Conclusion

Lesfic: Alternative Publishing, Activism, and Queer Women Writers

Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s 2006 Outrageous included a warm tribute to Barbara Grier, as Boss Granny explains to Arden Benbow why Full Court Press was a success: “I have a clear market in mind, the large, voracious market of lesbians out there wanting to read about themselves, who aren’t particularly educated but know what they like and don’t mind spending their money to get it. Why shouldn’t people like that be able to buy the kind of books they want?”1 Arden’s response captured Grier’s motivation: “So really … really you’re an idealist.”2 Though Boss Granny whooped at this characterization, Ortiz Taylor knew it represented the deepest aspirations of the WIP movement.

When Ortiz Taylor wrote Outrageous, the world in which Grier operated had already changed dramatically. Of course, many of the writers featured in The Lesbian South continue to publish, including Ortiz Taylor, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Mab Segrest. Florence King published a column for the National Review for years, “The Misanthrope’s Corner”; though she largely disavowed her alliance with the WIP movement, she is still best known for Southern Ladies and Gentlemen and Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. Rita Mae Brown has created a long, lucrative career as a writer of popular novels, including a series of mysteries cowritten with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown. Though transgressive sexuality makes an appearance in a number of her novels (including Sudden Death, her exposé of lesbians on the pro women’s tennis tour, written after she was dumped by Martina Navratilova), it no longer defines her public persona. Alice Walker continues to be a bracing public presence, even as she has moved away from fiction in recent years. Fannie Flagg remains an enormously popular novelist of the South, though she included no lesbian characters in her fiction after Fried Green Tomatoes until her 2010 novel I Still Dream about You—and then only in a subplot that was little more than an aside. Dorothy Allison is still a literary star, but she hasn’t published a novel since Cavedweller in 1998. In 2018, her long-promised speculative novel She Who was listed as “forthcoming” on her website.

Other institutions survive. Charis Books and More, the feminist bookstore founded in the Little Five Points neighborhood of Atlanta in 1974, is one of only a small group of feminist bookstores in the country. The lesbian feminist community that once dominated the Little Five Points area is gone; ALFA closed its doors in 1994, and the neighborhood is quickly gentrifying. But Charis remains an outpost of queer energy in its new location at Agnes Scott College, where one can still buy used Naiad Press paperbacks and used LPs of “women’s music.” Sinister Wisdom is still publishing; now led by editor and poet Julie Enszer, it is one of the few remaining institutions creating lesbian feminist community, and true to its roots, it has published three special issues on lesbian feminism in the South, all of which have been essential to the writing of this book. These special issues, based largely on oral histories, were organized at the lesbian writers’ retreat Womonwrites, which still meets at a state park in Georgia every May and offers a series of workshops for women writers. The many feminist periodicals that reviewed books are mostly gone, but Lambda Literary, a print journal founded in the 1980s that has evolved into an online resource guide, continues to be a central focus for queer publishing, with its daily reviews and its annual awards for almost every category of queer writing imaginable, including lesbian poetry and fiction.

Even some of the original lesbian presses continue to exist. Naiad Press turned over its writer contracts to the newly formed Bella Books, and when former Naiad employee Linda Hill became a partner, Barbara Grier gave her the coveted Naiad mailing list (evolved from the original mailing list pilfered from TL) and sold her the backlist “at approximately five cents per volume.”3 Bella Books still operates out of Tallahassee; it keeps some Naiad books in print and continues to publish lesbian romances, mysteries, and coming-out novels. Bella Books publishes southerners Mary Griggs, K. G. MacGregor, and many others.

The survival of these writers and institutions is remarkable, considering how dramatically the literary landscape has changed. The feminist culture of letters that enabled and nurtured the southern lesbian feminists discussed in this book was unraveling by the end of the 1990s, when mega-bookstores Borders and Barnes and Noble were putting independent bookstores, including gay and feminist bookstores, out of business. The rise of Amazon and ebooks further undermined the viability of small niche bookstores. At its height, there were more than 200 gay and feminist bookstores around the country; today, only a handful remain. Barbara Grier’s decision to retire in 2001 seems remarkably prescient. The deaths of many influential bookwomen—Bertha Harris in 2005, Barbara Grier in 2011, Catherine Nicholson in 2013, Florence King in 2016—can easily lead one to nostalgia for a lost era. Certainly, the political and cultural conditions that produced the WIP movement no longer exist.

It is easy to mourn the demise of the WIP movement, a network of authors, bookstores, publishers, and readers that fostered so much innovative writing. Yet today there is more lesbian fiction—known affectionately as “lesfic”—available to women, in both large cities and small towns, than anything the WIP movement achieved in its heyday. An Internet search of the term lesbian fiction may yield 56,799 results on a given day. The volume of lesbian writing is breathtaking, but making queer publishing culture visible is extraordinarily challenging.

Grier’s populist vision for lesbian publishing supported by genre fiction, especially romance, dominates lesfic. Bold Strokes Books, founded by Radclyffe (the pen name of a former surgeon), emphasizes lesbian romance but publishes a wide range of genres, including, in its own terms of categorization, speculative fiction, series, intrigue and thriller, erotica, fantasy, action and adventure, paranormal and urban fantasy, and general fiction. Bold Strokes Books also hosts writing retreats for aspiring writers through the Flax Mill Creek writing retreat.4 With more than 120 authors, it is a worthy successor to Naiad Press; indeed, Naiad was the model for Radclyffe’s own writing.

Bywater Books was cofounded by mystery writer J. M. Redmann and named for a New Orleans neighborhood. Kelly Smith, who formed Bella Books (and was ousted at Barbara Grier’s suggestion) became Bywater’s editor in chief.5 Its president, Michelle Karlsburg, is also a publicist for queer writers based in New York. Bywater styles itself as the more literary of the lesbian presses, but it doesn’t publish anyone like June Arnold and Bertha Harris; its fiction is closer to the “real novels” that Barbara Grier championed. Katherine Forrest, who transformed Naiad with Curious Wine, now publishes with Bywater, and the press also features a number of southern lesbian writers including Ann McMan (who lives in North Carolina), Alabama natives Bett Norris (who lives in Florida), and Wynn Malone (who lives in Kentucky).

Bella, Bold Strokes Books, and Bywater are some of the biggest publishers of lesfic. But established lesbian presses, with southern roots or otherwise, are not the only places that queer women are publishing. Younger writers are less likely to identify as solely lesbian and often write gay male erotica and focus on trans issues. Some publish with presses that are often more identified with gay men, like Lethe Press, or with “slash” erotica (male/male erotica that is primarily consumed by, and often produced by, straight women), like Arsenal Pulp Press, based in Vancouver. In Arkansas, Sibling Rivalry Press specializes in queer poetry and also publishes chapbooks, memoirs, and essays by lesbians and gay men. Queer coalitions provide other venues for queer women writers focused on erotica, BDSM, and political issues like homeless queer youth. The older identity-based publishing forums of gay and lesbian literatures still exist, but more flexible and diverse forms of erotica are everywhere, and younger writers are moving in and out of “set” genres and forms to create remarkable writing portfolios.

The most dramatic change has been the rise of self-publishing; authors can publish inexpensively and sell directly to readers, bypassing gatekeepers. Laura Antoniou, for example, makes her living as a full-time writer, without a day job or an academic position to sustain her. She began writing male/male erotica columns on safe sex for the Person with AIDS newsletter in the 1980s, then graduated to making $50 per story. Antoniou is the author of the Marketplace series of novels about an S/M secret society, which focuses on a wide range of sexualities, kinks, and identities. The series is categorized as erotica, though the sexual descriptions are part of a larger cultural critique and an imaginative reinvention of sexual identities into a freer, more hybrid erotic exchange. For her most recent book, Antoniou initiated a kickstarter campaign that raised $30,000, allowing her to publish beautiful, hand-bound editions for her dedicated readers, whom she refers to as patrons of her art. She has created a viable means of support for herself as a writer and artist without ever reaching the notice of more mainstream literary venues.

Queer publishing, then, continues to thrive, under the radar, as it has since the days of Cold War pulp paperbacks, out gay pulps, and lesbian feminist publishers. But abundance brings its own challenges. How do authors find readers, and how do readers discover the books they really want to read? There is no national association of feminist and gay bookstores for touring authors to visit to meet with readers directly, no network of feminist presses that publish books outside the mainstream, and no feminist periodicals to review them. As one aspiring writer told me at the New Orleans Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2016, “There is no gatekeeper. No one reviews the books anymore. I don’t know how you find an audience.” Though writers have become extraordinarily adept at marketing their own work, it may be that you don’t find an audience anymore; the audience finds you.

As Antoniou’s example makes clear, readers have taken charge, most notably in the plethora of groups, websites, and guides online. There are many online blogs about lesfic, including my favorite, The Lesbrary. Pinterest has a robust community, and #lesfic is an active hashtag on Twitter. One can spend many hours Googling lesfic and still not reach the end of the list of blogs, author websites, and reader discussion boards; searches in every social media platform keep turning up new sites, self-published authors, and publishers. Lesfic may be derided as trash, ignored, and patronized, but as Barbara Grier understood, readers know what they want. Indeed, these readers often become writers, and they support lesbian writers both virtually and in person.

In the absence of a national network of bookstores, queer book festivals have emerged nationwide to fill the void. The Left Coast Lesbian Literary Conference happens every fall in Palm Springs, California. The Rainbow Book Fair in New York City brings together a wide range of queer writing. Queer book fairs are held in the South, too. The Miami Book Fair brings a host of queer writers to its annual conference, and the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans is one of the best known queer book conferences in the South, uniting southern queer writers like Dorothy Allison with New York writers like Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano.

The association most clearly indebted to the WIP movement is the Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS), founded in 1999, which hosts an annual conference in a different city every July, featuring panels of lesbian writers discussing topics as diverse as creating video games from your fiction and creating tension in romance novels. Bella, Bywater, and Bold Strokes have large displays of books for sale, but self-published entrepreneurs abound. The first writer I met at GCLS in Alexandria, Virginia in 2016 was Ali Spooner, who began her writing career by self-publishing and then joined epublisher Affinity Books. Ali was wearing a t-shirt depicting the cover of one of her books; in fact, she had a t-shirt with a different book cover for every day of the conference, and if she met someone who had read all her novels, that reader was rewarded with one of the t-shirts. Self-promotion is prevalent, as writers show up with their self-published novels. The sister of an author gave me a t-shirt that said “Buy my book” and had the scan code on it, front and back. Everywhere, authors are touting their books, reading from their books, referencing their friends’ books, and hoping for a “Goldie,” the annual award GCLS created because it felt the Lambda Literary Awards didn’t pay enough attention to lesbian romance. GCLS has created its own literary association of the rock stars of lesfic who are unknown in more traditional literary venues.

A new network, then, has formed; these queer literary festivals give lesbian readers direct access to lesbian writers, with tourism thrown in. What makes this network different is the lack of engagement with the literary that Arnold and Harris championed on the one hand, and the absence of the merging of queer politics and queer publishing that so animated the WIP movement on the other. Barbara Grier’s triumph means that “literary” lesbian authors like Sarah Schulman, Jeannette Winterson, and Dorothy Allison operate in one sphere—of AWP and New York publishers—and lesfic authors operate in another. Bywater positions itself as the more literary of the lesfic presses, with higher-brow offerings and cover art, but it also publishes romances, and its fiction isn’t experimental, as Daughters was. The productive tension between pulp and avant-garde is largely absent from the current lesfic scene; the literary and lesfic do not meet.

The largely apolitical tone of lesfic is another key difference. It’s not that some authors don’t incorporate politics; Bett Norris, for example, focuses on the civil rights movement in her debut novel Miss McGhee, and speculative fiction, as a genre, is always fertile ground for cultural critique. But the widespread engagement with radical politics that so animated the writers in The Lesbian South isn’t readily visible in the alternative forum of lesfic. Romance stories about white women dominate lesfic, and conversations about race and about sexual ethics are in a nascent stage at the GCLS conference. At the 2016 meeting it often seemed like romance writers and readers were celebrating the current state of lesfic, and conversations about race, diversity, and sexual ethics were happening among other participants. Those conversations about objectifying women and including more diverse lesbian characters replay the debates of lesbian feminism in the 1980s. Participants aren’t arguing for more writers of color, but for more characters to be included by white writers. Concerns about lesfic book covers that objectify women—the topic of a panel dominated by Bywater authors—had no traction for the majority of authors, who simply want to sell their books and are happy to have scantily clad women help them do so (just as Cold War lesbian pulps did).

Perhaps this lack of interest in politics is understandable in an era when marriage equality has become mainstream. But queer activism continues to be widespread, especially in the South. Marriage equality has provoked a vicious backlash in southern states, and organizations like the Campaign for Southern Equality are resisting this backlash with lawsuits, rallies, and pride parades, with the vigorous support of allies in local communities. The Campaign for Southern Equality has had enormous success challenging anti-LGBT measures in Mississippi, with Roberta Kaplan winning high-profile cases. This activism is coalitional, with Black Lives Matter and progressive religious organizations joining with queer activists to resist institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia. Social media, not print, has dominated the activist strategies. Queer southerners are increasingly eager to stand and fight where they are. That real-world activism seems disconnected from lesfic.

In the current moment, remembering the queer South of the archive of lesbian feminism is more important than ever. The legacy of the southern lesbian feminist tribe and the independent presses that sustained them could inspire the next generation of queer southerners as they create a queer South that is not simply imaginative and virtual. The audacious, challenging vision of a queer South that the southern lesbian feminist tradition championed has never been more relevant—or more necessary. Their bold revision of “the South” into a multicultural, kinky, liberated space is still in progress, but the energy they unleashed and the taboos they challenged inspire a queer South that is still in a process of becoming.