ABSTRACT

Title of Document: THE WHOLE NAKED TRUTH OF OUR

LIVES: LESBIAN-FEMINIST PRINT
CULTURE FROM 1969 THROUGH 1989

Julie R. Enszer, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013

Directed By: Professor Deborah S. Rosenfelt, Women’s

Studies, & Professor Martha Nell Smith, English

During the 1970s and the 1980s, lesbian-feminists created a vibrant lesbian print

culture, participating in the creation, production, and distribution of books, chapbooks,

journals, newspapers, and other printed materials. This extraordinary output of creative

material provides a rich archive for new insights about the Women’s Liberation

Movement (WLM), gay liberation (the LGBT movement), and recent U.S. social history.

In The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives, I construct and analyze historical narratives of

lesbian-feminist publishers in the United States between 1969 and 1989. Interdisciplinary

in its conception, design, and execution, The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives is the only

sustained examination of lesbian print culture during the 1970s and 1980s; it extends the

work of Simone Murray on feminist print culture in the United Kingdom as well as the

work of literary scholars Kim Whitehead, Kate Adams, Trysh Travis, Bonnie

Zimmerman, and Martha Vicinus, and historians Martin Meeker, Marcia Gallo, Rodger

Streitmatter, Abe Peck, John McMillian, and Peter Richardson. From archival material,
including correspondence, publishing ephemera such as flyers and catalogues, and

meeting notes, oral history interviews, and published books, I assemble a history of

lesbian-feminist publishing that challenges fundamental ideas about the WLM, gay

liberation, and U.S. social history as well as remapping the contours of current historical

and literary narratives.

In the excitement of the WLM, multiple feminist practices expressed exuberant

possibilities for a feminist revolution. Cultural feminism and lesbian separatism were

vibrant expressions of the WLM; they were not antagonistic to radical feminism or liberal

feminism but rather complementary and overlapping. Economic restructuring in the

United States (e.g. globalization, decreasing governmental support for the arts, and

neoliberalism) tempered visions for a lesbian-feminist revolution. Lesbian-feminist

publishers experienced economic restructuring as it unfolded and actively discussed the

political, economic, and theoretical implications. The strategies and responses of lesbian-

feminist publishers demonstrate the effects of and resistances to these macro-economic

forces. Examining the economics of book publishing explains how literary artists and

other creative intellectuals support themselves in capitalist economies, illuminates

broader intellectual and cultural currents, and suggests how broader economic trends in

the United States interacted with cultural production.

 THE WHOLE NAKED TRUTH OF OUR LIVES:
LESBIAN-FEMINIST PRINT CULTURE FROM 1969 THROUGH 1989

By

Julie R. Enszer

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2013

Advisory Committee:
Professor Deborah S. Rosenfelt, Co-Chair
Professor Martha Nell Smith, Co-Chair
Professor Katie King
Professor Claire Moses
Professor Sonya Michel
Assistant Professor Christina Hanhardt
© Copyright by
Julie R. Enszer
2013
 Dedication

For my beloved, Kimberly A. Sherrill

ii
 Acknowledgements

Since the late 1980s, I have been reading books, journals and other artifacts of

lesbian print culture. This project is one part of my long intellectual and personal

engagement with these materials. First and foremost, I am grateful for and indebted to all

of the authors, publishers, distributors, and booksellers who brought lesbian books into

my life. Ultimately, this project is a way to honor their work, to let them know that I

heard them through the text on the page. They made a difference in my life.

I am grateful for the careful guidance and attention of my dissertation co-chairs,

Debby Rosenfelt and Martha Nell Smith. I could not have asked for better intellectual

guides through this process. Their good cheer and constant encouragement were vital. I

thank them both. The other members of my dissertation committee, Katie King, Claire

Moses, Christina Hanhardt, and Sonya Michel, each contributed enormously to the

creation of this dissertation. I appreciate the many thoughtful conversations I had with

each of them.

I am grateful to the following people who generously sent me materials for the

project, including copies of original lesbian-feminist journals, dissertations, and other

nuggets of lesbian-feminist print culture, including Judith Barrington, Ruth Gundle,

Esther Helfgott, Cheryl Clarke, Ellen Shapiro and Gail White. Many women involved in

lesbian print culture have been informants and supporters of this work from the

beginning, including Joan Larkin, Bea Gates, Cheryl Clarke, Marie Kuda and Minnie

Bruce Pratt; I appreciate their assistance. The Astraea Foundation delighted me by

providing a copy of their spring 1984 newsletter from their organizational records.

iii
Fortuitously, I connected with two daughters of June Arnold, Roberta and Fairfax, who

expanded my understanding of Arnold and Daughters, Inc.; I am grateful to both of them.

I appreciate the kind spirits and good conversations that many offered along the

way, enhancing my own thinking about the material and the work of this dissertation. I

extend special appreciation to the entire faculty and staff in the women’s studies

department at the University of Maryland, and particularly Elsa Barkley Brown, who

modeled intellectual engagement in ways that I want to emulate, and my graduate student

cohort, Lara Torsky, Laura Brunner, and our adopted cohort member Jeannette Soon-

Ludes. I am also grateful to colleagues and advisors in the LGBT Studies program,

particularly Marilee Lindemann, J.V. Sapinoso, and Jason Rudy. Linda Kauffman in the

English department provided extraordinarily helpful feedback and guidance at crucial

moments. Many others have provided enormous assistance to me in this work including

Sharon Deevey, a member of the Furies, always ready to answer questions from her

memories and experiences; Agatha Beins, dear friend, reader, and believer in this

dissertation; Gerald Maa, my constant correspondent throughout graduate school, who

has seen the ups and downs of this work mapped by pen on paper for many years; Jo

Passett, who shares my excitement for lesbian literary history; my dissertation writing

group Michelle Boswell, Mike Quilligan, Geneviève Pagé, Maria Velazquez, and Alyssa

Samek; and finally Minnie Bruce Pratt—her writing has been a beacon for me since I was

a young reader, and it has been an extraordinary pleasure to share work in progress with

her for her astute feedback and kind words.

This dissertation would not be possible without extensive research support. I am

grateful to the Women’s Studies Department and the University of Maryland for the

iv
Flagship Fellowship and on-going support as a graduate assistant; a Duberman

Fellowship at the New York Public Library supported archival research there; a Mary

Lily Research Grant supported travel to the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History

and Culture at Duke University; the Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Award provided support

for a research trip to Los Angeles, the Schlesinger Library Dissertation grant supported

research at Radcliffe; a summer 2011 research travel grant from the Women’s Studies

Department and a research travel grant from the Dickinson Electronic Archives enabled

me to visit San Francisco archives. The Mary Savage Snouffer Fellowship gave me the

time and space to think and write in a focused and productive way. The Woodrow Wilson

National Fellowship in Women’s Studies with the special designation as an Alicia

Ostriker Fellow sustained me for a final year. I am grateful to all of the people and

organizations that invested in this project; I hope this work is worthy of the support.

Grateful appreciation to Judy Grahn and Red Hen Press for permission to include

“Talkers in a Dream Doorway” and “I am the wall at the lip of the water.”

Finally, I share my great appreciation for animal companions. Shelby spent hours

sitting at my feet while I worked at the computer and was the first one to lead me back to

my work room when I had been away too long. Emma brought delightful puppy

distractions throughout the process, including ensuring that I took a break every day at

five P.M. to give her food and love. Some animal companions did not get to see me at the

finish line: Gertrude, HD, Homer, and Mary Claire. I appreciate them and miss them.

This work is dedicated to Kim. Kim fed me and supported me throughout graduate

school—she even legally married me at the nadir, when I never thought I would finish or

be employed again. Kimba, thank you. I love you.

v
 Table of Contents

Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1 Women's Press Collective, Diana Press, and Daughters Publishing
Company, Inc. ....................................................................................................................55
Chapter 2 Persephone, Long Haul, Kitchen Table Press ............................................145
Chapter 3 Small Lesbian-Feminist Presses .................................................................229
Chapter 4 “To All of the Women Who Find Something of Themselves in It”: Lesbian
Anthologies ......................................................................................................................290
Chapter 5 Literary Appraisals .....................................................................................371
Chapter 6 Aesthetic Appraisals ...................................................................................447
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................531
A Note about the Lesbian Poetry Archive .......................................................................540
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................544

vi
 Introduction

The Keeper of Accounts

“I am a keeper of accounts” - Irena Klepfisz, Different Enclosures.

“My subject is the extraordinary tide of poetry by American women in our own
time. An increasing proportion of this work is explicitly female in the sense that
the writers have chosen to explore experiences central to their sex and to find
forms and styles appropriate to their exploration. These writers are, I believe,
challenging and transforming the history of poetry. They constitute a literary
movement comparable to romanticism or modernism in our literary past.” Alicia
Ostriker, Stealing the Language.

The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives is a history of lesbian print culture from 1969

through 1989. The title is from Dorothy Allison’s poem, “The Women Who Hate Me,”

the title poem of Allison’s poetry collection, first published by Long Haul Press in 1983

and later reissued by Firebrand Press in 1991. This rich poem, written in seven sections,

explores the tensions between and among women in the narrator’s life. Allison says of

the women who hate her, “they cut me/as men can’t. Men don’t count./I can handle men.

Never expected better/of any man anyway.”1 The pain of rejection by women, as opposed

to men, highlights the centrality of lesbianism in the poem. Women reject the narrator for

being poor, southern, fat, and having “life-saving, precious bravado.”2 The women who

hate the narrator often hate her for her lesbianism, for her open, carnal sexuality. The

narrator confides that the women who hate her also hate her sister, “with her many

children, her weakness for/good whiskey, country music, bad men.”3 Making this

connection with her sister, Allison demonstrates how sexuality, not just lesbianism, is
1
Dorothy Allison, “The Women Who Hate Me,” The Women Who Hate Me (Brooklyn,
NY: Long Haul Press), 18.
2
Ibid., 19.
3
Ibid., 22.

1
suspect and the source of other women’s derision. In “The Women Who Hate Me,”

Allison writes about an underbelly of feminism: antagonism between women, the desire

to be accepted, the desire to be loved, homophobia, classism.4 Allison ends the poem with

a series of rhetorical questions. The questions begin with an incident of domestic violence

in the narrator’s relationship when she “came to be held up like my mama” by a lover

who locked her jeans and her shoes in a drawer, then called her, “‘You bitch. You

damned fool.’” Continually humiliating her, the lover asks her if she wants to “walk to

Brooklyn / barefooted?” or “try it mothernaked?” In the final lines of the poem, Allison

then writes:

Which meant, of course, I had to decide

how naked I was willing to go where.

Do I forget all that?

Deny all that?
Pretend I am not
my mama’s daughter
my sisters’ mirror

pretend I have not

at least as much lust
in my life as pain?

Where then will I find the country

where women never wrong women
where we will sit knee to knee
finally listening
to the whole

4
Allison wrote most of the poems of The Women Who Hate Me during the summer of
1981 after the April 1981 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. The events of that
conference are chronicled in Sex Wars by Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter; in short, some
feminists labeled Allison and seven other women perverts and anti-feminists. In an
interview, Allison said, “The poem ‘The Women Who Hate Me’ is essentially aimed at
the women I couldn't . . . speak to at the Barnard Conference because they were
screaming at me.” Dorothy Allison, interviewed by Susanne Dietzel, November, 1995,
http://www.tulane.edu/~wc/zale/allison/allison.html.

2
 naked truth
of our lives?

The final three lines of Allison’s poem suggest many of my intentions for this study. I

want to tell the whole naked truth of our lives in the complex, searching, and beautiful

way that Allison does in her poems. The complexity of “The Women Who Hate Me,” the

ways that the poem confronts difficult issues within women’s and lesbian’s lives, inspires

my work. The “whole naked truth” suggests a story that is unvarnished, undressed; a

story not made up, not made pretty, for public. The final image of women, sitting knee to

knee, is how I imagine lesbian print culture serving lesbian-feminist communities during

the 1970s and 1980s. Even when women could not sit knee to knee, they could sit with

their hands on a book, their eyes drinking the words on the page, their minds making

meaning and connections, their ears listening for truth. Finally, while writing this book, I

always returned to the question: how naked am I willing to go? Definitions: Constituting

a Literary Movement

Before I bare all, let me begin with definitions of key terms that I use throughout

the book. Lesbian print culture is how I describe published objects produced by lesbians

primarily for lesbian readers. Generally, I refer to the producers of these objects as

lesbian-feminists; often, though not always, that is their preferred term. Some women call

their work as writers, printers, and publishers simply feminist; others call it lesbian-

feminist or lesbian / feminist; some call it radical feminist; some call it socialist feminist;

others describe it as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Within the archives,

women use multiple terms to describe their work, their socio-political analyses, their

motivations, and their identities; often there is slippage and overlap among these terms.

Sometimes women use the words feminist, lesbian, lesbian-feminist, radical feminist, and

3
woman with extraordinary precision to align with particular theoretical, social, and

political positions; other times they use these words interchangeably. When possible, I try

to honor the words used by the women I am discussing. Generally, I use the term lesbian-

feminist, though sometimes I simply use lesbian. I apologize in advance to readers who

find the nomenclature confusing, inconsistent, or difficult to follow. I encourage readers,

however, to think of those feelings of confusion and difficulty with excitement and a

sense of new possibilities unfolding, which is how many women experienced language

during the 1970s and 1980s. With enthusiasm and zeal, lesbian-feminists created new

meanings with words and crafted new political positions through language.

The term Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) describes the extraordinary

activism that transformed the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

The WLM transformed the roles of women in families, communities, workplaces, and

civic life. Moreover, the activism of the WLM transformed how women thought about

themselves and their roles in society. I consciously resist ascribing dates to the WLM. For

the timeframe of this study, WLM suffices to refer to a broad range of feminist activities.

While many scholars use the phrase Women in Print Movement to talk about feminist

print culture during the WLM, I do not.5 Rather, like the women of the 1970s and 1980s,

I understand the writing, printing, and publishing activities by feminists during the WLM

as deeply entwined with the WLM. I do not want to extract this work as a separate—or

sub—movement. In addition, given the intensive focus of my subjects on labeling their

5
See Trysh Travis, “The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications” in Book
History 11 (2008): 275-300, and Saralyn Chesnut and Amanda C. Gable, “Women Ran
It: Charis Books and More and Atlanta’s Lesbian-Feminist Community, 1971-1981” in
Carryin’ on in the Lesbian and Gay South (New York: New York University Press,
1997), 241-284.

4
activities, identities, political formations, and work, I am less interested in labeling their

work retrospectively or in sorting them and their beliefs into different boxes. I want to

understand what work they did, how they described it, what effect it had, and what effects

it continues to have today.

While my strategy for writing and thinking about the WLM can be most accurately

described as lumping, I use a splitting strategy to think about the LGBT movement.6 I use

the term gay liberation to refer to activism by gay men and lesbians from the late 1960s

through the early 1980s. To refer to activism in the 1980s, I use the term gay and lesbian

rights or gay and lesbian movement. To refer to activism post-1990, I use the term LGBT

movement. I use these different labels for a few reasons. First, there is a longer and more

robust scholarly history of the WLM than there is of the LGBT movement; as a result

there has been ample scholarly work that defines various strands of the WLM and teases

out different historical periods and organizing strategies. For this reason, I use the term

WLM to synthesize this history and to provide an umbrella for my own work in lesbian

print culture. The history of the LGBT movement has not been documented as

extensively as that of the WLM. Certainly, the field of LGBT history is dynamic and

growing, but the volume of the historical record of the LGBT movement does not yet

approach the volume written about the WLM. Thus, I employ splitting to describe

different moments in LGBT history as a strategy to open future research by suggesting

the rich multiplicity of issues that remain unanalyzed. The second reason that I treat the

two movements with different levels of specificity is that I became active in the LGBT

6
I use the work of Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr in Sorting Things Out
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 159-160, to think about “classification and its
consequences.”

5
movement in the late 1980s. I narrate some of my own lived, historical understandings;

therefore, splitting for me seems urgent and crucial.

I use the term lesbian communities of readers or simply communities of readers to

refer to people who were reading materials produced by lesbian print culture. I struggled

with how to write about the women who were reading books by lesbian writers during

my time period. In some ways, these readers are vibrantly alive in my mind. Reading

author correspondence, books reviews, letters to the editor in community newspapers and

journals, and the books themselves, I imagine entering this community of readers. I

imagine myself as one among many women reading these texts and responding to them

with other women in community settings. Yet these settings no longer exist and these

communities are now dispersed. In this way, lesbian communities of readers are strangely

elusive. Mimi Van Ausdall surveyed women who were reading lesbian novels during the

1970s for their retrospective memories about their experiences as readers.7 Van Ausdall

surveyed fifty readers of lesbian novels during the 1970s and 1980s to determine what

they read, how they learned about lesbian novels, and what their perceptions were about

race and class in lesbian literature. Readers reported a variety of entries into lesbian

literature including friends, feminist bookstores, and college classes. Many readers

identified books that explicitly discussed race, though generally in a black / white binary,

and class. Van Ausdall suggests from the survey that lesbian literature and its readers

were “inseparable from lesbian revolution. . . .[A]t time, it [lesbian literature] even

7
Mimi Van Ausdall, “A Survey of Lesbian Readers: Literature, Identity, and Activism”
in Sinister Wisdom 82, 87-94. Van Ausdall also discusses this in her dissertation,
“Writing Revolution in the 1970s Lesbian Novel” (University of Iowa, 2007).

6
inspired readers to take action, ranging from coming out to becoming revolutionaries.”8

In spite of these glimpses into lesbian communities of readers, I find them elusive. By its

very nature, reading is a solitary activity. Reader communities, in the sense that I use the

term, are not formal groups or gatherings; there are not membership requirements, nor

records of meetings. Lesbian communities of readers are networks of people, friends,

associates, comrades, who read and discuss similar texts in informal ways: over coffee, at

meetings, at rallies, on the bus. They are occasional, informal, and ephemeral. In this

way, they are elusive. In spite of this, I refer to communities of readers repeatedly.

Using Michael Warner’s framework, I consider communities of readers as both

publics and counterpublics. Warner explicates the relationships between texts and publics

as “intertextual.” That is, publics are “frameworks for understanding texts against an

organized background of the circulation of other texts, all interwoven not just by

citational references but by the incorporation of a reflexive circulatory field in the mode

of address and consumption.”9 With this definition of publics, Warner highlights the

dynamic interplay of particular texts with the broader field, or habitus. Lesbian print

culture between 1969 and 1989 reflects a particular mode of address and consumption,

and it was an intertextual dialogue among a range of lesbian readers. In addition, lesbian

communities of readers also were a counterpublic, “defined by their tension with a larger

public.”10 Lesbians understood themselves as both an autonomous public and as a

counterpublic. Thus, I situate communities of readers as both a mass public, in the sense

8
Ibid., 92-93.
9
Michael Warner, Publics and Counter Publics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 16.
10
Ibid, 56.

7
that lesbians at times envisioned themselves as speaking primarily to other lesbians, and

as a counterpublic, engaged in critiquing a larger public sphere, one that was variably

feminist and/or heterosexual.

The term community, within this phrase and in many other locations in this book,

means a group of people with intellectual and affective relationships. I use community

primarily out of convenience; I do not have another word to use to describe these

relationships. I am mindful of the treacly overtones that community can have as well as

of the powerful critique of community by Miranda Joseph.11 Joseph demonstrates how

communal subjectivity is “constituted not by identity but rather through practices of

production and consumption.” For Joseph, community is used as a term to evoke

particular qualities, but in practice it exists through the material practices of capitalism.

While at times I use the word community in annunciatory and allusive ways, ultimately,

this history of lesbian print culture further explicates and supports Joseph’s argument:

production and consumption constitute community. In my study, the production and

consumption are of books; community includes readers, writers, publishers, and others

involved in bookmaking.

Like Warner’s publics and counterpublics, lesbian-feminism is both a subculture

and a culture. Hedbige describes subcultures as representing “a ‘solution’ to a specific set

of circumstances, to particular problems and contradictions.”12 By Hebdige’s definition,

lesbian-feminists are a subculture; they create their own communities, or solutions, to

respond to the endemic conditions of sexism and homophobia. As a group, or subculture,

11
Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006.
12
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979), 81.

8
dominated by men and heterosexual people, lesbian-feminists lack access to cultural

power. At the same time, lesbian-feminists, as a group, invested deeply in claiming and

asserting power through active resistance to domination. They believed in and worked to

create a world where they had cultural power, a world where they were not a subculture

but the dominant culture. In this way, lesbian-feminists constantly telescoped between

understanding their work as a part of a subculture and as a culture that would replace

patriarchy. Lesbian-feminists believed in building a culture that would supplant the

current, dominant, heterosexual culture. Like my subjects, I telescope between

understanding lesbian-feminism as a culture and as a subculture. They understood keenly

the dialectical nature of both culture / subculture and public / counterpublic; they

envisioned their work as actively engaging in the displacement of these dialectical

relationships.

During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian-feminists viewed their work as creating a new

culture, not as expressing a subculture, but to appraise lesbian-feminist activities

historically, I revert to a lens that views lesbian-feminism as a subculture.13 Hedbige

describes two ways that subcultures are incorporated into culture: “through commodities

and through ideologies.”14 In the past two decades, lesbian-feminism has been

incorporated into United States culture through both commodification and through

ideological adoption.

Although I rarely use the word culture independently, it is a central component of

the phrase lesbian print culture. I use culture with Raymond Williams’s definition in

13
It will surprise no one that the envisioned lesbian-feminist revolution was not realized.
14
Hebdige, 95.

9
mind. Williams notes that the complexity of defining culture emanates from an

“argument about the relationships between general human development and a particular

way of life, and between both the words and practices of art and intelligence.”15 It is

exactly this nexus between a particular way of life, in this case lesbian-feminism, and

words and practices of art and intelligence that this history explores. Williams notes that

culture references a tension between “material production,” which is primarily how

culture is use in archaeology and anthropology, and “signifying or symbolic systems,”

which is how culture is primarily used in history and cultural studies.16 The stories in this

book explore this tension between material production and symbolic systems and

demonstrate the significance of both meanings of culture for lesbian-feminists.

Pierre Bourdieu’s work on how objects are given cultural value, or distinction, is

also crucial for my work. At the center of Bourdieu’s analysis is the idea of habitus,

which has two meanings. First, the habitus is “the generative principle of objectively

classifiable judgements;” second, it is “the system of classification (principium divionis)

of these practices.”17 For Bourdieu, the habitus is the environment through which

“objectively classifiable judgements” and the system of classification to make

judgements emerge. From the habitus, “the represented social world, i.e., the space of

life-styles, is constituted.”18 I use the word habitus to refer to the political, social,

15
Raymond Williams, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976), 88-92.
16
Ibid.
17
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) 170.
18
Ibid.

10
cultural, and economic field of lesbian print culture. Books and ideas are created out of

and published into a larger habitus, or field of influence. Bourdieu further observes that

the cognitive structures which social agents implement in their practical

knowledge of the social world are internalized, ‘embodied’ social structures. . .
All the agents in a given social formation share a set of basic perceptual schemes,
which receive the beginnings of objectification in the pairs of antagonistic
adjectives commonly used to classify and qualify persons or objects in the most
varied areas of practice.19

Bourdieu’s articulation of the habitus and its consequences makes plain the social and

political consequences of this system of distinction for lesbians: social formations both

shape and determine systems of classification. He continues, “primary experience of the

social world is that of doxa, an adherence to relations of order which, because they

structure inseparably both the real world and the thought world, are accepted as self-

evident.”20 The dominance of heterosexuality as a norm renders lesbian, and all creation

that flows from that dominated subjectivity, as inferior, lacking formal or aesthetic value,

and not worthy of distinction. Moreover, these “social conditionings linked to a social

condition tended to inscribe the relation to the social world in a lasting, generalized

relation to one’s own body, a way of bearing one’s body, presenting it to others, moving

it, making space for it, which gives the body its social physiognomy.”21 Bourdieu

describes this as “[b]odily hexis, a basic dimension of the sense of social orientation.”

Bodily hexis is for Bourdieu “a practical way of experiencing and expressing one’s own

19
Ibid., 468.
20
Ibid., 471.
21
Ibid., 474.

11
sense of social value.”22 Bourdieu makes a critical connection between ideology and

materiality. Ideology becomes materialized or embodied through the doxa. For lesbians, a

variety of experiences in the social world inscribe bodily hexis; lesbian print culture is

one important structure that inscribes bodily hexis. By studying the objects of lesbian

print culture, we can understand how women both re-inscribed and resisted these

inscriptions. Part of the project of this book is to understand the habitus of lesbian print

culture as its own field of reference and to put it in dialogue with the literary habitus of

the United States.

Throughout the text I use both the first person and the first person plural: we, us,

our. I use these voices consciously to imbricate myself in the story. I was not a producer

of lesbian print culture during the time period of this study, but I am today. Currently, I

am co-editor of the lesbian journal, Sinister Wisdom, founded in 1976 and a touchstone of

lesbian print culture for many of the subjects in my study; a small LGBT press, A

Midsummer Night’s Press, published my single-author collection of poetry, Handmade

Love, in 2010, and, in 2011, A Midsummer Night’s Press published Milk & Honey: A

Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry, a collection of poetry that I edited. I feel a kinship

with the women whose lives and work are included in this study. I use the first person

plural to express my affective connection to these women. As a reader, you may or may

not include yourself in that appellation, but by using the first person plural, I invite you to

participate in the work.

Why examine lesbian print culture?

22
Ibid.

12
 Lesbian-feminist publishers produce books. Simply stated, publishing is about

making books and selling them to people. For me, there is something mystical and sacred

about books. Books come into our lives from libraries and friends; we buy them at

bookstores and other places of commerce. They are bound. Thick and thin. Glossy and

flat. Colorful and plain. With hard and soft covers. Books appear to us as readers as

though everything in them is perfect, correct, true. In spite of my training as a scholar,

through which I have learned that what is inside books is not always perfect, correct, true,

the romance with books continues. The same is true for many readers: there is something

romantic about books. Throughout this narrative, I talk about how books were made by

lesbian-feminists: what went into the design and creation of the pages, how they were

duplicated, how they were bound together. There are many reasons I narrate these details.

Even as I recognize and appreciate my own romance with books, I want to demonstrate

that they are objects, made by people.

Books, like art, obscure the labor behind them—the labor of the author, the editor,

the publisher, the printer, the distributor, the bookseller. I want to make this labor visible.

By making it visible, I animate a dialogic process between the creators of books and the

readers of books. By discussing the material production of books, I think about how

women, and lesbians in particular, made and distributed books. I seek to understand the

significance of their labor both to themselves at the time and to us as contemporary

readers as we think about what they did, how they did it, and why they did it. Finally, by

examining the process of book making, I suggest new ways of understanding lesbian-

feminism. For lesbian-feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, publishing connected intimately

with women's empowerment. Empowerment, meaning to take power for oneself, is a

13
central value of feminism during the WLM. Making books, typing them, typesetting

them, printing them with a mimeograph machine, a printer, or on a letterpress, binding

them with hand stitching, staples, or glue, was a form of empowerment not only for

publishers, but for authors and for readers. Making a book with only women’s labor or

only lesbian labor was significant in a variety of registers for lesbian-feminists.

In addition, the materiality of the books tells us something important about the

economics of publishing as well as broader economic. How is the type laid on the page of

a book? What materials are used to produce the book? What is the quality of the paper?

The binding? How many copies of the book were printed? How did readers find the

book? Was the book purchased by libraries? How did publishers start publishing? How

did they sustain their operations? What did they pay their employees? How did they

structure payment to authors? Why did publishers fail? Answering these questions

explains the material conditions of an individual book; collectively, the answers sketch

the broader habitus of book publishing as well as the habitus of communities of writers

and readers. Finally, understanding book publishing explains how literary artists

supported themselves in capitalist economies, illuminates broader intellectual and cultural

currents within communities, and suggests broader trends economically in the United

States.

By reading the materiality of the books themselves in conjunction with close

readings of the texts, biographical information about authors, bibliographical information

about publishers, and other methodological strategies, I make a multifaceted, co-

constitutive argument about the significance of lesbian print culture. Examining lesbian

print culture helps us understand the history and significance of WLM in new ways. It

14
also transforms how we understand the creation and expression of lesbian identities.

Finally, lesbian print culture invites us to rethink literary criticism and its function in

literary and aesthetic appraisals.

Currently, scholarly and popular debate speculates about the end of print culture.

Electronic media, such as the internet websites, blogs, ebooks, and electronic book

readers, saturate contemporary reading practices. Some commentators suggest that the

book will become a relic, an object at which future humans will marvel at for its

antiquated technology. Simultaneously, more books are being published in the United

States today than ever before23 and different types of literacy are emerging to respond to

these new forms of textual distribution.24 My work is not that of a futurist; I suggest,

however, that books will remain long into the future as a site of knowledge, organizing,

pleasure, and identity elaboration. Moreover, I believe that studies of print culture from

earlier decades provide an important lens to consider and reflect on the current changes in

print culture today.

Why does material history matter?

Why does material history matter? What is material history? Does the materiality

of a book matter? Isn’t it enough to just read the text? Throughout this book, I am

23
Bowker, the publishing industry’s source for bibliographic information, reports on the
release of new titles each year. In 2010, it reported on the continuing explosion of non-
traditional publishing (publishing through independent platforms, not through traditional
publishing houses). According to Bowker this category has experienced “exponential
growth over the past three years” and shows “no signs of abating.”
http://bowker.com/index.php/press-releases/616-bowker-reports-traditional-us-book-
production-flat-in-2009.
24
See Alan Liu’s “Imagining the New Media Encounter,” in A Companion to Digital
Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008,
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/.

15
attentive to a variety of aspects of lesbian print culture. Certainly, reading texts

themselves, thoughtfully and critically, is always a central concern, but I am also

concerned with the materiality of books. By the materiality of books, I mean the physical

object of a book, including how it came to be in the world, and how it travelled in the

world. By material history, I mean the study of the material conditions of the production

of a book: the work of authors, publishers, booksellers, and others involved with book

production. I use the term material conditions to mean the effects of money and

capitalism on how women live their lives. For lesbian-feminists, writing and publishing

can change the material conditions of the world, not only for the producers, but also for

the readers through new consciousness and new opportunities for activism. For writers

and publishers, the material conditions of book publishing bring money into their

personal economies and free them from doing other labor to make money, allowing them

to focus on labor that relates to their lives as activists and artists. For lesbian-feminists,

materialism, whether the material production of a book or the material conditions of

women’s lives individually or collective, is imbricated deeply with politics, political

values, and textual creations.

In 1981, Barbara Grier wrote to the contributors to The Lesbian Path, an anthology

of lesbian coming out stories edited by Margaret Cruikshank. Grier wrote that a “new life

… will soon be enjoyed by The Lesbian Path.”25 Angel Press published The Lesbian Path

in 1980, but according to Grier, Angel Press “did not deal properly with it at all.”26

25
Barbara Grier to Lesbian Path Contributors, April 27, 1981, Box 68, Folder “1981-
1985, Folder 1 of 2,” Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.
26
Ibid.

16
Cruikshank and the publisher at Angel Press disagreed about the initial cover design and

argued about distribution of the book.27 In 1981, Grier’s Naiad Press took over the

distribution of The Lesbian Path, including promoting it “to the 13,000 women on our

mailing list and to the 2000 bookstores we do business with.” Grier told the contributors

to The Lesbian Path that this arrangement would “make it much more widely read as it

richly deserves.” For lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s, how books are published and how

they are marketed and distributed to readers was just as important as content. Grier

believed that there was a particular way to distribute books to reach lesbians; she

developed and championed distribution to lesbians not only through feminist bookstores,

but also, and perhaps more important, through direct mail, community activism, and

networking. These were strategies for books to reach readers eager to read the stories of

their lives bound into book form. How books came into the world and how they reached

readers was important to the creators of the books, both publishers and writers.

The material practices of book publishing expressed political values and

ideological commitments of lesbian-feminists. Recovering these histories reanimates the

past and reframes its significance. For example, one central value of lesbian-feminists

was empowerment. Empowerment became a buzzword for a variety of social change

movements; today empowerment is a buzzword not even associated with social change.

Within the WLM, however, empowerment, the act of taking and using power in one’s

own life, was a central element of feminism. By creating small publishing houses,

distribution networks, bookstores, and communities of readers, lesbian-feminist writers

27
Margaret Cruikshank to Lesbian Path Contributors, Box 68, Folder “1981-1985, Folder
1 of 2,” Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University.

17
and publishers engaged in the act of empowerment, not only for themselves as artists, but

also in service to a broad vision of empowerment in relationship to the WLM. These

same activities—publishing, book distribution, bookstore operations—have economic

value, both within feminist communities and within the broader United States economy.

One strategy to attend to these disparate meanings, empowerment and economic value, is

to explore the material history behind print culture.

Attending to the material histories of books, chapbooks, broadsides, and other

objects of lesbian print culture allows us to examine the meanings of what was published

and to imagine new meanings of these published works in our lives as readers today.

Through this history, I demonstrate how books are made and how they come into the

world, linking material history with literary history and linking the ideological intentions

of the creators with the economic consequences. By making these connections, I not only

honor the work of lesbian-feminists in lesbian print culture during the 1970s and 1980s,

but I also create a narrative that expands our understanding of how work was done with

the hope that, by knowing what happened and how it was done, readers, writers, and

activists will feel inspired to recreate it, to make it anew, in our lives today.

Why 1969 through 1989?

On June 16, 1868 in San Francisco, Agnes Peterson incorporated the Women’s

Cooperative Printing Union (WCPU); the purpose of the business was “to give

employment to women as type-setters and thereby enable them to earn an independent

and honest living and to conduct and carry on a general printing business.”28 By 1870, the

census shows that the business employed three males and seven females. Under the

28
Lois Rather, Women as Printers, (Oakland, CA: Rather Press, 1970), 24.

18
direction of a later proprietor, Elizabeth G. Richmond, the firm prospered for many years

publishing books as well as “a wide variety of jobbing work, all of it the equal of the

work being done by competitors.”29 In the early 1900s, the WCPU ended after a

“disastrous fire, followed by mergers.”30 The WCPU gestures to a broader history of

women in printing and publishing and to the ways that printing and publishing function

as a source of economic support for women.

Lesbian-feminist publishing is exciting and innovative in the 1970s and 1980s, but

the WCPU reminds us that women have a long history in printing and publishing.31

While I circumscribe the decades of my study to 1969 through 1989, lesbian print culture

has a long history as well as an active present. By acknowledging the long history of

women in publishing with the example of the WCPU, I position the work of lesbian-

feminists in the 1970s and 1980s as important but not exceptional.

Throughout this account of lesbian-feminist publishing, I resist exceptionality. I do

this for three reasons. First, exceptionality suggests a form of engagement that is

unattainable to other actors; framing something as exceptional creates barriers to entry for

others. Second, exceptionality fixes a particular history as special; I see this history as

important and special certainly, but I want it to engage and excite others by its very

ordinariness, as opposed to its exceptionality. Finally, exceptionality suggests exclusion

29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
James Philip Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds, Women in Print: Essays on the Print
Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), Martha Watson, ed., A Voice of Their Own: The
Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), and
James Philip Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds., Print Culture in a Diverse America
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

19
and exclusivity. By and large the creators and promoters of lesbian print culture wanted

their work to be read and understood by their sister comrades and by other people. The

work of lesbian-feminist publishing is, in part, work about creating greater space and

greater opportunities for inclusion in the United States. Seeing this work as exceptional

separates it from the ordinary fabric of women’s lives and from the ordinary fabric of

U.S. history. I resist both of these ideas. Thus, rather than seeing lesbian-feminist

publishing during the 1970s and 1980s as exceptional, I see it as one example of lesbian,

feminist, and queer publishing in a long history. By resisting exceptionality, I invite other

histories of lesbian publishing and feminist publishing, retain space for exciting

publishing projects today, and assert that lesbian-feminist publishing had an

extraordinary impact not only on women’s history or LGBT history but also on United

States history.

Now, more specifically, why these dates? Casual readers may think that 1969

corresponds with the Stonewall rebellion and thus frames my work. In fact, 1969

corresponds with the year of publication of Woman to Woman, a mimeographed

anthology of lesbian poems published by Judy Grahn and Wendy Cadden through the

Women’s Press Collective. The publication of this book, Woman to Woman, is the point

at which I begin my study. The physical object of Woman to Woman represents the types

of printing practices that interests me and the effects that these printing practices had on

individuals, communities, and social movements.

The year 1989 corresponds with the awarding of the Lamont Prize to Minnie Bruce

Pratt. Many lesbians received awards between 1969 and 1989; I consider the award

system in chapter six of this book. Pratt’s’ award is significant because it was given to a

20
book that is very political, to a poet who was intimately involved with lesbian print

culture beginning in 1977, and to a book published by the feminist press, Firebrand

Books. Thus, 1989 becomes a good year to end the story, a pinnacle to bring the book to

a gentle close. These two incidents bound my study and ultimately provide me with a

way in and a way out of the work. I also use this twenty-year time frame because it

corresponds to the timeframe that Bonnie Zimmerman uses in The Safe Sea of Women.

Zimmerman’s study focuses exclusively on lesbian fiction; my work focuses more on

lesbian poetry. By using Zimmerman’s time frame, I pay homage to her vital work in

lesbian literary and historical criticism.

The period between 1969 and 1989 is also important politically and economically

in the United States. Through this narrative about lesbian print culture, I argue that by

examining what happens in lesbian-feminist communities and lesbian print culture, we

can understand important themes in U.S. history during this time period. The WLM is an

important grassroots, social change movement during these two decades. Historians of

the WLM locate different moments of flowering and decline for the WLM during this

period. In Daring To Be Bad, Alice Echols describes the years between 1968 and 1975 as

the apogee of radical feminism after which radical feminism was displaced by a less

political cultural feminism. Susan Faludi’s Backlash shaped a generation of thinking

about the powerful forces opposing feminism during the 1980s. The narrative for a period

depends on the degree of granularity and political investments of the narrator. For my

purposes, the WLM was a strong and vibrant movement to transform society during the

entire two decades of my concern. Many political battles and milestones occurred

between 1969 and 1989, including state, local, and federal organizing to pass the Equal

21
Rights Amendment (which ultimately failed to pass in 1981), political and legal activism

to defend the right to abortion, continued struggles for access to public accommodations

and public programs, and a series of firsts for women: Sandra Day O’Connor, the first

woman Supreme Court Justice, and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman nominated for

executive office on a major party ticket. In the private sphere during these two decades,

feminism affected women’s everyday lives and their relationships with one another and

their families.

Economically, the United States suffered major economic recessions during both

the 1970s and 1980s; these decades are also the beginning of a fundamental shift in the

economy from the post-World War II industrial manufacturing-based economy to an

economy oriented to information and service. These economic shifts evolved in tandem

with a shift in economic focus from national to global. Jefferson Cowie describes the

years between 1968 and 1982 as a period of a “decline in industry” and a “siege of

working-class institutions” that resulted in an embrace by some of the “new Right’s

retooled discourse of what it meant to be born in the U.S.A.: populist nationalism,

protection of family, and traditional morality.” Yet as Cowie notes, this did little to “cure

collective economic illnesses.”32 The continued transformation of the United States

economy from a manufacturing economy to an information and service economy

continues throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Producers of lesbian print culture track this

change; they saw their own labor and the material to produce their work transform from

1969 until 1989.

32
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
(New York: The New Press, 2010), 362-364.

22
 In reflecting on this time period, Lisa Duggan characterizes this period as an

implementation of “neoliberal policies of fiscal austerity, privatization, market

liberalization, and government stabilization.”33 Duggan argues that during these years the

United States dismantled the New Deal consensus and replaced it with new vision of

“competition, inequality, market ‘discipline,’ public austerity, and ‘law and order.’”34

The 1970s, in particular, were a period of “pro-business activism” with “a wide ranging

political and cultural project—the reconstruction of the everyday life in capitalism, in

ways supportive of upward redistribution of a range of resources, and tolerant of

widening inequalities of many kinds.”35 The values of “privatization and personal

responsibility…define the central intersections between the culture of neoliberalism and

its economic vision.”36 For Duggan, identity is key to the consolidation of power for a

neoliberal agenda. Lesbian-feminists were at the center of articulating identity politics,

particularly through lesbian print culture; lesbian-feminist publishing was at the

intersection of an emerging neoliberal economic system and feminist ideologies that

critiqued inequality and capitalism. Lesbian-feminists fiercely resist neoliberalism, but

lesbian-feminist publishers negotiated the increasing neoliberal economic and political

structures emerging at the time.

What has been written? And why is this book different?

33
Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality?, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), xii.
34
Ibid., x.
35
Ibid., xi.
36
Ibid., 12.

23
 This book is indebted to a corpus of scholarly work that examines lesbian literature

and history. This review of existing scholarship recapitulates elements of my overall

argument. In particular, it demonstrates three points. First, a multifocal methodology is

crucial for studies of lesbian literature and history. Second, throughout the time period of

my study, the lesbian and gay rights movement and the WLM were imbricated in ways

that need further examination. Third, the material conditions of production and

circulation of lesbian literature are crucial to understanding the theoretical and political

interventions of lesbian print culture. To this end, I review existing literature on lesbian

and feminist print culture, examine the historiography of the WLM and LGBT

movements, and conclude with a brief history of lesbian literary criticism.

Print Culture Studies

Feminist print culture is an area of study in textual studies and histories of books.

Current scholarship on feminist print culture includes attention to print culture in

conjunction with the WLM37 and feminist print culture more broadly.38 In the United

Kingdom, Simone Murray’s Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics

37
See Trysh Travis “The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications,” Simone
Murray Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (London: Pluto Press,
2004), Jan Whitt, “A “Labor from the Heart”: Lesbian Magazines from 1947-1994” in
Journal of Lesbian Studies 5, no. ½ (2001): 229-251, Kate Adams, “Built Out of Books
— Lesbian Energy and Feminist Ideology in Alternative Publishing,” Journal of
Homosexuality 34, no. 3 (1998): 113-141, Mary Thom, Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the
Magazine and the Feminist Movement (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1997), Amy
Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Martha Leslie Allen, The
Development of a Communications Network Among Women, 1963-1983
http://www.wipf.org/tableofcontents.html.
38
A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910, ed. Martha Watson and
Women In Print, eds. by James Philip Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand.

24
contextualizes feminist publishing by examining the business and publishing practices of

Virago Press. In Canada, in the feminine: women and words/les femmes et les mots, a

publication of conference proceedings from 1983, contains a few essays that document

and reflect on Canadian feminist print culture during the decade preceding the

conference; Doris Wolf’s dissertation, Cultural Politics and the English-Canadian Small

Press Movement: Three Case Studies, provides a context for Canadian feminist print

culture during the 1980s and 1990s.39

Three scholars explore lesbian and gay print culture in monographs: Martin

Meeker’s Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-

1970s, Marcia Gallo’s Different Daughters, and Rodger Streitmatter’s Unspeakable: The

Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America. Meeker’s work examines how

communication systems emerged in the gay and lesbian communities prior to Stonewall;

Gallo attends to the history of the Daughters of Bilitis with an extensive treatment of the

journal The Ladder; Streitmatter, a journalist, traces gay and lesbian press from its

earliest beginnings with the duplicated and individually distributed magazine of Lisa Ben

through the late 1990s. There are a variety of scholarly articles about lesbian print

culture, including Jenny Wrenn and Carolyn Weathers’s history of Clothespin Fever

Press,40 Jan Whitt’s examination of lesbian magazines from 1947 until 1994,41 and Kate

39
Doris Wolf, Cultural Politics and the English-Canadian Small Press Movement: Three
Case Studies, (PhD Diss., University of Alberta, Canada, 1999).
40
Jenny Wrenn and Carolyn Weathers, “Visibility through Book Publishing: The Story
of Clothespin Fever Press,” Collection Building 11, no 1 (1993), 32-34.
41
Jan Whitt, “A ‘Labor from the Heart’: Lesbian Magazines from 1947-1994,” Journal
of Lesbian Studies 5, no. 1/2 (March 2001): 229-251.

25
Adams’ analysis of lesbian-feminist publishing.42 Stacey Young’s chapter on feminist

presses, in Changing the Wor(l)d, includes history and analysis of Firebrand Press,

Kitchen Table Press, and South End Press.43 A number of unpublished dissertations

address print culture: Kate Adams, Mimi Van Ausdall, Kayann Short, Alexis Pauline

Gumbs, and Alisa Klinger all write about lesbian print culture.44 Kristen Hogan45 traces

the history of feminist bookstores with particular attention to the crises among bookstores

during the 1990s, building on Junko Onosaka’s work in Feminist Revolution in

Literacy,46 and Agatha Beins’s dissertation uncovers the meanings behind feminist

periodicals in the 1970s.47

The 1960s have received significant attention in relationship to print culture. Abe

Peck’s Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (1985),

John McMillian’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of

42
Kate Adams, “Built Out of Books -- Lesbian Energy and Feminist Ideology in
Alternative Publishing,” Journal of Homosexuality 34, no. 3 (1998): 113.
43
Stacey Young, Changing the Wor(l)d (New York: Routledge, 1997), 25-60.
44
Kathryn Adams, Paper Lesbians: Alternative Publishing and the Politics of Lesbian
Representation in the United States, 1950-1990 (University of Texas at Austin, 1994),
Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall, Writing Revolution in the 1970s Lesbian Novel (University of
Iowa, 2007), Kayann Short, Publishing Feminism in the Feminist Press Movement, 1969-
1994 (University of Colorado at Boulder, 1994), Alexis Pauline Gumbs, We Can Learn to
Mother Ourselves The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 (Duke University
2010), and Alisa Klinger, Paper Uprisings: Print Activism in the Multicultural lesbian
Movement (University of California Berkeley, 1995).
45
Kristen Hogan, Reading at Feminist Bookstores: Women’s Literature, Women’s
Studies, and the Feminist Bookstore Network (University of Texas at Austin, 2006).
46
Junko R. Onosaka, Feminist Revolution in Literacy: Women’s Bookstores in the United
States (New York: Routledge, 2006).
47
Agatha Beins, Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves: Locating U.S. Feminism through
Feminist Periodicals 1970-1983 (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2011).

26
Alternative Media in America (2011), and Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue:

How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (2009) all capture

the milieu of radicalism from the 1960s as it translated into publishing activities, even as

all fail to treat the engagements and contributions of women in substantive ways.48

Studies of print culture exist within the rubrics of history, literary studies, and

cultural studies; they overlap with the field of textual studies, a field that, according to the

Society for Textual Studies, examines “the discovery, enumeration, description,

bibliographical and codicological analysis, editing, and annotation of texts”49 in a variety

of disciplines. My interests in lesbian print culture emanate from the print culture of the

WLM but with a specific focus on lesbians; I situate the field of lesbian print culture as

making contributions to LGBT history, lesbian literary criticism, and textual studies.

Historiography of the WLM and the LGBT Movements

The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives joins a wide range of studies that examine

the history and meaning of the WLM50 and the significance of race as a key lens of

analysis.51 Literature on the WLM and the Gay Liberation Movement tends to see the two

48
See also Donna Lloyd Ellis, “The Underground Press in America: 1955-1970,” Journal
of Popular Culture 1 (1971): 102-124.
49
From Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, the journal of The Society for
Textual Studies, 4, no 2, (Autumn 2009).
50
Anne Valk’s Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in
Washington, DC (2008), Anne Enke’s Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested
Space, and Feminist Activism (2007), Judith Ezekiel’s Feminism in the Heartland (2002),
and Nancy Whittier’s Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s
Movement (1995) each explore feminist formations in different geographic locations.
51
Bettina Roth’s Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist
Movements in America’s Second Wave (2004), Kimberly Springer’s Living for the
Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (2005), and Winifred Breines’s
The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist

27
movements as separate formations. Historical treatments of the WLM including Anne M.

Valk’s Radical Sisters (2008), Anne Enke’s Finding the Movement (2007), and Kathy

Davis’s The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders

(2007) all contain substantial discussion of lesbians’ organizing and activism, but situate

the work specifically in relationship to feminism and less in relationship to gay liberation.

While histories of the Gay Liberation Movement are co-gendered, such as John D'Emilio

and Estelle B. Freedman’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (1988),

Amin Ghaziani’s The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian

and Gay Marches on Washington (2008), and Allida M. Black’s edited volume Modern

American Queer History (2001), and utilize feminist frameworks, they do not fully

illuminate an intertwined history of the WLM and the Gay Liberation Movement. This

history of lesbian-feminist print culture begins to uncover that history.

Lesbian Literary Criticism—A Brief History

The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives expands upon the work of Kim Whitehead,

Alicia Ostriker, Linda Garber, and Bonnie Zimmerman, and many others, in literary

studies,52 but I begin by tracing a longer genealogy of lesbian literary criticism, which

began with Jeannette Howard Foster’s self-published book, Sex Variant Women in

Literature. Foster, a teacher and librarian, dedicated her life to finding and identifying

Movement (2006) contribute an understanding of the WLM as not exclusively a

movement of white women.
52
Kim Whitehead, The Feminist Poetry Movement (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1996), Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-
1989 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the
Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001),
and Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in
America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

28
literature that either included narratives about “sex variant women” or that were written

by “sex variant women.” The publication history of Foster’s book is important,

particularly in trying to construct a genealogy of lesbian literary criticism.

Vantage Press, a vanity publisher, released Sex Variant Women in Literature in

195653 after Foster paid Vantage Press $2,000, nearly a year’s salary, to publish the book

she had worked on for nearly two decades. The manuscript was rejected repeatedly by

commercial publishers and a dozen university presses. In 1976, Foster wrote to historian

Jonathan Katz, “I wish you could see some of the answers I got from University presses

(or their readers).”54

The response to Sex Variant Women in Literature was a deafening silence that

lasted for nearly twenty years, until two new lesbian-feminist publishers reintroduced the

book. Diana Press, a feminist press based in Baltimore, Maryland, reprinted Sex Variant

Women in Literature in 1976, and, in 1984, Barbara Grier’s Naiad Press, a lesbian press

based in Tallahassee, Florida, reprinted it. There was no audience for Sex Variant Women

when it was published initially. The audience was born as Foster researched and wrote

the book and was old enough to read it when it was released in reprint editions by small

feminist and lesbian presses. This temporal and generational syncopation demonstrates

how for lesbians in the twentieth century, books themselves operate as an archive.

Sometimes, at the time of publication, the archive is illegible, but the exteriorization of an

artist’s interior subjectivity becomes legible later when new communities of readers

53
Passet, Sex Variant Woman, 189.
54
Katz Papers, Series 1. A. Correspondence 1960s-1990s. Box 3.

29
emerge with new discursive formations. Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature is an

example of a book operating and circulating in this way.

After Sex Variant Women in Literature, lesbian literary criticism continues

throughout the next two decades, but not among literary critics or authorized scholars.

Foster herself is not a literary critic in the formal sense. Her work as a lesbian literary

critic precedes the entry of lesbian literary criticism into authorized literary criticism by

at least fifteen years. In spite of this lack of lesbian literary criticism among authorized

literary critics, there is vibrant community-based lesbian literary criticism among groups

of lesbian readers and writers.

Literary criticism is of keen interest to the women of The Ladder, which features

regular book reviews and posts updates about important books published each year.

While some would frown on the book review as a form of literary criticism and scoff at

the notion that literary criticism could be contained in the pages of a newsprint magazine

circulated among lesbians, I maintain that the work of Barbara Grier and other writers

about lesbian literature between the years of 1956 and 1972 was lesbian literary criticism.

In fact, the collected writings of Grier’s lesbian literary criticism in Lesbiana, published

in 1976 by Naiad Press, remains the most sustained engagement with lesbian literature

between 1958 and 1972. Little rivals it in its scope of literary review and its attentions to

shaping lesbian literary aesthetics and lesbian literary sensibilities.

Lesbian literary criticism enters scholarly locations during the 1970s. Two

publications are exemplary of the influences of the feminist movement and the gay

liberation movement on lesbian literary criticism. In 1974, College English published a

special issue on “The Homosexual Imagination.” The issue addresses a wide range of

30
issues about homosexuality in scholarly locations, from critical readings of gay texts to

issues about homosexuality for teachers and students. It included an introduction focusing

on homophobia in education systems, an interview with Allen Ginsberg, poems, an

article by Dolores Noll titled, “A Gay Feminist in Academia,” and an article by Julia

Stanley,55 “When We Say ‘Out of the Closet’!” Stanley does a linguistic analysis of the

gendered inflections of language in the rhetoric of gay liberation. The second publication,

from Radical Teacher, is a 1978 essay by Elly Bulkin titled, ““Kissing/Against the

Light”: A Look at Lesbian Poetry.”56 Bulkin works to situate lesbian poetry as a subject

for teachers in the academy and makes important moves to situate lesbian poets in

relationship to canonical poets. These two publications indicate some of the energy and

ideas about lesbian and gay literature that infused the academy during the 1970s as

lesbian literary criticism was entering academic formations.

Lesbian and feminist literary critics generated at least four strands of lesbian

literary criticism in the past forty years. First, the recovery of texts written by lesbians

parallels the feminist praxis of textual recovery. Second, lesbian literary criticism

grapples with what it means to be lesbian either for authors or through textual analysis.

Third, lesbian literary criticism examines how lesbian lives are narrated (narrative theory)

and how lesbians respond to lesbian narrations (reception theory). Fourth, in the early

1990s, lesbian literary criticism turns from feminist to queer as a framework for lesbian

literary criticism.

55
Julia Stanley, a linguist, later wrote under the name Julia Penelope and co-edited with
Sarah Lucia Hoagland, For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology.
56
Elly Bulkin, “Kissing/Against the Light: A Look at Lesbian Poetry,” Radical Teacher
10 (December 1978), 8.

31
 In her genealogy of feminist literary criticism, Elaine Showalter identifies sexism

and misogyny in canonical texts as the first phase, and then the discovery of “a literature

of their own” as the second phase of feminist literary criticism. Showalter writes, “the

focus on women’s writing as a specific field of inquiry, moreover, led to a massive

recovery and rereading of literature by women from all nations and historical periods.”57

The recovery of lesbian literature tracks with the recovery of writing by women. Books

such as H.D.’s HERmione, written in 1927 but not published until 1981, and Marguerite

Yourcenar’s Feux, published in 1936 but translated into English in 1981, are examples of

the recovery of lesbian texts through feminist literary scholarship. Outside of the

academy, activist and publisher Barbara Grier returned Renee Vivien’s poetry to print in

1974 with A Woman Appeared to Me, translated from French by Jeannette Howard

Foster.

A second strand of lesbian literary criticism grapples with what it means to be

lesbian either for authors or through textual analysis. Adrienne Rich’s 1975 essay

“Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” argues that “we will understand

Emily Dickinson better, read her poetry more perceptively, when the Freudian imputation

of scandal and aberrance in women’s love for women has been supplanted by a more

informed, less misogynistic attitude toward women’s experiences with each other.”58 In

her influential 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Smith argues

for a lesbian reading of Toni Morrison’s Sula. Smith argues that in Sula “though their

[Nel and Sula’s] flirtations with males are an important part of their sexual exploration,

57
Showalter, New Feminist Criticism, 6.
58
Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” 163.

32
the sensuality that they experience in each other’s company is equally important.”59 Re-

reading Morrison’s Sula in order to explore lesbian desire and lesbian eroticism is as

critical a move for lesbian literary criticism as Rich’s argument that to understand

Dickinson one must be open to the possibilities of friendship and eroticism between

women. Reading lesbian desire is an important element of lesbian literary criticism.

In lesbian literary criticism, what it means to be lesbian is central for authors and

literary critics, and includes the following questions: What is lesbian literature? Must it

be about lesbians? Must it be written by lesbians? This area of lesbian literary criticism

overlaps, of course, with the prior strand of recovery; some work by lesbians has been out

of print and unavailable to readers, either as a result of the author’s gender or sexual

orientation or the treatment of lesbianism in the text.60 In addition, questions in this mode

of lesbian literary criticism overlap with historical questions, what is a lesbian? The

question, what is lesbian literature?, has political significance because it situates literature

by, for, or about lesbians as discrete objects of inquiry, and imbricates it with systems of

canonization and literary appraisal. Yet, this mode of inquiry is not entirely concerned

with questions of establishing a canon, although that is a significant element of it. In

addition to questions of canonization and disciplinary boundaries, the question, what is

lesbian literature?, frames inquiries into pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s, which have

been studied extensively.61 It also asks questions about books whose authors are lesbians,

though their literary products are not necessarily about lesbians, such as those by Mary

59
Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 177.
60
For instance, Olivia by Olivia was out of print for a long time as was Gayle Wilhelm’s
We Too Are Drifting (which appears to be out of print again).
61
For discussion of lesbian in pulp novels, see Foote, Keller, and Carter.

33
Renault. While scholarly works that define lesbian literature in the past four decades

engage different questions at different historical moments, there is persistence in thinking

about what objects operate to define lesbian literature.

A third area of inquiry for lesbian literary criticism is how lesbian lives are

narrated (narrative theory), and how lesbians respond to lesbian narrations (reception

theory). The narration of lesbian lives falls into four major thematic areas over the

twentieth century: coming out/becoming a lesbian, lesbian love and relationships,

woman-centric environments, particularly girls’ schools and all-women institutions, and

lesbian life stories, including narratives of passing or gender crossing. Bonnie

Zimmerman’s A Safe Sea of Women, the only book length study of lesbian novels of the

1970s and 1980s, uses narrative theory to situate these texts and explores how the novels

express various formations of lesbian identity at the time. While narrative theory

examines textual evidence from the author figure, reception theory concerns itself with

how readers read and understand texts. There has been extensive attention to reception

theory by feminist scholars.62 Kennard and Juhasz have done important work in reception

theory in relationship to lesbian readers.63

62
Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A Flynn, eds. Reading Sites: Social Difference
and Reader Response (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004), and
Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patronicio P. Schweickart, and Suzanne Juhasz, editors, Gender
and Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
63
See Jean E. Kennard “Ourself behind Ourself: A Theory for Lesbian Readers” in
Gender and Reading, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patronicio P. Schweickart, and
Suzanne Juhasz, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 63-82;
Suzanne Juhasz, “Lesbian Romance Fiction and the Plotting of Desire: Narrative Theory,
Lesbian Identity, and Reading Practice,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17, no. 1
(1998): 65–82.

34
 The early 1990s bring a new direction in lesbian literary criticism, queer theory.

While scholars like Linda Garber, Theresa de Lauretis, and Elizabeth Grosz take great

pains to situate queer theory in relationship to feminist theory in the early 1990s,64 there

is a turn from the formation of lesbian as imbricated with feminism to lesbian as

imbricated with gay male and queer communal formations. This is a productive

engagement, resulting in new queer literary criticism, such as Judith Halberstam’s

Female Masculinities and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing

Sideways in the Twentieth Century.

Even as there is a turn to queer theory, however, canonizing texts about lesbian

literature continue to be published. Bonnie Zimmerman’s encyclopedia project, Lesbian

Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (1999), links literature and history in a

reference volume. Terry Castle’s The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology

from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003) includes a selection of literature that engages lesbianism

as its subject. This framework departs from earlier anthologies, which took as their

organizing rubric literature by lesbians.65 As the terrain of lesbian is remapped with

different emerging meanings and identities in scholarship, the canonizing forces of the

academy stabilize the idea of lesbian literature through publishing projects.66

64
See Garber Identity Poetics, de Lauretis The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and
Perverse Desire, and Grosz “The Labors of Love,” in de Lauretis Feminism Meets Queer
Theory.
65
Faderman’s 1995 project Chloe Plus Olivia, an anthology of lesbian writing, takes as
its subject the portrayal of lesbians in literature, but also privileges lesbian writers, which
Castle does not. Earlier publishing projects of lesbian anthologies (such as Lesbian
Poetry and Lesbian Fiction) exclusively privilege work by lesbians.
66
Greenwood recently published a new two-volume set, Encyclopedia of LGBTQ
Literature in the United States, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, which further suggests
canonization.

35
 Contemporary lesbian literary criticism continues to emerge from locations that

are both literary and historical. Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and

the Invention of Homosexuality explores early twentieth-century American texts,

including Nella Larson’s Passing, as a way to understand the interplay of regulation of

race and homosexuality. Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of

Queer History is a thoughtful and sensitive rereading of modernist texts that dwells on

“backwardness” and a range of what might be labeled negative affects to encourage us to

rethink modernism and positive queer frameworks in the spirit of Leo Bersani’s Homos

and Lee Edelman’s No Future.

Lesbian print culture shaped both the literary output of lesbian poets and writers

and the identities and lives of women engaged directly in its production and consumption

in the broader culture of the United States. Through the examination of lesbian print

culture, The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives situates the objects of lesbian print culture

in a theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural context, and it positions similarly the

creators and distributors.

Parallelepiped Materialities: A Method for Understanding Lesbian Print Culture

In part, the accretion of the idea of lesbian (or any other term–sex variant, invert,

queer–that describes the intimate, erotic, communal, and public lives of women who

structure their lives around other women) happens through publishing during the

twentieth century. Publishing makes lesbian bodies and lesbian identities visible,

replicable, and re-authorable. Publishing makes lesbian bodies and lesbian identities

dynamically available to current and future communities of readers. Thus, the practice of

publishing in the twentieth century serves as a way to understand lesbian community

36
formations. To understand publishing practices, particularly lesbian print culture, I utilize

a methodology that I call “parallelepiped materialities” from the Foucauldian description

of the book.67 Parallelepiped refers to a prism with six, parallelogram faces. In

envisioning “parallelepiped materialities,” the six faces, or facets, I examine are: 1. close

readings, 2. author figure biographies, 3. means of textual reproduction, 4. reader

reception, 5. literary reception, and 6. aesthetic appraisals.68

67
Michel Foucault, “The Unities of Discourse,” The Archaeology of Knowledge (New
York: Vintage Books, 1972), 23.
68
My formulation of “parallelepiped materialities” is indebted to Martha Nell Smith’s
work on “triangular intertextualities” in Rowing In Eden (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1992), in which she defines as “the influences of biography, reception, and textual
reproduction upon one another” (2) and Katie King’s thinking about lesbian-feminist
cultural objects using the Necker Cube.

37
 Each of the facets corresponds to a set of questions of theoretical and material

concerns. Close textual readings (facet one), with engaged, even obsessive, attention to

the words and images on the page and the meanings that they suggest and evoke, invites

questions about what meanings are being reflected and created through this text, as well

as about what the texts say about lesbians and lesbian identity at different historical

moments. Author figure biographies (facet two), narratives about the lives of authors

from archival and published sources, provide a second facet of information through

which texts can be understood and engaged. 69 Author figure biographies encourage

questions such as, What does the biography of the author figure bring to the meaning of

the text?, and What does biographical information reveal about lesbian and lesbian

identities in relationship to the text?

Throughout this study, I list extensively the books and materials published by

lesbian publishers because for lesbian-feminist publishers, bibliography is a type of

biography. Bibliography is a narrative of what was published, by whom, and when.

Attention to bibliography for lesbian-feminist publishers is attention to author figure

biographies in a different register, one which illuminates important stories and meanings

for each of the publishers.

Textual reproduction (facet three) refers to how words, sentences, ideas, stories,

poems, and other written material are transformed from a writer’s notebook, loose leaf

papers, typewritten manuscripts, or, more often today, computers into an object that can

be duplicated for distribution. Duplication may include hand-copying, printing,

69
Here, I use Barthes’s term as the theoretically engaged substitute for the term author,
but note that my intention is framed in a politically engaged fashion, similar to Susan
Stanford Friedman’s usage, in her description of Nancy K. Miller’s work, in the essay,
“Negotiating the Divide” in Mappings.

38
photocopying, or HTML-rendering; duplication might further be called bookmaking or

magazine, newspaper, journal, or website publishing. Textual reproduction is tied

intimately to the material conditions of the author; the author’s relationship to capital—

economic capital and cultural capital—influences textual reproduction. In considering the

means of textual reproduction, specifically, how the text came to be printed and

published,70 I ask these questions: how did these objects come to be in the world? What

technologies were used for printing and publishing? What meaning did these

technologies have for the author and the publisher? How does the physical object address

the author figure’s biography? What resources does the author have to pursue

publication? What editors and publishers does the author know? How does the physical

object relate to the textual elements of the book?

Reader reception refers to a specific type of literary critical theory that examines

how readers encounter, receive, and interpret texts. Wolfgang Iser argues for literary texts

that force “the reader into a new critical awareness of his or her customary codes and

expectations,”71 while Stanley Fish argues that texts are no “objective” work of literature,

70
By printing, I mean the physical creation of the text through any of a variety of means:
off-set printing, letter press printing, Xeroxing, etc. and include material considerations
such as typesetting, paper used for the physical object of the text, and image reproduction
within the physical object. By publishing, I mean the range of activities that brings the
printed object into the world including distribution, marketing, and promotion.
71
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 79. As Eagleton notes, Barthes’s theory of reader reception in
The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975) departs
sharply from Iser, whose formulation of reader reception is most useful; Barthes’s work
illuminates lesbian poetry usefully, particularly in work by writers such as Gertrude
Stein, Lynn Lonidier, Nicole Brossard, Betsy Warland, and Daphne Marlatt.

39
but rather written by the reader through the process of reading, or experiencing the text.72

Robert Jauss sees the history of literature as “a dialogue between work and audience”

with “opposition between its aesthetic and its historical aspects” both of which are

“continually mediated.”73 Reader reception is informed by all three of these critics and

examines the reception of books by individual lesbians and by communities of lesbian

readers. As an aspect of parallelepiped materialities, reader reception leads to inquiries

such as: how did these objects reach readers? How were these objects received by other

lesbians? What meaning do individual readers and communities of readers make with the

objects? To answer questions of reader reception, I examine book reviews, references to

books in community publications or other material circulated within the community, as

well as other archival sources, including extant interviews and surveys.

Literary reception is how a book is received by formally authorized communities of

literary appraisal such as critics, scholars, and award committees among other authorized

communities. Some of these communities are predominately heterosexual, some are

mixed lesbian and heterosexual, and some are predominately lesbian and/or LGBT.

Literary reception investigates how readers received texts, what the composition of the

community of literary receptors means for lesbian writers, what critical apparatus is used

to appraise these objects, how these texts circulate after their initial publication, whether

72
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980). Fish’s work has been
used effectively by feminists in examining communities of women readers, specifically
Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Jacqueline Bobo’s Black
Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
73
Robert Jauss, “Literary History As a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Toward an
Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis University of Minnesota, 1982), 19.

40
they are reprinted in anthologies and other locations in order to gain greater circulation

and recognition, and how the texts are recognized in traditional systems of awards,

recognition, and accolades. To consider literary reception, I examine an archive of book

reviews and scholarly engagements but also consider additional elements that situate

writers canonically including inclusion in anthologies, the availability of inexpensive

teaching editions, editorial interventions, and formally researched biographies.

Finally, aesthetic appraisals are particular statements by critics and authorized

taste-makers in which models of judgment are invoked. Paul Lauter makes a distinction

between formalist, or speculative, criticism and canonical criticism.74 The former,

formalist, or speculative, criticism, maps roughly to this sixth facet of the parallelepiped,

and the latter, canonical criticism, maps roughly to the fifth facet of the parallelepiped:

literary reception. While my concerns are strongly materialist, I am unwilling to concede

the aesthetic as a site of inquiry and examination for lesbian poets. In short, while I

believe in the critiques of aesthetics as mobilized by Lauter and Eagleton, I also value

speculative criticism, particularly when embedded in a materialist framework. Therefore,

the sixth facet of the parallelepiped is aesthetic appraisals, embedded in a materialist

framework. To examine this facet of the parallelepiped, in addition to interrogating the

source of the aesthetic appraisal, I consider questions about how the object is appraised

aesthetically, who makes aesthetic judgments about it, what the composition is of the

people making aesthetic appraisals, how texts are appraised aesthetically within a

dominant (heterosexual) milieu, and how appraisals change when a lesbian milieu is

centered.

74
Paul Lauter, “The Two Criticisms—or, Structure, Lingo, and Power in the Discourse of
Academic Humanists,” in Canons and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

41
 Parallelepiped materialities animate the book by examining its component parts. A

physical object is recognizable as a book, in part, through the relationship of each of the

component parallelograms –binding, front cover, back cover, and stacks of paper with

words and images contained inside. The recognition of an object as a book, however, is

more than the relations between the six geometric figures; it is the use of the object by

people in the word—reading, engaging, responding, altering, and imagining anew.

Similarly, the different aspects of parallelepiped materialities are recognizable as areas of

study in relationship to history, literary studies, and textual studies. Taken together,

however, through the rubric of parallelepiped materialities, individual meanings interact

to produce new meanings and materialities, at least for the particular moment of the

attention and analysis.

The purpose of parallelepiped materialities is not to create another object for

fetishization, but rather to articulate a system of thinking about books and other objects of

lesbian print culture in conjunction with archival sources to create an effective history, in

the Nietszchean and Foucauldian sense, while allowing for a prism complex enough to

contain my contemporary set of intellectual and political stakes. The parallelepiped, a

metaphorical way of thinking about the book, offers a filter through which we have

different ways to see and understand archival sources.

The methodology of parallelepiped materialities when applied to lesbian texts

throughout the twentieth century is a strategy to examine the accretion of lesbian into

individual and communal identity formations and examine how those were produced and

what stakes they have for lesbians at different junctures in the century. Parallelepiped

materialities also explore more expansively the relationships within lesbian literary

42
cultures and between lesbian literary culture and non-lesbian literary culture with the

political intention of situating lesbian literature more broadly in canonical formations.

While there is an apparent complexity to parallelepiped materialities with these six

prisms for analysis, it is exactly this sort of complexity and thick reading that lesbian

poetry deserves. Lesbian poetry has been overlooked broadly, with the possible exception

of the poems of Adrienne Rich; the remedy to this ignorance is an ambitious

methodology that engages not a single strand of the problem, but rather the entire tangled

ball of yarn. Parallelepiped materialities expose an array of new relationships between

and among lesbian texts and lesbian communities.

Chapter Outline and Synopsis

Like my methodology with its six facets, there are six chapters, each with six parts.

As a whole, this story about lesbian print culture from 1969 until 1989 animates

Darnton’s “Communications Circuit.”75 Darnton identifies six nodes in the outer circle of

the communications circuit: 1. author, 2. publisher, 3. printer/supplier, 4. shipper, 5.

bookseller, and 6. reader/binder. Woven throughout this history are stories of each of

these nodes within lesbian print culture. Between each chapter is a brief story that

animates one element of the lesbian-feminist communications circuit as Darnton outlines

it. These stories are: 1. Judy Grahn, poet and publisher, 2. Granite Press, letter press

publisher, 3. Iowa City Women’s Press, a printer, 4. Women in Distribution (WinD), a

feminist distributor that operated from 1975 until 1979, 5. the Women in Print

Conferences, held three times during the period of my concern as a networking event for

75
Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” (Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 65-83)
and Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books? Revisited” (Modern Intellectual
History 4 no. 3 (2007): 495-508).

43
a variety of constituents, particularly booksellers, and 6. Barbara Grier, not as the

publisher of Naiad Press, but as a reader and cataloguer of lesbian literature. These stories

augment the chapters by bringing into focus a particular node of Darnton’s

Communications Circuit.

Although I attend to the outer circle of the Communications Circuit, for my story,

the center of Darnton’s Communications Circuit is crucial. In the center are three

conjoined areas: 1) intellectual influences and publicity; 2) economic and social

conjuncture; and 3) political and legal sanctions. For my lesbian-feminist subjects, these

were the engines driving their work. Darnton describes these as the other elements of

society, “which could vary endlessly. For the sake of simplicity, I have reduced the latter

to the three general categories at the center of the diagram.”76 For my story, these are the

elements that drove lesbian print culture. Lesbian-feminists were interested in intellectual

influence and publicity, in understanding the economic and social conjuncture as a way to

transform it through the feminist revolution, and in the political implications of their

work.77 The center of Darnton’s Communications Circuit, while a catch-all of influences

for him, is the most important aspect of the story of lesbian print culture.

Each chapter spans between 1969 and 1989. The timeline for the book overall

doesn’t proceed linearly, though each chapter is linear. The circular fashion of the overall

book resists the idea of history as a progressive narrative. Ideas and moments return

throughout the book, much as books continue to circulate after their initial release,

76
Darnton, “What Is?,” 67.
77
Here I diverge from Darnton. The political and legal sanctions he is thinking about are
things that effect the communications circuit for books. Lesbian-feminist publishers
encountered this, particularly in moving books across national borders, but my concern as
the concern of my subjects is with how books make political changes in the world.

44
influencing different readers in various times and spaces. This circular organization also

evokes a central tenet of feminism: to reposition power as not hierarchical but shared

throughout a group. Finally, each chapter begins with a short story—an imagined

narrative about some aspect of lesbian print culture within the chapter. Most of these

narratives, these interludes of creative non-fiction, are grounded in my archival research,

though they are filled with flights of fancy—my fancy as the author. I include them in the

book to animate the content of the chapter, to bring emotional urgency to the stories, and

to evoke an imagined affective experience of different moments in this history.

Chapter One examines three lesbian-feminist presses that operated primarily in the

1970s: Women’s Press Collective, Diana Press, and Daughters, Inc. and examines how

feminism informed each of the presses as well as explores the material conditions of

publishing. The second chapter examines three lesbian-feminist presses that operated

primarily in the 1980s: Persephone Press, Kitchen Table Press, and Long Haul Press.

With these presses I think about how publishing animated different identity formations in

feminism in the 1980s. The third chapter examines five smaller lesbian-feminist

publishers and thinks about the relationship between readers and publishers. The fourth

chapter looks at a series of anthologies of lesbian poetry to look at how anthologies

animated lesbian identities and consider how anthologies functioned as a vehicle for the

animation of identities. The fifth chapter looks at lesbian-feminist encounters with

literary power to think about how the identity of lesbian was adumbrated during the

period of my concern particularly in national formations. The sixth chapter considers how

lesbian-feminist texts from the 1970s and 1980s were taken up in popular culture and

45
thinks in particular about the aesthetic contributions of lesbian-feminist authors. A brief

conclusion brings the story to rest.

Two notes on style. First, by and large, I refrain from using quotation marks to set

off particular words. While I recognize that using quotation marks is convention in some

circumstances, particularly in scholarly prose, I resist them for their suggestion as “scare

quotes.” While quotations marks are a convention to highlight particular words especially

in scholarly writing, they also suggest a performance of almost but not quite, as in

“lesbian” poetry being almost but not quite either lesbian or poetry. For this reason, I

refrain from using them. Second, I quote material directly from archival sources and do

not correct any grammatical or spelling errors or designate them with the conventional

[sic]. Most errors are immediately recognizable; I trust that you as the reader will realize

they are from source documents and not my errors. In all cases, they are errors that I

would be comfortable making; if you ascribe them to me, it is fine. Most often, when I

encountered documents with errors and even when I repeatedly encountered the errors

while working on this book, I found the errors delightful. Some have a particular

exuberance or felicity associated with them that expresses for me some of the energy and

intensity of the WLM. I eschew designating them with the [sic] because I do not want to

call attention repeatedly to small typographical or grammatical errors. I make them. The

subjects of my study make them. Small publishers make them; large, commercial

publishers make them. Errors are a part of our life in print culture. I do not want to deride

subtly the subjects of my study by pointing out typographical or grammatical errors in

their work.

46
 Finally, four important lesbian-feminist presses are not included in this

dissertation: Firebrand Press, Aunt Lute, Spinsters Ink, and Cleis. I am interested keenly

in the work of these four presses and will devote proper attention to them in future

scholarly projects.

Conclusion

I began with the quotation from Alicia Ostriker’s book Stealing the Language. I

read that book when I was nineteen years old. My copy is filled with underlining and

pencil marks. Many of the notes from my younger self say, “Use this in my dissertation!”

When I first read Stealing the Language, I was enchanted with the power of Ostriker’s

language, particularly the strength and courage of her claims. Then, I imagined doing for

lesbian poets what Ostriker did for women poets. Now, more than twenty years later, I

take as my subject “the extraordinary tide of poetry by American” lesbians. Ostriker

wrote, “These writers are, I believe, challenging and transforming the history of poetry.”

I make a similar claim. Lesbian-feminist writers and publishers transformed United States

history. I am only the keeper of accounts. I am here to tell their story.

47
/Interlude 1/ A Bio-bibliographic Sketch of Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn was born on July 28, 1940 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in New

Mexico and, at the age of eighteen, enlisted in the Army. She was dishonorably

discharged from the Army for homosexuality at the age of twenty-one. Interested in

learning more about “who I might be, what others thought of me, who my peers were and

had been.”78 Grahn went to a library in Washington, DC to research homosexuality.

There, the librarian told her that those books were locked away. This began Grahn’s life-

long quest to make information, history, ideas, and opinions about homosexuality and

lesbians widely available.

In 1963, Grahn picketed the White House to increase visibility of gay and lesbian

people. A total of fifteen people participated in this action, organized by the Mattachine

Society; three, including Grahn, were women. In 1964, using a pseudonym, Grahn

published an article in Sexology Magazine saying that lesbians were normal, ordinary

people. In 1965, Grahn wrote The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke, an angry satire

about the ways that psychologists regarded lesbians and gay men. This poem would be

the title poem of her first collection, published six year later. In the interim, Grahn

published a few poems, again using a pseudonym, in the lesbian periodical published by

the Daughters of Bilitis, The Ladder. By 1969, frustrated with the lack of publishing

outlets available for her work and meeting other writers and activists in the San Francisco

Bay area, Grahn began a revolution. With a mimeograph machine, Grahn began

publishing her own work. With a group of women, she founded the Gay Women’s

Liberation Collective in 1969.

78
Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), xi.

48
 The Gay Women’s Liberation Collective became one of the most influential west

coast organizations in the lesbian-feminist movement and the lesbian print movement.

The collective founded a women’s bookstore, A Woman’s Place in Oakland, California,

which operated until the late 1980s. The collective also founded the Women’s Press

Collective, a publisher that operated until 1978. The Women’s Press Collective published

many of Grahn’s early chapbooks and poetry collections including Edward the Dyke And

Other Poems (1971), Elephant Poem Coloring Book (1972), The Common Woman,

(1973) and A Woman is Talking to Death (1974). These early books were published as

small print-run chapbooks. They were distributed by Grahn through readings and through

women’s bookstores around the country. The Women’s Press Collective, Judy Grahn’s

involvement in it, and her poetry represents the spirit and practice of the feminist poetry

movement during the 1970s. At this time, women and poets took control of the means of

production and wrote, produced, and promoted their own work through small presses in

which they were intimated involved in all aspects of the publishing.

Judy Grahn’s poetry is plain-spoken, grounded in a world of women in general and

of lesbians in particular. Her work is also highly aural; she uses anaphora extensively and

much of her work can be appreciated best by reading and hearing it. Grahn is a keen

observer of how women live their lives. She writes about children, family, domestic

scenes, but not to the exclusion of women’s working lives. Grahn writes with compelling

urgency about work, including the labor of secretaries, electricians, waitresses, and pipe

fitters. Above all, Grahn infuses her work with humanity and a sharp, honest humor.

Diana Press also published two volumes of short stories edited by Grahn titled True

to Life Adventure Stories volume 1 and 2. After the Women’s Press Collective closed,

49
Diana Press published Grahn’s poetry as well, including She Who: A Graphic Book of

Poems with 54 Images of Women and a new version of A Woman is Talking to Death.

During the 1980s, larger publishing houses, The Crossing Press and Beacon Press,

published Grahn’s subsequent books of poetry, The Queen of Wands and The Queen of

Swords. Publishers developed an interest in lesbian and feminist work as a result of the

demonstrated audience that writers and poets had created for their work.

In 1984, Beacon Press published Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue, a highly

creative and imaginative account of gay and lesbian culture, myth, and history. Told in a

personal, authoritative voice, Another Mother Tongue synthesizes Grahn’s historical

research and contemporary narrative accounts of gay and lesbian life throughout history.

A year later, in 1985, Grahn published The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian

Poetic Tradition with the San Francisco-based independent, feminist publisher Spinsters

Ink. The Highest Apple provides a similarly-styled history from Grahn’s research in the

history and literature of the Sapphic tradition. These two books establish the significance

of Grahn’s writing and thinking as a social theorist for the feminist and gay and lesbian

movements.

In 1989, The Crossing Press published an anthology of Gertrude Stein’s work,

titled Really Reading Gertrude Stein; Grahn edited this collection and it includes her

critical essays about Stein. This anthology made Stein more available to contemporary

lesbian readers. Grahn has also published a novel, Mundane’s World, a feminist,

ecological utopia set in an imagined prehistoric world. More recently, Grahn has been

developing and teaching about her metaformic philosophy. This philosophy, rooted in her

fiction and her research for Another Mother Tongue, was first articulated in Grahn’s 1993

50
book, Blood, Bread and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. In this book,

Grahn re-conceptualizes human history to place women at the center and to explore ways

to realign the values, ideologies and beliefs shaping our world. Grahn continues this work

in the online journal that she co-edits with Deborah J. Grenn, Metaformia: A Journal of

Menstruation and Culture.79

Judy Grahn’s work has received many awards and recognitions. She has won a

National Endowment for the Arts grant, an American Book Review Award, an American

Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1983, an American Library

Award, a lifetime Achievement award (in Lesbian Letters, and a Founding Foremothers

of Women’s Spirituality Award. Triangle Publishers, a GLBT association of people

working in publishing, feature a Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award annually.

Grahn has appeared in two featured films, Stolen Moments (1997), about three

centuries of gay life, and Last Call at Maud’s (1993), about a lesbian bar in San

Francisco closing after operating since the 1940s. Whether studying history or

participating in it, Grahn is often turned to as an expert on gay and lesbian experience.

Throughout her writing career, Grahn has collaborated with a variety of artists,

musicians, and dancers, and she has inspired many artists as well, including Ani

DiFranco. Grahn has taught extensively on feminism, gay and lesbian history and culture,

and women’s spirituality at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area.

Currently, she serves as Research Faculty for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

in Palo Alto, California.

79
The journal is available online at www.Metaformia.org.

51
 Thirty years later, Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman is still fresh and

revelatory. From the first poem, “I’m not a girl,” which concludes, “I’m a straight

razor/look at me as if you had never seen a woman before/I have red, red hands and much

bitterness,” Grahn announces that this is poetry that is unexpected, poetry that will

change and transform your sense of what poetry is and, by extension, who the poet is,

who women and who lesbians are. She moves easily between the polemic and the poetic

when she writes at the conclusion of the poem, “The Subject of Lesbianism,” “The

subject of lesbianism/is very ordinary; it’s the question / of male domination that makes

everybody/angry.” In the poem “If you lose your lover,” Grahn writes,

If you lose your lover

rain hurt you. blackbirds
brood over the sky trees
burn down everywhere brown
rabbits run under
car wheels.

This small, devastating poem uses a layered idiom to build meaning. Without

punctuation, the images may read, “blackbirds brood over the sky trees” or simply

“blackbirds brood.” Similarly, in the next line, “sky trees burn down everywhere” or “sky

trees burn down.” The effect of this indirect diction to describe location, particularly in

the prepositional phrases, is a sense of disorientation, a lack of ability to locate oneself in

space, as one feels when a lover is lost. Grahn continues, “should your / body cry? to feel

such / blue and empty bed[.]” Again Grahn splits the diction for the line to read “to feel

such blue and empty” or “blue and empty bed.” This syntactic indeterminacy does not

extend to the conclusion; Grahn ends the poem with the determination—even certainty—

of the poetic voice that infuses The Work of a Common Woman. Grahn writes, “comb

hair go here / or there get another.” These are poems of certainty, though Grahn is

52
never too pat or easy with her answers. Her awareness of the complexities of the world,

the sometimes disconcerting absence of easy places for thinking people to sit, is on

display elegantly in her long poem, “A Woman Is Talking to Death.” This meditation on

communal life, gender, and class is a tour de force that reads to a contemporary audience

as potently as it did in 1974.

In reflecting on her work in 1983 when the book The Work of a Common Woman

was published, Grahn wrote in the introduction to Edward the Dyke and Other Poems,

“At 16 I thought that the apex of poetic success would be to appear in the same anthology

with Amy Lowell. What has actually happened is infinitely more real.” She continued,

I called my first, woman-produced, mimeographed book Edward the Dyke and

other Poems for two reasons: first, by insisting that Edward was a poem, I was
telling myself that women must define what our poetry is. I believe this about
every other aspect of our lives also. Secondly, it meant people had to say the word
dyke. What would Amy Lowell say to this? She would probably offer me a cigar.

Yes, Amy probably would; it seems appropriate over three decades later to extend to

Grahn a cigar and a lifted glass to toast her work. This bio-bibliographic sketch is a toast

to Grahn, an under-toasted, under-appreciated poet. It also reveals how the author is a

crucial element of Darnton’s communications circuit. Grahn’s life and work wends its

way through multiple communications circuits, from small periodicals like The Ladder

and Sexology to small press publications through the Women’s Press Collective to larger

publishing houses like Beacon Press. Grahn is an author whose work is published in

multiple ways throughout her career, and her work reaches audiences in multiple ways,

not only through printed books but through how people take those printed books and

adapt them to other creative and cultural expressions. Her biography and the bibliography

53
of her work trace some of the paths of lesbian print culture during the twenty years of my

concern.80

80
Portions of the bio-bibliographic sketch originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of
Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States, volume 1 A-L, edited by
Emmanuel S. Nelson (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2009), 268-270.

54
 Chapter 1

Women's Press Collective, Diana Press, and Daughters Publishing Company, Inc.

Common and Uncommon Beginnings

I’m not a girl

I’m a hatchet
I’m not a hole
I’m a whole mountain
I’m not a fool
I’m a survivor
I’m not a pearl
I’m the Atlantic Ocean
I’m not a good lay
I’m a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness

—Judy Grahn, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems81

“I’m not a girl / I’m a hatchet” is the first poem of Grahn’s poetry collection

Edward the Dyke and Other Poems. In 1971, the Women’s Press Collective published

this fifty-two page collection, with thirty poems and a handful of line drawings by Wendy

Cadden. Imagine encountering Edward the Dyke for the first time in 1970. At a bar. Not a

printed and bound book, but a stack of mimeographed pages. Folded, crumpled, stained.

Imagine arriving tonight at the entrance, off the alley. A single light outside casts

shadows, if it is working; often broken by a flung pebble, shards of glass on the concrete

below. The alley smells vaguely of urine, but that odor is overwhelmed by alcohol from

the garbage. Walk by the dumpsters, pass three large women wearing fedoras, smoking.

81
Judy Grahn, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (Oakland, CA: Women’s Press
Collective, 1971).

55
They look at you, challenging. You fix your eyes to theirs. Reach for the propped open

door. There is no handle on it. When closed, it is locked with a large padlock and chain.

Inside, it is darker than in the alley. The large bouncer grunts as you walk through the

door. You’ve been here before. She knows you. You know she is a woman. You know

her name is Gert. In the bar, you hang your coat. The bartender, Mel, gives you these

poem. She says, Hey, you might like to read this. She thrusts the pages at you. They get

wet from the leavings of beer mugs, smudged by the dirty bar. You shove them into your

pocket.

The next morning, over coffee, you pull out the mimeographed pages. The cover

says, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems. You flip through the pages until the end. At

this moment, you don’t know it, but your life is about to change. You don’t know it, but

your world is about to change. You simply read,

1. Helen, at 9 am, at noon, at 5:15

Her ambition is to be more shiny

and metallic, black and purple as
a thief at midday; trying to make it
in a male form, she’s become as
stiff as possible.

You stiffen, riveted by the story of Helen. You haven’t read anything like it before. You

continue reading. You reach the end,

Her grief expresses itself in fits of fury

over details, details take the place of meaning,
money takes the place of life.
She believes that people are lice
who eat her, so she bites first; her
thirst increases year by year and by the time
the sheen has disappeared from her black hair,
and tension makes her features unmistakably
ugly, she’ll go mad. No one in particular
will care. As anyone who’s had her for a boss

56
 will know
the common woman is as common
as the common crow.

The poem enrages, gnaws, and satisfies you. As you turn the page, you almost hear the

caw, caw, caw of Helen. It would be uncanny if it weren’t so common.

***

Judy Grahn wrote and circulated “The Common Woman Poems” in 1969. About

their origin, Grahn writes, it was “completely practical: I wanted, in 1969, to read

something which described regular, everyday women without making us look either

superhuman or pathetic.” She did that. In seven poems, she captured seven portraits of

“common” women. Each concludes with a simile. Helen is “as common / as the common

crow.” Ella, “as common / as a rattlesnake.” Nadine, “as common as / a nail.” Carol, “a

thunderstorm.” Detroit Annie, “the reddest wine.” The seventh, Vera, is “as common / as

the best of bread / and will rise.”

Grahn’s desire to write common women expresses feminism in the early

Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). She wanted to write not about exemplary or

exceptional women but about common women. Working class women. Women who are

often, but not always, lesbians. Women who are living lives, not of privilege or even

great interest to others, but lives which suddenly become, by their very commonness, of

interest to Grahn and a whole new generation of women. In writing “The Common

Woman” Grahn hearkens back to Virginia Woolf, writing for the “common reader.”

Grahn positions herself with a single word in a lineage of women writers, writing for

women readers. The word—common—would be iterated by others, including Adrienne

Rich in her collection of poems, The Dream of a Common Language (1974), the

57
publishing collective of Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, a quarterly journal published in

Iowa City, Iowa from 1981 until 1996, and Ann Arbor, Michigan feminist bookstore

Common Language, almost becoming an anthem of the WLM.

Edward The Dyke and Other Poems is groundbreaking in its content and also in

its textual reproduction and distribution. Judy Grahn is one of the sparks of the lesbian-

feminist poetry movement, a movement which would illuminate the lives of women,

bringing them out of back-alleys across the United States and into the U. S. literary

mainstream. Part of the significance of Grahn’s Edward the Dyke and Other Poems is its

publication in 1971 as an early book from the Women’s Press Collective, but, outside of

the bound book, “The Common Woman” poems grow in their influence through wide

circulation. These poems, in Grahn’s words, “all by themselves. . .went around the

country. Spurred by the enthusiasm of women hungry for realistic pictures, they were

reprinted hundreds of thousands of times, were put to music, danced, used to name

various women’s projects, quoted and then misquoted in a watered-down fashion for use

on posters and T-shirts.”82 In some ways, the story of the poems of Edward the Dyke is

not a story of a book but the story of how lines of texts took hold in women’s psyches

and spread throughout the United States and eventually around the world. The story of

Edward the Dyke, in particular, and lesbian print culture between 1969 and 1989, more

broadly, is a story about changing political and economic contexts and emergent lesbian

identities in the United States.

I first read the poems of Judy Grahn in a collection titled, The Work of a Common

Woman, published by The Crossing Press. The copyright of this book is 1978. My copy,

82
Judy Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press,
1978), 60.

58
purchased in the early 1990s at a feminist bookstore in Ferndale, MI, must have been

published after 1983 because the back cover features two photographs of Grahn, one in

1973 and one in 1983. The photograph from 1973 was taken by Lynda Koolish; in it,

Grahn stands in front of a microphone with a small stack of note cards in her hands,

inviting the reader to imagine hearing Grahn read the very poems contained in the

volume. The photograph from 1983, taken by Tee A. Corinne, features a seated Grahn,

her head looking slightly to the left, her eyes looking confidently into the camera. The

Work of a Common Woman contains all of the poems of Edward the Dyke and Other

Poems from the original edition. The credits page of The Work of a Common Woman

states that the collection was “[o]riginally published by Diana Press, reissued by St.

Martin’s Press, this edition is part of The Crossing Press Feminist Series.” The publishing

genealogy of Edward the Dyke sparked my interest in lesbian print culture more than

twenty years ago; Grahn’s poems and the words of dozens of other common women

fueled my research and writing. I hope these stories, whether imaginatively rendered or

compiled through archival research, will inspire and delight you as they have me.

Introduction

Simone Murray identifies the “paucity of book-length research on the subject of

feminist publishing” and proposes a theoretical framework for conceptualizing feminist

publishing that incorporates both publishing history and women’s studies.83 In Mixed

Media, she narrates compelling histories of publishers in the United Kingdom,

particularly Virago, Pandora, and Sheba, to explore how they negotiated intellectual,

political, and economic issues in their publishing. Stacey Young in Changing the Wor(l)d

83
Simone Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (London:
Pluto Press, 2004), 27.

59
reads narratives of presses as sites of discursive feminist politics that challenge liberalism

and liberal feminism.84 In this chapter, I narrate histories of three lesbian-feminist

presses, Women’s Press Collective (WPC), Diana Press, and Daughters, Inc., as

negotiations among different strands of feminist ideologies and also as complex

negotiations of feminism within capitalism and emergent neoliberalism in the 1970s.

WPC, Diana Press, and Daughters all operated exclusively during the 1970s, a time of

intense feminist engagement in a variety of spheres—economically, politically, socially,

and culturally. In narrating their histories with a particular focus on textual reproduction,

that is, the physical production of books, I delineate different feminist ideas and

ideologies informing their work. Perched between the demands of operating within an

increasingly globalized capitalist system and feminist visions of creating new, more

egalitarian social and economic structures, lesbian-feminist presses negotiated these

challenges and conflicts in different ways, depending on the economic conditions,

political ideologies and personal circumstances of the women involved.

In this chapter, I first lay out some central feminist formations and particularly

ideological tensions within them. Then I consider the histories of three important lesbian-

feminist publishers, the Women’s Press Collective (WPC), Diana Press, and Daughters,

Inc. I conclude with a consideration of the economic contexts and pressures that both

circumscribed and enabled lesbian-feminist publishing during the 1970s.

While I am attentive to a variety of ideological feminist formations in the lesbian-

feminist presses, I am particularly attuned to how these narratives help us to rethink

narratives of radical feminism and cultural feminism in the WLM. In Daring to Be Bad,

84
Stacey Young. Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement.
(New York: Routledge, 1997).

60
Alice Echols argues that radical feminism, the analysis that “women constituted a sex-

class, that relations between women and men needed to be recast in political terms, and

that gender rather than class was the primary contradiction,” was eclipsed by cultural

feminism around 1975.85 For Echols, cultural feminism is a strain of feminist thinking

that aims “at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and the devaluation of the

female.”86 While I appreciate Echols’s history enormously and use her methodology of

close attention to archival print sources supplemented by oral histories as a way to tease

out political and ideological formations, I disagree with her overall assessments of the

trajectory of the WLM and feminist history. Cultural feminism did not eclipse radical

feminism. Cultural feminism was politically engaged and a new, vibrant expression of the

philosophy and politics of radical feminism, using culture as the means of social and

political transformation. Of course, it is easier to draw different conclusions now, with an

additional twenty-five years of hindsight and new scholarship that offers countervailing

ways to think about cultural feminism and radical feminism, including work by King,

Taylor and Rupp, and Rensenbrink.87

The Redstockings’ position on cultural feminism in relationship to radical

feminism shapes Echols’s definition of cultural feminism in Daring to Be Bad. In fact,

85
Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3-6.
86
Echols, Daring to be Bad, 6.
87
Katie King addresses these issues in Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in
U.S. Women’s Movements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); as do Verta
Taylor and Leila J. Rupp in “Women’s Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism: A
Reconsideration of Cultural Feminism,” Signs 19.1 (1993): 32-61, and Greta Rensenbrink
in her dissertation, Reshaping Body Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Cultural Politics
of the Body, 1968–1983 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).

61
the analysis of the Redstockings, in general, and Brooke Williams, in particular, is so

central to Echols’s historical narrations and conclusions that I closely trace original

sources that discuss cultural feminism during the 1970s and early 1980s. The use of the

term cultural feminism during the 1970s and early 1980s is almost exclusive to Brooke

Williams. Moreover, cultural feminism as a feminist formation is not a term used by

feminist activists and cultural producers during the 1970s; rather, cultural feminism is a

term used to describe a group of feminist activists by other activists who are ideologically

opposed to their work. Cultural feminism during the 1970s, rather than being a term used

by the creators of feminist culture themselves, is a term used exclusively to identify and

deride feminists—and feminist activities—who are perceived as a threat to radical

feminists by radical feminists themselves.

In 1975, the Redstockings’ self-published book, Feminist Revolution, circulated

widely in feminist networks.88 In Feminist Revolution, an article by Brooke, “The Retreat

to Cultural Feminism,” is a withering analysis and attack on cultural feminism as “an

attempt to transform feminism from a political movement into a lifestyle movement.”89

For Brooke, cultural feminism is “the belief that women will be freed via an alternate

women’s culture.”90 Brooke argues that cultural feminism “avoids the whole issue of

power, bases its thought on moralism, psychology, sex roles, and culture and is fatalistic

88
Feminist Revolution was initially self-published by the Redstockings in 1975; an
expanded edition was published by Random House in 1978. A large controversy
surrounded the 1978 publication, resulting in the excision of several articles for legal
reasons. My citations are from the 1978 Random House edition, but all of the material I
cite is also in the 1975 edition.
89
Feminist Revolution, 83.
90
Ibid, 79.

62
in its political views.”91 For her, cultural feminism is “inimical to revolutionary change”

because “real revolution” is about “power” and “real conditions.”92 The solution is

“polarization” between radical feminism and cultural feminism to relegate cultural

feminism “to the sidelines of the movement.”93 Brooke argues, presumably on behalf of

her comrades in Redstockings, for a way to strengthen radical feminism, a feminist

formation that they had worked to establish and promulgate, and that she and other

members of the Redstockings perceived, accurately, as weakening in the feminist field.

Cultural feminism emerges in Brooke’s analysis as a feminist practice in opposition to

the more righteous, radical, and revolutionary radical feminism that the Redstockings

espouse. I am sympathetic to the Redstockings’s polemic against cultural feminism, as I

imagine Echols was as a young scholar. Brooke’s article, as well as Feminist Revolution

as a whole, is less an attack on cultural feminism than it is a strategy to shore up support

for their radical feminist visions and practices. The radical feminist visions of the

Redstockings, particularly when read within the polemic of Feminist Revolution, are

compelling for people who care about feminism as an ideology that can offer radical

social, political, and economic transformation. At the same time, cultural feminism also is

compelling, both for feminists during the 1970s and 1980s and now in historical

appraisals of the WLM.

Since Echols relies not only on what Brooke says but also on how Brooke

positions radical feminism and cultural feminism, “The Retreat to Cultural Feminism”

91
Ibid, 83.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.

63
emerges in the history of the WLM as a crucial document. I analyze it closely in

conjunction with a later piece by Brooke expressing similar ideas. Brooke, who also

published using her full name, Brooke Williams,94 was outspoken about how cultural

feminism was diminishing radical feminism not only in Feminist Revolution but also on

the pages of off our backs and in her later article in Heresies. Although Brooke’s purpose

is to diminish the significance of cultural feminism, by reading against the grain of her

text I identify emergent values of cultural feminism as well as different tendencies within

cultural feminism. Three ideas within Brooke’s article are significant to my

understanding of cultural feminism. First, Brooke writes that “cultural feminism has

always emphasized process rather than content.” For her, this results in making “the

women’s movement into a goal-less movement.” In fact, debates about process are not

exclusive to cultural feminism. Consciousness-raising (CR) groups emphasized process

as a central focus of their work, and CR is not associated with any particular feminist

formation. Still, the adherence of concerns about process to cultural feminism by Brooke

is valid; process is a theme that emerges in narratives of lesbian-feminist presses and

other lesbian print culture organizations.

Second, Brooke recognizes that “the rise of lesbianism as an issue within the

women’s movement coincided with the rise of cultural feminism.” She continues, “The

two have had a mutual impact on each other’s development, and have blended to some

extent.”95 The adherence of lesbianism and cultural feminism is on one hand lazy

thinking on Brooke’s part. There are examples of cultural feminist work that are not

94
Since the two articles that I cite primarily only have the authorial attribution “Brooke,”
I refer to her using only that name in subsequent references.
95
Feminist Revolution, 80.

64
exclusively or even primarily lesbian. The linkage of any form of feminism with

lesbianism, as a way to deride its meaning and legitimacy, was, and continues to be,

lesbian baiting. At the same time, the linkage between the two has merit. Many of the

cultural institutions that Brooke cites and critiques were founded and operated by

lesbians; throughout the 1970s and 1980s, lesbians are in central roles of leadership,

creation, and distribution of feminist cultural work. Thus, as Brooke suggests, lesbian-

feminism and cultural feminism are in some ways co-constitutive. In this 1975 article,

Brooke identifies three tendencies within cultural feminism: lesbian separatism,

matriarchal practices, and individualized and therapy-oriented feminist practices.

Lesbian-feminism is a strand of feminism that weaves through all of these tendencies of

cultural feminism. In these histories of lesbian-feminist publishers, the focus is on how

lesbian separatism and cultural feminism intertwine at different moments, though

evidence of all three tendencies of cultural feminism exist in this history of feminist print

culture, and I gesture in those directions where appropriate.96

Third, Brooke critiques feminist businesses. She identifies feminist businesses as

similar to other locations of cultural feminism, such as women’s centers, women’s

communes, and women’s art centers. All of these formations are important to lesbian-

feminist publishers in developing distribution networks and communities of readers.

Brooke recognizes that feminist businesses “can provide useful services and support

people financially” even as “they cannot be seen as a solution to women’s oppression.”

96
Jo Freeman’s history of the WLM in Women: A Feminist Perspective (Palo Alto, CA:
Mayfield Publishing Company, 1979) asserts that feminist activity focused on “women’s
culture” arises out of the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian women in the WLM
(567). Freeman does not use the term, cultural feminism, but describes women’s culture.
Freeman’s investments are different than Brooke’s.

65
This I think exposes a strategic fault line between radical feminists and cultural feminists,

a fault line that, I argue, must be situated within the broader political field of the United

States.

Radical feminists envisioned solutions to the conditions of sexism in women’s

lives; businesses and cultural formations did not offer solutions directly, they offered

alternatives. Books, music, concerts, and other feminist gatherings were alternatives to

ameliorate temporarily the sexist and patriarchal conditions in the world. Perhaps the

alternatives would result in solutions, but cultural feminists were more focused on

alternatives that allowed them to express their visions and values in the current

environment of what was possible. In the United States, the years between 1968 and

1975, the focus of Echols’ history, inspire both visions of broad cultural and political

transformation and beliefs in a realistic probability of revolution or at least foundational

transformation. The convergence of multiple social justice movements in the United

States and a powerful anti-war movement created an optimistic atmosphere in which

radical feminists could believe that sexism was a problem that could be solved. During

the final years of the 1970s, however, the exuberance of the belief in revolutionary

change lessens. This is not because of an inadequacy in the thinking and theory of

feminists but rather because of changes in the broader field of United States politics and

the United States economy. A deep economic recession, the energy crisis, the failure of

the Vietnam War, all temper the environment. Solutions become less palpable;

alternatives to address problems like sexism and homophobia, which seemed more

intractable, became more realistic. The election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980 and

the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to gain ratification in June 1982 changes what

66
radical feminists imagine as possible and, as a result, changes their political practices.

Brooke’s connection between feminist businesses and cultural feminism in 1975 is

prescient. The next dozen years narrows what seemed possible and achievable for radical

feminists in the political and economic fields. The narrowing field for political gains

focused feminist energy on building alternatives, including extraordinary growth in

feminist publishing and bookstores. Rather than envisioning revolutionary strategies to

undo sexism in the political and economic field as radical feminists did, cultural feminists

negotiated the realities of limited political progress and globalizing capitalism by creating

lesbian-feminist economies.

In 1980, in Heresies 9, Brooke publishes a second article elaborating on her first

one. This article is titled, “The Chador of Women’s Liberation: Cultural Feminism and

the Movement Press.”97 In this article, Brooke expands on her thesis about the hegemonic

take-over of radical feminism by cultural feminism, particularly in the feminist press. She

articulates three other tendencies within cultural feminism, “spirituality and goddess-

worshiping,” which maps closely to the matriarchal practices she identified earlier,

“disruptive ‘dyketactics’,” and “academic cultural feminism,” which she describes as “the

97
Brooke, “ The Chador of Women’s Liberation: Cultural Feminism and the Movement
Press, Heresies 9, 1980, 70-74. The formulation of cultural feminism as a chador is
jarring to me as a contemporary reader distressed by the rise in Islamophobia and attacks
on Muslim people in the United States and Europe over the past decades. Moreover,
Brooke’s usage of it is problematic. She constructs an elaborate analogy between women
wearing the chador in Iran “as a symbol of resistance to the oppressive regime of the
Shah” and Western feminists at a science conference embracing “passion and
subjectivity.” Ultimately, Brook wants her readers to act in solidarity with women in Iran
who “held mass demonstrations demanding equal rights and shouting, “No to the veil!’”
While Brooke’s work is polemical, this analogy doesn’t seem apt, particularly for
contemporary readers, but even for readers in 1980, it must have been jarring.

67
main activity. . .seems to be reading novels by women.”98 All of these tendencies outlined

by Brooke seem congruent to me with practices of cultural feminism in the late 1970s

and the early 1980s, though I attach a different valence to them. All are worthy of more

elaboration and investigation.

Somewhat ironically, during the 1980s, the academic cultural feminism that

Brooke identifies, which included disciplinary work in literature, history, anthropology,

psychology and other areas as well as the growing interdisciplinary field of women’s

studies, pays minimal attention to the formation of cultural feminism. For instance,

Jaggar and Rothenberg’s textbook, Feminist Frameworks, does not invoke cultural

feminism as a feminist framework.99 One of my interests in examining these lesbian-

feminist publishing is to redefine and reposition cultural feminism in the history of the

WLM. The three elements identified by Brooke—attention to process, engagement with

business formations as a feminist intervention, and the blending of lesbianism separatism

with cultural feminism—form one rubric for defining cultural feminism. Later feminist

scholars offer other frameworks.

In 1981, Gayle Kimball defines cultural feminism as a third wave of feminism

that emerged in the 1970s, when “women created their own institutions for publishing,

bookselling, teaching women’s studies, music production, filmmaking, displaying and

teach art, worship, theatre, counseling, rape crisis intervention, refuges for battered

98
Brooke, Heresies 9, 70.
99
Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S Rothenberg. Feminist Frameworks: Alternative
Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1978. Neither the first edition in 1978 nor the revised edition in 1984 describe
cultural feminism. There was a third edition in 1993.

68
women, health care, banking, travel, and farming.”100 This definition of cultural feminism

brings together a wide array of feminist activity during the 1970s, though Kimball in her

definition foregrounds publishing and bookselling. Kimball’s expansive view of cultural

feminism is characterized by six themes: (1) anger about women’s powerlessness and a

search for alternatives to patriarchal and hierarchal power; (2) search for alternative

family structures, (3) respectful description of women’s actual lives and experiences; (4)

reclamation of sensuality, health care, control over contraception and birthing, and free

choice in sexual preference; (5) emphasis on knowledge lodged in the unconscious; (6)

concern for wholeness and overcoming duality.101 These themes are present in much of

the content of what lesbian-feminist publishers publish during the 1970s; they echo both

the characteristics of cultural feminism and the three strands of cultural feminism

identified by Brooke. At the same time, this expansive definition of cultural feminism

could stand in for all of feminism during the 1980s; thus while Kimball’s work is

important in considering cultural feminism, I am interested in identifying a slightly

narrower definition.

Allison Jaggar captures the interconnections between radical feminism and

cultural feminism in her 1983 book Feminist Politics and Human Nature. She notes that

radical feminism, populated by younger feminists who “no longer have previous political

experience in left organizations” are “less influenced by Marxist categories” and “no

longer address themselves to a left audience.” She sees these feminists as “part of a grass-

roots movement, a flourishing women’s culture concerned with providing feminist

100
Kimball, Women’s Culture: The Women’s Renaissance of the Seventies (Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 2.
101
Ibid., 10.

69
alternatives in literature, music, spirituality, health services, sexuality, even in

employment and technology.” Jaggar identifies them as radical feminists, but notes they

“might now prefer to call themselves cultural feminists or lesbianfeminists.” For Jaggar,

the variety of radical feminist ideas and practices is “an indication of the originality and

vitality of the movement.”102 Jaggar adeptly negotiates a variety of names for feminist

practices in her description of radical feminism and cultural feminism.103 Kathy Rudy, in

her 2001 essay reflects on her experiences during the 1980s in Durham, North Carolina,

working for Ladyslipper, a lesbian-feminist music distribution company. Rudy expresses

dissatisfaction with the terms radical feminist, cultural feminist, lesbian separatist; she

eventually uses the term radical feminist to describe her life and political practice. This

slippage between and among the terms, which Echols herself acknowledges even as she

works to separate and codify the formations, indicates the ways that a variety of feminist

formations overlapped during the 1970s and 1980s. As they emerged, the terms and their

meanings were inconsistent.

By the late 1980s, definitions of cultural feminism are mediated by debates about

essentialism and social constructionism. Linda Alcoff’s definition of cultural feminism is

representative of this dynamic. Alcoff writes in 1988 that cultural feminism is “the

ideology of a female nature or female essence reappropriated by feminists themselves in

102
Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 1983), 84.
103
While I am sympathetic with Sandoval’s critique of Jaggar, I also appreciate Jaggar’s
description of radical feminism and how it demonstrates the fluidity between and among
feminist formations.

70
an effort to re-validate undervalued female attributes.”104 She aligns Mary Daly and

Adrienne Rich as two key contributors to the elaboration of this strand of feminism.

Recent scholarship recapitulates this definition, including Eileen Hayes’ work on

women’s music festivals. Hayes writes that the ideas of cultural feminism are rooted in

“essentialist notions about gender, sexuality, politics, and in this case, music.”105 While

essentialism is an element of cultural feminism during the 1980s, cultural feminism as a

formation emerged prior to the 1980s and to the distillation of debates about essentialism

and social constructionism in feminist activist formations. Current scholarship lacks a

meaningful definition of cultural feminism that both describes the variety of activities

during the 1970s and 1980s and recognizes the intervention of post-structuralism in

debates about essentialism and social constructionism. An important exception is Bettina

Aptheker’s 2005 essay on cultural feminism in Wilma Mankiller’s The Reader’s

Companion to U.S. Women’s History. Aptheker frames cultural feminism as “the

multiracial, multicultural movement of women’s expressive art that arose with and deeply

influenced the women’s movement begun in the 1970s.”106 Aptheker thoughtfully

positions lesbianism and lesbian separatism as part of a broader feminist cultural

renaissance. Throughout this book, I try to follow Aptheker’s lead and tease out

definitions for cultural feminism from the lesbian-feminist work I examine. For now, let

me define cultural feminism as a set of feminist practices that takes culture as the raw

104
Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in
Feminist Theory,” Signs 13, no. 3 (1988), 408.
105
Eileen M. Hayes, Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s
Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 53.
106
Bettina Aptheker, “Cultural Feminism,” in The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s
History, Wilma Mankiller, ed, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 70.

71
material for transformation through feminist analysis and activism. This basic definition

provides narrower parameters than Brooke or Kimball suggest: it extricates cultural

feminism from debates about essentialism; and it reclaims cultural feminism as an

important strand of feminism during the WLM.

While I have dwelled on cultural feminism as a construct for thinking about these

histories of lesbian-feminist presses, I want to iterate that I don’t see the work of the

women in the presses as exclusively informed by any single feminist ideology. Rather, in

thinking about the feminisms enacted by lesbian-feminist publishers, I am inspired by the

work of Chela Sandoval in Methodology of the Oppressed. Sandoval articulates an

“oppositional ideology” that “apprehends an effective oppositional consciousness igniting

in dialectical engagement between varying ideological formations.”107 Challenging

hegemonic models of feminism, Sandoval employs a taxonomy that accounts for the

fluidity of thought and action based on different formations and different exigencies for

feminists. Sandoval articulates four forms of oppositional consciousness that activists

may use: (1) equal rights, (2) revolutionary, (3) supremacist, and (4) separatist. Sandoval

argues that “the differential mode of social movement and consciousness depends on the

practitioner’s ability to read the current situation of power and self-consciously choosing

and adopting the ideological stand best suited to push against its configurations.”108

Although Sandoval’s work is focused primarily on articulating strategic standpoints for

women of color, her framework is useful for thinking about the work and activism of

lesbians, some of whom are women of color, some of whom are white, in publishing.

107
Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 44.
108
Ibid., 60.

72
Sandoval’s framework and, more importantly, her method of thinking about different

ideologies as tactics, as opposed to entrenched and immutable positions, help me to

examine the types of feminism animated in lesbian-feminist publishing. To think about

feminist theories and ideologies in the practices of lesbian-feminist publishers, I telescope

between and among Sandoval’s forms of oppositional consciousness and “hegemonic

taxonomies” as a strategy to animate overlapping and emerging theories and practices of

women working at this time. While one of my investments is in recuperating cultural

feminism as a term that expresses important elements of lesbian-feminist publishing

activities, I am not interested in inscribing cultural feminism into taxonomic system for

thinking about theoretical and strategic positions of activists in the WLM. Ultimately, by

examining different types of feminism in publishing, I rethink narratives of the WLM and

the ideologies that informed WLM activists.

Women's Press Collective

Poet Judy Grahn had large ambitions; she also wanted big things—large printing

presses, a web press, and a freighter. In conversation with Carol Seajay, the publisher of

the Feminist Bookstore News, Grahn recalled: “I wished that I had the time and energy to

get $1,000 from 1,000 women and buy a freighter because I wanted to know what we

could do if we owned a freighter.” Seajay, astounded, asked, “A sea freighter?” Grahn

responded affirmatively. Seajay continued, “And set out to sea with. . . ?” Grahn replied,

“With cargo. What would we carry and to whom would we sell it, I wondered.”109

In objects not conventionally gendered female, Grahn imagined possibilities of

what women might create. Although the freighter never materialized, in the years

109
“Some Beginnings: An Interview with Judy Grahn (Part Two),” Feminist Bookstore
News, Summer Supplement (August 1990), 58.

73
between 1969 and 1977, the Women’s Press Collective (WPC) accomplished many

things with a small budget and without ever owning a web press.110 Although I open with

Grahn and her penchant for large things, the WPC, founded in 1969, is, at its heart, an

anarchist collective. In some ways, to emphasize Grahn is to betray the spirit and

philosophy of the group.

The original collective of the WPC included Grahn and her lover Wendy Cadden,

a graphic artist. Together, they began “to reprint articles about lesbianism” for lesbians to

read.111 “There was so little material available and people were so hungry for it.” The

WPC soon learned, “The more we put out this stuff, the more people wanted.”112 As they

circulated mimeographed articles and poems, they “got the idea of doing a collection of

women’s poetry and drawings.”113 This idea became the anthology, Woman to Woman,

the first printed book of the WPC. The first edition of 1,000 copies was printed on a

mimeograph machine and bound with a stapler. The pages were lavender and the cover

was red. The anthology circulated through lesbian networks as members of the WPC sold

it to the people they knew.

Glide Church, a local social justice congregation in San Francisco, California, saw

a copy of Woman to Woman and approached the Women’s Press Collective about

110
A web press would have allowed the WPC to produce mass-market paperback books.
Grahn discussed the web press plans with Carol Seajay in Feminist Bookstore News 13,
no. 3 (September/October 1990), 27.
111
“Women’s Press,” Undated article from lecture by Judy Grahn at Lesbian Herstory
Archives, June L. Mazer Archive.
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid.

74
publishing it with national distribution.114 The women of WPC were intrigued by the idea

but believed that “women should hold onto whatever they were doing.” Moreover, they

discovered that Glide “wanted to take it over and soften it,” including editing out parts

from Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto.115 For the WPC, the discussion with Glide

about publishing was productive. Glide made a $500 grant to the WPC, enabling them to

purchase their first press.116

Unfortunately, this press was “a horrible mistake, an ancient German press you

couldn’t get parts for in the U.S.” One repairman came out to look at it, but would only

fix it “if one of the women in our collective would sleep with him.”117 The collective

members kicked him out and dedicated themselves to learning how to fix and run the

press themselves. That particular press never worked properly; eventually it was replaced

by a Multilith 1250.

The Multilith, “just a piece of office machinery for in-house printing, running off

memos,” put the WPC into business. The WPC published its second book in 1971: Judy

Grahn’s poetry collection Edward the Dyke. Grahn recalled that she had been working at

jobs to earn money and she didn’t “want to continue taking those jobs so I decided to

114
Ruth Gottstein with Glide Church operated Volcano Press, another early feminist
press. Volcano Press published the first edition of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s
Lesbian/Woman in 1972.
115
Echols identifies Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto as the “earliest articulation” of the
view of gender as “an absolute rather than a relative category” in her article “Cultural
Feminism: Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography Movement” (Social Text 7
(Spring/Summer 1983), 35). Recent scholarship by Breanne Fahs and Greta Rensenbrink
reconsiders Solanas as a feminist.
116
Ibid.
117
Ibid.

75
give myself the job of printing Edward the Dyke and selling it.” She printed 2,000 copies.

Distributing the book was another challenge; Grahn reached out to people to sell copies

for her and found few people to sell it, “hand to hand. One book store took it, China

Books, which was owned by a gay man. The window display was all books imported

from China plus Edward the Dyke.”118 The following year, in 1972, the WPC published

three poetry books: Eating Artichokes by Willyce Kim, Child of Myself by Pat Parker

(reissued with graphic images after the original publication by alta’s Shameless Hussy

Press)119 and Judy Grahn’s Elephant Poem Coloring Book. All are illustrated with

striking graphic art work, both photographs and line drawings, by Wendy Cadden,

Brenda Crider, and other women.

In 1973, the WPC produced a brochure that explained the origin and intentions of

the WPC.120 In the very first sentence, the WPC wrote, “We are feminists with widely

different life-experiences,” an assertion of the multi-racial and multi-class composition of

the WPC. In an interview with Seajay, Judy Grahn affirms that a core value in growing

the WPC for her and Cadden was multiculturalism. “Both Wendy and I really believe in

multi-cultural society—so we made sure that the press was multi-cultural and expanded

118
Carol Seajay, “Some Beginnings: An Interview with Judy Grahn,” Feminist Bookstore
News (FBN) 13, no. 1, (May/June 1990): 24.
119
Ibid. In her discussion with Seajay, Grahn recognizes that persuading Parker to come
to WPC violated a tenet of publishing. She says, “I didn’t know how you act as a
publisher, and that you don’t steal people’s authors. So that was unethical of me, and alta
graciously forgave me for doing that years later.” FBN 13, no. 1, 24.
120
WPC 1973 brochure/flyer, Mazer Archives, Drawer #3. I analyze this document
closely and note that the production of the document was most likely a collective effort to
write, which often involves painstaking attention to each word and its meaning; it is an
important artifact for thinking about the meaning and intentions of the WPC women.

76
our membership strategically.”121 She says that the group was “solidly” multi-racial by

1974 and included, in addition to African American lesbian Pat Parker, “Anita Onyang,

who is Filipino American and Willyce Kim who is Korean American and Martha Shelly

who is Jewish American and Wendy [Cadden], who is also [Jewish American].”122 In

addition to racial-ethnic diversity, class diversity was important. Grahn continues, “two

or three white working class lesbians were involved including Anne Leonard, Sharon

Isabell, Paula Wallace and myself, working class white WASP people and then Joanne

Garrett, who is Black, and there were young middle class white women, Karen Garrison

and Jane Lawhon, fresh out of college and very supportive. They had a lot of energy and

they slipped us money and they got training for printing and worked with us three

years.”123 This conscious formation of the WPC as a multi-racial, multi-class group

demonstrates an early commitment within the WLM to multiculturalism.

The statement from the WPC about their work continues, “For three years we

have been learning to run a print shop, as well as to collect materials to publish. We are

beginning now to build a broader distribution network for feminist books, with prices

most women can afford.” Here the WPC articulates the labor that they are doing—

learning how to run a print shop and finding materials to publish as well as building

distribution networks. Martha Shelley describes her role in the WPC; she “folded books

together, sold books, went around and did poetry readings, did a lot of collating.” She

captures the mundane tasks of publishing, as well as the ways in which limited resources

121
Carol Seajay, “Some Beginnings,” FBN 13, no. 1, (May/June 1990): 25.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.

77
shaped their labor. “A lot of stuff we did by hand that would have been done [by

machine] if we’d had more machinery and more of a budget.”124 The emphasis on labor

in the WPC statement, as well as Shelley’s later reflections on the relationship between

labor and capital, demonstrate a commitment to a form of materialist feminist analysis.

The focus of the collective on producing affordable books is also significant. One

strategy that the WPC used to keep their books affordable was to “buy paper at the

cheapest place in town, the place where no one else will go because it comes to you in

odd lots with holes in the middle.” Purchasing paper this way influenced the design of the

books produced by the WPC; “they have blue this month, so that’s the cover stock,”

though when it came time to reprint, it was “difficult” because when they would return

“green is on sale.”125 The contingencies of learning printing, such as experimenting with

the machinery—the WPC had their own equipment and borrowed time on other

equipment throughout the San Francisco Bay area—and learning to estimate and

purchase necessary supplies, shaped both the books and the experiences of the women

working as members of the WPC. Affordability and accessibility were an important

values for the WPC, informed by a feminist sense of economic justice, but these values

conflicted with the economic realities of publishing. Books from the WPC were

underpriced in relationship not only to the broader book publishing market but also to

other feminist publishers. Actual costs of publishing—material and labor in all phases,

124
Martha Shelley, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, October
12, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 52.
125
“Women’s Press,” Undated article from lecture by Judy Grahn at Lesbian Herstory
Archives, June L. Mazer Archive

78
creation, production, marketing, and distribution—are not calculated accurately in the

price of books from the WPC.

While access and affordability are crucial issues for the WPC and other feminist

publishers, the price of books from the WPC demonstrates a lack of business acumen. In

addition to low book prices, the WPC wanted publishing to provide economic support to

collective members. The 1973 brochure states, “Although we still barely meet our

expenses, we are working towards supporting some of our group through the press.” The

WPC did not see their work as primarily volunteer or donated time and energy; rather

they wanted to build an operation that would support some of the members. Later in the

life of the WPC, the collective instituted a system to pay collective members. “At the end

of the month, we add up our income from sales, and deduct rent, overhead on the shop,

payments to writers and artists, and a certain percentage for reprints.” From this

description, the WPC understood the basic economics of publishing, particularly

reserving money for reprints. After paying the direct cost of publishing, the WPC divided

“the rest among ourselves. Each woman keeps track of how many days she worked that

month, and we each get paid the same rate per day.”126 The WPC employed an egalitarian

principle for payment: each person was paid the same for a day’s work. Unfortunately,

the money was never enough to actually support any of the members of the WPC.

Willyce Kim eventually left the WPC because she “took a job.” She recalls “I needed

money. All that time I’d been working for the Press Collective, and I needed more

money, so I left them to get a forty-hour-a-week job. It was hard. Sometimes I’d go back

to the press after I got off the job, and I found out I was too tired after [work] to be really

126
“Women’s Press,” Undated article from lecture by Judy Grahn at Lesbian Herstory
Archives, June L. Mazer Archive.

79
committed.”127 Although the WPC compensated artists and writers with royalty payments

and paid members of the collective for their labor in producing books, the WPC never

became a sustained source of economic support for any of the members.

The linkages among theory and materiality are a crucial dimension of feminist

theory at the time. Theory (visions and analyses) informs the material production of

books and printed materials. The final paragraph of the 1973 brochure asserts that the

WPC is “a resource of the women’s movement” with “two functions.” First, “It is a

school where we can learn skills and new ways to work together.” The feminist value of

process, attention to how things are done, connects with the physical labor of skill-

building in printing. The other function of the press was as “a tool for spreading new

visions of ourselves and analyses that are useful to us.” In this function of the press, the

theoretical and analytical aspects of feminism unite with process and the materiality of

publishing. The WPC acknowledges their process of needing to find “financial backing. .

.for each individual project” and affirming that they “welcome manuscripts and all forms

of feedback.” The transparency of their process as a collective and a publisher is central

to this statement about their work.

The 1973 brochure also promoted the next three books planned for publishing by

the WPC: Poetry and Drawings by Brenda Crider, Pat Parker’s Pit Stop, and Lesbians

Speak Out II. In reflecting on the collective, Grahn says that the anthology Lesbians

Speak Out “exemplifies our idea of what a collective is, that it’s anarchistic; and we stress

people making their own decisions whenever possible trying to be cooperative and

127
Kate Brandt, Happy Endings: Lesbian Writers Talk About Their Lives and Work
(Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1993), 218.

80
autonomous at the same time.”128 From this document we learn that the WPC animated a

variety of feminist formations from the early 1970s without specifically employing any

descriptive adjectives for their work or their thinking about feminism. They articulated

principles congruent with a variety of feminist formations, including cultural feminism as

well as socialist feminism.

The WPC focused on the political possibilities and political meanings of books.

The first book published by the WPC, Woman to Woman, expressed the value that all

women should have a voice; something was included in it from all who submitted work.

This was an important statement about literary politics for the WPC when they published

the anthology.129 One idea that circulates about feminist and lesbian-feminist publishing

is that in the exuberance of publishing, everything was published without editorial

oversight or discrimination. For the WPC, however, there was an intensive editing

process. Willyce Kim recalled, “When I handed in my manuscript to Judy and Wendy, it

wasn’t like I handed it to them and they said, ‘Okay, we’ll publish the whole thing.’ They

went through it; it was a weeding-out process of, ‘Well, this would [be] good with this

theme; these poems, as a group, would be the basis of Eating Artichokes, these poems

maybe something later on.’ There was a definite order to the way things got published

there.”130 Narratives about lesbian-feminist presses and especially assessments of the

128
“Women’s Press,” Undated article from lecture by Judy Grahn at Lesbian Herstory
Archives, June L. Mazer Archive.
129
I explore this collection further in a subsequent chapter.
130
Brandt, Happy Endings, 224.

81
quality of the work that the presses published often overlook the attention to editing by

peers.131

The intensive attention to editing extended to the graphics in the books as well.

The process of adding images to Pat Parker’s book Child of Myself demonstrates the

importance of physical proximity for the WPC. When Parker joined the WPC, she

“moved into our [Grahn and Cadden’s] house for a month and Wendy [Cadden] would

gather pictures and put them on the wall.” Parker with members of the WPC, “got

together, two or three times a week, and talked about what pictures should go with what,

and what color the cover should be, and the book grew out of that.”132 The process of

selecting artwork to accompany the poems was a collective process, intensified by a

collective living arrangement. The selection process was a dynamic dialogue among

Parker as poet, Cadden as artist, and the collective of the WPC.

The interconnections between art and feminist revolution were a primary concern

for the WPC in all of the projects they published. Grahn reflected on the political

significance of artwork for the WPC. “We had to think about why we are doing this, and

that’s the whole idea of useful art. It’s not that we set up this wonderful alternative press

and now every woman in the world can be printed, and every word that all of us write,

and every picture we take.”133 Grahn, like Parker, undermines the idea of absolute

egalitarianism in publishing in the feminist movement. Rather than accepting everything,

131
This elision occurs in exuberant descriptions of lesbian-feminist and feminist
publishing. See for example Honor Moore’s introduction to Poems from the Women’s
Movement (New York: Library of America, 2008).
132
“Women’s Press,” Undated article from lecture by Judy Grahn at Lesbian Herstory
Archives, document from Diana Press Papers, June L. Mazer Archive, Drawer #3.
133
Ibid.

82
Grahn was committed to a curatorial process grounded in the philosophy of art as useful

to the readers of the books published. She continued, “Our art has to do with reinforcing

the attitudes that we want women to have, giving us words and images to use as weapons

to continue building our movement. What we’re doing isn’t a luxury, isn’t art for it’s own

sake, isn’t a leisure class activity at all. It’s a tool and that’s the way we use it.”134 Grahn

positions art as a material component of the feminist movement. She rejects the

positioning of art as something only for the leisure class and instead recasts it as an

important revolutionary tool.

Art as a tool for a feminist revolution included not only language arts, but visual

art as well. In describing the kinds of graphics that the WPC wanted to print, Grahn noted

that “women are still depicting each other as limp, totally passive, objects to be seen and

admired, with no sense of self at all.”135 The WPC wanted instead “graphics that describe

the kind of energy, muscle and spirit that our books are also describing.” Grahn contrasts

two types of artwork, both created by women, and stakes her claim—and the claim of the

WPC—on artwork that is vibrant as opposed to limpid. Moreover, she unites the visual

and the literary; the desire of the WPC was for both the words and the images to capture

“energy, muscle, and spirit.”136 Grahn describes the guiding question of the WPC as

“What stories do we need to hear, what pictures to see, about what women are doing in

their lives?” The WPC wanted to get “this material together and making the best quality

134
Ibid.
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid.

83
books we can out of it.”137 The linkages between language, visual arts, and feminist

revolution that Grahn makes, as well as the political exigencies of all three, provide an

example of cultural feminism as deeply political and engaged in transformations of

cultural production, reproduction, and circulation.

The WPC published a total of twenty-four books and pamphlets, the bulk of them

between 1970 and 1976. In August of 1977, the collective issued an open letter

announcing that “[a]fter eight years of publishing and printing, The Oakland Women’s

Press Collective is disbanding as an entity.” The Women’s Press Collective affirmed that

“the people who took primary responsibility for it are continuing with the work and the

ideas” and that “[w]omen’s publishing has more potential than ever.” The Women’s

Press Collective believed that they had “a tremendous impact,” but that “the ‘collective’,

hobby shop form is economically backward, excludes the full participation of

workingclass women, and functions only for small numbers of books.” This statement

reinforces the continued commitment of the WPC to multi-class engagement as primary

to their political practice. Collective members believe that “It is vitally important to go on

with more complex structures and in greater volume.” And they affirmed, “Our

committment [sic] to radical women’s literature remains strong and we are determined to

make this literature available to more people.” In 1977, the WPC characterizes the work

that they have been publishing as “radical,” uniting the idea of radical feminism with

cultural production. After the WPC disbanded in 1977, titles from the WPC, including

books by Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, and Sharon Isabell, were available from Diana Press; a

137
Ibid.

84
handful of titles were still available through Women In Distribution.138 While this letter

indicates that the WPC was shuttering its operation, Grahn and Cadden were in

discussions with Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik of Diana Press about merging the two

operations. This merger was controversial within the WPC because of Reid’s and

Czarnik’s involvement with the Feminist Economic Network (FEN), a project that was

sharply criticized by WPC collective member Martha Shelley.139

Throughout these narratives about lesbian-feminist press publishing, I explore

why publishers stopped publishing. Often, as in the case of the WPC, the publisher

operated with time, attention, and energy invested by one or two people - even when it

operated collectively as the WPC did. When the people at the center of the operations

became tired, worn out, or ready to turn their attention elsewhere, the press closed. The

WPC disbanded for both economic and personal reasons. In the case of the WPC, the

personal and the economic are intertwined. The WPC’s statement on their disbanding

articulates the economic limitations of their publishing model and envisions more

complex structures in greater volume for feminist publishers; a vision that was realized

by subsequent publishers. In addition, Grahn personally wanted more time to devote to

her own writing. Evident in the end of the WPC is an imbrication of the personal and the

political. Moreover, social and economic forces facilitate burn out for movement

activists—and most publishers considered themselves movement activists. Martha

Shelley, reflecting on the end of the WPC, describes both the personal commitments and

138
Letter from the WPC, August 1977, Diana Press Papers, Mazer Archives, Drawer #3.
139
A complete discussion of Diana Press and FEN follows in the next section.

85
sacrifices of Grahn and Cadden to the WPC and the economic and structural realities that

brought about the eventual end of the WPC:

Judy and Wendy, I think, got burned out because for years they had been working
and working and never making any money and constantly selling books and
getting contributions but they never made any money. They were always living in
poverty. And they were really burned out about it, and I don’t think they quite
understood – I know Judy didn’t – that you can’t do everything politically correct
and expect the world to support you, and you’re not going to get rich that way.
It’s not designed that way. The economic structure isn’t designed that way. If you
put in a huge amount of labor to craft each book, you know, lovingly and without
high technology and then you sell your books cheap and you don’t have an
advertising budget, you’re not going to make money.140

Shelley articulates these economic, social, and political structures well in her reflections

on the end of the WPC. Hard work, combined with perpetual poverty, have a grinding

effect on people living in the United States, even when they have an activist vision for

social change. Thinking about the publishing activities within lesbian print culture, it is

important to recognize both the personal components of what causes people to start

publishing and what causes them to stop—burn out, the end of key relationships, the need

to focus on other remunerative or creative work—as well as the political, social, and

economic components. All of these women knew the feminist adage, the personal is

political. They elaborated the meanings of and connections between the personal and the

political in their daily lives. In publishing, personal and political have a co-constitutive

relationship; often, as is the case in the WPC, the decision to stop publishing is a dynamic

combination of personal and political reasons.

The impact of the WPC is, as they describe it in their statement about disbanding,

tremendous. During its eight years of operation, the WPC published more than two dozen

140
Martha Shelley, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, October
12, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 53.

86
books, chapbooks, or pamphlets on a wide range of topics, including rape, hand gun

usage, and electric shock treatment. WPC materials address a variety of political issues,

including the Weather Underground, the case of Joann Little,141 and of course lesbian-

feminism. These topics demonstrate the political engagements of the WPC in issues that

can be labeled retrospectively as “radical” feminist. In addition to these very political

materials, the WPC also published poetry; in addition to Grahn’s and Parker’s books, the

WPC published books of poems by Donna Shipley, Willyce Kim, and Zelima. The WPC

also published Witch Dream: Matriarchal Comix by Max Xaria.142 Witch Dream is two

graphic short stories; the first recounts a dream sequence of the protagonist, Casey, who

while in the hospital dreams of time with the “witches of the sun” in a matriarchal

community. The imagined matriarchal past is counterpointed with a critique about

medical institutions and their poor treatment of women. The second graphic short story is

titled “The Rise of the Amazing Amazons. . . .the women who bow to no man.” Witch

Dream expresses the matriarchal tendency of cultural feminism, invested in remembering

and envisioning a history prior to patriarchy. Thus, the content of the books from the

WPC reflects a range of feminist theories and investments; the production and circulation

of the books, however, is rooted in a practice that aligns with cultural feminism, even as

it expresses a variety of other political investments.

141
In 1974, Joann Little killed a prison guard who tried to attack her sexually. The case
drew national attention in feminist communities and many women worked in solidarity
with Joann Little’s defense team. The pamphlet published by the WPC was a first hand
account of the situation in North Carolina and the case against Little. Proceeds from the
pamphlet benefited the Joann Little Defense Fund. The full pamphlet is available at
www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org.
142
Max Xaria is now known Max Dashu and is a feminist historian.

87
 Materials published by the WPC circulated widely. Joan and Chesman report that

in 1977, they had “distributed over 60,000 copies of their books with eighteen titles in

print.” Four of these titles were by Judy Grahn, including Edward the Dyke, Elephant

Poem Coloring Book, A Woman Is Talking to Death, and The Common Woman. In 1977,

Judy Grahn’s first book, Edward the Dyke, had “sold over 6,000 copies.”143 “The

Common Woman Poems,” a series of seven “americanized sonnets”144 as Grahn

describes them, were “quoted and passed from person to person so thoroughly they

became an anonymous talisman for the women’s movement as a whole.”145 During the

1970s, the poems or lines from the poems were reprinted by women’s bookstores, in

feminist journals, and on t-shirt. The poems continued to spread through the 1980s,

1990s, and 2000s; lines from “The Common Woman” Poems showed up as graffiti

around the world, in the work of artists and musicians, including Ani DiFranco, and

adapted as songs by jazz groups, women’s choruses, and others. The dispersion of

Grahn’s “The Common Woman” poems demonstrates how widely feminism circulated

and how it was embraced in multiple, disparate locations. Grahn describes her poetic

voice as “forged in communities of lesbian feminists, activist feminists, and

disenfranchised gay men.”146 Her self-assessment of her political formation includes a

variety of feminist and activist locations, demonstrating the shifting alliances and

mutability of labels for political and cultural practices. For eight years, her work was

143
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 180.
144
Grahn, love belongs to those who do the feeling, 16.
145
Grahn, love belongs to those who do the feeling, 55.
146
Grahn, love belongs to those who do the feeling, 17.

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developed and nurtured in conjunction with her work at the WPC. The lasting impact of

both—the WPC and Judy Grahn—is a rich heritage of lesbian-feminist poetry and a

testament to what can be accomplished with vision and ambition through publishing.

While I see Grahn’s work as one of the important contributions of the WPC, I

want to reemphasize that Grahn and her poetry are not the full story. The full story is that

from 1969 until 1977, a small group of women with a set of political ideals, rooted in

feminism influenced but not bound by anarchism and socialism, published books,

chapbooks, anthologies, pamphlets. They published what was important and compelling

to them and to the women around them. Initially, they distributed what they published

largely by hand, person to person; they also helped to grow distribution networks through

readings, travel, and alliances with women’s bookstores, women’s spaces, and eventually

women distributors. Within the books, bound by hand with staples, string, or glue, the

WPC captured dreams, images, desires and ideas about feminism and lesbianism. They

gave them to the world as a gift that would last, as long as libraries held them, new

publishers reissued them, or computers rendered them. That is the story of the Women’s

Press Collective.

Diana Press

Diana Press began in a building at 12 W. 25th St. in Baltimore, Maryland, as a

“small instant print shop with one small press and an instant platemaker.”147 Initially

founded in January 1972 by a small group of volunteers, including Casey Czarnik, who

studied printing and commercial art in New York City and then worked in a Baltimore

147
“History of Diana Press – 1976,” undated document, Mazer Archives, File Drawer 1.
The Mazer Archives has an extensive collection of materials from Diana Press stored in
four file cabinets with multiple folders, many unlabeled. I reference individual documents
found there by name and by file drawer number.

89
printing shop, by July 1972, Diana Press incorporated as a business. Casey Czarnik and

Coletta Reid were the owners and operators as well as intimate partners. Reid and

Czarnik wanted to run a women’s print shop to “train women in the printing industry,”

with an emphasis on training other working-class women like themselves, and to provide

printing services for the women’s community.148

In the fall of 1972, Rita Mae Brown was not known yet as the chanteuse she

would become—writing the songs of lesbians in novels and poems. Yet, her charisma as

an activist and feminist must have been unmistakable. In later reports of her readings and

speeches in Lesbian Tide, writers describer her as “appealing and vibrant”149 and as

someone who carried herself with “ease and wit.”150 I imagine her as energetic, funny,

direct, and irresistibly sexy, personal characteristics that would only be amplified by her

future success. Brown was already a poet in 1972; her first book of poetry, The Hand

That Cradles the Rock, was published in a hardback edition issued by New York

University Press, with modest sales of about 650 copies in two years.151 Brown was

known best in lesbian and feminist communities as one of the organizers of the Lavender

Menace protest of NOW, as the co-author of the Radicalesbians’s statement “Woman-

Identified Woman,” and as a member of The Furies. Even though lesbian feminist

148
“Coletta Reid deposition,” August 26, 1979, Mazer Archives, File Drawer 4.
149
Ellen Loughlin, “An Army of Lovers,” Lesbian Tide, April 1973, 11.
150
Aleida Rodriguez and Claire Krulikowski, “Portrait of Woman as Artist,” Lesbian
Tide, June 1974, 6.
151
June Arnold, “Feminist Presses & Feminist Politics, Quest III, no. 1 (Summer 1976),
19.

90
communities questioned hierarchies and challenged institutional credentials, Brown had

impeccable bona fides in the movement.

In the fall of 1972, Brown approached Reid, also a former member of The Furies

and one of the founders of the feminist newspaper off our backs, and Czarnik about

publishing her second book of poetry, Songs for a Handsome Woman. Prior to Brown’s

proposition, Reid and Czarnik had seen their business primarily as commercial printing.

Early negotiations for the book reflect their mindset as commercial printers as opposed to

book publishers. Reid and Czarnik agreed to print the book without charge for their time

and expertise; Brown gave Diana Press $300 to purchase the paper for the first printing.

The three agreed that when the first printing of 2,000 copies of the book sold, Diana Press

would repay Brown her $300 and reimburse the press for printing expenses. They then

would split the profits, if any, among Diana Press, Brown, and the illustrator, Ginger

Legato.152 This model of compensating authors, not with royalties for each copy of the

book sold, as is the convention in commercial publishing, but with a split of net profits

from the sale of each edition of the book, became the economic model for Diana Press for

all of its books.

Songs to a Handsome Woman was finished in December 1972; the official book

release was in early 1973.153 The publication of Brown’s Songs to a Handsome Woman

launched Diana Press as a publisher. In later accounts of Diana Press, Reid and Czarnik

emphasize the primacy of commercial publishing. In fact, commercial printing paid the

152
Statement of expenses for Songs for a Handsome Woman, Mazer Archives, File
Drawer 1.
153
Reid deposition, Mazer Archives.

91
bills and was central to Reid and Czarnik’s initial vision and passion for the business,154

but publishing makes Diana Press significant historically.

During its first year, Songs to A Handsome Woman sold 998 copies to bookstores,

individuals, and libraries for a total revenue of $1,281.60.155 The book sold for $2.00

(with some women protesting the high cost!).156 Reid and Czarnik’ initial plan was to sell

the book to bookstores at a 24% discount, far below the publishing industry standard.

Ultimately, bookstores refused this discount rate and Diana Press had to comply with the

standard discount of 40%.157 By 1978, just before Diana Press closed, Songs to a

Handsome Woman was its best-selling title ever, with more copies sold than any other

single title.158 Part of the reason for this success is embedded in the material realities of

publishing: older titles that continue to sell gross more than newer titles.

If Songs to A Handsome Woman and Rita Mae Brown’s charisma launched Diana

Press into publishing, Reid and Czarnik embraced it wholeheartedly. In 1973, Diana

Press published two other books, E. Sharon Gomilion’s collection of poetry, Forty Acres

154
See for example “The History of Diana Press – 1976” and Reid’s deposition, both at
the Mazer Archives.
155
Statement of expenses for Songs for a Handsome Woman, Mazer Archives, File
Drawer 1.
156
The price of the book is actually quite reasonable. $2.00 in 1972 is worth
approximately $9.81 (source: http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/) or $10.59
(source: http://www.coinnews.net/tools/cpi-inflation-calculator) in 2011. The average
book of poetry today costs between $12.95 and $18.95.
157
Letter from Reid to Brown, Mazer Archive, Drawer 4.
158
Reid deposition, Mazer Archives.

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and a Mule, Lee Lally’s poetry collection, These Days,159 and a calendar. In 1974, Diana

Press again published three books. They obtained the paperback rights from New York

University Press for Rita Mae Brown’s The Hand that Cradled the Rock, and released

Women Remembered: A Collection of Biographies from The Furies, edited by Nancy

Myron and Charlotte Bunch, and Class and Feminism: A Collection of Essays from The

Furies, also edited by Myron and Bunch. In addition, Diana Press published a calendar

and a datebook. The Myron and Bunch essay collections are significant for three reasons.

First, the books circulated more widely and for a longer period of time than The Furies

newspaper; this greater circulation helped to establish the reputation of The Furies as an

important lesbian-feminist, radical feminist, and lesbian separatist formation in feminism.

Second, the collection of biographies articulates an important trend of lesbian-feminist

publishing throughout the 1970s: uncovering and reclaiming lesbian history. Third, the

collection Class and Feminism articulates class as a significant lens of analysis for

lesbian-feminism and lesbian separatism; in doing so, it also conceptually links both

formations with socialist feminism, demonstrating the ways these strands of feminism

were overlapping and co-constitutive.

In spite of two years of strong publishing, Diana Press faced a significant setback

in late 1974. On December 27, 1974, a fire on the third floor of 12 W. 25th St. damaged

the physical plant of Diana Press, located in the basement of the building. Extensive

water damage from the fire stilled the Multilith 1250 press, destroyed paper purchased for

forthcoming books, and damaged the composer and a new high-speed collator that had

159
Some controversy surrounded this publication; it was printed by Diana Press, but
attributed to Some of Us Press, a small Washington, DC-based press. In one catalogue
Diana Press lists this among its publications, but it is dropped from future catalogues.

93
been purchased over the summer for $7,000, half of which was loaned to the press by

individual women. Diana Press was insured, but the timing of insurance payments put the

press in a precarious position.160 Publishing in 1975 was delayed; Diana Press only

published two books, Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron’s Lesbianism and the Women’s

Movement and a reprint of Jeannette Howard Foster’s 1956 classic, Sex Variant Women

in Literature, in addition to their now annual calendar,161 and a datebook.

In 1976, Diana Press returned to publishing feverishly, producing eight books and

a calendar. In 1976, Diana Press published Z Budapest’s Selene: The Most Famous Bull-

Leaper on Earth, All Our Lives: A Women’s Songbook, edited by Joyce Cheney and

Marcia Diehl, Elsa Gidlow’s Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy, three anthologies

from The Ladder, all edited by Reid and Barbara Grier, Lesbian Lives: Biographies of

Women from The Ladder, The Lesbian’s Home Journal: Stories from The Ladder, and

The Lavender Herring: Lesbian Essays from The Ladder.162 Also in 1976, after extensive

revisions and negotiations between Reid as editor and Brown as author, Diana Press

published Rita Mae Brown’s book of essays, A Plain Brown Rapper.163 By 1976,

Brown’s success with Rubyfruit Jungle was legendary in the lesbian community. It was a

best-selling book for Parke Bowman and June Arnold’s Daughters, Inc. as a trade

paperback book; Daughters, Inc. sold the mass paperback edition to Bantam, a

160
Diana Press Press Release, undated, Mazer Archives, Drawer #1.
161
The 1976 calendar was created by Casey Czarnik and Coletta Reid and titled The Day
Before: A Graphic Datebook of our Female Ancestors.
162
The calendar was titled 1977 a year and a day calendar and authored by Carol Clement
and Zsuzsanna Emese Budapest.
163
There is an extensive editorial correspondence between Reid and Brown in the Diana
Press Collection at the Mazer archive.

94
commercial New York publishing house. In spite of the editorial strife between Reid and

Brown, keeping Brown on the list of Diana Press ensured continued revenue for Diana

Press.

Although publishing resumed after the fire, 1975 and 1976 were difficult years for

Reid, Czarnik, and Diana Press for reasons other than their publishing or printing

businesses. During the mid-1970s, feminists organized a growing constellation of

feminist credit unions, bolstered by the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which made

it illegal to discriminate against women in credit decisions. In May 1975, at a conference

of feminist credit unions in New Haven, CT, Valerie Angers and Joanne Parrent of the

Feminist Federal Credit Union (FFCU) of Detroit, the first feminist credit union,

proposed a national organization for feminist credit unions and other women-owned

businesses. At that time, there were thirteen feminist credit unions around the country.164

The credit unions met again over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1975 in Detroit, joined by

an array of other feminist businesses, including Diana Press. During the November

meeting, Angers and Parrent, representing the FFCU of Detroit, and representatives of

the Oakland Feminist Credit Union proposed the Feminist Economic Network (FEN).

Angers and Parrent conceptualized FEN not as a network or loose confederation of

feminist credit unions and businesses but as a holding company for a variety of business.

They envisioned FEN as a business that could leverage more resources and increase the

economic viability of the members through a single balance sheet. Angers and Parrent

thought that there would be universal support for the concept from the other women at

the conference. They were wrong.

164
There is a dearth of scholarship addressing feminist credit unions, and it is an area ripe
for additional research.

95
 In fact, the proposed FEN created controversy and, eventually, a split in the

conference. Besides the primary proponents of FEN, the Detroit FFCU and the Oakland

FFCU, only a small group of people and organizations supported FEN: Diana Press, New

Moon publications (publishers of The Monthly Extract), and the Washington area FFCU.

Together, these five groups left the conference to start FEN. The remaining conference

attendees ratified by-laws for the Feminist Economic Alliance, which valued not

corporate centralization but grassroots control.165 Such ideological splits among feminists

were commonplace, but the controversy around FEN was major and reported extensively

in the feminist press by both local outlets like Her-self in Ann Arbor, MI, and Big Mama

Rag in Denver, CO, and by national outlets like off our backs. Many women had

questions about FEN and offered sharp critiques. Some women wondered about the

efficacy of a large loan to purchase a building when smaller loans for tuition, school

books, and tools for women to enter the trades might be financially safer and have a

bigger impact to achieve feminist visions for social change. Other women questioned the

entire economic model of FEN, which they perceived as too corporate and too amenable

to recreating the structures of patriarchal capitalism. Others believed that some feminists

were being ripped off by other feminists in the deal.

In spite of the criticism within the feminist press, FEN shortly became operational

and leveraged a large loan of $252,000 from the Feminist Women’s Credit Union in

Detroit, underwritten by the Michigan Credit Union, to purchase the old Detroit

Women’s Club as the Feminist Women’s City Club. The Feminist Women’s City Club,

hailed as the largest ‘womanspace’ in the country, opened in early April of 1976. Gloria

165
The Feminist Economic Alliance appears to have done little work in spite of its wide-
spread support.

96
Steinem attended the dedication. Feminist opponents of FEN protested the gala weekend

of events. Eventually the Detroit police were called to mediate. Unfortunately, the FEN

didn’t have the cash flow to support the loan payments for the building. The entire

network collapsed in bankruptcy in September 1976.166 Diana Press was entangled with

FEN legally and financially. Eventually, Reid and Czarnik paid $5,000 to extricate Diana

Press from FEN and return it to its operation as a privately-held partnership. The

financial implications of the FEN partnership weren’t the worst consequences, however,

for Diana Press.

As FEN was collapsing, Czarnik and Reid were contemplating a move. They

needed more space for both the commercial printing business and the growing publishing

business of Diana Press. The cost of space in Baltimore was prohibitive. Reid and

Czarnik had been collaborating long-distance with Judy Grahn and Wendy Cadden of

Women’s Press Collective. They learned that space was cheaper and more available in

Oakland, CA. Czarnik and Reid decided to move the business across the country in the

spring of 1977.

The joint operations of the WPC and Diana Press in Oakland, facilitated by Reid

and Czarnik’s move, could have created a powerful feminist publishing operation. That

potential, however, was never realized. Moving the business and their family to

166
This history of FEN comes from a variety of documents at the Mazer Archives
including “Diana Press: An Overview 1972-1979” (Drawer #1), “What is FEN” by
Martha Shelley (Drawer #4), and responses to the controversy from Kathleen Barry and
the LA Women’s Center (folder FEN articles, Drawer #4). Alice Echols also recounts a
history of FEN in her article “Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography
Movement,” Social Text, No. 7 (Spring - Summer, 1983), 34-53.

97
Oakland167 was an ordeal for Reid and Czarnik and, in retrospect, a setback for Diana

Press. More devastating than the move, however, was a small pamphlet, titled, “What is

FEN?” Written and circulated Martha Shelley, “What is FEN?” was a scathing critique of

FEN and Diana Press. Shelley argued that the women involved with promoting FEN,

including in particular Reid, Czarnik, and Laura Brown, were racist and fascist in their

treatment of others. She believed that the business model embraced by FEN and by

extension Diana Press was both cravenly capitalist and also fascist. Shelley had been a

regular contributor to The Ladder when it published, was a member of the Women’s

Press Collective and was well-known within lesbian-feminist communities as a poet,

writer, and feminist thinker. Shelley was circulating the pamphlet when Reid and Czarnik

arrived in Oakland. As Czarnik and Reid were getting their sea-legs in Oakland as new

residents, adapting to the political environment there, and responding to Shelley’s rebuke

of FEN, they were also dealing with the challenges of finding experienced printers for

their business; women weren’t widely trained in the printing trades. In addition, the

personal relationship between Czarnik and Reid was deteriorating. These economic and

personal problems festered throughout the summer and fall of 1977.

Then on October 27, 1977, Diana Press was vandalized. The vandals destroyed

many active printing jobs, damaged machinery, and ruined a substantial portion of Diana

Press’s printed books. Although feminists rallied around Diana Press, including a $5,000

loan from Adrienne Rich to help keep the press operational,168 there were also rumors

that the damage was done by other feminists in response to outrage about Diana Press’s

167
Reid and Czarnik were raising Reid’s daughter.
168
Letter from Adrienne Rich to Coletta Reid, November 1977, Mazer Archives, Drawer
#3.

98
involvement with FEN. The effect of this vandalism, combined with management issues

and the deterioration and eventual end of Czarnik and Reid’s personal relationship, was

fatal for Diana Press. Books were cancelled throughout 1978, authors sued for royalty

payments;169 commercial printing came to a halt, and eventually Diana Press permanently

shut its doors in 1979.

The commercial challenges that Diana Press experienced included difficulty

finding women staff to operate the presses as well as changes in the commercial printing

business. While off-set printing continued to have a market in the late 1970s and

subsequent decades, new business machines were replacing commercial printing. Seajay

recalls, “suddenly we could do a good looking magazine relatively cheaply, much more

quickly and with much less effort—all because of this blossoming technology.” This

technology had a downside, though, as Seajay explains it, “No one [of the feminist

presses] could afford the new Xerox technology and classy printing machines, so there’s

a way that our whole printing movement collapsed due to that same technology.”170

Technology, while enabling some publishing, like Seajay’s Feminist Bookstore News,

also made other publishers like Diana Press obsolete.

In seven years of publishing, however, Diana Press had an extraordinary impact

on lesbian-feminist culture. What distinguishes Diana Press’s list of publications is not

the selection of enduring titles—that distinction probably goes to Daughters, Inc.—but

how their work defined issues important to lesbians in the 1970s. An important part of

Diana Press’s publishing was reprinting collections from The Ladder and The Furies.

169
Rita Mae Brown sued for royalty payments as well as Elsa Gidlow and Jeannette
Howard Foster (Mazer Archives).
170
“A Conversation with Judy Grahn,” FBN 13, no. 3 (September/October 1990), 40.

99
Diana Press books ensured that the work, political formations, and ideas from The Ladder

and The Furies were not lost and remained in circulation among women. Moreover, the

editorial selection of what to reprint from these publications shows a keen interest in

articulating lesbian history. Diana Press anthologies The Ladder and The Furies

constructed a lesbian identity that was simultaneously contemporary and grounded in a

history, real or imagined. Diana Press also was an early publisher of materials that

promoted women’s culture, particularly datebooks, posters, and calendars; these materials

helped to distill ideas labeled retrospectively cultural feminism. At the same time, Diana

Press, its founders, and the published books reflect a strong grounding in socialist-

feminism and in a material practice dedicated to empowering working-class women and

opening new economic opportunities for women.

It is possible to read the publishing history of Diana Press as straddling a period

of change in feminist attentions from radical feminism to cultural feminism, as Alice

Echols argues in Daring to Be Bad. In this view, Diana Press represents, through their

publishing activities, the political changes in feminism between 1972 and 1979. Diana

Press’s history as a publisher, however, is more complex than a turn from radical

feminism to cultural feminism; in fact, the history of Diana Press actually challenges

Echols’s history. The commitments of Reid and Czarnik to building economic power for

working-class women situates them as sympathetic to formations of socialist-feminism.

In addition to their material practice, Bunch and Myron’s book Class and Feminism, a

collection of articles in The Furies, demonstrates similar intellectual and ideological

allegiances with socialist-feminism. At the same time, Czarnik, as a graphic artist,

engaged in a material practice that articulated elements of cultural feminism, celebrating

100
women as producers of culture. Similarly, books by Z. Budapest and Diana Press’s

calendars and day books promote the emergence of cultural feminism, particularly

matriarchal ideologies. In fact, the history of Diana Press as both a publisher and a

feminist institution testifies to the intertwining of radical feminism, socialist-feminism,

and a variety of tendencies of cultural feminism in the thinking and material practices of

its owners, authors, and readers.

The end of Diana Press as a business and publishing house does not suggest the

unsustainability of a feminist ideology denuded of its radical political analysis of gender

or sexual orientation. That is, the business didn’t fail because of its lack of a radical

political analysis. Rather, the failure is the material consequence of the vandalism from

1978, the dissolution of the personal relationship between its two principles, and the

move to Oakland and its attendant difficulties of rebuilding a commercial business to

sustain the publishing business. Again, the personal and the political both contribute to

the demise of Diana Press.

By examining and reconstructing the history of Diana Press, I demonstrate the

complexities of their feminist ideologies and lived practices. The feminist work of Diana

Press cannot be defined with a single adjective; Diana Press engaged multiple feminist

formations in both its publishing and its commercial printing. The impulse to analyze the

ideology of feminists and locate ideological conflicts within feminism as a source for

political and organizational failures as well as waning activism and engagement during

the WLM is misguided. Although it locates culpability for the outcomes of feminism with

feminist themselves, admirable for the power it aligns with feminists, it fails to examine

the broader social, political, and cultural milieux in which feminists are embedded.

101
Economic restructuring in the United States, coupled with the rise of neo-conservative

coalitions, go farther in explaining challenges to feminism than feminist activity itself.

The material challenges to sustaining and continuing the work of Diana Press is partially

a result of these broader changes in the United States economy and political environment.

Daughters, Inc.

If Diana Press demonstrates both radical and socialist feminist principles in their

publishing work, and the Women’s Press Collective similarly reflects both radical and

socialist principles with a twist of collectivity and anarchy, Daughters Publishing

Company, Inc. is, in many ways, the antithesis to both of these ideological enactments.

From the beginning, Daughters, Inc. was a commercial business. Lovers Patricia “Parke”

Bowman and June Davis Arnold invested their personal resources—earned and inherited

wealth—in building Daughters Publishing Company, Inc., and making it a success.

Daughters, Inc. also was Arnold’s passion as a feminist. She believed that a novel

published out of the WLM would change the consciousness of the world; she believed

Daughters, Inc. would publish that novel. In some ways, she was right.

Daughters, Inc. was founded in 1972 in Plainfield, VT. Plainfield was a hotbed of

radical feminist activism during the 1970s because of Goddard College. June and Patty

(Bowman was Patty to her friends) ended up in Plainfield because June bribed her

daughter, Fairfax, to attend Goddard by offering her a horse. Fairfax (called Faxy by

friends) agreed to this proposition, so June, Patty, and June’s two children, Faxy, and Gus

all moved to Plainfield. Faxy attended Goddard; Gus was still in high school. June and

Patty bought a farmhouse in Plainfield. The old farm house had “pine paneling, narrow

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windows, low ceiling, and a pond filled with cow manure.”171 It also included a barn for

Faxy’s horse and a carriage house.172 Arnold taught herself “plumbing, wiring, and

carpentry and gutted the kitchen as she worked on her novel.”173 The home was also the

worksite for Daughters, Inc.

Patricia “Parke” Bowman was born “on February 7 in either 1933 or 1934” in

New Jersey.174 There is scant biographical information about Bowman; she was raised by

her grandmother, attended Bucknell, and then became a lawyer. According to Samn

Stockwell, who worked at Daughters, Inc. for two years, Bowman came from a Virginia

family with some money; she received money from her family to attend law school, but

she used that money to travel the world. “Patty worked to support herself through law

school,” a point of pride for her.175 There is ample biographical information about June

Arnold. June Fairfax Davis was born on October 27, 1926 in Greenville, SC. She was the

daughter of Robert Cowan and Cad (Wortham) Davis. The Wortham family had money

from the Houston-based American General Insurance Company. Arnold attended Vassar

College for a year but returned to Houston where she completed her B.A. at Rice Institute

(now Rice University) and then earned a master’s degree in literature. She married

171
Email communication with Fairfax Arnold, May 2, 2012.
172
Telephone Interview with Samn Stockwell, October 28, 2011.
173
Email communication with Fairfax Arnold, May 2, 2012.
174
Harris, Lovers, New York: New York University Press, 1992, lxiii. Throughout this
narrative I rely heavily on Bertha Harris’s account of Daughters, Inc, in her introduction
to the NYU edition of Lovers in 1993. While Harris’s narrative introduction is a treasure
trove of details for this press particularly in absence of other documents, I do want to
acknowledge that Harris is deeply bitter about her experience with Daughters, Inc.
175
Stockwell Interview.

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Gilbert Harrington Arnold; the couple had five children (one drowned in a swimming

pool around the age of two) before they divorced.176 Arnold’s first novel, Applesauce,

was published by McGraw-Hill in 1967.

Arnold was involved in feminist politics in New York in the early 1970s as a

community activist and rabble-rouser. One focus of her activity was “The 5th St.

Women’s Building.” A community of feminist activists, including Arnold and a hundred

other women (and Arnold’s son Gus), took over the building on New Year’s Eve in 1971.

The building was formerly a welfare center and women’s shelter. A collective of women,

including Arnold, organized the grassroots political action as a “conscious response to

women’s activism as a tool for helping us as women to take care of ourselves and each

other.”177 Eventually, the city ordered them out, and when they resisted, “the cops

dragged them out.”178 When it came time for the women who occupied the building to

appear in court, Arnold had the idea for them all to “dress up in stockings, high heels,

dresses, set hair-dos, and make up to challenge the arresting officers to identify” them.

The officers couldn’t identify the women and so the charges were dropped.179 Arnold was

involved with other feminist actions, often bringing along her daughters Roberta and

Fairfax, including one action to stop “a wealthy landlord from evicting tenants on low

176
Arnold’s oldest daughters, Kate and Roberta, were grown and living independently
when Arnold and Bowman moved to Plainfield.
177
Email communication with Roberta Arnold, May 1, 2012.
178
Harris, “Introduction,” Lovers, liv.
179
Email communication with Roberta Arnold, May 1, 2012.

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rent by being ‘squatters.’” Arnold, Roberta, and Fairfax all went to jail during this action

as well.180

Bowman and Arnold met at a cocktail party and fell “in love in the middle of this

hot-bed of a time.” Roberta recalls, “Mom fell in love with her, among other things,

because she wasn’t afraid to say whatever came out of her mouth, unlike my mother who

thought about every word.”181 Together, Bowman and Arnold began Daughters with an

initial investment of $15,000 from Arnold, a word processor and a mimeograph

machine.182 Initially, no one knew how to operate the equipment, so Arnold taught herself

and then trained the other women at the press.

The vision of Daughters, Inc. was “as kind of a Hogarth Press.” Daughters, Inc.

would “do what Virginia Woolf’s press had done for her books for the Women’s

Liberation Movement. It would introduce to the world a different kind of novel that

would change consciousness.”183 Transforming consciousness was the vision; brass tacks

of publishing was the day-to-day operations. Bowman and Arnold ran the publishing

house on the model of New York publishing houses, which Bowman called collectively

“Random House,” punning on the name of the commercial publisher. Arnold and

Bowman prided themselves on operating as a business: “their writers got contracts,

advances, royalties, royalty reports, etc., identical, according to Parke, to those issued to

180
Ibid.
181
Ibid.
182
Email communication with Roberta Arnold, May 1, 2012.
183
Stockwell Interview.

105
writers by the mainstream houses.”184 Not only did they want to operate using the model

of Random House, they wanted to outdo Random House: to beat big publishing at its own

game. For Bowman, “the way to beat Random House was through the tried-and-true

methods of cutthroat capitalism.”185 Arnold, however, was invested in publishing as a

part of “the independent women’s communication network.”186

During this time, Arnold embrace lesbian feminist separatism “in an idealized

way” and even, at times, a “romantic, euphoric way.” These ideas shaped Arnold’s work.

Whether learning to operate business machinery, renovating the farmhouse, or publishing

work by lesbian-feminists, Arnold’s “ideas of women being ‘self-sufficient’ from men

were part of her lesbian-separatist ideology as well as her inherited work-ethic.”187

Harris recalls that in 1972, Arnold “believed wholeheartedly that a full-scale

feminist revolution was at hand. With the patriarchy (and mainstream publishing) in

ruins, Daughters would replace Random House, and the works published by Daughters

would sell like hotcakes in the new world of empowered women.”188 This belief in the

imminence of a successful feminist revolution is echoed in many accounts of feminists

from the early 1970s. The possibilities for revolutionary change were palpable. The

Redstockings would have us believe that this fervor was a result of the analysis and

184
Harris, “Introduction,” Lovers, xxxiii.
185
Harris, “Introduction,” Lovers, xxxiii.
186
Arnold, Quest, 18.
187
Personal communication with Roberta Arnold, May 2, 2012.
188
Harris, xxxiii.

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activism of radical feminists.189 Certainly, that was part of it, but Arnold’s fervor is also

the result of a broader cultural milieu in which revolutionary possibilities seemed realistic

and at hand—a milieu that changed in the subsequent years.

While Arnold believed in a full-scale feminist revolution, she also believed in

culture as a site of feminist activism. In a radio interview with the Great Atlantic Radio

Conspiracy, Arnold reflected that “Women, because they have a low opinion of

themselves from the culture, tend to undervalue things that women do without even

knowing that they are undervaluing it. They say, oh, this is good, it could have been

published by a real publishing house.” For Arnold, the dominant culture was a source of

women’s diminishment of women’s work. Acting to change culture was a way to change

women’s position in the world and their perceptions about themselves and other women.

Arnold continued, “. . .They see women’s culture as a stepping stone, whereas we see it

as a takeover. And I think we have to continue to see it that way. We have to see

women’s culture as having real status. I think it is going to take time for women to

believe in themselves that much.”190 Arnold combines the language from the corporate

sector—takeover—with her desire to transform women’s culture. She argues for women

to not undervalue what they are doing and instead to give status and significance to what

women create. In short, Arnold sees culture as a central component of a feminist

revolution.

In 1976, mainstream, New York publishers published lesbian and feminist authors

prominently. Rather than the feminist revolution replacing Random House, Random

189
Redstockings, Feminist Revolution.

13th Moon Papers, New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division,
190

Box 16, Audio Tape.

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House was embracing feminist authors. Arnold addresses this issue directly, writing in

Quest that “Madison Avenue publishers, now owned by such as Kinney Rent-a-Car, Gulf

and Western, and RCA, are really the hard-cover of corporate America.”191 The editors at

the Madison Avenue publishers are “the intellectuals who put the finishing touches on

patriarchal politics to make it sell: what we call the finishing press because it is our

movement they intend to finish.” Arnold’s analysis puts the power of finishing off the

feminist movement in the hands of corporate-controlled publishers, an assessment that

more accurately locates power than Brooke’s desire to scapegoat cultural feminists.

The landscape for feminists and feminist publishers had changed by 1976 since

the founding of Daughters, Inc., Diana Press, and the WPC in the early 1970s.

Mainstream, commercial publishers were open to publishing books by feminists and

about feminism. Arnold’s article, “written with the help and criticism of Wendy Cadden,

Judy Grahn, Parke Bowman, Casey Czarnik and Coletta Reid,”192 outlines the reasons

why women should publish with feminist presses as opposed to “finishing presses.” For

an array of economic and political reasons, Arnold argues that “feminist presses are not

stepping stones to being published by the ‘real’ (artificial and false) male publishers.”193

Arnold concludes, “It is time to stop giving any favorable attention to the books or

journals put out by the finishing press. It is time to recycle our money and refuse to let

any male corporation make profit—off of us. It is time to understand what male status

really means and withdraw support from any woman who is still trying to make her name

191
Arnold, “Feminist Presses & Feminist Politics” in Quest 3, no. 1 (Summer 1976), 19.
192
Ibid, 18.
193
Ibid, 25.

108
by selling out our movement.”194 Arnold articulates a strong separatist position and

situates feminist and lesbian publishing as a material practice that can strike at the heart

of patriarchy and male supremacy.

Arnold synthesized this position further when she was asked by New York Times

Reporter Lois Gould if they were building an “alternate society” at Daughters, Inc.

Arnold quipped, “Of course not! We are building the real society! Theirs is the

alternate.”195 This articulation of the vision of Daughters, a group that at the time of the

interview included Bertha Harris and Charlotte Bunch along with Bowman and Arnold, is

a clear separatist position, though not particularly lesbian separatist.

As ideas about lesbian separatism and feminist separatism were being developed

in the 1970s, separatism as a political, economic, and social practice, was a variegated

phenomenon. In the Guide to Feminist Publishers, Polly Joan describes Daughters, along

with the WPC and Diana Press, as depicting “a strong political position for separatism in

women’s publishing.” She continues, “It would be inaccurate to simplify this policy of

radical independence as simply feminist separatism. The term itself implies many things

even within the Women’s Movement.” Joan continues that broad use of separatism

negates and simplifies “differing modes of operation or thought.” While it is unlikely that

any of the women at WPC, Diana, or Daughters, would have embraced the term

“separatist,” their material practice of publishing only women and primarily lesbians

reflects one type of separatism, one which was productive and profoundly creative and

194
Ibid, 26.
195
Lois Gould, “Creating a Women’s World,” New York Times Magazine (January 2,
1977), 10. There was a substantial controversy recounted in the pages of Big Mama Rag
with feminists and separatists objecting to Arnold’s, Bowman’s, Harris’s, and Bunch’s
talking to the New York Times.

109
generative for both the publishers and the authors. Joan continues, “It [the term feminist

separatist] accounts for a certain amount of mistrust and misunderstanding between

women’s presses. For Daughters, Inc. the real issue of separatism is economic and is far

more complicated than being or not being lesbian. Daughters maintains that it will be

only when women can withstand the lure of immediate money, and at some personal cost,

support all-women’s businesses, that women will be able to build structures necessary for

real economic independence.”196 Through Daughters, Inc., Bowman and Arnold built a

structure that brought economic independence, not to them because they already had it,

but to some of their authors as well as to women in the lesbian-feminist movement

through book selling.

Bertha Harris remembers Bowman and Arnold almost as polar opposites. Arnold

was a socialite who wanted attention and acceptance from radical feminists; Bowman

was the churlish capitalist who wanted “nothing to do with the presses. The radical

politics, the nonprofit status of most of them, their collective organization—it all smelled

strongly of the left wing.”197 In addition, it is also clear that Arnold embraced lesbian-

feminism and her life as a lesbian, whereas Bowman was ambivalent about her

lesbianism, even to the point of being at times homophobic. Whether Bowman and

Arnold were polar opposites is impossible to assess, but together they negotiated their

radical feminist publishing operation within the realities of commodity capitalism. 198

196
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 125-6.
197
Harris, xxxxii. Harris continues, “Parke got involved in publishing women writers
because she was in love with June Arnold.”
198
To my knowledge, there are no archives from Bowman, Arnold, or Daughters, Inc. I
have assembled this history from previously published sources, archival material

110
 The first five books published by Daughters in 1973 were June Arnold’s own

second novel, The Cook and the Carpenter, published with the pseudonym of “the

carpenter,” Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Pat Burch’s Early Losses, Nerves by

Blanche M. Boyd, and the novel, The Treasure, by Nobel-award winning novelist, Selma

Lagerlöf. The mix of titles on the first list demonstrates Bowman and Arnold’s

commitment to publishing literary fiction with feminist consciousness. Daughters

published twenty-three books by eighteen authors during their seven years as a

business.199 The most famous book published by Daughters was Rita Mae Brown’s novel,

Rubyfruit Jungle. In 1977, Daughters, Inc. sold the paperback rights to the book to

Bantam for $250,000, an unprecedented - and unrepeated - sum for a feminist publisher.

Bowman and Arnold split the $250,000 with Rita Mae Brown. Brown recollects, “I

remember standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue near Bleecker Street, outside the

Daughters office, with a check for $125,000 in my hand. It seemed like a dream: Poverty

that grinds you to dust, and suddenly a mess of money.”200 The sale happened at a time

when mainstream publishers were purchasing a number of lesbian and gay books for

paperback reissues. In addition to Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Bantam acquired Patricia

Nell Warren’s Fancy Dancer, Pyramid released a pocket version of the Allen

compiled from archives not dedicated to Daughters, Inc, and interviews with two of June
Arnold’s daughters.
199
Bertha Harris omits one book in her review of Daughters Press in the introduction to
Lovers.
200
Brown, Rita Will, 280.

111
Young/Karla Jay anthology After You’re Out, and Avon released a series of Christopher

Isherwood books.201

In 1978, Joan praises Daughters for breaking “many small press feminist myths

by publishing excellently written novels with high quality production and effective

distribution methods.” She echoes the expectations of both Arnold and Bowman by

noting, “with each year Daughters becomes more and more solid for women as a real

alternative to the big press.”202 For Joan, Daughters successfully positioned itself as ‘real’

publishers, just as Arnold and Bowman wished. Joan also describes the literary effect of

Daughters, “With publication of each Daughters book a new literary form seems to be

launched. So far every novel from Daughters has been without literary precedent. We

have grown to expect highly innovative literature, as well as good stories.” Although

Joan praises the literary and aesthetic merits of the novels published by Daughters, Inc.,

critical treatments of these novels remain sparse.

Unfortunately, Joan was unwittingly writing a retrospective about Daughters. In

1978, Arnold and Bowman moved back to New York to “June’s Manhattan loft building”

and “Parke bought the townhouse on Charles Street in Greenwich Village to serve as

company headquarters.”203 They published their last four books from New York, Lois

Gould’s X: A Fabulous Child’s Story, Bertha Harris’s Confessions of a Cherubino

(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich did the original edition in 1972), Joanna Russ’s Kittatinny: A

Tale of Magic, and Verena Steffan’s Shedding. In the fall of 1979, Arnold, fifty-three at

201
Ed Jackson, “Paperback Traffic,” Body Politic 43 (May 1978): 19.
202
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 124.
203
Harris, liii.

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the time and Bowman forty-five or forty-six, moved back to Arnold’s childhood home,

Houston, TX. The move to Houston was in part to escape the continued attacks on

Arnold by feminists. Bowman incorporated Daughters, Inc., in Texas, but shortly after

the incorporation, Arnold was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. The work of

Daughters ground to a halt as the two faced Arnold’s health crisis. June Arnold died on

March 11, 1982. Body Politic, a Canadian gay and lesbian newspaper, ran an obituary for

Arnold. When Bowman died in February 1992, there appear to be no notices of her death

in the feminist or gay and lesbian press. Arnold’s literary career enjoyed a brief

exhumation in 1987 when her final novel, Baby Houston, was published.

Critiques of Bowman and Arnold, the most vituperative from Bertha Harris, point

to many of the reasons for the closing of Daughters, Inc. Bowman and Arnold, while

espousing political beliefs in separatist, woman-centered publishing, made editorial

decisions without authorial consent, sold rights without authors’ consent, and acted often

in business terms instead of what was understood at the time as feminist terms.204 Harris

describes the end of Daughters “in the manner of any publishing company going out of

business. All titles abruptly went out of print; rights reverted to the authors; leftover

copies of the books were distributed among the authors and to remainder houses.”205

Harris suggests that Arnold and Bowman “might have sold the company to other women”

and posits that their decision to not do that “was their revenge, their particular Tet

204
Elana Dykewomon in the afterward to the Naiad Press edition of Riverfinger Women
recounts how Bowman and Arnold sold the rights to a section of the novel in the early
1980s against her wishes.
205
Harris, xxxiv.

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offensive, against women in general and the women’s movement in particular.”206 In fact,

Arnold’s illness seems to be the primary motivator for ending Daughters, Inc. In

Houston, Bowman and Arnold faced a grueling period of illness, compounded by their

reliance on alcohol as a primary coping strategy.

June Arnold invested an extraordinary amount of money in the feminist

community overall during the 1970s, giving generously to a variety of community

projects as well as providing the initial start up capital for Daughters, Inc. Arnold’s

money and the labor that Bowman and Arnold gave to Daughters, Inc. was crucial to the

success of Daughters; Daughters had a transformative effect on feminist and lesbian

literature. Yet, there is little positive recognition of Arnold and Bowman’s work within

feminist communities. Rather than recognizing how Arnold invested in feminism and

lesbian-feminist literature and the many positive effects of these investments, Harris

asserts that:

In fact, June risked nothing, and lost nothing, when she left Houston for New
York and the women’s movement. She had absolute control over her fortune, and
very sensibly she never neglected to foster it. She never felt the cost of Daughters,
nor did her generous handouts to feminist enterprises ever make a noticeable dent
in her wealth. She enjoyed the enviable position of being able to indulge in
charity (and buy alliances) without feeling the pinch of self-sacrifice. She once
told me that she was always very careful not to give to feminist causes any of the
money she meant her children to have. Her mother, she said, would want her
grandchildren raised as much as possible as she had been, and well taken care of
after her death.207

Certainly, there is truth in Harris’s statements; Arnold’s personal trust was set up in 1963,

and in 1973, Arnold set up and funded a trust for three of her children with extensive

206
Harris, lv.
207
Harris, lv.

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corporate holdings.208 At the same time, Arnold invested in and propagated a vision of

lesbian-feminism that was profoundly transformative.

There are ways to see Daughters as an anti-hero in any narration of feminist

practices. Daughters, Inc. operated with no collective, no scrimping and saving to do

work. Daughters, Inc. was a capitalist enterprise and an investment vehicle for the

wealthy couple. At the same time, Daughters, Inc., articulated a vibrant vision for cultural

feminism through not only the words of the founders of the press, but also through the

materials they published.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, four books from Daughters, Inc., were reissued.

New York University Press re-released Bertha Harris’s Lover and June Arnold’s The

Cook and the Carpenter. The Feminist Press reissued June Arnold’s Sister Gin, and

Naiad reissued Elana Dykewomon’s Riverfinger Women. These reissues, two by

independent feminist or lesbian presses, and two by a university press, reflect both

renewed interest in lesbian novels and the timelessness of the books from Daughters. As

editors, Bowman, Arnold and Harris were astute in their choices of what to publish.

Kayann Short in a review for The Women’s Review of Books notes that “confronting the

writing of our history helps us to see its gaps, its lapses, even its deliberate lies, with eyes

not uncritical, but perhaps less judgmental for recognizing that these narratives have

ensured our survival.”209 While the publishing entity Daughters, Inc. did not survive and

208
The Gus S.Wortham family and business records, MS 514, Woodson Research Center,
Fondren Library, Rice University, Series 1 Series I: Personal and Family, 1864-1997,
Subseries A: Gus S. Wortham personal.
209
Kayann Short, “Do-it-yourself feminism,” Women’s Review of Books 13, no. 4
(January 1996): 21.

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replace Random House, the novels it published survive as narratives to ensure our

survival.

Stake the Next Bonanza: Negotiating Feminism and Capitalism

Through these three histories of the WPC, Diana Press, and Daughters, I map an

ecology of book publishing by lesbian-feminists during the 1970s. To provide a context

for the environment in which these presses, and other lesbian-feminist presses, operated, I

now explain economic structures in the field of publishing during the 1970s to deepen

and elaborate the economic realities in which WPC, Diana Press, and Daughters

operated.

From an economic perspective, book publishing always has been challenging.

Book publishing depends on an initial capital investment. The first expense of book

publishing is the acquisition of intellectual property, that is, manuscripts, usually with an

advance to the author against royalties. In addition to acquiring intellectual property,

book publishers must front the costs of editing the manuscript, both conceptual edits and

copyedits, the layout and design of the book and cover, paper and materials for binding,

and printing. After the capital investment to create a book, additional capital is needed to

promote the book and to ship it to distributors, until recently primarily bookstores.

Generally, publishers are paid only on the actual sales of the books, with unsold books

fully returnable. Publishers ship books to booksellers on credit; booksellers make

payments on books sold to publishers ninety to 180 days from receipt of the books. This

investment and long delay of cash payment is only part of the challenge of publishing,

however. Sales are a gamble. Strong selling books risk not having enough copies in the

marketplace; if publishers are unable to have enough books to correspond with reader

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demand, they lose sales. At the same time, printing too many copies of a book that sells

poorly often means that the publisher never earns back the investment for the initial print

run. Ultimately, publishing houses earn profits in three ways. First, they have strong

sellers on their frontlist,210 which earn enough money to subsidize other books on the list.

Second, over time, often between five and twenty years, publishers develop a backlist of

books that continue to sell and bring in a consistent revenue stream. Third, publishers sell

rights, including those for paperback editions, book club editions, and foreign editions.211

The business model of publishing creates structural barriers against entry into the

field for new publishing houses. WPC, Diana Press, and Daughters, Inc. all faced these

challenges and negotiated them differently. WPC minimized initial capital investments

through donated labor, the purchase of paper cheaply, and their homemade model of

distribution: selling directly to readers through readings, other small events, and personal

networks. Similarly, Diana negotiated these challenges through a profit-sharing

arrangement with authors and by owning their own press and mastering printing through

commercial work. Daughters negotiated the challenge through capital investment and

benefited from an appetite at commercial presses to reprint feminist work.

Distribution of books often presents the greatest barrier to entry for new

publishers. Feminist publishers, in addition to building their own distribution networks,

also benefited from the concurrent development of a community of feminist booksellers

and a community of readers, hungry for feminist and lesbian books. These two decades

210
“Frontlist” is a term of art for new books published in the current publishing season.
211
I am grateful to my colleagues at The New Press for their generosity and good cheer
in educating me about the realities of book publishing today. Their knowledge of the
many challenges of book publishing and their innovative strategies as publishers
committed to publishing books in the public interest continue to inspire me.

117
saw a proliferation of feminist print materials, including newsletters, magazines, literary

journals, political journals, and feminist newspapers, as well as a proliferation of

communities and spaces dedicated to feminism, including coffeehouses, consciousness-

raising groups, and poetry reading series. These structures—booksellers, readers, and

publishers—are co-constitutive in feminist communities throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

WPC, Diana, and Daughters benefited from the growing audience for feminist books

during the 1970s, and their work as publishers helped to create these audiences. For

instance, June Arnold’s work in organizing the first Women In Print Conference in

Omaha, NE, in 1976 helped to build a network that was vital for the publishers during the

next decade.212 Feminist publishers and readers were part of a small, but growing, vibrant

network; publishers reaped financial benefits from this growth; readers reaped personal

and intellectual benefits from this growth. In spite of the co-constitutive relationship

between readers, booksellers, and publishers, book publishing is, and remains, in many

ways an economic gamble.

Feminists in the WLM were keenly aware of the structural barriers for feminist

book publishers and of the challenges that feminist publishers faced in the field of

publishing. To demystify the corporate aspects of publishing and help feminists enter the

world of publishing, Celeste West and Valerie Wheat published The Passionate Perils of

Publishing in 1978.213 West and Wheat were librarians with a radical critique of libraries.

212
Trysh Travis discusses Arnold’s role in the conference in “Women In Print.”
213
An electronic edition of The Passionate Perils of Publishing is available at the
Lesbian Poetry Archive, www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org. In addition to West and
Wheat’s book, Metis Press also published a do-it-yourself book for feminist publishers
titled A Book of One’s Own: Guide to Self-Publishing in 1979 by Christine Leslie
Johnson and Arny Christine Straayer. An electronic edition of A Book of Own’s Own also

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They published Booklegger Magazine and operated Booklegger Press. The Passionate

Perils of Publishing is both a polemic against conglomerate publishers, which West and

Wheat saw emerging in the 1970s, and a do-it-yourself manual for feminist

revolutionaries interested in publishing. Although outsiders to corporate publishing, West

and Wheat’s analysis and critique of corporate publishing is prescient. Their observations

about continued consolidation of publishing into the hands of a few large corporations

and the effects of increasing commercialization of booksellers were accurate at the time

and continue to resonate within the field of publishing. In 2000, Andre Schiffrin, a former

editor at Pantheon, the founder of The New Press, and a consummate insider in the

publishing world,214 offered an analysis of forty years of book publishing in The Business

of Books. His analysis is surprisingly congruent with the critiques of West and Wheat

from 1978.

While Wheat and West’s book offers a political critique of publishing, it also

offers a realistic financial picture of publishing in the late 1970s. With graphics and a

textual description, West and Wheat use The Passionate Perils of Publishing itself as an

example for the cost of publishing a single 7” x 10”, 80-page volume. Total expenses to

publish The Passionate Perils of Publishing were $14,500; gross revenue, if 4,500 copies

is available at the Lesbian Poetry Archive. A Book of One’s Own offers more direct
advice and information on self-publishing and less analysis and critique of corporate
publishing than West and Wheat’s book. Both are referenced in a variety of locations by
lesbian-feminist writers, publishers, and activists. In 1981, the Minority Press Group in
the United Kingdom commissioned and published Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers,
Publishers, and Distributors by Eileen Cadman, Gail Chester, and Agnes Pivot. This
book does similar work to The Passionate Perils of Publishing and A Book of One’s Own
in a U.K. context.
214
Schiffrin’s father was one of the founders of Pantheon.

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of the 5,000 print run sold,215 was $22,500.216 The net revenue would give them $8,000 to

“stake the next bonanza” and “take another ride.” West and Wheat explain that they

invested one-third of the expenses up front and then reinvested the remaining necessary

capital from sales.217 West and Wheat describe the expenses of book publishing in five

categories: plant cost, printing, marketing, distribution, and overhead. Plant cost for them

was $3,500, which included $2,500 for research, writing, and editing and $1,000 for

design, typesetting, and paste-up. Printing and binding was $4,000. They devoted $1,500

to marketing which included “mailing list rental, mailing piece costs, postage, ad space,

free books for review & kisses, publicist labor costs.” Distribution was $4,500.

Booklegger Press, West and Wheat’s press, sold books primarily through mail order;

hence, the breakdown for distribution was $2,000 for postage and supplies and $2,500 for

order processing labor at $3 per hour. Finally, West and Wheat attributed $1,000 to

overhead—“all ‘indirect’ operating costs pro-rated per book, such as rent, utilities, office

supplies, accounts management, general maintenance & gardening.” The cost of creating

each copy of the book was $2.90; they sold the book for $5.00. West and Wheat estimate

break-even when 2,900 copies sold; the initial investment is recovered when 1,800 copies

of the book have sold, but each sale incurs an additional expense for distribution. Sales of

the remaining 2,100 copies bring the net revenue needed to invest in the next book.

215
West and Wheat reserve 500 copies as “give-aways for reviews and passionate
‘patrons’ of Booklegger.”
216
These numbers are, of course, in 1978 dollars. One dollar in 1978 is worth $3.30 in
2010. The initial investment of $14,500 by West and Wheat is the equivalent of
$47,913.89 in 2010 dollars. Source: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/.
217
In order to make this work financially, they must have printed in two or perhaps three
smaller print runs.

120
 Within West and Wheat’s scenario for book publishing are a few critical items

that lesbian-feminist publishers often missed in their cost projections. West and Wheat

allocate $2,500 for the creation of the manuscript—an expense that is often excluded

from the publishing calculations of lesbian-feminist publishers.218 Wheat and West also

include payment for their labor in distributing books, another expense that often was not

considered or compensated by lesbian feminist publishers. From West’s and Wheat’s

description, book publishing has a good profit margin; in this scenario $2.10 per book, or

42% of the sale, is profit. The challenge is that $9,000 must be spent and then recovered

prior to any profit. Publishing requires both initial and on-going capital investment with

the risk of no return if the book does not sell well. 219 Of course, publishing requires less

capital investment than building cars, for instance, or computers. Nevertheless,

publishing was, and remains, a capital intensive business.

Book sales are uncertain and even, at times, capricious. West and Wheat’s

estimate of 2,900 copies sold as break-even seems like a modest sales quantity, but

consider the sales numbers of some of the books at WPC, Diana and Daughters. The first

printing of WPC’s Woman to Woman was 1,000 copies, a much smaller print run than

Wheat and West’s model requires. Woman to Woman is comparable in the number of

218
Daughters is the prominent exception to this; Daughters paid competitive advances to
all of the authors that they published. Elana Dykewomon recalls that she lived “on
welfare [to fund her creative work]. . .until I got an advance of $1,000 for Riverfinger
Women. (Dykewomon in Everyday Mutinies, 58). Funding the research and development
of books is a critical element of publishing; I examine some of the ways that individual
lesbian writers funded their work in a subsequent chapter.
219
West and Wheat’s estimate is ambitious. In reality, Andre Schiffrin reports that “the
average profit of publishing houses through western Europe and the United States, during
much of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, was in the range of 3 to 4
percent per annum, roughly the amount of interest paid by a saving bank” in Words and
Money (New York: Verso, 2010), 1.

121
pages to The Passionate Perils of Publishing, but WPC sold it for $1.50. Even with

discounted paper and inflation between 1970 and 1978, Woman to Woman was

significantly cheaper and thus had a smaller profit margin. WPC published 2,000 copies

of its next book, Edward the Dyke; by 1978 the book had sold 6,000 copies. Again,

however, the price of the book was modest; $1.25 in 1971 and $2.50 in 1978. While the

expenses may have been less, given WPC’s paper acquisition and printing expenses, the

profit margin on Edward the Dyke was small. Diana Press estimated the final costs of the

books more accurately. Initially, Diana priced poetry books at $1.00, but increased prices

as their publishing developed. In 1976, the highest price book was Foster’s Sex Variant

Women in Literature, which sold for $8.00; average prices for books were between $3

and $6. While the pricing per unit may have been more accurate to reflect the capital

investment, most Diana Press books sold between 600 and 1,000 copies in their first year.

These modest sales mean that the net revenue to stake new book projects wasn’t realized

until the second, third or fourth year after the book was published. Daughters initially

priced their books at $3.35 each220, but had increased the price to $4.00 by 1976. June

Arnold reports that Daughters sold out all of their first print runs of books.221 Even

assuming some exaggeration of that number, Daughters as a publisher was the most

financially solvent of these three presses. What allowed Daughters to thrive financially,

however, in addition to the capital investment of its founders, is the success of Rubyfruit

Jungle. Estimates of sales of the Daughters edition of Rubyfruit Jungle vary between

50,000 and 90,000 copies, though most accounts place it at about 70,000 copies. At $4.00

220
In 2010, $3.00 is the equivalent to $11.36.
221
Daughters, Inc. printed 3,000 copies as an initial print run.

122
per copy, 50,000 copies, even with a full bookstore discount of 40%, would have brought

$120,000 in revenue to Daughters. This revenue is, of course, exclusive of the sale of the

book to Bantam for $250,000.

Although Daughters was financially successful in their publishing and Rubyfruit

Jungle became a backlist sensation, ultimately none of these presses developed as a

sustainable publishing organization. The underpricing of books at the WPC, albeit for

important political reasons, was part of its demise. Diana Press’s revenue-sharing model

enabled it to begin as a publisher, but the cash outlays this model required annually are

part of the reasons for its financial failure. Daughters came the closest to building a

lesbian-feminist publishing house that was sustainable within the economic model of

publishing, though even Daughters never organized their publishing in ways that were

congruent with successful publishing houses, including seasonal catalogues, regular

publishing catalogues, and marketing and public promotion of titles.

Evaluating WPC, Diana, and Daughters only on their efficacy and survival in the

marketplace of publishing is unfair, however, for a number of reasons. First, all of the

women involved with these presses saw their impact as much greater than the world of

publishing or even than the production of single books. Second, there is an argument to

be made that publishing is rarely successful in capitalism; it is almost always a subsidized

venture. Third, all of these presses were affected by changes that were unfolding in the

marketplace, changes they couldn’t control. Finally, the marketplace of publishing

defines the field of publishing too narrowly. While the marketplace is one aspect of the

field of publishing, there are other, equally important, areas within the publishing field,

some of which were very successful for lesbian-feminist publishers.

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 While I believe that all of the women involved in publishing at the WPC, Diana,

and Daughters took pride in their books as aesthetic objects, the real motivation for all of

them was building the feminist movement. Whether the work was a “resource for the

women’s movement,” as the WPC described it, or “building the real world” as Daughters,

Inc. described it, the work of publishing was about creating social and political

transformation. Evaluating their impact only based on sales or the economic survival of

the press minimizes these visions and the centrality of these visions to the women

publishers. What is interesting is how their visions were mediated by capitalism. All of

the publishers actively negotiated the world of capitalism, the world of business, and the

world of commodity production in different ways. With the exception perhaps of Parke

Bowman, none of the women working at lesbian-feminist publishers would embrace the

identity “capitalist” to describe their work, yet all of them engaged in capitalism. They

worked within the system of capitalism even as they were envisioning a world that was

feminist and, perhaps, post-capitalist. What is the significance of these negotiations with

capitalism? First, flexible engagements with revolutionary ideologies (socialism,

feminism, anarchy) and material realities (capitalism) model ways for lesbian-feminists

to thrive. While many individual women retreated from movement work after the presses

closed, other feminist publishers emulated the work of feminist publishers in the 1970s.

Second, these negotiations demonstrate the ability to both resisted and subverted

capitalism while using the tools of capitalism to distribute ideas, theories, and

philosophies. Although Audre Lorde stated definitively “The master’s tools will not

dismantle the master’s house,” finding and using the tools of the master created new

houses even as feminists waited for others to be dismantled. In the end, I don’t want to

124
valorize feminist visions behind the presses nor capitalist impulses. I do not want to argue

that lesbian-feminist publishing is a capitalist enterprise; and I do not want to argue that it

is divorced from capitalism or that it existed outside of the capitalist system. Rather I

want to embrace the tensions between and among these propositions for lesbian-feminist

publishers in the 1970s. They navigated utopian visions for revolutionary change with the

need to support themselves on a daily, weekly, and annual basis with an income.

There is an argument to be made that publishing was never successful in

capitalism; it was always a subsidized venture. Indeed, thinking about small publishers

particularly of belle lettristic manuscripts, publishing always has been subsidized, if not

the raw materials (paper, ink, binding), then the time of both publishers and writers. The

publishing of Virginia and Leonard Woolf at Hogarth Press, Gertrude Stein’s and Alice

B. Toklas’s publishing through Plain Editions, and Sylvia Beach’s publishing through

Shakespeare & Company all demonstrate the need for financial subsidies in book

publishing. Through this lens, publishing has long operated as a hybrid industry, part

profit-oriented, part philanthropic. In the 1970s, lesbian-feminists recognized this

heritage of publishing and generally greeted women who could subsidize the work with

praise.

Finally, WPC, Diana, and Daughters, in particular, and lesbian-feminist

publishing, more generally, existed within a broader context of publishing which was

changing and evolving in its ecology during these two decades and beyond. West and

Wheat wrote, “The last few years have seen the rise of the ‘chain bookstore.’ Walden

Book Company and B. Dalton (owned by huge department store chains Carter Hawley

Hale and Dayton Hudson respective) are giants in this field. They are buying up

125
independent stores and building new ones in seemingly every shopping center. Like fast-

food outlets, the chain bookstores are automated for fast, volume turnover of bestseller

fare.”222 A similar situation is described by Kristen Hogan, not in the 1970s but in the

1990s as bookstore chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, grew. The evolving ecology of

publishing, changes in technology, changes in the availability of governmental support

for literary and artistic work, all affect these publishers, supporting or constraining their

work.

Perhaps where these presses were most influential was in the creation of a lesbian

literary ecology. A book, a single book, or 5,000 copies of a book, can only work when it

exists in a system in which people write books (a labor that far exceeds the $2,500 fee

that West and Wheat describe), people distribute books, and people read books. In many

ways the WLM created an ecological environment in which book publishing could thrive

during these two decades. The labor of groups of writers, like the Women Writes retreats

organized by southern lesbians, feminist bookstores and Women in Distribution were

vital parts of the ecology of the time.

Individual publishers and writers actively negotiate economic forces shaping

women’s lives and enact political ideologies through economic decisions and

arrangements. By tracing these different types of economic arrangements for feminist

presses and how women adapt to and negotiate the economic aspects of operating a

feminist press, I demonstrate an active engagement with a variety of economic

arrangements. I resist totalizing capitalism or socialism as two dichotomous visions for

our society and instead explore how women negotiated political and social values within

222
West and Wheat, Passionate Perils, 2.

126
a broader system of economic choices. I explore where they created viable alternatives

(even if they were short-lived) and where they navigated difficult constraints and

conditions. While it would be easy to critique the devastating effects of late capitalism on

feminism and feminist activism through print culture, I resist that and rather examine

where and how women worked within, outside, and around capitalism as a way to create

new possibilities and new visions for women.

Ultimately, my purpose in this extensive review of the economics of publishing is

to demonstrate how linked publishing is as an economic enterprise with the production of

cultural work, both in the broad field and in the more particular field of my work, lesbian-

feminist publishing. Understanding the imbrication of culture and economics changes

how we understand cultural feminism in the WLM. Rather than as a site of activism

denuded of economic and political analysis, as the Redstockings would have us believe,

cultural feminism is a site of intense engagement with both politics and economics. For

lesbian-feminist publishers, the textual reproduction of books was a form of activism that

resonated on multiple levels: literary, cultural, social, economic, and political.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I narrated histories of three lesbian-feminist presses, Women’s

Press Collective, Diana Press, and Daughters, Inc., operating in the 1970s, to make two

arguments. First, while cultural feminism is an important descriptor of their work, it is

not sufficient. Other strands of feminism, including radical feminism, socialist feminism,

and lesbian, or feminist, separatism, influenced all three. Second, I have mapped the field

of publishing as a location important to their work, exploring how publishers negotiated

the material realities of publishing as a capitalist enterprise.

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 These histories of feminist presses reinforce a recent strand of scholarship in

women’s studies that explores the WLM movement in geographic locations outside of

major urban centers, particularly New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.223 Mapping

the terrain of publishing and book distribution undermines a bicoastal bias of the

Women’s Liberation Movement in three significant ways. First, feminist presses and

publishers are spread across the United States. In this chapter, the WPC operated in

Oakland, CA, near San Francisco but a much more working-class community; Diana

Press was located in Baltimore, MD, and Daughters, Inc. primarily based in Plainfield,

VT during most of its publishing years. In subsequent chapters, I examine presses in

other locations, including Chicago, IL, Durham, NC and Tallahassee, FL. Second,

feminist and women’s bookstores, experiencing tremendous growth in numbers during

the 1970s and 1980s, also are located across the United States—and increasingly around

the world. Junko R. Onosaka’s recent book Feminist Revolution in Literacy: Women’s

Bookstores in the United States224 traces the development of women’s bookstores from

the 1970s through the 1990s, and Kristin Hogan’s dissertation, Reading at Feminist

Bookstores,225 positions feminist bookstores as a vital part of the feminist publish sphere

as well as exploring the current state of the bookselling market and its impact on feminist

223
See for example Anne Valk’s Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black
Liberation in Washington, DC (2008), Anne Enke’s Find the Movement: Sexuality,
Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (2007), Judith Ezekiel’s Feminism in the
Heartland (2002), and Nancy Whittier’s Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the
Radical Women’s Movement (1995).
224
Junko R. Onosaka, Feminist Revolution in Literacy: Women’s Bookstores in the
United States (New York: Routledge, 2006).
225
Kristen Hogan, Reading at Feminist Bookstores: Women’s Literature, Women’s
Studies, and the Feminist Bookstore Network (Austin: University of Texas dissertation,
2006).

128
booksellers. The existence of a distribution network that was decentralized and dispersed

throughout the United States ensured that books published lesbian-feminist presses

reached readers outside of their geographical area. Third, and most significant, is the

mobility of books. Books as objects are designed to travel. The movement of books is

simultaneously the movement of ideas. While early in the 1970s, distribution of books

primarily happened one-on-one, person-to-person, and thus were more localized, as the

WLM continued to grow and feminist distribution networks grew, books traveled from

the geographic region of the publisher to locations around the United States. This

traveling of books and ideas invites us to think about lesbian-feminism not as radiating

from urban centers, but rather as radiating from books with multiple geographic identities

- the location of the publisher, the location of the author, the location of the book sale,

and the location of the reader. This multi-nodal geography changes how we think about

ideas of feminism and lesbian-feminism traveling during the WLM.

Book publishing also challenges time in historical narratives. Books are

“published” on a particular day, or in a particular month. Publishers designate publication

dates to release books, but in reality book sales build slowly. The effect of books are only

measured in long time frames. Books that “just appear” as popular are the result of good

storytelling, writing, and editing combined with effective marketing and robust

distribution to reach a community of readers. This process of popularizing a book

requires months and years. Although the process can be accelerated and condensed to

appear as though a book “just” becomes popular, in reality it is a long-term proposition.

Publishers refer to this phenomenon as the long tail of books. Rita Mae Brown’s Songs to

a Handsome Woman, for example, was, over time, the best-selling book of Diana Press,

129
but also the first book published by Diana Press. More time on the market means more

sales for books to discover a new audience, year after year. Judy Grahn’s “The Common

Woman” poems changed history not simply because of their publication in 1971 from the

WPC. There are multiple points of first contact with these poems: the bar where a

mimeographed copy was shared, the first editions sold by Grahn and the WPC, the

reprinting of the poems in dozens of lesbian-feminist journals and newspapers, the

reprinting of the poems in The Work of a Common Woman and later in love belongs to

those who do the feeling. Each impression, of a press, or of the eyes, writes a new history

of encountering and experiencing the poems.

Finally, these histories of lesbian-feminist presses argue that it is important to

reconsider the significance of cultural feminism as an important element of the WLM and

as an on-going legacy of the WLM. Although cultural feminism has been accused of and

imbricated with essentialism, a largely discarded theoretical position in the post-Butler

world of feminist studies, and lesbian separatism enjoys primarily a position of mockery

in contemporary feminist discourse, the legacies of cultural feminism and lesbian

separatism are among the most enduring of the WLM. In part, this is because the

organizations founded from cultural feminism and lesbian separatism developed funding

strategies or business models to survive. While I have focused in this chapter on three

publishing houses that all eventually closed, their books remain in circulation and

continue to be reprinted. Since 1997, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle has sold 36,619

copies, according to Bookscan, which reports about 80% of trade sales. Judy Grahn’s

new and selected poems were published in a new edition from Red Hen Press in 2008.

Books from WPC, Diana Press, and Daughters have all been reprinted within the past

130
twenty years. Moreover, the field of cultural feminism, as I have defined it, encompasses

some of the most venerable feminist institutions: the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival,

the National Womyn’s Music Festival, bookstores like Charis Books and More in

Atlanta, Georgia, and Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin, the Mountain Moving

Cafe in Chicago, which operated for thirty-one years between 1975 and 2005, journals

such as CALYX and Sinister Wisdom, which continue to publish today, and numerous

battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers. Something in the overlapping and co-

constitutive ideological formations of cultural feminism and lesbian separatism creates

institutions that last and have lasting impacts on feminism, surviving through multiple

formations and reformations of feminism by activists from new and emerging

generations.

In the next chapter, I examine Persephone Press, Long Haul Press, and Kitchen

Table Press, feminist publishers working primarily during the 1980s. Again, I explore

how different feminist theories and ideologies shape the work of these presses and in turn

how the work published by these presses shape feminism during the 1980s and afterward.

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/Interlude 2/ WinD: Distributing Lesbian-Feminist Culture

For publishers, distribution rivals the labor of editing, designing, proofreading,

and producing a book or journal. Distributing a bound book—getting it into the hands of

readers eager to pay for it and read it—is a specialized function. In Darnton’s model,

distributors are “shippers” and include “agent, smuggler, entrepot keeper, wagoner, etc.”

In the contemporary communications circuit, distributors are the link between publishers

and retail booksellers. Early feminist publishers, like Diana Press, the WPC and

Daughters, Inc., operated as both publishers and distributors. WPC, Diana Press, and

Daughters, Inc. marketed their books through advertisements in lesbian and feminist

periodicals, flyers, makeshift catalogues, and community readings. While publishers

developed distribution strategies during the 1970s, feminist bookstores, the eventual

engines for the sales of feminist books, grew up around them.

Prior to feminist bookstores, books by feminist publishers and writers were

primarily sold hand-to-hand and through the mail. Mail-order sales of books is labor-

intensive; publishers received the orders through the mail or on the telephone, then they

pack and ship books directly to the purchaser. Direct to consumer distribution benefits

small publishers; it connects them closely with readers. Publishers know immediately

demand for their books and often receive immediate feedback from readers. Distribution,

however, consumes resources. It requires time and money, of which small publishers

never have enough. Thus, publishers need good distributors—people and businesses that

thrive on marketing and promotion and that have solid relationships with bookstores and

other retail outlets.

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 In late 1974, three women, each with experience marketing and distributing

lesbian-feminist materials, wondered, was there a need for a distributor dedicated to

distributing feminist and lesbian work? Could a feminist distributor function as an

independent business? Helaine Harris, Cynthia Gair, and Lee Schwing saw the

opportunity for a feminist distribution company and created Women in Distribution

(WinD). The story of WinD mirrors the growth in feminist publishing during the late

1970s. More importantly, the story of WinD illuminates the ways that feminist businesses

negotiated feminist principles within a capitalist economy, and WinD also demonstrates

how feminist businesses experienced the increasing neoliberal economy in the United

States and named it as a threat to feminism and lesbian-feminism.

WinD began modestly with a capital investment of $1,200 from its founders.226

Like the WPC, Diana Press, and Daughters, WinD was a business, and it was grounded in

the WLM. Gair and Harris were members of The Furies and founders of Olivia Records.

On November 11, 1974, Harris, Gair, and Schwing launched WinD as a national

distribution company in a letter to feminist colleagues and activists. They cited the

“upsurge of woman produced and woman oriented products such as books, calendars,

periodicals, records, and posters” as the reason for the company, and they recognized the

desires of producers of these materials to “get into the hands and influence a great many

women, women already in the movement and those not yet a part of it.” 227 WinD’s

intention was to aid producers of woman-oriented products with effective distribution.

226
Dear Sister Letter August 10, 1976, Folder “WinD,” File Drawer 2, Diana Press
Papers, Mazer Archives. In 2010 dollars, $1,200 is the equivalent of $4,808. Source:
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi.

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 In April 1975, WinD mailed its first “catalogue.” It was a small flyer, measuring

8.5” x 7”, with eleven books featured on the inside and a statement on the outside about

WinD. The copy of the catalogue that I saw was postmarked April 21, 1975 and hand-

addressed with red ink on the blue flyer. In the catalogue, WinD proclaimed, “We want to

be the liaison between you, the retail outlet, and the small press and independent

publisher.” They further noted, “The items in this preview catalog represent a wide range

of personal/cultural/political viewpoints of women today.”228 The description of materials

as “personal/cultural/political” demonstrates the currency of these three words to capture

the burgeoning material production of feminism. The slashes in the descriptor reflects the

multiplicity of feminist visions for material production and the inability of (patriarchal)

language to neatly describe or categorize it.

Even though the initial offerings of WinD were small, the catalog had a range of

materials, including periodicals: Sojourner, published in Boston, and Quest: A Feminist

Quarterly, published in Washington, DC; books from feminist publishers: Sharon

Isabell’s Yesterday’s Lesson (Women’s Press Collective), Lesbianism and the Women’s

Movement (Diana Press), and I’m Running Away from Home But I’m Not Allowed to

Cross the Street: A Primer on the Women’s Movement (Pittsburgh: KNOW, Inc.;229

books from independent publishers: two books from Times Change Press (an

227
Dear Friends letter from Harris, Gair, and Schwing, November 11, 1974, Folder
“WinD,” File Drawer 2, Diana Press Papers, Mazer Archives.
228
WinD flyer, Folder “Women Publishers and Presses,” Box 11, Atlanta Lesbian
Feminist Archive ca. 1972-1994, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University.
229
KNOW, Inc. was a feminist publisher spearheaded by Anne Pride. Little has been
written on KNOW but they were an important early WLM pamphleteer.

134
independent publisher specializing in radical/leftist books) and a book by alta from The

Crossing Press (the first book in The Crossing Press feminist series); and a record by

feminist singer Willie Tyson from Lima Bean Records. In spite of its modest

presentation, the array of materials foreshadowed what was to come for WinD - a broad

catalogue of interest to women throughout the United States. This first catalogue

promised the second in September 1975 followed by a spring catalog in March 1976.

The September 1975 catalogue featured 29 books, records, posters, and postcards.

A year later, in September 1976, WinD had 186 titles and over 200 accounts from

“women’s centers, women’s bookstores, universities, libraries, and establishment

bookstores across the country.”230 The growth of WinD mirrors the growth of feminist

presses and independent feminist publishing by writers and artists during this period.

The business practices of WinD illustrate the ways that lesbian-feminists

negotiated operating a feminist business within a capitalist context. In a letter to

colleagues preparing to attend the first Women In Print Conference in Nebraska in

August 1976, Gair and Harris231 described their feminist commitments. “From working in

Olivia Records we knew how to create a basic business structure and recognized the

contradictions and problems involved in setting up a corporate structure with

matriarchal/socialist goals.” I note their desire to set up a corporate structure with

“matriarchal/socialist goals.” As in the initial WinD catalog, the slash indicates the way

multiple ideologies were yoked together, expressing the excitement of the WLM at the

time and the ability of feminists to embrace multiple theories. Matriarchal and socialist

230
Dear Sister Letter August 10, 1976, Folder “WinD,” File Drawer 2, Diana Press
Papers, Mazer Archives.
231
Lee Schwing had dropped out of the company by this point.

135
overlap and diverge in the meanings they suggest; yet both commitments were important

to Gair and Harris and to their audiences. The word matriarchal has multiple valences. In

cultural feminism, matriarchal expresses a world controlled by women and deriving its

values through mothers, matriarchs, rather than through fathers, patriarchs. Matriarchal

also suggests a systemic alternative to patriarchy. Lesbian-feminists envisioned

matriarchy as not simply a flip of patriarchy in which women, not men, controlled

resources but rather as a different system, egalitarian and not oppressive. Through WinD,

Gair and Harris were building a business, indeed a corporation, but with an alternate

structure that expressed values congruent with the values of their constituents, both

feminist publishers and feminist booksellers. In the letter, Gair and Harris explicate how

they enact their matriarchal/socialist commitments. They write, “[I]n WinD we have been

trying to develop a feminist business which is non-hierarchical, does not exploit workers,

is actually worker-controlled and does not exploit the consumer.”232 Gair and Harris

articulate exactly what they mean by yoking matriarchal and socialist together. They

want to create a business that is non-exploitive to workers and consumers, echoing the

values of socialism, and that embraces feminist principles with an absence of hierarchy

and self-determination.

These business practices were not confined to the internal operations of the

company. In the letter, Gair and Harris outline what they want to discuss at the Women In

Print (WIP) Conference. Gair and Harris acknowledge that the profit margins for WinD

are small and that they need strategies to make their business more economically viable.

Finding business solutions for WinD was not simply an internal problem; they present the

232
WIP Letter, Box 13, Folder Women in Distribution, 1977-1981, Catherine Nicholson
Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

136
situation to the feminist community as a challenge. At the WIP conference Gair and

Harris, together with the community of feminists preparing to gather for the conference,

want to talk about how their business can both work economically and support the work

of others in the movement.

Gair and Harris frame their provocative idea to sustain WinD as a political action.

They outline one solution to the challenges of growing WinD as cutting “down the effect

of male competition.” Although feminists were invested in creating an alternate world

that was feminist and female-centered, the daily realities of life at WinD meant that they

operated “in direct competition with male distributors (who have access not only to

establishment books, but also to many of the very same books that we distribute).” To

eliminate this competition, Harris and Gair wanted feminist publishers to cease working

with male-owned distributors and instead provide exclusive distribution rights to their

books to WinD. They wrote, “If we are truly trying to set up a network through which

feminists in print can support each other, and since feminist distribution companies are

set up to distribute books by women to women then there is no need to distribute through

male distribution organizations.”233 In short, Gair and Harris wanted publishers to sign

exclusive distribution agreements with WinD to guarantee that WinD was the only sales

channel for bookstores and retail outlets for publishers they represent.

To bolster their argument, Gair and Harris continue, “There are now feminist

distribution companies which deal effectively with many of the problems of distribution

and are working out the other problems.” Although I am not sure specifically what ‘other

problems’ Gair and Harris reference, there are always issues between publishers and

233
Ibid.

137
distributors. Feminism and shared political commitments may mitigate some of these

issues, but they don’t eliminate them. Feminist publishers complained about WinD’s

distribution policies, the quality of shipping, and catalog representation, among other

issues. WinD, on the other hand, had to deal with issues arising from missed publication

dates, lack of stock, and publishers with unrealistic sales expectations, issues not too

different from the tensions between all publishers and distributors. In addition, the sheer

physical variety of materials published by feminist publishers must have created

distribution challenges, particularly with storage and shipping. Although many of the

materials published by feminist presses complied with book standards,234 some of the

best selling books were unique in their size. Grahn’s Edward the Dyke and Other Poems,

for instance, was 8 1/4 inches wide by 7 inches high. Moreover, the volume of staple-

bound books without a perfect spine emblazoned with a title creates storage problems;

staple-bound books don’t sit upright on shelves easily and, without the title on the spine,

they are difficult to identify when picking and packing for shipment. One solution to this

myriad of challenges is mutual support within the feminist publishing community. Gair

and Harris conclude their letter with the plea, “[W]e can only survive only if we are

supported by feminist presses.” In their appeal, Gair and Harris emphasize mutuality as

crucial if the feminist publishing environment is to survive and thrive.

The request for exclusive distribution rights must have been hotly contested. For

the next two years, Gair and Harris tried to convince Diana Press to sign an exclusive

234
Standard book sizes for hardcover books, paperback books, mass market paperback
books, and children’s books maximize the efficiencies in distribution for storage and
shipping.

138
agreement. Reid and Czarnik refused.235 While there would have been benefits to WinD

for such an agreement, primarily increased sales for WinD and new accounts as every

bookseller would have had to order from WinD, the benefits to the publishers would have

been minimal—and may have even meant a loss in sales. Commercial publishers secure

exclusive distribution agreements because of their size and reach. Large distributors have

aggressive sales forces, strong fulfillment practices, and good customer service. For small

distributors, like WinD, the tension between securing exclusive distribution rights and

having a distribution network large enough to support those rights was a business

conundrum. WinD needed to grow to hire more people and expand their distribution, but,

undercapitalized, growth was difficult.

How Gair and Harris made this request for exclusive distribution rights—through

an open letter to WIP conference participants—is significant. First, it shows a method of

thinking about and addressing problems in community contexts; Harris and Gair outlined

the issues in a letter to all conference participants and then discussed it at the conference.

Second, it demonstrates the currency of separatist practices in non-lesbian contexts.

Separatism is a political practice that is not always exclusive to lesbians even though it is

often described as lesbian separatism. For WinD, proposing a separatist business practice

had both political and theoretical value but also important economic implications.

Finally, this request demonstrates the interconnections between the burgeoning feminist

businesses; women saw themselves not in antagonistic or competitive relationships but in

relationships of solidarity and mutuality.

235
Letter from Cynthia Gair to Diana Press October 7, 1977, Folder “WinD,” File
Drawer 2, Diana Press Papers, Mazer Archives.

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 Even though exclusive distribution rights were rebuffed by Diana Press and other

feminist presses, WinD experienced enormous growth during its four years of operation.

In 1979, Harris and Gair wrote, “Each year between 1975 and 1978 our sales doubled.

Our list of titles increased from 30 in 1975 to 600 in 1979. The number of bookstores and

libraries that regularly order from us rose steadily from 25 in 1975 to 600 in 1979.”236

The sales data from Diana Press demonstrates the economic impact of WinD on small

publishers. In 1975, WinD sold 1,711 books from Diana Press and paid Diana Press

$1,748. In 1976, the number increased modestly, in part because Diana Press published

fewer new books; WinD sold 2,204 books from Diana Press and paid Diana $1,971.74. In

1977, the number increased nearly four-fold. In 1977, WinD sold 8,089 books from

Diana Press and paid them $13,926. In 1978, the number slipped slightly with 6,619

books sold and a payment of $12,950, still a strong performance. In 1977 and 1978, these

are significant sales numbers - and significant revenue - for Diana Press. Strong numbers

continued in the early part of 1979 (reports are available through March of 1979) with

WinD selling 2,575 books from Diana Press and paying them $5,416.237

In spite of the growth in sales both for individual publishers and to an ever-

broadening group of retailers, WinD continued to lose money each year it operated. By

the summer of 1979, Gair and Harris anticipated more losses as the business continued to

grow. “The challenge for all distributors is that distribution works as a way to earn money

only through high volume.” In distribution, like publishing, the margins are small. WinD

236
Dear Friends Letter July 1979, Box 13, Folder Women in Distribution, 1977-1981,
Catherine Nicholson Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University.
237
Multiple sources compiled from “WinD” folder, File Drawer 2, Diana Press Papers,
Mazer Archives.

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purchased books on consignment at fifty percent of retail price. WinD sold the book at

sixty percent of retail to bookstores and other retail outlets. The ten percent difference

between purchase and sale price is the revenue retained by WinD. Gair and Harris

explained, “[I]f we sell $1,000 worth of books in a week we make a ‘profit’ of $100.

Over half of that $100 will be spent on packing costs and most of the remainder will go

for publicity—for catalogs, flyers, promotions, etc. That leaves little or no money for

salaries, rent, and overhead.” In July 1979, Harris and Gair realized that the business was

not viable. They wrote to the publishers, “we have decided that Women in Distribution

must be dissolved.”238 They said, “Three main factors have influenced our decision. .

.:the financial position of WinD; the activities of the small and women’s presses; and the

activities of the major publishers.”239 The financial position of WinD was unsustainable.

Even if WinD raised its distribution fee from 10 to 15% of retail sales, there wasn’t

enough revenue to support the business. Moreover, the volume of books being sold

wasn’t large enough, even if they expanded the company’s mission and distributed books

from other, non-feminist small presses. The collapse of WinD into bankruptcy in August

1979 represented a significant financial, practical, and symbolic loss to feminist

publishers.

In addition to the challenging business model of distribution, external economic,

social, and political factors affected WinD and contributed to its demise. WinD

demonstrates how the broader economic climate shapes the economic realities of feminist

238
Dear Friends Letter July 1979, Box 13, Folder Women in Distribution, 1977-1981,
Catherine Nicholson Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University.
239
Ibid.

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businesses. In 1979, the United States was inching to a major recession with

unemployment at 6% in August of 1979 and GDP showing only modest growth in

1979.240 WinD experienced early the effects of the slowing United States economy. In

their letter, Gair and Harris wrote, “We have been experiencing extreme difficulties

collecting from many of our bookstore accounts in the last six months. Bookstores that

have been reliable in the past are now paying 90 to 120 days late. Some are not paying at

all.”241 Late payments of accounts receivable can have a crippling effect on small

businesses and did on WinD. In addition, Gair and Harris write, “Several stores have

gone out of business, leaving large due amounts unpaid.”242 The loss of accounts, small

feminist bookstores, not only created the problem of bad debt for WinD but also reduced

their overall sales. Gair and Harris continue, “In the last three months, we have seen sales

go down twice their usual summer rate of decrease. More bookstores are making returns,

rather than pay for shipments.”243 Small businesses like WinD and their bookstore clients

experience early the effects of relatively small changes in unemployment, for instance, or

sluggish overall economic growth. These economic conditions can have immediate and

sobering effects on small businesses, including feminist businesses. The slowing and

sluggish United States economy combined with the lack of access to capital to weather

difficult periods and leverage growth, which women widely understood as a challenge for

240
Source: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/rec1980.htm.
241
Dear Friends Letter July 1979, Box 13, Folder Women in Distribution, 1977-1981,
Catherine Nicholson Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University.
242
Ibid.
243
Ibid.

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feminist businesses, was the death knell of WinD. Ultimately, the cultural capital of

shared feminist commitments, central to WinD’s business model, was unable to

compensate for the slowing United States economy.

In addition to the economy, changes in the publishing industry affected WinD.

Gair and Harris note that increasingly trade and large corporate publishers publish titles

of interest to feminists and lesbians. Gair and Harris wrote, “We feel this phenomenon is

disastrous. . . for the growth of WIND and other alternative distributors and

publishers.”244 The adoption of feminist titles by trade publishers is a Janus-face

phenomenon. For authors, trade publishers helped their work reach a larger public

through robust distribution and presence in a wide range of non-specialist bookstores. For

feminist publishers and bookstores, the adoption of feminist titles by trade publishers

meant fewer books for feminist publishers, smaller sales margins, and increased

competition for the books they published. This dynamic, the relationship between the

small presses and the commercial presses, is one that is discussed and debated by women

throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

There are a number of registers to the debate within feminist communities about

the value of publishing with independent, feminist presses versus commercial presses.

Gair and Harris felt that the phenomenon of feminists and lesbians publishing with trade

publishers was disastrous “for freedom of speech and expression.”245 Gair and Harris,

like other feminist activists in lesbian print culture, believed that commercial publishers

usurped lesbian-feminist ideas and exploited them for capitalist profit that benefited

244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.

143
patriarchy and did not contribute to the feminist revolution. Moreover, they feared the

dynamics of the co-optation of the lesbian-feminist subculture. For Gair and Harris, the

co-optation of feminist and lesbian-feminist work represented an erosion of freedom of

speech and express.

The feminist communication circuit in the 1970s created a diverse and vibrant

intellectual culture by networking a wide variety of publishers and bookstores. Although

WinD did not succeed economically, WinD achieved extraordinary success in

disseminating books and materials by feminists and lesbian-feminist broadly throughout

the United States. While I emphasize the business and economic aspects of publishing to

examine where and how publishing was successful and why as well as what that tells us

about feminism, lesbian print culture is also a stake for freedom. Publishing and

distribution are business and economic activities, but to publish and distribute books by

lesbians is also a political activity, one that makes a stake for free speech and uncensored

expression. Lesbian print culture contributes to a diverse intellectual, social, and political

climate. When that is lost, as Gair and Harris note, it is at our own peril.

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 Chapter 2

Persephone, Long Haul, Kitchen Table Press

351 Boylston Street

The Arlington Street Church at 351 Boylston Street in Boston’s Back Bay is your

destination this evening. May 9, 1981. You walk with purpose, trying to exude more

confidence than you have. You are nineteen, or thirty-nine, or fifty-nine. Just coming out.

That is to say, just saying to others that you are, or might be, a lesbian. Lesbianism for

you is mainly intellectual right now. That is, an idea, not a practice. You’ve loved many

women, of course, but not well, you know, loved them. As you think about this, you

realize that aren’t exactly sure why you are going to this event. Yes, you have always

been a reader, bookish even. But not a fan of poetry per se. You wonder if perhaps this is

a mistake. Who will be there? What is a “Lesbian Poetry Reading?” You are even,

perhaps, a little afraid of what you will do when you arrive at 351 Boylston Street. You

pull your jacket tighter around you. It isn’t cold, the mid-fifties. A spring day, for Boston.

You try to remember where you found the flyer—stuffed into a copy of Gay

Community News that someone left at the bar? Or maybe someone in your reading group

gave it to you last week. Yes, that is it. The feminist reading group. You were intrigued

but quickly folded the flyer, stuffed it in your book, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born,

lest the group members think you were too interested in a lesbian reading. You see the

church at the corner of Boylston and Arlington, but you are early, too early, so you turn

to the right and walk up to the public gardens. The Arlington Street Church is a grand

edifice. You see women walking to the church, study them carefully, curiously. After a

145
few minutes in the garden, which now smells fecund, promising that soon spring will

arrive, you turn and walk back down Arlington Street to the church. More women are

walking in. You do not know that the reading will include twelve readers, after opening

remarks by Barbara Smith. You do not know that this reading celebrates the publication

of Lesbian Poetry by Persephone Press. You do not know that inside the church are the

readers: Elly Bulkin, Pat Parker, Cherríe Moraga, Jan Clausen, Marcie Hershman,

Adrienne Rich, Paula Gunn Allen, Joan Larkin, Audre Lorde, Robin Becker, Michelle

Cliff and Judy Grahn. You do not know that many of the poets will read not only their

own poems from the anthology but also the poems of other poets not in attendance. You

do not know any of this. You do not know that as you walk in the door, a smiling woman

will greet you and press a printed program into you hand. You do not know that this will

be a relief – something to read as you slide into a seat near the back of the hall. You will

read the readers’ biographies obsessively and browse advertisements from local business

and forthcoming books from Persephone Press. You do not know that there will be over

900 women at the event.246. You do not know any of this. Yet. Here, your hand on the

door handle. Breathe in sharply. Pull open the door. Walk in. You hope to find something

of yourself this evening.247

Introduction

The large audience gathered at the Arlington Street Church in May 1981 intimates

the success of lesbian-feminist publishing in the early 1980s. Although by May 1981 all

246
Maida Tilchen, “Getting to Know Who We Are: The Lesbian Poetry Tradition, An
Interview with Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin,” Gay Community News (1 Aug 1981): 9-12.
247
The exhibit, “Lesbian Poetry Reading,” at the Lesbian Poetry Archive
(www.lesbianpoetryarchive.org) contains source documents about this event.

146
of the presses from the first chapter—Diana Press, Women’s Press Collective, and

Daughters, Inc.—stopped publishing or were moribund, new presses arose to reach

readers, eager for lesbian-feminist books. A growing network of feminist bookstores,

complemented by other feminist cultural activities such as women’s coffee houses,

women’s centers on university campuses, and networks of grassroots activists, sold books

to lesbian-feminists with increasing ease and frequency. By the early 1980s, when

Persephone Press begin publishing in earnest, first print runs routinely were 5,000

copies—and many of the books went into second and third printings. Lesbian-feminist

presses in the 1980s demonstrate more business acumen and realism about publishing, a

stark contrast to the idealism and blind faith of lesbian-feminist publishers during the

1970s. In this chapter, I consider three lesbian-feminist publishers in the 1980s that

played a crucial role in lesbian-feminist identity elaborations: Persephone Press, Long

Haul Press, and Kitchen Table Press. Lesbian-feminist identity elaborations—the

exploration of the intersectional relationships between and among gender, sexuality,

racial-ethnic formations, and religious affiliations—shaped political debate and political

organizing in lesbian-feminist communities during the 1980s. Examining the identity

elaborations of lesbian print culture, in particular through the three presses in this chapter,

reveals the contributions that identity elaborations made to a body of theory about the

complexities of identity. Rather than understanding identity as fixed, static, or

essentialist, as subsequent critics have suggested, lesbian-feminists during the 1980s

struggled with identity as a protean category, worthy of continued, intensive examination.

Moreover, they believed that examinations and elaborations of identity were crucial to

building viable and meaningful political interventions to address and eliminate a variety

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of oppressive paradigms, including sexism, homophobia, racism, economic inequality,

and imperialism.

Identity elaborations, a term I prefer to the more widely embraced “identity

politics,” were a central concern of feminism in the 1980s. Diana Fuss is one of many

feminist theorists who examine identity politics and the effects of identity politics on the

WLM. In 1989, Fuss publishes her evaluation of “identity politics” during the WLM in

Essentially Speaking; after its publication, Essentially Speaking becomes a crucial text for

appraisals of identity politics. On balance, I agree with Fuss’s analysis in Essentially

Speaking; I argue, however, that Fuss simplifies and flattens the intellectual and political

engagements of lesbian-feminists with identity politics. The consequence of Fuss’s

simplifications of lesbian-feminism, as well as those of subsequent critics, is that the

original motives and intentions of lesbian-feminists—to grapple with the protean

category of identity and resist simplistic thinking in doing so—are lost in current feminist

historiography. Through the narratives of Persephone, Long Haul, and Kitchen Table, I

nuance our understanding of identity politics with greater texture than Fuss and

subsequent critics provide. By understanding the nuance and complexity with which

lesbian-feminists did their work, we can resituate their work in its historical context and

reappraise their activities and meanings.

Fuss describes “identity politics” as “the tendency to base one’s politics on a

sense of personal identity—as gay, as Jewish, as Black, as female.” 248 Fuss traces

identity politics from the Combahee River Collective, who wrote in 1977, “We believe

that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our

248
Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 97.

148
own identity, as opposed to working on somebody else’s oppression.” In Fuss’s

genealogy, identity politics were elaborated by Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith. Fuss

observes, “The link between identity and politics is causally and teleologically defined

[by Smith and Moraga]; for practitioners of identity politics, identity necessarily

determines a particular kind of politics.”249 While I am sympathetic to Fuss’s reading of

identity politics and its elaborations, and I agree with her genealogy, I understand the

nuances and implications of identity elaboration differently than Fuss and the many

feminist critics who have continued Fuss’s interrogation of identity politics.

Feminist engagements with racism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism in the late

1970s and early 1980s elaborate a deeper understanding of the relationships between and

among politics and corporeal bodies. The textual evidence that Fuss provides supports a

causal and teleological link between identity and politics, but Fuss focuses on a single

statement amid a multitude of statements and voices thinking about these relationships.

While Fuss’s distillation is useful, particularly in understanding the broader adoption of

“identity politics” as a legacy of the feminist movement of the 1980s and widely

circulated outside of it, today the term does not capture the complexity of feminists’

engagements with identity and with politics. Thus, I eschew the term identity politics and

prefer the term identity elaborations. I map identity elaborations through lesbian-feminist

publishing in the 1980s. Identity elaborations during the 1980s animated different

performances of lesbian identity and racial-ethnic formations. Many of these identity

elaborations emanated from books and the publishing practices of lesbian-feminist

publishers.

249
Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 99.

149
 Persephone Press operated from 1976 through 1983, though the bulk of their

publishing happened from 1980 through 1983. Persephone Press is significant for a

number of reasons. First, Persephone used community organizing as a central strategy to

sell books. Second, the women of Persephone Press articulate a lesbian-feminist response

to differential power between publishers and authors, particularly when questions of

power intertwine with questions of race. Third, Persephone Press published books that

distilled and extended various identity formations crucial to feminism in the 1980s.

Long Haul Press was a small press operated by Jan Clausen. Clausen operated

Long Haul Press from her home in Brooklyn, NY. Unlike Persephone, Clausen published

not to build a business but to share books and ideas within the lesbian-feminist

communities. A poet herself, Clausen produced a small corpus of high-quality books that

influenced lesbian-feminist thought. When the books she published needed a bigger

audience, she released the rights to the authors to pursue other publishing agreements.

While Clausen’s publishing practices were different from those of the women of

Persephone, her books, like the books of Persephone, articulated important developments

in lesbian-feminist theory. The publication and circulation of the germinal text, Yours In

Struggle, proved especially influential. Long Haul Press demonstrates the ways that

lesbian writers and publishers generated lesbian-feminist theory through lived

experiences, and Clausen’s personal story demonstrates how identity elaborations

personally affected feminists—and how identity elaborations changed during the 1980s.

Kitchen Table Press (KTP) had an extraordinary impact on feminism in the

1980s. During the WLM, KTP was the first press founded by and for women of color.

KTP is revered in the literature as a model of empowerment for women of color within

150
the political and economic habitus of publishing. Rather than examining how KTP is

exceptional among feminist presses, however, I situate KTP as an important publisher

within the tradition of feminist publishing in the United States. As a result of the nearly

hagiographic treatment of KTP in the existing scholarly literature, KTP becomes

exceptional for publishing by women of color; in comparison, other lesbian-feminist

publishers are positioned as monocultural (white). In fact, other lesbian-feminist

publishers actively engaged in anti-racist publishing and multicultural publishing. KTP is,

however, an important feminist, and lesbian-feminist, publisher. KTP’s work was vital to

identity elaborations, and KTP made important contributions not only to feminism but to

the history of lesbian-feminist publishing.

Feminist politics of the 1980s focused keenly on identity elaboration. Lesbian

publishers were crucial to this work through both the books that they published and

through their publishing processes. By examining KTP, Long Haul, and Persephone, I

trace how books contributed to feminist conversations about identity elaborations and

racial formations in the 1980s.

Persephone Press

From 1976 through 1983, Persephone Press (hereafter Persephone) published

fourteen books, beginning with Sally Gearheart’s and Susan Rennie’s A Feminist Tarot.

When the press folded in May 1983, Persephone had three additional books planned,

Barbara Smith’s Home Girls, Alice Bloch’s The Law of Return and Michelle Cliff’s

Abeng. Persephone’s books were enormously influential to feminist identity formations

and Women’s Studies as an academic discipline throughout the 1980s. Early in its

incarnation, the founders of Persephone echoed political analyses from Diana, Daughters,

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and WPC about publishing and feminism. For instance, in a 1980 interview with Equal

Times, Gloria Z. Greenfield and Pat McGloin said, “We are using publishing as a strategy

for the building of a women’s revolution.”250 By the early 1980s, however, Persephone

approached publishing differently than its predecessors. They leveraged over $100,000 in

loans to publish books, aggressively promoted and marketed their books, and eventually

approached commercial publishers to acquire Persephone. In spite of their business

savvy, Persephone did not survive as a publisher. Debt, combined with the emotional

turmoil of intense political engagements, led to the end of Persephone. The rise and fall

of Persephone as a lesbian-feminist publisher exemplifies lesbian-feminist principles,

conversations, and motivating ideologies in the early 1980s; the legacy of Persephone lies

in the way its books prompted new conversations and contributed to new identity

formations in feminism in the 1980s.

Persephone began as Pomegranate Productions, a project of three women: Pat

McGloin, Gloria Z. Greenfield, and Marianne Rubenstein.251 In April 1976, Pomegranate

Productions produced a conference on women’s spirituality. Titled “Through the Looking

Glass: A Gynergetic Experience,” the conference brought together feminists like Sally

Gearheart and Z. Budapest to discuss spirituality as a feminist issue. Reactions to the

250
Marilyn Weller, “Women’s Own Media,” Equal Times 5, no. 98 (October 13-26,
1980).
251
Carol Cain was a member of Pomegranate Productions initially, but left the group
during the summer of 1976 (Cynthia Rich, “Persephone Press,” Sinister Wisdom 13
(1980), 81.

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conference were split. Some women raved about the connections being made between

feminism and spirituality; others bemoaned it as the end of feminism.252

Writing for off our backs, Hope Landrine and Joan Rosenburger describe the

conference as split between “spiritualists” and “politicalists.” They describe the

“spiritualist camp” as “women who more or less felt that women could do nothing to

effect change in the system of patriarchy,” whereas the “politicalist camp” consisted of

“women who felt we could effect change in the system of patriarchy.” These different

attitudes toward change resulted in different political practices. For the “spiritualists,”

according to Landrine and Rosenburger, “the future of the movement should be in the

direction of withdrawal to worship the Goddess, practice magic, return to the Female

Principle, reject anything associated with patriarchy, and cultivate psychic powers”; for

the “politicalists,” “the modus operandi of the movement should be one of economic

bonding on the part of all women and, then, direct political action.” Landrine and

Rosenburger mourn the fact that “the political right-on sisters” were a smaller contingent

“and thus had less control over the conference.”253 Landrine and Rosenburger describe

the conference attendees within a binary; I suspect that conference attendees extended

along a larger continuum. Nevertheless, Landrine and Rosenburger’s description of the

252
Samn Stockwell recalls attending a conference on women’s spirituality in Boston
(most likely this conference, but Stockwell could not be certain) with Patty Bowman.
After the conference, Patty said, “Well, this is the end of the women’s movement, sister,
because there will be no one to fight on the front line if people are sprinkling corn meal
on the front sidewalk.” Bowman’s colorful assessment of the conference reflects one of
many views of the conference.
253
Hope Landrine and Joan Rosenburger, “Through the Looking Glass: A Conference of
Myopics,” off our backs 6, no. 5 (June 30, 1976): 12.

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two different mindsets among feminists at the conference reflects how they experienced

the event and how feminist histories portray this time period.

In 1976, the WLM had been in full force since 1968, especially on the east and

west coasts, from where most conference attendees hailed. The WLM was fueled by rage

and outrage about women’s treatment; this type of energy is difficult to sustain. As a

result, for some WLM activists, by 1976 the initial exuberance of the WLM waned. To

address this waning energy, new models of engagement, beyond consciousness-raising

and direct political action, began to emerge; these models enabled some women to enact

feminist beliefs and commitments. Landrine and Rosenburger portray the different

analyses of activists as either positivist or defeatist; both are reasonable responses to and

analyses of patriarchy. Different analyses about the root causes of sexism and patriarchy

prompt different solutions, including feminist spirituality, lesbian separatism, political

reform, and cultural production. Rather than polarizing any of the analyses or solutions as

positive/negative or productive/destructive, I am interested in how the Pommies (as

friends of the women behind Pomegranate Productions called them) built the business

Persephone from this moment of competing ideologies.

Landrine and Rosenburger describe the conflict as between “spiritualists” and

“politicalists”; Echols stages the conflict between radical feminism and cultural

feminism. In reality, feminists had multiple, variously conflicting and overlapping

analyses of sexism and patriarchy, and all of these analyses inspired important feminist

work. In the mid-1970s, the Pommies navigate conflicting ideologies about the feminist

revolution to create Persephone. Persephone began with a conference that expressed one

set of feminist concerns focused on spirituality, but by the early 1980s, through book

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publishing, Persephone had produced a new set of identities and ideologies reflecting

contemporary feminist concerns.

Pomegranate Productions entered book publishing in conjunction with the

conference. At the conference, it distributed Sally Gearheart’s and Susan Rennie’s A

Feminist Tarot. Gearheart and Rennie self-published A Feminist Tarot under the press

name Pandora’s Boox. A Feminist Tarot was an off-the-grid book with no ISBN to make

it recognizable to the book trade. Gearheart and Rennie printed 300 copies of A Feminist

Tarot for the conference; they gave the Pommies exclusive distribution for the book.

Pomegranate Productions retained 40% of sales revenue to fund speakers’ travel to the

Boston conference; they paid Gearheart and Rennie 60% of the revenue.

A Feminist Tarot was an extraordinary success; the initial printing sold out at the

conference. In June 1976, the Pommies reprinted 1,000 copies of the book, paying $337

for typesetting and $655 for printing and binding.254 They advertised and promoted A

Feminist Tarot and quickly sold all 1,000 copies of the second printing by March 1977.

In January 1977, Greenfield wrote to Gearheart and Rennie about the success of this

venture and asked if Pomegranate Productions could formally be the publisher of the

book—not simply act as printing coordinator and distributor.

As publishers, the Pommies wanted to make A Feminist Tarot, “a bit slicker in

appearance” with “a semi-gloss cover” and a “perfectly-bound” spine. About these

potential aesthetic improvements to the book, Greenfield wrote, “The reading of Tarot is

254
Carton 5, Folder “Feminist Tarot Production Costs,” Persephone Press, Schlesinger,
Radcliffe College.

155
often a ritual, and its nice to have aesthetic incorporated into the ritual.”255 For the

Pommies, the physical appearance of the book was important; Greenfield connects the

aesthetics of the book object—how it looks and feels to readers—with its function as a

ritual tool demonstrating the importance of the material object to readers and to her as a

publisher. Gearheart and Rennie agreed to let the newly renamed Persephone Press

publish A Feminist Tarot. In June 1977, Persephone published the second edition of A

Feminist Tarot, printing 3,000 copies. By November 1978, all of those copies has sold;

they ordered 5,000 copies in the second printing of the second edition. This printing

lasted them until March of 1981, when they ordered the third printing of the second

edition, this time with over 7,500 copies. In total, Persephone printed 16,800 copies of A

Feminist Tarot and sold them all.

In the late 1970s, Persephone Press acted as the distributor for Elana

Dykewomon’s book They Will Know Me By My Teeth, published by Megaera Press. In

1980, Dykewomon earned $152.25 in royalties from Persephone Press for the sale of 87

copies during the first quarter of 1980.256 In May 1980, Greenfield wrote to Dykewomon

that the distribution “has never been profitable for us—it costs more for us to include it in

our brochures and to put it in a jiffy bag than we make in sales.”257 Greenfield confirmed

this to Dykewomon, saying that the reason that Persephone distributed Teeth is “because

255
Greenfield correspondence. I note here the importance of aesthetics to the Pommies in
1977; this is a topic I discuss in depth in chapter 6.
256
Letter to Elana Dykewomon, April 7, 1980, Outgoing Correspondence Jan-June 1980,
Box 2, Persephone Press, Schlesinger, Radcliffe College.
257
Letter to Elana Dykewomon, May 5, 1980, Outgoing Correspondence Jan-June 1980,
Box 2, Persephone Press, Schlesinger, Radcliffe College.

156
who else will do it if we don’t, especially with WIND gone.”258 The distribution

arrangement was contentious at times, particularly because Dykewomon as a lesbian

separatist wanted her book “to be sold to and shared with women only.”259 In 1980,

Persephone said that they could not guarantee that the book would only be distributed to

women as Dykewomon wished. This reality, combined with previous conflicts about the

amount of money that Persephone paid Dykewomon and questions about how

aggressively they marketed the book, led to Dykewomon’s withdrawing from the

distribution agreement.

Many of the small feminist publishers offered distribution services to other

publishers and to individual women who had independently published books, particularly

after 1979 when Women In Distribution declared bankruptcy. Although there were

multiple book distribution companies in the United States at the time, feminist publishers

had closer relationships to feminist bookstores, the primary sales engines of feminist

books. This reality made distribution agreements with feminist publishers desirable for

small and individual publishers For feminist publishers, distributing books was not an

economic windfall, as the relationship and financial arrangements between Dykewomon

and Persephone demonstrates. Rather, distribution was done with a spirit of feminist

sisterhood. The ideal of building alternate feminist institutions was central to many

feminist economic activities in the 1970s and 1980s. Even for Bowman and Davis, with

their vision of outdoing Random House, publishing was not a way to amass personal

258
Letter to Elana Dykewomon, May 5, 1980, Outgoing Correspondence Jan-June 1980,
Box 2, Persephone Press, Schlesinger, Radcliffe College.
259
Teeth Flyer, Folder “Women Publishers and Presses,” Box 11, Atlanta Lesbian
Feminist Archive ca. 1972-1994, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University.

157
wealth but to contribute to the feminist revolution. For feminist publishers the nexus

between feminist organizing—what publishing was and is—and amassing economic

power provided a strategy to facilitate a feminist revolution. It was a fraught strategy,

however, and difficult to implement for small publishers like Persephone.

In January 1977, Persephone undertook its second book, The Fourteenth Witch,

by Shelley Blue.260 Combining poetry and photography, The Fourteenth Witch was

expensive to produce because of the more involved layout and design of the book.

Persephone printed a small run of 1,000 copies, which eventually sold out. Although the

second book wasn’t a runaway success like A Feminist Tarot, The Fourteenth Witch

brought a new woman to the collective publishing project: Deborah Snow, a

photographer living in Sonoma and co-creator of The Fourteenth Witch, joined

Persephone in 1978.261 Snow became Greenfield’s lover.

In July of 1978 at an editorial meeting, the women of Persephone—Greenfield,

McGloin, Snow, and Rubenstein—articulated their vision for Persephone. They wrote,

“We are a group of lesbians who realize that we can’t have our works published by the

patriarchy. We recognize the need to control our own thought. . . .We recognize that only

lesbian sensibility can transform the decadent state of society.” This assertion marks the

turn of Persephone from publishing books about “various aspects of women’s

spirituality,” as Joan and Chesman described the press in 1978, to being a consciously

260
The Pommies describe this in some accounts as their first book as they didn’t secure
rights to publish the Persephone Press edition of A Feminist Tarot until June 1977.
261
Rubenstein stopped working with the Pommies in early 1977; Rubenstein and
Greenfield were lovers and appear to have broken up around this same time.

158
lesbian publisher.262 The women of Persephone noted that the audience for their books

was “feminist women,” and that, through publishing, they sought “to provoke women to

think and reclaim their lives” and to be “pioneering, inciteful, and insightful.” The

Pommies concluded that their image and purpose is “to be the Provacative Lesbian

Publishing House.”263 For the Pommies, books with a lesbian sensibility appealed to

feminist women and would be a catalyst for greater feminist consciousness.

For their third book, Persephone returned to their best-selling author Sally

Gearheart. In February 1979, Persephone published Gearheart’s series of linked short

stories The Wanderground - Stories from the Hill Women. Like A Feminist Tarot, The

Wanderground was another success. Persephone paid for an east coast tour for Gearheart

to promote The Wanderground; Gearheart’s personal appearances supported the rapid

sale of the book. Persephone sold translation rights to The Wanderground in Germany

and Denmark, and licensed a Braille edition of the book.264

These first three books from Persephone, A Feminist Tarot, The Fourteenth

Witch, and The Wanderground, express an emerging feminist formation of cultural

feminism, with a focus on spiritual and matriarchal practices. While all three books are

concerned with feminist spirituality, each book expresses cultural feminism differently.

The Wanderground, in particular, became an important text to lesbian separatists.

Gearheart’s stories about the Hill women narrate a future world occupied only by women

after an apocalyptic event caused by patriarchal oppression and conflict. The

262
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 159.
263
Persephone Press Editorial Meeting July 23, 1978, folder “Meeting Notes 1979-1982,”
Carton 6, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
264
Feminist Bookstore News 4, no 3 (October 1980), 14.

159
Wanderground is a unique blend of utopian and dystopian fantasies that resonated

powerfully with lesbian separatists’ desires to build a world apart from patriarchy. All

three of these books appealed to lesbians. The Wanderground and its appeal to lesbian

separatists crystallized Persephone’s focus as a lesbian publishing house.

Bolstered by the success of the first few books, Persephone and its three

principles, Greenfield, McGloin, and Snowe, began learning more about publishing,

including “taking courses in layout, design, and in all the important areas of financial

accounting and marketing,” acquiring new books, and securing loans to publish those

books.265 In the earliest years of Persephone Press, the money to publish books came

from the three founders and their families. Gloria Greenfield recalled in a 1980 interview,

“Persephone for two years was a project that we paid for by housecleaning, by typing, by

teaching, and by doing whatever we could to raise money.”266 In the fall of 1979, the

principles began paying themselves salaries and working full-time for Persephone.

A series of personal loans and a bank loan from the Massachusetts Feminist

Federal Credit Union (totaling $100,000) supported the full-time labor of Greenfield,

McGloin, and Snowe and enabled the expansion of Persephone. Greenfield and McGloin

also had a knack for publicity. Ms. Magazine named Greenfield one of “80 Women to

Watch in the 80s” in their January edition. In the Ms. article, Persephone was described

as “a lesbian-feminist publishing house producing innovative material to foster lesbian

sensibility and new ways of thinking.” Moreover, Greenfield’s goal for the new decade,

according to Ms., was “for women to view feminist presses not as an alternative but as

265
Equal Times 5, no 98 (Oct 13-26, 1980).
266
Sinister Wisdom 13 (1980), 82.

160
their most logical option.”267 Greenfield’s statement echoes the earlier assertions of

Daughter’s Bowman and Arnold and the on-going debate among lesbian-feminist writers

about whether to publish with small lesbian-feminist presses or with commercial

presses.268

Persephone published four new titles in 1980: a reprint of Matilda Joslyn Gage’s

Woman, Church and State, Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To

Despise, Nancy Toder’s Choices, and an anthology edited by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia

Penelope, The Coming Out Stories. Of these titles The Coming Out Stories was the

runaway success.

Published in the spring of 1980, The Coming Out Stories was both an economic

engine for Persephone Press and a public relations success. The forty-one personal

narratives of The Coming Out Stories provided voice and visibility to lesbian experience.

The Coming Out Stories corresponded with a similar anthology, The Lesbian Path, edited

by Margaret Cruikshank.269 The two anthologies share some contributors; for instance,

Cruikshank is included in The Coming Out Stories, and Judith McDaniel and Minnie

Bruce Pratt are contributors to both anthologies. Although both anthologies were

published in 1980, The Coming Out Stories circulated more broadly, thanks in part to the

promotion and dogged determination of the women of Persephone. The Coming Out

Stories sold out its first printing of 5,000 copies within six weeks.270 Persephone Press

267
Ms. Magazine, January 1980.
268
Lesbian writers debated the political implications of publishing extensively; see for
example Arnold in Quest, Clausen in Sinister Wisdom, and Hodges in Margins.
269
Margaret Cruikshank, The Lesbian Path (Monterey, CA: Angel Press, 1980).

161
ordered a second print run of 10,000 copies, and by September 1980, Persephone had

sold 8,000 copies of the book and sales continued briskly. The Lesbian Path, published

by Angel Press, a publishing house owned by a heterosexual man, struggled to reach its

audience. Grier’s Naiad Press took over distribution in April 1981, but despite the

similarities between the books, or perhaps because of the similarities between the books,

The Lesbian Path never sold as well as The Coming Out Stories. For Grier, the

experiences of these two books in the marketplace demonstrated the importance of

lesbian-feminist publishers to lesbian books.271 Together these two anthologies reflect the

transition of personal narratives about lesbian lives from a psychoanalytic to a political

focus. Writers in both anthologies define the past as a time when lesbianism was shaped

by mental health professionals; in contrast, the present, in both of these anthologies,

defines lesbian lives through a political, and distinctly feminist, consciousness.

In the summer of 1980, internal conflict marred the operations of Persephone.

Persephone Press was a partnership of Greenfield, McGloin, and Snow; the three planned

to incorporate the business formally. In the spring of 1980, the relationship between

Greenfield and Snow came to an end; Snow began dating another woman, Mildred

Gibson, an attorney with significant financial resources. In July of 1980, Greenfield and

McGloin incorporated Persephone as a partnership without Snow—and without her

knowledge. When Snow learned about the incorporation and her exclusion, she was

enraged. Snow demanded $20,000 from Persephone as payment for her share of the

270
“Persephone Sells Above Industry Norm” Media Report to Women, (September
1980): 5.
271
Letter from Barbara Grier, April 27, 1981, Box 68, Folder “1981-1985, Folder 1 of 2,”
Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University.

162
business. Snow arrived at $20,000 by speculating the value of the sale of the rights to a

mass market edition for either The Wanderground or The Coming Out Stories.

Persephone’s contracts precluded the sales of rights to “male publishing houses,” but

Snow approached at least two authors, Michelle Cliff and Cherríe Moraga, about

terminating that part of the contract while Greenfield and McGloin were at a publishing

conference in Copenhagen.272 This bitter split led Snow to file a costly lawsuit, suing for

her portion of the business. Greenfield and McGloin contested the lawsuit, demonstrating

that the debts of Persephone far exceeded any perceived value. Eventually, Greenfield

and McGloin paid $4,000 to Snow in December 1981 to resolve the law suit.273 In the

course of the dispute, Greenfield and McGloin spent nearly $10,000 on legal fees; these

fees plus the payment to Snow were the equivalent of publishing an additional book, or

reprinting the books that they needed, badly, in the marketplace.274 Although the lawsuit

was never publicly reported in the feminist press, it took valuable time, energy, and

money from the operations of Persephone.

In spite of the lawsuit, the period between the fall of 1980 and the spring of 1982

was productive for Persephone. Each year Persephone published a series of important

books, and at least one of them was a break-out success. In addition, Persephone adopted

a variety of marketing strategies for selling books. Persephone initiated a book club to

help support the press with a “lifetime membership” for $500 and “autographed copies of

272
Folder “Snow Litigation,” Carton 6, Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library,
Radcliffe College.
273
Folder “Evidence of Settlement,” Carton 6, Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger
Library, Radcliffe College.
274
Ibid.

163
all Persephone books.”275 Persephone conceptualized, planned, and promoted book

launches as large, celebratory community events. They produced events for Lesbian

Poetry, This Bridge Called My Back, and Nice Jewish Girls, which each drew hundreds

of attendees in the Boston area. In addition, Persephone paid for author tours; for

instance, Michelle Cliff toured North Carolina, Houston, TX, Washington, DC, and

Baltimore, MD in February and March of 1981. Persephone used books as a platform to

promote lesbian authors and eventually to secure lesbian presence on television.

Persephone’s promotional activities simultaneously supported their mission and vision of

realizing social change through books and ensured the strong sale of their books

In 1981, Persephone published four new titles: three anthologies—Lesbian

Fiction, Lesbian Poetry, and This Bridge Called My Back—and a non-fiction book by

Alice Bloch, Lifetime Guarantee: A Journey through Loss and Survival. From this list,

This Bridge Called My Back was the runaway success, although all of the books were

strong sellers. In 1982, Persephone published Evelyn Torton Beck’s Nice Jewish Girls,

Irena Klepfisz’s The Keeper of Accounts, and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My

Name. Persephone published only one book in 1983, Alice Bloch’s The Law of Return.

The commercial success of books like The Coming Out Stories and This Bridge

Called My Back created financial and business problems for Persephone. In order to

reprint the books to keep them in the distribution system, Persephone had to borrow more

money continuously. Revenue from sales, therefore, repaid investors—both individuals

275
Equal Times 5, no 98 (Oct 13-26, 1980). Ironically as Persephone was initiating their
book clubs, the major book clubs in the United States were experiencing a decrease in
their members. See Rubin and Radway.

164
and institutions like the local feminist credit union. There was little cash to put back into

the business to pay for future books—or reprints of successful books.

By the middle of 1982, Persephone Press was having significant financial

difficulties. In August of 1982, Greenfield summarized the effects of the economic

recession, which gripped the United States, on Persephone in a letter to Elly Bulkin as

two-fold. First, “with the declining economy, booksellers have not been paying,” and

second, “printers have not been extending the usual credit line that they normally do.”

Greenfield wrote that the printers “have been squeezing us dry to pay up front for reprints

and new editions.”276 As a small business, Persephone encountered early the severe

effects of the recession in the United States. The Press responded quickly to the situation.

During the summer of 1982, Greenfield and McGloin did not pay themselves; instead,

they took loans from their mothers to cover their living expenses. They decided not to

“publish any new titles after the six forthcoming ones, for at least one year, so that we

will not jeopardize the backlist.”277 Through the Feminist Bookstore News (FBN),

Persephone asked feminist bookstores to order books directly so that Persephone could

benefit from higher margins on the books, even though that involved additional time and

labor for Greenfield and McGloin in fulfilling those orders. FBN described Persephone

Press as “in the midst of that classic cash-flow problem that shows up in the midst of

successful growth,” and explained how direct orders helped publishers. Through direct

276
Letter to Elly Bulkin August 27, 1982, Bound Outgoing Correspondence 1982, Carton
3, Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
277
Ibid.

165
orders, Persephone gets “the full 60% (of the cover price of the book),” and they “get

paid in 30 days which helps with paying the printers bills. A lot!”278

In addition to the financial pressures, Greenfield experienced burnout from the

intensive schedule of running a publishing operation and from the increasing conflicts she

encountered working in the community of lesbian-feminist writers. In December of 1982,

when Persephone was in a precarious financial situation, Greenfield wrote to Elana

Dykewomon about her increasing dissatisfaction with Persephone Press and the United

States feminist movement.

I hate being in the United States, and I hate the American feminist movement, and
I can’t stand the trapped feeling that I have in Persephone any more. By the way
none of this is for public broadcast—I’m assuming I am talking to you as you talk
to me, as friends with respect for confidentiality. Anyway, I wanted to kill myself
this past summer, thinking that I would have to stay in Persephone for the rest of
my life, working with prima donna authors (of all classes and colors), and have to
deal with the stress and madness, and then I realized that I didn’t have to kill
myself to get out—that I could walk out. So I’ve got a prison term of a couple
more years here and then I split.

Greenfield’s plan was to leave Persephone Press and go to live in Israel. As Greenfield

explained to Dykewomon,

So, why Israel? Because I want to save my life. . . . Because I love it there. Have
you been there? I love the deserts, I love the spirit in the air. Listen, I’d rather be
there than here, and it is going to get alot worse here, and if I had a choice of
being with Jewish assholes or goyishe assholes, I’d pick the Jewish assholes. And
besides, Israeli women are beautiful to look at (I’m a self-admitted pig), and
besides I want to live there because I can dream there and feel comfortable. I hate
it here. I don’t really want to die. . . I’m tired, Elana. I need to heal myself.279

This personal letter demonstrates the state of mind of Greenfield, confiding to a long-time

friend. The interpersonal challenges of operating a publishing company in the lesbian

278
Feminist Bookstore News 6, no. 2 (September 1982): 6.
279
Letter to Elana Dykewomon December 1982, Bound Outgoing Correspondence 1982,
Carton 3, Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

166
feminist community, which Greenfield alludes to as her dealings with “prima donna

authors” and “stress and madness,” cannot be underestimated. Lesbian-feminists

scrutinized lesbian-feminist business practices in relationship to evolving ethics and

ideals with zeal and at times ferocity.

Persephone’s financial difficulties were due primarily to the debt that the

company was carrying, but the United States recession was a significant factor as well.

Both of these could have been weathered, but a third financial roadblock came in early

1983. The IRS wrote to Persephone Press demanding past due payroll taxes. Persephone

had failed to pay payroll taxes to the IRS since the beginning of staff positions in 1979. In

1983, the amount due was over $15,000.280 The combination of these three factors—large

debt payments, a recessionary economy, and debt to the IRS—meant that Persephone was

without cash.

Greenfield and McGloin spent the early months of 1983 trying to save

Persephone. They approached new investors; they asked authors to appear at benefits for

Persephone; they encouraged bookstores to continue directly purchasing from

Persephone. Ultimately, they could not secure enough money. They approached other

publishers, including Alyson, The Crossing Press, and Beacon Press, but no one wanted

to purchase the entire company.281 In April 1983, Greenfield and McGloin began to

liquidate the company’s assets including “the Xerox machine, conference table, and

280
Letter to Pat McGloin February 1983, Bound Outgoing Correspondence 1983, Carton
3, Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
281
Various outgoing correspondence 1983, Carton 3, Persephone Press Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

167
typewriters.”282 By May 23, 1983, they transferred the company to bankruptcy

receivership. In June 1983, Greenfield and McGloin sold Persephone to Beacon for

$15,000. The agreement between Beacon Press and Persephone stipulated that Beacon

acquired rights to all of the books, but a number of the authors negotiated, often through

lawyers, for the return of their rights and then sold their books to other publishers. A

handful of the books went to Alyson Press, a Boston-based gay and lesbian publisher

founded by Sasha Alyson; Barbara Smith brought This Bridge Called My Back and her

forthcoming book Home Girls to Kitchen Table Press. In 1984, Beacon Press published

Grahn’s book, Another Mother Tongue, which had been under contract with Persephone

Press, to great acclaim.283

In immediate appraisals of Persephone Press, McGloin and Greenfield state that

their feminist principles were the reason for their failure. Speaking to Jill Clark of Gay

Community News, McGloin and Greenfield said “they felt ‘constantly conflicted’ about

whether to operate Persephone in accordance with [publishing] industry standards and be

financial healthy, or to do what they thought they as lesbian feminists should do, even

when it seemed to be financially unwise.”284 Greenfield and McGloin maintained that

their losses in 1981 and 1982 “were ‘due solely to our royalty structure,’ referring to the

282
Molly Lovelock, “Persephone Press: Why Did It Die?,” Sojourners 9, no. 1
(September 1983): 4, 18.
283
Grahn won the Stonewall Book Award in 1985 for Another Mother Tongue from the
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American
Library Association.
284
Jill Clark, “Persephone Press Folds, Some Titles Purchased,” Gay Community News
11, no. 4 (August 5, 1983), 1.

168
fact that Persephone paid its authors over twice the royalties that other publishers pay.”285

While the royalty structure was generous by trade standards, the contracts stipulated that

Persephone Press recouped their printing and publishing expenses first and then paid

authors. Naiad Press used a similar structure, as did Diana Press. Naiad Press made this

model financially sustainable, so Greenfield and McGloin’s claims of high royalties as a

reason for their financial difficulties are not entirely accurate.

McGloin and Greenfield also cited their promotional efforts on behalf of each

book as a financial challenge for the press and another departure from publishing industry

standards. Speaking to Molly Lovelock of Sojourners, they said, “Should we not have

funded large consciousness-raising events such as the Nice Jewish Girls and This Bridge

Called My Back readings, which lost approximately $3,000 each? These questions—and

the very fact that we are asking them—disturb us. But they are important for all of us to

consider.”286 The large public events that Persephone organized on behalf of its books did

lose money, as McGloin and Greenfield note, but they also contributed to overall sales

and visibility for the books. This is one of the areas of publishing where the feminist

principles of McGloin and Greenfield—the commitment to spread the word about books

as a part of their agenda for feminist social change—are in conflict with publishing

industry standards.287 Nevertheless, in light of the overall debts and liabilities of

Persephone, losing $3,000 per event for a handful of events is a small amount of money

and not directly responsible for the failure of Persephone.

285
Ibid.
286
Lovelock, “Persephone Press,” 18.
287
Commercial publishers invest in promotion and author travel only for books and
authors with sales figures that far exceed those of small, lesbian-feminist publishers.

169
 Ultimately, the failure of Persephone press was due to being overleveraged with

debt and making common small business mistakes—including not paying the IRS for

payroll taxes. The confluence of financial difficulties was more than Greenfield and

McGloin could manage. Moreover, by early 1983, both were tired and burnt out from

operating the press and responding to the many challenges of running a small business. In

addition, Persephone, like all of the lesbian-feminist presses, operated with intense

scrutiny from lesbian-feminist communities. Attention from lesbian-feminists was vital

for the press to reach its target audience, but it also resulted in pressure for greater

transparency and responsiveness to many ideological viewpoints, which at times

conflicted with one another and with the business of publishing. In spite of Persephone’s

demise, its impact was extraordinary.

Persephone Press and Identity Elaborations

Books published by Persephone played crucial roles in feminist identity

elaborations in the 1980s. Collectively, the books by women of color published by

Persephone shape a dialogue about anti-racism and publishing. Persephone’s effect on

different identity elaborations can be understood best through the books that it

published—and through the citation of these books in scholarly and popular work during

the last thirty years. Two stories provide additional information about the stakes of

identity elaboration in the early 1980s. These connected stories illuminate how

individuals as writers and publishers produced and experienced the contours of identity

elaborations in the early 1980s.

Through the publication of This Bridge Called My Back (hereafter This Bridge),

in particular, Persephone played a central role in articulating woman of color feminism

170
and the discursive formation woman of color. Woman of color feminism is a vibrant

strand of feminism during the 1980s, elaborated through lesbian print culture. Exploring

the dynamic engagement of race and sex in the lives of women of color, woman of color

feminism transformed the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1980s with new issues

and forms of political engagement as well as profound theoretical engagements. The

discursive formation, woman of color, united African-American women, Asian-American

women, Native American women, and Latina women as a common group, distinguished

from white women. This discursive formation was a crucial dimension of anti-racist

discourse and politics.

While This Bridge itself is the work of the editors and the individual authors, the

women of Persephone played an important role in the book: producing it as a high quality

trade paperback, promoting the book to readers, and distributing it to booksellers.

Moreover, Persephone was not simply a publisher with little investment in the content of

the book. To the contrary, racism and the effects of racism on feminist publishing were

central concerns for the women of Persephone. In an interview with Equal Times,

Greenfield and McGloin said, “One of the gaps. . .is the absence of published writings of

Third World feminists.”288 The overall catalogue of Persephone books demonstrates a

commitment to publishing women of color authors; of the fifteen books published by

Persephone, four (26.6%) are written or edited by women of color. In addition to their

publishing, the women of Persephone engaged in a dynamic dialogue with Persephone

authors about how to build an anti-racist politic within the press and within the larger

lesbian-feminist movement.

288
Equal Times 5, no 98 (Oct 13-26, 1980).

171
 Persephone also played a key role in articulating the identity, Jewish lesbian,

through the publication of Nice Jewish Girls (hereafter NJG). The publication of NJG in

April 1982 highlights multiple discussions about anti-Semitism in the WLM; Beck, the

editor of NJG, and Greenfield were important voices in many of these discussions. Both

of these stories about the elaboration of women of color identities and Jewish lesbian

identities connect through the principal actors—women, lesbians, activists, authors, and

publishers. All shared a commitment to developing lesbian-feminism as an ideological

and political position and expressing it through publishing. These stories illuminate the

significance of identity elaborations in the 1980s and the role of books in this work.

Much has been written about This Bridge and its effects on feminist identity

formations during the 1980s.289 This Bridge can be described as nothing short of iconic.

Edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge gave voice to a range of

women of color writers and activists; This Bridge made connections between and among

women of color and explicated the effects of the racism and sexism on women’s lives.

Gloria Greenfield met Cherríe Moraga while publishing The Coming Out Stories.

Adrienne Rich wrote the introduction to The Coming Out Stories and recommended

Moraga to Greenfield as a contributor when the collection was nearing completion.290

289
See for example, Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, edited by Cherrie
Moraga (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990) and the introduction to This Bridge We
Call Home, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge,
2002).
290
Gloria Z. Greenfield Letter to Cherrie Moraga Lawrence, October 25, 1979, Outgoing
Correspondence 1976-1979 (bound), Carton 2, Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger.

172
The Coming Out Stories includes Moraga’s piece, “La Güera.”291 Moraga and Anzaldúa

approached Persephone to publish the collection they imagined; the collection became

This Bridge.

Persephone released This Bridge on May 28, 1981; three days later the publishers

brought it to the NWSA Conference in Storrs, CT.292 Persephone organized a large gala

reading and celebration for the release of This Bridge on June 5, 1981 in Boston, MA.293

While the editors were critical of Persephone—wanting them to do more promotion and

publicity—Persephone did an excellent job publishing the book by standards of both

feminist presses and commercial presses. The first print run of 5,000 copies quickly sold

out; in August 1981, Persephone printed an additional 10,000 copies of the book.

Persephone ordered 5,000 more copies in a third printing of the book in July 1982.294 On

March 31, 1983, as Persephone was folding, Persephone had sold 17,915 copies of This

Bridge; Persephone paid $15,138.93 in royalties to the editors.

While the history of This Bridge is exceptional in feminist publishing writ large,

This Bridge is not an exceptional book for Persephone; that is, This Bridge is one of a

number of anthologies that Persephone published and one of a number of books written

291
Adrienne Rich was an important facilitator and connector in lesbian-feminist
publishing communities during the 1970s and 1980s; in addition to her own work as a
poet and essayist, Rich edited Sinister Wisdom with her partner Michelle Cliff from 1981
through 1983.
292
Chela Sandoval writes about the conference in “Feminism and Racism” in Making
Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), which
explores some of the dynamics of race within the conference.
293
Letter to The Coming Out Story Contributors, Folder “Correspondence 1981-1985
(folder 1 of 2),” Box 68, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Duke.
294
Folder “This Bridge Production Costs,” Carton 5, Persephone Press Papers,
Schlesinger.

173
women of color. Although they did not formally articulate it in public materials,

Persephone’s publishers had a strong personal and political commitment to publishing

work by women of color by the early 1980s.

In a letter to Sally Gearheart, Greenfield describes an on-going conflict with

Sarah Hoagland about race. Greenfield writes that she and McGloin had been in a “year

long argument with her on her anthology on women and violence.” According to

Greenfield, Hoagland believes that “it is not her responsibility if black women are too

lazy to submit articles for anthologies.” Greenfield tells Gearheart, “We believe she is a

racist pig.” Greenfield continues that at Persephone they “insist” that their anthologies be

“well representative of the lesbian community.” Hoagland apparently described McGloin

and Greenfield as “white honkies interested in quotas.”295 The discussion about racism in

publishing was particularly apt because another issue discussed by Greenfield with

Gearheart is the possible adaptation of The Wanderground into a movie. Gearheart

wanted the film to be cast with all women of color. Greenfield objected rigorously,

noting, “You can’t take white culture, white concerns, and white personalities and put

colored skin on them. To do so is more than offensive—it is exploiting the anti-racist

movement.”296 Greenfield’s blunt remarks to Gearheart about her book and about

Hoagland demonstrate how Greenfield prioritized anti-racism in her work with

Persephone.

McGloin also shared concerns about anti-racism in feminist publishing and the

WLM. In a letter to Judith McDaniel and Maureen Brady, publishers of Spinsters Ink, on

295
June 1981 letter to Sally Gearheart, Outgoing Correspondence May-August 1981,
Carton 2, Persephone Press, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
296
Ibid.

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June 26, 1981, Pat McGloin wrote about a visit with Susan Wood-Thompson and Betty

Byrd, who were working on the 1981 Women in Print Conference. McGloin wrote that

one of the concerns she had about the meeting is that it “will be all white, and I think

there has to be a consciousness about why that is, and what our responsibilities are to

change that.”297 The 1981 Women in Print conference was not all white, in part because it

included a broader group of women than just publishers and because the conference

organizers initiated a dedicated fundraising campaign to support the travel expenses of

women of color.

Persephone responded institutionally to position itself as an anti-racist ally;

Greenfield and McGloin personally spoke out as anti-racist allies. Additional material

publishing practices further illuminate the individual and institutional anti-racist

commitments. McGloin and Greenfield hired other women of color to edit books by

women of color. For Zami, they hired Smith and Moraga to edit the manuscript and

provide editorial feedback to Lorde; they also hired Michelle Cliff as the copy editor for

the final version of the manuscript. By engaging women of color in the process of

creating books, McGloin and Greenfield endeavored to minimize the power differentials

between them as publishers and women of color as authors.

Persephone adopted editorial guidelines written by Elly Bulkin for reviewing

works by white women. In this undated document, Persephone defined the press as “a

lesbian-feminist publishing house which intends to have an impact on society. We see our

books as organizing tools for social change, and seek strongly woman-identified work

297
Outgoing Correspondence January - April 1981, Carton 2, Persephone Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

175
with the potential to both confront oppressive (i.e., sexist, homophobic, racist, anti-

Semitic, classist) structures, and to move people to action.” The guidelines continue,

“Persephone is committed to challenging racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, classism

and ageism; therefore, we will not accept a manuscript which perpetuates these social

structures.” This preamble is followed by “guidelines, developed by Elly Bulkin” for

reviewing works by white women. What follows are a series of questions in five different

categories—representation, audience, language, critical attitudes/assumptions, and

sources. Questions include:

•To what extent are works included by women of color who represent different
racial and cultural backgrounds?
•Are women of color represented by work dealing with race and racism as well
as topics not primarily focused on race (feminist theory and criticism;
overviews of contemporary poetry or novels by women)?
•Does the writer make any assumptions about the race of her audience and, if
so, what implications does that have for women of color?
•Does she use terms connecting “black” or “darkness” to evil and negativity and
“white” to goodness and innocence?
•Does she give equal value to the work of women of color and white women?
•Does she consider the implication of her subject for women of color?
•Does she show an awareness of work done in her field by women of color
(including that published by Third World presses and periodicals) and include
that in her bibliography?

It is difficult to say when and for how long these guidelines were used in reviewing work

for Persephone Press, but these guidelines express the ideals of Greenfield and McGloin

as anti-racist allies.

While books from Persephone are crucial to the articulation of different racial

formations within feminism, and Greenfield and McGloin worked to be anti-racist allies,

they had difficult relationships with women of color authors. Their perceived power as

publishers contributed to tensions with women of color authors. In one incident, Barbara

Smith and Cherríe Moraga, who were lovers at the time, confronted Greenfield and

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McGloin about racism in a letter. In August 1981, McGloin and Greenfield were on

vacation in Long Island; Smith and Moraga gave a contact telephone number for them to

Rima Shore and Gloria Anzaldúa. Greenfield and McGloin were angry about the

interruptions to their vacation. They were curt with Shore; they hung up on Anzaldúa.

Greenfield and McGloin wrote about their anger to Smith and Moraga. Smith and

Moraga responded:

The worst aspect of this whole mess is its racial ramifications. Whatever your
intent, when a white woman is unjustifiably mean to a woman of color, it shows
incredible insensitivity and unawareness of a whole history and dynamic of white
people being in dominant positions over Third World people and using that
domination to excuse individual cruelty. It is not enough to go on record
publishing the works of Third World women. People don’t become anti-racist
overnight, but it involves a process of constant self-examination and weighing
how even familiar behavior becomes unacceptable when the reality of racial
power is a factor. In other words, hanging up on a white woman/author might be
impolite, but it would be only that. The white woman would not have to even
wonder if it was also motivated by negative racial feelings and be even more
deeply hurt by having to ask this question. We’re talking here about an
unjustifiable reaction and not the righteous anger that can occur between any two
human beings.

As Smith and Moraga state in the letter, attention to racism was not only an institutional

concern; it was a personal concern, deeply tied to personal interactions and individual

behaviors. The letter from Smith and Moraga continued with other concerns that they had

about Persephone Press, including their decision not to publish a collection of poetry by

Hattie Gossett, which Gossett placed with South End Press; Smith and Moraga felt it

would get “so much less than the visibility it deserves” at South End. Smith and Moraga

continue in the letter that Greenfield and McGloin

hold the purse strings. That’s a fact. . . .We can’t change the fact that you have the
resources and financial power, that if shared, are indeed beneficial to us. (And it is
to your credit that you have worked to achieve them.) What we want you to know
is that the only way the actual material and racial differences between us become
non-oppressive is when good judgment and respect for authors, as essential to the

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 production of books, is part of the bargain. These are the only conditions we can
work under.

They end the letter affirming their “great faith” in “Persephone’s political commitment

and our waiting to have a successful working relationship in the future.”298 This letter

illuminates the ways that feminists thought about race and power within institutions and,

just as significantly, within interpersonal relationships. While I am sure this was a

stinging letter to receive for Greenfield and McGloin at the time, and a time-consuming

and draining letter for Smith and Moraga to write, it demonstrates the thoughtful ways

that feminists communicated with one another—and the ways that they understood

societal power structures affecting interpersonal relationships.

In January 1982, less than a year after Persephone published This Bridge and six

months after this letter from Smith and Moraga, the conflict between women of color

authors and editors and Greenfield and McGloin became so profound that there was a

facilitated conflict resolution meeting between the Persephone publishers and a group of

women of color authors. Before I discuss this meeting, however, I turn to the second

story, about anti-Semitism.

Like questions about anti-racism, questions about anti-Semitism were deeply

personal. Persephone Press published Nice Jewish Girls in the spring of 1982. This book

sold rapidly; by the fall of 1982, 8,000 copies sold. The process of assembling the book

was a collaborative process between Evelyn Torton Beck as editor and Gloria Greenfield

as publisher. This collaboration was not without conflict between the two—particularly

about the quality of contributions and about individual contributors. Nevertheless, when

298
Folder Smith, Barbara, Carton 4, Persephone Press, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe
College.

178
the book was published, it coalesced the identity of Jewish lesbian as a standpoint with

political, social, and spiritual meanings. Reviews, both inside and outside of the lesbian-

feminist community, recognized the significance of NJG.

Nice Jewish Girls emerged from a broader discussion about anti-Semitism in the

WLM. Greenfield herself was increasingly sensitive to anti-Semitism in the WLM. Two

prominent incidents of anti-Semitism, particularly in the feminist press, happened in late

1981. First, in the November issue of FBN, FBN editor Carol Seajay made light of

hearing that the bookstore Old Wives’ Tales, where she worked in San Francisco, CA,

was anti-Semitic because it didn’t have particular books available. In addition to this, in

the same issue, Celeste West, the author of the humorous column “Hotterline,” under the

pseudonym “Medea Matters,” wrote that at the WIP conference she “learned that feminist

publishing is controlled by JEWISH-WORKING-CLASS-LESBIANS and the 4-H.”

West’s attempt at humor failed. The next issue of FBN, dated February 1982, contained a

sampling of outraged letters to Seajay about the two comments. FBN printed letters from

Sisterhood Bookstore in Los Angeles, CA, Lammas in Washington, DC, Michelle Cliff

and Adrienne Rich, then editors of Sinister Wisdom, Pat McGloin, Maureen Brady of

Spinsters Ink, and Nancy Bereano and Elaine Gill, both of The Crossing Press. This

public controversy highlighted the ease with which anti-Semitic comments were made

and the power of women in the community to speak out against them.

In a similar register, the December 23, 1981, issue of Gay Community News

(GCN) contained a review by Amy Hoffman of Noretta Koertge’s novel, Who Was that

Masked Woman? Hoffman wrote:

Almost all the characters in this book are flat and incoherent, but this is
particularly true of anyone who is not a midwestern WASP. The most disturbing

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 and offensive aspect of this book is its racism. Koertge is not malicious, but she is
unforgivably ignorant. Tretona approaches anyone who is different from her with
the most clichéd of liberal stereotypes and Koertge doesn't seem to make any
judgements about this.

GCN received a number of letters to the editor about the review, with a range of

responses. The letter from Koertge herself—a defense of the novel—concludes with this

sentence, “The coffee-shop energy we might spend in trying to decide whether there is a

tiny speck of racism in my little novel could be much better employed in fighting the

economic and political institutions which really oppress people.”299 While Koertge’s

novel is rife with racist stereotypes, for McGloin—and presumably Greenfield—it was

also anti-Semitic. On January 20, 1982, Pat McGloin wrote to GCN about the novel, “The

characterization of Jews in Who Was That Masked Woman propagates stereotypes of

Jews as wealthy and sexually voracious. . . .This overwhelming concern with money on

the part of the Jewish characters (and only the Jewish characters) propagates the image of

the ‘greedy Jew’ whose focus is to ‘make it.’”300 McGloin also enumerates a number of

racial characterizations in the novel as racist. These two situations demonstrate how the

women involved with Persephone were learning to read and explain anti-Semitism and

racism in feminist novels to a broad feminist audience. These incidents function as a form

of consciousness raising, not only for McGloin and Greenfield, but for many of the

women in their social, political, and publishing circles.

One crucial incident synthesized McGloin’s and Greenfield’s concerns about anti-

Semitism within the WLM: a manuscript from Jan Clausen. In October 1980, Jan

299
Gay Community News 9, no. 26 (January 23, 1982), 4.
300
Letter to GCN, Outgoing Correspondence 1982, Carton 3, Persephone Press Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

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Clausen queried Persephone Press about her novel manuscript Sinking, Stealing. Sinking,

Stealing is the story of Josie and Ericka. Josie is a non-Jewish lesbian whose Jewish

lover, Rhea, dies suddenly in a car accident; Ericka is Rhea’s daughter, who has lived

with Josie as a co-parent for most of her life. After Rhea’s death, Ericka’s father has sole

custody; he decides to move his family and Ericka from Brooklyn to Cleveland, OH,

severing the relationship between Josie and Ericka. Josie and Ericka, without any legal

rights to support their familial relationship, clandestinely leave Brooklyn and travel

around the United States searching for a way to preserve their relationship. Sinking,

Stealing explores the legal precariousness of lesbian families during the 1980s as well as

how differences of class and religion shaped intimate and familial relationships. The

women of Persephone Press, including Greenfield and McGloin, liked the initial material

and offered Clausen a contract for the novel, which was finalized in October 1981.

Clausen submitted the manuscript to Persephone in November 1981. In December 1981,

in an eleven-page memo, written by Pat McGloin and circulated to Maureen Brady, Elly

Bulkin, Michelle Cliff, Hattie Gossett, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Adrienne Rich,

Cynthia Rich, and Barbara Smith, McGloin outlined the concerns of Persephone Press

about Sinking, Stealing. McGloin begins,

Through the persona of Daniel Fein, Jan Clausen has created a despicable
character, ostensibly to address issues of male privilege, father privilege, and class
privilege. The act of a gentile (not to mention a white gentile from a privileged
class) choosing a Jewish man to symbolize these privileges is anti-Semitic. Jews
have been the scapegoats for the evils of capitalism and imperialism throughout
history. 301

301
Open Letter, Carton 3, Outgoing Correspondence 1981, Persephone Press Papers,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

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The memo continues with ten pages of quotations from the manuscript and a discussion

about how both Jews and gentiles are portrayed in Clausen’s novel manuscript. This

memo is passionately argued—and a withering attack on Clausen. Persephone circulated

this statement because “in the past week, various lesbian-feminist writers have

condemned Persephone’s judgement of Sinking, Stealing, accusing us of ‘stifling’ the

creativity of the writer or being ‘insensitive’ to emotional needs of the writer.”302

McGloin refutes this characterization; she states that Persephone stands behind its

judgment of Clausen’s novel and that the publishers hope that “these comments will not

only assist Jan Clausen in her necessary consciousness-raising, but will also help both

writers and readers in developing a sensitivity to anti-Semitism in lesbian literature.”303

In January 1982, Clausen and Persephone Press officially terminated the book contract. A

revised version of the novel was published by The Crossing Press in 1985.

Defining anti-Semitism in lesbian literature is an important outcome of this

incident—and the ones previously discussed. In her introduction to NJG, Beck analyzes

Clausen’s earlier short story collection, Mother, Daughter, Sister, Lover, as an example

of the perniciousness of anti-Semitism in feminist literature.304 While this conflict was,

justifiably, deeply painful for Clausen and her partner and fellow Persephone author, Elly

Bulkin, a Jew, it voiced concerns about anti-Semitism within the WLM and particularly

in lesbian-feminist literature. This incident with Clausen’s novel was known only to a

small but influential group of lesbian-feminist authors and publishers, but it defines a

302
Ibid.
303
Ibid.
304
“Why Is This Book Different from All Other Books? By Evelyn Torton Beck, Nice
Jewish Girls (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1982), xxvi.

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climate and a method of conflict management for these lesbian feminists. Close textual

analysis was an important strategy for lesbian-feminists to identify, articulate, and

analyze the material conditions of women’s lives. Like consciousness-raising groups, but

with written texts instead of spoken texts, lesbian-feminists understood this type of

analysis as central to consciousness-raising, as McGloin indicates in her letter. While the

method of a letter, shared with many people, may not be the most caring strategy to

address anti-Semitism (or any type of oppression), for this group of lesbian-feminists, the

written word was an important site of activism.

The conflict over Clausen’s manuscript informed a broader discussion about

conflict between publishers and authors, and particularly conflict between women of

color authors and Persephone. Barbara Smith initiated a conflict resolution session

between the authors, primarily women of color, and the Persephone publishers. On

January 30, 1982, Gloria Anzaldúa, Elly Bulkin, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara

Smith, Gloria Greenfield, and Pat McGloin met in New York City.305 Linda Powell

joined them as a facilitator. The group met to talk about “authors-publishers relations

with special attention to the following issues: feminist structures for dealing with conflict;

structures for dealing with differences related to our various identities; white publishers

and 3rd world writers establishing viable working relations.”306 A part of the concerns

that the authors brought to the table was the manner in which Persephone Press dealt with

the situation with Clausen’s book, in particular the contract termination. Although this

305
Letter from Barbara Smith January 7, 1982, Folder “Barbara Smith,” Carton 4,
Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
306
Letter from Barbara Smith January 22, 1982, Folder “Barbara Smith,” Carton 4,
Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

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conflict ostensibly was between the two white publishers at Persephone and a white

author, as the conflict unfolded it took on racial overtones.

The women of color published by Persephone, particularly Gloria Anzaldúa,

Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Barbara Smith, expressed concern about the

termination of Clausen’s contract—fearing that they might be treated similarly. Except

for Lorde, who was teaching at CUNY-Staten Island, for all of the authors, royalty

payments from books were their primary income source. Moreover, as Smith and Moraga

articulated in their earlier letter, they were concerned about the power dynamics between

them as authors of color and Greenfield and McGloin as white publishers.307

These power dynamics and the conflicts they engender are standard in

relationships between authors and publishers—disagreements about promotion, attention

that books get (or do not get) in reviews, availability of books in bookstores—but the

racial dichotomy of white publishers and women of color authors amplified the conflicts

and made them even more vital to these activists, all of whom were acutely committed to

their personal and political agenda to address, interrupt, and end institutionalized racism.

Lorde, Smith, Moraga, and Anzaldúa were discussing already the formation of Kitchen

Table Press when this meeting happened; the meeting certainly highlighted the need for a

press that women of color would control entirely.

Conflicts within Persephone about racism and anti-Semitism reverberated on

multiple levels. They shaped what Persephone published and how they published.

Directly or indirectly, they translated into the books that Persephone published. The

books that Persephone published, through their wide circulation, influenced how many

307
Minutes January 30, 1982 Meeting NYC, Folder “Barbara Smith,” Carton 4,
Persephone Press Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

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feminists and lesbian-feminists thought about racism, anti-Semitism, and lesbianism.

Through both their publishing and their political lives as publishers, Greenfield and

McGloin shaped lesbian-feminism as an ideology and subject position concerned with

anti-racism.

Conclusion

Persephone Press operated for eight years, though it published most intensively

between 1980 and 1983. The history of Persephone helps us to understand a number of

things about the history of feminism. First, Persephone maps the changing contours of

radical and cultural feminism. The project began at a time when radical feminism was

remaking itself into different expressions of feminism. The women of Persephone

respond to the evolution of radical feminism first with books that expressed feminist

spirituality and cultural feminism. Then, Persephone published books that articulate

different identity formations, particularly elaborations of lesbian feminism and woman of

color feminism. These books helped to articulate the forms and effects of anti-Semitism,

homophobia, and racism on women’s lives.

Identity elaborations are significant throughout the 1980s, not as a corrective to

feminist practices of the 1970s, but as a productive expansion of the theory and practices

of feminism during the 1970s. The political insight of building theory through personal

experience extends through the identity elaborations of the 1980s. The ideas of

consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s are re-expressed through books, often

anthologies, published in the 1980s. Rather than either a corrective to 1970s feminist

practices or the final death throes of feminism, identity elaborations are a conscious

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engagement of feminists to re-imagine and re-make the world to be more just, more

equitable, more truthful.

Another significant part of the story of Persephone is the sale of Persephone’s

assets to a commercial publishing house. This disposition of Persephone in 1983 is at

odds with the earlier rhetoric and convictions of Greenfield and McGloin; they fiercely

resisted the co-optation of lesbian-feminist work by commercial (heterosexual)

publishers. At the same time, given the financial pressures that they faced, it was critical

for them to sell at least a portion of the business to address their financial issues. Is the

sale of Persephone to Beacon a sign of the success of Persephone? Yes and no. Is the sale

of Persephone to Beacon an example of lesbian-feminists selling out to commercial

interests? Yes and no. The sale of Persephone to Beacon is never fully realized—not all

Persephone books are transferred to Beacon, and Persephone does not become an imprint

of Beacon as imagined at one point in the negotiations. In spite of these facts, the

intention of the sale contract that Greenfield and McGloin negotiated and signed is to

relinquish control of all aspects of Persephone to Beacon, a commercial publishing entity.

I use the word commercial with care, however; Beacon is a non-profit publisher, owned

and operated by the Unitarian Universalist Association. Beacon is a progressive

publisher, allied then and now with feminism. Through the lens of lesbian-feminist

publishers in 1983, however, the sale to Beacon is a form of selling out. Lesbian-feminist

control of the books was or would have been lost; this fact is part of the reason that so

many authors took the rights to their work from Persephone and brought the material to

other publishers, negotiating their own contracts and terms for subsequent publication.

From a historical perspective, however, the sale to Beacon demonstrates the significance

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of Persephone’s titles and the market at the time for lesbian-feminist literature. The

willingness of Beacon to purchase Persephone demonstrates the success of Persephone:

to create a bold market and demonstrate the demand for lesbian-feminist books.

Ultimately, Greenfield and McGloin made the decision to sell to Beacon not for strategic

political or philosophical reasons, but because of the economic necessity to raise cash to

pay creditors. In some ways, the sale of Persephone to Beacon demonstrates the

economic viability of lesbian-feminist print culture in the early 1980s, an achievement for

all of the women who labored to publish and create a market for lesbian-feminist books;

in other ways, the sale of Persephone is the final collapse of a company that tried to build

a business based on lesbian-feminist principles and ultimately could not sustain it.

Persephone mobilized identity elaborations and published political and theoretical

work. The books by Persephone enabled and extended identity elaborations during the

1980s. When reflecting on the closing of Persephone, its founders articulated the idea of

an on-going lesbian-feminist publishing environment. In an interview with Molly

Lovelock after Persephone closed, Greenfield and McGloin said, “We hope that the gap

will be filled by existing feminist publishers, and that new houses will be formed, just as

Persephone followed Diana Press.”308 A continuing genealogy of lesbian-feminist

publishing is significant. The historical narrative of lesbian-feminist presses is not

smooth; it is one with many stops and starts, hiccups and sputters; there are more stories

of challenges due to lack of money and lack of experience than there are successes. Yet,

lesbian-feminist presses persist; lesbian print culture endures. As Greenfield and

McGloin note, women look to the past to identify dreams and aspirations for their future.

308
Molly Lovelock, “Persephone Press: Why Did It Die?,” Sojourners 9, no. 1
(September 1983): 18.

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They looked to Diana Press and Daughters, Inc. to articulate their vision and define the

work at Persephone; they hoped others would do the same. The press that follows

Persephone, that continues its legacy, is Kitchen Table Press. Although the founders

already had organized Kitchen Table Press (KTP) when Persephone collapsed, the

collapse of Persephone enabled the growth of KTP through the acquisition of two key

titles—This Bridge Called My Back and Home Girls.

Two Postscripts

It is easy for me to idolize the work of lesbian-feminist publishers—and it is an

impulse that I resist in telling these stories. Sometimes, the antidote is in the archive—as

is the case with the opening narrative about the lesbian poetry reading. The idea of a

lesbian poetry reading attracting over eight hundred people enchants me; I have spent

many long hours thinking about how glorious the evening must have been for all

involved. In my mind, everything about the evening was perfect. An audio tape of the

event reveals that it was not. At the end of the evening, Gloria Greenfield spoke from the

stage.

During the second part of the poetry reading, a heterosexual couple came in and
ripped off the cash proceeds from the film showing. [The event organizers were
collecting money for a lesbian-feminist documentary.] So I am asking all of us to
dig deeper into our pockets and to donate to that. Also Persephone Press will be
giving five cartons of Woman, Church and State to New Words [the feminist
bookstore in Boston] and all of the cash and proceeds from those sales will go
into the benefit. All of the money will go to the defense fund. Please give money
as you go out.

Cash was stolen from other lesbian-feminists the night of the Lesbian Poetry Reading.

Greenfield’s announcement from the podium came under fire in subsequent weeks in the

feminist newspaper Sojourner; a few attendees wrote to the newspaper to complain that

Greenfield identified the thieves as heterosexual; they believed that this perpetrated

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oppressive politics. This story captures some of the politics of the time. Persephone

modeled good feminist citizenship by collecting money for an allied project; Persephone

demonstrated their support for the local feminist bookstore, and they modeled open and

transparent communication when money was stolen. The women who wrote letters to

Sojourner furthered the dialogue through public critique aimed at consciousness-raising

and critical reflection. This period of lesbian-feminist activism was a time of vibrant

dialogue; anything and at times seemingly everything was a site for debate and analysis

as well as a potential building-block for change.

The second post-script is about Greenfield herself. Today, Gloria Greenfield is

married to a man and produces documentary films; her most significant documentary to

date is The Case for Israel, a pro-Zionist film narrated by Alan Dershowitz. In a

statement for the Jewish Women’s Archive from the mid-2000s, Greenfield recounts the

experience with Clausen’s manuscript in the early 1980s. She writes:

The completed manuscript that we received months later turned out to be a novel
about a stereotypical Jewish capitalist landlord who was destroying peoples’ lives
by gentrifying Park Slope. Within an hour of reviewing the contract, we notified
this white, gentile author that her book contract was cancelled on the grounds of
its anti-Semitic stereotyping. The next day we were beckoned to a meeting in
New York to meet with several of our prominent women-of-color authors to
discuss the cancellation of Clausen’s contract.

In this reminiscence, Greenfield compresses the timeline of these events significantly. In

fact, the incident unfolded over a number of weeks, from early November 1981 through

late January 1982. Greenfield summarizes the meeting:

I began the conversation with the question, “Persephone Press cancelled the
contract for an anti-Semitic novel written by a white Christian woman. Why are
we here?” Their collective response was “She is a friend of women of color, so if
you hurt her, you hurt us.” In this very brief dialogue between Persephone Press
and the leading Hispanic and Black lesbian-feminist writers, poets, and
theoreticians, it became very clear that at worst, anti-Semitism was considered

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 acceptable, and at best anti-Semitism was considered insignificant. I had devoted
many years of my life to the radical feminist movement, and at this moment I
realized that I no longer wanted to contribute my life’s energy to it, nor did I want
to remain a part of it.

Greenfield characterizes the dialogue as brief; in fact, it was lengthy. It was a sustained

engagement among a group of women. While I do not doubt that in retrospect Greenfield

experienced fellow activists dismissing and minimizing anti-Semitism, from the archival

materials I have reviewed, Greenfield’s statement is too definitive. There was

simultaneously a deep concern with anti-Semitism as well as racism. To characterize one

or the other as insignificant is misleading. In her brief memoir, Greenfield concludes that

she has “not diminished my feminist consciousness” but integrated “the prioritization of

my Jewish identity.”309 Greenfield’s clarity about the meeting in retrospect is striking; the

conversation was not as direct at the time. In spite of these inaccuracies in Greenfield’s

account, her narration is important. It captures her response as an individual and as an

activist in these events.

Greenfield’s statement mirrors the definitively held passions of women about

feminism and lesbian-feminism during the years of my study. She presents herself as

certain in her beliefs and immediate in her actions; she leads the reader to understand and

nod with sympathy about her commitment to do Jewish identity work instead of radical

feminist work. Moreover, Greenfield echoes the feminist narrative of a click—a moment

when truth is realized. This epistemic formation emanates from another earlier moment in

feminist print culture—the first issue of Ms. Magazine in which women recounted the

click in their consciousness when they became a feminist.310 I think that Greenfield does

309
http://jwa.org/feminism/_html/JWA101.htm (accessed 1 April 2012).

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this unwittingly in her rhetoric, but these rhetorical flourishes have been adopted in

narrating stories about our lives. I call attention to both the narrative and the style of

narration because, while I appreciate the activist work that it does, it undermines our

understanding of the past as messy, uncertain, tentative, and emergent. Greenfield’s

presentation of the history of Clausen’s manuscript with Persephone is how some authors

and activists want us to view lesbian-feminism: as an ideology that drew clear lines with

moral opprobrium, as a political formation that could not contain multiple and competing

identity elaborations, as a theoretical framework that prioritized in a hierarchy different

kinds of oppression, as a movement that demanded that women choose what was

significant, what to prioritize. While some people certainly experienced lesbian-feminism

this way, particularly in retrospective narrations, in the moment it was not. In the

moment, it was uncertain, fluid, and reaching for inclusivity. It was people, primarily

women, who thought deeply, felt passionately, wrote thoughtfully, beautifully,

polemically, and who wanted to create a better world for their daughters and their sons.

They made mistakes along the way; people were hurt, deeply; there were political

successes and failures; there were existential and epistemological crises. Through it all,

though, there was humor, caring, compassion, love, and a belief that things could be

better for all of us in the future.

Long Haul Press

The story of the Brooklyn-based Long Haul Press is the story of one woman, Jan

Clausen, and her circle of friends in Brooklyn, NY. Long Haul Press authors were all

310
See the first issue of Ms. Magazine and Mary Thom’s Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the
Magazine and the Feminist Movement (New York: Henry Holt, 1998) and Amy Erdman
Farrell’s Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina press, 1998).

191
friends, colleagues, or family of Clausen. All of the books were produced at The Print

Center. In total, Clausen published six books between 1979 and 1987 under the imprint

Long Haul Press. The creation and distribution of books from Long Haul Press was a

community project among the writers and Clausen as publisher and writer herself. The

first two books Jan Clausen published though Long Haul Press were her own. In 1979,

she published her second book of poetry, Waking at the Bottom of the Dark, and in 1982

she published a chapbook length essay, A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and

Feminism, which analyzes poetry and feminism. Subsequently, Clausen published two

other poetry collections: in 1983, Dorothy Allison’s The Women Who Hate Me and in

1986 Judith McDaniel’s Metamorphosis, and Other Poems of Recovery. The final book

Clausen published, Twentieth Century Pioneer (1987) by Shannon Edna Wright, is by her

grandmother and is a personal narrative that describes “for my grandchildren and great-

grandchildren a vanished way of life on a farm in a wooded area of northern

Minnesota.”311 Twentieth Century Pioneer is a series of vignettes edited by Clausen.

The sixth book published by Long Haul Press was Yours In Struggle: Three

Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism. This book with three essays, one

each authored by Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, has a significant

life, traveling far outside the small press into both its first edition from Long Haul Press

and in its second 1988 edition from Firebrand Books. Yours In Struggle makes Long

Haul Press different from other small publishers and more like Persephone Press and

Kitchen Table Press because of its wide circulation and adoption as a course text in

Women’s Studies. As a textual artifact for thinking about feminist identity formations in

311
Wright, Twentieth Century Pioneer, 7.

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the 1980s, Yours In Struggle explores some of the central questions of identity during the

1980s and also hints textually at larger questions of identity formation and identity

transgression. I explicate these identity formations and transgressions by reading Yours In

Struggle and its publishing history in concert with two memoirs: Elly Bulkin’s Enter

Password: Recovery and Jan Clausen’s Apples and Oranges. Thus, this discussion of

Long Haul Press focuses on Yours In Struggle and the personal relationship between

Clausen as publisher of Long Haul Press and Bulkin as a writer and Clausen’s lover.

Elly Bulkin began contemplating writing about her Jewish identity when Gloria

Greenfield asked her to contribute an essay to New Jewish Girls. Bulkin didn’t contribute

to that collection—the timeline was too short for her comfort—but the seed was

planted.312 The germ of writing about Jewish identity took root after a painful experience;

it bloomed into Bulkin’s essay, “Hard Ground: Jewish Identity, Racism, and Anti-

Semitism,” in Yours In Struggle. The rejection of Clausen’s manuscript by Persephone

and the memo that Greenfield and McGloin circulated about anti-Semitism in Clausen’s

novel was painful both for Clausen and her lover. The critique was repeated in the

introduction by Evelyn Torton Beck in Nice Jewish Girls. Beck wrote, “Anti-Semitism

may also thoughtlessly be perpetuated even when Jews are more fully integrated into the

body of a literary text and not simply objectified as peripheral ‘others.’ This occurs

whenever portrayals of Jews, though plentiful, are limited to negative characteristics. For

example, while there are quite a number of Jewish characters in Jan Clausen’s short story

collection Mother, Daughter, Sister, Lover, not one of them has any positive

312
Personal communication with Jan Clausen, July 19, 2012.

193
attributes.”313 Beck continues providing an example from one of the stories in which the

Jewish characters are “stereotypically rich and crude” while the lesbian, “poor and

‘politically correct’ in her values” is “only ‘part Jewish.’”314 In another story, Beck

argues that Jewish experience is “trivialized” in a depiction of the Warsaw Ghetto

Uprising. This was a harsh critique of Clausen’s work; while Beck is careful to frame her

analysis in literary and political terms, the effects of her words and the circulation of the

letter were painful for both Clausen and Bulkin, who had been intimate partners and

collaborators since 1975. Clausen writes about the “climate in which the politics of a

range of identities—sexual, racial, ethnic—were being pursued in ways that increasingly

made my corner of dykedom feel like demolition derby.”315 Bulkin describes the

experience as “like having trash dumped all over the lawn, words scrawled on the

walls—the 3 a.m. act, not of the Klan or some local kids, but of the neighbors who for

years had been dropping by for coffee.”316 Beck’s critique of Clausen’s work began a

period in their lives, which both Clausen and Bulkin refer to as “the cloud.” This cloud

extended from 1981 until 1986. Bulkin wrote her essay for Yours In Struggle between

August 1982 and May 1984; it was published in the fall of 1984. The emotional content

of Bulkin and Clausen’s lives during “the cloud” was not limited to the pain caused by

accusations of anti-Semitism; during this period, Bulkin was also dealing with memories

of child sexual abuse and a deep depression. For Bulkin, writing the essay, “Hard

Ground: Jewish Identity, Racism, and Anti-Semitism,” was a way “to clarify; to argue for

313
Beck, Nice Jewish Girls, xxvi.
314
Ibid.
315
Clausen, Apples and Oranges, 156.
316
Bulkin, Password, 15.

194
complexity; perhaps more than anything, to affirm my intention not to crawl under a rock

and be heard from no more.”317

The circulation of Yours In Struggle, with support from the Astraea

Foundation,318 ensured that Bulkin was heard. Yours In Struggle became a feminist best

seller. The initial print run sold out, and the book was reissued by Firebrand Press in

1988. It was a staple in feminist classrooms, articulating a method for thinking about

multiple axes of oppression and for talking about responsible actions for people in

positions of power. When Long Haul Press published Yours In Struggle in the fall of

1984, feminist authors and activists were articulating an intersectional analysis of identity

in a variety of print locations. Four earlier, significant anthologies—All the Women are

White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), Home Girls (1983), This

Bridge Called My Back (1981), and Nice Jewish Girls (1981)—all extend an argument

within feminism about intersectional identity. Intersectional identities, intersectional

analyses, and intersectionality are phrases that describe the interactions of multiple

identity categories within individual bodies. Intersectional identities and intersectional

analyses also link the embodiment of individual identities with collective identities—

women of color, African-American women, Jewish women, working class women, and

so on. While the particular word intersectional emerges later in scholarly discourse319, a

317
Bulkin, Password, 16.
318
The Astraea Foundation was founded in 1977; Astraea made a grant of $700 to Long
Haul Press in the spring of 1984 (Astraea Foundation Newsletter, courtesy of Astraea
Foundation).
319
See Dill, Hill-Collins, Crenshaw, and Dill and Zambrana.

195
central project of feminism in the early 1980s was elaboration of these intersectional

relationships.

Yours In Struggle as a text presents some of the complexities of early feminist

thought about intersectionality and provides an excellent example of identity elaborations

in the middle of the 1980s. Yours In Struggle began with Bulkin’s essay in response to

her experience with “the cloud.” Bulkin and Barbara Smith decided to do a joint

publication when the National Women’s Studies Association invited both of them to be

on a plenary panel on racism and anti-Semitism at the 1983 conference. Minnie Bruce

Pratt was also on that panel. Together the three of them completed Yours In Struggle.

Pratt, Smith, and Bulkin acknowledge in the introduction the separate authorship of each

essay, saying “each of us speaks only for herself,” and that they “do not necessarily agree

with each other.” For the three of them with, in their words, “very different identities and

backgrounds—white Christian-raised Southerner, Afro-American, Ashkenazi Jew,” the

book “indicates concrete possibilities for coalition work.” Within their elaboration of

identities in the preface to the book are the multiple axes that each see as crucial to

identity, not only race, ethnicity, and religion but also regional location. The book itself is

a physical manifestation of what coalitions could be and how they might work.

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s essay, “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” opens the collection. In

it, Pratt ruminates on her personal experiences with racism and anti-Semitism in her life,

including her family’s ownership of slaves and the invisibility of Jewish people in her

southern town. Pratt struggles to find a standpoint as a white Christian-raised Southerner

to address and eventually oppose racism and anti-Semitism. Through writing, reading,

and activism, she discovers a way to strip away “layer after layer of my false identity,

196
notions of skin, blood, heart based in racism and anti-Semitism.” To “regain” her “self-

respect” and “to keep from feeling completely naked and ashamed of who it is I am,”

Pratt examines “what I have carried with me from my culture that could help me in the

process.”320 Pratt unearths a history of resistance and hope that connects her to the

“history, people, and place”321 and provides a foundation for her to act in opposition to

racism and anti-Semitism. The process that Pratt narrates in her essay is one of identity

elaboration for people whose identities link them to some aspects of power and privilege,

like being white and raised Christian, even as in other parts of their identity they may be

marginalized, like being lesbian. Pratt’s essay offered an intersectional identity analysis

and elaboration for feminists that served as a theoretical model for a variety of women. It

was not limited to particular identity categories; that is, it was not limited to non-

dominant racial-ethnic people in the United States (African-Americans, Latinos/as, Jews),

but rather was a way of thinking that could be adapted by all people who wished to

examine power and privilege.

Pratt concludes her essay with reflections on the political environment of the

United States in the early 1980s including increasing globalization in which “the

economic foundation of this country is resting on the backs of women of color here, and

in Third World countries”322 and the shaping of foreign policy in the Reagan

administration “by evangelical Christian beliefs that hold the U.S. has a divine calling to

“protect the free world” from godless, evil, “perverted” communism.”323 For Pratt,

320
Pratt, Yours in Struggle, 43.
321
Ibid, 44.
322
Ibid, 54.

197
articulating her own privilege and responsibility and naming the larger economic and

political forces shaping women’s lives is at the root of feminism and of her feminist

identity elaborations.

Barbara Smith’s essay, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships

between Black and Jewish Women,” makes similar moves to articulate embodied

standpoints to address racism and anti-Semitism. Smith addresses Jewish women and

African-American women in separate sections to “cover what I need to say to Black

women and what I need to say to Jewish women” even as she acknowledges that “this

essay would be read in its entirety by both Black and Jewish women, as well as by

individuals from a variety of other backgrounds.”324 In this way, Smith animates through

the text a variety of conversations both spoken directly and “overheard.” By addressing

multiple groups separately and simultaneously, Smith demonstrates, through the

construction of the text itself, the possibilities of coalition that Bernice Johnson Reagon

had suggested in her essay, “Coalition Politics.”325 For Smith, coalition work is the

foundation for addressing issues of racism and anti-Semitism; she writes “to encourage

better understanding between us and to support the possibility of coalition work.”326

Smith recognizes the expediency of labeling and dismissing people: “All of us resort to

323
Ibid, 55.
324
Smith, Yours in Struggle, 69.
325
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” Home Girls, edited by Barbara Smith
(Brooklyn, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1983). I note here that Smith’s essay was also first
delivered as a speech, as was Reagon’s “Coalition Politics.” Katie King’s work explores
how feminists valued a variety of textual and verbal constructions (Chapter 3, “The
Politics of the Oral and the Written” in Theory in Its Feminist Travels (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994).
326
Smith, Yours in Struggle, 85.

198
this tactic when the impact of our different histories, cultures, classes, and skins backs us

up against the wall and we do not have the courage or desire to examine what, if

anything, of value lies between us.”327 Smith acknowledges the fractiousness of identity

elaborations by feminists. I do not mean to minimize or dismiss the conflict and pain that

particular identity elaborations caused for individual feminists and communities of

feminists; rather, I wish to explicate the productive work that identity elaborations did

and try, as Smith does in her essay to create a space that is “both” “and.”

Bulkin’s essay is the longest of all the essays in Yours In Struggle. It is divided

into nine sections. Each section layers different elements of complexity to the questions

Bulkin struggles to write about in the text, primarily questions about relationships

between Blacks and Jews individually and collectively as well as the relationship

between Israel and Palestine, a flashpoint for Jewish identity formation. Bulkin situates

the relationship between Israel and Palestine as crucial for Jewish feminists to interrogate

as a method for thinking about oppression in personal as well as structural terms.328

Bulkin concludes her essay with a series of questions for discussion in small groups,

harkening back to the roots of consciousness-raising in the WLM. Deeply concerned with

multiple standpoints through which feminism can view both anti-Semitism and racism,

Bulkin elaborates how feminists counter racism and anti-Semitism in particular activist

formations. In the end, Bulkin articulates a nuanced, situated standpoint for perceiving

anti-Semitism and racism as a Jewish feminist. Bulkin concludes, “I resist the temptation

to end with a closing burst of optimism, a reference to sisterhood, unity, or revolution. I

327
Ibid.
328
I am indebted to Jan Clausen and our on-going conversations for sharpening my
thinking about Long Haul Press and Yours in Struggle.

199
am neither a visionary nor an optimist. I have sat in too many meetings and been in too

many groups to be either. But I do believe in the absolute necessity of fighting anti-

Semitism and racism and in the possibility of political change. And I do know that there

is much work to be done.”329 In this conclusion, Bulkin acknowledges the end of the type

of exuberant feminist sisterhood that we encounter in early writings from the WLM;330

Bulkin echoes Bonnie Thornton Dill’s prescription from 1983 for the “abandonment of

the concept of sisterhood as a global construct based on unexamined assumptions about

our similarities.” Yours in Struggle works to examine questions of difference in a political

and strategic way as Dill suggests. The production of Yours In Struggle as both an

intellectual product and as a physical artifact responds to Dill’s challenge for “a more

pluralistic approach that recognizes and accepts the objective differences between

women.”331 In each essay, Bulkin, Smith, and Pratt explore new articulations of feminist

identity with greater complexity and attention to both the embodied and lived conditions

of women.

Bulkin’s, Smith’s, and Pratt’s production of identity in Yours in Struggle

demonstrates exactly the type of dynamic tension in identity politics that Fuss explores in

Essentially Speaking. Fuss argues that in the intellectual milieu of identity politics “all

representations of identity” are “simultaneously possible and impossible.”332 Indeed, this

329
Bulkin, Yours in Struggle, 193.
330
Clausen notes that Bulkin’s work was “always skeptical and temperamentally opposed
to exactly this kind of oversimplifying exeuberance.
331
Bonnie Thorton Dill, “Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive
Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 146.
332
Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 102.

200
was the case for the authors of Yours in Struggle—and for many other lesbian-feminists

in the early 1980s—who were producing new identities through their writing and

publishing work. The possibilities of imagining new identities, new coalitions, and new

political actions fueled the creative work of lesbian-feminists, even as the impossibilities

discouraged and disheartened them. Fuss asserts that “such a view of identity as unstable

and potentially disruptive, as alien and incoherent, could in the end produce a more

mature identity politics by militating against the tendency to erase differences and

inconsistencies in the production of stable political subjects.”333 The view of identity as

unstable, disruptive, alien and incoherent is exactly the type of identity elaboration that

Pratt, Smith, and Bulkin articulate in Yours In Struggle, even as they each make moves

that stabilize identity for political and strategic purposes. The genesis of the book for

Bulkin is a disruptive and unstable experience; the publication of the book itself by the

three women in collaboration with Clausen as publisher is meant to disrupt ideas about

identity, politics and coalitions for the readers of the book. Lesbian-feminists grappled

with the epistemological challenges that Fuss identifies in her work even as they

continued to produce new writing, new books, and new methods of political engagement.

As the charges of anti-Semitism against Clausen began to recede into memory,

another conflict about identity emerged. This time the conflict arose not among other

members of their close-knit feminist community but between Bulkin and Clausen. To

state it plainly, Clausen had an affair. With a man. Bulkin “raged—about men, about

roles, about women who could pass as straight.” In her memoir, she continues in a poetic

vein, “About betrayal./In our home./After twelve years.//And we had been dykes

333
Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 104.

201
together.”334 For Bulkin, the end of the relationship is filled with rage and betrayal.

Clausen experiences similar emotions, though with a different valence. In her memoir,

Clausen riffs the Judy Grahn poem, “Carol, in the park, chewing on straws” from her

series “The Common Woman Poem.” Grahn writes, “She has taken a woman

lover/whatever shall we do”; Clausen riffs, “She has taken a male lover, whatever shall

we do.”335 While Clausen recollects the experience with some levity, the consequences of

her break-up were significant. She and Bulkin “used to joke about being card-carrying

dykes”336 and together “helped make all of these rules”337 about what it means to be

lesbian and feminist. Now she experienced herself as “exiled from the Garden of

Dykedom.”338 In the end, the dozen-year partnership of Clausen and Bulkin, both

intimate and in publishing and writing, ended. For both women, the question of identity is

at the center of the end of their relationship. Though the end of Clausen and Bulkin’s

intimate relationship operates in a different register than the questions of identity

elaborations in Yours in Struggle, the central questions are similar. Bulkin asks in her

memoir, “Who’s a lesbian? Who a bisexual?. . .What is the relationship between sex and

lesbian identity? Who speaks for (and represents) the lesbian communities? And who

decides?”339 These questions, with different variables, are the same questions addressed

in Yours In Struggle. The answers lie in the elaboration of identities and in new identity

334
Bulkin, Password, 62.
335
Clausen, Apples and Oranges, 10.
336
Ibid.
337
Ibid., 12.
338
Ibid., 10.
339
Bulkin, Password, 67.

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formations, articulated through changing political and life circumstances. In Fuss’s

words, this work is disruptive and alien; I would add it is also vitalizing and invigorating

for communities and for publishing.

Reflecting on the aftermath of her break-up, Clausen indicts the lesbian

community of poets and writers in Brooklyn for shunning her. Her story of transgressing

lesbian identity and the responses of other lesbian-feminists was widely publicized in

“My Interesting Condition,” an article that ran in Out/Look in 1990. The timing and

circumstances of the public unraveling of Clausen and Bulkin’s relationship dovetails

with changing identity elaborations and changing sites of publishing about these identity

elaborations in the late 1980s. For Clausen, publishing began as a way to engage in

dialogue within “the new feminist world of multi-issue activism all mixed up with ideas

and books.”340 By 1990, when she published the article in Out/Look, elaborations on the

identity of lesbian-feminist waned; power and potency emerged from different identity

formations: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer. Clausen’s personal publishing history

traces these changes from lesbian-feminist presses with national distribution to a new,

glossy, national gay and lesbian magazine. With the emergence of new types of identity

elaborations, particularly a co-gendered gay and lesbian movement and the complexities

of “queer” and “bisexual,” new publishing vehicles emerged as sites for these identity

elaborations.

I trace these very personal and at times painful stories not as a way to engage in

gossip about authors whom, frankly, I revere, but rather as a mechanism to think about

identity elaborations and how imbricated they are with lesbian print culture. Elaborating

340
Clausen, “My Interesting Condition,” Out/Look 7 (Winter 1990): 12.

203
identities is done through print—through stories, essays, poems, and other printed

artifacts. As identities transform and mutate over time, people respond to these identity

elaborations with new publishing vehicles. Rather than seeing debates about identity as a

dead end for feminist politics, I embrace them as representing a keen engagement of

feminism in a broader vision of social justice. The identity elaborations of feminism

throughout the 1980s offer new political engagements for lesbian-feminists in issues of

social justice, including Central American solidarity work, anti-nuclear work, the Middle

East, and AIDS. These moments of identity elaboration in the 1980s also generate new

publishing ventures to support the creations of writers and artists engaged in new

articulations of identity formations.

Kitchen Table Press

Kitchen Table Women of Color Press (hereafter KTP) was the first publisher

owned and operated by, for and about women of color. Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith

discussed the concept for KTP in 1980; Smith convened the first meeting to discuss KTP

in the fall of 1980 and announced the formation of KTP at the second Women in Print

conference in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1981. KTP began publishing in 1983 and

published consistently until 1992. From 1993 until 1997, a transition team tried to re-

invigorate KTP, but ultimately the press closed in 1997.

In this section, I narrate a history of KTP from a variety of sources, primarily

published accounts of KTP, but also some archival material and oral history interviews. I

trace the history of KTP by reviewing the books and materials that KTP published to

examine how these books fueled feminist activist formations and feminist identity

categories. One of the key distinctions of KTP from other lesbian-feminist presses

204
emphasized in the existing literature is that it is the only publisher owned and operated by

women of color. In addition, three characteristics distinguish KTP from other lesbian-

feminist presses: KTP published an array of print objects; book distribution is central to

the operation of KTP; and KTP functioned as a resource and clearinghouse for feminists

of color. These practices of the press shape the business structure and economic

operations of KTP, and they shape how KTP operated as a social change agent. These

practices also illuminate further the significance of KTP as a publisher by, for, and about

women of color.

In addition to examining the material practices of KTP, I discuss the interventions

of KTP into feminist formations in the 1980s and early 1990s. Like Persephone Press and

Long Haul Press, KTP played a critical role in identity elaborations; KTP both

consolidates and elaborates woman of color as an identity category and woman of color

feminism as a feminist formation. KTP also plays a crucial role in defining an emerging

form of feminist activism and women’s studies scholarship: transnational feminism.

In 1980, Audre Lorde said to Barbara Smith, “We really need to do something

about publishing.” In this statement, Lorde asserts the need to engage in publishing as a

site for activism and social transformation. This conversation prompted Barbara Smith to

organize a meeting at her home in Roxbury, MA, on Halloween weekend in 1980 “when

Audre and other women from New York were in town to do a Black women’s poetry

reading.”341 That weekend, Lorde, Smith, and others discussed what became Kitchen

Table Women of Color Press.

341
Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” in
Communications at the Crossroads: The Gender Gap Connection (Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Publishing Corporation, 1989), 202-207.

205
 The first description of KTP was a single sentence, “Kitchen Table: Women of

Color Press is the only publisher in North America committed to publishing and

distributing the writing of Third World Women of all racial/cultural heritages, sexualities,

and classes.”342 This mission statement highlights three key aspects of the press:

publishing and distribution, commitment to the constituency of Third World Women, and

a commitment to exploring the intersections of race, sexuality, and class. Smith reflects,

“On the most basic level, Kitchen Table Press began because of our need for autonomy,

our need to determine independently both the content and conditions of our works, and to

control the words and images that are produced about us.”343 This assertion of autonomy

is a central tenet of KTP. One way that KTP articulated the values of autonomy and

control is in the first edition of This Bridge published by KTP. In the front matter to the

book is the following statement: “The following, then is the second edition of This Bridge

Called My Back, conceived of and produced entirely by women of color.” This statement

locates power and autonomy as emanating from the object of the book itself. It alludes to

the history of wrenching the book away from Persephone, following its closure, and into

the hands of women of color as publishers. While women of color conceived and played

a role in the production of the first edition of This Bridge, the ownership of Persephone

by two white women made its production not exclusively a project of women of color. In

the second edition of This Bridge, KTP asserts the value of controlling all aspects of

production. This value—controlling all aspects of production—emerges from both

feminism and black liberation. Both ideologies included a strong strain of separatism as a

342
Ibid., 202 and printed materials from KTP.
343
Ibid., 202.

206
strategy to strengthen autonomy through withdrawal from white hegemonic culture. The

desire of KTP to control all aspects of production, as evidenced by the front matter of

This Bridge, expresses these values.

Smith continues, “As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had

no options for getting published, except at the mercy or whim of others, whether in the

context of alternative or commercial publishing, since both are white-dominated.”344

While other lesbian-feminist writers worked to create a division between lesbian-feminist

presses and commercial presses, Smith unites the two as both dominated by white people.

Smith’s statement is true; as owners and operators of publishing houses, white people

dominated lesbian-feminist publishing. Smith’s statement, however, implies that lesbian-

feminist presses were monocultural. I refute this characterization. Yes, the principals of

many lesbian-feminist presses were white women, but Smith’s homogenizing

appellations flatten the output of lesbian-feminist presses. Lesbian-feminist presses

published many important books by women of color. In addition, women of color

participated prominently in feminist cooperative or collective presses, including the

Women’s Press Collective. Women of color also published their own books through

independent imprints, particularly SDiane Bogus, who operated WIM Books, LindaJean

Brown, Stephania Byrd, and doris davenport.345 Smith’s statement that alternative

publishers are dominated by white people had extraordinary political value in 1989 and

throughout the life of KTP; it highlighted the important work of KTP and drew attention

344
Ibid., 202.
345
Becky Birtha highlighted these authors in “Celebrating Themselves: Four Self-
Published Black Lesbian Authors” published in off our backs 15, no. 7 (June 31, 1985):
22.

207
to the power of publishing, one of Lorde’s intentions in instigating the press. Through

retrospective appraisals of lesbian-feminist publishing, however, we need greater nuance

to appraise lesbian-feminist publishing and to explore the ecosystem of writers and

publishers with attention to race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Originally a collective and based in Boston, Massachusetts, the collective

formally launched KTP at the second Women in Print Conference, held in Washington,

DC, from October 1st through 4th, 1981. In the spirit of WIP, the announcement of

KTP’s birth was an opportunity for others in feminist publishing to lend support to the

new operation and for women of color authors to learn about a new vehicle for

publishing. There were significantly more African-American women and women of color

at the second WIP conference than the first conference. Of the over 250 attendees at WIP

conference, about 10% of them were African-American.346 The conscious attention to

racial-ethnic diversity in organizing the conference was one of the achievements of the

second WIP conference; it represented a commitment within WIP—and the feminist

movement more broadly—to attend to questions of racial-ethnic diversity. At the

conference, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and Hattie Gossett, three of the founders of

KTP, facilitated a workshop titled, “Third World Feminist Publishing: Prospects and

Problems.” In this workshop, Moraga, Smith, and Gossett outlined the necessity for

creating KTP: “the suppression by establishment and leftist presses and the difficulties

with feminist presses” which oob described as “ironed out with considerable struggle and

346
Fran Moira, “Women in Print: Overview,” off our backs 11, no. 11 (December 31,
1981): 2.

208
dependent on the intercession of supportive white feminists.”347 Some of the conflicts I

discussed previously between McGloin and Greenfield of Persephone Press and women

of color authors had not occurred yet when this conference happened; thus, as I have

suggested, the stories that I tell are part of a broader narrative of conflict and struggle

around the issues of race within the lesbian-feminist presses.

In late 1981, Smith and Moraga, who were lovers and members of the KTP

collective, moved to New York City “because that’s where the real energy for the press

seemed to be.”348 KTP lists seven members in the collective as of November 1982: Sonia

Alvarez, Myrna Bain, Brenda Joyce, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Mariana Romo-

Carmona, and Barbara Smith. In 1983, KTP published its first catalogue. The catalogue

included books they had published or were planning to publish as well as books they

were distributing. Cheryl Clark’s self-published book, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition

of Black Women, was the first book KTP distributed. Using the Iowa City Women’s Press

as a printer, Clark published the first edition of Narratives on December 1st, 1982. The

self-published edition quickly sold out; KTP published the second edition of Narratives

under the KTP imprint.349 The first book KTP published, in March 1983, was Cuentos:

Stories by Latinas. The KTP catalogue describes Cuentos as “the first collection of short

fiction by Latinas written from a feminist-political perspective which includes work by

women from the U.S. and Latin America, both in English and Spanish.” At the time, KTP

347
Fran Moira, “Racism and Classism in Feminist Periodicals, Bookstores, Publishing
Organizations, off our backs 11, no. 11 (December 31, 1982): 10.
348
Barbara Smith, interview by Loretta Ross, transcript of video recording, May 7, 2003,
Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 79.
349
The second edition had 2-3 additional poems (Interview with Cheryl Clarke).

209
was also thinking about a book “focusing on the situation of women of color in

prison.”350

From the beginning KTP envisioned its role as both a publisher and distributor of

books by women of color. In the spring 1983 catalogue, KTP included ten other books:

two book by Fay Chiang (published by Sunbury Press), the Persephone Press edition of

This Bridge as well as Zami and Home Girls from Persephone, two books written by

Barbara Smith, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are

Brave (The Feminist Press) and Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (a pamphlet from Out

& Out Books), Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (Spinsters Ink, 1980), and Black Lesbians:

An Annotated Bibliography (Naiad Press, 1981).351

While book distribution created problems for Persephone, for KTP, distributing

books expanded its offerings and helped KTP to achieve part of its mission: greater

visibility for women of color authors. By distributing books, KTP brought books together

in a single catalogue for readers and book buyers, resulting in greater visibility for the

books, for the authors, and for KTP as a publisher and distributor.

Securing start-up capital for KTP was an issue. Other feminist presses relied on

personal wealth, money raised from family members, commercial businesses, or

fortuitous financial situations, like the distribution of A Feminist Tarot. Audre Lorde

“donated substantial earnings from her readings” to KTP to help KTP start.352 KTP also

raised money with a fundraising letter. In their initial fundraising efforts, KTP used the

350
File 1, Cheryl Clarke Papers, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library..
351
Nicholson Archives, folder KTP, Duke University.
352
Alexis DeVeaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2004), 277.

210
Working Women’s Institute as a fiduciary agent to secure tax-deductible contributions

from the community. The collective wrote that the “anticipated costs for producing and

distributing 5,000 copies of Cuentos is $15,000.” The collective notes in their letter,

“Unlike some other successful alternative publishers, no member of our collective brings

to Kitchen Table personal wealth that would keep Kitchen Table functioning. As women

of color the resources that we do rely upon are our minds, our bodies, our commitment,

and our dreams of a global communication network that will connect women of color

everywhere.”353 The Collective situates their work as both akin to other alternative

publishers but different from those publishers by virtue of being only for women of color.

This letter highlights the economic disparity between the alternative publishers

(presumed white) and KTP as a women of color press. By soliciting funding through a

community-based appeal, KTP actually expands the audience for their books and the

constituency of KTP. They are not simply a publisher producing commodities for the

market-place, but a community, exemplified in the first person plural, building a global

communications network to “connect women of color everywhere.” This rhetoric echoes

earlier calls for universal sisterhood from the WLM but focuses on women of color.

While women of color are foregrounded in the fundraising appeal and in other

printed material from KTP, I understand the use of the first person plural—in relationship

to women of color—as not an exclusive rhetorical strategy but as a subtly inclusive one.

KTP is by, for, and about women of color, but the books are not only sold to women of

color or to women for that matter. The public presentation of KTP is as a separatist

publisher, but the distribution and organizing, while focused on women of color, includes

353
Fundraising Letter November 20, 1982, Folder “Kitchen Table Press,” Cheryl Clarke
Papers, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.

211
white women and men, particularly men of color. The marketing and promotion

strategies for the objects produced by KTP extend into feminist communities, lesbian

communities, and communities of color. Thus the “our” is a community that is

simultaneously delimited and open. The referent, women of color, is clear, but the “our”

invites allies to join as well.

In 1983, KTP encountered what was a nightmare situation for Smith and some

other members of the collective: Persephone closed. The downward spiral of Persephone

from January through June of 1983, culminating with filing bankruptcy, meant that books

were not being shipped to bookstores and other distribution sites. The uncertainty of

bankruptcy and the assigning of contract rights to Beacon Press meant that many others,

including Smith and Lorde, had to sue in order to regain rights to their work. During this

period, which lasted between twelve and eighteen months, it was difficult for women to

acquire copies of This Bridge, and the planned publication of Home Girls was delayed.

The end of Persephone, however, was an incredible opportunity for KTP. It brought two

crucial titles to KTP: This Bridge and Home Girls. After the legal issues with Persephone

were resolved, KTP sold the stock of This Bridge from Persephone. KTP did the first

printing of Home Girls. These two books are the best-selling books for KTP. In 1986,

FBN reported that KTP went back to press for a fifth printing of This Bridge, bringing a

total of 35,000 copies into the marketplace; Home Girls went back to press for a total of

17,500 copies in the marketplace. These two books and their strong sales brought crucial

revenue to the press.

KTP expanded through 1984 and 1985. In the spring of 1984, Smith and Moraga

approached activist Betty Powell about taking on “some kind of coordinating function”

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for KTP. Powell “had spent 19 years in educational and public service work; done

political organizing in the gay and feminist communities for ten years, and used her

experience in fundraising as a founding member of the Astraea Foundation.” Powell

joined KTP officially in September 1984 as “the first and only full-time paid staff

member.”354

When Powell joined KTP as a paid staff member, the collective structure was

breaking down. Smith continued to be integral to KTP as a volunteer, but to build KTP as

an institution, KTP hired additional staff people. Powell hired Lynn Kagawa to work on

distribution—including automating the billing system for bookstores. KTP began as a

volunteer collective, but the material conditions of the lives of collective members

changed by the mid-1980s. Members had less time and energy to dedicate to volunteer

activities, necessitating hiring paid staff. While one part of this reality was the increasing

stature and income of some members of the collective, particularly Audre Lorde, there

were larger economic shifts afoot as well. During the mid-1980s, the U.S. economy

continued to shift from an industrial economy to an information and service economy.

Increased work hours to satisfy basic living needs characterized this period. In addition, a

series of recessions and increasing globalization made workers more economically

insecure. Limited time and increased economic insecurity limited the amount of time for

voluntary projects. These larger economic dynamics affected KTP and other lesbian-

feminist publishing projects.

354
Tricia Lootens, “Third National Women in Print Conference,” off our backs 15, no. 8
(September 30, 1985): 8.

213
 With paid staff and a growing publishing program, KTP expanded its outreach at

conferences to both sell books and do political outreach. Powell and Smith described this

part of their work as “not only discovering, but creating an audience: an audience of

people of color, they stressed, not just of lesbians or women of color.”355 In many ways,

more than a publisher, Smith, in particular viewed KTP as a platform for political

organizing—a way to meet people and change consciousness. She noted that “at many

conferences, the press’s book table also becomes a political gathering point.”356 That

same year, as a part of their outreach and organizing strategy, KTP published a large

catalogue. Smith and Powell report that 40,000 copies of the catalogue were in

circulation.357 The robustness of the catalogue was made possible by the commitment to

not only publish work but also distribute it.

In 1985, KTP initiated the pamphlet series and published five pamphlets in 1985

and 1986. These pamphlets, in addition to presenting an essay by a prominent writer, also

included a resource listing of organization and publications; they were individually

“shrink wrapped with a wearable button reflecting the pamphlet’s theme.”358 The five

pamphlets demonstrate the multiple political commitments of KTP. The first pamphlet

was a reprint of “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” with the subtitle “Black

Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties” and a new foreword by Barbara

Smith. It included a button with the slogan: BLACK FEMINISM LIVES! The second

355
Ibid.
356
Ibid.
357
Ibid.
358
FBN 8, no. 6 (June/July 1986): 33.

214
pamphlet contained two essays: Audre Lorde’s “Apartheid U.S.A.” and Merle Woo’s

“Our Common Enemy, Our Common Cause: Freedom Organizing in the Eighties.” This

pamphlet made connections between South African apartheid and North American racism

and included the button: NO TO APARTHEID, NO TO RACISM. The third pamphlet

was another essay by Audre Lorde, “I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across

Sexualities”; it included a button with the universal NO symbol slashed across

HOMOPHOBIA. The fourth pamphlet was by Barbara Omolade: “It’s a Family Affair:

The Real Lives of Black Single Mothers,” with a button that said: “Black Single Mothers:

We Are Family.” The final pamphlet was by Angela Y. Davis, “Violence Against

Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism,” with a button that said “Fight Racism,

Fight Rape.” Taken as a whole, this pamphlet series was an innovative publishing project,

bringing short and incisive texts to people at a low cost (the pamphlets ranged in price

from $2.95 to $3.50) and pairing them with a visible political statement through the

button. This pamphlet series, with its combination of text and physical symbol of

activism, represents an important innovation of KTP: the mass production and circulation

of booklets as tools for organizing and activism. They also demonstrate the intellectual

foundations of KTP: promoting an intersectional analysis of people’s lives on multiple

axes of oppression.

During 1985, KTP also incorporated as a non-profit organization to be “eligible

for both grants and a special bulk mailing permit.” Smith noted that nonprofit status was

controversial among some lesbian-feminist publishers, who worried about “government

interference” in their operations. For Smith, incorporating as a non-profit was an

economic question. At a 1985 WIP workshop, Smith said, “White women have large

215
amounts of disposable income; people leave them money, write them checks.”359 KTP,

operated by women of color with less access to disposable income, could not afford to

exclude the possibility of finding grant money.

In 1985, at the third Women in Print Conference in Oakland, CA, Smith told

participants in a workshop on the status of KTP that in the spring of 1983, “Persephone

Press decided to go out of business—and the emphasis is on ‘decided.’”360 Smith presents

an alternate narrative to the end of Persephone with the suggestion that Greenfield and

McGloin chose to walk away from Persephone; she also intimates that their choice was

aided, in part, because they were walking away from women of color authors who have

less value than white authors. Smith continued to note that “at the time Persephone had

four or five books by women of color either in print or accepted for publication,” and

without KTP, “Home Girls might never had existed, and Bridge might have been a

memory.”361 Smith acknowledges that she “made a decision not to talk about it” because

“our movement loves the gossip level, even though we pretend not to.”362 Smith’s

assertion that Persephone decided to go out of business has merit. Yes, the financial

situation at Persephone was grave, but Greenfield and McGloin were also burned out.

There is a valid argument that the concatenation of economic and personal problems

caused McGloin and Greenfield to decide to close the business. Whether Persephone

closed in a failure that could not be prevented by the principals or because the principals

359
Third National Women in Print Conference” by Tricia Lootens, off our backs 15, no.
8, (September 30, 1985): 8.
360
Ibid.
361
Ibid.
362
Ibid.

216
decided to close Persephone, the end of Persephone had negative consequences on a

handful of books by women of color—books that were at the time extraordinarily

significant and whose significance would only continue to grow. I view the situation as

creating a unique opportunity for KTP to flourish, though I appreciate Smith’s lingering

anger and resentment about the end of Persephone.

Again the nexus between the personal and the structural creates a potent dynamic.

Feminist analyses make connections between the personal and the political, or structural,

and these analyses make situations like the collapse of Persephone fraught with meaning.

In reporting on the workshop at the third WIP conference for off our backs, Lootens

reflects that “the Persephone story seemed to me to hit home: if women of colors’ gains

were precarious where Persephone was concerned, they looked equally precarious at the

conference; and although Smith didn’t explicitly draw the connection, I felt it was in the

air.”363 The third WIP conference in 1985 did not have the same high level of

participation from women of color as the second one did in 1981. In 1981, women at the

WIP conference celebrated the gains in access for women of color to the conference and

the strides of the movement in building a multicultural community; by 1985, these gains

had eroded as feminist and lesbian-feminist publishing faced new challenges in the

political and economic climate in the United States under the Reagan administration.

Unbeknownst to Smith, her statements about deciding—or not—to go out of

business were prescient: in 1986 and 1987, KTP encountered difficulty. Reflecting on the

period in 1998, Smith wrote, “the Press shifted quickly from being a ‘collective’ of

women who did at least some of the necessary work voluntarily to being an organization

363
Ibid.

217
in which everyone (except for me) got paid for their time. . . .the attempt to maintain

several paid staff positions, as well as other negative forces, led by 1986 to the Press’s

crisis.”364 Smith intervened in the KTP crisis and prevented the failure of KTP. In 1987,

she moved KTP from Brooklyn to her new home in Albany, NY. When she moved the

bank account to a local Albany bank, “we had less than three dollars in the bank and tens

of thousands of dollars in debt, owed mostly to our printer.” Amazingly, in a great act of

devotion and tenacity, Smith, with a new friend in Albany, Lucretia Diggs, saved KTP,

kept it solvent and continuing to publish.

In Albany, four people worked with KTP on a regular basis, including Smith,

Diggs, and an array of more temporary workers, including one white Jewish woman.365

KTP had offices at the Albany Urban League/NAACP building, building an important

alliance between the feminist press and these two historic civil rights organizations. The

years between 1987 and 1993 were productive for KTP. KTP published six original titles

between 1987 and 1993: A Comrade is as Precious as a Rice Seedling by Mila D.

Aguilar in 1987; Mitsuye Yamada’s Desert Run: Poems and Stories and Hisaye

Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories in 1988; Gloria T. Hull’s Healing

Heart: Poems 1973-1988 in 1989; Audre Lorde’s Need: A Chorale for Black Woman

Voices in 1990; and Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Poems in 1992. Yamada’s

book was the last book published by KTP.

KTP published fifteen books and pamphlets during the fifteen years of its

operation. One of the distinguishing characteristics of KTP is the variety of printed

364
Smith, The Truth that Never Hurts (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998),
197-198.
365
Smith, Truth, 200-201.

218
materials that the press published. In addition to traditional trade books and the influential

pamphlet series, in 1991, KTP “printed a poster in protest against the U.S. Senate’s

disregard for Anita Hill’s testimony at the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation

hearings in 1991.”366 The poster included “the signatures of 1603 supporters inside a

woman’s silhouette.” This type of publishing—beyond the bounds of traditional

publishers—demonstrates the activist intent of KTP as well as the flexibility of the press

to respond to emergent activist needs. 1983 was the most productive publishing year;

KTP reissued Narratives under its imprint and published Cuentos. In addition, KTP

reissued This Bridge and published Home Girls, both of which it acquired after

Persephone closed. Textual accretions—the list of KTP titles extending over a decade,

the designation of women of color, in both the press’s name and in its mission

statement—make meaning. From the initial collective, which included women with a

variety of racial-ethnic heritages, to the books published by KTP, KTP unified women of

color under that designation.

One way of understanding KTP is as a publisher that consolidated the identity

formation, women of color, and the feminist formation, women of color feminism. KTP’s

publishing practices and their rhetoric supports this interpretation of KTP. At the same

time, KTP also continued the practice of identity elaboration. The books and materials

published by KTP reflect a continuing evolution of women of color as an identity

formation—extending it to be inclusive of women from a variety of racial-ethnic

backgrounds and persistently concerned with questions of class and sexual orientation.

366
Kayann Short, “Coming to the Table: The Differential Politics of This Bridge Called
My Back” in Eroticism and Containment Notes from the Flood Plain, Caro Siegel and
Ann Kibbey, editors (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 12.

219
KTP also extends the identity formation of women of color; initially, the term describes a

U.S.-based identity formation, while the term, Third World Women, described women of

color in locations outside of North America and Western Europe. These two terms,

women of color and Third World Women, overlapped and converged, however, in their

practical applications. Through its publishing practices, KTP extended the term women

of color internationally.

Kate Rushin animates this tension between identity consolidation and elaboration

in her poem, “The Bridge Poem.” The metaphor of women of color as a bridge originates

in the publication of This Bridge and in Rushin’s poem in particular. Like the productive

and dynamic tension between identity consolidation and elaboration for KTP, the bridge

metaphor in which women of color connect different worlds is fraught with multiple

meanings, both within Rushin’s poem and as an extended metaphor for women of color.

On one hand, KTP, in particular, and women of color, more broadly, are a bridge

between two worlds. KTP bridged worlds between white lesbian-feminist publishers and

women of color, and, more broadly, worlds between white feminists and feminists of

color. Yet, the bridge metaphor suggests a binary relationship, a physical and metaphoric

linking of two things. In fact, KTP envisioned and worked to create multiple worlds and

multiple relationships among these worlds. The topography envisioned by KTP through

its publishing was not binary. Through publishing, KTP encouraged men of color to read

about women of color and lesbians of color. KTP created opportunities for women in the

United States to learn about the lives of women in other countries. KTP extended worlds

through their publishing, not by building bridges but by elaborating multiple identities

and multiple connections between and among identity groups. In this way, the bridge that

220
both This Bridge suggests and that Donna Kate Rushin constructs in her poem, “The

Bridge Poem,” is about multiple constituencies and multiple worlds.

Rushin’s poem bears out that vision powerfully. Rushin begins:

I’ve had enough

I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

In the third stanza of “The Bridge Poem,” Rushin enumerates the many people she

“bridges:” members of her family, white feminists, Black church folks, ex-hippies, Black

separatists, artists and her friends’ parents. The act of bridging for Rushin is not an act of

bridging within a binary. She is engaged with multiple people in a large community—and

she rejects the role of being a bridge. As if bridging between and among these people

were not enough, Rushin exclaims, “Then/I’ve got to explain myself/To everybody.”

From this description of her experience, Rushin moves to refusal. She explains that she is

“sick of it,” sick “of filling in your gaps.” Rushin exhorts readers of the poem to “Find

another connection to the rest of the world/Find something else to make you

legitimate/Find some other way to be political and hip.” One strategy that feminists could

use to “find another connection” was reading the books published by KTP. The act of

publishing books empowers women of color as authors, publishers, and readers. It also

reduces their burden to educate others by providing a less invasive educational tool to

learn about the lives and experiences of women of color for white feminists, men of

color, and other interested readers.

If KTP embraced its role as a bridge in service to its vision of creating multiple

worlds, at the end of “The Bridge Poem,” Rushin rejects using her body as a bridge.

Rushin asserts that “The bridge I must be/Is the bridge to my own power” and

221
 I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

For Rushin, usefulness for women of color comes after finding their “true selves.” Part of

the quest of This Bridge is the articulation of what the writers’ experienced as their true

selves in order to be of use to themselves and to a broader liberatory movement. As much

as This Bridge and “The Bridge Poem” embrace the metaphor of a bridge to build a new

world, they also decline the role of a bridge for individual women of color. This dynamic

tension between how organizations could operate in making new worlds through

coalition work and how individual bodies were situated, often forced to do bridging work

to the exclusion of their own self interest—of discovering their “true selves”—

demonstrates a significant epistemic rupture in feminism during the 1980s. While many

feminist theorists and historians argue that the WLM collapsed amid discussions about

‘identity politics’ and an embrace of essentialism, this epistemic rupture between the

theoretical work that women envisioned to heal the experiences of sexism, racism,

homophobia and other sources of oppression and the lived realities of oppressed people

contributed more to the decline of energy for feminist activism than current feminist

scholarship suggests.

Through books, KTP as an institution was useful; KTP created the possibilities

for multiplicitous identities within lesbian-feminist worlds. KTP reflected differential

feminism as articulated by Sandoval. Short describes the work of This Bridge as

“differential movement between ‘naming specific differences’ (identity politics) and

‘crossing over’ (coalition politics)” and argues that this epistemology “forms the structure

222
of This Bridge.”367 This is true, but This Bridge, in particular, and publishing by KTP, in

general, challenges binary epistemologies—a structure Short unwittingly embraces.

Through both the objects that KTP published and its material practices as a publisher—

production, distribution, marketing, promotion—KTP animated systems of thinking

about feminist identities and feminist formations that expanded the meanings of feminism

and resisted existing binaries.

In addition to creating multiplicitous worlds, KTP also enabled feminism to

extend internationally. In 1985, Smith noted that “The publication of Mila Aguilar’s A

Comrade is as Precious as a Rice Seedling has helped move the press more into a public

anti-imperialist stance.” Publishing the book, “not only meant taking direction in

circulating petitions for Aguilar’s release from prison in the Philippines, it meant moving

into a new culture, a new community.”368 Publishing books helped KTP to extend its

politics to anti-imperialism and new international consciousness, just as reading books by

KTP helped feminists to think in these new directions.

Short argues that “the anthology format of many of Kitchen Table’s books is

another political publishing choice” because it promotes the writing of “as many women

of color as possible.” I agree, but I also think that the presence of multiple genres and

writers writing across multiple genres is a hallmark of the WLM and feminist publishing

writ large. Even more important than publishing iconic anthologies, KTP’s contributions

demonstrate the flexibility to publish multiple types of print material to meet different

political and economic needs for feminism.

Conclusion

367
Short, “Coming to the Table,” 27.
368
Lootens, “Third National Women in Print Conference,” 8.

223
 In interviews after KTP folded, Smith reflects on KTP as a failure. Her

commitment to Lorde was to build an institution—something that would last for women

of color. The operations of all of the presses in this study ended by 1989. A few lesbian-

feminist presses survived during the 1990s, notably Naiad Press and Firebrand Books.

Some feminist presses continue today, including The Feminist Press, Cleis and Spinsters

Ink/Aunt Lute, but the landscape for lesbian publishing and feminist publishing are

radically different today than they were during the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, none of the

lesbian-feminist presses have survived to 2012 with the strength and vibrancy they had in

the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.

There are many reasons that small lesbian-feminist presses fail or choose to end

their operations. Burnout of the principals is common, as is simply the desire of women

to pursue other activist engagements. The economics of running a small publishing house

are daunting in the best economic environment. In an economic environment

characterized by recessions and multinational capitalism, in which publishers and media

in general were increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few large, multi-national

corporations, the survival of small publishing houses without financial subventions is

nearly impossible. The concatenation of many factors allowed feminist presses to prosper

in the 1970s and 1980s. These factors include the proliferation of feminist bookstores, the

growth of identifiable communities to sell books to, and the visibility of invested

communities of readers for lesbian-feminist books. The changing political, economic, and

social environments led them to fold during those decades and in subsequent decades.

One vibrant legacy of lesbian-feminist publishers during the 1980s is the printed

conversations about identity elaborations. Persephone Press, Long Haul Press, and

224
Kitchen Table Press all contributed to these conversations through their publishing

practices and through the advocacy and activism of their principals.

I don’t want to create the sense of a lost world of Lesbos, but I do want to

acknowledge the broad cultural habitus that emerged between 1969 and 1989 as having a

substantial formative effect on lesbian-feminist publishing. Smith’s sense of KTP’s

failure to create an institution is not accurate. Elaborations of radical feminism, cultural

feminism, and lesbian-feminism as an epistemological project resist the very structures of

building institutions. That is, projects directed to vanguard thinking often find themselves

bound necessarily by time. Institutions by their very nature have particular investments in

the status quo, even when they want to change aspects of the status quo. This is not to

suggest that there isn’t a need to have a woman of color press, or lesbian-feminist

presses, but that the lives of such presses are often necessarily limited in time.

225
/Interlude 3/Women In Print Conferences

Between 1976 and 1985, feminist publishers organized three Women in Print

Conferences. These conferences provided a focus of community and activism for women

involved in printing and publishing and animate some of the challenges and issues that

lesbian-feminists faced during these years.

June Arnold hatched the idea for a gathering of women involved in printing and

publishing. The conference was planned by Arnold, Charlotte Bunch of Quest Magazine,

Coletta Reid of Diana Press, and Nancy Stockwell of Plexus. The conference ran a full

week from August 29, 1976 through September 5th at a Campfire Girls’ camp in Omaha,

NE. The organized selected Omaha because it is in the middle of the country, equidistant

for women on both coasts to drive. 132 women attended the conference representing

eighty “newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, printing companies, bookstores, and

distribution services.”369 The eight days of the gathering was intense and enormously

generative for different lesbian-feminist projects around the country.

In 1981, a group of Washington, DC-based activists organized the Second

National Women in Print Conference. The organizing committee included women from

the off our backs collective, Mary Farmer of Lammas bookstore, and two self-publishers

based in Washington, DC, Betty Bird and Susan Wood-Thompson. This conference was

larger—attended by over 250 women representing an array of feminist print culture

projects—and featured a wide range of programing, including nearly sixty workshops and

several caucuses.

369
Janis Kelly, “Conference of Women in Print,” off our backs 6, no. 8, (November 30,
1976): 2.

226
 What distinguished the Second National Women in Print Conference, according

to both newspaper reports after the conference and participants memories, is the inclusion

of women of color. The conference organizers raised money separately to provide

scholarships for women of color and working class and poor women to attend the

conference. The organizers’ commitment to inclusion by reducing economic barriers

affected both attendance at the conference as well as the types of conversations and

debates that conference attendees had. In addition, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

launched at the second Women in Print Conference, with many attendees committing to

support the press in a variety of ways.370

The Third National Women in Print Conference was held from May 29 until June

1, 1985, at the University of California, Berkeley. Over 200 feminists attended.

Organized by a “small, ad hoc group of women in the San Francisco Bay area,” the

conference had a “deliberate” focus on the “nuts-and-bolts” of publishing. Although the

conference was held in the midst of powerful debates about pornography, conversations

about these issues were subdued at the conference. A report about the conference in off

our backs notes that women attended from two prosex periodicals, On Our Backs and

Outrageous Women, as well as women from feminist bookstores who refused to carry

these periodicals, but no direct confrontations happened at the conference.371

The great drama of the conference centered around Barbara Grier and Naiad

Press. To promote the book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, Grier sold excerpts from the

370
Fran Moira, “Women in Print: Overview,” off our backs 11, no. 11 (December 31,
1981): 2.
371
Tricia Lootens, “Third National Women in Print Conference,” off our backs 15, no. 8
(September 30, 1985): 8.

227
book to Forum, a subsidiary of Penthouse. Grier sold the stories without consultation

with the editors of Lesbian Nuns or the authors of the individual stories, creating a furor

among the contributors to the book and the larger lesbian-feminist community. At the

Women in Print conference, the organizers devoted a session, “hastily arranged and

heavily attended,” to the “ethical and legal issues” with Naiad Press.372 This workshop

session did not lay to rest all of the concerns that women around the country had about

Grier and Lesbian Nuns, but, through the testimony of other authors and publishers in

similar situations to Grier’s, the session contextualized Grier’s actions in the broader

lesbian-feminist publishing community. Still, issues about Lesbian Nuns and Barbara

Grier brewed throughout the summer of 1985.

After 1985, there were no more Women in Print Conferences. Lesbian-feminist

publishing continued, of course, but women never recreated the dedicated communal

space of a conference. The next conference where lesbian-feminist authors, publishers,

and other literary activists gathered was not a space exclusively organized by and for

women. Out/Write, a conference for lesbian and gay authors, began in 1990. Out/Write

reflects the different identity formation of gay and lesbian, but it continues the political

spirit and commitment to community that June Arnold expressed when she organized the

first Women in Print conference in 1976.

372
Ibid.

228
 Chapter 3

Small Lesbian-Feminist Presses

That Woman On My Mind

The bell on the front door rings for the last time today. The whack of the deadbolt,

secured by your co-worker, tells you the official workday is over. For a moment, the print

shop is silent, only a quiet hum from fluorescent lights. Stacked by the back door, boxes

of finished jobs are ready for morning deliveries. Beneath the counter by the cash register

are boxes of new stock delivered late this afternoon. You’ll need to put them up before

you leave tonight so that customers can navigate the shop in the morning. You will do

that task while the machines churn through their second shift: printing the chapbook for

your small press. Your boss knows you are staying late to use the equipment. He grunted

his assent with the caveat, Don’t tell me more. Clean up. Don’t let me or others see it.

Fine. You retrieve the big box from near the typesetter. In it is all you need for the next

few hours: Alix Dobkin’s album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, the film for printing, the

thick, creamy paper you ordered especially for this job. With the album on the turn table

and Dobkin crooning, The woman in your life will do what you must do to comfort you

and calm you down . . .because the woman in your life is you. . . ., you fire up the

machine. Even though it’s only been off thirty minutes, it needs time to warm up.

Carefully, you place the film over the large drums. You’ll print eight pages at a

time of the forty-four pages for the book. There is enough stock to print 525 or 530

copies, though a couple dozen will be soiled in the process. You hope for 500 good

copies on this first run. Tonight, the interior pages. It would be great to do the cover with

229
the heavy, gray-flecked, linen stock, but it will be printed in purple, and you don’t know

if you’ll have the energy to clean the machine, reload it with purple ink, then run the job.

You don’t want to make any mistakes. This is important. A job of love and passion. It

isn’t like the school lunch menus or the grocery store inserts for the Sunday newspaper.

This is a book for lesbians. Poems about love and life. Poems to nurture the revolution.

You take out the black ink. It is thick and viscous. It becomes thinner as the machine

heats it preparing to roll it on the page.

While you print, you sing along with Alix, but then you start to compose your

own song from the rhythms of evening work. You hum first with Alix, then add these

words,

Running this old printing press

with a woman on my mind
it jammed up tight eight times today
and I think this might make nine
there’s paper in the rollers
and solution down my sleeve
I just got here but I think it’s time to leave.373

You delight in this improvised chorus and then begin to add verses:

I just got to work today

after seeing her last night
since I arrived, everything’s gone wrong
and nothing’s gone right.

Ha! A good rhyme there. Suddenly the press seizes. There’s paper flying everywhere.

Maybe you’ll add that as the next line. You attend to the press, pulling out the jammed

paper, taking out pages that have been creased, then carefully reload everything and

373
These lyrics are by Cris South, a printer and one of the women of Night Heron Press.
The complete song lyrics are from the Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Box 57, folder “Cris
South 1978-1979, 1982-1986,” Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and
Special Collections Library, Duke University. At the bottom, South typed, “Dedicated to
Minnie Bruce” and then in handwritten text wrote, “I love you! Chuckle—Cris.”

230
begin printing again. Alix is still singing, but you begin a new verse remembering last

night:

We went out to dinner

and we talked endlessly
then went back home and we made love
’til it was nearly three.
I got up at six AM
did not get here til nine
how can I run this printing press
with that woman on my mind?

There is poetry in printing. The “endless reams of paper,”

the press is out of ink

blanket wash has all run out
and the belts are out of sync
the masters all are tearing
oh, today is not so kind,

You fiddle more with the machine. Coaxing it to finish the job. Hours pass. It is

dark outside. At last, the final pages are stacking on the finisher. You think, it looks

good! You are excited to show it off. Tomorrow night, you’ll print the covers. Then, it

will be ready to be trimmed and collated over the weekend. That will be a good afternoon

of work, even with three or four sets of hands to help. You move the boxes from the front

to the paper storage area, composing the final verse for your song. Maybe you’ll call it

“The Printer’s Blues.”

Life is hard when you have to work

to earn your daily bread
I don’t make those decisions
I just go where I am led.
When it gets the best of me
and my day gets out of line
I just run this printing press
and keep that woman on my mind.

231
Maybe you’ll just title it, “Running This Old Printing Press.” You scribble your song

down on paper. Tomorrow you will type it up and give it to the one you love—that

woman on your mind. You tidy up the shop a bit more. Turn off the lights. Leave out the

back door. It is late, but you still have a few hours to spend with that woman on your

mind.

Introduction

Larger lesbian-feminist presses like the Women’s Press Collective, Diana Press,

Daughters, Inc., Persephone Press, and Kitchen Table Press expose new histories about

lesbianism-feminism and feminist ideological formations in the 1970s and 1980s; smaller

presses tell stories as well. Small presses demonstrate that lesbian-feminist publishing

was not a bicoastal phenomenon; they illuminate the roots and alliances of lesbian-

feminism with gay liberation in the early years and later with the gay, lesbian, and

bisexual movement. Most importantly, small presses demonstrate the close relationship

between lesbian-feminist writers and readers during the WLM. By examining the

material histories of four small lesbian-feminist presses—Womanpress, Violet Press, Out

& Out Books, and Night Heron Press—I consider how publishing and community

building are co-constitutive for lesbian-feminists. For my purposes, community building

refers to a variety of activities of lesbian feminists that define and articulate lesbian-

feminists as a community to be organized and activated for political, social, and

intellectual purposes. By exploring community building as co-constitutive with

publishing for both publishers and authors, I rethink reader reception as an element of the

literary habitus.

232
 Reader reception refers to a specific type of literary critical theory that

examines how readers encounter, receive, and interpret texts. Wolfgang Iser argues for

literary texts that force “the reader into a new critical awareness of his or her customary

codes and expectations,”374 while Stanley Fish argues that texts are no ‘objective’ work

of literature, but rather written by the reader through the process of reading, or

experiencing the text.375 Hans Robert Jauss sees the history of literature as “a dialogue

between work and audience” with “opposition between its aesthetic and its historical

aspects” both of which are “continually mediated.”376 The reception of lesbian-feminist

texts demonstrates all of these theoretical approaches, though I am most interested in

exploring how reader reception is shaped through a co-constitutive process mediated by

lesbian-feminist publishers’ community building. Through the small lesbian-feminist

presses, I explore how readers not only respond to the texts that are published, but also

shape future publishing through their responses. Rather than seeing reader reception as

solely a receptive relationship, I explore the dynamic engagements between and among

374
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 79. As Eagleton notes, Barthes’s theory of reader reception in
The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975) departs
sharply from Iser. While Iser’s formulation of reader reception is most useful to me,
Barthes’s work would illuminate a different set of lesbian poetry, such as work by
Gertrude Stein, Lynn Lonidier, Nicole Brossard, Betsy Warland, and Daphne Marlatt.
375
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980). Fish’s work has been
used effectively by feminists in examining communities of women readers, specifically
Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Jacqueline Bobo’s Black
Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
376
Robert Jauss, “Literary History As a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Toward an
Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis University of Minnesota, 1982), 19.

233
readers, artists, and publishers, and the print culture artifacts that these engagements

generate.

For my purposes, small presses refer to publishers that published fewer than a

dozen books and were operated by women as an avocational activity. That is, for these

lesbian publishers publishing was not the primary vocation or means of economic

support. I make this distinction retrospectively and out of convenience to narrate the

stories; it is not a distinction made by women at the time or widely discussed in their

frameworks about publishing. In fact, many of the women involved in lesbian-feminist

publishing, either book publishing or journal publishing, identified primarily as writers or

artists, regardless of their means of economic support.

Lesbian-feminist small press publishing exploded during the 1970s and continued

throughout the 1980s—and beyond. In 1978, Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman published

the Guide to Women’s Publishing.377 This compendium of publishers of both periodicals

and books as well as all-woman print shops captures the breadth of publishing activities

in 1978. Chesman and Joan declare in their introduction, “At the same time that feminist

presses (books and magazines) were bursting into being, women’s print shops were

getting off the ground, and women’s bookstores began springing up all over the country.

The intensity of Feminism as a Movement, even with inadequate distribution methods

spread through the ‘printed word.’”378 These statements from Chesman and Joan capture

the intensity of the production of feminist print culture during the 1970s. Their

377
Guide to Women’s Publishing was published by Dustbooks. Dustbooks was founded
by Len Fulton to publish the Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. Fulton was
an ally and advocate of small press publishing of women’s writing.
378
Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman, Guide to Women’s Publishing (Paradise, CA:
Dustbooks, 1978), 3.

234
assessment of the field focuses primarily on the proliferation of small presses and on a

variety of business and community networks that supported the creation, distribution, and

reception of feminist print culture. Joan, the primary compiler of information about the

presses, divides feminist presses into two groups in her overview: presses that have

published four or more titles and presses that have published one to three titles. Joan

identifies a total of forty-seven presses that have published four or more books and

twenty-six presses that have published between one and three books. Of these seventy-

three presses, many published work by lesbians and more than a dozen were dedicated

entirely to publishing work by lesbians.379

Feminist and lesbian-feminist publishing during the 1970s and 1980s addressed

an array of topics. Poetry, of course, was a popular and important publishing category for

lesbian-feminists, including all of the five small presses that I profile; each press

published important poetry titles. While my selection of presses is in some ways

representative of the publishing activity of the time, the selection is by no means

comprehensive. Between 1969 and 1989, many poets, inspired by the energy of the WLM

for sharing work, published their work through an independent imprint. Some notable

poets who published independently include Wendy Stevens, who published I am Not a

379
I include the following presses in my count of publishers dedicated to publishing work
by lesbians: Daughters, Inc., Diana Press, Druid Heights Books, Naiad Press, Out & Out
Books, Persephone Press, Violet Press, Womanpress, Women’s Press Collective,
Amazon Press, Metis Press, and New Woman Press. The relationship between lesbianism
and lesbian-feminism is porous, however, as I have discussed previously. Hence
distinctions like the one I make here always are contested. For instance, Out & Out
Books only published work by lesbians, with only one exception. Moreover, many
presses that published a range of feminist work were operated by lesbians even if the
published work wasn’t primarily or exclusively lesbian. I provide these distinctions about
lesbian publishing in an effort to further clarify the activities within lesbian print culture
while acknowledging that the appellations of lesbian and lesbian-feminist are overlapping
and malleable through the time period - as they continue to be today.

235
Careful Poet herself from her Washington, DC, home; Chocolate Waters, a member of

the Big Mama Rag collective in Denver, Colorado, who published To the Man Reporter

from the Denver Post (1975), Take Me Like a Photograph (1977), and Charting New

Waters (1980); Susan Wood-Thompson, who published her first and only book of poetry

Crazy Quilt under the imprint Crown Books; Elsa Gidlow, who published her work

through Druid Height Press;380 Tee Corinne, who published through Pearlchild Press

between 1984 and 2003; Susan Sherman, who published through Two & Two Press; and

Irena Klepfisz, who reprinted her first collection under the imprint Piecework Press.381

Feminist publishing, however, wasn’t limited to poetry. In 1975, with the imprint

Down There Press, Joani Blank published The Playbook: For Women/About Sex. By

1978, she had sold about 6,000 copies of the book.382 Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove

published Turned-On Women’s Songbook, a collection of songs written by Jean

Mountaingrove, through an imprint, New Woman Press. In 1970, Helen Garvy published

a forty-eight-page book, How to Fix Your Bicycle. By 1978, she reported to Chesman and

Joan that 100,000 copies of the book were sold and that she published a second book, I

Built Myself a House, with her imprint Shire Press.383 The variety of topics that feminists

addressed during the 1970s demonstrates the expansiveness of the vision of feminism for

women in the WLM. The ability to remake the world, or at least fix a bicycle, build a

380
Gidlow also published with Diana Press.
381
Bibliographies of these presses and poets and many others, including Shameless
Hussy Press, Mulch Press, Motheroot Press, and ManRoot Press are available at
www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org.
382
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 129.
383
Ibid., 205.

236
house, and have a pleasurable orgasm, were all within reach through the revolution of the

WLM, and these visions were shared through publishing.

To get their words, ideas, and arguments out, feminists and lesbian-feminists

developed a variety of publishing vehicles, ranging from larger publishing houses intent

on taking on the New York-based industry to small letter-press production studios and

self-named imprints for a single book or the books of a collection of friends and

colleagues. The variety of lesbian and feminist publishing during the 1970s and 1980s

demonstrates the significance of empowerment as both ideology and action in the WLM.

Lesbian-feminist publishing animated feminist ideas of empowerment; by publishing

either independently or collaboratively with other writers, artists, and printing

tradeswomen, lesbian writers and artists took control of the means of production and used

it in service to their art.

In retrospect, we might ask, is this feminist publishing activity self-publishing? Is

it vanity publishing? One way to answer both of those questions is yes, but I use the

labels self-publishing and vanity publishing cautiously. In spite of the long history of

author-controlled publishing, there is a stigma associated with self-publication. In

academic circles, self-publishing suggests that the work is of lesser quality because it is

not peer-reviewed. Yet, we see, for example, in the Women’s Press Collective that

manuscripts were intensely peer reviewed—by peers in the collective and by other

feminists. Thus, while we may describe the publishing of Judy Grahn or Pat Parker as

self-publishing, because they were both intensely and personally involved in the

publishing process, their manuscripts were also peer-reviewed and peer edited. In this

way, the moniker self-published is not accurate. Moreover, publishing outside of

237
academia operates with a different type of peer review than academic scholarship: sales

of books to individuals and libraries. This aspect of publishing may be called more

accurately market review, or market success. By this measure, the publishing activities of

lesbian-feminists achieved different levels of success based on the project and on the

overall economic viability of the press. While I cautiously embrace the label of “self-

publishing” for many of these publishing projects, for Grahn, Parker, and other feminist

publishers, the work of creating the books was neither vanity nor self-serving, it was an

act of taking power, an act of empowerment for the writers. Lesbian-feminist publishers

understood their work not as self-publishing but rather as engaging in an activity to strike

at the heart of patriarchy and capitalism: producing books oneself.

By attending to the material production of books during the Women In Print

Movement, I illuminate the lives of lesbians during the 1970s and 1980s and the

enactments and meanings of their feminist commitments; I also highlight their belief in

the immediacy of a feminist revolution and explore the ruptures within feminism as well

as the sutures feminists sought to sew through their work. Publishing books has never

been easy. There are conflicts. Difficult moments. These conflicts are characterized

sometimes by historians and feminist theorists as intractable ideological differences;

certainly sometimes they were, though I tend to see them as important elaborations of and

negotiations between feminist theory and practice. Moreover, interwoven with these

ideological conflicts and the broader historical conditions in which women lived, are

interpersonal conflicts. I gesture to some of these conflicts—should gay men and lesbians

work together?, how can lesbians build inclusive environments?, are twelve-step recovery

programs legitimate?, what does lesbian mean?—always trying to hold on to a truth that

238
both political and personal forces shape our lives and our work. To that end, here are four

narrative histories of small lesbian-feminist presses—Womanpress, Violet Press, Out &

Out Books, and Night Heron Press. Close the door. The light from the handmade light

table will provide the warm glow you need while you listen to the hum and whir of the

press operating smoothly, for now, in the background.

Violet Press

“It was a moment when we reenvisioned all of society and imagined a culture of
our own.”—Fran Winant

On the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, June 28, 1970, Fran Winant

marched on the streets of New York with friends and comrades from the Gay Liberation

Front. Ten thousand people marched in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day “with

our banners and our smiles.”384Peter Hujar preserved a moment from that day in an iconic

photograph with Winant front and center and more than a dozen sisters and brothers

around her, smiling laughing, arms raised, marching.385 Hujar’s photograph would later

be printed as a poster emblazoned with the words, “COME OUT!! JOIN THE SISTERS

AND BROTHERS OF THE GAY LIBERATION FRONT.” In 1980, Winant includes an

image of the poster on the third page of the second edition of her chapbook Looking at

Women. In 1970, though, Fran Winant was twenty-six years old,386 a founding member of

the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and deeply involved in the GLF in 1969 and 1970.

Through the GLF, Winant worked with other women to organize GLF’s first all-women’s

384
Winant, “Christopher St. Liberation Day, June 28, 1970,” Looking at Women, 42.
385
Hujar became prominent as a black and white fine arts photographer. Hujar died from
complications of AIDS in 1987; he was the long-time companion of artist David
Wojnarowicz.
386
Winant was born on October 28, 1943.

239
dance on April 3, 1970. Women of the GLF felt that the co-gendered dances “had a male

sensibility” and they wanted instead, “light, space, and bare breasts.”387 Later that year,

some of the lesbians in the GLF broke with the organization and formed

RadicaLesbians.388 Winant reflected in 2010, “I reluctantly went with them. I felt GLF

might ultimately be destroyed by groups splitting off, but I understood that as women we

needed to explore our own identities and bond with as well as challenge the women's

liberation movement.”389 In 1970, in New York City, the WLM and gay liberation were

intertwined in both constructive and conflictual ways; lesbian activists and writers like

Winant personally invested in the vibrancy of a variety of activist formations.

Amid the excitement and emergence of these new political organizations, Winant

founded Violet Press and published its first title, her chapbook, Looking at Women

(1971). The interior pages were typed on a typewriter; the cover art, title page,

advertisement for “A Gay Womans Anthology,” and back cover were drawn by hand by

Winant. Winant “took it [the typed pages and cover] to a woman I knew in the printing

field” who “helped me to get it printed in a pamphlet style with a stapled binding.”390 The

book was priced at $.50. Winant reflected, “I wanted my book to be in the price range of

every woman who wanted it. I didn’t think of the high cost of postage, stationary, my

387
Ellen Shumsky, presentation given at the CLAGS conference, In Amerika They Call
Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 1970s, October 2010.
388
RadicaLesbians, a collective of Lois Hart, Rita Mae Brown, Barbara XX, Artemis
March, Ellen Shumsky, and Flavia Rando, authored “Woman-Identified Woman,” Ellen
Shumsky, CLAGS conference, October 2010.
389
Fran Winant at the CLAGS conference, In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian
Lives in the 1970s, October 2010.
390
Fran Winant, “Lesbian Publishing Lesbians: My Life and Times with Violet Press,
Margins 23 (August 1975): 62.

240
labor—mailing books and doing publicity, which was, of course, unpaid, and which took

many hours away from my writing.” As in the Women’s Press Collective, the exuberance

of bringing books into print masked the economic realities of publishing.

During the 1970s, Violet Press published five titles: three by Winant, Looking at

Women (1971), Dyke Jacket: Poems and Songs (1975), a perfect-bound book with a

glossy cover, and Goddess of Lesbian Dreams (1980), also perfect-bound; one anthology,

We Are All Lesbians (1973), edited by Winant; and another collection of poetry, To

Lesbians Everywhere (1976) by Judy Greenspan. Although I characterize Winant’s books

as poetry, many of her collections include not only poems, but also songs, printed with

full musical scores. Through Violet Press, Winant planned to publish Ellen Marie

Bissert’s The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Dyke; Bissert was the editor

of the journal 13th Moon. Winant and Bissert even discussed merging Violet Press and

13th Moon, but as the page proofs were prepared, Bissert withdrew her manuscript, ended

the collaborative relationship with Winant, and published the book herself under the

imprint 13th Moon Books. In the late 1970s, Winant explored the possibility of putting

out a record of songs, but that project didn’t materialize. During the 1980s, Winant also

focused on her work as a visual artist.

According to Winant, she printed 3,000 copies of each book and sold most of the

copies.391 Winant published a second edition of Looking at Women in 1980 after the first

edition sold out. The main distribution outlets for Violet Press books were women’s

bookstores and gay and lesbian bookstores. In Margins, Winant wrote, “I naively thought

the book could be sold through free mentions and reviews in women’s and other

391
Personal conversation with Fran Winant.

241
movement newspapers and magazines.”392 While most of Winant’s books were reviewed

and mentioned in women’s newspapers and magazines, the work of selling the books was

a personal, one-on-one project, done by reaching out to both readers and booksellers.

During the 1970s, Winant’s work and Violet Press were supported by the National

Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Arts Council and the CETA grant for youth

employment. Support from these public agencies was critical to the work of Violet Press

and Winant.

Violet Press is significant as a very early publisher of lesbian-feminist poetry in the

WLM. Winant’s collection, Looking at Women, circulated in New York around the same

time that Judy Grahn circulated Edward the Dyke and Other Poems. The anthology

Winant edited, We Are All Lesbians, is one of the earliest anthologies of lesbian poems.

The production and distribution of the books from Violet Press demonstrate both the do-

it-yourself ethos of the 1970s, building on ideologies of empowerment and

consciousness-raising and the way that writers networked with friends and colleagues to

produce their work. Winant’s work through Violet Press also provides us with insight

into the ways that ideas about social change were interconnected, particularly between

the WLM and gay liberation. I analyze the content of some of these early poems to

discuss this further.

The poems of Looking at Women are generally in the confessional mode that

characterized much feminist poetry in the early years of the WLM.393 Looking at Women

392
Winant, Margins, 62.
393
For a discussion of this see Howe’s and Bass’s introduction to No More Masks and
Segnitz’s and Rainy’s introduction to Psyche.

242
speaks to the sentiments of Grahn’s “The Common Woman” poems and even to Edward

herself. Winant writes in the title poem,

My companion was a woman

People asked us if we were sisters
They asked us
in order to force us to lie
about our relationship
because we were constantly together
because we were lovers
because we could not protect eachother
We could not protect eachother394

Winant’s poem articulates the desire for lesbians to be seen as lovers, and the dangers—

as well as opportunities—that presents in the early 1970s. In the poem “I Want To Be,”

Winant muses, “If I were a scientist / a woman lesbian scientist / sitting in a laboratory /

wearing a white coat,” her greatest observation would be

there are things about women

that draw me to women
there are things about women
that draw me to myself395

In addition to situating a woman, a lesbian, as a scientist, something that was understood

as transgressive of gender roles at the time, Winant suggests here that lesbianism has a

particular valence for all women, that is, anyone can be a lesbian, and that lesbianism

makes it possible to understand one’s self better. By articulating the experience of being a

lesbian, Winant names lesbian as a subject position available not only to her as a poet but

394
Winant, Looking at Women, 3.
395
Winant, Looking at Women, 11; emphasis in original.

243
to other women as readers. For Winant, lesbian is an almost magical subjectivity396

available to all women.

Winant’s poems are not all about women and lesbians, however. Winant’s political

engagements and commitments included both feminism and gay liberation; her poetry

reflects both. She writes about the one-year anniversary of “Christopher St. Liberation

Day,”

we are marching into ourselves

like a body
gathering its cells
creating itself
in sunlight
we turn to look back
on the thousands behind us
it seems we will converge
until we explode
sisters and sisters
brothers and brothers
Together

In this passage, Winant utilizes the language of nature—gathering its cells, sunlight, an

explosion—to place lesbians and gay men, sisters and brother, firmly in the realm of the

natural. This image was a sharp contrast from the medical and psychological discourse

that surrounded Winant when she was writing these poems. Metaphorically, she evokes

the political and social changes she envisions. What Winant imagines in these poems are

changes not circumscribed by a particular ideology of feminism nor by feminism itself.

Winant’s use of grammatical parallelism to link lesbians and gay men reminds us of the

multiple and overlapping allegiances of lesbians and feminists at the time to the WLM

and to gay liberation.

396
Katie King, “Lesbianism as Feminism’s Magical Sign,” Theory in Its Feminist
Travels: Conversations in the U.S. Women’s Movements (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 124-37.

244
 In a similar move, in the poem “World Youth,” Winant captures the multiple

conflicts between and among people at a meeting at the United Nations about

homosexuality. While on one hand the focus of the poem is about homosexuality, it also

engages in a broader discourse about national and international politics. Winant centers

questions of gay rights and feminism, but considers United States imperialism with equal

seriousness. “World Youth” functions as both a poem and a report to readers about what

happened at the gathering at the United Nations and what work needs to be done from

multiple nationalist perspectives. “World Youth” is significant because it articulates

international concerns about homosexuality and feminism. While it expresses these

concerns within particular ideologies and values from the early 1970s, it still

demonstrates the engagements of lesbians and feminists with concerns broader than and

beyond United States activism.

Winant’s engagements in Looking at Women reflect a political environment in

which she was writing and circulating poetry; in her environment, lesbian-feminism was

emergent with other concerns about global citizenship, gay rights, war, and women’s

liberation. Winant wrote in Margins, “In my work and the way I presented it, I was

attempting to make a synthesis of art and politics.”397 Winant’s poetry reveals complex

political ideologies that correspond with the emergence of lesbian-feminism. Winant’s

poems resist narrow definitions of art or politics.

In October 2010, reflecting on the work of Violet Press, Winant said, “It was a

moment when we reenvisioned all of society and imagined a culture of our own as well,

voices the old society had always suppressed speaking at last, reaching out to one another

397
Winant, Margins, 62.

245
in a new dialog influenced by consciousness raising and movement organizing but riding

a wave of feeling, a sensibility, that went beyond this.”398 Winant links the revolutionary

vision of radical feminism with cultural work as a strategy for achieving those envisioned

transformations. Winant explains that hearing suppressed voices and engaging in new

dialogues shaped by consciousness-raising and movement organizing was one way

women imagined that societal changes could happen. She also imbues that moment in her

memory with a “feeling, a sensibility that went beyond.”399 This sensibility was the

excitement and palpability of change that women experienced at the nexus of the WLM,

gay liberation, and the variety of other liberatory movements. Violet Press and its five

slender volumes of poetry remind us of the importance of activist work in the production

of cultural objects. The history of Violet Press, its books and its principal, Fran Winant,

animates how activist formations overlap and energize one another. In the early 1970s,

the connections between the WLM and gay liberation are fecund for lesbian print culture.

Womanpress

Today we think in terms of sisterhood—and that’s good, that’s productive. But

when a writer reaches sixty she also begins to look for daughters, for inheritors.
We hope that our work too will help to make a foundation for those who come
after us. We hope that young women coming up realize the challenge and the rich
possibilities that are open to them. . . .that they will go on where we leave off.
—Valerie Taylor, “For My Granddaughters,” Lesbian Writers Conference,
Chicago, IL, September 13, 1974.

For five years, from 1974 until 1978, lesbian writers from all over the United States

and Canada gathered during a September weekend in Chicago, Illinois, for the Lesbian

398
Fran Winant, Presentation at In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the
70s, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, October 8-10,
2010.
399
Ibid.

246
Writers Conference. Originally organized by Marie Kuda, owner and operator of

WomanPress, novelist Valerie Taylor, Susan Edwards and Rebecca Hunter of Lavender

Press, and Polly Adams of Mattachine Midwest, the Lesbian Writers Conference

networked lesbian writers, readers, and publishers.400 The Lesbian Writers Conference

corresponded with a variety of lesbian-feminist publishing in Chicago. Three small

presses in particular operated in conjunction with activities of the Lesbian Writers

Conference: Lavender Press, Womanpress, and Metis Press. Three important themes

emerge from the Lesbian Writers Conference and the publishing connected to it. First, the

Lesbian Writers Conference demonstrates the way that community building and

community networking are co-constitutive of lesbian publishing. Second, the conference

and publishing activities demonstrates the vibrancy of lesbian-feminist print culture

outside of United States coastal metropolises. Third, the conference demonstrates the

importance of elaborating literary genealogies for lesbian writers to the organizers of the

conference and the publishers.

The five conferences all followed a similar format, with a keynote address on

Friday night, workshops and break out sessions on Saturday, and readings and

celebrations of conference attendees on Sunday. The first conference featured a keynote

speech by Valerie Taylor “dedicating the conference to Dr. Jeannette Howard Foster,

Ph.D., whose pioneering opus, Sex Variant Women in Literature, was long out of

400
Mychal Brody’s Are We There yet?: A Continuing History of Lavender Woman, a
Chicago Lesbian Newspaper, 1971-1976 (Iowa City, IA: Aunt Lute Books, 1985)
documents, through interviews and reprints of articles from Lavender Woman, the history
of Lavender Woman and its publishing in Chicago.

247
print.”401 In her keynote speech, Taylor talked about “our origins, our spiritual mothers

and grandmothers: Aphra Behn, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.”402 Taylor also

urged lesbian writers “to follow the example of May Sarton and Colette, who wrote about

friendship, heterosexual love, growing old, and many other parts of life in addition to

lesbian love.” Taylor continued, “When we don’t feel like variants any more, the world

will be our province.”403 For Marie Kuda, “Val’s keynote was an irreverent history of

lesbian writers and ended with her hope that she would live to see the contributions of her

literary “grandchildren” at similar conferences in 20 years.”404

The 1974 conference included a book fair with “tables laden to overflowing with

lesbian/feminist novels, poetry and non-fiction” as well as “out-of-print lesbian novels on

display.”405 On Saturday, workshops were held for conference participants. Participants

in a fiction workshop debated the merits of Rubyfruit Jungle, with one participant saying

“the truly realistic lesbian novel hasn’t been written yet.”406 Frances Chapman described

another workshop in off our backs (oob) as getting “down to the tension among form, art,

revolution and politics, which holds together our lives as lesbian writers and artists.”407

401
Marie Kuda, “Women Loving, Women Writing,” Outlines, September 30, 1998, 18-
19.
402
Frances Chapman, “Women loving words and other women,” off our backs 4, no. 10
(October 31, 1974): 7.
403
Ibid.
404
Kuda, “Women Loving,” 18.
405
Chapman, “Women loving,” 7.
406
Ibid.
407
Ibid.

248
These tensions weren’t explicated further for oob readers; perhaps Chapman assumed

that readers would intuitively understand these tensions. From a contemporary

perspective, the report demonstrates the imbrication of form and art with revolution and

politics. Sunday morning included poetry readings and panel discussions on politics and

art.408 Participants came from around the country, including Fran Winant from Violet

Press, women from Big Mama Rag, a Denver women’s paper, and Ellen Marie Bissert,

editor of 13th Moon.

At the first Lesbian Writers Conference in 1974, each conference attendee received

a free copy of Women Loving Women: a select and annotated bibliography of woman-

loving-women in literature. Women Loving Women was originally printed by Lavender

Press, an offshoot of Lavender Woman; the cost of printing the volume “was partially

defrayed by advertising from local lesbian businesses.” Marie Kuda compiled Women

Loving Women, which contained approximately 200 bibliographic entries covering works

published from 1914 to 1974 with annotations.409 A later edition of Women Loving

Women was issued by Womanpress in 1975, though as Kuda notes, “who knew edition,

from imprint, from reprint—in those days we were all flying by the seat of our pants.”410

In 1975, at the second Lesbian Writers Conference, held at the First Unitarian

Church in Chicago, 160 women attended. The focus of the conference “was on small

408
Ibid.
409
The complete text of Women-Loving-Women is scanned and available at
www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org.
410
Internet comment by Marie Kuda at www.chicagoreader.com.

249
presses and self-publishing.”411 Barbara Grier provided the keynote for this year’s

conference and described how “The Ladder was successful in reaching out to and being

subscribed to by socially-isolated lesbians, especially before the beginning of a strong

lesbian-feminist consciousness”412 In her address, Grier described her practice as editor

of The Ladder and as editor at Naiad Books. Grier responded personally to every letter

and inquiry from a lesbian as a part of her editorial work; some weeks she mailed more

than 300 letters. Conference participants praised Grier’s engagement with lesbians,

particularly “socially-isolated lesbians.” Grier’s letter writing and mail- and telephone-

based networking demonstrates a commitment to community-building practices through

publishing.

The 1975 conference featured lively debates about inclusion and feminist practices.

For instance, a workshop was added on “Class consciousness in lesbian literature” which

grew out of discussions between women at the conference.413 In a discussion about

content and style, one woman speculatively asked, “Were we repeating male heterosexist

assumptions in trying to determine a standard of lesbian feminist writing?,” while the

women from Lesbian Connection414 asserted their desire to be a forum for lesbians “who

411
Mimi Lewin and Tanya Tempkin, “Lesbian Writers Come Together,” off our backs 5,
no. 9 (November 30, 1975): 18.
412
Ibid.
413
Ibid.
414
Lesbian Connection is a lesbian periodical that was just beginning in 1975 and was
based in East Lansing, MI. Lesbian Connection, which is still publishing today, is a
compendium of lesbian voices, community announcements, discussions, and postings
about issues, ideas, and commerce of interest to the lesbian community.

250
don’t consider themselves writers to start writing.”415 They wanted to reach out “to

women on a broad base” and include “differing styles as well as varying content and

class perspectives.”416 These reports from the conference demonstrate how important

class was as an issue for lesbian-feminists, as well as issues of outreach to lesbians

generally. In assessing the success of the first two conferences and announcing the third,

Kuda wrote on the press release, “In its first two years the conference has drawn women

from twenty-six states, Canada and even one woman from England. Twenty-two Lesbian

and Feminist publications have been represented, several participants have had books

published and many more have had some of their writing published, at least locally.”417

The 1976 conference was keynoted by Beth Hodges, who had been the editor of

the special issue of Margins titled “Focus: Lesbian Feminist Writing and Publishing,”

and who was preparing a special issue of Sinister Wisdom on lesbian-feminist publishing.

The title of Hodges’s speech was “Print Is Our Medium.” Workshops in 1976 continued

to address an array of writing and publishing issues for lesbian-feminists, particularly

emphasizing do-it-yourself approaches to publishing, such as “Camera Ready Copy, You

& the Printer” by Michele Burke of Nearly Full Moon Press in Wisconsin and Marie

Kuda’s workshop “Self-publishing,” which covered “estimating potential market,

planning your publication, copyright, ISBN, LC Numbers, pricing, distribution,

bookkeeping, etc.”418 Other workshops included “Lesbians in the Library,” presented by

415
Lewin and Tempkin, “Lesbian Writers,” 18.
416
Ibid.
417
Folder “Lesbian Writers Conference 1976, Box 5, Catherine Nicholson Papers, Sallie
Bingham Collection at Duke University.

251
Rochelle Bernstein, “Writing and Researching Women’s Biography,” presented by

Barbara Grier, two workshops on lesbians and fiction, a panel on Lesbian-Feminist

Criticism, “Teaching of Lesbian Literature” by Evelyn Beck and Susan Lanser from the

Women’s Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, a poetry workshop with

Claudia Scott, and a panel discussion by women who attended the 1976 women in print

conference. A Saturday evening meal with entertainment was sponsored by the women of

Chicago’s Mountain Moving Coffeehouse. Sunday afternoon was a celebration and

reading and performance of work from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m.419

In 1977, Alma Routsong, who wrote Patience and Sarah under the pen name

Isabel Miller, provided the keynote address; in 1978, Yvonne Macmanus, who wrote

under the name Paula Christian, was the keynote speaker. In 1978 the conference almost

didn’t happen because of concerns about “having a conference in a state that refused to

ratify the ERA.”420 The conference did proceed, but that was the last year of the Lesbian

Writers Conference. Marie Kuda notes that they “received letters from sci-fi writer

Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ann Shockley who wrote the first inter-racial lesbian love

story, and other popular authors expressing interest in future conferences.”421 The

planners of the Lesbian Writers Conference noted the success of the five-year series at a

reunion held in 1989. Kuda writes, “Every conference presenter had one or more

published books. Of the women who read on those Sunday afternoons, dozens gained

418
Ibid.
419
Ibid.
420
Kuda, “Women Loving,” 19.
421
Kuda, “Women Loving,” 19.

252
considerable recognition from their creative or academic writing; for example: short-story

writer Becky Birtha’s Lovers Choice, Chris Straayer’s Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies:

Sexual Re-orientation in Film and Video, Marilyn Frye’s The Politics of Reality: Essays

in Feminist Theory, and fiction writer Julie Blackwomon (who read to us as Julie

Simmons) published in Voyages Out 2 and Home Girls.”422

These five gatherings of lesbian writers in Chicago at The Lesbian Writers

Conference built and networked a vibrant community of lesbian writers, as Kuda

demonstrates. The Lesbian Writers Conference also supported and nurtured three lesbian-

feminist publishers in Chicago, IL: Lavender Press, Womanpress, and Metis Press.

Lavender Press, which published Kuda’s first edition of Women Loving Women,

published two other books: Thunder from the Earth by Rebecca Hunter and Susan S. M.

Edwards (1973) and Portrait by Claudia Scott (1974). Womanpress published eight

books or pamphlets, and Metis Press, founded in 1976 by the publishers of the feminist

journal Black Maria, published eight books.

Womanpress’s publishing played an important role in amplifying the Lesbian

Writers Conference. Womanpress, owned and operated by Marie Kuda, reissued Women

Loving Women, and published three pamphlets from the keynote speeches at the Lesbian

Writers Conference. In 1975, Womanpress published a pamphlet of the speech delivered

by Valerie Taylor on September 13, 1974, “For My Granddaughters” in a sixteen-page

edition and sold it for 50 cents; in 1976, the speech delivered by Barbara Grier on

September 19, 1975, “The Possibilities are Staggering,” was published in a 16-page

edition, sold for 65 cents; in 1977, Womanpress published Beth Hodges’s keynote

422
Kuda, “Women Loving,” 19.

253
address from the 1976 Lesbian Writer’s Conference on September 17, 1976, titled, “Print

is our medium.” By printing pamphlets of the keynote speeches, Womanpress ensured

extended circulation of the conference speeches, preserving them for future readers and

using them as a platform to build attendance at future conferences.

The other three publications of Womanpress were an anthology of poetry and prose

from the 2nd Annual Lesbian Writers Conference in 1975, a chapbook by Penelope Pope,

and a collection of poetry by Jeannette Howard Foster and Valerie Taylor. Like the

keynote pamphlets, the anthology extended the work of the Lesbian Writers Conference.

The 128-page anthology, Women Loving, Women Writing, priced at $3.95, “contains

materials submitted from forty of the one hundred sixty women from all of the country”

and “contributors include high school dropouts and Ph.D.s with a variety of job skills,

their ages run from 18 to 62 and their work ranges from the angry to the erotic with some

song lyrics, workshop reports and an allegory for children.”423 By creating an anthology

from the conference, Womanpress highlighted the women who participated in the

conference and offered them a publishing vehicle.

The final two books published by Womanpress highlighted the work of Chicago

writers and also emanated from connections made at the Lesbian Writers Conference.

Womanpress published The Enclosed Garden, by Chicago-born Penelope Pope in the fall

of 1976. This 64-page book sold for $2.25. The collection of poetry by Jeannette Foster

and Valerie Taylor, Two Women, includes photographs by Eunice Militante. The poems

of Jeannette Foster were written between 1916 and 1938 and the poems of Taylor were

423
Womanpress catalogue, Folder “Women Publishers & Presses,” Box 11, Atlanta
Lesbian Feminist Alliance, Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) Archives, ca.
1972-1994, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

254
written between 1940 and 1975. Foster and Taylor were both revered in the Chicago

community, as evidenced by the attention devoted to both of them at the first Lesbian

Writers Conference. Foster’s book Sex Variant Women in Literature provided an

important intellectual and literary genealogy for the lesbian writers gathered, and Taylor,

who was born and raised in the Chicago-area, was described as “a feminist, peace activist

and an advocate of gay liberation, she also spends considerable time worrying about the

problem of feeding the world’s population. She has published seven lesbian novels, two

other books and a sizeable body of short material. Now retired and living in the East, she

is working on a novel about two women over sixty—love at any age!” Her influences

“range from Edna St. Vincent Millay through Gertrude Stein to Denise Levertov.” Two

Women brought together the poetry of these two writers, providing a map of lesbian love

and desire prior to the current insurgence of lesbian-feminism in the 1970s. All of the

material published by Womanpress demonstrates the activist role of the publisher.

Womanpress not only published and distributed materials by and about lesbians for

lesbian readers, the press also took an important role in promoting and building

communities for lesbian writers and lesbian readers.

Like Womanpress, Metis Press was another small, Chicago-based, lesbian-feminist

publisher. Metis Press made “their public debut at the Omaha Women in Print

Conference” in 1976.424 Slowly acquiring equipment for printing, including “a 320 AB

Dick, a cantankerous 1250 Multi, platemaker, light table, and dark room,” the owners

Chris Sanders and Barb Emrys noted, “we do not survive financially; the time we have to

424
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 195.

255
spend working to survive has been a great drawback.”425 Between 1977 and 1984, Metis

Press published eight titles beginning with Barbara Emrys’s Wild Women Don’t Get the

Blues: Stories in 1977. In 1978, Metis published three books: Muriel Goldenson

Madden’s On the Wire, Stretched with Power, Barbara Sheen’s Shedevils: Stories, and

Arny Christine Straayer’s Momma Used to Hum to Me. In 1979, Metis published two

collaborative books, Linda Johnson Stern and Valerie Pinkerton Tio’s The Secret Witch;

and, They Met the Who-Ever-It Was and A Book of One’s Own: Guide to Self-Publishing

by Christine Leslie Johnson and Arny Christine Straayer. In 1980, Metis published Arny

Christine Straayer’s Hurtin & Healin & Talking It Over. The last book published by

Metis was in 1984, Georgia Jo Ressmeyer’s Bernice: A Comedy in Letters.

The Lesbian Writers Conference and the publishing of Lavender Press,

Womanpress, and Metis Press are all deeply connected with community building,

networking and organizing among lesbian feminists. More than half of the publishing of

Womanpress is related to materials from the Lesbian Writers Conference. The published

artifacts from Womanpress have the intention of spreading the energy and messages of

the Lesbian Writers Conference to groups of readers, writers, and activists who couldn’t

attend the conference as well as bolstering the on-going influence of the conferences.

Lavender Press and Metis Press both enter book publishing from a background in

publishing periodicals, demonstrating the extensibility of publishing within the

community of editors, publishers, and writers. Both Lavender Woman and Black Maria

had a devoted following of readers; thus, the extension from publishing periodicals to

publishing books brought both experience and a known audience. The strong community

425
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 195.

256
engagement of the publishers of Lavender Press and Metis Press in building activist and

literary formations provided an important foundation for reaching readers.

The Lesbian Writers Conference and the publishers associated with it demonstrate

another node of geographically dispersed feminist projects during the 1970s. Earlier

narratives of the WLM and lesbian-feminism emphasized locations on “the coasts” or in

a particular city such as New York or San Francisco as vanguards of lesbian-feminism. In

Chicago, however, there was a vibrant publishing and activist community of lesbian-

feminists and that community was networked in national ways. Certainly, geography

shapes different expressions of lesbian-feminism; what is possible in New York, NY, or

Oakland, CA, is different from what is possible in Chicago, IL, or East Lansing, MI, but

all activities were important expressions of feminism and lesbian feminism. These

examples of inclusion, modeled by Grier in both her conference speech and her material

practices as editor of The Ladder and Naiad Books, by Kuda in her leadership of the

conference, and by Lesbian Connection in its publishing work, are important responses to

the values and ideals of lesbian-feminism. All of them built lesbian-feminist practice by

engaging lesbians in lesbian print culture.

Literary genealogies and the practice of elaborating them both in print and in

communal gatherings is striking in the example of WomanPress. Valerie Taylor and

Marie Kuda invoke the description of “literary grandchildren” to describe the intellectual

genealogies of writers that they imagined creating through the work of the conferences

and through publishing. Two Women as a cultural artifact asserts the existence of lesbian

desire, and its longevity and historicity prior to the current expansion of lesbian-feminism

that women were witnessing and participating in when the book was published.

257
Moreover, the emphasis of Kuda as publisher in the anthology that came out of the

second Lesbian Writers Conference demonstrates the expansiveness of vision that

organizers and activists had for lesbian-feminism, both as a political practice and as an

ideology.

The bibliography Women Loving Women is a significant intervention into lesbian

print culture and theories of literary bibliography. The bibliography enacted in Women

Loving Women is what I characterize as community biography. It tells a story of origin

about lesbians and publishing in the 20th century.426 In the introduction, Kuda notes that

“minimal bibliographic information is included” on each of the books she presents. For

Kuda, bibliography refers not to extensive iterations of published editions but rather to

authors and titles of books. More important for Kuda than an exhaustive bibliographic

survey is “a solid background in the literature of women loving women,” one that

emphasizes in particular lesbianism as a “valid, positive alternative lifestyle.” Through

bibliographic entries, supplemented by factual and chatty annotations of the books, Kuda

narrates a history of lesbian love and desire, with attention to initial thematic appearances

of boarding school narratives, coming out narratives, and prison narratives about

lesbianism, to name a few. Included in Women Loving Women are H.D., Michael Field,

Amy Lowell, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, and Gale Wilhelm as well as pulp

books by Ann Bannon, Vin Packer, and Tereska Torres. Even biography makes an

appearance where appropriate, including Rebecca Patterson’s biography of Emily

Dickinson. In Women Loving Women, Kuda tells a story about lesbianism through a

426
I take the term story of origin from both Katie King (“Bibliography and a Feminist
Apparatus of Literary Production, TEXT 5: Transactions of the Society for Textual
Scholarship (1991): 91-103) and Kathy Davis in The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

258
history of lesbian publishing and of lesbian authors. Much like Grier and Foster in their

earlier work, Kuda constructs a genealogy for lesbian writers through the practice of

bibliography.

The political meanings of the publishing and circulation of Women Loving Women

are profound for Kuda and for her readers. At the conclusion of her introduction, Kuda

writes, “If we each hound libraries and bookstores for copies of some of these books we

have really made headway; and if each would write publishers to demand reprints of out-

of-print books we will have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We will have been a

small part in a resurgance of energy—women, lesbians demanding as our right access to

our literary grandmothers, sisters and book-children yet unborn.”427 Kuda links the

readers of her bibliography with their literary foremothers and inserts all of them into a

system of publishing and book circulation where everyone has an important part to play

as an advocate for lesbian literature. Women Loving Women is a tool: not only to guide

reading and shape a community biography of lesbianism but also to make lesbian

literature more visible to booksellers, libraries, and publishers. Kuda understands “access

to our literary grandmothers, sisters and book-children yet unborn” as a right. By

articulating this within a political framework, Kuda enacts bibliography as a form of

biography, as a political statement, and as a site of political activism.

Kuda’s work within the system of literary culture was successful. In addition to the

five years of the Lesbian Writers Conference, by the end of 1978 the small chapbook

Women Loving Women was “reviewed in library journals in the U.S. And Canada” and

“added to the shelves of 123 libraries by the end of 1978.” An announcement inserted in

427
Kuda, Women Loving Women, ii.

259
the book as it went to press informed readers that Foster’s Sex Variant Women in

Literature was being released by a commercial press (Diana Press.) In addition, many of

the books out of print then were reissued through actions taken by many others within the

lesbian-feminist movement.

Out & Out Books

“I feel as if our hearts were beating very fast in those days.” —Joan Larkin

Consciousness-raising groups were foundational to the Women’s Liberation

Movement,428 but CR groups weren’t the only groups that brought women together for

revolutionary purposes. A Brooklyn-based writing group called Seven Women Poets in

the early- and mid-1970s was the genesis for what would develop into Out & Out Books.

Seven Women Poets included Joan Larkin, Jan Clausen, Irena Klepfisz, Alison Colbert,

Sharon Thompson, Mary Patton, and Kathryn McHargue.429 Larkin describes the group

as “a very intense group” reflecting the “intensity of lesbian-feminism.”430

The women of Seven Women Poets, who had done some readings together,

imagined publishing a collection with work by all seven of the women. The idea of

publishing a collection corresponded with a trip Larkin planned to San Francisco to visit

Martha Shelley. Larkin and Shelley had met when Larkin wrote a fan letter to Shelley

428
In Dear Sisters, Baxandall and Gordon describe consciousness raising (CR) as “the
major new organization form, theory of knowledge, and research tool of the women’s
liberation movement. CR assumed that “women were the experts on their own
experience” and that “feminist theory could only arise from the daily lives of women.”
The proliferation of CR groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s was one element of the
sharing and adoption of feminism by women. Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters, 67.
429
Interview with Joan Larkin, May 26, 2011; Kathryn McHargue’s name was provided
by Jan Clausen in a personal email correspondence, June 30, 2011.
430
Interview with Joan Larkin, May 26, 2011.

260
after listening to her show, “Lesbian Nation,” on WBAI. Larkin recalls, “I loved her

voice. I think it was the Yiddishkeit that came through. Here was a Jewish dyke who

talked like Brooklyn and was very smart, and she had the message that I was passionate

about at the time, you know, Dykes Ignite.” At their first dinner together, Larkin was just

coming out and Shelley “knew immediately what had to be done.” The two didn’t have a

long romance, but they began a friendship.431 Shelley “had been very moved by Judy

Grahn’s poetry” so she “moved out to California and joined the Women’s Press

Collective.” 432 When Larkin visited, she stayed in Shelley’s home, shared with Judy

Grahn, Wendy Cadden, Alice Molloy, and Carol Wilson, all of the Women’s Press

Collective.433 Larkin talked with the members of the Women’s Press Collective as well as

alta of Shameless Hussy Press about the possibility of publishing the collection of the

Seven Women Poets. The west coast publishers weren’t able to commit to the project, but

Larkin said, “It was inspiring to connect with both alta and with Judy and to see the

beautiful books that the Women’s Press Collective were doing.”434 In response to

Larkin’s inquiry about the Seven Women Poets anthology, alta prophetically told Larkin

“to publish it yourself,” so she returned to Brooklyn with the idea of starting a press.435

431
Ibid.
432
Martha Shelley, interview with Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, October
12, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 50.
433
Ibid, 51.
434
Larkin interview.
435
Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman, Guide to Women’s Publishing, Paradise, CA:
Dustbooks, 158.

261
 Although the collection of Seven Women Poets was never published, Larkin,

Bulkin, Clausen, and Klepfisz started Out & Out Books. Clausen, in her memoir Apples

and Oranges, describes it as “a cooperative self-publishing scheme” in which they

“would issue poetry books under a common imprint” to “give each writer or editor

control of her own project while averting the stigma of vanity publication” and that they

“would share distribution and publicity efforts.”436 Judy Grahn dismissed Larkin’s

anxieties about the stigma of self-publishing during her trip to San Francisco. Grahn’s

retort when asked if she was concerned if someone would view the Women’s Press

Collective as vanity publishing was, “Hell, that’s not vanity, that’s aggression.”437

The first project published by Out & Out Books was a collection of lesbian poetry,

Amazon Poetry. Larkin and Bulkin worked on the anthology throughout 1975.438 By the

end of 1975, Larkin, Bulkin, Clausen, and Klepfisz collectively had published four

books. In addition to Amazon Poetry, they published Jan Clausen’s After Touch,439

Larkin’s Housework, and Klepfisz’s Periods of Stress.

Shortly into the work of Out & Out Books, the group Seven Women Poets spiraled

into conflict which resulted in “an angry, explosive break up” of the group.440 In

remembering these years, Larkin said, “I feel as if our hearts were beating very fast in

436
Clausen, Apples and Oranges, 130.
437
Larkin interview.
438
A complete discussion of Amazon Poetry follows in chapter four.
439
In Apples and Oranges, Clausen describes this book as “self-published.” (Clausen,
Apples and Oranges, 141). While I appreciate Clausen’s characterization of the book in
her retrospective narrative, self-consciousness about “self-publishing” during the 1970s
and the first half of the 1980s does not seem predominant in archival sources.
440
Interview with Joan Larkin, May 26, 2011.

262
those days.” Her description is both of the quick beats of excitement and possibilities as

well as the rapid contractions of the atria and ventricles triggered by adrenaline,

heightening reactions and perceptions of emotional intensity. Eventually, Seven Women

Poets stopped meeting. Bulkin and Clausen, then lovers, with Klepfisz and her lover,

Rima Shore, began Conditions, “a magazine of writing by women with an emphasis on

writing by lesbians.” Larkin recalls that the starting of the journal was painful to her; the

editorial group - formerly close friends - weren’t initially interested in considering her

work for the journal.441 Out & Out Books didn’t publish any books in 1976 after the

initial publication of the first four books.

In 1977, however, Larkin resumed publishing and released two books: Bernice

Goodman’s The Lesbian: A Celebration of Difference and Jacqueline Lapidus’s Starting

Over: Poetry. Both of these books came to Out & Out Books through personal

relationships: Goodman was Larkin’s therapist and well-known in the New York lesbian

community as a “guru in creating lesbian communities,” and Lapidus was a friend of

Larkin’s.442 In 1977, Out & Out Books also published two small pamphlets. The first was

a speech by Adrienne Rich titled, “The Meaning of Our Love for Women is What We

Have Constantly to Expand.”443 The occasion of Rich’s speech was Gay Pride on June

26, 1977. Rich writes that “[t]he summer of 1977 was a summer of militant, media-

scrutinized “Gay Pride” marches, responding to the antihomosexual campaign whose

441
Larkin’s poem, “Blood,” was published in Conditions 6 in 1980.
442
Larkin interview.
443
Out & Out Books also became the distributor of Susan Sherman’s Women Poems,
Love Poems in 1977, though Sherman had printed the book earlier and it languished
without distribution.

263
media symbol was a woman, Anita Bryant.” As a result of the confluence of gay pride

and the vilification of a woman, Bryant, lesbian-feminists felt “torn and alienated.” Rich

says, “Our understanding of the meaning of Anita Bryant, and the meaning of woman-

identification, was of necessity more complex (than the meaning of the gay male

community.)” Thus, a small group of women chose “to separate from the Gay Pride

demonstration in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow and hold our own rally.”444 This is the

rally that Rich addressed. Out & Out Books typeset and printed Rich’s speech as the

“first in a series of pamphlets on lesbian-feminism.”445 In 1979, Out & Out Books printed

a second printing of the pamphlet, after W. W. Norton published Rich’s collection On

Lies, Secrets, and Silence, which also contained the essay. The second pamphlet was

Barbara Smith’s influential essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” which had been

published in Conditions 2. In the course of publishing these books in 1977, other women

joined in the publishing activities, including Larkin’s lover, Ellen Shapiro, who had a

background in typography and book design. Shapiro oversaw the design and production

work for all of the books produced by Out & Out Books from 1977 on.446 Two other

women worked with the press briefly, Beth Hodges and Terry Antonicelli; in 1980,

Larkin hired lovers Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste to help with the press.

In 1978, Out & Out Books published four broadsides, another pamphlet and a

book. The broadsides were single poems: “From Caritas: Poem 3” by Olga Broumas,

444
Adrienne Rich, Introduction to “The Meaning of Our Love for Women is What We
Have Constantly to Expand,” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1979), 223.
445
Ibid.
446
Interview with Ellen Shapiro, July 5, 2011.

264
“Carrington” by Melanie Kaye, “Unemployment: Monologue” by June Jordan with

illustrations by Lynne Reynolds, and “Frances Holt” by Felice Newman with illustrations

by Ellen Weiss. The pamphlet was Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as

Power.” Lorde delivered the paper, “Uses of the Erotic,” at the Fourth Berkshire

Conference on the History of Women on August 25, 1978 at Mt. Holyoke College. Out &

Out Books published it as a pamphlet the same year; “Uses of the Erotic” was reprinted

in Sister Outsider in 1985 in the Crossing Press Feminist Series. The book was Beverly

Tanenhaus’s To Know Each Other and Be Known: Women’s Writing Workshops. This

book, which documents a series of women’s writing workshops, animates the continued

significance of writing as not only an artistic and literary engagement, but also a

community engagement for feminists and lesbian-feminists.

In 1979, Out & Out Books published one book by feminist historian Blanche

Wiesen Cook, Women and Support Networks. Women and Support Networks contained

two essays by Cook, “Women Against Economic and Social Repression: The Two Front

Challenge” and her classic article on lesbian feminism, “Female Support Networks and

Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman, Jane Addams,”

which originally appeared in the August 1977 issue of Chrysalis. In 1980, the last year of

publishing for Out & Out Books, Larkin, with her lover Ellen Shapiro, published two

books and a chapbook. The two books were Jane Creighton’s Ceres in an Open Field

(Creighton did the design work and typesetting for the book) and Joanna Russ’s On Strike

Against God. The chapbook was the sonnet sequence, “Taking Notice,” by Marilyn

Hacker, which appeared in her full-length collection with the same title.447 Marilyn

447
Marilyn Hacker, Taking Notice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

265
Hacker brought Joanna Russ to Out & Out Books when the two of them were in an

amorous relationship.

By 1980, Larkin was operating Out & Out Books on her own and turning her

attention elsewhere. Larkin notes, “I had my own road that I had to travel to sobriety. . .

.and part of the letting go of Out & Out Books and distancing myself for a very long time

from some of the people that I had done all of the work with was” to be sober. About her

years as publisher of Out & Out Books, Larkin remembers both “a lot of anger and

intense conflict as well as a lot of just amazing connection and blazing.”448 Shapiro

remembers, “There was very little money involved and lots of time, and, after a while, it

felt like it was time to move on to other stuff.”449 In total, Out & Out Books published ten

books, four broadsides and four chapbooks. Shapiro reflects that Out & Out Books “was

a really good mirror on the times” because “it brought the words of interesting, important

writers” to readers cheaply. She says, “there was nothing flashy about the products. It

was really about trying to disseminate them in ways that lots of people could read

them.”450 Through Out & Out Books, a wide range of Brooklyn-based and New York-

based writers engaged in some aspect of the project - writing, designing, publishing, and

selling books of interest to lesbians and feminists. Larkin recalls that while the press

didn’t make money—any proceeds from the books were put into publishing the next

448
Larkin interview.
449
Shapiro interview.
450
Interview with Ellen Shapiro, July 5, 2011.

266
one—she didn’t heavily subsidize the publishing activities either because the publishing

paid for itself.451

Through the books and activities of Out & Out Books, women shared information

among themselves and how they saw the world. Blending book publishing and fine art

printing, in the case of the broadsides and pamphleteering, Larkin and her compatriots in

the press expressed a variety of feminist ideas. From Audre Lorde’s call to recognize how

“the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change

within our world” to Barbara Smith’s Black feminist critical perspective on Sula, which

opened lesbian meanings in the novel to readers, the authors of Out & Out Books were

thinking critically about lesbian-feminism and offering new ideas and analyses to readers.

The books of Out & Out Press grapple with strands of radical feminism as well as

cultural feminism. Out & Out Books enacted different feminist formations through their

material publishing activities. Initially, Out & Out Books was a collective; over time, the

work became more specialized, and women came and went from the press as interests

changed. The books, pamphlets, and broadsides were tools that authors and the publisher

used as a form of consciousness-raising and community networking. While all of these

enactments of feminist ideologies are important, for Larkin, the “primary motive in

founding a press” was “making available to others the books we needed for our

survival.”452

Out & Out Books was a source for community building and networking both

through the production of the books themselves and also through the distribution of the

451
Larkin interview.
452
Joan and Chesman, Guide, 157.

267
books at poetry readings and other events. The books published by Out & Out Books

emerged from social circles among writers and lesbians in Brooklyn at the time. For Out

& Out Books, relationships drove the publishing and conflict in relationships inspired

other publishing projects. While Larkin described the publishing as “disorganized” and

“relationship-based,” the caliber of authors published by the press and the quality of the

work published continues to appear, in retrospect, extraordinary.453

In Brooklyn, in the 1970s, a group of lesbian writers came together; they became

literary luminaries, and their work remains relevant and powerful. Yet I resist seeing

these women and their work as exceptional. Part of my resistance to exceptionality

reflects feminist ideas from the time, ideals that I believe are still worthy today. The

significance of the work of Out & Out Books is how it emerged from a daily practice of

feminist engagement. Larkin describes her work as publishing friends and producing

material that was urgently necessary for lesbians. While the work was deeply political in

terms of whom she was publishing and what she was giving voice to, the work was also

housework, to use the title from Larkin’s first collection. It was done in her home with a

homemade light table, farmed out to a friend who typed on a new IBM Selectric,

produced at the local, non-profit printer. More than exceptional, the work of Out & Out

Books was quotidian, much like the daily beating of our hearts. Sometimes our hearts are

just faster. Sometimes our hearts flutter.

Night Heron Press

The statement, “Donations and/or words of support are also very gladly accepted,”

appears after ordering information for Night Heron Press books in a review of Minnie

453
Larkin Interview.

268
Bruce Pratt’s chapbook, The Sound of One Fork, in The Front Page, a newspaper

covering lesbian and gay issues in the Carolinas.454 The review, which considers both

Pratt’s chapbook and the newly published anthology, Lesbian Poetry, is riddled with

errors; Pratt’s name is misspelled as Platt throughout, there are subject-verb agreement

problems, and, at the end of the review, two paragraph-long notes from the editor extol

the books reviewed, perhaps betraying the editor’s assessment that the reviewer didn’t

attend to the books well enough. In my reading, these errors add to the charm of the

review. Within each error, typographical, grammatical, substantive, are the traces of both

the people (the reviewer, the editor, the subject of the review) and the energy, even

urgency, of the moment. The Front Page is a small newspaper that was founded out of

the energy of the 1979 March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights.455 In 1982, when

these reviews were published, The Front Page was in its third year of sustaining the

activist energy from the march through publishing. Writing and distributing news and

information about gay and lesbian issues throughout North and South Carolina in the

early 1980s cannot be considered an easy task. Nor was publishing lesbian poetry. I don’t

know if Monteagudo, the writer of the review,456 added the line about donations, or if the

editor of The Front Page inserted the line when the pages were being typeset, or if Cris

South, one of the women of Night Heron Press, wrote it when she provided ordering

information to accompany the review. Whatever the origin of the delightful phrase, it

captures some of the sentiment and spirit of publishing for lesbian-feminists. For small

454
Jesse Monteagudo, “Lesbian Poetry,” The Front Page 3, no. 1, 6.
455
The Front Page merged with Q-Notes in 2006 and continues to publish today.
456
According to Pratt Jesse Monteagudo was a reviewer who worked out of southern
Florida and syndicated his reviews to gay and lesbian newspapers.

269
publishers, who placed great importance on communicating with other women, words of

support, whether through reviews of the books published (even with errors!) or private

correspondence, are as important as donations and book purchases.

Night Heron Press of Durham, NC, was a project of three women: Cris South, a

printer in Durham, NC, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Mab Segrest. South and Pratt were

lovers at the time. The three had worked together as a part of the Feminary Collective.

Night Heron Press published two chapbooks in 1981, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s The Sound of

One Fork and Mab Segrest’s Living in a House I Do Not Own. In a grant application,

Pratt described Night Heron Press as founded “to publish the work of Lesbian women,

living in or linked to the South in some way, who have been denied access to more

traditional means of publication because of their sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, or

political point of view.” She described the beginning of the press as “[o]perating with the

volunteer labor of three women, some donated use of equipment, no advertising budget,

and cash spent only for the cost of materials.” Pratt noted that from 1981 until 1982, the

Press had substantial achievements, selling almost 2,000 copies of the two chapbooks of

poetry and “a third book in production now.”457 At one point, Pratt envisioned Night

Heron Press as a larger part of an imagined future. Pratt wrote to her friend Elizabeth

Knowlton in Atlanta that she hoped it would be integrated into “Cris’ business/copy

center when/if that gets going.”458

457
Box 36, folder “Fund for Southern Communities application for Night Heron Press,
1982-1983, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University. The third book was never published.
458
July 9, 1981 letter to Elizabeth Knowlton, Box 55, folder “Knowlton, Elizabeth, 1979-
1994,” Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University.

270
 Pratt describes publishing The Sound of One Fork “with a minimum of fuss and

muss.” The entire process took about two months between early April and late May

1981—including her time selecting and ordering the final manuscript, which she did in

consultation with Segrest. The collaboration between Segrest and Pratt as writers and

poets was important to the formation of the final book. Pratt describes her process as

putting “them in a story/chronological order” and then Segrest “re-ordered them

somewhat” which exposed some of the weaker poems in the collection. Pratt notes,

“When I read them in her sequence it was clear that those three didn’t hold up to the rest.

(I knew this but tried to hide them in chronological order.)” Pratt edited the book and

finalized it for typesetting. She reflected to Elizabeth Knowlton, one of the people the

book is dedicated to, “I’ve always felt this material was The Story of My Life so that’s

the organization.”459 This observation by Pratt is congruent with what many lesbian-

feminists were seeking in poetry at the time. The autobiographical impulse of narrative

and confessional poetry appealed to women in the WLM. Both The Sound of One Fork

and Living in a House I Do Not Own are similar in content and tone. Pratt and Segrest

explore lesbian domesticity and intimacy between women with particular emphasis on

their expression as southern lesbian writers.

The production of Pratt’s chapbook was a family affair. Pratt writes to Knowlton,

“When Ransom and Benjamin [Pratt’s sons] were here they helped me finish the

remaining 350 copies—folded covers, stapled and trimmed. They were wonderful—and

so excited to be helping me and to be making books. Ransom said, ‘Lots of people read

books, but not many people make them.’” In 1981, Pratt was a non-custodial mother; she

459
Ibid.

271
documents the saga of losing custody of her sons to her ex-husband in her later

collection, Crime Against Nature. Her delight in engaging her sons in producing the book

is compounded when she finds Ransom reading the poems as he is stapling the finished

books. He said, “Did you really drown a turtle? Why did he say no? Why were the rotten

oranges in the refrigerator? Whose refrigerator was it? Is this the Anne I met last

summer?” Pratt confides to Knowlton, “I almost wept with joy.” The labor of Ransom

and Ben Weaver on Pratt’s chapbook brings the family closer together through the shared

project. After the books had been trimmed, collated and stapled, both Ransom and Ben

wanted autographed copies and an extra copy to share “with selected teacher/friends.”460

Initially, Pratt distributed The Sound of One Fork herself. She sent a flyer out with

the Humor issue of Feminary in the fall of 1981. She noted that bookstores which were

already ordering Feminary would receive it and “hopefully they’ll pick me up.”461 Pratt

also sent out “publicity to women’s bookstores cross-country, and trying to get library

journals to review it—so librarians will order.”462 The Sound of One Fork reached readers

through the dint of Pratt’s labor: she traveled around the country doing readings and

events in women’s bookstores, homes, and other lesbian-feminist spaces. Pratt recalls

selling books out of the trunk of her car to readers, one by one.

The initial print run of The Sound of One Fork was 490 copies; Pratt distributed

twenty to friends and a small number of review copies. Eventually, Night Heron Press

printed 2,000 copies of The Sound of One Fork and sold them all. The final printing of

460
Ibid.
461
Ibid.
462
August 10, 1981, letter to Ben Weaver, Box 61, folder “1981 (1 of 2),” Minnie Bruce
Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

272
500 copies cost “$600 for paper printing, collating, stapling, and trimming.” Pratt only

printed 500 copies at a time because that is all she had enough money for - “even

bartering with Cris.”463 In 1982, The Crossing Press agreed to distribute both books from

Night Heron Press; when The Crossing Press stopped distributing books, The Sound of

One Fork was distributed by Inland.464

Although Pratt characterizes her distribution of review copies as judicious, The

Sound of One Fork was widely reviewed in both the United States and Canada. Reviews

appeared in Sinister Wisdom, off our backs, and Gay Community News. In a review for

the Canadian newspaper, Body Politic, Joy Parks wrote, “The poems in this small volume

speak directly and, telling their story simply (the way one would tell a friend), bring truth

and delight to the reader in the stark but moving language of women’s bodies and the

Southern landscape.” Parks’s review highlights the general reception of The Sound of

One Fork: lauding Pratt as a poet who unites feminism with Southern experiences and

echoing the overall sentiment of lesbian-feminist poetry as confessional conversations

between friends.

The review in Conditions, however, tells a different and important story. Jewelle L.

Gomez reviewed the book in Conditions: Nine, beginning with these sentences, “One

reason for my lasting attention to a good writer is her subjective, unstinting use of facts

and fantasies of her life in her work and the ability to create a kinship between them and

463
January 20, 1986, letter to Sheila, Box 62, Folder, “1986-1988 2 of 2,” Minnie Bruce
Pratt Papers. Correspondence between Pratt and South indicates that South produced at
least 500 copies as a way to pay off a debt that she owed Pratt, Box 57 & 58, Folders 1-5
“South, Cris, 1978-1979, 1982-1986,” Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers.
464
September 15, 1982, letter to Nancy Bereano of The Crossing Press, Box 12, folder
“Correspondence 1981-1985 2 of 4,” Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers.

273
my own. Minnie Bruce Pratt is such a poet.”465 Gomez brings a much more nuanced

reading to Pratt’s work than other critics, noting that writers use both fact and fantasy,

subtly challenging the idea that lesbian-feminist poetry is only confessional, and

highlighting a kinship between herself as an African-American writer and Pratt as a white

writer. Gomez continues, “[S]he writes from within a distinctive experience of oneness

with her world, the American South, and at the same time conveys her sense of

estrangement from its pervasive tradition of separate and unequal.”466 Gomez’s choice to

frame the review about race demonstrates not only insight into Pratt’s poetry but also the

publishing commitments of Conditions, which had just transitioned from the all-white

founding editors to a new, multi-racial editorial collective.

Gomez’s appraisal of the work is particularly relevant to the poem “Segregated

Heart” in Sound. In this poem, Pratt begins to make important connections between her

identities as a lesbian and feminist and issues of nation and race. Pratt explicated these

connections more fully in the essays of Rebellion, which Firebrand Books published in

1992. The interconnections between lesbian-feminism and anti-racist politics emerged

from important political and intellectual work done by the Feminary collective in

articulating an anti-racist Southern focus for the journal.467

In the end, Night Heron Press published two chapbooks that are now out of print

and primarily available to readers only through libraries. Pratt selected a few of the

poems from Sound for The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems. Segrest hasn’t

465
Jewelle L. Gomez, “Review of The Sound of One Fork.” Conditions: Nine (1983):
173-5.
466
Ibid.
467
Personal communication with Minnie Bruce Pratt.

274
published poetry since Living, though her collection of essays, My Mama’s Dead

Squirrel, narratively picks up on many of the themes of Living.468 Attending to these two

chapbooks as artifacts of Night Heron Press demonstrates opportunities that publishing

offered to lesbian-feminists. The two chapbooks provided a platform for Segrest and Pratt

to promote their work and activism. When Sound was published, Pratt was trying to

organize her life in a way that provided her time and space to write without the demands

of teaching as a lecturer at local universities; Pratt lived, in part, on the money from the

sale of the chapbooks. In addition, Sound was a tool for her to do readings and lectures

which became an important source of personal income for her.

Sound was also a tool that Pratt used to go “beyond [her] personal limits,

geographical [and] political, to connect to others in motion—lesbians in motion.” The

book, which traveled through distribution at bookstore, also allowed Pratt to physically

travel from her home to other communities. Pratt’s experiences on the editorial collective

of Feminary and with the southern women’s writer conferences, WomanWrites, provided

connections throughout the south. She used Sound as a platform to “enter into and meet

lesbians and overlapping communities—for instance, communist and anti-racist fighter

Eddie Sandifer was the host for my reading at the MCC [Metropolitan Community

Church] in Jackson, MS.”469

Night Heron Press was part of a broader vision of a livelihood for South as a

tradeswoman in printing. For South, as for Pratt and Segrest, the material conditions of

468
Her later collection, Memoirs of a Race Traitor, explores her work against racist and
religious violence, two themes that are important to both Pratt and Segrest at the time the
chapbooks are published, but muted in their treatments in the collections of poems.
469
Personal communication with Minnie Bruce Pratt.

275
printing intersect intimately with the ideals of feminism. In a 1984 novel by South,

Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses, the protagonist, Jessie, owns a print shop. The central

plot revolves around printing materials for an anti-Klan protest; a subplot of the novel

involves a battered woman in a shelter and the actions of feminists in both providing

personal safety and security to women and also bringing broader safety to the community

through protesting the Klan.470 The mingling of themes and experiences in fiction by

South suggests the connections between the material conditions that produced books as a

part of the Women in Print Movement and the lesbian-feminist theories that shaped

women’s lives.

Of course, making these connections between the labor of printing and the labor of

writing and editing was not always easy work. Pratt remembers conversations and

arguments within the Feminary collective about “the built-in inequality” between the

“blue-collar” work of printing and the “white-collar” work of writing and editing. Two

intimate couples in the Feminary collective embodied these dichotomies: Pratt and South

and Eleanor Holland and Helen Langa. Pratt and Langa were teachers and South and

Holland were printers and from working-class backgrounds. Both South and Holland

earned their living as printers at least for a while. Pratt recalls “the clash of material

reality and political ideals” as “inevitable.” Even though all were “bound together in our

lesbian identity,” as a group they wrestled just as much with classism as with anti-

racism.471

470
Cris South, Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses: A Novel of Resistance (Trumansburg,
NY: The Crossing Press, 1984).
471
Personal communication with Minnie Bruce Pratt.

276
 Sound and Living are in many ways representative chapbooks of lesbian print

culture in the early 1980s. The poems within them, how the books were published, and

how the books were distributed into the world of lesbian-feminists tell a common story

about how lesbian print culture emphasized a “do it yourself” sensibility and about poetry

as a medium of the movement. Thinking about the material conditions involved in the

production of these two chapbooks, however, opens and deepens the story to reflect how

people’s lives and livelihoods connect to poetry, to art, and to revolution.

Conclusion

Although Jan Clausen describes her social life as revolving “around the bicoastal

village of feminist publishing,”472 the five stories of small presses that I have recounted

demonstrate that the lesbian-feminist small press movement was not confined to the east

coast and the west coast. Rather, publishing was a political, social, and cultural

expression of lesbian-feminism for an array of women in different geographical locations

in the United States. Moreover, these women were networked with one another through

shared activism, political ideologies, overlapping friendships, intimate relationships, and

publishing interests.

The stories of these five small presses demonstrate the connection between

community building and publishing in lesbian print culture. Fran Winant’s work as a poet

and publisher through Violet Press expresses the experiences she had working with Gay

Liberation Front and Radicalesbians; her poems and her publishing practice are shaped

by the experience of her activism in the gay liberation movement and the WLM. Marie

Kuda’s work as an organizer of the Lesbian Writers Conference shapes her publishing

472
Clausen, Apples and Oranges, 2.

277
with Lavender Press and Womanpress. The spark of inspiration for Out & Out Books

came from a group of women writers, and, throughout the life of the press, the principles

of collaboration and collectivity are expressed. For Minnie Bruce Pratt, the distribution of

The Sound of One Fork, while augmented by commercial distribution, is grounded in a

community practice of speaking directly with lesbian-feminist readers throughout the

south. All of these presses demonstrate a mutually constitutive relationship between

community building and publishing for lesbian-feminism. This relationship is equally

important in both the formation and operation of presses as well as in their reasons for

ending.

Kate Adams describes the reactions of Sherry Thomas, a member of the bookstore

collective of Old Wives’ Tales in Oakland, CA, who was visiting Harriet Desmoines and

Catherine Nicholson in Nebraska when they learned that Women In Distribution (WinD)

filed for bankruptcy in 1979. They were all reminded of “the fragility of institutions

we’ve come to almost take for granted” and wondered “Is this the beginning of the end of

feminist business strategy?”473 But 1979 is not the end, nor is 1989. Certainly, milestone

events suggest reorganization and even retrenchment of both feminist ideologies and

forms of activism. Arguments about backlash against feminism as mounted by Faludi and

others are compelling, as are arguments about the repercussions of internal struggles,

such as the so-called “sex wars” during the 1980s and debates about essentialism and

separatism. Rather than seeing the Women in Print Movement, as Trysh Travis names

this period, as having a particular end point, I understand the period as containing many

endings and new beginnings reflected in constantly changing and evolving relationships

473
Kate Adams, “Built Out of Books -- Lesbian Energy and Feminist Ideology in
Alternative Publishing,” Journal of Homosexuality 34, no. 3 (1998): 113.

278
and political formations. Publishing and community building have a co-constitutive

relationship. As communities change and evolve in their formations, different forms and

vehicles for publishing are necessary and emerge to satisfy community and individual

needs.

279
/Interlude 4/Iowa City Women's Press

In the five hundred years’ history of movable type, men have traditionally been
the owners and directors of commercial printing establishments. In a profession
involving use of heavy machinery and equipment women have perhaps naturally
filled the roles of printers’ devils, press feeders, typesetters, proofreaders, and
bookbinders. Moreover, a certain habit of ignoring female contributions has
obscured much of the participation in printing.
—Lois Rather, Women as Printers, 1.

In the WLM, one site of struggle was male-dominated jobs. During the 1960s and

1970s, women entered the skilled trades to address both sexism and income inequality.

Like other skilled trades, printing, the physical component of publishing, was male-

dominated. One lesbian-feminist response to these conditions was to initiated woman-

owned print shops. In 1978, Joan and Chesman list nine all-woman print shops in the

United States, including the Oakland, CA-based Diana Press.474 These all-woman print

shops were primarily located on the east coast and the west coast, but some, including the

Iowa City Women’s Press, were located in the middle of the country.

Founded in 1972 by a collective of eight women, the Iowa City Women’s Press

formed with two purposes: “to help women gain more control over their printed words”

and “to help women gain more control over their lives through access to skills.”475 One

particular incident inspired the founding of the Iowa City Women’s Press. A male printer

refused to print the November 19, 1971 issue of Ain’t I a Woman?, Iowa City’s feminist

newspaper. The issue “contained medical self-help photographs” including photographs

of a healthy cervix and demonstrations of self-directed vaginal exams and menstrual

474
Joan and Chesman’s list is a time snapshot and not a comprehensive list of all-woman
print shops that operated in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.
475
“The Invisible Lesbian/Feminist Printer,” Feminist Bookstore News 6, no. 1, 9.

280
extraction. The printer said “that they would not print ‘pornography.’”476 This outraged

the local activists; women began to discuss starting their own printing business.

Around the same time, feminists in Iowa City organized a feminist poetry reading.

The first reading happened in the spring of 1971; a second reading happened in the spring

of 1972. Poetry, for the women gathered at the readings, “was not just an art form on

display—the form became the background for an evening of communicating our common

female culture.”477From these two reading events, a group of women decided to publish a

collection of poetry from the readings. All Women Are Welcome to Read Their Poetry

was the first book that the Iowa City Women’s Press published. The organizers said, “We

saw the poetry readings as special moments in women making their own history and we

wanted to share that history with other women.”478 Initially, the women who organized

the anthology wanted to have it printed professionally, but the cost of professional

printing was “astronomical.” They decided to print the anthology themselves on a

mimeograph machine. They wrote in the anthology,

Most women probably regard the mimeograph as a simple crude machine and see
labor on such a tool as so unrespected that only women do it. Typical to society is
the attitude that all labor done by women in crude. Many women will run mimeo
machines sometime in their lives for their bosses, or even for political lovers,
hardly any women will be allowed near a more sophisticated press. We want to
break that cycle by acquiring our own press, but first we wanted to break it by
respecting people's labor within the limitation of the only machine allowed to us.
We're writing about these realizations to encourage other women to see the tools
available to them as what they are - a mimeo is a small press, regardless of its
degree of sophistication.479

476
Ibid.
477
Preface, “All Women Are Welcome to Read Their Poetry,” 1973, 1.
478
“All Women Are Welcome to Read Their Poetry,” 1973, frontmatter.
479
Ibid.

281
From publishing the 2,000 copies of the anthology “came the determination to form a

women’s press collective to enable women in this town, and throughout the midwest, to

control what they want to print.” Proceeds from the poetry anthology were designed to

“help to purchase offset press equipment.” The Iowa City Women’s Press was born.

The Iowa City Women’s Press started as a volunteer-run, seven-woman, collective

print shop “in a converted garage.” In a letter to Coletta Reid of Diana Press, Lori of

ICWP described the work that they were doing to “the converted garage: rewiring,

insulating, putting sheet rock up;” Lori said, “we’re building the inside to suit our

needs.”480 In addition, the ICWP adopted a collective structure that “placed a priority on

nonhierarchical democratic values,” which prompted them to create a system of job

rotation that they adhered to strictly during the early years.” Initially, the Iowa City

Women’s Press wanted to help women get their words and ideas into print; they charged

very little for their services. Lori told Coletta we “print at no cost for some women and. .

.print at cost for any women who will help us run their materials or do it themselves.”481

By June 1973, the Iowa City Women’s Press had an impressive amount of equipment,

including “a 10 yr. old 1250 [multi-lith printer], a 50 yr. old platen press, a NuAr

platemaker (the old fashioned method), a Robertson vertical camera, a light table, a 30”

papercutter, a whole punch (weight 1/2 ton), a folder, and a drafting table.”482 The ICWP

acquired the equipment through the proceeds from the poetry collection and with a

donation from Robin Morgan, who gave the ICWP her honoraria from speaking at the

480
Diana Press Papers, Mazer Archive.
481
Ibid.
482
Ibid.

282
University of Iowa. In addition, the ICWP made their printing equipment available to

individuals and community groups and taught women how to operate the presses.

The AIAW newspaper collective used the presses of the ICWP to print the

newspaper and two special volumes: Academic Feminists and the Women’s Movement,

an analysis of how academic women were taking over the women’s movement, and

Because Mourning Sickness Is a Staple in My Country, a collection of poetry that

explores the relationships among gender, sexuality, and class.

The Iowa City Women’s Press also published two skills manuals: Greasy Thumb

(1976) by Barb Wyatt and Julie Zolot and Against the Grain (1977) by Dale McCormick.

Greasy Thumb was an automechanics manual for women; Against the Grain was a

carpentry manual for women. In 1982, the Iowa City Women’s press employed 4-5

women full time and had associated “bindery and typesetting businesses” that employed

another 3-4 women.

An article for FBN in March 1982, titled “The Invisible Lesbian/Feminist Printer,

provides a snapshot of the ICWP. Barb and Joan, two members of the Iowa City

Women’s Press collective, describe the Iowa City Women’s Press as currently

concentrating “more and more on printing books for lesbian/feminist publishers and self-

publishing women, and on printing periodicals such as Common Lives/Lesbian Lives and

Sinister Wisdom.”483 After a brief update on the Iowa City Women’s Press, Joan and Barb

describe two endemic problems for the Iowa City Women’s Press: “trying to compete as

an undercapitalized business in a highly capitalized industry” and “credibility.”484 The

483
“The Invisible Lesbian/Feminist Printer,” Feminist Bookstore News 6, no. 1, 9.
484
Ibid.

283
Iowa City Women’s Press relied “on old and inefficient equipment” to do their work and

struggled with credibility “when women are unable to recognize the dilemma we are in.”

Barb and Joan explain that mistakes of the press are not the result of “carelessness” but of

“material problems.”485 Limitations of equipment and training created problems for the

press, making them less competitive on price and quality in comparison to other, better

capitalized print shops. Joan and Barb used the forum in FBN to ask women “to consider

seriously the ramifications of not supporting these (lesbian-feminist) shops.” Specifically,

they noted that it was difficult for them to get women publishers “to understand that the

labor of producing a book goes hand in hand with the labor of writing and publishing a

book. Lesbian/feminist publishers would find it inconceivable to publish a book written

by a man; yet virtually all choose to have their books produced by men.”486 Barb and

Joan wanted this to change. The made three appeals to the FBN community:

1. If you are a publisher of books or periodicals, consider having women-owned

printshops do your printing. It is beyond our capabilities at this point to efficiently
produce large runs of 300-page books. Where we can be competitive is in the area
of smaller books and periodicals, such as 100-200 pages and 2000-5000 copies.
2. If you are involved in any women’s organizations, ask where the letterhead,
flyers, brochures, or posters are being printed. If there isn’t a woman printer in
your area who is capable of doing what you need, contact us for names of other
women printers nearby.
3. When you go into a women’s bookstore, be aware of what books and
periodicals are printed by women (look for this information on the copyright
page); and know that the money you pay for that book goes directly back to
women, all the way down the line.487

These appeals to a national community to provide concrete support to the Iowa City

Women’s Press by using them as a printer demonstrate how the Iowa City Women’s

485
Ibid.
486
Ibid.
487
Ibid.

284
Press used feminist ideologies as a way to build a national base of customers. Barb and

Joan appealed not only publishers of books and periodicals but also to local women’s

organizations and to book buyers to support the work of the Iowa City Women’s Press.

Barb and Joan on behalf of the Iowa City Women’s Press mobilize a range of

constituents to support the organization—and the principles it embodied. For a period of

time, this appeal was effective. In principle, women wanted to matronize woman-owned

businesses.

Barb and Joan also solicited feedback from the FBN community in the article.

They asked,

1. Would you consider paying $.50 more for a book produced by women? This is
a way for all of us to capitalize our own institutions.
2. As a bookseller, would you consider displaying women-produced books
separately and explain and educate customers about the difference in prices?
3. As a publisher even if you can’t feasibly print all of your books with a feminist
printer, perhaps you can print one or two books a year, especially those books that
are of most importance to our lesbian culture, in a lesbian/feminist shop.488

These questions indicate some of the business strategies and consciousness-raising

tools that the Iowa City Women’s Press mobilized to educate existing and potential

customers. The letter concluded, “This is a critical time for the Iowa City Women’s

Press. We are worried about our future, both in terms of our own jobs and the continuing

existence of the press.” In 1982, the Iowa City Women’s Press was concerned about their

economic viability. Barb and Joan continue, “Right now the Iowa City Women’s Press is

the only lesbian/feminist press in the country in which a book can be typeset, printed and

bound by women. Its loss would be a significant one. The loss of any lesbian/feminist

press at any stage of its development is significant. The survival of our cultural

488
Ibid.

285
institutions—our insistence on our public selves—is an important guarantee for the

survival of our individual freedom.” The Iowa City Women’s Press did survive

throughout 1982, 1983, 1984, and most of 1985, but The Iowa City Women’s Press

closed in December 1985.

In reporting on the closing of the press, Carol Seajay wrote,

Over the years the Press printed many of the issues of Sinister Wisdom, many of
the early Naiad Press titles, early issues of Lesbian Connection, and all of the
issues of Common Lives/Lesbian Lives and Maize, as well as Narratives: Poems
in the Tradition of Black Women, Shadow on a Tightrope, and Saturday Night in
the Prime of Life. Lesbian Land was the last book off the press. Aunt Lute Book
Company, the publisher started by two of the Press’s founders with the intention
of having the books printed by the press, had to have its two most recent books
printed elsewhere.489

Lorna Campbell, one of the workers at the Iowa City Women’s Press, described the

reasons for the press’s closure to Seajay: “Basically we were all good workers. But none

of us were managers.” Campbell describes multiple issues at the Iowa City Women’s

Press resulting in its closure. The Iowa City Women’s Press invested in another press to

modernize and increase their capacity, but they financed this investment with debt. To

service debt payments, the Iowa City Women’s Press brought in more work, but

simultaneously they faced the challenge of worker burnout. The press tried to address the

work situation and limit workers to a forty hour work week, but this move limited overall

productivity. Over time, the finances for the press “consistently got worse.” Finally, when

the collective of the Iowa City Women’s Press examined what needed to be done to make

the press viable, they realized that the pricing schedule was not competitive, the

equipment was antiquated, and they didn’t estimate effectively the amount of time that it

489
Iowa City Women’s Press Closes, Feminist Bookstore News 8, no. 4 (Dec/Jan 1986),
13.

286
took to run jobs. In addition, the community of lesbian publishers for printing jobs was

decreasing; to have a large enough economic base, the collective would need to market

their services outside of the lesbian community, a prospect which didn’t appeal to

members of the collective. In light of all of this, the collective decided to dissolve the

corporation, leaving some debts, and releasing all of the workers to pursue other

project.490

At the conclusion of the article in FBN, Seajay asks, “Is this the end of an era? Are

the dreams we birthed no longer possible? Does the press closing represent a settling of

visions? Revisions?”491 Seajay senses some of the issues facing lesbian-feminist

publisher in the mid-1980s. The closure of the Iowa City Women’s Press, followed in

January 1987 by the closure of the San Francisco Women’s Press, did mark the end of an

era. Not the end of feminism, nor the end of feminist publishers, but the end of an

experiment in building an alternative lesbian-feminist economy. Lesbian-feminists

envisioned a world in which all aspects of the means of production were controlled by

and benefited women. A broad network of lesbian-feminists worked to make this a reality

between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, but by the late 1980s, the project failed.

There are two primary reasons for the failure of the alternative lesbian-feminist

economy. First, the community of lesbian-feminists was more robust and defined through

activism between the years of 1976 and 1983. By the middle of the 1980s, this

community began to fray for a number of reasons. Some women developed new activist

interests outside of lesbian-feminists, including Central American solidarity work, work

490
Ibid.
491
Ibid.

287
on reproductive choice, and anti-nuclear activism; other women had a restless sense of

insularity within lesbian-feminist communities; other women experienced stress and

burnout from fractious personal and political conflicts. Lesbian-feminist communities

were small communities to begin with; as conflicts and strife within the community grew

and as women developed new interests and attentions, the community became even

smaller and lacked the economic power to sustain the array of community institutions

that had been developed.

Second, the forces of commodity capitalism, which dictate that the most

inexpensive products and services prevail in the marketplace, overwhelmed lesbian-

feminist communities. Barb and Joan rightly note that many lesbian-feminist books

published in 1982 were not printed by lesbian-feminist printers. That trend continued as

printing technology simultaneously became more sophisticated and cheaper. Printers with

established, well-capitalized businesses offered cheaper prices to lesbian-feminist

publishers and in service to their own bottom lines, they brought their business

elsewhere. Undercapitalized lesbian-feminist printers could not compete. Thus, these two

dynamics—changes within lesbian-feminist communities and the forces of commodity

capitalism—dealt a fatal blow to many lesbian-feminist business, including the Iowa City

Women’s Press.

The Iowa City Women’s Press, however, fulfilled partially their two original

objectives. Their first objective was “to help women gain more control over their printed

words.” During the thirteen years of operation, the Iowa City Women’s Press did just

that. Moreover, they helped to transform the overall environment for women. The refusal

of business by the male printer in 1971, which sparked women to create the Iowa City

288
Women’s Press, is now an action relegated to history. Today, commercial printers print

feminist and lesbian books without question. Part of the reason for this new approach to

business is aggressive capitalism, which dictates that the market responds to money. If

lesbians can pay, printers will print the materials. It is not untrue, however, to recognize

that the work of feminists and lesbian-feminists created a new social and political

climate, which brings more acceptance to the publication and circulation of lesbian

materials. The act of taking power to print materials for lesbian-feminist communities,

combined with the circulation of these materials by publishers, changed the habitus in

which women live. The work of the Iowa City Women’s Press was successful in

achieving this aspect of its mission and contributing to the transformation of society.

The other goal of the Iowa City Women’s Press—to help women gain more control

of their lives through access to skills—was also partially achieved. The Iowa City

Women’s Press Collective not only was an important site of employment and skill

building; through its two self-help publications, Greasy Thumb and Against the Grain,

the Iowa City Women’s Press Collective educated and advocated for women to have

knowledge about skilled trades. Many women involved in the Iowa City Women’s Press

continued to make other important contributions to lesbian print culture. Joan Pinkvoss,

one of the founders of the Iowa City Women’s Press Collective, left the collective to

become the publisher of Spinster’s Ink, a small lesbian press, which eventually merged

with Aunt Lute. Other members of the Iowa City Women’s Press Collective worked on

the lesbian periodical Common Lives/Lesbian Lives. The Iowa City Women’s Press

Collective was an important political and economic formation within the WLM and its

work animates many key elements of lesbian print culture.

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 Chapter 4

“To All of the Women Who Find Something of Themselves in It”

Lesbian Anthologies

On the Tip of Our Tongues

The moment of the poem is not when it is read by a solitary reader whose eyes scan

the page. It is not when the inky press runs paper over plates making an impression which

will be bound into a book. The moment of the poem is not when the poem is typeset. It is

not when the poet sets pen to paper, the first time or the last. Each stroke of the pen, each

stroke of the finger on the keyboard, each mechanical intervention to create print is a

tragic effort to reclaim the past. The moment of the poem is always, already lost by the

time the first word is written, by the time the last word is read.

As when you read Judy Grahn’s “Talkers in a Dream Doorway.”* You are not in

New York. There is not a woman leaning in the doorway. You are not leaving. There is

no cab honking nine flights below. You are not aware of your own body’s temptation.

You are not admitting, or denying the admission of, your desire. You are not imagining

pulling a breast to you. You are not saying goodbye with longing. When you encounter

the poem, you are reading. Ideally, in bed. You are watching, witnessing words cascade

down a page. Reading as if for the first time, though it may be the second, or third, or

sixty-ninth time that you have read the poem. Each time the poem remakes you. Rewrites

your desire, reconfigures your perceptions of your body, her body, the chaste or racy

thoughts of your mind, the intensity between you.

290
 The moment of the poem is both always already lost and waiting, restlessly, to

emerge. Patiently pressed in white pages, the moment of the poem emerges again when

soft hands crack the spine of a book for a contemplative moment. The book, with the

poem, releases a cacophony of sounds—traffic roaring, knuckles digging into thighs,

tongues talking in each other’s mouths—but the loudest sounds are the beating of your

heart, the wanting something, the wine-flushed face, the flexing tongues, the all-

consuming passion. The loudest sounds are what was lost, what never happened: the

leaning down, the tongues nodding together, the possession of life.

The moment of the poem a Janus-faced phantom—lost always, already as you read

this and waiting, restlessly, to emerge. It cannot be found as it slips farther and farther

into a history that cannot be recreated, yet you search for it incessantly, wanting to find,

to hold that brief ephemeral, elusive moment. Wanting to say,

we’ve got it,

we’re in the doorway.
we’ve got it right here, between us,

(Admit it) on the tip of our tongues.

_____

*Talkers in a Dream Doorway

You leaned your body in the doorway

(it was a dim NY hall)
I was leaving as usual—on my way.
You had your head cocked to the side
in your most intelligent manner
eyes glistening with provocation,
gaze direct as always,
and more, as though wanting something,
as though I could have bent and kissed you
like a lover
and nothing social would have changed,

291
no one minded, no one bothered.
I can’t testify to your intention.

I can only admit to my temptation.

Your intensity dazed me, so matter of fact

as though I could have leaned my denser body into yours,
in that moment while the cab waited
traffic roaring nine flights down
as well as in my ears,
both of us with lovers of our own
and living on each end of a large continent.
We were raised in vastly different places,
yet speak this uncanny similar tongue.
Some times we’re different races,
certainly we’re different classes
yet our common bonds and common graces,
common wounds and destinations
keep us closer than some married folks.

I admit I have wanted to touch your face, intimately.

Supposing that I were to do this awful

act, this breach of all our lovers’ promises—in reality—
this tiny, cosmic infidelity: I believe our lips would first be
tentative, then hardened in a rush of feeling, unity
such as we thought could render up the constellations AND our
daily lives, justice, equality AND freedom,
give us worldly definition
AND the bread of belonging. In the eye of my imagination
I see my fingers curled round the back of your head
as though it were your breast
and I were pulling it to me.
As though your head were your breast
and I were pulling it to me.

I admit, I have wanted to possess your mind.

I leaned forward to say good-bye,

aware of your knuckle possibly digging a tunnel
through my thigh, of the whole shape of your body as
an opening, a doorway to the heart.
Both of us with other lives to lead
still sure why we need so much to join,
and do join with our eyes on every
socially possible occasion.

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More than friends, even girl friends,
more than comrades, surely,
more than workers with the same bent,
and more than fellow magicians
exchanging recipes for a modern brand of golden spit.

I admit we have already joined more than physically.

The cab’s horn roars.

You smile, or part your lips as if to welcome how I’d just
slip in there, our tongues nodding together,
talking inside each other’s mouth for a change,
as our upper bodies talked that night we danced together.
Your face was wine-flushed, and foolish; my desire selfish,
pushing you beyond your strength.
You paid for it later, in pain, you said.
I forget you are older, and fragile. I forget your arthritis.
I paid later in guilt, though not very much.
I loved holding you so close, your ear pressed to my ear.
I wanted to kiss you then but I didn’t dare
lest I spoil the real bonding we were doing there.

I admit I have wanted to possess my own life.

Our desire is that we want to talk of really important things,

and words come so slowly, eons of movement
squirt them against our gums. Maybe once in ten years a sentence
actually flashes out, altering everything in its path.
Flexing our tongues into each other’s dreams, we want to
suck a new language, strike a thought into being, out of the old
fleshpot. That rotten old body of our long submersion. We sense
the new idea can be a dance of all kinds of women,
one we seek with despair and desire
and exaltation; are willing to pay for
with all-consuming passion, AND those tiny boring paper cuts.
I never did lean down to you that day.
I said good-bye with longing and some confusion.

I admit to wanting a sword AND a vision.

I doubt I will ever kiss you in that manner.

I doubt I will ever stop following you around, wanting to.
This is our love, this stuff
pouring out of us, and if this mutual desire is
some peculiar ether-marriage
among queens, made of the longs of women

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 to really love each other, made of dreams
and needs larger than all of us,
we may not know what to do
with it yet but at least
we’ve got it,
we’re in the doorway.
We’ve got it right here, between us,

(Admit it) on the tip of our tongues.

Introduction

Anthologies, from the Greek words for “flower” and “gathering,” are collections

of writing with particular power in literary circles for canon creation and perpetuation.

For lesbian writers and publishers, anthologies define and explore the meanings, past,

present, and future, of lesbian identity and lesbian-feminism. Lesbian, as a descriptor

(both adjective and noun) for women who build their lives around erotic, emotional,

sensual, and sexual relationships with other women, dates to 1890,492 but the use of

lesbian changes throughout its history in the language. In this chapter, I narrate one

history of lesbian poetry by examining anthologies published in the United States,

between 1969 and 1989. I examine how editors developed anthologies, including what

work anthologies do politically, socially, and literarily, and what meanings they make for

lesbian identity formations. I consider what dialogues anthologies encourage in

relationship to lesbian identity formations and how anthologies engage in the production

of lesbian identities for poets and readers. Two question shape this history: how are

lesbian communities imagined and constructed in different moments in time and by

different groups of people?, and how are lesbian identities imagined and constructed by

poets in both their poetics and in their practice of poetry?

492
J.S. Billings used “lesbian love” in The National Medical Dictionary (London: Lea
Bros & Co, 1890) to describe tribadism.

294
 During the WLM, anthologies become a crucial literary form; anthologies operated

not only as a collection of writing but also as a forum to project an imagined world.

Attention to genre in relationship to the WLM is prevalent in scholarly literature. Stacey

Young argues that what she terms autotheoretical texts are crucial to the WLM as a

method of political speech grounded in personal experience.493 Dana Shugar argues that

science fiction and fantasy texts formed a crucial intellectual bulwark for lesbian

separatists.494 Honor Moore and T.V. Reed examine the significance of poetry for

feminist activism.495 In a similar register to genre, the form of the anthology is a

significant expression of lesbian-feminism during the 1970s and 1980s. Jane Gallop

examines scholarly anthologies as “good places to witness the dynamics of

collectivity”496 within feminism; the dynamics of collectivity for lesbian-feminism are on

display in anthologies as well. The rich publishing environment of feminism and lesbian-

feminism in the 1970s and 1980s created possibilities for multiple engagements with

anthologies. An overview of feminist scholarship on anthologies opens this chapter.

With this history of lesbian anthologies, I make three arguments. First, lesbian-

feminist anthologies crystallized and extended lesbian-feminist identities in lesbian-

feminist literary, political, and aesthetic contexts. Second, by examining the material

493
Stacey Young, Chapter three, “The Autotheoretical Texts,” Changing the Wor(l)d:
Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (New York: Routledge, 1997).
494
Dana R. Shugar, Part Three, Separatism and Women’s Community (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
495
Honor Moore, Poems from the Women’s Movement (New York: Library of America,
2009) and T. V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights
Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
496
Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 8.

295
conditions of the publication of lesbian-feminist anthologies, from how material was

solicited and selected for publication to how published books circulated, I illuminate how

anthologies produced identities and how identities changed over time, demonstrating that

the search for lesbian identity or lesbian-feminist identity is as consuming, and as futile,

as the search for the moment of the poem. Writers and editors utilize anthologies, in

particular, as a site of identity formation and elaboration for lesbian-feminism because of

the unique attributes of anthologies as a gathering of multiple voices. Third, I explore

how anthologies express particular values and ethics for lesbian-feminist authors.

I foreground these arguments by considering the work of literary critics Jeannette

Howard Foster and Barbara Grier. Foster and Grier created the idea of lesbian readers

and then promulgated it through their published criticism to create lesbian communities

of readers. Poets, editors, and activists in the 1970s and 1980s conceptualized, published,

and sold anthologies for lesbian reader communities. While Foster and Grier never

worked as editors of lesbian poetry anthologies, their work as readers and critics brought

together poems and poets as lesbian in precursor anthologies for lesbian readers.

To demonstrate these three arguments, I review lesbian-feminist anthologies

between 1969 and 1989, with particular attention to the identities defined and articulated

through the anthologies, and consider the material means of production of the anthologies

in relationship to broader feminist formations. Lesbian poetry anthologies begin with

small press publishing in the form of chapbooks. Four chapbooks—Woman to Woman

(Women’s Press Collective, 1970), Dykes for an American Revolution (Easter Day Press,

1971), We Are All Lesbians (Violet Press, 1973), and Because Mourning Sickness is a

Staple in My Country (Ain’t I a Woman, 1973)—and one collection of lesbian writing

296
including poetry, Lesbians Speak Out (Women’s Press Collective, 1971/1974) are the

focus of this investigation. All of these anthologies circulate in lesbian reader

communities as sites of identity performance, consolidation and explication for lesbian-

feminism. Two perfect bound anthologies of lesbian poetry, Amazon Poetry (Out & Out

Books, 1975) and Lesbian Poetry (Persephone Press, 1981), continue the work of the

chapbooks, particularly distilling the identity of lesbian through poetry, but also having a

keen eye to the literary, particularly intervening in systems of canonization.

If lesbian-feminist publishing of anthologies in the 1970s represents the

crystallization of lesbian identities through lesbian print cultures, the 1980s represents the

elaboration of these identities. Lesbian-feminist publishing in the 1980s, particularly

through special issues of literary journals, produces a variety of anthologies that expand,

amplify, complicate, and extend ideas about lesbian identities, particularly through the

examination of intersectional identities: lesbian and African-American, lesbian and

Jewish, lesbian and Native American, lesbian and Latina. While some of these

anthologies are picked up by mainstream, commercial publishing houses, all of them

originate with small, lesbian-feminist publishers. The first commercial publication of a

lesbian poetry anthology is an anthology that deploys the identity of gay and lesbian, but

not lesbian-feminist. Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, edited by Joan Larkin and Carl

Morse and published by St. Martin’s Press in 1987, crystallizes a new identity formation,

gay and lesbian. Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time expresses a co-gender identity

formation and a denouement to the work and activities of lesbian-feminist publishing.

This chapter narrates stories about specialized books–anthologies–and the editing

practices and reading practices that brought lesbian anthologies into being. It also tells

297
stories about politics–politics of identities, politics of publishing, and politics of lesbian

lives.

Anthologies and Literary Scholarship

Nancy K. Miller observes that feminist scholarship has “transformed the

anthology from its function as repository of the old and classical to its current state as a

projection of the new and innovative.”497 Miller suggests, and I amplify, the significance

of anthologies in projecting, even creating, new and innovative writing and identities.

Miller references, in particular, the canon-creating anthologies of Gilbert and Gubar498; a

variety of poetry anthologies do similar work. In 1973, major publishing houses in New

York published three anthologies of women’s poetry: No More Masks!, edited by

Florence Howe and Ellen Bass; Rising Tides, edited by Laura Chester; and Barbara

Segnitz and Carol Rainey’s Psyche. In 1974, Vintage books published Louise Bernikow’s

The World Split Open, and, in 1975, Bantam Books published Lucille Iverson’s We

Become New. Each anthology assembled poems by women poets and positioned the poets

and the poems in relationship to feminism, explicitly in No More Masks! and implicitly in

Psyche, through the lens of identifying and defining a women’s poetic tradition. The

work of anthologizing feminist poetry continued throughout the subsequent decades with

books such as Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (1987), Collected Black

Women’s Poetry (1988), A Formal Feeling Comes (1994), a revised and updated No

More Masks! (1993), One Hundred Great Poems by Women (1995), and The

Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (2001).

497
Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal (New York: Routledge, 1991), 57.
498
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, editors, The Norton Anthology of Literature by
Women: The Tradition in English, 1st edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).

298
 The WLM prompted the publication of anthologies of women poets. “Recovery”

of literary work of women poets was an important strand of feminism at the time. Elaine

Showalter describes it as the “second mode of feminist criticism engendered by . . . the

study of women as writers, and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and

structures of writing by women.”499 Annette Kolodny notes that the “most obvious

success” of feminist literary scholarship “has been the return to circulation of previously

lost or otherwise ignored works by women writers.”500

All of the aforementioned anthology projects reflect the impulse to identify and

claim women poets lost to the canon. While feminism made significant contributions to

recovering presumptively heterosexual women poets and shepherding them back into

print, the work of recovering lesbian poets as lesbians, with attention to how they

organized their intimate and sexual lives, did not have the same amplitude as the recovery

of women poets during this time period.501 In fact, some of the recovery work of women

poets reflects a conscious “closeting” of the women, presenting them as feminist icons

and not as lesbians. Scholarly attention to Emily Dickinson demonstrate this tendency as

499
Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” in Feminist Literary Theory
and Criticism: A Norton Reader, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 530.
500
Annette Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield” in Feminist Literary Theory and
Criticism: A Norton Reader, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2007), 475.
501
See Bonnie Zimmerman’s 1981 article, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of
Lesbian Feminist Criticism” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

299
either ambivalence or hostility to seeing Dickinson in a woman-centric or lesbian

context502 as do the attentions to Bishop, Woolf, and H.D.503

In Miller’s configuration of anthologies as formative and projective, lesbian poets

often were obscured or elided. Elly Bulkin analyzes this issue in her essay,

“’Kissing/Against the Light:’ A Look at Lesbian Poetry.”504 She writes,

The 1973 publication of No More Masks! and Rising Tides was tremendously
important for women, but it did almost nothing to establish lesbians as significant
contributors to women’s literature. The problem stemmed not from the lack of
lesbian poets in each book, but from the impossibility of identifying them unless
they were represented by poems about subjects not connected directly and
explicitly to lesbian oppression and/or sexuality.505

While Bulkin criticizes No More Masks! and Rising Tides, elsewhere she acknowledges

Louise Bernikow and her introduction to The World Split Open favorably. Jan Clausen in

A Movement of Poets explains the significance of Bernikow’s introduction to lesbian

poetry communities: Bernikow “acknowledged the historical correlation between

502
Adrienne Rich’s essay from Shakespeare’s Sisters, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of
Emily Dickinson,” provides a reading of Dickinson as a lesbian, but also documents the
strenuous efforts within the literature to identify a male love interest for Dickinson.
503
More recent scholarship on Dickinson, H.D., Bishop, and Woolf has brought attention
to the lesbian and woman-centric aspects of the writers’ works and lives. On Dickinson,
see Martha Nell Smith and Ellen M. Hart’s Open Me Carefully (Ashfield, MA: Paris
Press, 1998); on H.D. see Susan Stanford Friedman’s Psyche Reborn (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987) and Penelope’s Web (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008, 1991); on Bishop see Carmen L. Oliveira’s Rare and Commonplace
Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2002); on Woolf, see Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska,
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (San Francisco: Cleis, 2004).
504
Elly Bulkin, “Kissing/Against the Light": A Look at Lesbian Poetry,” Radical
Teacher (1978), 7-17.
505
Ibid., 11.

300
women’s poetry and woman-loving.”506 In evaluating feminist anthologies critically,

Bulkin and Clausen acknowledge the function of anthologies in canon formation and

intervene on behalf of lesbian poets.

During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian-feminist critics, anthologist, publishers, and

poets engaged keenly in canonical criticism, but canon formation wasn’t the only concern

of lesbian-feminist editors in compiling anthologies. Anthology editors also thought

about how to produce lesbian as a subject position by publishing books that gathered

lesbian writing and disseminating these books to communities of lesbian readers. By

producing lesbian anthologies, editors simultaneously looked forward to form new

lesbian-feminist communities and looked backward to understand lesbian-feminists in the

past.

Early ‘Anthologists:’ Jeannette Howard Foster and Barbara Grier

Before lesbian poetry anthologies could be imagined, lesbian readers had to be

imagined. Two literary critics, working outside of the traditional context of literary

criticism, shaped lesbian reading practices and produced identifiable communities of

lesbian readers. Jeannette Howard Foster and Barbara Grier, through their writing,

imagine, create, and embolden communities of lesbian readers.507 In her 1956 self-

506
Jan Clausen, A Movement of Poets (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1982), 16.
507
Lesbian reader communities precede Foster and Grier. In 1928, Djuna Barnes
published privately in France her book, The Ladies Almanack, including a limited number
of books in which Barnes hand-painted images within the book. The Ladies Almanack is
both a celebration and farce of lesbian life at the time. Barnes sold it privately to friends
and acquaintances, building a lesbian readership for her work through her publishing
practice. While there are examples of lesbian reader communities that precede Foster and
Grier’s work in the 1950s, the concatenation of Foster and Grier’s writing and publishing
with the political formation of the Daughters of Bilitis and later feminist organizations
makes lesbian reader communities both sustainable and replicable.

301
published book, Sex Variant Women in Literature, Foster, a librarian and literary critic,

reviews a broad array of literature from antiquity to the present for themes of “variance,”

Foster’s term for love between women and lesbianism. In Sex Variant Women in

Literature, Foster discusses a number of poems and books of poems, including the book

of Ruth from the Bible and the poetry of Sappho, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Louise

Labe, Adah Isaacs Menken, Michael Field, and Emily Dickinson. Through her narration,

Foster teachers her readers, whom she imagined to be both lesbians and enlightened

others, to read lesbian themes in poetry. She “unlocked” and “decoded” themes, imagery,

and biographical narrations as consonant with lesbianism. Although Foster primarily

focuses on thematic portrayals of lesbianism without regard to authorship, that is, she is

as content to read portrayals of lesbianism by men, heterosexual and homosexual, as she

is those by women, she also engaged biographical information to identify lesbian authors.

Foster constitutes the idea of lesbian poetry in two ways. First, through poems with

lesboerotic emotive and sexual expressions within the text; second, through the idea of

“lesbian poets” as women who loved other women and wrote about their love poetically.

Foster reads as a lesbian for lesbian themes and to identify other sex variant women.

Through Sex Variant Women in Literature, Foster creates a ‘precursor anthology’ of

lesbian poetry and lesbian poets. This ‘precursor anthology’ is not a bound book, but

rather a yoking together of poems and poets for readers to encounter as lesbian. In short,

Foster teaches readers of her book to read as lesbians.

The distribution of Foster’s 1956 edition was limited. After trying to publish it

with a commercial publisher, Foster self-published it with Vantage Press with a press run

302
of 3,500.508 Of those 3,500 copies, “Vantage sold nearly eleven hundred copies” and sold

“unbound pages to British publisher Frederick Muller, Ltd., in 1958” for a British

edition.509 The 1975 edition by Diana Press, made with the original plates from the 1956

edition, sold 2,272 copies (probably on an original press run of 2,500)510 and earned

Foster $1,383.72 in total royalties.511 This edition doubled the initial audience of the book

and was a modest success for Diana Press.512 More importantly, the Diana Press edition

of Sex Variant Women in Literature reached lesbian readers directly. In 1984, Barbara

Grier reissued Sex Variant Women in Literature through Naiad Press. In spite of the

limited circulation of the first edition of Sex Variant Women in Literature, the book did

crucial work. Sex Variant Women defined lesbian literature and lesbian poetry,

established a lesbian literary tradition, and mobilized communities of lesbian readers.

Foster’s work inspired one reader and critic in particular, Barbara Grier. In her

prodigious book reviews for The Ladder, Grier positioned a number of books of poetry,

including the first poetry collection by Mary Oliver (who would not come out until the

508
Joanne Passet, Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster (New York:
Da Capo Press, 2008), 193.
509
Ibid., 195.
510
Coletta Reid’s records on the book indicate that in February 1978, Diana Press had
150 additional copies of the book in stock. File Drawer One, Diana Press Papers, Mazer
Archives.
511
File Drawer One, Diana Press Papers, Mazer Archives.
512
Although the book was a modest success for Diana Press, Foster, with deteriorating
health and in need of money to support herself, hired a lawyer to demand a financial
statement on book sales and owed royalties. This action corresponded with turmoil at
Diana Press and increased the negative publicity about Diana and the failure to make
timely royalty payments to authors.

303
next century) as lesbian.513 Grier preferred to use the term lesbian for women-loving

women over Foster’s preferred term, sex variant. Like Foster, Grier identified within

poems emotive and sexual expressions of lesbianism, whether or not the author of the

poems was herself a lesbian. Through her reviews in The Ladder, Grier carefully directed

readers to poetry where they could find Sapphic love, affection, and emotions in poetry.

Grier’s reading of poetry was not limited to poetry by lesbians, though she did delight in

knowing and identifying poets—and fiction writers—as lesbian when she could. Grier’s

reviews of May Sarton’s work as well as that of Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee

Vivien revel in what poems by lesbians have to offer lesbian readers.514

Given the lack of women who openly identified as lesbians either in their poetry

or individually in their lives, Grier, like Foster, treats representations of lesbianism by

heterosexual men and women with equal time, attention and enthusiasm. Grier identifies

lesbian poetry, or as she often calls it “poetry of lesbiana,” as poetry infused with the

spirit of lesbianism, or female erotica, love, and lives, and only sometimes written by

lesbians. For example, she writes of Boris Todrin and his poem “Hate Song,” “It is hard

to be enthusiastic over someone who obviously wrote in hatred . . . This is the story of

one man’s loss of his wife to another woman. It is very effective poetry though certainly

nagative in its approach.”515 James Wright’s work earns Grier’s appraisal of “unusually

513
Oliver acknowledged her partner, Molly Malone Cook when she won the National
Book Award in 1992, (Sue Russell, “Mary Oliver: The Poet & the Persona,” Harvard
Gay and Lesbian Review (Fall 1997): 21). but she didn’t write about her partnership with
Cook until in the early 2000s.
514
Barbara Grier, Lesbiana: Book Reviews from The Ladder (Reno, NV: Naiad Press,
1976), np.
515
Grier, “Poetry of Lesbiana,” Undated copy from Lesbian Herstory Archives.

304
intuitive, coming as they do from a male author’s pen” for his two poems, “Sappho” and

“Erinna to Sappho.”516 Grier’s reading practices were concordant with the wishes and

desires of her readers during the 1960s, primarily the women reading The Ladder. Like

Foster’s, Grier’s reading practices, as expressed in her reviews, demonstrate the ways she

read and analyzed literature for lesbian themes, desires, and images as well as named

authors and poets as lesbian.

This reading practice of Grier and Foster prefigure the work of Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick. In Between Men and the Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick reads

homosociality within canonical texts with the intention of excavating power at the

intersection of gender and sexuality for men in canonical texts. Grier’s and Foster’s

intentions were different from Sedgwick’s; they wanted to bring visibility to lesbian

desire through their reading practices. In spite of these different intentions, the reading

strategies of all three are strikingly similar. Consider Sedgwick’s exploration of whether

Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd is a homosexual: “Claggart is depraved because he is,

in his desires, a pervert, of the sort that by 1891 had names in several taxonomic systems

although scarcely yet, in English, the name ‘homosexual’[.]”517 Now consider Foster’s

reading of the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Bible, “This great short story, long

acclaimed as a masterpiece of narrative art, is the first of a thin line of delicate portrayals,

by authors seemingly blind to their full significance, of an attachment which, however

516
Ibid.
517
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 96.

305
innocent, is nevertheless still basically variant.”518 Both Sedgwick and Foster read the

texts to label characters as homosexual or variant, even though such labels are barely

accessible to either the authors writing the texts or contemporaneous readers. Moreover,

both are engaged in teaching the readers of each of their texts how to read like them.

Sedgwick’s work is written for an academic audience; Grier and Foster both wrote for

“common readers” and primarily addressed lesbian readers. The similar practice of

reading in spite of these different audiences is striking; all share an investment in using

literature as a tool to identify homosexual or variant desire. For Grier and Foster, this

close reading practice articulates a lesbian subject position and an understanding lesbian

identities in the 1950s and 1960s.

Reading for lesbian themes, however, is only one part of forming a lesbian

reading community. Another component is publishing for that reading community.

Publishing for lesbian reading communities has a long history in the twentieth century,

primarily centered around small groups of friends and associates, as exemplified by

publication and circulation of books like Djuna Barnes’s The Ladies Almanack and Lisa

Ben’s Vice Versa.519 The Daughters of Bilitis was the first organization that had at is

center a mission to address the needs of sex variant women, or female homophiles, to use

the language preferred by the women of The Daughters of Bilitis.520 The Ladder was the

518
Jeannette Howard Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad
Press, 1984), 22.
519
Lisa Ben’s newsletter, Vice Versa, published between June 1947 and February 1948 is
the first known print journal for lesbians. See Streitmatter and Gallo for more
information about Vice Versa. A complete archive of the issues of Vice Versa is available
here: http://www.queermusicheritage.us/viceversa0.html (accessed 19 April 2012).
520
Marcia Gallo’s history of the Daughters of Bilitis, Different Daughters, is useful for
both its perspective on the development of the organization as well as the ways in which

306
print journal of the Daughters of Bilitis, published regularly from 1956 until 1972, in

booklet form with two staples. The Ladder was mailed to subscribers around the United

States. The Ladder as a print product provides vital insight into lesbian life and culture

during this time period. The Ladder contained a wide range of materials within its pages:

biographies of famous lesbians, reports from meetings of the Daughters of Bilitis,

narratives about radio shows, commentaries by members, re-written news clippings of

interest to homophile women, positions on debates within the community, and notes of

personal interest to members.521 Poetry began appearing in The Ladder in February 1957

with volume 1, issue 5. That particular issue included two poems by Jo Allyn (most likely

a pseudonym, which was the convention for the journal) titled “Rain” and “Awakening.”

The appearance of poetry in the journal regularly continues through 1972, when The

Ladder stops publishing. It is striking that a small organization with limited resources

published poetry consistently within its pages. Poetry provided emotional texture to the

emergent subjectivity of lesbian. Poetry, in short, conveyed the shared emotional and

imaginative bonds of women reading The Ladder.

While Grier’s reading practices and reviewing practices trained women to read

poetry as lesbian in the tradition of Jeannette Howard Foster, the advent of the women’s

the founders and members understood lesbian as a category and descriptor of their
identity.
521
A reprint of all of the issues of The Ladder was collated and bound into large books in
1975 by Arno Press, the same year that Amazon Poetry was published; this reissue of The
Ladder made the journal available to a new generation of readers. The Arno Press edition
of The Ladder wasn’t the only gathering of materials from The Ladder, however. Coletta
Reid of Diana Press, in collaboration with Barbara Grier, edited and published three
anthologies of material from The Ladder. These anthologies are Lesbian Lives:
Biographies of Women from The Ladder, The Lesbians Home Journal: Stories from The
Ladder, and The Lavender Herring: Lesbian Essays from The Ladder; all were published
in 1976.

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liberation movement prompted new practices of writing, reading and circulation. In short,

rather than reading for lesbianism coded within a text, more women wrote poems that

openly used the word lesbian, as well as dyke, lover, butch, and gay. Foster and Grier,

through their practice of literary criticism, created “precursor anthologies” of lesbian

poetry. That is, while they did not work as editors bringing together individual poems and

publishing them into a single book, they brought together poems and poets as lesbian.

They created the possibilities and discussions of lesbian poetry as a special genre of

poetry—and, perhaps just as importantly, they created an audience for lesbian poetry.

This was vital work for subsequent anthologies published during the 1970s.

Small Press Lesbian Anthologies

Woman to Woman is the first book published in 1970 by Women’s Press

Collective and the first lesbian anthology published in the lesbian print movement of the

1970s and 1980s. The first printing of Woman to Woman was a mimeographed edition of

1,000 copies. A second edition was published using the Women’s Press Collective’s

offset printer. The second edition had a red cover and was 6.5” by 8.5”, the size of legal

paper folded in half.522. The book was bound with two staples and collated by hand. The

pages alternate between interior gray paper and a thinner onion-skin paper. The graphics

and artwork of the book are printed on the thinner paper; the printed text on the gray

paper. The book is unpaginated, but there are twenty-four pages of the interior gray paper

with onion-skin paper in between most pages. The printing of the book includes a few

blank pages, most likely errors in planning the printing, and one poem with a typewritten

522
The Women’s Press Collective purchased their paper at a discount store and as a result
books within editions and in subsequent printings often had different paper stock.

308
note that indicates the proper order to read the poem because the pages were reversed in a

printing error.

Woman to Woman carries the sub-title, “a book of poems and drawings by

women.” Woman to Woman is both one of the earliest examples of lesbian-feminist

poetry publishing and not a lesbian book. It is not a book of lesbian-feminist poetry as it

would come to be formulated by the middle of the 1970s because it includes work by

heterosexual feminist writers, such as Anne Sexton’s poem, “Unknown Girl in the

Maternity Ward.” At the same time, Woman to Woman is the first book published by the

Women’s Press Collective, which was a primary publisher of lesbian-feminist books

during the 1970s. In addition, many of the poets included in the collection are lesbians

and explicit lesbianism in the poetry is evident. For instance, one poem in the middle of

the collection begins, “Theres one thing a man cant have: the/love between two

women.”523 This poet affirms the separateness of lesbians from patriarchal culture.

Another poet writes, “I am starving for physical comfort./I cannot go to a woman who

has not expressed an openness to loving me./I can go to a woman for love—to give love

to.” While the poet affirms intimacy and affection between women, the poem concludes

with the challenges of lesbians loving heterosexual women:

No man deserves your love and attention.

For womankind I am jealous of your man-spent moments.
I simply, fearfully, cautiously, bewilderingly love you.
Besides the “attraction of opposites”
How do we beings get together to love?

In these lines the poet bemoans the time the beloved spends with men and wonders how

to create a world that is more hospitable to lesbians. In another poem, lesbianism is the

523
Woman to Woman is unpaginated.

309
salve for harsh experiences with patriarchy. Judy Grahn’s poem, “Asking for Ruthie,”

about a prostitute, ends with this prayer for Ruthie.

sun cover her, earth

make love to Ruthie
stake her to hot lunches in the wheat fields
make bunches of purple ravens
fly out in formation, over her eyes
and let her newest lovers
be gentle as women
and longer lasting

With these lines, Grahn imagines the natural world, the sun, earth, and ravens providing

solace for Ruthie. She then asks that her love be “gentle as a women” and “longer

lasting.” Grahn valorizes the sexual intimacy of women while punning on the limitations

of sexual intimacy with men. Woman to Woman as an artifact represents the slipperiness

between lesbian, lesbian-feminist, and feminist during the early years of the Women’s

Liberation Movement.

Woman to Woman foregrounds two aspects of lesbian print culture: iterative

printing and editorial interrogation. Much of the book is a compilation of reprinted

poems. Reprinting poems in books, journals, magazines, and newsletters is a common

practice throughout the 1970s and has an iterative effect on lesbian identity. Many of the

poems in Woman to Woman are reprinted from previous publications, including Sexton’s

poem, an excerpt from Genesis, and selections from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto.

Judy Grahn’s “The Common Woman” poems appear in the anthology, as well as Susan

Griffin’s “I think of Harriet Tubman”; this is the first printing of both of these poems,

which were reprinted extensively during the next decade. Excerpting and reprinting

materials was a central strategy in lesbian print culture to reach new women with writing

by, for, and about lesbians. The iterative quality of lesbian print culture, much like the

310
iterative quality of the world wide web today, is a way that lesbian identity formations

were expressed and solidified over time.

One fascinating aspect of the book is that neither the poems nor the artwork are

attributed to individual artists. Reflecting on this in the second edition, the editors

acknowledge that they “believe very strongly that women deserve recognition as

individuals and that women have been ‘anonymous’ too long,” and also “that ‘famous’

women are used as tokens in the publishing world, and our attempt in Woman to Woman

is to reject the exploitative standards of that world and at the same time reject the

divisions which fame creates among women.”524 The choice made by the publishing

collective to balance these two ideological commitments was to publish the poems

without individual attribution but to recognize the writers through a listing on the back

page of the book. These egalitarian and anti-hierarchical editorial beliefs shape other

lesbian publishing projects in the first half of the 1970s.

Although the poems and artwork are printed without attribution, the anthology

includes many prominent poets. Included in the book are poems by Alta, Anne Leonard,

Anne Sexton, Barbara Harr, Barbara Reilly, Carol Berge, Connie McKinnon, Cynthia

Mack, Diane DiPrima, Diane Wakoski, Jennie Orvino-Sorcic, Judy Busy, Judy Grahn,

Mallory King, Marge Piercy, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Lowen Fletcher, Marion

Buchman, Naome Gilburt, Pat Parker, Red Arobateau, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Griffin, and

Valerie Solanas. At the time of publication in 1970, the most notorious name on this list

would have been Valerie Solanas for her SCUM Manifesto. In addition, the poets Anne

Sexton, Diane DiPrima, and Diane Wakoski would have been recognizable to readers.

524
Untitled introduction to Woman to Woman, unpaginated.

311
Hacker, Grahn, Piercy, Parker, Sanchez and Griffin were just beginning their careers as

poets; Woman to Woman might have provided an introduction to their work for many

readers. Alta, the founder and publisher of Shameless Hussy Press in 1968, would have

been well-known to west coast readers. Artwork for Woman to Woman is contributed by

Brenda, Susan Coleman Anson, Wendy Cadden, Susan Forkner, Gail Hodgins, Rachel

Oldham, Betty Sutherland, Deborah Figen, Robin Cherin, Jeri Robertson, Karen G., Sue

Holper, and “one other sister.” All of the artists and writers contributing to the book are

published without attribution. This challenge to editorial conventions placed primacy on

the readers’ direct encounters with the poems and artwork; that is, readers experienced

the work without the mediating influence of the author’s reputation.

In addition to the ideological tension in attribution of poems and artwork, the

collective that produced Woman to Woman negotiated copyright issues. Another

statement on the last page of the collection reads, “We have made every reasonable effort

to obtain permission to reprint the poems and excerpts in Woman to Woman. Anyone

objecting to their publication in this book should write to Woman to Woman . . . and we

will revise future editions accordingly.”525 A paradox confronted early lesbian editors and

editorial collectives: the need to respect and honor the work of authors versus the need to

circulate widely the poems to reader communities that, in some cases, desperately needed

them as a balm for isolation from sexism and homophobia.

The editors of Woman to Woman describe the process for compiling the book in

the introduction. “The editing standards for this book were set by some 60 women—with

525
Ibid.

312
varying politics and tastes—who were asked to pick poems that talked to them.”526 Thus,

Woman to Woman is a truly collective product, with many women involved in the

editorial work—something that has been traditionally defined as the work of a single or

small group of people, especially for small books like Woman to Woman. Women

involved in the project were aware that their actions as editors directly challenged

editorial convention. Moreover, in the introduction, they directly challenge prevailing

aesthetic standards for poetry. The editors write:

We believe that any poetry or drawing that talks to people is good art, living art,
and that a collection of ideas is more interesting and more important than a
collection of names. This is the point the book tries to make by its odd structure,
which will probably never be repeated. In Woman to Woman we wanted to catch a
glimpse of ourselves, so after much discussion we decided to let it stand as the
small, strange jewel that it is.527

The odd structure that the makers of the book emphasize is both the unconventional

attribution of the poems and artwork in the book, and the collective process for editing

the collection. The anthology was not simply an object curated by one or two people; it

was a community project that reflected particular ethical and philosophical commitments

by the women involved. By the second edition of Woman to Woman, when this

introduction was written, perceiving the anthology as a “small, strange jewel” reflects the

response of readers to the book, a response so positive it necessitated the second printing.

While Woman to Woman is not labeled a lesbian anthology, four anthologies

published in the next four years have lesbian stated or implied in their titles: Dykes for an

526
Ibid.
527
Ibid.

313
Amerikan Revolution published by Easter Day Press in Washington, DC, in 1971;528 We

Are All Lesbians published by Violet Press in New York in 1973; Because Mourning

Sickness is a Staple in My Country, published by Ain’t I a Woman in Iowa City, IA, in

1973; and the first edition of Lesbians Speak Out, published in 1971 for the West Coast

Lesbians’ Conference held at the Metropolitan Community Church and then reissued in a

significantly expanded, perfect-bound, second edition in 1974.529 All of these collections

are a fascinating hybrid of newly-available commercial print production and handmade

flair.

In reviewing Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution for off our backs, Frances

Chapman wrote, “Dykes as a printed artifact says something about the eventually

numbing effect of the glossy, eye appeal of the slick, stylish media of the Establishment

and the Counter-Establishment.”530 The same could be said for We Are All Lesbians,

Because Mourning Sickness is a Staple in My Country, and Lesbians Speak Out.

Although all of these publications were professionally designed, pasted up, and produced

as printed artifacts, they also express a visual aesthetic that defines lesbianism in

opposition to “slick, stylish media.” In both content and presentation, these four

anthologies define lesbian as containable within the object of a book and challenge the

528
Easter Day Press published two chapbooks, Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution and
Notes Towards a Women’s Analysis of Class. The two chapbooks reflect how closely
political issues are imbricated with poetry for women writing and publishing at this time
in Washington, DC.
529
That is, bound with a glued spine.
530
Frances Chapman,“Women Loving Words and Other Women” off our backs (31 Oct
1974), 7.

314
meaning of lesbian and the art of book-making. All three chapbooks and Lesbians Speak

Out, a perfect-bound book, have poetry at the center of their project.

Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution is a thirty-two page chapbook bound with

staples.531 The cover is lavender cardstock; on the front and the back is the same image,

possibly taken from a photograph of the title spray painted on a door next to another door

with the word, Agnew. The interior stock is alternating cream and lavender paper. The

entire chapbook is printed with pink ink. Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution contains

poetry, prose, and drawings by children and adults. This small publication includes a

number of poems, perhaps most notably poems by Rita Mae Brown, though other poets

like Edith Rosenthal, Cynthia Funk, and Kate Winter are included, as well as a number of

women who publish only with their first name.532 While Woman to Woman grappled with

the editorial meanings of authorial acclamation in their anthology and ultimately

eschewed associating authors with poems, Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution suggests a

different concern for authorial assignation: being publicly identified as a lesbian. Dykes

for an Amerikan Revolution prints full names, presumably where the authors consented,

and first names, presumably for the authors who were comfortable with a modicum of

anonymity.

Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution is as focused on poetry as it is on politics.

Chapman reflects on this dual focus in her review for off our backs, writing, “Although

some of the writings assert the politics which says that Lesbianism is an obligatory

531
An electronic copy of the book is available at www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org.
532
In her review of Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution (which Grier calls “an untitled
paperback anthology”), Grier states that although “no editor is listed. . .one strongly
suspects Rita Mae Brown is the editor” (Grier, Lesbiana, 254).

315
preliminary to the liberation of society, this is overshadowed by the language and

emotions of alive and sensible women.”533 Chapman’s appraisal of the anthology

references a political debate about the role of lesbians in the feminist revolution, but

Chapman subsumes the political with attention to the aesthetic. For Chapman, the

primary feature of poetry is the language and emotions of women. She concludes the

review by noting, “Lesbianism is still a political doctrine, but there is little of the strident

and accusatory harangue with which the doctrine is usually argued. Poems are better than

polemics any day.”534 Chapman pronounces the chapbook a success because, while it

may be informed by lesbianism and politics, it transcends this political orientation

through language and emotion. The relationships between poetry and politics, language

and emotion, and polemic and poems become key areas of analysis for reception and

analysis of lesbian poetry over the next decades.

The politics of Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution are important, in part because it

is an artifact that locates additional lesbian print culture activity in the metropolitan

Washington, DC-area. One of the political statements in the book is about daycare. The

piece is signed by Colitta, Helaine, Sue, Ginny, Sharon, Joan, Susan, Rita, Tasha, Betty,

Charlotte, and Marlene.535 Many of these women become the founders of The Furies, the

influential lesbian separatist collective that produced the newspaper by the same name,

the very year that Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution was published. Thus, while here I

533
Chapman, “Women Loving,” 7.
534
Ibid.
535
The presumptive identities of the signers are Coletta Reid, Helaine Harris, Sue (Lee)
Schwing, Ginny Berson, Sharon Deevey, Joan Biren, Rita Mae Brown, Tasha Peterson,
Betty Garmen, Charlotte Bunch, and Marlene Wicks.

316
read Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution as one of a handful of poetry chapbooks

published in the first five years of the 1970s and part of a genealogy of lesbian print

culture in the 1970s, it is also an artifact that speaks about the political activism on behalf

of lesbian-feminism and lesbian separatism in Washington, DC.

Grier’s appraisal of the book is less inflected by reading the politics of the book

and more shaped by the aesthetics of the poems. For her readers in The Ladder, Grier

refers to the book as an “untitled paperback anthology” and tells them, “the cover is best

left unmentioned, but if you buy it, go beyond the cover to read the contents.”536 Grier’s

distaste was probably for the word “dykes” and the spelling of American as “Amerikan.”

These two words presumably had particular meaning politically for the contributors to the

anthology and for the editors, denoting a political awareness of the identity of lesbian as

dyke and a critique of American politics and culture. For Grier, however, what is primary

is the quality of the work. She writes:

Included are some unbelievably horrible poems. . .but there is some very good
material, too. Right now the big thing is ‘everyone’ expresses herself regardless of
what it might do to the next person. It’s a good idea, at least in theory. Ironically,
while the book trumpets revolution, the best poem in it is “For Queen Christina”
by Rita Mae Brown, which celebrates a woman who gave up her throne for love
of another woman, which seems politically very very intelligent indeed.537

Grier, as a speculative critic, offers an aesthetic appraisal of the material, singling out one

poem as “the best.” She also comments on an emergent political and aesthetic practice of

lesbian publishing: freedom of expression extricated from aesthetic appraisal. Finally,

Grier situates the political message of the book to be congruent with her own politics:

praising action that prioritizes celebrating and making visible love between women.

536
Grier, Lesbiana, 254.
537
Grier, Lesbiana, 254.

317
 The anthology We Are All Lesbians, published by Violet Press of New York in

1973, is twice the size of Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution, but the two are similar in

many ways. Though absent of drawings and writings of children, We Are All Lesbians

combines art with typeset poetry and handwritten poetry as well as the reproduction of a

musical score and a chant. We Are All Lesbians, in addition to its larger size, is larger in

its vision of a lesbian community. The anthology includes a poem by Elsa Gidlow writing

about Sappho as well as poems written for Emma Goldman, the goddess Diana, and St.

Joan of Arc. A handful of poems are written in the tradition of Judy Grahn’s “The

Common Woman Poems,” with titles like “For the Woman Who Pours Molten Lead” and

“Middle Class Hippie to the Warehouse Dyke.” Fran Winant, the unnamed editor of the

collection, addresses Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson as icons for lesbian poetry in

her poem “Gertrude and Emily.” Winant echoes the language of Stein, saying, “Gertrude

your language was called/hermetic/as in ‘hermetically sealed’.” She continues asserting

that Stein’s writing “couldn’t be allowed to make sense” and asking:

When you talked about

“tender buttons”
were those breasts you meant
when you asked
“when do I see lightning”
and answered
“every night”
were you talking about making love538

In this way We Are All Lesbians expresses the ways that poetry was a form of dialogue in

the lesbian community at the time. Winant writes explicitly in an intertextual dialogue

with Stein, while other women in the anthology are engaged intertextually with Judy

Grahn, for instance, and Elsa Gidlow, who was a contributor to the anthology and living
538
Dykes for an American Revolution, chapbook is unpaginated.

318
at the time in Marin County, California. Through the intertextual dialogues with Stein, for

instance, the anthology expresses the desire for a broader literary history for lesbians and

appropriates that history when necessary. The intertextual engagement with living poets

like Grahn and Gidlow demonstrates the ways that contemporary poetry circulated within

and among lesbian communities.

The desire for a broader literary history earned We Are All Lesbians a lashing in

the review magazine Margins. Margins was “A Review of Little Mags and Small Press

Books” publishing in the 1970s. In the twelfth issue of Margins, Angela Peckenpaugh

reviewed We Are All Lesbians. She began the review noting, “More lesbians speak in We

Are All Lesbians than have in the past, and the tone—rather than emphasizing paranoia or

disappointment—is generally celebration, almost like a religious movement with

testimony by converts.”539 Peckenpaugh, like Chapman in off our backs, comments on

the appearance of the book, characterizing it as “a group effort, with various art styles

(none very professional.)”540 She notes that the drawings are “almost all” of women and

that the hand-written poems give it “the effect of informality and homely originality,

rather than artistic prowess.”541 While these critiques may be valid—and may not have

even been of concern to the creators of the anthology, Peckenpaugh is most upset about

the inclusion of Emily Dickinson in the dedication and in Winant’s poem. She writes that

the dedication, “got my dander up.” Then she explains, “To my knowledge, Dickinson

was not gay. So why the implication.” This reception by a reviewer in the literary

539
Angela Peckenpaugh, “We Are All Lesbian,” Margins, Number Twelve (June-July
1974), 40.
540
Ibid.
541
Ibid., 41.

319
establishment (in spite of the wide attention and circulation of Rebecca Patterson’s

biography on Emily Dickinson from 1951, in which she presents Dickinson as a lesbian,

thwarted by her love for Kate Anthon) reminds us of the world into which women

published We Are All Lesbians and Dykes for An Amerikan Revolution. The assertion of

lesbian identity for writers was a daring one, as is evidenced by the number of writers in

these two anthologies who do not attach their full names; and to name other, famous

writers as lesbians, as Winant does in her poem and as the anthology does, is to open

oneself for attack and ridicule—both of which Peckenpaugh delivers with fury.

Another anthology published in 1973 is the small chapbook Because Mourning

Sickness is a Staple in My Country. This chapbook has fifty-two pages of poetry, printed

on newsprint and “paid for and distributed by” Ain’t I A Woman?, an Iowa City collective

and newspaper publisher. The chapbook measures 6 ¾ inches by 5 inches and is bound

with two staples. The front cover is all black with the title printed in white type. The back

has only the name and address of the newspaper Ain’t I A Woman?. Because Mourning

Sickness has two sentences on the inside front cover describing the contents, “This is a

collection of poems by working-class dykes who have been going through changes and

writing poems, among other things. The book is designed to fit your back pocket.” These

poems, most without titles, are all printed without an author attribution.

Because Mourning Sickness interrogates the intersection of class, sex, and sexual

orientation in the poems. In one poem, the poet writes:

I would be a committed woman

I am, not, that is to say,
I am a woman that commits
I commit the felony – loving
women.

320
 I commit misdemeanors—
My child is dirty and she
screams in public.

I commit forgery.
I don’t always sign the line
Lesbian, sometimes just my name.

I commit acts holding me in

contempt—
I allow my legs to
grow hair.
I will my muscles to swell
I growl I touch myself
I wear comfortable clothes
I hex men that bother
I tell women their men are
fuckers
I tell women they are the
strength of the
world.

In these lines, the poet moves between critiques of laws that criminalize homosexuality

and contemporary norms of childrearing that marginalize working-class people. The poet

also considers more nuanced crimes, such as not always openly identifying as a lesbian.

The poet then moves into a feminist critique of how women are disciplined to dress and

groom their bodies. This section ends with a feminist call to women as “the/strength of

the/world.” This poem explicates an intersectional analysis of the connections between

lesbian sexuality and working-class experiences. Because Mourning Sickness circulated

among lesbian-feminist writers (for example, Ellen Marie Bissert references it as an

under-recognized anthology in a speech about feminist book reviews), but very little is

written about it.

Lesbians Speak Out is a collection of poetry, prose, drawings and photographs.

The first edition was hand-distributed at a conference; the second, expanded edition was

321
published and distributed by Women’s Press Collective. A collective of six women—

Judy Grahn, Wendy Cadden, Brenda Crider, Sunny, Jane Lawhon, and Anne Leonard—

produced Lesbians Speak Out. In an undated and unattributed document from the

archives of the Women’s Press Collective, these reflections on Lesbians Speak Out were

recorded:

Editing Lesbians Speak Out, was a very painful process but it taught us a lot. A
group of women put a collection of articles together and we wanted to expand on
it. We asked for contributions and got mostly poetry; and decided to accept at
least one of everything that had been sent to us by each woman. And that was a
big step from the traditional way that editors pick and choose and end up with 17
poems by one person and three others, and then they say, “Oh, well, no one else in
the world can do it.” And the result is that it’s an incredibly wealthy book, it’s
rich in different kinds of experiences ‘cause people were writing about very real
things and it’s all in there. We worked on it for something like four years. There
were six of us working on it and we disagreed so much that we have six
introductions to this book.542

In these reflections on Lesbians Speak Out is another explicit critique of conventional

editing standards. While the author indicates that the disagreements within the collective

resulted in the six introductions to the book, reading Lesbians Speak Out retrospectively,

the multiple introductions to the 1974 collection emphasizes the importance of

collectivity to the enterprise, rather than a failure in a collective process. While We Are

All Lesbians was primarily edited and compiled by Fran Winant,543 We Are All Lesbians,

Dykes for An Amerikan Revolution, and Because Mourning Sickness is a Staple in My

Country all reflect a collective impulse in their presentation. Editorship is not ascribed to

a single person. Moreover, many of the poems, if signed, are signed only with first

542
Loose document, File Drawer 2, Diana Press Papers, Mazer Archives.
543
Winant was known at the time as the publisher of Violet Press; her first book of poetry
solicited submissions to We Are All Lesbians, but she is not identified as editor in the
chapbook.

322
names. While one interpretation of this is that some women were afraid to use their full

names, it is also possible that the eschewing of the patronym is a statement against

patriarchy and the assignation of names of fathers and husbands to women and children.

What distinguishes Lesbians Speak Out is the explicitness of its collective editorial

approach.544

According to Grahn's introduction, “Lesbians Speak Out was originally conceived

and collected by Carol Wilson as a series of articles, selected and typed on stencils by

Natalie and Ellen; and mimeographed in a great hurry by the Women's Press Collective

for a conference in L.A.”545 The conference was the Los Angeles West Coast Lesbians’

Conference in 1971.546 Returning from the conference, the larger group of six editors

began a three-year process of expanding the collection and producing the second edition,

perfect-bound; it was published in 1974. To solicit contributions to the second edition of

Lesbians Speak Out, the editors placed a small piece in the December 1971 issue of The

Advocate. It read, in part, “The Lesbians Speak Out Collective is preparing a second

edition of its book, Lesbians Speak Out, and is seeking as wide a range of materials as

possible about lesbians to include in the volume. The group wants articles, poetry, songs,

544
Kathryn Flannery discusses how editors of feminist publications “presumed that
readers would become writers. . .to fuel cultural and political change” (“That Train Full
of Poetry” in Feminist Literacies, 1968-75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005),
129). The editorial decisions made by the Lesbians Speak Out Collective are concordant
with Flannery’s analysis, as well as Kim Whitehead’s notion of a “coalitional” voice in
feminist poetry (The Feminist Poetry Movement (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1996), xix).
545
Lesbians Speak Out, unnumbered front matter.
546
There are two West Coast Lesbians’ Conferences; the first is in 1971 and is held at the
Metropolitan Community Church; the second is in April 1973 and is held at the
University of California-Los Angeles (ULCA).

323
pictures, drawings, short stories, and whatever else is available.”547 In addition, the

collective announced that it was looking for letters for a collection of lesbian letters.548

Unlike Dykes for An Amerikan Revolution and We Are All Lesbians, Lesbians

Speak Out contains equal parts poetry and prose, accented by a variety of photographs

and line drawings. Lesbians Speak Out gathers many previously published tracts from the

WLM, including Martha Shelley's “Gay Is Good,” Radicalesbians’s “Woman Identified

Woman,” pieces from Gay Women's Liberation in Berkeley/Oakland, and a report from

the Lesbian Mother's Union. In addition, essays in the anthology address a variety of

issues of concern in the early days of Gay Women's liberation: the experience of lesbians

in high school, conference reports, sexuality concerns, concerns about feminism and

liberation. Reflecting a hallmark of lesbian-feminist editorial practices, Lesbians Speak

Out embraces conflicts and differences of opinion. For instance, there is a report from the

April 3rd 1970 all women’s dance in New York, organized by members of the Gay

Liberation Front and one of the first events that sparked the development of the

Radicalesbians. This report, written by members of the RAT class workshop, contains

both praise and critique of the event—a visible working through how to think about

various political and social formations.

One thing that is striking about the anthology is how photographs and graphics

punctuate the text. For instance, accompanying the article by two members of the Lesbian

Mother's Union is a full-page photograph of families at the beach. In the image, the

reader can see about a dozen and a half people and two dogs. At the center is the back of

547
The Advocate 74 (December 1971): 8.
548
I do not know what, if anything, came of this project.

324
a naked child and another child being towel dried by an adult. The report on the Los

Angeles Gay Women's Conference features three photographs of women speaking at a

conference. An article on schizophrenia includes on the facing page a line drawing by

Ned Asta animating the experience described in the text.

Poetry is significant and central to Lesbians Speak Out. The first poem is Judy

Grahn’s “A History of Lesbianism,” reflecting not only Grahn’s role editorially on the

book, but also the persistent concern among lesbian-feminists at the time with imagining

and articulating a history. Poems are primarily by women in the Bay area, including

Willyce Kim, Pat Parker, Sandy Boucher, and Grahn, but also included are two poems by

Fran Winant, Rita Mae Brown, and many poems by women who use only their first

names. Yet, calling Lesbians Speak Out a “poetry anthology” would be a misnomer. It is

a lesbian anthology and it contains lesbian poetry alongside essays, political analysis,

conference reports, and artwork. The poetry of Lesbians Speak Out mirrors the wide

array of issues that the book addresses and is as central to articulating what lesbianism is

and who lesbians are as the prose or artwork. One of the most striking things about the

book, in fact, is the way that all elements within the anthology work in concert to render a

vision of what lesbians are, what their concerns are, and what it means to be a lesbian and

to be in community with lesbians. Grahn writes:

It is the poems and graphics which I love best about the book. I used to think art
had to fit a certain form, a standard. Now I think anyone who sets out to make a
drawing or poem, does--unless she is too secretive to say what she really means,
or writes in a specialized language, such as academic or Greek or only-to-herself.
Is it not so, that moving art comes from moving people--from women who are
taking risks, moving toward each other and away from what destroys them;
toward strength and away from helplessness; towards the earth and away from
cloudy dreams. About 80 lesbians have a piece of their real selves in this

325
 collection and it's grand, and already I'm ready for more. As the song says, we're
still not satisfied.549

Grahn articulates the significance of poetry and artwork to her individually and also

decouples it from the mode of “speculative criticism” dominating literary criticism at the

time. Grahn articulates rather an aesthetic philosophy of art as coming from “moving

people” who “put their real selves in this collection.” This may function as a broader

editorial and aesthetic statement for lesbian-feminist publishing.

Wendy Cadden, Grahn’s lover, writes part of her introduction in poetry. She

writes,

We are the ones who must write

the stories and the articles
that describe us

we are the ones who must make

the pictures of ourselves

who must make the reference to

ourselves in history

The reference to making history in these lines and the importance and primacy of lesbians

creating and writing their own lives and their own history is an important part of Lesbians

Speak Out.

At the conclusion of Lesbians Speak Out, a page and a half is dedicated to “books

by, for, or of interest to lesbians.” This is a common practice of both periodicals and

books: offering readers an opportunity to find other books like it. Including pages with

information for finding additional materials in lesbian-feminist print objects was a way to

yoke together not only like-minded books but also authors and publishers. It created the

effect of multiplicity for readers of the book. These two pages dedicated to other books
549
Lesbians Speak Out, unpaginated front matter.

326
articulate and extend the formation of lesbian—and highlight the centrality of printed

materials in defining lesbian.

These anthologies establish important norms for reading and circulating lesbian

poetry in the early 1970s. The various calls for submissions demonstrate the commitment

to soliciting writing from a wide range of writers. Anonymous authorship, while it can be

read as a need to shield women from the very real concerns of violence, hostility, losing

children, etc., for being out as lesbians, also reflects a cultural value. Women believed in

undermining patriarchal nomenclature and in deflecting attention from the singular

author. Anonymity in editorship also suggests the political meanings bound with

editorship. The variety of editorial practices, including attention to diverse voices in

anthologies, representing authorship in multiple fashions, using poetry as central to

theoretical and political articulations of lesbian, and resisting definitions of lesbian poetry

only in relationship to speculative criticism, demonstrate the importance of lesbian poetry

in articulating and recovering a history and in imagining a future.

All four of these anthologies interrogate the value of editorial and authorial

ascription through the elimination of a named editor and the eschewing of authorial

ascription. Part of the lack of authorial ascription was fear of identification with

burgeoning lesbian-feminist activism by hostile outsiders. Particularly for contributors to

Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution, many of whom are mothers, the dangers of being

openly known as a lesbian in the early 1970s are obvious. Fears about being openly

lesbian, however, were not the only reason for eschewing authorial ascription. As the

editors of Woman to Woman indicate, refusing to identity authors and editors was also a

327
political act which challenged literary representations of authors and the formalized

aesthetic measures of the literary world.

I turn my attention now to the 1975 publication of Amazon Poetry as an important

collection of poetry—the largest one at the time and the first perfect-bound book solely of

poetry—that brings together poems under the appellation “lesbian.” By focusing on a

perfect-bound book, I don’t want to fetishize print (as is the impulse today as more

publications migrate to the internet), but rather to emphasize the importance of print

culture to the writers and readers of the time. Print culture was a vehicle for lesbians to

share ideas and analysis, as well as a tool to make visible the lives and bodies that women

experienced in the world. The expansion of lesbian poetry anthologies from the thirty-

two pages of Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution to the sixty-four pages of We Are All

Lesbians to the 218-page Lesbians Speak Out reflected not only the possibility of more

poems for readers and communities of readers to engage, but also the growing

importance of the lesbian community.

Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry

Two perfect-bound anthologies of lesbian poetry appear in the United States in

the 1970s and the 1980s;550 the first, Amazon Poetry, published by Out & Out Books,

crystallizes lesbian poetry. The second, Lesbian Poetry, published by Persephone Press in

1981, extended and interrogated the boundaries of lesbian poetry. I examine the genesis

550
Virago Press published another lesbian poetry anthology, Naming the Waves, in 1988.
Christian McEwen edited Naming the Waves; McEwen, born in the United Kingdom,
lived in New York when she edited the book. Naming the Waves is “a collection of
transatlantic lesbian poetry, roughly half of which is British and half North American.”
Virago Press was well-known among lesbian-feminists in the United States, but the
books primarily sold in the U.K. I admire Naming the Waves enormously, but regretfully
exclude it from this analysis, given its limited United States circulation.

328
and circulation of these two anthologies to think about how the identity formation of

lesbian evolves between 1975 and 1982 and how women contest and expand the meaning

of lesbian.

On April 19, 1975, in Majority Report, a feminist newspaper printed in New York

and distributed throughout the United States, there was a small news story, which

referred to “a group of women” soliciting poems for an upcoming anthology. The article

stated that “Although they [the group of women compiling the anthology] know that

lesbian poets are writing in all parts of the country, they have not yet heard of most of

these women.”551 Both the presence of this article in Majority Report and this statement

reveal Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin’s intentions in compiling Amazon Poetry: they

wanted to find a larger group of lesbian poets and publish poems from poets who had not

yet been heard. The article continues, “Excellent poems are going unread, in large part

for lack of publishing outlets and limited space in those that do exist.”552 In this

statement, Bulkin and Larkin convey their political analysis about publishing. In spite of

the strengths and new opportunities that feminist publishing created for women and

women writers, it had limitations; simultaneously, commercial publishing, due to sexism

and homophobia, too often excluded lesbians. Hence, the need for the proposed

anthology for lesbian poets who want “to make their poetry visible to those presently

unaware of the vitality of current lesbian literature.”553 In Amazon Poetry, Bulkin and

Larkin wanted to demonstrate the “vitality” of lesbian poetry and to make it available to a

551
Majority Report (April 19, 1975): np.
552
Ibid.
553
Ibid.

329
large audience. The call for poems indicated that Amazon Poetry would “be published in

the fall of 1975.”554 The deadline for poets to submit their work was July 15, 1975.

Identifying lesbian poets and drawing the correlation between lesbianism and

women’s poetry were two issues that Bulkin and Larkin addressed in crafting and

publishing both Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry. These two anthologies created and

circulated a body of work that was identifiable as lesbian to readers. Although Amazon

Poetry was not the first book to circulate carrying the appellation lesbian in relationship

to poetry, it was the first perfect-bound anthology of lesbian poetry. One of its tasks was

to define the term lesbian poetry. In the essay, “Kissing against the Light,” Elly Bulkin

describes the two fundamental assumptions about lesbian poetry. Bulkin writes, “1) the

poet’s lesbianism is an essential, not an incidental, fact about her life and her work; 2) a

discussion of lesbianism must focus not only on our political ideas (what we think), but

on our feelings (how we act, what we say, how we live our expressed politics).”555 Bulkin

asserts the centrality of lesbianism to a writer’s life and expands lesbianism to be not

simply a political formation but an affective, or lived, experience as well. Bulkin’s

definitions provides one lens for thinking about lesbian poetry; Bulkin’s definition,

however, reflects a specific formation of lesbian, informed by the time and location.

Larkin said in an interview in 1981 that she and Bulkin received about 2000

submissions for Amazon Poetry.556 In addition to promoting their call for work in

554
Ibid.
555
Bulkin, “Kissing,” 11.
556
Maida Tilchen, “Getting to Know Who We Are: The Lesbian Poetry Tradition/An
Interview with Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin,” Gay Community News (August 1, 1981):
11.

330
feminist publications like Majority Report, Bulkin and Larkin “made up about 200 little

flyers and sent them around to women’s centers, women’s newspapers, women’s coffee-

houses for posting.”557 In this way, the process of compiling the anthology was itself a

community-organizing project. Larkin notes in a 1981 interview that at the time they

were distributing flyers, “there wasn’t even a simple way of finding all those places, but

we found the names of women’s presses and coffee-houses in Kirsten Grimstad’s and

Susan Rennie’s Women’s Survival Catalogue.”558 Bulkin and Larkin’s roles as editors

included the traditional roles of selecting poems for inclusion, compiling and copy

editing the manuscript, and overseeing production as well as identifying a community

and network of people through which they could find poets.

In addition to these organizing strategies, Bulkin and Larkin also solicited poems

from poets they wished to include, including Susan Griffin and May Swenson.559 In the

solicitation letter to May Swenson, Larkin reiterated the process, writing, “We have sent

notes announcing our anthology to women’s centers, women’s bookstores, and women’s

publications throughout the country in an attempt to locate exciting poetry by women we

haven’t yet heard of.”560 Through this letter, sent to Swenson’s publisher and delivered

by the publisher to Swenson, Larkin asked Swenson to contribute a poem to the

anthology, which she did.

557
Ibid.
558
Ibid.
559
Ibid.
560
Swenson Correspondence, Subject File Folder “Amazon Poetry,” Lesbian Herstory
Archives, Brooklyn, NY.

331
 The organizing process with which Bulkin and Larkin approached Amazon

Poetry, while not described in the final book itself, is one of the hallmarks of lesbian

poetry at the time: it was a tool to network and connect lesbian-feminists and a process

through which lesbians could collaborate. Bulkin and Larkin model collaboration in their

co-editorship of the anthology and in the process of identifying poems for inclusion and

in reaching out to poets to participate. Larkin and Bulkin both believed that there were

many other lesbian poets out there in the world that they needed to connect to for the

project.

Organizing Amazon Poetry was for Larkin and Bulkin both a political project and

an aesthetic project. Amazon Poetry was one of the first books published by Out & Out

Books. Aesthetic questions and political questions concerned Larkin and Bulkin equally

as poets and anthologists while assembling Amazon Poetry. In the letter to May Swenson,

Larkin wrote,

Some of the poetry we have received recently is from women who can’t yet allow
their real names to be used in a book of lesbian poetry. This makes us very
conscious now of the potential impact on them and on us and on an oppressive
society of the appearance in it of so many of our sisters. For us, this is an
affirmation of our completeness and pride as woman-identified women. We are
very much against, however, limiting the scope of the book to poems about
sexuality or the politics of feminism. We simply want good poems, poems that
reflect the variety of our lives and love of the craft of poetry.561

In this part of the letter, Larkin outlines for Swenson some of the political issues of

assembling the book and some of the challenges that some poets faced in considering

having their poems included. Larkin then writes, however, about their commitment to

561
Ibid.

332
aesthetics in the book, using the phrases, “good poems” and “love of the craft of

poetry.”562

When the manuscript was completed, it included thirty-eight poets who

contributed a total of sixty-three poems to the anthology. The most prominent names at

the time include Ellen Bass, co-editor with Florence Howe of No More Masks, Adrienne

Rich, May Swenson, and May Sarton. When published, Amazon Poetry lists at the end of

the book sixteen “small-press poetry” publishers, including Diana Press in Baltimore,

MD, Feminist Press in Old Westbury, NY, Out & Out Books in Brooklyn (the publisher

of Amazon Poetry), and Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, CA. All of the listed

presses include full mailing addresses so that women interested in purchasing books by

contributors can order them.

Larkin and Bulkin raised money to publish Amazon Poetry. Initially, they

approached Glide Church, who ultimately did not provide financial assistance. Larkin

told Swenson in her initial letter, “we did later get enough from a private donor to make

perfect binding possible, which will extend our distribution possibilities.”563 Out & Out

Books published Amazon Poetry at the end of 1975. Between four and five thousand

copies of the anthology were ultimately sold or distributed, according to later interviews

with Larkin and Bulkin as well as records from Persephone Press, who published Lesbian

Poetry in 1981, partly based on the successful sales history of Amazon Poetry.

From this thick description of Amazon Poetry, I examine three things. First, I

interrogate the idea of “lesbian” that is presented through the book by examining two

562
Ibid.
563
Swenson correspondence. Larkin does not recall who the private donor to Amazon
Poetry was (Larkin Interview).

333
stories of poets in relationship to the collection. Second, I explore the idea of generations

of poets and how identity is bound by experience and experience, in turn, is bound by

history. Finally, I discuss how Amazon Poetry was revised, updated, and expanded into

Lesbian Poetry, published in 1981, and suggest some of the changes that the new

collection made to the identity of “lesbian,” particularly in relationship to the greater

inclusion of lesbians of color.

Locating Lesbian in Amazon

Of the first edition of Amazon Poetry, the editors write in the “Prefatory Note,”

“What is a ‘lesbian poetry anthology’? Some expect only love poetry; others, a collection

of poems specifically about our oppression as lesbians. Instead, we have put together a

book of poems that show the scope and intensity of lesbian experience.“ The poems of

Amazon Poetry certainly do that, but rather than reading the poems closely, what I want

to examine is how the inclusion of one poet and the exclusion of one poet serve as a way

that lesbian was understood not by common, lesbian readers at the time, but by literary

critics.

Two central questions about anthologies, because they are a site of the

aggregation and multiplication of power, are: who is included? and who is not

included.564 To think about these questions, I examine a case of inclusion in Amazon

Poetry (which later became exclusion in Lesbian Poetry) and a case of exclusion. My

intention in exploring these editorial decisions is not to suggest anything about the

processes of the editors of the anthology, but rather to examine the ways that women

564
The complete tables of contents with poets and poems for both Amazon Poetry and
Lesbian Poetry are available at the Lesbian Poetry Archive,
www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org.

334
thought about and organized their work as poets in relationship to the changing social

context of “lesbian” during the times when these anthologies were published.

A handful of poets with prominent reputations in the world of poetry are included

in Amazon Poetry. Among readers of feminist poetry, many of whom were already

familiar with a process of “decoding” to identify lesbians, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre

Lorde and Ellen Bass were important names in the anthology. Similarly, May Sarton,

who had come out more than ten years earlier, in conjunction with the publication of her

novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, had a large and public reputation as a

novelist and poet. The poet who may have surprised some readers and who certainly

delighted the editors when she agreed to participate is May Swenson.

Larkin and Bulkin solicited Swenson directly to include her work in the

anthology. In the initial letter, dated July 12, 1975, Larkin wrote, “I am afraid you may

consider our request an invasion of your privacy. I do know that you have not identified

yourself with the women’s movement. I hope, nevertheless, that the letter attached will

help to interest you in lending support to our project by allowing us to include something

you have written.”565 Enclosed with the letter is a full description of the project, and, in

the body of the letter, Larkin describes the anthology with its title, Amazon Poetry, as an

anthology that is lesbian and for “woman-identified women.” A second letter was

dispatched to Swenson in August of 1975. Swenson responded to Larkin’s request for

poems affirmatively on August 16, 1975.

565
Swenson Correspondence, Lesbian Herstory Archives. Though Swenson had not
appeared in a feminist anthology, she indicates in her reply to Larkin that she was waiting
to hear from Ms. Magazine about one of the poems. Swenson’s engagement with
feminism as a movement is as complex as her engagement with lesbianism as a
movement and merits further examination.

335
 I enclose a copy of an old poem, one I still like: TO CONFIRM A THING. This
was published in my collection, TO MIX WITH TIME, in 1963—has never been
paid any particular attention that I know of. To me the statement it makes doesn’t
seem at all obscure, but perhaps the metaphors constitute a thicker veil than I
expected. TO MIX WITH TIME is now out of print, and I own all rights to the
poems in it, so that permission for reprint is the only one necessary.566

Swenson’s positive response to Larkin demonstrates her willingness to have her work

read as an expression of eroticism between women. Swenson’s participation in the

anthology was a political act, understood as such by Swenson, Larkin, Bulkin and the

readers of the anthology.

Swenson believes that the poem makes a “statement” that “doesn’t seem at all

obscure,” though she is aware that the poem is not read overtly as lesbian and postulates

that “perhaps the metaphors constitute a thicker veil than I expected.” In fact, Swenson’s

poem in Amazon Poetry, in relationship to other poems such as Marcie Hershman’s

“Making Love to Alice” or Pat Parker’s “For Willyce,” is thickly veiled and obscure.

Putting Swenson’s poem in dialogue with the poems of May Sarton and Elsa Gidlow,

however, reveals congruence in their presentation of lesbianism. Different generations

express lesbianism differently in poetry.

Kirstin Hotelling Zona analyzes Swenson’s aesthetic in relationship to lesbian

poetry with the question, “What do we make of a self-identified lesbian’s poetry that is

often drenched by tropes of heterosexual desire?”567 Zona answers this question with a

thoughtful reading of the “blatantly heterosexual or stereotypically gendered tropes” in

Swenson as a strategy that “radically refuses normative sexuality through a performative

566
Swenson Correspondence, Lesbian Herstory Archives.
567
Kirstin Hotelling Zona, “A 'Dangerous Game of Change': Images of Desire in the
Love Poems of May Swenson,” Twentieth Century Literature 44.2 (Summer 1998): 219.

336
appropriation.”568 Zona reads Swenson’s poetry as a negotiation of Swenson’s lesbianism

in relationship to the larger poetry academy and as a subversive strategy for expressing

her own sexuality through more acceptable images and tropes. Informing Zona’s textual

reading of Swenson’s poems, however, is an understanding of lesbian identity as

constituted during the period of the 1970s and 1980s, rather than a lesbian identity

constituted prior to the 1970s, when Swenson wrote the poems. These different meanings

of lesbian and different constructions of lesbian identity move fluidly and overlap.

In fact, Swenson’s relationship to the word “lesbian” was a vexed one. Swenson

willingly and quite happily allowed Larkin and Bulkin to include her poem in Amazon

Poetry, but five years later when asked for poems for the new anthology, Lesbian Poetry,

Swenson refused. She wrote to Larkin, “I have not sent you any poems for inclusion in

the proposed anthology—nor would I do so—any more than I would submit any writing

to a book titled, for instance, ‘The Heterosexual Women’s Poetry Anthology’.”569In a

long letter to Larkin, Swenson writes that part of her reason for refusal (in addition to the

title “inviting the charge of being crude”) was “People attracted to such a title would not,

I think, be looking principally for first rate poetry.”570

Ironically, in 1988, Larkin again solicited poetry from Swenson for the co-

gendered anthology she edited with Carl Morse, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time,

and at that time in spite of the title, Swenson assented to include poems. Sue Russell

writes, “It is difficult to speculate about why she accepted the later invitation and not the

568
Ibid, 219-220.
569
Sue Russell, “A Mysterious and Lavish Power How Things Continue to Take Place in
the Work of May Swenson,” Kenyon Review 16.3 (Summer 1994): 132.
570
Ibid.

337
earlier one.”571 I would argue, however, that part of what is at work in these inclusions

and exclusions is the changing way in which lesbian identity is constructed at these times.

Russell, writing about Swenson’s lesbianism, notes, “While Swenson did not go out of

her way to disclose her lesbianism, neither did she go out of her way to hide it.”572 This

characterization of Swenson’s identity deployment by Russell, which seems accurate to

me, is an expression of a particular location of identity construction and deployment

informed by mid-century queerness.

Swenson’s presence in Amazon Poetry, absence in Lesbian Poetry, and resumed

presence in Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time reflects changing associations with

language and identities. Russell underscores some stability in the construction and

deployment of lesbian identity for Swenson; that is, she didn’t “go out of her way to

disclose” it nor did she “go out of her way to hide it.” This construction is congruent with

the descriptions of identity that Michael Sherry articulates in Gay Artists in Modern

American Culture for his subjects, including Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and Paul

Menotti. It is also congruent with Elizabeth Bishop’s identity as a lesbian. Bishop’s

actions, however, in relationship to identity formation and deployment are very different

than Swenson’s actions.

I turn here to Elizabeth Bishop, the absent poet in Amazon Poetry, Lesbian

Poetry, and all future anthologies of queer poetry no matter how named. If Swenson’s

presence excited contemporary readers of poetry, the absence of Elizabeth Bishop would

have gone unnoticed. Bishop refused to have her work published in women-only

571
Ibid.
572
Ibid.

338
collections. As she told the editors of Psyche: The Feminine Poetic Consciousness,

Barbara Segnitz and Carol Rainey, in a letter, “I simply prefer the sexes mixed.”573

Segnitz and Rainey contextualize this remark in their introductory essay as follows, “Few

women would disagree with this statement as the ultimate goal of the current women’s

liberation movement, which hopes to bring about a climate in which the sexes can be

“mixed” in a more realistic, humane, and just manner.”574 They continue the essay,

however, with a thorough discussion of Bishop’s work saying, “[S]ince Elizabeth Bishop

is a major poet, and since she exemplifies the more intellectual approach to poetry we

have discussed, we’ve decided, after deliberation to include a discussion of her poetry in

hopes that the reader will at some time read or reread her work.”575 In this way, Bishop’s

absence from Psyche is truly a spectral presence as the authors frame and analyze her

work in relationship to the authors included in the anthology.

In Amazon Poetry, the absence of Elizabeth Bishop was less of a presence for

readers. As Bishop scholarship evolves, however, stories of Rich’s solicitation of Bishop

for Amazon Poetry emerge. According to Richard Howard, after Bishop met with Rich,

Bishop said, “Do you know what I want Richard? Closets, closets, and more closets.”576

Bishop, in Howard’s recollection, plays on the newly emergent trope of “the closet” as

something from which gay and lesbian people emerge. In fact, such an experience was

573
Barbara Segnitz and Carol Rainey, Psyche: The Feminine Poetic Consciousness; an
Anthology of Modern American Women Poets (New York: Dial Press, 1973), 30.
574
Ibid.
575
Ibid.
576
Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral
Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 330.

339
discordant with Bishop’s life. She was open about her many relationships with women,

including, in particular her relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, which whom she

lived in Brazil for over a decade.577 Bishop lived her life as a lesbian similarly to

Swenson; she didn’t “go out of her way to disclose” it nor did she “go out of her way to

hide it.”

Russell and Sherry articulate this construction of identity—as something that is

neither hidden nor revealed. It is an identity construction of a particular time and location,

and a construction that changes with the political and social formations of the 1970s.

Amazon Poetry as a title, as Swenson suggests, is evocative of lesbianism, but not

annunciatory. The move from evocation to annunciation, from “Amazon” to “Lesbian,”

demonstrates how the meaning of “lesbian” changes. For Swenson – and Bishop –

“lesbian” was located in “Amazon,” but for new readers, “lesbian,” or “Lesbian” was the

word they sought, without cloaks or veils.

Understanding Generations of Lesbians

Different constructions of lesbian identity can be crudely mapped onto

generations. Linda Garber in Identity Poetics makes similar generational gestures in her

work. Garber articulates connections between Pat Parker and Audre Lorde as a

generational relationship, in which Parker is a foremother to the work of Lorde.

Similarly, Garber articulates a relationship between Judy Grahn and Adrienne Rich in

577
Carmen L. Oliveira details the sixteen year relationship between Bishop and Soares in
Rare and Commonplace Flowers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

340
which Grahn’s work functions as a precursor to Rich’s work on lesbianism in poetry in

the 1970s.578

After the publication of Lesbian Poetry, Larkin and Bulkin recognized these

generational dynamics. In an interview with Gay Community News, Bulkin said:

I think we’ve had a couple of generations. The earliest generation was women
writing in the late 60s and early 70s. That wave was Judy Grahn and Pat Parker
and Willyce Kim, who were publishing with Diana Press and the Women’s Press
Collective, and in Amazon Quarterly. At some point, what they were doing could
be looked at as a “school.”579

Bulkin continued by characterizing aspects of the writing of this “earliest generation”:

It was important that they be anti-hierarchical; the “common Woman” poems by

Judy Grahn are an example of this. They [the poets] wanted to communicate
directly with the audience—they didn’t want images or symbols that might
interfere. There was a great emphasis on oral tradition. A lot of poems were
written for somebody to stand up in front of an audience and make immediate
contact with women who had felt, as a result of how poems were taught to them
in high school, that they could never understand a poem. I see that as the first
generation.580

While I suggest that labeling Grahn as part of a “first generation” involves a misnomer,

because lesbian poetry extends farther back in history, Bulkin’s description of this school

of poetry is important. It produces the constellation of Swenson, Bishop, and Sarton as a

“school” of poetry with a different construction of lesbian identity. Amazon Poetry

gathers generations and interrogates what lesbian means and how it is represented on the

page by poets at different times and in different locations.

Larkin also identifies another “school” or generation of poets in her reflections.

578
Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer
Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
579
Tilchen, “Getting,” 11.
580
Ibid.

341
 There are poets who are in the book[,] who are in Amazon Poetry[,] that came
from a much more traditional place in terms of how they learned to write poetry,
and who their audience was. They had written a great deal of heterosexual-
identified poetry, and in some cases, like Adrienne Rich, had received awards and
recognition from the white male establishment. That’s a whole other group of
people.581

Larkin identifies different schools of poetry in a different register than Bulkin. While

Bulkin gestures to more literal generations in relationship to when they became active as

poets, Larkin delineates different milieux in which poets worked. Prior to coming out as a

lesbian, Rich’s work received accolades from the “white male establishment.” Similarly,

Swenson’s work was first associated with lesbianism in Amazon Poetry. These are less

generational differences than differences in the period of coming into consciousness, as

Nancy Whittier suggests in her work Feminist Generations. Coming out in a

heterosexually-identified literary establishment and asserting the presence of lesbians—

and the authority for lesbians to be in such a space—was political work for lesbians and

feminists; work that Larkin and Bulkin embraced. Different political stakes, shaped by

their historical moment, make different identity constructions exigent.

Larkin and Bulkin both reflect on generationality in their comments about Amazon

Poetry. While I recognize the significance of generationality in these anthologies, I am

cautious about invoking generationality too forcefully. Generationality can provide a

useful framework to think about the lives and work of lesbian poets. Current women’s

studies scholarship attends to generational issues within feminism.582 Moreover, within

literary history, generational issues are significant; one example is scholarship on

Elizabeth Bishop and her relationship with the elder Marianne Moore. While generational

581
Ibid.
582
In particular, see Whittier’s Feminist Generations.

342
analysis can be productive, I resist generationality as a framework for three reasons. First,

the “wave” analysis of feminist history is rooted in generationality. In addition to

providing an inaccurate narrative of feminist history, the organization of feminism into

“waves” (which Larkin references in her statement above) invites generational discord

and conflict. The idea of “third wave feminism” is a manifestation of how historical

narrative frameworks shape current feminist activism; more recently, Susan Faludi’s

writing about generational conflict in “American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide”

demonstrates how thinking about generations of feminism invites the recapitulation of

past conflicts.583 Quite simply, the epistemic framework of generations breeds conflict.

Second, generational analyses leads to teleological thinking about history; they promote

the idea that there is a progressive trajectory of human history. While this idea is

appealing, it is empirically false. Finally, generational discussions reify heteronormative

narratives about human life.584 While age and experience create differences within

communities, framing them as generational implies a familial arrangement that inevitably

reverts to heterosexual families and obscures kinship relationships and non-normative

families. These are exactly the types of hegemonic systems that lesbian-feminists worked

to subvert and reimagine during the 1970s. Ultimately, more than generationality, the

examination of identity construction hinges on these two questions: what experiences

583
Susan Faludi, “American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide,” Harper’s, October
2010.
584
Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, Duke
University Press, 2004) and Kathleen Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child: Growing
Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) synthesize
this source of my discomfort elegantly and eloquently.

343
construct the meaning of lesbian identity for individuals and for communities?, and how

are those experiences bound historically?

Larkin’s comments about the different generations or schools of poets explicitly

acknowledges the importance of audiences in relationship to poets’ work. An important

part of Amazon Poetry, in addition to gathering poems by lesbian poets, was the creation

of an audience for lesbian poetry. For Larkin, that audience is not heterosexual, white, or

male, but rather an audience of lesbians reading and interpreting lesbian poems. The size

and scope of the audience for an anthology is important; commercially, it defines the

potential sales. Larkin and Bulkin were less concerned with the commercial possibilities,

however, and more concerned with creating an anthology that would mobilize

communities of readers for lesbian poets. Through their editorial work, they imagined

communities of readers; by publishing Amazon Poetry, they created a book that

mobilized communities of readers. Larkin and Bulkin printed 500 copies of Amazon

Poetry in the first printing through Out & Out Books. They immediately sold out. Larkin

remembers going to a second printing within a month or two. In total, Out & Out Books

printed three or four printings of Amazon Poetry, probably totaling 2,000-4,000 copies.

Amazon Poetry sold briskly through 1980.585

The circulation and reception of texts is crucial as writers imagine and create new

texts. Jacqueline Bobo’s and Janice Radway’s work examine how communities of readers

and communities of reception among African-American women and readers of romance

novels, respectively, alter how we understand various literary and social texts and how

those texts are used in people’s lives to make meanings. The collection, publishing, and

585
Larkin interview.

344
distribution of women poets in anthologies that were feminist had the effect of both

creating communities of readers of feminist poetry and of creating new communities of

feminist poets. Amazon Poetry did similar work for lesbian poets. Larkin reflects on the

constellation of politics, aesthetics and communities of readers in relationship to Amazon

Poetry.

One facet of the new wave is for those people to come out as lesbians. Not simply
to come out, but to develop a politics which is very much reflected in their poetry,
and has made changes in some aspects of their poetry. But they have moved
toward a place where they can simply be talking to women, instead of assuming
that they have to explain themselves to men, or that they have to consider men as
part of their audience.586

Larkin links politics with the craft of poetry in this statement and articulates the centrality

of the audience for poets. The creation, production, and circulation of Amazon Poetry

constructed “lesbian” as both a subject position and as a reader position; Amazon Poetry

built new lesbian literary communities of writers and readers.

Lesbian Poetry, Anthology Redux

When Lesbian Poetry was published in 1981, it was a much larger collection of

poems—nearly 300 pages in length compared to the 112 pages with thirty-eight poets of

Amazon Poetry. In this edition, there is a more robust set of back materials, as well as a

lengthy introduction by the editors titled “A Look at Lesbian Poetry.” The size of the

book signals the effectiveness of poetry as a medium for the movement. Lesbian Poetry

demonstrates the way in which feminist publishing had grown, been taken up by

mainstream presses, and ironically also had contracted. The final part of the book

contains not only greatly expanded contributor biographies and an essay by co-editor Elly

Bulkin titled, “Lesbian Poetry In the Classroom,” but also a full six pages of “Work by
586
Tilchen, “Getting,” 11.

345
Contributors,” which includes a listing of each book and chapbook published by the

contributors along with full mailing addresses or other instructions on how to get their

books. The introduction to this section includes these notes: “While large commercial

presses have the resources to bill you, women’s presses do not—so help them out by

prepaying (in United States currency).”587

Lesbian Poetry also reflects a commitment to and a belief in lesbian communities

that were multiracial and multicultural in their conception and formation. This value was

being articulated in new and different ways within lesbian communities by the time

Lesbian Poetry was published. The vital statistics of Lesbian Poetry in comparison to its

predecessor, Amazon Poetry, illuminate some of the differences between 1975 and 1981.

In Amazon Poetry there were sixty-three poems by thirty-eight poets. Of these poets,

three of them (Audre Lorde, Willyce Kim, and Pat Parker) were lesbians of color; Lorde

and Parker, African-American, and Kim, Asian-American. Therefore, four per cent of

the poets were lesbians of color, and their poems represented a total of eleven per cent of

the collection.

Lesbian Poetry included work by sixty-four poets, with a total of 145 poems. Of

the poets, eighteen of them were lesbians of color, or twenty-eight per cent of the

contributors; and forty-one of the 145 poems were from lesbians of color, or twenty-eight

per cent. The racial-ethnic backgrounds of these eighteen lesbians were also more

diverse, and included African-American women, Mexican-American women, Latina

women, Native American Women, and Asian-American women. The greater number of

poems by lesbians of color in Lesbian Poetry is heralded by the editors and reviewers

587
Bulkin & Larkin, Lesbian Poetry, 298.

346
because it reflects the particular values of inclusion and multiracialism that were

circulating in the lesbian-feminist communities at the time.

By 1981, more lesbian poets were being published by mainstream commercial

publishing houses, including Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, and Audre Lorde. Bulkin

and Larkin looked for a commercial publisher, but couldn’t find one. Receptive ones

were waiting to see how “lesbian books” would sell. Judy Grahn’s book, The Work of a

Common Woman, had just been published by St. Martins, and Bulkin and Larkin indicate

that St. Martins was among the publishers waiting to see how “lesbian books” would fare

in the marketplace. While they were interested in commercial publishing for this new

poetry anthology, Larkin and Bulkin also “didn’t want to be exploited—by Sapphic

images or by a Hollywood image of two women kissing.”588 This represents some of the

political concerns about the growth of lesbian publishing and the fears about what

happened to lesbian work when it entered the commercial or mainstream sphere.

Ultimately, Persephone published Lesbian Poetry; Bulkin met Greenfield and McGloin at

the National Women’s Studies Conference. Larkin noted, “It’s important to have

publishers who appreciate the fact that poetry is involved with political activism, is a

political statement.”589 Larkin’s statement here resonates on many levels in relationship

to Lesbian Poetry. She and Bulkin saw the project as “political activism” and a “political

statement” not only in relationship to the world of publishing, but also in relationship to

how the book was constructed, particularly the aesthetic standards of the project and the

racial-ethnic make up of the anthology.

588
Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich, “Coming Out with Culture,” Sojourner, 27.
589
Ibid.

347
 When it was published, Lesbian Poetry was celebrated by Persephone Press on

May 9, 1981 with a reading event titled, “The Lesbian Poetry Reading.” The event was

held at the Arlington Street Church in Boston and began with opening remarks by

Barbara Smith, followed by readings by Bulkin, Parker, Moraga, Clausen, Hershman,

Rich, Allen, Larkin, Lorde, Becker, Cliff, and Grahn. Many of the poets read not only a

selection of their own poems from the anthology but also the poems of other women who

were not in attendance at the event. The event was accompanied by a printed program,

which highlighted the readers’ biographies as well as instructions for finding their books,

and included advertisements from local businesses and forthcoming books from

Persephone Press. Over 900 women attended the event.590

While reviewers of the earlier anthologies, Dykes for an Amerikan Revolution and

We Are All Lesbians, commented on uneven and even questionable aesthetics within

those collections, Larkin and Bulkin asserted the primacy of aesthetic considerations in

compiling Lesbian Poetry and affirmed that they had the same standards for Lesbian

Poetry as they had for Amazon Poetry. Larkin said about aesthetics, “The poem itself had

to be a powerful, poetic, integrated statement.”591 Also like these earlier anthologies, the

success of this endeavor was greeted with some ambivalence by reviewers. Andrea

Loewenstein, reviewing the book for Gay Community News writes, “I liked some of them

[poems] a lot, others not at all.”592

590
Tilchen, “Getting,” 11.
591
Ibid., 17.
592
Andrea Loewenstein, “Transmitting the Message,” Gay Community News (August 1,
1981): 11.

348
 While Loewenstein’s review was not entirely uncritical, her assessment of the

book lends some insight into the function that this book had for shaping lesbian identity

at the time. Loewenstein writes, “This is an anthology of poems by women who have

chosen to take the risk and suffer the consequences (and there are consequences) of

publicly identifying themselves as lesbians.”593 Loewenstein’s assessment here reflects

the continuing and increasing framework of gay and lesbian identity in relationship to

“the closet.” Loewenstein valorizes public identification as lesbian by noting the risks

and subsequent consequences. This is a framework that is effective and relevant for some

of the contributors in the anthology, but is less meaningful for the older generation, as I

have discussed. She continues, “It is probably logical that there are lots of lesbian poets—

the act of peeling away and discarding the realities we were taught in order to find our

true sexuality and identity is not unlike the peeling away and coming to terms which is

necessary to write an honest poem.”594 Loewenstein’s metaphorical language analogizes

the experience of poets with the experience of lesbians in coming out and is an example

of how poetry was imbricated with lesbian-feminism.595

The process for putting together Lesbian Poetry was quite different than that for

Amazon Poetry. Poems were not solicited through an open call because, as Bulkin said,

“It would have totally overwhelmed us.”596 Instead, Bulkin and Larkin solicited poems

593
Ibid.
594
Ibid.
595
Jan Clausen’s discussion of poetry and lesbian-feminism in A Movement of Poets
remains a timely and important analysis as does Katie King’s discussion of it in Theory in
Its Feminist Travels.
596
Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich, “Coming Out with Culture,” Sojourner, 17.

349
from existing networks. They reviewed manuscripts from Conditions, which Larkin was

editing at the time and which had a guest-edited special issue in 1979 titled, The Black

Women’s Issue, that sold over 5,000 copies. They also considered materials at the

Lesbian Herstory Archives. This process, and its results, demonstrates a value of lesbian-

feminism: consciously creating multicultural texts. While it may seem that an open

solicitation process, like the one engaged in Amazon Poetry, would result in a more open

and transparent process and by extension in a collection that reflects racial-ethnic and

class diversity, in fact, the opposite is true. Lesbian Poetry, compiled through process

centrally-controlled by the editors, reflects more racial-ethnic diversity. As the editors

knew, achieving a multicultural community project required attention to the process and

an active structuring of the outcome to be more inclusive of a variety of voices.

Bulkin and Larkin explicitly articulate the value of multicultural anthologies and

the processes used to achieve it in their assessments of the project. In addition, in

interviews and other writings, they share three other observations about racial-ethnic

diversity and inclusion in Lesbian Poetry as important in their work. Bulkin and Larkin

note that first, the advancement of lesbian movements creates more visibility and

possibilities for lesbians of color; second, academic locations and formations are

exclusive of lesbians of color; and third, writing about race is not only the responsibility

of lesbians of color–white lesbians must share the work as well. The questions of race

and examining racism in lesbian communities were not simply questions of inclusion or

representation, however. Larkin cited Minnie Bruce Pratt as an important contributor

because of how her poems address a history of racism. Larkin noted that Pratt “cross[es]

those divisions between white women and women of color, to really struggle with those

350
divisions, at the point when she’s come out and recognized her bonding with women.”597

These observations, combined with the book itself, demonstrate how thinking about race

in relationship to publishing was crucial to lesbian-feminists in the early 1980s.

Interviews with Bulkin and Larkin, as well as Joan Nestle’s review of the book in

manuscript form and later published in Sinister Wisdom, indicate that one of the most

important developments for the editors and for lesbian readers of Lesbian Poetry was its

inclusion of more lesbians of color. Bulkin said, “In Lesbian Poetry, more than 1/4 of the

poems are by lesbians of color, and so it is much more reflective of the women out there

who are writing very powerfully.”598 Bulkin positions this development of more lesbians

of color writing and publishing poetry to questions of “generations or waves as a

concept.”599 Bulkin continues,

For the most part, the earlier lesbian poets who were known historically were
white and upper-middle class or upper class, women like Amy Lowell or H.D.600
What I see in the last five years is an increase in the number of lesbians of color
who are writing as lesbians of color. This book is only a reflection of what’s out
there. Earlier, that material wasn’t being published, but a great deal of it was
being written. There was a lack of accessibility, and fewer publications.601

597
Tilchen, “Getting,” 9.
598
Macdonald and Rich, “Coming Out,” 17.
599
Tilchen, “Getting,” 9.
600
Given that this interview was conducted in 1981, this statement most likely reflects
the best information available to Bulkin; however, I want to note that since this time, the
poetry of African-American lesbians and bisexual women such as Angelina Weld
Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Nella Larsen have been recovered and considered
more fully. I am cautious about this analysis in relationship to Bulkin. In fact, Bulkin
discusses Grimké in her introduction to Lesbian Poetry so she was well aware that the
history was not exclusively white, though she does say “for the most part.” This is an area
deserving of more analysis within the textual evidence; in addition, more genealogical
work is needed on poets who are lesbians of color.
601
Tilchen, “Getting,” 9.

351
Here Bulkin reflects on the material conditions of publishing, that is what is being

published and what opportunities exist for publication, as important to understanding a

tradition of lesbian poetry. Bulkin’s comments reflect both a concern with the centrality

of portraying the experiences of lesbians of color and the systemic barriers to those

portrayals. While Bulkin’s comments could be interpreted as a historical narrative of

progress, I do not believe that is an accurate interpretation. She is reflecting on what has

been and what was then, not on what might happen in the future.

Larkin expands on Bulkin’s reflections further, particularly in consideration of

race and genre. She says:

We tried not to define poetry in a strict academic sense. There’s a Pat Parker
poem called “Movement in Black” which is basically a performance piece. It also
worked well on the printed page. There’s a piece by Sapphire which in some ways
moves over toward prose poetry, and is typeset like prose. Michelle Cliff’s piece
in the book, “Obsolete Geography,” was turned down by Poets and Writers,
which categorizes people as writing either fiction or poetry, and they said her
poem was neither. I think we’ve tried to move away from this attitude of
excluding women because we have this definition and they didn’t fit into it. We
wanted to try to get at what women are actually writing.602

Larkin first notes the challenge of academic formations for lesbians of color, and their

commitment as editors to not draw lines that were exclusive. Larkin also considers how

writing by lesbians of color at the time was confounding traditional genre definitions—

that is, the distinctions between poetry and prose as well as between poetry and memoir.

Larkin notes that the response of such genre-crossing resulted in confusion, at best, and

hostility, at worst, from various publishers.

Loewenstein recognizes the inclusion of women of color poets as well in her

review of Lesbian Poetry, “It is one of the very few poetry anthologies of any kind which
602
Ibid.

352
contains more than a token representation of non-white poets, and this makes it a far

richer and deeper collection.”603 Loewenstein reflects one value of lesbian-feminism at

the time: multiracial engagements enhance community. Loewenstein continues and

expands this formulation: “The poets included range widely in class and experience.”604

With this sentence, Loewenstein affirms that the imagined multicultural community is not

only multiracial, but also draws on a range of class backgrounds and other experiences as

a central to it’s formation. Loewenstein concludes, “It is a relief not to have to read the

(by now standard) apology to working class women or women of color which

accompanies so many feminist publications—the editors realized too late that they were

not including everyone and will do better next time.”605 Loewenstein names past

experiences of failed multiculturalism and praises the anthology for not making these

mistakes.

I’m cautious to not valorize the work of Larkin and Bulkin with regard to race in

either Lesbian Poetry or Amazon Poetry. Ultimately, I don’t believe an imagined past of

perfection in relationship to multicultural or multiracial practices exists. I do believe that

the process, commitments, and outcomes achieved by Larkin and Bulkin in Lesbian

Poetry provide a model for future practice in compiling anthologies and thinking about

lesbian poetics. The conscious multiracial representation and analysis that Bulkin and

Larkin produced in Lesbian Poetry is important. At the same time, tensions around

racism are evident in the poems of Lesbian Poetry and resist any utopian readings of the

603
Loewenstein, “Transmitting,” 11.
604
Ibid.
605
Ibid.

353
book or of the lesbian community at the time. For instance, Julie Blackwomon writes in

her poem “Revolutionary Blues,”

when I say sisters help me

the noose tightens on my neck
I cannot breathe
it is because I am black
my sisters say
yes,
but what has that to do
with our revolution?606

Here Blackwomon reflects some of the common experiences of racism that women of

color were addressing in lesbian-feminist communities.

Barbara Noda’s poem, “Strawberries,” is an apostrophe to her father, whose

“strawberry-stained/skin” was “a field brown/as dark as your curses/ of Mexicans.” In the

poem, Noda writes of how he “plows his whole family/under and bitter and sodden” and

concludes that he did not “escape/the strawberries/a dusk encrusted/shimmering “ that

“plowed and plowed/a carcass/ a lifetime.”607 In this poem, Noda, a writer of Japanese

descent, does not shy away from the difficulties between people of color as well as

exploring the crushing effects of exploitive work on her father.

Barbara Smith’s poem, “Theft,” dedicated to Angelina Weld Grimké, begins

The white women

are talking about
their poets.

For hours.

While claiming that

they do not have enough.608
606
Lesbian Poetry, 132.
607
Ibid., 253.
608
Ibid., 197.

354
When she claims Grimké, one white woman shouts, “She’s not Black!” and Smith “tries

to explain in seconds/about bloodlines,/Black and white halves of families/Rape.”609

Smith captures the challenges of inter-racial communication as well as the legacies of

slavery and racism in the United States. Smith’s conclusion is that “we must save our best

and/darkest selves for us.”610 This conclusion gestures to Smith’s publishing with Kitchen

Table Woman of Color Press, which focused on publishing women of color only. Within

the poem, Smith advocates that women of color save their words and the commercial

possibilities for their words for enterprises owned and operated by women of color.

Thus, far from suggesting that Bulkin and Larkin constructed a utopian world in

Lesbian Poetry, I suggest only that they assembled a collection of poetry that consciously

included lesbians of color, represented in larger numbers than in their prior anthology.

Yet, through the poetry they included, Larkin and Bulkin gathered poems that expressed

some of the struggles and thinking about race and racism in the lesbian community at that

time.

Anthologies and Identity Formations

Through editing, publishing, and circulation, Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry

stabilized one meaning of the phrase “lesbian poetry” to be poetry by lesbians and

reflecting and shaping lesbian identity. In the 1980s, lesbian-feminist publishing used

anthologies in a new way, equally political and aesthetic: to elaborate intersectional

identity formations, particularly racial-ethnic identity formations.

609
Ibid.
610
Ibid.

355
 Within journal publishing, special issues on particular topics are de rigeur.

Anthologies played an important role in synthesizing the identity formation of lesbian

and lesbian-feminist as I have discussed. In addition to examples discussed previously,

other anthologies aided in the deployment of lesbian, including the 1969 special issue of

Motive magazine and the fall 1977 special issue of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on

Art and Politics titled “Lesbian Art and Artists.” This issue of Heresies was edited by a

special collective and included a note above the editorial collective statement that said,

“All contributors to the issue are lesbians.” The production and distribution of the issue

highlights the significance of lesbian as a particular identity category within feminism.

In 1985, ten years after Signs began publishing, a special issue of Signs was

published, titled simply “The Lesbian Issue.” The editors, Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara

C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, and Kathleen M. Weston, in their introduction reflect that the

fifteen essays of the issue demonstrate “the more thorough development of lesbian

studies in literature and history, disciplines that are overrepresented” in the issue of the

journal. They positioned the issue as “a milestone in feminist scholarly recognition of the

legitimacy of lesbian studies and its import to a full understanding of women in culture

and society.”611 The issues of Signs, Heresies and Motive demonstrate the continuing

power of special issues in the articulation of lesbian identities through nearly two decades

of feminist publishing.

Special issues, published by lesbian-feminist journals during the 1980s,

articulated and crystallized intersectional identity formations in lesbian-feminist

communities. Special issues of lesbian-feminist journals ignited and extended particular

611
Freedman et al., The Lesbian Issue, 1.

356
dialogues about race and racial-ethnic formations within lesbian-feminism. Special issues

function sometimes as an act by white editors responding to charges of racism. Barbara

Smith names this dynamic: “The late 1970s and early 1980s was the era of the “special

issue,” the response of some white feminist journals and periodicals to increasing

numbers of women of color raising the issue of racism in the women’s movement.”612

While Smith’s statement critiques white journal publishers and bolsters her argument for

the need for dedicated publishers for women of color, special issues modeled one

effective action that white editors could take to address institutional racism. The effect of

these special issues was generative both of new publishing activities and new political

formations, strategies, and actions. Three examples of special issue publishing extended

conversations about race within the WLM and opened new opportunities for lesbian-

feminist publishing at commercial publishing houses.

Two lesbian couples, Rima Shore and Irena Klepfisz and Jan Clausen and Elly

Bulkin, founded Conditions in 1976 as a “magazine of writing by women with an

emphasis on writing by lesbians. They published the first issue of the annual magazine in

1977. A perfect-bound book of 150 pages, the first issue featured poetry, fiction, feature

articles and an extensive selection of reviews. Issues of racism and the representation of

women of color in lesbian journals concerned four members of the founding collective.

They invited Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel to edit a special issue, Conditions Five,

in 1980 that featured the work of African-American writers. Titled The Black Women’s

Issue, Conditions Five was the best-selling issue of Conditions. It provided a foundation

for Home Girls, the anthology Barbara Smith initially edited for Persephone and later
612
Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,”
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10, no. 3 (January 1, 1989): 11-13.

357
published through Kitchen Table Press. Over 10,000 copies were printed and sold.

Conditions Five articulated the intersections of Black and lesbian; readers reacted to

Conditions Five with excitement and praise. The publication of Conditions Five also

prompted the all-white editorial collective of Conditions to rethink how it worked and

initiated a transformation of the editorial collective from a group of all-white founders to

a multi-cultural collective. This collective guided Conditions through the next decade of

publishing.

Sinister Wisdom published two special issues that extended conversations about

feminist identity formations. Beth Brant, a Mohawk/First Nation writer, edited a 1983

issue featuring work by Native American lesbians. After the issue sold out, Firebrand

Press republished this issue of Sinister Wisdom in 1988 as A Gathering of Spirit. In 1986,

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz edited a special issue of Sinister Wisdom on

Jewish lesbians.613 This issue extended the work of Evelyn Torton Beck in Nice Jewish

Girls, particularly including work by Israeli lesbians and dialogues between United States

Jewish lesbians and Israeli lesbians. Kaye/Kantrowitz expanded this issue and published

it as a book, The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, with Beacon Press in

1989. These publishing activities animated particular identity formations that were then

extended, replicated, modified, and reimagined by women once they received the

published product.

Thinking about anthologies as originating in lesbian-feminist periodicals and then

traveling to small publishers and commercial publishers demonstrates how publishing

articulated and amplified lesbian-feminist and feminist identities. These anthologies

613
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was the editor of Sinister Wisdom when this issue
published.

358
crystallized identity formations. Through publishing, women could replicate and reauthor

identities through the continued circulation and rereading of books, sometimes for more

than a decade. The publishing practices of these anthologies also offer different histories

of the WLM; they crystallize not only identities but also frame debates and highlight

issues of persistent concern.

Publishing continues to write histories of the WLM indirectly by reissuing

foundational texts and publishing retrospective anniversary texts. Two recent examples of

this are Still Brave and This Bridge We Call Home. Still Brave is an anniversary text of

All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Published

by The Feminist Press on the 30th Anniversary of All the Women, Still Brave assesses the

impact of All the Women. This Bridge We Call Home is an anniversary edition of This

Bridge Called My Back. Embedded within each of these texts is an origin story of each of

the original books and a new narrative framing the significance of the book. Attention to

these stories and the publishing activities behind them invites new considerations of the

histories of the WLM.

Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time

While lesbian anthologies found commercial publishers, the first collection of

lesbian poetry with a commercial publisher was not dedicated exclusively lesbian poetry,

rather it reflected a new identity formation: gay and lesbian. St. Martin’s Press published

Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, edited by Joan Larkin and Carl Morse, in 1988.

The identity formation of gay and lesbian is not new. There is a long history of

literary collaborations between lesbians and gay men. The Gay Liberation Front included

both lesbians and gay men. The 1970 issues of Motive focused on gay liberation were in

359
two parts – one by gay men and one by lesbians – and edited collaboratively. Karla Jay

and Allen Young collaborated together on two books, The Gay Report (1979) and

Lavender Culture (1978). Morse curated a co-gender reading series in New York

beginning in the 1980s. Felice Picano published the anthology A True Likeness: Lesbian

and Gay Writing Today in 1980 from his press, Sea Horse Press. A True Likeness

collected fiction and poetry by lesbian and gay male writers. Negotiating gender divisions

is an on-going task within lesbian and gay communities; writers and editors foreground

different configurations of gender partnerships and collaborations at different historical

moments. The lesbian-only publications that I have been examining thus far demonstrate

one tendency in lesbian publishing. The anthology edited by Larkin and Morse is another

tendency.

While co-gender publishing is a part of the history of lesbian print culture, the

timing of the publication of this anthology is significant. By 1988, many of the small

lesbian-feminist publishers had folded. Firebrand and Naiad Press continued to publish

and have substantial sales, but many of the other small presses were out of business. Few

lesbian-feminist printers were in business in 1988. Feminist bookstores continued to

operate in over a hundred communities in the United States and were growing in number

internationally, but increasingly feminist bookstores stocked titles for gay men and books

and materials that were lesbian and gay. Identity categories were changing.

Two developments are important in the changing landscape of identity

elaborations. First, in March 1987, a group of activists founded the direct action group

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). The activism of ACT UP focused initially

on the AIDS epidemic in the United States Many lesbians were among the early

360
organizers involved in ACT UP, particularly lesbians with activist experience in the

lesbian-feminist movement and the pro-choice movement. Ann Cvetkovich documents

lesbian involvement in ACT UP in An Archive of Feelings614 as does Deborah B. Gould

in Moving Politics.615 In addition to energizing a new type of direct action to draw

attention to AIDS, ACT UP helped to synthesize a new identity formation of gay and

lesbian.

Second, the glossy, national magazine OUT/LOOK debuted in the spring of 1988.

OUT/LOOK billed itself as a “national lesbian & gay quarterly” and created a “national

forum for discussion of lesbian and gay culture, politics, and opinion.”616 The publishers

of OUT/LOOK printed 9,000 copies of the first issue and 15,000 copies of the second

issue in the summer of 1988. The 8 1/2 x 11” glossy magazine OUT/LOOK provided a

print outlet for new conversations among gay and lesbian activists and intellectuals.

Taken together, the work in ACT-UP and the advent of the new glossy publication

OUT/LOOK signifies how the identity formation of gay and lesbian becomes central

during the late 1980s.

Gay & Lesbian Poetry In Our Time contains the work of ninety-four poets. Of the

included writers, forty-two (45.7%) are women. The forty-two lesbian writers included in

Gay & Lesbian Poetry In Our Time represent a broad array of writers both established

614
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
615
Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotions and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
616
OUT/LOOK (Summer 1988), 3.

361
and emerging in lesbian literature.617 Of the forty-two lesbian writers, sixteen are women

of color or thirty-seven percent (37.2%). The collection represents a broad diversity of

lesbian poets. Some like Rich, Grahn, and Jordan were well known not only in lesbian

communities but in broader literary communities. Others were well-known from lesbian

print culture, like Dorothy Allison, Cheryl Clark, Jane Clausen, Irena Klepfisz, Pat

Parker, and Kate Rushin. Susan Saxe was known among political lesbian-feminists as a

political prisoner. Rukeyser’s first appearance in a lesbian anthology is in Gay & Lesbian

Poetry in Our Time. The lesbian poets of Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time extend the

conversation about lesbian poetry initiated by Bulkin and Larkin in Amazon Poetry and

Lesbian Poetry. In this collection, however, the work of lesbians and gay men is

commingled.

The introduction is a transcribed conversation between Carl Morse and Joan

Larkin, performing exactly the kind of dialogue, between a gay man and a lesbian, that

the book offers. In the introduction, Larkin and Morse trace the genealogy of lesbian and

gay poetry, respectively, from the small press publications in lesbian print culture and

gay male print culture. Larkin recalls the Women’s Press Collective as the first all-

women’s press, while Morse recalls Gay Sunshine magazine and ManRoot Magazine and

617
The forty-two lesbian writers in the collection are Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzaldúa,
Jane Barnes, Ellen Marie Bissert, Beth Brant, Olga Broumas, Susan Cavin, Jane
Chambers, Chrystos, Cheryl Clarke, Jan Clausen, Tatiana De La Tierra, Alexis De
Veaux, C.M. Donald, Beatrix Gates, Jewelle Gomez, Melinda Goodman, Judy Grahn,
Susan Griffin, Marilyn Hacker, Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Irena Klepfisz, Joan Larkin,
Audre Lorde, Honor Moore, Cherríe Moraga, Robin Morgan, Eileen Myles, Suniti
Namjoshi, Pat Parker, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Kate
Rushin, Susan Saxe, Vickie Sears, Anita Skeen, Linda Smukler, May Swenson, Kitty
Tsui, Lisa Vice, and Heather Wishik.

362
ManRoot Press.618 Larkin and Morse discuss the occasional tensions between lesbians

and gay men and the points of common cause. Morse says, “The point is, although

lesbians and gay men are not separate, we are distinct—and, often, we see things

differently.”619 Rather than an identity that is smushed together, gay/lesbian, this is an

identity that is a handshake: gay and lesbian.

Published by a mainstream commercial publisher, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our

Time is the beginning of a period of greater commercial publication of lesbian and gay

authors, not only in anthologies but individual novels and poetry collections. Gay and

Lesbian Poetry in Our Time also signals the reformation of a new identity category:

lesbian and gay as opposed to lesbian or lesbian-feminist.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined over a dozen anthologies to consider how

anthologies produce identities within lesbian-feminist communities. Anthologies are a

significant genre for lesbian-feminists. They enable a multiplicity of voices to represent

lesbian, and they have the space and structure to enact a commitment to multicultural

inclusion. Early anthologists like Jeannette Howard Foster and Barbara Grier did not

publish anthologies but trained readers through their critical writing to recognize lesbian

books and specifically lesbian poetry. Through their literary criticism, Grier and Foster

helped to generate communities of readers. Beginning in 1969, with the publication of

Woman to Woman, lesbian-feminists published small anthologies of lesbian writing.

618
Joan Larkin and Carl Morse, Introduction, Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), xviii.
619
Ibid., xxiii.

363
These anthologies continued to proliferate through lesbian-feminist communities with a

variety of intentions.

The publication of Amazon Poetry and its expansion into Lesbian Poetry in 1981

crystallized lesbian poetry as a category of literary output for lesbian communities. In

reflecting on Amazon Poetry in her essay A Movement of Poets, Jan Clausen wrote, it was

“the largest collection of lesbian poetry then available, and the most comprehensive

through the end of the decade.”620 Lesbian Poetry, similarly, was a significant and

comprehensive collection of work. What enhances the meanings of these text, however,

is not simply the poems inside them, though they each are interesting and worthy of

individual consideration. Rather, by embedding these texts in the historical conditions of

publishing, including an examination of what existed prior to their publication and what

was imagined through and after their publication, we are more able to understand the

significance of the collections in enabling specific lesbian identities and in creating and

imagining specific lesbian histories.

Lesbian Poetry and Amazon Poetry constructed lesbian identity for a new

generation of poets in intimate dialogue with previous generation of poets. They also

were engaged in issues important to the feminist community about how to bring the

voices of women of color and working class women more to the forefront for serious

critical and intellectual engagement. Upon the publication of Lesbian Poetry, Larkin said

in an interview, “It’s thrilling to be connected with this book and I think it is sort of a

milestone, but in a way I regret that it’s standing so much by itself right now. I would like

to see more of this work being done. A lot of people weren’t included for various

620
Jan Clausen, A Movement of Poets (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1982), 17.

364
mechanical reasons, but I’d hate to have a gap of five years again before another

anthology of lesbian poetry is published.”621There was in fact another gap – and it was

longer than five years. The next significant anthology of lesbian poetry was the co-

gendered, Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, published in 1988. Today all of the

anthologies of lesbian poetry are out of print and have been for many years.

By mapping these anthologies, I examined how anthologies defined what it meant

to be a lesbian, as well as what meaning lesbian editors sought to make in producing and

distributing poetry that interpellated lesbian. In the dedication to Amazon Poetry, Larkin

and Bulkin wrote,

We dedicate this book to women of every race,

of every class,
of every age;

We dedicate it to the 300 women from nearly forty states and four countries who
sent us their poetry;
to those who didn’t sign their poems or asked us to publish them anonymously;
to those who have long been out as lesbians and as lesbian writers;
to those who found in this book the right place to come out publicly.

We dedicate it to the women who felt too frightened to send us their poetry;
to the silent women who have not yet begun to write;
to all of the women who find something of themselves in it.

We dedicate it to the women we love who make possible our lives and our words;
to our daughters—and to other women’s daughters and sons—that they may grow
up to understand.

This dedication captures the hopes and aspirations that Bulkin and Larkin had for

Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry. It also captures the spirit of lesbian print culture and

the publication of numerous anthologies. Ultimately, these anthologies are part of a long

history of literary expressions and multiracial and multicultural aspirations by women-

621
Tilchen.

365
loving, perverse, sexually deviant, sex variant, homophilic, homosexual, and lesbian

women. By attending to the words and the conditions that brought anthologies into being,

we can begin to understand their lives more fully and what their lives mean for our lives

today.

366
/Interlude 5/ Barbara Grier, Common Reader

Before she built the largest commercial space devoted to lesbian literature, before

she was the most prodigious publisher of lesbian literature, before she was the most

voluminous reviewer of lesbian literature, before she compiled definitive bibliographies

of lesbian literature, Barbara Grier was a reader—a common reader. What made Grier’s

common reading uncommon is what she did in addition to reading. Grier created an

uncommon future for lesbian literature.

Barbara Grier was born in 1933, and, at the age of twelve, she came out to her

mother. The knowledge of her sexual orientation and the availability of public libraries

began her lifelong passion for lesbian literature. Grier’s project of reading and

cataloguing books by lesbians and about lesbian experience was nurtured by her early

friendship with Jeannette Howard Foster, but reading alone or in small communities of

lesbians was not enough for Grier. She sought public platforms to share her joy of and

discoveries in lesbian literature.

Grier found her first publishing home in the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis,

The Ladder. By the early 1960s, Grier was a regular contributor to The Ladder, writing

articles, under a variety of pseudonyms, and numerous book reviews, most often using

the pseudonym Gene Damon. Writing for The Ladder enhanced Grier’s project as a

reader and bibliographer of lesbian literature. In 1967, Grier self-published her first

bibliography, The Lesbian in Literature, which gathered together Grier’s reading list of

lesbians in literature with extensive annotations. Grier published two other editions of

The Lesbian in Literature, one in 1975 and one in 1981.

367
 Grier didn’t limit herself to book reviewing or writing articles at The Ladder. In

1970, she became the editor of The Ladder with Rita LaPorte. The two had an ambitious

vision of a national lesbian magazine in the spirit of Newsweek. Emboldened by the

growing Women’s Literation Movement, they wanted to dramatically expand the

readership of The Ladder. This dream was not realized; The Ladder folded in 1972, but

Grier kept reading and exploring ways to publish lesbian literature.

Shortly after the end of The Ladder and during the period that Grier, her partner

Donna McBride, with another couple, Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford, were

hatching the idea of Naiad Press, Grier met Coletta Reid, one of the owners and operators

of Diana Press. Grier pitched a series of anthologies from work published in The Ladder.

Grier mailed Reid microfilm of the issues of The Ladder along with a letter outlining the

anthologies. Reid responded enthusiastically. Together Reid and Grier edited The

Lesbians Home Journal, a collection of short stories, The Lavender Herring, a collection

of essays, and Lesbian Lives, biographical sketches. All were published by Diana Press in

1976. With substantial circulation within lesbian-feminist communities, these three

anthologies ensured the continued circulation of lesbian writing from The Ladder and

provided an important afterlife for this significant publication.

Naiad Press launched in 1974 with the publication of a novel by Sarah Aldridge,

the pen name of Anyda Marchant, one of the co-founders of Naiad. Grier supplemented

her bibliographies in The Lesbian in Literature with a collection of book reviews that she

wrote as Gene Damon for the column Lesbiana in The Ladder. The book Lesbiana, a

368
collection of book reviews,622 was the first title by Grier that Naiad Press published.

Grier’s work as a reader, bibliographer, and book reviewer influenced the Naiad Press.

From 1973 until 2003, Naiad Book published over 550 titles. The types of books Naiad

published reflect Grier’s wide-ranging attentions as a reader. While best-known for

romance, mystery, and adventure titles, Naiad also published or republished important

literary books, including Renee Vivien’s poetry, Gale Wilhelm’s novels, work by Jane

Rule and Patricia Highsmith, and important pieces of lesbian literary history like Foster’s

Sex Variant Women in Literature and J. R. Roberts’s Black Lesbians: A Bibliography.

During its heyday, Naiad published twenty-five titles a year and had revenue approaching

$1 million. By any measure, Naiad was an incredible achievement and much of its

success is due to Grier’s hard work and readerly passion.

There are many ways to describe Barbara Grier: astute business woman, fierce

advocate, relentless negotiator, devoted to lesbian rights, willful, determined, funny,

generous, intractable, demanding. All of these descriptors are apt, but at the core of all

these attributes , at the core of all of Grier’s work, is the fact that she was a reader. Grier

read voraciously. When she was not reading, Grier created new books to read. She

published books and created a publishing company that altered the literary and cultural

landscape for lesbians.

Judy Grahn liked to imagine what she could do with an ocean freighter; Barbara

Grier knew what she could do with a warehouse. In February 1988, she built one on the

property where she and McBride operated Naiad in Tallahassee, FL. Freight trucks

delivered boxes of books from commercial printers to the warehouse early in the
622
Barbara Grier, Lesbiana: Book Reviews from The Ladder, 1966-1972 (Reno, NV:
Naiad Press, 1976).

369
morning. In the afternoons and evenings, Grier, her long-time partner Donna McBride,

and Naiad employees transported boxes to the post office, boxes that they had filled with

orders during the day for bookstores and for individuals. Orders sent initially by mail or

with a friendly telephone call to Naiad Press, whose phone line was in Grier’s and

McBride’s home and advertised as open from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m. Later, orders would

come through the fax machine; Grier trumpeted the occasion of a dedicated fax line in

one of her frequent “Dear Friends” letters. A warehouse. A freighter. Big dreams by

iconic lesbians who changed lesbian print culture.

370
 Chapter 5

Literary Appraisals

What You Wore

What will you wear? The question breeds delight when thinking about readings at

feminist bookstores, demonstrations with lesbian activist groups, celebratory dinners with

friends. Your closet, filled with clothes: festive, alluring, fierce, fanciful. Whatever you

wear, when you are out among your people, feminists, lesbians, lesbian-feminists, social

justice activists, is greeted with praise. They recognize, affirm, and celebrate you, your

being, your essence, swaddled in clothing, comfortable and familiar.

What will you wear? Conveying ‘lesbian’ through garments requires careful

choices about audience and occasion. How many times have you asked your lover, your

friends, Is this too dykey? Is this not dykey enough? You want to convey poet,

professional but also lesbian. What will make the mark? What will you wear to an

evening event at the Guggenheim? Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets?

Where the host for the evening is a woman who uses the appellation ‘Mrs.’ followed by

her husband’s first and last name? What will you wear to an event where you will be

honored? After being judged worthy, excellent, exceptional? What will be festive?

Appropriate to the venue? Appropriate for the occasion? You want something that honors

the award, but still expresses you as a person, you as an activist, you as someone

entrenched in a community of activists, poets, and intellectuals who don’t spend evenings

at the Guggenheim. You want something that conveys the gravitas of the evening, the

gravitas of your work for which you won the award, but still reflects you—your being,

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your essence, your place in the world. What will you wear? A gown? A suit? A dress? A

skirt?

You select Batik. Cotton fiber waxed then hand-dyed. Light purple. Mint green.

Here a line, there a curly-cue. Wax prevents the dye from penetrating, leaving raw cotton

exposed, revealing a fanciful design. A smock shirt and pants. Separates. The top, long

sleeves, mint green, a lavender-purple bib. Darker pink piping details the design. The

pants, mint green. Pockets sewn in the side. Not deep, but enough for your hands to touch

your thighs. You imagine the women who made this frock. Picking, cleaning, spinning,

weaving cotton. Waxing, dying cloth. Pattern makers and seamstresses. Each thread,

every square inch, the work of women. Yes, that is appropriate, the best way to dress for

the event. Separates. Batik. Made more elegant with button earrings, a striking necklace.

Flat, comfortable shoes. What will you wear? You wear batik.623

Introduction

I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only
known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something
rang. In no one of these three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full
life began.
-Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, (New York, Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1933: 6.

If only we all had the certainty of Alice B. Toklas as voiced by Gertrude Stein;

Toklas, or Stein, knew genius “on sight” when something within her rang; she was never

mistaken. Most of us don’t have such personal or literary discernment. We rely on, or at

least are influenced by, others. Literary institutions are one facet of the field of influence.

623
The outfit that Minnie Bruce Pratt wore to the Lamont Award celebration is in her
archive at Duke University. Box 127, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

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Literary institutions accrue and assert power to shape what we read and how we make

judgments about what we read. Literary institutions, like many complex systems, are

slow to adopt changes from the social and political environment; they also are invested,

consciously or unconsciously, in maintaining the status quo to ensure the continuity of

their own power. This chapter explores power in literary institutions. In particular, I

examine the interventions of lesbian-feminists into institutional systems of literary

appraisal during the 1970s and 1980s. The interventions of lesbian-feminists demonstrate

their keen engagement in literary appraisals. Lesbian-feminists advocated inclusion of

lesbians and feminists and envisioned systemic transformations of literary appraisals to

serve lesbian-feminist writers.

First, two key terms. Literary reception is how formally authorized communities,

such as critics, scholars, fellowship and award committees, critically assess creative

work. These formally authorized communities include institutions like the Modern

Languages Association (MLA), the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP),

the Pulitzer Prize Foundation, the Lambda Literary Foundation, and the National Book

Association (NBA). Authorized communities also include governmental organizations

such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a variety of state-based arts

organization, and more informal networks such as national, state, and local poetry

laureates. Some of these communities are predominately heterosexual, some are mixed

lesbian and heterosexual, and some are predominately lesbian and/or LGBT. They all

make literary judgments about what books are worth reading and what books should be

singled out for special recognition. They also explicitly and implicitly promote the

writings and careers of individual authors. Over time, literary reception accretes to

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become literary appraisals. During the twenty years of my concern, lesbian-feminists

intervened in these literary judgments in numerous ways with a variety of intentions and

outcomes.

I distinguish between literary appraisals and aesthetic appraisals, although the two

are co-constitutive. For my purposes, literary appraisals are judgments made by formal

institutions. Literary appraisals focus on particular texts and particular moments in time.

For instance, on behalf of institutions, people (for example, individuals, panels of judges,

and committees) select prize-winning books among a particular cohort of books

published. The cohort of books may be defined by date of publication, geographic

location of the author, content, or a combination of these factors. These literary appraisals

are often time-bound and periodically repetitive—often they happen on an annual basis.

The production of these appraisals by an individual or committee is generally black-

boxed; that is, the input and output are known, in this instance the books nominated, the

list of finalists, and the winner, but the process of arriving at the decision is opaque. The

selection of judges as well as the judges’ reviews, considerations, deliberations, votes,

and process of arriving at the decision are not made available to outsiders. Aesthetic

appraisals, on the other hand, are made by individual critics, although often these

individuals have institutional imprimaturs. For example, literary critic Helen Vendler has

the institutional imprimatur of Harvard University; anthologies, an important site for

canon-making which plays a central role in aesthetic appraisals, bear the institutional

stamp of publishers, such as W. W. Norton, Oxford University Press, or Broadview.

Aesthetic appraisals invoke standards of excellence as their mode of judgment, focusing,

in particular, on judgments of beauty, transcendence, and sublimity. In making aesthetic

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appraisals, critics judge works worthy to be a lasting part of literature. The intention of

aesthetic appraisals is to shape the future reception of a particular text; aesthetic

appraisals focus less on the current moment, although contemporary standards and

opinions obviously influenced these judgments deeply, and more on perpetuity. Like

literary appraisals, aesthetic appraisals are also produced within a black-box, in this

instance, usually the mind of an individual, but often through an undisclosed committee

process. Together literary appraisals and aesthetic appraisals adhere; together, they

participate in processes of canonization and narrations of literary history.

As noted previously, Paul Lauter makes a distinction between formalist, or

speculative, criticism and “canonical” criticism.624 Lauter describes formalist criticism as

“offering unique forms of knowledge or experience, interpreted by specially-sensitized

individuals;”625 it is “indebted to Continental philosophy,” “deeply concerned with

questions of epistemology” and conducted primarily in “graduate institutions” in the

United States and Europe.626 For Lauter, this critical practice separates literary works

from people’s lives.627 Canonical criticism, on the other hand, “emphasizes the impact of

literary works on how we conduct our lives, how we live within, extend or restrict, and

develop the communities that give our lives meaning.”628 For Lauter, canonical criticism

624
Paul Lauter, “The Two Criticisms—or, Structure, Lingo, and Power in the Discourse
of Academic Humanists” in Canons and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), 133-153.
625
Lauter, “The Two Criticisms,” 135.
626
Ibid., 134.
627
Ibid., 135.
628
Ibid.

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focuses on the construction of literature courses and anthologies, “the roots of our

systems of valuation,” and on what is important for students to read and learn.629

“Canonical” criticism maps roughly to the fifth facet of the parallelepiped as I have

outlined it: literary appraisals. Formalist, or speculative, criticism, maps roughly to the

sixth facet of the parallelepiped: aesthetic appraisals.

Since the beginning of the WLM, feminist literary critics and scholars have

grappled with literary appraisals, or canonical criticism, and aesthetic appraisals, or

speculative criticism. In 1985, Elaine Showalter outlined two historical tendencies in

feminist literary scholarship: “exposing the misogyny of literary practice” and the

recovery of writing by women.630 These two strategies of literary scholarship intervened

in both speculative and canonical criticism; they transformed literary scholarship, and the

discipline of literature more broadly, to include women. These two strands converged in

the mid-1980s with the contested question of a ‘female aesthetic.’ Female aesthetics were

initially mapped to lesbian consciousness and imbricated with lesbian separatism; later

questions about female aesthetics were contested in broader discussions about

essentialism and social constructionism. In this chapter and the next, my questions about

aesthetic appraisals in relationship to lesbian-feminism acknowledge this history, but I

am concerned more with the canonical criticism Lauter discusses. Alicia Ostriker models

how to think about the stakes of both literary and aesthetic appraisals simultaneously in

Stealing the Language. Ostriker writes as a speculative critic but grounds her analysis

deeply within questions of canonization and materialism.

629
Lauter, 134.
630
Elaine Showalter, “Introduction,” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature & Theory, (New York, Pantheon, 1985), 6.

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 My concerns are strongly materialist, aligned with Lauter’s analysis and practice

of canonical criticism and Ostriker’s hybrid analysis. Like the material, the aesthetic is a

vital node of inquiry and examination for lesbian poets. Conversations about the aesthetic

aspects of poetry and the aesthetics of lesbianism are evident in both personal

correspondence between and among lesbian-feminist poets and within the pages of

lesbian literary and political journals. Certainly, the concern with aesthetics is shaped at

least in part by the pervasiveness of speculative criticism in academia, where many of the

poets and writers I examine trained and taught. Although it is possible to dismiss

speculative criticism and aesthetics as objects constructed and reconstructed at different

historical moments for the purpose of policing boundaries, I am reticent to dismiss them

completely. Rather, I am interested in exploring how lesbian-feminists addressed both

speculative and canonical literary criticism in activism and in print culture. My intention

for this exploration is two-fold. First, I want to understand the co-constitutive relationship

of the speculative and canonical forms of criticism, or the literary and aesthetic as I think

of them. Second, I think about how lesbian-feminist work can be apprehensible in both

modes of critical praxis. Ultimately, speculative criticism, or aesthetic appraisals, and

canonical criticism, or literary appraisals, are both about power—the power to write, the

power to publish, the power to have work read by contemporary readers and by readers of

the future.

This chapter examines four moments of lesbian-feminist encounters with power,

in particular the power of literary institutions. Thinking about these encounters, these

questions are especially important: how are lesbian-feminist texts made visible to literary

institutions? How are lesbian-feminist texts received by literary institutions? How do

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lesbians feel about the reception of lesbian-feminist texts by literary institutions? What

history of engagement with literary institutions shapes the literary landscape for lesbians

and feminists today? First, consider the 1974 National Book Awards: four women poets

were finalists for the 1974 NBA in poetry; three organized to make a statement about the

nature of literary reception and national awards. Second, Stanley Kunitz awarded the

1978 Yale Younger Poets award to Olga Broumas; the announcement of the award in

light of two earlier awards to lesbian poets, Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich, argues

for how Kunitz mapped a new form of literary appraisal for lesbian poets. Third, feminist

and lesbian-feminist advocacy in relationship to the National Endowment for the Arts

(NEA) is crucial to facilitating greater recognition of women writers and poets. Finally,

the story of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s winning the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1989 signals new

modes of literary appraisals. All of these stories animate the engagement of lesbian-

feminists with systems of literary appraisal. Lesbian-feminists involved with print culture

were not only producing materials to be read by friends and others in their cohort; they

also were invested in producing literary works that would be recognized and appraised as

significant in the current moment and by history. In the conclusion, I reflect on the

success of lesbian-feminists’ work in the 1970s and 1980s in light of the status of lesbian-

feminist poets today. One of the legacies of lesbian-feminist engagements in literary

appraisals is making lesbian visible as a citizen-subject in the United States. This

apprehensibility of lesbian in relationship to United States citizenship sets the stage for

political engagements in the 1990s and beyond in issues like military service and same-

sex marriage. If I am sanguine about the literary appraisals of lesbians in the

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contemporary milieu, I am dour about aesthetic appraisals, a question I discuss in the

final chapter.

“A Realm Beyond Ranking and Comparing” The National Book Awards 1974

On Thursday, April 18, 1974 at 6 p.m., a crowd gathered at Alice Tully Hall inside

Lincoln Center in New York City for the twenty-fifth annual National Book Awards

(NBA). Like many award ceremonies, the NBA feature a program followed by a gala

reception. In 1974, NBA were given in ten categories, including poetry; the award winner

in each category received $1,000. Award nominees, publishers, agents, members of the

National Book Committee, and other publishing insiders gathered in Alice Tully Hall on

this Thursday night in April. The National Book Committee, a non-profit organization,

administers the awards through an Awards Policy Committee; outside independent

readers determine the award recipients.631 The NBA are prestigious among publishers for

recognizing outstanding books annually. Newspapers generally report the winners of the

NBA in the following morning’s edition, but the NBA are an event for publishing

insiders. Readers become aware of the NBA primarily through books, which, after

winning or being a finalist, have a seal emblazoned on the cover noting the distinction. In

spite of the large numbers of writers and readers in the United States, the NBA have

never taken on the profile of the Oscars, the Emmys, or even the MTV Video Music

Awards. Book prizes in the United States don’t attract throngs of gawkers; they are

festive events for insiders—commercial publishers and selected writers.

631
Of the eleven members of the Awards Policy Committee in 1974, three (27%) were
women: Martha Duffy, Nancy Wilson Ross, and Kate Wilson. Martha Duffy was a writer
for Time Magazine and had just been promoted to senior editor in 1974; Nancy Wilson
Ross was a novelist.

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 For the 1974 National Book Award in poetry, the three judges, David Kalstone,

Phillip Levine, and Jean Valentine, named eleven books of poetry, published in 1973, as

finalists. Seven of the books were by male poets; four were by female poets.632 Allen

Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Evan S. Connell, Jr., Peter Everwine, Richard Hugo, Donald

Justice, and Charles Wright were the seven nominated male poets. The four nominated

books by women were Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich, From

a Land Where Other People Live by Audre Lorde, Revolutionary Petunias and Other

Poems by Alice Walker and Armed Love by Eleanor Lerman. Rich, Lorde, and Walker

were all well-known in feminist literary circles; Lerman, at the age of twenty-one, was a

relative newcomer. Arriving at the event that evening, Rich, Lorde, and Walker had a

pact. If any one of the three won, they would deliver a pre-written statement on behalf of

all of them.

The finalists for the NBA were announced on Monday, March 18, 1974 in the New

York Times. At the time of the announcement, the New York Times had reviewed only

two of the four NBA finalist books by women: Lerman’s Armed Love and Rich’s Diving

into the Wreck. Although the New York Times is not the only location of book reviews, it

was and continues to be a site of literary appraisal with broad influence, not only in

literary communities but also among reading publics. Considering what was reviewed in

the Times and how it was reviewed in the Times provides one window into literary

appraisals. The Times reviews for these two books by Rich and Lerman provide insight

into how Times critics appraised lesbian poets.

632
Four finalists of eleven, or thirty-six percent (36%), is not a bad ratio. In fact, for the
NBA, that ratio persists. From 2000 through 2009, of the winners of the NBA in poetry,
three were women (30%), and of the forty finalists, fourteen were women (35%).

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 X. J. Kennedy reviewed Lerman’s book with two other books by male poets on

February 17, 1974, a month before the awards were announced. Kennedy opens his

assessment of Lerman’s book with this statement, “If volumes of poetry carried letter-

ratings the way movies do, then ‘Armed Love’ would deserve at least a double X.”

Aligning Lerman’s poetry with pornography, Kennedy describes the poems as “glimpses

of life in a drug-torn Lesbian ghetto” and asserts that most often “the raw facts just

remain on their page like meat left in its butcher’s paper, untouched by deep

understanding or by art.” Kennedy’s choice of simile to describe Lerman’s work must be

seen through the lens of gender. By describing her poems with their lesbian content as

raw meat on a butcher’s block, Kennedy metaphorically aligns women with objects for

(male) consumption. Although Kennedy alludes to an artistic process for writing poetry

in which the raw material of life experience is transformed into art, his simile brings to

mind, not Rukeyser’s visions in The Life of Poetry which affirm women’s engagement,

but rather Carolee Schneemann’s performance art Meat Joy (1964), which explores the

corporeality of women’s bodies in relationship to raw meat as a source of varied

emotions from revulsion and pleasure. Schneemann demonstrates the artistic possibilities

of raw meat, even as she critiques as a feminist equations of women’s bodies with meat.

Kennedy leaves no room for Lerman’s work to have similar agency.633 The review

concludes with an obligatory reference to Sylvia Plath; she is, for Kennedy, the only

female poet with the “skill and intelligence” to meaningfully “relate her private agonies

633
Recently, Lady Gaga performed a contemporary interpretation of the trope of
analogizing women’s body with meat when she appeared at the MTV Video Music
Awards on Sunday, September 12, 2010 in a dress made of raw meat.

381
to those of a larger world.”634 The trope of comparing women poets to Plath is recurrent

in the New York Times. Being rated “double X” earned Lerman a great deal of notoriety

in poetry circles, but Kennedy’s appraisal of Armed Love dismisses her work as raw,

unartful, and pornographic.

Among reviewers for the Times, Kennedy was not alone in ignoring how poetry

was making connections between women writers and readers based on personal

experience and how poetry was circulating in the WLM. On August 25, 1973, Harvey

Shapiro reviewed Erica Jong’s Half Lives and Rich’s Diving into the Wreck. Shapiro was

a long-time reviewer for the New York Times; he became the editor of the Times Book

Review in 1975. On one hand, Shapiro’s review offers some praise and a rigorous

analysis of the work of both poets. On the other hand, it fails to take seriously the

political and social meaning of feminism. For instance, Shapiro describes Jong’s work as

“quick, easy, raunchy (the pose is sometimes that of a female rake).”635 He then asks,

“does she manipulate her audience?” Shapiro’s question begs another: which audience?

An audience of feminists hungry for words to express their lives? An audience of women

in danger of being manipulated by lesbians and rakish straight women? An audience

reading the New York Times Book Review that might be duped into reading these poems?

All of these questions are unanswered. At the conclusion of his review, Shapiro asserts

that “men don’t fare too well in these poems,” invokes Emily Dickinson with the line,

“Emily Dickinson, you’ve come a long way” (blessedly removing the “Baby” at the end

634
X. J. Kennedy, “Lovers of Greece, Women and Tennessee,” New York Times
(February 17, 1975), 346. Reading reviews of women poets in the New York Times might
lead one to believe that the only poet worthy of comparison was Sylvia Plath.
635
Shapiro’s word choice, rake, modified by female, demonstrates how profoundly
gender and sexuality were contested in this historical moment.

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of that well-trodden phrase), and identifies the “inevitable recall of Sylvia Plath” in

Jong’s work. Then, he turns to Rich.

Although Shapiro praises Rich for her “gravity and honesty” as well as her “subtle

rhetoric,” he ultimately asserts that the problem with the collection is that “the rhetoric

was developed to handle the personal, the private, and the wider connections the poet

wishes to assert are mainly just asserted.” This comment demonstrates Shapiro’s derision

of feminism in Rich’s work; many of the connections that she makes are with women.

Shapiro’s minimization of her work as “asserted” and not earned is a rhetorical strategy

to dismiss feminism. He argues, “the poet is unwilling (because of her wider concerns) to

draw her characters plainly and we are frequently left with an indefinite “you” and a

poem that is close to clarity but not brought to clarity.” Shapiro concludes his review of

Rich by describing her as “insisting on anger” and says that while he finds “exhilaration”

in her commitment to unearthing new modes of being, he ultimately finds the poems

“off-putting, self-congratulatory” and “patronizing.”636 Overall, rather than seeing the

content and craft of Rich’s and Jong’s work as dynamic innovations in contemporary

poetry, Shapiro invokes traditional modes of appraisal and diminishes some of the very

aspects of the work—anger, accessibility, and rhetorical power—that distinguish it for

contemporaneous readers.

The type of comparative reading that Shapiro does of Rich and Jong is a standard

book review technique, but it is one that Rich disliked. Clausen recounts in her memoir

that Bulkin wrote a review “that acknowledge[d] her (Bulkin’s) preference for Rich’s

636
Harvey Shapiro, “Two Sisters in Poetry,” New York Times (August 25, 1973): 21.

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subtle language over Morgan’s rhetoric.”637 According to Clausen, Rich objected, saying,

“Our criticism mustn’t reproduce the competitive atmosphere of the male poetry scene.”

This New York Times review is an excellent example of the atmosphere Rich alludes to in

her conversation with Bulkin.638 Readers must have objected to Shapiro’s review as well,

because Rich’s book was reviewed again in the Times four months later by Margaret

Atwood. Atwood’s review followed an emerging feminist convention to appraise work

on its own merits; Atwood concludes her review, “It is not enough to state the truth; it

must be imaged, imagined, and when Rich does this she is irresistible.”639 Atwood

counters Shapiro by saying that Rich not only states the truth but renders it imaginatively

and irresistibly. Atwood’s review can be read as a corrective to Shapiro’s review; its

presence on the pages of the New York Times demonstrates how feminists demanded that

readers—even in patriarchal contexts—read their work differently.

Although neither Walker’s nor Rich’s books were reviewed by the Times before

being named finalists for the NBA, Walker reviewed two books for the Times, June

Jordan’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Guy’s The Friends (a young adult title). Through

these reviews, her name and the nominated book were mentioned in the Times; her

presence on the pages of the Times marked her as significant in the literary field for

637
Clausen, Apples and Oranges, 2.
638
Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent article “Why Not Compare?” (PMLA 126.3 (2012),
753-762) summarizes the reasons for not comparing, which center “on the ways in which
comparison presumes a normative standard of measure by which the other is known and
often judged,” (753) elucidates a number of important reasons for comparisons, and
offers models for comparative readings. Like Rich’s chiding against comparison,
Friedman’s manifesto for comparison is grounded in contemporary needs and desires for
feminist literary criticism.
639
Margaret Atwood, “Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972,” New York Times
(December 30, 1973).

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Times readers. At the end of September 1974, after Lorde’s book was a finalist for the

NBA, Helen Vendler wrote a long review of books published by Dudley Randall through

Broadside Press. Vendler’s review considers work by Don Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti),

Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and Audre Lorde. Vendler notes that “Lorde’s poems,

like others in the Broadside series, depend less on ambiguity or irony than on the force of

earnestness and plain speech.” Vendler appraises the work in a way that doesn’t minimize

lyricism or craft but rather understands the craft as central to the political work of the

poems. She notes that the poets “distrust a concealing rhetoric,” which I understand to

mean language that is too refined, too crafted, too likely to obscure the underlying,

powerful emotions. Vendler writes that the poets of Broadside “practice instead only the

mute rhetoric of contiguity.” For these poets, like feminist poets, “The convergence of

causes to the final effect is rhetoric enough.” Stating the ideas within the poem is

powerful enough and justifies a rhetoric that is, in Vendler’s words, “muted.” Vendler’s

review, unlike Shapiro’s or Kennedy’s, explores the work on its own terms, creating

greater space for acceptance by readers of the Times.640

Returning to the award ceremony in April 1974, the NBA for poetry was the

penultimate award given that evening. There were two winners in the poetry category:

Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich. Both of the poets delivered political acceptance

speeches. Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s lover, delivered Ginsberg’s speech. I imagine his
640
I note that while I appreciate Vendler’s treatment of the Broadside Press authors in
1974, as a critic today Vendler’s work is troubling from the perspective of race and
gender. Vendler’s recent review of Rita Dove’s anthology, The Penguin Anthology of
Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin, 2011) in The New York
Review of Books (Helen Vendler, “Are These the Poems to Remember?,” The New York
Review of Books, November 24, 2011) positions her as a less sympathetic reader. Dove’s
response, “Defending an Anthology” (The New York Review of Books, December 22,
2011) demonstrates some of the contemporary, contested terrain of canonization.

385
voice ringing through the hall when he described Ginsberg’s book as a “time capsule of

personal national consciousness during American war-decay recorded 1965 to 1971.”

Ginsberg, voiced by Orlovsky, took the occasion of the NBA to “call out the Fact: our

military has practiced subversion of popular will abroad and can do so here if

challenged.” He cited Chile, Greece, Persia and Indochina as places where the US has

“imposed military tyranny.” Ginsberg, through Orlovsky, concluded with the assertion:

“we have all contributed to this debacle with our aggression and self-righteousness,

including myself,” and “there is no longer any hope for the Salvation of America . . . all

we have to work from now is the vast empty quiet space of our own Consciousness. AH!

AH! AH!”641 Sounding his barbaric yawp through Alice Tully Hall, Orlovsky voicing

Ginsberg indicted United States militarism and imperialism.

Like Ginsberg, Rich’s speech was also political. Rather than indicting militarism

and imperialism, Rich, speaking on behalf of her compatriots and herself, voiced

opposition to patriarchy. Although Walker did not attend the ceremony, Lorde did; she

joined Rich on stage.642 Rich read the collective statement. I include it here in its entirety:

The statement I am going to read was prepared by three of the women nominated
for the National Book Award for poetry, with the agreement that it would be read
by whichever of us, if any, was chosen.
We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in
the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a
patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as
token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain. We believe that
we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by
competing against each other; and that poetry— if it is poetry— exists in a realm
beyond ranking and comparison. We symbolically join together here in refusing
the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize

641
http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_aginsberg74.html.
642
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2004), 133.

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 among us, to be used as best we can for women. We appreciate the good faith of
the judges for this award, but none of us could accept this money for herself, nor
could she let go unquestioned the terms on which poets are given or denied honor
and livelihood in this world, especially when they are women. We dedicate this
occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color,
identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the
mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the
grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will
understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet; the
silent women whose voice have been denied us, the articulate women who have
given us strength to do our work.

In my imagination, Rich, a slight woman, a careful speaker, delivered the speech with a

muted passion. I wonder, was she nervous? Did her voice crack? Did her hands sweat?

Her knees shake? In my mind, the final words of the collective statement are met with

silence—a silence filled with emotion: shock, awe, reverence, embarrassment,

discomfort, pity, joy, glee. I suspect, though, that there wasn’t silence. Rather rustling

sounds from a large audience—shoes scraping the floor, chairs squeaking, the hack of a

cough, the gasp of a dry throat being cleared. Then, tentative applause, growing more

certain, more final. I imagine Rich and Lorde smiling as they left the stage together,

pleased with the moment to speak truth to power, to critique as feminists a literary system

that was shaping their lives and that they believed they would alter through their actions.

Organizing together to make a statement is a classic feminist intervention. The

statement—and the organizing behind it—enacts feminist solidarity. It was an

extraordinarily courageous act to organize the speech and to deliver it. A number of

things are striking about the statement, beyond the feminist solidarity that Walker, Rich,

and Lorde share by writing and delivering it at the ceremony. First, the statement sets up

a series of binaries: women who are unheard/women who are heard but as tokens,

supporting each other/competing with each other, women who understand/those who do

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not yet, silent women/articulate women. The deployment of such a series of binaries

strikes readers today as anachronistic, given the prevalence of deconstructionism, but in

context it is deeply meaningful. Binaries are a powerful rhetorical construction. They

define oppositional subjectivity; they enable organizing and mobilizing. While today we

may understand the binaries as a sign of a naïve and earnest feminism later supplanted by

more theoretical and nuanced apparati, the binaries in the statement are neither. They

signal an intervention: political mobilization. Lorde, Walker, and Rich highlight the

challenges that women writers face to an audience who, individually and collectively, all

contributed to the exclusions and mistreatments of women writers and who all had the

power to make change.

The people in Alice Tully Hall that night did not include the women invoked in the

statement: mathematicians, dishwashers, pregnant teenagers, waitresses. These women,

however, were an audience for these three poets; they were women to whom they

wanted—and did—speak with their work. Through the statement, Walker, Lorde, and

Rich mobilize a readership for poetry that reaches beyond the gathered literati to their

imagined readership, “all women, of every color, identification, or derived class.” This is

the universal sisterhood of feminism in the early 1970s. Although both contemporaneous

feminists and later feminists, in subsequent appraisals of the WLM, intensively critique

the idea of a universal sisterhood, it is a rhetorical gesture with meaning in the early

1970s, and for these three poets in 1974. The idea of universal sisterhood in this

statement is not devoid of meaning, nor is it one generated exclusively by white

feminists. The statement, although delivered by Rich, was written collaboratively by the

three, two African-American writers and a half-Jewish writer of European descent. The

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statement and the action represent an interracial and interethnic collaboration of lesbian-

feminists in support of a vision for feminist change. Like the binaries, as contemporary

readers, we may find the allusion to universal sisterhood quaint, even dated, but universal

sisterhood was an idea deployed in multiple contexts and, like binaries, it situates the

authors’ intent: to constitute and speak to women as a class.

The final significant element of this statement is the vision for poetry that the three

articulate. The vision is both materialist and aesthetic. The three challenge the “terms on

which poets are given or denied honor and livelihood in this world, especially when they

are women.” The authors make explicit how imbricated poets’ economic livelihoods are

with literary reception and literary appraisals. They affirm that they “can enrich ourselves

more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other.” This

statement is an early articulation of ideas that would be crucial to both Lorde and Rich in

their later writing. Ultimately, the three want poetry to exist in a “realm beyond ranking

and comparing.” One way to interpret this realm is as an aesthetic realm. In this way,

through the statement, the three poets indicate a rupture between the literary and the

aesthetic where the literary is a site of ranking and comparing and the aesthetic is

transcendent. Although I think that interpretation is congruent with how some critics

think about the aesthetic in relationship to the literary, I do not think that was the

intention of Walker, Lorde, and Rich. I think their imagined realm was one in which the

individual and the communal commingled in a participatory and consensual fashion,

through a process imagined by lesbian-feminists as central to creating a feminist

revolution.

389
 In many ways, this statement resists the entire premise of literary appraisals. To

dwell on literary appraisals or aesthetic appraisals is to validate the patriarchal structures

and give them new meaning and authority. Lorde, Walker, and Rich want to refuse “the

terms of patriarchal competition” and share the prize together. They reject ranking

organizations like the NBA. They envision a world in which value is not ascribed through

competition, but rather through “self-determination.” It is a vision that expresses this

particular moment in feminism, during which everything was examined, critiqued, and

subject to recreation in a more egalitarian way. It is a vision that I embrace as a utopian

ideal, even as the pragmatist in me seeks models for lesbian-feminist inclusion in

patriarchal contexts.

There is an interesting backstory to the NBA statement. Rich approached Eleanor

Lerman, the other woman nominee, to join them in the statement. Lerman says that she

and Rich “had a big fight” because she “wouldn’t go along with them.”643 Lerman

thought that “if we were going to make a statement it should be about the fact that poets

can’t support themselves with their work and that writers, in general (except for the big,

famous ones) had a hard time supporting themselves as writers.”644 Lerman’s vision for a

political intervention, as she recollects is, is not about feminist analysis but rather about

economic analysis. Lerman describes this as a “disconnect between the older, educated

women and the younger ones like myself who had (in my case, for instance) barely made

it through high school and really were living a kind of hippie lifestyle. I was working in a

harpsichord kit factory, doing wonderful but manual labor and I thought that a bunch

643
Personal email communication with Eleanor Lerman, May 2011.
644
Ibid.

390
of—in my mind—effete, snobbish, academic women had no business telling me about

how hard it was to be a writer.”645 Lerman continues, “I thought those women were being

intellectual bullies—they were older, smarter, better educated and supposedly, more

politically informed than me—so they thought they could more or less issue orders about

what I should do. I don’t know where I got the courage, but I was a stubborn kid. I had

been living on my own since 18 and thought I knew just as much as they did about what

it took to survive.”646 In her reflections, Lerman aligns the feminism of Lorde, Walker,

and Rich with privileges from age and education.

Lerman’s minority report is significant for a number of reason. It demonstrates that

sisterhood as a concept, even at the height of its deployment in the WLM, is a fractured

one, unable to contain the multiplicity of women’s lived experiences. Lerman believed

that, if there was a statement to be made, it should be about the economic conditions of

writers lives—regardless of gender. While Lorde, Walker, and Rich articulated gender as

the primary lens of analysis in this particular moment, Lerman’s concerns were about

class. By declining to join the other three women poets, Lerman resisted the primacy of

gender to describe her material conditions, asserting instead the primacy of class.

Lerman’s refusal to join Walker, Lorde, and Rich in the statement also demonstrates how

generational fractures occur within feminism. Remembering earlier generational conflicts

helps to contextualize later moments of generational conflict, including our own.

Generational conflicts are not exceptional but rather a part of the fabric of our collective

645
Ibid.
646
Ibid.

391
lives. Lerman’s refusal to join with the others in the statement and her reflections today

on her refusal show that feminism was a contested space then, as it continues to be today.

W. W. Norton, Rich’s publisher, issued the statement delivered at the awards

ceremony as a press release the next day. The full statement was published in off our

backs.647 Lesbian-feminists involved in poetry writing and publishing discussed the

action with admiration and appreciation. Beth Hodges included the statement in the

special issue of Margins that she edited on Lesbian-Feminist Publishing.648Whether or

not it was an effective intervention is difficult to assess. The statement demonstrates the

significance of literary appraisals, even as it rejects participating in the system of literary

appraisals. Lorde’s nomination, in particular, had important material consequences for

her literary career. The nomination was enough for Dudley Randall to order a second

printing of From a Land Where Other People Live and emblazon the cover with ‘Finalist

for the NBA.’ Moreover, Randall quickly signed a contract with Lorde for her next book,

New York Head Shop and Museum.649 In 1976, her NBA finalist status contributed to

Lorde’s securing Charlotte Sheedy, a new feminist literary agent, as her agent. Although

the relationship between Lorde and Sheedy was conflictual, Sheedy helped to further

Lorde’s literary career.650

In the official history of the NBA, Rich is recorded as a co-winner of the NBA in

Poetry for 1974 with Ginsberg. Her statement, crafted with Lorde and Walker, is in the

647
off our backs 4, no. 7 (June 30, 1974): 20.
648
Margins 23, edited by Beth Hodges (August 1975): 23.
649
De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 141.
650
De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 157.

392
official NBA record.651 Yet, Lorde, Rich, and Walker’s hope for poetry to exist in a realm

beyond ranking and comparison is not realized. Ranking and comparison continue today.

The vision and practice of solidarity that Walker, Rich, and Lorde demonstrate through

the statement is replicated in future feminist actions, as the three themselves replicated it

from past actions. A more complex and nuanced understanding of the material conditions

of women’s lives replaces ideas like “universal sisterhood” and the binaries that the three

invoked. Their gesture of donating money is repeated. The dream of women whose

voices have gone and still go unheard is, still, a dream deferred. The action of Walker,

Rich, and Lorde demonstrates solidarity and protest as important interventions and

captures the spirit of feminism in 1974; however, when considered in tandem with the

Ginsberg statement, their action also reflects a broader political milieu. Dissent was the

tenor of the time; poetry the vehicle for its expression.

“Her subject is sexual love between women”: Olga Broumas wins the Yale Younger
Poets Prize, 1977

For his valedictory selection as the judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Stanley

Kunitz selected Olga Broumas’s manuscript Beginning with O as the winner of the 1976

prize. Yale University Press published Beginning with O in 1977. Beginning with O

expresses joy and exuberance in lesbian bodies and lesbian love-making; as a selection of

poetry for a university press in 1977, it is stunning in its explicit lesbian eroticism. The

content of Beginning with O alone makes it an interesting case to consider for lesbian-

feminist encounters with power and literary institutions. In addition to the content of the

collection, two other elements of this moment are crucial to thinking about lesbian-

651
National Book Foundation website,
http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_arich_74.html.

393
feminist encounters with power. First, the publication and circulation of Beginning with

O validates the power of lesbian-feminism not only as an engine for generating poetry but

also as a communications circuit for distributing poetry. Second, Kunitz’s appraisal of

Broumas’s book in his introduction (itself a literary appraisal) offers a radical model that

diverges from accepted literary truisms for aesthetic appraisals of lesbian-feminist work.

Broumas’s selection was not Kunitz’s first recognition of the merits of a poet who

expressed feminism or lesbianism. Kunitz selected Carolyn Forché’s book Gathering the

Tribes in 1975 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; Yale University Press published it

in 1976. In his introduction, Kunitz singles out Forche’s poem “Kalaloch” for its

“faultlessly controlled erotic narrative” and its “boldness and innocence and tender,

sensuous delight.” Kunitz declares, not having read Broumas’s manuscript, “It may very

well prove to be the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era.”652 Kunitz quotes the

concluding section of the poem to complete his introduction to the volume:

Flies crawled us,

Jacynthe crawled.
With her palms she
spread my calves, she
moved my heels from each other.
A woman’s mouth is
not different, sand moved
wild beneath me, her long
hair wiped my legs, with women
there is sucking, the water
slops our bodies. We come
clean, our clits beat like
twins to the loons rising up.

We are awake.
Snails sprinkle our gulps.
Fish die in our grips, there is
sand in the anus of dancing.
652
Foreword to Gathering the Tribes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), xiv.

394
 Tatoosh Island
hardens in the distance.
We see its empty stones
sticking out of the sea again.
Jacynthe holds tinder
under fire to cook the night’s wood.

If we had men I would make

milk in me simply. She is
quiet. I like that you
cover your teeth.

In these stanzas, Forché crafts a world of only women where the natural world with flies,

loons, and snails is intertwined with lesbian sexual desire and the consummation of

lesbian sexuality. For a brief moment in the final stanza, a speaker acknowledges the role

of heterosexual reproduction in the creation of milk from women’s bodies; this

observation causes the beloved other to become silent. Then, ignoring the intrusion of

heterosexuality, the beloved returns the reader to a world of only women through a small

affirmation of the beloved, “I like that you/cover your teeth.” The presence of Forché and

Broumas as winners of the Yale Younger Poets Prize with their poems that explicitly

celebrate lesbian sexuality demonstrates how lesbian-feminist poetry entered discussions

about American poetry broadly by the mid-1970s. This entry was not without

controversy, however, but I will return to that.

Let me begin with some background on the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Yale

University Press began its poetry publishing series in 1919. Between 1919 and 1932,

Yale University Press published a series of books by younger poets. In 1933, Yale

University Press instituted a first book prize for a poet under thirty (later under forty)

under the editorship of Stephen Vincent Benét. Benét wanted the series to be a “coveted

honor”; the series grew to fulfill Benét’s wishes during subsequent decades. With

395
distinguished editors Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, Dudley Fitts, Stanley Kunitz,

Richard Hugo, James Merrill, and James Dickey, the Yale Series of Younger Poets grew

to represent “the greater part of the varieties of verse practiced by American poets in the

twentieth century.”653 While I don’t mean to single out the Yale Series as exemplary

(certainly there are many other prizes for poets and publishers of note), the award to Olga

Broumas in 1977 and the reputation of the series as a literary institution for poets leads

me to consider not only the occasion of Broumas’s winning the prize, but also the broader

question of when and where lesbian poets enter systems of literary appraisal.

Between 1919 and 1932, prior to the book prize, Yale University Press published

thirty-one books of poetry. Of these, eleven (35%) were by women. In the fifty-seven

years where one volume of poetry was published as a prize winner, from 1933 until 1989,

for the purposes of my study, thirty-three women won the prize, or fifty-seven percent

(57%).654 In total, of the 110 books published in the Yale Series, fifty-two are by women

or forty-seven percent (47%). In short, the publication history of Yale University Press

approaches gender parity. I recount these numbers even though gender is only one

measure of diversity in poetry series; other measures include race, ethnicity, geography,

aesthetic traditions and many others. Still, gender parity is an important strategy for

653
George Bradley, “Introduction,” The Yale Younger Poets Anthology (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1998), ci.
654
In the twenty-two years since 1989, eight of the winners have been women (36%):
Christiane Jacox Kyle, Jody Gladding, Valerie Wohlfeld, Ellen Hinsey, Talvikki Ansel,
Jessica Fisher, Arda Collins, and Katherine Lawson.

396
feminists in relationship to literary appraisals.655 I recount these numbers as one way to

think about how women are represented in poetry as a field of publication.

Two other women, who later became iconic lesbian-feminist poets, won the Yale

Younger Poets Prize at different times and under different editorships: Muriel Rukeyser

and Adrienne Rich. In 1935, the third year of Benét’s editorship, Benét selected Muriel

Rukeyser’s collection Theory of Flight for the prize. Rukeyser had been second in

Benét’s mind for the 1934 award, which went to James Agee. In his introduction, Benét

praised Rukeyser as having “remarkable power” for a poet who was only twenty-one

years old. The poems of Theory of Flight, while deeply political, are not explicitly

feminist or lesbian. In fact, for much of her career, Rukeyser was not open about being a

lesbian.656 It was only after her death that she came to be regarded as a leading

contributor to a lesbian-feminist poetic tradition.

Like Rukeyser, Rich was also twenty-one when she won the Yale Younger Poets

Prize. Also like Rukeyser, Rich was not a lesbian at the time of winning, and her poems

were not explicitly feminist or lesbian. Auden selected Rich’s first collection A Change of

World for the prize in 1951. According to Bradley, Auden’s introductions as a whole

“give a short course in poetry.”657 In his introduction to Rich’s book, Auden analogizes

655
Recently, the organization VIDA has released an annual count that examines women
and publishing in a variety of venues; see www.vidaweb.org. Juliana Spahr and
Stephanie Young used this methodology in their recent influential article “Numbers
Trouble” (Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “Numbers Trouble,” Chicago Review
53:2/3 (Autumn 2007): 88-111).
656
Rukeyser’s relationship with May Sarton is documented in Margot Peters’s May
Sarton: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Rukeyser was scheduled to
read as a part of a panel of lesbian poets at the 1979 MLA Conference, but she became
ill, couldn’t attend, and died a few months later.
657
Bradley, “Introduction,” lix.

397
reading a poem to encountering a person. He asserts, “We would rather that our friends

were handsome than plain, intelligent than stupid, but in the last analysis it is on account

of their character as persons that we accept or reject them.” For Auden, this maps to

poetry in which “truthfulness is an absolute essential, good manners of enormous

importance.” Auden then concludes his introduction with brief words about Rich. He says

that she “displays a modesty not so common at that age” and that her poems are “neatly

and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not

cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.”658

Since neither Rukeyser nor Rich were open as lesbians when they won the prize,

their winning does not suggest openness to work by lesbians, but it does demonstrate how

different editors respond to political work in selecting the prize winner. Benét remarked

in particular on Rukeyser’s politics in his citation for the award and praised her for her

progressive political convictions. Auden on the other hand emphasized formality,

austerity, and craft over political engagement. Auden’s comments on Rich’s poetry in his

introduction represent not only his editorial aesthetic, but also a formalist manner of

reading poetry, pervasive in the early 1950s, just as Benét’s remarks reflect not only his

editorial aesthetic but also a way of reading from the mid-1930s that embraced the social

and cultural. The history of the Yale Prize demonstrates how openness to politics in

poetry changes over time. Benét’s stewardship, like Kunitz’s stewardship, valued the

political meanings that poetry makes.

For both of these poets, the early designation as prize winners accompany them

throughout their career. Walter Clemons quotes Auden’s words in a 1975 Times review
658
Alicia Ostriker’s account of the praise of modesty for women poets is useful to
contextualize Auden’s comments. See Stealing the Language, 3.

398
of Rich’s Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974; Clemons notes continuity between

Auden’s praise and Rich as a “plain-speaker” who is “neither a maenad, an ecstatic, nor a

flirt, the roles easiest available to women poets.”659 Clemons’s strategy in this review is

to praise Rich for her exceptionality: she is not like other woman poets. He iterates

aesthetic principles for Rich’s poems. The continued reception of Rich as plain-spoken

and the repetition of Auden’s assignation of her as modest demonstrates how early

reception shapes reception throughout one’s career. As I have demonstrated, reception,

both literary and aesthetic, is shaped in part by the social and cultural habitus. This fact

supports the importance of advocacy for the positive reception of lesbian-feminist work.

Although the work of Rich and Rukeyser is framed differently by the judges of

Yale Younger Poets Prize because of the different historical moments, for both poets, the

selection of their work by the Yale Younger Poets Prize judge helped to build their

careers. Both Rich and Rukeyser used the cultural and political capital they accrued from

the prize and their subsequent successes on behalf of a range of political causes to be

outspoken advocates for feminism and to further the keen political engagements of poets

and poetry. Rich and Rukeyser both use their influence to benefit others. These actions

illuminate their own ethical commitments, but also demonstrate how cultural capital

accrues through systems of literary appraisals. Systems of literary appraisal do not dictate

how cultural capital is used; that is an individual decision. I unpack some of the meanings

of the Yale Poetry Prize in relationship to Rich and Rukeyser as a way to understand the

659
Walter Clemons, “Adrienne Rich: a retrospective,” The New York Times (April 27,
1975), ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851-2006) w/ Index (1851-
1993): 288. I refrain from commenting on Clemon’s descriptions of women poets.

399
contingencies of editorial decisions and to demonstrate the significance of prizes in the

longer arc of literary history.

When Beginning with O was published, it was controversial at Yale. Bradley

reports, “there were people on campus who considered the book the worst ever published

in the series,” and the sentiment heightened “particularly after her reading at the

press.”660 Although some at the university may have objected to Broumas’s poems,

readers embraced them. Beginning with O sold over 18,000 copies. The only other book

that sold more was Michael Casey’s poems about Viet Nam in Obscenities, the 1971

winner of the Yale Younger Poetry Prize. The strong sales of the book are not a result

only of the power of Yale University Press or the patina of Broumas’s being a prize

winner, but rather the increasingly organized community of lesbian-feminist readers.

Newspapers like off our backs, periodicals like The Advocate, and the new journal

Christopher Street all covered Beginning with O as a prize-winning book. The growing

network of feminist bookstores delivered an audience to Broumas and to the Yale Poets

Prize. In some ways the power of lesbianism and lesbian-feminism in relationship to

poetry is not only the creation of poetry, as Moore and Reed suggest, but the creation of

an audience to receive the poetry.

This audience received, in addition to the thirty-one poems in Beginning with O, an

introduction by Kunitz. In the introduction, Kunitz artfully navigates gender conflicts

associated with feminism and situates Broumas’s work as a lesbian-feminist poet as

worthy of literary and aesthetic recognition. Kunitz does this in three ways. First, Kunitz

addresses his own subjectivity as a man in encountering these poems. He writes, “As a

660
Bradley, “Introduction,” xxxvii.

400
mere male, I am conditioned to resist much that Broumas has to say about the gender of

oppression and its opposite number, personified by the image of the stone Aphrodite.”661

I hear humor in Kunitz’s dependent clause “as a mere male,” particularly in light of the

Greek goddess imagery in Broumas’s poetry.662 By directly addressing his gender, Kunitz

acknowledges that in some ways he should be an oppositional reader of Broumas’s work,

but he still finds it “impressive” and pleasurable.

Second, at every turn, Kunitz unites both the explicit lesbian content of Broumas’s

work with language that solidly positions Broumas’s work as aesthetically worthy of

consideration. Kunitz opens his introduction, “This is a book of letting go, of wild

avowals, unabashed eroticism; at the same time it is a work of integral imagination,

steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet’s heritage and imbued with an

intuitive sense of dramatic conflicts and resolutions, high style, and musical form.”663

Note how Kunitz uses the connector phrase “at the same time” as opposed to suggesting

that her work is powerful in spite of its eroticism. Moreover, the final clause enumerates

the aesthetic work of the poetry—dramatic, stylized, and musical. In a later statement,

Kunitz writes, “This is not idle feminist palaver. Her book is as much a political

661
Stanley Kunitz, Foreword to Beginning with O (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977), xii.
662
I want to acknowledge that I read Kunitz’s introduction as generous and significant,
but at the time of publication it was met with skepticism by Ellen Frye. Frye reviewed
Beginning with O for off our backs and noted that the “prestigious award assures her a
position among contemporary poets” but that there are “dangers inherent in that
position.” Frye ascribes titters to Kunitz in the introduction and suggests that he was
titillated by her lesbianism. I don’t hear them.
663
Ibid., ix.

401
document as it is an impassioned lyric outburst.”664 Given the overall tone and

engagement of Kunitz with Broumas’s work, I take the meaning of palaver in the first

sentence to mean discussion and not to be dismissive or minimizing. The final sentence

here unites the political work that Broumas’s poems do with the aesthetic as “an

impassioned lyric outburst.” Kunitz consciously or unconsciously situates Broumas’s

work in a space that straddles successfully both the political and the lyrical, the feminist

and the aesthetic. It is a rare and important moment for a male writer at a university press.

Third, in addition to situating Broumas’s work individually, Kunitz examines the

use of aesthetics in relationship to poetry by feminists and lesbians. Kunitz writes, “Now

and then I detect a note of stridency in her voice, a hint of doctrinal overkill.”665 The

words stridency and doctrinal are used regularly by critics to attack the political work of

lesbians and feminists in poetry, but rather than a blanket dismissal Kunitz subtly

acknowledges this tendency and ascribes to Broumas only “notes” and “hints.” Kunitz

continues with what is almost a standard rebuke to lesbian-feminist poets, “I am tempted

to remind her of Yeats’s dictum that we make out of our quarrel with others, rhetoric; out

of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”666 Kunitz references Yeats’s dictum, as others do,

but he makes an extraordinary move that radically alters the reception of Broumas. In the

next sentence he asks, “But is the Yeatsian dialectic universally applicable? In these

poems the cause is the flame.”667 While many feminists and lesbian-feminists questioned

664
Ibid., x.
665
Ibid., xii.
666
Ibid.
667
Ibid., xii-xiii.

402
the dialectics of patriarchal culture which separate the personal from the political, such

questioning was not the norm for non-feminist critics. Kunitz is exceptional. In the

selection of this volume of poetry and in his introduction, Kunitz questions this dialect

between poetry and politics and invites readers to reconsider it. Perhaps, as Kunitz

suggests, the appraisal of poetry as transcendent when it is a “quarrel with ourselves” is

not universally applicable. Kunitz continues, “On the other side of the anger is an

irresistible élan, an exultation—even an ecstasy—of the senses.”668 Kunitz guides readers

to understand the political elements of Broumas’s poetry as central to the aesthetic

appreciation of her work.

Winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize is an important moment of literary appraisal

for Broumas and for lesbian-feminist poetry more broadly. For Broumas, the prize

brought more attention to her work, not only the prestige but also the sales of the book. In

1979, Broumas received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) individual artist grant

and in 1981 she received a Guggenheim fellowship. Since her first book, Broumas has

published six additional books of poetry and three books of English translations of poems

by Odysseas Elytis. Two of Broumas’s subsequent books of poetry are collaborative

projects, Black Holes, Black Stockings with Jane Miller and Sappho’s Gymnasium with

T. Begley. These books as well as her translations demonstrate an important and

continuing aesthetic innovation in lesbian-feminist poetry: collaborative writing. For

lesbian-feminist poetry, the prize, and more particularly Kunitz’s introduction and its

intervention in literary and aesthetic reception, provided an alternative mode of critical

reception from an authorized location.

668
Ibid., xiii.

403
Contesting and Promoting ‘Artistic Excellence’

Ellen Marie Bissert, the publisher and editor of 13th Moon, was a fierce advocate

for the inclusion of women in a variety of institutions of literary power. She publicly

highlighted sexist exclusion at the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM),

a New York-based non-profit that supports literary magazines through technical

assistance and grant making. She also spear-headed feminist advocacy, targeting the

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).669

Bissert had a strong analysis of the economic forces shaping the small press

movement, most particularly from her vantage point as a publisher of a periodical. Bissert

and co-editor, Kathleen Chodor, founded 13th Moon as a student publication at City

College of New York in 1973.670 In the first issue, about 90% of the work came from

students in the creative writing program at CCNY, though the inaugural issue also

contained work from Adrienne Rich and Eve Merriam. The printing of this issue was

funded by a $500 grant from the student government at CCNY. Bissert funded the second

issue of the journal with a small research grant she secured. From 1973 through 1981,

13th Moon grew from a staple-bound, student journal produced at The Print Center to a

perfect-bound, glossy journal with a national readership. By the late 1970s, 13th Moon

had nearly 700 subscribers and printed 1,500 copies of each issue.671 13th Moon

669
CCLM and the NEA have a close relationship; shortly after the creation of the NEA,
magazine editors founded CCLM as a regranting organization for the NEA.
670
Chodor departs as editor of 13th Moon beginning with the second issue and Bissert
remained the sole editor until the end of her editorship in 1981.
671
Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980, Box 6, 13th Moon Records. The New York Public
Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.

404
published a wide array of feminist work, including poems by June Jordan, Marge Piercy,

Mary Ellen Solt, Cynthia MacDonald, Marilyn Hacker and others.672 The growth of the

journal happened through the hard work of Bissert and a small cadre of women, including

June Rook, Bissert’s lover from 1976 until 1979, and Judith Stivelband, who was

responsible for the scrupulous copyediting of the journal. Dissatisfied with the quality of

labor and production, Bissert and Rook learned paste up, design, and how to produce the

mechanicals for the journal. In addition, they also undertook an ambitious direct mail

campaign to promote sales and build subscriptions. In 1975, when 13th Moon

incorporated as a nonprofit and could mail at reduced rates, Bissert sent out 14,737 flyers

announcing their newly published double issue. The labor for this mailing was

substantial, “considering the fact that most of the lists we used were neither in zip-code

order nor on pressure-sensitive labels.”673 Three years later, in early 1978, 13th Moon

mailed over 27,000 flyers to a variety of lesbian and feminist mailing lists soliciting

subscriptions. These labor-intensive direct mail campaigns enabled substantial

subscription growth for 13th Moon. Grant-seeking, however, securing money from public

institutions, was the biggest financial support for the journal.

672
13th Moon and Bissert have a vexed relationship with the word feminist. The
masthead for 13th Moon evolves during Bissert’s publishing. In the first issue, the journal
asserts that it is “a literary magazine publishing work by women”; later this is amended to
say “publishing work by women—whoever we choose to be.” In the late 1970s, the
editorial statement is amended to include the word feminist; Bissert wrote, “13th Moon is
feminist in the general sense of being concerned exclusively with the work and viewpoint
of women. Although the staff recognizes the interdependence of politics and culture, 13th
Moon places primary emphasis on the writings of women rather than on political issues.”
673
Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980, Box 6, 13th Moon Records. The New York Public
Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.

405
 During the 1970s, the CCLM offered a variety of support services to small

publishers, including direct grants of support to journals and a variety of fellowships and

awards.674 Bissert organized feminists to confront the CCLM about sexist exclusion of

women journal editors on two occasions: the Fels grant in 1975 and then the CCLM

Editor’s fellowships in 1979. The Fels grants were a program supported by the

Philadelphia-based Fels Foundation; it recognized excellence in literary publishing with a

cash prize to both the editor and the writer. In 1975, Bissert, joined by Louise Simons of

Painted Bride Quarterly and Anne Pride of Know, Inc., “protested the all white male

make-up of the Fels Awards panel which awards its prestigious prizes to mostly white

male editors and authors.”675 Bissert sent out fifty-three letters to feminist editors and

CCLM members urging them to vote as a block to elect two feminists, Romaine Murphy

of Gravida and Polly Joan of Women Writing, to the grant committee. In addition, she

issued an open letter about organizing a women’s caucus to make CCLM and the NEA

“more responsive to our needs as editors, publishers, and writers.”676 This flurry of letter

writing articulated a need for the organizations to be responsive to feminist concerns and

for women to organize as a constituency to change the organization. In 1976, CCLM

awarded 13th Moon a Fels grant for publishing work by conceptual artist Amelia

674
The work of CCLM continues today, though now the organization is called the
Council for Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). Under the leadership of Jeffrey
Lependorf, the non-profit organization continues to be a vital source of technical
assistance for small magazines and publishers as well as an advocate for small magazines
and publishes in government and in the marketplace

675
Folder CCLM - Fels Award, Box 6, 13th Moon Records. The New York Public
Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.
676
Ibid.

406
Etlinger. Etlinger and 13th Moon both received a cash prize in conjunction with this

award. Organizing and advocacy on behalf of women editors worked, but the results did

not last.

In 1979, the CCLM announced a new program: CCLM Editor’s fellowships.

Editor’s fellowships came with a $5,000 grant. Members of the literary community

nominated editors to CCLM for the award. Adrienne Rich nominated Bissert and Mab

Segrest, editor of Feminary, for the award. In 1979, the inaugural year of the prize,

among the ten winners, not one was a woman. Bissert was one of three honorable

mentions. Bissert rejected the distinction in a public letter to Maureen Owen, the only

woman on the CCLM board of directors. Bissert deplored “the sexism inherent in the

panelists’ decisions.”677 Several feminist publications reprinted Bissert’s letter while “the

male small press gave it scant coverage.” As a result of Bissert’s objections, CCLM

released the application statistics: 225 people were nominated, forty of whom were

women, fifteen, non-white men. Of the 124 people who completed the applications,

twenty-three were women and eleven were non-white men. There were thirty-three

semifinalists, five women and four non-white men.

These numbers shocked and outraged not only Bissert but other feminists.

Adrienne Rich wrote to Maureen Owen, “I am appalled by the blatant sexism evidenced

in the Council’s decision to fund ten male editors.”678 The attention that Bissert brought

to the grant process resulted in a special meeting of the CCLM board to “discuss the

677
Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980, Box 6, 13th Moon Records. The New York Public
Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.
678
Rich letter to Maureen Owen, August 7, 1979, Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980,
Box 6, 13th Moon Records, The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Division.

407
controversy” and the awards. 679 The next year, the CCLM Editor’s fellowships went to

five women and five men; one of the winners of the $5,000 award in 1980 was the

editorial collective of Conditions.680 Maureen Owen acknowledged the importance of

Bissert’s protests, saying it “strengthened my position on the board at CCLM & the

position of women editors & writers in general. She who shouts, get heard!”681

Bissert spear-headed similar advocacy efforts on behalf of women targeting the

NEA. In October 1976, speaking on a panel on “Women’s Problems in Publishing” at the

Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP)/East Conference,

Bissert said, “Grant committees are dominated by the very male editorial sensibilities

from which we and our contributors have fled.” This conference led Bissert, Louise

Simons of Painted Bride Quarterly, and Mary MacArthur, editor of Gallimaufry, to

organize a letter writing campaign to “get more women on the Literature Panel of the

NEA.” At the beginning of their campaign in the late spring of 1977, there were four

women on the twenty-three member panel responsible for awarding grants to literary

magazines. Formerly, there were only two. Bissert, Simons, and MacArthur queried a

group of women writers to make suggestions for feminist panelists; then they directly

solicited the recommended women to submit their credentials to the NEA for

consideration. The three approached a wide range of women to self-identify as interested

in serving on a NEA panel, including Tillie Olsen, Elaine Gill, Audre Lorde, Bertha

Letter from Bissert, 28 June 1980, Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980, Box 6, 13th
679

Moon Records, The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.
680
CCLM Press Release, Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980, Box 6, 13th Moon Records.
The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.
681
Letter from Maureen Owen, Folder CCLM Editors’ Grant 1980, Box 6, 13th Moon
Records. The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division.

408
Harris, June Arnold, Louise Bernikow, Ann Tyler, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, June

Jordan, Alix Kates Shulman, Rita Mae Brown, and Robin Morgan.

Discussions about the credentials and qualifications for service on the NEA panel

reveal some of the challenges feminists faced in changing the NEA. The challenges

highlight institutional sexism. It was difficult to find feminist writers with a high enough

profile to be accepted by the NEA and with time to dedicate to the project. Alix Kates

Shulman remarked to Bissert “that there weren’t all that many women with lots of

prestige around.”682 Certainly, while we may recognize the women from the Bissert list

now as women with formidable stature, for many of them, their careers were just

beginning in 1977. In addition, Bissert confided to MacArthur, “My perception of the

ones that have it [prestige] is that they do because they have managed to assert their right

to do their own work and not others.”683 This insight highlights the need for writers to

devote time to their own work. While Bissert’s advocacy work is important, it is also

time consuming and takes time and energy away from creative work. Bissert continued,

“I really envy this quality in them that asserts their work as first priority. I must admit

that as 13th Moon grows I find it increasingly difficult to get myself to do creative work.

There is a part of me that feels what I do is housework—this 13th Moon work.”684 This

tension between different forms of work in both literary communities and feminist

communities is crucial; it demonstrates how closely connected material conditions,

Bissert letter to Mary MacArthur July 7, 1977, Box 6, Folder Mary MacArthur, 13th
682

Moon Records. The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscript Division.
683
Ibid.
684
Ibid.

409
particularly time and money, are to the production of creative work—and the bind many

women writers find themselves in.

In spite of the difficulties of identifying prestigious panelists with enough time to

serve, Bissert, Simons, and MacArthur suggested to Leonard Randolph, the Literature

Program Director in 1977, a number of feminists for appointment to the panel, including

Louise Bernikow, Elaine Gill, editor at The Crossing Press, Tillie Olsen, and Frances

Whyatt. In addition, they circulated a fact sheet and instructions on how to submit as a

potential panelist to over two dozen feminist writers. In August 1977, three more women

were appointed to the panel: Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Frances

McCullough. In a letter to MacArthur and Simons, Bissert noted that although initially

she was “thrilled with the news” in looking at it closely it is a very small victory: women

now were 17.39% of the panel, not “really a significant improvement percentage-

wise.”685 The letter continues with Bissert’s commitment to continue to write letters

complaining about the situation and to secure additional resumes from feminist women to

be submitted for the NEA grants panel.

In 1979, Audre Lorde was appointed to the NEA panel, in what many saw as a

huge victory for feminists and for third world writers, who were also advocating for

greater inclusion in the NEA.686 Bissert’s engagement with advocacy for the inclusion of

women on these panels was in many ways relentless. She greeted successes initially with

Bissert letter to Mary MacArthur July 7, 1977, Box 6, Folder Mary MacArthur, 13th
685

Moon Records. The New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscript Division.
686
See Alexis DeVeaux’s discussion of the National Association of Third World Writers
(NATTW) in Warrior Poet, 264-6.

410
cheers, but then dove deeper into the data and, distressed by the continued inequality,

redoubled her efforts.

Public grants from organizations like the CCLM and federal grants from the NEA

were vital to the growth and diversity of literary periodicals during the 1960s and 1970s.

Another program, CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which

began in 1973 and continued through 1982, provided support to small publishers. 13th

Moon received two CETA grants. One was for a researcher to produce a bibliography of

American Women Poets born before 1830; the second supported the production of a

series of poetry readings. Although the CETA-funded workers could not work directly on

the magazine, their labor contributed overall to the magazine. Feminist publishers in the

1970s relied on public support for literary projects, whether through arts funding or

economic development programs. The loss of this public support in the 1980s during the

Reagan administration is one of the reasons that lesbian and feminist print culture waned.

Even though public support was crucial for 13th Moon to continue publishing,

Bissert was critical of the entire grant funding system for publishers. She viewed reliance

on grant support as a form of “welfare” administered by different literary bodies,

particularly the CCLM and the NEA, two organizations she was most closely involved

with. Bissert recognized both the value of grant funding and the limits of this funding.

While Bissert’s critique focuses on how the CCLM and the NEA administer grant

funding, in particular the power relationships between magazine editors and funders, it

foreshadows future debates to limit public support of the arts. In spite of these critiques,

inaction was never part of Bissert’s repertoire. Her analysis of funding, coupled with her

political analysis of small presses, led to her advocacy campaigns to ensure the presence

411
of more women on the NEA panels and more women grant recipients. In 1982, Bissert

resigned as editor of 13th Moon; she went to work in the financial services industry in

New York. Bissert left with a great deal of bitterness and anger about feminism and small

press publishing. Today the landscape is quite different; although Bissert may not know

it, the story of the inclusion of women in the NEA Literature Program is more positive.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and its advisory board, the National

Council on the Arts, was established by Congress in May 1966. An initiative in President

Johnson’s plan to build a ‘great society,” the NEA is a national agency charged with

supporting the arts as a vibrant part of American culture. At the suggestion of four

members of the National Council on the Arts—Ralph Ellison, Paul Engle, Harper Lee,

and John Steinbeck—the NEA established a fellowship program for artists in 1966. The

first year, a committee of the NEA selected fellows, including artists from a variety of

disciplines. In 1967, the NEA formally began giving grants to individual writers. The

NEA appointed Carolyn Kizer as the first NEA Literature Director to oversee the

program in 1968.687 Throughout the forty-five year program, grant-making evolved based

on both budgetary constraints and political controversies.688 Today, it is, in the words of

the NEA, “a competitive fellowship program based on artistic merit.”689

Since 1985, the NEA has awarded annually individual grants of $20,000 to

approximately fifty writers a year. A panel of independent judges determines the winners
687
Since 1968, there have been nine NEA Literature Directors; two of whom were
women (NEA Literature Fellowships, 9).
688
For a fuller discussions of NEA controversies, see in particular Miranda Joseph’s
work in Against the Romance of Community.
689
NEA Literature Fellowships: 40 years of Supporting American Writers, (Washington,
DC: National Endowment for the Arts Office of Communications, March 2006), 6.

412
each year. The NEA notes that the “Literature Fellowship is arguably the most egalitarian

grant program in its field. The $20,000 fellowships for general writing-related costs are

highly competitive, but unlike most other literary awards, they are selected through an

anonymous process in which the sole criterion for review is artistic excellence.” The

NEA further states that the diversity of writers is possible through a different panel of

judges each year. The judging process is “double blind,” that is, judges do not know the

author of the manuscripts reviewed and the names of the judges are confidential until

after the process is complete. The NEA hails its judging process as open and inclusive,

with a “fundamental emphasis. . .on artistic excellence.”690

Chairman of the NEA, Dana Gioia, recognizes the importance of these fellowships,

which bring “significant attention” to the winners, often resulting in “publication

opportunities, critical reviews, job offers, academic tenure, and especially added self-

confidence.”691 The NEA boasts that “The Endowment has had an outstanding track

record of finding and supporting talent” and then notes that “forty-six of the seventy

recipients of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction since 1990 were previous NEA Fellows.”692 Clearly,

it is an award that matters; it is a literary appraisal that makes a difference to writers in

both their careers and their material conditions.

To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Literature Program, the NEA released a

report detailing the 2,756 writers and translators who had been funded by the NEA

690
NEA Literature Fellowships, 4.
691
NEA Literature Fellowships, 1. I note that the final item in the list seems incongruent
with earlier items.
692
NEA Literature Fellowships, 4.

413
between 1966 and 2005. Of the fellowship winners, 2,572 were individual writers; the

balance of the awards were translation grants.693 Of the 2,756 writers who received

individual awards between 1966 and 2005, 939 of them were women, or 36.5%.694

Within the report, diversity of grant recipients is a central message. For the NEA,

diversity includes “geography, ethnicity, gender, age, aesthetics, and life experience.”695

In the narrative about the history of the Literature Fellowships, wherever individual

artists are named, there is, within each list, a conscious enumeration of diversity. For

instance, in 1967, twenty-three grants were awarded; the report lists them as given to

“such writers as William Gaddis, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, May Sarton, Richard Yates,

and Isaac Bashevis Singer.”696 Three white women and three white men.697 Later,

describing the time in 1995, when Congress threatened to cut funding for the NEA,

“representatives from literary organizations. . . brought writers to Capitol Hill to meet

693
For the purposes of my analysis, I consider the fellowships awarded to individual
writers to support their creative work, not translation grants.
694
I calculated this number by analyzing the names of individuals from the “NEA
Literature Fellowships: 40 Years of Supporting American Writers” report. I reviewed
each name to determine the gender of the recipient, looking up names that appeared to me
gender-neutral. I expect there is some error in this calculation given the source of the data
and the method. I queried the NEA and received an electronic file of the award winners
from 1984 through the present, but the NEA does not have an electronic file of all of the
award winners. The NEA does not capture demographic data, other than city and state,
for award winners. I did not analyze the racial-ethnic backgrounds or the sexual
orientation of individual grant recipients. This would be an interesting, though time-
consuming, analysis.
695
NEA Literature Fellowships, 4.
696
NEA Literature Fellowships, 5.
697
I recognize that I am flattening the diversity mandate of the NEA to only race and
gender here to serve my analysis. Others may wish to examine facets such as geography,
age, ethnicity, and aesthetics. Such analysis may lead to different conclusions.

414
with Congressmen [sic], writers such as E. L. Doctorow, Wendy Wasserstein, Bobbie

Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley.” Two men, two women, one person of color. Within the

report, the NEA profiles thirty-three past winners of the NEA Fellowship with a brief

description of their careers and a quotation about what the fellowship meant to them. Of

these thirty-three profiles, sixteen (48.5%) of them are women and twelve (36.4%) are

people of color. I enumerate these examples because the NEA sends a crucial message

about the importance of the inclusion of women and people of color through these textual

strategies. The NEA consciously constructs diversity, including gender and

race/ethnicity, in their public communications. While some might read this as “politically

correct” window-dressing for a national organization, I am less cynical. I believe that the

NEA, both its administrators and its judges, conceive and execute the Fellowship

program to be inclusive, to be an award system that recognizes the excellent work of

women writers and writers of color.698 And yet.

The overall data for the program suggests that women still remain a paltry thirty-

seven percent (37%) of the award recipients, though further analysis suggests that in

recent years the program approaches gender parity. Based on all fellowships from 1966

through 2005, women are thirty-seven percent (37%) of the award recipients; analysis of

more recent annual data tells a slightly different story. Citing the 2004 award cycle, the

NEA Literature Fellowships reports says that the forty-two prose Fellows “hailed from 22

698
I am mindful of Jane Ward’s work in Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT
Activist Organizations (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008). She argues that
diversity has been co-opted in service to a variety of liberal and neoliberal formations.
Her argument may very well be the case at the NEA as well.

415
states; 43 percent of them were women; and they ranged in age from 27 to 58.”699 The

most recent two years of data are even more heartening. In 2011, of the forty-two poetry

Fellows, thirty (71.4%) were women and twelve were men; in 2010, of the forty-two

prose Fellows, nineteen (45.2%) were women and twenty-three were men.700 Given this

data, during the past two years, the NEA Literature fellowship achieved gender parity.701

Certainly, the NEA’s public focus on the diversity of its grant recipients is one of

the legacies of feminism and the civil rights movement in the United States. In addition,

sustained, feminist advocacy efforts, including those of Bissert, Lorde, and many others,

had an effect on the agency and its current funding patters. But, what about lesbians? A

number of lesbian writers who began publishing in lesbian print culture received NEA

awards, including Jan Clausen, Gloria Anzaldúa, Irena Klepfisz, Beth Brant, Michelle

Cliff, Alexis DeVeaux, Janice Gould, Jewelle Gomez, Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker,

Susan Griffin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Audre Lorde. The 40th Anniversary Report

features Kay Ryan, an out lesbian, as one of the grant recipients. Unfortunately, there are

no explicit references to lesbian writers in the report. To understand the substantial

effects of the NEA on lesbian literature, one must decode the sexual orientation of

fellowship winners.

It cheers me to see gender parity and solid representation of people of color in the

NEA fellowship program today. I do not want to underestimate the significance of the

699
NEA Literature Fellowships, 4. I note that statistics about the racial-ethnic background
of the writers is not included.
700
The NEA awards poetry and prose fellowships in alternate years.
701
There is a striking disparity between prose writers and poets, which deserves further
investigation.

416
achievement—and the work of lesbian-feminists in making it a reality. I do, however,

want to reflect on one of the unanticipated effects of this work as it relates to nationalism.

The NEA is a federal agency; its work represents a nationalist project. Lesbian-feminist

writers and activists, including those advocating inclusion in the NEA, critiqued the

United States as a nation vigorously. For example, Minnie Bruce Pratt notes in her essay

“Identity: Skin Blood Heart” that “today the economic foundation of this country is

resting on the backs of women of color here, and in Third World countries” and that the

“foreign policy of the Reagan administration is being shaped by evangelical Christian

beliefs that hold the U.S. has a divine calling to “protect the free world from godless, evil,

‘perverted’ communism.”702 Audre Lorde connected the growing anti-apartheid

movement in South Africa with the treatment of African-Americans in the United States,

writing that “stock in Black human life in the U.S.A., never high, is plunging rapidly in

the sight of white american complacencies.”703 She then noted, “no matter what liberal

commitments to human rights is mouthed in international circles by the U.S.

Government, we know it will not move beyond its investments in South Africa unless we

make it unprofitable to invest there.”704 Jan Clausen wrote about United States militarism

for off our backs in 1981.705 Clausen also wrote about her Central American solidarity

work and the “fate” that the United States inflicted on Nicaragua “at gunpoint, land mine-

702
Minnie Bruce Pratt, “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” in Yours In Struggle (Brooklyn,
Long Haul Press, 1984), 54-55.
703
Audre Lorde, “Apartheid U.S.A.,” in I am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished
Writings of Audre Lorde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 70.
704
Ibid., 71.
705
Jan Clausen, “Women and Militarism: Some Questions for Feminists,” off our backs
9, no. 1, (January 1981).

417
point, bayonet-point, International Monetary Fund-point.”706 These writers, who

represent the broader field of lesbian-feminist authors, are critics of both United States

policies and the broader nationalist project of the United States.

Lesbian-feminist activists and writers did not see their work as advocating for the

inclusion of women or lesbians in nationalist projects. Rather they saw themselves as

advocating to end sexist exclusion. Their intention was never to bind feminism, or

lesbianism, to nationalism. Nevertheless, in hindsight, this work can be understood as a

nationalist project. To advocate for lesbian-feminists on a national literature panel, to

work for lesbian-feminist publications to be funded with federal tax dollars, to secure

fellowships for lesbian writers from a federal agency is all work that binds lesbians to a

national project, supporting and promoting it even as they critiqued it. Ultimately,

advocacy within the NEA helped to interpellate lesbian as a citizen-subject in the nation.

This literary work isn’t exceptional; much work in both the lesbian-feminist movement

and the gay and lesbian movement during the 1970s and 1980s made lesbians legible as

citizens of the nation.

One of the effects of this advocacy work is the successful creation of a linkage

between lesbian as an identity category and discourses about citizenship and nationalist

inclusion. The success of this work and the new legibility of lesbian in the nation is one

of the factors that causes the lesbian and gay movement in the 1990s to turn to issues

even more centrally imbricated with the state, particularly military service and marriage.

Although these issues were rarely supported by lesbian-feminists and lesbian-feminists

706
Jan Clausen, “In Pieces: A Feminist in the Central American Solidarity Movement,”
in Books & Life (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 198.

418
were some of the strongest critics707 and although it was never the intention of lesbian-

feminists to support an explicitly nationalist project, the extraordinary success of the

NEA advocacy campaign set the stage for continued engagement by queer and feminist

advocates in nationalist projects.

Pratt Wins an Academy Award

On May 1st, 1989, Nancy Bereano of Firebrand Press called Minnie Bruce Pratt at

her home in Takoma Park, MD. Pratt and her companion of nearly eight years, the

photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB), lived in “a big old house with rosebushes in the back

yard and an apple tree and a crabapple.” Pratt confided to Dorothy Allison, “Miz Harris,

next door, approves of me because I get down on my knees in the yard and ‘work hard.’”

On this Monday in May, Pratt wasn’t on her knees working the earth, planting crops of

okra, tomatoes, and squash;708 she spent most of the day on the telephone. Bereano called

to tell Pratt that she had won the Lamont Prize from the American Academy of Poets.

The Lamont Prize, now renamed the James Laughlin Award, is awarded to a poet for her

second book of poetry. While feminist poets had received the prize, including Ai in 1978,

Carolyn Forché in 1981, and Sharon Olds in 1983, Pratt was the first out lesbian to win

the Lamont Prize.709

707
Paula Ettelbrick’s work remains some of the strongest feminist critiques of different
gay and lesbian activist campaigns in the 1990s,
708
Letter to Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and
Special Collections Library, Duke University.
709
Marilyn Hacker won the Lamont Prize in 1973 when it was a first book prize; at the
time of the prize Hacker was known in lesbian and feminist circles and married to
Samuel L. Delany.

419
 Pratt recorded her reaction in her journal as “pandemonium, disbelief, shock.” She

spent the next few days talking to friends about the award. Almost everyone’s first

reaction was “oh my god.” Then they affirmed that “there’s hope in the world,” and

“something good is going on out there.” Many believed that the award is “only because

of political movement.” For Pratt and her friends, the feminist movement and the lesbian-

feminist movement contributed to the environment in which Pratt’s book won the prize.

Pratt recorded, “Unalloyed this is a triumph for one of us.”710

Pratt’s selection by the Lamont panel of Alfred Corn, Marvin Bell, and Sandra

McPherson was a big event for lesbian-feminist print culture, not only because Pratt was

out as a lesbian and part of the lesbian-feminist print movement, but also because the

poems of Crime Against Nature were about lesbian experience. The twenty-seven poems

of Crime Against Nature explore the narrative about how Pratt lost custody of her

children when she came out as a lesbian and divorced her husband in the 1970s. The

selection committee wrote about the poems, “In spare and forceful language Minnie

Bruce Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages between

her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities. She makes it plain, in

this masterful sequence of poems, that the real crime against nature is violence and

oppression.”711 Pratt’s selection for the prize was an affirmation of her power as a poet,

voicing an important political message.

The title of Pratt’s prize-winning book is grounded in the political moment. In

1989, sodomy laws were legal and enforced in many states in the United States. People

710
Folder 6, Box 8, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.
711
Lamont citation in Crime Against Nature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1989).

420
called sodomy laws colloquially “crime against nature laws.” In 1986 in the Bowers v.

Hardwick decision, the U. S. Supreme Court affirmed the rights of states to criminalize

sexual expression between two people of the same sex. As a result of this decision,

lesbian and gay activists targeted sodomy laws as an important site for community

mobilizations for gay and lesbian rights; the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

organized an initiative to repeal sodomy laws.712 Pratt’s poems in Crime Against Nature

animate the consequences of sodomy laws for her individually and articulate the larger

stakes of the gay and lesbian community in these laws.

The recognition of Pratt’s work and its political valence was significant. In a letter

to Pratt, Adrienne Rich heralded the award, “I’m glad it has won this prize for so many

reasons: the uncompromising beauty of your work; that that work will reach new

audiences, because I know poems can change consciousness when allied with other kinds

of statements; because your voice will have to be heard tonight in a place where I’ve

stood feeling lonely & isolated; because this prize should be a lever for opportunities for

you to write more.”713 Rich articulates the many values of winning prizes. For Pratt as an

individual poet, for lesbian-feminist poets more broadly, and for gay and lesbian activists,

the prize validated Pratt’s work and the political injustice of state-sanctioned harassment

and prosecution of queer people for sexual expression.

712
The 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision was overturned by the Supreme Court with the
2004 Lawrence v. Texas decision.
713
Folder Rich, Adrienne, 1981-1992 (folder 1), Box 57, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

421
 Rich continued, “I don’t underestimate the feelings of responsibility you must be

carrying. But I join you in celebrating all the opportunities this means—.”714 Rich’s

private comments to Pratt demonstrate a continued commitment to poetry as a tool for

social change. Rich writes that “poems can change consciousness when allied with other

kinds of statements,” a formulation Rich articulates often in her work. Rich’s earlier

resistance to systems of literary appraisal is tempered in her letter to Pratt. 1989 is a very

different political moment for lesbian-feminists than 1974. Nine years of Republican

Presidential administrations, combined with an extraordinary backlash against feminists,

had narrowed the spaces for radical statements and actions.

Although Pratt recorded herself as “elated” and “excited,” she was also

“disbelieving” and “suspicious.” She wanted the event to be a “huge reunion, a kind of

jubilee with lots of foreigners among old antagonists” and to relish “the joy of all my

friends.” although she realized that the entire event “seems like someone’s sitcom plot on

how to watch the most incongruous people in a formal setting.”715 In the days leading up

to the event, the feelings of disbelief and suspicion continued for Pratt. The recognition

from the panel brought up Pratt’s “old conflict with authority” and the dynamics of Pratt

“on the outside” and “the judges on the inside” was an “all too neat a reversal of the

judges/judging that went on when I lost the children.” She noted it felt like “a brick, a

trip” and “a bitter cosmic joke.”716 To receive acceptance and accolades from an

714
Folder Rich, Adrienne, 1981-1992 (folder 1), Box 57, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
715
Folder 6, Box 8, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.
716
Folder 6, Box 8, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.

422
institution for poems that are at their core about exclusion from full access to society was

an irony not lost on Pratt.

In preparing for the ceremony, though, Pratt affirmed her commitment to make

visible the lesbian-feminist movement that brought her to write the poems and to nurture

the movement through the prize. Like Lorde, Rich, and Walker in 1974, Pratt donated the

$1,000 from the prize. She selected four organizations, “that nourish us all”: the Sexual

Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL), Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,

Sisters in South Africa, a self-help organization of women living under apartheid, and the

Second Encuentro of Latin American and Caribbean Lesbians, which convened in 1990

in Peru.717 Pratt announced this publicly at the award ceremony. Her speech celebrated

both the activists in the room and also the movement that supported her, making her life

and her work as an artist possible.

The award ceremony was May 16, 1989, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

City. Presiding over the event at the museum, which Pratt described as “a rather cold

forbidding place—nothing homey about it!,” was Mrs. Edward T. Chase, the President of

The Academy of American Poets.718 That evening, the American Academy of American

Poets honored two other poets: Martin Greenberg, who won the 1989 Harold Morton

Landon Translation Award, and Martha Hollander, who won the 1989 Walt Whitman

Award. Friends and supporters of Pratt filled the room including her publisher Nancy

Bereano, Adrienne Rich, who was celebrating her sixtieth birthday, Barbara Smith,

717
Text of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Lamont Acceptance Speech, Gay Community New 16,
no. 46 (June 11-18).
718
Pratt letter to her mother, Folder ““On Accepting the Lamont Award for Poetry, As a
Lesbian at the Guggenheim,” 1989 May 16 (folder 1),” Box 35, Minnie Bruce Pratt
Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

423
publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Joan Nestle, Jewelle Gomez, Judith

McDaniel, and Elly Bulkin.

The experience at the event, however, was not the jubilee that Pratt imagined.

Pratt’s award was presented after Greenberg’s award and prior to Hollander’s award. Her

speech began, “The gay bar that I went to in 1975” and according to most accounts of the

evening, discomfort on the stage began with those words. Judith McDaniel describes it

best in a letter to the Director of the Academy of American Poets. She writes,

only a few moments into Ms. Pratt’s presentation, John Hollander began looking
at his watch, fidgeting in his chair, whispering audibly to James Merrill and
distracting the audience. His behavior made it clear that he was not interested in
what Minnie Bruce Pratt had to say, nor in hearing her read her poetry, and he
began these interruptions long before he could have known whether she would
speak for the same amount of time as the previous recipient, Martin Greenberg, to
whom Mr. Hollander listened with attention and respect.719

Pratt split the time for her reading in honor of the award between her statement, which

lasted eight minutes, and her reading of two poems from the collection, the first poem

and the final poem. Pratt did read longer than the other two award recipients. Greenberg

read for twelve minutes and Hollander read for fourteen minutes; Pratt’s reading was

twenty-seven minutes. Presumably, award recipients were told to read for twelve to

fifteen minutes. When Pratt finished reading her first poem and announced that her final

poem would be a multi-part poem, she said “This final poem is in six parts; you might

want to move around in your seat a little bit.” At this point, Hollander verbally told Pratt

that her time was up. Pratt replied, “I know, I know,” and then began to read the final

719
Folder “McDaniel, Judith and Maureen Brady, 1980-1992,” Box 56, Minnie Bruce
Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

424
poem of Crime Against Nature. Pratt’s refusal to comply with Hollander’s direction and

her conviction to complete her reading as planned is palpable—even in audio only.720

The President of the Academy replied to McDaniel, “We are all exceedingly sorry

that the deportment of anyone on the platform should have caused distress or provoked

offense. The Lamont Poetry Selection is a major prize with a distinguished thirty-five

year history; I would hereby like to reaffirm the Academy’s congratulations to Minnie

Bruce Pratt on receiving the 1989 Selection for Crime Against Nature and reassure you

that the Chancellors’ only intent in presiding was to offer formal recognition to all three

of the award-winners.”721 Hollander’s behavior was a source of pain and anger for Pratt

and for many of her friends and colleagues in the audience.

While McDaniel only describes the behavior of Hollander and Merrill in her letter

to the Academy President, overall, the event celebrated heterosexuality and highlighted

the ways that heterosexuality is privileged in society. Pratt’s award was literally

sandwiched between two performances of heterosexuality. While, most likely, these

performances of heterosexuality were illegible to the heterosexual event organizers and

attendees, they would have been profoundly legible to the lesbian-feminists in the

audience. The first award, the Harold Morton Landau Translation Award, was given to

Martin Greenberg for his translation Five Plays by Heinrich von Kleist. To read the

plays, Greenberg and his wife, Paula Fox, came to the stage and read together. The

readings amused some lesbian-feminist members of the audience; their laughter, when

720
An audio recording of the poetry reading and awards presentation is in the Poetry
Room of Harvard’s Lamont Library.
721
Folder ““On Accepting the Lamont Award for Poetry, As a Lesbian at the
Guggenheim,” 1989 May 16 (folder 1),” Box 35, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book,
Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

425
Fox reads “took every liberty with you a husband is permitted,” joyfully pierces the

silence in the room during the reading. Nevertheless, the performance of heterosexuality

through the acceptance of the award with Greenberg and his wife team-reading is

painfully clear.

The final award, given immediately after Pratt’s reading, was for the Walt

Whitman Award for a first book of poetry. In 1989, Martha Hollander, John Hollander’s

daughter, won the award. While not meaning to diminish the work of Martha Hollander,

the notion of a heterosexual, family dynasty in the poetry world titillates the audience in

the presentation of this award. W. S. Merwin was the judge for The Walt Whitman

Award in 1989, but could not present the award because he lived in Hawaii; James

Merrill presented the award on behalf of Merwin.722 After reading portions of Merwin’s

citation, Merrill notes that Merwin wanted to know, after selecting the manuscript, if this

Martha was “John and Ann Hollander’s daughter who I knew as a very little girl.” With a

flourish, Merrill tells the audience that Martha is the daughter of John and Ann. Again, I

do not want to diminish the strength of Martha Hollander’s poetry or the pride of her

parents, but the performance of this familial relationship, a relationship that is authorized

by the state and treated with great affection and admiration by all who spoke that night

and presumably by many in attendance, further highlights the struggle, alienation and

pain that Pratt experienced. Even as an insider winning an award, she was marked as an

outsider: interrupted during her reading and forced to watch the affectionate and jovial

performance of state-sanctioned and universally recognized relationships during the

722
Of course, Merrill was well-known for being in a long-term, companionate
relationship with David Jackson, but at this even, presenting the award to Martha
Hollander, he performed a function that privileged and celebrated heterosexual families
and excluded homosexuals through silence.

426
award presentation for both of the other award winners. This unspoken, unuttered, and

unacknowledged heterosexual framework further alienated Pratt and other lesbian-

feminist attendees.

Gay Community News wrote about the awards ceremony under the headline,

“Lesbian Poet Harassed at Award Ceremony.”723 In the article, Hollander, interviewed by

the GCN reporter, maintained that “his actions during the ceremony were not an

expression of his displeasure with the content of Pratt’s speech or poetry”; rather, he was

simply monitoring time as the event’s presider.724 He explained, “I think that was taken

ill by some of the people she had brought with her who didn’t know that that was the

convention.”725 For Pratt, however, this was an example of people using “the format to

harass you.”726

Marilyn Hacker, another attendee that night, recalls it as a “very painful evening”

as well, but for her it was not “queer sexuality” but “bringing politics into the academy. .

. that made those gentlemen fidget.”727 These reports of that night in May 1989

demonstrates the potency of the encounter of Pratt and the array of grass-roots, activist

women engaged in the lesbian-feminist print movement with the Academy of American

Poets, a membership organization that speaks for the poetry establishment. Pratt and her

723
Jennie McKnight, “Lesbian Poet Harassed at Award Ceremony,” Gay Community
News 16, no. 45 (Jun 4-Jun 10, 1989): 3.
724
Ibid.
725
Ibid.
726
Ibid.
727
Richard Tayson, “Poets Are Out in the Presses,” Gay and Lesbian Review (November-
December 2004): 24.

427
comrades understood the experience as an encounter with power and as a demonstration

of how institutions silence those without power. The Academy understood it as a single

event in a long history of events and resisted inflecting it with particular political

meanings.

Pratt told GCN, “It was the most public, formal, prestigious situation that I have

ever been in with someone who tried to silence me.”728 For a lesbian, being silenced by a

public institution in 1989 was fraught with meaning. Naming a system of silencing and

demonstrating an example of how lesbian-feminists are silenced by institutions was a

potent critique with multiple valences. Being silenced resonated both with AIDS

activists, who proclaimed, Silence = Death, and with lesbian-feminists, as suggested by

the words of Lorde, “Your Silence Will Not Protect You.”729 Pratt took the discomfort of

Hollander, however, as an affirmation that she is “on the correct path in terms of trying to

challenge entrenched power structures.”730 As a follow-up to the article, GCN printed the

entire text of Pratt’s acceptance speech.

Even though Pratt’s poems had been lauded by the Academy, for the lesbians and

feminists in attendance that evening, the Academy had treated Pratt as a human, as an

open lesbian, with contempt. A month later, Pratt wrote in her journal for the first time

since the Lamont ceremony. She connects her experience at the Lamont ceremony with

728
McKnight, “Lesbian Poet,” 3.
729
The sentence is from an essay titled, “The Transformation of Silence into Language
and Action.” It was first used by Lorde in a paper delivered at the Modern Language
Association’s Lesbian and Literature panel, Chicago, IL, December 28, 1977; the speech
was published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and then in Lorde’s book The Cancer
Journals (San Francisco Spinsters, Ink, 1980).
730
McKnight, “Lesbian Poet,” 3.

428
an exercise she used in Introduction to Women’s Studies, her class at the University of

Maryland. After watching a Maya Angelou film, she asked students, “Write about a time

you lost your voice, couldn’t speak.” Pratt writes in her journal that she “couldn’t write -

from the Lamont until now, a month.” She was “conscious every day that I’m not writing

in this journal.” She continues, “Certainly the events at the Guggenheim (now

documented in GCN, letter to me) were not an unambiguous—that’s not it—the rudeness,

interruptions, fear, antipathy from Hollander and Merrill—enough of a public trial and

humiliation to make me fear again the consequences of revealing my life.” This private

reflection demonstrates how profoundly personal Pratt’s poetry is and how difficult it was

to make these revelations—being a lesbian, being judged unfit as a mother by the state—

in 1989. Pratt continues, “Though Adrienne said, ‘You did everything just right.’ How

many people, women, lesbians would feel ridiculed, wounded beyond all criticism by

that…?” Even though Pratt felt “frozen at the core,” she also noted that it was “—a great

victory, the boys shining,” and a large group of friends celebrating. Afterward, she was

“exhausted in some deep way - sick for three weeks.”731 The conflicting emotional

realities of winning the award—on one hand, unabashed support for her work as a poet,

and, on the other hand, disrespectful treatment at the award ceremony—demonstrate the

deep conflicts of public recognition. While Pratt, like many other lesbian-feminists,

wanted her work to be publicly recognized, the recognition came with consequences,

both public and personal. Recognition from mainstream institutions like the Academy of

American Poets implied a type of co-optation that lesbian-feminists fiercely critiqued.

The experience of living in a world with unrelenting sexism and homophobia creates
731
Folder 6, Box 8, Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.

429
suspicion and dis-ease with recognition; moreover, in this case the very institutions that

recognized Pratt’s work also perpetuated these harms as they recognized her. As Rich

noted in her letter to Pratt, being the first _____ (woman, lesbian, person of color) or the

only _____ (woman, lesbian, person of color) is isolating and often harmful.

Finally, I share a quotation from John Hollander about Pratt’s work when he

introduced her at the award ceremony. Hollander’s introduction was, in general, pro

forma. He described the Lamont Prize, awarded for a second book of poetry, as revealing

“great knowledge of and sensitivity to a question of deep significance for all artists: Well,

now, what about the next one?”732 He proceeded to describe the selection process and the

mechanics of the award, including recognizing the panel of judges. He gave a brief

biographical introduction of Pratt and read from the judges’ citation. The judges

described Crime Against Nature as telling “a moving story of loss and recuperation” and

making “it plain in these masterful sequences of poems how the real crime against nature

is violence and oppression.” These words from the judges’ panel emphasize the emotive

power of the poems as well as describing them as “masterful,” suggesting the recognition

of their technical accomplishments within poetry. Hollander then said, “I should only add

that her chronicles and epistles speak of pain and dislocation with all the force of the

literal and with the special candor of the unadorned.”733 This single sentence, Hollander’s

only appraisal of Pratt’s work, demonstrates the diminishment of lesbian poets in the

realm of the aesthetic. By describing Pratt’s poems as “chronicles” and “epistles,”

Hollander suggests that they are not quite poems; rather, they are stories or letters.

732
Poetry Reading and Awards Presentation (New York: Academy of American Poets,
1989), Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard College Library.
733
Ibid.

430
Further, he suggests that they are “literal” and “unadorned,” that is, they are not crafted,

not transformed, through the artifice of poetry. While this statement is a small one amid a

flurry of words that evening, it demonstrates a strategy to dismiss and minimize the

poetic contributions of lesbians. Rather than simply letting the judges’ citation stand,

Hollander inserted his assessment of the work in a way that appears laudatory initially but

serves to undermine the craft of the poems as works of art.

Pratt received the Lamont Award in 1989, the boundary of the time period of my

study. Firebrand Press published Crime Against Nature in 1990. In 1990, the NEA

awarded Creative Writing Fellowships to three openly lesbian writers, including Minnie

Bruce Pratt.734 That year, in response to the rhetoric of Senator Helms (R-NC), legislation

was passed to prevent the NEA funds from using its funds “to promote, disseminate, or

produce materials which in the judgment of the NEA. . .may be considered obscene,

including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual

exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts.” The NEA was able to amend

the legislation to include this phrase, “which when taken as a whole, do not have serious

literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” to give them some flexibility in the arts

funding program. As a result of this legislation, the NEA required writers to affirm that

they would not generate “obscene” work with the NEA funds. Pratt, Lorde, and Chrystos

all signed the statement—the value of the fellowship was too great for them to decline the

fellowship—and all three of them publicly protested the censorship that the NEA was

supporting. Also that year, chair of the NEA, John Frohnmayer, vetoed four grants to

734
Creative Writing Fellowships is the name used for the individual writer fellowships in
1990; today the name is Literature Fellowships. The two other NEA Creative Writing
Fellowship recipients were Audre Lorde and Chrystos.

431
performance artists.735 Performance artists Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and

Karen Finley were all recommended for individual artist grants by the independent

reviewers. They were also all openly gay and lesbian performance artists or included gay

issues centrally in their work. Frohnmayer vetoed the grants to avoid controversy, an

action which spawned even more controversy and backlash from artists and activists.

Hughes, Miller, Fleck, and Finley, calling themselves the NEA 4, sued. They eventually

won in court and received the grants as a part of a settlement. I append this history to the

discussion of Minnie Bruce Pratt to demonstrate how the NEA continues to be a site of

activism for lesbian-feminists and gay activists.

As the Yale Younger Poets Prize opened doors and new opportunities for Broumas,

so the Lamont did for Pratt. It brought her work to a major university publisher

(Pittsburgh University Press) and ensured broader circulation of Crime Against Nature

and more speaking engagements.736 Like the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, the Lamont

reflects the tastes and attitudes of different judges to political themes of the prize winning

books. For lesbian-feminist poets, deeply committed as a group to advocacy for

recognition and inclusion of lesbian-feminism in systems of literary appraisals, the

Lamont Award was a vindication of their advocacy work within literary institutions. For

Pratt, the award was also a vindication—of her work as an advocate for lesbian poets and

also of her work as a poet; the Lamont affirmed the poetic value of her work by an

institution held in the highest regard in poetry. Yet, the award is also a reminder that

735
The funding program for performance artists is a different funding program than the
Literature Fellowships.
736
Speaking engagements have been an important source of economic support for Pratt
who hasn’t held a long-term institutional appointment.

432
public validation is a source of conflict. The promise of feminism is not happiness, but

solidarity—and energy to continue the struggle.

Conclusion

Why are literary appraisals important to lesbian writers? Each of these stories

illuminates a range of answer to that question. Rich, Lorde, and Walker in a display of

feminist solidarity rejected the power of the NBA to name a winner and highlighted the

plight of women writers in literary appraisals. Kunitz provided a new way to understand

the aesthetics of political—and lesbian-feminist—poetry, using his position as the judge

of the Yale Poetry Prize. Bissert organized women to challenge the NEA for greater

inclusion of feminist writers with both immediate and lasting success. Minnie Bruce Pratt

challenged her silencing at the Lamont Poetry Prize in the public forum of GCN. All of

these stories explore the contours of power in literary engagements.

Literary appraisals are individual and community encounters with power, and

they have material consequences. My interest in this history of lesbian-feminist

encounters with power is to understand how literary appraisals shape what we read. By

analyzing institutional power structures, we can develop strategies to intervene and

change them. The stories in this chapter examine how people, individually or in groups,

made lesbian writing more visible to and more appreciable by readers. The activist

interventions of lesbian-feminists in literary institutions during these two decades interest

me as a political strategist. I want to know: how do we make lesbian writing more visible,

more appreciated, and more engaged in broader literary conversations?, and how do we

ensure the continued and on-going inclusion of lesbian-writers in all aspects of literary

life?

433
 I have another interest in these stories. This interest is also polemical, activist, and

deeply personal. It stems from my habits as a young reader. When I was eleven years old,

I discovered the poems of May Sarton at the Waldenbooks in the mall in Saginaw, MI.

Reading her poems, I knew that I shared something with her. At the time, I couldn’t name

what it was we shared, but her poems were life-giving to me. How did Sarton’s book of

poems, Halfway to Silence, end up on that shelf so that I could pick it up? And, four years

later, how did the Naiad Press edition of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence end up on a

nearby shelf?737 What contingencies bring books to bookshelves for sale? What

contingencies keep books off bookshelves in bookstores and in libraries? Exposing the

material conditions behind the circulation of books is one way to begin to change what

books are available, with the hope that other young women, other girls like me, reading

alone or furtively at the mall, have books to sustain them. Thus, there are many stakes in

literary appraisals for lesbians and for feminists. Lesbian-feminist interventions into

literary appraisals create new possibilities for the recognition of lesbian-feminist writers,

and they have material consequences for economic support for lesbian-feminist writers.

Literary appraisals also affect readers, including young girls alone at the mall.

Literary appraisals, particularly the ability for individuals and groups of jurors to

recognize creative work by lesbians as excellent and worthy, have significant economic

consequences for writers and for small publishers. Recognition by literary institutions

was crucial to the livelihoods of writers. Writers as diverse as Rita Mae Brown, Jewelle

Gomez, Olga Broumas, Chrystos, Adrienne Rich, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Audre Lorde

benefited from fellowships administered by the NEA as well as other funding institutions.
737
Although in my mind I remember clearly the Naiad Press edition of Lesbian Nuns, it
is more likely that it was the mass market Warner Books edition.

434
Accolades such as the NBA nominations and the Lamont Prize supported the sales of

books for small publishers. Lesbian-feminists recognized that engaging in the field of

literary appraisals to shape the positive reception of lesbian-feminist work not only

brought more political, social, and cultural capital for lesbian-feminist writers, but had

economic consequences for lesbian-feminist writers as well.

Lesbian-feminist investments in literary appraisals expressed the broad

transformative agenda of the WLM. The interventions of Bissert and other feminists on

behalf of greater inclusion of women and feminists in government-sponsored literary

institutions may appear to be liberal feminist interventions into systems of power; that is,

they may seem to have simply reformist intentions for the inclusion of women. In fact,

however, this advocacy work is informed by a variety of feminist theories, not only

liberal feminism. Moreover, it has profound economic implications for individual

lesbian-feminist poets and writers and for the periodicals that were crucial to publishing

their work. Liberal feminism informs these interventions, certainly, but so do theories

from radical, socialist, and cultural feminism. By recounting these stories of lesbian-

feminists engagement with the power of literary institutions, I have outlined how

different strands of feminism informed the interventions and explore the material

consequences of appraisals by literary institutions. While these interventions have a

liberal feminist component (ensuring that women are represented and involved in literary

institutions such as the NEA and CCLM), there is also a radical feminist component

evident in the belief that feminist engagement will have a role in transforming

institutions. These examples of feminist and lesbian-feminist interventions into systems

of literary appraisal demonstrate the ways different feminist theories and ideologies

435
manifest themselves in the material practices of writers, editors, and publishers. Within

the same field of influence, lesbian-feminists invoked different feminist theories of

change and embraced a variety of strategic interventions.

During the 1970s, two elements defined lesbian-feminist poetics. First, a woman

who identified as lesbian-feminist wrote the poetry; this authorial inscription is important

to lesbian-feminist readers.738 For instance, while the poetry of Carolyn Forché in

Gathering the Tribes is lesbo-erotic, it was not lesbian-feminist for readers in the 1970s

the same way Olga Broumas’s work was.739 The other element is the presence of lesbian

content in poems. Each of these issues had to be addressed and overcome in order for

lesbian-feminist work to gain recognition through systems of literary appraisals.

The emergence of lesbian-feminist poetics corresponds with developments in

contemporary United States poetry at the time. In the second half of the twentieth

century, one strand of lyric poetry turned to confessionalism. Confessionalism, beginning

with the publication of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and W. D. Snodgrass’s

Heart’s Needle (1959),740 converged with the social and political movements of the

738
I am mindful of Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” but for the readers of
lesbian-feminist poetry in the 1970s, in particular, this analytical framework was not for
them a meaningful one.
739
Although in this discussion, I fix the identity of being lesbian, during the 1970s
women understood that the identity of lesbian is mutable. While the promise of becoming
a lesbian was more celebrated, as in Alix Dobkin’s lyrics Any woman can be a lesbian
(Alix Dobkin, Lavender Jane Loves Women, 1973), women also understood that women
could be lesbians for a period of time and then return to relationships with men and a
heterosexual identity.
740
I consciously use a genealogy for confessionalism here with two white, heterosexual,
male poets. Often Plath and Sexton are the genealogy given for confessionalism, with
Plath’s first book The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Sexton’s To Bedlam and
Part Way Back (1960), particularly in relationship to the feminist poetry of the 1970s, but
Plath’s Ariel, first published in 1965, is a more accurate benchmark, and confessionalism

436
1970s and 1970s—the civil rights movement, the WLM, and the gay liberation

movement. Lesbian-feminists, authorized by a social and political context, wrote poems

within a broader aesthetic movement in poetry that profoundly validated the exploration

and transformation of personal experience into art. As a result of the convergence of

confessionalism in poetry and a number of social change movements in the United States,

lesbian-feminist poets wrote and circulated powerful poetry that foregrounded lesbian

experience and explicit lesbian sexuality. Consider a genealogy of this poetry, beginning

with the poems of Judy Grahn’s Edward the Dyke (1970) and including Rich’s Twenty-

one Love Poems, Broumas’s Beginning with O, Pratt’s We Say We Love Each Other,

Lorde’s Our Dead Behind Us, and Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the

Seasons. These works explicitly write lesbian bodies and lesbian erotics into late-

twentieth century poetry. In addition, each of these writers—as well as many others—

lived openly as lesbian. Yet, few literary appraisals interpellated lesbian poets as lesbian.

With the exception of Broumas’s Beginning with O, none of these works received high-

profile literary prizes. While the advances that lesbian-feminists made with literary

appraisals provided much needed economic and cultural capital, they did not establish

lesbian-feminist poetics in the minds of readers and critics as a powerful mode of poetry.

Although central to the art and craft of poetry, neither lesbianism nor lesbian-feminism

became recognized as a significant literary or aesthetic innovation in poetry.

Today, lesbian poets hold some of the most prestigious positions in the poetry

world and garner some of the most important literary prizes. In 2009, the poet laureates

was well underway by the publication of Ariel. While I do not want to diminish the
significance of women in confessionalism, I do want to highlight that it was a strand of
contemporary poetic engagement that initially was not gendered female.

437
of the United States and the United Kingdom were both queer women. Poet Laureates are

appointed by the government and charged with representing poetry nationally. The

United States Librarian of Congress appointed Kay Ryan poet laureate in the United

States in July 2008.741 Of the forty-nine Poet Laureates (or Consultants in poetry as the

position was titled between 1937 and 1986), twelve have been women, or twenty-five

percent (25%). Ryan is the first out lesbian to occupy the post.742 Although Ryan’s poetry

is muted on questions of sexuality and sexual orientation, she was open about her long-

term partner, Carol Adair, whom she married in California in 2007, shortly before

becoming United States Poet Laureate.743 In May 2009, Queen Elizabeth II appointed

Carol Ann Duffy as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Duffy is open as a bisexual

woman. In addition to these public appointments, lesbian poets have been recognized

with significant awards in poetry. Recently, Ryan won a MacArthur Foundation

Fellowship, a fellowship referred to as a “genius” prize. Joan Larkin won the Academy of

American Poets 2011 Academy Fellowship, with a stipend of $25,000; Eleanor Lerman

won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. Moreover, the best-selling American poet is

Mary Oliver; Oliver came out a decade ago and wrote openly about her long-term

relationship with Molly Malone Cook. Oliver’s openness about her lesbianism has not

affected the sales of her books of poetry and prose.

The prominence of lesbian poets today is in part a result of both the poetry

published and circulated by lesbian-feminists in the 1970s and 1980s and the

741
Ryan’s term extended through July 2011.
742
Elizabeth Bishop was the Poetry Consultant from 1949-1950; she was not open about
being a lesbian reflecting the conventions of the time.
743
Adair died in January 2009, during Ryan’s tenure as Poet Laureate.

438
interventions of lesbian-feminists in systems of literary appraisal. Institutional

recognition is awarded not only on artistic merits, but on a complex habitus of social

political, and economic forces. This habitus was altered by lesbian-feminist publishing

and political interventions during the 1970s and 1980s. Lesbian-feminists spoke truth to

power at award ceremonies like the NBA and the Lamont, in advocacy work for

inclusion at the NEA, and in defining the MLA as a significant site of power. Allies such

as Stanley Kunitz also aided in transforming the habitus for lesbian-feminist poets and

writers. Lesbian-feminist engagement in literary appraisals is successful—the quality of

literary appraisals changes. Throughout the subsequent twenty years lesbian writers are

recognized more by established literary prize committees. This is not, of course, entirely

due to these moments of contesting power. The social and political landscape of the

United States changes as well between 1969 and 1989 and between 1989 and today. The

open acceptance of gay and lesbian people in United States society today is

unprecedented, but part of the new acceptance of lesbian and gay people is a result of the

literary activism of lesbian-feminists from 1969 until 1989.

In spite of this work, today, the term lesbian-feminist sounds like an anachronism.

Few poets or activists use it as a primary location to identify a set of practices—political

or literary. In reports of the achievements of Ryan, Duffy, Oliver, and Larkin, the

description ‘lesbian-feminist’ does not appear. In the field of contemporary poetics, like

the contemporary political and social fields, there is a field of feminist and a field of

lesbian. Although the two overlap, they do not unite in the same potent ways they did

during the 197s and 1980s. Although there has been progress for lesbian and feminist

poets, this is not a progressive narrative. Rather, it is a mapping of these two terms,

439
lesbian and feminist, and the contours of the work they generate between 1969 and 1989.

I indicated at the beginning of this chapter that I am optimistic about literary appraisals

for lesbians and I affirm that. Literary appraisals discussed in this chapter and literary

appraisals conducted during the subsequent decades demonstrate the strides of lesbian-

feminists in securing recognition from literary institutions. At the same time, the work of

lesbian-feminists poets and writers from the 1970s and 1980s—not so long ago—are

being erased quickly and lost to new generations through editorial practices. The struggle

for literary appraisals of lesbian-feminist work continues.

Finally, I offer this critique. While lesbian poets have made substantial strides

during the last two decades and enjoy prominence today, they have done so on terms to

conform to existing heterosexual and patriarchal values. Work by openly lesbian poets

today often is not explicit about lesbian sexuality and does not push boundaries of poetry

to examine non-normative experiences. Mentioning this critique feels crucial to honor the

persistent analyses and critiques of the lesbian-feminists of my study. Although I do not

explicate the critique, I can imagine many compelling arguments to support it. It merits

further consideration.

While literary and aesthetic appraisals often present themselves as separate from

economic realities of art, the two are deeply imbricated, as I have demonstrated in this

chapter. Lesbian-feminism invited women to think about a multiplicity of lenses and

frames for its work. In the same way, assessing the effects of lesbian-feminist

interventions on literary institutions depends on which lens to use. Twenty or more years

later, the results of lesbian feminist interventions are both dramatic and insignificant.

Remembering them is one way to be reminded that the work must continue.

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 In the next chapter, I explore aesthetic appraisals as a related, and still material,

aspect of the parallelepiped. One argument I make throughout this book is that for

lesbian-feminist poets, the aesthetics of their work is defined, in part, through their

publishing and distribution practices. The objects themselves—books, chapbooks,

journals—are an aesthetic object created for the delight and enjoyment of other lesbian-

feminists. The recognition of this aesthetic connection between the physical books and

the language of the books is not appreciated broadly. I examine the aesthetics of lesbian

print culture and consider the effects of lesbian-feminist print culture in the 1970s and

1980s on the literary and aesthetic landscape of the 1990s and 2000s.

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/Interlude 6/Granite Press

Offset printing, the transfer of type from a photographic plate to a rubber blanket

and then to paper, is a technological innovation from the beginning of the twentieth

century; offset made printing easier and more accessible. In the last three decades of the

twentieth century new types of printing technology—photocopying, laser printing, inkjet

printing, and digital printing—displaced offset printing. Many lesbian-feminist publishers

simply wanted to use the cheapest and most efficient printing technology to create books

and distribute them to readers. The book arts captured some lesbian-feminists, however,

like Bea Gates, and they remained loyal to letterpress printing. Letterpress printing, the

direct impression of inked moveable type onto paper, originated with Gutenberg and

continues to have devotees to this day. During the 1970s and 1980s, letterpress printing

was as much an art form as writing itself. With a letterpress press, printers created

beautiful printed objects—books and broadsides—with time and attention to the labor

and craft.

Bea Gates is a poet and activist, deeply committed to the revolutionary potential of

language. During the 1980s, Gates owned and operated Granite Press, a commercial

letterpress print shop and small publishing company. Gates discovered poetry as a

teenager living in Cambridge, MA. The Boston area offered Gates some of the finest

bookstores in the country; she spent days in the poetry aisles learning intuitively about

the different means of production for books. Gates remembers, “New Directions had

poems from the Chinese and City Lights had little books, like one of the Pocket Poetry

Series, HOWL!. . . .There were things called broadsides that were beautiful poems with

woodcut illustrations. There were books printed only in black and red with classic

442
typography. I didn’t even know the word typeface, but [I recognized] the beauty of the

whole presentation. I thought, this is cool.”744 From those early experiences reading and

encountering poetry, Gates spent a lifetime investigating “the space for poems” and

creating space for poetry in the world.745

As a college student at Antioch/West, Gates moved to the San Francisco bay area

where she “dropped into Cranium Press and just hung around with Clifford Burke.” One

day, Burke told her, “If you sort this typeface, you can have the type.” Gates sorted the

‘pied’ font and acquired her first font, Deepdene, cementing her love affair with printing

and typography. Gates slowly acquired many skills in the bay area; she learned how to set

type, met people who made paper and learned the intricacies of letterpress printing with

different types of paper. After college, she moved back east and built her own print shop

first in the Berkshires, her second, for a short time in Hancock, ME, and her third, long-

term location as Granite Press in Penobscot, Maine in 1977.

During the 1970s, Gates learned the art of bookmaking. She created a chapbook of

her own poetry, native tongue, from her Antioch senior thesis, and printed it on

letterpress with her own font of type. She remembers, “I had to rewrite one poem because

I didn’t have enough letters. I had to break down and reset the page each time. I would do

two poems and print them two up. I printed native tongue in different colors, which was

untraditional. . . .I loved the effect.” After printing native tongue, she learned how to

create a binding for the book from her old friend, binder Gray Parrot, as well as from

744
Interview with Bea Gates, November 28, 2011.
745
Ibid.

443
books about binding. Gates printed two editions, “One had handmade paper with a very

few bound in half leather and marble paper, and a few were bound in buckram.”

Gates subsidized her letterpress printing with commercial work; she also worked a

variety of other jobs—cocktail waitress, hardware store clerk, librarian. In 1981, Gates

left Maine and entered the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied

with Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, and Jane Cooper. Gates published her own chapbook,

Shooting at Night: Poems, and Rosa Lane’s chapbook, Roots and Reckonings: Poems,

under the Granite Press imprint in 1980.

While studying with Paley, Gates, tipped off by Jane Cooper, suggested that she

publish a broadside of one of Paley’s poems. Paley agreed, and in 1982, Granite Press

published, “Goldenrod.” Gates and Paley continued to talk about Paley’s poetry, and

Gates persuaded Paley, who was shy about her poems, to agree to have Granite Press

publish her first collection of poetry, Leaning Forward, in 1985. Gates published Leaning

Forward in two editions: a letterpress edition that sold primarily to collectors and

libraries and a trade edition. In 1986, Gates published a trade paperback of Joan Larkin’s

collection, A Long Sound: A Book of Poems, which explores Larkin’s own recovery from

alcoholism.

In 1986, Gates began working on the book that would be her greatest

accomplishment as a publisher and also the book that put Granite Press out of business.

Ixok Amar·Go: Poesía de Mujeres Centroamericanas por la Paz /Central American

women's poetry for peace is a bilingual anthology of Central American women’s poetry

with fifty contributors and fifty, largely North American women poets/translators.746

746
Ixok Amar·Go is a word the editors invented that combines Mayan, Spanish and

444
Gates worked with translator and editor Zoë Anglesey on the project, which was released

in 1987. The bilingual book is a mammoth collection of poems by women in every

country of Central America. Ixok Amar·Go represents an important political engagement

of some lesbian-feminists: solidarity work with revolutionaries in Central America and

includes a significant contribution by many lesbian poets.

Granite Press published Ixok Amar·Go right as television networks aired the Iran-

Contra hearings. Ixok Amar·Go sold out right away. Reprinting immediately for the

burgeoning women's studies and Latina/Latino studies courses as well as activists

communities and readers of poetry in translation was an obvious need, but Gates held

back due to the pressure of the IRS audit and threatened fines. Shortly after Ixok

Amar·Go published, the IRS audited the tax filings of Granite Press. Gates believes that

the audit of Granit Press, as “a hobby, not a business” was motivated by the political

content of the book and by her activist work challenging United States policy in Central

America. The result of this audit, which consumed Gates’s time and financial resources,

was the end of Granite Press. Subsequently, however, the IRS acknowledged that Granite

Press was a business and issued a refund to Granite Press. By that time, Gates was

teaching and doing freelance editing, public relations, and design work in New York

City.

Throughout the 1980s, Granite Press operated as a small publisher of fine

letterpress editions of poetry as well as commercial books. Granite Press stopped

operating as a publisher in 1989 during the IRS audit. The blending of different means of

producing texts—letterpress as well as offset printing—highlights the changing industry

English and means women going forward in love without bitterness.

445
and the flexible ways that lesbian publishers and printers responded to these changing

conditions.

Most important to Gates, always, was book design. She told Feminist Bookstore

News, “It’s important that the books are a whole thing. —That something happens to you

when you pick it up, as well as what happens to you when you read it. . . .It has a

different feel [and impact] if it’s designed.”747 This attention to beauty, not only within

the text itself, but in the appearance of the book as an object, was crucial to Gates and her

work with Granite Press—and for many other lesbian-feminists during the 1970s and the

1980s. Gates’s work at Granite Press, particularly her letterpress printing, demonstrates a

different type of publishing from other lesbian-feminist publishers considered herein, but

Gates’s political commitments and her attention to the aesthetics of books resonates with

the attentions and concerns of many other lesbian-feminist publishers.

747
“Granite Press: Penobscot, Maine,” Feminist Bookstore News 8, no. 5 (April/May
1986): 23.

446
 Chapter 6

Aesthetic Appraisals

on the other side of the rainbow

I invite you to return to another bar. A women’s bar, or in the parlance of some

lesbian-feminists, a wimmins/womyns/womons bar. The alternate spellings of women

suggest the significance of attention to language as a source of revolutionary

transformation; wimmin eliminates the presence of men in the word women. It is

December 1974. Your destination is The Bacchanal at 1369 Solano Avenue in Albany,

California. Albany is a suburb of San Francisco, north of Berkeley, south of El Cerrito.

To get there from the south, take the 580 north and exit at Buchanan Street; it’s just a

short drive from the freeway.

Proprietors Sandra Fini and Joanna Griffin opened The Bacchanal just this year.

Already it is becoming a destination and a gathering place for lesbian-feminists. At the

Bacchanal, “a bar for and by women,” women gather to play games—scrabble,

backgammon—, listen to poetry readings, and see art exhibits.748 Tonight, there is a

performance. Poetry. Dance. Someone gave you a flyer about it. You walk in. The lights

are dim. Inside, women. A dozen and a half. You grab a beer from the bar. Take a seat.

You have arrived just in time. The show is beginning. Five women take the stage. You

don’t know them. Later you will recognize Ntozake Shange as the ascribed author. Later

you will know that Joanna Griffin, one of the owners of The Bacchanal, the publisher at

748
“Lesbian Bars in the East Bay Owned By Women For Women” by Barbara Hoke,
http://www.cappellettidesigns.com/tellherstory/Bars.htm.

447
Effie’s Press and a poet herself, is involved. You may come to know Paula Moss and

Elvia Marta from Raymond Sawyer’s Afro-American Dance Company. You may learn

Nashira Ntosha and Jessica Hagedorn are the other two women performing tonight. For

now, you watch the show. They “dance, make poems, make music, make a woman’s

theater.” It is “raw, self-conscious, & eager.” You don’t know it, but what they are

“discovering” in themselves “had been in process among us for almost two years.”749

You don’t know it, but next year, the show will be performed in New York, first at

the Rivbea, then at the Old Reliable on East 3rd Street, and then at another bar,

DeMonte’s.750 It will be published as a book by alta’s Shameless Hussy Press in 1975.

The title from a line in the first five minutes of the performance: for colored girls who

have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. It will move to the Booth Theatre on

Broadway in September 1976.751 It will be defined as a “choreopoem”—a brave assertion

of a new genre to express the experience of African-American women. It will be a great

success on Broadway. The book will be republished by Bantam and reprinted and

reprinted and reprinted. The Literary Guild will republish for colored girls and reprint it

and reprint it and reprint it. This is one beginning. Here. Tonight. At The Bacchanal.

Introduction

If lesbian-feminists made great progress in literary appraisals, that is, in how

literary institutions receive lesbian writers, contemporary aesthetic appraisals of lesbian

749
for colored girls, xiii.
750
for colored girls, xviii-xix.
751
for colored girls, xx.

448
print culture are dismissive at best and derisive at worst.752 This is ironic; aesthetics

motivated lesbian-feminist publishing. Publishers wanted to create books that were

beautiful—both as objects and as containers for beautiful works. Yet, aesthetics are used

today to diminish the work of lesbians; critics suggest lesbians’ work is not good quality,

not aesthetically satisfying, not worthy of continuing engagement. By resituating

aesthetics as a category of analysis produced by material power structures, aesthetics

becomes a category both to understand lesbians’ creative work and to blunt critiques.

During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbians understood the aesthetics of both lesbian-feminist

publishing and lesbian work through shared experiences within communities that trained

them to apprehend and appreciate the aesthetic aspects of the work; today, the aesthetics

of lesbian-feminist publishing and lesbian-feminist work are not embedded in the same

communities. These works have not been explicated by critics in order for them to be

appreciated by contemporary audiences. Part of my work in this chapter—and throughout

this book—is invoking the sensorium through which readers experienced lesbians’ work

at the time of its production. In addition, by interrogating the aesthetics of lesbian print

culture in this chapter, I expand the aesthetic appreciation of lesbian-feminist cultural

production. By engaging lesbian print culture in discussions about aesthetics, I transform

the contours of how we understand lesbian aesthetics in literature and in popular culture.

First, what are aesthetics? I take my definition from Jacques Ranciére, who defines

aesthetics as “a specific form of sensory apprehension”753 and as “a regime of the

752
The most recent diminishment of lesbian culture generally and lesbian print culture is
in Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Stories.
753
Jacques Ranciére, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009),
29.

449
functioning of art and a matrix of discourse, a form for identifying the specificity of art

and a redistribution of the relations between the forms of sensory experience.”754 In other

words, aesthetics are both a way of perceiving artwork through the sensorium (literally,

the human nervous system, including the mind) and as a way of understanding artwork

within the embedded power structures of discourse and distribution. Rancière’s project in

Aesthetics and Its Discontents demonstrates “how aesthetics, as a regime for identifying

art, carries a politics, or metapolitics, within it”755 Rancière elucidates the co-constitutive

relationship between aesthetics and politics as “linked, beneath themselves, as forms of

presence of singular bodies in a specific space and time”756 From Rancière, I take an

imperative to reclaim two words, aesthetics and politics, in relationship to lesbians and

lesbian print culture. Rancière defines the relationship between aesthetics and politics as

“the way in which the practices and forms of visibility of art themselves intervene in the

distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration, in which they distribute spaces and

times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.”757 In previous chapters, I have

demonstrated how lesbian print culture distributed books physically through lesbian

communities and beyond. In this chapter, I use this embodied and material definition of

aesthetics to demonstrate how lesbian print culture distributed aesthetics, or “sensory

apprehension,” throughout the broader United States culture. In addition to explicating

the aesthetics of lesbian print culture, in particular its reliance on situating bodies in

754
Ibid., 14.
755
Ibid., 15.
756
Ibid., 26.
757
Ibid., 25.

450
specific spaces and times, I also reclaim the words aesthetics—and aesthete—as a vital

form of engagement for lesbian print culture.

Aesthetics are a mode of discerning sensory experiences in the world and sharing

those experiences with others. Aesthetic appraisals are judgments that invoke standards

of excellence in relationship to the sensorium as the basis of judgment; historically,

aesthetic appraisals focus, in particular, on questions of beauty, transcendence, and

sublimity, but from Rancière, aesthetics seeks to elaborate the ways that art intervenes in

the reconfiguration of how we experience the world, in how texts—novels, poems,

plays—reconfigure the distribution of spaces, times, subjects, and objects—common and

singular—to make lesbian visible and central. Three questions shape this exploration of

lesbian-feminist aesthetics. How does lesbianism, both the author’s lesbianism and

lesbianism within in a text, relate to the aesthetic reception of work? How did lesbian

print culture create an aesthetic, and how has that aesthetic been adopted in other

locations? How do lesbian-feminist writers enter aesthetic discourses in literature and in

popular culture, and how do lesbian-feminists transform aesthetic discourse through

issues important to lesbians and feminists?

Given my materialist concerns in previous chapters, two terms of aesthetic

appraisal are particularly important in this analysis: middlebrow and highbrow.

Middlebrow and highbrow are terms that are used colloquially to suggest measures of

aesthetic value, and they are used by literary critics in materialist analyses of book

history. Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture traces the construction

of middlebrow culture in the United States through the publication and circulation of two

book series: the “Great Books” and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Janice Radway’s A

451
Feeling for Books narrates further a history of the Book-of-the-Month Club, particularly

thinking about the construction of middlebrow books in relationship to highbrow

literature. Moreover, the terms middlebrow and highbrow make visible the co-

constitutive relationship between aesthetics and politics and suggest the material facets of

both.

To define these two aesthetic designations, highbrow and middlebrow, I look

farther back in literary history than Rubin and Radway. I turn to Virginia Woolf. In the

essay, “Middle Brow” from Death of the Moth, Woolf writes an extended response to an

editor about a review of her work. Woolf objects rigorously, and with her tongue firmly

planted in her cheek, to the elision of the word “highbrow” from the review. She says,

“To be a highbrow, a complete and representative highbrow” like Shakespeare, Dickens,

Hardy, Flaubert “is of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination.”758 By

demurring about the attainability of highbrow status for herself, Woolf explicates the

difference between highbrow and lowbrow as a ‘disinterested’ observer. Woolf defines

highbrow as “the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a

gallop across country in pursuit of an idea,” while lowbrow is “a man or woman of

thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life”759

Woolf substitutes the mind for the body in definitions that are otherwise equivalent. The

mind is the province of highbrow; the body, the province of lowbrow. This emphasis on

class reflects the world Woolf observed; for the upper class, those living in Kensington,

as she painfully points out she does, the life of the mind is available, but for the lower

758
Virginia Woolf, “Middle Brow” in Death of the Moth, 177.
759
Ibid., 178.

452
classes, it is the body that is most central, most necessary. Woolf maps class as a rigid,

economic construct onto literary aesthetics. While Woolf’s definitions appear to

discipline the meaning of highbrow and lowbrow, I read Woolf as always highly

ironized, including in these definitions. Woolf’s definitions reflect her observations,

spiked with venom. The venom and irony invite readers to question the rigidity of

Woolf’s definitions.

Woolf reserves most of her derision for middlebrows. Woolf says that the

middlebrows are “the go-betweens; they are the busybodies who run from one to the

other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief.”760 Middlebrows mediate between

the minds of the highbrows and the bodies of the lowbrows and in doing so create

problems for both. She continues, “They are neither one thing nor the other.. . .Their

brows are betwixt and between. . . .The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred

intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in

pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed

indistinguishably, and rather nastily with money, fame, power, or prestige.”761 Woolf

imbricates middlebrow with “money, fame, power, or prestige.” This is highly ironic and

a key element of Woolf’s definition of middlebrow. Woolf herself was a strong advocate

for the importance of money for women, as she demonstrated in both A Room of One’s

Own, where money was a key to women’s success as writers, and Three Guineas, where

money was a way for women to leverage power in key political and social spheres. Yet,

Woolf seemingly derides this key characteristic, the hallmark of the middlebrow, the

760
Ibid., 179.
761
Ibid., 180.

453
acquisition of “money, fame, power, or prestige.” Middlebrow, for Woolf, is both inside

and outside of the mind and the body, and mediating between the mind and the body is

“money, fame, power, or prestige.” In short, from Woolf’s configurations, middlebrow

becomes a site to contest economic and cultural power.

Woolf cedes that she couldn’t imagine the assignation of highbrow for herself, thus

the space for conflict and change is in the middle. Like Woolf, lesbian-feminist writers

think about these aesthetic categories of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, and like

Woolf, they understand the role of economic and cultural power in each of these

designations. Lesbian-feminists made important contributions to culture—highbrow,

middlebrow, and lowbrow. Within these contentious categories, I examine how lesbian

print culture during the 1970s and 1980s produced both highbrow and middlebrow books.

The producers of lesbian print culture envisioned themselves creating an alternate world

for lesbian. This alternate world would need literature of all types—high-, middle-, and

lowbrow. For lesbian-feminist publishers, everything produced expressed the

revolutionary potential of the moment.

By considering highbrow and middlebrow together in this chapter, I map the

effects of lesbian print culture on a broad field of influence which does not prescribe

either highbrow or middlebrow but recognizes both as fields of influence for lesbian print

culture. Recognizing the multi-focal influences of lesbian print culture on contemporary

literature and contemporary popular culture, I demonstrate the many ways that aesthetics

operate in our contemporary culture.

In this chapter, I make five arguments. Each argument elucidates a different

register for engaging aesthetics in relationship to lesbian print culture. First, I consider

454
twentieth century literary history and the bifurcation of lesbian and aesthetic as a

phenomenon that emerges during the 1970s and 1980s. During the earlier decades of the

twentieth century, lesbians—and texts produced by lesbians—were central to what is

received as aesthetic innovation. Second, I examine the canonization of lesbian writers

during the twentieth century in contemporary anthologies from the 1970s and 1980s.

Work by lesbian authors is included in some of these anthologies, but more advocacy and

scholarship is required to ensure the continued canonization of lesbian literature. While I

view canonization as a deeply material practice, the patina of canonization is aesthetic

excellence; thus, engaging aesthetics as a term to describe and appraise lesbians’ work is

a crucial strategy to ensure continued presence of lesbians’ work in literary canons.

Third, I outline the aesthetic principles of lesbian-feminist print culture as the creators

understood it. I explore how they imagined themselves making aesthetic interventions as

well as assess what interventions they made. Fourth, I examine the career of Rita Mae

Brown to consider how a writer central to lesbian print culture in the 1970s became a

middlebrow author in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Using Rita Mae Brown’s career, I

think about the economics of highbrow and middlebrow in relationship to lesbian writers

both in the contemporary moment and in history. I argue that the WLM created an

opportunity for lesbian writers to be middlebrow, to have their work taken up by a

broader public, and to make money. This seemingly economic and material argument

about Brown’s career is significant in relationship to aesthetics because it exposes the

materiality of aesthetics and the manner in which being placed as middlebrow obscures

highbrow aesthetic contributions. Finally, I examine the ways that lesbian feminist print

culture has been taken up by popular culture post-1989, looking in particular at the work

455
of Ntozake Shange, Sapphire, and Dorothy Allison. Lesbian-feminist presses originally

published the work of all three authors, and in recent years their novels have been

adapted into major motion pictures. Each of these cases demonstrate how lesbian-

feminism has been both commodified and ideologically adopted in contemporary United

States culture, making a unique aesthetic contribution that extends the politics and

ideology of lesbian-feminism.

Together these histories invite a reconsideration of lesbian print culture as a site of

aesthetic intervention. During the 1970s and the 1980s, some lesbian-feminist critics and

writers associate judgments of quality with adherence to patriarchal standards. Other

lesbian-feminists believed that appraising lesbians’ work in relationship to quality and

aesthetics was a crucial strategy for ensuring longevity of the work. Rather than

reconciling conflicting ideologies, lesbian-feminist critics tended to appraise the work on

its own merits, as Adrienne Rich and many others advocated, or avoid the conversation.

Even more recent critics have eschewed conversations about aesthetics and quality in

relationship to lesbian literary work. For instance, Bonnie Zimmerman considers the

quality of lesbian fiction in a lengthy exegesis in The Safe Sea of Women. She

acknowledges that the criticism of lesbian writing originates within the community itself;

women asked “whether or not lesbian fiction is ‘good’ enough to merit serious attention

from literary critics, or to satisfy the common reader.”762 Zimmerman observes that

“while the lesbian community has developed alternative standards of content—standards

based upon honesty and fidelity to the range of lesbian lives—it has yet to redefine

artistic quality.” Ultimately, Zimmerman elides questions of quality by saying, “The

762
Zimmerman, Safe Sea, 17.

456
purpose of this writing—self-aware or not—is to create lesbian identity and culture, to

say, this is what it means to be a lesbian, this is how lesbians are, this is what lesbians

believe. Whatever their aesthetic value, lesbian texts are ‘sacred objects’ that bind the

community together and help express—by which I mean both reflect and create—its

ideas about itself.”763 I am extremely sympathetic to Zimmerman’s handling of the issue

of quality, as she defines it, but I am frustrated by her elision. Lesbian print culture did

redefine artistic quality. Certainly, sexism and homophobia inform judgments of quality,

or appraisals of the aesthetic quality of work, as lesbian-feminist critics have discussed,

but to avoid discussions of quality, to refrain from making aesthetic judgments, is to

consent to the exclusion of lesbian-feminist writing from broader literary discussions and

from canonization.

Not only did lesbian print culture define and redefine artistic quality, through

lesbian print culture, lesbian-feminist aesthetics emerge as both recognizable and widely

influential. Lesbian print culture aspired to fostering excellence, and both publishers and

writers wanted recognition for excellence in external appraisals. Rather than eliding

questions about aesthetics and the aesthetic appraisal of lesbian writers, I address these

questions directly. Aesthetics are a key aspect of canonization and therefore vital to the

long-term survival of lesbian literature. Stories in this chapter recount important histories

about aesthetic appraisals, but, more importantly, they invite us think about the broader

stakes of lesbian print culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

One of the most common questions people asked me while conducting this

research was, “But is any of it any good?” This chapter endeavors to provide two

763
Ibid., 21.

457
responses to that question. First, I want to undo the simplicity with which we understand

aesthetic appraisals. I want us to think complexly about how we come to conclusions

about quality as individual readers and as literary communities. Second, though, I want to

answer the question directly. Yes, some of it is good; some of it is excellent; some of it is

sublime; some of it is dreadful. It is like all literary output. “Is it good?” is a question

that needs to be unpacked in thoughtful ways, but it is also a question that needs to be

answered, directly, clearly, frankly. We avoid the question at our peril—risking the loss

of both the past and the future of lesbian-feminist literature.

Aesthetics, Lesbians, and Poetry

A bifurcation between lesbian and aesthetic emerges in the 1970s and 1980s. In

earlier decades of the twentieth century, lesbian poets were central to aesthetic

innovation; in contemporary poetry, lesbians are recognized as some of the finest poets in

English. In this section, I offer a brief exegesis of lesbians and aesthetics in twentieth

century poetry; I then explore how and why a bifurcation between lesbian and aesthetic

emerges during the 1970s and 1980s.

There are many strands of poetic engagement in the twentieth century. Different

groupings of poets, or “schools of poetry,” characterize the century as well as different

formal engagements and different modes of circulation. This is not a comprehensive

overview of poetry in the twentieth century, and lesbians have not been central to all of

the strands of poetic engagement. Lesbian poets, however, are significant in three strands

of poetic engagement in the twentieth century, and lesbian poets are crucial to aesthetics

and aesthetic innovation during the twentieth century. Lesbian poets play significant roles

458
in imagism, modernism, and what I call, after Ron Silliman, mid-century, School of

Quietude poetics.764

Imagism is a poetic movement in the 1910s. The focus of imagism is on a single

image in a poem and the deep engagement with that image. Imagist poems are often brief

and highly charged with emotion that derives from a central image. The beginning of

Imagism is often credited to Pound, who marked up a poem by H.D. and labeled her

“Imagiste”765 This is one origin story, and one that situates H.D., an openly bisexual poet,

as central to Imagism. The strongest advocate for Imagism, however, was Amy Lowell.

Lowell used her personal wealth and charisma to spread the ideas of Imagism and the

poetry of Imagist poets. Lowell was an aggressive and unrelenting champion of imagism.

Lowell is also open about her lesbianism throughout her life. If H.D. was the aesthetic

innovator of Imagism, Lowell was the material advocate and popularizer of the

movement. Both Lowell and H.D. organized their intimate and erotic lives with female

partners at the center. Lesbianism and bisexuality are important aspects of their

biography and, particularly for Lowell, of their artistic expression. Yet rarely is the story

of Imagism a story of the contributions of queer women to literature or literary history.

764
Silliman uses “School of Quietude” on his blog as a way to examine power in literary
history. Silliman attributes the embrace of the poets of the School of Quietude to the
erasure of innovative and experimental poets including the Objectivists. A succinct
definition of “School of Quietude” and how Silliman uses it to analyze power is here:
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-know-whenever-i-use-phrase-school-of.html
(accessed 5 January 2012). Lesbians also play an important role in
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, an important consideration that I regret is outside of the
parameters of my study.
765
See for example the website of the American Academy of Poetry,
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658.

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 Similar to Imagism, Modernism is framed in origin stories that identify Pound and

Eliot as its leading practitioners.766 In fact, lesbians are involved centrally in the writing,

production, and circulation of Modernist texts. Gertrude Stein understood both her poetry

and her prose as a part of the Modernist project. Eliot recognized Djuna Barnes’s

Nightwood as a “great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit

and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of

Elizabethan tragedy.”767 Virginia Woolf is recognized, after many years of obscurity, as a

significant innovator of modernist novels. Although Woolf spent her adult live married to

Leonard Woolf, she had significant emotional and erotic relationships with women.

Origin stories about Modernism often elide the literary contributions of Barnes and Stein

as well as the contributions of other lesser recognized poets and novelists, including Gale

Wilhelm, Mina Loy, and Angelina Weld Grimke.

In addition to writing Modernist texts, lesbians were critical to the publication and

circulation of Modernist texts. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap edited the influential

journal, The Little Review, which played a vital role in defining and promoting

Modernism. 768Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company, who lived her life with her

companion, Adrienne Monnier, published Joyce’s Ulysses and promoted the book

766
See for example the website of the American Academy of Poetry,
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5664 (accessed 5 January 2012.
767
T.S. Eliot, “Introduction,” Nightwood, (New York: New Directions, 1937), xvi.
768
See Anderson’s Autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War (New York: Horizons Press,
1969).

460
extensively to ensure its wide circulation.769 Lesbians played a prominent role in the

curation of Modernism and provided sustained material support of time and money in its

promotion and dissemination. In these ways, lesbians were deeply involved in both the

aesthetic and material aspects of Modernism.

While Imagism and Modernism were two striking innovations in poetry in

particular and literature more broadly, the period after World War II was hardly barren

for lesbian writers. Harper & Brothers published a popular trade novel, Wasteland, by Jo

Sinclair, the pen name of lesbian writer Ruth Seid, in 1946; Wasteland was the winner of

the Harper Prize. Wasteland delves into the “new” study of psychoanalysis through the

main character, Jake Brown. Through the novel, Brown struggles to understand his life as

a working-class Jewish immigrant and to reconcile himself to the unconventional life of

his sister, Roz, and her close, affectionate relationships with other women. While

Wasteland isn’t itself aesthetically innovative, it is a mainstream novel about lesbianism

in the post-war period. During the next two decades lesbianism continues to be an

important theme in literature, though not in highbrow or middlebrow literature. Rather,

lesbianism figures prominently in popular literature: pulp novels and mass market

paperbacks. Lesbian narratives in pulp novels and mass market paperbacks were

scandalous, titillating, and part of a complex morality tale for popular consumption.

Mid-century, lesbianism as a theme was not confined to pulp novels, however, nor

were lesbian writers confined to obscurity. Lesbianism for mid-century poets was quite

ordinary—as long as it did not enter the poetry. The School of Quietude included two

769
See Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959) and
Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in
the Twenties and Thirties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983).

461
prominent lesbian poets: Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Rukeyser. The lives of Bishop and

Rukeyser are strikingly similar. They were born within two years of one another, Bishop

on February 8, 1911 and Rukeyser on December 15, 1913. Rukeyser’s first book,

Theories of Flight, won the Yale Younger Series Prize in 1935, selected by Stephen

Vincent Benet. Houghton Mifflin published Bishop’s first book of poetry, North & South,

in 1946. Bishop and Rukeyser died within six months of one another. Bishop died on

October 6, 1979; Rukeyser died less than six months later on February 12, 1980. Since

their deaths, their work has had very different critical responses.

Both Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Rukeyser were lesbians; both women’s primary

physical and emotional relationships and attachments were with other women. Born in

the 1920s, how they lived as lesbians was shaped not by the energy of the WLM or the

Gay Liberation Movement, but rather by a set of standards for homosexuals shaped by

the post-World War II era. Two recent scholarly books illuminate frameworks for

thinking about homosexuality in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.

Margot Canaday traces the crystallization of homosexual identity in the U. S. as

concurrent with modern definitions of citizenship and argues that “homosexuality and

citizenship are both a type of status that is configured (even, to some extent, conferred)

by the state.”770 Canaday examines how federal bureaucracies of welfare, immigration

and the military define homosexual personhood beginning in the 1930s and extending

through the 1990s. Rather than embracing a gay liberationist analysis of the closet as a

location from which homosexuals must liberate themselves, Canaday asserts that “The

closet, after all, was a deliberate state strategy that became increasingly explicit toward
770
Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 255.

462
the end of the century.”771 The closet emerges as a trope toward the end of the twentieth

century; prior to gay liberation, the closet was more amorphous, less certain. Canaday

notes, “Its brilliance was in inviting people to pass and then suggesting that they suffered

no harm because they could hide.”772 For Bishop and Rukeyser, in the 1940s, 1950s, and

1960s, “hiding” their lesbianism had less valence; neither of them hid their intimate

relationships with other women. While Canaday examines federal policies in relationship

to homosexuals, her work suggests ways that definitions and expressions of

homosexuality change during the second half of the twentieth century. How Rukeyser

and Bishop lived as lesbians—openly in their personal lives, but in the case of Bishop,

muted in her poems—reflects a broader identity construction of homosexuality mid-

twentieth century.

Like Canaday, Michael Sherry examines homosexuality in the United States in the

middle of the twentieth century. Sherry considers the presence of gay male artists,

particularly musicians and composers, in the U. S. mid-century. Sherry argues that a vast

“homintern,” an imagined homosexual international conspiracy in the arts rose in

conjunction with America’s global conflicts—World War II and the Cold War—which

magnified and defined the contributions of queer artists. . .and shaped a Lavender Scare

in the arts.”773 When the Cold War abated, scrutiny of gay men also abated. Focusing on

a different field of influence than Canaday, Sherry explores both the openness of

homosexuality in the arts mid-century and the anxieties of the broader culture, expressed

771
Canaday, Straight State, 256.
772
Canaday, Straight State, 256.
773
Michael Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1.

463
in particular in the media, about homosexuality. These public and private realities about

homosexuality shaped how gay men and lesbians lived their lives and negotiated their

sexualities in the public sphere. Bishop, even living abroad in Brazil, and Rukeyser

witnessed and experienced these evolving anxieties about homosexuality and their

consequences on both of them as queer women. Although the poetry of both Bishop and

Rukeyser is muted on questions of lesbianism, especially in comparison to poetry from

the 1970s and beyond, both of them lived openly as lesbians, particularly by mid-century

standards.

The posthumous reception of each could not be more different. Bishop emerged as

a beloved poet; Rukeyser teeters toward obscurity. Bishop’s work is paltry compared to

Rukeyser’s; the slim volume of Bishop’s complete poems can be read in an afternoon;

Rukeyser’s Collected Poems fill nearly 600 pages. Rukeyser was keenly political, from

her first book which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize to her final collection of poems.

Bishop eschewed politics in her poetry, and in her correspondence with friends. Since

their deaths, Bishop has become revered by contemporary poets and Rukeyser nearly

forgotten. Scholarship on Bishop pours out (a quick search of scholarship databases on

Bishop’s name returns over 4,700 results; Rukeyser returns 1,722) while scholarship on

Rukeyser remains thin. Bishop’s greater circulation after her death is related to the

aesthetic of her work in which her lesbianism is deeply subsumed, while the lesser

circulation of Rukeyser’s work is a result of the way that her leftist politics, not her

lesbianism, are foregrounded. On one hand, this is a simple literary study of posthumous

circulation of two poets’ work, but the different types of posthumous reception for

464
Bishop and Rukeyser offers a model to think about how politics and poetry work together

in aesthetic and literary appraisals in lesbian-feminist print culture from 1969 until 1989.

This brief narrative about poetry during the twentieth century suggests two things.

First, throughout the twentieth century, lesbians were aesthetic innovators. Certainly,

lesbians were not the only innovators, but writers such as Lowell, H.D., Stein, Barnes,

Rukeyser, and Bishop are all significant canonical figures in American literature; all lived

their lives openly as lesbian or bisexual women. Each of these writers innovated

differently; more importantly, how they lived their lives as lesbians or bisexual women

varied according to their historical and material conditions. This is not surprising; the

construction of lesbian public identities is historically contingent. In spite of these

different identity constructions, it is important to establish the presence of lesbian poets

and writers in literary history and to recognize their aesthetic contributions.

Second, open lesbianism influences literary and aesthetic reception. Narratives

about Imagism and Modernism that privilege white male founders secure more currency

in literary history than narratives about queer, white female founders. While both

Rukeyser and Bishop were open about their lesbianism, given the standards of the time,

the leftist, socialist, and political elements of Rukeyser’s work marginalize her

contemporary reception. Literary critics receive Bishop on the other hand as a master, in

part because her work eschews politics and includes very few references to lesbianism

and lesbo-eroticism. Thus, to be understood as a lesbian in one’s work is to be received

over time as lesser than, not important, and/or marginal.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, lesbian-feminists recognized these facts keenly and

critiqued the systems of canon-formation for their sexist and homophobic exclusions. On

465
the whole, they did not want to participate in the systems of canon-making, in the

conferral of power and prestige, in aesthetic appraisal. Lesbian-feminists wanted to work

in “a realm beyond ranking and comparing.” While the principles of this position are

important and must be honored, at the same time, the principles create an ideological

double-bind. Participating in the system acknowledges and validates its power; refusing

to participate in the system relegates one to the dustbins of literary history. Within the

context of lesbian-feminism, women created their own histories and literary icons,

embracing early work by Renee Vivien, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and a host of

other lesbian writers. On one hand, the bifurcation between lesbian and aesthetic is one

that lesbian-feminists themselves advocated as a strategy to highlight the patriarchal

underpinnings of literary studies. On the other hand, this bifurcation compromises the

future reception of lesbian-feminist poets. Two interventions offer a path out of this

double bind: recast literary history with an eye to the significant aesthetic and material

contributions of lesbians, a strategy that I have engaged in this section and which I

continue in the next sections by examining anthologies and recovering the aesthetic

contributions of lesbian-feminists.

Reading the Norton Anthologies

Anthologies are one important site of literary canonization.774 To examine how

lesbian-feminists and lesbians fare in contemporary canonization, I examined three

Norton anthologies: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, The Norton

Anthology of Poetry, and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
774
Paul Lauter, among many others, interrogates the process of canon building as well as
the role of anthologies in numerous articles, many of which are collected in the Part I of
Canons and Contexts, “The Canon and the Literary Profession,” (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).

466
Teachers use a wide array of introductory anthologies; I selected Norton Anthologies

because they are recognized as the most influential and widely used literature anthologies

in undergraduate education. To ensure that I examine a range of modes of canonization, I

include three anthologies. Two anthologies, The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, are devoted exclusively to

poetry in English, each with different time frames shaping the selection of the materials.

Both of these anthologies include poetry from a variety of countries, though the bulk of

the poets are from the United States. One anthology, The Norton Anthology of American

Literature, is devoted to American writers; it engages in nationalist work to define an

American canon. While these three anthologies provide only a slice of data about the

canonization of lesbian and lesbian-feminist poets, I believe that the conclusions drawn

are representative.

The process of selecting work to include in anthologies is challenging. A number

of factors constrain what ultimately appears in an anthology. Anthologies draw on the

expertise of the editors: a single editor, a small group of editors, or a larger editorial

board. Literary scholarship informs editors’ selections, both their own scholarship and the

body of scholarship available and in circulation. While technology makes scholarship

more widely available, it also creates additional challenges. The availability of a large

body of scholarship creates new constraints, particularly individual’s time and attention

to attend to it. For some lesbian writers, the dearth of scholarly attention to their work

renders them less visible for consideration for inclusion in anthologies. There are also

constraints on anthologies outside the control of the editor or editors. The budget

allocated by the publisher for permissions influences not only which authors editors

467
include but also which works editors include by an individual authors. In addition, rights

to reprint work can be difficult or impossible to secure, particularly in the twentieth

century while subject to copyright. In short, I do not wish to suggest that editors of these

anthologies make conscious sexist, racist, or homophobic exclusions. Rather, this

analysis provides data to think critically about how lesbians and lesbian-feminists fare in

contemporary canonization processes.

First, a word about methodology. For each anthology, I counted the total number of

authors included in the volume; I then counted how many of them are women, how many

of them are people of color, and how many of them are queer.775 I did not count or

consider the number of individual works representing writers or the number of pages

devoted to each writer. While these may provide more granular analysis about overall

representation, I do not wish to count the number of angels on the head of a pin. I am

interested in representation broadly. For lesbian poets, I examine what poems are

included and what poems are excluded as a way to think about how work that deals

explicitly with lesbianism and lesbian sexuality is included or excluded.

The editors of the largest anthology, The Norton Anthology of American Literature,

organize it into five volumes.776 I examined only Volume E: American Literature Since

1945, given the chronological parameters of my concern.777 The Norton Anthology of

American Literature includes a wide range of literary writing—poetry, fiction, drama,

775
I use queer to include lesbians, gay men, and bisexual and transgender people.
776
Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, general editors, Wayne Franklin, Philip F. Gura,
Jerome Klinkowitz, Arnold Krupat, Mary Loeffelholz, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, and
Patricia B. Wallace, editors, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Eighth
Edition, New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
777
An analysis of the full collection certainly would yield interesting data.

468
public speeches, and personal writing. All of the volumes are organized chronologically

by the birth year of the author. Volume E begins with Stanley Kunitz, born in 1905, and

ends with Junot Díaz, born in 1968. In addition to the presentation of individual authors

with a selection of work by each author, there are two special sections in Volume E, one

on “Postmodern Manifestos” and the other “Creative Nonfiction.”

Of the ninety-five authors included in Volume E, thirty-five are women (36.8%)

and of those, eight are lesbians or bisexual women (8.4%). Thirty-two of the authors are

people of color (33.7%), with four openly gay male authors among that cohort. Within

the “Postmodern Manifestos,” of the eight excerpts, two are by women (25.0%) and one

is by a person of color (12.5%). Within the “Creative Nonfiction” section, of the seven

authors, four are women (57.1%) and three are people of color (37.5%).

Many of the women poets in this anthology were published early in lesbian-

feminist print culture, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sharon

Olds, Alice Walker, Joy Harjo, and Ursula K. LeGuin.778 Bishop makes a prominent

appearance with eleven poems, including her most anthologized poems, as does

Gwendolyn Brooks; Muriel Rukeyser is not included in this anthology. The two new

women poets added to this edition of the anthology are Sharon Olds and Kay Ryan. Olds

published in feminist periodicals early in her career, and, although Kay Ryan did not

publish in lesbian-feminist periodicals, she was the first openly lesbian United States Poet

Laureate. The selections from both Rich and Lorde elide the explicit lesbian sexuality of

their work. The editors include two poems from Rich’s earlier work, “Snapshots of a
778
The appearance of an author in lesbian-feminist print culture is not an indication of the
author’s sexual orientation. Lesbian-feminist publications published work by women of
all sexual orientations. The appearance is indicative of an author’s alliance with
feminism.

469
Daughter-in-Law” and “Diving into the Wreck,” as well as more recent work, but most of

her explicitly lesbian work, like “Twenty-One Love Poems,” is not included. Lorde’s

work emphasizes her intersectional identities as an African-American woman and

mother.

The second anthology I examined is the fifth edition of The Norton Anthology of

Poetry.779 This anthology covers poetry from “Caedmon’s Hymn” and Beowulf to

contemporary poems by Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, and Greg Williamson. This

anthology has 335 individual authors.780 Of these there are seventy-one women (21.2%).

I wondered if the anthology included more women writers from the twentieth-century. It

does not. In the anthology, 168 authors were born in the 20th century; thirty-eight women

of them are women, or 22.6%. Thus, there is not a significant increase in women poets

represented when examining only the twentieth-century. Women are represented at just

over twenty percent throughout the anthology. The representation of women writers in

earlier time periods in this anthology is a testament to the work of feminist literary critics

in recuperating women writers from a wide range of historical periods in United States

literature.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry includes a selection of work by both Elizabeth

Bishop and Muriel Rukeyser as well as May Swenson. Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde

are the only contemporary lesbian-feminist poets included, though other feminist poets

779
Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, The Norton Anthology of
Poetry, Full Fifth Edition, New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
780
I excluded unattributed selections in the anthology such as Riddles and Anonymous
Lyrics.

470
are included, like Margaret Atwood, Jorie Graham, Carol Ann Duffy, Fleur Adcock, and

Eleanor Wilner.

The third anthology I examined was The Norton Anthology of Modern and

Contemporary Poetry.781 This anthology focuses on poetry in English.782 The anthology

offers a wide selection of each poet’s work and is divided into two volumes, Modern

Poetry (volume 1) and Contemporary Poetry (volume 2). I examined Contemporary

Poetry (volume 2). The volume contains 124 poets; forty-one of the poets are women

(33.0%) and thirty-one are people of color (24.8%). There are fourteen poets (11.3%) in

the anthology who are openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual. In particular in this volume, there

are substantial selections from Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Muriel Rukeyser,

Adrienne Rich, including “Twenty-one Love Poems,” Audre Lorde, and Marilyn Hacker,

though not her most erotic poetry.783

The paltry representation of women in The Norton Anthology of Poetry gives me

pause. What message do the editors transmit to students and scholars in a collection that

is less than twenty-five percent women writers? Perhaps Woolf’s observation in A Room

of One’s Own is accurate, “if we live another century or so. . .and have five hundred a

year each of us and rooms of our own. . .then the opportunity will come and the dead poet

781
Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Claire, editors, The Norton
Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003.
782
I note that, while not part of my project, an analysis and critique of this volume
through the lens of the national origin of poets included would be an interesting and rich
examination.
783
The first volume contains a robust selection of poems by Gertrude Stein, including
some of her most lesbo-erotic poems.

471
who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.”784

But we are inching to her imagined future, and while recent achievements by women

poets are proving Woolf’s prescience, the representation in anthologies like The Norton

Anthology of Poetry demonstrate more absence than presence. Moreover, I find it striking

that two of the three contemporary anthologies include women as one-third of the overall

anthologized authors. It seems uncanny. I do not know if W. W. Norton as a publisher

has a policy about the overall inclusion of women and people of color in their

anthologies, but the recurrent percentage of women included, one-third, seems too

convenient.

This observation drove me back to my own college textbooks from the late 1980s. I

examined the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, published in

1988.785 The second edition is a single volume. I examined both the full volume and half

of the volume, beginning with Olson, to have an accurate comparison with the third

edition which is expanded to two volumes. In the second half of the second edition, there

are eighty-one poets, of whom thirty are women (37%). There are more women in the

third edition, forty-one, than in the second edition, thirty, but women represent a higher

percentage, thirty-seven percent (37%) in the second edition than in the third edition

(33.0%). Before Olson, there are sixty-eight poets; nine of whom are women (13%).

Thus, the overall book contains 149 poets, thirty-nine of them are women (26%). The

expansion of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry into two

784
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1928, 1957), 117-118.
785
Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair, editors, The Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry, Second Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). This is a text I used as an
undergraduate.

472
volumes for the third edition brings more poets—and more women poets—into the

collection, but the overall percentage of women decreases by four percent (4%). While

this decrease seems small and may be invisible to readers who only note that there are

more women in the new edition, it raises the question, when will we have anthologies

with gender parity?

What do these anthologies tell us about lesbian poets? Lesbian poets are

included—and some of their most lesbo-erotic poetry is also included. Moreover, the

biographical entries of the poets included details that make the lesbian poets visible and

recognizable; this is particularly important for young students newly encountering the

material. Although lesbian poets and writers are represented in the anthologies, including

some writers whose work first circulated publicly through lesbian print culture, some of

the most beloved poets to lesbian readers during the 1970s and 1980s are excluded. As

just one example, the absence of any selections from Judy Grahn’s work in any of these

anthologies is palpable; Grahn may be one of the most powerful voices not only of

feminism and the WLM but of working people. The omission of Grahn, and other poets

whose work came into prominence through the WLM, including Joan Larkin, Susan

Griffin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Pat Parker, Stephanie Byrd, and Cherrie Moraga,

demonstrates the rapidity with which lesbian writers are forgotten. Honor Moore’s new

anthology from the Library of America, Poems from the Women’s Movement,786 returns

many of these poems to print and provides their work with greater circulation, but they

still remain excluded in basic classroom texts, an important tool of canon-making.

786
Honor Moore, Poems from the Women’s Movement (New York: Library of America,
2009).

473
 Reading to find lesbians in general anthologies is daunting work. General literature

anthologies are not conceived or designed for reading with granularity and particularity

on any issue. Anthologies are designed by editors and publishers to expose students to

broad traditions of genre and national literature. Although anthologies introduce

diversity, in the broadest sense of the word, they also organize and regularize the

cacophony of voices within them through both the broader intellectual narratives of the

anthology and through typography, design, and presentation. In spite of this, finding

lesbians and lesbian poetics in contemporary anthologies is possible. Moreover,

anthologies change over time and through new scholarly attentions. Yet, from my

analysis, changes in regard to the inclusion of women writers are not dramatic. Given that

feminist literary criticism has been a significant engagement of literary scholarship for

the past forty years, and that women writers are still only a third of the authors in

anthologies, at best, literary criticism may not be enough. The data of this anthology

analysis suggests that we need a barricade moment in literary studies to bring gender

parity to anthologies. One-third—or less—is simply adequate. The paltry representation

is a failure of editors and publishers and a disservice to students and scholars.

Lesbian-Feminist Aesthetes

Imagine a middle-aged white man, between forty-five and fifty-five, about five

feet, four inches tall, weighing about 125 pounds. He stands before you in brown Bruno

Magli shoes; he is wearing slighted faded Levis that fit his frame perfectly and a pressed,

buttoned-down, lilac shirt. His hair is coiffed, treated with a small amount of “product,”

but it ripples when he passes his fingers through it. If you speak to this man, he may talk

474
about fashion or modern dance or contemporary art. Is the man who stands before you,

whom you certainly recognize as a gay man, an aesthete?

Imagine a young Latina, between twenty-five and thirty, about five feet tall, lithe,

with the frame of a dancer. She stands before you in a warm-up suit, fire engine red, with

worn sneakers. She spends much time in silent reverie, but occasionally the ideas and

energy burst forth: the last choreographer she worked with, a new project she is working

on with a small dance collective downtown, the first time she went to the ballet as a

young child. She tells you about a poetry reading she went to last week at a dingy

coffeehouse in the neighborhood where she lives. It was alive, I tell you, alive! One

woman in particular, she was fierce and angry and tender. I want to take those poems

and set them in motion. I want to make a dancer out of her; I want to make a dance from

her words. Is this woman who stands before you, whom you certainly recognize as a

lesbian, an aesthete?

Imagine a young African-American woman, between thirty and forty, almost six

feet tall; she may tower over you. She wears a small gold stud earring in her nose and a

gold loop pierces the top of her ear; beyond these markers, though, she dresses

conservatively: a tailored, pinstriped suit, black pumps with a low heel. Today, she is

tired from the two hundred young children who visited the library this afternoon where

she works. First, story hour for the youngest ones, then crafts for the third and fourth

graders, then a book-making class for middle schoolers. She is too tired to speak to you—

the children, the activities, the long day. She pulls out a book from her leather satchel. It

is old, not quite tattered, but delicate. She holds it carefully. Is it? Could it be? A first

edition of Annie Allen? Would she carry a book that valuable in her bag? Take it out to

475
read in a quiet moment at the end of the day? Yes, you nod, yes, quite possibly, it is. Is

this woman who stands before you, whom you certainly recognize as a lesbian, an

aesthete?

Imagine an older African-American man, between seventy and eight. He stands

before you with a black enamel cane. He is wearing a brown suit. A silk cream, collarless

shirt beneath the double-breasted blazer. Beneath his sleeve, a gold watch; beneath his

pants, silk socks. He is happy to discuss the recent death of Derrick Bell or the news of

that young man, Eric Michael Dyson, teaching a class at Georgetown about Jay Z. He

would also be happy to discuss the music of Ella Fitzgerald or his recent trip to Israel and

the Wailing Wall. Is this man, whom you clearly recognize as gay, an aesthete?

Now imagine a middle-aged white woman, somewhere between forty-five and

fifty-five, about five feet, four inches tall, weighing about 175 pounds. She stands before

you solid in Birkenstock sandals; she is wearing billowy purple cotton pants and a navy

blue long-sleeve t-shirt. Her hair is closely-cropped to her head, or it is long and tied back

in a single pony tail. She is wearing two or maybe three silver rings. She doesn’t wear

make-up or contact lenses, preferring somewhat thick plastic classes with an extra pair of

readers hanging around her neck. She carries a fabric bag filled with books and random

papers, it has the logo of an environmental or human rights non-profit organization on it,

but it is fading from many cycles through the laundry. If you speak to this woman, she is

as likely to discuss human rights in China, the outsourcing of labor for the construction of

electronics, a recent novel by Sapphire, or The Book of Mormon on Broadway. Is the

woman who stands before you, whom you certainly recognize as a lesbian, an aesthete?

476
 When I say aesthete, what image comes into your mind? How is it gendered? How

is it racialized? What, if any, is the sexual orientation of the person in your mind’s eye?

All of these imagined people are aesthetes. According to the Oxford English

Dictionary, an aesthete is “one who professes a special appreciation of what is beautiful,

and endeavours to carry his ideas of beauty into practical manifestation.”787 This

definition certainly describes many of the lesbians who were publishers and promoters of

lesbian print culture from 1969 until 1989. Individually and collectively, they professed a

special appreciation for what is beautiful; they worked to manifest beauty in the everyday

lives of the women around them.

Our contemporary notion of who is an aesthete—and of what are aesthetics—is

narrowly defined by a set of issues and concerns deeply entwined with what Woolf calls

highbrow and with what Rancière identifies as a “specific regime for the identification of

art.”788 These myopic definitions of aesthetics—and of aesthetes— exclude the very

actors that I care about the most. In fact, the meanings of aesthete and of aesthetics are

expansive. They suggest the ability to apprehend through objects (books, poems, visual

art, performance art) experiences in the world. The labels, aesthetes and aesthetics, like

all labels, are significant. Rather than eschewing these labels, I am interested in the bold

reclamation of them as a strategy to create more space for aesthetic appraisals and

appreciations of lesbian print culture. Lesbian-feminist writers and publishers in the

1970s and 1980s were aesthetes. Moreover, lesbian-feminist publishing made a number

787
Second edition, 1989; online version September 2011.
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/3236>; accessed 31 October 2011. Earlier version first
published in New English Dictionary, 1884.
788
Rancière, Aesthetics, 8.

477
of important aesthetic interventions. Lesbian-feminist writers and publishers understood

their work in relationship to the sensorium, including, but not limited to beauty and

sublimity. Seeing lesbian-feminists as aesthetes engages a different type of appreciation

for their work. In addition to seeing the work as political and having material impacts, for

which I have argued rigorously in previous chapters, seeing lesbian-feminist work as

aesthetic engages in a long artistic tradition of understanding the effects of the work on

the sensoria of viewers. Finally, understanding the aesthetic contributions of lesbian-

feminist writing and publishing opens more possibilities for the work produced by lesbian

writers to engage in systems of canonization. Appreciating the aesthetics of lesbian print

culture and making the aesthetics of the work visible in a greater sphere makes the work

of lesbian print culture more apprehensible to a broad group of readers.

The aesthetic innovations of lesbian print culture fall into three categories. First,

lesbian writers and publishers defined a lesbian-feminist aesthetic through what was

published. Second, lesbian-feminist publishers articulated an aesthetic through the books

themselves. Third, the circulation of the books and objects of lesbian print culture was

itself an aesthetic intervention. Lesbian-feminists invested in aesthetic standards that they

created in order to engage the sensoria of lesbian-feminist readers. Ultimately, the

aesthetics of lesbian print culture have been adopted and circulated outside of lesbian

print culture—a phenomena I discuss in the final two sections of this chapter.

Three lesbian-feminist aesthetics emerge from material published by lesbian print

culture from 1969 until 1989: accessibility, writing explicitly about lesbian sexuality, and

using experience as a strategy to develop lesbian-feminist theory. Each of these

characteristics are not merely descriptive of the work from lesbian print culture, but are

478
aesthetic markers that emerge from the work to reorder the sensible and rewrite notions

of place and space through artistic media.

Lesbian-feminist publishers valued clear, accessible language. Accessibility,

however, does not mean plain, or simple, language. Sometimes accessible language is

plain, reflecting the diction and structure of language spoken among women gathered

together. Accessibility, however, did not mean language denuded of the complexity and

beauty that characterizes literature. The language of Pat Parker’s poetry or Judy Grahn’s

poetry or Stephanie Byrd’s poetry is language that might be overhead by women

speaking casually among one another, but it is also language that is artfully crafted to

give this illusion.

Accessibility also refers to accessing feminist consciousness. When lesbian poets

and critics write about accessibility in the 1970s and 1980s, they reference the ideas of

breaking down barriers to reveal a new consciousness that would transform the world.

Lesbian-feminist writers and theorists believed that, through feminist work, readers could

access difficult and complex visions of a new feminist work. For example, throughout

The Cook and the Carpenter, June Arnold employs a new system for pronouns in the

text, the ungendered words “na” and “nan.”789 These new pronouns interrupt language

and invite readers to reflect on how hegemonic gender is in our most basic forms of

thinking and writing. These new pronouns create challenges for readers encountering The

Cook and the Carpenter. For readers, it is unsettling to integrate these pronoun

appellations. The text is not easy to read and understand, but for lesbian-feminists in the

1970s it was accessible; it allowed them to access a new, feminist consciousness.

789
Marge Piercy created a similar set of ungendered pronouns in her 1976 novel Woman
on the Edge of Time.

479
Unfamiliarity makes The Cook and the Carpenter difficult and even at times unclear; in

spite of this, the novel is not inaccessible. For contemporaneous readers, the novel was

accessible; it enabled them to access feminist consciousness. 790

Sally Miller Gearheart’s The Wanderground is another book that forges feminist

consciousness.791 The Wanderground, subtitled Stories of the Hill Women, is a futuristic

novel that is both fantasy and apocalypse. The fantasy is the world of the Hill Women, a

separate, woman-only community; the apocalypse is the city, from which the women

have retreated, which is devastated from war or an environmental catastrophe. The Hill

Women retreat because it is their only chance for survival. The Hill Women have special

powers of intuition and healing. Gearheart animates these special powers in two ways:

she tells stories about relationships between and among the women and she describes the

special characteristics of the community through compound words: mindchannels,

listenspread, frostbreaths, and fallaway, to give a few examples. These compound words

have simple, common words as their root, but when combined together they elicit new

meanings that correspond with the benefits of a feminist, separatist utopia. The

compound words in the text are not limited to the special powers of the Hill Women.

790
I note here that many lesbian-feminists believed that feminist, or lesbian-feminist
consciousness, was something that could be accessed through the imaginative creations
of language acts. In some ways, these women understood feminist consciousness as
already always existing and facilitated into being through language acts. I state this in
Butlerian, post-modern language, although they did not understand it in that way. Many
lesbian-feminists believed that the literary creations of women like Arnold in The Cook
and the Carpenter accessed an existing feminist world as opposed to creating a feminist
future through the experience of readers encountering the text. It seems to me that
lesbian-feminists beliefs during the 1970s and 1980s, the sinuous relationship between
the past, present, and future, and the theoretical insights of post-modernism offer
dynamic but not irreconcilable tensions as they reside restively together.
791
Sally Miller Gearheart, The Wanderground (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1978.

480
Gearheart uses compound words throughout the text to describe landscapes, experiences,

directions, and feelings. The effect of this language is a layering of meaning which

sometimes creates more specificity and other times creates confusion. Similar to reading

The Cook and the Carpenter, entering the world of The Wanderground requires readers

to engage with Gearheart to create imaginatively the women-only community. In The

Wanderground, the work of accessing the future feminist world is shared work between

Gearheart as the author and individuals as readers. Thus, while I describe clear,

accessible language as an aesthetic principle of lesbian print culture, accessible language

is rich with complexity and multiple meanings, and it is rooted in a vision of feminist

social change.

The second aesthetic value that emerges from lesbian print culture is the primacy

of lesbian bodies, lesbian sexuality, and lesbian eroticism to aesthetic experience. Explicit

writing about bodies and sexuality had different meanings. Educational and political

intentions are common in publishing explicit work about women’s sexuality. For

instance, Joani Blank’s book, The Playbook for Women about Sex (Down There Press,

1975), educated women about sexuality with an explicitly feminist political message.

Aesthetic meanings were as important as educational or political meanings, particularly

in relationship to lesbian sexuality. Writers and publishers profiled lesbians’ writing and

art about lesbian bodies, lesbian sexuality, and lesbian eroticism. In 1976, Sinister

Wisdom featured a photograph by Tee Corinne of two nude women with one in a

wheelchair; they reprinted the image as a poster which became a best-seller in a variety

of feminist bookstores. Similarly, Corinne’s The Cunt Coloring Book, a series of line

drawings of female genitalia, was a success for Corinne. The Cunt Coloring Book, which

481
literally provided templates for women to color on and explore the many varieties of

female genitalia, is one example of how lesbians explored lesbian sexuality through book

arts. The purpose of this publishing was not to titillate lesbian readers, though certainly

sometimes it did, but to present lesbian sexuality as a subject worthy of consideration in

high art.

Poets wrote about explicitly about lesbian sexuality throughout the 1970s and the

1980s. Two examples demonstrate how lesbians used the traditional sonnet form—with

all of its aesthetic associations with male/female dyads and courtly love—to create space

within traditional poetic forms for lesbian sexuality and desire. For example, consider

Joan Larkin’s “‘Vagina’ Sonnet” published in her first book, Housework:

Is “vagina” suitable for use

in a sonnet? I don’t suppose so.
A famous poet told me, “Vagina’s ugly.”
Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems.
Meanwhile, he inserts his penis frequently
into his verse, calling it, seriously, “My
Penis.” It is short, I know, and dignified.
I mean of course the sound of it. In poems.
This whole thing is unfortunate, but petty,
like my hangup concerning English Dept. Memos
headed “Mr./Mrs./Miss”—only a fishbone
in the throat of the revolution—
a waste of brains—to be concerned about
this minor issue of my cunt’s good name.792

Larkin addresses both political and aesthetic issues in the poem in deeply entwined ways.

The central trope of the suitability of the word vagina for a sonnet alludes to the aesthetic

question of what is appropriate to write about in poetry. Larkin then puns on the visuality

and sonic qualities of the vagina, juxtaposing it literally and metaphorically with penis.

The volta in this poem is at the beginning of the final sestet when Larkin declares, “This
792
Joan Larkin, Housework (Brooklyn: Out & Out Books, 1976), 70.

482
whole thing is unfortunate, but petty.” She turns her attention then to the question of

“English Dept. Memos” and their language of formal address. She describes both the

language of formal address, aligned with the use of the word vagina in a sonnet, as “a

fishbone/in the throat of the revolution,” suggesting that there are bigger changes afoot

for women than their formal appellations and vaginas. This tongue-in-cheek suggestion

ends with Larkin’s minimizing the central question, in a Woolfian ironic move, as a

“minor issue of my cunt’s good name.” In the conclusion, Larkin substitutes “cunt” for

“vagina,” employing a word considered even more vulgar and ugly by some. This

substitution asserts Larkin’s power as a poet to name herself and her body parts, both in

the sonnet and in the world. By employing a sonnet, Larkin asserts her power as a woman

to engage in broader aesthetic questions that include and celebrate women’s bodies.

While Larkin’s sonnet commingles politics and aesthetics, in Hacker’s novel in

sonnets Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, politics are more tangential. The

narrative focuses initially on the lust and desire of the lovers. Hacker writes,

Hey, listen, the day when it’s you and me

heart to cunt to heart to cunt, all clear
for me to call and say, ‘Get over here
now, girl!’ and you would with your own key.”793

With these lines, Hacker creates a visual image of lesbian sex, “heart to cunt to heart to

cunt,” reusing the reclaimed vulgar word “cunt” to express a visual image of physical

lesbian desire. This visual image is animated with the urgency of sex begin new lovers,

“Get over here/now, girl!” Hacker reinforces the centrality of lesbian sexuality and the

beauty of it through the rhyme scheme in this quatrain. The ABBA rhyme scheme pairs

793
Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (New York: Arbor
House, 1986), 19.

483
the words “me” and “key” in the first and fourth lines and the words “clear” and “here” in

the second and third lines. The quatrain resists the end stop of each line; the energy runs

through linear enjambment, mimicking the energy of the two new lovers to assume the

position of their lust and desire. Through form and craft, Hacker situates lesbian sex

within the aesthetic convention of the sonnet as a way to claim the space for lesbian

sexuality.

In a later sonnet in the collection, Hacker writes,

First, I want to make you come in my hand

while I watch you and kiss you, and if you cry,
I’ll drink your tears while, with my whole hand, I
hold your drenched loveliness contracting. And
after a breath, I want to make you full
again, and wet. I want to make you come
in my mouth like a storm. No tears now. The sum
of your parts is my whole most beautiful
chart of the constellations—your left breast
in my mouth again. You know you’ll have to be
your age. As I lie beside you, cover me
like a gold cloud, hands everywhere, at last
inside me where I trust you, then your tongue
where I need you. I want you to make me come.794

In this sonnet, Hacker describes lesbian love-making within the constraints of the sonnet

form. She describes not only manual and digital stimulation of her lover’s vulva and

vagina, but also oral stimulation, “I want to make you come/in my mouth like a storm.”

Using the Shakespearean sonnet form to shape her evocation of the action, Hacker also

uses the common tropes of literary sonnets: storms, constellations, clouds. Hacker weaves

these canonical allusions into her description of lesbianism to demonstrate how lesbian

bodies and lesbian sex and desire operate within the registers of human experiences.

794
Hacker, Love, Death, 21.

484
 From the Hacker and Larkin sonnets, the project of lesbian-feminists to write

lesbian bodies and women’s bodies with defiant specificity. The effect of this is to situate

lesbian bodies as both perfectly ordinary and transcendently aesthetic. Hacker, Larkin,

and a host of lesbian-feminist poets work to make space in poetry for lesbian bodies and

lesbian sexuality. This content choice, while crucial for both political and personal

reasons to poets, is also an aesthetic choice—and an aesthetic intervention into the field

of poetry. The explicit presence of lesbian bodies and lesbian love-making also sets the

stage for the resistance of receiving lesbian-feminist poetry as aesthetically significant. In

the dichotomy that Woolf observes, the body is reserved for the lowbrow; thus, poetry

that concerns itself centrally with the body is received as lowbrow. Explicit descriptions

of the body in all of its glory cues readers that the work is lowbrow. Woolf’s observation

that highbrow is yoked to the mind, while lowbrow is yoked to the body, illuminates one

of the barriers lesbian-feminist writers from the 1970s and 1980s experience in the

aesthetic reception of their work. By unpacking and challenging that dichotomy, lesbian-

feminist poetry can be recuperated and appreciated for its aesthetic value.

The third aesthetic value that emerges from lesbian print culture is using personal

experience as an aesthetic object and as a site to build lesbian and feminist theory. Audre

Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Minnie Bruce Pratt are all classic examples of writers whose

work in both poetry and prose explores the nexus of personal experience and theory

building with aesthetic intentions.795 Since their work has been treated extensively by

795
Stacey Young examines Minnie Bruce Pratt in relationship to autotheoretical texts in
Changing the Wor(l)d; Alexis De Veaux situates Lorde’s biography in relationship to her
creative output and the generation of feminist and lesbian-feminist theory; Rich’s Of
Woman Born is an example from her oeuvre of how her prose used personal experience
to build feminist theory.

485
scholars, I turn to the poetry of Stephanie Byrd, published in two chapbooks, A Distant

Footstep on the Plain and 25 Years of Malcontent, to explore this value. Byrd, an

African-American poet based in Boston, MA, published these two chapbooks in 1976 and

1981, respectively. Byrd writes forcefully about her experiences as an African-American

lesbian exploring many issues and themes similar to those of Lorde and Parker in her

work. Byrd’s poetry is the site of much theorizing, particularly about the legacies of

slavery, the diasporic nature of the African people in the United States, and her

intersectional subject position as a woman, African-American, and lesbian. In “Quarter of

a Century,” Byrd reflects on naming. The poem opens, “I’ll never know my real

naming/Never know its origin.”796 Byrd continues that she was “born into uncertainty and

schizophrenia” and “a place where I have no say.”797 She says she lives “with the ghosts

of slaves” and her “body aches from unseen beatings.”798 She cries “tears of blood” and

works

Tilling a field of my brother’s

And sister’s
Bleeding bodies
And all in the while searching for a naming799

She explores the naming through her grandmother, who tells her that “her grandmother’s

mother was called Smothers.”800 After exploring the absence of names, Byrd affirms that

she has sought names “in strange women’s breasts/and between their legs.” Byrd posits

796
Stephania Byrd, 25 Years of Malcontent (Boston: Good Gay Poets, 1976), 20.
797
Ibid.
798
Ibid.
799
Ibid.
800
Ibid.

486
that she names herself through the act of lesbian sex. Like Larkin and Hacker, the

carnality of the body resonates beyond the physical. The bodies of “strange women”

become a corporeal realization of naming oneself as a woman and as a lesbian.

At this point in the poem, Byrd seeks “naming in bones,” which becomes the

guiding image of the remainder of the poem. Byrd gathers “bones of past and

present/carving them with knives/reading them with bibles/pounding them in rhythms”

until she stands up “hoping to be Ezekiel.” In the final stanza, Byrd writes,

Bones say seek my naming in the East

swollen cracked lips tell me to turn home
grandmothers warn me to turn away the alien ways of
what is white
For when these things are connected
Winding serpentine in hieroglyphs and
language
a name long evasive wanderer and prophet
will be written on the stone801

Throughout this poem, Byrd theorizes naming from the experience of being unnamed as a

legacy of racism and slavery and from the experience of being a lesbian. She concludes

that she is a wanderer and a prophet, but that her name will ultimately be “written on the

stone.” The sonic resonance of stone and bone, the image that dominates the final stanza

of the poem, demonstrates permanence, bodily and metaphorically. Byrd theorizes using

metaphor, imagery, and allusion in this poem. Her personal voice, grounded in her

individual experience, transforms through the poem to a poetic voice, a communal voice,

that offers theoretical insight.

In “The Earth’s Poor Relations,” Byrd theorizes the relationship between class and

race in the United States. The poem opens:

801
Ibid.

487
 All these maladjustment problems
add up
to one thing
work will get you money
but I seems
to find
that this
this receipt
of pay
isn’t enough802

The title sets the intention for the poem, to speak about “poor relations,” and the selection

of “the earth’s” poor relations suggests the broad emotional and intellectual reach of the

poem, even as it opens with the very particular plight of the speaker of not having enough

money. After this opening, the speaker reflects on how there isn’t enough money and “we

always feudin” about small amounts of money that are “totally unrelated” when the “need

for not 10’s or 20’s/but thousands.”803 Through these lines, the speaker locates herself in

a particular place and excavates the conflicts that emerge about money. Someone reminds

the speaker of the poem about “how cousin allie/made do on $40/a month,” which she

refutes as being “40 or more years ago.”804 Byrd grounds this poem in both a general and

a specific location as well as in a particular historical moment. The poem continues,

referencing “Andrew Young or Cicely Tyson/ they making baskets of dough,/even

millions.”805 While many of Byrd’s poems explore the tension between white people and

African-Americans, in this poem she excavates class conflicts within the African-

American community, using dialect to represent ironically the voice of poor African-

802
Stephania Byrd, A Distant Footstep on the Plain, 45.
803
Ibid.
804
Ibid.
805
Ibid.

488
American women and demonstrating how these conflicts are both interracial and

intraracial.

“The Earth’s Poor Relations” concludes with this stanza:

just to give niggers like me

the chance to print up my own words
but the folks don’t know that
you gots to pay somebody
just to learn to ask right or
you gots to screw and I ain’t talking messing
it’s about your whole body and mind
and I don’t whore for art or money
and I don’t like giving them any more
than I have to to survive
but some how the fights
they break out and we cry
the animals howl along in tune
and my mind can only reach towards
thousands because
the millions would cost us too much806

Questions of scale are central to this poem, from the scale of Byrd’s particular location to

the earth overall, from the question of $40 a month forty years ago or $400 a month

today, from “reaching towards/thousands” or “the millions.” The question is: what is the

scale, or register, to understand these economic questions.

Byrd’s theorizing through her personal experiences and the personal narratives of

the other characters that she introduces in her poems are one dimension of lesbian-

feminist aesthetics. The aesthetic elements of her work—the presentation on the page, the

use of language that is both direct and to some readers shocking, the imagery and

allusion, all work together to create the aesthetic experience of the poem, one which is

grounded in Byrd’s personal experience and builds theoretical interventions that explicate

806
Ibid.

489
her subject position as an African-American lesbian and to explore the production of her

art.

In addition to the aesthetic values that emerge from the work of lesbian print

culture, two other arena for aesthetic expression emerge: the books themselves and the

mechanisms of distribution. Books were aesthetic objects in lesbian-feminist

communities. Lesbian-feminist publishers created books that were by their own

estimation and by the estimations of their readers beautiful. Perhaps the strongest

measure of this beauty was the physical appearance. This beauty was achieved through

the combination of visual representations with language. Grahn articulated this as a

central value of the Women’s Press Collective. While Grahn’s words echo Marxist

rhetoric about the value of art and literature in revolutionary work, over time, the

combination of visual art and language together becomes an aesthetic hallmark of

lesbian-feminist print culture. Particularly for publishers of poetry chapbooks, combining

art and poems became de riguer. The earliest chapbooks of poetry anthologies, Dykes for

an Amerikan Revolution, We Are All Lesbians, and WPC’s Woman to Woman, begin this

dialogue within books between visual art and poetry. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s,

chapbooks continue to include art and poetry, including books by Susan Sherman,

Willyce Kim, and Pat Parker. In the 1980s, publishers like Firebrand Books and Naiad

Press value the art and design of their books, with particular attention cover art.

Publishers Nancy Bereano and Barbara Grier note that book covers have important

marketing value; quite simply, books with better covers sell more. This attention to book

covers, however, is also a continued enactment of the lesbian-feminist aesthetic of

creating dialogue between words and images in lesbian print culture.

490
 What constitutes beauty in the physical appearance of books, however, operated on

two seemingly contradictory registers. On one hand, books that appeared handmade,

feminist, woman-made were particularly admired exactly for their rejection of traditional

standards in book arts. On the other hand, books that appeared as good as or better than

trade publishing books were equally hailed as vital to the lesbian-feminist aesthetic. This

dynamic tension shaped the publishing activities of lesbian print culture and enabled a

multiplicity of practices. Some publishers worked to “outdo” the patriarchal publishing

houses through women’s labor. Other publishers rejected the slick production of

commercial publishing and promoted a handmade aesthetic that celebrated and affirmed

women’s actions as the creator of the object. Both tendencies are aesthetic values of

lesbian print culture.

These two aesthetic tendencies join together to create an ethos that defined the

lesbian community as being “by, for, and about women.” This phrase is repeated on

multiple flyers describing aspects of lesbian print culture as well as other cultural objects

and activities that emerge from lesbian-feminism. The phrase is later adapted by Lesbian

Connection to define businesses as LOO, Lesbian Owned and Operated. This value of

women’s being responsible for all aspects of an object’s production is rooted in

economics. Emphasizing something as “by, for, and about women” (or lesbians) suggests

building an alternate economy in which women are central and can eschew the

patriarchal economy. The phrase worked in both political and economic registers. It was

also an aesthetic statement. By suggesting that this idea—by, for, and about women

(lesbians)—is an aesthetic principle, I do not diminish the economic aspects of the

principle. Rather it is a principle that is both economic and aesthetic; the concatenation of

491
the two amplifies how this value operated in lesbian-feminist communities. Being

“woman-made” and using woman-owned resources through the entire development and

supply chain was a point of pride for many lesbian-feminists, including those in book

publishing. While many publishers found the model unsustainable over time (both Naiad

and Firebrand books used non-woman-owned printers, for example), it is a principle that

was significant and has lasting meaning. As an aesthetic principle, describing something

as “woman-made” or “lesbian-made” did not simply evoke economics. It stated

something about the nature of the object itself. It implied a particular type of beauty. It

suggests, like Kantian definitions of beauty, that beauty cannot be understood simply by

understanding the tools that create art or the elements within the art, rather, it suggests

that beauty is apprehended through the combination of all of these elements.

Finally, lesbian print culture built communities to distribute books, journals, and

other objects of lesbian print culture. These communities included bookstores,

coffeehouses, conferences, feminist celebrations such as International Women’s Day and

other formal and informal lesbian and feminist gatherings. While these communities were

an economic engine for lesbian print culture, they were also an aesthetic intervention. For

lesbian-feminists, community was an aesthetic object, that is, it was an object and an

experience to be constructed in an artful way. Characteristics of the aesthetics of

communities include the conscious construction of the community, particularly thinking

intensively about who was included and who was excluded; open and transparent

decision making processes in which all decisions for the community, and in many cases

for the individual, were discussed, debated, and critiqued; and a blend of culture and

commerce. The spaces in which lesbian-feminist communities existed—coffeehouses,

492
bookstores, community gatherings—were arranged in particular aesthetic ways that were

collages and mosaics of a larger imagined community. Thus, the distribution

communities of lesbian print culture were aesthetic objects of lesbian-feminism. They

defined beauty for women through the physical space they created, the affective

experience they offered, and the imagined environment of support, nurturance, and

solidarity for one’s being. Certainly, community as an aesthetic object was not always

realized; perhaps more often it existed only as an ideal. Miranda Joseph critiques the

fetishization of community, which is an element of community for lesbian-feminists. For

Joseph, community is fetishized as a construct that exists outside of the constraints of

commodity capitalism; Joseph’s work demonstrates the internecine relationship between

community and capitalism.807 While Joseph’s critique is crucial to understanding how

community operates in the imaginary realm and how community materializes through

economic constraints and contingencies, it is also important to recognize the creation of

community as an aesthetic object for lesbian-feminists. For lesbian-feminists,

communities, or intentions for communities, are an important aesthetic characteristic of

lesbian print culture.

In reading these multiple sites of aesthetic interventions by lesbian print culture, I

have mapped many engagements of lesbian-feminists with aesthetics, with the sensorium.

These aesthetic engagements offer a way to appreciate lesbian print culture and to

recognize the contributions that lesbian print culture made to feminism and to United

States culture broadly. This examination also illuminates where and how aesthetics

connect with materiality, including material culture, politics, and economics.

807
Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002).

493
Rita Mae Brown

In the first chapter, I described Rita Mae Brown as a “chanteuse” of the lesbian-

feminist movement. In addition to being enchanting, Brown artistic production and

circulation offer one lens for mapping lesbian-feminist aesthetics. In her memoir, Rita

Will, Brown describes her intellectual foundations, forged at New York University in the

English Department and Classics department. She studied classical Latin, Greek,

Shakespeare, and Chaucer.808 In her writers’ manual, Starting from Scratch, Brown

provides “An Annotated Reading List” that extends from Caedmon to Anthony Burgess

and includes Beade, Malory, More, Donne, Behn, Rosetti, Wilde, Christie, Woolf and

scores of other writers.809 Brown situates herself as an heir to a long tradition of Western

literature and philosophy. Brown also forged herself intellectually through lesbian-

feminist activism. These two traditions define the aesthetics of Brown’s work. Brown’

engaged with material universally hailed as highbrow to adapt and extend it on behalf of

lesbian-feminism as a theory, practice, and epistemic position. Brown recognized lesbian-

feminists as part of elite, Western intellectual traditions. The subject position of lesbians

and feminists, however, marginalized their intellectual engagements. Nevertheless, I

argue that Brown’s work in the 1970s situates her—and her intellectual and political

comrades—in the aesthetic milieu of high art. The political realities of publishing situate

Brown as a middlebrow author. During the 1970s, Brown was an iconic writer in lesbian-

feminist communities, known for her beloved books that were a sensation among small

presses. Brown’s early poetry, novels, and essays demonstrate her intellectual

808
Rita Mae Brown, Rita Will (New York: Bantam, 1997), 202.
809
Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual (New
York: Bantam, 1988), 215-253.

494
engagements and her easy charisma, inviting in readers from around the United States to

her books. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Brown’s work moved from independent

lesbian-feminist presses to mainstream, commercial presses. Brown’s presence in

commercial publishing validated the concept of lesbian-feminist publishing: there was an

audience and a market for books by and about lesbians. Commercial publishing extended

Brown’s influence to a much wider audience, but it labeled her work as middlebrow.

Epistemologically, it was impossible for a lesbian in the late 1970s and early 1980s to be

perceived as part of the intellectual and social elite; lesbians could not be highbrow; they

were not vibrant contributors to highbrow culture. Thus, Brown settled quite happily for

commercial success and popularity. The commingling of these various aesthetic

designations demonstrates how the designation of lesbian influences aesthetic appraisals.

In the late 1960s in New York, Brown was the editor of the newsletter of the New

York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Brown was one of many

lesbians in the organization raising questions about the inclusion of lesbians in NOW’s

agenda, organizing which prompted Betty Friedan to describe lesbians as a “lavender

menace” within NOW. Brown left NOW frustrated with its lack of action to address

issues of concern to lesbians. In 1971, Brown moved to Washington, DC, and shortly

after the move she met Charlotte Bunch and other feminist activists in Washington.

Brown, Bunch, and other women founded The Furies, a lesbian-feminist collective. The

Furies published a newspaper in which they articulated many ideas central to lesbian

separatism. In her memoir, Brown describes lesbian feminism as “a harebrained idea”

that “if women were lesbians, their best energy would go to women; they would become

woman-identified instead of identifying with men, who clearly did not have their best

495
interests as a class at heart.”810 The Furies were a short-lived formation—active for about

eighteen months. The collective lived and acted in accordance with its name. Through the

intellectually vibrant and politically active environment of The Furies, Brown formulated

many ideas that connect lesbian, feminism, and socialism. In 1976, Diana Press published

Brown’s political essays in the book, A Plain Brown Wrapper. This collection

demonstrates the formative power of lesbianism, feminism, and Marxism on Brown

politically and socially.

In addition to how lesbianism and feminism shaped Brown intellectually, her early

career as a writer was nurtured by lesbian-feminist publishing, both in journals and in the

small press movement. Brown’s work was published in The Ladder, Amazon Quarterly,

and Sisters. Her novels were reviewed and she was interviewed when they were released

by a variety of publications across the United States and Canada, including Lesbian Tide

(Los Angeles, CA), Body Politic (Toronto, ONT), So’s Your Old Lady (Minneapolis,

MN), and Sojourner (Boston, MA). Lesbian print culture was crucial to the marketing

and promotion of Brown’s books; it highlighted Brown as an author and helped her to

connect with communities of readers for her creative work. After the success of Rubyfruit

Jungle, Brown published one other novel with Daughters, In Her Day (1976). Brown’s

career then moved to commercial publishing, where she was an extraordinary success.

Brown has published consistently—novels, memoirs, mysteries, and writing manuals—

since the late 1970s. She is a best-selling author of both novels and more recently

mysteries, co-authored with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown. In addition to “chanteuse,” Rita

Mae Brown has earned many other monikers: popular author, middlebrow author, and

810
Brown, Rita Will, 265-266.

496
icon of popular culture. While I do not want to diminish Brown’s talents and hard work

in relationship to her success, lesbian print culture provided a foundation for Brown’s

success and her work, even when published by commercial publishers, is one of the

legacies of lesbian print culture from the 1970s.

The narrative of Brown’s journey from lesbian separatist to popular culture icon is

dramatic and embodies the dispersal of lesbian-feminism in broader United States

culture. Brown’s transformation from lesbian rabble rouser to popular author mirrors

some of the political, social, and economic transformations of the past forty years. Two

factors shape Brown’s career: her writing and her charisma. Clear, easy to read, and

engaging prose characterize Brown’s writing from her first book of poetry in 1970 to her

most recent holiday mystery. From her earliest poems in The Hand That Cradles the

Rock to her recent Sneaky Pie mysteries, the voice of Brown’s writing is chatty and

accessible, as well as quirky and offbeat.

To read Brown’s entire oeuvre is to see the mind of a lesbian-feminist at work. Her

feminist commitments, her convictions as a open lesbian, her belief in an economic

system that benefits all people, not just the elite, are present throughout her books, though

at different registers. Through all of Brown’s books is a sensibility about the world, a

sensibility shaped by being an outsider who becomes an insider and by being a person

born to low-brow circumstances who comes to bask in celebrity and money from

personal success. While lesbian-feminists criticized Brown ferociously as the star of her

celebrity ascended, notably when she purchased a Rolls Royce and talked about its

pleasures to the magazine Saveur, Brown continued to speak out and write about the

same issues that she began writing about in the early 1970s. Brown writes—and thinks—

497
as a lesbian-feminist whether she is living in a collective, lesbian separatist house in

Washington, DC or a horse farm in Virginia.

Brown’s indelible charisma infuses all aspects of her life and career. Early

descriptions of Brown as “appealing and vibrant”811 and a person with “ease and wit”812

continue to be apt. In 2008, Newsweek writer Andrea Sachs said of Rita Mae Brown, “No

one could ever accuse Rita Mae Brown, 63, of having lived a boring life.”813 Brown

speaks and writes passionately. Early in her life, Brown’s politics captured the mind and

attention of lesbian-feminist communities, communities she helped to create. As her life

unfolded, she continued to write, publish, and garner media attention. Brown’s charisma

and hard work carried her through a variety of social and political environments, from

working for the lesbian-feminist revolution to being an Emmy-award winning writer in

Hollywood with Norman Lear, from traveling around the country to sell Rubyfruit Jungle

to describing her relationship with Martina Navratilova to newspaper reporters and the

general public. More than Brown’s changing over the course of her public life, the world

around her changed.

As much as Brown’s career has been driven by her writing and her charisma, the

social and political environment has been transformed during the past forty years. Brown

helped to create and benefited from these changes. From her earliest days as an activist,

Brown openly expressed her lesbianism. Brown’s platform changed, particularly in the

811
Ellen Loughlin, “An Army of Lovers,” Lesbian Tide (April 1973): 11.
812
Aleida Rodriguez and Claire Krulikowski, “Portrait of Woman as Artist,” Lesbian
Tide (June 1974): 6.
813
Andrea Sachs, “Rita Mae Brown: Loves Cats, Hates Marriage,” Newsweek (Tuesday,
March 18, 2008,)
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1723482,00.html#ixzz1w5eDS6h2.

498
years between 1972 and 1982. Brown went from speaking out in the NOW newsletter to

being interviewed by The Washington Post about her relationship with Martina

Navratilova. By the mid-1980s, media outlets like People and Time regularly covered the

release of Brown’s new books. Brown’s willingness to be out as a lesbian is a part of

what changed the contemporary reception of lesbians in the United States.

Brown matters to lesbian-feminist aesthetics. Her work—The Hand that Cradles

the Rock (1971), Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Songs for a Handsome Woman (1973), and A

Plain Brown Wrapper (1976)—helped to define lesbian-feminist aesthetics. Brown’s

bold, defiant presentation of lesbianism influences profoundly how lesbianism is written

about by lesbian-feminist writers in the 1970s. Rubyfruit Jungle, a classic of popular

lesbian literature, provides a template for lesbian writers to respond, rework, and

reimagine in subsequent decades. Books like Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the

Only Fruit (1987), Emma Donoghue’s Stir Fry (1994) and Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home

(2005) all respond directly and indirectly to the quest of Molly Bolt in Rubyfruit Jungle.

I am not arguing that Brown is an authorial candidate for entry into the bastion of

high-brow art, into the world where aesthetic appraisals deem her art of the highest form,

though I do think that Rubyfruit Jungle deserves more examination by literary critics

rather than just attention in LGBT Studies and Women’s Studies. I am arguing, however,

that Brown’s career is a consequence of what aesthetic space was available to lesbian

writers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The contingencies of commercial publishing

shaped Brown’s career and reputation as a result of where, when, and how lesbian writers

enter publishing. Brown is an example of an open lesbian writer who achieved

recognition outside of the literary and aesthetic fields of lesbian-feminism. She is a writer

499
who has supported herself consistently for four decades by publishing highbrow and

middlebrow books. From 1997 through July 2011, Rubyfruit Jungle sold 36,619 copies

according to Bookscan; Brown’s more recent books, The Purrfect Murder, sold over

31,000 copies from its release in January 2009 until July 2011, and Santa Clawed sold

31,000 copies between November 2009 and July 2011. She has lived simultaneously

inside the lesbian-feminist revolution that Arnold, Bowman, Reid, Czarnik, and Bunch

imagined, as well as inside mainstream United States popular culture. When Brown

began her publishing career, a career as an open, political lesbian could not be imagined.

The possibility of a lesbian best-selling author, of a lesbian writing middle-brow books

for popular consumption, of taking the lesbian-feminist familiar, a cat, and transforming

that into a series that is widely read by lesbians and non-lesbians alike is one that could

not be imagined. Brown created it in conjunction with many other publishers, editors, and

writers. The fact that today Brown is a best-selling author and a lesbian is a reality

worthy of celebration. It marks one transformation of our political, social, and economic

environment. Underestimating Brown’s achievements is a cruel diminishment of both her

work and of the lasting—and transformative—effects of lesbian print culture.

Adapted: Legacies of Lesbian Print Culture

Since 1996, there have been three significant film adaptations of lesbian work by

writers whose work originated in lesbian print culture. Anjelica Huston directed the

adaptation of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (hereafter Bastard) for

Showtime, a cable station, in 1996; Lee Daniels directed Precious, based on the novel

Push by Sapphire (hereafter Precious) as a feature film in 2009; Tyler Perry adapted

Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is

500
enuf (hereafter for colored girls) in 2010. Allison, Shange, and Sapphire all published

work in lesbian-feminist journals; lesbian-feminist presses published their early books.

Lesbian print culture nurtured and supported the careers of all three of these writers. The

movement of these authors’ works, first to commercial publishers and then to film,

represents wider distribution of lesbian-feminism and its attendant ideas and ideologies to

both lesbian and non-lesbian audiences.

Lesbian-feminism describes a variety of political, ideological, social, cultural, and

economic expressions of feminism and feminist alliances. The contexts and meanings of

lesbian-feminism evolve during the 1970s and 1980s, but generally lesbian-feminism is

an expression of feminist commitments that affirm and celebrate lesbianism. To examine

the material and cultural legacy of lesbian-feminism, I offer first a brief history of the

movement of books between small lesbian-feminist presses and commercial publishers. I

then discuss the early films that emerged from lesbian print culture and the challenges of

translating lesbian-feminist work into film. I then discuss each of the books offering a

reading of the text in relationship to lesbian-feminism. Finally, I examine how lesbian-

feminism translates—or doesn’t translate—in the film adaptations.

The study of these three books and their film counterparts suggest three

conclusions. First, Robert Darnton’s “Communications Circuit,” which provides a

“general model for analyzing the way books come into being and spread through

society,” needs an additional node, film, to understand how books are being spread

through society today. Second, films offer possibilities and perils for lesbian-feminist

books, though on balance the new possibilities that films created outweigh the perils.

501
Finally, these three books and the film adaptations demonstrate the on-going legacies

lesbian-feminism and lesbian print culture from the 1970s and 1980s.

From Lesbian Print Culture to Commercial Publishers

Although these three texts and the movement of the authors from small lesbian-

feminist publishers to trade publishers is notable, the boundary between small presses and

commercial publishers for lesbian writers always has been porous. Gertrude Stein’s work

moved from her small, self-publishing press, Plain Editions, to Harcourt Brace with the

book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Audre Lorde published four poetry books

with Broadside Press, a small African-American publisher based in Detroit, MI, before

W. W. Norton published her work, beginning in 1976. Rita Mae Brown published two

novels with Daughters, Inc. and two poetry collections with Diana Press, then published

her subsequent novels with commercial presses. In 1976, Bantam reissued Shange’s for

colored girls, originally published by alta’s Shameless Hussy Press. The regular

movement of authors and books from small presses to commercial publishers highlights

one of the functions of small presses historically: vetting work and authors for larger

presses.814

This vetting process by small presses functions in both aesthetic and economic

registers. Aesthetic innovators and experimental writers often find early homes for their

work at small presses. Small press publishers need to satisfy fewer editorial tastes (and

often only one) in making their selections, and they often have modest sales expectations.

The economic risks of publishing for small presses are less dispersed. In addition, often

814
A similar dynamic exists in music publishing as Geoffrey Stokes documented in Star-
Making Machinery: The Odyssey of an Album (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Inc, 1976).

502
publishers value aesthetic rewards over marketplace success. Historically, small presses

publish work and nurture audiences to buy the work. When an author has a large enough

audience for a trade press to realize profit from the work, often the author moves to a

trade press to gain greater visibility and more economic compensation for her work.

Some lesbian-feminist publishers, however, criticize this dynamic. Some lesbian-

feminist critics viewed the movement of authors from lesbian-feminist presses to trade

presses as an assault by trade publishers on small, feminist presses. June Arnold of

Daughters, Inc. wrote that the “finishing press [her phrase for commercial publishers who

want to “finish” the women’s movement]. . . does not want the independent women’s

presses to survive. Each time he takes a feminist book from us he weakens us all.”815 The

women of Persephone Press, a lesbian-feminist publisher that operated from 1977

through 1983, included a clause in their contracts that they would not sell rights to male

publishing houses. Indeed, one value of lesbian-feminist publishing during the 1970s and

1980s is to retain lesbian-feminist authors within lesbian-feminist publishing; authors

who publish with commercial presses were treated by some with suspicion and even

derision. Thus, my thesis here, that there is value to the porous relationship between

small presses and commercial publishers, would be pilloried by many of these historical

actors.

Yet, small presses receive benefits from these moves. For a small press struggling

to keep up with demand for a popular book, selling the rights for a reprint or mass market

edition can ensure the success of the book and the future success of the author—and

bring much needed revenue to the small press. The sale of Rubyfruit Jungle to Bantam by
815
June Arnold, “Feminist Presses & Feminist Politics,” Quest III, no 1 (summer 1976),
25.

503
Daughters, Inc. and the sale of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence to Warner by Naiad

Books were economic windfalls for all involved—the lesbian-feminist publisher, the

author, and the trade publisher. Lesbian readers benefitted as well; both of these books

had wide distribution not only in bookstores but as mass market paperbacks they were in

grocery stores, drugstores, and a variety of other retail outlets. They reached a much

wider audience through the mass market paperback format from a commercial publisher.

Although I respect the dissent of lesbians about “selling out” to trade presses and

agree with many of the critiques, I also celebrate the opportunities that it creates, for

publishers, for authors, and for readers. The porous relationship between lesbian-feminist

presses and commercial presses cannot be characterized as symbiotic, but these

relationships are important for the broader ecosystem of lesbian feminist publishing, and

they can be used by savvy publishers to benefit lesbian-feminist publishing. Although the

channels between small presses and trade presses have been open for lesbian-feminist

authors since the 1970s, the last two decades are unique because lesbian-feminist books

move from lesbian-feminist print culture to film. Film brings a much larger audience to

lesbian-feminist stories than any format of a printed book.

From Page to Screen

During the 1970s, Rita Mae Brown optioned Rubyfruit Jungle for a film, but,

although there were reports of its being in production, the film never materialized.816

816
In 1977, Lesbian Tide reported that the screen play for Rubyfruit Jungle was in its
second draft and director Joan Tewksbury would direct the film (Majoie Canton,
“Casting Begins for Rubyfruit Movie,” Lesbian Tide 6, no. 6 (May/June 1977): 13), but
by 1979, Brown told Lesbian Tide that the producers were still trying to raise money for
the film and if they didn’t by August 24, 1980, the rights would revert back to her (Paula
Facine and Sharon McDonald, “The Many Faces of Rita Mae Brown,” Lesbian Tide 9,
no. 3 (Nov/Dec 1979): 4.)

504
Prior to the 1990s, the most prominent film adaptation of a lesbian novel was Alice

Walker’s The Color Purple, adapted to film by director Steven Spielberg. Audiences,

however, received The Color Purple, as a book and as a film, in the context of Walker’s

identity as an African-American feminist writer, rather than as a bisexual woman.817

Donna Deitch made Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart into a film, Desert Hearts, in 1986.

Desert Hearts was an “art house” film with modest distribution. The film was a hit with

lesbian audiences, however; when released on VHS, Naiad Press distributed Desert

Hearts directly to consumers and feminist books through its catalogues.

Translating lesbian-feminist books to commercial films poses two challenges. First,

the capital investment to produce and distribute a film is much greater than the capital

required to produce and distribute a book. Adapting the work of lesbian authors is an

economic gamble because, until recently, mainstream film audiences were not receptive

to lesbian characters and plots. Second, in some instances, lesbian-feminist ideas and

values expressed in books are lost in film. Themes, particularly lesbian characters and

sexuality, central to the written text are be muted in film adaptations. This reality,

combined with separatist ideas about lesbian-feminist culture, made some lesbian-

feminist writers reticent to sign film contracts. Nevertheless, the continued circulation of

work that originated in lesbian print culture is an important legacy of lesbian-feminism,

and it represents the dispersal of lesbian-feminism in mainstream United States culture.

Lesbian-Feminism in Bastard

817
Evelyn C. White describes Walker’s process of embracing her bisexuality (Evelyn C.
White, Alice Walker: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 411-413).

505
 Penguin Putnam published Dorothy Allison’s Bastard during a flowering of lesbian

writers in trade presses during the 1990s.818 Allison’s early writing was nurtured by

lesbian print culture. Allison was a member of the Conditions editorial collective.

Lesbian-feminist journals published her early work. Long Haul Press published Allison’s

first collection of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, in 1983. Firebrand Press published

Allison’s short story collection, Trash, in 1988. Firebrand rereleased The Women Who

Hate Me in 1991. In 1992, when the commercial publisher Penguin Putnam acquired

Allison’s first novel, Bastard, Allison earned a record advance for the book; Victoria

Brownworth reports that Allison received $37,000 for the book, the “largest advance ever

by an out lesbian for a first novel.”819 Even though Bastard was published by a trade

press, it is a legacy of lesbian print culture.

Bastard is a coming of age story about Ruth Anne Boatwright, “Bone.” Bone

narrates the novel, telling stories about the first thirteen years of her life. Set in

Greenville, South Carolina, Bone and her mother, Anney, live in a world where people

work hard but never quite have enough money to pay all of their bills, where memories

are long, and where family stories shape one’s fate. Anney struggles to create a better

place in the world for herself and her two daughters, but in the process, Bone becomes

the target of extreme physical and sexual abuse by Anney’s second husband, “Daddy

818
There are many reasons for the relative abundance of lesbian writers in commercial
presses in the 1990s, including market demand for books, lesbians or gay men in
influential acquiring editor positions at commercial publishing houses, and the strength of
the small presses in identifying and publishing books by lesbian writers. Sarah Schulman
discusses these dynamics astutely in “To Be Real,” the final chapter of Ties that Bind.
819
Victoria A. Brownworth, “On Publishing: Indecent Advances,” Lambda Book Report
4, no. 8 (January 1995), 49. In September 2001, Brownworth wrote that Allison’s
advance for Bastard was $60,000 (Victoria A. Brownworth, “Get It in Writing,” Lambda
Book Report 1, no. 2 (September 2001): 5).

506
Glen.” Bastard concludes with a harrowing rape scene; “Daddy Glen” viciously

brutalizes Bone. Bone leaves the home to live with her aunt Raylene. At the end of the

novel, Anney visits Bone and gives Bone her birth certificate; Anney then leaves Bone

with Raylene and returns to her marriage to Glen.

Lesbianism is not a central theme in Bastard; poverty, child abuse, child sexual

abuse, and illegitimacy are. Lesbians, however, read Bastard as a lesbian book. New York

Native, a gay newspaper, wrote about the upcoming publication of Bastard, “Dorothy

Allison’s first novel Bastard Out of Carolina will appear in April ’92. . . While it’s

impossible to determine from the catalogue copy whether the main character, Ruth Anne

Boatwright, is a lesbian, she probably is.”820 In part, lesbians readers assumed that Bone

was an autobiographical character. This assumption is not far from the truth. Allison

describes her own early life in the essay “A Question of Class”: “I was born in 1949 in

Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately

poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress,

and was just a month past fifteen when she had me.”821 Later in the same essay, Allison

adds autobiographical details that mirror Bone’s own biography; when Allison was five,

her mother married “the man she lived with until she died. Within the first year of their

marriage Mama miscarried, and while we waited out in the hospital parking lot, my

stepfather molested me for the first time, something he continued to do until I was past

820
“Publishing News,” New York Native (September 1991): 40.
821
Dorothy Allison, Skin (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1994), 15.

507
thirteen.”822 Allison’s personal narrative and her history in lesbian print culture shaped

the reception of Bastard as a lesbian novel.

While lesbianism is not a central theme in Bastard, there is one significant lesbian

character: Bone’s aunt Raylene. Raylene is not revealed as a lesbian until the final pages

of the denouement. There are, however, clues about Raylene’s lesbianism earlier in the

novel. The first time Anney sends Bone to Raylene’s house to keep her away from Daddy

Glen while she works, Bone objects. Bone wants to go with her mother and earn extra

money washing dishes at the diner where Anney works. Not realizing Bone’s secret

desire, Anney asks Bone, “Did somebody say something to you about Raylene?”823 Bone

asks, “What would anyone say about Raylene?”824 This exchange signals that there may

be something “odd” about Raylene—something that would cause people to talk. Shortly

after this exchange, Bone tells readers more about Raylene. Raylene “had always been

different from her sisters.”825 Butch told Bone “that Raylene had worked for the carnival

like a man, cutting off her hair and dressing in overalls. She’s called herself Ray.” Bone

observes, she “wore trousers as often as skirts.”826 These details, the clothing, the hair,

the name, function as clues to lesbianism for readers trained to decode lesbian

characters.827

822
Ibid., 18.
823
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Plume, 1992), 177.
824
Ibid.
825
Ibid., 178.
826
Ibid., 179.
827
Barbara Grier, building on the work of Jeannette Howard Foster, wrote extensively
about how to decode lesbian characters in fiction and defined a reading practice that

508
 At the end of the book, Raylene comes out to Bone, not in a traditional “coming

out” narrative but by telling her a story. Raylene tells Bone about a woman she loved and

how she made the woman choose between her and her children. Raylene tells us it was a

terrible choice, one that “killed her” and “killed me.”828 By telling Bone this story,

Raylene builds empathy in Bone for the choice that Anney faces: leave Glen or leave

Bone. Raylene’s revelation that she was in a relationship with a woman is incidental to

her broader narrative about the choices women face between their children and love.

Although Raylene presents lesbianism as tangential in her story, as a character

Raylene is not tangential in Bastard. In fact, Raylene is Bone’s savior. When Raylene

discovers that Glen has been physically beating Bone at a family funeral, she tells her

brothers, who physically extract revenge against Glen.829 After Glen’s most violent and

brutal beating and rape of Bone, which puts Bone in the hospital, Raylene comes to the

hospital to rescue her. When Bone is in the hospital, Raylene shoves her way in and

comes to Bone, “like a tree falling, massive, inevitable, and reassuringly familiar.”830

Allison invokes a natural image of Raylene as a tree that will shelter and protect Bone.

Bone describes herself as opening her mouth “like a baby bird.”831 This nature imagery

situates Raylene as an “earth mother” figure caring for the vulnerable, birdlike Bone.

influenced readers and writers throughout the second half of the twentieth century and
through until today.
828
Allison, Bastard, 300.
829
Ibid., 244-247.
830
Ibid., 297.
831
Ibid.

509
 Raylene is also a god-like figure. When the sheriff interrogates Bone, Bone hears

Raylene’s voice, “awesome, biblical.”832 Raylene is powerful. She can intervene and end

the brutalities of men: the assaults of Daddy Glen, the verbal assaults of the sheriff, and

the insistent questioning of the doctor. Raylene has the power and the authority to stop

them all. Metaphorically and literally, Raylene is the only woman who can save Bone

from the brutality of Daddy Glen. Bone’s mother abandons her, choosing Daddy Glen

instead; Raylene rescues her from the hospital and from the sheriff’s interrogation.

Raylene brings Bone home to nurture her to health.

Reading Raylene, the open lesbian, as both savior and earth mother ties both of

these roles to lesbianism. In Bastard, Raylene is the person who can care for Bone and

save her from the physical and sexual brutality of Glen as well as from the emotional

neglect of Anney. In this reading of Bastard, Raylene as a lesbian suggests that lesbians

are saviors; lesbians are nurturers for women and children; lesbians offer an alternative to

the violence of men.

There is another lesbian-feminist reading of Bastard, one that invokes lesbian

separatism and its theoretical vision for change. Lesbian separatism is a theoretical and

ideological position championed by lesbian-feminists; lesbian separatists advocate

withdrawal from the hetero-patriarchal culture into woman-centered communities. In

these woman-centered communities, lesbian separatists imagined that women could heal

from physically, emotionally, and intellectually from the effects of patriarchy and

strategize to create new tactics to overcome systemic misogyny and sexism. Lesbian

separatists struggled with how to include heterosexual women in their vision for social

832
Ibid., 298.

510
change. How could straight women be a part of the world of lesbian separatism? Would

they eventually betray other women in service to the needs of men?

Allison enacts this anxiety in the plot of Bastard. Although we see, through Bone’s

narration, the pain and anguish that Anney faces with the choices that confront her, in the

end, Anney leaves Bone for her husband. For lesbian-feminist readers and lesbian

separatists, this plot is a morality play about the dangers of heterosexual women to the

feminist revolution. Allison portrays starkly the inability of heterosexual women to stand

up to men, even in the face of overwhelming violence against their metaphorical and

literal sisters and daughters. Through the characters in Bastard, Allison explores

women’s inability to act in solidarity with women, even when those women are their

daughters. While the violence and brutality of Glen is important in the novel, for lesbian

readers, especially lesbians interested in a revolutionary lesbian-feminist consciousness,

the anguished Anney and her relationship with Bone is the central focus. How could

Anney let her daughter be violated emotionally, physically, and sexually by her husband?

One answer the novel intimates is the divided loyalty of heterosexual women between

other women, particularly their daughters, and men. Bastard challenges lesbian-feminist

readers to examine their loyalties and allegiances to heterosexual women by animating

the dire consequences of heterosexual women’s divided loyalties. Allison challenges

heterosexual female readers to get their priorities straight and not stay with abusive men.

These are two different and complementary lesbian-feminist readings of Bastard.

In one reading, Raylene is a lesbian savior and nurturer Bone, helping her escape male

violence. In the other reading, a solution to male violence for Bone—and for all

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women—is lesbian separatism, the refusal to be with men as suggested by Bone’s life

with Raylene. In both of these readings, Bastard is a profoundly lesbian-feminist novel.

Bastard: From Page to Cable

Bastard was an extraordinary success for Allison. The New York Times included it

with the listing of books to “Bear In Mind” and named it one of the best books of 1992

after it was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award.833 Director Anjelica Huston

optioned movie rights, for $25,000. That payment, plus the advance for her second novel,

Cavedweller, which Lisa Cholodenko made into a movie in 2004,834 paid Allison’s debts

and a down payment on her house in Guerneville, California.835 In 1996, the cable

network, Showtime, released Huston’s film of Bastard, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as

Bone’s mother Anney.836 The film generated controversy when Ted Turner refused to air

it because of its portrayal of violence. This controversy expanded the original audience

for the movie.

In the film Bastard, lesbianism is unintelligible. There is a brief discussion between

Raylene and Bone about the carnival. Bone says she heard that Raylene ran off to the

carnival with a man and then asks Raylene, “How come he didn’t marry you?” Raylene

tells Bone, “I did run off to the carnival all right but not for no man. I ain’t never wanna

833
Award citation: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba1992.html#.T2YonI77qSM
(accessed 18 March 2012).
834
Cavedweller. Dir. Lisa Cholodenko. Cavedweller Productions Ltd., 2004.
835
Alexis Jetter, “The Roseanne of Literature” The New York Times Magazine
(December 17, 1995.
836
Bastard Out of Carolina. Dir. Angelica Huston. Showtime Networks, 1996.

512
marry nobody. I like my life the way it is, little girl.” For the cable television audience,

Raylene is an independent, single woman, not a lesbian.

In the film, the focus of the plot is the brutality of Daddy Glen. In the novel, while

there are ample descriptions of the brutality and violence of Daddy Glen, there is more

attention to the relationship between Anney and Bone. Ultimately, the novel centers on

relationships between and among women—not only Anney and Bone, but also Anney,

Bone, and Anney’s sisters. The film centers on relationships between women and men.

While the book explores questions of women’s complicity with male violence, the film

explores child abuse and sexual assault as violence inflicted by men on women and

children.

The film makes one other significant alteration from the book. Bone’s birth

certificate functions as an important symbol and subplot in both the book and the film.

Anney wants to have Bone’s birth certificate changed from “uncertified,” meaning that

Bone was born to an unwed mother and therefore “illegitimate,” to “certified.” Anney’s

struggle to have Bone’s birth certificate “certified” is a drama in which Anney, as an

individual, petitions representatives of the state for authorization and validation. This

quest for state-sanctioned recognition can be understood in a variety of ways. Anney

demonstrates her care and concern for Bone’s future through it. Anney also rebels in this

quest, demonstrating both her ability to fight for her child and the opposition that she

faces from the state to being the mother that she wants to be. Finally, this quest raises

questions about how people’s lives are defined by the labels given by the state; as a

young child Bone hates the word “bastard,” yet the word marks her indelibly.

513
 In the book, when Anney comes to visit Bone for the last time at Raylene’s house,

she gives her an “oversized, yellow, official looking, and unsealed” envelop. In it is

Bone’s birth certificate. At the bottom it is “blank, unmarked, unstamped.”837 Anney

gives Bone a birth certificate that doesn’t label her “illegitimate.” Readers can imagine it

as a passport to a world where Bone is not labeled unworthy by the state. In the film,

Anney also gives Bone the birth certificate, but it is stamped at the bottom “certified.”

This is a small change, which likely reflects the visual needs of filmmakers. “Certified” is

more dramatic than blank space on film. Yet this stamp of approval at the end of the film

is misleading. It codifies a binary of certified and uncertified which Allison deftly avoids

in the novel. The blank birth certificate of the novel suggests a life for Bone yet to be

written; the stamp of “certified” in the film writes an overly optimistic future for Bone.

Films necessarily flatten the nuances of a book, which have more space to develop

characters and themes. Moreover, particularly in 1996 to reach the larger audience that

film brings, the themes change to speak to a broader, more mainstream, more middlebrow

audience. The film, Bastard, erases Raylene’s lesbianism. Yet, even though there is not

explicit lesbianism in the film, a lesbian-feminist aesthetic informs the film. Although the

focus of the film is on Glen’s unrelenting violence, the story of the violence bears the

watermark of lesbian-feminism. Telling the truth about violence against children, the

whole naked truth, in an artistic way, expresses an aesthetic value of lesbian-feminism.

Bearing empathic witness to violence through the film, the audience, unwittingly, adopts

a standpoint from lesbian-feminism. The audience of the film may not understand, as

readers of the novel do, the possibilities of lesbian saviors or the exigency of lesbian

837
Allison, Bastard, 309.

514
separatism as a possible alternative to male violence, but they assume an empathic

standpoint, enabled by lesbian-feminism, that lets them witness male violence in which

they can engage their imaginations to ameliorate it. The power of this lesbian-feminist

empathic standpoint is even more evident when considering Bastard in relationship to

other films about domestic violence such as The Burning Bed (1984) and Sleeping with

the Enemy (1991). Certainly, this aesthetic value, achieved through a lesbian-feminist

standpoint, it is not apparent to all viewers of Bastard, but it is a beginning of a mode of

seeing and understanding stories about lesbian lives for mainstream United States

audiences. In this way, Bastard, introduces lesbian-feminism subtly to mainstream

United States audiences.

Lesbian-Feminism in Push

Like Allison’s Bastard, Sapphire’s Push is a novel that thematically addresses

poverty, violence, and sexual abuse. Like Allison’s early work, Sapphire’s early work

was nurtured by lesbian-feminist print culture. Sapphire’s earliest writing was published

in 1978 in the second issue of Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians. Azalea, a

periodical for third world lesbian writers and artists based in New York City, regularly

published writing by Sapphire through 1983. Two of Sapphire’s poems were included in

Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology, and her stories were published in Common Lives/Lesbian

Lives, IKON, Conditions, 13th Moon, Conditions, Heresies, and On Our Backs. In 1994,

High Risk Books, a small publisher affiliated with the London publisher Serpent’s Tail,

published Sapphire’s collection of poetry, American Dreams. In 1996, Sapphire

published Push with Knopf. An excerpt from the novel was published in The New Yorker

in April 1996. Knopf published Sapphire’s second poetry collection, Black Wings &

515
Blind Angels, in 1999 and her second novel, The Kid, in 2010. Throughout the 1980s and

1990s, Sapphire was also well-known in New York poetry scenes as a lesbian-feminist

and as a slam poet.

Push is narrated by sixteen-year-old Claireece Precious Jones. Precious is pregnant

with her second child by her father and learning to read and write for the first time

through a caring teacher, Blue Rain, at an alternative school. Push is as unrelenting as

Bastard in its portrayal of violence. Allison explores Anney’s inability to choose to

protect Bone; Sapphire narrates not only Mary Johnson’s, Precious’s mother, inability to

protect Precious but also Johnson’s own sexual abuse of Precious. Push confronts readers

with multiple forms of family sexual violence. Sapphire offers no easy gender paradigm

to understand the violence.

If there is a savior in Push, it is Precious’s teacher, Blue Rain. Like Raylene, Blue

Rain is a lesbian. Throughout the novel, Precious struggles with what to think about

homosexuals, particularly in light of her idolization of Louis Farrakhan. Blue Rain

reveals her sexuality in an open way, initially via codes for readers cued to recognize

lesbians and later openly when confronting the homophobia of Farrakhan. When Blue

Rain introduces herself to the class, she says, “I’m here because my girlfriend used to

teach here and she was out one day and asked me to substitute for her, then when she

quit, they asked me did I want a job. I said yeah and I been here ever since.”838 In this

introduction, girlfriend may be misunderstood by readers as simply a female friend. In

the next paragraph, however, Sapphire slyly reports Precious as appraising another young

woman in the class, “a big redbone girl, loud bug-out girl . . . a girl my color in boy suit,

838
Sapphire, Push (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 45.

516
look like some kinda butch.”839 Precious’s ability to recognize lesbians only as butch

becomes important later when she learns that Ms. Rain is a lesbian.

In Ms. Rain’s class, Precious reads Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and identifies

with Celie, the protagonist in The Color Purple, “except I ain’ no butch.”840 By

juxtaposing Precious’s negative thoughts about lesbianism and her readerly identification

with Celie, Sapphire demonstrates how lesbians are appropriate role models for young

women. Sapphire stages Precious’s realization about Ms. Rain’s lesbianism along with

her reconsideration of Farrakhan. From the beginning of the book, Precious shares her

admiration for Farrakhan, but Ms. Rain confronts Precious about Farrakhan. Precious

reports, “Miz Rain say Farrakhan is jive anti-Semitic, homophobe fool.”841 Precious

continues, “Just when I go to break on that shit, go to tell class what Five Percenters ’n

Farrakhan got to say about butches, Ms Rain tell me I don’t like homosexuals she guess I

don’t like her ‘cause she one.” Precious is shocked by this revelation. She thinks, “I was

shocked as shit. Then I jus’ shut up.” She decides, “Too bad about Farrakhan. I still

believe allah and stuff,” but she relinquishes some of her idolization of Farrakhan.842

Through this intertwined narrative, Sapphire suggests that education is an important way

to overcome homophobia.

Sapphire’s Push does not simply extol the value of literacy and education; Sapphire

also narrates the development of Precious’s consciousness through Precious’s own voice.

839
Ibid.
840
Ibid., 83.
841
Ibid., 76.
842
Ibid., 83.

517
Precious confides, “Ms Rain say homos not who rape me, not homos who let me sit up

not learn for sixteen years, not homos who sell crack fuck Harlem. It’s true. Ms Rain the

one who put the chalk in my hand, make me queen of the ABCs.”843 Sapphire sets up a

dichotomy between the sources of oppression in Precious’s life as she understand them

(rape, lack of a quality education and drugs in her community) and the sources of

liberation—literacy—facilitated by an open lesbian. Through Precious’s journey to

literacy, Sapphire animates Precious’s growing consciousness about homophobia and her

own critical reflections on her life.

Throughout Push, Precious learns more about gay and lesbian people, and she

comes to accept them. Thinking about her classmate Jermaine, Precious says “She write

real in book. Call what she is sexual preference. Say she shouldn’t be judge ‘cause of

that” (Sapphire, 97.) Precious develops a language to talk about lesbians, learning terms

like sexual preference, and also a way to emotionally respond to lesbians as having

shared experiences. Precious continues, “She got hard rock story too. Say mens beat her

for what she is. Mother put her out house when she fine out.”844 Both Precious and

Jermaine have experienced male violence and been thrown out of their homes by their

mothers. As Precious says, “These girlz is my friends.”845

In addition to lesbianism as something revealed to Precious by Ms. Rain, in Push,

lesbianism is a site of empowerment for Precious and for all of the young women. “Ms.

Rain say we got to write not in our journals. Say each of our lives is important. She got us

843
Ibid.
844
Ibid.
845
Ibid.

518
book from Audre Lorde, a writer woman like Alice Walker. Say each of us has a story to

tell. What is a black unicorn? I don’t really understand the poem but I like it.”846 Lesbian-

feminist writer Audre Lorde, bisexual writer Alice Walker, and Walker’s lesbian

character, Celie, offer models for Precious and other young women to understand their

own importance in the world—and their own agency. Lesbian writers and lesbian

characters model empowerment for Sapphire’s characters.

Finally, Sapphire enacts lesbian-feminist ideologies through the narrative in Push.

Through both Blue Rain as a lesbian character and the story about Precious’s being HIV

positive, Sapphire demonstrates a shared camaraderie among the poor women of color in

Precious’s class, the LGBT community, and people with AIDS. Sapphire textually

animates a crucial tactic of lesbian-feminism, articulated by Bernice Johnson Reagon in

“Coalition Politics,” by linking the young women in the Each One, Teach One program,

the LGBT communities, and the communities of people with AIDS.

Although Blue Rain can be read as a savior figure like Raylene in Bastard,

salvation is much more tentative in Push. Blue Rain recognizes that Precious, like all

human beings, has an interior life and needs to articulate and share that life through

language. Like Allison, Sapphire evokes the natural world, the earth mother, in Blue

Rain, most notably through her name. At the conclusion of the novel, though, Precious’s

future is by no means certain—she has a young baby, Abdul, to care for and recently has

been diagnosed HIV positive. Precious can read and write at an elementary level and

looks forward to teaching Abdul to read and write, but success is not certain for Precious.

846
Ibid., 98.

519
 In Push, readers follow the narrative of a young, African-American woman whose

life is transformed by her lesbian teacher, Blue Rain, and by lesbian-feminist writers,

particularly Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. By tracing an intellectual genealogy for

Precious, Sapphire situates lesbian-feminism as an ideology that is liberatory for Precious

and for her students in the Each One, Teach One program. This is an important

continuation of the values and legacies of lesbian-feminism that Sapphire invites readers

to the novel to adopt.

From Alfred to Oscar

The translation of Push from the novel published by Alfred A. Knopf to an Oscar

award-wining motion picture is handled deftly by director Lee Daniels.847 Daniel’s 2008

adaptation of Push to the silver screen with the title Precious, a Film Based on the Novel

Push by Sapphire received stunning reviews. Daniels, an openly gay director, brings two

important interventions to the film Precious for lesbian-feminists.

First, Daniels uses the visual medium of film to provoke a reconsideration of what

constitutes beauty—and how beauty is represented—for movie viewers. Precious is a

visually rich film. Through the protagonist, Precious, played by Gabourey Sidibe, a fat,

young African-American woman, Sapphire and Daniels invite film viewers to rethink

human beauty and locate it not in a narrow space of slender, young, white bodies. Yet as

much as Daniel explores beauty, in the end, Precious is a gorgeous film about ugly

situations. In addition to the portrayal of Precious’s mother, Mary Johnson, by singer

Mo’nique, many critics hailed the performance by singer Mariah Carey as Precious’s

social worker. Carey’s performance is one of the compelling examples of how the visual

847
Precious—Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Dir. Lee Daniels. Lionsgate, 2009.

520
medium of film transforms textual media. Carey’s physical transformation for the film—

from a popular music icon to a Harlem social worker—was stark. Even though Carey

would not be recognized as a music icon in the film, she remained a beautiful person on

screen. Similarly, the apartment where Precious and her mother live, a dirty, nasty roach-

infested apartment, is in the film still dirty, but Daniels bathes the apartment in different

colored light throughout the film, suggesting the emotional and affective space of

Precious’s interior life. The interplay of visual beauty with ugly, even grotesque,

emotional situations expands the viewers understanding of the aesthetics of beauty.

Second, Daniels preserves the narrative of Push in the film, including Ms. Rain as

a lesbian. In fact, in the film, the scenes of Ms. Rain and her partner make Blue Rain even

more of a savior figure for Precious. Ms. Rain as an open lesbian, and the ordinariness

with which an open lesbian was received in the film, suggests how much things have

changed in the past twenty years. Daniels presents a vision of the text and lesbian

characters in the text that is congruent of lesbian-feminist visions in which lesbians

possess special characteristics for redemption and salvation for the world.

Three Decades of Ladies: A Choreopoem in bars, theatres, print, and film

While Allison’s Bastard and Sapphire’s Push have lesbian characters, Ntozake

Shange’s for colored girls does not. Shange’s choreopoem is an homage to sisterhood

among African-American women. Sisterhood in for colored girls is a strategy to

overcome the sexism and racism in the world. As the lady in purple explains,

she held her on her lap

the lap of her sisters soakin up tears
each understandin how much love stood between them
how much love between them
love between them

521
 love like sisters 848

At the climax of for colored girls, all the women affirm that their love is “too beautiful,

too sanctified, too magic, too complicated, too music to have thrown back on their faces”

(Shange, 49.) The women chant and dance together until they “fall out tired, but full of

life and togetherness.”849 This intimacy that the women find in one another and then in

themselves concludes in the chant “i found god in myself & I loved her.”850 This mantra

is a formulation of both feminist sisterhood and lesbian solidarity in the 1970s

configuration that Rich articulates as the “lesbian continuum” and Walker describes as

“my mother’s garden.” for colored girls expresses lesbianism through the female

solidarity. The text, a genre hybrid of poetry, dance, and performance, emerged from a

moment of feminism in which lesbianism and feminism commingled in powerful ways.

The material history of for colored girls from its early performance at The

Bacchanal to its travels to New York and the Broadway stage demonstrates the cultural

power that for colored girls had as a site to translate feminism and intersectional woman

of color identities to theatre audiences. Shange describes the genesis of the choreopoem

in her experiences of reading Judy Grahn’s “The Common Woman” poems.851 She

developed the work using the spaces she “knew: Women’s Studies Departments, bars,

cafes, & poetry centers.”852 Moreover, the people who showed up to nurture the

848
ntozake shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is
enuf (New York: Bantam, 1976), 44.
849
Ibid., 50.
850
Ibid., 67.
851
Ibid., xvii.
852
Ibid., xx.

522
development of the choreopoem were poets, dancers, and the women’s community.853

Shange describes “working in bars” as “a circumstantial aesthetic of poetry in San

Francisco” (Ibid., xiii.) She says, “During the same period, Shameless Hussy Press & The

Oakland Women’s Press Collective were also reading anywhere & everywhere they

could. In a single season, Susan Griffin, Judy Grahn, Barbara Gravelle, & alta, were

promoting the poetry & presence of women in a legendary male-poet’s environment

This is the energy & part of the style that nurtured for colored girls. . .”854 for colored

girls as a text and as a play emerged from the vibrant communities of lesbians and

feminists in the San Francisco Bay area.

Given both the historical specificity of the text and its endurance as a book, a

poem, and a theatre piece, its translation to a motion picture in 2010 is a fascinating

addendum to its wider travels. Tyler Perry directed the film, for colored girls.855 Tyler

Perry is a modern-day Hollywood mogul, a unique blend of popular culture icon (Perry

stars in many of his own films) and an extraordinarily astute businessman. Perry’s films,

often made with modest budgets, are profitable; his films have strong theatre ticket sales

as well as subsidiary rights sales for television, cable, and DVDs. Perry’s films reach a

broad African-American audience. Perry’s films are also middlebrow entertainment;

Perry often employs formulaic narratives in which faith and God play a prominent role in

solving heterosexual family crises. Although Perry has been critiqued by African-

853
Ibid.
854
Ibid., xiv.
855
for colored girls, Dir. Tyler Perry, 34th St. Films, 2010.

523
American critics, including Spike Lee, I find his combination of business acumen with

his showmanship and entertainment production a powerful popular culture force.

Perry’s vision of for colored girls translates the poetic, impressionistic text of

Shange into a more dramatic narrative with a star-studded cast. for colored girls was a

modest success at the box-office, grossing over $37 million856 and a disappointment to

many fans of the book and the play. The lesbian-feminist message of Shange, like that of

Allison, is muted in the film. for colored girls as a film focuses more on relationships

between men and women than relationships between women. Yet, the adaptation of for

colored girls by Perry introduces the story to a new generation. On balance, having more

stories from lesbian print culture circulating in popular United States culture is a positive

development—for lesbian-feminist writers and publishers.

Conclusion

These three books—Bastard, Push, and for colored girls—share much in common.

Early work by all of the authors circulated in lesbian print culture. Violence is a central

theme of all three books. Relationships between and among women are a central theme of

all three books. For Shange, relationships among women are a way to survive and

possibly overcome violence; for Allison and Sapphire, relationships among women are

more fraught: they offer both the possibility of redemption and survival, but also the peril

of abuse and betrayal. Finally, both for colored girls and Push challenge expectations

about genre. for colored girls defines a new genre, the choreopoem, to contain its mixture

of poetry, dance, performance, and drama. At the conclusion of Push is a book within a

856
Box office revenue from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1405500/.

524
book, the writings of the young women in Precious’s class, telling the stories of these

women.

Each of these novels became films in different ways and in different systems of

power within the film industry. Huston’s film of Bastard was a made for television film;

Daniels, already an award-winning filmmaker, adapted Push into not only an award-

winning film, but a box office success; Tyler Perry, a filmmaker with extraordinary

commercial success but limited critical acclaim adapted Shange’s work. Each film uses

different strategies to portray lesbianism—from a muted, almost erased, presence to an

open, almost celebratory, portrayal. Yet, in spite of these differences, all three films

circulate lesbian-feminist theory and ideology to mainstream audiences. Film reaches a

much wider audience than books; a best-selling book by a lesbian author might sell

75,000 copies in its first year; the film Precious in a limited release opening weekend was

seen by about 180,000 people.857

Together these three texts and film adaptations suggest three things. First, today

Darnton’s communications circuit needs to be amended to include film as a vital

component of the circulation of books. Increasingly, adaptations of novels function as a

crucial part of the communications circuit of books, and they have important economic

consequences for authors and publishers. The sale of film rights benefits authors with

cash payment to acquire the rights and, occasionally, royalty payments in conjunction

with the economic performance of the film. Publishers who own the rights to the book

when the film is released, generally reissue the book with a special cover that highlights

the film and increases the individual sales of the book.

857
Source: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=preciouspush.htm.

525
 The disparate social and cultural locations of each of these films demonstrate the

multiple ways in which objects from lesbian print culture move from narrower literary

circulations to broader distribution through film. The books speak to artists situated

differently within the habitus of film-making. During the 1970s and 1980s, movement of

lesbian novels to made-for-television films, Oscar-worthy films, or popular films simply

was not possible. Now, it is possible, and the past three to five years illustrate a real

flowering of the adaptation of lesbian-feminist novels.

Second, through film, lesbian-feminist ideas and principles circulate within a

broader cultural milieu. While publishers imagined lesbian print culture becoming the

“real” culture, that is supplanting others, what happened, and continues to happen, is that

the ideas and principles of lesbian feminism circulate beyond the small circles of lesbian-

feminists into a broader cultural milieu through popular culture. Dick Hebdige argues that

dominant cultures incorporate subcultures through commodities and ideology.858 These

three texts, originally published by commercial publishers, demonstrates how lesbian-

feminism became a commodity in publishing. Similarly, the film adaptations are

commodities circulated in the dominant culture, but both the books and the films are also

ideological incorporations of lesbian-feminism into United States culture.

Ideological incorporation may be co-optation, but it also may represent a change to

the prevailing ideology. Commodification co-opts work by subcultures, and there is merit

to the argument that popular culture co-opts lesbian-feminist work. Houston’s adaptation

of Bastard, with its erasure of Raylene as a lesbian and its focus on the relationship

between Anney and Glen instead of the relationship between Anney and Bone, co-opts

858
Hebdige, Subculture, 95.

526
some aspects of Allison’s work to craft a more palatable narrative for a presumed

heterosexual audience. At the same time, the film invites audiences to assume a lesbian-

feminist standpoint—even if audiences are unaware of the standpoint. The adaptations of

Push and for colored girls, however, retain more of the ideology of lesbian-feminism;

these two films are less co-optation than adoption of lesbian-feminism. In a material

sense, all three films co-opt the original work of the authors to create a new cultural

object that generates profits for a variety of stakeholders. Yet, each of the authors in

creating the text, and in the case of Shange the text and the performances, made her own

commodity: a book to be sold. In addition, each of these authors received a substantial

royalty payment for the rights to adapt their work to a film; for all of them, this money

was crucial to supporting their future work as artists.

In all three of these books and films, ideas that originate in lesbian-feminism

circulate through the films beyond the circumscribed circles of lesbian-feminism.

Through these films, lesbian-feminism, if not as a named object, then as a set of

ideologies, circulates in middlebrow culture in ways that are visible and apprehensible for

a larger public. Thanks to film, lesbian books are no longer just for lesbians.

Conclusion

Through this chapter, I have mapped five ways to understand the aesthetic

contributions of lesbian-feminist print culture. First, I examined how lesbians played

central roles in aesthetic innovations throughout the twentieth century, focusing in

particular on Imagism, Modernism, and the School of Quietude. This history is important

to understand the contributions of lesbians in a broader, historical narrative of literary

history. Second, I examined Norton Anthologies to consider how lesbian-feminism

527
influenced anthologies created in the 1990s and 2000s. Third, I examined the aesthetic

contributions of lesbian-feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, I discussed what

accessibility meant to lesbian-feminist writers and publishers, how lesbian-feminists

wrote explicitly about lesbian sexuality, and how experience operated as a crucial site for

the generation of lesbian-feminist theory. I also examined how the production and

distribution of books also had a particular aesthetic valence of lesbian-feminists. Fourth, I

discussed the career of Rita Mae Brown as an example of a writer central to lesbian print

culture whose influence extends beyond the lesbian-feminist community during the

1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Brown is one example of the influence of lesbian-feminism in

popular culture today. Finally, I discussed three film adaptations of work that originated

in lesbian-feminist print culture. These films demonstrate the increasing ways that

lesbian-feminist writers enter popular culture and the ways that lesbian print culture, and

its values and ideologies, shape contemporary cultural production.

Ultimately, what I want is for lesbian writers and artists to be recognized in a

variety of cultural fields for their contributions. For me, reading Elizabeth Bishop’s

poetry as an undergraduate the in the late 1980s was an exhilarating experience because I

knew she was a lesbian. I want other lesbian poetry in the canon of what young readers

discover through college and high school courses. I want lesbian poets to receive critical

scholarly attention. I want lesbian poets to be read, reread, circulated, and enshrined in

libraries, digital and physical.

Mapping the habitus of lesbian print culture robustly makes those who are

currently being canonized less exceptional because it situates them in communities of

writers and artists. Audre Lorde, who is included now in most literary anthologies,

528
worked in an environment that also produced E. Sharon Gomilion, Stephanie Byrd, Pat

Parker, Joan Gibbs, and Cheryl Clarke. Marilyn Hacker worked in an environment that

also produced Irena Klepfisz, Susan Sherman, Joan Larkin, Claudia Scott, Jacqueline

Lapidus, and Martha Courtot. Dorothy Allison, whose oeuvre includes novels, poetry,

and essays, is an artist akin to Jan Clausen and Minnie Bruce Pratt, who also write in

multiple genres. The period between 1969 and 1989 is a fertile moment for multiple

lesbian writers. The dynamic of star authors as exemplars of the moment is a function of

canon-creation, but it is important to remember the environment that produced this

literature and the multiple artists working together to write and reflect the voices and

experiences of the time. Genius does not emerge in isolation; the presence of a broad

community of people creating art is crucial. By mapping writers who are currently being

canonized, such as Hacker, Lorde, and Rich, in relationship to a broader community of

writers, we understand their work more fully and open new possibilities for others.

The effects of lesbian print culture are long-lasting, even as the adumbration of

lesbian writers into the cultural milieu are not complete. Lesbian print culture flourished

in conjunction with the WLM but is not exclusive to the WLM. Lesbian print culture is

constantly being reimagined and reinvented by new generations of lesbians and feminists

as it has been for the past century.

In 1976, in the introduction to the Bantam edition of for colored girls, Shange

wrote, “I am on the other side of the rainbow/picking up the pieces of days spent waitin

for the poem to be heard/while you listen/i have other work to do/[.]”859 Shange’s

conclusion explains the dynamics of writers and artists in relationship to print culture.

859
Shange, for colored girls, xxi.

529
Print culture binds words into books; the discovery of those books extends over time. In

lesbian print culture, because many of the books were produced by small publishers,

much of the work is at risk of being lost, but for a small number of artists, the work

remains and continues to be recognized. Maintaining access to the wide range of work

produced by lesbian-feminist print culture is crucial as is nurturing the habitus in which

lesbian artists work today.

Somewhere today, someone is stepping into a performance space to hear the work

of a lesbian artist. In ten or twenty years, that work may be taken up in popular culture,

seen on film, heard in popular music, read in best-selling novels. That work may bring us

new understandings of lesbian lives and lesbian communities, and of common lives and

common communities. But, as Virginia Woolf warns, it will only happen “if we have the

habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.” It will only happen if

we have the ability to recognize the work as aesthetically valuable, as worthy for

inclusion in anthologies, as important to be available to broad groups of people. It will

only happen if there is material support for lesbian writers and the projects that they

imagine and create. “So to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.”860

860
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 117-118.

530
 Conclusion

The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives explores lesbian print culture as an

important historical, epistemological, and cultural project of lesbian-feminism. The

history of lesbian print culture from 1969 until 1989 challenges and alters contemporary

narratives about the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM); it re-contextualizes lesbian-

feminism, and lesbian separatism, as vital and vibrant aspects of the WLM. The Whole

Naked Truth of Our Lives demonstrates how lesbian-feminists used books—the writing,

printing, distribution and circulation of books as well as other objects of print culture (for

example journals, chapbooks, newspapers, and broadsides)—as tools to elaborate and

extend lesbian-feminist epistemologies. Finally, The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives

demonstrates culture as a vital and material component of the WLM and of lesbian-

feminism.

The history of lesbian-feminist publishing and lesbian print culture illuminates the

multiple geographic locations of lesbian-feminism and the WLM. Despite earlier

historiography, the WLM was not a bi-coastal phenomenon. Neither was lesbian-feminist

publishing. Lesbian-feminism and lesbian print culture bloomed in multiple locations

around the United States. This history of lesbian-feminist publishing suggests a revision

to feminist historiography that illuminates the effects of feminism on the broader social,

political, economic and cultural habitus. In addition to resituating the history of the WLM

without a geographic bias toward either United States coast, this study of lesbian print

culture repositions cultural feminism and lesbian separatism as two vital expressions of

feminism. Feminist histories routinely disregard cultural feminism and lesbian

531
separatism, and even deride them as insignificant. This history demonstrates that, in fact,

cultural feminism and lesbian separatism are important expressions of feminism that

made significant contributions to the WLM.

Cultural feminism is not a kluge to radical feminism. Cultural feminism does not

denude the feminist movement of political action or of a vision of the transformation of

society. As this study explains, women working on cultural projects understood their

work as profoundly political, containing the seeds of revolutionary transformation.

Engaged in a feminist practice that used the material of culture as a site for social

transformation, cultural feminists considered their work a feminist intervention with

multiple meanings and political valences. Lesbian-feminist production of culture through

publishing is and was a societal intervention to address sexism, homophobia and

patriarchy, operating with multiple valences: political, social, and economic. As lesbian-

feminist publishers demonstrate repeatedly, not only in their production but also in their

commentary on what books they publish and how they publish those books, they wanted

not only to build lesbian consciousness and communities of lesbian readers but also to

use books to leverage social change in broad, transformative ways. Thus, cultural

feminism was not a fleeing from radical feminism, but a vital adaptation of a variety of

feminist practices where the target for change was culture, and that culture was

understood as deeply material—and meaningful—to women’s lives.

Similarly, separatism and lesbian separatism are important and recurrent strategies

in the WLM. Beginning with the articulation of lesbian separatism by The Furies and

continuing through the publishing work in the 1980s, lesbian separatism is not a strategy

of separation and withdrawal but a strategy of engagement to address a variety of

532
feminist concerns including patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism.

Moreover, both cultural feminism and lesbian separatism are ideological positions

inflected with theoretical, political, and material analyses. Neither can be understood, or

dismissed, as simply essentialist ideologies. Rather, they are ideological positions, shaped

by the material conditions of women’s lives with political and material intentions. Of

course, neither cultural feminism nor lesbian separatism are monolithic constructs. The

nuance of both of these ideologies in relationship to the WLM and lesbian print culture

are important. By repositioning cultural feminism and lesbian separatism as crucial to

various feminist formations, we can understand the WLM as a complex social movement

with many invested actors. This history of lesbian print culture re-imagines radically

feminist historiographies of the WLM to include cultural feminism and lesbian

separatism in meaningful and productive dialogues.

The history of lesbian print culture also illuminates how lesbian-feminists used

publishing as an epistemological project. Lesbian-feminists theorized actively about the

world and, particularly, about people’s roles and responsibilities in the world. Lesbian-

feminists wanted to build ideas and strategies for transformative social, political, and

economic change. Central to lesbian-feminist publishing in the 1970s was the

interrogation of the origins of the modern world and particularly the origins of oppressive

structures. During the 1980s, lesbian-feminist theories focused intensely on identity

formations. Lesbian-feminist publishers extended conversations about identity

formations, particularly the identity formation “woman of color,” through a variety of

publishing projects. While these two strands of theoretical engagement had significance

in each of these decades, for lesbian-feminists, publishing, during this time period and

533
beyond, offered epistemological interventions into a wide range of feminist dialogues,

including, but not limited to, identity formations.

Previous examinations of lesbian print culture established the formative role of

lesbian print culture in relationship to lesbian identity but elided the significance of

economics in both the production and circulation of lesbian print culture. Examining the

material conditions of lesbian print culture, that is the creation, production, marketing,

and distribution of objects of lesbian print culture, suggests new understandings of both

the economic habitus of writers and small presses as well as changes in the broader

United States economy. The conventional narrative about lesbian-feminist publishing is

that words and books helped to create feminist consciousness and changed individual

lives. This is true, but lesbian print culture also had a broader impact on individual

women, communities of women, and the United States popular culture.

Lesbian print culture activists conceived lesbian print culture as a means of

economic support for women. Certainly, for some women publishing was a hobby—a

project that women did on the side as an addition to their primary means of economic

support—but for others, it was an activity for building skills, resources, and institutions to

create an economic power-base for lesbian-feminists. Although this vision was not

realized in an enduring way on a broad, societal scale, for many women printing and

publishing provided skills and economic support. For instance, after her involvement

with the Women’s Press Collective, Martha Shelley worked as a typesetter;861 Casey

Czarnik, one of the principals of Diana Press currently owns a print shop outside of San

861
Martha Shelley, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, October
12, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 58.

534
Francisco, CA;862 Helaine Harris, one of the founders of WinD, started Daedalus books, a

distributor of remaindered books, in 1980; she continues to work there today as a vice

president. In addition, many of the writers who began their careers publishing with small,

lesbian-feminist presses continue writing and publishing with both mainstream presses

and new small presses, including Minnie Bruce Pratt, Jan Clausen, Elly Bulkin, and

others. For many of the people in this study, publishing remains a vital economic engine

in their lives.

The stories of lesbian-feminist publishing begin to map the contours of the United

States economy during this time period as the United States government implemented

neoliberal economic policies. The ending of federal work training programs like CETA

had a profound impact on lesbian-feminist publishers limiting the opportunities for

funding to support and build their operations. The limiting of public resources for the arts

also presented challenges and limits for lesbian-feminist publishing. From these stories a

picture begins to emerge about how macro-economic changes effect individuals and

small businesses. Moreover, there is an economic component to the rise and fall of

feminist organizations, directly related to the United States economy and to government

investments in the arts.

In addition to illuminating the economic restructuring in the United States, lesbian

print culture illuminates the formation of political recognition of gay and lesbian as

citizenship categories in the United States. During the 1990s, lesbian print culture, and

the activism that corresponded with it, was central to promoting the idea that lesbians

were part of the national conversation and had a valid subject position to make

862
Personal communication with Suzanne Snider.

535
citizenship claims. The literary activities of lesbian-feminists in both their activist work

and in the published work make lesbians apprehensible to a variety of national

formations, including the NEA. This apprehensibility, and the demands of lesbians to be

understood in relationship to the national body politic, provides a crucial platform to the

LGBT rights movements in the 1990s and beyond, particularly in relationship to military

service and marriage equality.

This history invites the examination of what constitutes a lesbian literary canon,

particularly the relationship of lesbian literary work to the American literary canon. I

have offered counts and percentages of the representation of women and lesbians in

various literary locations. This practice raises the question: what should the percentage

be? Gender parity in all major sites of literary and aesthetic appraisals seems reasonable.

It is discouraging that in 2010, after forty years of feminist activism both inside and

outside the academy, the numbers are not more consistently near fifty percent. Certainly,

gender representation may range from forty-five to fifty-five percent (45-55%) in a

particular year, even forty to sixty percent (40-60%), but in a particular five or ten-year

period, gender parity should exist. In fact, some journals and some prize competitions do

have numbers like that, though some of the most prestigious, elite journals and

competitions continue to have women authors represented at less than forty percent

(40%), and more often around a paltry one-third (33%) of published authors. Forty years

of feminism have changed the literary landscape, but thirty-three percent (33%) or forty

percent (40%) is not enough. Gender parity remains a distant goal, and perhaps an

unachievable one without a focused and forceful intervention.

536
 If we achieve gender parity in literary appraisals, the work of achieving gender

parity in aesthetic appraisals will be easier. Moreover, if women have parity with men in

literary and aesthetic appraisals, then lesbians will be better represented. This is not a

given, of course. The conflicts around lesbian issues in the early WLM and even today

demonstrate that homophobia continues. Nevertheless, gender parity is an essential

milestone for lesbian writers.

Finally, this history is instructive for the state of publishing today. The WLM

asked questions about power. Who has power? Who wields power? Who is affected by

the wielding of power? Lesbian-feminist publishers fundamentally challenged the system

in which publishers held power over authors and creators of literary works. This system

had been challenged before, of course, by many, but in a sustained way, the WLM

reshaped the relationships between and among authors, publishers, booksellers, and

readers. These relationships among writers, publishers, and readers are being renegotiated

today as new technology emerges in publishing, particularly print-on-demand

technology, online publishing, and ebooks. The actions, values, and ideals of the women

who are at the center of this study are instructive for contemporary readers thinking about

similar issues.

The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives focuses on the process of publishing. It

explores how individuals and collectives published work; it considers how women

distributed books to existing readers and cultivated new readers through their work; it

examines personal and interpersonal relationships behind significant publishing events.

This attention to the process of publishing demonstrates how cultural production is

deeply material. While symbolic systems often describe the foundations of culture, for

537
cultural production, people and money—labor and capital—are the foundation. The

Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives demonstrates the material component of culture for the

WLM and for feminism. It resists the elision of the material, of labor and capital, from

culture as a societal structure and the sensorium as an individual and interpersonal

structure. It insists that we recognize the process as a crucial part of the outcome. This

obsessive attention to the material histories of books in lesbian-feminist communities

echoes an important value of lesbian-feminism: our process is our politics. How lesbian-

feminists did things is as important as what they did. How lesbian-feminists published

books is as important as the books that they published.

Although lesbian print culture continues beyond 1989 and there are a number of

exciting lesbian print culture projects today, the end of the 1980s is an end to a particular

formation of lesbian print culture—a formation shaped and defined by lesbian-feminism.

By 1989, Naiad Press and Firebrand Books were the only two operating lesbian-feminist

presses; all of the other lesbian-feminist presses closed. Moreover, as lesbian-feminist

presses like Naiad and Firebrand forged into the 1990s, the works they published

reflected new identity formations, focusing more on queer and lesbian than on the hybrid

identity of lesbian-feminist. While the impact of lesbian print culture is evident in the

circulation of ideas and objects from lesbian print culture in film, and the 1990s

themselves have exciting developments for lesbian print culture that merit further

examination, lesbian-feminist print culture, as defined and articulated in the 1970s and

1980s, comes to a rest at the end of the 1980s, eclipsed, at least temporarily, by other

formations of identity and other instantiations of print culture.

538
 To conclude, I invoke the words of poet and publisher, Judy Grahn. “I am the wall

at the lip of the water” is one of the poems from Grahn’s collection She Who. This history

is a wall, a rock, the dyke in the matter. It is a womanly swagger, a dragon, a bulldyke, a

bulldagger. It is a celebration of my wicked grandmothers and a prayer for my wicked

daughters—may they write and publish prolifically in our lesbian-feminist future,

bolstered by knowledge, strength, and history from the lesbian-feminist past.

Julie R. Enszer
April 2013

I am the wall at the lip of the water

I am the rock that refused to be battered
I am the dyke in the matter, the other
I am the wall with the womanly swagger
I am the dragon, the dangerous dagger
I am the bulldyke, the bulldagger

and I have been many a wicked grandmother

and I shall be many a wicked daughter.863

863
Judy Grahn, love belongs to those who do the feeling, (Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen
Press, 2009), 89.

539
 A Note about the Lesbian Poetry Archive

Throughout my research for this project, I have been compiling a digital archive of

materials at www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org. This digital humanities project is a

substantive output of my doctoral research. There are six objectives for the Lesbian

Poetry Archive. The Lesbian Poetry Archive:

• is a repository for a variety of digitally reproduced print publications,

• functions as a visualization tool for understanding my work and exploring
the connections between and among the various cultural objects produced by
lesbian print culture between 1969 and 1989,864
• makes my research and sources visible and more transparent to common and
expert readers,
• allows people to interact with publishing data, poems, journals, and the
histories that I have compiled,
• invites alternate readings for new thinking and different conclusions about
the materials,
• operates as a teaching tool that invites people to engage with lesbian poetry
and the history of its textual reproduction, and
• enhances the experience with print through multimedia engagements.

At its core, the Lesbian Poetry Archive is a project about public scholarship.

Throughout the twentieth century, lesbians, primarily lesbians outside of academic

locations, initiated, published, printed, distributed, and read lesbian print culture through

a variety of public channels. The Lesbian Poetry Archive uses a contemporary

technology platform to continue this vital work of compiling, analyzing, and

disseminating lesbian writing.

One of the most inspiring aspects of researching and writing this dissertation has

been learning about the lesbian community reception of poetry during this time period.

864
While my dissertation is circumscribed to these dates, the material at the Lesbian
Poetry Archive is not limited to this time frame.

540
Nine hundred women at the launch of Lesbian Poetry; five hundred women at the launch

of This Bridge Called My Back; two hundred women at the fifth annual Lesbian Writers

Conference in Chicago, IL; the travels of Minnie Bruce Pratt throughout the south

reading her chapbook, The Sound of One Fork. I dream about ways to create audiences

like that in our contemporary world. The Lesbian Poetry Archive is one intervention of

mine to that end.

The Lesbian Poetry Archive consists of four primary components: Archive,

ebooks, Exhibits, and Bibliographies. The bibliographies are compilations of

bibliographic data on publishers, poets, writers, and journals. Much of this material has

been compiled from academic databases and augmented with additional research and

conversations with individuals involved with the press. The exhibits gather materials that

are both visual and textual and tell stories to readers about lesbian print culture. The

exhibit area includes some maps and other visualization tools to think about data that is

included in the archive.

The ebooks are the newest aspect of the Lesbian Poetry Archive. In conjunction

with authors, I create facsimile editions of chapbooks with new content from the author

and contemporary critics that situate the books historically and in a contemporary

context. To date, the Lesbian Poetry Archive has published two ebooks: The Sound of

One Fork by Minnie Bruce Pratt and Two Chapbooks by Stephania Byrd. Future ebooks

are scheduled to profile the work of Martha Courtot, Eloise Klein Healy, Cheryl Clarke,

and Mab Segrest. For each ebook, the launch corresponds with an online publication

about the ebook in another location, generally one that is not primarily a lesbian

audience. The Sound of One Fork was profiled in an article at the Poetry Foundation

541
website and Byrd’s chapbooks were profiled on the Ms. Magazine blog. These articles

and profiles fulfill my political objective to interject lesbian writers into literary

conversations that are not restricted to LGBT writers.

Finally, the archive itself. In the archive, I gather and display out of print books.

Unlike the ebooks, these are not contextualized by the authors but are simply presented in

digital form using facsimiles from the printed book. The archive primarily contains books

that are out of printed and have limited availability in public or university library

systems. Many are texts that have been formative to my thinking about lesbian print

culture.

My plans to expand the Lesbian Poetry Archive are ambitious; the Lesbian Poetry

Archive is a cornerstone of my future research agenda. One objective for the Lesbian

Poetry Archive is the continued expansion of core materials in the archive section and the

continued release of new ebooks. In addition, I have identified a number of multi-media

sources to add to the archive. As new technology becomes available, I want to create

learning experiences at the Lesbian Poetry Archive that utilize video and audio files and

that present the stories being lesbian print culture to visitors in dynamic and compelling

ways. Although digitization of archival materials continues in academic libraries, some of

the key materials of lesbian-feminism, particularly periodicals, are being left out of the

process. By integrating the Lesbian Poetry Archive into my teaching, I plan to build

archives of lesbian-feminist periodicals using the Hot Wire and Heresies archives as

models.865

865
The archive of issues of Hot Wire, The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, is
here: http://www.hotwirejournal.com/hwmag.html (accessed 2 March 2012) and the

542
 The Lesbian Poetry Archive is one of the outcomes of my dissertation research; it

complements this written text. More importantly, it expands the public consideration of

lesbian print culture. Averaging over 500 unique visitors a month with over 1,500 page

views, the Lesbian Poetry Archive is a public, scholarly forum where lesbian print culture

is accessible and available. The Lesbian Poetry Archive is a digital humanities project

where the intellectual work of preserving, analyzing, and evaluating lesbian print culture,

lesbian literary history, and lesbian literature can continue and grow.

archive of Heresies is here:http://heresiesfilmproject.org/archive/ (accessed 2 March

2012).

543
 Bibliography

Primary Sources

Interviews

Evelyn Torton Beck, in-person interview, Washington, DC, July 10, 2012.

Charlotte Bunch, in-person interview, New York, NY, July 19, 2012.

Cheryl Clarke, in-person interview, Jersey City, NJ, May 20, 2012.

Bea Gates, in-person interview, New York, NY, November 2011.

Joan Larkin, in-person interview, Brooklyn, NY, May 26, 2011.

Ellen Shapiro, telephone interview, July 5, 2011.

Samn Stockwell, telephone interview, October 28, 2011.

Fran Winant, informal conversation, October 9, 2010.

Archives

13th Moon. 13th Moon Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York
Public Library.

Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance. Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) Archives.
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

Beam, Joseph. Joseph Beam Papers. Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

Bogus-Adamz, SDiane. SDiane Bogus-Adamz Papers. Manuscripts, Archives and Rare

Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York
Public Library.

Bunch, Charlotte, 1944- . Papers, 1967-1985. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Bunch, Charlotte, 1944- . Additional papers, 1950-1988. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe

Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Diana Press Papers. June L. Mazer Archives, Los Angeles, CA.

544
Gidlow, Elsa. Elsa Gidlow Papers, 1898-1986. GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco,
CA.

Grier, Barbara. Barbara Grier-Naiad Press Collection (GLC 30), The James C. Hormel
Gay and Lesbian Center, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA.

Helaine Victoria Press Collection. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard

University.

Hodges, Beth. Beth Hodges Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard
University.

Jay, Karla. Karla Jay Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public
Library.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Jonathan Ned Katz Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The
New York Public Library.

Nicholson, Catherine. Catherine Nicholson Papers. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.

Persephone Press. Persephone Press Records, 1974-1983. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe

Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Pratt, Minnie Bruce. Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.

Rich, Adrienne, 1929-2012. Papers, 1927-1999. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Quest: a feminist quarterly. Records, 1972-1984. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Journals

13th Moon

Albatross: The Lesbian Feminist Satire Magazine

Amazon Quarterly

Conditions

The Furies

Lesbian Tide

545
Sinister Wisdom

So’s Your Old Lady

Books and Other Printed Material

Bissert, Ellen Marie. The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Dyke. New York,
NY: 13th Moon, Inc., 1977.

Blackwomon, Julie. Revolutionary Blues and Other Fevers: Poetry. Publisher unknown,
1984.

Brown, Rita Mae, Rubyfruit Jungle. Plainfield: Daughters, Inc., 1973.

-----. A Plain Brown Wrapper. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1976.

Bulkin, Elly. Enter Password: Recovery, Reenter Password. Albany: Turtle Books, 1990.

Bulkin, Elly and Joan Larkin. Amazon Poetry. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books, 1975.

Bulkin, Elly and Joan Larkin. Lesbian Poetry. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981.

Bulkin, Elly, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Barbara Smith. Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist
Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism. Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press,
1984.

Bulkin, Elly, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Barbara Smith. Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist
Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Press, 1988.

Byrd, Stephanie. 25 Years of Malcontent. Boston, MA: The Good Gay Poets, 1976.

-----. A Distant Footstep on the Plain. Publisher Unknown, 1981.

Clausen, Jan. After Touch. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books, 1975

-----. Apples & Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1999.

-----. Duration. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 1983.

-----. Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover: Stories. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1980.

-----. Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover: Stories. London: Women's Press, 1985, 1980.

-----. A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism. Brooklyn, NY: Long
Haul Press, 1982.

546
-----. The Prosperine Papers. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1988.

-----. The Prosperine Papers. London, Women's Press, 1988.

-----. Sinking Stealing: A Novel. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1985.

-----. Sinking, Stealing. London: Women's Press, 1985.

-----. Waking at the Bottom of the Dark. Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press, 1979.

Courtot, Martha. Tribe. San Francisco, CA: Pearlchild, 1977.

-----. Journey. San Francisco, CA: Pearlchild, 1977

Crew, Louie, and Rictor Norton. “The Homosexual Imagination: A Special Issue.”
College English 36, no. 3 (1974).

Dykes for an American Revolution. Washington, DC: Easter Day Press, 1971.

Freedman, Estelle, Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, and Kathleen M. Weston, eds.
The Lesbian issue: essays from Signs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985.

Foster, Jeannette Howard. Sex Variant Women in Literature. New York: Vantage Press,
1956.

---. Sex Variant Women in Literature. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975.

---. Sex Variant Women in Literature. Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1984.

Gidlow, Elsa. Elsa, I Come with My Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow. San
Francisco: Booklegger Press, 1986.

Gidlow, Elsa. On a Grey Thread. Chicago: W. Ransom, 1923.

Gomillion, E. Sharon. Forty Acres and a Mule. Baltimore, MD: Diana Press, 1973.

Grahn, Judy. Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. Boston: Beacon Press,
1984.

---. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1993.

Grier, Barbara. Lesbiana: Book Reviews from the Ladder, 1966-1972. Reno: Naiad Press,
1976.

The Lesbian in Literature—three editions

547
Hacker, Marilyn. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. New York: Arbor
House, 1986.

Heresies Collective. Lesbian Art and Artists. Issue 3 of Heresies: A Feminist Publication
on Art and Politics. New York, 1977.

Hoagland, Sarah Lucia and Julia Penelope, ed. For Lesbians Only: A Separatist
Anthology. London: Onlywomen, 1988.

Johnston, Jill. Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1973.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA. New
York: Crowell, 1978.

Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie and Irena Klepfisz. The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s
Anthology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Kim, Willyce. Curtains of Light: Poems. Oakland, CA: W. Kim, 1971.

-----. Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid. Boston, MA: Alyson Publications, 1985.

-----. Dead Heat. Boston, MA: Alyson Publications, 1988.

-----. Eating Artichokes. Oakland, CA: Woman's Press Collective, 1972.

-----. Under the rolling sky. [Oakland, CA?]: Maud Gonne Press, 1976.

Larkin, Joan and Carl Morse, eds. Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time. New York: St
Martin's Press, 1988.

Larkin, Joan. A Long Sound: A Book of Poems. Penobscot, ME: Granite Press, 1986.

-----. The Women Writers Calendar: 1983. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1982.

-----. Housework: Poems. Brooklyn, NY: Out & Out Books, 1975.

Lesbians Speak Out. Oakland, CA: Women’s Press Collective, 1974.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press,
1983.

Parker, Pat. Movement in Black: the collected poetry of Pat Parker, 1961-1978. Ithaca,
NY: Firebrand Books, 1999.

-----. Jonestown & other madness: poetry. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985.

548
-----. Movement in Black : the collected poetry of Pat Parker.[Foreword by Audre Lorde;
introduction by Judy Grahn; graphics by Wendy Cadden, Irmajean, Karen
Sjoholm.] Oakland, CA: Diana Press, 1978.

-----. Pit stop. Oakland, CA: Women's Press Collective, 1973, 1975.

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