Don't get me wrong: Christopher Baum's Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (reviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review) looks like a fascinating read. Especially as we stand here in a moment of transformation -- accelerating this week with the Prop. 8 overturn in California, and Washington's embrace of same-sex marriage -- this appears to be an important account of how the gay literary writers contributed to revolution. Baum focuses on Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Kushner, James Baldwin, Edward Albee, and Edmund White, and other writers that are less-titanic, but were pivotal in their time. Storytelling, he argues, is a triggering mechanism for cultural turn.
But I'm irritated that there's no mention of gay women contributing to it. This, even though the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s made publishing and writing a key tenant, which in turn made space for lesbian and bisexual women writers to flourish. See, for example, The Feminist Press, Calyx, Virago Press, Kore Press, the Women's Review of Books, and the feminist bookstore movement, like this one in Madison and this one in Chicago.
In Eminent Outlaws, where is Gertrude Stein? Susan Sontag? The brilliant Kate Millett of Sexual Politics? Rita Mae Brown? Audre Lorde? Adrienne Rich? Dorothy Allison? Elizabeth Bishop? Amy Lowell? Mary Oliver? Alison Bechdel? Ali Smith? Sapphire? Emma Donoghue? Diane DiMassa? Djuna Barnes? Carson McCullers?
And where is Sarah Orne Jewitt? June Jordan? Edna St. Vincent Millay? Kay Ryan? Alice Walker? Angela Davis? Joanna Russ? Octavia Butler? Willa Cather (probably)? Elizabeth Bowen? Jeannette Winterson? Tove Jansson? Gabriela Mistral? Hélène Cixous? Colette? Virginia Woolf, for god's sake?
Such oversight reeks of the mid-century erasure that Baum believes he is challenging with this book.
Don't forget Bertha Harris, Sally Gearhart, June Arnold, Jill Johnston, Kathy Acker, and other delightful radicals...
Posted by: spiky | February 11, 2012 at 12:01 PM
High-five to that, spiky!
Posted by: Anna Clark | February 11, 2012 at 12:49 PM
See page x of the introduction: "This book is about gay male writers and not lesbian writers. I chose this focus reluctantly, but I needed to simplify an already complicated story. Also, lesbian literature has its own dynamic and history. It needs its own historian." Quite frankly, I knew I was not qualified to do that job. Jewelle Gomez and others have pointed out that a sister book needs to be written, and I agree. You are very smart and well read. It might be a project you'd want to pursue.
Posted by: Christopher Bram | March 13, 2012 at 11:28 PM