Conan and Sappho: Robert E. Howard on Lesbians Part 1 by Bobby Derie

In another alteration of the basic captivity theme, Marylin is held not by a dark-skinned man, but by a dark-skinned woman. The sexual threat is not eliminated, however, as Howard implies a sadistic lesbian relationship, something of a recurring theme in his work. (Trout 75)

Cross Plains, Texas

In 1926 Cross Plains, Texas was in an oil boom, and Robert E. Howard was working odd jobs, seven nights a week, with little time to write. His letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith are filled with verse, and on occasion, sex. Growing up mainly in a small Texas town, their sexual education would not have been in any way formal. They picked things up through conversation, practical experience, and in many cases reading. These exchanges would have a formative influence on how Howard understood female homosexuality, and how that conception featured in his fiction. Over time, this would form the recurring theme noted by Trout.

Sapphism & Psychology

According to George Sylvester Viereck; “Love in its spiritual aspect he (Swinburne) knows not. His amorous fancy feeds upon the esoteric, things ‘monstrous and fruitless’. The ordinary relation between sexes engages him only when it is sadistic.” And again, quoting Viereck; “Modern science has divested perversion of its evil glamor. Freud has taught us that perversity is an essential phase in the evolution of childhood…occurring at all times in a fairly constant percentage of human beings. Swinburne adds a new complexity. He does not turn toward his own sex. His passion goes out to woman, but he loves woman, not with the passion of a man for a maid, but with the hectic craving of Lesbian woman for her own sex.”

—Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, 23 Jun 1926, CL1.106

Howard quotes from Viereck’s introduction to Algernon Charles Swineburne’s Poems and Ballads, published as Little Blue Book #791. It is the first mention in his letters of lesbians, and part of his earliest discussion of homosexuality and bisexuality in general. In the same letter, Howard relates to Smith:

Thus it would seem that a pervert is a man or woman who gets little or no pleasure out of intercourse, but must seek some other method to stimulate the senses or the imagination. Opium smokers revel in sexual debauches which are purely imaginary but from which they doubtless obtain more pleasure than from actual deeds. The smoking of opium does not produce the effect of seeming intercourse, but vague thoughts, fantasies, float through the being dimly arousing all the hidden lust. A pervert may be born that way, or may be a worn-out libertine who has lost his ordinary lust through indulgence. They are usually more or less bisexual, naturally.

That is my theory and much of it is probably erroneous. Perversion is a mark of decadence. It flourishes in all fading nations. Men’s virility dwindle and fade; they feel the need of sexual desire, which has always been taught as necessary, but they lack the basic lust. So they turn to more obscene ways. (CL1.104)

Homosexuality began to come to academic attention in the 19th century, with works like Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1896), Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (1897), Alfred Eulenberg’s Algolagnia: The Psychology, Neurology and Physiology of Sadistic Love and Masochism (trans. 1934) and psychosexual studies continued in the 20th century by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Howard’s views in his 1926 letter characterize “perversion” as a deviation from heterosexual practices. Although this leaves open what exactly counts as “perversion,” it explicitly includes homosexual acts. This would have been the common view of most laymen and professionals during the 1920s, as when Freud wrote: