50 STATES > Texas

In 1895 in the small town of La Grange, Texas a medical doctor named John Wesley Carhart wrote a novel about a lesbian love affair called ‘Norma Trist: or Pure Carbon, a story of the inversion of the sexes’. In addition to featuring one of the first unambiguously lesbian heroines in American fiction, "Norma Trist" contains astonishingly sympathetic and progressive defenses of same-sex desire.