I love Judy Grahn
I recently bought Judy Grahn's book, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds and I love it! It's a gay cultural history thats written like a story. She discusses gay tradition and culture back to Sappho and the Greek Gods. It is an absolutely facinating book. She breaks down every stereotype and traces its origins back in time. For example, why is the purple the 'gay color'? Within 'The Craft', purple signifies power. It is a mixture of the "female red" and "male blue."
Purple represents, brings about, and is present during radical transformation from one state of being to another. Purple also appears at twilight and at predawn. It stands at the gate between the land of the material flesh in one world and the land of the spirit or soul in another and is present in the envelope of energy that surrounds the body, usually called the "aura." It is especially prominent in the aura during the transormational events of birth and death...Purple as signifying power as well as gay-ness can be traced back the gods Apollo as well as the island of Lesbos where Sappho lived. Read the book - its amazing!
Judy Grahn's poetry can also be found in Gay & Lesbian Poetry in our Time by Carl Morse and Joan Larkin. Sadly, this book is out of print, however you can easily find it on Amazon, E-Bay, or at the Amazon Feminst Bookstore in Minneapolis. The book also contains poets like James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Allen Ginsberg, Dorothy Allison, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams and Adrienne Rich. My new favorite poem is by Adrienne Rich:
Love Poem XXI
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising from beneath
the horizon - when I said "a cleft of light"
I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
shared, could be chosen without lonliness,
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.