IN 1938, Daphne du Maurier’s melodramatic novel, Rebecca, became an international bestseller, and Hollywood producer David O. Selznick acquired the film rights for $50,000. Also in 1938, Alfred Hitchcock, then a noted director of British-made suspense movies, signed a contract with Selznick and was soon named to direct the screen adaptation of the novel. Thus began the making of Rebecca (1940) …

I first discovered the 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness when I was growing up in my academic parents’ house full of books. I became aware that this book had been banned in England, and I believed this was because the English legal system of the time still enforced Victorian morality, unlike the legal system in the U.S., where I was growing up “free.” I didn’t read the novel again until I was a fifty-year-old English instructor in Canada, looking for something new to say about it. I was amazed at how much the book seemed to have changed.

Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, women’s bookstores and concert events carved out important spaces for cultural expressions of lesbian feminism in North America. During the latter part of that era I belonged to a private lesbian club called Herizon in Binghamton, New York, a community with a large lesbian population …

Can three decades have passed since I sat in a darkened Manhattan cinema transfixed by the cherubic-faced Robby Benson giving the performance of a lifetime as the innocent and emotionally troubled Billy Joe in the movie Ode to Billy Joe? Any gay person watching that landmark flick could immediately identify with the conflicted protagonist and both sympathize and empathize with his plight.

This charming, delightfully queer pastoral, which was originally published in 1966, has been brought back by Little Sister’s Classics, a series of books created by Arsenal Pulp Press and the Vancouver bookstore Little Sister’s to revive gay and lesbian literary classics.

This charming, delightfully queer pastoral, which was originally published in 1966, has been brought back by Little Sister’s Classics, a series of books created by Arsenal Pulp Press and the Vancouver bookstore Little Sister’s to revive gay and lesbian literary classics.