THE DEATH last week of Barbara Grier, a publisher of books for lesbians, provided yet another occasion for major media outlets to lionize lesbianism. Obituaries of this obscure lesbian publisher appeared throughout the nation. Before the creation of Grier’s publishing house, the obituaries patiently informed us, lesbians were without pulp fiction of their own. Imagine the darkness in which they groped. In an obituary Sunday, the New York Times provided these facts about Grier’s life:

When Ms. Grier was 12, she told her mother that she was “a homosexual,” Ms. Grier said in the “Before Stonewall” profile. “Mother said since I was a woman, I wasn’t a homosexual, I was a lesbian. She also said that since I was 12, I was a little young to make this decision and we should wait six months to tell the newspapers.”

A few years later, when her sexual identity seemed fully mature, Ms. Grier received two of her first lesbian-themed books from her mother. Both were classics of the genre: “The Well of Loneliness,” a novel by the British writer Radclyffe Hall, which caused a scandal when it was published in 1928; and “Of Lena Geyer,” a 1936 novel by Marcia Davenport, a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

The salient details here are :

1. A person’s sexual identity is “fully mature” by the age of 15. (In other words, leave your children to their own devices. Get rich, pursue your dreams, dear mother, it’s not up to you.)

2. Lesbians read.

3. Mrs. Grier’s mother encouraged her daughter to be a lesbian. (Is it any surprise her father was an “intermittent presence” in her life?)

The name of Grier’s publishing company is Naiad Press. The naiad was a type of water nymph honored by the Ancient Greeks and identified with freshwater springs, pools, and streams. She was highly feminine and mysterious. It is strange to think of the modern lesbian, who rejects femininity, as identifying with these creatures of the pagan underworld.

A Naiad, John William Waterhouse; 1893

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