Bisexuality and the Burden of Proof
These findings offer a much fuller picture of the earliest known bisexual woman poet in Portugal than the little that was previously available. Although much remains to be learned about Judith’s life, especially from the 1930s to her death in 1959, the identification of Olga de Moraes Sarmento as her lover is strong evidence that Judith not only wrote her bisexuality but lived it. Given that Judith wrote and published love poems to women, under her own name, facing down censorship in order to do so, one would hope that no further facts would be needed to convince literary historians that she desired women as well as men.
Alas, this has not always been the case. René Pedro Garay, concluding that Judith “provavelmente amara ‘saficamente’ outras mulheres (em corpo e/ou espírito)” (probably “sapphically” loved other women [in body and/or spirit]), hedges his bets.[1] Jorge Valentim quotes Garay and adds, skeptically, “Não se pode deixar de notar que, na sua trajetória biográfica, constam dois casamentos heterossexuais” (One cannot help noting that, in her biographical trajectory, there are two heterosexual marriages).[2] Fabio Mario da Silva and Ana Luísa Vilela compare Judith Teixeira unfavorably with Sappho and take care to distance her from any notion of exclusively lesbian or sapphic desire: “O discurso erotizado, não apenas o lésbico, predomina . . . há impressões sobre o amor – que não tem necessariamente a identificação como o sáfico; o discurso erótico é . . . não forçosamente lésbica” (The eroticized discourse, not only lesbian, predominates . . . there are impressions of love—which are not necessarily to be identified as sapphic; the erotic discourse is . . . not necessarily lesbian).[3] The writers might have looked to other lesbian poets of nineteenth- and twentieth-century western Europe for a closer basis of comparison; rather than dismissing Judith Teixeira as a Sappho manquée, they might have considered the possibility of bisexuality. Perhaps it is for this reason that Silva also insists on comparing Judith Teixeira to Charles Baudelaire.[4] Baudelaire’s work, especially Les fleurs du mal (1857), was known throughout the Western world by the early twentieth century. No poet writing in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese could have escaped Baudelaire’s influence even had they wished to, much as we are all the descendants of Shakespeare, Dante, and Pound. In the case of Judith Teixeira, who does not even mention Baudelaire in her artistic manifesto, it is difficult to discern what the utility or even the interest of such an analysis could be.
The assumption apparently made by these and other scholars in the field seems to have been one of monosexuality: Judith could desire either women or men, but not both. She was either a lesbian or a heterosexual; there were no other options.[5] Because some of her love poems were addressed to male listeners, she desired men. As for the love poems addressed to women, they were not evidence of desire. At any rate, they could not prove that that other desire was ever acted upon—not when the poet had been married to two men.[6] Regardless of intention, the effect of statements like those quoted above has been to discourage biographical research into Judith’s relationships with women. The lack of a thorough biography has fed into a vicious cycle: If scholars have found no information, it is because there is no information to be found. It has, moreover, distanced Judith Teixeira from those who need her most: bisexual women.
Researchers may wish to ask: What constitutes an acceptable threshold of evidence for bisexuality (or, for that matter, lesbianism) among women who lived and wrote prior to the 1970s? Photographs of lovers caught in flagrante, their faces and bodies clearly visible, with real names scribbled on the back? Journals or memoirs recounting every partner and sexual position? A cache of erotic letters, which neither the writers nor their descendants ever destroyed?
Even when “hard” evidence is available, some scholars have insisted on ignoring it. The case of Eleanor Roosevelt is particularly notable in this respect. Despite decades of scholarship and remarkably well-preserved documentary records, it was only in 2018 that novelist Amy Bloom publicly revealed not only that the First Lady never enjoyed sex with the President but that she had deeply loved journalist Lorena Hickok and that her closest circle of friends were all lesbians.[7] Despite speculation by biographers that Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) had carried on a heterosexual affair with her bodyguard Earl Miller, the correspondence that might have settled the question one way or the other has disappeared.[8] Without proof that ER ever desired or enjoyed sex with men, even men for whom she felt the deepest affection, we cannot describe her as bisexual. She was a lesbian. This is in contrast to the woman who published as Judith Teixeira, whose desire for men as well as women is clear from her actions as conveyed in the trial records and from her physical sensations as she describes them in her poetry.
Amy Bloom’s discoveries run counter to the claims of biographers such as Blanche Wiesen Cook, who—to her credit—publicly insisted on the erotic content of the letters between ER and Hickok, but did not re-examine assumptions that a woman who is friends with a man and traveling alone with him must therefore be having sex with him—even a man who is working as her bodyguard. Unlike FDR biographer Geoffrey Ward, who outright dismissed the eroticism of ER’s love letters even when quoting directly from them, Cook acknowledged ER’s desire for women.[9] Unfortunately, she also attempted to split the difference by inserting a “romantic friendship, a life-enhancing relationship” with Miller.[10] In a time and place where heterosexuality was privileged in fact and representation, what might the term “romantic friendship”—coined by historian Lillian Faderman as a replacement for the phrase early modern women used, “bosom friends”—even mean?[11] From the first, “bosom friends” was a euphemism for sexual intimacy between women, in the way “friendship” had been a transparent euphemism for gay sex and love since at least the second century CE, when a character in a Greek novel, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, by one Achilles Tatius of Alexandria, asks rhetorically whether anyone really believes that Achilles and Patroclus merely sat across from each other. The answer, of course, is no. Their “friendship” (philia, also translated as “love”) was one of sexual pleasure (hēdonē).[12] Like ER and Hickok—or, for that mattter, Achilles and Patroclus—Judith, Olga, and possibly Júlia have been overlooked for too long. It is difficult to shake the feeling that some of that ignorance has been willful.
The sexuality of women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian, is always in danger of being controlled by men. For women poets, writers, and other creators, the threat is twofold—not only toward their bodies but toward their life’s work. When men claim that a woman enjoyed the happiest of heterosexual marriages, when they refuse to understand her own words to the woman (or women) she loved, when they emphasize her relationships with men and elide those with women, when they refrain from investigating further, the result is to shove her posthumously back into the closet. When a lesbian is mistakenly outed as bisexual or vice versa, she is camouflaged under a flag that is not her own. Facts matter. Misinformation about a woman’s life is a final indignity toward her name. Distortions or omissions in an artist’s biography distort or even preclude our understanding of her work. The work, it’s fair to say, would not exist without the woman who created it.
Bisexual activist Robyn Ochs offers a personal definition of bisexuality that is now widely accepted as a community definition: “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one gender, not necessarily at the same time, in the same way, or to the same degree.”[13] As I understand it, romantic attraction refers to the drive for emotional intimacy and companionship—in other words, the wish to make a life with someone. Sexual attraction refers to physical desire, to the sensation of arousal in one’s body—in whatever parts of the body one happens to experience it. Some people may prioritize one over the other or experience the two as one and the same. When researching bisexuality in history, what matters is a record—whether written, oral, or visual—of sexual and/or romantic attraction toward people of more than one gender. Many bisexuals, especially women, might never have been able to act on their attraction toward people of their own gender. But whether they had sex or stopped short of it, found love or remained single, the question for us is not whether they did but whether they wanted to. In Judith’s case, the poems signed Judith Teixeira are amply sufficient proof of desire. The documents I have found prove that she had the courage—and the social and financial resources—to act on that desire.
How many other forebears have been hidden in plain sight?
Notes
[1] René Pedro Garay, Judith Teixeira: O modernismo sáfio português (Lisbon: Universitária Editora, 2002), 70.
[2] Jorge Valentim, “Safo em Sodoma: A escrita feminina de Judith Tetixeira em tempos de Orpheu,” Abril 5, no. 10 (April 2013): 151.
[3] Fabio Mario da Silva and Ana Luísa Vilela, “Homo(lesbo)erotismo e literatura, no Ocidente e em Portugal: Safo e Judith Teixeira,” Navegações 4, no. 1 (January–June 2011): 75, 76.
[4] Fabio Mario da Silva, “A relação da poesia de Judith Teixeira com a de Charles Baudelaire,” Convergência Lusíada34, no. 50 (July/December 2023): 265–83.
[5] On the assumption of monosexuality, see, for example: Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Michael du Plessis, “Blatantly Bisexual; or, Unthinking Queer Theory,” in RePresenting Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire, ed. Maria Pramaggiore and Donald E. Hall (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 19–53; Kenji Yoshino, “The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure,” Stanford Law Review 52, no. 2 (January 2000): 353–462; Meg Barker et al., The Bisexuality Report: Bisexual Inclusion in LGBT Equality and Diversity (Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance and Faculty of Health and Social Care, Open University, 2012); Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2013), esp. 59–93; Angelos Bollas, “Hegemonic Monosexuality,” Journal of Bisexuality 23, no. 4 (2023): 441–55.
[6] On cultural preconceptions of bisexual women in particular, see, for example: Christine Serpe et al., “Bisexual Women: Experiencing and Coping with Objectification, Prejudice, and Erasure,” Journal of Bisexuality 20, no. 4 (2020): 456–92; Sarah Jane Daly, “Bisexual Women and Monogamy,” in Bisexuality in Europe: Sexual Citizenship, Romantic Relationships and Bi+ Identities, ed. Emiel Maliepaard and Renate Baumgartner (London: Routledge, 2021), 100–114; Meg Barker et al., The Bisexuality Report, p. 16; Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, esp. 136–192.
[7] Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Random House, 2018).
[8] Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1: The Early Years, 1884–1933 (New York: Penguin, 1993), 15.
[9] Ward’s quotations include Lorena Hickok’s remiscence of “your eyes, with a kind and teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips.” Geoffrey C. Ward, “Outing Mrs. Roosevelt,” New York Review of Books (24 September 1992): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/09/24/outing-mrs-roosevelt. Ward also quotes Eleanor Roosevelt’s own account of the difficulties in her married life in her 1937 and 1949 memoirs, love letters between her and the journalist Lorena Hickok (published in 1982 by Joseph Lash), and her family’s recollections of her love for Marie Souvestre (the lesbian promoter of Les Rûches, a girls’ boarding school near Fontainebleau, whose elopement with another woman, one of the teachers, was a great lesbian scandal of the late nineteenth century). The connection with Marie Souvestre is even stronger proof than scholars have previously realized. When ER was a child, her aunt, Anna “Bye” Roosevelt, sent her to Allenswood School, run by none other than Bye’s own former teacher Marie Souvestre. Though Marie Souvestre is popularly mis-identified as co-headmistress of Les Rûches, researcher Suzanne Stroh has discovered that it was in fact Marie Souvestre’s life partner, Caroline Dussaut, who was the sole headmistress and owner of the charter. Dussaut had two long-term lovers: the German teacher, Fräulein Geissler (first name unknown), and Marie Souvestre, who had no teaching credentials but served as a promoter of the school. In 1883, Souvestre left Dussaut and Les Rûches, taking along “her address book, half the capital, and the Italian teacher (highly credentialed) who had become her new lover” (Stroh, 91). The affair later became the subject of a novel by Dorothy Strachey, Olivia (1949). Eleanor’s aunt knew full well that Marie Souvestre lived openly as a lesbian, with her lesbian partners, yet this did not deter her from sending her niece to Allenswood. Suzanne Stroh, Afterword to I Remember Her, by Natalie Barney (as Natalie Clifford Barney), trans. Suzanne Stroh (Sequim, WA: Headmistress Press, 2025), 87–93. See also David Steel, Marie Souvestre, 1835–1905: Pédagogue pionnière et féministe (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014).
[10] Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1: The Early Years, 1884–1933, 442.
[11] Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981).
[12] Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 74–77, esp. 77.
[13] Robyn Ochs, “What Is Bisexuality?” in Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, ed. Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Bisexual Resource Center, 2009), 9.