Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier

"Whatever else will be said about her–and you can bet there will be plenty, because Barbara was no stranger to controversy–the one thing that is true above all else is that she was the most important person in lesbian publishing in the world. Without her boldness and her audacity, there might not be the robust lesbian publishing industry there is today." - Teresa DeCrescenzo

Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier
Joanne Passet

Barbara Grier – feminist, activist, publisher, and archivist - was many things to different people. Perhaps most well known as one of the founders of Naiad Press, Barbara’s unapologetic drive to make sure that lesbians everywhere had access to books with stories that reflected their lives in positive ways was legendary. Barbara changed the lives of thousands of women in her lifetime.

Indeed, Grier, who in the 1950s and ‘60s contributed to and later edited The Ladder, one of the first lesbian periodicals, had a long and storied career as a champion of lesbian literature at a time when few else did. An avid collector of lesbian-themed books, she compiled and dispersed reading lists to women searching for reflections of their lives in literature. Grier also personally corresponded with hundreds of lesbians who wrote her care of The Ladder, desperate for advice, comfort, and guidance. At the same time, she was legend for her acid tongue, terse manner, and self-importance, so anyone who was completely surprised when Grier released Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, an anthology of writings by lesbian nuns, in 1985 and then sold excerpts to Penthouse Forum, didn’t know the real Barbara Grier.

For the first time, historian Joanne E. Passet uncovers the controversial and often polarizing life of this firebrand editor and publisher with new and never before published letters, interviews, and other personal material from Grier’s own papers. Passet takes readers behind the scenes of The Ladder, offering a rare window onto the isolated and bereft lives lesbians experienced before the feminist movement and during the earliest days of gay political organizing. Through extensive letters between Grier and her friend the novelist Jane Rule, Passet offers a virtual diary of this dramatic and repressive era. Passet also looks at Grier’s infamous “theft” of The Ladder’s mailing list, which in turn allowed her to launch and promote Naiad Press, the groundbreaking women’s publishing company she founded with partner Donna McBride in 1973. Among its notable authors were Katherine V. Forrest, Ann Bannon, Valerie Taylor, Karin Kallmaker, and Isabelle Miller. Naiad went on to become one of the leaders in gay and lesbian book publishing and for years helped sustain lesbian and feminist bookstores—and readers—across the country.

Joanne Passet is Professor Emerita of History, Indiana University East. A former librarian, she is the author of Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality, and Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West.