Pink Ink: The Written Word

Probably more than any other minority group, gays and lesbians have looked to the written word for evidence of our existence. Lesbian and gay readers and scholars have spent untold efforts to discover if a particular favorite writer was homosexual, or to see if perhaps homosexuality has been "coded" into a story. Because lesbian and gay readers want and need to have our experiences and lives validated in the stories we read, we persist in trying to uncover the truth about authors whose sexualities have been "straightened up" by biographers and historians, as well as correct the distortions in the ways many stories about love and sex (among other things) have been interpreted by nongay critics and readers.

Of course, many difficult questions arise when we begin to investigate what writers who have lived in different historical and cultural contexts meant when they described love between men or love between women. Writers whose sexual orientation today we would describe as gay, lesbian, or bisexual have been a part of every literary form throughout history,. From Albee, Alther, and Arenas, to Barnes, Baldwin, and Aphra Behn, from Sappho, Shakespeare, and Gertrude Stein, to Whitman, Wittig, and Woolf, the list goes across history, languages, mationalities, and colors, and includes poets, playwrights, and novelists. Just as gay authors have alway existed, so too have gay characters and themes been present throughout literature, regardless of the sexual orientation of the writer. Carmilla, vampire and predecessor to Count Dracula, was a lesbian. Stephen Gordon became the most embattled butch in the English-=speaking world in 1928 when The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was banned in England (where it remained banned for 30 years). James Baldwin wrote some of the most powerful and eduring depictions of love between men. Virginia Woolf wrote orlando (1928) for her beloved Vita Sackville West. And the novels of Em. M. Foster and Edmund White have been regarded as homoerotic in tone and imagery.

Contemporary gay readers cannot only find images of ourselves in traditional literature, but we also live at a time when there has been anemergence of explicitly gay writing by and for gay and lesbian readers. We can move beyond proving that we exist to raise other questions about how we live and what shapes our experience.

Mainstream publishing houses now produce some gay and lesbian writing. For gay men, the struggle to be published in large houses is still difficult, but for lesbians it still is often impossible. Thanks to lesbian and gay presses, openly lesbian and gay writers are published in larger numbers than before. Especially for lesbians, publishing from within the community provides access to audiences that may not otherwide be available. Never again will lesbian and gay readers be dependent on heterosexual writers for descriptions of our triumphs, pains, and joys.(Lynn Witt, Sherry Thomas, and Eric Marcus, Out In All Directions, Warner Books, Inc, 1995, pp. 132-133)

Women's Presses And Lesbian Publishing

The most important medium in the development of gay and lesbian subcultures and a powerful force in the promotion of national and international rights movements, gay and lesbian publishing is today almost as diverse as gay and lesbian life.

As a revitalized feminist movement took shape in the 1960s, a number of women founded presses that specialized in the publication of periodicals and books for, by, and about women. By 1976, when June Arnold hosted the first Women In Print conference, some 130 women represented more than 80 presses, publishers, periodicals, and bookstores. Although many "women's" presses were founded or staffed by lesbians and, especially after Stonewall, feminist publications increasingly featured lesbian points of view, it was not until the 1970s and the rise of lesbian feminism that strictly "lesbian" publishing began. This new movement nicknamed its adversary "LICE" (Literary-Industrial Writer's Conference) and signs of its development included Marie Kuda's Lesbian Writer's Conferences, held annually from 1974 through 1978.

The growth of lesbian-friendly presses in the 1970s made it possible for lesbian fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to be published in book form rather than in small-circulation magazines. Supported by an increase in women's bookstores, which in the 1990s were still responsible for an estimated 75 percent of sales of lesbian-oriented books, these presses made lesbian writing more widely accssible than ever before. Carol Seajay, founder of Feminist Bookstore News, counted 15 women's presses and nine women's bookstores in 1973; some 33 presses and 73 bookstores in 1983; and more than 130 bookstores in 1992. Between 1992 and 1994, 25 new women's bookstores opened in the US and Canada. Sales of lesbian books were estimated at $25 million annually in themid-1990s. Lesbian-themed books accounted for 40 to 60 percent of total sales in women's bookstores.

Although some writers like Sarah Schulman have alleged that mainstream publishing houses are less receptive to lesbians than to gay men, an increasing number of lesbian writers find themselves faced with a difficult choice between women's presses and mainstream houses. Although mainstream houses sometimes offer higher financial rewards and broader exposure, writers like Jan Clausen, who surveyed 35 fellow lesbian writers, editors, and publishers believe that many successful lesbian writers stay loyal to women's presses because they "have literally made possible our art, our movement, our lives." (Completely Queer, Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson, Henry Holt & Company 1998, pp. 456, 459, 460)

Lesbian Literature

Because lesbians are almost always born into families outside of the gay subculture, the written word has been one of the most important means of transmitting and preserving the gay and lesbian experience. As a result, "literature" is often defined more broadly in a gay and lesbian context than in culture at large. In addition to the belles lettres sense of the word, lesbian literature includes nonliterary accounts, often written in the first person, that evidence the existence of homoeroticsm and same-sex bonding in places and at times when positive, open expressions of homosexuality were impossible.

Same-sex love and homoeroticism have been features of literature from its beginnings, both in the Middle East and in China. In a few cultures, such as that of ancient Greece and premodern Japan, homoerotic themes were much more common in literature than they are today. Specifically "gay and lesbian" literature, however, did not develop until the last half of the 19th century when writers as varied as Edward Carpenter and Renee Vivien began to publish works that consciously--and possitively--asserted a "variant" sexual identity. Although lesbian characters began to appear with increasing frequency in books written by straight as well as lesbian and gay writers in the 20th century, it was not until the 1950s--and, especially, after Stonewall--that gay and lesbian movels, short stories, poetry, etc., began to be published in quantity.(Completely Queer, Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson, Henry Holt & Company 1998, p. 366)

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