Despite winning a prestigious prize and getting published in the early 1990s, Ling Yan's Silent Thrush, an important representation of the lesbian life in a Taiwanese Opera troupe, was suppressed, ignored, and silenced in waves of controversy. By looking into the controversies that the novel aroused, and tracing different discourses and politics behind the scenes, this paper identifies the representation of lesbianism as the reason of being silenced of Silent Thrush. Rereading the novel, this paper also aims at revealing and understanding the subaltern native lesbians. The paper discusses Silent Thrush from three perspectives respectively: first, the discourse of native literature; second, queer discourse versus identity politics; third, aesthetic criticism and the cultural translation of native homosexuals. The dispute between Silent Thrush and the discourse of native literature is an important incident in the history of Taiwanese queer/homosexual literature since it was the first outbreak that unveiled the contradiction between homosexuality and the native-national discourse triggered by representation of lesbian representation in Silent Thrush. It reflected the dual anxieties between the "lost nativity" and the "disappearing nation" of Taiwanese society at that time. Besides, this paper also traces the sad tone, a realistic writing technique, of the subaltern lesbian text criticized by the queer/homosexual discourse and mainstream literary criticism. It examines the limit of the homosexual identity politics and the aesthetic politics of mainstream literary criticism, and explores the alternative sexual identity performativity and its practice of the native lesbians against the urban-elite queers, which may enrich the contents and spirits of homosexual literature, queer discourse, as well as the imagination of the native-national discourse.