 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Eureka Valley Harvey Milk Branch Library. My name is Karen Sunheim, and I'm the branch manager here, and welcome to Lesbian Publishers, a historical perspective and a current view. Before we begin tonight's program, I would like to mention a few upcoming events. Next Tuesday night, August 2nd, we have Trash Connoisseur, Jennifer Blow-Dryer, and a group of her writer friends They've all contributed to an anthology called Good Advice for Trendy People, and we'll discuss everything from door etiquette for the nightlife challenged to how to be an art star. And on August 16th, we will have author and psychotherapist Rick Eisensee here, who will be celebrating the re-release of his three books on gay men and relationships. Also, while you're here, please take a look at the Out at the Library exhibit. Out at the Library, which continues through October, is a celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, taking place at the main library and at this branch. And here we have an exhibit of memorabilia and documents from the Gay Games Archives, as well as artwork from the Reversing Vandalism exhibit. Tonight's special program is part of the series Out at the Library, and tonight we'll be talking about lesbian publishing, the past, the present, and the future. I would like to thank the Friends and Foundation of San Francisco Public Library for their financial support of this program. I would also like to thank Jim Van Buskirk of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, Catherine King and Joan Jasper from the Office of Exhibitions and Programming, Eric Montero of our media department for videotaping the program tonight. And I'd like to thank Carol CJ, our moderator for the evening, for working so hard at coordinating this program. And you can also buy an Out at the Library catalog, which goes through all the exhibits in three locations here tonight after the program. And I would like to introduce now Carol CJ. Carol CJ has made an enormous contribution to the world of lesbian publishing. She started Old Wives Tales Bookstore in 1976 after working at a woman's book, a woman's place bookstore for two years. She published feminist bookstore news from 1976 to 2000. In 2003, she launched Books to Watch Out for a suite of book review publications for gay men, lesbians, and feminists. And now I'd like to welcome Carol CJ. This is such a great gathering. You know, I want to welcome you all and, you know, I wish I was having a, you know, that this was a party and we could just all dance. You know, the combination of, you know, just kind of incredible historic people in this audience is pretty awesome. And I hope that many of you will get up during the discussion period and talk about the particular place that you came in and the contributions that you made or the work you did or what you thought was most important during those years or better yet, you know, what you see as our future. You know, there are easily a dozen or two dozen people who could be on this panel. And, you know, that's why I think the party theme. So this is, as Karen said, part of the, out at the library celebration. And if you haven't seen the exhibit here or the one downtown, I'd certainly encourage you to go down and take a look. There's some incredible correspondence up on the walls. There's Barbara, some of Barbara Greer's great collection of pulp novels, letters about the launching of Nayed Press, Barbara's correspondence with May Sartin and other people, and some incredible photographs. And it's just a wonderful collection. Let's see. I think I'm here not so much as a publisher, but to represent the periodical side of the lesbian publishing movement and also to represent the bookselling side of the lesbian publishing movement, without which I maintain there would be no lesbian publishing movement. And there's some rather esteemed lesbian feminist booksellers here in the audience as well. Joining me tonight are Joan Pinkfoss, Frederique Del Acosta and Renata Stendhal. You may have noticed that Barbara Greer is not with us tonight. She, over the course of the last week, has been through a hurricane. Her house was struck by lightning and a very good friend of hers was killed in an automobile crash. And she made what I think is a very lazy decision for a 71-year-old to stay home. But we miss her. And she also sent her comments and Joel Gomez has consented to read them during this discussion. So I will briefly introduce the people who will be speaking. And then each person will speak. Well, I'll do a little bit of context setting. And then each person will speak and Barbara Greer will be ghost-spoken here. Then we'll have a little, perhaps a little Q&A among ourselves and then open it up to all of the insights and questions and thoughts and wishes and dreams of the many wonderful women here tonight. Joan Pinkfoss in 1972, I believe, was one of the founders of the Iowa City Women's Press, an illustrious organization that both printed and published books and at various times included a typesetting aspect, a bindery. And I may have this correct or it may be my mythology, but passionately held the belief that women needed to be able to control the entire means of production from writing to the reader so that no men could ever again censor our ideas and our communication. It's not that I personally feel passionately about that, but we continue to have some of those problems today. Joan later co-founded our locally owned and operated Antloot Book Company and has shepherded through many, many transitions over the years and is a fine and wonderful publisher. Frederique Del Acosta co-founded Clius Press in 1980 with Felice Newman. Clius, after Frederique, after working with Out and Out Books went on to found Clius, co-found Clius, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. And Clius to my mind is the quintessence of lesbian publishing. Every time you say lesbians can't or lesbians don't, they do. Every time you hear that lesbians don't publish, they publish, whatever. Lesbians publish only romances. Shout a hole in it. Lesbians don't publish literary work. Lesbians don't like sex. Lesbians only like vanilla sex. Lesbians don't publish men. Lesbians don't, well, you know, you get the picture. That's Clius Press. Minata Stendhal will talk about her experience as one of the founders of Edgeworks, a brilliant, if short-lived lesbian publishing company that burst onto the scene in 2000 with an intense nine-book season. She will also talk, as will the rest of us, about lesbian publishing internationally. She's also the author of a photo biography of Gertrude Stein and the author of True Secrets of Lesbian Desire, Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships. You know, where did this thing come from that lesbians and lesbian feminists don't like sex? I mean, where did that come from? Men. Men. Thank you. She's also a translator, a counselor, and a writing coach. So, that said, I will say a few things about the context and where we came in. I believe that lesbian publishing is a story that hasn't yet been told. We've lived through some of it. Many of us have created it. Most of us have just reveled in it, and we'll capture more of that history tonight. But I want to say that lesbian publishing is also a history of resisting sexism, of resisting invisibility as lesbians and also as women. That it's an experience of sexism as much as homophobia, and that the two together make a much longer row to hoe than it would be without the double discrimination. Some of the missing history, just to be a little participatory, who in this room knows that Ulysses, James Joyce's Ulysses, was first published by a lesbian press? And that's a very high percentage. And how many people know that the second edition of Ulysses was published by a lesbian press? You know, as snacks we got both the English language edition and the French language edition. And it was published, for those of you who didn't know, by the proprietors of two of Paris's most legendary bookstores, Sylvia Beach and Adrien Monnier, who were a lesbian couple, although they published individually. Sylvia sold books at Shakespeare and Company and published in English, and Adrien at, I Will Spare You My French, a bookstore which translates as The House of the Friends of Books, and she published in French. Without them, Joyce probably would have disappeared from the literary scene. And do lesbians get credit for that? I ask it. And there's another story here. Monnier was also a writer, and as long as she wrote under a pseudonym, a male pseudonym, mind you, all the writers in Paris celebrated her work. When she finally came out about it, silence. And suddenly, all these people who were so interested in this author had nothing to say. It seems that they liked her better as their bookseller. They liked her better as someone that introduced them to each other and sort of acted as a publicist for them and was kind of in that help the guys out category rather than as a peer. Not being a rich girl at that point, she went right back to bookselling where she can continue to make a living, but I have to tell you that the legions and the ranks of lesbian booksellers are pretty impressive, but we disappear. And then there's what I like to call the Susan Sontek factor. Most of you already know that. But I'll just quote Larry Kramer's wonderful remarks who said, Susan is beyond being a lesbian, except for the fact that she has affairs with women. She doesn't really fit into that category, which is more than anything as an intellectual. I don't know. I look upon her as a Venus with Hera, some great goddess that is on Mount Olympus and beyond sex, beyond sexuality. She's in that category. And I think Mount Olympus beyond sexuality. What do you think those people were doing or those gods and goddesses were doing? So except for the fact that many women have had affairs with women, there is no history of lesbian publishing. But don't get me started. And I will just stop there with that whole line of thought. But the Sontek effect has plagued our history. And I will just let you entertain yourselves with the great lesbian writers who no one ever thinks of as lesbians, you know. And I will also say that I can't tell you how many times since I launched Books to Watch Out for, which has both a gay men's edition, which is written by our local hero Richard Labonte in absentia in his Canadian lifetime. And the lesbian edition, I can't tell you how many people have looked me in the eye and said to me, I don't read lesbian books. I'm not talking people. I'm talking lesbians. As if any of these people would say to me, I don't read any other category of human being and look me in the eye and say that. But somehow it's okay to say that about lesbians. Go figure. So I want to say that at the point where we all came in, there had been lesbian pulps and they had certainly been published and they started disappearing. And for me, in about 1973, I started finding these other books I found on a trip to California, something called Songs to a Handsome Woman by Rita May Brown published by Diana Press. And I took it back to my hometown in the Midwest and I said, this is going to change the way we think about ourselves. This is going to change the way we love each other, these ideas, this other stance about how to be a lesbian. I had heard of, and I'd actually read the lead essay in Madness Network News, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems published by the Women's Press Collective here in Oakland. I bought a copy of this on a motorcycle trip and I had 3,000 miles and one book and I let myself read a different poem every day and I could read any of the ones I'd already read but I couldn't start more than one new poem a day. That's how hungry and desperate many of us were at that point in time. After I came to California, I found things like class and feminism published by Diana Press. What a combination of thoughts and even more exciting lesbianism in the women's movement. So that's kind of the early women's liberation moment of the world changing and so that's the point where Joan and a group of people started the Iowa City Women's Press. Alright, so I'm sort of following Carol's instructions here and one, trying to keep it short and two, following a little bit of an outline which I've kind of broken down into years to make it a little easier but can people hear in the back? Yikes, okay. That's a lot of a publisher. We're always the voice behind the scene. We try not to go out in public if we can help it. I went to the writer's workshop in fiction Iowa City to get my MFA in between 1967 and 1969. And those, as so many of you know, were really amazing times politically. There was the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam movement, the National Guard Armory in Iowa City got blown up in 68, SDS meetings and but as for lesbians, so anyway this was part of what formed me as a person and made my work very grounded in social justice work early on. But as for lesbians, there was nobody out in the circles that I was in, of the 200 or so students in the writer's workshop, there were only two women. And when I went to the one bar where the writers and gays and people hung out the sort of alternative bar, there was only one lesbian couple and they'd come in from the country. I mean they were a very interesting couple but you wouldn't see them hanging out in many places. So I left after those two years and went far away from Iowa City and did some teaching. And then I came back in 72 because Iowa City was a very different and changed place. There was a lesbian community of scores and scores of women. Don't ask me how this happened just sort of overnight. People decided they could be public and it didn't. Of course it had a lot to do with some of the early work that had been done, some of the magazines that were being published. One of which, A&I Woman, was a very important influential rag that came out of Iowa City and was actually started by women who were working class women, students or wives of students who had been disillusioned by the male dominance of SDS. So it started out as sort of a leftist political magazine and then turned into a lesbian magazine as more and more the women probably became lesbian. I think that's probably what happened. But several of us began talking about a printing press at that time in order to control how information got out because we realized that that was an important part of what this change was going to be. This was especially true because with A&I Woman tried to do a self-help issue which in those days self-help was mostly about health and sometimes euphemism for abortion because of course at that point it wasn't legal. So one of the things in the self-health movement was to learn how to use a speculum. And so A&I Woman was doing an issue with graphic photographs and they couldn't find a publisher. The regular printer wouldn't print it and they couldn't find another printer to print it. So it became even clearer when you talk about what the needs were. We saw those needs as being very important. And at the same time as Carol said, I think that community because it was perhaps because it was based in the Midwest and it was difficult to find jobs to make livings. We did move very much towards figuring out how women could expand into areas of work that had been traditionally male dominated. And so the trades were obviously that. And so when we started the printing press, the first thing we had planned to do and what we did do was put out two manuals. My props happened to be here. I wanted you to have a gander at these because they're really old. So against the grain, a carpentry manual for women. And the greasy thumb, auto mechanics book for women. So. And so we continued, but part of the problem with the printing presses is that we ran it as a business. So some women could make an income. Some of the women who didn't have other opportunities. And pretty soon we lost the possibility of publishing. So in 82, Barb Weiser, and that's a name I hope a lot of you know, she now is the manager of Amazon bookstore, one of the few women's bookstores left in Minneapolis. Barb and I started ant loot books and which was named after her grading at if anybody wants to know the story sometime, I'll tell it to you. But and our commitment and our goal, Barb and I shared a lot of the same political values and and literature values. And so we really wanted to be publishing books by lesbians that dealt with the issues that were important to their lives. And also to be publishing novels by lesbians that were, you know, dealt with what their lives were like as lesbians. So one of the first books that we did was Saturday Night in the Prime of Life by Dodisha Spadu. And that was a lesbian novel short, but really interesting. And we did a number of others, including Shadow on a Tightrope, which was about fat politics, which had not been really addressed well at all. And it's still in print. And I just saw somebody come in on his story background. So, so we did Shadow on a Tightrope and that was very important for us. So we continued to work together until about 85 and then Barb decided to follow her dreams to Minneapolis. And at that point, I took a hard look at the fact that being as small as we were, we couldn't do justice to the to the to the authors that we were publishing. And after much talking with Sherry Thomas back and forth in San Francisco, where I was getting an electrical license so I could support myself by being a publisher. We decided to merge the two presses after a long discussion with my partner at the time about moving to California. So in 86, Aunt Lute got moved to California, joined up with Spincers, and for about three years it was called Spincers and Aunt Lute. And during that time, let's see, during that time I was, well before I left Iowa City, because of all the things that were going on in Iowa City and all the work that had been done in class and race for years there. I was very, I was supported in the notion that there was a lot missing in publishing, including lesbian publishing in terms of the voices that were being heard. And so I became more and more interested in trying to do voices by women of color. And so part of my, most of my work at Aunt Lute, Spincers' Aunt Lute was, well we had already done Audrey Lord and Paula Gunn-Allen, but it was working with Gloria and Saudua, Chair Mohanji, and Carmen Demata Flores, and other women to put out, to put out their work. At the same time, we were doing really exciting work with lesbians, which was, you know, Joanne Lulan's well-known lesbian sex and lesbian passion, which was really great. And we did the book Why Can't Sharon Kowalski Come Home, which was, you know, a really important book to be doing. We had to take out liability insurance, you know, we had to do all sorts of things because it was a scary proposition, but it was a book that we were proud to have done and I think helped change a lot of lesbians' lives and how they looked at partnership and how they looked at forcing the legal system to recognize them. So, and at the same time that this is going on, and I hope we get to this, was the women in print movement had started, what would you say, Carol, or, Frederic, what would you say? In the 70s, everyone just said in 1980. Yeah, 78 might have been. Okay, so Carol was a big part of that and that's when all the presses began to get to know each other and it was so exciting because you didn't feel like you had to cover the whole shebang, you know, that you knew everybody was out there doing their own piece and I've always respected Cleo's work because I think they really have made such a deep cut into the puritanical underpinnings of American society and I hope that Aunt Lute has done that in maybe a little different direction too. When it became clear that Sharon Thomas and I had different goals about what we wanted to be doing, we separated back out and I really wanted to create Aunt Lute as an institution that embodied the diversity inside the institution of publishing so that the people who selected the manuscripts, the people who were on staff, so forth, were represented some of the communities we were publishing and at the same time we started an internship program that would help teach young women how to do publishing. We started, not only did we start many writer's careers, but we started many women into the publishing world in other parts of the country so that's been exciting. And I think that goal of continuing to do new voices and building careers from a grassroots perspective was so informed by, I mean not all of our writers are less, all the writers from Aunt Lute now, not all of them are lesbians and in fact it's probably less than 50% now and it used to be more than that before and we could talk about that at length as to how that happened. But I think that what's important to say is that it still contains that grassroots connection to community and that that's something that I've learned in my lesbian political days that will never leave me that it has to be built out of and spoken to and be a part of the community that you exist in to have the value to carry into some knowledge that's important and that the fact that it sparks dialogue across cultures is great and we do a lot of panels and things like that but I think that that's one of the most important things that we try to keep a hold of and as a result if you look at that what you see is there's a never ending need for the possibility of making room for new voices because there's always a new voice coming up that needs expression that will never happen in New York City and there are probably even authors here who could talk about how they're really worried about what their careers might look like as a lesbian writer if New York decides they have enough lesbian writers this year or next year or a year after. So I think that that's part of why we need to keep looking at what we're doing as important and I also believe that in other communities and other countries that there'll be new different forms of lesbian communities coming out and they too will need a place to make their voices heard so that's a possibility for all of us to be there for. So I think I'll end with that and hope that I can say something more pithy at a later date. And now we will have Barbara Greer channeled to us through the graciousness of Joel Gomez. This is so unlike Barbara Greer. I'm speaking personality wise too. To say that I think I first met Joel when she was publishing conditions magazine. Well I'm really honored to be able to sort of jump in for Barbara. One as a San Francisco library commissioner commissioners hardly ever get to do events. They just show up. But I'm also really really pleased because I'm really disappointed not to see Barbara and Donna who I haven't seen in about 15 years because the lesbian feminist literary movement is what formed the ground for my career. Really. And if it weren't for these women here and Barbara and Nancy Berriano I probably wouldn't have ever published. And Donna and Barbara were at a national women's studies conference and heard me talk about what was going to become the guild of stories. And Donna made a kind of a look and it was like the two of them were communicating. Barbara did a beeline for me like a cruise missile. I'd never seen anyone move that fast in my life. And I understood how she had scaled the heights to do the work that no one else was doing. So this is Barbara's statement. My life is my publishing history. I began by collecting lesbian books at age 16 getting clues from anywhere including my own mother. By 23 and 24 when I began working for the magazine The Ladder I first met Jeanette Foster author of Sex Variant Women in Literature. By then I had about 350 to 400 books in the field and that would be about 1958. I worked for The Ladder from 56 until 72 publishing it for its last two years of life and it ended in October of 72. Two women approached my lover Donna McBride and I and asked us to begin a publishing company with them. NIAID Press was born January 1, 1973. The press was officially closed in April of 2003. Instead of selling the company we turned it over to other women. The resulting company is Bella Books run by Linda Hill ironically a NIAID author and Becky Arbergas the last NIAID employee before Donna and I retired. The things I did to make a living during the nine years from 1973 to 1982 when I became the first paid employee of NIAID Press are not worth mentioning. Donna was a librarian and had a good job. Our life though was run by our 80 hour weeks and in 1982 Donna told me to quit my job and become NIAID Press full time. She joined me six months later and we began to grow enormously being able to put all our time and energy into NIAID. Our goal was to make lesbian books particularly works of fiction available massively to lesbians everywhere. Our political priorities were set in the early movement years when we decided that lesbians were far less allied with gay men and far more allied with the feminist movement. In most ways that colored everything that we did. This work is probably more important today than it was when we began and it is happening on a much larger scale. While we do not have as many lesbian publishers now as we have had in some periods in the recent past that is I believe a temporary thing. I saw Bella books go from a rocky beginning to solid financial and publishing stability beyond my wildest dreams. I am not fully at leisure to discuss all their plans but I believe they will out do me enormously and nothing nothing could make me happier. Many critics seem to believe that as an internet world we will eventually have no readers and that is just not true. Our old NIAID Press list is now Bella books growing list and it is doing the same getting bigger. Lots of my customers who began with us years ago and were then far older than I are gone from us. But there seems to be an unlimited supply of women who like need and want the books. There is abundant evidence that our movement was always a print media movement but this is the same movement that makes women's basketball possible today. It is also in some manner responsible for the wonderful sight of a woman driving a gigantic bulldozer and clearing hurricane damaged houses and rubble from roads. We are part of what makes it possible for women at least in most countries to have almost any job, any work. We have ironically cut a lot of the gender classifications of earlier life away from our lives today. It doesn't matter a bit if we think we still need lesbian publishing. Our opinion is not being considered happily. I have noticed that lesbians are still springing up to begin their own companies and publish their own works and then as was often done before begin grabbing up authors around them and growing even before they know they are. An example, one I love a lot is take one well-placed physician and professor who becomes first a lesbian novelist and then a publisher and then a distributor and then find someone else to distribute her books, her own and everyone else's and then decides that her surgical experience is interfering with her time flow and her new job and she gives that up and devotes herself entirely to being Radcliffe the author. Say you don't love the arrogance and joy of someone naming herself after Radcliffe Hall and bold strokes the publisher. Just as there is no way to remember all the beginnings, there is no way to predict the endings. But as a bet, I think we will be around in fact or in spirit a long, long time from now. And again, I am not Barbara Greer. Thank you, Joel. It was a lifetime opportunity. Yes. How did Clia start? Clia started with Felice. My partner was here. My work partner. I met Felice in graduate school and she was already had caught the bug of publishing. She had been working with motherhood publication, which I believe with KNOW was the first women's publishing company in the U.S. When I met her, she was working on her MFA and she was printing Women in Honor. Adrien Rich's book, Women in Honor, Some Notes and Lying. And we got together and moved to New York together where I got a job at Out and Out Books, which was a Brooklyn-based lesbian publishing company that was run by Joan Larkin, who is a poet whom I am sure you have read. And in 1978, we moved to Minneapolis and both worked as printers because we thought it was important to know how to print the books. And at that time, there was Iowa Movement's City Press, which was hugely influential. And we are deciding to start Clia's. There was Nayaad. There was Spinsters, which Marine Brady and Judith McDaniel. There was Persephone, which was sort of the Rolls Royce of lesbian publishing. And then there was this extraordinary woman who we were working as printers, both of us, this extraordinary woman who gave us $30,000 to start a publishing company. And her name is Mary Trotman. And she is 80, some years old, and she lives in L.A. And without her, there would be no Clia's. So that's sort of how we started, we'll be 25 years old this year. We started with one book really. We didn't really know what we were doing in terms of publishing, but we had this idea about a book. There was a time where there was a lot of... The conversation was very much about violence against women. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon were in Minneapolis at that time, and we were in Minneapolis. There were amazing magazines. There was No More Cages, I don't know if you remember that magazine, that was about women in prison. There was a lot of conversation about women in violence. It was very theoretical, some of it, and it was mostly about documenting the violence and the victimization of women. From the beginning, we decided that we were going to take a somewhat different stance and publish a book that documented the resistance of women to violence instead of the victimization. So we did this book which really, in some ways, is sort of the theme of what we did after that, which was gathering the testimonies of women who worked in rape practice centers and battered women shelters and lesbian separatists, women who were taking arms against their attackers, women who had killed their attackers, Juanita Thomas in Michigan, whom we went and visited. There was just so much there and there was so much energy in the women's movement there. There were so many ideas and just also so many actions being women were very active. There was a lot of street theater, there was just so much going on and we thought it would be really interesting to have a book that documented that. In some ways, it was this very modern way of looking at history. So we came out with this book. In some ways, it was completely crazy because it was 400 pages. It was eight and a half by 11. And it had photographs. So we blew the entire $30,000 on this book. And then, what do we do? And then what happened was that Felice's dad came to Minneapolis and bought her this old, beaten up Volvo station wagon. So now we had this book, we had to sell the book, right? So we put cases of the books in the back of the Volvo and then we put the sleeping bags on top and we started driving. And we did this eight week tour or seven week tour around the country and we went to better women shelters and rape crisis centers and women's bookstores and take back the night marches. And we saw the books. And the piles started to diminish and we were sort of sleeping like this. But people really noticed this book. I mean, it was incredibly ambitious and it was really in your face politics. So that was sort of the beginning of the history of Clears Press. It was sort of a scary book in a way, you know? Women killing the... Oh, the title was Fight Back, Feminist Resistance to Male Violence. And it came out in 1980. So, you know, I can sort of talk about the history of Clears Press with some of the books because we were so driven by the ideas that authors came and presented to us in some ways and we grew because of the idea of those authors. I'll give you some historical markers. So 1980, Fight Back. 1984, we did a book called AIDS, the Women. In 1987, we did a book called Sex Work which was a book that documented the rights of sex workers. Just to give you an idea that for us publishing was about in some ways staying really true to our politics and acquiring readership. So each of the books that we did in some ways acquired wider and wider readership. So, for instance, at a time when the feminist movement was mostly saying that prostitutes were victims and couldn't really say anything because they didn't have the rights or the knowledge to talk about sex and work. We thought it was really important on the contrary to have them talk about this and that they had in fact a lot to contribute to the feminist movement. In 1987, we published Susie Sexpert, Lesbian Sex Work. 1987. 1988. 1990. Whatever. 1990. Then some of the notable books that we did, I Am My Own Woman by Charlotte von Mastorf and that was in the late 80s or in the early 90s. Whatever. You know, just like come up and do it. And that was a book that hardly anybody noticed. And then last year, this play based on the book and on the story of Charlotte von Mastorf won the Pulitzer and the Tony Award. And let's see, other books that were really important. Body Alchemy, Lauren Cameron. One of the first books on transsexuality. And other books that were really important. Ann Bannon. Ann Bannon, who had been published by Nigh at Press and was out of print. We've republished her books and now we have film production companies knocking at the door wanting to do miniseries. You know, those are the things that really changed the way we've published. Those were adventures. Christine Jorgensen. The autobiography of Christine Jorgensen which was an adventure in itself. You know, she had died without leaving a will. And we had to settle her estate. We had to find who had the will. We found this person who was her roommate who lives in Bodmin Cornwall in this little town and nobody knows that she's transsexual. We went and found this woman and she had a copy of Christine Jorgensen's will. So because of this will we were able to settle the estate and publish the book. You know, there were a lot of adventures at Clears. And that gives you an idea of the kind of work that we're doing. We felt and we feel that we are very connected to the rest of the world in the 80s. We published The Little School by Alicia Partnoy, an Argentinian writer who was a student at the time of the junta in Argentina and was in prison in a concentration camp. Another love by Isabel Galgochi, a Hungarian lesbian who wrote a novel about the Soviet invasion of her country. No Place Like Home by Melanie Friend, a book of photographs about the situation of Albanians before during and after the Kosovo War. And some of our books are published by Minnet Editions, which is a human rights imprint of Clears Press. So that gives you an idea of what kind of books we're doing. One of the questions that Carol asked of me was what compelled you to do this work. So I have this little list here. The love of books and adventure, passion for history, politics, art and propaganda, finding conventional heterosexual values repellent, the company of women, being pissed off with the often simplistic analysis that came out and comes out of the feminist and gay movement. The opinion that the desire to fit in is not an intelligent reaction to oppression. Wanting to live in the big world, a possibly inflated sense that we can affect culture, and above all, a belief that our readers are very, very smart. The audiences have changed, however, and as I mentioned, we started as a feminist press, and mostly our audience was feminist women and people on the left, although the left was very critical of books like Sex Work, for instance, because they thought that oppressed people, how can oppressed people choose to be oppressed? As we started publishing gay men at the onset of the AIDS epidemic and gained, I think, a devoted audience, best gay erotica was created to encourage gay men to pursue the vital erotic exploration and desire. They were crucial to them and to us, as lesbians and queer people. We've just reissued John Preston's books. John Preston is the grandmaster of gay erotica, gay-SM erotica. Writers like Pat Caliphia, now Patrick Caliphia, were instrumental in analyzing sexual culture and legitimize us to an academic audience. You see how we're sort of building on audiences here. Claude Summers, with the Quarancy Clopidia series, visual arts, music, and popular culture, which you all should have. It's a great, great series. It's in most public libraries around the country. And then we have Suzy Bright, Violet Blue, Felice Newman, Bill Brant, Tristan Taumino. Tristan was in her early 20s when she started editing best lesbian erotica. She was so articulate, all of them were so articulate and so joyful, so adventurous, that I think they invigorated a new generation of women, lesbians, and men who were determined to explore their sexuality. And I credit them for bringing together a generation, a new generation of heterosexual, bisexual, queer readers who want to explore sex in a positive way. The Good Vibration's Guide to Sex, which now has sold more than 100,000 copies, really assured us the trust and loyalty of readers who thought, who knew that if they bought a sex guide from Clare's Press, it was going to be well researched, positive, well edited, well written. And then we get reviews. For instance, now Felice's book, the whole lesbian sex book, gets this review from the library journal. Check this out. This comprehensive and superbly competent manual sets a standard for which all popular sex writers should aim, not just for lesbians. Heterosexual women could learn a great deal about themselves as could the men who aspire to please them. That's the library journal. You know, it's working. Then authors like Gore Vidal, Don Weisey, Gore Vidal sexually speaking, Don Weisey, Black Like Us, and the collected Writers of Bayard Rustin, Edmund White, whose arts and letters were just published, May Jane Meeker, High Smith, I don't know if you've read it, you should read it, it's great. Regina Marlar, who lives in San Francisco, who edited a book called Queer Beats, Catherine Forrest, Lesbian Pop Fiction, which just came out. Virginia Wolves, Melin Broja, which had never been published in a trade edition. All these books got us reviewed in mainstream newspapers, magazines such as The New York Times, The L.A. Times, et cetera, et cetera, and propulsed us out of the ghetto. Broadest writers who never thought of Queer Express as a possible publisher. This year we are reissuing some classic lesbian novels from people you may or may not have heard of, François Mallejeuris, who is a French writer who wrote a fantastic lesbian novel in the 1950s, which was originally published by FSG, completely disappeared. It's a great lesbian book. Most people have never read it. We are publishing her. Dorothy Stretchy, Olivia. Do you remember Olivia? Any of you have read Olivia? Fantastic lesbian book. Dorothy Stretchy, you know, the sister of Lytton Stretchy, Blooms Ray, all these people. Yeah. And then we follow up Nye Express, Glorious Footsteps, and we're publishing more of the lesbian pop novels. We're publishing the bad lesbian pop novels. The ones that end badly. The ones where the lesbians are really, really, really bad. We're publishing this year two memoirs by heterosexual man, Matthew Ross, Yom Kippur-Aggogo, Kevin Keck, Ady Prospect, which is about his, which is a sexual memoir, because they came to us because they thought Queer Express is a home for us, and we thought, yeah, sure, come on in. We're publishing Deconstructing Tyrone, which is a collection of essays by black women about men compiled by two journalists who work for the Washington Post and the Detroit Free Press. That gives you an idea of the kind of books that we're doing. So I think we're doing okay. One of your questions was, do we still need lesbian publishing? Yeah. I think there's some really, really great work happening, and larger publishers, because there are some gifted editors working in larger publishers. But we have to remember that it's still very, very important to think of who owns the press. Things might change, editors move on, so forth. So I think it is still a very, very crucial and important thing to have lesbians presses, gay and lesbians presses, publishing gay and lesbians books, and whatever else they feel like publishing. Practically speaking, it means a level of commitment on the part of the presses, to the authors, to the books, the content, the covers, the longevity of the books. That very few other publishers or mainstream publishers are able to offer to the authors. In the case of Clius, it often means a long-term relationship. Many of our authors have more than one book on the list. A shared passion for the work and for the vision of the author. For a lot of the early publishers, there was a great deal of problems with distribution of books, and it's still a problem for a lot of small publishers. How did you distribute the books? Are readers going to be able to find the books, especially with the advent of Amazon and large chain bookstores? It's really a crucial problem for publishers. We feel that we should publish quirky books, but our distribution should be as mainstream as possible. So that the books are in the Barnes & Noble, as well as in the gay bookstores. We think, and it's difficult, that readers should be able to still find our books in the gay and lesbian aisles of those bookstores. I think we need to be really concerned about the context in which we publish. We need to stay close to the culture of the readers and forever expand the audience we serve. It's good economics, it's good politics. It's used to be called coalition politics. We really like this challenge. That's what we're now the largest independent lesbian gay queer publisher in the world. That's true. And in terms of the future, I think the future is good. I think the fact that writers like Edmund White and Michael Cunningham and Ellen Hollinghurst and Kong Toeben, who you should read, I just read his latest book. It's really great. It's called The Master. It's wonderful. I think the fact that they win prizes. I think the fact that people like Michel T. hopefully is going to get a big advance. That Tristan Taramino publishes a column in The Village Voice that Sarah Waters books get made into BBC mini-series. Those are really good signs. What it means for us is that our books, the Clare's books also get reviewed in the New York Times. It means that our authors get interviewed on fresh air. That's all really, really positive. Chain in online bookstores now know that there's a huge market for lesbian and gay books. Well, independent gay lesbian bookstores and feminist bookstores knew it all along. As I said, some producers are knocking at our doors. They all come to us because they know what we do. Before that, we were sort of publishing in a desert. So I think it's a really, really good time for us to be publishing what we're publishing. I think it's a healthy... In terms of content, I think it's a very, very healthy time. Carol asked me to talk a little bit about international publishing. I don't know if we'll come to that. Okay, I don't know very much. I know in Europe, I know the situation in the UK is not very, very good. The gay men's press in the UK and Diva are no longer publishing. The women's press in the UK is no longer publishing. The only one that has sort of survived and is still doing fantastic books is Virago. In France, there are lots of small publishers, and I have the names here. I don't know that I want to go through the list here, but I have like one, two, three, four, five, six... 15 gay and lesbian publishers in France. There are some in Belgium. I think you could tell us about the publishers in Germany. It's very healthy publishing in Germany. In Italy and Spain, I don't know. And then finally, I just want to say that it's really, really important to credit some of the people who came before us. I mean, Nihat Press really did fantastic work. Persephone Press did fantastic work. I don't know if you remember some of their books. Where are they? This bridge called my back. Nice Jewish girls. The Coming Out Stories. All those books, you know, that a lot of lesbian generation, my generation and 50 years old read and were incredibly important. And also because when Cleo started in 1980, those are the people who really, really helped us. I remember Nihat Press, although Barbara Greer made me swear never to say, called us and said, I hear you girls are doing this press in Minneapolis. You should come to the Women in Print conference in Washington, D.C. And we thought, we can't go to Washington, D.C. We don't have money to go to Washington, D.C. And she sent us money for gas to drive to Washington, D.C. You know, those are the kinds of things that used to happen. When we got there, Persephone, the women of Persephone Press, said, do you guys have a contract? And we thought, well, no. We went to their room and they sat us down and they gave us a sample contract so that we wouldn't have to pay a lawyer to, you know, all those things that happened, I think are really, really important to remember. That's it. That's it. Almost at day one, I happened to be there, thank God, and it turned my life around immediately, 180 degrees, and led to all sorts of activism creatively and among them, one of my activist wonderful things that I found to do was translate American feminists. Americans were way ahead of us Europeans back then and had some great, important authors that absolutely needed to be introduced to the European scene. In my German scene, Germany is my motherland and although I had to leave it because I couldn't stand it when I grew up there, I went to Paris. But these feminists, for example, it's amazing that you mentioned Adrian Rich, the book on honour and lying, it is one of those that I translated. And wouldn't you know that it influenced me greatly when recently I wrote this book about lesbian honour, honesty and truth telling in sexual relationships or in relationships. So I translated Audrey Lorde, her poetry and her essays and went on tour with her in Germany and Switzerland. I translated Little Gertrude Stein, which was a big challenge for me as a writer. I picked her one criminal novel, her thriller, called Blood on the Dining Room Floor, which of course had nothing about a thriller, really. And I translated Susan Griffin's Woman in Nature, a major book in my becoming a woman, Mench, a lesbian radical feminist. Susan Griffin was the reason that I met my life companion, my soulmate Kim Churnin, a writer who became known for her biography of her mother, communist mother in my mother's house and then being the first woman writer in America, writing about eating disorders, hungry self, for example, the obsession. Kim and I, because of this translating business and me being a wild radical separatist lesbian feminist in Paris, met at the same café and hit it off pretty fast and I moved here for her in 1986. A big leap and we are at Edgewick Books. By that time, Kim had published about 14 books in major publishing houses in America and was absolutely exhausted and tired of the mainstream publishing world. So were many of our friends, it turns out, in the Bay Area. We also found that many of the very good writers that we knew and felt we were, were not able to publish our books anymore because we were the typical mid-list authors. All of a sudden, publishing seemed to have changed dramatically from a place where smaller editions of books like, let's say, 5,000, maybe even 2,000 books could be published and this was not possible anymore because of the best-seller mania that completely took over. And we felt that our books, my own, Kim's, the books we wrote and published together like Sex and Other Sacred Games and a book about Cecilia Bartley, our beloved favorite opera diva, that these books had all been tempered with by the mainstream publishers that really we felt this out of controlness that, of course, writers always feel, the frustration of not really having a say about the cover, the title, about even the content. It's amazing how often we were pushed into a more commercial corner. That led to edge work books, which was our great desire to publish something that was just more on an edge, the non-publishable edge, the feminist edge, the please, let's discover, rediscover what this nostalgic, wonderful thing was that we had when there was a world of feminist, lesbian engagement and passion. We wanted to revive that spirit and we were very naive and we were very visionary and very stupid. We, of course, had this vision, intelligent vision, I think, that the only alternative to this big monster of mainstream bestseller publishing was grassroots little women's collectives, so back to the 70s and women's collectives, do you remember? And that sort of inspiration of a small group of women who would come together, all writers, all in the same pot, or peas in the same pod, and do this together with a great amount of energy. Well, it turned out that our energy was very, very small because most of the women in our group were writers and not publishers. And what a conflict. We were all exhausted after a year of preparing for this and then all of the writers didn't want to go out and do marketing for their books. They said, I want to write my next book. Please, leave me alone. So we ran into this obstacle majorly. We also ran into huge economical obstacles. We had this collective with eight and in the end nine books that were all, I mean, half of the books were written by lesbian authors and the other part were kind of economical marketing thinking of our collective. Like, we wanted a political book about the Iraq-Iran revolutions and the whole backlash there. So we picked a book, Susan Perry's book about that time and the women's coming of age in Iran during the revolution. We picked another book that seemed important because it was a spiritual book written in a Japanese form of writing about a woman Buddhist monk and her autobiography in verse, written completely in verse. Things like that, that were definitely on some edge and could not be or would not have been published. Just when we were ready to produce our books and, of course, we picked everything women made. We picked a woman producing house, Cypress House, to do the kind of real work. We were very much in a hurry. We did, unfortunately, not do what you guys did, meaning go to learn with Cleo's books or with your book, your press, of course, or any other lesbian feminist press. We thought, oh, we have published, we know. Totally untrue. We knew nothing. And we stumbled over our own feet and we stumbled over America's tragedy of 9-11. Just when we were ready, this happened and we had had great support inside the women's collective of resourceful women, women's donors, women's philanthropy. This is what made us exist at the beginning and gave us the money, believing in our feminist project, reanimating feminist ideas and launched us. But after 9-11, just when we had lost, I mean, invested all our money in books that were, in fact, quite expensive. They were hard covers. They looked beautiful, we thought, and would give us a chance to publish paperbacks in other companies, if not in our own, so that we would get the money of the paperbacks and there would be a kind of new source of income for the press. But these sources dried up so fast that you wouldn't believe it. After 9-11, there was a sort of no philanthropy. Thank you. We are all afraid for about 6 months to a year and just at this point, we would have needed money for marketing, for, you know, really doing something for this book in addition to what we did, which was creating literary salons. We had a very successful, every month, salon at the Montclair Women's Club and a lot of women came. Sometimes 100 women came to our salons discussing books and there was sometimes we chose a topic like Jewel Gomez came to discuss with Chitra, Divakaruni and myself about erotic writing and things like that that were successful and fun, but it wasn't enough without funding to kind of keep us alive. Even our ninth book, which already had been in production which was our edge work effort for women of color, feminist, huge, thick anthology, four pounds or something like that on writing, political feminist writing by women of color did not make edge work or keep us afloat. So we had to cave in also because of the collective factor that we were all exhausted and basically our lessons from the women's movement that collectives are a tricky beast, they seem to kill their members because of all kinds of misunderstandings, betrayals and disappointments. They all happened again in this replay and basically Kim and I did all the work and had to cave in after two years of trying very hard. And now edge work has still a beautiful website that we put a lot of money in. The books still sell, but they didn't sell much beyond 500 copies per book. My sex book, which I then had called Love, Learning's Place and Design Myself is the only one that went into mainstream as a paperback and then was called Secrets of Lesbian Desire, looked very different. Different title, everything of course very different. Less eyebrow, more market, mass market, et cetera. And that was also the only book that was sold in another country in Germany so far where it did better than in America so far because it's still going in both countries. But that was the kind of sad disappointment with that event of trying to be published, which we haven't given up by the way. I must say that I think the spark of energy might strike us again because of course now we won't do all these mistakes again that we have made. We would do it very, very differently and I think we learned a ton of what not to do and maybe also what to do nowadays when publishing is so different on demand publishing and new technologies like that a new world and websites and blogs and blogs and you name it. So if we might be back in the run at some point, I hope so. Now I'm going to stick myself in here as a publisher briefly before we go on to the commentary and discussion part. I'm going to talk briefly about being a publisher of commentary on what we've all been doing, on what publishers have been doing, on what the writers have been doing, on what the bookstores have been doing, on the coming and going and coming and going and coming and going of all of the different publications that we came up with over the years. I started doing feminist bookstore news in 1976 out of that first incredible women in print conference for which I'd like just for a moment to pay homage to June Arnold and also the Bacchanal bar in Albany where she sat around one evening with a group of local people and people she was traveling with and said, wouldn't it be amazing to just get all these women that are doing all of these bookstores and publishing companies and magazines together and see what would happen? Well, you know, we didn't do a lot of that. We did a fair amount of sex. But she made it happen. You know, at a campfire gruel camp in Nebraska where the really big debate was if you had to be naked to swim in the pool but we found that it was ist because, you know, some people weren't comfortable and other people had very fair skin and would, you know, sunburn in ten minutes. So, you know, we learned to expand our political beliefs about that at the time. Nancy Stockwell, I think, is the one who came up with the idea that we should make our own paper because, you know, the patriarchy's going to control us by limiting our access to paper. Paper shortages were a big thing in the news that year. And there, in fact, was some experience with Blender's wheatgrass and grasshoppers to see if that could make a mix that turned into paper. And it did, but you couldn't print on it. And it was really quite an incredible time where people learned, you know, about contracts or they learned about many, many things. Oh, I think one of the important roles was that no writers were allowed. The only writers who came had to be passing as publishers or journalists or, I mean, magazine publishers. And the idea was that this was about the means of production and getting the information out rather than the debates about the art itself. Was this in Nebraska? Yeah. Yeah, outside of Omaha, because that was equal driving distance from the West Coast and the East Coast. There were actually people who flew in airplanes to get there, but not very many of them. There were, I think, a seven car caravan from the Bay Area, including one person who had, I believe, just written the women's gun pamphlet with a pistol under her pillow to protect us all. So there was this incredible energy and there were about 20 women's bookstores there and we found we had so much to tell each other. Oh, oh, inventory system, three by five, right down the names of the book. Some really, you know, racy ideas and some ideas and aspects other people hadn't thought about. So we just talked all week. It was a week long. Oh, I want to say we also had our fair share of spies and paranoia about spies and everyone wore little lavender bands to prove that they belonged there. So you might be naked, but you were still supposed to be wearing your lavender sash. Some did and some didn't. But the bookstores kept talking to each other and we had so much to share with each other and so much to learn from each other and, you know, by the end of the week we had as many questions and answers as we had at the beginning, it seemed. So we had this idea that we should find a way to stay in touch. Now you have to realize this is 1976. Long distance calls cost, you know, several dollars a minute. None of us can afford playing tickets. The photocopy machine had yet to come into common currency. We don't even talk about, you know, imagine life before email. So we had several ideas. One was to start kind of a round robin thing where, you know, I'll write something and I'll mail it to you and then you add some and you mail it to her and then you add some and finally someone said, it's just going to sit on my desk. It won't go anywhere. It'll stop. Okay, we came to that one up. And in the end, two of us agreed to do a newsletter. It was myself and a woman named Andre from Rising Woman Books, often called Moving Woman Books in Santa Rosa. And because someone had given them a press, a printing press, a Gestettner. So we would get together all this information and when people failed to send it to us, we would make it up or research it or whatever. Just get the gossip. And then we would type it up and then I would borrow a car and drive to Santa Rosa and we'd get out the Gestettner and put it in the middle of their living room, collective household, of course, collective bookstore. And we would crank out, you know, 50, 60, 100, 120 copies and then dry overnight. And then in the morning we'd get up and turn the pieces of paper over because, you know, they had to dry overnight and then we would crank the other sides and mail them out. And that was, you know, not an uncommon experience of lesbian publishing. The Women's Press Collective, which was one of the first presses and was here in Oakland, the really big thing was learning how to take that press apart, how to make it work, how to manage it so that we could print the work. So that was a very important part. And little by little feminist bookstore news, it was a newsletter then, got bigger. There were more bookstores and, you know, eventually we decided that maybe we would let the publishers read it. Their newsletter had fallen apart and, you know, we kind of needed them and the magazines were kind of important and, you know, it got bigger and bigger and, you know, eventually Harper Collins was reading it because they wanted to know what those feminist publishers were publishing so they could steal the ideas and make a mint on them. We facilitated communication as a way to say that. In the heyday, you know, I think we probably had about 900 subscriptions, which was pretty good for a trade magazine focused on gay and lesbian books. I mean, lesbian and feminist books, we did not do gay books. But then eventually we I got first Ed Hermans and then Richard Labonte to write what we called Gay Men's Lit from Feminist Bookstores. It was the name of the column and it was a little cheat sheet for all of the women who ran bookstores and also sold gay men's books, but, you know, didn't really read the literature carefully and needed a cheat sheet and because, you know, the gay men had been using feminist bookstore news for years to know what to stock for the lesbian, so we thought it was time to share the information, make it a two-way street. We published things like List of Women's Bookstores and this was, you know, kind of the heyday list when there were, you know, this is about 100, 110 stores, feminist bookstore catalog, which, you know, we did about 500,000 of this pretty glossy publication. It made me fall in love with color, which I couldn't afford to print, but I found a way. And that lasted until about 2000 and, you know, you can guess the reasons why. Why did I do feminist bookstore news? I had fallen in love quite early on with the idea of newsletters and getting information to people that small, that getting specific information to small groups of people was often enough to change the world. I had done a newsletter for abortion counselors in southwestern Michigan and what we did was pool information about where women could get abortions about how do you send a woman to Japan, to England or to New York and California. We did not publish how to send people to Jane in Chicago. That was very careful information because of course that was conspiracy to commit murder for which any of us would be liable. But I had this understanding that getting that specific information to a small group of people would change an enormous number of women's lives. And I believe that about bookstores about what the women's movement and the bookstores distributed the information and the publishers got it into forms that could be distributed and going out. Later I started in 2003, I started doing books to watch out for which is you could call the book review, you can call the gossip sheet, you can call it. We don't do much scandal mongering. I think we have exhibited great control and restraint. And doing that because with the demise of so many gay bookstores and so many feminist bookstores, it's gotten harder to find the information about gay and lesbian and feminist books. If you know the name of a book you want, it's very easy to buy it on the internet. It's very easy to get it. But if you don't have that information if you don't already know the name of the book, it's very much harder to find the books. So I came up actually I was working in Sacramento and doing technical writing at the time and I was very pissed because I couldn't find a good book to read when I did get home from work and I wasn't finding it in Sacramento, the bookstore had closed, the women's bookstore had closed, the gay store was really an exciting place if you were under 25 but I wasn't, I was not their audience and they didn't buy for me and I was just really pissed that all these years in the women's movement I couldn't find a book to read. So that kind of drove the idea of putting together something that would be easy to distribute that could go out by email or print and I have to say that there was one other driving factor and that was that I missed the gossip. I want to know who is publishing what. I want to know where the books were, I want to know how and where and why and what made things happen. It's something I've been privy to doing feminist bookstore news for years and I just kind of felt myself drying up without it so I'm now doing books to watch out for there are copies of both the gay men's edition and the lesbian edition and I would love it if somebody would just pick these things up and start passing them out. I have a stack of subscription forms and postcards and I think you all must know five people you could be at least one of those things too and my feelings will be personally hurt if each of you doesn't do that. Birthday gift end of summer gift holiday gift broke up with your girlfriend gift retirement gift many great occasions for that and the other real reason is to fight the invisibility that if the lesbian books if the gay books, if the feminist books don't find their markets, if they don't find their audience, which is to say if they don't sell the publishers can't stand business or as is the case with mainstream presses, well if they don't sell we know what happens and with the mainstream presses if they don't perceive the books as selling they stop publishing them and I am personally not ready to go back to a world without a lot of really good complex, difficult lesbian characters running around in any more than I want a world without difficult complex lesbians and so I think that's probably all the most important things I had to say and now I want to move a little into a couple of questions we've talked some about international publishing, did anyone have anything else they want to add to that? I wanted to add one story to that and that's about lesbian publishing in Taiwan the story about gay and lesbian publishing internationally isn't news anymore I personally almost every country has some kind of gay and lesbian publishing going on I personally know of two groups publishing lesbian books in Taiwan but the juicy story is what do they do there's a lesbian publisher in Taiwan called Muster Press that has captured kind of the hearts of the Taiwan publishing society because of the Taipei International Taipei Book Fair a couple of I guess it was about six months ago, eight months ago now when the government said that all books that were inappropriate for young people which is to say that had sex or anything like that and it had to be marked with an R as restricted content our dyke publisher said no she said well many of the people in my books are lesbians but these are not inappropriate books for young people this is not unusually sexually explicit content inappropriate and I won't do it and she didn't do it and she got away with it and it was as if no publisher there had ever thought not to bow down to that so it's like oh here's the dyke leading the way and stealing the hearts and minds and kind of that's the international publishing story I want to tell I can add one I just made a little Google search Google Germany to see if my hit words like lesbian publishing companies would render results and it was very interesting because on the one hand I met this invisibility that is typical that nothing came up under these words exactly directly but in some kind of meandering some paths I found that there is gay lesbian book fair especially in conjunction with the regular book fair that is in Leipzig the big big German book fair apart from Frankfurt and of course that was very interesting to me it shows some of the particular energy that I feel is in German lesbian and gay publishing which I think has been growing this is not a nostalgic it's quite the opposite that there is more energy there is still more money of course for culture all together in European countries in Germany especially so that was good news and Berlin is the scene certainly for gay and lesbian publishing and there are quite a number of publishing houses I discovered through my own book to Seekers of Lesbian Desire which was bought by one of them it was a very happy discovery and they are very good and do really great work with a lot of positive energy does anyone on the panel have any questions? one thing that is sort of interesting is I think that there are a lot of American authors who are being translated and published in Europe there are very few European authors that are being translated and published in the US and I've always felt very sad about that for several reasons so one is very expensive to translate a book and a lot of European publishers have subsidies from the government so that they can actually pay for the translations whereas our government doesn't really encourage translation of or you know encourage us to know that there are other countries but but really what is also important to realize is that whenever those books are published and we've published a few translations of lesbian authors from other countries and one of them that I mentioned another love by Isabel Galgochi which is a great novel and then this French lesbian malageuris next year The Illusionist which is a great lesbian novel as well were translated and hardly sold any copies when The Illusionist was published by FSJ I think it sold like 15 or 2,000 copies which is really pathetic and we sold I think like 700 copies of another love those are great great books so I would encourage you all to look for those books as well because when you read first of all you can guarantee that you are like it but when you buy one of these books you encourage us to publish those books and you make it possible for presses to actually take the risk of translating the books and publishing it so you know just think about it so now I think to open up to the comments the suggestions the questions of the tremendous tremendous collection of people we have gathered here in this room I can speak to that I'm going to do a little question repeating just for the sake of video the question a short form was what impact have all the lesbians out there in library land had on publishing and supporting the publishing when we did Gloria and Sardoe's Sportelands la Frontera in 1987 and I went to the library journal when we were there for the American Bookstores Association I actually make an appointment with this woman at the library journal who really acted like she was not having any of this maybe she had three minutes for me so I walked in and she was a dyke she was sitting there clearly and receptive to the fact that I was there she just happened to have the New York spirit about no no no stay away from me but once there she was absolutely wonderful about taking a look at that book which was very edgy at the time I mean nobody even understood what it was for so long except this woman did and not only did they review it but thanks to her they selected it as one of their most important books in 50 books of that year and I'm convinced and of course because it had so much lesbian content I'm convinced if she herself had not been a lesbian that that probably would not have happened and that she saw the scope of that book being growing up on the borderlands and I think it helped make that book what it is today so that's just a sort of narrative that's very specific but I think those women are everywhere and they're constantly helping all of us and they're certainly helping the readers find the books which is really what's important to us and you know we've always tried to work very closely with them in our distribution networks to try and get the books to libraries because we know that's where we want them and that's where the young people find them I have one more thing to add I always have one more thing to add it's it's not only I think again it's been librarians have supported our books but in the case of Clare Spress Jim Van Bosker who's a great lesbian has been instrumental in our publishing schedule because you know there are many books that we would have never published without Jim's help finding the books the lesbian pop books in particular and that's that's a tremendous function of librarians that not all librarians really take too hard I think but you know we're really lucky to have the James Holmes collection in San Francisco and Karen's work and so forth because it's just incredible the power that librarians could have on developing the list of the publishers who are willing to listen to them they're an incredible resource for us and I would also add the incredible advocacy that librarians have done about refusing to allow books to be censored in schools and libraries and keeping the books out there come hell or high water and sometimes careers I want to add something to that too our plan with Edgework Books is to donate all the leftover copies that we have from Edgework to libraries so that they have an existence beyond being stored somewhere and trickle selling I mean they still do but so little that we felt it would be really the right action to get them out to the libraries how do you do that oh thank you the library question I know as you said it seems to wisdom and the library subscriptions kept it and I'm sure many other small feminist journals will float during the libraries just renewed the more automatically the year when it was only one issue or two years without an issue and get through doing that and those journals many of them wouldn't still exist and it seems to wisdom they'd have come back this year so that's just the public information is doing very well it has an issue on activism and if you activists want to submit things then why am I obsessed with it so it could be very accurate plenty of time and the other thing is about international publishing interestingly my biggest support has been from international publishers England Over Woman Germany Cooling Shackenburger and then Canada Press Gang and then Raincoast and my experience is those presses in other countries have been much more willing to take this anyway than me and also that audiences in other countries besides this one come out you know in Canada it wasn't unusual for the small presses for Press Gang when it was before it was driven into bankruptcy by unfortunate circumstances but they had a following and three other people would come out in Vancouver and Toronto to their readings of three authors that people didn't really know about regularly and they'd come anytime Press Gang put on a reading this is a true in the States and well-known writers except if you're at the level of the reserve you do a reading in a single walking of 20 people in San Francisco already in Chicago you go to these cities 20 people somebody does a lot of people visiting the university spouses maybe 50 so I think one of the things that is important for us being publishing is to really work with local audiences to get the writer audience interface going in a stronger way and it's also of course that the small presses are supported in a way both culturally and by the government in those countries that they want but it's still one of the really important things for publishers to work on yep more comments Brett well for us you can go on our website www.antlute.com principle and see what the guidelines are and that's but we always advise people with manuscripts to really do their homework and research about the presses that you're submitting to to see what works they produce because if they're not producing they don't have an audience for the book you're doing they're probably not going to build one so you want to get with a press that would have an audience unless they're clious and in fact we too build an audience almost every time we do a book but that's more about getting into community centers and so forth which is a lesson that we did have to learn and when you have grassroots work you have to go into grassroots to find the audience but unless you're clious number one do your research so that when you write your letter your letter is directed towards that publisher about why your work would be good for them and why you feel there would be an audience for you there because then it makes the publisher think okay well we're starting with number one she understands audience and she understands that there might be a match that's what I would advise is do some research did you want me to first of all don't feel cross it's you know we wouldn't be publishing if you were not asking that kind of question so it's sort of important you can send us a book proposal depending on what you're writing or a sample or you can send it to us on email on the attachment in the mail and if we fall in love with it then we'll publish it could you maybe stand please the story behind Christine Jorgensen the book had been published in I think 1967 I'm not sure about my dates I'm not good at dates okay but she's good at publishing what do you want anyway it had been published in hardcover by a small publisher in New York in hardcover and then it had been published I think by Putnam in softcover the rights reverted apparently to the large publisher and then it's very complicated I don't know exactly I think it was Erickson's books Christine then died and there was apparently there was no will so I did a lot of research and just couldn't find any clue as to where to find the will or anything and then I think two years after I started doing the research I thought the and I called Susan Stryker and Susan Stryker said oh yeah and read all the names of the nieces and nephews of Christine Jorgensen and told me that Christine Jorgensen at the end of her life had been living in a house in Southern California and that she had a roommate who also had gone through an operation and was living with her when this was happening and so forth and they were quite good friends gave me the name of that woman who completely escapes me right now and the name of a transsexual activist in England who might know of her so I got in touch with a guy in England who told me yeah she lives in Brenda, my name is Brenda Lana Smith lives in Bodman and I have to say I have to preface that with the fact that the book was the reason why we were interested in the book to start with was because Don Wisey was an editor at CLIAS I think it found a copy here so you know and I'd read it and came back to the press and said this is really interesting so anyway, we go back to Bodman there we both Don and I traveled to Bodman one morning arrived there and this woman who this large woman was waiting for us at the station and we got in the car and Don had just arrived from the States and he was really jet lagged and I had been in London for a few days and we had like had no breakfast or had like you know coffee at the station and we got into the car and Brenda told us okay well I've got everything ready I've got whiskey vodka, gin and we were like she was rallying the names of all this alcohol and we were getting really sort of queasy and then we arrived in this extraordinary little apartment Bodman is a very small town and she was living in this tiny apartment and we arrived there and there were pictures of Christine Jorgensen everywhere and Jane Russell it was really bizarre it was really bizarre and and she told us that I think and then pictures of the house where she was raised and then she was talking about her life and she had been and her life as a man she had been a general council of Denmark in Bermuda but she was English it was weird and really lovely conversation and so we started talking and it turns out that her father divorced her mother and then got married to Jane Russell so that's how the Jane Russell thing so we were sort of like this is really hot here we are in Bodman and you know there's like things and she's like and and then she talked to us about Christine Jorgensen and how she'd live with Christine and now they they used to party a lot together and she would for instance take Christine to chemotherapy Christine had cancer and then they would stop at hotels and have like this huge gin and tonics after chemotherapy and in the meantime she's telling us all the stories we haven't eaten and it's like six o'clock at night and Dawn is like about to pass out in fact I think he sort of passed that or threw her up or something and it's just really a bad bad scene there and then she came out with copies of The Will and nobody knew where The Will was and gave us copies of The Will and photographs we went through albums and so forth photographs and then so we had everything then we came back to the states and I found out that the lawyer now I just forgot his name Donald Segretti the lawyer who was about to who was the executor of The Will the lawyer was Donald Segretti do you remember who Donald Segretti is? Donald Segretti was was hired by the the committee to reelect the president Nixon to disrupt democratic events before Watergate and was arranged during Watergate and so forth and did some time in jail I believe and so forth so we then had to find Donald Segretti and we finally found Donald Segretti called Donald Segretti and let us to Donald Segretti knew where he was stuck to his secretary but he apparently was working like 30 minutes a week and was never answering phone calls so finally we got a lawyer to write to Donald Segretti because we thought he's going to answer a lawyer saying you were supposed to settle this will or whatever it is, probate this will and you never did it so you know, get on it so that's how we got The Will probated and as it turns out she had left her estate or her writing to the motion picture and television fund home for the agent and so we had to transfer the rights to them and then they granted us the rights to publish the book that's how it happened and it sold like 1500 copies so far it's still selling great but you can make a movie out of your experience but it was it really was an adventure I would like Feliz to answer that question actually, would you mind? yeah, you can come over here we haven't had any censorship problems with any book that's primarily text we've had censorship problems getting books printed that are graphic like Annie Sprinkle and books like that have been we've had to go out of the US we actually had to print that book in Canada which is very ironic Annie Sprinkle? I don't know, I really have to think about it somewhere in the 90s somewhere in the 90s we publish a lot of erotica anthologies they sell really well, they're really popular they're really fun to publish and there are certain limitations on the covers that come out of the chains and it's not like an edict it's more like we show the covers to our distributors and the buyer for Barnes & Noble and the buyer for Borders and the buyer for this or that it's sitting there saying this isn't going to go over but we keep we push it so Frederique actually has a lot to do with this but Frederique is the art director but we really push it Clius broke the nipple barrier and we were the first ones to have women's nipples on the cover of a erotica book and I didn't even know we were doing it until after it had been done it's like, oh yeah, there's nipples on that book and no one said anything we got in trouble with a book recently the cover is a photograph that's like a vintage erotica it's the book Wicked it's erotic fantasy stories of famous people so there's made up erotic stories about historical figures and there's this sexy vintage sepia-like image and there's a shadow where her thighs meet and oh my god, if you took a magnifying glass you would see pubic hair and this is this vintage art iconic thing and we had to what did we have to do? we had to deflate her that's right, Amazon on Amazon it was like a blank and for Amazon to show the picture we had to like get rid of the pubic hair and we had to Photoshop it but it's at Barnes & Noble pubic hair is yes, the pubic hair we nailed it it's totally inconsistent but they don't really care they're in it for the buck they really don't care and basically the more visible we are the more we're imitated by the New York publishers and there's this huge amount of competition because everybody imitates what we do which is not necessarily a terrible thing it means there's more books for you to choose from and we think quality always wins out and so we're not too worried about it and so there's more of a large section of lesbian and gay and queer erotica which is okay we tried to be positive about it so now we think that Amazon is really too shaved pussies that's gonna be our next anthology and you were here for it okay, we have time for one more question it's an actual yeah, it is yeah, she has tremendous breast, doesn't she and she's proud of it last question so that was the world as we invented it so maybe on that note thank you all very much for coming thank you to the library for having us and to all of the fine panelists present in absentia and in imitation