My author’s copies of Tales from the Levee came yesterday. The Genesis of this book, or you might say the labor and delivery, goes back some 17 or 18 years. Looking at those days objectively (hind sight is often 20/20) I see a woman who’d taken on a drastic change rather late in life. After a 15 year marriage and two children, after going to gay bars on intermittent weekends for years, I was in the process of a messy divorce and was living openly with a woman. Last summer when I read the galleys for the book (it was the first time I’d read the whole thing in several years) I saw in the text the raw emotion of finally accepting that I was gay and all that that meant. I don’t write that way anymore. At least I don’t think I do. But I didn’t change it because there was some stark and genuine truth cradled in all that anguish and joy. Of course, leaving all of that untouched, I know I am also leaving myself open to criticism from those who believe it poor taste to let ones feelings show so unabashedly.

When I started the first stories, I was new to it all, and what I tend to do when I’m confronted with something that scares me is ask a lot of questions and learn all I can. That’s how I stumbled on to the first story. My first live-in lover (who’d had spent more time in gay bars than most people) told it to me. When I wrote the story down, I didn’t dream it would eventually be in a book. The story is "The Queen of Tanqueray" and it’s about a fight in a bar between a two lesbians—a prostitute and her butch lover. The second story I tried to write was "Lady Verushka’s Lover." It was a difficult one because I wanted so much in it. I knew I wanted it to reflect a sense of community, introduce the drag queens, and interject some humor. That turned out to be a pretty tall order. What do I remember about writing that story is—my writing instructor at Sangamon State (who always loved everything I wrote) told me the story was hopeless—I conducted the first of several Levee interviews then (with Verushka herself)—I painstakingly revised the story several times—and finally, when I read it to my writers group (all straight except for me), I had to read over the sounds of their enthusiastic laughter. Both of those stories were published. In fact, they both hit the first place I sent them. And I began to have the idea that the stories were important somehow.

So one afternoon we invited Miss Pauline to our apartment. And I’ll never forget the way we sat laughing and talking about the old days, and if I do forget, I have it all on tape. Out of that interview came the story "The Arabian Nights," about the days when Pauline managed a massage parlor. This was followed by a somewhat longer and more complex story called "Bulls." However, by the time those four stories were finished, my rocky first lesbian relationship had ended, and I was sure that I’d written the last Levee story because I had only been a visitor to the bars in those early days. And I certainly didn’t know the people I needed to talk to. Besides I was in a lot of pain. That was when I learned my second significant lesson about being gay. There was nowhere to talk about this painful break-up because everyone I knew either didn’t know I was gay, pretended they didn’t know, or didn’t understand the deep feelings that one woman can have for another. Moreover, the few gay people I knew were her friends (or so I thought). Suddenly that sense of community that existed on the Levee seemed very important. So to keep the project moving, I wrote a story that was completely fiction (the only one in the book) called "The Cajun Dancer."

When the dust finally settled from the end of that first relationship, I saw that interviews had a momentum—and they were far from over. In fact, people wanted to talk to me. I don’t remember the order of the rest of the stories—but when I was finished, I put the stories in order by the approximate years the events might have happened—some were easier to nail down than others. The stories at the end of the book about a murder of a man named Ray Hubert. I’d gone to the archives of the State Journal-Register to get exact details. Other stories are composites of events that happened over a period of time, pulled together for the sake of literary form. Anyway, when I put it all in order, I saw the "Tales" were not only telling the story of gay life in the 1960’s and 70’s, but they were also telling the story of Springfield and how (and sometimes why) the downtown area developed. The era I described started with the destruction of the Orpheum Theater and ended with the destruction of the buildings along North Fifth Street to create a site for the Near North Plaza.

I don’t remember how many times I revised the manuscript—let’s say it was a lot, but the day came when I thought the book was complete. Only then did I realize that 8 years had passed since that first story. Anyway, I started sending the manuscript to mainstream publishers and started accumulating rejection slips. They were usually hand written (if you have to be rejected, this is the best, most complementary way). I remember an editor at Norton told me that she was sure I’d find a publisher for the book. She said it was too regional for them.

In 1995 I submitted Tales from the Levee to the Friends of Lincoln Library as an entry for the Writer of the Year Award, and I won. The book got so much publicity locally as a result that I easily could have sold a thousand copies out of my trunk. But still I had no publisher. The original Levee manuscript that won the award is still in the Sangamon Valley Archives. Since it can’t be checked out, I didn’t think many people would read it. But I’ve heard, in fact, that people have gone up there and spent the whole days reading it.

At any rate, I was discouraged by mainstream presses, so I started sending the manuscript to University Presses. I didn’t get rejected from many of them—they simply didn’t respond at all. That is except for Indiana State University Press. The book got past the first and second readers there. But a change in management resulted in another hand written rejection. A note on top of the returned manuscript from one of the readers said, "I’ve never read a book like this. The only one I can think of that is even close is Stone Butch Blues, and this is much better than that one."

Following the University presses, I tried the independent gay and lesbian presses, and I learned from trying to place Tales from the Levee with them that there are publishers for the boys and there are publishers for the girls, but seldom do the gay presses publish both genders. Tales from the Levee, of course, is the story of a community that included both men and women.

In the mean time a member of my writers group managed to place her lesbian mystery with a lesbian publisher, and I realized mysteries were big sellers in the lesbian market. So I started writing a mystery. When I sent the Levee manuscript to New Victoria Press, I got another hand written rejection. This time the note said that the book wasn’t right for them, but if I had anything else they’d love to see it. I pulled a bunch of erotic short stories (that I had been writing since I finished the Levee) together and sent them to New Victoria. They accepted the book and it became Skin to Skin; Erotic Lesbian Love Stories. My publisher convinced me to put the word ‘lesbian’ in the title. I wish I’d held my ground because that word cost me a lot of sales in this part of the country. For me that first book was a bitter sweet experience. Having a book published was thrilling. Not having the Levee stories (that wanted most to publish) accepted was a letdown. Anyway, the erotic stories were followed by two mysteries: Nine Nights on the Windy Tree and Dispatch to Death. While I was writing for New Victoria, I put the Levee on the shelf, telling myself that most writers have a first manuscript sitting in their closet.

Then a few years back, Buff Carmichael published some of the Levee stories in The Prairie Flame, and the gay community’s reaction to them was inspiring. With a renewed determination, I took the manuscript out and started sending it around again. My decision to send the Levee to Herrington Press had to do with the fact that they seemed to publish both gay and lesbian books—albeit under different imprints. Plus they promoted the books more than the much smaller New Victoria Press could. But I didn’t hear from them for over a year. I actually forgot about the submission. Then one day I got this contract in the mail—strange as it may seem, from the male imprint, Southern Tier. And now it is another year later and the book is sitting here on my desk.

I recently realized that by writing this book, I not only put down some tales, but I did the thing I set out to do in the first place—I learned what it’s like to be a homosexual in the Midwest. I see the stories now as being about a time when we were young—a time when there was a place where we lived and laughed and loved—and sometimes died. It was a time of sequins and wigs, of a drunken drag queen swinging from a beer sign, of women, their bodies pressed together, swaying in smoky barrooms to a ballad by Patsy Cline. It was a place where we drank and laughed together, where friendships were drawn, and no matter how crazy some of us behaved, we were part of something bigger than our individual numbers. I look at the students in my writing classes (19-year-olds with tattoos and pierced tongues) and I read their papers about all the excitement in their lives, and I want to say to them—"Honey, you have no idea . . ." --Martha Miller