Sleeping Beauty: A Lesbian Fairy Tale
[Atlanta]: Sojourner Truth Press, 1971. Saddle-stapled in blue card wraps, with green stock inside. First edition. Illustrated. Oblong octavo. Previous owners’ inscription to inside wrap and first flypaper, and some sunning at the extremities of the wrappers, else near fine. Printed in a second edition a year later. Item #10310
The first edition of the lesbian retelling of Sleeping Beauty issued by a short-lived woman’s printing collective in Atlanta. Authored by former Weather Underground member Vicki Gabriner.
In this illustrated fairy tale, the protagonist Stephen finds her lesbian happily ever after in “The Land” with Lilith, a woman who awakens her from a 99-year-long slumber—the result of a lesbian witch’s curse—with a kiss.
Active for just three years from 1969 to 1972, Sojourner Truth Press printed The Great Speckled Bird, an underground anti-imperialist newspaper based in Atlanta, and numerous broadsides. Gabriner, born in Brooklyn in 1942, and raised in a politically active family, was a member of the Weather Underground and traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, an international coalition that organized solidarity caravans of young people to Cuba, formed by the SDS and Cuban government. Gabriner also founded the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance.
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