Cirrus@Austlit

'If Monte Punshon is remembered today, it is for two things: she lived to 106 and in her last years she was feted as “the world’s oldest lesbian.” This woman — born a century earlier but happy to declare in the 1980s that she had always loved women — had always resisted the label. For her, unlike the lesbian feminists of a new era, the personal was not political: “I’m not labelled anything. I’m just me myself. I hate that name.”' (Introduction)