IN 1965, CANADIAN WRITER JANE RULE almost lost her university teaching job. She tells the story in the introduction to Lesbian Images, a book about Gertrude Stein, Violet LeDuc, Willa Cather, and others. The previous year, Rule had published Desert of the Heart, the first gay- or lesbian-positive novel ever published in Canada. When the university administration realized that this popular romance was about two lesbians, they tried to end Rule's teaching contract. She was saved at the last minute by sympathetic colleagues who made the case that although some

people write murder mysteries, it does not follow that they themselves are murderers. Similarly, though Jane Rule had written about lesbians, they argued, it did not necessarily follow that she herself was a lesbian. University officials were satisfied enough with this reasoning to let her stay. People on campus did, however, start getting a bit curious about her longtime roommate Helen Sonthoff.

How Jane Rule managed to live through such indignity and insult, I will never fathom. But it's because of the pioneering activism and writing of women like her that I am able to live and write as an out lesbian. Jane Rule made it part of her mission to create a kind of visibility for lesbian writers. It's up to lesbian writers of the present day to make our work a part of the wider dialogue of world literature. It's not enough that our writing exists in the cultural margins -- it is as important and necessary to the national dialogue as the literature of any other "minority" group, be they African American writers, Asian American writers, or Mid-Life Crisis Straight White Male writers.

But lesbians who write openly about our lives as lesbians are not rewarded by mainstream reviews, grants, or even serious consideration. The lesbian work that is most rewarded is that which can be read as, or pass for, straight. We see this when we look at some of the recent and long overdue successes that lesbian writers have had in terms of mainstream acceptance.

Last year, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama was given to the lesbian playwright Paula Vogel for How I Learned to Drive. This is a substantial, moving play, and more than deserving of the Pulitzer or any other accolade anyone wants to give it. And Paula Vogel is an out lesbian who does not hide her lesbianism in interviews or by coding it secretly in her work. But it is no coincidence that the biggest honor she has been given thus far in her career is for a play that does not have any lesbian content. How I Learned to Drive is about, among other things, the sexual abuse of a child within an extended family. Child sexual abuse was also at the center of the plot of Dorothy Allison's novel Bastard out of Carolina, the most successful novel by an out lesbian of our era, but a novel that has no lesbian content. Does this mean that our culture is more nervous and ashamed of lesbianism than it is of childhood sexual abuse?

This year, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Wit, a play by Margaret Edson. The play is about an older woman who is bravely coping with a terminal diagnosis. This woman is smart, witty, an academic, and very single. In other words, a classic case of an old-style lesbian intellectual. Edson is a lesbian, but her protagonist is strangely asexual. Imagine August Wilson winning the Pulitzer for a play in which none of the characters happen to be of any race at all.

The few lesbian writers who have been rewarded by mainstream acceptance are not rewarded for lesbian content. The message we are given is that for our art to be "real" art, of interest to anyone but ourselves, we have to "graduate" from the fringey stories of our own personal, political, and sexual lives to stories not about us.

I know this sounds excessive, but let's imagine a comparison. Let's say that early in his career, the African American author Charles Johnson wrote a couple of novels in which African American men were major characters. Imagine that these books were not accepted for publication by a mainstream publishing house because the white editors of these houses found the characters "marginal." Imagine that some brave, small African American press published these books, but they were only read by the 10 percent of our culture that is African American, about the same percentage that is homosexual. Then imagine that Johnson wrote a book that takes place in a white suburb of Connecticut, say a story about a middle-aged, white, straight male academic who has a mid-life crisis and an affair. Or maybe a story about a white man in Montana with a drinking problem who goes fishing.

Let's say this book about a white protagonist suddenly finds a big publisher. Maybe the lone black editor at a mostly white publishing house, who has told himself he's always wanted to publish a black writer but had been concerned about looking too "marginal," finally finds a black writer who has written a book about a "substantial" (i.e., white) subject. The book comes out and gets lots of critical attention. After all, this author has been quietly writing books for years, and he knows how to write a book. But because his previous works have been ignored by mainstream reviewers -- white people who simply had no personal interest in marginal black issues -- they regard this fellow as a new discovery! They laud him for having "gotten beyond his personal obsessions to explore universal themes." Then they do him the great compliment of comparing his work to that of white writers like John Cheever, John Irving, John Gardner, Rick Moody, Rick Bass, or Richard Ford. Because as far as these critics know, since they've never read them, writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and my particular hero, Richard Wright, never existed. Now imagine that the book sells lots of copies, wins some awards, makes some money, and maybe even gets sold to the movies.

What is this writer to do?

While I, like most folks, believe that an artist should be able to explore whatever she or he wishes, including imagining her or his way into other people's heads, what does it mean that the black work by this writer is ignored while the white work is praised? It means that though this writer has imagined his way into and written about a life that is different from his own, the critics and promoters of mainstream culture who determine what will be read, reviewed, and rewarded, cannot imagine a life different from their own.

What I've just described is a dreadful scenario. Thank goodness the real Charles Johnson's brilliant work is about, among other things, the histories and positions of African American men in our culture. And thanks to the work of Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and others who made a place in our culture for literature about black men's lives, Johnson was able to get this important work out to a wide readership.

Dreadful though that imagined scenario may be, it is also, unfortunately, a realistic depiction of what lesbian writers in America face today. For years we have been grousing about having our work dismissed -- we've been turned down for grants and funding and have had our writing critically ignored. I am one of those lesbians. Despite my publication record of seven books in the U.S. (four of which were first published in the U.K., three by a big publishing house there) and translations of books and stories into several languages, I have never received any grant I have ever applied for -- NEA, Guggenheim, Ingram-Merrill, WSAC, SAC, KCAC, Artist Trust, Louisa M. Kern, Bunting, and others.

After years of hearing lesbian writers' anecdotes about being denied funding, New York-based writer and activist Sarah Schulman studied the seven major supporters of independent fiction writing in this country. She looked at who was funded between 1990 and now. The report is called "Institutional Exclusion of Lesbian Literature from Foundation Support," and here's some of what she found: "There are many stages of closetedness in the current literary market and they have distinct relationships to foundation support. In the current climate lesbians who are closeted personally and in their creative work are the most likely to receive funding. Almost every foundation that we examined funded women in this category.

"The second most likely group for support were women who were openly lesbian or bi-sexual in the gay and lesbian media but omit or deny the same sex experiences in the mainstream media. None of these women had primary lesbian content in her work. The third most likely group for support are women who are completely out personally, but are primarily known... for creative work with no primary lesbian content. In some cases, like Adrienne Rich, these women's reputations were established before they came out as lesbians.

"The final category, women who are out personally and in their work, are almost completely excluded from foundation support."

Schulman provided some interesting numbers to support her argument:

· Since 1990, the Guggenheim Foundation has funded 39 fiction writers -- 23 men and 16 women. Guggenheim Fellows with primary queer content: four men and one woman, the American writer Blanche Boyd. The Guggenheim is the only one of these foundations you can apply to. And in a way it acts as an entry-level grant, in that the following grants, which are awarded by internal nomination only, often go to folks who have previously won a Guggenheim.

· Since 1990, The MacArthur Foundation has funded 11 fiction writers -- seven men and four women. MacArthur Fellows in fiction with openly queer content: one gay man, Guy Davenport. Lesbians: zero.

· The Whiting Foundation gave money to approximately 28 fiction writers -- 19 men and nine women. Whiting fellows with primary queer content: gay men, four. Lesbians: zero.

· The Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writers Fund has awarded money to approximately 18 fiction writers -- nine men and nine women. Lila Wallace Fiction Fellows with primary queer content: gay men, zero. Lesbians: zero.

· The Lannan Foundation has made grants to approximately 15 fiction writers -- 11 men and four women. Lannan Fiction Fellows with primary queer content: gay men, zero. Lesbians: zero.

· The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded money to over 40 fiction writers. American Academy Fiction fellows with primary queer content: seven gay men and one lesbian, the English writer Jeannette Winterson.

"When such a significant force systematically withholds support from lesbian literature," Schulman's report concludes, "there are concrete results. Most importantly, writers are financially pressured to drop the lesbian content from their work in order to be able to earn a living. [T]hose who won't are excluded not only from financial support, but also from the prestige and recognition those foundations represent." This exclusion is both caused by and contributes to the larger exclusion of lesbian voices from mainstream publication, attention, influence, and dialogue.

It's notable that although lesbian artists are almost entirely excluded, some gay men did get funded. Overall, almost 70 gay and straight men received funding, as opposed to only 42 women. In the queer world, unfortunately, it is still much as it is in the world at large -- men have more money, power, and acceptance than women. Things have gotten better but are still far from equal.

The first woman to come out as a lesbian in the mainstream media was Jill Johnston, art critic for the Village Voice. She did so in 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots. In 1973, Johnston was able to place Lesbian Nation with a mainstream publisher. This book included essays with titles like "The Making of a Lesbian Chauvinist," "Dyke Nationalism and Heterosexuality," and my personal favorite, "Lois Lane is a Lesbian." Recently, Johnston has said this about her writing from the 1970s: "My whole mission... was to mongrelize the language, deform and debase every convention, create a freak of culture, engender a misbegotten blot on the authorial landscape. In addition to lower-casing and deparagraphizing, thieving quotes, standardizing the non sequitur, decontextualizing narrative and glorifying the neologism, I enjoyed writing unpunctuated and run-on sentences, and habitually twisting grammatical norms and common usage." The novelty of her style, Johnston went on to say, was meant to represent the "birth of an historically unprecedented lesbian/feminist identity." As Gertrude Stein had done before her, Johnston reinvented American literary form and language. But while Stein had done so in the 1930s and 1940s without making public statements about her lesbianism, Johnston very publicly tied the innovations of her writing style to her identity as a lesbian.

Also in 1973, Daughters, Inc., a small feminist publisher that happened to be run by a bunch of dykes, published Rubyfruit Jungle. The author was Rita Mae Brown, a member of the Washington, D.C.-based radical feminist collective, the Furies. This first novel was a fast, funny, Huck Finn-esque coming of age story about an all-American lesbian. At first it sold by word of mouth, but was soon picked up by a major New York publishing house and eventually became a best seller.

But then, in the mid 1970s, to quote Jill Johnston again, "everything was closing down." The advances feminists and lesbians had started to make into mainstream culture were reversed by a conservative backlash. Folks like Phyllis Schlafley and Anita Bryant began rearing their pretty little "Total Woman" heads. Feminists and lesbians who had hoped to follow along on Jill Johnston's and Rita Mae Brown's mainstream publishing successes had to stop hoping for that. So women like Barbara Grier, Nancy Bereano, Barbara Wilson, and the women of the Feminist Press founded their own publishing houses to support the writing of women -- both straight and lesbian -- whose work was excluded from the mainstream. There was less need for a comparable progressive men's publishing movement because men -- straight and discreetly gay like Capote, Vidal, Davenport, and Purdy -- already had access to male-centered mainstream publishing.

Some of the acceptance of more recent literature by gay men has been due to the impact of AIDS on our culture. Gay men were the first people to get AIDS, to organize care for their sick and dying, and to make art about these losses. As long as the disease was perceived as a condition that affected only gay men, it was nearly impossible to get mainstream news coverage of it, much less funds for research and prevention. Later, as the numbers of the dead grew to the extent that non-homosexuals realized they were losing their brothers, sons, and co-workers too, AIDS shifted from being a "merely" gay disease to a disease worthy of receiving government money, study, and support. Now, of course, worldwide, AIDS is not a "gay" disease at all. Similarly, when AIDS was perceived as being a "gay" subject, art about AIDS was relegated to obscurity -- stories and plays were published or performed by gay men in small venues. Only after movie stars and avowedly straight sports stars started dying from and talking about AIDS did the disease become a subject of mainstream art. Then more people started paying attention to art made by and about gay men. This laid the groundwork for the success of works like Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Paul Monette's Becoming a Man.

The literature of AIDS occupies a unique place in queer literature. I am personally very aware of this. My fifth book was a novel called The Gifts of the Body. It is about a woman who does chore work for people who are dying at home of AIDS. It was based on experiences I had when I volunteered for the Chicken Soup Brigade, then worked as a home-care helper for the Fremont Public Association. I continue to be grateful for having been able to do that work, and for being able to grieve in my own way by writing some of the stories in that book. I continue as a writer to be proud of how I shaped those stories and made a book that could be of use, not only to readers but also to Fremont, which receives a tithe of whatever income the book earns.

However, I am not the only lesbian who has found that only when I began to write about AIDS did my work gather any significant interest beyond a lesbian readership. Death due to AIDS, once it was no longer perceived of as a "queer" subject, became something America was willing to think about. But the lives of people who are lesbians are still not regarded as worthy of mainstream American interest.

American culture is richer, smarter, and better for the dialogue brought to it by the previously ignored "minority" literatures of African-, Asian-, Native-, Latin-, and disabled-Americans. Lesbians -- and gay men too -- are regarded as a different kind of minority because of the alleged "choice" we have about who we are. But the only real choice gay and lesbian writers have is whether to be out and honest about ourselves or to hide in the artistically compromising, though financially useful, closet. The belated welcome mainstream American publishing is finally extending to these groups -- by way of review coverage, awards, and grant money -- needs to be extended to lesbians as well. Until that happens, feel free to just send me a check.