historical queer love letters

theboywhocriedbooks:

I was reading this autostraddle article about love letters between writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and it was so gay that I thought I’d share my fave. Sidenote: last fall I was taught all about their love affair in class and so this just makes my heart explode with gayness. 

In 1926, a year after the start of their affair, Vita left the country to travel — a trip neither of the two were happy about. In January, Vita writes:

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — but oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”

 In reply to that, Virginia writes:

“Your letter came this morning — But why do you think I don’t feel, or that I make phrases? “Lovely phrases” you say which rob things of reality. Just the opposite. Always, always, always I try to say what I feel. Will you then believe that after you went last Tuesday — exactly a week ago — out I went into the slums of Bloomsbury, to find a barrel organ. But it did not make me cheerful … And ever since, nothing important has happened — Somehow it’s dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a longeared owl and ass.”

I’m so gay.