Читать книгу Lover - Bertha Harris - Страница 15

By the early seventies, the new political consciousness created by feminism and lesbian-feminism, and by the 1969 gay Stonewall revolt, was being met by a corresponding cultural consciousness out of which a new kind of highly politicized writing was born. Mainstream publishers, by and large, found this work either too inexpert, or too strange (and too political and too sexual) to risk it, and they had already—or were in the process of doing so— satisfying any need they saw for “politicized” women’s writing by publishing the work of white feminists dealing with the politics of heterosexual love and romance (Erica Jong, Marilyn French, et al.) and the work of middle-class (at least) African-American women such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker. The politics of the constant book buyer tend to be liberal.

The new gay, feminist, and lesbian-feminist writers, as a consequence—or because they preferred to be independent of a mainstream which they found classist, sexist, heterosexist, homophobic, racist—founded their own presses. Some presses actually had a press; others used Xerox equipment or hand-cranked mimeograph machines. Suddenly, in verse, fiction, and broadsides, the “love that dared not speak its name” became a motormouth. Much of what it had to say was memorable.

The presses eked out a hand-to-mouth existence. The costs of the publications often barely covered the production expenses. Nobody got paid; skills, including fundraising, were learned on the job. Decisions were usually made collectively. Hardship was the rule, burnout was the norm; but the staying power was in some cases enormous, and it was almost exclusively fueled by the adamantine convictions which had got the presses going in the first place: that well-wrought words on a page could, by speaking the unspeakable, create and organize radical political activism.

How well wrought the words were was not usually of primary importance; “good” writing was useful writing, the kind that made gays and lesbians feel strong, comfortable in their own skins, angry, tough, and highly motivated to enforce change, perhaps revolutionary change, in the surrounding heterosexual world. That it worked, to some extent, is history.

But there was considerable talent giving good literary and journalistic value attached to some of the presses. In Washington, D.C., Diana Press published Women Remembered (important women “lost” by the patriarchy), edited by Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron (1975), and Rita Mae Brown’s A Plain Brown Rapper (tough political analyses), and reprinted Jeannette H. Foster’s invaluable scholarship, Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey (1975). On the West Coast, Amazon Press brought out The Lesbian Reader: An Amazon Quarterly Anthology, edited by Laurel Galana and Gina Covina (1975); in Oakland, The Women’s Press Collective, which devoted itself exclusively to work by lesbians disfranchised by race or class, published Judy Grahn’s Edward the Dyke (n.d.) and A Woman Is Talking to Death (1974), both of which found immediate movement acclaim. In New York, Karla Jay edited, with Allen Young, After You’re Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbian Women for Quick Fox in 1975; and Times Change Press published Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian-Feminist Anthology, edited by Phyllis Birkby, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, Jane O’Wyatt, and myself (consciousness-raising, personal narratives, a noteworthy essay on manhating by science-fictionist, Joanna Russ). The best presses today are Barbara Smith’s Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Faith Conlon’s Seal Press, and Joan Pinkvoss’s Aunt Lute.

Arno Press was located on Madison Avenue instead of in a damp basement or an illegal loft. Arno belongs in this context, however, because it had the vision to recognize the writing on the wall as early as 1975, when it began the Arno Special Collection, fifty-four reissues of lesbian and gay classics dating from 1811 to 1975. Jonathan Ned Katz was the editor.