Victoria A. Brownworth, the Philadelphia journalist and author who wrote the Lambda Literary Award–winning novel Ordinary Mayhem, died on May 22, 2025.
Born in February 1956, Brownworth studied American studies and women’s history at Temple University. She began her career at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News in the 1980s and early 1990s, where she became, by her own account, the first person in the United States to write a column about lesbianism in a daily newspaper. She went on to host the radio program Amazon Country on WXPN-FM and to write for The Advocate, Curve, SheWired, the Bay Area Reporter, Philadelphia Gay News, Lambda Literary Review, and other outlets, along with the New York Times, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times. For three decades she wrote the “Lavender Tube” television column for the Bay Area Reporter, and she continued filing pieces on LGBTQ history, disability, and politics from a hospital bed in her final weeks.
Out for Blood (1995), an anthology she edited, gathers seventeen mystery and crime writers on the subject of death — menacing strangers, murderous friends, maniacal relatives.
Too Queer (1996) collects her own essays from lesbian and mainstream periodicals, tracing her development as an activist and taking an anti-assimilationist line on same-sex marriage, the military, and queer politics.
Restricted Access (1999), co-edited with Susan Raffo, brings together essays at the intersection of sexuality and disability.
Coming Out of Cancer (2000), an anthology including contributions from Audre Lorde, Ruthann Robson, Pat Parker, and Dr. Susan Love, addressed lesbians’ elevated cancer risk and the barriers to care that homophobia in medicine creates.
The Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica: 1920–1940 (2007), edited with Judith M. Redding, collects lesbian erotic writing from the interwar decades.
Bed: New Lesbian Erotica (2007) is a further anthology of erotic fiction and poetry she edited.
Ordinary Mayhem (2015), her novel of a photojournalist reporting on atrocities abroad while confronting her own family’s buried secrets, won the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Mystery.
Brownworth lived for decades with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 1993, alongside breast cancer and related heart damage.
Complete Bibliography
Novels: Day of the Dead (2009), Ordinary Mayhem (2015), Sleep So Deep, Erasure
Essays: Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life (1996)
As editor (selected): Out for Blood (1995), Night Bites: Vampire Stories by Women (1996), Out for More Blood (1996), Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors (1997, with Judith M. Redding), Night Shade: Gothic Tales by Women (1999, with Judith M. Redding), Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability (1999), Coming Out of Cancer (2000), Women of Mystery (2006), Bed: New Lesbian Erotica (2007), The Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica: 1920–1940 (2007, with Judith M. Redding), Fantasy: Untrue Stories of Lesbian Passion (2007), Wild Nights: (Mostly) True Stories of Women Loving Women (2007), Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (2011), Women of the Mean Streets (2011), From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth, Night Shadows: Queer Horror (2012)
Brownworth died of cancer, after also living for decades with multiple sclerosis, on May 22, 2025, in Philadelphia. She was 69. Her wife, the painter Maddy Gold, whom she married in October 2014 after fifteen years together, predeceased her, dying of cancer in November 2022.
Photograph from Bold Stroke Books