We're going to talk about some things together and then we're going to open it up for questions from you. I'm going to start off with a question since all three of you wrote during different time periods. You got started at least during different times. And I'm wondering, what was it like to be a writer during that time? I mean, could you really say what you wanted to say? How was it with the idea of getting published? I'd like to start with Ann Bannon since she was doing this in the 50s. What was it like for you to write lesbian fiction back then? Oh, well, it was challenging. It was frightening. One of the reasons we called this discussion from sleaze to classics is simply the fact that anything about homosexual romance in those days was sleaze. No matter how beautifully written, no matter how heartfelt, no matter how well-intentioned or well-styled, it was simply infra-dig, was dangerous literature, could fall into the hands of children. The mere reading of a chapter out of Odd Girl Out would, of course, convert every young girl to lesbianism on the spot. There was no hiding from the seductiveness of it all. So we had an illicit identity, and it was a toxic identity.  There was no one you could turn to who could tell you differently. If you went to the family doctor to ask, he was a hotline back to your parents. If you went to your religious advisor, he would scorch your ears off with how wicked and how dangerous this was. If you went to your favorite teacher, they would say, well, dear, in a few years you'll mature and you'll grow out of it.    So it was within this context of rejection and marginalization that you had to write, and it was miraculous that it got done at all. But there were some groundbreaking books that kind of opened the door. The first, not really the first lesbian original pulp, but the first lesbian, a story with a lesbian theme, always denied by the author, was a book called Women's Barracks. And it was a huge hit, and it was published in hardcovers in England, and it was published by gold medal books in pulp. And of course, that was another reason the books were sleeved. The paper was very shoddy, acid-riddled stuff. The ink soaked through it. The covers, the backs of the covers were glued instead of stitched. The covers themselves were shockingly candid. They would pose the ladies with as much cleavage as they dared, and getting as close to each other as they dared position them. So I mean, just everything about them was tainted. So with that in mind, the first cover on Women's Barracks was actually rather chased. It was some girls in the French resistance wearing army-style uniforms and kind of gazing at each other. And one of them was in her scanties.  So gold medal books said, God, you know, this is wonderful. We're making money. This is better than the Westerns. It's better than the cops and robbers. It's better than science fiction. We're making money like we can't believe. So we've got to find another one. And no one was brave enough to step forward and publish until one of their own secretaries came in, or I guess she was doing copywriting then, a young woman named Mary Jane Meager. She said, I can write you a book. And so the editor-in-chief, Dick Carroll, said, well, let's, okay. I'll give it a shot. Let me see what you can do. And she sat down and wrote a book that he called Spring Fire. And it was another huge seller. And that's the book, aside from The Well of Loneliness, which was one of the few that I had ever found very weepy, very grim, but Spring Fire was about a couple of college girls falling in love, having a great romance. And I read that book in a gulp. And I thought, I can do this. I've been there. I just, in fact, I had just graduated from college. It's fresh in my mind. And I sat down and I wrote a monster manuscript, about well over 600 page, type script pages. When you're young, it just comes out. And- How much experience, huh? Yes. It was turning ignorance into ingenuity. Basically. But I, so I got this all written. And I don't, I had no idea how to publish. Where do you go? Who do you ask? So I wrote to Vin Packer, the pen name that Mary Jane Meager used. And I said, how does one get into print?  And she miraculously wrote back. And she said, well, I don't know where you are. But if you can get to New York, I will introduce you to my editor. Well, I've asked her over the years, how, you know, what in the world possessed you that you would help me get a start? And she said, I don't know. You're, it was something about your letters. But she could never pin it down. I don't know what I said either. I haven't got the letter. But I was in Philadelphia. So it was no big deal to get to New York. The big deal was to talk my husband into letting me go. Much hair tearing over that.  He said, oh, a women's hotel? I said, yes. He said, well, as long as you stay at the women's hotel. And so that was the deal. And I went up with this monster manuscript. I met Mary Jane. I met Dick Carroll. He read it immediately, which is very kind of him because they were getting 400 manuscripts a month. And he could hardly get through them all and give them any kind of evaluation. But he liked it. And he accepted it. He said it's a very bad book. But if he had said it's a very bad book and go home and start over, I would have been dreadful. But he said it's a very bad book, but. So I went home full of hope. And my instructions were cut it in half and tell the story of those two girls that you've got stashed in a shadowy corner there and will have something. So I went home. I cut it in half. I told the story of the two girls, feeling very abashed because I thought I had disguised the fact that they were in the story at all, and sent it back. And they published it without changing a word. So, I mean, I should have had to paper the bathroom wall with rejection slips. I should have had to go through what everybody else has to go through. But it was a different era. And they were looking for this. Now, this is one of the most, I think you could say, chased and kind of sweet college romances that you could imagine. This is not a wicked book. This is not a book about two sleazy women. This is two educated, beautiful girls that fall in love. And I had a wonderful time writing it. What I really needed on my library shelf at the time was the idiot's guide to lesbianism or the lesbianism for dummies because I was one of the dummies. But I thought I can imagine. I can feel myself in it. And so, coasting on that, you know, wisp of a dream, I wrote the book. I, you know, we did escape scrutiny by the critics, I will say that. It was a very, very different era. It was too beneath their dignity for them to read that stuff and comment on it seriously. So, in that regard, we were able to say things that couldn't be said in more dignified fiction unless you published with Olympia Press in Paris. I mean, that's how Henry Miller got his stuff in print and Lady Chatterley's lover first saw the light of day and stuff like that. But in the pulp paperbacks, you really could say more than you could in hard covers and you made an awful lot of money. So, a great many very so-called serious writers would drift over to the paperbacks so that they could earn the same kind of money that we were earning. It really was good money. And they held that against us too. But so, I would have to say the atmosphere around us was toxic and rejecting the very topic we were trying to write about so earnestly and so honestly in and of itself was considered unacceptable, undignified, improper, the books of course were throw away books just like magazines, nobody expected them to have a life of longer than three to six months at the outside. So, we didn't think we were writing great literature but we still gave it everything we had. So, it wasn't, we weren't writing in an atmosphere in which we were encouraged or in which anything we were doing was recognized as writing of worth. I look back now and I wonder what did my books, what was the value, why were they among the few of the lesbian pulps that are still around and still loved and have been through all these additions. We've had an off-Broadway play, there's a film in the works, where did all this, I mean how come I got that lucky? And I'm not really sure and for a long time I thought it was because in a sense there's social history. But, and the more I thought about, during their day they were travel guides. I mean if you were a kid from Peoria or economy Indiana and you made it to Chicago or San Francisco or New York, where did you go? What did you wear? What drink should you order? How did you talk and present, presentation of self, all that stuff. And there it was in my series and some of the others although mine was specifically set in Greenwich Village. So I think for the kids of that era it really gave them kind of a cook's tour of what to expect when they got there. But I think the other part of it must certainly be that my feelings were running so deep in the way that they only can when you can't express them.  So you write or in my case I wrote love letters to the women I could never meet. And it kind of got me through. I did what so many other women did in that time which was to marry and have children because we didn't know what else to do. And I don't regret the children at all, they're wonderful but it really was when you were swimming against the tide. But in terms of literature I kind of caught a wave. There was fascination with the lesbian pulps. It was the first time in popular culture that this topic was just out there. And you could pick it up. The covers of course were designed to appeal to men. That was why they were so quote sleazy. But the writing was designed to appeal to women and the women learned to read those covers metaphorically. And so today you don't sneak around, you don't pretend you're writing about something else. You don't have to fight for critical attention. It's taken seriously, it's accepted, it's part of the American literary canon and a very important part. But we could never aspire to that. We never dreamed of that. We really, when you think you're writing, even though you're putting everything you've got into it, but you think it's gonna be thrown in the trash at the end of somebody's commute to work, it's hard to value it. It's kind of seeps into your own view, well this really won't ever be treasured by anybody. And I know now how very wrong I was about that, but at the time that was how we felt about it. I'm rattling on too long. Well you really put your passions into it. Yeah, I did, yes. I'd like to ask Lucy, when you started writing, gay lesbian liberation was in full swing. And you started, was it the 80s or? Well, yeah, whoops, I wanna respond to what Ann said and go from there because I have a little story that's, I was born in 1957. When was your first book published, 1957? Okay, so I was born in 1957. Nine years later when I was nine years old, my family, I come from a big family, lots of brothers and sisters, we got a call in the middle of the night and my aunt had died in a fire. My father's sister, the aunt for whom I'm named, her for whom I'm named, yes. She was also Lucy Bledsoe. So she died, she perished and I was nine and we didn't talk about those things, she's gone, people sobbed for a while, time went on, but that was, so that was 1966 when she died. Only 10 years after that, more like nine years after that, I came out as a lesbian in college and started wondering about this aunt of mine who had died, who had been unmarried and started asking my family questions. I'm losing my track, but it just felt, I guess what I'm getting to is, my next book that's coming out in October is called A Thin Bright Line, it's based on the story of my aunt. I started doing all this research about who she was. She was in fact a lesbian, she in fact had a partner who I was able to find although after she had died and aunt's books play a part in the novel I've written about my aunt who lived in that era starting in Grinchville. So it's very, very, very exciting for me to be here now. But in this process of writing this story about my lesbian aunt who also wanted to be a writer, and I have so many more stories about that, but I'll save them, I've had this immense and I can't exaggerate enough gratitude for my aunt, for Anne writing those novels, for the generation before me who came out and told these stories and I realized, made my life possible and made the answer I'm gonna give to Karen's question in a minute possible. I've seen this so clearly as I've studied this. I mean, my aunt in 1943, and it took me a long time to get this information because it was hard, a self-readman at Stanford has this incredible essay called The Burning of Letters Continues. And it's about how it's really hard to research lesbian lives from the past because people literally burn their letters. And with my aunt, there was literally about nothing to go on because she died in a fire, but also people didn't save their love letters and things because they were afraid of them being found. Anyway, so my aunt left the farm in Arkansas where she grew up with my dad, just tiny little town in Arkansas. And 1943 when she was 20, I went to Grinch Village. Now how the hell did she know to do that? Like how, I mean, there's no internet. How'd she know on this farm in Arkansas that she needed to get to Grinch Village? But she did, she got there. And she did some very revolutionary things as did Ann, as did other women of that generation. And I can hardly not cry every time I think about that because here I am then going away to school in 1975 and suddenly everything explodes. And I got to write my lesbian stories when there was eight feminist lesbian presses, lesbian feminist presses, which no longer exist, but there was, help me out, Alana and anyone else. There's Firebrand and Seal and Daughters and, you know. Finsters, all there waiting for our stories. And it was such a heady, exciting time. There were the outright conferences, we were all, I mean, it felt so exciting. The sad part about now is we felt, I mean, I feel the same way about the anti-war movement, everything else, feeling like we were so on the brink of change and the change hasn't been enough in so many categories. But at that time it was all very heady and exciting. And I used to think, you know, oh God, my parents' generation, but it was just a very few years after my aunt died.  So I'll stop there, but that's, you know, the relationship between our generations of publishing is very, I mean, what people before my generation did made what I can do and how I can live possible. And that's becoming so clear to me. And I'll just say one more thing. And that's that I'm really seeing now how the next generation is building on that. And that's exciting for me too. And I feel so supported by younger people.  I can relax a little bit, you know. So there's, I just really was happy to be invited to have this conversation with everyone. Well, Juliana, you just turned 28, was it? The other day? Yeah. Happy birthday. Thank you. What about you? I mean, people are saying all sorts of things now. Sometimes it seems like you can say anything. That's probably too general. But how is it for you writing about lesbian life and relationship? I mean, I'll start by saying that I wasn't born here. So, you know, it's like, even though I'm carrying sort of like the legacy of people here, I also, I was born in Columbia and I was raised there. And so it's just, I, you know, and I was born in a family of a lot of women. So my mom has five sisters and her mom has five sisters. And I feel that my, the way that I entered lesbian literature was by listening to them bitch about their husband, sort of like constantly and on stuff. I also went to Catholic school with nuns.  And I feel like I was, I came of age at the moment where the internet started being sort of like pressing in our lives daily. So I was still there for like dialogue with like people who are 20, don't even know what that is for a floppy disk. I know what a floppy disk is.  And so I, when I speak to folks who maybe were born in the States in like an urban place, I was also born in an urban place, but at my same age, they had a very different experience coming out to you because they were exposed to other things. But I think that publishing here, I moved then to Miami. I came out when I was in Miami.  When I moved to San Francisco though, that's when I started writing more and I've been here for eight years. And I feel what I'm feeling is that there's a move to more queer centered literature and definitely a move towards like intersectionality. So I guess in my experience when I was looking also for literature, I used to just like interject my own narrative in like straight books, you know?  We don't even include some women, but the point is I would just sort of like insert my own longing and my own desire into those narratives. Like I feel that the characters that I identify with are just some of this like very unstable and neurotic women in some of this novels because I was like interjecting my narrative. So it wasn't necessarily lesbian literature when I was coming of age. But here specifically, I feel like now it's very much about queerness. When I'm here in San Francisco, I identify more as queer. When I go back to Columbia, I identify as a lesbian so I can take up space. So it's more about like taking up space there. But with regards to the publishing thing here, I think the internet has exploded and has given especially sort of like queer people of color, like lesbians of color, a different place to also publish and for people to sort of like create community in the internet around other issues. But it is, you have a plethora of places to publish now. I guess that what is interesting of what I'm seeing a little bit now is that some places really want an ethnographic narrative of what your life is. So if you are, for instance, for myself, I am very much expected to write like the lesbian-Latina experience. So it's like very specific sort of like ethnographic narrative. So it is, I mean, there's so much now. I feel it's more of like, where do you actually focus your energy? So it's a little bit different. But we were also talking a little bit with Lucy how now the physical spaces that women have, just queer women in general, they're almost none, none existed in San Francisco. And when I'm reading sort of like books about the 90s here, the scene was very different. And sort of like, people had to struggle with certain things, but at the same time there was more public space, it seemed. Whereas like now there's none, none the Lexington clothes last year. Just even about like bookstores and like places where people are congregated now, it feels that it's, at least in my experience, we're going a little bit into the underground again where a lot of these things are happening inside people's basements or their houses. Like I used to have a reading series on my own house before. And so because of gentrification and because women have access to vertical mobility, they also have to move out, right? And like a lot of the artists have to move out. And so it's a weird way that we're progressed, but at the same time, like who's actually progressing and who has access to the publishing industry. And the internet is a wonderful place, but at the same time is very lonely. So because people may not feel like it's necessary to congregate, maybe we're not creating the strong communities as we could. So it's a lot of like variants, you know? I don't think that, I mean, there's really great things and there's really like other things that are more complex that are happening, definitely. Interesting. I'm wondering, do you, I know there was a lot of inhibition and when you were writing, and that seems to have lessened over time. Do, how do the three of you feel about whether or are there things you still cannot say? There are things I'm no good at saying. I was on a panel at the old, well, still going strong, the Sains and Sinners Festival in New Orleans about 10 years ago, and one of my co-panelists was Michelle T. And we were supposed to talk, our topic was how to write a sex scene. And I, we went down the line introducing ourselves and I said, I'm June Cleaver. I, you know, it's difficult and I find myself dancing around it and insinuating and suggesting more than getting clinical. And I think the young writers just are able to do that brilliantly. And they're, because they're not, they don't feel apologetic about it. It's not something that's been only done behind doors all your life, never talked about. And so I guess to this day I'm still very shaded in what I try to describe intense love scenes and it becomes more about the feelings and, you know, the intensity of it and the way it carries you and it becomes sort of irreversible and fabulous, but not about exactly what people are doing between the sheets. So that part of it, that, you know, be that explicit has been difficult for me. I guess my generation generally, by and large, I mean the Delta of Venus was pretty explicit, but that's rare that somebody in that era would write as straightforwardly about it. So I don't know, I found it awkward. What about you two? What do you think? Are there things that you feel you cannot write about or? I feel like that's such a complicated question because I feel that my job as a writer is to tell the deepest truths, I know. And so that's always the whole process is trying to undercover what those are. So if I'm writing about a character or two characters, I'm trying to understand what is really the truth in this relationship. And so then when do we self-censor? I mean, that's sort of what the question is. When do we, I don't know when I self-censor because I'm self-censoring. So I mean, I certainly try not to, but we're also culturally aware of the things we're supposed to say and not say and then not aware of so many of our blind spots that, so I guess all I wanna say is that is my job to not censor the things that I feel like need to be most said, but I probably do. I mean, I'm gonna agree with Lucy on that.  I didn't even think that I've written anything really lesbian-y.  But I feel like I just enter it through like a sentence or, you know, character's motives and then it just sort of like evolves. And I maybe, I don't write sex scenes. I'm terrible at that. So like, I don't know. Maybe I would censor myself, but like I've never tried to dove in that because like it's not, it's not my thing. I'm not alone. No. I don't know. It's just, you know, I just don't write like any erotic art or any of that. Like very much interested in just in functionality in general. But I feel like it's more of like, I don't seek ever to write about identity specifically, you know, that just, my characters just happen to be like, you know, one of them is Columbia and the other one happens to be like queer, but it's not that I seek out to explain identity. In the few writing classes I've taken, I've been told that writing a sex scene is the most difficult. You're one of the most difficult things no matter what your age is, so. It is difficult, but it's also one of the most profound things humans do. So I like trying, but it's, it's, it's difficult. Yeah. I mean, also trying to do it in a nuanced way, you know, so it's not like cheesy or like incredibly cliche. It's like, it's tough. Well, people like to argue a lot about is it best left off the pager, you know, and I think it just depends. I think sometimes it's fun to read or write or see a sex scene that's completely explicit, although in sometimes it is more interesting if it's suggested. I just think it depends. Yeah.  Cause of course as writers you're, I know you're very voracious readers too. Well, I projected that onto women that I didn't know sometimes. The few people I knew in my childhood who were clearly lesbian was the classic one was a gym teacher, very nice woman, but very rejecting of feminine norms. So she stood out and being kids, we didn't, you know, we weren't kind about that. But I don't know, I remember some of you know this. I projected romantic feelings onto the Statue of Liberty because I thought, you know, whenever she came to life, wow, you know, just the size and the beauty of that statue and it was so compelling. But in more, I would say it was in my sort of sheltered experience, very unlikely that I would have known how to identify anybody or, but I certainly had crushes and I was hopeful about people that turned out not to be interested.  But I think it was so dangerous and you exposed yourself to so much scorn and ostracism, all kinds of difficult things socially that women sort of went to lengths to disassemble all that, which was one of the reasons why it was so refreshing to be in Greenwich Village when I was there. I mean, to see two women walking down the street holding hands or kissing in a doorway or to see women dressed in butch clothes. I mean, that just galvanized me. I would never have seen that in the streets of my hometown. But I could imagine it, I could imagine it and then to see it in reality, I know it was just memorable, sort of etched in my mind and opened me up to a lot of the ways that people can be gay and lesbian that I had never thought before that could be actually in this world, in the same world I was walking around in.   So there wasn't much of that that didn't kind of redound on the person who was brave enough to be out like that. It was really tough. Well, Lucy and Juliana, did you have lesbian or queer fiction that? I was in love with Pippi Lungstocking. She was just awesome. But there really weren't, I know some people talk about Carson McCulloch's scout, I don't remember reading her young enough to, it seemed like there was nobody.  And I mean, it's interesting because in the 70s, who burst onto this scene were a lot of poets, you know, Adrian Rich and Pat Parker and Audre Lorde and it was this whole world of poetry that was in terms of literary lesbian characters. But before that, you know, I know there were lesbians writing, but I didn't find them until then, so. Here's what I remember. Like I said, I went to a Catholic school and every single year we had to put on sort of like the Christmas play with like, you know, Joseph and Mary. So I'm gonna say the Bible because it's like, you know, the book that I read the most, the fiction book that I read the most when I was a child and I had to interpret it. And of course it was all girls' school.   There was so much homoeroticism around playing the Bible. Now in retrospect, I'm like, I didn't do anything, you know, like, but at the time, you know, there was so much tension between all of us girls like reading some of the stuff instead of like performing it with each other. So I have to say the Bible. Good answer. In a few minutes, we're gonna open it up to you all to ask questions, but I wondered, is there anything that you wanted to bring up that I didn't ask you or that came up during the conversation? Well, I, you know, I'm the, I guess the Amy Noss Grease up here that's, I've been around the longest and I really can see an interesting historical arc from the way things were in the 50s through the women's movement when once again, I think rules were laid down, things were supposed to be a certain way. You, you, there were, the butch femme dichotomy fell into disrepute because it was thought to be representative of uneven power distribution, the butchers had all the power. That's been rethought, thank goodness, because it's a very exciting way of being with somebody, but also because why should it be off the list? I mean, if it's satisfying and both parties agree then fine. And the other thing is it wasn't a power divide in the way that it was described by the women's movement. No, the femmes had all the power. The femmes had all the power. They could be out in the world. They could do whatever they needed to do. They could have jobs. They could be accepted everywhere. If you were really butch, that was much harder. And so that there were, there were a lot of things that happened in the 70s and 80s that I think had their own kind of repression. Chris Williamson told me when, you know, the musician that remember she used to wear the little Indian headband and I asked her one time why she wore that.  They told me that to be really lesbian, I had to have short hair.  I'm not gonna do that. And they say we're very, very angry with her. And after every concert, she would have to go and sit with a group of people who would deconstruct what she had done and criticize. And one of the things was you've gotta cut your hair. And so she said, well, I'll keep it. I'll hold it down and I'll put the band on, but that's as far as I'll go. Now she wears it short, but then she, because she was, you know, being pushed. So the social context has changed. The cultural view of things has changed a lot. And therefore, when we go to the room of our own where we write, we're in a different place, I think, than people in the 50s and 60s. And then now things are once again different. And I think the younger women probably have a tremendous range of options open to them that we didn't feel we could tackle. We were doing enough to put our names on these books. Most of us were using pseudonyms for that, you know, known to plume for that very reason. And now you write as who you are. You don't have to hide behind another name and you're out there and you have a lot of support. But I'm curious about that. You know, whether you actually feel that as the youngest panelist, what kind of freedom to write and say and publish where you are. I mean, I think that what's really fascinating about now is the idea that sort of like the work queer can encompass more like infinite, some like more infinite like elements and identity, you know, and it's not, and people are able to express themselves more differently that just like sort of like the lesbian thing, especially because it's much more trans-inclusive. But it's, I think that I cannot talk about this without like speaking about intersectionality.  So like I will get published if I write like, you know, a Latina story. And so it's very much sort of like expected this narrative. So it's interesting how maybe the sort of like queer desire is maybe not questioned, but maybe there's other parts of the identity that may be put in question, depending on who you are and what you're writing about, right? And so the idea of like same-sex desire may have been like normalized in publishing, definitely. But I think that what the work is in my head right now is getting a diverse group of people on power, you know, sort of like an editorial board and then like, you know, editors in like different places and all of that.   I was like, oh, we already have a Latina this year.   So they have like characters are named like John Smith and then they get published like that. And then, you know, so I think it just depends on the way that you're navigating the publishing industry. For me, definitely, I think like there's more and I do feel the pressure to produce this specific narrative that is very much in context with like, you know, the US idea of like, you know, what Latina is, you know, I wasn't even, when you go to Colombia, it's like, what?  So it's an interesting sort of like, you know, because I also have to navigate the world inside the Colombian publishing thing. And it's, and it's just, it's different, I think, depending on who you are and what you're trying to publish and do. That's my answer. Mm-hmm. Does anyone, any one of you have a question you'd like to ask?  There's a woman with a hat and then I see three people, so. Hi, my name is Jessie. Age-wise, I'm writing between Lucy and Juliana and I came out very late, age 40 is when I came out. And I have been trying to be a writer for some time but I feel rather irrelevant because I'm not an either wave of, you know, change of those two. And the wave of change that came in the 80s, I wasn't a part of. You know, the whole Alison Bechdel scene and all that. So I have some interesting bits to my own life. I came out of the Renaissance Fair, where I had an intersex husband slash wife and all of that. But I feel very in between everything and I came to San Francisco to meet people and they all had moved to Oakland for the rents. So I'm kind of floundering around in this non-space. And I'm very curious to see if you have anything to offer to say about how I can fix this. Like what do I have to offer that would be relevant and of interest to people that are on completely different tracks from me. And not, you know, I'm not part of any mainstream at any point and I'm not even sure like my subgroup would be of much interest. So anyway, I just would like your thoughts on that. Thank you. I have a thought. Okay. I think that you should go into that place of like being uprooted and in limbo in your writing. I think that you shouldn't be worrying so much about like theme and like what kind of statement you're going to make about your life more of like, you know, a character.  You know, I feel like if you start thinking that you're irrelevant and because you want to, because like thematically what you want to say it's already being quote unquote said. I don't think it's going to get you anywhere. I think you have to focus more on like the craft of writing and the fact that you're, because there's still a lot of people, people still writing and they produce these amazing stories that may have been told again and again and again, but we keep bringing them because of the craft, right? Because of the voices different, because the way that it's told, because it's coming from a different angle. So you yourself are like unique in whatever, in your voice and what you're doing. So I think that going into that place of uprootedness and like limbo and like not knowing it's a great place to start and then just going to like specifics in your story and just focusing on craft instead of like themes or like a statement that you want to make about the world. It's like looking at the same scene painted by several different artists and you recognize it that it's totally different because, and it's the same way in writing each voice is so different that don't let yourself feel constrained by a particular school or theme or the prevailing meme in the culture. Your voice is always unique and always valuable. Hi, my question is for Ann. I just want to say that I'm from Oakland, hi.  All of this is familiar to me and grew up in that same mindset. So my question is, what did you tell your husband you were going to New York to do? And what happened?  You went there, you were successful. You came back to this husband. What did you say to him? I told him, I had read a book that I admired and I was going, the author was kind enough to invite me to New York and I had written a manuscript which he could plainly see. I didn't want to tell him much about what I had written about and he didn't want to know. He hadn't read any of my books until, I guess he had read one page and he said, well you do dialogue well, that was it. And it wasn't until we were long, long since divorced and we got together for a cup of coffee somewhere along the line. And he said, you know, I never read those books. But I told him I wanted to write and I thought maybe I had a chance at getting published. And as long as I stayed at the women's hotel, you know, which I sort of did, now a man. And then I would come home and tell him that I was making progress and I was rewriting which he could see and then they said they would publish the book. And by the time it came out, we had just moved to California and he was quite horrified but the money was very good and he just didn't want to know. And so he didn't interfere. I mean, this is how a lot of people... This was the deal that people made in order to get through their lives. We had two little kids. I had to take care of them. He had to take care of us. That allowed me to write. You know, it's far from ideal. Neither one of us, I think, was particularly rapturous about the arrangement. But it gave us each a little space and those were early years when I was able to get the writing done. But it was difficult, yeah. So I'm next. My name's Happy and I'm a visual artist and writer also.  I think that's a really big problem these days with lesbian erasure. Another thought is a femme. It is just as difficult to be femme in this world as it is to be butch because we're always having to come out. I actually wrote an article for an anthology just now. But so Lucy, I'm just wondering, and all of you, if you didn't have a publisher as a lesbian author, where are our publishers? We do have some lesbian presses still and feminist presses, but we are being erased as a culture in a lot of ways. So I'm just wondering if there's any thoughts about lesbian-specific writing happening now and how you feel about that? I have a lot of thoughts about that. Thank you, I knew you would. And it's very, very difficult. And it's very hard to explain to anyone except other lesbian writers how difficult it is to publish lesbian work right now because everybody looks out there and there's Ellen and there's, oh yeah, you go on and on or all the other forms of media lesbians seem to be running the world and in fact lesbians are running the world and have been for decades. But somehow the powers that be don't want to publish our novels and people just don't believe me when I say that. But I mean, we can name if you, Carol Anshaw had her book published a couple years ago it kind of disappeared after it came out. So I mean, yes, as soon as you say this people will throw examples at you but if you look at the percentage of lesbians writing compared to the, I mean, they just aren't publishing our work and you don't want to say that because you sound like sour grapes, you sound bitter, you sound, so it's a really hard conversation to have and it's nice to be in this group where we can have it and it's hard to talk about outside queer circles or even outside lesbian circles. And I don't know what it is. I was at, I'm not outright, the Lambda Literary Awards last year and I was at the party afterwards and there was an editor, and a lot of the New York editors say they are dying for, I mean they will say they are dying for lesbian books but they just aren't seeing good ones. I've heard this over and over, they're just not seeing good ones. And so my question is what exactly are they, what do they want? And I don't think they know but the perception is that we don't have an audience. I think that's the bottom line. So they'll say, well this is a really good book and I loved it but there's only a tiny percentage of the population who's gonna read it because only lesbians read lesbians. This is where I get really upset because I read very broadly across all kinds of demographics. In fact, I would rather read about people different from myself. That's what books are so I can see out into the world so I can learn. But there's this assumption and it seems to be primarily only made about lesbians that only lesbians read lesbians even though we will read all of the different kinds of people from ourselves and other, every other category. And that just seems so entrenched especially in New York publishing and since there's no lesbian feminist presses right now that's sort of it. So I don't know, I was starting to tell a story about being at, I don't even know, I don't even think I want to tell that story so what an editor said to me but it's very, oh I just, I ran into this very fancy editor from a very fancy New York publisher. I was at this party and I was nervous because I was at a party and I was trying to make conversation.  And she looked me in the eye and she said, books by young people.  But there's, and I think, you know, which is not to say they're publishing books by young lesbians either. Well, I could even add though, another perspective and that is 50 years ago, the lesbian pulp sold like crazy because there was an enormous crossover audience of men to whom this topic has been of great interest over the millennia. I mean, there are graffiti in caves in Norway saying, you know, Ulla is getting it on with Ingrid down the next cave down, literally. And so it has been of great interest. The great difference I think is, and you're absolutely right that the media have exploded so that it's available on television, it's available in film, it's available in all the other visual and audible venues that weren't accessible in the 1950s. Television was just getting started and was being carefully monitored and censored and the books were all there was. That was the source of information and it was the first time, as I was saying earlier, where there was a really significant contribution in that beginning era of information and a range of characters and there were probably about a dozen of us writing them at the time and we couldn't pump them out fast enough. That could be true today too, if they wanted to do it. It's a corporate world, it's a capitalist society. If they took a product and said this is a good book, they could sell it to everybody. I mean, that's the thing, it's their job to take something that they think is good and sell it to people. So I don't quite know how, I mean, I don't think there's bad people there but somehow there's something that's stopping people from thinking that our stories are worthwhile. I mean, I think it has a lot to do with just still being othered, all of this. Sort of at the center of the experience, instead of a white straight dude basically and all of those stories are sort of, and everybody else is othered. So it's the same thing, it's like, oh, we already have two lesbian stories right now, next, we already have, like they don't want to publish even though it's still a narrative, even though it's still a story but they could have 10 stories of straight people just going through life. And so I think it has a lot to do with still what's at the center and what's the focus and what's the default, it's not our community basically. Our community's still being othered and so therefore they only let in so many people. I'm sorry, I kept this because I wanted to also say that this panel is the only thing in the queer cultural centers pamphlet that uses the word lesbian, the only one. And also I want to confess that I have written a lesbian erotic novella, looking for a publisher, very good. Hi, my name is Ilana and I started to think about what Anne said about the fear that lesbianism would rub off. When I was teaching at San Francisco State, I had written a lesbian historical novel about Jewish women that had been rejected by several lesbian publishers because they already had a Jew in their lineup. So that's very familiar. But finally that published by Canadian publisher. And my officemate said that she was afraid to read it and it was that same thing that she felt like there was something in it that would rub off and taint her in a way. And I was like, what? You should read this book. It's just a historical novel. It's about labor unions for God's sake.  But you know, it's just that kind of marginalization, that kind of being pushed always to the outside as if our stories aren't in some way universal, that we don't have a claim to being universal. Only, as you say, the young white dude does. It's kind of weird because what I find in other people's stories and in your books is that when you enter anybody's story imaginatively, the whole world opens up in a whole other way. Whoever writes it, if they're writing well and they're opening their truth to you, then there you are. So this is a very big cultural problem. And there's a lot of misogyny, I think, at the root of it. I think, yeah. And I just want to say that's everyone who has not read A Lotta Dyke, Women's Beyond the Pale. It's the novel she's referring to. It's an absolutely beautiful lesbian novel. One thing that worries me a lot about this issue is all the people who stop writing or who aren't writing. All the people from all the queer writers, all the lesbians, all the who like, and I know many in my generation who stopped writing because they weren't getting published, beautiful writers. And I think of a lot of young people who maybe aren't writing because it's very, I mean, I have a will of iron, so I just keep going no matter what. But I just inherited that from my mother. A lot of people don't have that. It's very, very painful to be rejected and to be out there, to have your story and try to find publishers for it. So I worry about that a lot. It's not just those of us who have written, but it's the people who, we were talking about self-censorship before.  And that's what worries me. That's a good option for a lot of people. We have a question over there. Yeah, I'm interested in what you might have, any of you might have to say about the movie Carol that came out last year based on a lesbian pulp novel from 60 years ago and how that was made into a mainstream movie by a mainstream movie company and shown in mainstream theaters as opposed to being, say, at Frameline Festival. I found it fascinating that I could go to, like the Embarcadero Cineplex and see this and straight people were seeing it and it won awards and mainstream actress. But it's from a book from a very different period and yet it seemed to really resonate with a lot of straight people.  So I'm just curious what your thought is about that. I mean, I think it has a lot to do with what Ilana was saying here.  So like, you know, I read a novel about like a man falling in love with a woman and in my head when I was growing up, I like, I put my experience in there because if it's well written, I can do that. And I think that that movie, I mean, I really enjoyed the movie, maybe folks here didn't, but like I really love the movie and I love the subtleties of everything that just like, I adore that. But I think it's very much like that. It's like asking, it did a good job in asking the public that it's like, regardless of the sort of like identity piece that is here, you're able to feel that longing, right? You're able to feel that love for someone else. And so those are like very, very sort of like basic human feelings that were really greatly sort of like expressed and created in that movie. And so because, I think because it was so well done, people could relate to that, people could relate to the longing and sort of like the loss and all of this like sort of like greater human feelings that bypassed like the idea of just being a lesbian thing, right? I mean, for me, it was like, it's great. I could get to see like, you know, it's a way of making out that's good. But like past that is also about just this longing and this loss instead of like, you know. So I think that a lot of people just, when it's like well done, when the art is really well done and you know, talking about literature, if you have a really good narrative, you're able to relate to that as well. Any other opinions about Carol? I was curious what you thought about. Well, yeah, it was true to the era. I think that's a good observation. Of course it was written by Patricia Highsmith under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan. And yeah, I think, in fact, I think it's the only time she was ever nice about lesbians in print anyway. But no, it was a lovely film. Yeah, it was. And I think that was the kind of subtlety that Ulyana mentions was really indicative of that kind of behavior and kind of cautiousness and suppression. But it's sometimes young people come up to me and they say, gee, maybe it was more exciting back then. You know, maybe we should go back to that a little bit. It would have been fun because everybody had to kind of hide it, but she knew it was smoldering there. I said, no, you don't want to go back. But in so far as there were rewards, maybe that was one of them that you learned to read people and you were very attuned to anyone you were interested in. And yeah, it was a lovely film. It really was well done. I have a question. We were talking about publishing and Lucy, you were saying how hard it is for a lot of people to get published about lesbian subjects. And then I was thinking about Ulyana because you, Ulyana brings in a monthly program here of four writers every month and they're mostly queer writers. And I'm wondering what their experience is of getting published. And a lot of them, they're not all women, but can you say something about that? And also with younger people, very often the word queer is the preferred term. Yeah, I think that's sort of like a generational, I mean, and for me, it's also a geographical thing that I navigate. So I think like every single person has a way of navigating the world differently. It's basically that, you know, because of your social and historical context, let's just say that. But in terms of the people that are, I'm not, I don't know everybody's experience, but we bring everyone from like established writers to like more emerging people. I've noticed also that a lot of emerging people have just created things for themselves. So like the internet has opened up a huge world because it's like, it's really cheap to just have, you know, WordPress or something and you get together with your friends and then you start publishing people. And so I feel like there's been, there's a niche for like everything right now online specifically. And I feel like a lot of people, there's a lot of small presses, a lot, a lot of small presses and people are publishing with small presses more and more. Like emerging writers have noticed people that are my age or a lot of them are publishing with like really small presses and like Berkeley or Oakland. And then, you know, they do a lot of like the e-book stuff and then they do a lot of self-marketing because now with social media you can do that. So I feel like there's like different tools that you can use now. So if you have a social media following and you have a, you self-publish your book, it's easier to get like distributed. So I don't know about everybody's experience, but that's definitely, there's definitely a move to like small presses. And I wonder also if the disappearance of gay and lesbian bookstores hasn't had an effect because they would showcase new publications and people would become aware of new things coming out and read stuff. They might not have found in the old chain bookstores, many of which have also vanished.  You know, they're somewhere near the maps or the, you know, having nothing to do with it or they're lumped in with the ethnic literature and there'd just be a little tiny selection whereas the wonderful bookstores, I think you still have one or two, don't you have a different light or did they pack up and leave? They just opened up the dog ear in the Castro. Oh, did they? They opened up one, they're closing bookstores in the Castro and they opened up the dog ear in the Castro. But I think you're right about the loss of bookstores. I think that like roaming and like being surrounded by books makes a huge difference. It's a difference, different than just like clicking and buying something on Amazon. And it's terrifying that that experience may be lost. I don't think that it's gonna be lost, but it's terrifying that like, not everybody sort of like has it. Yeah. Any more questions from, oh, I'd see, there are a few. Good. Hi, so I wanted to kind of speak to what Huliana had said about being kind of being othered and pigeonholed and what kind of writing you've done. I recently had a piece published in an Iranian anthology of Iranian American writing and I wrote about being Iranian and queer in there and so that was seen as something that was unique and different and hadn't been put in there before in that particular space and context. But, and going forward in my writing, I'm kind of wondering, well, what else do I write about? Is that all I am? Just an Iranian queer writer that's all I can write about and be pigeonholed in that particular aspect. How do you kind of get into that universal narrative that you want to be able to express to other people? I mean, I think it goes back a little bit to like the question I was here. To me, it just goes to craft and not thinking about making a statement about your identity and even just like thinking about being an Iranian American, like there's a gazillion stories there. And I mean, I'm thinking specifically, even if I wanna write from my own point of, from my own like lived experience as like an immigrant in Latina, et cetera, et cetera. I think there's a million different stories and things that have happened there and ways that I can imagine that. So to me, I feel like don't try to make a statement. Don't try to be like this is my experience here and that's it. I feel like it's more of just like enter the story, like find a character, find like a gossip, find like a line that is gonna let you enter, enter a narrative. Don't get concerned about the statement that you're gonna make about being an Iranian American and if it just happens to be that your characters are Iranian cool, if it just happens to be that you're telling the specific story, but I think like be more concerned with the narrative and the story and the craft that like the statement of all your identity that you're making, because that's gonna relieve you from that. You have to be invested in your character.  You have to be invested in the narrative that you're creating.  If I'm not dropping, I mean in Iranian Spanglish. So like, but if I'm not dropping like three words of Spanish, like then people are like, ooh, I'm like that doesn't matter, you know. What matters is that you're putting like time and effort into creating, like building those complex characters and like creating like a narrative that you're proud of, not so much that you're making a statement about your identity. So since this is tied to the exhibit, one of the components is lesbian literary love, which sort of talks about community and the community of women who supported one another who collaborated feminist bookstore news, the women's bookstores all throughout the country. And I think in some ways, Juliana, you're building a community with the Radar Reading Series. And I'm just wondering if you could talk about that word and what does it mean? And we talked about the lack of lesbian bars. So is there virtual community? What is community? How was it and how will it be in the future? Wow, yeah, that's a very beautiful question. And yeah, I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking about, again, going back to the era of the 50s and 60s and writing about my aunt. And I think of my new novel, A Thin Bright Line, it's a love story. I think of it very much as a love story. It's the most love story I've ever written. It's a love story of me from my aunt and my gratitude that I expressed before. And it's also her love story with a woman that she gets involved with in the story or the woman who she survived her by many decades after she died. But also a lot of what I did in creating that story was try to understand what it meant to have community in the 60s and 70s. And back then, I did a ton of historical research. People were meeting in homes then too. I mean, some people, mainly working class women, would meet in the few bars that existed. Most middle-class women were meeting in homes. There was a divide that way, but not completely. Of course, there was mixing. But how did these women find each other and make community? And I think I actually have this soft spot for coming out in the 70s when we had to hide because there was this intense, oh my gosh, I came out and I played basketball and that's how I came out. And half the women were lesbians and half were straight.   And yes, we were hiding, but we were also developing all this theory and this art and I'm not sure, but it seems like that's missing now. Part of it is that you address there's so many different communities now and that's great. I mean, everybody gets to, you know, there's not one community and you fit in or you don't, which it wasn't exactly true in the 70s either, but you know, so it's a really good question.  It's, you know, we were talking about this a little earlier. I mean, Pat and I have been spit on in Berkeley. I mean, there's still tons of homophobia. We still need community. So there's this weird thing like, there's no homophobia anymore and, you know, there is and I'm rambling, but thank you for the question. It's a good one. Well, it's valuable in so many ways and I think when I was young, I mean, we would have been amazed to think of ourselves as a community, but I think at the time we hadn't, we had none of the things that we all take for granted. Now we, there were no community centers. There were no celebrity cruises. There were no out athletes, star athletes. There were, there was no internet. There were no community centers. There were the bars and the lesbian pulps. Now, some of us could get to the bars if we made the pilgrimage to one of the big urban centers. The rest of us had the pulps. That was it. I mean, we didn't really, maybe we were a nascent community. We were beginning to talk to each other through those institutions, if I may call them that. And they mattered a lot and they were kind of, and the very beginnings of publishing like The Daughters of Boletus. The ladder, that was so fun to read those. Yes, it was. Yes, but it was terrifying to receive it in the mail. I mean, it had to come in a plain brawn envelope and they didn't know how to increase their mailing list because people were afraid to have their name appear on that list somewhere and the cops might raid it. The cops raided the bars. I mean, it was awfully hard, but I like to think that maybe we did play a role in founding the sense that maybe we could be a cohesive, real group of people who someday could talk to each other openly, communicate like everybody else and think of ourselves as sisters and brothers, but as a community that mattered and that had an identity and that had a place in the world that they could take and stand up for. But that was only just the very little seed of a beginning in the years after World War II. And I think that it's, maybe just like, it was like fragmented, it got together and now I feel like it's incredibly fragmented again with the legalization of gay marriage and the normalization of a lot of gay life. It feels that the community is just very, very fragmented because people have different priorities. And so specifically in the Bay Area, and so we're a very, very politically active community in the Bay Area, just people have different priorities now and so it's not so much about being legalized and it's not so much about marriage, but it's like everybody has their own struggle now. So I think that definitely the internet is providing a huge space for people to connect. And I wanna say especially for like queers of colors and it's like really, really important for us to have that space. And then outside of that space, I say it's about, because it's not so much about accepting now being gay. I feel like it's moved beyond that and it's not pretty much about dismantling the system. I like the system at large, it's like it's huge and about other issues of social justice.  And yeah, so I think that that's where they're going. Definitely the internet is providing space for that. We have a question in the front. Lucy Jane? Yes, Susan. What I loved about your writing is when you wrote about being in the Antarctica and being with all these people who might or not accept you even aside from your lesbianism, but I learned so much from your books because I've never been to those places and I just love being transported to Antarctica or was it Antarctica or Antarctica? Yeah, Antarctica. Okay, and having all those experiences with you and it was just wonderful how you wrote about it and took me along with you because yeah, because that's a reason that I read a lot of books. Is to have those other experiences, not just to make my experiences better, but to just travel with you on your experiences and all those things that happen to you there, acceptance, non-acceptance, the animals, everything. I just loved it. It was just. Thank you. It just transported me to another world, another set of people, another everything and that really made me love your book. Well, thank you so much. It's a nice of you to say. Okay. Yeah, I really, I don't write about my identity that much. I love putting my lesbian and my queer characters and I also actually like to write a lot of straight characters. Lately I've been obsessed with writing straight women characters because I have a lot of opinions about straight women. And I love putting my characters in places and really my stories are usually about something much, something I rarely write about queer or lesbian identity per se. I was writing about Antarctica in that book and yes, of course, the lesbian identity was gonna come up. But anyway, thank you for those are very sweet comments.  Yeah, there was lots of lesbian identity in there, but I just was appreciating that you also got the whole Antarctic thing too because I would like to be able to write about a lot of different things. And that's again, that thing where we get pigeonholed and then, oh, that's what she writes about. She has to write about that. You have to write about Columbia. I got to write about lesbians only. You know, it's like, get that to that point. Good. To a place I've never been to and people have never been to experience that I've never. Transport's the best word. That's what we wanna do with our writing. Yeah. On that note, it's really time for us to close. Are there any final statements any of you would like to make before we say good night? Well, I would like to say that I'm grateful and delighted to have such wonderful, younger women coming along, carrying on. And I admire their work and I wish both of you tremendous success. And thank you all for coming. And did any of you bring books to sell? I have a few books, if anyone's interested, yeah. Thank you, Karen, for doing this. Oh, you're welcome. I have two sisters, one older than me and one younger, so I feel like I'm in that situation again. I love being in the middle. Anyway, I appreciate all your questions. They were really, really good questions. A lot of them are so unanswerable because they were such good questions. Thank you. I mean, I just wanna say thank you so much for doing this. I think there's a lot of intergenerational dialogue about many things that it's missing. And I think that we don't get together enough to have this and it's really valuable and important and it's really valuable for us, the people that are coming after of us to know who paved the road for us and to learn and to know our history. But it's also great to be able to sit down and talk about that history. So thank you for doing this. Thank you so much for coming. Also, can I do this? Raiders, we have at the Raiders Superstore tomorrow which is our anniversary and it's in this room and it's gonna be insane. La Pocha Nostra, Sandra Ibarra, La Pucheta Chica Boom, Ayala León and Chinaca Hodge are gonna come and read and perform right here and then afterwards we have a fundraiser at the luggage store which is called The Witching Hour and it's gonna be very witchy. So and I'm gonna be in drag tomorrow so you can come and see me in drag. But anyway, tomorrow at six if you wanna come the Raiders Superstore. Is this Rebecca? You wanna announce your event too? You have an event. And also, I just wanna remind you about seeing our 20th anniversary exhibition. It's in four venues. The largest part of it is just across the way in the Jewett Gallery. And we also have some in the Hormel Center on the third floor, on the sixth floor and also at the Harvey Milk Theureka Valley Branch. And on Thursday night at six p.m., we're gonna have a little tour, a guided tour led by our archivist, Tim Wilson. And he's gonna point out all sorts of great things with wonderful anecdotes. And so I hope you can come. It'll start on the third floor at six p.m. on Thursday. So anyway, thanks for coming. There's some information on our current exhibition and upcoming events as you leave. So good night. Thank, I wanna thank my guests. I'm so happy you all three were able to be here. Three writers who I admire greatly. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Karen.