LOVE BETWEEN WOMEN: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism by Bernadette J. Brooten; University of Chicago Press; 412 pages; $34.95.

This massive and erudite work of scholarship, the well-deserved winner of this year's Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Studies, has been compared to John Boswell's classic Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (they even have the same publisher). But whereas Boswell's book is an overall survey of "Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century," Love Between Women limits its scope to the first centuries of the Christian religion and to "pagan" attitudes that influenced it.

Furthermore, though Boswell's book is mostly about gay men (while claiming to cover both genders), Brooten's book is, as the title tells us, about "love between women" -- and that, of course, is an entirely different topic.

According to Boswell and other male scholars, ancient Romans saw "[male] homosexual interest and practice as an ordinary part of the range of human eroticism". Christians' negative views about [male] homosexuality were the result of their interpretation of certain passages in Jewish scriptures.

On the other hand, Brooten notes that "nearly all extant sources on sexual relations between women condemn such relations," and that "early Christian views on female homoeroticism closely resembled those of their non-Christian contemporaries."

To Roman and Christian alike, women-loving women did more than perform certain "forbidden" sex acts. They subverted the natural order of the universe: "Gender role transgression emerges as the single most central reason for the rejection of female romantic friendship."

Like most men through history, Imperial Romans could not figure out what women did together without a penis. They tried to explain away their predicament in typical fashion by introducing a dildo or some other "penis substitute". A more fundamental objection to love between women was how it seemed to subvert "those sexual relations that represent a human social hierarchy."

Roman-period writers, argues Brooten, "saw every sexual pairing as including one active and one passive partner, regardless of gender, although culturally they correlated gender with these categories: masculine as active and female as passive." Though "passive" men were derided as "effeminate" (that is, woman-like), the ancients recognized that "males could be either active or passive (such as when they were boys or slaves), whereas females were always supposed to be passive."

These views were shared and inherited by Paul and other Christian "fathers". Love Between Women includes a lengthy critique of Romans 1:26, the only passage in the Bible that explicitly condemns love between women: "For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for un- natural."

Because this verse was followed by one that condemned male homosexuality, most Biblical scholars assume that Paul's objected to lesbianism for the same reason that he opposed sex between men.

However, Brooten writes, "Paul's condemnation of sexual relations between women embodies and enforces the assumptions about gender found in nearly all the Roman-period sources on female homoeroticism." To Paul, as to his "pagan" contemporaries, "natural intercourse" was one between an active man and a passive women. Women who did not stay within such boundaries were "unnatural".

In Love Between Women Brooten goes beyond the usual literary sources in her search of ancient instances of women-loving women. Her sources include "love spells commissioned by women to attract other women, astrological texts, medical texts, and a dream-classification text."

Brooten is a scholar writing for other scholars, which makes her text difficult at times for the average reader. On the other hand, patient readers who stay the course will be amply rewarded, especially if s/he reads the footnotes which, as is often the case, are at times more interesting than the text.

Love Between Women is the first book by Brooten, Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University. I hope it is not her last.

If Love Between Women won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Studies, what is the winner of the Award for Lesbian Fiction? I am happy to write that it is MEMORY MAMBO, a Novel by Achy Obejas (Cleis Press; 249 pages; $12.95). Obejas, a Cuban- American who lives in Chicago, is also the author of We came all the way from Cuba so you can dress like this?, a collection of short stories.

Memory Mambo is the story of Juani Casas, a young cubana lesbiana living in exile with her dysfunctional family and an endless assortment of primos (cousins). It is funny and touching and you don't have to be cubano to enjoy it (though it helps). Memory Mambo is another triumph for Cleis Press, who also won awards in both the Small Press and Transsexual categories for Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits by Loren Cameron. It couldn't happen to a better press.