Lesbian Love is one of the earliest examples of American lesbian literature. It has further historical significance as the "evidence" used to deport its lesbian Jewish author back from the U.S. to Europe where she was eventually killed by the Nazis.
This book was transcribed from the original text by Cosmographia Books Publisher Nina Alvarez, who for 25 years owned the only known copy of Lesbian Love. It includes the stories as originally written (besides some light copyediting) with four original printed erotic illustrations. The four additional erotic photographs mounted to blank pages were omitted from this reprint, as it is believed they were added later, and not by the author.
Eve Adams, born Eva Kotchever (pen name Evelyn Addams) ran a tearoom in New York called Eve's Hangout, one of the first lesbian & gay cafes in the Greenwich Village. In 1925, she self-published a private circulation of 150 copies of a small collection of short stories called Lesbian Love. Soon after, Eve's Hangout was raided and the book used as evidence in Eve's arrest for obscenity and disorderly conduct. At her deportation hearings, she said, "I admit having written a book entitled Lesbian Love, based on true acts and living characters of today... I believe the book is not in any way immoral, indecent, or vulgar... There is not one word in the whole book that is vulgar."
Truly, these stories of lesbian love, lust, longing, and lifestyle in the roaring twenties are at times tender, humorous, adventurous, beguiling, adoring, sad, or romantic, but they are not vulgar, nor are the gently erotic illustrations that accompany them. It is believed that the trumped up charges were an excuse to punish Adams, who had been sympathetic to the anarchist Emma Goldman.
Eve was deported to her home country of Poland. She lived in Paris in the 1930s and helped distribute the writings of Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and other writers with "forbidden" books. In December 1943, Eve and her partner Hella Soldner were arrested in Nazi-occupied Nice and deported to Auschwitz where they paid the ultimate price.