OUR LESBIAN ROOTS.

BOOK BY BOOK, THESE COURAGEOUS WOMEN PLANTED THE SEEDS OF 20TH-CENTURY HERSTORY 

A hundred years ago homosexuals hid between the lines of vaguely gay stories. But 20th-century writers gradually abandoned queer-coded literature and began a literary tradition rich with gay and lesbian characters and situations. These trailblazers and their contemporaries, represented here, have crafted a legacy of defiant prose and poetry chronicling our lives.

A CENTURY OF LESBIAN WRITERS

1996 African-American author Sapphire herself stops the bidding on her first novel, Push, at a reported $500,000. Even so, the size of the advance sets new (and unpopular) standard at major houses, which are at last willing to pay for gay and lesbian stories.

1995 Urvashi Vaid's remarkable Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation argues that gays and lesbians are being distracted from the goal of full acceptance by the mainstream's counteroffer of surface tolerance.

1994 Achy Obejas's We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? is among a group of newly popular writings by Latina lesbians. During the 1990s poetry collections by Cherrie Moraga and Erika Lopez's Flaming Iguanas also show up on lesbian best-seller lists.

1989 Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman, with illustrations by Diana Souza, is a groundbreaking children's book that features openly gay characters. The book inspires a pile of similar titles from mainstream publishers all over the country.

1988 Two women who blend fictional experimentation with political critique become literary stars: Dorothy Allison publishes Trash, a collection of feminist stories, and Sarah Schulman brings out After Delores, a "narrative of loss" that wins the American Library Association's Gay and Lesbian Book Award.

1977 M.F. Beal's lesbian crime novel Angel Dance kicks off a new subgenre of queer women's fiction. Katherine V. Forrest's Kate Delafield mysteries (including 1984's Amateur City) and Claire McNab's Lessons in Murder (1988) are among the most popular entries.

1974 Patricia Nell Warren publishes The Front Runner, an all-time favorite love story for gay and lesbian sports fans. Jenifer Levin and Carol Anshaw later join the ranks of lesbians who write movingly about sports and love.

1973 Rita Mae Brown, destined to become the most-read lesbian author in the country, publishes Rubyfruit Jungle, the first crossover lesbian novel. Other commercial hits follow, like Blanche McCrary Boyd's Nerves (1973) and Lisa Alther's Kinflicks (1976).

1969 Judy Grahn, Wendy Cadden, and other women cofound Woman's Press Collective. 1973; Author June Arnold founds Daughters Inc. with her lover, Parke Bowman; writer Bertha Harris (The Joy of Lesbian Sex); and feminist political guru Charlotte Bunch. These presses engender writing like Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), the first major theoretical work of feminism's second wave, and predate contemporary houses like Naiad and Firebrand Books.

1968 Audre Lorde becomes one of the first black lesbian voices in print with The First Cities, a poetry collection. Cheryl Clarke (Living As a Lesbian, 1986), June Jordan (Naming Our Destiny, 1989), and others continue the tradition.

1962 Marion Zimmer Bradley begins her "Darkover" series of pansexual science fiction novels, a form further explored by Joanna Russ (The Female Man, 1975) and Sally Miller Gearhart (The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, 1978).

1936 Djuna Barnes's Nightwood presents lesbian romance as tormented and unfulfilling, a theme revisited repeatedly over the next few decades, most memorably by Patricia Highsmith (writing as Claire Morgan) in 1952's The Price of Salt. The 1960s will see a transformation, with overtly lesbian-positive novels like Jane Rule's The Desert of the Heart (1965) and May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965).

1924 Radclyffe Hall's The Unlit Lamp and The Well of Loneliness (1928) are groundbreaking novels exploring lesbianism as an acceptable way of life, a message largely abandoned until Mary McCarthy's The Group in 1963.

1906 to 1915 Radclyffe Hall composes five volumes of poetry, four during her turbulent affair with Mabel Batten. Hall's work inspires Elsa Gidlow, one of the first poets to publish explicitly lesbian work. Adrienne Rich carries on the tradition in the '50s, followed by Judy Grahn (Edward the Dyke, 1971) and Jewelle Gomez (The Lipstick Papers, 1980), among others.

Pela is the Arizona arts correspondent for National Public Radio.