Note: My previous T-shirt posts have tended long, so I’ve been aiming to post just once a week, on Mondays. Not all my Ts are part of a long(ish) story, however — or, like this one, they’re the precursors of a story that will be elaborated on later. So, starting now, I’m going to occasionally post shorter tales mid-week, on Fridays. We’ll see how it goes!

Considering what an important role women’s fantasy & science fiction (f/sf) came to play in my life, I’m a little surprised that I can’t pinpoint what got me started in earnest. It almost certainly happened in the late 1970s, after I moved back to D.C., immersed myself in the grassroots women’s community, and came out as a lesbian.

On the other hand, only a handful of my new communitarians were avid f/sf readers. Most of the rest considered it a guy thing. They had good reason. Much later I heard the once-witty (maybe) cliché that “the Golden Age of science fiction is 14.” It didn’t have to be said that it was also male.

I’d been an avid reader from an early age, but I leaned toward nonfiction. My fiction reading through high school was mostly mysteries and political thrillers: Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent and A Shade of Difference; Fletcher Knebel’s Seven Days in May, Night of Camp David, and The ZinZin Road; and anything about nuclear apocalypse, such as Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach.

Yes, indeed: it’s not hard to see how the latter two titles might be considered f/sf, or at least proto. As a schoolkid I was very, very big into superhero comic books: Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Justice League of America. I did like Wonder Woman, though her costumes were embarrassing: did any of the male superheroes run around in such scanty clothing? In college I got lost in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I read Frank Herbert’s Dune and was especially impressed by his use of Arabic and derived-from-Arabic names.

But f/sf didn’t become a passion till, in the late ’70s, I realized that much of the best new women’s writing around was fantasy and/or science fiction. I don’t even remember where I started, maybe Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969) or Joanna Russ’s Female Man (1975)?

I found Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines (1978) at Moonstone Bookcellars, the one on Pennsylvania Ave. NW near Washington Circle (and George Washington University — there was another one in far Northwest, Friendship Heights or somewhere, but I don’t think I ever went to that one), and almost certainly read it before its predecessor, Walk to the End of the World (1974). Wow! A world of all women — and horses too!

Joan Nestle, of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, was a huge science fiction fan, and the LHA already had an impressive collection of feminist f/sf zines and books. She pointed me in promising directions toward treasures like Amanda Bankier’s zine The Witch and the Chameleon (1974–76), and the furious controversy that had followed the publication of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover Landfall in 1972. From her I learned that MZB had written several lesbian pulp novels under various pseudonyms and that she had played a key role in collecting the bibliographical information that went into Barbara Grier’s path-breaking bibliography The Lesbian in Literature.

Moonstone, whence this T-shirt comes, was a compact shop below sidewalk level, crammed with floor-to-ceiling shelves of fantasy and science fiction, nearly all of which came in mass-market paperback. Anything with a woman’s name on the spine I’d take off the shelf, peruse, and often buy.

Moonstone did not carry Sally Gearhart’s pioneering The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (Persephone Press, 1978), which quickly became a lesbian and feminist classic. The primary problem was the format, not the content. Like virtually all feminist-press books it was published in trade paperback — and trade paperbacks didn’t fit on mass-market shelves.

Using the name of the D.C. Hags, which had brought Mary Daly to D.C. in March 1979, I took the lead in producing a reading and talk by Sally in November of that year. My interview with her appeared in the January 1980 off our backs.

I’ll have plenty to say about women’s f/sf later (will I ever!), but I’m pretty sure my obsession started here, in the late 1970s, and that the Moonstone Bookcellar near Washington Circle did plenty to encourage it.

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