Items

• Aphrodisiac : fiction from Christopher Street
  This anthology of “the best fiction from Christopher Street” was praised for its “literary excellence” by ‘Publishers Weekly’. It compiles eighteen short stories published in “America’s leading gay magazine”, from authors including Jane Rule, Edmund White, Tennessee Williams and Kate Millett. The magazine, named after the location of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, was founded in 1976 and published monthly until the mid-1990s. As well as original fiction, it featured writing on gay politics and culture, interviews and satirical cartoons. A series of essays about the unfolding AIDS crisis in New York by Andrew Holleran – one of the featured authors in this collection – was later published as ‘Ground Zero’.
• Human warmth : & other stories
  Twelve short stories featuring gay and lesbian characters, which strive for “some kind of universality, even when dealing with very specific homosexual content”, according to the author’s preface. Daniel Curzon (1938-) is a former journalist for publications such as ‘Gay News’, and a now-retired professor of English. In the mid-1970s, Curzon edited and published ‘Gay Literature – A New Journal’, a literary quarterly which folded after eighteen months. Following ‘Something You Do in the Dark’ (Putnam’s,1971), dubbed the “first gay protest novel”, Curzon wrote (and sometimes self-published) several other short story collections, novels, plays, poems and humorous titles, including ‘The Joyful Blue Book of Gracious Gay Etiquette’. His novel ‘From Violent Men’ was also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’.
• 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.