Cleis Press
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Cleis Press is an independent publisher of books in the areas of sexuality, erotica, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, fiction, and human rights. The press was founded in 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman. They wrote and published the press's first book Fight Back: Feminist Resistance to Male Violence in 1981. Beginning with the groundbreaking Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, a 1986 memoir by former political prisoner and Amnesty International board member Alicia Partnoy, and followed by publisher Frédérique Delacoste’s Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry in 1987, Cleis Press earned a distinguished reputation for books that challenged popular assumptions about politics, gender, and sexuality.
Over the years, Cleis Press has published nonfiction books by Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, Edmund White, Essex Hemphill, Gore Vidal, Christine Jorgensen, Patrick Califia, Violet Blue (author), and Tristan Taormino, among others. Notable fiction includes works by Achy Obejas, reissues of classic lesbian pulp fiction (including Ann Bannon’s historic Beebo Brinker series), the Nancy Clue series by Mabel Maney, and Virginia Woolf’s first completed novel, Melymbrosia. Additionally, Cleis Press is a respected source for erotica and self-help sex guides, including The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex.
In 2000, Cleis Press founded Midnight Editions, a human rights imprint that aims to present fiction, nonfiction, and photojournalism from regions where repression and censorship are endangering creative expression.
Cleis Press has been the recipient of many awards, including several Lambda Literary Awards, and in 2004 Doug Wright’s play I Am My Own Wife, which was based in part on the Cleis Press memoir by Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and three Tony Awards.
Now based in San Francisco, Cleis Press is the largest independent queer publishing company in the United States. Among many lesbian, feminist, and gay presses that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, it is the only press that is still run by its founders. While the press is often labeled a "lesbian press" because of its lesbian-feminist beginnings, its publishing program today encompasses a wide range of books by women and men, straight and queer. In fact, in 2005 Cleis Press plans to publish two books by heterosexual men: Matthue Roth's Yom Kippur a Go-Go and Kevin Keck's Oedipus Wrecked.
