5/27/2023 0 Comments I Am a Woman by Ann Bannon![]() ![]() KVF: Many lesbian writers like myself have had inspirational role models like you as beacons. She is attractive and vibrantly intelligent and looks a fraction of her age. Recently retired from her position of Associate Dean at Sacramento State College (a Ph.D., she was a professor of Linguistics there for many years–a discipline reflected in the wonderful precision of her spoken words), she is not, as some of you might imagine, a tottery old lady leaning on her cane. ![]() ![]() We have become friends–another undreamed of event. Naiad Press put Ann’s books back in print in the 1980s, and Cleis Press is reissuing them with specially designed 1950s-style covers, so these books and their portraits of a vital period in our history are available to a new generation. She is one of our greatest pioneers and heroes. For women of my generation these are the good new days, and we know that Ann Bannon helped to save our lives. Back in 1957 I could not have imagined such a possibility, nor could I have dreamed of the community we have today. I met Ann in 1983, a meeting that remains one of the highlights of my life. I discovered who some of us were, how some of us lived. In the pages of that novel, and the four books to follow– I am a Woman, Women in the Shadows, Journey to a Woman, Beebo Brinker–I found a community of my own in a wondrous, mythical place named Greenwich Village. ![]() I was eighteen years old, isolated in my queerness, filled with self-loathing. I found Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out the year it was published, 1957, in Detroit. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |