Every year is an amazing year for sapphic stories, people are putting out consistently amazing stuff and they will keep doing it even if the world makes it harder and harder. It is a really competitive year this year for my top slot with the top 4 really all being able to be number one so take the order of this list with a grain of salt. I can’t say enough how dazzled I was by some of the stories I read this year and there was a lot of really cute stories that while they didn’t have anything that wowed me I still enjoyed that just didn’t make the cut. Unlike last years list there is no none sapphic stories here, I read some non sapphic stories but they simply didn’t make the cut. So this is a great place for anyone looking for stories about women in love with women.
Last year I separated Manga from Webcomics and Comics but this year I didn't Read any new Manga, aka not part of an ongoing I was reading from last year that felt worthy of a top spot. So I will be including at least one of those ongoings on this list but they'll be no separate manga list. Here’s hoping 2025 I read so many great comics, Manga and webcomics there three separate lists so I can cheat and share more stories.
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10. If You’ll Have Me
This is a cute little modern romance by one of my favorite artists so I had to support it when I was given the chance. This is just a classic romance type story, not a ton of frills or twists to the normal romance formula except that it’s lesbains with a nice art style. A nerdy girl falls for a popular hottie with a reputation for getting around and love blooms through misunderstandings and tough feelings. It’s cute with a great art style, it’s just nice and a great book for if you just want to see a lesbian love story.
9. LSBN
This is a short but sweet comic, it isn’t very long, it isn’t particularly deep, some trans lesbians were working on a mech to do big battles but suddenly their hit with an order for peace. Feelings get messy as years of work go down the drain and these women find themselves going to each other and the feelings they all have about this. The art itself is really unique, it has an extremely creative vision of it’s world that is really a spectacle to look at and for sure gives value to actually owning the book rather then checking it out just briefly since it is a fast read. It’s simple, sweet and good.
8. The Marble Queen
This is a YA graphic novel which have a hard chance at making it on a list like this for me, I try to read a lot of them but I have such a hard time getting through them but here I really did get enthusiastic about this story. The biggest carry for the story is definitely the art, really striking art that truly makes this story stand out in the crowd. This is an arranged marriage gay romance where both parties fall in love with one another. It’s a very classic fantasy princesses type story in that way with you know scheming evil family and uproars and restoring order and what not. It is a fun book and the Pirate Woman in this story is very hot and I liked it, it’s just a solid classic formula type story. I have little critiques about it but ultimately I think it’s solid.
7. Rainbow!
This was a turn around of the century for me where I was really not in love with the first half of this story at all but having stuck it through basically exactly where volume 1 ends the story really picks up and starts to be something great. It’s cover and stuff pitches it as a kinda sweet and fluffy romance but this is a drama romance there just isn’t a lot of drama between the romantic interests themselves. This is the story about two women who are being abused in different ways by their mothers falling in love and how they as high schoolers deal with the shifting of their lives through meeting each other and though the new lows their moms push them to. It’s a good story and it’s good to see stories about people who are dealing with this kind of abuse still finding love and figuring out their own ways out of situations. It’s idealistic in some ways but I think some hope isn’t a bad thing to give to people. This is a really sweet story story even when it gets rough and it’s worth folks time.
6. Eldritch Darling
One of those comics that feel like they could be on this list every year but it wasn’t on last years list so I feel extra good about giving it a slot this year. This is a very cute small panel comedy romance webcomic. The plot as it were starts with an eldritch monster girl having taken on a human guise falling in love with a woman and trying to keep it together and from there we follow how their relationship blooms, her feelings about human life and her shifting feelings on herself. The relationship shifts and changes and it’s a good story with decent progress and has been slightly expanding out it’s characters and stuff over time as it keeps going. It’s short, sweet, good times for anyone looking for just a nice read.
5. The Deep Dark
A trans and cis woman romance with a ton of mess around them having secrets, toxic people in their lives and more all tied up with just a bit of the magical elements. Mags is a butch lesbian who’s got a big secret, a little monster tied to her she must feed her blood. This secret keeps her detached from everyone but small hookups with a girl who has a boyfriend and doesn’t want to come out. One day Nessa comes back to town, a trans woman and her old best friend, a person she cared so deeply about before the weight of her secret really got to her. She’s dealing with a creepy ex boyfriend and went back to her old home town to get away with him for the summer. Both are hesitant to share what’s going on with the other and both are effected by events that happened when they were a child that caused Nessa to move. The two’s connection is just really good and I like that both these women are very caught up in their own shit at first and really feel like they should be together but maybe can’t because of that. I think this is Molly Knox Ostertag’s best story so far and I am really glad she got to release it.
4. She Loves To Cook And She Loves To Eat 4
A true masterpiece, I say this every time with She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat and I will keep saying it, I imagine She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat Volume 5 will be in next year's top 10 too. Sakaomi Yuzaki is simply a master of the craft of manga and storytelling that is beyond most people ever. The way she can capture the raw feelings captured by fatphobia, sexism, homophobia, lesbobia, aphobia, etc all while keeping a fairly soft and cozy tone is truly a testament to her craft. Volume 4 was a brilliant move forward in the story and the romance properly and it’s yet another testament that I enjoyed a fairly big slow burn when I am not a big slow burn enjoyer. The food looks brilliant, the character designs are fantastic, I can’t imagine a world where this story falls off.
3. Superwomen In Love 4 and 5
Having finished this I can say that this is one of the best Yuri Manga of all time. While She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat is a masterpiece that makes me think about the true mastery of one of the mediums of art I work in and love the most, this story was just fucking fun as hell for me.We have big love confessions, fusion, action, mechs, and so much more. I really can’t say enough just how much of a blast this story is. I would kill to see this adapted it’s just such a freaking blast and it’s so gay and it’s so much fun. The main couple is really masterfully done and the side characters are all great and thought out to at least some small extent. It makes for a really great cast and a really great time. It’s stupid but it’s like perfectly my kind of stupid and I love it.
2. The Strange Case of Harleen and Harley
Two of my favorite characters of all time get a fun YA retelling that honestly might be my favorite origin story for both characters ever. Harleen’s life has gone to shit, her and Pamala broke up for a bit and she ended up dating a dude who was a bit unhinged and murdered her bullies. That made her have to move, ruining everything she had going for her the only saving grace from her families judgement, the judgement of people around her and the crushing despair of potentially losing her access to higher education is that her and Pam got back together. Harleen agrees to enter clinical trials with Pamala when she suspects they are doing animal testing and wants to find out, plus it would get Harleen some money for signing up. The shots Harleen is subjected to awaken Harley inside of Harleen and start these two off on an adventure. It fits the characters, it does the representation of plurality so much better than most media I’ve seen, it doesn’t condemn doing crimes at all which is great for a villain story, it instead lets us just see criminals as people who make choices and you can judge those choices on your own. You will though be shown the rich fuckers running these experiments and hate them and it’s great. I really love this story, it’s probably my favorite YA book, it might be my favorite superhero comic ever, it’s just great.
1. Sunset Phoenix
Lesbian Monsters, I did it that’s the review, shouldn’t have to sell it further than this. I will though, it’s a fantastical setting with magic but also very modern. Our Mob Boss is a Phoenix meaning she’s immortal unless you kill her with a special blade only a Phoenix can make. Someone kills another one of the Phoenix’s who run the city and the mobs and attempts to frame her spy for it which also frames her. The two have to work together to figure out who did it, prove they did it or else the best case for them is all out mob war and the worst case is their too dead to know what happens next. The story isn’t done yet but the first arc is finished meaning there is a very solid end point to hit if you pick this series up. The chemistry between Emilia and Valentine is just really strong and the action scenes are just super cool. It is one of those series that is like 10/10 everything I really have nothing negative to say about the book it just really perfectly does what it is trying to do and I like what it’s trying to do.
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If you are a writer and/or artist who would like your work published in a print and digital magazine, consider submitting to Villanelle Mag!
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Villanelle welcomes classical and experimental pieces which play with form, genre, and style. Although situated in Australia, it accepts works from all over the world, including pieces in English and bilingual. If you want to know more about the magazine, visit the website. You can also find more detail on submitting via the submissions page.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay's experiences in the Village may be seen as a paradigm of what some women encountered if they let it be known that they consider themselves lesbian. Millay, who had been called Vincent in college, was probably the model for Lakey in Mary McCarthy's novel The Group. Like Lakey, she was the creative and independent leader of her fellow students at Vassar, and also, like Lakey, all her love affairs during her college career, which did not end until she was twenty-five years old, were with other women. Her strongest "smash" in that all-female environment was with Charlotte (Charlie) Babcock, who was the model for Bianca in Millay's play The Lamp and the Bell (1921). The play depicts a self-sacrificing love between two women about whom others say, "I vow I never knew a pair of lovers/ More constant than these two." Millay also had a passionate attachment to Anne Lynch during those Vassar days, and even several years later she wrote Lynch: "Oh, if I could just get my arms about you!- And stay with you like that for hours. ...I love you very much, dear Anne, and I always shall." Another Vassar classmate, Isobel Simpson, Millay called her "Dearest Little Sphinx" and "[my] own true love." From Greenwich Village she promised Isobel: "Someday I shall write a great poem to you, so great that I shall make you famous in history".
But although Millay's erotic life had been exclusively with women, once out of that all-female environment and in Greenwich Village, there was pressure on her to become at least bisexual. As a good bohemian she pretended, of course, to continue to regard homosexuality in a blase manner, as her response to the psychoanalyst who tried to cure here of a headache suggests. Yet despite her panache, Millay eventually bowed to the pressure to give up exclusive lesbianism, as many women's college graduates must have in the heterosexual 1920s, when companionate marriage was seen as the "advanced" woman's highest goal.
The unpublished memoirs of Floyd Dell, who became Millay's first male lover in Greenwich Village, give some insight into how women who came to the Village as lesbians were sometimes steered toward heterosexuality in this "progressive" atmosphere. For weeks Millay had agreed to go to bed with Dell, since she was taught in the Village that free bohemian women should have no scruples against such things; but she was obviously ambivalent, insisting they remain fully clothed and refusing to have intercourse. Finally Dell pressured her sufficiently to make her overcome her reluctance. "I know your secret," he said. "You are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls in college," devaluing such relationships as a mature sexual experience. Dell claims that Millay was astonished at his deductive powers and she admitted, "No man has ever found me out before." In her chagrin she gave in to him. Dell's memoirs indicate that he was one of the early lesbian-smashers. He says he made love to her, feeling that it was his "duty to rescue her." His rescue was obviously imperfect, however, since she was still having affairs with women years later when she took up with Thelma Wood, the woman who also became Djuna Barnes' lover and her model for Robin in 'Nightwood'. Dell finally had to admit with disappointment that Millay could not be entirely rescued. Years after their relationship, he lamented in an interview, "it was impossible to understand [Millay]... I've often thought she may have been fonder of women than of men." But despite his cognizance of her feelings about women he believed he had right on his side when he proselytized for heterosexuality, and he was encouraged in this conviction by the bohemians who scoffed at the technical virginity of women whose erotic lives were exclusively with women.
...
The kind of pressure that was put on Millay to give up her love for women, or at least to make it take a secondary position to heterosexuality, was probably typical of what happened to young females even in this most bohemian environment during the 1920s, when love between women such as had been so vital in earlier eras was devalued. While sex between women was acceptable and even chic in circles that were enamored with the radical or the exotic, serious love relationships between women could no longer be highly regarded since they would interfere with companionate heterosexual relationships. Of course there were some bohemian men who saw lesbianism as part of the Village's experiment with free love and they respected the women's choices, and there were others who were titillated by it, and still others who were homosexual also and happy enough that their female counterparts were enjoying themselves. However, many bohemian men, if they could take lesbianism seriously at all, resented not only the women's ties to each other but their general assertiveness, which in itself may have signified danger to some of the men.
Lesbians in Bohemia, from Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman, p. 118-121
This particular chapter is interesting, as it explores the experiences of lesbians and bisexual women involved in the bohemian culture of the New York Greenwich Village during the 1920s. Faderman explains throughout the chapter that it was more common to see women within bohemian culture calling themselves bisexual then lesbian, even if they were lesbians, because, despite the appearance of acceptance and celebration of homosexuality, they were treated as oddities and as though their love of women was just a phase or not as real as heterosexual love, particularly by bohemian men.
Also the bohemian culture’s pressure on women to be openly sexual sounds very familiar...
Not much has changed, huh.
