Remembering Taylor Mead: Queer, Beat Poet, and Warhol Superstar

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Victoria Brownworth in Remembrances

Taylor Mead, actor, Beat poet, performance artist, queer, died in Colorado on May 9th. Maybe in Denver, maybe not. Probably of a massive stroke. He had planned to return to New York where he had spent a flaming, fabulous youth. He was 88. (more…)

In Remembrance: Margaret Thatcher’s Queer Legacy

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Victoria Brownworth in Opinion, Remembrances

Whenever a former head of state dies, the revisionist history begins. It began with startling immediacy after Margaret Thatcher’s passing on April 8. The 87-year-old former Prime Minister was the longest serving PM of the 20th century and the first and only woman elected PM in the nation with the longest-serving female monarch in the world. She died from a stroke after having suffered from dementia for years as chronicled in John Campbell’s book, The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer’s Daughter to Prime Minister (and portrayed with Oscar-winning sincerity by Meryl Streep in the film version). (more…)

In Remembrance: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Victoria Brownworth in Remembrances

Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died April 3 in New York from complications of pulmonary disease. She was 85. (more…)

Writer and Critic Donald Richie, 88, has Died

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Edit Team in Remembrances

American ex-pat, writer, and critic Donald Richie, author of the memoir The Japan Journals, 1947-2004 and The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, an expansive English-language book on Japanese movies co-written with critic Joseph L. Anderson, died on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 in Toyko. He was 88. (more…)

In Remembrance: Julia Penelope, Lesbian Theorist

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Victoria Brownworth in Remembrances

It had been many years since I had heard the name Julia Penelope. Yet there was a time when her name was as common for me as those of Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Andrea Dworkin–lesbian theorists whose essays on lesbian-feminist theory helped mold my young lesbian mind into revolutionary lesbian thought and ideas. Thus when I learned that she had died on Jan. 19 at the age of 71, I was saddened–as much by her death as by the fact I hadn’t thought of her in years. I went down to my library to pull some of her books from the shelf and found that each of them was heavily underlined, with notes in the margins. (more…)

Gerda Lerner: Founder of Women’s Studies Movement Dies at 92

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Victoria Brownworth in Remembrances

Some people imprint you for life. Gerda Lerner was one of those people. As 2013 dawns, Women’s Studies and Women’s History are standard, credible, degree-producing disciplines. But when I was in college, Gerda Lerner was an almost mythic creature, doing something that no one else had done before: She was teaching women’s history. And at one of the premier colleges in the country, Sarah Lawrence, not someone’s living room in a little private salon. (more…)

Activist and Poet William Brandon Lacy Campos, 35, has Died

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Edit Team in Remembrances

Poet, writer, and activist William Brandon Lacy Campos, author of the poetry collection It Ain’t Truth If It Doesn’t Hurt and contributor to the anthology From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction, died on Friday night in his apartment in New York, New York. He was 35.  Cause of death is currently unknown. (more…)

Novelist Tereska Torrès, 92, has Died

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Edit Team in Remembrances

The French writer Tereska Torrès, who was best known for her controversial pulp novel Women’s Barracks, died on Thursday in her home in Paris. She was 92.

Torrès wrote 16 books in all, both novels and memoirs. Her last book, published earlier this year, was Mission Secrète (Tallandier), a memoir of detailing her campaign to “help the ‘black Jews’ of Ethiopia to emigrate to Israel.”

The NY Times reports:

Though she wrote more than a dozen novels and several memoirs, Ms. Torrès remained inadvertently best known for “Women’s Barracks,” published in the United States in 1950 as a paperback original.

The book is a fictionalized account of the author’s wartime service in London with the women’s division of the Free French forces. Though its sexual scenes appear tame to 21st-century eyes, the author’s forthright depiction of the liaisons of the women in her unit with male resistance members — and with one another — scandalized midcentury America.

Originally published by Gold Medal Books, “Women’s Barracks” has sold four million copies in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It was reprinted in 2005 by the Feminist Press in its Femmes Fatales series, which features pulp, noir and mystery novels by women of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

Torrès’ novel was condemned in 1952 by the U.S House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. The Committee found the book offensive and lurid.

Ms. Torrès, who was married for many years to the American journalist and writer Meyer Levin, stated in interviews that she was disappointed at what she viewed as the cultural ”fascination with the novel’s scenes of erotic love between women at the expense of all else.”

In an interview with the The Independent in 2007, Torrès stated, “I look on the Internet and I learn that I am the literary queen of the lesbians, the person who wrote the first lesbian, erotic pulp novel. I hate it. I hate it. If you look at Women’s Barracks, there are five main characters. Only one and a half of them can be considered a lesbian.”

Tereska was born in Paris as Tereska Szwarc in 1920, the daughter of Marek and Guina Szwarc. Her father, Marek, was a noted painter and sculptor and her mother, Guina, was a novelist and poet.

A war heroine, the powerful accounts of Torrès’ life superseded many of the narrative arcs found in her ficition.

The Independent reports:

In June 1940, Tereska, then aged 19, travelled through Spain and Portugal to join the small group of men and women who answered Charles de Gaulle’s appeal to continue the fight against the Nazis from London. She said she did not hear de Gaulle’s celebrated BBC radio broadcast and had never heard of this “obscure colonel”. But she decided that she must go to London as soon as a friend told her about his appeal because of her “shame” at Marshall Philippe Pétain’s surrender to the Germans.

She was enrolled into the women’s section of the Free French forces, originally known, as she delighted in pointing out, as the “corps feminin” [female body]. Her first novel, Le sable et l’écume, begun when she was 17, was published in 1946. The book was a critical success but brought in little money. Hence the decision to write Women’s Barracks, which was translated into English by Levin and sold to an American publisher of pulp novels. Torrès refused for more than half a century to allow it to be published in French because, she said, it gave the “wrong impression” of what the Free French forces were doing in London.

In 2005, the website Salon interviewed Torrès about the popularity of Women’s Barracks. Torrès stated:

French literature is full of sexual description — Flaubert and Proust and everything. I felt I was extremely tame! The book spoke very delicately about the few matters of sexual encounters. But so what? I hadn’t invented anything — that’s the way women lived during the war in London. Generally in London the atmosphere in the war was very free, because there was a feeling that every day could be the last. People later thought it was so shocking.

(Image via Babelio.com)

Arch Brown, Filmmaker and Playwright, is Dead at 76

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Jameson Currier in Remembrances

Filmmaker, photographer, playwright, and philanthropist Arch Brown died of natural causes at his home in Palm Springs, California, on September 3, 2012. He was 76 years old. (more…)

In Remembrance: Bill Brent, Groundbreaking Queer Sex Publisher

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Lori Selke in Remembrances

The first time I saw Bill Brent in person he was in Chicago for the Book Expo of America. He came down to my neighborhood to a little coffeehouse around the corner to eat cake and talk. We hit it off instantly. I didn’t think, then, about how rare that sort of ease can be, and I certainly didn’t think, “I’m going to work for that man someday,” or “I have finally met my mentor.” I thought, “nice guy! We’ll stay in touch.” And we did. (more…)