A Long Story About “A Short Story About a Penis”: Lesbian Histories, Queer Methods in Sarah Schulman’s Early Work

In March 1983, Sarah Schulman finished a draft of a short story about a lesbian who wakes up one day with a penis, descriptively titled “A Short Story About a Penis.” Though now a well-known writer, Schulman enjoyed limited success placing her fiction as a young writer in the early 1980s. In the middle of the feminist sex wars, “A Short Story About a Penis” racked up rejections from every significant lesbian literary magazine before finally appearing in On Our Backs, a newly launched lesbian sex magazine, in March 1986. While still struggling to place her story, Schulman created a performance piece to vent her frustration with the lesbian publishing scene. In her performance, Schulman read “A Short Story About a Penis,” which, she claimed, was the recently discovered work of a long-forgotten lesbian writer from the 1930s. In this article, I reconstruct the history of “A Short Story About a Penis” based on conversations with Schulman and the archival footprint of the performance in her personal papers. In offering an intellectual history of Schulman’s thinking on gender, sexuality, lesbian identity, and history, this article places Schulman within a genealogy of what came to be known as queer and trans, without obscuring the fraught history of lesbian in the 1980s.