Born November 28: Rita Mae Brown

How do people reconcile the Rita Mae Brown of the 1960s, 70s and 80s with the Rita Mae Brown of today? Born to an unmarried 18 year-old, adopted by the Browns, expelled from the University of Florida, she seemed destined to be a lifelong hellraiser. She cofounded the Student Homophile League, was at the Stonewall riots, quit her job at NOW to protest Betty Friedan’s anti-lesbian remarks, organized the Lavender Menace zap at the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, and in 1971 cofounded The Furies Collective promoting lesbian separatism (above). In 1973, she exploded the world’s idea of lesbian fiction, taking it from the suicidal, sepia flatland of The Well of Loneliness to the brazen, technicolor 3-D of her Rubyfruit Jungle. (Of course the manuscript had been rejected by every mainstream publisher and ignored by every mainstream reviewer, but Daughters Press paid Brown $1,000 and made her novel a hit through word of mouth. It remains her best known work of thirty-eight books and nine screenplays, one of which was nominated for an Emmy.) From 1979 to 1981 she lived with Martina Navratilova, then wrote a novel, Sudden Death, about a lesbian tennis player. From 1983 to 1991, Martina was with beauty queen Judy Nelson; their breakup was messy and public and Judy sued for palimony, but Rita Mae mediated, kept it out of court, and ended up living with Judy. (Judy wrote a book about her affair with Martina called Love Match, for which Rita Mae wrote the introduction, then later wrote another book, Choices, about her affairs with Martina and Rita Mae, no introduction.) In a 1997 interview with OutSmart magazine, Brown talks about why her great love for Fannie Flagg didn't work out:

because Fannie's "just so homophobic," she says. "Well, you know, Fannie's almost 60, and it's just a different generation's outlook. They were already getting established in their careers when we were in our teens and struggling with the Viet Nam War and civil rights. There's a grand canyon between us."

This is perplexing because Imdb and the NYT give Flagg's birthdate as September 1944 and Brown's is November 1944. Equally vexing is how Brown presents herself on her official website. As the author of fifteen mysteries "coauthored" with her cat Sneaky Pie Brown and six mysteries set in the world of fox hunting, she understandably spends a lot of time extolling animals and country life. She discusses fox hunting at length.She takes pride in her title as Master of the Hounds. She thanks Jesus her horses are generally healthy. Yet in her rambling 2,100 word "About Rita Mae," she never mentions lesbians in any way, dismisses her (gender neutral) affairs, and says she found her past activism boring.

Anyway, there I was now hailed as the Mother of the Feminist Movement, the Gay Movement. Meanwhile, I worked full time and then worked at night on political issues. They bored me if for no other reason that they were about cities and I belong in the country.

Thank god Martina hasn't mellowed this drastically. Nor has Rita Mae entirely lost her spark. She says the difference between Democrats and Republicans "is the difference between syphilis and gonorrhea."

Comments

[Davan S. Mani]

Fannie Flagg may have lied about her age. She may have been born in 1941 or earlier.

[not fake]

That's the kind of image that i really thing is super image like. If more images very real like this were out there we'd be super full of graet images in the world.