She witnessed the beginning of the Stonewall uprising firsthand.īrown and a friend were walking through Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969, when they heard the approach of police vehicles. She ended up attending a community college before heading to New York. While the harassment was directly connected to Brown’s sexual orientation and her alleged outing of other students-a charge she vehemently denies-she believes her outspokenness about racial justice was the real reason she was targeted. Some sources say she was expelled, but in her own telling, she left voluntarily after she was singled out for harassment by school officials and fellow students, fearing the school would sabotage her grades and make her ineligible for future scholarships. (Other sources place the number of Black students admitted that year at seven.) Brown writes that she was incensed by the students’ treatment and became involved in anti-segregation activism.īrown left the university two years later. According to her 1997 autobiography Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser, that was the same year the school admitted five Black students and segregated them in a corner of a dorm. Rita Mae Brown was allegedly forced out of college for civil rights activism.īrown started her freshman year of college at the University of Florida in 1962. In the early 1980s, Brown’s celebrity was such that, when her relationship with tennis star Martina Navratilova ended, the breakup was covered by the Washington Post.įrom her early forays into activism to her current life as a bestselling mystery novelist, here are seven things you should know about Rita Mae Brown. According to The New York Times, by 1977, women were naming their cars after Brown and camping on the author’s doorstep. Brown is considered the first openly gay author to enjoy mainstream success.īrown wasn’t even 30 years old when her debut novel was published, but she had already made her mark in the realm of feminist and LGBTQ activism, first as a member of the high-profile feminist organization NOW and then as one of the group’s most outspoken critics. Racy, irreverent, and explicitly autobiographical, Rubyfruit Jungle was so popular in its initial release that its first publisher couldn’t keep up with demand.
But Brown’s bawdy, wry coming-of-age romp was an altogether different beast than Highsmith’s understated love story.
Rubyfruit Jungle wasn’t the first mainstream lesbian novel, or even the first mainstream lesbian novel to rack up impressive sales- Patricia Highsmith’s pseudonymous 1952 romance The Price of Salt (later retitled Carol) supposedly sold more than a million copies after it was released in paperback. When Rita Mae Brown’s first published novel hit bookstands in 1973, no one had read anything even remotely like it.
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