LITMIR.BIZ

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      Parke Bowman wanted nothing to do with the presses. The radical politics, the nonprofit status of most of them, their collective organization—it all smelled strongly of the left wing to Parke. Parke got involved in publishing women writers because she was in love with June Arnold.

      Daughters Publishing Company, Inc., was not a press. Both partners, June Davis Arnold and Parke Patricia Bowman, were rather touchy about the distinction. “Publishers of Fiction by Women” (eventually, they would reluctantly include some nonfiction), their writers got contracts, advances, royalties, royalty reports, etc., identical, according to Parke, to those issued to writers by the mainstream houses. Parke and June referred to all mainstream publishers as “Random House.”

      Parke’s stated goal was to run Daughters as if it were Random House and thereby compete with Random House in the marketplace. To Parke, Daughters was strictly a business whose business was profit-making. She wanted to publish novels with both literary merit and commercial appeal, and if the works were perceived as feminist, so much the better. But from the start she made it clear that she would never agree to publish a novel for political content alone.

      June idealized the back-breaking labor at the presses, and she was in complete agreement with their political sentiments. June claimed that Daughters’ reason for being was to publish the novel-length fiction which the presses could not afford to publish. As soon as Daughters was founded, June began looking for manuscripts in keeping with the spirit of the poems, short stories and nonfiction of the presses: deep-thinking personal revelations about the nature of oppression.

      In 1972, June believed wholeheartedly that a full-scale feminist revolution was at hand. With the patriarchy (and mainstream publishing) in ruins, Daughters would replace Random House, and the works published by Daughters would sell like hotcakes in the new world of empowered women.

      Parke enjoyed the idea of Daughters’ replacing Random House, but the last thing on earth she wanted was a feminist revolution, or any connection whatsoever with “prerevolutionary” women’s presses, which she more or less privately referred to as “a bunch of damn dumb dykes.” The way to beat Random House was through the tried-and-true methods of cutthroat capitalism.

      Throughout the life of Daughters, Parke longed to have a quiet, deeply closeted life with June. What Parke had in mind was something closely resembling a standard upper-class heterosexual monogamous marriage. She would eventually get just that, but not until June’s hopes for a women’s world, and her own personal ambitions, had been severely disappointed.

      From the start, therefore, the partners were at odds about the aims of the company. Throughout Daughters’ brief life (less than a decade), June and Parke went through an ongoing struggle to dominate the company and realize their opposing views. Compromises were grudgingly made, or else one or the other of the partners would back down and wait for the next time. It’s a miracle of a sort that the company lasted as long as it did. The miracle, of a sort, was money, lots of it.

      At first, I was only another of the Daughters’ novelists. Then I became their “senior” (their only) editor. Officially, my relationship with the company ended there. Unofficially, I was the third side of a triangle that rivaled the old Lesbian Gothicks in terms of booze, blood, tears, madness, violence, and operatic grand passions—so much so, I often wonder if Daughters wasn’t something I wrote instead of lived.

      For a while, I loved Daughters and Daughters loved me. I applied—I misapplied—three tenets of feminist doctrine to the way I loved Daughters: that trust, solidarity, and strength arise from making oneself totally vulnerable to women; that one may trust women totally, but never men; that male oppression is the sole cause of mental and emotional ill-health in women, and feminism the sole cure. It’s difficult for me to confess to something so banal, but here goes: I needed a good mother.

      Founded in 1972, Daughters published its first list in 1973. By 1979, Parke and June had dissolved Daughters in the manner of any publishing company going out of business. All titles abruptly went out of print; rights reverted to the authors; leftover copies of the books were distributed among the authors and to remainder houses. Parke sold the townhouse in Greenwich Village that had been company headquarters. June and Parke severed their connections with feminism and their authors (including me), and retired to an insulated haute-bourgeoise life in Houston, June’s home town. At the time, June was fifty-three and Parke was forty-five or forty-six. I hoped never to see either of them again.

      Late in 1975, I had rented, along with the feminist theoretician Charlotte Bunch, space in the Manhattan loft building June owned and where she and Parke lived on the top floor. After midnight, in late December of 1977, my phone rang. It was June, in one of her classic rages. She shouted into my ear that I had to be off her premises no later than the next day, my lease notwithstanding. The person I was in bed with, she announced, was an FBI agent who was sleeping with me for the sole purpose of gaining access to Daughters in order to destroy the company.

      The person I was in bed with had about as much to do with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as I did with professional ice hockey. June’s accusation was so very far off the wall that I wondered for an instant if the time had come, finally, to phone for the guys with the straitjackets. I got my breath back; I told June that it was my distinct impression that whoever went to bed with me—including that time back in 1910 (or was it 1902?) when it was J.Edgar Hoover himself, in full frontal nudity, lusting after me—did so to gain access not to Daughters but to my body, okay?

      June told me to start packing. I was gone the next day, as ordered.

      After June’s death, Parke would confess that it was she, not June, who’d wanted me out of the building, no holds barred. That made plenty of sense to me, for two reasons: The FBI had had a strong grip on Parke’s imagination for some time before the night I was caught in bed with J. Edgar Hoover. And Parke had been in love with me since the day we met. If she couldn’t have me, nobody could. Rita Mae Brown, with admirable succintness, once described Parke as a femme in butch clothing, and June, vice versa. She was right. June had to evict me on Parke’s behalf because Parke didn’t have the necessary machismo.

      After the fiasco of my eviction from June’s building, I never expected to hear from either Parke or June again. But in 1979, June telephoned from Houston and rather warmly told me that she and Parke would love to see me, would I come and visit? I said yes. My nearest and dearest suggested that I was out of my mind to go near Parke and June again. I replied that I was certain that Parke and June must want to apologize, heal old wounds, effect a reconciliation: did that sound like I was out of my mind?

      I was out of my mind. June met my plane; Parke waited in the car. June drove and pointed out the sights. Parke sat in stony silence. June told me that they lived in Houston’s most fashionable suburb. It seemed like any fashionable suburb to me—spookily silent, absolutely white-skinned, so rife with self-protection the entire neighborhood seemed to be wedged inside an invisible condom. Their house was hidden behind a locked fence. It was long, low, enormous, and replete with many faux Tijuana-hacienda touches which I recognized because I’m chief of the aesthetics police. Outside, surrounded by a rose garden, there was a swimming pool that passed my inspection.

      Parke disappeared in the house. June showed me a guest room approximately one city block’s length from their bedroom, then she disappeared. I hung out in the guest room for a few hours. Then Parke showed up and told me to give her five dollars; she was going out for burgers, five bucks should cover my share. I gave her five dollars.

      We sat at a table in a dining room suitable for Kiwanis Club banquets and unwrapped dinner in silence. For some reason I wasn’t hungry, so I decided to make conversation. I introduced the subject of combat women in the military, a controversial topic in the news at the time, and asked whether they thought it was a feminist thing for women to turn themselves into cannon fodder—or did they think that turning women into cannon fodder was just another male plot to get rid of uppity women?

      That broke the ice. Instantly, Parke and June flipped from restrained hostility into the active kind: unlike me, they weren’t lily-livered pacifists. They believed in their country. They were one hundred percent

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