I don't know how or why, 32+ years after I was last a student there, the University of Michigan Women's Studies Department suddenly added me to their mailing list, but this week I received their (annual? biannual?) snazzy glossy magazine. For me, the highlight of a piece about a graduate seminar on "Lesbian Worlds" they currently offer was this reproduction of the cover of what may be the first 50s lesbian pulp fiction, the postwar French novel Women's Barracks by Tereska Torres, available in a reissued English translation from the Feminist Press.
There's much more about the course, taught by Professor Esther Newton, at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lesbian.history, including a number of other noteworthy images like these covers of The Ladder, the lesbian magazine published by Daughters of Bilitis, whose beloved co-founder Del Martin recently died.
All this got me briefly nostalgic for my Ann Arbor days and wondering whether the course covers any of the history of the lesbian community there during the first post-Stonewall years when I was part of it. Which in turn reminded me that some years back, when I was doing research for my first novel at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, I came across a newspaper clipping about an Ann Arbor protest by GAWK -- the Gay Awareness Women's Kollective -- in 1974 or 1975 and there in the photo, very young and very skinny, was me. I couldn't resist incorporating a reference to GAWK -- wasn't that the greatest name ever? -- into the novel, in a scene set, yes, in Ann Arbor in the 70s.
