Fried & Convicted, page 21
Guess what? It’s not okay. We need to echo those immortal words from the film Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Of course, it would be a lot easier if people’s pants actually did burst into flame when they lied or their noses grew into giant dildos when they made stuff up. But alas, not so.
So we need a national, nonpartisan Lie Detection Society, headed by a truthiness czar with a staff of researchers to call out lies and stop the bullshit.
Just as “curb your dog” laws made us scoop the poop and the heroic MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) made it unacceptable to drive drunk, we need a new acronym to take the campaign poop out of politics. Let it be unacceptable or at least very expensive to lie. We can do it. What’s a good acronym?
CALL: Citizens against Lying Liars
COLD: Citizens Operating Lie Detectors
CAPP: Citizens Against Prevaricating Politicians
CRAB: Citizens Raging Against Bullshit
CRUD: Citizens Rejecting Utter Deceit
CRAP: Citizens Raging Against Prevaricators
You get the idea. Pick one. Let’s organize. I stand ready to work.
November 2016
YOUR SPINACH IS REPORTING IN
Eventually I had to get up off of the sofa and stop sulking. By the evening of the day after that shocking (to me) election result, the front page of my newspaper slipped to the floor when I left the room. Upon my return I discovered that Windsor had ripped it to shreds. That made me laugh. So I sat down with him on the floor and joined in, ripping up the rest of the newspaper, from the obituaries to the classifieds, laughing and moving on.
And just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water, I got a call from a friend who lurks on the Internet looking for things to warn me about. I learned that now MIT says we have to be careful what we say in front of our spinach.
That’s right, scientists are turning spinach into an information-gathering early warning system. According to a press release from MIT, by embedding spinach leaves with something called carbon nanotubes, engineers have turned spinach plants into sensors that can detect bombs and wirelessly tell a smartphone about it.
Seriously? Now I have to worry about calls from vegetables other than telemarketers?
MIT put out a press release calling the program “a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier.” Please, spinach and other gassy vegetables have been talking to me for years. But before, when my lunch was repeating, it wasn’t repeating what it heard.
We’re used to being warned that certain foods or plants are bad for your health, but in a case of “turnabout is fair play,” this is the first time foods and plants will be warning us.
As the folks at MIT see it, when chemicals in the groundwater are sucked up naturally by the plant, the newly engineered leaves emit a fluorescent signal. That, in turn, is read with an infrared camera on a smartphone, which then emails the user.
Oh good God, if homeland security gets an urgent email from
its spinach, I pray it doesn’t go to junk mail and delay the bomb squad.
Here’s a question: If spinach can talk, is it still a vegetable? Can vegans still eat it? It may not have eyes, but now it has ears.
And while we’re talking spinach, what else can we expect from this talking spinach? If these plants are turning into snitches, will our spinach rat us out when we go to the fridge for a frozen Snickers instead of a celery stalk? Will broccoli learn the game, become an informant, and report me to my Fitbit?
In fact, we’ll have to get rid of the phrase “vegging out.” Spinach plants will soon be working as hard as bomb-sniffing Labrador retrievers. The farmer in the dell now listens for spinach chatter and supervises an undercover spy ring.
When James Bond is captured by his nemesis and bomb-sniffing spinach saves the day, is the movie You Only Diet Twice? Or Live and let Diet? Diet Another Day? You can stop now, Fay.
Wait a minute! Has anybody told Popeye the Sailor Man? If loose lips sink ships, now he’s got to forget about Bluto and keep an eye on his spinach. Popeye can still shout, “I yam what I yam,” but his spinach can’t say the same. Now it’s Big Brother.
If you see Rudy Giuliani coming toward you with a spinach toupee, duck and cover.
The possibilities are endless. As long as spinach can reach out and warn someone, what else might it do? Scientists think leafy plants can really get into monitoring the environment while they suck up a lot of information from their surroundings. There are plans to make bionic plants that change color to warn us of things. Beyond our country just going green, we’re hoping spinach can go pink or purple to report upcoming droughts, plagues or the zombie apocalypse.
In fact, scientists are also hoping that sensors in other plants, such as the Madagascar periwinkle, which produces drugs to treat cancer, can monitor their own health to maximize the yield of those rare compounds. Wow. I’d try to make a joke about Madagasgar periwinkle, but its name is already funny enough for a listening device. “Come here, Madagasgar periwinkle, I need you!”
So here’s the thing. Knowing the potential of spinach to forewarn, I’m planting a crop in my teeny backyard. I’ll follow the news from MIT and learn how to use my spinach to its full tattletale potential.
Wikipedia suggests “keeping an eye on your plants and harvesting when the leaves reach desired size. But don’t wait too long, as bitterness will set in quickly.”
Tell me about it. I’m already bitter that my salad is smarter than I am and apparently far more in demand in the job market. I’ll keep you posted on my communication farm.
In the meantime, I’ve got to go. I hear my spinach calling.
December 2016
ON THE CORRECT SIDE OF HISTORY
I admit it, I was worried.
I learned last summer that a book, called Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier, by historian and author Joanne Passet was in the works. Author, publisher and gay rights pioneer, Grier and her partner Donna McBride were two of the founders of the now legendary Naiad Press, along with Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford. You’ve heard from me about Anyda and Muriel for years. And these four women founded the first and arguably most successful lesbian publishing house in the country.
I adored my dear friends Anyda and Muriel, and worried that with two sides to every story and this being a biography of Barbara, the last word on their publishing legacy might be told from Barbara’s vantage point alone.
And I had something to worry about since Barbara and Anyda had clashed early and often in the founding and subsequent running of Naiad Press. Their head-butting morphed into a full-blown feud prior to the two-couple business partnership breaking apart for good in 1994.
As for Barbara Grier herself, she was a complicated character. I’d heard much from Anyda and many others about her being needlessly tough on employees, rudely direct in criticism to and about writers and colleagues, and ruthless in business. I’d also heard from Anyda and others that she could be generous to a fault, loyal beyond words, and one of our publishing and lesbian rights heroes. Complex. People loved her or wanted to vilify her, little in between. I wish I had known her for a thousand reasons, but also so I could give you my opinion of this very influential lesbian pioneer.
The instant the book was published this fall, I grabbed my Kindle and downloaded it, intent on scanning the whole thing, just looking for outrageous instances where the author got only Barbara’s side of the story. I stood ready to cry “foul!”
Well, first of all, I had to stop speed-reading because the prologue on the book was so damn fascinating. I sat in my recliner, Windsor on my lap, an adult beverage nearby, and soaked up the historic story of the founding of The Ladder, the first lesbian publication to be distributed nationwide. It carried me away from there.
Also, early on it was pretty clear that the book’s author was a crackerjack historian, working from original sources, personal correspondence, a phenomenal amount of research, and interviews with dozens, maybe hundreds of people. Even me. She’d interviewed me so long ago I’d forgotten she was doing the book. I remembered the call and our correspondence when a document I had given to her was referenced in a footnote. Cool.
So I devoured the book. It turned out to be an exquisitely researched biography and great read. It’s an important look at the rise of lesbian publishing and a marvelous resource for preserving our history and culture—something you know I am passionate about.
And I was thrilled that when it came to the founding of Naiad, the book got it exactly right. In fact, even the criticisms about Anyda were true. I have to admit, she was imperious, classist, and a little bit haughty. Were her books literary masterpieces? No. But Anyda had the courage to write lesbian romance books and then fight like hell to see them published. Women all over the country adored her books because for the first time they could read about themselves in lesbian love stories with happy endings.
And Anyda, too, could be wonderfully generous, warm to her friends and fiercely determined to see a lesbian publishing house rise and thrive.
Were Anyda and Muriel silent partners in Naiad? Absolutely not. Their start-up funds and single-minded determination to find printers that would print lesbian books got the company started and kept it growing. But Anyda and Muriel aged and, yes, for the last 9 years of the partnership they were less and less involved in day-to-day operations.
All that being said, I did have two small corrections for a second edition. It was stated that Naiad Press had to pay to have Anyda’s manuscripts typed. Not true, as Muriel did that for every single book. I saw the boxes and boxes of carbon copies.
Secondly, Anyda wrote a total of 14 books, not 13. The last one, O’Mistress Mine was published, by A&M Books, in 2003. I wish you could have seen a giddy 92-year-old pulling a book from a just-delivered carton and grinning as she waved it over her head.
And I would have liked to see one addition.
In one of the more memorable lesbian publishing scandals, Naiad Press published the book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence in 1993. The book itself was an anthology of convent stories told by former nuns—quite wonderful and only scandalous to those who never expected to see the words lesbians and nuns in the same sentence.
Barbara Grier and Anyda were excited about the anthology because Barbara had been looking for a “crossover book,” to bring lots of visibility to lesbian publishing. They knew this title could do the trick.
And did it ever!
There was a media explosion followed by national talk show interviews with the women who edited the anthology. Next came huge sales and the rare placement of a lesbian book in mainstream bookstore chains. Naiad’s bet had paid off. Their financial future was given a huge boost and Naiad Press was the talk of the town.
However, scandal soon erupted.
Barbara Grier, working to maximize income for Naiad, offered excerpts from the books to gay and women’s publications like Philadelphia Gay News, Ms. Magazine and Christopher Street. She also offered excerpts to Forum Magazine—a men’s soft-core porn magazine published by Penthouse.
Holy cow. When Anyda found out about the Forum Magazine deal she was livid. A fierce feminist, she was practically apoplectic. Still very much involved in the business then, Anyda fumed to Barbara about the outrageous deal. She was disgusted at the betrayal of the women who wrote the essays, and embarrassed to see a Naiad excerpt in a “dirty magazine.” She was still spouting off about it to me 15 years later.
The deal with Forum caused a huge stir in the lesbian literary community, and lots of folks were quoted about the scandal in Indomitable, but not Anyda.
After I finished reading the book, I wrote a gushing fan letter to author Joanne Passet, praising her research and the job she did, but asking only that one question: Why was Anyda not quoted regarding the Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence scandal?
Joanne wrote back to me, noting she’d thought she’d included Anyda’s comments but it might have been deleted in editing. She did let me know that her research showed that Anyda tried to present a united front for Naiad during the scandal, and did not speak out publically even though she disagreed with Barbara’s actions—also that Anyda’s disappointment grew over time.
I can see that. But let me tell you, I got to hear a lot of Anyda’s comments on the scandal over Dewar’s Scotch and cheese and crackers while sitting on Anyda and Muriel’s porch.
Face it. This was quite a story.
And you should read about it. All of it. Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier is a terrific book about our publishing, social and political history.
Read it now, because I have a feeling we need to remember our past as we confront our future. We need to be inspired by the pioneers who brought us so far. We need to be energized to get our butts back out on the streets with our placards and our bullhorns and our solidarity. A new political administration has been installed, and there are new threats against the gay rights we have fought so hard to win.
I intend to be at the Women’s March on D.C., on the day after Inauguration Day, January 21, 2017. You may hear from me if I need bail money.
In the meantime, we have to stay indomitable. I love the book Indomitable and I am tickled that in the endnotes I am literally a footnote to history.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first and always to my wife Bonnie, who, for some reason thought “we” were retiring. Instead she keeps me in stories as my partner in crime and hits the fairways while I slave over a hot computer. It’s been a remarkable few years, in turns both scary and jubilant. So glad you are well, putting and puttering.
Thanks to Bywater Books for taking the leap to reissue my four previous collections and for publishing my latest screeds and antics.
To my Bywater mentors: Marianne K. Martin and Kelly Smith, you’ve been nonstop encouraging me since we first met in that over-landscaped, humid New Orleans courtyard more than a decade ago—cheering me on even as I was nominally a publishing “competitor.” I’m proud to have you as my friends, editors and bosses. I’m even prouder I taught Kelly to drink cosmopolitans.
To my Bywater co-conspirators: Salem West, I’ve adored you since you offered, in print, to be my cabaña girl here at the beach. You’re a treasure, personally and professionally—and besides, you introduced me to Ann McMan, delightful friend and genius cover designer. Good times ahead!
And a huge thank you to the magazine publishers/editors who keep me in ink—Steve Elkins and Murray Archibald (I love you both dearly), of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, and to Terry Plowman of Delaware Beach Life Magazine. Your deadlines encourage me to go out and have crazy adventures, and I cannot thank you enough for the incentive—and the honor of being part of both of these remarkable publications.
Cheers to my chosen son Eric for the belly laughs and support—and for being an awesome blogger himself, alerting me to pop culture trends and unconscious bias. Love you.
And, once again, a very special nod to my BFF Stefani Deoul for trolling the Internet for bizarre stories to launch my essays, and being editor, accomplice, cheerleader, critic, therapist, and all the other things a friend really needs.
Never was the phrase “we get by with a little help from our friends” more fitting than the past few years for Bonnie and me. Thanks to Eloise for being there for us always; and to Nancy Hewish for being the stunt Bonnie, running sound and accompanying me on gigs when my wife was home recuperating. And thanks to all our friends who came along on adventures, when we were in sickness and in health, so we got through it all and I had something to write about.
Enormous hugs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fay Jacobs, a native New Yorker, spent 30 years in the Washington, D.C. area working in journalism, theatre and public relations. She’s a humorist, storyteller and LGBT activist.
Her first book, As I Lay Frying—a Rehoboth Beach Memoir was published in 2004 and is in its fifth printing. Since then she has published Fried & True—Tales from Rehoboth, For Frying Out Loud—Rehoboth Beach Diaries, and Time Fries—Aging Gracelessly in Rehoboth Beach.
She has contributed feature stories and columns to such publications as The Washington Post, The Advocate, OutTraveler, Curve Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, The Washington Blade, The Wilmington News Journal, and more.
Since 1995 she has been a regular columnist for Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, and since 2010 she has had a monthly column in the award-winning Delaware Beach Life Magazine.
Since 2015, Fay has been touring with her one-woman show, Aging Gracelessly: 50 Shades of Fay.
She and Bonnie, her partner of 35 years and wife of five years, are aging in place in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with their spoiled schnauzer, Windsor. Fay is thrilled to have found a home at Bywater Books.
At Bywater Books we love good books about lesbians just like you do, and we’re committed to bringing the best of contemporary lesbian writing to our avid readers. Our editorial team is dedicated to finding and developing outstanding writers who create books you won’t want to put down.
We sponsor the Bywater Prize for Fiction to help with this quest. Each prize winner receives $1,000 and publication of their novel. We have already discovered amazing writers like Jill Malone, Sally Bellerose, and Hilary Sloin through the Bywater Prize. Which exciting new writer will we find next?
For more information about Bywater Books and the annual Bywater Prize for Fiction, please visit our website.
www.bywaterbooks.com
Fay Jacobs, Fried & Convicted
Thank you for reading books on ReadFrom.Net
Share this book with friends
Of course, it would be a lot easier if people’s pants actually did burst into flame when they lied or their noses grew into giant dildos when they made stuff up. But alas, not so.
So we need a national, nonpartisan Lie Detection Society, headed by a truthiness czar with a staff of researchers to call out lies and stop the bullshit.
Just as “curb your dog” laws made us scoop the poop and the heroic MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) made it unacceptable to drive drunk, we need a new acronym to take the campaign poop out of politics. Let it be unacceptable or at least very expensive to lie. We can do it. What’s a good acronym?
CALL: Citizens against Lying Liars
COLD: Citizens Operating Lie Detectors
CAPP: Citizens Against Prevaricating Politicians
CRAB: Citizens Raging Against Bullshit
CRUD: Citizens Rejecting Utter Deceit
CRAP: Citizens Raging Against Prevaricators
You get the idea. Pick one. Let’s organize. I stand ready to work.
November 2016
YOUR SPINACH IS REPORTING IN
Eventually I had to get up off of the sofa and stop sulking. By the evening of the day after that shocking (to me) election result, the front page of my newspaper slipped to the floor when I left the room. Upon my return I discovered that Windsor had ripped it to shreds. That made me laugh. So I sat down with him on the floor and joined in, ripping up the rest of the newspaper, from the obituaries to the classifieds, laughing and moving on.
And just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water, I got a call from a friend who lurks on the Internet looking for things to warn me about. I learned that now MIT says we have to be careful what we say in front of our spinach.
That’s right, scientists are turning spinach into an information-gathering early warning system. According to a press release from MIT, by embedding spinach leaves with something called carbon nanotubes, engineers have turned spinach plants into sensors that can detect bombs and wirelessly tell a smartphone about it.
Seriously? Now I have to worry about calls from vegetables other than telemarketers?
MIT put out a press release calling the program “a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier.” Please, spinach and other gassy vegetables have been talking to me for years. But before, when my lunch was repeating, it wasn’t repeating what it heard.
We’re used to being warned that certain foods or plants are bad for your health, but in a case of “turnabout is fair play,” this is the first time foods and plants will be warning us.
As the folks at MIT see it, when chemicals in the groundwater are sucked up naturally by the plant, the newly engineered leaves emit a fluorescent signal. That, in turn, is read with an infrared camera on a smartphone, which then emails the user.
Oh good God, if homeland security gets an urgent email from
its spinach, I pray it doesn’t go to junk mail and delay the bomb squad.
Here’s a question: If spinach can talk, is it still a vegetable? Can vegans still eat it? It may not have eyes, but now it has ears.
And while we’re talking spinach, what else can we expect from this talking spinach? If these plants are turning into snitches, will our spinach rat us out when we go to the fridge for a frozen Snickers instead of a celery stalk? Will broccoli learn the game, become an informant, and report me to my Fitbit?
In fact, we’ll have to get rid of the phrase “vegging out.” Spinach plants will soon be working as hard as bomb-sniffing Labrador retrievers. The farmer in the dell now listens for spinach chatter and supervises an undercover spy ring.
When James Bond is captured by his nemesis and bomb-sniffing spinach saves the day, is the movie You Only Diet Twice? Or Live and let Diet? Diet Another Day? You can stop now, Fay.
Wait a minute! Has anybody told Popeye the Sailor Man? If loose lips sink ships, now he’s got to forget about Bluto and keep an eye on his spinach. Popeye can still shout, “I yam what I yam,” but his spinach can’t say the same. Now it’s Big Brother.
If you see Rudy Giuliani coming toward you with a spinach toupee, duck and cover.
The possibilities are endless. As long as spinach can reach out and warn someone, what else might it do? Scientists think leafy plants can really get into monitoring the environment while they suck up a lot of information from their surroundings. There are plans to make bionic plants that change color to warn us of things. Beyond our country just going green, we’re hoping spinach can go pink or purple to report upcoming droughts, plagues or the zombie apocalypse.
In fact, scientists are also hoping that sensors in other plants, such as the Madagascar periwinkle, which produces drugs to treat cancer, can monitor their own health to maximize the yield of those rare compounds. Wow. I’d try to make a joke about Madagasgar periwinkle, but its name is already funny enough for a listening device. “Come here, Madagasgar periwinkle, I need you!”
So here’s the thing. Knowing the potential of spinach to forewarn, I’m planting a crop in my teeny backyard. I’ll follow the news from MIT and learn how to use my spinach to its full tattletale potential.
Wikipedia suggests “keeping an eye on your plants and harvesting when the leaves reach desired size. But don’t wait too long, as bitterness will set in quickly.”
Tell me about it. I’m already bitter that my salad is smarter than I am and apparently far more in demand in the job market. I’ll keep you posted on my communication farm.
In the meantime, I’ve got to go. I hear my spinach calling.
December 2016
ON THE CORRECT SIDE OF HISTORY
I admit it, I was worried.
I learned last summer that a book, called Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier, by historian and author Joanne Passet was in the works. Author, publisher and gay rights pioneer, Grier and her partner Donna McBride were two of the founders of the now legendary Naiad Press, along with Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford. You’ve heard from me about Anyda and Muriel for years. And these four women founded the first and arguably most successful lesbian publishing house in the country.
I adored my dear friends Anyda and Muriel, and worried that with two sides to every story and this being a biography of Barbara, the last word on their publishing legacy might be told from Barbara’s vantage point alone.
And I had something to worry about since Barbara and Anyda had clashed early and often in the founding and subsequent running of Naiad Press. Their head-butting morphed into a full-blown feud prior to the two-couple business partnership breaking apart for good in 1994.
As for Barbara Grier herself, she was a complicated character. I’d heard much from Anyda and many others about her being needlessly tough on employees, rudely direct in criticism to and about writers and colleagues, and ruthless in business. I’d also heard from Anyda and others that she could be generous to a fault, loyal beyond words, and one of our publishing and lesbian rights heroes. Complex. People loved her or wanted to vilify her, little in between. I wish I had known her for a thousand reasons, but also so I could give you my opinion of this very influential lesbian pioneer.
The instant the book was published this fall, I grabbed my Kindle and downloaded it, intent on scanning the whole thing, just looking for outrageous instances where the author got only Barbara’s side of the story. I stood ready to cry “foul!”
Well, first of all, I had to stop speed-reading because the prologue on the book was so damn fascinating. I sat in my recliner, Windsor on my lap, an adult beverage nearby, and soaked up the historic story of the founding of The Ladder, the first lesbian publication to be distributed nationwide. It carried me away from there.
Also, early on it was pretty clear that the book’s author was a crackerjack historian, working from original sources, personal correspondence, a phenomenal amount of research, and interviews with dozens, maybe hundreds of people. Even me. She’d interviewed me so long ago I’d forgotten she was doing the book. I remembered the call and our correspondence when a document I had given to her was referenced in a footnote. Cool.
So I devoured the book. It turned out to be an exquisitely researched biography and great read. It’s an important look at the rise of lesbian publishing and a marvelous resource for preserving our history and culture—something you know I am passionate about.
And I was thrilled that when it came to the founding of Naiad, the book got it exactly right. In fact, even the criticisms about Anyda were true. I have to admit, she was imperious, classist, and a little bit haughty. Were her books literary masterpieces? No. But Anyda had the courage to write lesbian romance books and then fight like hell to see them published. Women all over the country adored her books because for the first time they could read about themselves in lesbian love stories with happy endings.
And Anyda, too, could be wonderfully generous, warm to her friends and fiercely determined to see a lesbian publishing house rise and thrive.
Were Anyda and Muriel silent partners in Naiad? Absolutely not. Their start-up funds and single-minded determination to find printers that would print lesbian books got the company started and kept it growing. But Anyda and Muriel aged and, yes, for the last 9 years of the partnership they were less and less involved in day-to-day operations.
All that being said, I did have two small corrections for a second edition. It was stated that Naiad Press had to pay to have Anyda’s manuscripts typed. Not true, as Muriel did that for every single book. I saw the boxes and boxes of carbon copies.
Secondly, Anyda wrote a total of 14 books, not 13. The last one, O’Mistress Mine was published, by A&M Books, in 2003. I wish you could have seen a giddy 92-year-old pulling a book from a just-delivered carton and grinning as she waved it over her head.
And I would have liked to see one addition.
In one of the more memorable lesbian publishing scandals, Naiad Press published the book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence in 1993. The book itself was an anthology of convent stories told by former nuns—quite wonderful and only scandalous to those who never expected to see the words lesbians and nuns in the same sentence.
Barbara Grier and Anyda were excited about the anthology because Barbara had been looking for a “crossover book,” to bring lots of visibility to lesbian publishing. They knew this title could do the trick.
And did it ever!
There was a media explosion followed by national talk show interviews with the women who edited the anthology. Next came huge sales and the rare placement of a lesbian book in mainstream bookstore chains. Naiad’s bet had paid off. Their financial future was given a huge boost and Naiad Press was the talk of the town.
However, scandal soon erupted.
Barbara Grier, working to maximize income for Naiad, offered excerpts from the books to gay and women’s publications like Philadelphia Gay News, Ms. Magazine and Christopher Street. She also offered excerpts to Forum Magazine—a men’s soft-core porn magazine published by Penthouse.
Holy cow. When Anyda found out about the Forum Magazine deal she was livid. A fierce feminist, she was practically apoplectic. Still very much involved in the business then, Anyda fumed to Barbara about the outrageous deal. She was disgusted at the betrayal of the women who wrote the essays, and embarrassed to see a Naiad excerpt in a “dirty magazine.” She was still spouting off about it to me 15 years later.
The deal with Forum caused a huge stir in the lesbian literary community, and lots of folks were quoted about the scandal in Indomitable, but not Anyda.
After I finished reading the book, I wrote a gushing fan letter to author Joanne Passet, praising her research and the job she did, but asking only that one question: Why was Anyda not quoted regarding the Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence scandal?
Joanne wrote back to me, noting she’d thought she’d included Anyda’s comments but it might have been deleted in editing. She did let me know that her research showed that Anyda tried to present a united front for Naiad during the scandal, and did not speak out publically even though she disagreed with Barbara’s actions—also that Anyda’s disappointment grew over time.
I can see that. But let me tell you, I got to hear a lot of Anyda’s comments on the scandal over Dewar’s Scotch and cheese and crackers while sitting on Anyda and Muriel’s porch.
Face it. This was quite a story.
And you should read about it. All of it. Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier is a terrific book about our publishing, social and political history.
Read it now, because I have a feeling we need to remember our past as we confront our future. We need to be inspired by the pioneers who brought us so far. We need to be energized to get our butts back out on the streets with our placards and our bullhorns and our solidarity. A new political administration has been installed, and there are new threats against the gay rights we have fought so hard to win.
I intend to be at the Women’s March on D.C., on the day after Inauguration Day, January 21, 2017. You may hear from me if I need bail money.
In the meantime, we have to stay indomitable. I love the book Indomitable and I am tickled that in the endnotes I am literally a footnote to history.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first and always to my wife Bonnie, who, for some reason thought “we” were retiring. Instead she keeps me in stories as my partner in crime and hits the fairways while I slave over a hot computer. It’s been a remarkable few years, in turns both scary and jubilant. So glad you are well, putting and puttering.
Thanks to Bywater Books for taking the leap to reissue my four previous collections and for publishing my latest screeds and antics.
To my Bywater mentors: Marianne K. Martin and Kelly Smith, you’ve been nonstop encouraging me since we first met in that over-landscaped, humid New Orleans courtyard more than a decade ago—cheering me on even as I was nominally a publishing “competitor.” I’m proud to have you as my friends, editors and bosses. I’m even prouder I taught Kelly to drink cosmopolitans.
To my Bywater co-conspirators: Salem West, I’ve adored you since you offered, in print, to be my cabaña girl here at the beach. You’re a treasure, personally and professionally—and besides, you introduced me to Ann McMan, delightful friend and genius cover designer. Good times ahead!
And a huge thank you to the magazine publishers/editors who keep me in ink—Steve Elkins and Murray Archibald (I love you both dearly), of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, and to Terry Plowman of Delaware Beach Life Magazine. Your deadlines encourage me to go out and have crazy adventures, and I cannot thank you enough for the incentive—and the honor of being part of both of these remarkable publications.
Cheers to my chosen son Eric for the belly laughs and support—and for being an awesome blogger himself, alerting me to pop culture trends and unconscious bias. Love you.
And, once again, a very special nod to my BFF Stefani Deoul for trolling the Internet for bizarre stories to launch my essays, and being editor, accomplice, cheerleader, critic, therapist, and all the other things a friend really needs.
Never was the phrase “we get by with a little help from our friends” more fitting than the past few years for Bonnie and me. Thanks to Eloise for being there for us always; and to Nancy Hewish for being the stunt Bonnie, running sound and accompanying me on gigs when my wife was home recuperating. And thanks to all our friends who came along on adventures, when we were in sickness and in health, so we got through it all and I had something to write about.
Enormous hugs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fay Jacobs, a native New Yorker, spent 30 years in the Washington, D.C. area working in journalism, theatre and public relations. She’s a humorist, storyteller and LGBT activist.
Her first book, As I Lay Frying—a Rehoboth Beach Memoir was published in 2004 and is in its fifth printing. Since then she has published Fried & True—Tales from Rehoboth, For Frying Out Loud—Rehoboth Beach Diaries, and Time Fries—Aging Gracelessly in Rehoboth Beach.
She has contributed feature stories and columns to such publications as The Washington Post, The Advocate, OutTraveler, Curve Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, The Washington Blade, The Wilmington News Journal, and more.
Since 1995 she has been a regular columnist for Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, and since 2010 she has had a monthly column in the award-winning Delaware Beach Life Magazine.
Since 2015, Fay has been touring with her one-woman show, Aging Gracelessly: 50 Shades of Fay.
She and Bonnie, her partner of 35 years and wife of five years, are aging in place in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with their spoiled schnauzer, Windsor. Fay is thrilled to have found a home at Bywater Books.
At Bywater Books we love good books about lesbians just like you do, and we’re committed to bringing the best of contemporary lesbian writing to our avid readers. Our editorial team is dedicated to finding and developing outstanding writers who create books you won’t want to put down.
We sponsor the Bywater Prize for Fiction to help with this quest. Each prize winner receives $1,000 and publication of their novel. We have already discovered amazing writers like Jill Malone, Sally Bellerose, and Hilary Sloin through the Bywater Prize. Which exciting new writer will we find next?
For more information about Bywater Books and the annual Bywater Prize for Fiction, please visit our website.
www.bywaterbooks.com
Fay Jacobs, Fried & Convicted
