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reflections: kudos: a column of books, living history and gallimaufry
by Marie J. Kuda
2001-01-03

This article shared 3962 times since Wed Jan 3, 2001
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There were more gay and lesbian themed books published last year than in the first 50 years of the 20th Century. Non-fiction titles proliferated. New biographies and autobiographies are no longer circumspect about the sexual preferences of their subjects. Even persons long dead and the subjects of several learned tomes are getting a second look through the lens of queer scholarship. Queer academics didn't really get off the ground until caucuses were formed within the old-line organizations in the late ླྀs early-ྂs. When Louis Crew and Julia Penelope Stanley created their caucus in the MLA ( Modern Language Association ) and Barbara Gittings and others spearheaded the first Gay Task Force of the American Library Association, the floodgates began to crack open.

Reference Books

One of the first areas found wanting by the ALA Gay Task Force in studies conducted in the 1970s was the content of topics on gays and gay issues in encyclopedias and reference books. In the last decade of the century, queers no longer merely look to correct existing works&emdash;although the cyber-pedias are found sorely wanting in this area. Our cultural historians are being pressed into service to create reference sources with a queer take on every topic from literature to film. Students doing research or just searching for lifestyle answers now have dozens of options. The year 2000 saw the publication of the two volume Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures by the old established house of Garland Publishing at $280 for the set, a bit pricey for popular consumption. Former Chicagoan, Bonnie Zimmerman, edited the lesbian volume. A really excellent desk-sized 700-page paperback, Completely Queer: The Lesbian and Gay Encyclopedia by Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson of a few years earlier is more appealing in a $25 price range.

Film Studies

Gays & Film by Richard Dyer ( 1977 ) was followed by the attention-getting, now-classic study, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies ( 1981 ) by Vito Russo. Analysis by writers like B. Ruby Rich, Andrea Weiss and Chris Straayer dissected films for lesbian content and context. Pop culture Hollywood scavengers like Alex Madsen and Boze Hadley dragged old stars out of their closets and coffins. Quentin Crisp regaled us with witty film criticism. And biographers had a field day with everyone from actress/icon Marlene Dietrich to directors Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor. One of the last books to squeak through the Century was Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty ( Routledge, 2000 ) a revisionist examination of Caligari, the Wizard of Oz, The Women, The Red Shoes, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and other cows in the sacred canon. He does stretch it sometimes, like trying to push Citizen Kane into a queer classic&emdash;so who knew "rosebud" was a gay descriptor for anus?

Coming Out Stories

Foreshadowing the tell-all biographies of the 1980s, the ྂs were flooded with anthologies of coming-out stories. In the last decades of the century we had gotten down to the teenagers with Growing up Gay ( New Press ) and Two Teenagers in Twenty ( Alyson ) . Appropriately, the Century would close on a mature note with Gay Old Girls ( Alyson, 2000 ) Zsa Zsa Gershick's interviews of the ྌs and ྖs with nine lesbians over 70. Of local interest is "Pouty Vixens and Sweater Girls" her chat with novelist Valerie Taylor in 1990, seven years before her death.

Biographies & Letters

Probably the most interesting publishing phenomena are the letters of gays and lesbians that reach print, either in the context of biographies or just collections of letters, that resolve, once and for all, questions of sexual preference. In the early ྂs the letters of Alice B. Toklas, Staying on Alone, unabashedly portrayed her devotion to Gertrude Stein and flooded our files with tons of gay gossip about others in their extended circle. But it wasn't until the 1980s that publishers were willing to let it all hang out. The decade opened with a publicity blockbuster, The Life of Lorena Hickok E.R.'s Friend by Doris Faber that quoted extensively from the love letters of Eleanor Roosevelt. Mid-decade Darlinghissima, Janet Flanner's letters to Natalia Danesi Murray created a literary succes d'estime. In the mid-ྖs Always Rachel, the romantic letters of environmental activist author Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman reinforced the new, expanded definitions of "lesbian" emerging from women's studies.

A volume of early letters by Tennessee Williams has just been released as has what purports to be The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. A new book, Tchaikovsky: Letters to His Family ( Cooper Square Press, 2000 ) , includes two to his brother Modeste which confirm the sexual preference of both&emdash;men&emdash;and shows the composer's marriage to Antonia Miliukova to be a sham.

Biographies of other composers, like Bernstein and Copeland, pop singers, musicians&emdash;male and female, proliferated. Maurice Ravel: A Life by Benjamin Ivry and new biographies of novelist Marcel Proust and poet Arthur Rimbaud consider the influence of their sexuality on their work. A recent triography of photographer George Platt Lynes, artist Paul Cadmus, and Lincoln Kirstein of the New York City Ballet written by David Leddick, is titled Intimate Companions. And, appropriately the ྖs ended with the publication of the second volume in Blanche Wiesen Cook's definitive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Art and Artists

The area of most explosive interest is undisputedly art and photography with dozens of new titles as the decade ends. The Century closes with the publication of two books that will likely become standards in the field. James M. Saslow's Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts ( forthcoming in a less expensive paperbound edition from Penguin later this year ) and, pioneer in the feminist art movement, Harmony Hammond's Lesbian Art in America: a Contemporary History. These books edge out Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West ( 1986 ) . Concurrent with the exhibits of work by Romaine Brooks ( 1874-1970 ) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and UC Berkley, The University of California Press issued what is essentially an exhibit catalog, Amazons in the Drawing Room: the Art of Romaine Brooks by Whitney Chadwick. Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs ( 1991 ) by Boffin and Fraser is still top flite, but Deborah Bright's text, the Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire ( 1998 ) included the entire GLBT field. An esoteric book, Sailor: Vintage Photos of a Masculine Icon, a collection of 150 photographs and portraits edited by Kevin Bentley falls in the homo-eroticism category by default. Biographies and critical works abound&emdash;The Queer Caucus for Art Newsletter, from the LGBT Caucus for Art, Artists and Art Historians ( an affiliated society of the College Art Association ) carries frequent reviews by scholars in the field and a books column by lesbian art historian Tee A. Corinne.

Censorship

Censorship of gay and lesbian writing persisted the entire 100 years. Oscar Wilde opened the century in jail, more for his lifestyle than his art. However, his works, even his children's books, continue to be read. The 1920s saw the burning of Radclyff Hall's lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, after the publisher was tried for obscenity. Lesbian publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were tried for sending obscene material through the mails when they serialized parts of James Joyce's Ulysses in their magazine, The Little Review. In the 1940s with paperback publishers under attack, Tereska Torres' novel Women's Barracks was hauled up before a Congressional Committee because it portrayed a positive lesbian relationship in the military.

Local schools and libraries continued to hack away at gay and lesbian publishing and more titles joined the list of banned books. Leslea Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies became the kindergarten target of right-wing "family values" folks. The attack on the young adult market was launched against Nancy Garden's 1982 Annie On My Mind, a love story between two teen-aged lesbians that ends happily. After one minister disputed court rulings in favor of the book by publicly burning it, Garden was inspired to write her The Year They Burned the Books ( 1999 ) setting the issue in the context of a high school newspaper's coverage of a similar event. Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and April Sinclair's Coffee Will Make You Black have been purged from some classes, but not for the lesbian issue usually. As the century closed, the printer for Lone Wolf Press refused to print the 25th Anniversary edition of Tee Corinne's Cunt Coloring Book. You will recall CCB made quite a stir in Congress a year or two ago when it was photocopied and handed around to legislators as an example of what was wrong with some public library collections. Interestingly, censorship efforts have not torpedoed any of these books&emdash;in fact it helped boost some to bestseller status.

Fiction Publishing

This broad heading includes many genres of popular favorites from Mysteries to Sci-Fi. The 1970s saw the birth and growth of lesbian and gay small presses fueled mainly by fiction titles. There was always a small market for good fiction with gay or lesbian content and many early "classics" were reprinted under the auspices of mainline houses. But the ྌs and ྖs saw the co-opting of many queer presses by the mainstream as markets became visible and sales grew.

In the 1970s, reviews proliferated as gay and lesbian newspapers expanded their markets. Also in the ྂs Lambda Book Club was the first to give that avenue for distribution a try; it fizzled after brief fireworks. Attempts at gay and lesbian distribution flared, a few houses prospered under direct mail, others went with established alternative distributors. By the ྖs book awards and whole newspapers given over to reviews were firmly entrenched. As the century ended fictional issues echoed expanding GLBT society&emdash;minorities within a minority. More collections were released from Latin and African American writers; Trans, Leather, and fetish issues commanded more print space. Leslie Feinberg's excellent Stone Butch Blues ( 1993 ) dealing with lesbian "Trans" issues capped a plethora of books on role-play and erotica that has flooded the fiction market since the ྌs. Fiction writers swept over to the mainstream from Rita Mae Brown and Ellen Hart to Armisted Maupin, Edmund White, and Mark Zubro. Others, like Sci-Fi author Joanna Russ, Canadian Jane Rule, and Gore Vidal who were successful mainstream writers offered material to our remaining small presses. Queer titles also made the transition to film, some not too successfully&emdash;John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil&emdash;for instance.

For lesbians there were two standout books in the last half of the century. Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah went from a privately printed soft-cover sold out of a shopping bag to a hard-cover Literary Guild Selection under a major imprint in 1971. Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, a Daughter's Inc. imprint in 1973 demonstrated the existence of a lesbian market as it went through nine printings&emdash;Bantam Books bought the rights and did an initial paperback run of over a million copies. The whole phenomenon of the lesbian publishing movement is the topic of two books in progress, one for release in 2001.

By the end of the millenium few alternative presses and bookstores were left standing&emdash;the major markets and under-capitalization overtook most. As the GLBT lifestyles become more absorbed, the mass published counter culture writing will become less edgy and more palatable to the common culture. It's good to see some houses hanging on like Cleis Press, and new ones growing, like Turtle Point.

Web-books in the Future?

The Future of queer publishing is a conundrum. Presumably the cutting -edge stuff will increasingly be on the internet. When instant printing became available in the 1960s anyone could put out some sort of book in limited quantities. As queer presses grew, initial runs of books numbered about 3,000 copies ( in the 1930s Virginia Woolfe's Hogarth Press was doing initial runs of less than 300 ) . Robert MacAlmon of Contact Editions, Hemingway's gay publisher, had first runs of less than 100 copies&emdash;he did 50 of Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack. Current queer houses run a maximum of 10,000. Economically the cost per book on these runs precludes competing with mainstream presses. Books on the internet, assuming you can reach a target market of users interested in your product, have the potential of replacing the alternative press set up. Any writer with a website can become an instant publisher and distributor. But eBooks, with their capacity to hold 200 or more titles in a palm-reader the size of a small paperback will be a harder market to crack. It will be interesting to watch as cyber options develop.

Copyright 2001 by Marie J. Kuda. e-mail: kudos chgo@aol.com


This article shared 3962 times since Wed Jan 3, 2001
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