What do you think?
Rate this book
A Plain Brown Rapper
Distributed by The Crossing Press, Trumansburg, New York 14886.
Contents: Violence --
Coitus interruptus --
Yale break --
Something about "walk a mile in my shoes" --
Say it isn't so --
August 26, 1970, N.Y.C. --
Hanoi to Hoboken: a round trip ticket --
Living with other women --
Take a lesbian to lunch --
The last straw --
The shape of things to come --
Roxanne Dunbar --
Gossip --
Leadership vs. stardom --
The last picture show --
A manifesto for the feminist artist --
Love song for feminists from Flamingo Park --
I am a woman --
The good fairy --
It's all Dixie cups to me --
The lady's not for burning.
Contents: Violence --
Coitus interruptus --
Yale break --
Something about "walk a mile in my shoes" --
Say it isn't so --
August 26, 1970, N.Y.C. --
Hanoi to Hoboken: a round trip ticket --
Living with other women --
Take a lesbian to lunch --
The last straw --
The shape of things to come --
Roxanne Dunbar --
Gossip --
Leadership vs. stardom --
The last picture show --
A manifesto for the feminist artist --
Love song for feminists from Flamingo Park --
I am a woman --
The good fairy --
It's all Dixie cups to me --
The lady's not for burning.
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Rita Mae Brown
144 books2,271 followersRita Mae Brown is a prolific American writer, most known for her mysteries and other novels (Rubyfruit Jungle). She is also an Emmy-nominated screenwriter.
Brown was born illegitimate in Hanover, Pennsylvania. She was raised by her biological mother's female cousin and the cousin's husband in York, Pennsylvania and later in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Starting in the fall of 1962, Brown attended the University of Florida at Gainesville on a scholarship. In the spring of 1964, the administrators of the racially segregated university expelled her for participating in the civil rights movement. She subsequently enrolled at Broward Community College[3] with the hope of transferring eventually to a more tolerant four-year institution.
Between fall 1964 and 1969, she lived in New York City, sometimes homeless, while attending New York University[6] where she received a degree in Classics and English. Later,[when?] she received another degree in cinematography from the New York School of Visual Arts.[citation needed] Brown received a Ph.D. in literature from Union Institute & University in 1976 and holds a doctorate in political science from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Starting in 1973, Brown lived in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. In 1977, she bought a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia where she still lives.[9] In 1982, a screenplay Brown wrote while living in Los Angeles, Sleepless Nights, was retitled The Slumber Party Massacre and given a limited release theatrically.
During Brown's spring 1964 semester at the University of Florida at Gainesville, she became active in the American Civil Rights Movement. Later in the 1960s, she participated in the anti-war movement, the feminist movement and the Gay Liberation movement.
Brown took an administrative position with the fledgling National Organization for Women, but resigned in January 1970 over Betty Friedan's anti-gay remarks and NOW's attempts to distance itself from lesbian organizations. She claims she played a leading role in the "Lavender Menace" zap of the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, which protested Friedan's remarks and the exclusion of lesbians from the women's movement.
In the early 1970s, she became a founding member of The Furies Collective, a lesbian feminist newspaper collective in Washington, DC, which held that heterosexuality was the root of all oppression.
Brown told Time magazine in 2008, "I don't believe in straight or gay. I really don't. I think we're all degrees of bisexual. There may be a few people on the extreme if it's a bell curve who really truly are gay or really truly are straight. Because nobody had ever said these things and used their real name, I suddenly became [in the late 1970s] the only lesbian in America."
Brown was born illegitimate in Hanover, Pennsylvania. She was raised by her biological mother's female cousin and the cousin's husband in York, Pennsylvania and later in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Starting in the fall of 1962, Brown attended the University of Florida at Gainesville on a scholarship. In the spring of 1964, the administrators of the racially segregated university expelled her for participating in the civil rights movement. She subsequently enrolled at Broward Community College[3] with the hope of transferring eventually to a more tolerant four-year institution.
Between fall 1964 and 1969, she lived in New York City, sometimes homeless, while attending New York University[6] where she received a degree in Classics and English. Later,[when?] she received another degree in cinematography from the New York School of Visual Arts.[citation needed] Brown received a Ph.D. in literature from Union Institute & University in 1976 and holds a doctorate in political science from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Starting in 1973, Brown lived in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. In 1977, she bought a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia where she still lives.[9] In 1982, a screenplay Brown wrote while living in Los Angeles, Sleepless Nights, was retitled The Slumber Party Massacre and given a limited release theatrically.
During Brown's spring 1964 semester at the University of Florida at Gainesville, she became active in the American Civil Rights Movement. Later in the 1960s, she participated in the anti-war movement, the feminist movement and the Gay Liberation movement.
Brown took an administrative position with the fledgling National Organization for Women, but resigned in January 1970 over Betty Friedan's anti-gay remarks and NOW's attempts to distance itself from lesbian organizations. She claims she played a leading role in the "Lavender Menace" zap of the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, which protested Friedan's remarks and the exclusion of lesbians from the women's movement.
In the early 1970s, she became a founding member of The Furies Collective, a lesbian feminist newspaper collective in Washington, DC, which held that heterosexuality was the root of all oppression.
Brown told Time magazine in 2008, "I don't believe in straight or gay. I really don't. I think we're all degrees of bisexual. There may be a few people on the extreme if it's a bell curve who really truly are gay or really truly are straight. Because nobody had ever said these things and used their real name, I suddenly became [in the late 1970s] the only lesbian in America."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 11, 2008
Rita Mae Brown was one of the most articulate political theoreticians of the Lesbian Movement of the 1970s in the USA. This is still quite probably my favorite lesbian political book of all time. Sarah Hoaglund writes famous drivel. Plain Brown Rapper is difficult to find, but worth the trouble. This book literally changed my life. I look back on it, almost thirty years later, and realize that it may have had entirely too much influence on my thinking, but it taught me to stand up for myself and speak out in a world that had always told me to sit down and shut up. And I will never give up my copy. Not because of the book, but because of the changes it elicited in me.
August 22, 2025
A COLLECTION OF EARLY WRITINGS BY THE FAMED NOVELIST
Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944) is a lesbian feminist novelist and activist. She wrote in the Introduction to this 1976 book, “I charged into the brand new feminist movement in 1968 and the straight women did their best to see I’d charge right back out again. A few diehards are still trying to purge lesbians but we are here to stay. Since then, many women have come out. The difference between feminists who became lesbians and lesbians who became feminists is that the former take great pleasure in principle while the latter make a principle of pleasure. Those women who do choose lesbianism whether by principle or pleasure are at least making that choice themselves rather than bending to relentless heterosexual propaganda…
“We’ve all learned to mistrust a mystique of unity which comes at the expense and silence of minority women. Women who aren’t safely white aren’t going to be quiet about it, nor are poor women, nor are lesbians. Lesbianism was the first issue to break ideological ground on the real meaning of multiplicity rather than conformity. Because of that initial, bitter struggle I hope the issues of class and white bias can be handled with more maturity than any of us handled the lesbian issue.
“In those days I ate, breathed, and slept feminism. Nothing else mattered to me. We would bring about a revolution in this nation and we would do it now… Such burning intensity culminated in the Furies Collective… We lived together, shared chores equally. All clothing rested in a common room. We slept together on mattresses in the same room… We rotated jobs in the outside world except for the two of us who had decent jobs… We created a newspaper … a child care center, a school that taught car repair, home repair, and self defense… Precious little time was left for us to enjoy ourselves.” (Pg. 13-14)
“For all our fevers and mistakes, we learned… We learned that not all women are sisters and not all men are enemies…. We also learned some devastating things about ourselves. We were all white. A few of us came from lower class backgrounds. The majority were middle class…In 1971 only Charlotte [Bunch] and I displayed a clear sense of calling. This was to be our undoing. The other women, in time, developed career identities for themselves. We were all lesbians at that time… What we discovered, painfully, were the real walls that prevent effective commitments between people…. By not defining leadership or process we made things far worse than if we’d put down rules… Women from middle class backgrounds controlled the collective’s finances although, again, the rules were unclear….” (Pg. 14-16)
The Furies began to create within ourselves the dynamic of a fascist state… We weren’t emotionally open with one another and I take the blame for much of that… The Furies also did not reckon with the land mines of woman hatred. By becoming a feminist or a lesbian one does not automatically love women… Since my gifts were more obvious … because of the circumstances of my life, I became dangerous. That I had gifts was sin enough. That I refused to apologize for them was unforgiveable. The Furies purged me on March 6, 1972…” (Pg. 17-18)
“The Furies taught me I have two talents, organizing and writing. Given the state of feminism I am in no danger of exercising the former… Feminists are able to tolerate both injustice and disorder. Our movement is still so far from political seriousness that we don’t pay our workers a decent wage… We must go one step further and develop a plan of action so we act out upon our political enemies rather than constantly reacting to our political enemies.” (Pg. 21-22)
She observes in a brief essay, “The possibility of women committing premeditated violence seems ludicrous. Until we threaten property or persons of the so-called establishment we will not be taken seriously. It is the ultimate perversity of our society … that a social movement is not considered a political force until it imitates the male by using force rather than reason. Once destructive potential is established then the establishment will reason with you because it is in the SELF-interest to reason with you.” (Pg. 25)
She argues in another essay, “With the [Equal Rights Amendment] passed and ratified, women of the middle class will concentrate on furthering their own status and neglect the ‘dangerous’ issues the revolutionaries have raised. These women do not begin to question the basic structure of our nation, they are gaining too many benefits from Wall Street and its colonies. Even when child care centers and abortion clinics are established across the land, the country will not be shaken. It will free more women to work for more rich men who can exploit more poor people here and abroad. More women, especially white heterosexual women, will be siphoned off into the profits and before you know it, women will become as proficient at exploitation as men. Money talks. You dig?” (Pg. 55)
She recalls, “When the rumblings of the just born Women’s Liberation Movement reached me, I was filled with hope. I was off to find and join Women’s Liberation and to conquer sexism once and for all. What I found was that sexism exists between women in the movement and it is potentially as destructive as the sexism between men and women.” (Pg. 86)
She explains, “Lesbianism… means, for me, that you dump all roles as much as possible, that you forget the male power system, and that you give women primacy in your life---emotionally, sexually, personally, politcally.” (Pg. 90)
She asserts, “Straight women … don’t put women first. They betray Lesbians and … they betray their own selves. You can’t build a strong movement if your sisters are out there f____g with the enemy.” (Pg. 114)
She observes, “Principle demands that we think alike, act alike, and possibly even look alike…. Think of the controversy over body hair. Think what would happen if I gave a speech to a feminist audience while wearing a skirt?... Are we so abysmally weak we can not tolerate difference much less enjoy it?” (Pg. 213)
This is a frank, passionate, and highly interesting collection of writings.
Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944) is a lesbian feminist novelist and activist. She wrote in the Introduction to this 1976 book, “I charged into the brand new feminist movement in 1968 and the straight women did their best to see I’d charge right back out again. A few diehards are still trying to purge lesbians but we are here to stay. Since then, many women have come out. The difference between feminists who became lesbians and lesbians who became feminists is that the former take great pleasure in principle while the latter make a principle of pleasure. Those women who do choose lesbianism whether by principle or pleasure are at least making that choice themselves rather than bending to relentless heterosexual propaganda…
“We’ve all learned to mistrust a mystique of unity which comes at the expense and silence of minority women. Women who aren’t safely white aren’t going to be quiet about it, nor are poor women, nor are lesbians. Lesbianism was the first issue to break ideological ground on the real meaning of multiplicity rather than conformity. Because of that initial, bitter struggle I hope the issues of class and white bias can be handled with more maturity than any of us handled the lesbian issue.
“In those days I ate, breathed, and slept feminism. Nothing else mattered to me. We would bring about a revolution in this nation and we would do it now… Such burning intensity culminated in the Furies Collective… We lived together, shared chores equally. All clothing rested in a common room. We slept together on mattresses in the same room… We rotated jobs in the outside world except for the two of us who had decent jobs… We created a newspaper … a child care center, a school that taught car repair, home repair, and self defense… Precious little time was left for us to enjoy ourselves.” (Pg. 13-14)
“For all our fevers and mistakes, we learned… We learned that not all women are sisters and not all men are enemies…. We also learned some devastating things about ourselves. We were all white. A few of us came from lower class backgrounds. The majority were middle class…In 1971 only Charlotte [Bunch] and I displayed a clear sense of calling. This was to be our undoing. The other women, in time, developed career identities for themselves. We were all lesbians at that time… What we discovered, painfully, were the real walls that prevent effective commitments between people…. By not defining leadership or process we made things far worse than if we’d put down rules… Women from middle class backgrounds controlled the collective’s finances although, again, the rules were unclear….” (Pg. 14-16)
The Furies began to create within ourselves the dynamic of a fascist state… We weren’t emotionally open with one another and I take the blame for much of that… The Furies also did not reckon with the land mines of woman hatred. By becoming a feminist or a lesbian one does not automatically love women… Since my gifts were more obvious … because of the circumstances of my life, I became dangerous. That I had gifts was sin enough. That I refused to apologize for them was unforgiveable. The Furies purged me on March 6, 1972…” (Pg. 17-18)
“The Furies taught me I have two talents, organizing and writing. Given the state of feminism I am in no danger of exercising the former… Feminists are able to tolerate both injustice and disorder. Our movement is still so far from political seriousness that we don’t pay our workers a decent wage… We must go one step further and develop a plan of action so we act out upon our political enemies rather than constantly reacting to our political enemies.” (Pg. 21-22)
She observes in a brief essay, “The possibility of women committing premeditated violence seems ludicrous. Until we threaten property or persons of the so-called establishment we will not be taken seriously. It is the ultimate perversity of our society … that a social movement is not considered a political force until it imitates the male by using force rather than reason. Once destructive potential is established then the establishment will reason with you because it is in the SELF-interest to reason with you.” (Pg. 25)
She argues in another essay, “With the [Equal Rights Amendment] passed and ratified, women of the middle class will concentrate on furthering their own status and neglect the ‘dangerous’ issues the revolutionaries have raised. These women do not begin to question the basic structure of our nation, they are gaining too many benefits from Wall Street and its colonies. Even when child care centers and abortion clinics are established across the land, the country will not be shaken. It will free more women to work for more rich men who can exploit more poor people here and abroad. More women, especially white heterosexual women, will be siphoned off into the profits and before you know it, women will become as proficient at exploitation as men. Money talks. You dig?” (Pg. 55)
She recalls, “When the rumblings of the just born Women’s Liberation Movement reached me, I was filled with hope. I was off to find and join Women’s Liberation and to conquer sexism once and for all. What I found was that sexism exists between women in the movement and it is potentially as destructive as the sexism between men and women.” (Pg. 86)
She explains, “Lesbianism… means, for me, that you dump all roles as much as possible, that you forget the male power system, and that you give women primacy in your life---emotionally, sexually, personally, politcally.” (Pg. 90)
She asserts, “Straight women … don’t put women first. They betray Lesbians and … they betray their own selves. You can’t build a strong movement if your sisters are out there f____g with the enemy.” (Pg. 114)
She observes, “Principle demands that we think alike, act alike, and possibly even look alike…. Think of the controversy over body hair. Think what would happen if I gave a speech to a feminist audience while wearing a skirt?... Are we so abysmally weak we can not tolerate difference much less enjoy it?” (Pg. 213)
This is a frank, passionate, and highly interesting collection of writings.
August 11, 2021
Not really sure how to star this. There were some takes that I thought were interesting like her critique of the Equal Rights Amendment and the insidiousness of "stardom" that still feels relevant today.
But beyond that I thought large chunks of it were redundant, essentially with Brown emphasizing that Lesbianism is the solution to liberation for all- seemingly made claims that there should be less attention made to the ways that U.S. imperialism specifically impacts women and that that focus should be turned to how women being/becoming Lesbians as the grand solution. It was strange. She also made a bunch of false equivalencies between Lesbian/Feminist struggles and Civil Right's struggles.
But beyond that I thought large chunks of it were redundant, essentially with Brown emphasizing that Lesbianism is the solution to liberation for all- seemingly made claims that there should be less attention made to the ways that U.S. imperialism specifically impacts women and that that focus should be turned to how women being/becoming Lesbians as the grand solution. It was strange. She also made a bunch of false equivalencies between Lesbian/Feminist struggles and Civil Right's struggles.
October 6, 2008
These radical lesbian/femenist essays from the 70's were fun, provocative, cutting, clear, and full of a compelling political analysis. I enjoyed the voice a lot, and I feel like it grounded my understanding of the 2nd wave femenist movement more. Thirty plus years later, and Rita Mae Brown's ideas are just as radical and pertinent.
January 26, 2010
Way ahead of its time, this set of essays, rantings, poetry that Rita wrote back in the day, would still stir up a mess of controversy certainly between chauvanists and feminists, but also among feminists, perhaps even of the same brand of feminism. Its radical, militant, and uncompromising.
Fucking brilliant. oh yeah and out of print. find it!
Fucking brilliant. oh yeah and out of print. find it!
January 10, 2011
The star rating is probably unfair. I don't usually care for poetry.
July 25, 2017
misandry 4eva!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews