INDOMITABLE: The Life of Barbara Grier by Joanne Passet

Author:Joanne Passet [Passet, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2017-01-19T23:00:00+00:00

State of Lesbian Publishing

As Barbara surveyed the lesbian publishing scene in the summer of 1980, she predicted a bright future for Naiad Press. “We are the largest press now operating functionally in the business. DAUGHTERS has issued no new titles for a year or so…DIANA has gone to hell (where they belong) in a hand basket…and the next largest presses are FEMINIST PRESS…[and]…MOON BOOKS…even more specialized than we are, and are not per se or even really much at all interested in the Lesbian market.” Persephone Press had just three titles in print, and in Barbara’s opinion, the lesbian-feminist founders were “new babies, nice kids, and they will someday be real competition on a friendly basis with us.”[9]

Despite her interactions with others in the Women in Print movement, Barbara was a maverick, standing on the periphery of lesbian-feminist politics. A veteran of childhood poverty, she found the hand-to-mouth existence of the Women’s Press Collective unacceptable. Like Parke Bowman of Daughters, Inc., Barbara had come of age in the pre-feminist era. She saw nothing wrong with a top-down management style and operating a successful for-profit business, especially after decades of giving her labor to the movement. Convinced she was right, Barbara forged ahead fearlessly with her plan to increase access to lesbian books.[10]

Prior to 1981, when Naiad Press released eight titles, its publication output varied from one to four books each year, and had no clear specialization. In addition to the Sarah Aldridge novels, Naiad offered readers three volumes by French writer and poet Renée Vivien, a novel by 1950s pulp novelist Valerie Taylor, and the work of two first-time novelists. Reacting to Marchant’s displeasure at “Naiad’s being accused of being lily white,” Barbara responded almost immediately with a manuscript by Ann Allen Shockley for a collection of short stories about interracial relationships that her black friends in Kansas City had read and enjoyed. In less than two weeks, Marchant had drawn up a contract for The Black and White of It, which appeared in 1980, along with Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson’s Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century Germany and Pat Califia’s Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality.

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