Items

• Annie on my mind
  One of the first lesbian young adult novels with an unequivocally happy ending, this is the semi-autobiographical story of Liza and Annie, two teenage girls who fall in love before their relationship is discovered by the school secretary. Nancy Garden (1938-2014), who received an award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature in 2003, met her partner, Sandy, at high school in the 1950s. They remained together until Garden’s death. In 1993, copies of ‘Annie on My Mind’, which had been donated to high schools by an LGBT advocacy organisation, were burned in Kansas City. Following a lawsuit and trial, the book was returned to libraries in 1999. Now considered a classic, it has never been out of print. Garden disliked this cover artwork, preferring the 1992 edition which showed “the two girls really relating to each other equally”.
• Aphrodisiac : fiction from Christopher Street
  This anthology of “the best fiction from Christopher Street” was praised for its “literary excellence” by ‘Publishers Weekly’. It compiles eighteen short stories published in “America’s leading gay magazine”, from authors including Jane Rule, Edmund White, Tennessee Williams and Kate Millett. The magazine, named after the location of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, was founded in 1976 and published monthly until the mid-1990s. As well as original fiction, it featured writing on gay politics and culture, interviews and satirical cartoons. A series of essays about the unfolding AIDS crisis in New York by Andrew Holleran – one of the featured authors in this collection – was later published as ‘Ground Zero’.
• Autobiography in search of a father. Mother bound
  Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a critic, journalist, feminist and leader of the lesbian-separatist movement in the 1970s. Before publishing perhaps her best-known work, ‘Lesbian Nation - The Feminist Solution’ in 1973, Johnston wrote on dance for the ‘Village Voice’ newspaper, and was the first of its columnists to come out in print. ‘Mother Bound’ details her complicated family relationships and narrates her life up to 1965. Characterised as “readably rambling, pseudo-psychological ponderings” by one somewhat withering reviewer, though notably less experimental in form than her later criticism, ‘Mother Bound’ was followed by a second volume of autobiography, ‘Paper Daughter’, in 1985.
• Burning : a novel
  Jane Chambers (1937-1983) was an award-winning poet, screenwriter and playwright, who broke new ground by bringing happy, well-adjusted lesbian characters to the stage in plays such as ‘Last Summer at Bluefish Cove’. In ‘Burning’, Cynthia and Angela are on holiday in a New England farmhouse when they are possessed by the spirits of two women persecuted for their love some two hundred years earlier. ‘Burning’, Chambers’s first novel, was originally published by Jove in 1978 before being published by JH Press, one of the Gay Presses of New York. In 1981, Chambers received a Human Fund for Dignity Award with Harvey Fierstein (actor and writer of ‘Torch Song Trilogy’, also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). In the same year, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died two years later. Since 1984, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award has been offered in her name.
• Coming out
  This novel tells the story of middle-aged divorcee Roger Thornton, and his new life as an out gay man residing in New York, in a relationship with the younger and more extrovert Michael. In addition to this central relationship, the novel features characters from the wider LGBT community including a lesbian couple and Lola, who we would now recognise as a trans woman. The book’s design is reminiscent of a pulp novel, complete with yellow edges. The blurb contains the word “sensitive” which was often used by publishers in the earlier half of the twentieth century to allude to gay men. Wallace Hamilton (1919?-1983) also wrote non-fiction and plays and was a contributor to the ‘New York Native’ paper. Like his character Roger, he was married and came out when he was middle-aged.
• Common lives/lesbian lives : a lesbian feminist quarterly. Number eight, Summer 1983
  Founded in 1981 and edited, typeset, printed and bound by a lesbian collective from Iowa City, ‘Common Lives/Lesbian Lives’ was a quarterly journal committed to “describing the lives of ordinary lesbians” in all their diversity. As the front matter states, this included “lesbians of color, Jewish lesbians, fat lesbians, lesbians over fifty and under twenty years old, physically challenged lesbians, poor and working-class lesbians and lesbians of varying cultural backgrounds”. This issue features poetry, childhood memoir from Joan Nestle and a piece showcasing visual art, with black-and-white reproductions. It is also notable for the essay ‘Love as Addiction – A Story of Battering’ by Kate Hurley, one of the first explorations of intimate partner violence among same-gender couples. ‘Common Lives/Lesbian Lives’ ran for a total of 56 issues, until its primary distributor went bankrupt in 1995.
• Fox Running : a novel
  The fourth novel for teenagers by R.R. Knudson (1932-2008), again with a sporting theme (‘You Are the Rain’, about a doomed canoe trip, was another of the books seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). Fox Running is a Mescalero Apache girl in her late teens, coached by young former Olympian Kathy ‘Sudden’ Hart. To research the novel, Knudson spent time at the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico and with an athletics track team at the University of Arizona. ‘Fox Running’ was first published by Harper & Row in 1975 before being reprinted by Avon in 1977 and as an Avon Flare paperback in 1981. The inside illustrations are by Ilse Koehn and are reproduced from the Harper & Row edition.
• Happy endings are all alike
  Uncompromisingly frank from its opening line, Sandra Scoppettone’s (1936-) depiction of the love affair between teenage girls Jaret and Peggy was a much-needed riposte to 1950s lesbian pulp, such as the novels of Ann Bannon and Vin Packer. As one reviewer put it, “The story 1) is not preachy, 2) does not kill off either girl in the end, 3) is not syrupy”. The ground-breaking ‘Happy Endings Are All Alike’, chosen as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, was first published by Harper & Row in 1978, preceding Nancy Garden’s ‘Annie on My Mind’ by four years. Scoppettone is known also for her crime-writing, as a playwright and for her collaboration with Louise Fitzhugh (author of ‘Harriet the Spy’) on the 1961 picture book ‘Suzuki Beane’, a counterculture parody of the ‘Eloise’ books set in Greenwich Village.
• Look me in the eye : old women, aging, and ageism
  This book focusses on women and ageing via several essays previously published in journals such as ‘Broomstick’ and ‘Sinister Wisdom’. Barbara Macdonald (1913-2000) and Cynthia Rich (1933-), the sister of poet Adrienne Rich, who were a couple and active in the women’s rights movement, write from different stages in the ageing process. Macdonald uses her introduction to reflect on the repressive environment she encountered growing up, which forced lesbians to become “other”, an otherness she now equates with being an older woman. The copy displayed here is the 1985 reprint edition. The first edition, and likely the one seized during the raids, was published by Spinsters Ink, a feminist press founded in 1979 in New York by Judith McDaniel and Maureen Brady.
• Scotch verdict* : Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon
  A “Scotch Verdict” results in the Scottish legal system if a case is “not proven” or is inconclusive. Using archival documents, historian Lillian Faderman (1940-) explores this outcome in the 1810 case of Edinburgh teachers Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods. The two women were accused by pupil Jane Cumming of having a sexual relationship which led to the removal of all pupils from the school. Having lost their work, Pirie and Woods brought a libel case against Jane’s grandmother, Dame Cumming Gordon, which ended in the titular Scotch Verdict. Unlike many of the ‘Operation Tiger’ titles, this book is still in print. The Pirie and Woods case also inspired Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play ‘The Children’s Hour’ which was later filmed.
• Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present
  Academic Lillian Faderman (1940-) uses literary and documentary sources to present a history of romantic love between women, one of the first comprehensive studies of its kind. Following initial research on poet Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Faderman expanded her scope to consider a period of five hundred years and the lives of many women (including those featured in the ‘Scotch Verdict’ case explored in another Faderman work seized during the raids). The book describes how societal attitudes to love between women moved from tolerance (albeit not to women who dressed as men), to prejudice and eventually, to liberatory lesbian feminism. The book, dedicated to Faderman’s partner Phyllis Irwin, is shown here in the UK edition, although it is likely to have been the US William Morrow edition that was seized from Gay’s the Word.
• The journey
  This knowingly ahistorical lesbian feminist Western, set in Canada and the US in the nineteenth century, is dedicated to “all the little girls who always wanted to [...] grow up to be cowboys”. Teenager Anne leaves home and teams up with sex worker Sarah. Travelling together across the Pacific Northwest, they become lovers, have a child and receive support from a matrilineal group of Indigenous people. Despite reversing gender roles, the novel is in other ways a romp through the stereotypes of the Western genre – wagons, guns, vigilante justice. Anne Cameron (1938-2022) was a prolific writer of fiction for adults and children, as well as poetry and drama for stage and screen. Born Barbara Cameron, she later wrote under the name Cam Hubert. ‘The Journey’, her third novel, was reissued in 1986 by feminist press Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
• The joy of lesbian sex : a tender and liberated guide to the pleasures and problems of a lesbian lifestyle
  Published a year after ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’, the subtitle of this volume introduces the “problems” as well as “pleasures” of lesbian life in marked contrast to its gay male counterpart. Written by Dr Emily L. Sisley (1930-2016) and novelist and Daughters, Inc. founder Bertha Harris (1937-2005), and illustrated by Yvonne Gilbert, Charles Raymond and Patricia Faulkner, it follows the formula set by ‘The Joy of Sex’ in 1972. It covers all aspects of lesbian life and sexuality from “Alcohol and sex” to “Water, water, everywhere”, followed by a bibliography. It had a smaller initial print run than ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’ – 50,000 rather than 75,000 copies – and its reception was mixed. One (lesbian) reviewer objected to its misandry while another suggested its “authors cling to the concept of a penis”. It was also criticised for its omissions, “myths and misconceptions”, particularly around disability, race and class.
• The terminal bar : a novel
  Self-published by Larry Mitchell (1939-2012) of Calamus Books, one third of the Gay Presses of New York collective, this novel is set in a real Times Square bar which was popularly known as the “roughest” in New York but which was a sanctuary for its clientele. Based on Mitchell’s experiences and those of his friends, the novel follows a group of lesbians and gay men against a backdrop of a decaying America, symbolised by the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979. The novel has also been considered the first work of fiction to reference AIDS. The copy of the book on display is inscribed to Gay’s the Word by the author “In defence of the freedom to read”.
• The winged dancer
  A “grown-up lesbian adventure story”, according to New Zealand’s feminist magazine ‘Broadsheet’. Part murder mystery, part tale of psychological development, part love story, it describes lesbian feminist Kat Rogan’s journey from Chicago to the fictional Latin American country of Marigua. Rogan spends time in prison, solves the case and also comes to terms with the dominant and submissive sides of her personality. The book was criticised by some reviewers for exoticising South America and failing to engage with the politics of the region. Camarin Grae (1941-), author of ‘Paz’ (1984) and ‘Soul Snatcher’ (1985), among other works, was the owner of Blazon Books – this was their first title.
• True to life adventure stories. Vol. 1
  Judy Grahn (1940-) is a poet, lesbian feminist and advocate of women’s spirituality. She also wrote 1984’s ‘Another Mother Tongue’, a mythic queer history. In response to Grahn’s question, “what is a woman’s adventure story?”, this book presents stories by twenty writers which relate women’s direct experiences. Writing by working-class women is a strong feature of the collection, with an emphasis on maintaining the authors’ unedited natural language and spelling. The book was published by Diana Press, a feminist printing and publishing house founded in 1972 by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik. The cover illustration is by Karen Sjöholm, who also worked at the Press. The Press was vandalised in 1977, with damage to plates, paste-ups, books and machines. It closed in 1979.
• Who was that masked woman?
  Bertha Harris, co-author of ‘The Joy of Lesbian Sex’, described this coming-of-age novel as “an authentic slice of lesbian Americana”. The novel follows young lesbian Tretona Getroek, from her childhood on a farm amidst religious Revival meetings, through to university and travels that take her to Turkey and England. She also explores her sexuality while combatting the prejudices of the church, education and psychiatric establishments. Tretona is the masked woman of the title, hiding her identity. Noretta Koertge (1935-) wrote a sequel to this novel, 1984’s ‘Valley of the Amazons’, and was part of the Daughters, Inc. publishing collective. She is currently Emeritus Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University.
• Witches heal : lesbian herbal self-sufficiency
  Billie Potts (1940-2013) was one third of Elf and Dragons, self-described “lesbian witches”, who were a Woodstock-based women’s land collective, a publisher, distributor of herbs and part of a wider feminist spirituality movement. Women’s rural collectives were common in the USA at this time. Potts’s book is a guide to herbalism and an “access tool”, promoting self-sufficiency and encouraging lesbian women to reclaim their role as healers. The book proved controversial as its publication coincided with an acrimonious split within Elf and Dragons. Susun R. Weed accused Potts of using her work uncredited and asked feminist bookshops not to stock the book. The ‘Operation Tiger’ raids were not, therefore, the first attempts to restrict this book.
• You are the rain : a novel
  When a hurricane strikes an all-girl canoe trip in the Florida Everglades, athletic Crash and introvert June become separated from the group and must depend on each other to survive. The novel is described as being “Of lesbian interest” in the 1975-76 catalogue of women’s bookstore First Things First, although the relationship is implied rather than overt. The novel is endorsed on the back cover by lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, with several references to the poetry of Emily Dickinson throughout. The title is taken from a May Swenson poem – “I will be earth you be the flower / You have found my root you are the rain”. Swenson and R.R. Knudson (1932-2008) were lovers in the mid-1960s. They collaborated on the collection ‘American Sports Poems’ (1988), and Knudson was Swenson’s literary executor on her death in 1989.