Barbara Jane Brickman

Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! examines a larger-than-life lesbian menace in mid-century media embodied in five queer icons—the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon, and the rebel. Across comics, fiction, television and movies of the era, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire.