FAQ
Q: What is Middle and Ring? Where does the name come from?
A: Middle and Ring is a website hosted on Neocities, a free, open-source, interoperable website host. Kill the hydra of algorithm-driven social media and make & code your own little home on the web today!
The name "Middle and Ring" refers to (1) the central (foundational, basic, core to lesbian identity) and fringe (off-the-beaten-track, controversial, little-known) nature of the documents this website hopes to preserve, and (2) the two fingers lesbians often fuck with.
Q: Who operates Middle and Ring?
A: A lesbian who's interested in queer history and her ancestors. Hi!
Q: Can I submit something to Middle and Ring?
A: Sure! Just leave a URL, link to a PDF, or book suggestion in my guestbook and I'll evaluate it for its suitability.
Q: What do the archive tags mean?
Genre tags:
- Fiction: Any fictional story
- Nonfiction & history: Any substantially nonfictional retelling of the past and present of lesbian existence. Literary writing and storycrafting are included, but fictional characters or substantial differences from historical reality are not. Historical works are dated based on the date of their topic, rather than the publication date
- Erotica: A fictional or nonfictional story written for the purpose of exploring sexuality—arousal, celebration, complexity, regret, love, hatred, spirituality... porno is also in this category
- Poetry: Just what it sounds like
- Memoir: Someone's personal story of their own life. Often overlaps with nonfiction & history
- Film: Just what it sounds like
Topic tags:
- Lesbian feminism: Per Wikipedia, "a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism." Most influential and active in the 1970s and '80s. This tag also contains feminist writers who are lesbians and who have a wide variety of political positions, not just those that subscribe to such tenets of '80s-era lesbian feminism as lesbian separatism and anti-trans attitudes
- Butches & femmes: Ah, that tingling polarity. Joan Nestle describes the dynamic as "flamboyance and fortitude, one beckoning the other into a full blaze of color, the other strengthening the fragility behind the exuberance." This category also includes butch4butch, femme4femme, relationships beyond a strict butch/femme dynamic, and explorations of femme and butch as individual and personal identities
- Lesbians of color: Any work that wholly or substantially deals with the issues, identities, experiences, and communities of non-white lesbians, including Black, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous & Pacific Islanders, and many others. Many of the works in this archive are authored by and address the issues & experiences of lesbians of color, but works will be tagged as such only if this identity is the primary focus of the work
- Leatherdykes & SM: Leather, kink, fetish, BDSM, power dynamics, and other non-normative sexual practices among lesbians and queer women. While the leatherdyke scene initially grew out of the gay leathermen's scene, many of these documents track it from its beginnings into a full-fledged scene in its own right
- Transmasc & female masculinity: Female gender-nonconformity in all its guises, from womanhood through the transmasculine spectrum. Sometimes overlaps with butchness
- Transfem & queer trans women: Trans women who love women, including their contributions to (and their often embattled reception in) queer women's community
Please note: Materials may contain graphic depictions of rape, intimate partner violence, homophobia, transphobia, racist violence, and more. The webmistress provides materials for historical and current reference and does not necessarily endorse any views therein. No content or trigger warnings are provided beyond title, author, and genre and topic tags. Read at your own discretion.
Q: There’s stuff on here that talks about [trans women / trans men / bisexuals / leatherdykes / people who write dirty stories]. They don’t belong in a lesbian archive or a lesbian community!
A: This archive takes an expansive view of what it means to be lesbian, who our ancestors and descendants are, and what documents are valuable to share. People in the past did not use language in the same way we do, and people in the future won’t either. Even people in the present disagree on what it means to be a lesbian, a queer woman, a dyke, a gay person in general—and what people say they believe is often different from how they live their lives. I prefer to conceive of our mutual love and solidarity, what histories we inherit and what inheritances we pass down, a little more broadly. Here are two quotes that clarify what I mean:
"[The early 20th century] is a historical moment when terms are being first invented, being fought over and fought through, as the sites of struggle and definition. Embedded in the word ‘lesbian’ at the time was a series of ideas about gender-nonconformity, or at least gender expansiveness, that have become less so over time, as other terms and ways of thinking evolve. [...] It’s not to say that I think this is exclusively a trans and gender-nonconforming story, and has nothing to do with the history of lesbianism, but I think it’s just as much a mistake to say that this is just a lesbian history and has nothing to do with trans and gender-nonconforming ideas. To acknowledge [that historical figures may have used identity terms differently and with greater complexity than we would today] is about a responsibility to those of us who are still gay or lesbian, for whom those terms still apply, and who have often—too often, I think—defined our own histories by pushing away gender-expansive people and gender-nonconforming behavior... These are also histories to which we have responsibility, these are also histories in which we are implicated; that, I think, implies the necessity for some kind of political solidarity in the present."
Ben Miller, writer and historian at the Schwules Museum (paraphrased from source, emphasis mine)
"The thing is, it actually takes a massive amount of work to make gays+lesbians and trans folks even appear to be separate groups. You have to rewrite the entirety of our shared history and suppress demography, culture, and sociality. The onus is on the anti-trans fools. It has never been a material question if gay+lesbian and trans ‘go together.’ They have been not only overlapping but often indistinguishable categories for well over a century. Only American identity politics, with its fetish for separation and ranking, pretends otherwise. It’s not just that so many trans people are gay and lesbian—though we are! It’s that trans and gay+lesbian life share a deep intimacy, in community and in form. Fairies, bulldykes, butches, street queens: people who were gay-as-in-trans, as in the terms don’t live up to them."
Jules Gill-Peterson, professor of trans and queer history at Johns Hopkins (source, emphasis mine)
So chill out, and remember two things: Queer community divided is much easier to destroy. And diversity is hot.