#34: Curious Wine
On ‘70s cabin romance and writing this newsletter for an entire year
One year ago tomorrow, I sent the very first issue of Read Something Queer.
My plan then was to send a new book review every single Thursday. Given that it’s now a year later and I’m only on issue no. 34, I clearly didn’t stick to that plan. I’m still consistently surprised by how often Thursday comes around, and I should probably just call it a bi-weekly newsletter at this point.
Despite my haphazard publishing schedule, it’s been a fun project to work on. At the very least, it’s made me put down my phone for a few hours every week to read a book, which I wasn’t always doing before. I also get genuinely excited every time one of you responds to one of these emails with your thoughts, so please keep doing that.
Anyway, for this milestone newsletter I’ll be reviewing a book that claims on its cover to be THE MOST POPULAR LESBIAN ROMANCE OF ALL TIME. Enjoy!
— Becca
Curious Wine by Katherine V. Forrest
Fiction, 1983
“Nothing interesting can possibly happen in a cabin full of women,” claims one character in the first chapter of Curious Wine. It’s the winter of 1978, and Diana Holland has just been dropped off at a cabin near Lake Tahoe. She’s fresh out of a breakup with her boyfriend and ready to spend the weekend drinking a ton of white wine with five women she’s never met.
As she meets the group, she’s immediately drawn to one woman in particular:
Diana’s eyes lingered on Lane Christianson. Leaping firelight reflected gold highlights in her hair, which was shades of blonde and silk-textured, reaching just below the nape of her neck, framing her face and falling over her forehead. Cut in layers that shifted in pattern as she moved her head, her hair reminded Diana of a stand of autumn trees she had once seen in Utah with leaves like sunlit coins, blowing in the wind in changing colors of gold. In the firelight, the warm tones of her skin suggested the topaz she would become under a summer sun.
As luck would have it, Diana and Lane are assigned a room together on the upper level of the cabin. While the rest of the women sleep downstairs in more accessible bedrooms, the two of them will need to climb up a ladder and through a trapdoor to their more secluded quarters.
Before I go any further, it’s important to establish the incredibly ‘70s vibe that permeates the cabin and the entire book. The women spend the majority of the story near a massive stone fireplace, sitting on brown shag carpet surrounded by “warm and lustrous” wood paneling. They wear robes as they eat together at a curved breakfast bar, and sit in rattan chairs to play cards and Scrabble.
What I pictured the entire time was basically a combination of the following images:
There are also several scenes in the nearby Harrah’s, which would’ve looked like this:
Anyway, there’s something between Diana and Lane from the get-go, and it becomes even clearer as they retire to their romantic bedroom that first night. They look at the stars just outside their window and quote Emily Dickinson to one another before deciding that they might as well (platonically) share the bed with the better view.
I hope I’m not giving anything away by telling you that they have sex in that room a bunch of times. To be honest, those scenes didn’t do much for me. They’re pretty sappy, which is simply not my thing. But they’re objectively quite steamy, and it’s fairly clear that they were written by an actual lesbian, which is nice for 1983.
What’s more fun, though, is the ongoing dynamic between Lane and Diana and the other four women in the cabin who have no idea what’s going on. In the evenings, the group drinks and smokes excessive amounts and the conversations become increasingly personal.
They spend a particularly intense evening playing “encounter games” that involve staring into one another’s eyes, trust-falling into each other’s arms, and taking turns paying each other compliments. Lane and Diana blatantly flirt with each other through the entire thing, and somehow no one notices—presumably because everyone else is too busy talking about sex with men. It’s fun.
Parts of the book don’t age well, particularly one character who is openly racist and gets away with it because no one “feels like arguing.” There’s also a gratuitous rape scene with no bearing on the plot that I’d recommend you simply skip if you read this.
Still, it feels like a lesbian time capsule straight out of 1978—and for that reason alone, I’m happy to have it on my bookshelf.
Queer points:
+6 for excessive use of the word “gently” during every sex scene
+14 for the whole Emily Dickinson thing
Buy it on Bookshop, or pick up a copy at your local used bookstore
Congrats on your anniversary! That’s great! Here’s to many more years!