architecture of my fantasy hero. I just thought she needed to look like “Tommie” and to have the “heart and stomach of a king,” to quote Elizabeth I. It took me a few trips to Greenwich Village, and the reading of some of the then-current pulp paperbacks, to begin to recognize the qualities she required and to flesh them out. By that time, I was into the planning for this book and ruminating hard about my characters.
And so we come back to the roof of that Upper West Side apartment, looking down on the lights of the city. One night, staring across the twinkling horizon and seeing the character in my mind’s eye, I thought for the thousandth time, “If I could just find a name for her, she would come into focus for me.” For whatever blessed reason, it was at that moment that the childhood nickname of an old friend floated back into my mind: Beebo. I seized upon it and captured my Beebo whole, intact, entire. Never again was I the same, once Beebo began to breathe. The Beebo Brinker Chronicles were off and running, and so was their author. Thus it was that Beebo met Laura, and they began their passionate but rocky odyssey.
There is one other character whose genesis deserves attention for a moment. He is Jack Mann, that cynical, witty, sometimes prickly, but quite lovable gay man who makes his initial bow in this novel. He is shamelessly plucked, right down to his hair and fingernails, from an old hometown friend whom I met through my first serious beau—a “Jack,” too, but with a different last name. The original Jack, probably five or six years older than I, loved traditional jazz, and in my family, it was played a lot. My stepfather was a superb jazz piano player, and my mother, a one-woman cheering section. The rest of us were young, feisty, and crazy about the music, which was undergoing a revival of interest in the ‘40s and ‘50s. We worshiped Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier, and many less well known but excellent musicians playing in the genre. A lot of them came through the Chicago area, where we lived, and our informal weekend jam sessions became well enough recognized to draw some of them out to our suburban bungalow on an occasional Saturday night. We hosted Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis’s first wife and a great jazz pianist herself), Johnny and Baby Dodds (clarinet and drum players par excellence), and others. Jack just gobbled it up. He would settle into an old easy chair in the living room, legs propped up on a hassock and cigarette in mouth, and drum with his fingers on the chair arms. I can’t count the beers that disappeared on such an evening, but there are ancient tapes of the music, and it was nothing to apologize for.
The original Jack was always a treat to have in our company. My little brothers adored him, but they didn’t learn his name on the first visit. There were so many young musicians around on weekends that we had a standing joke that they were all uncles: Uncle Bob, Uncle Bill, Uncle Harry. So Jack, on his first visit, was greeted with, “Here comes Uncle Somebody.” It stuck, even after they mastered his name. He had a funny take on life—ironic, droll, and rather unsparing—and he would sit in that chair and shoot zingers at us between musical numbers. We all loved him. I noticed, however, that unlike the other young men who dropped by so often, he never brought a date with him. Whether or not he was gay is another of those mysteries I never cracked.
I began to lose track of Jack only after I went away to college, when I was able to get news about him only occasionally from the hometown boy I was dating. Finally, shortly after my college graduation, I thought to ask the now-former beau, “Where is Jack these days?” The answer was not reassuring. He had gone to work for the CIA and had been sent to Ho Chi Minh City, then known as Saigon. He had, in fact, made several trips there, and finally, he did not come back from one of those trips. By now, it was the early 1960s, an increasingly dangerous time to be in Southeast Asia. No one from those heedless, happy times in my hometown seems to know how his story ended. It is a source of sorrow to me that he drifted out of my life without leaving a trace—except, I venture to hope, in his incarnation in these stories as Jack Mann, the good-hearted, perpetually frustrated gay man who could never resist taking in lost kids and helping them find jobs and make their way in the Big City. Alas, they always made their way to some other lover and left Jack in the lurch. But he never lost hope, nor do I, that someday, somehow, “Uncle Somebody” will come strolling up the front walk, cracking wise and charming us all.
And oh, the drinking! And oh, the smoking! You follow it all in the narrative, and you really wonder how any of us survived those days. And the truth is, there were casualties. But consider the reason. Where else were we to go? What women’s bookstores, what culture clubs, what social safety nets were there for women then? How did they even find one another? They resorted to the one social institution that represented a haven, a place to meet old friends and find new ones, a place to relax and be oneself—a place, in other words, that served an indispensable function in a perilous era. That some of the women from the ‘50s and ‘60s were sacrificed to the flow of liquor and smoke, lamentable though it is, is hardly to be wondered at. The options were so few and the need was so great that the bars were always crowded. Still, those women must be remembered with affection and gratitude; they were pioneers, too, and helped to build the foundation of sisterhood we all stand on today.
Last, the title. I had wanted to call the novel Strangers in This World. But Dick Carroll wouldn’t go for it. I suspect he knew much better than I that my title would not work as a code phrase to alert potential readers to its lesbian content. He was a canny marketer and used every available strategy to promote the books. Indeed, he had come up with the rather clever Odd Girl Out as the title for my first book. So what did he invent for this one? I Am a Woman. I always thought it was a vacuous sort of name for a book. It has no real referent: Who, for example, is the “I”? The book is not a first-person narrative. The title makes sense only as part of a longer sentence followed by a question, which had to be reproduced in its entirety on the cover of the original edition: I Am a Woman in Love with a Woman. Must Society Reject Me? What a mouthful of angst. I thought it was unwieldy and irrelevant to the story line; it could have been slapped on virtually any lesbian pulp paperback. It had no special connection to this one. But I Am a Woman the book became and remains. And in that incarnation, it sold like the proverbial hotcakes in 1959. So Dick Carroll was right and I was wrong. It still seems unappealing to me, an almost nameless name. On the other hand, this book, vague title and all, is one of my favorites in the series.
And so the saga of Laura and Beebo begins here, with its somewhat old-fashioned language and a few dated attitudes, but with a fresh and youthful joy in love and lust and all hopeful possibilities that defies the passage of time. It’s no great secret that the white-hot romance between them didn’t last a lifetime. But that’s only the first lifetime. They are still young at heart, still handsome women, still kicking. Who knows what the future holds? My own life is proof positive that none of us knows or perhaps would want to. All the good things seem to come upon us unawares. I leave all doors open.
Ann Bannon
Sacramento, California
December 2001
Tell your father to go to hell. Try it. It’s a rotten hard thing to do, even if he deserves it. Merrill Landon did. He was an out-and-out bastard, but like most of the breed, he didn’t know it. He said he was a good father: sensible, firm, and just. He said everything he did was for Laura’s own good. He took her opposition for a sign that he was right, and the more she opposed him, the righter he swore he was.
But he was a bastard. Laura could have told you that. But she couldn’t tell him, because he was her father. That was why she ran out on him. Left him high, dry, and sputtering in his plush Chicago apartment with only his job to console him. And never told him where she went. Never told him why.
Never told him of the angry agony of her nights, spent torching for a love gone wrong. Never mentioned his straight-laced bitter version of fatherly affection that hurt
