were in the process of doing so— satisfying any need they saw for “politicized” women’s writing by publishing the work of white feminists dealing with the politics of heterosexual love and romance (Erica Jong, Marilyn French, et al.) and the work of middle-class (at least) African-American women such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker. The politics of the constant book buyer tend to be liberal.
The new gay, feminist, and lesbian-feminist writers, as a consequence—or because they preferred to be independent of a mainstream which they found classist, sexist, heterosexist, homophobic, racist—founded their own presses. Some presses actually had a press; others used Xerox equipment or hand-cranked mimeograph machines. Suddenly, in verse, fiction, and broadsides, the “love that dared not speak its name” became a motormouth. Much of what it had to say was memorable.
The presses eked out a hand-to-mouth existence. The costs of the publications often barely covered the production expenses. Nobody got paid; skills, including fundraising, were learned on the job. Decisions were usually made collectively. Hardship was the rule, burnout was the norm; but the staying power was in some cases enormous, and it was almost exclusively fueled by the adamantine convictions which had got the presses going in the first place: that well-wrought words on a page could, by speaking the unspeakable, create and organize radical political activism.
How well wrought the words were was not usually of primary importance; “good” writing was useful writing, the kind that made gays and lesbians feel strong, comfortable in their own skins, angry, tough, and highly motivated to enforce change, perhaps revolutionary change, in the surrounding heterosexual world. That it worked, to some extent, is history.
But there was considerable talent giving good literary and journalistic value attached to some of the presses. In Washington, D.C., Diana Press published Women Remembered (important women “lost” by the patriarchy), edited by Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron (1975), and Rita Mae Brown’s A Plain Brown Rapper (tough political analyses), and reprinted Jeannette H. Foster’s invaluable scholarship, Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey (1975). On the West Coast, Amazon Press brought out The Lesbian Reader: An Amazon Quarterly Anthology, edited by Laurel Galana and Gina Covina (1975); in Oakland, The Women’s Press Collective, which devoted itself exclusively to work by lesbians disfranchised by race or class, published Judy Grahn’s Edward the Dyke (n.d.) and A Woman Is Talking to Death (1974), both of which found immediate movement acclaim. In New York, Karla Jay edited, with Allen Young, After You’re Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbian Women for Quick Fox in 1975; and Times Change Press published Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian-Feminist Anthology, edited by Phyllis Birkby, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, Jane O’Wyatt, and myself (consciousness-raising, personal narratives, a noteworthy essay on manhating by science-fictionist, Joanna Russ). The best presses today are Barbara Smith’s Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Faith Conlon’s Seal Press, and Joan Pinkvoss’s Aunt Lute.
Arno Press was located on Madison Avenue instead of in a damp basement or an illegal loft. Arno belongs in this context, however, because it had the vision to recognize the writing on the wall as early as 1975, when it began the Arno Special Collection, fifty-four reissues of lesbian and gay classics dating from 1811 to 1975. Jonathan Ned Katz was the editor.
Lover Gets Published: 7
Parke Bowman wanted nothing to do with the presses. The radical politics, the nonprofit status of most of them, their collective organization—it all smelled strongly of the left wing to Parke. Parke got involved in publishing women writers because she was in love with June Arnold.
Daughters Publishing Company, Inc., was not a press. Both partners, June Davis Arnold and Parke Patricia Bowman, were rather touchy about the distinction. “Publishers of Fiction by Women” (eventually, they would reluctantly include some nonfiction), their writers got contracts, advances, royalties, royalty reports, etc., identical, according to Parke, to those issued to writers by the mainstream houses. Parke and June referred to all mainstream publishers as “Random House.”
Parke’s stated goal was to run Daughters as if it were Random House and thereby compete with Random House in the marketplace. To Parke, Daughters was strictly a business whose business was profit-making. She wanted to publish novels with both literary merit and commercial appeal, and if the works were perceived as feminist, so much the better. But from the start she made it clear that she would never agree to publish a novel for political content alone.
June idealized the back-breaking labor at the presses, and she was in complete agreement with their political sentiments. June claimed that Daughters’ reason for being was to publish the novel-length fiction which the presses could not afford to publish. As soon as Daughters was founded, June began looking for manuscripts in keeping with the spirit of the poems, short stories and nonfiction of the presses: deep-thinking personal revelations about the nature of oppression.
In 1972, June believed wholeheartedly that a full-scale feminist revolution was at hand. With the patriarchy (and mainstream publishing) in ruins, Daughters would replace Random House, and the works published by Daughters would sell like hotcakes in the new world of empowered women.
Parke enjoyed the idea of Daughters’ replacing Random House, but the last thing on earth she wanted was a feminist revolution, or any connection whatsoever with “prerevolutionary” women’s presses, which she more or less privately referred to as “a bunch of damn dumb dykes.” The way to beat Random House was through the tried-and-true methods of cutthroat capitalism.
Throughout the life of Daughters, Parke longed to have a quiet, deeply closeted life with June. What Parke had in mind was something closely resembling a standard upper-class heterosexual monogamous marriage. She would eventually get just that, but not until June’s hopes for a women’s world, and her own personal ambitions, had been severely disappointed.
From the start, therefore, the partners were at odds about the aims of the company. Throughout Daughters’ brief life (less than a decade), June and Parke went through an ongoing struggle to dominate the company and realize their opposing views. Compromises were grudgingly made, or else one or the other of the partners would back down and wait for the next time. It’s a miracle of a sort that the company lasted as long as it did. The miracle, of a sort, was money, lots of it.
At first, I was only another of the Daughters’ novelists. Then I became their “senior” (their only) editor. Officially, my relationship with the company ended there. Unofficially, I was the third side of a triangle that rivaled the old Lesbian Gothicks in terms of booze, blood, tears, madness, violence, and operatic grand passions—so much so, I often wonder if Daughters wasn’t something I wrote instead of lived.
For a while, I loved Daughters and Daughters loved me. I applied—I misapplied—three tenets of feminist doctrine to the way I loved Daughters: that trust, solidarity, and strength arise from making oneself totally vulnerable to women; that one may trust women totally, but never men; that male oppression is the sole cause of mental and emotional ill-health in women, and feminism the sole cure. It’s difficult for me to confess to something so banal, but here goes: I needed a good mother.
Founded in 1972, Daughters published its first list in 1973. By 1979, Parke and June had dissolved Daughters in the manner of any publishing company going out of business. All titles abruptly went out of print; rights reverted to the authors; leftover copies of the books were distributed among the authors and to remainder houses. Parke sold the townhouse in Greenwich Village that had been company headquarters. June and Parke severed their connections with feminism and their authors (including me), and retired to an insulated haute-bourgeoise life in Houston, June’s home town. At the time, June was fifty-three and Parke was forty-five or forty-six. I hoped never to see either of them again.
