The heir to Naiad is Bella Books of Ferndale, Michigan, run by Kelly Smith, who spent eighteen months working for Naiad in the late 1990s. Grier has been very supportive of Bella, and she notes that almost all of the Naiad writers have signed on with Smith. Grier expects that after the transition "roughly half of Naiad's 500 titles will remain in print."

Sponsor Message.

Bibliophiles Grier and McBride have left an important heritage to the scholarly community by donating their collection of lesbiana to the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library. The collection, valued at $400,000 at the time of its donation in 1995, comprises more than fifteen thousand books, monographs, and manuscripts. It also includes photographs and items of memorabilia.

Grier has always been forthright in declaring her lesbianism and strongly encourages others to do likewise. She states in Coming Out Stories, "I am positive that it [i.e. having come out and lived openly as a lesbian] is the reason that I have been extremely happy all my life," and also says that she regards being a lesbian "as some kind of heaven-sent blessing."

Grier entitled her coming out essay "The Garden Variety Lesbian." Hers has been a bountiful garden indeed.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

The gay and lesbian press is of prime importance in sustaining a frequently embattled minority and has been crucial in the development of a national mass movement for gay rights.

The glbtq history of Los Angeles, the U.S.'s second largest metropolis, is replete with cultural, social, and political firsts.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Appealing to glbtq people who enjoy romantic fantasy, the queer romance novel has recently come into its own.

In a series of five interlinked pulp novels set in Greenwich Village and its homosexual bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bannon provides an important record of lesbian life in a period when few women dared speak openly about homosexuality.

A matriarch of fantasy and science fiction literature, Marion Zimmer Bradley also authored lesbian paperback pulps and articles for The Ladder and Mattachine Review.

The first national lesbian political and social organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis was a significant part of the pre-Stonewall lesbian and gay rights movement.

A pioneer in the American gay rights movement, Barbara Gittings worked tirelessly within the American Library Association to make material with glbtq content more accessible to the reading public.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

An early leader in the struggle for glbtq rights, Los Angeles activist Don Slater was sometimes at odds with others in the movement but never wavered in his devotion to the cause.