Gay Liberation Information Service, American Friends Service Committee, Marilyn Murphy, and Cleis Press: Lesbian and Gay Print Culture, 1978 to 1993

Gay Liberation Press

Photograph

Lesbian and gay movement print culture archive, 1978 to 1993, tracing the passage from liberation era attacks on psychiatric authority to affirmative youth work, lesbian feminist cultural criticism, and the professional book trade built by independent presses. The earliest item is a 1978 Gay Liberation Information Service printing of Psychiatry and the Homosexual, first published in 1973 by members of the London Gay Liberation Front's Counter Psychiatry Group, while the sequence closes with Cleis Press's 1993 trade catalogue, where lesbian studies, sexual politics, health, fiction, and other fields appear as an organized publishing list. Bridges of Respect and Marilyn Murphy's Are You Girls Traveling Alone? document two additional routes by which lesbian and gay print entered broader institutional and intellectual settings: the American Friends Service Committee's national work with adults serving lesbian and gay youth, and book length lesbian feminist writing drawn substantially from the periodical culture of Lesbian News.

Archive of four publications, 1978 to 1993, comprising one pamphlet, one resource guide, one first edition essay collection, and one publisher catalogue.

[1] Psychiatry and the Homosexual: A Brief Analysis of Oppression. Gay Liberation Pamphlet no. 1. London: Gay Liberation Information Service, 1978. 32 pp. A collective critique of psychiatry's treatment of homosexuality, opening with the declaration that “The oppression of homosexuality in Western society is total.”

[2] Whitlock, Katherine. Bridges of Respect: Creating Support for Lesbian and Gay Youth. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1988. 97 pp. An affirmative resource guide for adults working with lesbian and gay youth, grounded in AFSC's Quaker tradition of opposition to discrimination.

[3] Murphy, Marilyn. Are You Girls Traveling Alone? Adventures in Lesbianic Logic. Los Angeles: Clothespin Fever Press, 1991. First edition. 235 pp. With an introduction by Marilyn Frye. Murphy's essays, many first published in Lesbian News, combine humor, personal narrative, and lesbian feminist critique; Catherine O'Dette described her method as “the Lesbianic equivalent of the Socratic Method.”

[4] Cleis Press 1993. San Francisco and Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1993. 23 pp. Trade catalogue organized into New Releases, Fiction, Lesbian Studies, Sexual Politics, Politics of Health, and other sections, with contributors and authors including Susie Bright, Pat Califia, bell hooks, Carol A. Queen, Andrew Ross, and Michael Warner.


The chronology begins with a British gay liberation text produced when activists were directly challenging psychiatry's authority to define and treat homosexuality. The Gay Liberation Front had identified psychiatry as a mechanism of oppression in its 1971 manifesto, and its Counter Psychiatry Group formed partly in response to the continued use of aversion therapies; Psychiatry and the Homosexual emerged from that work and argued that homosexuality required neither cure nor therapeutic correction. PubMed Central (PMC) Ten years later, Bridges of Respect shows an affirmative model operating inside a national service organization: AFSC later traced a direct line from the 1988 guide to its 1992 Bridges Project, established as a national clearinghouse for LGBT youth and organizations serving them. Friends Journal Murphy's 1991 collection records another infrastructure, the circulation of lesbian feminist argument through periodicals, anthologies, independent presses, feminist bookstores, and networks of writers including Frye, Lyon, Martin, Dobkin, Penelope, and Valentine. The 1993 Cleis catalogue captures the trade end of that development. Cleis cofounder Felice Newman later recalled that the press began by hand addressing and shipping books from a basement and that late 1980s wholesaling arrangements brought its titles before national accounts including Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Ingram, making the catalogue's sales and ordering apparatus evidence of a material change in how lesbian and gay books circulated. PublishersWeekly.com Moderate wrapper soiling and handling wear across the group; Psychiatry and the Homosexual and the Cleis catalogue show more pronounced surface soiling, the Cleis rear wrapper retains mailing labels and adhesive residue, and Murphy's front wrapper has a long diagonal crease with rubbing and edge wear; bindings remain intact and the visible interiors are clean. Overall good condition.

Item #23901

Price: $385.00