It’s been a bruising summer, but despite personal crises and the global descent into a violent dark age, I’ve managed to make some headway on my own projects. A recent trip to the archives of the San Francisco Public Library yielded some insights into the history of Naiad Press, which holds a reputation for being one of the most influential lesbian presses in the U.S. during the late twentieth century. In addition to publishing a number of original works of lesbian fiction, the press also reprinted Carol Morgan’s The Price of Salt in 1984 (it wouldn’t appear under Patricia Highsmith’s own name until the early 1990s). It’s pretty uncontroversial to say that Naiad and lead editor Barbara Grier had a role to play in establishing The Price of Salt as a “classic” of gay and lesbian literature, but the novel’s publication history provides some insight into how that process happens–or at the very least, enables us to see that re-classification and conferral of value as a process, rather than as deserved recognition long delayed by the homophobia of publishers or, say, a heteronormative reading public.
I’m wary about how much of my research to post here, but writing for an (imagined) public helps to motivate me when, frankly, the shotgun blast of bad news I wake up to every morning saps a lot of my energy, even before the day itself has started. I’ll continue to post snippets of things as they come up.
Steven A. Ruszczycky, PhD 