Donald A Wollheim/Darrell G Raynor - Part II

 Continued from Part I. 

In 1963, Susanna and Marie sold their resort property as it was unprofitable. In early 1964 they bought another 150 acre property with a large house, again in the Catskills, close to Hunter, New York. This became Casa Susanna, and like the Chevalier D’Eon Resort was frequented by the transvestite crowd. Susanna and her guests would go, dressed, to drive-in movies and to friendly neighbours. Some transvestite visitors even went into the village of Hunter for shopping, where, if nothing else, they were noted for being overdressed.

Wollheim became a regular at Casa Susanna and used the name Donna or Doris. He did not drive and so Elsie chauffeured him. The daughter Betsy was sent to summer camp every year for two months for 8 years to avoid awkward questions. In 1964 he announced that he was going out for Halloween as his sister, and spent five hours in the bathroom getting ready – even at age 12 Betsy realized that this was odd.

Siobhan Fredericks in New York, who had quit Virginia Prince’s FPE, started a competing magazine, Turnabout, of which the first issue came out June 1963. It made fun of the many femme* words that Prince had coined, and attracted cross-dressers who were critical of Prince and her ideas. Fredericks also started a support group in her home, to which Harry Benjamin sent some of his patients, including Renée Richards. Wollheim joined the editorial staff, and wrote articles for Turnabout using the pseudonym ‘D. Rhodes’.

In Issue #1 D. Rhodes contributed “How to write a TV story”. It mocked the genre but assumed that ‘TV story’ = forced femininity. He also reviewed the Nan Gilbert booklets – four had been published at that date. He wrote that such ‘petticoat-punishment’ was ‘calculated to grip the fantasies of most transvestites’. He also contributed ‘Turntable’, an assemblage of bits and pieces from newspapers to the early issues.

In Issue #3 he wrote “Overs and Unders” in which he proposes two kinds of male heterosexual transvestites, of both of which he says: “Virtually all recorded cases of transvestism begin as fetishism which demands not only visual or tactile contact with the fetish object but also the actual wearing of it”. The ‘Overs’ first fixate on shoes, the ‘Unders’ first fixate on under garments. “ … the Over is not greatly concerned with his physical surroundings, especially in his living quarters. The dainty details of feminine life hold no great fascination for him and he is likely to be indifferent to any feminine touches in his surroundings. The Under is more likely to be sensitive to suggestions of femininity all about him, such as color and texture. He is quite often more retiring as an individual and not as bold or aggressive as the Over.” … “It is possible that the Over's career interests tend toward the mechanical arts, the applied sciences, artisan skills, or manual labor. The Under is more likely to be the intellectual worker, the creative artist, the practitioner of one of the more abstract professions, or a worker in some area which would follow logically from his original preoccupation with the unseen as a basis for his imagination. Getting in somewhat deeper, it occurs to me that Overs tend toward the schizoid personality pattern, to include in their ranks the dual-personality types of TV, and to trend more toward homosexuality and transsexualism. On the other hand, the Unders tend toward the manic-depressive pattern, more often become sado-masochistic and melancholic, perhaps even suicidal.”

In Issue #4 he wrote a fantasy of “the year that transvestism caught on” and how the fashion dictated clothing for men and women was reversed.

In Issue #5 Dr Hugo Beigel provided a short article restating the professional opinion that transvestism was not intersex, was a personality disorder and therapy was available. Siobhan Fredericks replied. Shelagh Niles, who often wrote for Transvestia, replied to Rhodes’ article on “Overs and Unders”, partly agreeing, partly adjusting. The same issue contained a short TV fiction by David Grinnell, a pseudonym that Wollheim had previously used for Destination Saturn and Edge of Time.

In 1965, editor Wollheim arranged for Ace Books to publish Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. He believed that the copyright was invalid because the Houghton Mifflin edition had been bound using pages printed in Britain for the hardcover edition there. By US copyright law the text was therefore public domain in the US. The Ace edition was the first US paperback edition of Tolkien's work. However Ballantine Books soon after published an authorized paperback edition with some minor revisions to renew the copyright, and this became the preferred edition for Tolkien fans. 

A Year among the Girls, Wollheim’s memoir of his exploration of the transvestite scene, was published in 1966 by the adventurous publisher Lyle Stuart. Wollheim was of course practised with using pseudonyms, and the book was published as by Darrell G Raynor, but not as by D. Rhodes which would have connected the book to his articles in Turnabout. The book was reprinted as a Lancer paperback in 1968.

Presumably Virginia Prince was not pleased with the book as it sympathized with those who had split from her organizing. Sheila Niles, presumably with Prince’s agreement, reviewed the book in Transvestia, #38.

“In this autobiographical account, the author makes a very serious effort to explore and explain the TV world as he saw it from March 1962 to March 1963. He is an excellent observer and a skilled writer, and it is unfortunate that his viewpoint (more fetishist than TV by his own account) is such as to make his interpretations miss the mark. The good public image of the TV, so carefully built up in the text, is almost completely destroyed by the last chapter - where the author suddenly loses his objectivity and becomes both petulant and spiteful.”

Turnabout #6, Winter 1966, contains D Rhodes’ essay “A random factor in transvestism”, a follow-up to his “Overs and Unders” in Issue #3. After feedback from readers, and reported variations: “One individual would say that he believes himself to be an Under but that he has already adopted and mastered many of the techniques of the Over. On the other hand, an Over will be found to show an interest in the fantasies and preferences of the Under, such as frilly nightgowns and an emphasis on the color pink.” He discusses the impact of a random factor: “The random factor we find here is the measure of closeness to the conscious mind of the thought that life would be better if one had been of the opposite sex … in the Over, this thought is much closer to the surface of the mind, is often quite clearly a conscious desire, and the drive is exerted toward attempting to achieve the impossible”. 

In the same issue, Siobhan Fredericks reviewed A Year Among the Girls, and was very positive:

“This reviewer can say without reservation that this book is the most important study of transvestism to have been published in many years. And in terms of its potential for increasing public understanding of the transvestite's milieu, it is the single most important work ever published. In fast-moving reportorial style, the book presents a sympathetic -- but nonetheless analytical -- “inside” view of the TV phenomenon in terms which the average non-TV reader can readily comprehend and accept.

The author, who happens to be a member of the staff of this magazine, charts out his personal experiences during a single year -- June 1963 to June 1964 [sic] -- in which he first “came out of the closet" and made contact with the TV community so well known to the readers of TURNABOUT and TRANSVESTIA. The events which took place and the personalities which he encountered are thoroughly detailed, as are the effects which these individuals and events had on his own life.

The most amazing thing about A YEAR AMONG THE GIRLS is the accuracy of the author's reportage."

In Turnabout Issue #7, Summer 1966, D Rhodes contributed “In the literature of Transvestism”. He restricts his survey to “literature written especially for transvestically-inclined readers -- and not stories where some-one or other, in order to advance the plot, finds it necessary to don feminine clothing. Such stories are really not TV literature, although it may have some entertainment value for TVs”. He starts with the legendary Miss High Heels, and mainly sticks to forced femininity tales. Ironically he ignores the then newly published I Want What I Want by Geoff Brown, which is positively reviewed elsewhere in the same issue.

In the same issue Siobhan Fredericks wrote about the reception of AYAG:

“DISSENSION IN THE RANKS

One can't help but be amused at the antic behavior of our FPE [Virginia Prince’s term Full Personality Expression – a term used for her national group which had absorbed the Hose and Heel Club] friends and note the way it varies from the official party line as handed down from the Valhallan heights by the male sorority's house organ and fountainhead, TRANSVESTIA. It's refreshing to observe that FPE's attempts to standardize TVism fail so dismally despite stern manifestos and dogmatic directives from on high. Dissension appears rampant among FPEers, and we applaud the rebels for hanging onto their individuality and common sense.

A case in point is the review of Darrell Raynor's A YEAR AMONG THE GIRLS which appeared in a recent TRANSVESTIA, ostensibly authored by FPE Field Commissioner Sheila Niles, who intended to bestow the kiss of death on the book — a book which we lesser mortals view as the greatest thing to happen to TVism since someone thought of cross-dressing. Said Commissar Niles of the book: ‘It's petulant and spiteful.’"

This followed by positive but anonymous quotes from various FPE office holders.

In 1968 Gail’s male persona met and started dating the film star Joan Bennett, and thus disengaged from the transvestite scene.

Also that year, A A Wyn, the owner of Ace Books died, and the company was purchased by a consortium headed by a bank, that had almost no publishing experience. The bills and the authors were not paid, and Wollheim spent most of the time reacting to this rather than publishing books – so he left in 1971. Donald and Elsie founded DAW Books (from his initials). DAW Books was the first mass market specialist science fiction and fantasy fiction publishing house. Most of the writers whom he had developed at Ace went with him to DAW. DAW books were distributed by New American Library. However the NAL objected to Thomas Burnett Swann's How Are the Mighty Fallen, 1974, because of its foregrounding of the Biblical Jonathan and David as gay lovers. (reviews). Wollheim had to fight vigorously to get it released.

Betsy became an associate editor of DAW Books in 1975, and took over the management in 1985.

Donald died in 1990; in 1994 Elsie facing surgery told their daughter everything about her father’s secretive cross-dressing, showing her the AYAG book and boxes of photographs.

Elsie died in 1996

Betsy sold DAW Books in 2022, but continues to work there.

In 2022 Betsy spoke movingly and at length about her father’s cross-dressing and Elsie’s support in the documentary Casa Susanna.

----------------

digitaltransgenderarchive.net does not have Turnabout #8 and #9 which probably have contributions from D Rhodes – but I was unable to consult them. #10, “back in circulation again after so long, - six years, almost”, does not mention either D Rhodes or Siobhan Fredericks, and consists mainly of a long rambling (27 pages) anonymous essay. From then on it is a rather different publication.

The best survey of trans literature is of course Peter Farrer’s In Female Disguise, Karn Publications, 1992, which includes excepts from books by authors from Thomas Mallory to Walter Scott to Mark Twain to Conan Doyle. It is a pity that Wollheim never did a survey of trans science fiction – which he presumably could well have done. Back at the end of the previous century there was a long list on the internet of trans SF. I think that I found it on alt.transgendered. What did happen to that?

AYAG:16 Raynor describes himself as “the father of teenagers”. However only one, Betsy, is mentioned in anything that I read, and she, being born in 1951, was not yet teenaged.

The Unders and Overs dichotomy probably has a place in the pre-history of AGP/HSTS. I wonder if either Freund or Blanchard ever read the proposal and thought that they could do better.

While Wollheim did publish William Burroughs and did go to bat for the gay content in Thomas Burnett Swann's How Are the Mighty Fallen, he does blot his copybook with a few queer-phobic comments – although not as badly as say Betty Cowell :

p22 Before the first meeting with Prince, Wollheim notes that Prince is not: “the kind of person I have always bristled at, resented, disliked in the same way that any normal man tends to bristle at the flagrant faggot.”

p30 On first meeting Prince (male persona), Wollheim notes: “I had looked for evidence of effeminacy, and had not found much”.

p47 On first meeting Gail, Wollheim notes: “His voice was deep and masculine. No Faggot this.”

Shelagh or Sheila Niles? She herself equivocated.

---------------

Bibliography

The Donald Wollheim bibliography as SF writer and as SF editor is enormous, and cannot be repeated here. The items below refer to his life and to his involvement with transvesting.

For his professional bibliography see ISFDB and SFE.

The Biography of Donald Wollheim (not mentioning Darrell Raynor):

• Sam Moskowitz. The Immortal Storm. Hyperion Press, 1974.
• Damon Knight. The Futurians. John Day, 1977.
• Charles Platt. “Donald A Wollheim” in Dream Makers Volume II: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction. Berkley Books, 1983.

Fancyclopedia    EN,Wikipedia    IMDB     Library of Congress

By and about Darrell Raynor and D Rhodes:

• D Rhodes. “How to write a TV Story”, “Turntable”, “The Gilbert Booklets”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 1, June 1963: 7-9, 26-7, 28-9. Online.
• D Rhodes. “Turntable”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 2, October 1963. Online.
• D Rhodes. “Overs and Unders”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 3, 1964. Online.
• D Rhodes. “Full Circle”, “Turntable”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 4, 1964. Online.
• Hugo Beigel. “The Myth of the Latent Femininity in the Male”; Shelagh Niles. “Dear Abbé” (On Overs and Under); David Grinnell. “The Hook”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 5, 1965. Online.
• Darrell G Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. Lyle Stuart,1966, Lancer Books, 1968.
• Sheila Niles. “Review of A Year among the Girls”. Transvestia, 38, April 1966. Online.
• D Rhodes. “A Random Factor in Transvestism”; Siobhan Fredericks. “Books … A Year Among the Girls”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 6, Winter 1966. Online.
• D Rhodes. “On the Literature of Transvestism”; Siobhan Fredericks. “Dissension in the Ranks”. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism, 7, Summer 1966: 18-19. Online.
• Katherine Cummings. Katherine’s Diary: The Story of a Transsexual. Beaujon Press, Revised edition, 1993: 135-7, 144, 151, 195, 224.
• Dallas Denny. “Heteropocrisy: The Myth of the Heterosexual Male Crossdresser”. Chrysalis: The journal of Transgressive Gender, 2,3,1996: 23-30. Online.

• Sébastien Lifshitz (dir & scr). Casa Susanna. France/US, 97 mins 2022. Online. Betsy Wollheim talks about her father at 12:50-21:30, 55:59-57:41, 1:10:20-1:17:12.
• Mark Asch. “Casa Susanna (TIFF 2022)”. Screen Slate, September 12^th Online.
• James Kleinmann. “ DOC NYC 2022 Film Review: Casa Susanna ★★★ 1/2 ”. The Queer Review, November 11, 2022. Online.

There is No mention of Darrell Raynor in:

• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Robert S. Hill. ‘As a man I exist; as a woman I live’: Heterosexual Transvestism and the Contours of Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America. PhD Dissertation. University of Michigan. 2007.
• Peter Farrer. Cross Dressing since the War: Selections from Justice Weekly 1955-1972. Karn Publications, 2011.

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The copyright on A Year Among the Girls was held by Lyle Stuart – perhaps to protect Wollheim’s identity.

Other books published by Lyle Stuart:

• The Secret Life of Walter Winchell(1953)
• Fidel Castro. History Will Absolve Me,
• Edward Sagarin. The Anatomy of Dirty Words. 1962.
• Penelope Ashe (Mike McGrady et al). Naked Came the Stranger.
• William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook, 1970 (how to make bombs)
• Patricia Morgan as told to Paul Hoffman. The Man-Maid Doll.Lyle Stuart, Inc 1973.
• The Turner Diaries, 1997. (a reissue of the white-supremacist dystopian novel, with an introduction disagreeing with the attitude of the novel, but advocating freedom of the press and opposing censorship)

Donald A Wollheim/Darrell G Raynor (1914-1990) science fiction writer and editor, trans memoirist - Part 1

(writing as Darrell Raynor, Wollheim invariably used male pronouns for other transvestites, and this will be taken as his choice of pronoun)

(All page references to A Year Among the Girls (AYAG) are to the 1968 Lancer Book edition)

A life-long New Yorker, Donald Wollheim discovered science fiction at the age of 13 in 1927 with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing. In 1934 his first story was published in Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, and as per Gernsback’s usual practice he was not paid. He found other unpaid authors and they sued.

In 1936 he organized what was later deemed to be the first science fiction convention when a New York group met with a Philadelphia group in the latter city. In 1937 he founded the Fantasy Amateur Press Association; in 1938 he was a co-founder of the Futurians, a Marxist-influenced SF fan group that included many who would later become well-known SF writers. Over the next couple of decades Wollheim became a moderately successful SF author (sometimes using pseudonyms: Allen Zweig, David Grinnell, Millard Verne Gordon, Martin Pearson), but more significantly as an editor and publisher. In 1943, after a long courtship, he married fellow Futurian Elsie Balter.

From 1947 he was an editor at the pioneering paperback publisher Avon Books. In 1951 the Wollheims had a daughter, Elizabeth or Betsy. A year later Donald joined the new publisher Ace Books as an editor. Among the writers who debuted at Ace were Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Leigh Brackett, Ursula K. Le Guin and John Brunner. He published William S. Burroughs’ Junkie, and reprinted Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of Tarzan and of Mars, and brought out the paperback version of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

By the end of the 1950s he was at the top of his trade, was flying back and forth across the US, and his father had a stroke and became his son’s responsibility.

“… deep down, I hated him. This was a concealed hatred, as such things usually are, but it was a deep, thoroughly entrenched part of my whole social attitude. [AYAG: 16-17]

He continued:

“I have a theory that most tranvestites are father haters; that most homosexuals are mother haters. I do not equate transvestism with homosexuality for this reason.” [AYAG:17]

By December 1961 Wollheim was building to a nervous break-down:

“Underneath, in the springs of my subconscious, new forces were thrusting through. I felt the sap of my masculinity rising to higher pitches than ever before. I became intensely aware of women, more so than ever was normal to me before. My sexual fantasies began to shape themselves into sharper forms, more violent. More vivid.

I thought about transvestism. I became actively curious about it. Were there really such people? What were they like? Did they see things as I did?

There is a literature of transvestism, but it is limited, rare, and not very satisfactory. There are nasty little stores on Main Street in Los Angeles and 42^nd Street in New York that sometimes have little booklets that touch on the subject. …

I think that the nervous breakdown became extreme in December. It grew more manifest in January. In that month, two things occurred. I saw a copy of a real transvestite magazine in a store in New York, and a curious Canadian newspaper found its way into my hands.”

[AYAG: 17-18]

He tells us that:

“The fantasy generally took the form of imagining myself being forced to such clothing as punishment for some imaginary misdemeanor. That was how my mind got around the shame of desire. … transvestism was a buried stream throughout the greater part of my life. A few hasty experiments now and then when opportunity coincided with lust.” [AYAG:15]

He had also discovered, in certain bookstores on 42^nd St, a few illustrated booklets featuring petticoat punishment created by a writer generally referred to as Nan Gilbert. In 1960 Gilbert had had his mail stopped and was fined $500. Wollheim nevertheless contacted Gilbert, and they corresponded for some time.

In March 1962 Wollheim, in Los Angeles on business, having previously corresponded, met first Virginia Prince in his hotel room, and then was invited to dinner with Virginia and wife Doreen. He was chauffeured to the Prince’s home by Robert Stevens/Barbara Ellen, previously the manager of a radio station back east, who was also a business associate of Prince (AYAG: chp 1-4). After an interesting evening, it was suggested that in New York Darrell should contact Gail and Susanna who were listed in Transvestia. He also bought the complete back file of Transvestia.

Back home, the first task was to tell Mrs Wollheim. This was done in stages and accomplished after 10 days, and a few days after that they went shopping together on 5^th Avenue for feminine nightwear. 

Darrell also wrote letters to Gail and to Susanna. The former had to go via Prince/Transvestia in Los Angeles, and therefore took longer to get a response. Susanna had published contact details in Transvestia, and could be contacted directly. A letter from Susanna arrived quickly, but an actual meeting – for one reason or another – took several months. It was early April, two weeks later, before a letter arrived from Gail, but it gave a phone number, and Wollheim was able to visit the next evening, had a heart-to-heart chat and was given gossip about New York transvestites.

Nan Gilbert – who had been active among transvestites at an earlier date, and had also been a business man – gave advice not to contact persons such as Gail and Susanna, in that they were frustrated persons who would be disappointing. On the other hand, Wollheim and Gail met a few times for lunch. In May Gail’s move to an apartment in Greenwich Village was complete and Wollheim attended a small party where Gail was the only person in female clothing. Gilbert was mentioned, and known by those who were present. Later when Wollheim sent regards to Gilbert from ‘Alice from Canada’, a reference to one in attendance, Gilbert became curt, and the correspondence was soon discontinued.

Wollheim had business in the Pacific northwest, and wrote to Annette, in Idaho, who had been the cover girl on Transvestia #5, and was duly welcomed. Annette, an engineer and mechanic, lived outside the city, oscillated openly with a wife, two children and a mother, and openly transvested with friends and neighbors and even members of the city council.

The social functions at Gail’s were on most evenings. Wollheim met more of Gail’s acquaintances, and heard tell of Siobhan, who was doing a science PhD, was editor of a science journal and was one of the most successful transvestites in the city.

On the 4^th July, Mrs Wollheim also attended the soiree at Gail’s. This was the first time that they met ‘Fiona from New Zealand’ (actually Katherine Cummings from Australia). A few weeks later the Wollheims visited ‘Fiona’ in Toronto where she was taking a librarian studies degree.

In September, after having been stood up twice by Susanna, and not until then met her, Wollheim phoned to ascertain that she was at home and went straight round. They talked and got on, and Wollheim agreed to attend the Halloween weekend meeting at the Chevalier D’Eon cottage that Susanna and wife owned in upstate New York, the second year that Virginia Prince was to attend – coming all the way from Los Angeles.

Come Halloween, the Wollheims drove up on the Saturday morning. For the first time Wollheim appeared in female dress – for the after-dinner party. Most of the persons that he had met at Gail’s were there as was Virginia Prince, and ‘Fiona’ from Toronto and her flat mate. And psychologists Hugo Beigel and Wardell Pomeroy – who did not cross-dress. Harry Benjamin had also been invited but did not arrive. The Wollheims invited Annette and Virginia and their wives to visit in New York the next day.

In December Wollheim and wife attended a party at Susanna’s New York apartment.

In the early months of 1963, Wollheim, being a professional writer and editor, began to consider putting his feelings and experiences of the past year onto paper, especially as the near mental-breakdown of the year before had passed as he had accepted what he really was, and something like normality had been recovered. As preparation for the writing, he intended to attend a meeting of Virginia’s Hose and Heels Club while in Los Angeles. He had heard that Barbara Ellen, Prince’s business partner was on the out, as was Evelyn, another close associate. Wollheim wrote to Prince asking to attend the Club meeting, but it took three weeks before an answer came, and the answer took umbrage with a piece of doggerel that Wollheim had innocently sent when requesting that any photographs of him not be published. Wollheim had also been corresponding with Barbara-Jean, vice president of the Hose and Heels Club. Prince forbad attendance at the meeting, but did agree to meet with him, but only on the condition that he not contact Barbara Ellen, Evelyn or Barbara Jean.

The first night in Los Angeles, Wollheim went to dinner with Prince and wife, and afterwards back to Prince’s home where he heard Prince’s side of the dispute, which he initially accepted. However two days later he was having second thoughts and phoned Barbara Jean, which led to dinner and an invitation to a party on Friday night where he met all three of the ex-communicants. Evelyn invited Wollheim to breakfast on Sunday morning before his flight home. Prince had also proposed Sunday morning breakfast, but then cancelled it after hearing that Wollheim had attended the party.

Continued in Part II.

----------------------

“copy of a real transvestite magazine in a store in New York, and a curious Canadian newspaper found its way into my hands”. December 1961. The magazine was of course Transvestia, and the Canadian newspaper Justice Weekly. Peter Farrer published an excellent book on the latter in 2011: Cross Dressing since the War: Selections from Justice Weekly 1955-1972.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950 – ) science fiction writer and editor.

Original version August 2010

Salmonson started life as Amos, being born in Seattle to parents on the carny circuit, father a fire eater and mother a sword swallower.  Amos was seven when, with an elder sister, they were abandoned and put in the foster system. 

Salmonson started submitting stories to pulp magazines from the age of 10, although without initial success.   At 12 Salmonson ran away and was able to survive in the burgeoning hippy scene of the mid 1960s.   Salmonson’s father was rediscovered, and his new wife, a Thai Buddhist nun, became a teacher of Buddhism to the teenager.  

By the age of 22, Salmonson was able to get published.   A few years later, while one of the editors of The Literary Magazine of Fantasy and Terror which served as a forum for issues of feminism, Salmonson transitioned and was able to discuss her changes in its pages.


Jessica Amanda Salmonson has specialized as a writer and anthologist in stories with female protagonists, and in feminist science fiction. She has also used the names Patrick Lean and Josiah Kerr and Paghat the Ratgirl. 

She is a prolific author.   For the most comprehensive list of her works see her page in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

• Jessica Amanda Salmonson. The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era. Paragon House, 1991;Anchor Doubleday, 1992.
• Jessica Amanda Salmonson & Jules Remedios Faye. Wisewomen & boggy-boos : a dictionary of lesbian fairy lore. Banned Books. ii, 105 pp1992.
• John Clute. “Salmonson, Jessica Amanda”. In John Clute and John Grant (ed) The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Orbit.  St Martin’s Press, 1997. 

 EN.Wikipedia       Encyclopedia.com       Fancyclopedia    
 Internet Speculative Fiction Database    

Caitlin R Kiernan (1964–) novelist

Kiernan started life as Kenneth R Wright in Dublin, and a few years later moved to Leeds outside Birmingham, Alabama, with his mother, Susan Ramsey Cleveland.

Susan, an avid reader, introduced Wright to Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker. Wright also became strongly interested in paleontology, and as a teenager, volunteered at the Red Mountain Museum where fossils of Cretaceous mosasaurs, extinct seagoing reptiles, could be seen in the rock. Wright also spent several summers on archaeological and paleontological digs.

After studying geology and vertebrate paleontology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Colorado at Boulder, Wright then held both museum and teaching positions at the Red Mountain Museum, and published in paleontology journals, mainly on mosasaurs.

By 1992 Wright had transitioned, and was using the name Caitlin R Kiernan. She wrote her first novel, The Five of Cups, but it was not published until a decade later. Caitlin continued to be published in paleontology journals using her new name.

Her 1995 short story “Persephone” was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers of America, and led to Neil Gaiman and the editors of DC/Vertigo Comics asking her to write The Dreaming, an anthology comic book spun off from Gaiman's popular Sandman, featuring both existing supporting characters from Gaiman's title and new ones of Kiernan's own creation.

Her first published novel, Silk, came out in 1998. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award and won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel. More novels, short stories and comics followed. Her most acclaimed novel to date is The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, published in 2012 and set in Providence, Rhode Island.

Like HP Lovecraft, a major influence, Caitlin lives in Providence with her wife. She describes herself as an atheist pagan.

Caitlin has used the Red Mountain cut, as a setting for four of her novels – Silk (1998), Threshold (2001), Low Red Moon (2003), and, to a lesser extent, Murder of Angels (2004).
She has also written as Kathleen Tierney.

• Geoffrey H Goodwin interviews Caitlin R Kiernan. Bookslut, November 2004. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_11_003472.php.
• Jeff VanderMeer interviews Caitlin R Kiernan. Weird Fiction Review, Mar 12, 2012. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/interview-caitlin-r-kiernan-on-weird-fiction.

Encyclopedia of Alabama     EN.Wikipedia    EN.Wikipedia(Bibliography)    Wikiquote     Amazon Author Page     Queeraday    LocusMag    LiveJournal
______________

Of the people whom I have featured in this encyclopedia, Caitlin is one of the few listed as a notable in the Wikipedia article on her home town.

Rachel Tortolini (194?–) physicist, doctor, writer.

Totolini’s great great uncle was Barnaba Tortolini, the Italian mathematician.

Tortolini did a BS degree in physics and electrical engineering, and then worked for the CIA for three years researching Soviet comsats, and then did degrees in mathematics and philosophy, and worked for Lockheed and Hewlett-Packard.

After transition in 1980, Rachel did a degree in medicine at the University of Cincinnati from 1984-9, specializing in psychiatry and pathology, followed by a psychiatry residency at the Seventh-day Adventist Loma Linda University Medical Center. She did a study of intersex (broadly defined) patients, which led to the first version of her book under the pseudonym of Sarah Seton, and speaking engagements. This was not compatible with the ethos of the Christian medical center and she was asked to go elsewhere.

She became a general practitioner, and then a hospital and prison doctor in Hawai’i. From 2007 she has run a gender clinic, and revised her book on transsexuality. She contributed to the Intersex Guidelines mainly written by Milton Diamond and H. Keith Sigmundson that is featured on the UKIA site. She has also written and published a science fiction novel under the name of Abyssinian J. Kelly. She is also active in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and has worked for human rights for indigenous peoples of the Pacific.

The title of the latest version of her book is Transsexuality in the late 20^th Century, which is so in that she wrote most of it around 1990. Her position is biologistic and that transsexuality is a type of

intersex: that “DNA mapping and advances in neuroanatomy have shown us that transsexuals are indeed inverted in sexual dimorphic areas of their brains (p xv)”, however like most biologistic accounts she does not explain or cite evidence to show how transsexuals differ in this biology from gays or transvestites, or why with each decade there are more trans people. She pays special attention to aromatase syndromes (p 40, 66-72).

Her designations of transsexuality vary from “simply a natural variation in human personality (p xii)” to “Gender Identity disorder (GID) is a rigorously defined syndrome not a blend (p xv)”. On p12 she writes:

“Unfortunately, this so-called ‘real life experience” (RLE) is not specific (although sensitive) to primary transsexuals; many effeminate homosexuals, transgenderists, and self-stigmatized transvestites have deceived themselves into believing they are ‘women’ for secondary gains and can negotiate the trial period successfully due to being gifted with a body habitus close enough to the sex-stereotypes”.

Remember that she wrote this in 1990 before the Blanchard-Bailey fracas, and before the HBS-notTG movement. In February 2010 she commented on Women Born Transsexual:

“Speaking as a clinician, I had no idea that the intersex diagnosis was being hijacked to self serving ends by some members of our community (?). I would also like to apologize here if I have in anyway contributed to encouraging this type of behaviour. “

• Sarah Seton, MD. “Transsexual Theatre”, 1990. Online at: http://lvtgw.jadephoenix.org/Info_htm/Social/tranthea.htm.
• Abyssinian J. Kelly. Heat Death: A Romance. CreateSpace, 2008.
• Sarah Seton. Transsexuality in the late 20^th Century: What it was and what it wasn't. Aetheom Press, 2008.
• Rachel Tortolini MD, MA. LinkedIn. www.linkedin.com/in/racheltortolinimd.

Raphael Carter (? - ) writer

Raphael Carter was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and in 1995 moved to Minneapolis.

Zir postcyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, 1996, was well received and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Carter, who reportedly does not identify as either male or female, wrote "The Murk Manual: How to Understand Medical Writing on Intersex” which uses humorous definitions to express the anger that intersex persons understandably feel, e.g:

“female.
1. A male intersexual when the endocrinologist is through with him. 2. A female intersexual whom the urologist has not seen yet. ...

urologists.

Those benefactors of humanity who, with considerable difficulty, distinguish intersexed infant boys from intersexed infant girls. These infants, when grown, may with equal difficulty distinguish urologists from butchers.”

The next year zie wrote "Androgyny: Rarely Asked Questions" which revives some obscure words such as Arenotelicon, Salmacian, Scrat.  Zie calls zirself androgyne, epicene, neuter.

“People are usually upset at being given a choice, at least where gender is concerned; nothing stops a conversation cold like explaining that I don't care whether people call me he or she”.

However zie points out:

“The trouble is that we humans, strange beasts that we are, use the same language for taxonomy and identity. By describing ourselves we shape ourselves. All too easily, we become slaves to our self-definitions, so that we cannot tell when they have ceased to be true.”.

Carter’s short story, ‘Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation’ was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and won the James Tiptree, Jr Award in 1998. It tells of the discovery of a genetic condition, genagnosia, whose carriers cannot tell gender, but learn social cues so that they can fake such a telling.

Between 1998 and 2002 Carter maintained the Honeyguide Web Log, the second site ever that was named a weblog.

• Raphael Carter. “The Murk Manual: How to Understand Medical Writing on Intersex”. Chrysalis Special Issue on Intersexuality, 1997. www.isna.org/books/chrysalis/murk.
• Raphael Carter. “Androgyny RAQ”. http://practicalandrogyny.com/raq.

EN.WIKIPEDIA    WORLDCAT  AMAZON.COM 
 

Rachel Pollack (1945 - 2023) novelist, poet, Tarot grand master.

Pollack was raised Jewish in Brooklyn, New York. He did a BA in English at New York University and a masters at Claremont Graduate School in California.

In 1971 Pollack declared herself as a transsexual, and as a lesbian (an almost unknown position at that time). Rachel, and her wife Edith, moved to London and Rachel became the contact person for the Gay Liberation Front TV/TS group, which is how she met Roz Kaveney, and together they formed a transvestite presence at the GLF meetings. Rachel and Edith were misunderstood in different ways by both GLF and the political lesbians, but raised issues by their very presence. In line with the magical reality of her fiction, Rachel challenged the biological definition of women. Edith was active in the Women’s Liberation Front.

Rachel moved on to Amsterdam, where she started on hormones and then had surgery from Philip Lamaker in 1976. This was done without counselling in that she obviously knew what she was doing.

She returned to the US and has successfully pursued a career as a writer. Her Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best novel of the year 1989.

In 1990 at age 45 she had a bat mitzvah, 30 years after her bar mitzvah.

In 1992 she wrote “Abandonment to the Body’s Desire” in Rites of Passage:

"the trance-sexual woman sacrifices her social identity as a male, her personal history, and finally the very shape of her body to a knowledge, a desire, which overpowers all rational understanding and proof".

Her emphasis has been and remains that transsexuality is a passion, and certainly not a sickness. In 1993 Rachel spoke on trans issues to the Council of Europe, and also at the International Conference of the Harry Benjamin Association.

From 1993-5 she revived the Doom Patrol comic book and introduced, Coagula, a trans character.

She was a contributor to TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism. In a 1997 paper for the Transsexual New Telegraph (as Rites of Passage had become), she wrote:

“What sense does it make to label some people as true transsexuals, and others as secondary, or confused, or imitation? Whom does such an attitude serve? I can think of no one but the gatekeepers, those who would seize the power of life and death by demanding that transsexuals satisfy an arbitrary standard. To accept such standards, to rank ourselves and others according to a hierarchy of true transsexuality, to try to recast our own histories to make sure they fit the approved model, can only tear us down, all of us, even the ones lucky enough to match that model.”

Rachel’s Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, 1997.

Anne Lawrence cites Rachel as a major influence and includes two essays on her site, and Catherine Platine quotes her “words of wisdom” from her “Archetypal Transsexuality”:

"Transsexuality comes to us with all the power of a divine force who will not be denied. If we recognize it and accept it as a true vision of the self from the deepest part of the psyche, if we carry the Goddess with us .....then we may find it opens us to a life of spirituality and joy. If we try to deny or belittle it, or explain it away, it can destroy us. Knowing ignorance is strength. Ignoring knowledge is sickness. If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.".

Her 2002 novel, A Secret Woman, has a police detective who is both trans and Jewish.

In 2003 she published The Body of the Goddess: Sacred Wisdom in Myth, Landscape and Culture.

She is an expert on the tarot, and has written many books on its interpretation. She wrote the text for the tarot decks of Salvador Dali and Hermann Haindl, has designed her own tarot deck, and worked with Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman on the Vertigo Tarot Deck.

She suffered for some years from  Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and died from it at age 77. 

• Rachel Pollack. “Abandonment to the Body’s Desire”. Rites of Passage, 1992. Reprinted: www.annelawrence.com/abandonment.html. Reprinted again in Noach Dzmura (ed). Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in the Jewish Community. North Atlantic Books, 2010.
• Rachel Pollack. “Archetypal Transsexuality”. 1995. www.annelawrence.com/archetypal.html.
• Rachel Pollack. “Aphrodite: Transsexual Goddess of Passion”. Journal of Archetypal Psychology, Spring 1995.
• Rachel Pollack. “What is to be done? A Commentary on the Recommended Guidelines” In Gianna E. Israel & Donald E. Tarver. Transgender Care: Recommended Guidelines, Practical Information, and Personal Accounts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997: 229-35, 269.
• Rachel Pollack. “The Varieties of Transsexual Experience”, 7 Transsexual News Telegraph 18, 20, 1997.
• “Transgender Jews”. Lilith, Spring 2002.
• Rachel Pollack. “The Transsexual Book of the Dead: Osiris and the Trance Man”. In Dean Kotula. The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals. Los Angeles, Calif: Alyson Publications, 2002.
• Cathryn Platine. “The Wisdom of Direct Knowledge”. 2003. http://gallae.com/gnostic.html.
• Rachel Pollack. The Body of the Goddess. London: Vega, 2003.
• Mair Davies. “Rachel Pollack” in W11 in the 1970s, 2006. http://maironline.com/bobby/w11/09rachel.htm.
• Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong.  "Writer Rachel Pollack, who reimagined the practice of tarot, dies at 77".  NPR, April 19, 2023.  Online.

EN.Wikipedia     www.rachelpollack.com    Tarotpedia

Roz Kaveney (1949 - ) writer, critic, editor, activist.

Kaveney grew up in Acton, London. Before going to university, he spent some time with a group of trans sex workers in Manchester who helped with self-definition, and with self-defense. At Pembroke College, Oxford the gay scene was somewhat lacking:

“I wanted something that promised more, something wilder and saner. Something with radical politics and a sense of fun and experimental attitudes to the possibilities of sex and style and screaming in the street.”

A phone call to the newly formed Gay Liberation Front in London led to the TV/TS Group, which turned out to be run by Rachel Pollack then living but fifty yards from where Kaveney had grown up. Together they formed a transvestite presence at GLF meetings.

From the late 1970s Kaveney established a reputation as a Science Fiction critic, and also wrote on feminism, gay rights and censorship. Roz had completed transition by 1980.

"I was reared Catholic but got over it, was born male but got over it, stopped sleeping with boys about the time I stopped being one and am much happier than I was when I was younger."

In the 1980s Roz was a co-editor of Interzone science fiction magazine. From 1989 she was a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship. In the early 1990s she was in the Midnight Rose collective (with Alex Stewart, Neil Gaiman and Mary Gentle) that produced a series of SF anthologies for Penguin Books.

In the mid-90s, when she was Deputy Chair of Liberty, she wrote their report of transsexuals for submission to the UN. The Director, having come across the term ‘transgender’ and thinking it a more radical synonym, did a search and replace throughout the document. Roz persuaded him that the best solution was a policy switch in favour of appropriate rights for all trans people.

She was a contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 1997.

In her essay for More & Whittle’s Reclaiming Gender, 1999 Roz articulates six non-negotiable axioms as the basis for any workable transgender and transsexual politics:

1. Display solidarity with all of our transgender (including transsexual) brothers and sisters
2. Build alliances by getting involved as ourselves in other areas of politics
3. Don’t let journalistic and intellectual attacks on our community go unanswered; We can have and keep the intellectual and moral high ground
4. Be creative, be smart, be ourselves and don’t let anybody tell us who we are and what we do
5. Refuse the pathological medical model - we are not sick, just different
6. Refuse those politics - heterosexism, body fascism - that work against all the above, but most especially against no.1.

She continues:

“The reformist transsexual agenda often sets up, as part of its argument, a largely false dichotomy between ‘people who pass’ and the inferior capacity of ‘people who don’t pass’. ... And, of course, none of us really know that we have passed all the time and as long as we fetishize the model of passing as the only way to be accepted as who we are, for just that long our self-esteem will be under threat from any small child or gutter journalist who feels like having a go. ... The possibility, or even probability, that someone passes most of the time is no defence for them on the rare occasions when they do not. You are only as safe as your roughest day.”

Roz is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent and The Times Literary Supplement, and was number 85 in the Independent on Sunday Pink List, 2011.

• Kris Kirk and Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 1984: 82.  
• Roz Kaveney. More Tales from the Forbidden Planet. London: Titan Books, 1987.
• Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, and Roz Kaveney. The Weerde. Bk. 1, A Shared World Anthology. ROC, 1992.
• Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, and Roz Kaveney. The Weerde. A Shared World Anthology Bk. 2. Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin, 1993.
• “Roz Kaveney”. John Clute and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
• Roz Kaveney. “Talking Transgender Politics”. In Kate More and Stephen Whittle. Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin De Siècle. London: Cassell, 1999. http://bit.ly/rpFY0e.
• Roz Kaveney. Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel. London: Tauris Park Paperbacks, 2001.
• Roz Kaveney. From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.
• Kaveney, Roz. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
• Kaveney, Roz. Superheroes. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.
• Jorjet Harper. “Pop Culture, Queer Culture: An Interview with Roz Kaveney”. Windy City Times, 2008-04-16. www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=18047.
• Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Story. Nip. London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2011.
• Roz Kaveney. “Shot, Stabbed, Choked, Strangled, Broken: a ritual for November 20th”. In Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Berkeley, Calif: Seal Press, 2010.
• "Roz Kaveney". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roz_Kaveney.
• "Roz Kaveney". The Guardian. www.guardian.co.uk/profile/roz-kaveney.
• Roz Kaveney. "Gay Liberation Front at 40". Pride London. www.pridelondon.org/component/content/article/61-glf/111-glfrozkaveney
• http://glamourousrags.dymphna.net.
• http://rozk.livejournal.com.
• “Roz Kaveney” Internet Speculative Fiction DB. www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Roz_Kaveney.

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I also went to the GLF TV/TS group, but in 1974, by which time it was pretty naf.

Jean Marie Stine (1945 - ) writer, publisher.

Henry Eugene (Hank) Stine, who also has written as Allan Jorgenson, Robert Randall, Victor N. Davich, Janice Morgan Stevens and Sibly Whyte, is most famous for the novel Season of the Witch, 1968, in which a man, accused of rape, is punished by having his consciousness transferred to the woman’s body. Still having a male consciousness, s/he hopes to regain his original body, but has to kill the body to kill the personality now occupying it. Finally she realizes that she is pregnant from her original male body, and accepts her femaleness. The story was filmed in 1996 as Memory Run (also released as Synapse).

Stine was editor of Galaxy science-fiction magazine from 1979, and transitioned to Jean Marie in the 1980s.

Jean Marie is also a writer of self-help books, and is the publisher of Renaissance E Books.

She was a board member of the transgender groups IFGE and the Tiffany Club of New England; a contributing editor for both the online magazine International TG and the print zine Transformation.

She has also written biographical material about Ed Wood, the filmmaker.

• Charles Platt. “Hank Stine”. Who Writes Science Fiction? London: Savoy Books 1980. New York: Berkley Books as Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. 1980.
• Allen A. Goldstein (dir & scr) Memory Run/Synapse. Scr: David N. Gottlieb & Dale Hilebrand, based on the novel Season of the Witch by Hank Stein, with Chris Makepeace as Andre Fuller and Karen Duffy as Celeste/Josette. US 90 mins 1996.
• Jean Marie Stine. Ed Wood – The Early Years Renaissance E Books. 112 pp 2001.
• Janice Morgan Stevens. Everything you wanted to know about sex changes ... and were afraid to ask: a primer for male to female transsexuals. Renaissance E Books. 2002.

EN.Wikipedia.