Dorothy Allison, Renowned Lesbian Author, Dead at 75.

Dorothy Allison, an award-winning lesbian author and feminist activist, died at 75 from cancer on November 6, according to her representative, the Frances Goldin Literacy Agency. Allison was well known for her portrayals of queer identity and working-class Southern characters. Along with her work as a writer and as an activist, Allison also co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia, which bills itself as the “oldest, continuously running women’s BDSM support and education group in the country,” in 1981, many years before her debut novel broke onto the scene.

Allison was the recipient of four awards by the Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that focuses on advocacy and resources for LGBTQ+ authors, for her works Trash, Skin, and Cavedweller, though she is likely best known for her debut novel Bastard Out of Carolina, a semi auto-biographical novel that Allison used to fictionalize many of her childhood experiences, including growing up in impoverished Southern Carolina and sexual abuse. Later, Allison also wrote Two or Three Things I Know For Sure,  a memoir where she wrote candidly about the abuse she experienced as a child, her family history, and the challenges she faced as she entered the writing scene.

One experience that she wrote about in the memoir was the scrutiny she felt as a lesbian and as a survivor of sexual assault, as she thought many might think that the abuse is what made her a lesbian, an experience she also recounted on air in an interview with National Public Radio after her novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, had come out. “I believe that my lesbianism has been a source of energy and power in my life,” Allison says in the interview. “It’s almost as if, oh, you must hate men because of what he did to you … but I don’t love women because I hate men. I happen to love women, and lust is a little bit more basic than running away, you know?”

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