6 Homophobic Writers You Can Live Without

Photo: 6 Homophobic Writers - Head shots of DH Lawrence, CS Lewis, Anthony Burgess, Raymond Chandler, Norman Mailer, F Scott Fitzgerald

The early 20th century celebrated homophobic writers of high reputation. We were taught their work in school. They were reviewed in quality publications. And they were looked up to as wise men.

What is homophobia?

Most of us think of homophobia as if it were something toxic in the air or the water. Equal marriage laws and visible queer people make us feel it’s getting better. Homophobic laws like the ‘LGBT-free’ zones in Poland make us feel less hopeful.

During his Literary Salon event on 18 February this year, discussing his tv series It’s A Sin with presenter Damian Barr, Russell T Davies asked the question in a slightly different way.

Davies’ series is set in gay London in the 1980s. At the end of the story his hero, Ritchie, is dying of AIDS. Ritchie’s mother looks after him in his last days but refuses to believe he is gay.

Why are people homophobic?

Davies said that attitudes like hers can’t be blamed on culture or religion: ‘God isn’t enough.’ He felt that every person’s homophobia is an individual response – unique to them – woven out of the traumas and secrets in their lives.

In the case of Ritchie’s mother, she hints that her father ‘was a terrible man.’ Was she abused? She doesn’t explain. Davies said that the truth might have come out later, if he had had more time to tell the story. But the bare mention, offering no further understanding, seems typical of homophobia – understanding is not what it is about.

Everyone knows a homophobe

Everyone knows a homophobe, or knows of one. Many queer people keep difficult conversations with family members in our memories, whether we want to remember or not. The controversy about trans people taking place today is bringing this kind of impasse back into focus when many of us thought it was receding into the past.

If Davies is right, and homophobia is a kind of vulnerability, we’re not likely to hear more about it from homophobes in real life. Like Ritchie’s mother, they are unwilling to say more. But just as knowledge of queer lives came first of all through books, despite the worst censorship could do, it’s also possible to look at writers – traditionally, people who can’t stop talking about themselves – for a clue to homophobia.

6 homophobic writers

And unfortunately, the early 20th century had some homophobic writers of high reputation, who were taught in school, reviewed in quality publications, and looked up to as wise men.

Photo: Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton

(At least, the ones I’m going to mention are all men. There are certainly homophobic women writers. One possible candidate is Enid Blyton, creator of the Famous Five and now considered to have had racist attitudes. But she sometimes produced 50 books a year and searching her entire output for homophobic content would not be easy or congenial.)

One cautionary note: looking at homophobic content in novels is not the same as saying that a writer’s work is worthless. People are mosaics, and prejudice can exist side by side with courage and creativity. But we can learn something from scrutinising the attitudes in these books, and perhaps it’s long past time – queer writers had to suffer sceptical, sometimes patronising reviews for generations.

1. D H Lawrence

Photo: DH Lawrence 1929
D H Lawrence, 1929

The most famous homophobic writer in English is probably D H Lawrence. He is best known for his last novel, Lady Chattlerley’s Lover, and for his hero’s speech denouncing every kind of sex except the missionary position.

Book cover: The Rainbow, DH Lawrence, Methuen, 1st Edition 1915
The Rainbow, Methuen, 1st Edition, 1915

Lawrence’s earlier novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, were banned, because they had bisexual characters, but also because they were sexually explicit. (Senator Reed Smoot of the US approved of the ban and said that Lawrence was ‘a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that it would obscure even the darkness of hell.’)

Lawrence’s letters do reveal a darkness in his mind which his novels only suggest – that he was literally homophobic, frightened and repelled by gay men. After a visit by David ‘Bunny’ Garnett and his lover Francis Birrell, Lawrence wrote about ‘the horror of little swarming selves’. ‘We must fight this Baal,’ he wrote in another letter, ‘and keep the other flag flying.’

There are shelves of books, articles and theses about Lawrence’s life and possible gay encounters. He hinted at a great deal and admitted very little.

2. C S Lewis

Photo: C S Lewis 1946
C S Lewis, 1946

A writer of Christian sci-fi (as well as many religious books which were said ‘make righteousness readable’), C S Lewis may be a somewhat clearer case. In That Hideous Strength, the story of a Satanic foundation which takes over an English university, he created Miss Hardcastle. She is the foundation’s head of security, a tall and strapping character in her uniform, who wears lipstick and waves an unlit cheroot about.

Book cover: That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis, Bodley Head, 1st Edition 1945
That Hideous Strength, Bodley Head, 1st Edition, 1945

She only lights the cheroot when she arrests and tortures Jane, the story’s heroine. It’s astonishing that an Oxford don and religious writer felt free to publish this scene. He had already established Miss Hardcastle as a figure of scary fun, and probably would have said, like some people who post threatening messages on Twitter, that it was all just a joke.

After Lewis’ death in 1962, it came out that he had had an affair with a much older woman. She probably did not smoke cheroots, but she did make Lewis do housework regularly. There is no evidence that she was a lesbian, but perhaps he found it easy to seize on homophobia as a way to represent his guilt about the relationship (which he always regretted) and his fear of strong women.

3. Anthony Burgess

Photo: Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess

Born a generation after Lawrence and Lewis, in 1917, Anthony Burgess. Most people remember him now for his novel A Clockwork Orange, especially the film made by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, which features one woman being raped and another being murdered.

But Burgess also wrote a dystopian fantasy, The Wanting Seed, about a future in which England is threatened by overpopulation. The government tries to force everyone to become queer (one of the characters affects a limp wrist and sissified speech in order to rise in the Ministry of Infertility.) There are other ridiculous lesbian stereotypes. Of course, the country soon falls into anarchy and the natural order is restored.

Book cover: The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess, Heinemann, 1st Edition, 1962
The Wanting Seed, Heinemann, 1st Edition, 1962

Burgess had one of the more adventurous and difficult lives of any 20th century novelist. His mother and sister died in the 1918 flu and he always felt that his father resented him for surviving. He became a teacher, a soldier, a speaker of several languages, and a prolific composer. And he said to have been dismissed from a job because his wife said ‘something obscene’ to Prince Philip.

Burgess moved in sophisticated circles and must have known many queer people. He did not have to reach for the low-humour cliché portrayals he uses in The Wanting Seed. Perhaps they were simply the easiest. Or perhaps Burgess, the defiant survivor, enjoyed putting two fingers up whenever he could.

4. Raymond Chandler

Photo: Raymond Chandler 1943
Raymond Chandler, 1943

Unlike Lawrence, Lewis and Burgess, Raymond Chandler was not a literary writer, but after his death he became one. He is the creator of the tough detective Philip Marlowe, hero of The Big Sleep – a vividly written description of a world of crime and perversity.

Of course, this world is queer, and we first see Marlowe surveilling a an underground porn library run by a gay man. He watches the customers pull up on a normal Los Angeles street and is surprised to observe that some of them are women.

Book cover: The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, Knopf, 1st Edition, 1939
The Big Sleep, Knopf, 1st Edition, 1939

What kind of porn are the women of Los Angeles secretly borrowing? We never find out. Whatever these books are, they make a grown man blanch when Marlowe shows him a page.

Marlowe himself blanches when he visits Geiger, the porn librarian, and not just because he finds him dead. Worse still, the librarian’s bedroom turns out to be ‘neat, fussy, womanish’ with a flounced bedspread.

All this is just scene-setting and the real story turns out to be about a straight criminal, a gangster, and a wealthy and beautiful heroine. But the early episode has done its work, setting the atmosphere and highlighting the depravity of Marlowe’s enemies and his cool, unflappable character.

Like the three authors we’ve seen so far, Raymond Chandler had a hardworking and adventurous life, complicated by early poverty and family breakup. He was a teacher, journalist, scriptwriter, would-be poet and essayist, and a First World War soldier. He suffered all his life from alcoholism and depression. ‘There is no trap so deadly,’ he wrote, ‘as the trap you set for yourself.’

5. Norman Mailer

Photo: Norman Mailer 1948
Norman Mailer, 1948

All these writers were partly British or Irish, but Norman Mailer was an American. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948 after he served in the Second World War and has never gone out of print. His reputation was bound up with male violence and misogyny, both in fiction and real life, and he cheerfully fought feminists such as Kate Millett and Germaine Greer on television.

Book cover: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Rhinehart & Co, 1st Edition, 1948
The Naked and the Dead, Rhinehart & Co, 1st Edition, 1948

Many of his villains were gay men, and in a 1955 article for One Magazine, a publication of the homophile movement, he admitted that this was due to laziness and lack of any experience of queer people. He had nothing to gain from making this admission – almost fifteen years before Stonewall – and why he made it remains a mystery. But it’s a rare example of a homophobe looking honestly at himself.

6. F Scott Fitzgerald

Photo: F Scott Fitzgerald 1921
F Scott Fitzgerald, 1921

Of all these writers, the one who may have given most insight into himself is F Scott Fitzgerald, now best known as the author of the American classic, The Great Gatsby. A prolific writer in a circle of prolific writers, he described his life constantly. His may be the strangest of these stories of homophobic writing.

In his early, successful days, Fitzgerald does not seem to have had much interest in queer people. He was a success as a drag artiste at one memorable party at Princeton, just before the First World War, but there is no evidence he had any gay relationships.

Book cover: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Scribners' Sons, 1st Edition, 1925
The Great Gatsby, Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1st Edition, 1925

In the early 1920s he became the novelist of privileged youth. He was said to have defined ‘the jazz age’. His sudden fame led to his marriage to the southern belle, Zelda Sayre, the model of many of his fictional heroines. They became a celebrity couple and moved to Paris, where he wrote The Great Gatsby.

But then things began to go wrong. Gatsby was a financial failure. It was a novel about class, not about privileged youth. The wealthy characters were brutal and the hero, Jay Gatsby, was brave, naive and doomed.

Accusations

It was about this time that Fitzgerald seems to have discovered homophobia. One of his Paris circle, a publisher, called him a queer. Fitzgerald claims that Zelda began to accuse him as well, but there is apparently nothing from her in writing, only from Fitzgerald himself and his friend, the writer Ernest Hemingway.

As in so many of these writers’ stories, depression and alcoholism began to take their toll. Zelda had an affair and a nervous breakdown, and Fitzgerald committed her to mental health clinics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Homosexuality became an obsession with Fitzgerald. He talked of going to a prostitute to prove himself, even though there had never been any lack of women in his life. Then he began to believe that Zelda was a lesbian. He wrote that she was getting up to strange things with the nurses in her clinic. He put a lesbian character, Miss Taube, into his next novel, Tender Is The Night.

Eventually Fitzgerald and Zelda separated. She spent the rest of her life in and out of clinics. Fitzgerald found a new lover, the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. By then he had much more to worry about than his theoretical masculinity, and apparently said no more, good or bad, about queer people.

Is homophobia just a phase?

There are few homophobes for whom homophobia is just a phase. As someone who seems to have been homophobic in one situation lasting a few years, Fitzgerald might correspond most closely to Russell T Davies’ view – that homophobia is not a given in our culture, but a response to grief and trauma, an easy outlet for the unmentionable.

Though writers have more to say about themselves than most people, creating art is a risky lifestyle and writers may not be the best illustrations of typical homophobes. But there is another reason to examine the lives and prejudices of these classic writers. They were once icons of what was considered the best in our civilisation. Millions of young people read their books and remembered them for a lifetime. In their stories, they projected fear and humiliation onto queer people. We need to question those stories, no matter how brilliantly written, and keep pursuing the insights of openly queer art and queer lives.

We’re delighted to be able to publish this blog raising awareness of homophobia in English and American literature as part of International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, 17 May 2021. What are your thoughts on our take on these iconic writers? Please feel free to comment.

At the World’s End

Meggie’s Journeys by Margaret D’Ambrosio
Polygon, 1987

A few days ago, #ReclaimTheseStreetsPorty, one of the groups formed after the abduction and presumed murder of Sarah Everard in London, attached a series of posters and banners to a fence at Portobello Beach in Edinburgh.

‘Our Bodies Our Minds Our Power’, said one. Others said, ‘Educate your sons.’ ‘Strong women stay strong.’ ‘Good men challenge violence in word and deed.’ ‘Be a radical dreamer.’

Many people stopped to look more closely and read a list of victims of violence against women in 2021 and 2020. Some passers-by were disturbed or confused. Others were moved by the signs.

It’s possible that no one who saw them knew the name of Margaret D’Ambrosio. She was a writer who was killed by her partner 21 years ago in Port Seton, along the coast from Portobello.

Book cover: Meggie's Journey

D’Ambrosio’s book, Meggie’s Journeys, has been out of print for many years (it apparently went into a second edition with a new publisher in 1988). It once sold well at the First of May Bookshop and West & Wilde. It is women’s writing rather than queer writing, except in the sense that it describes a wisdom which accepts many ways of love and of life. It is a Celtic fantasy novel of legendary times on the land which would one day be called Edinburgh. The dedication reads: To the Old Ones: Nothing is ever forgotten. We’re delighted to have a copy in our archive.

But nearly everything about D’Ambrosio’s writing seems to have been forgotten.

A search on the internet reveals much more about her death than her life. She and her partner were found in their flat on 23 January 2000: she had been murdered; he had committed suicide.

The Herald reported that she had been interested in New Age beliefs, sang in folk clubs, and had worked at the Bull and Bush pub in Lothian Road around the time her novel was published. Did she publish anything else? The paper didn’t say.

Polygon, her publisher, was the literary imprint of Edinburgh University Press at the time Meggie’s Journey first appeared. And it seems unlikely that they would have accepted D’Ambrosio’s novel unless she had a history as a writer – possibly under a different name. In 2002, Polygon became an imprint of Birlinn an independent publisher based in Edinburgh. Today, it continues to publish literary fiction and poetry by such well-known Scottish writers as Liz Lochhead and Edwin Morgan.

In 1987 Polygon had an imaginative list. Its books were sometimes found in the First of May and Lavender Menace. The cover Polygon gave D’Ambrosio’s book was beautiful and unusual, different from the primary colours usually found on radical books. It featured old-fashioned, softly coloured pen-and-ink drawings by Hazel McGlashan of Celtic symbols such as plants and animals, and at the bottom of the cover, waves on the sea.

The cover represents the book well. It is a picture of what Iron Age culture may have been like, similar to the Boudicca series by lesbian writer Manda Scott. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scott said she wanted to portray a society where the sexes were equal and nature was not exploited as in modern times but considered a source of wisdom and spiritual power. D’Ambrosio’s vision seems to have been similar, but while Scott’s novels are stories of conflict, Meggie’s Journey is closer to poetry. It is meant to take us into the state of mind of her Celtic characters.

The novel explains that Celts believed in the Otherworld, similar to the Christian Heaven – but instead of being remote, it existed within nature and the world we know. In certain places and times, human beings could slip through the barriers into a truer world than our own.

In the novel, Meggie is questing for the Well at the World’s End, which will show her the face of the Goddess. On the four seasonal Celtic festivals (which include Beltane, still celebrated in Edinburgh), she journeys to the Otherworld. Her companion is Annis, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young maiden.

Meggie meets the Sidhe, a race of spiritual beings well-known in Celtic legend. White ravens and beautiful spirits speak to her. She survives the realm of the Barrowbane and the River of Lamentation. She makes a reconciliation with Death and comes to the Well at the World’s End. But while she has been on her quest, time has passed, and the Celtic world has faded away.

At the end of the book a young woman from modern Edinburgh meets Meggie by St Margaret’s Loch, under Arthur’s Seat, and the doors to the Otherworld reopen for both of them.

The book itself is more like a vision than a 20th century novel. Plot and character are less important than the vision of the Otherworld and its realisation within ourselves.

The vision is composed with care and in detail. D’Ambrosio even composed music to go with the poems in the book. The story of 175 pages seems to contain a lifetime’s imagination.

There is no hint as to how or why D’Ambrosio came to write the story. She cites only a few sources. She may have explained more when she gave a reading from the book, and some people must still remember it. It’s to be hoped that more about her life and her other writing will emerge. The novel seems to address the pain of bereavement, and as she reaches the World’s End, Meggie says, ‘Between death and love, life dances forever.’ The work she might have done if she had lived is lost, but we still have her novel and perhaps, a quest of our own – to speak out together and protect women – and to remember her as a radical dreamer, part of Edinburgh’s creative history.

Published: 22 March 2021

Unsung: the queer books that tell our story – the video

As part of this year’s LGBT History Month, Bob and Sigrid took part in a live webinar conversation on 24 February with Chris Creegan about how queer books tell our story. The conversation ran long over time with thought-provoking questions and comments from those who attended virtually – and their enthusiasm for the books, writers and publishers of the 1980s and 90s who made so much possible today. Thanks especially to writer and mental health campaigner Chris Creegan, Cleo Jones of Edinburgh City Libraries who introduced us, and Pretty Bright who produced our video on unsung queer writers and the webinar. If you missed the conversation or the video, now’s you chance to catch up.

Feel free to leave your comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

Unsung: The queer books that tell our story from Howard Elwyn-Jones on Vimeo.

Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Queer Culture

Why has Rebecca always had a reputation as a queer novel?

Generations of gay men have declaimed the first line, spoken by Joan Fontaine in the 1940 film: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’. But for most of its 82 years in print, critics dismissed it as an ordinary gothic romance.

Image: Poster advertising the 1940 film Rebecca
Film poster dated 1939 promoting Rebecca the film which was released in 1940.

It has a mysterious mansion, an innocent heroine, an enigmatic hero, a beautiful dead first wife, a sinister housekeeper, and a faithful dog. The heroine is haunted by the first wife and nearly kills herself. But she and the hero end up together.

Still, there was something more going on.

I know when I decided that Rebecca was a queer novel. It was in 1977, when I heard Antonia Fraser (biographer of Mary Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell) and writer Daphne du Maurier go head to head about Rebecca on Radio 3. I remember the programme because I had just come to the UK and discovered Radio 3, and found it fascinating.

Fraser took part in the programme because she found Rebecca fascinating. She had named her eldest daughter for the beautiful and compelling title character. She had become so involved with the story that she decided to rewrite it from Rebecca’s point of view.

In the original story, Rebecca, mistress of Manderley, dies one night in a sailing accident. Everyone (it seems) mourns the loss of such a graceful, spirited, kindly person. Maxim, her widower, marries a naïve young woman, a heroine whose name we are never told. One of life’s lurkers, shy and undistinguished, she wonders endlessly about Rebecca.

Halfway through the action, Maxim reveals that Rebecca’s good qualities were a sham. In reality she was a manipulator and a liar. She enjoyed acting the part of the lady of Manderley while pursuing a hedonistic life in London. She was incapable of love, he insists: ‘she was not even normal’. When she threatened him in her cottage on the beach, he killed her and sank her boat to make it look like an accident.

Fraser wanted to believe that Rebecca was ‘really’ kind and lovely, and that Maxim was the liar. She was reading the novel as young people and fans sometimes do: as a participant, not a spectator.

Du Maurier listened politely to Fraser’s rewritten version of her story. Then she said that, yes, she had to wonder if she had gotten Rebecca completely wrong. But she felt that meddling in other writers’ work could lead in strange directions. As it so happened, she had been doing research into the life of Charles the First, and discovered a manuscript describing his affair with Oliver Cromwell. She said she had no plans to publish this startling revelation, but hoped Fraser would take it as a friendly warning.

Many people must have listened to this talk, and some of them may have wondered about it afterwards. Du Maurier had warned Fraser off elegantly and made her look a bit naïve. (Fraser didn’t seem offended. Her alternative Rebecca story and du Maurier’s riposte were later republished together.) But why had du Maurier used such a daring fantasy to make her point – a fantasy which was a bit beyond the pale? In the 1970s, talking about queer kings at all was pushing the boundaries.

I wondered if there was a covert message in du Maurier’s talk and remembered the line about Rebecca as a woman who could not love; ‘she was not evennormal.’ Not even normal? Were her lovers not normal, or was her attraction to them not normal – because some of them were women?

Maxim also says that Rebecca told him terrible things about herself, things he would never repeat to anyone. What could they have been? Rebecca probably had not told him she was the leader of a Satanic cult or a serial murderer. The phrase was much more likely to mean that she boasted of her sordid affairs with both sexes and that he realised she was one of those ‘reptile women’ who could not feel love, only unnatural lust.

Book cover: Rebecca First Edition 1938 Gollancz
Book cover of the first edition of Rebecca published by Gollancz in 1938

The idea that a book as famous as Rebecca, which had been in print for 39 years at that point, could be ‘a gay novel’ was tremendously exciting. Just four years earlier, Vita Sackville-West’s autobiography had been published. It revealed that Orlando was Virginia Woolf’s love letter to Vita. Little by little, queer dimensions in writing were emerging. (These days, we even hear that Charles the First may have been attracted to his father’s lover, the Duke of Buckingham.)

Du Maurier herself insisted that Rebecca was not a romance. She called it ‘a study in jealousy’. The most overtly jealous character is the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. She is ‘devoted’ to Rebecca, who called her ‘Danny’. She tells anyone who will listen about Rebecca’s courage, distinction, riding skills, taste in clothes. In one of the novel’s most famous scenes, brilliantly translated to the screen in Hitchcock’s film, she shows the heroine Rebecca’s evening clothes, her nightdress and her bed, encouraging her to touch the satin and put her face against the furs. She is a camp figure, exaggeratedly grim and stark, but for most readers, just a sinister sideline in a story of jealousy in marriage.

But after du Maurier died in 1989, her biographers were able to be truthful about her life. It emerged that she was bisexual and had fallen in love with her publisher’s elegant wife, Ellen Doubleday. She had also had an affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence (though Lawrence’s family deny the idea to this day).

In letters, du Maurier compared Doubleday to Rebecca, seemingly embracing her vision of Rebecca’s beauty and charisma and discarding the dark side. Perhaps du Maurier herself, through her passion for Doubleday, had come to see Rebecca differently.

Du Maurier’s death left other writers free to ignore the warning she gave to Fraser. (In modern publishing, with its publisher-commissioned prequels and sequels, being involved with other writers’ works is not just a temptation, it’s good business.) Sally Beauman, journalist and critic, published Rebecca’s Tale in 2001. It portrays Rebecca as adventurous, romantic, ruthless – and, marginally, bisexual. Meanwhile, one of the characters, her brother, turns out to be gay.

The character of Mrs Danvers – rarely explored in writing – has grown and changed in film and on the stage. Portrayed by powerful actresses such as Judith Anderson, Diana Rigg and Anna Massey, she is no longer the grotesque figure in the novel. In Rebecca, Das Musical, Susan Rigava-Dumas portrays her as darkly beautiful and vital, almost an avatar of Rebecca herself.

This comes closest, perhaps, to a queer reading of du Maurier’s novel. Mrs Danvers, who loved Rebecca, becomes her voice in the world of the living and holds onto her claim to Manderley. But all the major characters, not just Rebecca or Mrs Danvers, could be described as misfits in the world of patriarchy. They are people who don’t belong, sexually and in other ways. It is a novel about three women fighting over a house (and over a man because he brings them a place in that house). Manderley is more than just a mansion – it is the characters’ only chance at a life or a home.

Our views of Rebecca will keep unfolding as queer culture becomes more insightful, as boundaries are rethought, challenged and broken down.

Rebecca has been in print ever since it was published in 1938. Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive has a copy of the Virago edition.

Murder in the Collective

Murder in the Collective by Barbara Wilson
Women’s Press, 1984
ISBN 0704339439

‘Safe spaces’ in 1984 were thin on the ground

‘Safe spaces’ for queer  people were rarely heard of in 1984. This mystery by a lesbian writer explores the idea of ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’. In a liberal, wealthy city, challenging the system isn’t supposed to lead to murder. But when Pam’s radical print shop collective proposes to merge with a lesbian typesetter, she is horrified to find the shop’s machinery smashed and one of her co-workers shot dead.

Cover: Murder in the Collective

Quiet, methodical Pam teams up with impulsive Hadley from the lesbian collective in order to solve the mystery. At first, they are less than serious, but then they become lovers as well as fellow-sleuths. As Pam tries to come to terms with a complete change in her life, the situation spins out of control – and the police, saboteurs and foreign rebel movements are involved. Pam and Hadley are no longer sure if they can trust anyone – including each other. 

Mysteries are one of the most popular types of lesbian books today, but few deal with the world of queer books and presses. Lesbian writer Barbara Wilson, now known as Barbara Sjoholm, founded Seal Press in the US, lived in London in the 1980s, and came to Lavender Menace to read from Murder in the Collective.

This is a taster of a longer appreciation of Wilson’s first crime novel, which will be published as a longer blog soon.

Maybe the Moon

Maybe the Moon
Bantam Press 1993, a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN 0593 027655

The Lavender Menace LGBT+ Archive has been growing for about a year now. One of our books was rescued from a remainder shop – Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin, a hardback novel published in 1993. On the front is a ‘friendly label’ showing a catastrophic drop in the price.

Why did the publisher, Transworld, expend so much effort to create a beautiful design? At the time the bookshop opened, few commercial publishers would go anywhere near a lesbian or gay book. We may never know what inspired Transworld’s change of heart. But Maupin’s novel lies at a crossroads in the history of queer books – and of our bookshop itself.

By the 1990s the Tales of the City novels were popular. They had even spawned a tv series (though the negotiations around the queer content led to years of delay.) But, meanwhile, Maupin had moved on to something very different. He was writing and publishing Maybe the Moon.  

Tales of the City tells stories of colourful, bohemian San Francisco. They are comic and light-hearted though often serious as well (focussing, for instance, on the HIV epidemic.)   Maybe the Moon comes from a very different place – and not just because it’s set in Hollywood.

David Benson with Armistead Maupin, West & Wilde Bookshop 1990

Maupin’s reading for Maybe the Moon filled West & Wilde’s large shop. Tales of the City fans listened as Maupin explained that this was a different novel, not part of the San Francisco series, based on the life and writings of his friend Tamara De Treaux, who had died recently at age 30.

De Treaux was a Hollywood actor who had played the title role in one of the most famous films of all time, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. But she remained unknown. She played the legendary alien in a rubber suit and was never credited. She was 31 inches tall.

‘She was invisible,’ Maupin told San Francisco Focus magazine in 1992. ‘It occurred to me that there was a very strong parallel between her and lesbian and gay actors who are required to stay invisible, to remain in the closet.’  De Treaux refused to obey the rules and gave interviews about her role to magazines and newspapers, drawing Spielberg’s anger – and Maupin’s respect.

‘She was the inspiration for my character Cady,’ he said. He insisted that Cady was an amalgam of De Treaux’ experience and his own. He believed, he said, in empathy as the basis of storytelling (and living).

Photo: Armistead Maupin and the Menaces at a reading of Logical Family, 2017
Armistead Maupin and the Menaces at a reading of Logical Family, 2017

Now, almost 30 years later, Maybe the Moon is out of print. The lesbian and gay community (as it was known then) has changed dramatically. But how does the novel read today?

Maupin’s portrait of Cady’s life – seen through her notebooks – is stark. There is gentle humour, as in Tales of the City, but some of it is darker. We learn how Cady copes with people’s ignorance, with constant hostile stares – with living in a ‘normal’ world which is, to her, a set for a film about giants.  She lives by her feisty wit, but often has to bite her tongue because there is so much about her life that people simply cannot understand.

And then there’s sex.

To most people, Cady is a sexless freak  – but she is strongly heterosexual and frank about it. ‘If sex with a little person was kinky by definition,’ she explains, ‘I had no choice but to embrace kink and be damned grateful for its existence.’

 ‘It was a question of perception,’ she adds, ‘and taking control of my own destiny.’

Eventually, she falls in love with Neil, a black piano player. He is a loyal friend – and then he and Cady become lovers. Their relationship is affectionate, sexual, and full of humour – even though it is not easy or without cost. One of the best parts of the book is their shy but joyous first night together on Catalina Island.

Meanwhile, Cady’s friends are outsiders like herself: Renee, warm-hearted, generous and somewhat dim, getting older, still single, and very talented at finding the wrong men;  Jeff, gay waiter and writer – who is determined never to be closeted, but, like Cady, finds that honesty comes at a price. He helps her in a plot to defy her producer’s orders and appear at a lavish movie event, not as a character in a rubber suit, but as herself.

In his interview for San Francisco Focus, Maupin detailed his own struggles with Hollywood. One producer wanted to make a version of Tales of the City without queer characters. A screenwriter suggested that one of Maupin’s gay characters should become a serial killer.

Another version of the hardback
cover published in the UK in 1993

The UK publisher of Maybe the Moon took a different, positive view. The initial print run of the book was 60,000. At least two versions of the silver-and-lavender cover of our copy were produced, as well as another, different, American cover. Someone thought it was a novel which would be bought and remembered.

It marked a time the lesbian and gay community was becoming the LGBT+ community, making a place to stand and facing outward.  Like Cady, we were taking control of our destiny.  Maybe the Moon has no lesbian, trans or non-binary characters, but Maupin’s view looks forward to the queer writing of today. It shows the moment we changed our vision: Cadence Roth, sexual outlaw, is straight, but she is also queer.

Footnote: Gay writer Paul Magrs blogged about Maybe the Moon in 2012 at http://lifeonmagrs.blogspot.com/2012/05/maybe-moon-by-armistead-maupin.html. You can see the American cover of Maybe the Moon as part of our banner photo at the top of our website. A new series of Tales of the City was launched on Netflix in 2019, with the same queer characters as the original series and  no gay serial killers.

Please leave a comment about this review and your own thoughts if you’ve read the book yourself.

Welcome to our new Lavender Menace Queer and LGBT+ Books Archive blog

When we opened in 1982, one person asked shyly, ‘Are there were really enough lesbian and gay books to fill an entire shop?’.

Today, there are enough queer books (as we would call them now) to fill an enormous library. Small presses such as Onlywomen, Gay Men’s Press, and Brilliance Books opened the door. Larger publishers followed and created such classic bestsellers as Rubyfruit Jungle and A Boy’s Own Story.

Interior of McDonald Road Library showing book display including What Belongs to You
Interior of McDonald Road Library Edinburgh, featuring book display including What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Forty years on the queer library has so many floors, attics, cellars, corners, and balconies, that some of them are hard to find. The rise of the internet and changing fashions in publishing have meant that the original presses have closed – of all of them, only Virago Press still exists. Many of their books are now out of print and unknown.

But at the same time there are new queer writers and new shops and publishers. After 20 years which saw independent bookshops in decline, two queer booksellers have set up business in the UK since 2018 – Category IS Bookshop in Glasgow and Portal Bookshop in York. We don’t seem to have to worry about having enough books or readers.

This blog will wander through the queer library, climb the ladders to some of the inaccessible shelves, try the keys to rooms which aren’t usually visited, and help visitors make their own maps. We’ll call on guest bloggers to take us where we haven’t been before. We want to use our knowledge of the start of queer bookselling to connect the older books and writers with the new ones – it’s all one story.

We’ve already started blogging about the books in our growing archive – found in our own and friends’ collections and secondhand shops.  And we invite you to comment – tell us about your part of the queer library and take part in readers’ conversations which wouldn’t have been possible when we opened the shop in the 1980s.