The Lesbian Literary Luminaries of the South

Six lesbian feminist writers living in the South – Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest, Barbara Grier, doris davenport, Suzanne Pharr, and Ann Allen Shockley – wrote and published about lesbian lives beginning in the 1970s. Their work reimagined the South as a vibrant place where queer women could live and thrive in the midst of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Story by Julie R. Enszer | Illustrations by Abby Giuseppe

In 1979, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Mab Segrest, both in their early 30s and exploring their lives as lesbians, drove from North Carolina to Florida’s Sugarloaf Key to meet and interview Barbara Deming. Active in the major moral and political movements of the time, Deming visited Cuba, attended hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, worked with Women Strike for Peace, and was arrested in a Civil Rights demonstration in Birmingham. After Deming was injured in a car accident in 1971, she and her lover, Jane Gapen, moved to Sugarloaf Key, where, five years later, they bought a small lot with two houses and a guest cottage.

From this perch, Deming and Gapen continued to publish and write on feminist, civil, and human rights issues — and to welcome visitors like Pratt and Segrest. Today, Sugarloaf Women’s Village is a land trust committed to creating and promoting safe spaces for women.

When Deming died in 1984, Pratt wrote her obituary for the feminist newspaper off our backs. She described Deming as teaching people “through her stubborn holding on to her own truth, turning it over and over, and joining it to the truths of others. …” 

Those words and Deming’s ethics offer a radical moral reimagining of the lesbian feminist South. Through writing and publishing during the 1980s and 1990s, literary activists such as Pratt, Segrest, Barbara Grier, doris davenport, Suzanne Pharr, and Ann Allen Shockley crystallized and further extended the work Deming began. Today, their work operates as both genealogy and geography of a queer, powerful, transformative South. 

For Pratt and Segrest, their visit with Deming became a touchstone in their own development as lesbians, feminists, and activists. The conversations that transpired over their four-day stay sharpened a sense of moral responsibility to justice, particularly in the South, as well as a commitment to literary labors. 

Pratt and Segrest worked on Feminary, a feminist newspaper and, later, literary journal of the South. While both emerged as significant voices in lesbian feminist communities and in national political conversations in the following decades, it was the South that forged their moral imaginations.

Born in 1949 in Birmingham, Segrest taught, wrote, and engaged in radical feminist and lesbian activism in North Carolina after studying English at Duke during graduate school. Throughout the 1980s, she worked at North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence (NCARRV), where she challenged the Ku Klux Klan and racial extremists while creating a space for anti-racist North Carolinians to stand in opposition to hate and violence from these extreme groups. This work was documented in her first two books, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel and Memoir of a Race Traitor. In these books, Segrest analyzes race and structural racism in the world and, more specifically, in the South — applying an intersectional lens to her analysis of race as intimately intertwined with gender and sexual orientation. Segrest recently published a book about the asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia, Administrations of Lunacy, documenting the origins and ongoing legacies of slavery, racism, and the carceral state.

Like Segrest, Pratt models strategies to challenge white supremacy while reckoning with her own imbrication in it as a white woman born in Alabama. Pratt’s work explores family history and her actions to build cross-racial friendships and alliances. Her 1984 essay in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Essays on Anti-Semitism and Racism maps a rich terrain that acknowledges the histories and legacies of white supremacy and explores ways that white women can productively challenge it. Pratt’s poetry collections, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, and Rebellion, also grapple with racism and legacies of chattel slavery. Pratt later extended her thinking about race and sex and developed a nuanced understanding of gender, gender transgressions, and gender identity in the braided essays S/HE, which chronicles her meeting and falling in love with transgender writer and activist Leslie Feinberg.

Both Segrest and Pratt explore lesbian literary lineages in their work, tracing their attentions through imagined mothers and their gardens, as Alice Walker described this gesture in feminism. They find kinship with Angelina Weld Grimké, Carson McCullers, and Lillian Smith. From these readings and in their own work, they imagine a South where white women oppose racism and stand with African American people; they imagine a South where gay and lesbian people live openly, free from harassment. They imagine new worlds that might come into being through writing and publishing; through words, their words, and shared words.

The year Pratt and Segrest visited Deming, another lesbian feminist was moving to Florida. Founded in 1973 by Missouri-based Barbara Grier and her partner, Donna McBride, independent lesbian book publisher Naiad Press was developing momentum. Wanting a warmer climate and to be closer to their Naiad business partners Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford, the couple looked South.

Well before Naiad, Grier was known as a lesbian activist, writer, and publisher. For 14 years, she wrote a column about lesbian books in The Ladder, the publication of the midcentury lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, which she later edited. As a reader, she was unquenchable. Her collection Lesbiana, a compilation of Ladder columns and one of the first books from Naiad, is the most astute compendium of lesbian themes in literature published in the 20th century. Grier loved books, and by the middle of the 1970s, she was making them.

In the early 1980s, Naiad took flight with a series of successful books: Sapphistry by Pat Califia; The Black and White of It, a collection of short stories by Ann Allen Shockley; and the novel Faultline by Sheila Ortiz Taylor. Strong sales of these books enabled Grier to quit her hourly office job and focus full time on Naiad. Although Naiad published primarily genre fiction — including lesbian romance and mystery — Grier also published lesbian literary novels over the course of her career, including Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart, Katherine Forrest’s Curious Wine and An Emergence of Green, and reprints of midcentury novels like The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan). Had she not dedicated her life to lesbian activism through expanding reading possibilities for queer women, Grier might have been considered one of the extraordinary publishing moguls of the 20th century and one of the most influential editors of her era. 

Grier and McBride published lesbian desire, lesbian stories, and lesbian love; today their work continues to circulate in used-book marketplaces and increasingly receives attention, including a museum exhibit at Florida State University, spearheaded by Michael Franklin. Much of this transformative work was done in Florida’s Panhandle, where she and McBride built an economic engine of lesbian literature to drive lesbian revolutions.

Suzanne Pharr has produced clear and compelling prose to help people understand the politics of the moment and broader ideologies animating our times for the past 40 years. Yet Pharr’s primary identities are not poet, writer, or publisher; she is a community organizer and activist whose legacy resonates with the individual lives and communities transformed through her work.

Pharr founded and led Arkansas’ Women’s Project for decades. She is a co-founder of the multi-issue organizing initiative Southerners on New Ground (SONG), and, from 1999 until 2004, she led the Highlander Research and Education Center, a locus of organizing and popular  education in the South and Appalachia since its founding in 1932. At the center of Pharr’s work is the radical belief that individuals joined together can solve communal problems and build communities of care and compassion. In the face of right-wing insurgencies, political extremism, aggressive capitalism, and economic degradation in the South and around the world, Pharr holds values of justice, equity, and shared communication as vital to organization and activism.

Pharr’s writing also serves as a powerful testament to her organizing work; hers are essential theoretical texts of feminism and progressivism. Two of her earlier books, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism and In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation, articulate lesbian feminist resistance to white supremacy, grounded in Pharr’s experiences as an activist and organizer. More recently, the collection Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy provides an open window into her lifework. Editor Christian Matheis describes Transformation as “a movement book” that centers the work of movements as an art form in and of itself and also debuts a new format for publishing: open source.

A full generation older than many in the lesbian feminist activist community, Ann Allen Shockley was born in 1927 in Louisville, Kentucky. She had worked as a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, archivist, substitute teacher, librarian, and author when Bobbs-Merrill published her 1974 novel Loving Her — considered the first lesbian novel with an interracial couple, Renay Davis and Terry Bluvard, at its center. Immediate reception of the novel was mixed, and in subsequent years and decades, reactions continued to vary. While some praised Shockley’s work to bring Black lesbians into literature, others criticized her work, describing her characters, particularly the men, as flat and opining that the politics obscured her craft. For instance, in the early pages of Loving Her, Renay’s daughter Denise explains to Terry, “Daddy says the only thing we are to white people are maids and cooks and people who do dirty work.”

Shockley’s work must have enchanted Grier. In 1980, Naiad published Shockley’s collection of short stories, The Black and White of It, and in 1987 republished Loving Her for its growing lesbian audience. Then 60 years old, Shockley wrote in her author’s note that she “write[s] on weekends, holidays, and summer months, with my dogs, Tiffany and Bianca, watching the birthing pains. I wish it could be different.” 

With limited time and the usual writing challenges, Shockley produced an impressive literary output including two other novels, Say Jesus and Come to Me and Celebrating Hotchclaw. Shockley’s imagination created a world in which white and Black women could live, work, and love together. These literary representations are few, perhaps because of the continued segregation that shapes the material conditions of women’s lives today and in the recent past.

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While genealogies of lesbian feminism often locate its beginnings and key conceptual and theoretical innovations in Northern urban centers, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest, Barbara Grier, doris davenport, Suzanne Pharr, and Ann Allen Shockley all demonstrate its strong ties to the South. Chronicled in Jaime Harker’s book The Lesbian South, feminism, lesbianism, and publishing together offered intellectual, political, and social tools for women to remake the world according to a powerful moral reimagination that emerged from their lived experiences and their studies of the past. 

More than embodying a trajectory of progress or narrative of a “new” South, these women and dozens of other folks around them formed a web of lesbian feminists, of anti-racism practitioners, of progressives living in a place they loved, in a place they landed, or a place they grew up. They wrote the South as a place for struggle: to reckon with a racist past; to challenge ongoing racism; to interrogate whiteness and understand white privilege while resisting and refusing it; and to address — even topple — white supremacy. They created a place to struggle and a place to engage and reimagine. And a place to write and publish, which is what these women did.

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