and happy

She's gay

Rose grows up in 'jungle'

By Judy Klemesrud

• New York Times

NEW YORK If feminists hadn't banished such adjectives as peppy, perky and pert from the language, those words could be used aptly today to describe Rita Mae Brown.

She has a short, flippy hair style, smiling brown eyes, a girlish, Southern drawl, and the high voltage energy of a varsity cheerleader.

She is also a lesbian. And a political activist, and a poet, as well as the author of the humorous autobiographical novel, "Rubyfruit Jungle," about a woman who grew up homosexual and enjoyed it.

The book became an underground phenomenon and sold 70,000 copies after it was published in 1973 by a small Manhattan women's collective, Daughters Inc. No major publisher would touch it at the time.⠀

Earlier this month, a major paperback house, Bantam Books, began distributing 250,000 copies of the book after paying Miss Brown and Daughters Inc. $250,000 for the rights.

And in the spring of 1979 filming of "Rubyfruit Jungle" is scheduled to begin under the direction of Joan Tewkesbury, screenwriter of Robert Altman's "Nashville." No star has yet been signed to play the book's spirited heroine, Molly Bolt, but Miss Brown, who was the co-author of the script with Arnold Reisman, said she hoped it would be Lily Tomlin

"My real life pretty much follows the book," the 32-year-old author said the other day, as she sat in the study of an apartment she shares with a friend in Greenwich Village. "One of the few differences is that Molly Bolt made a film about her mother for her project at the New York University film school, and I made a film about a nun."

Molly Bolt is a sassy, precocicus child, born out-of-wedlock in rural Pennsylvania, who is adopted by working class parents who move to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Molly has her first lesbian experience in the sixth grade, becomes a student leader in high school, wins a scholarship to the University of Florida, and is eventually expelled for having an affair with her roommate. She winds up in New York City, where she finally completes her degree in cinematography.

"I think the reason people like the book so much is because it's about resilience and overcoming adversity," Miss Brown said. "That's what Molly Bolt is all about, and people understand that whether they're straight or gay."

As a result of the success of her book and two earlier books of poetry, "The Hand That Cradles the Rock" and "Songs to a Handsome Woman," Miss Brown has emerged as one of the writing stars of the homosexual women's movement, along with Jill Johnston, Kate Millett and Bertha Harris. Two women fans named their cars Rita Mae. She even has female groupies who camp on her doorstep.

How does she account for her popularity? She laughed. "Most lesbians are thought to be ugly, neurotic and self-destructive," she said, "and I just am not. There's no way they can pass me off that way. I'm not passing myself off as gorgeous and a bastion of sanity, but I'm certainly not like those gay stereotypes of the miserable lesbian, the poor woman who couldn't get a man and eventually commits suicide.

"And I'm funny," she added with a big smile. "Funny people are dangerous. They knock down barriers. It's hard to hate people when they're funny. I try to be like Flip Wilson, who helped a lot of white people understand blacks through humor. One way or another, I'll make 'em laugh, too:"

Miss Brown, who wore no makeup, was dressed in a black silk blouse with gray penguin figures

New York Times

Rita Mae Brown, poet and political activist, has emerged as one of the writing stars of the homosexual women's movement.

on it, black pants, turquoise glitter socks and black clog shoes. A red silk aviator's scarf flowed dramatically around her neck.

What does she think about the cult of personality that seems to have sprung up around her? “I . don't like it," she replied. "I think it's very unhealthy and destructive. Like most writers, I lead a pretty monastic existence I have no lover right now and people will call me up or sit out on the step..On the one hand it's flattering, but on the other hand it's frightening, because if they had gotten my message, they'd go out and do something themselves."

Frowning, she said she had observed what had happened to several leaders of the women's movement who had achieved cult celebrity, including Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett. "In Gloria's case, I think she became even more quiet and private because so many people made impossible demands. In Kate's case, I think it threw her off course for a while. That's what her second novel, 'Flying,' is all about."

Miss Brown has long been active in both the women's and homosexual movements. She was an early member of the National Organization for Women, a founder in 1969 of the radical feminist group Redstockings, and a member from 19711973 of the Furies, a lesbian collective in Washington, which forged a lesbian feminist separatist ideology and began promoting it in a newspaper of the same name.

Miss Brown, who currently teaches writing part-time at the Women Writers' Center in Cazenovia, N.Y., is also the author of a newly published novel called "In Her Day," about two lesbians -one middle-aged and in the closet, the other a young activist who meet in the Mother Courage restaurant in the Village and try to reconcile their different lives.

And she has just completed her third novel, based on the lives of her mother and her aunt, called "Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other."

Miss Brown displayed, no outward emotion when asked about Anita Bryant's anti-homosexual Save Our Children crusade. "It's made the gay issue public in a way that it never could have been without her bigotry," she said evenly. "So it's been valuable. My 72-year-old mother even got her preacher to preach a sermon in favor of gay rights, and against Anita.”