This story originally appeared in News Is Out.
Witch. We hear women called this all the time. Sometimes it’s meant as a substitute for the misogynist b word. But “witch” is not a benign slur to fling at women. The history of women being called witches is grim. Demonizing, torture and killing of women — particularly lesbians or women thought to be lesbians — is inextricably tied to being targeted as a witch. Witchcraft and lesbianism are often linked and have been since the days of burning witches at the stake centuries ago.
For centuries, women have been accused of being witches — an accusation that usually accompanied being unmarried and/or having too many cats. Ohio senator JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” claim during the election was all about his attempt to target Democrats as anti-family and too gay friendly. Vance included Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg with the “ladies,” even though Buttigieg is married with two children.
Vance stopped short of calling “childless cat ladies” “unnatural,” but the implication was clear. And this charge of childlessness has always been one attached to lesbians.
Back in 1992, Republican presidential candidate Rev. Pat Robertson famously linked feminism with lesbianism and witchcraft. Robertson, who was a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump when he was president, wrote, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist and anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
While Robertson’s comments seem extreme, they aren’t that different from Vance’s. This thread has run through conservative politics for decades and there has been a direct targeting of LGBTQ+ people in the election. Kamala Harris herself has been called a “witch.”
Lesbian witches have found their way into popular culture, with iconic lesbian witches in TV series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Agatha All Along,” but the history is far darker.
The Church and Witchcraft
Witchcraft was deemed heretical in the 15th century when the Church and the State were inextricable. Over several centuries, women were burned at the stake, pressed to death, drowned and hanged as witches. Most were unmarried and either targeted as lesbians or were in fact lesbians.
This demonizing of women — particularly single women who were outside social norms or mores — is as ancient as witchcraft itself. In 1486, Heinrich Kramer, a German priest who tested women for witchcraft, wrote the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches. Two years earlier, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull citing witches and witchcraft as a sin against God and the Church.
The Malleus Maleficarum would be used as the primer to torture and kill tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of women throughout Europe during the height of the witch craze between the 16th and 17th centuries.
Feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin wrote about “Gynocide: The Witches” in her groundbreaking book Woman Hating in 1974. Dworkin estimated the number of witches killed during what is referred to as “the burning times” at nine million over 300 years. That number has been scaled down in the years since Dworkin wrote that treatise to at most, several hundred thousand.
Dworkin wrote, “Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.” The reality that women were the targets of annihilation for their difference — or for their lesbianism — was historical fact. Dworkin and other feminist theorists and historians have always maintained that woman-hating/misogyny was at the core of branding women as witches. Being labeled a witch meant a woman could be tortured and killed, usually because she didn’t ascribe to her mandated role of heterosexual normativity or because she disobeyed the patriarchal systems of the time, notably the Church and the Crown.
While some men were also tortured and killed, male and female historians agree that women outnumbered the victims of the European witch craze 100 to 1. Men were killed predominantly for consorting with witches rather than for being witches themselves.
This was true in the Salem Witch Trials in the American colonies. These trials took place in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693 when a group of girls claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused local women of witchcraft.
Modern History
Four Latina lesbians — Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh and Anna Vasquez — were accused in 1994 of sexually assaulting Ramirez’s young nieces in a Satanic witchcraft ritual.
Convicted in 1998, they spent 15 years in prison for a crime they did not commit before finally being released in 2013 and exonerated in December 2016 with a documentary, “Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four,” about the literal witch hunt against them.
Throughout Africa, India and South America, lesbians have been targeted as lesbians. Lesbian witches have been chained, raped and even murdered by families in Cameroon.
Just months ago, Rose Tagnesi, a lesbian teacher in California who was named Administrator of the Year in Special Education in 2022 by the Association of California School Administrators was accused of being a witch. Tagnesi, who was put on leave last year pending an investigation, has filed a lawsuit in which she alleges that board member Jim Kelly referred to Tagnesi and another female staffer as “witches who were part of an LGBTQ+ coven.”
The Killing Continues
With women still targeted as witches and still being killed all over the world, some historians argue that pardoning past victims could end the killings.
The 2023 Annual Report of the United Nations Human Rights Council asserts that each year, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people — mostly single women — are hurt or killed in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Papua New Guinea because of witchcraft beliefs.
One 2020 UN report states at least 20,000 “witches” were killed across 60 countries between 2009 and 2019. The actual number is likely much higher as incidents are severely under-reported.
It’s still dangerous to be a lesbian in much of the world. And it’s still possible to be killed for being a witch, because witch hunts were and are all about persecuting the powerless.