Russ came out about 1969, the subject of her only non-science fiction novel On Strike Against God (1980). After teaching at Cornell University, SUNY at Binghamton, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, Russ became Professor of English at the University of Washington (Seattle). She suffers from back problems and writes standing up.

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Russ's science fiction began to be published in 1959. According to Russ, her 1967 Alyx story marked a change: "I had turned from writing love stories ... to writing stories about women in which the woman won." Russ continued the Alyx series with Picnic on Paradise (1968) and The Adventures of Alyx (1986). Her friendship with the gay science fiction writer Samuel Delany has influenced her writing throughout her career.

Two of Russ's science fictions changed the genre and created controversy. Her 1969 short story, "When It Changed," appeared in 1972 and won a Nebula Award. In first person, the story depicts a human with a wife and daughters on a colonized planet, living through the first hours of regaining contact with earthmen. After several pages, readers realize that the narrator is female, that all the people on this planet are lesbians. Russ uses role-reversal (a woman as husband and narrator) and the misogyny and of the spacemen to call into question the necessity of gender roles.

Her novel The Female Man (1975) opened new possibilities of form as well as content for science fiction. Russ magnified the sf convention of parallel histories by bringing together the same woman as she exists in four different lives--oppressed heterosexual Jeannine from a United States in which the Depression never ended; Joanna (note the author's name), an unmarried university professor from a culture like ours; Jael, an assassin from a world where the sexes are literally at war; and Janet Evason from a utopian lesbian planet.

Written in a "lyric" stream of consciousness style that Russ discusses in her essay "What Can a Heroine Do?" The Female Man is a funny and serious book about what is wrong with patriarchy and how to fix it. Russ links her anger at inequality and her humor: "wit is a kind of rage, a form of hostility."

The anticolonizing fiction We Who Are About To... (1977) continues Russ's experimental lyric feminism: A space ship crashes, the survivors try to start a colony and fail, and the older woman protagonist, who resists, kills the others and finds her own meditative way to die. During the 1970s, Russ also published And Chaos Died (1970) and The Two of Them (1978).

Russ has worked mainly in the sf short story during the subsequent two decades, publishing three collections: Extraordinary People (1984), The Zanzibar Cat (1984), and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). Striving for compression, Russ's short stories are dense and delightfully perverse twistings of generic conventions: a lesbian gothic tale, for example, and a ghost story in which a daughter learns to mother herself.

Russ's criticism began in the general aesthetics of science fiction and moved to passionate feminist critiques of science fiction and other literatures. Her essays on "What Can a Heroine Do?" "Images of Women," and "Amor Vincit" are central to feminist sf criticism. Her book How to Suppress Women's Writing is a witty catalogue of reasons why literary history denies the existence of women's writing: her husband wrote it, she wrote it but it wasn't really art, and so on.

In Magic Mommas, Russ treats broad issues of women's and gay and lesbian liberation, returning to science fiction in the essay on Kirk-Spock pornography.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Historically either distrusted as agents of chaos or admired as examples of female power and intelligence, Amazons were depicted as heterosexual until the twentieth century, when lesbians adopted them as symbols of powerful women living without men.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Beginning with the "new wave" in the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy writers have explored openly and seriously issues of gender and sexual orientation.

Writer of science fiction, memoirs, erotica, cultural studies, and postmodern criticism, and winner of multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Lambda Literary Awards, Samuel R. Delany is widely regarded as one of the finest science fiction writers of his generation.

Although Ursula Le Guin does not address homosexual issues directly, she includes homosexuals as minor characters in works that cause readers to reexamine their assumptions about sex roles and stereotypes.