Boston Independent Activist Publishing: A History

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Don Weise RIP / Alyson Publications

I had not heard the news that noted gay publisher/editor/writer Don Weise died this last January. This is sad and (for me, who did not know him personally) surprising news, given his age. I don't know details, nor do I need to know them. He has left a significant legacy. I had exchanged a few emails over the years with Weise, starting with my writing to him about a project while he was running Alyson Books between 2007-2010. I was low-key representing a British friend who had a non-fiction book I thought they could publish, though it wasn't meant to be. We still exchanged a few emails, and I found his willingness to write back to me - then perhaps an Associate Editor at Beacon Press - a kindness. The connection to this blog is Alyson Publications, an LGBTQ publisher started in Boston, in fact in the South End of Boston, in 1980 by Sasha Alyson. There is a lot more to say on this front, and I will save it for another post. Some basic info on Alyson and the press can be found in...

Ideas Bouncing Around

Part of my interest in starting this old-school blog was getting myself to type out things I was considering and research I found, as if to keep me on track toward... something. I'm still not sure what the result will be, if anything. One idea I'm considering is some kind of heady mix of neighborhood history (South End in Boston), publishing history (the South End Press), and personal narrative, thinking through urban studies ideas around gentrification, transportation changes, the history of the political left in this country, and more. Would anyone care? I could see mixing chapters on the neighborhood, but perhaps in first person rather than a more dry history, along with chapters focusing on important publications from the South End Press, with context around each book's publication with also a sense of its impact and legacy. Part of me wonders if a book like this could be useful as we think about place and grounding ourselves, and how to face overwhelming politics. Ar...

Non-Fiction Woes

Earlier this year, Ceci Browning wrote a piece for the Times of London headlined, There’s a crisis in non-fiction book sales. What’s to blame? Facts were facts, including this: " according to Nielsen, sales of non-fiction books in 2025 were down 6 per cent compared with 2024. It was the lowest yearly total since 2017, the sorry end point of years of painfully consistent decline. " The article gets into some reasons for this, explaining that commercial presses are unwilling to take risks on authors without big platforms. Fine, and this is something indie presses may be more willing to work around, and actually help establish a platform. But a conversation I'm having and hearing more is that no one wants to read depressing political books when our everyday politics is infuriating. It's not even infuriating for those of us on the left now; it's depressing, in that everything awful is a fait accompli. We have a fascist president who continues to enjoy widespread ap...

New England Free Press

I am going to jump back at some point soon to do a deeper dive on this other press based in the South End, but I did want to put it down here first. I'm seeing this blog as a kind of placeholder and space to draft things, though I don't want to be tedious. I want to hold myself accountable. I hear Substack can be useful for such writing, but I also hear they platform some deeply problematic and offensive material. I also had Ghost recommended to me. I worry about making people sign up for my writing, even at no cost. We'll see if I migrate over at some point. Happy to hear from folks about these options. As for the placeholder... One of the first presses that piqued my interest, after thinking about the South End Press coming out of my own neighborhood - most obviously, given that they used the neighborhood's name right in their own - was the New England Free Press . They were in a slightly earlier period, publishing pamphlets and more from 1967-1981, jumping around the...

The South End: A Lite Neighborhood History

I have lived in the South End of Boston since 2003, with one year off (2008-2009, moved to East Boston). I have lived in the same apartment since 2009. Like every urban neighborhood, everyone has nostalgia for a past, some of it real and some of it imagined. South End has a deep history, going back to its formation in the mid-19th century, when the city filled in the South Bay to create it. (While this history may seem far back, it arises more often than you might think, as when there is a drought and locals worry about the wood pilings under their buildings drying up and getting damaged.) It has hosted a number of demographic groups, based around ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and more. There was overlap, which gets confusing to some folks. I am quite certain there were complicated politics. I could provide a history here but I will only give the biggest overview, to get us to the period that interests me so much (the 1970s and the neighborhood's political publishing scen...

Presses: Persephone Press

I am jumping out of the South End to Watertown - Watertown?! - to start a section on Persephone Press , a lesbian-feminist collective that published books from 1976-1983, when it was sold, interestingly, to Beacon Press. (I have to wonder if my former boss and mentor Joanne Wyckoff was involved in this deal as I believe she was at Beacon Press at that time and involved in a lot of their amazing feminist publishing - not to mention famously buying paperback rights to Octavia Butler's Kindred , which is unrelated but she should get credit!). I'm interested in Persephone Press as it was a collective, like South End Press, and I'm really drawn to that model, with the full understanding that there are serious challenges with it (as one can see in the short life of this important publisher). This press should not be mixed up with the still-thriving Persephone Books in the UK, whose beautiful newsletter I still get after i stopped into their former store-front years ago in Londo...