The story of the fiercely independent lesbian activist Marie Equi has come to YouTube. Earlier this month I was interviewed by David Perry, program host of Ten Percent on Comcast TV Channel 104 serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Perry’s broadcasts feature the diversity of the Bay Area’s rich LGBTQ community and document its history.
 
This nine-minute interview recounts Equi’s early adult days on a homestead, her defense of a girlfriend with a horsewhipping in the center of a small Oregon town, and her heroic relief work following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Only so much can be covered in nine minutes, but I mentioned as well Equi’s fight for voting rights, economic justice, and free speech.
 
MARIE EQUI: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions published by Oregon State University Press in September 2015 is available at bookstores and online.

I​n honor of today's passing of novelist Harper Lee ("To Kill A Mockingbird"), I'm posting a recent review I wrote of her second novel, the much-debated Mockingbird sequel "Go Set A Watchman." 

Curious, Challenging, and Unexpected
If you’ve cherished To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman will probably be a curious, challenging, and possibly unsatisfying experience. Mockingbird, both the book and the film, has, of course, claimed such an iconic niche in the public psyche that this related volume is at an immediate disadvantage. Yet Watchman also surprises with its own course and, I found, lingered in my mind long after I completed it.
 
At first Watchman seems to meander with its story line, perhaps like small-town life in the heat of summer. The protagonist, Jean Louise, returns to Maycomb Junction, Georgia, her hometown, for an annual visit to her beloved father, Atticus, who has aged considerably since he first appeared in Mockingbird as the single father of two young children. Soon enough Maycomb’s cast of characters appears, each of study of tradition, ritual, and quirkiness. There’s an early suggestion that race relations will dominate this story, but the start of the incident seems much-delayed. In the meantime, the flashbacks of childhood reminiscences sometimes seem almost irrelevant. Jean Louise’s close relationship with her older brother and her flirtation with her childhood friend and perhaps future husband set the scene further.
 
Once Jean Louise is exposed to the reality of how her family, especially her father, experiences and accommodates the questions of race, she is thrown into a tailspin. What surprises and troubles the story is the turn from attitudes about race to a young woman’s coming of age. How does she live with an idyllic childhood and romanticized relationships and how does she set herself free to find her own way as an adult?  The turnabout is intriguing, but Jean Louise’s conclusions about race in 1950s South seem unresolved. The author does present the question of how much understanding and patience are required for something as complicated as a way of life tied to racial disparities and, frequently, outright racism. 
 
Although Watchman might have been better told with greater focus and story development, it is an intriguing story that is ultimately as nuanced and complicated as Southern racial traditions and way of life.

Marie Equi has arrived in Chicago with a burst of enthusiasm in a just-published review by Windy City Times, Chicago’s only weekly LGBT newspaper. Here’s an excerpt by reviewer Liz Baudler:
 
“Helquist has done a great service in detailing Equi's life, as biographies at the intersection of pre 1950s West Coast activists and LGBT individuals are not common. With her blustering personality and zealous commitment to her values, it'd be a fascinating exercise to see Equi as a fictional character or some sort of time-traveling lesbian feminist superhero. It's not hard to imagine her as a ferocious ACT UP protester, or as part of second-wave feminism's Lavender Menace. Still, Helquist lets her speak through quotes in news accounts and snatches of correspondence, and that is often enough to enchant the readers. The book has been named a 2016 Stonewall Honor title by the American Library Association and the research alone deserves recognition.”
 
The full review is available here: http://goo.gl/9ZWiwS

 Five months after the release of my biography of Marie Equi, I am re-reading my book without editing and revisions in mind. Today I found this on page 57, in my introduction to the direct democracy initiatives gaining momentum in Oregon:

The year was 1905. In eight more years, Equi became radicalized after getting clubbed by police during a labor strike.

Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions
Oregon State University Press
Available in bookstores; check the “Look Inside” feature at Amazon:   http://goo.gl/fWAjmW