Items

• My first satyrnalia
  One of two Michael Rumaker (1932-2019) books seized, this novel follows a narrator through a night in New York, on the streets, in the bookshops and in “make-out booths”. The narrator’s ultimate destination is an apartment where a Fairy (Faerie) Circle is gathering for the Saturnalia of the book’s title, an “orgiastic celebration” of the Winter Solstice. The Fairy Circle refers to a meeting of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural movement founded in 1979. The novel is scattered with references to non-fictional locations, books and music, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, Donna Summer and Arthur Evans’s book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture’ (also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). The novel, therefore, provides a sense of gay culture in Greenwich Village as it was forty years ago.
• True to life adventure stories. Vol. 1
  Judy Grahn (1940-) is a poet, lesbian feminist and advocate of women’s spirituality. She also wrote 1984’s ‘Another Mother Tongue’, a mythic queer history. In response to Grahn’s question, “what is a woman’s adventure story?”, this book presents stories by twenty writers which relate women’s direct experiences. Writing by working-class women is a strong feature of the collection, with an emphasis on maintaining the authors’ unedited natural language and spelling. The book was published by Diana Press, a feminist printing and publishing house founded in 1972 by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik. The cover illustration is by Karen Sjöholm, who also worked at the Press. The Press was vandalised in 1977, with damage to plates, paste-ups, books and machines. It closed in 1979.
• Witchcraft and the gay counterculture : a radical view of Western civilization and some of the people it has tried to destroy
  This book by Arthur Evans (1942-2011) is a rebuttal to the homophobic bias of “professional historians” and academics. Merging myth and history, the text is a self-proclaimed radical and subjective vision of a pre-Christian world of nature societies, which touches on many themes including Druids, Gnosticism, witchcraft, matriarchy, class politics and magic as a collective endeavour. Published by the Boston-based Fag Rag collective, it was edited by two of its members, Michael Bronski and Charles Shively, and chapters were initially published in the journals ‘Out’ and ‘Fag Rag’. Active in gay liberation movements, Evans was a co-founder of the Gay Activists Alliance and of the San Francisco Faerie Circle. This text is still in print in pirated editions and remains popular with Radical Faeries.
• Witches heal : lesbian herbal self-sufficiency
  Billie Potts (1940-2013) was one third of Elf and Dragons, self-described “lesbian witches”, who were a Woodstock-based women’s land collective, a publisher, distributor of herbs and part of a wider feminist spirituality movement. Women’s rural collectives were common in the USA at this time. Potts’s book is a guide to herbalism and an “access tool”, promoting self-sufficiency and encouraging lesbian women to reclaim their role as healers. The book proved controversial as its publication coincided with an acrimonious split within Elf and Dragons. Susun R. Weed accused Potts of using her work uncredited and asked feminist bookshops not to stock the book. The ‘Operation Tiger’ raids were not, therefore, the first attempts to restrict this book.