Lesbian Publishing History Naiad Press First Edition of Penny Hayes’s Yellowthroat 1988

Penny Hayes Lesbian Literature Pulp

First Edition

Hayes, Penny. Yellowthroat, 1988, is an early lesbian Western published by Naiad Press, the lesbian feminist press that brought gay and lesbian fiction to readers outside mainstream publishing channels. Hayes had begun writing lesbian Westerns with The Long Trail in 1986 and has subsequently been credited by her later publisher, Bella Books, with creating the lesbian Western as a distinct genre. Yellowthroat places a lesbian relationship within the conventions of frontier adventure, combining outlaw fiction, racial violence, revenge, and same sex romance in a Western setting.

Hayes, Penny. Yellowthroat. Tallahassee, Florida: Naiad Press, 1988. First edition. 230 pages. Softcover. 5.5 x 8.5 inches. The novel follows Margarita Sanchez, who sets out for revenge after her husband is killed in a racist lynching and subsequently encounters Julia Blake, a hostage who becomes her lover and Margarita’s first lesbian relationship. The publisher’s back cover describes the book as another tale from the author of The Long Trail, “filled with authentic and colorful detail of mining towns and gold dust fever and everyday western life,” emphasizing “how women with independent minds lived in the old west.” Contemporary cataloguing identifies its subjects as women outlaws in New Mexico and lesbians, placing female same sex desire within a genre traditionally organized around male frontier protagonists.

Published by Naiad Press during a period when the press was devoted to producing and distributing lesbian literature, Yellowthroat extended Hayes’s earlier use of Western conventions to center women whose romantic and sexual lives departed from the heterosexual assumptions of the genre. Bella Books, which later reissued Hayes’s work, credits The Long Trail with initiating her lesbian Western fiction and identifies Yellowthroat among the novels that followed. Cover very clean, with almost no wear to spine. Very good condition. An early Naiad Press lesbian Western combining the outlaw narrative with an explicit female same sex love story.

Item #20451

Price: $85.00