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Creating a Southern Lesbian Feminist Culture

The Women in Print Movement and the Battle of the Literary

Women’s liberation was obsessed with print. Feminists believed that an independent media was essential to a political and cultural revolution, and so produced a diverse array of publications: newspapers, stapled newsletters, bound journals, glossy slicks, poetry chapbooks, bound paperbacks. These publications cropped up across the nation in big cities, small college towns, communes, and suburbs, and in every state. Feminists read each other’s publications, reprinted articles, passed on announcements for journals, conferences, and meetings, and constructed, in the absence of the Internet, what would become known as the women in print (WIP) movement. The complete history of this movement has yet to be written, but a number of scholars have begun to excavate it,1 and participants in the movement have written memoirs.2 My narrative below contributes to this body of scholarship. I view the larger movement through a small cohort of southern lesbian feminists; many knew each other, but all engaged with queerness and southernness in consequential ways. They contributed to an ongoing debate about the role of literature in the creation of a distinctly lesbian feminist culture.

Two figures will help me frame the key debates of the WIP movement. Barbara Grier and June Arnold were older than most women’s liberationists, and they could not have been more different in background or tactics. Texas native Arnold came from wealth and privilege; after graduating from Rice University and marrying, she moved to Greenwich Village with her four children, and eventually became a novelist and publisher of Daughters, Inc., a press that embodied a highbrow aesthetic. Grier, by contrast, was a self-taught literary critic and bibliophile who never attended college, and worked as a secretary and a bill collector. After decades of involvement with the lesbian publication the Ladder, she founded Naiad Press, which began in Reno, Nevada, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and entered its most lucrative phase on its final move to Tallahassee, Florida. Arnold and Grier shared a fierce commitment to lesbian literature and a tenacity that others sometimes found grating.

These disparate figures challenged traditional notions of the literary, from above and below. For Arnold, the exclusion of women in general, and lesbians in particular, from the literary canon led her to theorize a specifically lesbian feminist version of the literary, marked by experimentation and by feminist politics. I call this the “feminist avant-garde.” For Grier, the elitism of the literary was problematic; she was drawn to accessible narratives and valued the popular for the cultural work it performed, especially for lesbian readers. I call this the “popular” or “pulp” (strictly speaking, pulp refers to mass-produced small paperbacks, but it also suggests a popular intervention that is denigrated or dismissed by cultural gatekeepers). Both approaches are emblematic of larger trends in women’s liberation, and thus construct accessible guideposts in my history of the WIP movement.

Both Arnold and Grier were important midwives to the emergence of southern lesbian feminist writers; consequently, they serve as useful introductions to the writers whose books will become my central focus in the next three chapters. Most of the writers in The Lesbian South had relationships with Arnold and/or Grier. These were not always warm relationships, but because both Arnold and Grier had strong personalities, vast networks, and dreams of world domination, they had a surprising number of encounters with southern lesbian feminist writers, which makes them excellent mechanisms for placing the writers of The Lesbian South within the feminist print culture of their early careers. What follows is an abbreviated history of the WIP movement, with an emphasis on southern lesbian writers.

Though I discuss Arnold and Grier as antagonists, they were coconspirators as well. Both believed that literature could change the world and that feminist literature would not only create new ways to understand gender but also liberate women from patriarchy. Despite personal proclivities, all feminist bookwomen embraced a wide range of literary forms, from the experimental to the pulpy. As Cecilia Konchar Farr and I argue, “The multiplicity of feminist literary practices marked the Women’s Liberation Movement as a whole, resulting in a number of genres and formal styles. Feminist literary culture … produced texts that ranged freely across cultural hierarchies.”3 Avant-garde and popular books were produced by the same presses, sold in the same bookstores, and reviewed in the same feminist periodicals. It was the tension between these two poles that made early feminist print culture so inventive and so vibrant. The absolutist rhetoric of both Arnold and Grier often obscures the ways that their projects were mutually constitutive. Could feminist literature value the difficult and still embrace the accessible? Could writing be feminist and “literary”? This was the quixotic dream that drove many WIP participants and informed the archive of southern lesbian feminism that would emerge from it.

Lesbiana and the Creation of a Lesbian Literary Tradition

Long before women’s liberation emerged in the late 1960s, Barbara Grier made her reputation as an obsessive lesbian bibliophile. Her mentor, librarian Jeannette Foster (who collected the first comprehensive bibliography of lesbian writing),4 introduced her to the Ladder (TL), a small, subscription-only magazine for lesbians published by the Daughters of Bilitis, an organization advocating for the rights of gay women. The organization often emphasized “mainstreaming” and encouraged butch women to dress to pass; it also provided an outlet for lesbians to claim rights and imagine a national lesbian community. Though it would be seen as too conservative by the early 1970s, in the late 1950s it was a lifeline for the many women who embraced it.5

Barbara Grier’s interest was less political and more literary. She cared about books, as she had from the age of thirteen when she marched up to the librarian and “requested books about homosexuals.”6 She wanted novels about lesbians and she wanted them when they were not easy to find, except, perhaps, in the wire racks at the local drugstore. Self-taught as a book collector (with help from her librarian partners and Foster), Grier tracked down any book with lesbian content and wrote reviews of them in TL under the pseudonym Gene Damon. By 1966, she had become the book review editor for TL, in a wide-ranging column titled Lesbiana.

Foster’s Sex Variant Women provided a lesbian literary history, but Lesbiana created an up-to-date contemporary lesbian literary culture. Grier’s tradition was free of the restrictive Cold War aesthetics that informed her college-educated TL peers; her literary tradition included every text that had lesbian content, no matter where it might fall in a cultural hierarchy. This included what we now refer to as “lesbian pulp,” and what TL editor Barbara Gittings dismissed as “trash.”7 Grier, significantly, called these novels “paperback originals,” a descriptive term that avoided the negative connotations of “pulp” and “trash,” even though she considered many of the paperback originals to be trash. She once defined their plots with devastating brevity: “The old familiar round of girl meets girl, falls in love, leaves girl temporarily for another girl, and ends up back in the arms of the first girl friend. It has the actual number of obligatory sex scenes, and the happy ending which used to indicate a fair evening waster.”8 But for Grier, paperback originals were not necessarily badly written. Indeed, she lamented the decline of paperback originals at the end of the 1960s. Following the spoof above, she wrote,

There are no really good paperback originals around anymore. I can’t help wondering what happened to Valerie Taylor, Paula Christian, Ann Bannon, etc. Rumors circulate and say that Ann Bannon has given up writing. Valerie Taylor and Paula Christian seem to feel there is no publishing market for their kind of book, and Artemis Smith has left the field in favor of working toward hardback publication in esoteric fiction (which hasn’t actually happened yet). It is, to put it bluntly, a damned shame, because the audience who bought their books by the thousands of copies still exists, still lives in isolated towns throughout the United States and still needs this vicarious involvement with a world they cannot or do not share personally.9

Grier articulated a vision of the “cultural work” of lesbian pulps that academics in the 1990s and 2000s would elaborate in greater detail.10 For Grier, paperback originals were important because they created a virtual community for lesbians in “isolated towns,” providing “vicarious involvement” and a sense of belonging. Whether she personally valued these books as literature was less important than the desires of the “audience who bought their books by the thousands.” She may have marked these books with a T (for “trash”) in her published bibliography,11 but she refused to ignore or denounce them. As biographer Joanne Passet argued, “Barbara was contesting the power of mainstream literary critics. As she knew from personal experience and from the many women who wrote to her, any book that helped a lesbian recognize herself in print was worthy of recognition and preservation.”12

Grier didn’t review only lesbian pulps, however. Note her mention of Artemis Smith’s turn to “hardback publication in esoteric fiction.” Paperback originals is a carefully neutral term; esoteric, defined in the dictionary as “understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest,” may have been intended to be neutral, but it suggests elitism—experimental, for example, doesn’t have the exclusive implication. Esoteric fiction in the 1960s embraced experimental aesthetics, on the one hand, and transgressive sexuality, including queer sexuality, on the other. As I argue in Middlebrow Queer, 1960s style embraced the antihero. The outsider became the most truly American, and misfits of all sorts—murderers, radicals, sociopaths—became fashionable. This opened up space for other kinds of alternatives to the “white straight male” protagonist who had become the representative American in the 1940s and 1950s.13 Racial, gender, and sexual diversity became the norm. In the early 1960s John Rechy’s City of Night, an experimental novel featuring a male hustler as its narrator, was published by highbrow Grove Press; James Baldwin’s Another Country, which used transgressive sexuality to explore American racism, was published as a paperback original.14 Both June Arnold and Bertha Harris took advantage of this publishing trend to publish their first novels in the 1960s (Applesauce in 1966 and Catching Saradove in 1969, respectively).

It is not a compliment, of course, that “homosexuals” were included in the same category as hustlers, prostitutes, thieves, and other criminals, which may have been why “esoteric” fiction did not inspire Barbara Grier. Her review of Therese and Isabelle demonstrates her reservations. “Miss Leduc,” she argued, “is not a good writer. She is far, far too concerned with making poetic images out of garbage scenes. Her delicate preoccupation with scatological imagery is more nauseating than Henry Miller’s blunt interpretations of the same sort of material. Spraying fecal matter with flower scented phrases does not alter the composition of the material.”15 Grier’s disgust with the “scatological” betrays both age and her suspicion of a “liberation” that uses lesbian images to both titillate and disgust; indeed, she felt that the novel was destructive to lesbians in their quest for full equality. Her critique of the “poetic” embrace of “garbage material” suggests that the merging of explicit sexual material with experimental writing, so common in the 1960s from Hunter S. Thompson to Ishmael Reed, continued to frame lesbianism as innately transgressive and antiestablishment. Grier may have feared that these transgressive descriptions of lesbian sex precluded the depiction of lesbians’ full humanity. Politically, she seemed to find these depictions damaging. And yet, Grier argued that “despite all I have said, the book must be read, if only to see what the current literary image of Lesbianism is like, in the field of esoteric fiction.”16 Esoteric fiction, like paperback originals, had a place in the lesbian literary tradition.

Grier was also not a fan of the explicitly sexual descriptions that were becoming more common in the 1960s literary scene. Grove Press’s 1961 reissue of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer prompted one of many literary obscenity trials in the 1960s that extended the terms of what was acceptable in explicitly sexual literature. Esoteric writers were influenced by a host of popular genres, including sex paperbacks sold in adult bookstores in the 1960s. Heterosexual pornographic paperback houses published gay pulps to reach homosexual readers; gay pulps like Richard Amory’s The Song of the Loon and Victor Banis’s spy spoof The Man from C.A.M.P., along with many other varieties of erotica, were distributed in drugstores, by direct mail, and in the newly emergent “adult bookstore.” Only recently have scholars begun to investigate this phenomenon,17 but Grier, who published articles in gay publications like ONE magazine,18 was well aware of this gay publishing trend.

She was not, however, a fan of what she called “the blow-by-blow technicolor things which often pass these days as ‘romance.’ ”19 Indeed, she found much of this trend badly done, especially by women, because “women do not, by and large, do well as pornographers, or even pseudopornographers. They are either florid and asinine (Violette Leduc, for example) or falsely clinical, as in this title.”20 And yet, she didn’t dismiss the “new pseudopornography,” for despite her use of this disapproving term, she also believed that it had a place: “There is no question that some of these are literature, and some have serious social value. There is also little question that many of them don’t have value of any kind. But it is necessary and good that they be published. It is necessary that everything and anything can be published, and after that the individual can decide what she wants to read or wishes to ignore.”21 Her construction of a lesbian literature is guided by individual choice and personal freedom, not prescriptive rules about the “right” way to do it. She wants to publish “everything and anything,” plotting a lesbian literary tradition that is inclusive and leaves individual readers the right to decide which version best suits their needs.

Grier herself preferred the middle ground—well-written narratives with rounded characters and believable plots. “Popular ladies’ author Gladys Tabor” was an ideal for Grier: “There is so little common sense in today’s world, so much anger and so much bloodshed, it is a real delight to read this gracious lady’s books.”22 Grace and common sense were not lauded qualities in the 1960s. Grier described her own ideal in her overview of books in 1967: “The most important achievement is that there have been several dozen valid, literate studies published in just that short time. The entire span of literature before these last eleven years has provided a lesser quality.… Those mainstream novels that have included Lesbians as perfectly acceptable ordinary members of society at large have done a good deal to make the world a better place for all of us: a place where being a Lesbian doesn’t begin to carry even half the stigma it did some fifteen years ago.”23 Although there weren’t as many of these novels about “perfectly acceptable ordinary” lesbians as she would like, Grier was delighted to find them within a broad array of lesbian literature. Grier preferred accessible, realistic fiction, but she didn’t think it was her job to tell other readers what they should like. As a “self-appointed expert” of “Lesbian Literature and History,”24 Grier embraced a diverse lesbian literary culture. And yet the only place she could publish this open-minded survey of lesbian literature was in a small alternative monthly magazine with a secret mailing list. There simply wasn’t the public space for the kinds of fiction she preferred.

At least, not until gay liberation and women’s liberation created new venues for publication. No longer were lesbians at the mercy of whatever books mainstream publishers or paperback companies thought would sell or what writers could afford to self-publish or distribute. There would be an explosion of print, enough that a new generation of self-taught literary critics could prescribe what lesbian literature should be, instead of simply describing what scraps they could find.

“A Dyke with a Book in Her Hand”: Women’s Presses and the Literary Lesbian

After Barbara Grier became editor of TL in 1968, she decided to transform it from a magazine for “gay women” to an explicitly feminist journal. To do so, she and the executive director of the Daughters of Bilitis, Rita Laporte, removed the confidential TL mailing list (a single printed copy, hidden so the FBI could not obtain the membership list, as it had tried to do on more than one occasion) and took it to Nevada to Laporte’s residence. Then they declared their independence from the national organization, severing TL from the Daughters of Bilitis.25 Members of the national organization, who had been about to oust Laporte, believed that Grier had stolen the magazine. TL became a feminist magazine for the last two years of its existence, independent of the Daughters of Bilitis and open to all women, not just lesbians. Former editor Barbara Gittings never forgave Grier for this theft.

What on earth had gotten into Barbara Grier? She had always been imperious, but the specific impetus behind this power grab was women’s liberation. Grier started attending Kansas City’s women’s liberation meetings and invited the women to help with TL.26 Her shift of TL to an explicit feminism led to new correspondences with lesbian feminists from around the country who discovered TL and wrote to educate her about the burgeoning feminist movement. As Grier’s biographer notes, Grier “received tutorials on leather culture from University of Michigan graduate student Gayle Rubin, on the Feminist Economic Network from Martha Shelley, and on the Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians from Karla Jay.”27 Younger lesbian feminists, including Rita Mae Brown, Kate Millet, and Judy Grahn, began publishing in the journal. And though Grier’s grand experiment with TL failed (it went bankrupt in 1972), the possibilities that bid for freedom unleashed and the contacts she gained through TL made Naiad Press’s later success possible.

Barbara Grier was not the only bookish lesbian for whom women’s liberation and gay liberation were an awakening. Women’s liberation was a pop culture phenomenon, a national debate, and a good time in the late 1960s. It was a national movement, with consciousness-raising groups cropping up in cities, universities, and suburban homes. Its scope was broad, its tactics varied, and its ambition audacious. Radical feminism in particular was an outrageous carnival, full of manifestos, shifting alliances, strong personalities, and performance art political actions. All of the writers in this study were marked by the era, and most were explicitly involved in feminist activism and action.

In 1960 June Arnold left her abusive husband and moved with her four children to New York City to pursue her long-deferred dreams of becoming a writer. She moved in literary circles, took creative writing classes at The New School,28 and eventually published an experimental novel in 1966. But it would take the women’s movement to inspire her prose and transform her into a publisher and a literary organizer. She started, as so many women’s liberationists did, with a consciousness-raising group,29 but she quickly moved to more direct political action, participating in one of the most famous feminist actions in 1970, the takeover of the Fifth Street Women’s Building. Nearly forty women’s liberation groups, after trying to negotiate with the city for an abandoned property to use as a women’s shelter, occupied the building without permission, fixed it up, and turned it into an all-purpose women’s resource center providing child care, employment services, and spaces for consciousness-raising groups. The women held the building for fourteen days before they were forcibly removed by the police and arrested.30 One of the lawyers who got them released, Parke Bowman, became Arnold’s partner and cofounded Daughters, Inc. with her. Though the city succeeded in removing the women from the building (and later razing it to build a parking lot), it was unsuccessful in prosecuting many of the women responsible. During the action, Arnold had encouraged the women to turn their backs on the police photographers; this made it difficult for the police to identify the perpetrators, so they were released without being charged.31 The novel Arnold wrote about this experience, The Cook and the Carpenter, would lead, inadvertently, to another revolution—this one in print.

Bertha Harris arrived in New York around the same time as Arnold. A scholarship student at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Harris had edited her college literary magazine and become close friends with instructor Kate Millett,32 later the lauded author of Sexual Politics, whom she followed to New York. Details of that first sojourn are hazy, but Harris gave birth to a daughter and participated in Greenwich Village’s avant-garde scene, including a performance of Yvonne Rainer’s postmodern dance Trio A in 1966. By 1966, she was back in North Carolina, getting a master’s degree at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and studying with Catherine Nicholson, a professor who would later launch the southern lesbian feminist periodical Sinister Wisdom. When Harris returned to New York as an English instructor in the 1970s, she found a transformed and improved landscape for lesbian artists.

Rita Mae Brown was younger than Harris and Arnold, a pin-up girl for women’s liberation. Born in Pennsylvania, Brown moved with her family to Florida and attended the University of Florida. She was expelled for civil rights activism in 1966 and went to New York City, where she attended New York University (NYU), wrote for underground publications, published poetry, and got involved in NYU’s gay liberation front and the National Organization for Women (NOW). She was a key conspirator in the notorious 1970 “Lavender Menace” action against NOW, when she and other activists turned out the lights at a NOW meeting, appeared on the stage wearing shirts that said “Lavender Menace,” and staged a teach-in. That same year, she cowrote “The Woman-Identified Woman” with the Radicalesbians; the document defined a lesbian as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”33 She then moved to Washington, D.C., where she joined the Furies collective, seduced married philosopher Charlotte Bunch, and produced an influential feminist newspaper.

In San Francisco, Texas native Pat Parker joined the women’s movement; she and Judy Grahn did readings together, becoming the first poet superstars of the women’s movement. They were the only poets to be featured by Olivia Records on the spoken-word album Where Would I Be without You. Parker’s “nickname was ‘the Preacher’ ”34 and her early publications were standards of the women’s liberation movement.

Hardly anyone included in this study was not involved in women’s liberation. Tennessee native Maureen Brady went north from college and formed Spinsters Ink with her partner Judith McDaniel. In Tennessee, writer and librarian Ann Allen Shockley, seeing publication possibilities open up, published what is generally regarded as the first black lesbian novel, Loving Her; she would become friends with a number of southern lesbian feminists, including June Arnold. South Carolina native Blanche McCrary Boyd left her husband to join a commune in Vermont, where she had relationships with women and met June Arnold and her fledgling women’s press. In Florida, Dorothy Allison joined a commune, started a women’s center, worked at the women’s bookstore, and otherwise embraced the emerging national community of lesbian feminism, culminating in attending the Sagaris Feminist Institute in Vermont and meeting Rita Mae Brown, Blanche McCrary Boyd, and most importantly for her life as a writer, Bertha Harris. In Durham, North Carolina, Mab Segrest and Minnie Bruce Pratt were attending graduate school, becoming involved in the women’s movement, and coming out; for the married Pratt it was a particularly traumatic experience that led her to lose custody of her two sons. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Catherine Nicholson would become entranced with feminist periodicals and manifestos, quit her university job, run the women’s center, and eventually start a feminist journal with her much younger lover, Harriet Desmoines. Georgia native Alice Walker would move from civil rights activism in Jackson, Mississippi to the women’s movement in New York, writing for Ms. magazine and eventually publishing the iconic The Color Purple in 1982. In Los Angeles, Fannie Flagg was mainly outside radical feminism, but she did attend Equal Rights Amendment fundraisers, where she (fatefully) met the newly arrived Rita Mae Brown. Only self-proclaimed “royalist” Florence King would refuse any alliance with the women’s movement—which didn’t prevent her from taking advantage of the publishing opportunities women’s liberation afforded her, including in Ms. magazine.

In addition to mainstream interest in feminist voices, the rise of independent media helped to fuel women’s liberation. Trysh Travis defines the WIP movement as “an attempt by a group of allied practitioners to create an alternative communications circuit—a woman-centered network of readers and writers, editors, printers, publishers, distributors, and retailers through which ideas, objects, and practices flowed in a continuous and dynamic loop.”35 Activists were eager to create “a communications network free from patriarchal and capitalist control.”36 That network included newsletters and periodicals, which published manifestos, position papers, poetry, news, and book reviews; women’s presses, which published a wide range of writers and genres; women’s bookstores, which sold the periodicals and books produced by these alternative presses; women readers, who supported these venues and often joined in as bookstore owners, writers, or publishers; and even the distributors and operators of the physical presses themselves.

Feminist periodicals emerged across the country in just about every major urban area. Kathryn Adams notes that “between March, 1968, and August, 1973, over 560 new publications produced by feminists appeared in the United States, each one serving as a mailing address for the movement.”37 Feminists also created their own book publishing companies. Two of the earliest were Diana Press in Baltimore and the Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, California. Poet Judy Grahn was a key member of this collective, which started with photocopied pamphlets stapled in the middle with industrial staplers by women who volunteered their time. They bought industrial printing machines and then had to teach themselves how to use them; Grahn tells the story of a male printer who promised to show them how to use the press if they would sleep with him—he was ousted, and they taught themselves.38 The Women’s Press Collective published some of the earliest poetry chapbooks of the women’s movement, by Grahn and Pat Parker, which were distributed widely. Diana Press was another collective in which the editorial act of choosing texts and the physical act of printing them were housed in the same workplace. It published Barbara Grier’s anthologies of TL in the 1970s and Rita Mae Brown’s poetry collection The Hand that Cradles the Rock.

In the early days of both presses, poetry had a prominent place—as, indeed, it did in the early feminist movement. Kim Whitehead defines that poetry as “grounded in women’s individual experiences, geared toward women’s liberation from gender oppression, and therefore involving the need for both subjective and collective expression.”39 The importance of experience inspired early women’s liberationists: “Women who might never have considered a traditionally prosodic poem as a means of expression flocked to poetry when they discovered that it could emerge from their experience.”40 The valuing of that experience—often violent, usually invisible—meant that the content of women’s poetry was vitally important, focusing on violence, empowerment, and sexuality.

Poetry, and women’s literary expression more generally, was often framed in democratic terms. All women’s experience had value, and thus writing by all women, not just professional writers, was important. Or, in Dorothy Allison’s dismissive formulation of the notion (written in 1990):

The whole feminist small press movement was created out of that failed belief and the hope of re-establishing some way to have Literature that we could believe in. All those magazines and presses—the ones I have worked with and supported even when I found most of the writing tedious or embarrassing—were begun in that spirit of rejecting the false god for a true one.… If Literature was a dishonest system by which the work of mediocre men and women could be praised for how it fit into a belief system that devalued women, queers, people of color and the poor, then how could I try to become part of it. Worse, how could I judge any piece of writing, how could I know what was good or bad, worthwhile or a waste of time? That’s the ethical system that insists a Naiad press novel has the same worth as one from Knopf (better even since it is the product of a dissident mind)—that there is no good or bad: only politics.41

Leave aside Allison’s disillusionment with this system (though that tension was always a part of the system) and you see some of the values inherent in the WIP movement. First, it emphasized independence and autonomy, because most feminists saw clearly how the mainstream literary establishment was male dominated and assessed works not on “literary merit” but on political and cultural acceptability. Second, it encouraged a radical revision of the very category of “literary,” because so many writers were excluded from the club based on ideology or identity. The literary was an open debate, a site of reclamation.

Though for many people this movement may have ended up with “there is no good or bad, only politics,” one committed group of lesbians believed they could have it all: good writing, expanded content, and experimental prose. For them, the lesbian and the literary were fused, necessarily. Many wanted to create a distinctive lesbian culture grounded in literature and the arts. Their first role models were modernist lesbian expatriates whose experiments in both lifestyle and form were seen as mutually sustaining. And their most enthusiastic advocate was Bertha Harris. For the 1973 Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology Harris wrote an essay on lesbian society in Paris in the 1920s, beginning with a quirky anecdote that may or may not be true (as with all of Harris’s anecdotes):

Now I am 35 and have a penchant for old ladies; but then I was 21 and had a penchant for old ladies.

I was 21 and fresh out of The Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina … then it was a woman’s college and called itself one.… Among the native pop it was called a hotbed of lesbianism.

This rumor, thank god, was true.

I was fresh out of the arms of the hotbed of lesbianism and out of the clutches of the closet-sado ex-marine Dean and on the streets of New York: the summer of 1959. And when I was not at my $55.00 a week job I was hanging out on the corner of Patchin Place—not, under any circumstances, to catch a glimpse of e. e. cummings—but waiting for Djuna Barnes to take her afternoon walk and, with all discretion, follow her—moved the way she moved, turn the way she turned, hold my head like her head. As often as I could (and with discretion) I followed her and, trailing her, received the silent messages about my past I needed and she could give: and never once during our exchange did I encroach upon her lordly solitude to give her my name. The name she made up for me was my real name; and it was the name she used, when, in my fantasy, she would stop and take my hand to thank me for all the flowers I daily stuffed into her mailbox in Patchin Place and then tell me how it was to be a dyke in Paris, in the Twenties.42

Djuna Barnes has become a particularly important figure of queer modernism; Nightwood, published in 1937, featured gender and sexual outsiders, including a trans character, and was praised by mainstream figures like T. S. Eliot. She also wrote the privately published Ladies Almanack in 1928, a spoof of Natalie Barney’s lesbian network that Harris had certainly read in her trips to the Rare Books Room at the New York Public Library. In her article, Harris names the members of this artistic network as her literary forebears: Colette, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach, Una Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, Romaine Brooks, Natalie Clifford Barney. Harris explains that these writers were ignored by her university teachers and introduced to her by the owner of “the Phoenix Bookshop on Cornelia Street” (78). Her conclusion merged literary ardor with lesbian feminist rebellion: “Like every other dyke with a book in her hand, I know that these are the women our fathers stole us from.… They were American and English and French but mostly American but with the father’s nationality in effect wiped out by the more profound nationality of their lesbianism” (79). Harris’s sketch of “the only available expressions of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world” (87) is now familiar—Natalie Barney’s salon, around which brilliant writers, painters, and dancers clustered—but in 1973, these writers were just beginning to be uncovered and reprinted. Harris was by far the most intense lesbian expatriate devotee, but June Arnold was also invested; Virginia Woolf was Arnold’s role model, and she would later model Daughters, Inc. on Hogarth Press. This move to claim lesbian modernists was widespread in early women’s liberation; even Naiad Press was influenced by the lesbian expatriate trend, reprinting Renee Vivien and Gertrude Stein in its early years.

Even more important was Harris’s aside: “the more profound nationality of their lesbianism.” This early articulation of a “queer nation” was partly bluster, at least for Harris, but the concept was common in her group of lesbian provocateurs; Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation was published the same year. “Our fathers” had stolen lesbian culture, but it could be rediscovered and, even more importantly, reinvented through art. This focus on the aesthetic was a small part of women’s liberation, but it was a potent force, and one of particular import for southern lesbian feminist writers, who were major players in the articulation of the feminist avant-garde. Dykes with books in their hands were coming out of the library and into your lecture halls, your classrooms, your women’s music festivals, and your homes.

The earliest journal to take up the cause of the lesbian literary was the 1972 Amazon Quarterly, a lesbian feminist journal that sought to invent an autonomous, distinctive lesbian culture through literature. Two English graduate students, Gina Covina and Laurel Galana, laid out their vision for the journal in their first editorial statement, “Frontiers”:

We want to explore through the pages of Amazon Quarterly just what might be the female sensibility in the arts. Freed from male identification, lesbians are obviously in a very good position to be the ones to cross the frontier Doris Lessing has told us the “free woman” stands at[.…] The important factor is that it be in some way a launching out from all that we as women have been before into something new and uncharted … a voyage into the depths of your mind or a new connection you’ve discovered between something in your anthropology class and a book you were reading in herstory[.…] We are calling this an arts journal in the sense that art is communication. The standard we want to maintain is not arbitrary: we simply want the best of communication from lesbians who are consciously exploring new patterns in their lives. We hope you’ll help us make it even more than we can imagine.43

You can see the recurring idea of the lesbian as the vanguard of the women’s movement here—the epitome of the “free woman.” Lesbians were creating “something new and uncharted,” and the arts were the best way to explore these “new patterns.” Aesthetic experimentation and lesbian identity are fused in this formulation.

Amazon Quarterly (AQ) published poems (including poems by Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde), essays on lesbian identity and the novel, and biographical sketches of little-known women artists, including Margaret Anderson. Both Rita Mae Brown44 and June Arnold45 published excerpts of their Daughters, Inc. novels in AQ. AQ also published a series of essays on “how to make a magazine,” encouraging their readers to join the print revolution.46 The journal regularly included lists of feminist publications, feminist presses, and feminist bookstores, creating a roadmap for an emerging lesbian nation.47 It is a journal full of utopian possibility, creating a lesbian culture through the arts, without the prescriptivism and judgment of later lesbian feminism.

AQ was not framed explicitly as a southern periodical, but one of the editors, Laurel Galana, was from the South. In one issue, she noted this fact in a handwritten note: “As we go to press we are receiving more and more kind letters from around the country. The ones that touch me most are from my Southern sisters. I endured my first twenty-one years there. May you have the courage to change it.”48 Though southern writers like June Arnold and Rita Mae Brown were featured prominently in the journal, the South wasn’t Amazon Quarterly’s primary focus. Southern lesbians were a small but vibrant part of the WIP movement and were overrepresented in the creation of a literary lesbianism. In the rest of this chapter, I outline some of the main trends of this literary lesbianism. One wing made the “esoteric” its ideal; another focused on lesbian feminist iterations of the “paperback original.” The lesbian avant-garde was embraced by both Daughters, Inc. and Sinister Wisdom, inspiring the rise of a southern lesbian feminist literary culture.

Daughters, Inc., Avant-Garde Feminism, and the Lesbian Aristocrat

You might say that Daughters, Inc. began out of exigency. June Arnold couldn’t find a publisher who would accept The Cook and the Carpenter, her experimental novel about the Fifth Street Women’s Building takeover, so in the spirit of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Arnold became her own publisher. Julie Enszer explains that “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.”49 Arnold bought a farmhouse in Plainfield, Vermont, where her daughter Fairfax went to school (at Goddard) and where a number of New York radicals had moved. Blanche McCrary Boyd was living in a commune nearby, after a troubled sojourn at Duke University and a residency at the creative writing program at Stanford University with her husband, whom she left for a lesbian romance and a radical “intentional” community. Boyd would not only publish her first novel with Daughters, Inc. but also type up some of the other novels published in Daughters’ first list. Despite her proximity to communes, however, and her own coalitions with political groups, Arnold did not embrace the communal model of publishing—an egalitarian division of labor, an opting-out of capitalist structures, and a rougher, do-it-yourself textual artifact, the product of inexperienced printers. Instead, Arnold started the press with a clear investment of capital, paid a commercial press to produce the manuscripts, and focused on selecting and shaping submitted manuscripts.

The first four novels she published plotted a new course in feminist writing: in addition to Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter, Daughters, Inc. published Pat Burch’s Early Losses, a coming-of-age novel that followed a young woman through 1960s protests to women’s liberation, Blanche McCrary Boyd’s novel of mother/daughter friction, Nerves, and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, which would become the most popular lesbian novel of the 1970s. Three of these four novels were by southern lesbians. Though Daughters did not maintain this ratio with its later lists, the press’s publication of June Arnold and Bertha Harris, including reprints of their books, made it an important site of southern lesbian feminist writing.

Daughters, Inc. continued to publish interesting fiction that its founders believed created a “new” women’s literature. It published what many consider to be the first feminist detective novel, M. F. Beale’s Angel Dance, which featured the “macho” Latina detective, radical, and fugitive from justice Kat Alcazar, who helps the feminist celebrity Angel Stone (modeled on Kate Millet) extricate herself from a complicated conspiracy. Many of the press’s novels deal with pressing feminist issues of the day, including alcoholism (Nancy Lee Hall’s Confessions of a Drunken Mother), incest (I Must Not Rock, by Linda Marie), spousal abuse, violence, coming out, and coming of age.

But it was its embrace of the feminist avant-garde that made Daughters, Inc.’s reputation, thanks in great part to the public provocations of Arnold and Bertha Harris (who in 1975 became an editor for Daughters). Their rhetoric concerning the “right” way to do feminist and lesbian fiction was divisive, bracing, and sometimes hilarious. In Arnold’s famous essay “Feminist Presses and Feminist Politics” she argues for the central importance of the WIP movement, which she describes as “a circle of media control with every link covered: a woman writes an article or book, a woman typesets it, a woman illustrates and lays it out, a woman prints it, a woman’s journal reviews it, a woman’s bookstore sells it, and women read it—from Canada to Mexico and coast to coast.”50 That autonomy was key, for Arnold, to prevent women’s artistic vision from being coopted by the “Madison Avenue formulae” (20). Arnold argued that feminist writers should publish only with women’s presses like “the Women’s Press Collective, Diana Press, and Daughters, Inc.,” because mainstream presses “will publish some of us—the least threatening, the most saleable, the most easily controlled or a few who cannot be ignored—until they cease publishing us because to be a woman is no longer in style” (19). Arnold ended her essay by denouncing as a traitor any feminist writer who published with a “finishing press”: “Withdraw support from any woman who is still trying to make her name by selling out our movement” (26).

It is hard to argue with Arnold’s assessment of the fickle nature of mainstream support of both feminist and lesbian writers; despite brief moments of interest (including the early 1970s and the early 1990s), mainstream publishing has rarely sustained an interest in diverse authors, including lesbians, feminists, and writers of color. But Arnold’s absolutist stance did not take into account the struggles of writers without independent means of support who depended on advances from publishers. To dismiss every woman who published with a mainstream press as a sell-out was to impose a very narrow litmus test for authentic feminism. Very few writers (and independent publishers) could survive without dealings with commercial presses—including, as I discuss below, Rita Mae Brown and June Arnold herself.

The most important point in this essay was about the essential connection between independent publishing and avant-garde writing. Arnold argued that independent publishing enabled experimental aesthetics: “I think the novel—art, the presentation of women in purity (also I would include poetry, short stories)—will lead to, or is revolution.… Women’s art is politics, the means to change women’s minds.”51 By focusing on liberatory writing, not on big profits, feminist presses were more likely to take a chance on the daring and the difficult. Arnold believed that “the means to change people’s minds” lay in language and in form. “One of the things we have noticed in reading women’s press writings is a change in the language.… We’ve experimented with unpatriarchal spelling and neuter pronouns. I think we’ve changed our sentence structure, and paragraphs no longer contain one subject,” Arnold argued, because women writers aimed for “the inclusiveness of many complex things.”52 Arnold described feminist literature as “experience weaving in on itself, inclusive, not ending in final victory/defeat but ending with the sense that the community continues. A spiral sliced to present a vision which reveals a whole and satisfies in some different way than the male resolution-of-conflict.”53 The autonomous women’s press movement was essential to the feminist literary movement that Arnold embraced; for her, the feminist avant-garde required autonomy.

Bertha Harris was even more confrontational than Arnold in her advocacy of the feminist avant-garde, but she became less sure that an emerging lesbian feminist culture would produce the literary utopia she imagined. She feared the same literary desert that Allison would bemoan in 1990, where accessible popular novels would supplant the avant-garde. In a famous essay first presented at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in 1974, Harris argued that lesbian art was by definition oppositional: “A lesbian form significantly differing from the patriarchal form I have described,” she explained, “is not achieved through sexual substitution.… Individual turnabouts of heterosexual reality seem, to many, to constitute a literary expression of lesbian sensibility; and as such distract us from the apprehension of lesbian reality.”54 In pursuit of this goal, Harris rejected some of the most beloved characters of women’s liberation, as well as the reading practices of the consciousness-raising novel—identification, emotion, and vicarious experience:

The great service of literature is to tell us who we are.… Lesbians, historically bereft of cultural, political, and moral context, have especially relied on imaginative literature to dream themselves into situations of cultural, political, and moral power. Twenty years ago, without Molly Bolt, we were Rhett Butler and Stephen Gordon and the Count of Monte Cristo. It is, of course, much more to the point to be Molly Bolt, or Patience or Sarah or Mrs. Stevens. The trouble with this process (vulgarly referred to as “identifying with”) is that while the new lesbian hero is certainly safer for our mental health than Rhett or Stephen … and while we see her operating in what some might very loosely call a “cultural” context of tree-hugging, feminist folk-rock, vegetarianism and goddess-worship, her aggressive, strong, even magnificent image is by and large taken on by her beholder still inside the heterosexual/patriarchal definition of moral and political reality. Lesbian literature is not a matter of a woman plus a woman in bed.55

Harris rejects the egalitarianism of the WIP movement in favor of her ongoing commitment to an esoteric literary. June Arnold wanted literature to enable a truer, more radical vision of gender, but the list of Daughters, Inc. suggests that she still believed that a variety of forms could achieve this. Harris rejects the idea that simple representation—“a woman plus a woman in bed”—is enough. In trashing a number of groundbreaking lesbian texts—Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah, May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaid Singing—she makes it clear that lesbian feminist literature needs to do more than change the characters; it must change narrative practice. French feminist writer Monique Wittig, who moved to the United States in 1976, articulated a comparable vision of lesbian identity and literature in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, The Lesbian Body, and Les Guerilleres. It seems clear that Wittig was an influence.

Harris’s queer vision of both lesbians and literature concludes with a final plea for the lesbian literary: “Lesbians, instead, might have been great, as some literature is: unassimilable, awesome, dangerous, outrageous, different: distinguished. Lesbians, as some literature is, might have been monstrous—and thus have everything.”56 Harris’s penchant for the monstrous is discussed in more detail in chapter 3, but note here that her embrace of the monstrous was specifically literary; she is suspicious of the lesbian culture (“tree-hugging, feminist folk-rock, vegetarianism and goddess-worship”) that was already hardening into a dogma. Harris provoked several public skirmishes like this in the mid-1970s, both in print and in person. She had little patience for the democratic versions of literature bubbling in lesbian feminism; her protégée, Dorothy Allison, voiced similar frustrations in the 1990s.

But these absolutist manifestos aside, the feminist avant-garde was more invested in trash and assimilable narratives than Harris publicly admitted. This was partly because feminist presses published in paperback rather than hardback, and this connected them to the “paperback originals” that dominated early representations of lesbianism. In addition, although these books were larger in size than the standard pulp, they were often lumped in with the books of mass market paperback companies and pulp pornographers, and “respectable” review venues like the New York Times would not review paperback originals on principle. June Arnold saw Random House as her competition, but Random House saw Daughters, Inc. as a feminist version of Dell Books.

Privately, Bertha Harris expressed much more affection for those novels of “sexual substitution.” She was, for example, a big fan of Gene Damon, and she wrote Barbara Grier a fan letter in 1975 that performed her love for lesbian pulp:

I MISS THE LADDER, I MISS THE LADDER, I MISS THE GOOD OLD LADDER!!! I MISS Ann Bannon and Beebo Brinker and Ann Aldrich and Love Among the Shadows and We Too Must Love and sentences that begin, “It was my first week in New York: and I was lonely, lonelier than I’d ever been at the farm where at least I had Sheba, my horse, for company—Sheba, who didn’t care that I was different.… I had finally found a job, typing letters for a strangely fascinating older woman, who for some reason terrified me—although, for some reason, my heart lifted strangely, pumped insanely, everytime she entered the office, wearing her usual broad-shouldered pin-striped tailored suit and her crisp white shirts. But that was during the day; and, after five, I was left in my little rented room with only my own thoughts for company—unendurable thoughts, for they were of nothing but Marcie—Marcie of the long, glorious mane of golden hair who had, for some strange unutterable reason, broken my heart—Marcie, now Mrs. Tom Simpkins—and my sister-in-law! At last, I could bear it no longer. Instead of going home that night, I simply started walking. I don’t know how long I walked, but somehow it helped to stretch my legs and fill my lungs with air.… Soon I was in a part of the city I had never visited—a place of little curving streets, doors leading down from the sidewalks, which, when they flashed open let out a beat of jazz and the sound of laughter—and that only made me lonelier, especially for that laughter, that gold laughter that matched the gold mane. Then my heart, for some reason, stopped—one of those doors opened, and out walked two women—hand-in-hand!!! They stood swaying in the shadows for a moment—then—oh my god!—they were kissing. Kissing, passionately, mouth to mouth, melting into each other’s arms as though they were one!!!!”57

This spot-on parody of the tropes of lesbian pulp (with its focus on Greenwich Village, butches, familial constructions of lesbian desire, and disingenuous femmes) opens new possibilities for reading the popular in Bertha Harris. Like many 1960s avant-garde writers, she incorporated pulp and popular culture references into her experimental fiction. And indeed, the follow-up to Harris’s literary triumph of Lover was The Joy of Lesbian Sex, cowritten with Emily Sisley. Both The Joy of Lesbian Sex and The Joy of Gay Sex (by Charles Silverstein and gay literary icon Edmund White) built on the association of queer identity with explicit sexual acts, which was first established in the lucrative and titillating books of lesbian and gay pulp. Harris’s participation in the project was an act of bravado, but it also says a lot about her radical ethos of lesbian feminism that she didn’t believe that it hurt her cultural capital; if anything, it established her bona fides as a liberated radical unfettered by monogamy or respectability.

Daughters, Inc. was less prescriptive than the public proclamations of Arnold and Harris suggested. Julie Enszer notes that the “work of the women in the presses” was not “exclusively informed by any single feminist ideology,”58 and instead incorporated an “oppositional consciousness” that was fluid, contingent, and pragmatic. Literature was a cultural category that early feminists believed had been defined in explicitly patriarchal ways and had excluded a host of women writers whom they found exemplary, including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes. Coming up with new, fixed requirements for the literary didn’t interest many in the early feminist reading community. Instead, the central purpose, Judy Grahn wrote, was to discover “women’s real life stories” and “the truth we deserve.”59 Attempts to capture women’s reality, beyond the screen of patriarchy, were made in a number of genres and formal styles; Grahn argued that “the more closely coordinated we allow the content and form of any art to be, the more accurate, useful and whole it is.”60 It wasn’t until the middle of the decade that Arnold and Harris started evangelizing for a particular aesthetic style, but even then, Harris’s avant-garde proclamations made the same assumption—that literature tells us who we really are. And despite Harris’s sometimes strident tone, Daughters’ book list always ranged far beyond Arnold’s and Harris’s particular literary preferences. In this, they had more in common with Barbara Grier than they would have admitted.

Daughters, Inc.’s inclusive tendencies became apparent in June Arnold’s most important activist legacy: the formal creation of what we now call the women in print movement. In 1976 Arnold proposed a meeting of all women involved with bookselling and editing, distributing, reviewing, and writing feminist literature. The meeting was held in the center of the country, at a campsite in Nebraska, so that everyone could drive to it. The logistical challenges were immense, requiring multiple mailings, the planning of numerous workshops for every part of the book business, and the coordination of food, lodging, entertainment, and socializing for more than 100 women, many of whom were cantankerous and spoiling for a fight. Among the attendees were many who would later be important in the southern lesbian feminist network: “Dorothy Allison, Parke Bowman, … Harriett Desmoines, Barbara Grier, Bertha Harris, … Donna McBride, Catherine Nicholson,”61 and representatives of the southern feminist journal Feminary.

The conference offered an exhaustive regimen of workshops dedicated to every aspect of the “media circle”: publicity, reviewing, layout, distribution—nothing was left to chance. Barbara Grier was there, rubbing shoulders with Bertha Harris and other esoteric writers and publishers. They established a national network that was not beholden to outside influence, united against LICE (the literary industrial corporate establishment), their dismissive acronym for the mainstream publishing establishment.62 According to Kristen Hogan, “This conversation among the bookwomen grew into a feminist literary advocacy network that would change both the vocabularies of feminism and reading and publishing in the United States.”63 One of the most important legacies of this network was the Feminist Bookstore News, started by Carol Seajay (of Old Wives Tales Press in San Francisco). Indeed, many of the successes of feminist publishers and bookstores over the next two decades grew out of this first WIP conference.

In the aftermath of the conference Daughters, Inc. became more successful than it had ever been; ironically, it was finally gaining mainstream recognition. Harris’s Lover was widely reviewed in feminist publications as the prototype for a new kind of lesbian writing. Daughters, Inc. was the subject of an article in the New York Times Magazine,64 featuring interviews with Arnold, Bowman, Harris, and Harris’s lover Charlotte Bunch, that depicted the press as interesting, dogmatic, and unrealistic. Not long after the New York Times article came out, Arnold sold the rights to Rubyfruit Jungle to Bantam Books for $250,000 in an astonishing act of pragmatic flexibility. Arnold had denounced other writers for publishing their work with the “finishing press” and republishing small-press books with big publishers, and she had just told the New York Times that she would not sell the rights to any mainstream press.65

Brown wanted the sale; the money gave her financial security and independence for the first time in her life. And Arnold had invested enough of her own money—both in Daughters, Inc. and in the women’s movement as a whole—that getting something back on her investment must have made sense to her. But the response of the women’s community was vituperative as Daughters, Inc. was denounced in women’s periodicals and in person. It was part of a larger pattern of critical and abusive behavior from fellow feminists that led Arnold to conclude that the community was no longer sustaining, and in 1978 she returned Texas, with her lover Parke Bowman, to write a novel about her mother (the posthumously published Baby Houston) and to embrace, in geographical terms, a long-term imaginative obsession. New York feminists felt that Arnold was abandoning both feminism and feminist publishing, but Arnold and Bowman incorporated Daughters, Inc. in Houston and planned to continue the business with the proceeds of the Bantam sale.

Arnold’s diagnosis of cancer shortly after her return to Houston derailed these plans. In the time she had left—she died of brain cancer in 1982—she tried to finish her novel and beat her diagnosis. Her death was a tragedy for her children and for Bowman, who in her grief destroyed the bulk of the records of Daughters, Inc. It was also a loss for the literary movement as a whole, and without June to fiercely defend her own legacy, that task was left to others with scores to settle. In the early 1990s, Bertha Harris denounced June Arnold, brutally.66 Yet, June Arnold deserves to be remembered for her work as a feminist publisher and a key contributor to the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

Periodicals and the Creation of a Southern Lesbian Feminist (Literary) Culture

Though Arnold’s active involvement in lesbian feminism ended in 1978, her influence, particularly in the creation of a lesbian literary aesthetic, lingered much longer. You could say that June Arnold had a hand in the launch of Sinister Wisdom. Catherine Nicholson had been living a closeted lesbian existence, like many of her generation and class. As a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she lived on Country Club Drive, had discreet affairs, and worked unobtrusively within the university system. The women’s movement changed everything for her. Bertha Harris arrived as a student in the late 1960s from Greenwich Village, full of radicalism and wild experimentation and sexual bravado, and her connections to the New York scene provided Nicholson with her first entrée to a different realm of possibility. When she began a relationship with the decades-younger Harriet Desmoines, Nicholson’s journey from respectable middle-aged professor to radical feminist accelerated considerably. She and her collective, the Drastic Dykes, started making noise.

Harris provided introductions to New York feminist leaders, but they were first radicalized through print. Daughters, Inc.’s first list mesmerized them, as Desmoines explained: “In three nights and three days (in between making money, cooking, breaking up urchin battles, typing women’s center stencils, vying for ‘heterosexual acrobat of the year,’ and various other Renaissance Girl activities), I read Rubyfruit Jungle, Nerves, Early Losses, The Treasure, and The Cook and the Carpenter. I read them again. I read them backwards, I read them middle to outside. I go through and pick out the juicy parts. I fall in love with the Carpenter, I fall in love with the Cook, I fall in love with Three. I end up falling in love with every single female character but one in June Arnold’s novel.”67 Daughters, Inc. became one of their inspirations. So, too, did Amazon Quarterly and the C.L.I.T. papers in Dyke Quarterly, founded in 1975. In 1975 Nicholson and Desmoines traveled to New York for the Gay Academic Union conference and attended a party at June Arnold’s house in Greenwich Village (which Barbara Grier also attended), and Arnold became a mentor to them.

When their favorite lesbian periodical, Amazon Quarterly, announced it was ending publication, they decided to start their own lesbian journal. It wasn’t a very financially savvy plan, but it was an intellectually exciting idea. Nicholson resigned her job at the university and created, with Desmoines, Sinister Wisdom. They published their first issue on 4 July 1976—a declaration of independence. Desmoines’s “Notes for a Magazine” in the first issue was both an introduction and a manifesto of sorts:

We’re lesbians living in the South. We’re white; sometimes unemployed, sometimes working part-time. We’re a generation apart.… A nightmare reveals our fears: Catherine dreams that she wakes next to me. I’m holding slides of mutilated bodies and soundlessly screaming. Catherine looks up at the blank TV. A single open eye stares at us from the screen.

So why take chances? Because we needed more to read on, to feed on, more writing to satisfy our greedy maws. We’d become lesbian separatists because no other political position satisfied. But that left us with scattered beginnings of a culture and no viable strategy. We believed with the CLIT papers that consciousness is women’s greatest strength, and we both responded strongly to Mary Daly’s call for “ludic cerebration, the free play of intuition in our own space, giving rise to thinking that is vigorous, informed, multidimensional, independent, creative, tough.” But how to think that keenly and imaginatively, how to develop that consciousness?68

Their faith in the power of print—independent print—to create both a revolutionary consciousness and an independent lesbian culture harks back to both Arnold and Harris.

They had enough money for one year. It is unclear whether Arnold offered financial support, but she did bring the considerable weight of her influence to bear. Nicholson’s extensive handwritten notes from the many practical sessions at the first WIP conference in 1976 (still preserved in the Sallie Bingham Center at Duke University) show that the sessions provided important mentorship. But even more important was the genesis of the journal’s second issue, a special issue titled “Lesbian Writing.” Arnold had participated in a special MLA session on lesbian writing in 1975 and Beth Hodges planned to edit a special issue on the session for Margins, but Arnold insisted that the material be given to Sinister Wisdom. It is likely that Arnold was trying to help Nicholson and Desmoines, but this was also part of the war that she and Harris were waging against the “finishing press”: feminist writers should publish only with feminist presses; otherwise, they were sell-outs. Sinister Wisdom won the right to publish the proceedings, but the artifact of this battle—the second issue of Sinister Wisdom—suggests that the question was not entirely resolved. Indeed, Desmoines and Nicholson made the admirable decision to include in the special issue vigorous debate about the role of lesbian publishing, with dissents by several lesbian writers and a very personal letter from Beth Hodges, who defined the treatment she had received from fellow lesbians as “trashing” and “bullying.”

Inside the cover, Hodges, Desmoines, and Nicholson included a photograph of Barbara Grier with the following homage:

This issue is for Barbara Grier (Gene Damon), who wrote sixteen years for The Ladder, editing it four of those years while averaging sixty letters a day to isolated lesbians across the country; who gathered the most complete bibliography of lesbian literature available; who knows with such clarity the importance of lesbian writing and publishing to our lives: “There are many women to find, many lesbians to write about and for. We are the women to do this … We have to go out on hills and listen for the wild sweet singing of our past and record it for our future.” (Grier to Lesbians Writers Conference, Chicago, 1975.)

Beth writes: “I know you’re a legend but I don’t get choked up over legends. What moves me is the woman Barbara: not-very-humble, not-so-patient, but infinitely generous. For twenty years you’ve been encouraging lesbian writers and lesbian readers by sharing your time, your love, your energy, your knowledge. Thank you, dear Barbara. Your life blesses us all.”69

Grier’s status was unassailable in the early work of literary lesbians, where her catholic appreciation for all kinds of lesbian writing coexisted with the more avant-garde aesthetic of Arnold and Harris. But the debates that kept erupting suggest the difficulty of defining the lesbian aesthetic. Was it, as Grier maintained, anything with lesbian characters? Anything lesbian readers wanted to buy? Or was it, as the avant-garde wing of lesbian feminism maintained, something aesthetically distinctive, unassimilable, a means of revolution?

The “Lesbian Writing” issue didn’t provide a consistent answer. Arnold’s comments from the 1975 “Lesbians and Literature” MLA panel discussion (included in the special issue) made a clear case for the political efficacy of lesbian feminist writing and its role in creating a new form of literature. She suggested that the lesbian feminist genius is collective, based in groups of characters, which led to several key features: “a breaking down of distance between the writer and the reader,” “a change in humor,” and “a kind of unprecedented, complete honesty, however embarrassing.”70 “The feminist presses,” she concludes, “… will be the ground in which this new art is brought to flower.”71

In the published dialogue on lesbian literature between June Arnold and Bertha Harris, however, a more nuanced discussion about lesbian literature emerges. They discuss the freedom that women’s presses gave them to tell the truth and take chances in their writing, but they also discuss the importance of not censoring themselves to satisfy an emerging lesbian consensus about appropriate characters:

J: I wonder if there’s another kind of censorship going on among lesbians now which hasn’t been stated: that we’re supposed to write about women being tender, sensitive, understanding, etc., about women working in groups. But when you’re in the middle of a novel and your character is doing something that’s against that …

B: And you know it’s true, what the character is doing.

J: You’ve got to stay with the character. Even if the character is a drunk and the critics say, Don’t you know a lot of sisters are having trouble in the bars and they’re becoming alcoholics and aren’t you romanticizing alcohol? Do you think we have some responsibility to that, or do we have responsibility to the character?

B: No. We have only responsibility to the character. If you’re writing from the absolutely raw place. Because responsibility to the character and what you’re doing is ultimately responsibility to the women’s movement and to all lesbians.

J: Even though it’s not clear right now.

B: Even though it’s not popular or clear, because, along with us writing fiction, we assume that women who read are also peeling off layers of consciousness. I think a big misunderstanding of what sex is, has been put about through the lesbian-feminist movement in particular. Sex among women sounds like early childcare sometimes.

J: Babies playing in the rain and all love and sweetness.

B: We all know that’s not true. Sex can be violent, and devastating, and I think that to write a novel in which everything is sweetness and light, sexually among women, is lying. And lies always propagate not only bad literature but bad politics. And losing. People who believe lies lose.72

This exchange is remarkable: two women who were infamous for their strident attacks on sell-outs discuss the ways that prescriptive intolerance could hurt not only lesbian literature, but also the larger revolutionary claims that literature was intended to serve. A cynical interpretation would be that they didn’t want anyone to question their own aesthetic choices, but they felt free to challenge everyone else’s decisions. More broadly, they were grappling with the very real problem of prescribing a “right” way to do lesbian literature. No matter how responsible to the “community” one tries to be, it is always possible to violate another’s deeply held beliefs about where one publishes, how and about whom one writes, and what situations and characters one creates. Arnold and Harris produced and published some of the most interesting lesbian fiction of the 1970s, but they also contributed to an atmosphere in which questions of authenticity led to self-destructive internal fights and the demise of Daughters, Inc. itself. Believing in literature without prescribing one definition of it is a difficult line to walk, and these literary lesbians often had difficulty maintaining their passion and their generosity simultaneously.

In her opening and closing remarks to the section “The Politics of Publishing and the Lesbian Community,” Jan Clausen made clear her own discomfort with the push for “women’s presses,” mentioning the controversy about the special issue of Sinister Wisdom, the decision of former Amazon Quarterly editors Gina Covina and Laurel Galana to have Harper and Row publish their anthology of the magazine, and a panel discussion at the May 1976 New York City Lesbian Conference that became, in her words, “an acrimonious debate over the validity of publishing with ‘the man.’ While painting what seemed to me an overly rosy picture of feminist publishing alternatives, June Arnold, Parke Bowman, and Bertha Harris took such a strong stand against publishing with the male-controlled presses under any circumstances that some who disagreed with various points they made (myself included) felt reluctant to speak up.”73 Clausen’s uneasiness with the stridency of this position is echoed in the responses of the lesbian writers who provided more nuanced perspectives about when and how lesbians should publish their work. Very few ruled out mainstream presses, and most reacted negatively to the proposition that “the lesbian writing community should act in any way to encourage or discourage certain publishing decisions on the part of its members.”74 Clausen’s decision to publish the unedited responses of writers including Audre Lorde, Rita Mae Brown, and Jane Rule widened the range of voices of the “lesbian community,” and collectively, these writers directly challenged Arnold and Harris. Nicholson and Desmoines were in many ways Arnold acolytes, but they did not shy away from criticizing her in these pages. Nor did they themselves avoid criticism: Beth Hodges’s piece details her dismay at being bullied into choosing to publish in Sinister Wisdom and her anger at Nicholson and Desmoines.75 Nicholson and Desmoines gave themselves the final word in the issue, reiterating arguments about revolution and the women’s press that echoed Arnold’s and Harris.76 But they didn’t claim final authority, and their final statement did not resolve the debate about the politics of lesbian publishing.

Perhaps because of the multiple voices involved in the debate, the special issue that Arnold had insisted be published by Nicholson put Sinister Wisdom on the map. The journal issue sold out, and women from across the country wrote looking for copies. The issue articulated a lesbian aesthetic that wasn’t only about content but also about form—the culmination of Harris’s and Arnold’s vision for lesbian feminist literature.

Many supporters and contributors to Sinister Wisdom commented on the journal’s location in the South, and Harriet Desmoines wrote about it in the third issue:

How to Go International on Grits and Turnip Greens:

Earlier this year it dawned on us that we were publishing a journal of Lesbian writing in the hometown of the “Praise the Lord” television network and that this was somewhat akin to raising pineapples on the North Pole. Our solution? Move to New York, move to Boston, move to L.A., move to San Francisco! Finally, we decided to just stay where we were. For one thing, it freaks people out in the Bay area. For another, most Lesbians live, love, work and politic outside the metropolitan centers. And the movement monster could surely stand a corrective dose of Southern Midwestern, “provincial” chauvinism. Then, too, we have our smug moments, like the evening one deeply closeted South Carolina Lesbian appeared, hopping from one foot to the other, sputtering, “I can’t believe you all are here!”77

Desmoines’s critique of the concentration of lesbian feminism on the coasts suggests that a bias existed long before official histories of the women’s movement de-emphasized its “Southern Midwestern” factions. The sputtering South Carolina lesbian is a symbol of the southern inflection of the magazine, but ultimately, Sinister Wisdom aspired to be a national magazine of lesbian (literary) culture rather than a regional publication, as demonstrated by the heading “How to Go International on Grits and Turnip Greens.” It published early poetry by Audre Lorde, reprinted influential essays by Adrienne Rich, and discussed lesbian identity in universal terms. So when Julia Penelope, formerly employed in the South but relocated to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, invited them to move to Nebraska and gain the university’s financial support for the journal, Nicholson and Desmoines moved.

Their departure inspired the creation of another feminist periodical more clearly rooted in a southern lesbian feminist consciousness. Mab Segrest, a former contributing editor to Sinister Wisdom, decided to transform a small feminist newsletter in the North Carolina Research Triangle into a southern lesbian feminist journal published by a collective that included herself, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Cris South. The name of the collective, Feminary, was inspired by a term from Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres for the books that “the women” carried around their necks, a sign of their liberation.78

In the inaugural issue of the magazine in 1979, when its name officially became Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, the Feminary collective explicitly thanked Harriet Desmoines and Catherine Nicholson “for their courage and example,” and “their work for lesbians in the South.” The issue also included an extended mission statement:

Feminary is produced by a lesbian feminist collective in the Piedmont of North Carolina. As Southerners, as lesbians, and as women, we need to explore with others how our lives fit into a region about which we have great ambivalences—to share our anger and our love.

We want to hear Southern lesbians tell the stories of women in the South—our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and friends. We feel we are products of Southern values and traditions but that, as lesbians, we contradict the destructive parts of those values and traditions; and we feel it important to explore how this Southern experience fits into the American pattern.

We are committed to working on issues of race, because they are vital to an understanding of our lives as they have been, as they are and could be—and to understanding and overcoming differences of class and age among lesbians as well.

We want to encourage feminist and lesbian organizing in a region whose women suffer greatly in their lack of political power.

We want to provide an audience for Southern lesbians who may not think of themselves as writers but who have important stories to tell—stories that will help to fill the silences that have obscured the truth about our lives and kept us isolated from each other.

We want to know who we are.

We want to change women’s lives.79

The mission statement asserts essentialist notions of southern identity—“Southern values and traditions”—but then complicates them with race, class, and gender. It aligns itself with the transformative ethos of women’s liberation, even as it embraces the “ambivalences” of the South and the founders’ own identities. It celebrates the South and critiques it. Feminary quickly became a central imaginative meeting place for far-flung members of the southern lesbian feminist tribe, as an iconic cover suggested: over a map of the South, two lesbians kissed across Alabama and Georgia, and a woman reclined orgasmically in Virginia. It was explicitly and proudly southern, rejecting stereotypes of backward ignorance and southern belles. Despite its invocation of southern tradition, however, Feminary was not at all nostalgic. Class and race analyses were central to its work; southern patriarchy was the problem, and broad coalitions against that hegemony were seen as the only solution.

Feminary was also deeply interested in the literary. The second issue of the reimagined journal was devoted to poetry, and it is filled with poems, book reviews, and surveys of southern lesbian literature. References to Bertha Harris, June Arnold, and Rita Mae Brown abound in the review essays, but Feminary also had an egalitarian approach to writing; its mission statement encouraged contributions from women who didn’t consider themselves writers. Feminary was an important space for a theorization of a distinctively southern lesbian feminist consciousness, and an heir to the projects of Arnold, Harris, Nicholson, and Desmoines.80

Members of the Durham collective burned up the roads between urban centers, giving talks, attending conferences, camping at writing retreats, and advocating for a distinctively southern lesbian feminism. Minnie Bruce Pratt, a Feminary member, recalls, “We used to joke about how we were the revolutionary answer to the Fugitives, a new literary tradition bent on turning the old values of the South topsy-turvy.”81 Trained in the “essential South” of the Fugitives, the Feminary collective claimed another South, grounded in multiculturalism, radicalism, and resistance. Their revolutionary and literary movement was linked by lesbian feminist centers in cities, college towns, and communes across the South, in Gainesville and Tallahassee, Atlanta and Durham, Charlotte and Knoxville.

Three other feminist publishing ventures not primarily grounded in southern lesbian feminism also provided places for lesbian feminist writers to publish. Quest magazine was edited by Charlotte Bunch, who had been a member of the Furies and was in a relationship with Bertha Harris (Harris became a guest editor for Quest, and Bunch was also involved in Daughters, Inc.). Bunch invited Dorothy Allison and her collective to move to Washington, D.C. to work on the journal, which they did in 1976. Conditions was overseen by another collective that would later include Allison and other famous lesbian feminists including Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, Ely Bulkin (who coauthored a book with Minnie Bruce Pratt), and Jewelle Gomez. Conditions published African American writers who also published in Feminary, as well as Pratt and other southern lesbian feminist writers. The very talented editor and publisher Nancy Bereano published a number of southern lesbian feminist texts including, as editor at Crossing Press, Maureen Brady’s Folly and Cris South’s Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses, and as founder/editor of Firebrand Books, Allison’s Trash, Segrest’s My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, and Pratt’s Crime against Nature. At the same time, further south, Barbara Grier was reviving the paperback original tradition of lesbian writing.

Lesbian Feminist Trash: Naiad Press and Lesbian Genre Fiction

Naiad Press was one of a legion of feminist publishing ventures in the early 1970s. After the demise of TL, former contributor Anyda Marchant wrote to Barbara Grier asking for help in publishing her novel “about two women who come to love each other in what I consider a completely normal fashion.… It has a, for them, happy ending.” She had trouble imagining that it would be published, “even by new women’s presses, who all seem hung up on the idea of fiction as tracts with social significance. Of course fiction can be important in conveying ideas but to my mind the demands of fiction as art come first. However, I have decided to try printing the story myself and selling it as a paperback book moderately priced.”82 Grier wrote back with enthusiasm; she believed that TL readers, who liked “vicarious experience” and “tend to be readers for the sake of reading,”83 would be the perfect audience. Grier used the pilfered Ladder mailing list to distribute it, Marchant and her partner provided start-up funds, and Naiad Press was born.

The press remained a modest operation in the 1970s, publishing a small but eclectic range of lesbian fiction. As Grier explained to a prospective author in 1976, “unlike Daughters we are a very poor press.”84 That year marked the high point of Daughters’ cultural influence, but the dogmatism of Arnold and Harris was beginning to irritate people, including Grier, who had a much broader view of what constituted acceptable lesbian writing. However, Harris was a fan of Grier, remembering her from her days as Gene Damon at TL. In 1975 she invited Grier to a Daughters party in New York, where Grier met many southern lesbian feminist expatriates for the first time. Grier’s description of that Greenwich Village party, in a letter to Marchant, reveals her ambivalence:

The first night (not Thanksgiving) we went to the loft of Daughters[.…] It was a very impressive place in many ways … simple and dripping with the subtle things that sit in corners and scream quietly (money money money). The women are (meaning here Parke and June) fairly impressive … but too political for my tastes … though June is elegant looking much in the same way Jane Rule’s Helen Szonthoff is … lean, well bred, good facial planes, quick bright eyes[.…] Parke and June are thinking of trying to get a publishers conference going … with a Midwest location … to get the women together who are active in publishing women’s material … It is an interesting idea[.…] I do love Bertha.… She is funny and quick and well on her way to becoming an alcoholic.85

The gossip about Arnold and Harris is entertaining, but there is also the suggestion that Grier was alienated by both Arnold’s strident politics and her affluence. Arnold’s wealth and her sense of herself as part of an elite clearly rub Grier the wrong way, and her suspicion of the esoteric literary is likely linked to her sense of a class divide. If only the overeducated few could read it, how was such writing revolutionary? Daughters’ avant-garde feminism sought to teach what a liberated lesbian future could look like. Grier was much more modest and practical; she sought lesbian fiction that lesbians wanted right now—especially lesbians like her in the flyover states, not the New York radical scene.

That tension continued to erupt between Naiad and a succession of feminist presses (including Persephone Press and Kitchen Table Press), but Grier’s philosophy remained consistent: give lesbians what they want. She wrote in a letter to Marchant in 1977 about the decision by Diana Press to begin to publish fiction:

I am not so concerned about their announced intention to publish fiction. From what little contact I have had with them I should say that there is no likelihood of a real competition between us and them. One thing we must bear in mind is that Naiad has a definite publishing policy.… We are publishing for women who want real novels—you can call them romantic if you want to—and hopefully we will pick the kind that will go on being republished and reread. This is a slower kind of success, I am aware, and in that respect we are handicapped in dealing with both Diana and Daughters.… The writers who would please the critics that have called our books trash can, with my best wishes, go to Diana and Daughters for their way into print.86

Grier’s clear sense of her own purpose, even in the modest beginnings of Naiad Press, is striking: she was the one publishing “real novels,” and she didn’t mind if those novels were characterized as romance. Diana and Daughters, by contrast, were publishing the esoteric fiction that didn’t speak to her audience. Grier’s embrace of what might be called a middlebrow aesthetic (though many termed it lowbrow or trash) and her rejection of a highbrow definition of the literary demonstrated an aesthetic commitment to accessible novels that remained consistent throughout her career.

Grier’s discontent with the stridency of the women’s press movement reached its breaking point over a controversy at Diana Press. Grier, a great supporter of feminist presses, had published her own TL anthologies with Diana Press and had also encouraged her mentor, Jeannette Foster, to reprint her groundbreaking anthology Sex Variant Women with them. Diana Press had promised 50 percent royalty payments for authors after printing expenses had been paid, but five years later, no royalties had been paid at all. Foster was suffering from dementia and could not afford nursing home care, and Grier felt guilty for leading her friend astray. Rita Mae Brown simply wanted what was owed her. They all sued the press.

Grier felt betrayed. As she wrote to the lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow, “It has managed to make it possible for me after about 25 years to turn my back on the movement and walk away … and this time I will not look back.”87 Grier remained involved in the movement, but something fundamental changed after this experience. From now on, she would run Naiad as a business, publishing what women wanted to read, not what political activists thought they should want. In 1979 she moved with her librarian partner, Donna McBride, to Tallahassee, Florida, to reinvent her press.

Grier wanted Naiad to be her full-time job, and for that, she needed commercial success. She published a wide range of books in the early 1980s, from reprints of lesbian classics (like Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart) to lesbian sex manuals (Pat Califia’s Sapphistries). Shortly after moving to Tallahassee, Barbara Grier met Florida State University professor Sheila Ortiz Taylor, who had written a novel called Faultline. Grier was convinced she had found the new Rubyfruit Jungle—a clever, funny, and formally interesting novel with a heroine to rival Molly Bolt: Arden Benbow, a motorcycle-riding, poetry-writing, Latina lesbian mother of six, ex-wife of Malthus, lover of Alice. Grier was ready. She arranged for a first printing of 10,000, a large run for a small feminist press without much capital. She had promotional material made, including buttons, t-shirts, and bookmarks, all depicting a rabbit—a play on the name Malthus and a reference to the novel’s rapidly reproducing rabbits (and Arden’s own fecundity). She solicited jacket blurbs from famous writers, including two iconic southern lesbian feminists. Rita Mae Brown enthused, “Faultline is faultless. Sheila Ortiz Taylor has written an earthquake of a book.”88 Bertha Harris praised the book as a literary triumph and an example of authentic lesbian literature: “Faultline is a family narrative done to a brilliant surreal turn. An American standup comic masterpiece sired by Buster Keaton out of Gertrude Stein, born on the San Andreas fault and danced on the ceiling by a Black Fred Astaire. How otherwise can you talk about the adventures of a Lesbian mother with six children, three hundred rabbits and a very relaxed attitude? A laugh out of life at last.”89 Harris’s preferences for avant-garde literature, popular culture, surrealism, and humor seemed to be satisfied by this book, which featured multiple narrators, flashbacks, and subversive queers but which also, unlike Harris’s novel Lover, was remarkably accessible. Grier was convinced that Faultline would make Naiad solvent and successful.

Faultline marked a significant shift in tactics for Grier. Published the same year that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple became a literary sensation, Faultline was promoted using strategies invented by LICE. As Joanne Passet explains, “Determined to get Taylor’s Faultline ‘into the hands of every woman in America (and all over the world too),’ ” Grier promoted the book at the American Booksellers Association meeting, arranged for publication in “England, Germany, Spain and France,” and contacted Bantam Books about a mass-market edition (which didn’t happen).90 Faultline was a success for Naiad, but not on the scale of Rubyfruit Jungle. As it turned out, Grier’s financial stability came not from a funny literary novel but from a romance novel.

Published in 1983, Katherine Forrest’s Curious Wine detailed the deliciously slow seduction of Diana Holland by Lane Christianson at a women-only weekend in Reno, Nevada. Forrest deftly writes a lesbian fantasy—the perfect blonde woman, the isolated bird’s-eye room (with a ladder that pulls up for perfect privacy), the easy, intense physical connection, and most importantly, the happy ending: love at first sight becomes the one true love unlike any actual relationship, gay or straight. Readers know exactly how this story will end up—with Diana and Lane in bed together—but Forrest’s tantalizing manipulation of the conventions of romance makes the journey thoroughly satisfying for the reader.

Curious Wine became Naiad Press’s bestselling novel and remained a constant on its “top ten bestseller” lists. Grier was a savvy enough businesswoman to recognize that she had found her meal ticket. Forrest became “the press’s supervising editor,”91 encouraging first-time authors to tap into the lucrative market that Curious Wine had uncovered. Naiad published lesbian detective novels, lesbian mysteries, lesbian science fiction, coming-out novels, and, of course, lesbian romances. A wide range of authors, including many first-time novelists, fed the insatiable demand of its lesbian readership. Its forays into nonfiction, particularly the notorious Lesbian Nuns, led to mainstream recognition.92

Naiad Press quickly became a symbol of everything the lesbian feminist avant-garde abhorred, what Harris disparagingly referred to as “woman plus woman in bed.” For many, Naiad represented the degradation of the dreams of June Arnold, Bertha Harris, and Catherine Nicholson to create a distinctive aesthetic of lesbian writing. And yet Harris, the queen of the literary lesbians, remained on friendly terms with Grier. She blurbed Faultline in 1982, and in the late 1980s negotiated with Grier to bring out a new edition of Lover. Though Harris ended up reprinting with New York University Press, she had high praise for Naiad Press. As she wrote in a letter to Grier: “I am very proud of you. Because of you, lesbians have something to read—virtually anything we want. Immediately after food, sex, shelter, work, friendship, comes the next vital necessity: something to read. I call Naiad an International Treasure. I (and you) recall the horrible days well when there was nothing to read.”93

Grier saw her work at Naiad as providing lesbians with what they wanted, not what the urban activist vanguard thought they should have. For this lesbian book collector and bibliographer, reading remained a good in and of itself. What women readers did with that reading was less important to Grier than getting them to read at all. If feminist reading led to consciousness raising and political transformation, great, but Grier was content with other outcomes—the construction of identity, a virtual sense of community, even pure pleasure. “I suppose if I could,” she explained to Houston bookstore owner Pokey Anderson, “I would make better readers, but you can’t do that.… There is a place in the world for all of it, there’s a place for all this reading.”94 Grier insisted that we open up our understanding of feminist reading practices. Her populist ethos fueled Naiad’s success in the 1980s and 1990s.

Literary Lesbians and Mainstream Success in the 1990s

The rise of Naiad Press transformed lesbian fiction into a recognizable and lucrative literary category available in bookstores and accessible to a wide array of readers, lesbian and otherwise. By the end of the 1980s, Naiad’s visibility and accessibility exceeded anything Grier might have imagined when she was writing her Lesbiana column back in the 1960s. But not everyone was happy about the rise of lesbian genre fiction. Dorothy Allison’s 1988 letter is representative of the discontent that existed:

I want so to write mean stories—work that pushes the envelope of what people allow themselves to think, work that stretches the lesbian imagination. Most “lesbian” fiction doesn’t even make me mad; it just sits on the shelf like stale white bread so bland I don’t even want to call it Lesbian.… There is so much more that can be done with fiction than most lesbians seem to realize, so many more lesbian realities to explore, so much more I want to try to do. So much stuff, I need to see for myself, the edge of fear mostly, the place where fear skirts lust and the way it breaks.… I want the ambiguity.… I want the uncertainty and the surprise.95

Allison had been a lesbian feminist true believer, living in a commune, running a women’s center and women’s bookstore, attending the Sagaris Institute, and working for iconic feminist journals including Quest and Conditions. Bertha Harris was her mentor, but the transgressive, monstrous lesbian Harris championed did not become the ideal in 1980s lesbian feminism. The “lesbian sex wars” led to Allison’s almost total disillusionment with feminism. It also prompted her to starting publishing. Her 1983 book of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, was a direct response to her detractors; her 1988 collection of stories, Trash, was similarly transgressive and courageous. Although Allison was fed up with the women’s press culture that Naiad represented—“stale white bread”—she still needed women’s presses to get published.

But this was about to change. The first hint of what was to come was an unexpected prize. In 1989 Minnie Bruce Pratt won the Lamont Poetry Prize for her book Crime against Nature, which detailed Pratt’s loss of parental rights after coming out and divorcing her husband. It is hard to overstate what a milestone this was. The Lamont was one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in the nation; an award of the Academy of American Poets, it was designated specifically for a poet’s second book and was meant to honor up-and-coming poets. It was comparable to being named a Yale Younger Poet or winning a Pulitzer Prize for poetry; some of the most famous American poets have been honored with a Lamont Prize. James Merrill was the host at the ceremony at which Pratt received the award.

This recognition by the Academy of American Poets was widely seen as lesbian literature’s coming of age; with the exception of Adrienne Rich (who had been a Yale Younger Poet but lost much of her academic reputation when she embraced lesbian feminism), Pratt was the first lesbian feminist poet to receive mainstream recognition, particularly for content that was explicitly queer. She emphasized this in her acceptance speech, and placed the genesis of these poems in the South:

The gay bar that I went to, in 1975, when I was first coming out as a lesbian, was called The Other Side; it was an old warehouse on Russell Street, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and was, in fact, located on the other side of the tracks. When I went with my friends, we’d stand in a clump in the narrow doorway, then squeeze an awkward entrance between a cigarette machine and the counter where we paid our money and someone stamped our hands with blacklight ink.… The entrance was deliberately narrow so it could be easily blocked by one person while we all ran out the big double doors in the next room.…

I was never arrested in a raid on that bar or any other. Judgment on me as a lesbian came down in another place in my life, when I was told that I was not fit under the General Statutes of the State, not fit under the sodomy law, to be both a lover of women and the mother of my two sons. The poems in the book Crime against Nature, for which I am receiving this award tonight, are a reconciliation of these ways of loving, as a mother, as a lesbian; are a reconciliation of a contradiction that I do not accept, that I have defied in my life and in my writing.96

Pratt constructs a poet’s metaphor for the treacherous narrow space for queer life in the South, structured for secrecy, protection, and escape. Her reconciliation was not just as a lesbian and a mother but also as a southerner who refused the narrow confines to which she had been relegated.

Pratt gave explicit credit for her achievement to women’s liberation, gay liberation, and (implicitly) the WIP movement. “I would not have begun to live as a lesbian nor have survived to write these poems without the women’s liberation and the gay and lesbian liberation movements. Many of the people who made the political and cultural realities that helped me survive are here tonight: Women who’ve excavated and saved the facts of lesbian history, women who’ve written the poems, edited the magazines, newspapers, and journals, taken the photographs, taped the radio shows, run the bookstores, and begun the women’s studies and gay studies programs, women who have created the places where lesbians can live and think and flourish.”97 Pratt’s acknowledgment of the WIP movement, with its network of journals, bookstores, writers, and academics, gives it credit for her development as a writer. She called her winning the award “the trajectory of the eighties around us breaking through into the mainstream. It was one of those moments.… I mean, nobody could believe it. Like, what happened? And of course, all of our conversations were around, how did this happen? How is this possible? Very interesting, because we were trying to calculate the impact of the movement on the cultural arena.”98 The big names of the “lesbian feminist cultural establishment”99 were there, staging an uncomfortable encounter between lesbian feminists and the mainstream cultural establishment.

It was a warm-up for the literary phenomenon to come: Dorothy Allison’s 1991 Bastard out of Carolina. Allison had been working on the novel for many years. After the publication of Trash in 1988, she received a big advance from Dutton, a subsidiary of Penguin established in 1986. The contract with Dutton gave her the benefit of wide distribution of her novel, including in the increasingly significant big box bookstores Barnes and Noble and Borders. Allison had reservations about publishing with a mainstream press; they had first suggested a book cover that she described to Firebrand publisher Nancy Bereano as “a Steven Spielberg cleaned-up version of Tobacco Road.”100 But the advance allowed her the time to finish the novel, and the money the publisher budgeted for a book tour, promotion, and distribution gave her a remarkable opportunity to reach a far larger audience than she had ever enjoyed.

One would not think that a coming-of-age novel about poverty, abuse, and incest would become a runaway bestseller, but like Alice Walker’s 1982 The Color Purple, Bastard out of Carolina exceeded all expectations. The novel prompted national conversations about incest, became a finalist for the National Book Award, was turned into a movie directed by Angelica Huston, and made Dorothy Allison a literary star. It continues to appear on college syllabi for a variety of courses including southern literature, “grit lit” surveys, queer studies, and gender studies overviews.

Other southern lesbian feminists took advantage of the interest in queer topics and received renewed attention. Blanche McCrary Boyd had a reset, of sorts; in 1991 she published a collection of linked short stories, The Revolution of Little Girls, which, because she would not allow her first two novels (Nerves and Mourning the Death of Magic) to be reprinted, was treated much like a first book. She also reprinted her collection of essays, The Redneck Way of Knowledge. Bertha Harris came back in 1992 with a reprint of Lover; her new introduction detailed her experience with radical feminism and settled scores with June Arnold. Minnie Bruce Pratt published Rebellion, a collection of essays, in 1991, and Mab Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor came out in 1994; both were published by independent presses. Even in a moment of mainstream acceptance, feminist presses remained an essential part of the publishing ecosystem.

One could call this a return of the literary lesbian, except that the literary lesbian had never really gone away, even if mainstream presses had lost interest. Allison and Boyd were invested in traditional notions of the literary and did not appreciate the rise of lesbian genre fiction that Naiad Press represented. But Allison’s own literary tastes were not limited by the experimental ethos that her mentor Harris advocated. She wrote in a letter about lesbian writer Sarah Schulman’s novel Empathy, “Everything I say should be taken in the context of my own biases and interests in fiction, [and] the fact that while I understand and enjoy traditional narratives, I have little to say about experimental writing. I read very little of it.”101 Allison’s preference for “traditional narratives” complicates her own embrace of the literary. For avant-garde lesbians like Harris, “traditional narratives” were not literary enough.

Allison’s own relationship to the literary was complicated, and in some ways, she was closer to pulp queen Barbara Grier than her public persona suggested. Privately, she wrote S/M science fiction erotica. One story, “Predators,” was published; the rest were sent by mail to private subscribers for a fee.102 It could be said that Allison started the niche market for lesbian S/M erotica, just as her friend Jewelle Gomez began the lesbian vampire trend with The Gilda Chronicles. Allison has been careful not to publish the erotica under her own name, but she was writing it at the same time she was finishing Bastard out of Carolina. As it was for Harris, for Allison the line between literary and trash was permeable.

Even as Allison became the most widely known southern lesbian feminist writer, she understood the continued perils of depending on mainstream publishers. As she wrote to her agent,

I worry a great deal how any lesbian writer who takes herself and her writing seriously can survive in mainstream publishing where the bottom line is sales. I believe that there will always be a barrier between the lesbian writer and the straight audience that has to be overcome if a trade publisher is to make a profit. The lesbian audience is just not big enough to get the kind of sales that warrant hardcover profits, though the combined, lesbian, feminist and gay audience may be. Nor do I believe in the universal audience—the idea that if the work is good enough it will draw in the readers. I know far too many good writers whose work is obscure and marginal.103

So the problem of the literary and the literary lesbian continued, even as many lesbians went mainstream in the 1990s. By and large, Allison was treated as if she had come out of nowhere to write a first novel, though she had been publishing throughout the 1980s and had been nurtured by the feminist movement for her entire career. In a conversation with Boyd not long after the publication of Bastard, Allison critiqued the mainstream press’s fascination with her:

BB: So, how are you feeling about being a crossover artist?

DA: Hi, darlin’. It’s bullshit. What about all those straight writers who are read in queer communities? If you’re talking about crossover only in terms of small-press lesbian and gay writers who suddenly sell some books to straight people, it’s insulting and trivializing.104

Allison notes the continued myopia of the mainstream about the “small-press” system set up by the WIP movement. The fact that New York Times reviewers didn’t notice, she insists, doesn’t negate the importance of that sustaining network of small presses, alternative bookstores, queer and feminist writers, and readers. The media wanted to treat Allison as a singular oddity, rather than as part of a southern lesbian feminist tradition, but she knew better.

Ultimately, the WIP movement created a distinctive literary network whose members believed literature could liberate women from the ravages of the patriarchy. Its interrogation of the literary led to a remarkable production of literary artifacts that critics have yet to appreciate. Those productions ranged across levels of sophistication and tastes, united in a fearless examination of women’s experiences and a commitment to writing previously unspeakable truths.

This small press revolution enabled, both in the books it published and the mainstream interest it commanded, the creation of the archive of southern lesbian feminism. The main interests and contours of that tradition are the focus of the next three chapters, which explore the radical South, queer sexuality, and the reconstruction of southern space. In the spirit of the WIP movement, these cultural and literary investigations proceed topically, with a diverse range of southern lesbian feminist voices chiming in. Whatever their differences, these southern lesbian feminist writers were engaged in a radical critique of the South—its racism, its hypocrisy, its control of physical and intellectual space—and their common critiques and inventions deserve to be understood together.