Boston Independent Activist Publishing: A History

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...

The way I envision doing this blog for now is focusing on different presses across different posts, which is to say that I will focus on the South End Press now but return to it in other posts, rather than covering all of it in one post. That is where I see the blog as specifically useful as a platform, rather than a book manuscript which needs more cohesion (says the book editor). This will ultimately stitch together, I hope, but I want to put things out as I research and write them up, so it may have the stops-and-starts of research; the meandering path; the return to, the course correction, the reversals? We'll see. I'm also going to feel free to include autobiography without being self-indulgent. I moved to the South End after living in Boston for a bit under two years, and I really didn't know much about the neighborhood. I knew it had a reputation for being gay, and I was moving with a male partner. I had lived in London for three years and the South End's roots i...