NEW YORK, NY.- Shameless Hussy Press was a shoestring operation in 1969 when the poet known as Alta began publishing books from her house on a hand-cranked offset printer. She was having trouble getting her own brash and sensuous free-form poetry published by the mainstream companies, as were her friends, and when she learned how simple offset printing was, she decided to do it herself.
Few bookstores were willing to carry Shameless Hussy’s publications, not just because of the content — there was not, at first, an appetite for such bold feminist writing — but also because of the format: spineless, stapled chapbooks, like zines. (Many of its titles are now collectors’ items.)
Still, Shameless Hussy (the name was a phrase Alta’s mother used for women she didn’t approve of) would go on to publish works by some of the most notable feminist writers of the era, including Black lesbian poet and activist Pat Parker and Mitsuye Yamada, whose pieces about her childhood in a Japanese internment camp, “Camp Notes and Other Poems,” were first published by Shameless Hussy in 1976.
Alta, who founded what is believed to be the country’s first feminist press — and who went by her first name only, so as not to be associated with the surnames of her father or husbands — died March 10 at home in Oakland, California. She was 81.
Her daughter Kia Simon said the cause was breast cancer.
Alta published Ntozake Shange’s landmark poem, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Shange had conceived the piece as what she called a choreopoem — a mix of dance, music and the spoken word — weaving together the voices of women who have endured sexism, racism, rape and more. Originally performed in bars and coffeehouses, it went on to fame as a play, first at the Public Theater in Manhattan and then on Broadway.
Alta recalled being bowled over by “For Colored Girls” when Shange sent it to her. “I was just stunned,” she said in an oral history conducted for the University of California Santa Cruz. “I just kept reading it and reading it.”
Much of second-wave feminism, like the leftist movement that preceded it, ran on print, and poetry was the perfect medium.
“It’s like music,” said poet, playwright and essayist Susan Griffin, whose collection of poems, “Dear Sky,” and book of short stories, “The Sink,” were published by Shameless Hussy Press. “It expresses things you haven’t quite integrated into your rational mind. It’s the cutting edge of social change. Things would come out in poetry that later could be articulated in policy or ideas.”
Shameless Hussy’s debut was inauspicious: a collection of 10 poems by women that Alta scrounged together and called “Remember Our Fire.” She held a celebratory reading, but, she recalled, the contributors refused to attend. Julia Vinograd, a street poet known for her habit of blowing bubbles at People’s Park in Berkeley, California, complained that it was just a bunch of women reading. Diane di Prima, a Beat poet, seemingly confused about the mission of feminism, said, “Oh, you just want to make women go work in factories.” (Alta recalled telling her, “No one wants to work in factories, what are you talking about?”)
“To say that there was a supportive women’s writing community in 1969 is not quite accurate,” Alta said.
But it grew. There were readings when as many as 1,000 people showed up, and the poets, Alta included, were treated like rock stars. She schlepped that first anthology, all 250 copies, along with a book of her own work, to the local bookstores, but only two welcomed it — one was Cody’s Books, a beloved Berkeley institution on Telegraph Avenue — where they sold out in six months. Women began sending Alta their writing, digging in their drawers, as she put it. By 1974, Alta was setting up at a card table at the annual American Booksellers Association conference with the other indie presses, where she joked that they got traffic because they were next to the bathroom.
By 1977, The New York Times reported, there were some 82 feminist presses throughout the United States and Canada. That same year, the proprietor of the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan’s theater district said he tracked down Shameless Hussy Press to order “For Colored Girls” because customers were clamoring for it. The books arrived packed in soap cartons, soap flakes clinging to the covers, he told the Times, and “a hand‐lettered invoice followed, stating ‘YOU OWE US’ in bold letters.”
Alta’s own work was salty and direct. “In the Spring of My 35th year, Oakland, 1977,” reads, in part:
Any day now, maybe any year now, let’s not be hasty,
Maturity will come and I will stop lusting.
Or lust, rather, after things of the spirit, after insight and vision(s).
I will see beyond the smooth arms of sun tanned men and the soft breasts of women bending over roses.
I will see their auras, and our energy fields will touch, and I won’t get VD anymore.
I have taught myself to look away from the young fellas, their eager cocks just waiting to snap out as I reach out.
I no longer look at them, no longer stare at their thighs in their jeans.
But it’s backfired somehow, now I see bald heads as a good sign.
Those guys have a lot of hormones to work with,
and chubby tummies
are a sure sign of lusty appetites, oh jeez
“She was very much like her poetry,” Griffin said. “Honest, playful, outrageous. She loved breaking the rules. She was like a female Charles Bukowski, and like Bukowski, she took great pleasure crossing lines.”
Alta Gerrey was born May 22, 1942, in Reno, Nevada. Her parents, Alta (Pettycrew) Gerrey and William Gerrey, ran a piano store out of the family home. Alta learned to play from a young age, which helped to move the goods.
“It was a great selling device to have this little girl sit down and peel off some nice music,” she said.
Her father and her brother, Bill, were both blind; when Alta was 12, the family moved to Castro Valley, California, so her brother could attend a school for the blind. Alta studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to volunteer as a teacher in the Black communities of Prince Edward County, Virginia, about 70 miles west of Richmond, where schools had been closed in a rebuke to integration efforts. She returned to Berkeley not long after.
After Alta’s marriage to Danny Bosserman, an aspiring actor, ended in divorce in the late 1960s, she lived for a time with poet John Oliver Simon. She married Daniel Skarry, a classical guitarist who worked in a gas station and helped with Shameless Hussy’s distribution, in the early 1970s; they divorced a decade later. In addition to her daughter Kia, she is survived by another daughter, Lorelei Bosserman, and a granddaughter.
Before it closed in 1989, Shameless Hussy published some 50 titles, including 19th-century French novelist George Sand’s “The Haunted Pool,” which had been out of print; Calamity Jane’s letters to her daughter; and three volumes of Alta’s own poetry. By the mid-1970s, Shameless Hussy’s printing press had moved out of Alta’s garage, and the books were being published, now with spines, by a company in the Midwest.
From 2006 to 2008, Alta ran her own gallery in Berkeley, showcasing works by local artists.
“My own poetry was only shocking because it hadn’t been said a million times,” she said in the oral history. “Now it’s been said a million times. If you read my poems now, they’d say, ‘What’s the big deal?’”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
