In honor of the last week of Pride and the importance of LGBTQ teens (especially) to see how far we have come I am posting the following review of my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage (Thorned Heart Press) by the author Kathy Anderson.
Reading Loving Artemis is a full-body immersion into the 1970s, with the smells of joints and musk oil, the tastes of beer and lip gloss, and the sounds of motorcycles roaring down a highway.
It captures perfectly the days when young queers searched library catalog cards to find “homosexual” books, when teen lesbians felt they were the only ones in the world. More than a coming-of-age story, more than the love story of Artemis and Grace, the novel is also an illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable journey through the decades. I cared about these characters and loved seeing their lives come full circle by the book’s end in the 21st century.
Kathy Anderson, novelist and playwright
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
To read my review of Kathy Anderson’s novel, click here.
In honor of my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage (Thorned Heart Press; 2022) being featured in the Pride issue of Jae’s Pride issue of Sapphic Bingo, I’m reposting this short section of the beginning of Loving Artemis.
It is my pleasure to bring you this opening of my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage (published by Thorned Heart Press) that I read recently at an online reading. The excerpt is on YouTube and below that is the text. The novel starts out when one of the narrators is in midlife and attends the New York Pride march in 2012. This narrator sees a woman who reminds her of an old flame in her youth in the late 1970s and she wonders what made Art (short for Artemis) Art.
Enjoy!
Grace stood on the crowded sidewalk and watched the Dykes on Bikes contingent kick off the parade. The skyscrapers on both sides of Fifth Avenue echoed the roar: rage turned celebratory. Today was their day. Pride. Motorcycles, full of motion, crawled at parade speed. Hands gripped controls at the ends of shiny handlebars. Engines revved. Rainbow flags rippled red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Horizontal stripes danced. The colors represented the many nationalities and ethnic groups — all of them — in the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community. Like a telephoto lens, Grace focused in on a woman in the center of the crowd, and mirrored sunglasses stared back. The woman’s short, mahogany hair looked like it had been carved by the air, like wings. A thrill shimmied up Grace’s spine. The woman was riding slowly. but in Grace’s imagination, she zoomed. She reminded Grace of a girl from her adolescence, her lover (even though they didn’t call it that then), a girl named Art. Maybe Art had blazed through time — from high school to the present nearly three decades and a world of difference later. Art had been short for something, but Grace couldn’t remember what. Grace had known Art so long ago that it felt like a previous life; one that Grace never talked about. No one knew about her past except Thalia, Grace’s partner of twenty-four years. Thalia was a compassionate person. She almost always saw the best in everyone. Her voice lilted. Her hair fell to her shoulders in a cascade of loose curls of silver and shades of blond and brown. Beyond salt and pepper, her hair resembled shades of light. When Thalia looked up at Grace, her hair framed her face. Her crown caught the light and a halo appeared. When Thalia listened intensely, her deep-set blue eyes enveloped Grace. One time, when Grace mentioned that “No one believes me when I talk about my past.” Thalia responded by saying somberly, “I believe you.” In that moment, Grace relaxed into herself. Thalia made her feel understood. She was safe with Thalia. Grace never mentioned her past, even to her friends. She made sure never to tell her students. What kind of example would that set? Grace hadn’t used drugs for years and dealing them was in her past. She had come to understand that life was too precious to risk. She had seen firsthand that actions had consequences. Even Thalia had her limits. Before becoming involved with Grace, she had been involved with a woman who had a drinking problem and who got involved in messy situations. Thalia made it clear that the relationship hadn’t lasted long. Grace knew she was lucky
To order my most recently published novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
To see the Pride issue of The Sapphic Book Bingo, click here.
In honor of Pride month, I’m re-posting this review of a book about the gay pioneer Harvey Milk written by Lillian Federman. It’s important to remember our heroes, especially in these trying times. Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in the prime of his live, would have been 90 this year. (His birthday was in the end of May.)
Below is my review of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Federman published by Yale University Press. You can view the video on Book Tube or read the review below that.
His death changed a lot of lives — including mine, including yours. –Janet Mason booktube
When I first listened to the audiobook of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press in 2018, I thought I knew about Harvey Milk and would just be getting a refresher, something I could pass along. Harvey Milk is the gay leader who was assassinated in 1978 when he was 48. Having held a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for nearly a year, he was the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the United States. He was dubbed the Mayor of Castro Street — the gay neighborhood in San Francisco where Milk eventually moved and made his home.
As is described in the epilogue of the book, Milk was larger in death than he was in life.
His murder — along with the then San Francisco Mayor George Moscone — galvanized the LGBT community across the nation and the world. The anger that erupted after his murderer received a less than two-year sentence was too long-suppressed gay anger and it could not be denied.
His death changed a lot of lives — including mine, including yours.
The new information that I found in this book was in the details of his complex background and in the Jewish identity of this man who was raised in Long Island New York, a place that was rife with anti-Semitism during the holocaust when he and his family would listen to the news on the radio, fearful that the Holocaust could spread to America.
The book, which is part of Yale University’s Jewish Lives series, points out that Harvey Milk was informed by Tikkun olam — the Jewish philosophy of repairing the world. After he came out and was radicalized in San Francisco, he was always concerned about the disenfranchised and rose to elected office by building coalitions.
He was, in many ways, ahead of his time in understanding the power of uniting — or what is now called intersectionality.
He was accused by the (largely unsuccessful) gay establishment of the time as muddying the waters by focusing on the rights of all oppressed groups and not only on gay rights. But Harvey persisted. And he succeeded in furthering gay rights only as someone who was not concerned with “fitting in” and upending the status quo could. When I read Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press, I knew I was reading about an important part of LGBTQ history but I didn’t know how important it was until the last page was turned.
This is Janet Mason with reviews on You Tube and Spotify
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
This week I learned of the passing of my old friend Anita Cornwell, the pioneering author of Black Lesbian in White America, which was the first book that I know of which included the words Black and Lesbian in the title. Anita began to lose her memory more than fifteen years ago and was living in a long-term memory care facility. My partner and I haven’t visited her in recent years–since the pandemic–but I do have several memories of visiting her there before then. Anita was 99 years old at the time of her passing.
One visit, when Anita was laying in bed in her institutional room with a long rectangular window behind her, my helpful partner Barbara asked Anita if there was anything she could get for her. Anita, who was laying down because the dementia had caused her to forget how to walk, suddenly opened her eyes and replied that, “You can get me a million bucks.”
“What would you do with a million dollars,” asked Barbara.
“For starters, I’d buy a car,” said Anita.
Earlier on, when I was at the home and saw Anita, she told me she didn’t remember much but she did remember how she always had to get up early to go to work and how much she hated that.
Below is an article that I wrote about Anita for Sinister Wisdom that was published in the Spring of 2007.
May she rest in peace.
Janet Mason Anita Cornwell: Remembrance of Things Present
I first met Anita Cornwell in the early eighties at a reading that she and Becky Birtha were giving at a now defunct lesbian and gay community center located on Camac Street, one of the back alleys of center city Philadelphia. Anita was reading from her book, Black Lesbian in White America, published in 1983, the same year that I came out as a lesbian. The room where Anita and Becky (whose first book of short stories For Nights Like This One had just been published) read was small and cramped and filled with lesbians. There was no place in the world I would have preferred to be.
Many of the women in the room, Anita and Becky included, would come to be important members of my community, intimate friends, and fellow travelers in the life that still lay ahead of me. At the time their faces were still new to me, and these women I had yet to meet, like my list of books I had yet to read, were an endless source of fascination for me. Looking back on this reading, by these two women who were to become influential friends and alter my course as a lesbian writer, I’d like to say that my world split open, that I was shaken to the core, my perspective inalterably changed. But this reading was almost twenty years ago, and as memory goes, there are many things that have slipped away from me. I do know that this reading was an important part of my ongoing consciousness raising, which in those days seemed to be a daily, if not hourly, event. Since I can’t recall who I was with, I assume I went alone. But I didn’t feel alone in the intimacy of that small room which resounded with the leveling honesty of both Anita and Becky’s work. When the authors had finished reading, I went up to the front of the room and sat down with them. I remember that we talked for a while—and that what we talked about, perhaps, was substantial since less than a year later I ended up in the same writing group with them. But all I recall of our conversation is that I wore purple day-glo socks and the aspect of my personality that was reflected in this was not lost on Anita. Perhaps it was those purple socks that set the stage for a friendship. I read both of their books and wrote a review of Black Lesbian in White America for Tell-A-Woman, the newsletter of the Women’s Switchboard, a collective of which I had been a member, and also published a review in off our backs, the lesbian feminist newspaper out of Washington D.C. Anita’s book was fire under my heels. Shortly after reading and reviewing it, I attended a women’s liberation conference at Temple University. No doubt many powerful things were said at this conference. But what I remember most was that one of the women on the panel, a white, heterosexual, upper middle class woman who had made a name for herself in the feminist movement, answered a question from the audience by saying something to the extent that the women’s movement wanted to include Black women but that “those women didn’t want to join us.”
The audience was a very mixed group, Black and white women and other races, representing members of the local community as well as students and the academics who worked at the university. Hisses and objections to this obviously racist remark rifled through the audience, my own voice among the chorus. After the speakers were done the room was still buzzing with lively dialogue and debate. I entered into a conversation with a conservatively dressed Black woman, a few decades older than me, who had previously been talking to one of the few men in the room. Her mild amusement—perhaps at my youth, or my idealism, or my red high top sneakers— turned to nervousness as I mentioned the L-word in the title of Anita’s book. Then I paraphrased Anita’s statement “You seem to be saying that I have to be led either by white womyn or Black men. Why can’t I lead myself?” “That’s right!” the woman exclaimed, her vehemence and enthusiasm undaunted by the fact that her male companion was still standing by her side. Her consciousness changed on a dime. And that is the power of the written word. Anita came of age as a lesbian in the 1950s, and in her early writings—published in The Ladder and The Negro Digest—she was among the first, if not the first, to identify as a Black Lesbian in print. Born in the Deep South, “when integration was a term seen only in the dictionary,” Anita writes of herself as a young woman hanging out in the Village where “She was looking for some of them, but they were home in the closet growing shoe trees.” She writes of her involvement in the women’s movement when she was often one of the oldest women in the room as well as being one of the few Black women: “We of the fifties (and the forties and on back to when) not only had to operate from the closet but, worse yet, most of us seemed to exist in a vacuum.” Anita’s writing reminds us of the things that were and are specific to her generation, and at the same time she writes of truisms that we would do well to heed today. “Just as there is no such thing as a little bit of pregnancy, ditto with oppression,” she writes. And she reminds us that “with all the freedom of expression allowed today, Hollywood’s exploitation of womyn is more violent and vicious than even the most pessimistic Feminist would have believed possible just fifteen years ago.” And she stares truth in the face baldly by questioning the obvious, “Out of over 50 million womyn in this country, why are so many so content to be little more than charwomyn for men?” Anita Cornwell writes in a voice that is incisive—as Becky Birtha writes in the foreword of the book, Anita puts forth “…an acute political analysis of both racial and sexual oppressions…both radical and feminist…written long before those words were in common use together.” She writes of her collective struggles—joining her voice in a long interview in the mid-section of the book with that of Audre Lorde’s—and she writes of her individual struggles as a lesbian writer: “After staring at hundreds of blank pages….I learned to face myself. I learned that I not only existed but that I had every right to my own existence!” As strong as this voice is, it is my concern that it continues to be heard. Books go out of print, and politics—though they are still as necessary as ever— go out of fashion. History becomes yet another memory that slides away. I would like this not to happen with Anita. Anita writes in a voice that is above all else, unapologetically her own, a voice that is capable of reminding generations to come that they have every right to their own existence. And that voice is absolutely necessary. When I think of Anita it is always her voice that comes to mind. Along with her writing voice, is her speaking voice coming to me across the telephone wires. Our time together in the writing group was short lived since Anita’s schedule—writing nights and sleeping days—has made it increasingly difficult for her to participate in an ongoing group. Every few months—sometimes longer—there are gatherings where we get together. At least on one occasion we offended the hostess of a party—a mutual friend of ours—by sitting in the corner all night and talking about writing. More often there is Anita’s voice on the phone, an encouraging message left on my machine, or a late afternoon conversation that always alters my perspective—reminding me among other things of the virtues of patience, necessary for hanging in there over the long haul— and leaves me carrying the warmth of Anita’s voice with me for the rest of the day. Over the course of nearly twenty years there are many things that long-term friendship can contain. One of these things for me is the memory of my mother who loved Anita’s work. (Like Anita I was raised by a feminist mother who very much taught me to be my own person.) Another thing is the memory of a movement, the lesbian feminist milieu that I came out in which still shapes my relationship to myself and to the world. Then there is mutual respect, as Anita has always taken an interest in me and my work. But the most important thing about my friendship with Anita is the affection that one woman can feel for another, deeply connected through the years.
Janet Mason, author 