The only time I've been on a magazine cover ... so far

A couple of weeks ago, I did a Zoom interview with Julie Enszer and Chloe Berger of Sinister Wisdom about my time on the off our backs collective. I can't remember my exact dates as a collective member, as opposed to an intern or friend, but I was at the magazine between about 1985 and 1990. (I was the world's worst intern, mostly because I had no idea what an intern was--we didn't have them in the U.K. back then. I'd also never had an office job--so I was maddeningly oblivious to concepts like the office worker needing to know when I might show up and for how long.)

Chloe and Julie asked great questions, and I immodestly suggest you watch the video or read the transcript linked in the top matter. (I also recommend carol anne douglas' take on her much longer time on the collective. And yes, I can only write collective members' names in lower case.)

We talked about how getting involved with a feminist publication was a great, concrete way to get involved with feminism, because it was a project with a meeting place and a schedule and a concrete purpose. We talked about the big issues in feminism during that period--the sex wars, the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance, and the fallout from the Barnard conference--and the pieces I remember from that era. I admitted that my favorite perk was getting to see the books and especially the exchange subscriptions with other feminist magazines, and I talked a lot about how being part of the off our backs collective, especially as the office worker, was the best journalism training I can even imagine.

(My home away from home for two weeks in February.) Photo courtesy of UVA.

Excuse this newsletter's quiet start to 2026. I spent the beginning of the year getting ready to spend another couple of weeks with Rita Mae Brown's archives at the University of Virginia. And now I'm back from an incredibly useful trip.

I must admit, I didn't mumble, "OH MY GOD!" quite as often this time around, but you only see, for example, your subject's mother's response to her most famous work once. In the recent visit, I was also mostly focused on "unprocessed" papers--bigger boxes that have gotten just a quick once over from the archivists--material that is, by definition, less organized and categorized. (Last September, I could look at the finding aid and think, "Oh, I don't care about [topic the librarians had carefully separated out and arranged into folders]," and skip them guilt-free; this time, I had only a general sense of the contents of each box.)

For all that, I learned a lot from my first visit, which meant several things went better, or at least more efficiently, this time around. I have been surprised at how hard it is to find practical advice about using archives, so just in case anyone reading this needs it, here are a couple of tips from me.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening on Zoom, attending Bio Lab 2026, the annual "online forum" of Biographers International Organization, a name surely chosen so they could use the acronym BIO.

It was great. There were four sessions, all presented by eminent biographers, sharing tips and offering advice on--you'll never guess!--writing biography. I asked questions, I made notes, I tried to maintain a poker face when the opening speaker, the only person whose presentation was pre-recorded, made some statements I disagreed with. (What's that? There's no great standalone biography of Betty Friedan? Nonsense, Rachel Shteir's Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter may be slim, but it's excellent--and left me a tiny bit more sympathetic to Friedan than I was when I started it!)

I had a blast, and I learned a lot, but I almost didn't recognize myself.

I've never been one for taking classes. I think the sum total of my "adult education" is: a few language classes; a series on "investigative journalism" at the Institute for Policy Studies in about 1985--I didn't really learn anything except, thanks to the instructor's habit in the break, that red peppers could be eaten as snacks; and a course on "Scotland in Union and Dis-Union" here in Edinburgh.

Happy New Year! It's been a great one for me so far: With two days to go before the exhibition closed, we finally went to see "Resistance" ("how protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest"), which has been at a gallery that is at most a five-minute walk from our apartment for nearly six months!

I am one of those people who loves to do end-of-year look-backs. (I don't miss having a "jobby job," but I kind of miss annual reviews.) So, today, although absolutely no one asked for it, here are some of my favorite books of 2025.

First, my stats. I read 81 books; 52 works of nonfiction, and 29 fiction. When it comes to the gender breakdown of the authors whose works I read, 46 were by men, 31 by women, and four were anthologies or male-female co-authors. Once again, audiobooks made up the vast majority of my listening: My format breakdown was 62 audiobooks, 11 physical books, and eight on Kindle. You can see the full list of what I read here, but the following were my favorites:

Last week, Ancestry.com absolutely, totally, and utterly consumed my attention. I was late for Zoom meetings, missed both lunch and dinner one day, and gave myself a stitch having to run (OK, walk-run) to a hair appointment because I just had to do one more search before I left the house.

I've always enjoyed hearing friends' (and friends' mother's) stories about their adventures in genealogy, but since I'm shockingly incurious about my own family tree, I had never dabbled.

I love biographies, but I must admit that I tend to zone out in those early chapters about the subject's forebears--I have a hard time keeping the generations straight and always get a bit lost in the branches. With a different subject, I might have skimped on the family history, but since Rita Mae's origin story is such a big part of her mythos--and of her early work--that wasn't an option. It's also a complicated story. As Rita Mae put it in her memoir, Rita Will, "we're all mixed up worse than a dog's breakfast."

Figuring things out so that I can explain them elegantly was quite the task, but oh what fun. I now understand why people become obsessed. It's a(n often frustrating) puzzle, a research challenge, and a fascinating slice of history. Still, I'm now comfortable negotiating Census records, city directories, and records of births, marriages, and deaths.

This week I got sidetracked on what I recognize is an "I know this will probably end up being a sentence (at most) in the book, but I can't stop researching it anyway" rabbit hole.

It started with an open letter that Daughters Inc., the lesbian-feminist press that first published Rubyfruit Jungle, sent to the feminist media in 1977, explaining why they had not been sellouts when they sold mass-market rights for that Rita Mae Brown novel to Bantam, a mainstream press.

I'm back from the Pacific Northwest, and more important, I think my brain is finally in the same time zone as my body. I've never been one of those people who claimed to be immune to jet lag--in an era when I was less, um, together, the only time I wasn't late to work was in the immediate aftermath of international travel--but it's way worse these days. It's partly age, but I think it's mostly the enshittification of air travel. With sad resignation, I've realized I need to stop buying the cheapest possible plane ticket if I want to be present for the first few days of a trip, not to mention the immediate aftermath of getting home. Waah!

Still, the trip was definitely worth a few days of messed-up sleep. I got to hang out with some new friends and some very old ones. I spent more time in cars in those two weeks than I have in the last three years. (Thanks for all the rides!) I got a tiny insight into how things work at a large-ish state university. (I spoke at one class where we donned wireless mics and strode around while talking with the students.) I got to visit some really great bookstores--special shoutout to Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene. The two where I spoke--Up Up Books in Portland, Oregon, and Charlie's Queer Books in Seattle--were awesome. And I was so happy to see the Outlaws & Outliers exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum.

Lots of people came out, even in Seattle, even though the Mariners were playing in the elimination game of the American League Championship Series--as close as the team has ever been to the World Series--while I was talking. Honestly, though, I'm not sure I could've handled more people from my past at the Seattle event. There were folks from my days at Seal Press (original recipe), Encarta, early Slate (and someone from current Slate), vanpool, and a few I know from even earlier. As with last summer in New York and DC, it's slightly maddening to get to see people you haven't hung out with in years (some I hadn't seen in decades) but also not have a chance for a proper catchup. I also met lots of people for the first time, including some subscribers to this newsletter, which was wild.

(Not the best photo of either of us, but ...)

I just got back from two weeks in Charlottesville–where it was colder than in Edinburgh. OK, outside, in the real world, it was many degrees warmer, but I spent most of my time in the freezing confines of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library Reading Room, looking at the papers of Rita Mae Brown.

I spent every possible minute in said reading room—I’m still upset about a slightly late arrival one morning, caused by slow service in the student-run coffee shop. This represented approximately 61 hours of flipping through folders. There are 188 boxes of processed material (and approximately 30 unprocessed boxes) in the collection, of which I looked at 40. I was in full “turn every page” mode, so I felt good about that rate of productivity. (Obviously, I had prioritized boxes based on the finding aid—it wasn’t a random file flip.)

It was a fantastic experience. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’ve been researching increasingly intensively for about 18 months, but the information and “attitude” I found in the papers variously surprised, shocked, and challenged a lot of the things I thought I knew.

I’ve been working on a book proposal for the last year or so … and as this announcement from Publishers Marketplace indicates … it was bought by Bloomsbury. Wow!

I’m writing a biography of Rita Mae Brown, early lesbian-feminist activist, author of what might be the best-selling lesbian novel of all time (Rubyfruit Jungle—its only rival is The Price of Salt/Carol), quite possibly America’s first celesbian, and now the author of more than 50 (you read that right) mysteries featuring chatty animals and murder-adjacent fox hunters.

My interest in Rita Mae goes way back—Rubyfruit Jungle was one of the first lesbian novels I read, and as a teenage tennis fan, I gazed upon her in 1980 when, to the delight of the British tabloids, she accompanied her then-girlfriend Martina Navratilova to Eastbourne and Wimbledon. The other week I had lunch with my college roommate, and I was shocked to learn that she, like me, can still recite the lines from one of the poems in Brown’s book The Hand That Cradles the Rock that for some reason I wrote on our apartment window. (We could’ve cleaned it off a lot sooner than we did, but …) In 2017, I persuaded Slate that I should profile her, and I spent a weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, getting a tour of her farm and attending the last hunt of the season. I’m pretty sure that was the only assignment I ever totally and utterly failed to deliver. The more I read about her, the less I could bear to focus on just one or two aspects of her life.

It’s the height of summer—that’s right, it’s 65 degrees Fahrenheit here in Edinburgh, officially “phew, what a scorcher” territory for the Scottish capital—so let’s do a quiz.

I found “A Queery Query: Test Your Gay IQ,” by Ian Young, in the Nov. 15, 1979 issue of The Advocate. It’s a tad dated (hardly a surprise, given that it’s 46 years old), and a bit heavy on gay-male culture (I’ll spare readers the task of deciding whether Radclyffe Hall is a boys’ school, a country house, or a lesbian author), but I thought I’d pull out a few of the questions for your quizzing pleasure. Answers down below. I’ll put the whole thing at the bottom of the page so you can go deep on gay royals if you’d like.

Note: The language is direct from 1979.

1. In January 1927, a gay play called The Drag opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Who was the author?

2. Give the titles of the following plays: a) The country life of a lesbian couple is broken up when one of them is seduced by a man. A falling tree crushes the other one. b) A handsome young man seduces all the members of a household. c) A little girl spreads a rumor that two teachers are lesbian lovers. d) A man robs a bank to buy his lover a sex-change operation. e) A tweedy actress loses her job and then her lover. f) A young king has an affair with his brother who then goes mad. The king drowns in a marsh. g) When a lawyer’s closetry leads to the death of a young gay man, he helps to expose a blackmail ring. h) A gangster brutalizes friends and enemies alike but brings his mother tea every morning and takes her to the seaside. i) Twenty-six lesbians and gay men talk about their lives.

3. Rose O’Neill was a lesbian poet. But she made her money as the creator of a popular item of Americana. What was it?

4. Why did author Rita Mae Brown disguise herself as a man?

5. What French artist asked, “Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses when girls are so much prettier?”

I’ve been bonkers busy the last couple of weeks, as a couple of projects I’ve been working on for more than 18 months (one fitfully, the other consistently) are at peak “pay attention to me.” (More news coming on both of those soon, I very much hope.) HOWEVER, work can’t stop me from looking through 1970s queer magazines, and how better to while away a summer afternoon than by laughing at—I mean sharing historical appreciation of—some classic display ads.

The first thing to say is that most of the display ads you’d find in the gay press in the 1970s were predictable—photos of cute mustachioed naked guys doing things you don’t normally do naked, like eating dinner; photos of naked guys shot from behind to reveal tan lines so deep that these days you’d think they might be tattooed on; and dull ads for travel agencies (remember them?) and tax preparers and law offices.

But there were a few surprises. For example: companies tried to sell some truly HEINOUS garments to gay men. Check out these items. The first ones are especially mind-boggling.

Taken from June 14, 1978 issue of The Advocate

I know how this looks, but I promise I'm not running for Congress!

I spent Saturday morning refreshing a webpage to see where I was in a queue to buy tickets. They went on sale at 10, and having set not one but two alarms (one for 9:50, one right on the hour), I clicked "get in the queue" just as tickets went on sale ... and found that I was 1,658th in line! I just had to go check a screenshot, because that number seems impossibly high--this wasn't one of the concerts of the summer I was trying to get into, it was the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Impossible, but true.

You've surely heard of the "Edinburgh Festival," which is actually at least four festivals: the Edinburgh International Festival (broadly speaking classical/non-popular music and "legitimate" theater from around the world), the Fringe (technically Edinburgh Festival Fringe--comedy and pretty much anything else imaginable--and lots that I wish were unimaginable), the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the book festival--all of which take place in the month of August.

In other words ... at a time when the city is so crowded that lots of residents get the hell out of town (it used to be that homeowners could finance a new bathroom by letting out their home to festival performers/attendees, but short-term rental restrictions have made that much trickier of late); when there are so many other entertainment options; and when vacation-loving Scots head to sunnier climes (which is just about anywhere in the world--and I am not complaining) ... 1,657 people hit the "buy tickets" button before me in the first milliseconds after 10 a.m. What a great city this is!

Jane Cholmeley and me after the Lighthouse event.

On Wednesday, June 4, on the eve of A PLACE OF OUR OWN's paperback edition pub day, I did an event at Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh's radical bookstore and a fantastic resource for the city and the community beyond.

Wednesday night's program was called "Queer Women/Queer Spaces" and it consisted of Lighthouse owner Mairi Oliver interviewing Jane Cholmeley and me about said spaces. Jane was one of the owners of Silver Moon, one of London's two feminist bookstores, which was located in the heart of the UK's traditional bookstore street, Charing Cross Road. (No more, alas—it still has a couple of used bookstores, but it's crap-shop central these days.) I had pre-ordered A BOOKSHOP OF ONE'S OWN, Jane's book about the creation, life, and end of Silver Moon, and picked up my copy on pub day, but it took me 18 months to sit down and read it.

It's so great! It's written in a very straightforward style with some good, dry British humor. Jane is very English—a vicar's daughter with an RP accent, who went to boarding school, has that posh name—and who changed thousands of lives with the store she owned and ran with a few other women, most notably Sue Butterworth, her partner in business and for several years, including the crucial setup stage of the store, in life.

Read to the end, and I promise this photo will make sense!

On Wednesday, May 28, it will be a year since my first book was published! Just as it seems crazy to me that we are 5/12 of the way through 2025, I cannot believe that 365 days have passed since my U.S. pub date! So, one year in, a few thoughts on being an author.

Publishing a book is a massive feat. I had worked in publishing (albeit in a different era), so I knew how much is involved—which led me to imagine that once I had one in stores, I would have no other purpose in life beyond promoting the book. Sit next to me on a train? “Would you like to see my book?” Pop by to read the meter? “Would you like to see my book?” Serve me in a restaurant? “Would you like to see my book?”

I didn’t do that—I don’t think. We don’t even have a copy in the living room. (Now, put your head into my office, and you’ll see a whole shelf of them, along with a framed version of the New York magazine “Approval Index” that had A PLACE OF OUR OWN at the intersection of Brilliant and Highbrow—a tad more brilliant than the Booker-nominated (and amazing) Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden, and a hair less highbrow than Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Roommates, one of my favorite novels of 2024, which I am shocked hasn’t won tons of prizes.) I pictured myself having a copy of my book to hand at all times and whipping it out at the slightest provocation. That hasn’t happened, but maybe that will change (in the UK at least) when the paperback comes out on June 5—a lighter load!

I read some fantastic books in April, so let's talk about them right here!

My first book of the month was HANG ON ST CHRISTOPHER, by Adrian McKinty--perhaps my favorite of the three dude-penned thriller series that I listen to as soon as they are published. (The other two are Mick Herron's Slough House books and SA Cosby's not-technically-a-series series set in Virginia.) This was the eighth, and maybe the last, of the Sean Duffy books. Duffy is a Catholic cop in the (very Protestant) Royal Ulster Constabulary during the period of the Troubles. He's smart, sensitive, with exquisite taste in music and art and books--that guy would love A PLACE OF OUR OWN--but the thing that always blows me away is how effectively McKinty introduces truly shocking aspects of Northern Irish history into every book. I fancy myself relatively well-informed, but I always seem to find myself Googling something like "Oliver North, Belfast" and discovering that what seemed like an unlikely flight of fancy was actually the dirty truth. This one was the least shocking in that regard, but Duffy was at his absolute Duffy-est, which made up for it. (Reading this book also allowed me to have an informed conversation about the Irish town of Knock with a woman I met in Lockerbie train station the other day!)

There are so many important things I know nothing about, and one of them is how East Pakistan became Bangladesh. I addressed that with THE BLOOD TELEGRAM: NIXON, KISSINGER, AND A FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE, by Gary J. Bass., which was fascinating and maddening and superinformative, but OMeffingG the horror that was Nixon and Kissinger! What a hateful pair of bigoted snakes! Foul.

Pies!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Glasgow Bell about a Scottish cultural institution that I love: A Play, a Pie, and a Pint. This theater company has a very clear mission statement, which I'll tell you about by quoting from my story:

A Play, a Pie, and a Pint was dreamed into being in 2004, when David MacLennan’s radical theatre company lost its funding, and publican Colin Beattie was looking for a way to bring cultural programming to Òran Mór, the new venue he was launching in the West End.

MacLennan hated the performing arts’ dependence on the vicissitudes of public subsidies and vowed to create a theatre project that would cover its own costs. The principles MacLennan and Beattie came up with — a new play every week, lasting under an hour, performed at lunchtime, with food and drink included in the ticket price — still apply today.

I think I've mentioned before that I have become an audiobook addict (I'd typically avoid that word, but I swear that when I'm coming to the end of a book, my desire to line up a new one is a bit extreme). I also curate a list of books that are good to fall asleep to--they can't be utterly awful (that would be aggravating), but they can't be too good or I'd get really involved with them and stay awake listening. When I came across audiobook versions of Jan Morris' "Pax Britannica" trilogy, about the rise and decline of the British Empire, I figured they would be good zzz-inducers. I knew her as a travel writer (and for her transition memoir, Conundrum, of course), but I was guessing she'd be fall-asleep-to tier as a writer of history. WOW, WAS I WRONG!

I've now listened to the first two books, Heaven's Command and Pax Britannica, and they are magical. The scope of expertise is absolutely astonishing; over the course of a page (I've just opened to one at random--happily I found a used copy in my local Oxfam bookstore), she ranges from India to South Africa to Canada, and her writing style is so vivid that I now plan to dip into Heaven's Command for inspiration whenever my own prose feels a bit dull.

Here's a--randomly selected; I just let the book fall open--paragraph:

Me in Gay's the Word (Photo by Jim MacSweeney)

Hello again! Since your eyeballs last rested on one of my newsletters we made a brief visit to London, which was fabulous. I must confess that quite a bit of time was devoted to book and stationery shopping (Edinburgh isn’t a Japanese stationery wasteland, but nor is it a haven), but we also saw some friends (including three people we almost literally ran into while exiting the London Review Bookshop—since none of us lives in London, that felt like a freaky coincidence) and wondered at the marvels of Lebanese ka’ak bread at Ta’mini next door but one to Gay’s the Word.

Speaking of Gay’s the Word … what a joy to visit a thriving queer bookstore. I had seen a story in The Bookseller about Jim MacSweeney, the manager of 27 years, stepping down and longtime deputy Uli Lenart moving into his shoes. In that story, MacSweeney said of the store, “Sales have doubled then increased again. … It’s dementedly busy.” Being a cynical person, before I visited, I figured there was a pinch of PR dreamcasting in that statement, but … NOT AT ALL. Every time we popped in (we were staying nearby, so that was more than once) or walked by (even more times because of Ta’mini) it was PACKED. Like, so packed that at times it was hard to see entire sections because of the crowds.

This photo, taken in Manchester a couple of months ago, has nothing to do with the topic of this newsletter. I just like all the teeth.

For the last few months I've been doing freelance editing a couple of days a week for the Manchester Mill publications--local sites for Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow, and London. I'm having trouble knowing how to describe them: Websites? Newsletters? Publications? Substacks? (Out of date, since most have now migrated to Ghost, but no one says, "I read a great Ghost this morning"!) All those terms are broadly accurate. but none feels quite right. I was a subscriber to the Manchester Mill before I worked with them, and I don't know that I ever went to the website--to me they were newsletters I read in my email inbox. But when I wanted to provide links in the first sentence, I went to the web, since that is where their stories are archived.

The Mill is not the subject of this newsletter--though I have been SO IMPRESSED with every aspect: smart management, great writers, dogged reporting, a real commitment to local journalism; if you have a few extra bucks a month and an interest in any of these cities or Britain generally, I HIGHLY recommend you subscribe to at least one. Nor is it the tricky business of new media nomenclature. (Phew!) The topic is, I guess, the challenge of newsletters. Like this one I haven't sent out in nearly five months, despite writing "newsletter" on my to-do list every other weekend.

The thing I've found tricky is that I said it would be a collection of interesting things I found while researching my book A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN'S CULTURE, but that book is out now (and available in bookstores just about everywhere), so I am no longer diving for those particular pearls. (Pause to ponder Pearl Diver, the 1970s lesbian-feminist magazine from Portland, Oregon, which didn't hesitate to put drawings of naked women on its cover. Also that as a confirmed water-hater, pearl-diving really is the job I am least suited for.) I have been working on another book for 18 months or so--and WOW have I found some amazing things while digging around the internet and reading old magazines--but I can't talk about that project until--inshallah!--it sells.

Hello! It’s been a while. Between moving (not exactly a gas, but I’m happy to have done it), traveling to the Midwest for some book events (a gas, and a joy to meet a bunch of women who read this newsletter), and hosting some American visitors (massive fun), I’ve been a bit distracted. But as we approach the last quarter of the year, I’m ready to return to routines (the good kind) and productivity (the non-masochistic kind).

Later this week I’m going to be starting a part-time freelance editing gig at The Mill, a very exciting local-media startup in the UK. “Very exciting” is usually business-speak for “dull as ditchwater,” but in this case, I mean it. I wasn’t looking for work, but the energy of founder Joshi Herrmann and the kind of writing they’re publishing made me want to re-commit to the 9-to-5, at least for a couple of days a week!

Now that Q4 is right around the corner, I’m also keen to get back to work on the proposal for my next book. I’ve been researching, my favorite bit, for a while, and I’ve discovered some CORKING nuggets, but I have to pause that fun and do the less exciting job of writing the proposal.