Despite collecting a vast number of labels from the people around her as she grows up in the 1970’s – ‘bastard’, ‘orphan’, ‘lesbian’, ‘queer’, ‘spic’, ‘ugly’, ‘monogamous’, ‘housewife’, ‘loud’ – she is unphased, and takes delight in throwing them all aside to focus on her passions. Our protagonist Molly Bolt has a strong sense of self. Find your passions If Rubyfruit Jungle helped to push you on your path to freedom, I’ve done something right.” Perhaps, but you’re still a victim the most revolutionary thing you can do is to be yourself, to speak your truth, to open your arms to life including the pain. Victims draw great strength by banding together and declaring a common oppression and a common (always glorious, of course) culture. Once you buy into a definition of yourself that has been made by others, you’re a victim. “When I wrote Rubyfruit Jungle in 1971 (the year I wrote it was not the year it was published), the only way to begin to understand your situation was to take the label given to you by others, a label devised centuries if not millennia before, and to understand how this became hardened oppression. Some of her words are so perfect that I can only repeat them here word for word: The particular version I own has a wonderful introduction by Rita Mae Brown herself, written in 2015. Rubyfruit Jungle was written in 1976, a breakthrough lesbian novel (though Brown herself would argue that this is a story about people in general, not a subsection of society) that has no doubt helped to shape modern queer literature.

The only LGBT section I remember seeing in our island library were medical textbooks (and this was in the 90’s/00’s!) My god, how I could have done with this book when I was younger – but how out of the question it was at the time to get hold of queer literature (or anything on the periphery). I wanted to start this review with the words ‘Growing up gay is hard.’ And while every part of that is true, it’s not in the spirit of Rubyfruit Jungle, which celebrates a shrugging off of oppression, the adventure of self-discovery, and the shredding of labels and limits.

Rubyfruit jungle author