including being named “Editor’s Choice” and a “Notable Book of 1992” by the New York Times Book Review , Best Book of the Year Dealing with Lesbian Subject Matter by the American Library Association’s Social Responsibility Task Force, and Bestseller Among University Press Books by Library Journal . Faderman’s books have been translated into German, Japanese, and Spanish.
An award-winning teacher, Faderman has lectured to thirty-five university groups in and outside the United States. She serves as general co-editor of the Between Men/Between Women Series for Columbia University Press and on the advisory boards for the journals Thamyris, Women’s History Review, Journal of Homosexuality , and Signs . She has served the Modern Language Association by serving on and chairing the Executive Committee of the Women’s Studies in Language and Literature Division and by serving on the editorial board of the Gay Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Lesbian and Gay Newsletter. She was also associate editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality from 1989 to 1993.
Lillian Faderman’s partner is Phyllis Irwin, whom she has been with since 1971. Faderman is the mother of a son, Avrom, born in 1975.
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