What a long way we have come. With a simple subscription, I can have access to news of books about my life—gay books, women's books. When I first came out I didn't know such books existed. When women's and gay lib erupted, I could visit whole bookstores devoted to issues I cared about and stories I wanted to read. Now, although many of those bookstores have been subsumed by the big guys profiteering from our work, I get a monthly newsletter called 'Books To Watch Out For'* that keeps me from being isolated.
I think it's safe to assume that Sappho wrote more than the seven or eight poems we have of hers, yet that's all we have left of ancient lesbian writing, while 'Beowulf' still bays in every high-school English class. I think it's safe to assume that, if there had been feminist newsletters and bookstores in, for example, George Elliot's time, we would have had a very different picture of 19th-century England and she could have used her own name, Mary Ann Evans. I think it's safe to assume that Willa Cather would have had a lesbian tale or two to tell had she not felt compelled to make her Antonia's admirer and narrator male. I also think it's safe to assume that for every Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall, there were hundreds more whose love dared not speak, or write, its name and that we have forever lost those unique voices.
My friend the Librarian remembered the first time she walked into a women's bookstore in the fall of 1976. It was New Earth Books and Records in Lawrence, Kan., and the shop consisted of two rooms on 39th Street across from a derelict building. In the second, less well-lighted room, a range of shelves held the lesbian books. During her first visit, the Librarian dared not look at those shelves. Yet she remembers thinking, 'If I just kept looking I would find everything I wanted.' Like so many of us, her emotions on first encountering a literature of our own were a jumble of panic, triumph and exultation. 'I felt like the world would open up and I would fall through,' she said.
That the rudimentary revolution of a New Earth has morphed into a service as sophisticated as 'Books To Watch Out For' is evidence of how far we have come. Now the Librarian can live anywhere and find everything she wants.
My handydyke friend remembers when she and her partner, the Pianist, closed their bookstore. Two women came to their door, repeat visitors from out of town, looking for their 'women's-books fix' and pitifully begged for suggestions about where to find some. The Handydyke felt bad—she remembered the first time she'd gone into a women's bookstore and been, she said, 'flabbergasted, surprised, floored, amazed and too embarrassed to even look' at the lesbian books. All those words about her life were just out of reach because, as a high school teacher, she had to live in the closet like the out-of-towners longing for women's books. The Pianist laughed, remembering the first gay book they read, The Front Runner, and how they hadn't even bought it—someone gave it to them. The Librarian added that she only knew there were gay books because she found Rubyfruit Jungle, which has a lesbian character, tucked away in a little kiosk in Chicago.
A straight friend took the Pianist to her first women's bookstore. She and the Handydyke had never even heard of Tucson's Antigone books ( not far from them ) until they moved to the Northwest and opened a bookstore of their own. The Pianist now thinks of these stores as integrated resources of our culture and feels that her introduction to them was a revelation that there was even the possibility of a culture.
Now, when I read 'Books To Watch Out For,' whose name is itself derived from another amazing development in gay and feminist culture, the comic strip 'Dykes To Watch Out For,' or when I read 'The Lambda Book Report'* and our other newspapers, newsletters and magazines—I know these are signs of a strong and thriving society. Never again will our voices be lost. We stepped into the hole that opened up in the earth and built out of it a structure of books and music and art all our own.
Clarification
In the Passages section of the AIDS at 25 section of the June 21 issue, Gordon Sinclair was identified as one of the deceased. This person is not the same as the former owner of Gordon restaurant—who is still very much alive.
