Lover. Bertha Harris
revolution in 1969, Jill came out in print like gangbusters and became my sex hero. Her Voice columns were collected under the titles Marmalade Me (1970), and Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973).
Lover’s Stab at Manhating: 4
I’ve read somewhere lately that what the real-life (the biblical) Salome wanted cut off from the body of John the Baptist (“Jokanaan” in the opera) was not his head.
In the late sixties, the women’s liberation movement felt a rush of manhating. So did I. It was a heady, Dionysian sensation. We went up on the mountain and stomped. Sensation led to daring suggestion, which Valerie Solanas elegantly dealt with in her publication the S.C.U.M Manifesto; the acronym stands for Society for Cutting Up Men. I chose to deal with the daring suggestion with less than daring. In Lover, from time to time, I recount, sometimes word for word, stories women were telling me about what men, sometimes their men, had done to them. Toward the novel’s conclusion, I wheel in the body of a murdered man. Think of the corpse as Lover’s revenge motif. The character of Veronica hides the corpse by hastily turning it into fiction. Lover’s author loves murder mysteries.
Life Before Lover: 5
My pre-Lover fiction was still entrenched in the themes of Southern Gothic and Lesbian Gothick; they are not dissimilar, nor are they unlike Italian opera. Both genres tend to be soaked in booze, blood, and tears; both are thick with madness, violence, suicide, and love’s tragic finales. I was perversely laboring to apply, perfected, my version of a literary technique that had died, already perfected, along with the Bloomsbury group, to booze, blood, tears, madness, violence, suicide, love’s tragic finales.
When I asked Parke Bowman (who would publish Lover) why she was so eager to take my novel on, one of the things she told me was that she wanted her company, Daughters, to represent the work of a female avant-garde and that as far as she was concerned, I was it. She went on to say that she was disinterested in feminist and lesbian content or sensibility. Parke freed me from any sense of responsibility to force a direct figuring of the politics, ideals, or goals of feminism or lesbianism or lesbian-feminism in my writing. Nonetheless, my politics (such as they are) exist side by side with my DNA in Lover.
But I’ve never been much of a political animal, nor even a social one: it’s the rules, the ordained procedures and ideologies. I like to be either alone or having a good time. A good time is an interval of passionate and intimate exchange followed almost immediately by seclusion; a night in a great gay bar followed immediately by seclusion; a big, lavish party musiked by wall-to-wall Motown, washed in gin, and dense with new breakups, new couplings, new networking, new gossip, and good dope—and when it’s over, two days later, a month of seclusion.
At one of those parties, circa 1973, the funniest and smartest and straightest woman in New York, Eve Leoff (Keats scholar and Professor of English at Hunter College), told some bozo that she’d rather sit on my lap than dance with him. The bozo threw a sexist, heterosexist, and homophobic tantrum, after which Eve danced with me. Politics are where you find them.
I became, sort of, to the best of my ability, a political animal in the early seventies because, most particularly, I didn’t want to disappoint Kate Millett, whose first book, Sexual Politics, turned me instantly into a radical feminist. But mostly I became a political animal in order to have a good time. Feminism struck me as a good time, and it was. Back then, it still frightened the horses; it made most men foam at the mouth, and it got the best women horny. As such, feminism forcibly yanked my writing up from under the Bloomsbury tomb where it had been trying to pass as good but dead.
Some of the best times I had being political were with the artists, Jenny Snider and Louise Fishman; with Phyllis Birkby, the Yale-trained renegade architect; with Smokey Eule and Mary Korechoff, master carpenters who also kindly hammered some sense into me; with my highly significant attorney, Carol Calhoun; with the anthropologist Esther Newton, whose first book was Mother Camp, a study of heterosexual male transvestism; and with Jane O’Wyatt, mystic and graphics designer. Very often, the most political thing these friends and I did together was to tell one another the truth. Which made us fearless.
Lover Regards Print: 6
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.