CONTENTS |
Cathy Cade: “Before the rainbow flag, lavender was associated with the LGBTQ community as a symbol of the blending of the gendered colors pink and blue.”
Carmen Rios: Popaganda: Real Talk with Feminist Trailblazers
Sarah Schulman: “When I started my writing career I vowed to have openly lesbian content in my work and I was warned that professionally this was ‘the kiss of death.’ My first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, appeared in 1984 and was almost impossible to publish. It had 61 rejections with warnings from publishers that the lesbian content would ‘offend librarians.’ And even now, I regularly see lesbian writers with no out content consistently being welcomed into categories of support and opportunity that still aren’t generally available to those of us who insist on our place in American letters. But today, THIRTY-FIVE YEARS later, Sophie finally made it to the New York Times Book Review.”
Amanda Montell: “When English speakers want to insult a woman, they compare her to one of a few things: a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut). That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. In English, our negative terms for women necessarily mirror the status of women in Western society at large.”
Cheryl Clark: “poets are among the first witches”
Terry Castle: “Thirty years after dinner with the Poet Lady, one still finds oneself staring into the won ton all too frequently, dismayed yet again at how invisible, literally and figuratively, lesbianism remains, even in the great rainbow-flag-waving cities of the West. Some of the smartest and most well-meaning straight people still don’t get it – in fact, don’t even see it.”
Mary Meriam, Editor
Lavender Review
Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shirt (2010)
Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shirt (2010)