Naked In The Promised Land by Professor Lillian Faderman

Naked In The Promised Land

Professor Lillian Faderman

This modern classic of LGBT writing includes an introduction from Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, and a new afterword from Lillian Faderman.

Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman is the only child of an uneducated and unmarried Jewish woman who left Latvia to seek a better life in America.

Lillian grew up in poverty, but fantasised about becoming an actress. When her dreams led to the dangerous, seductive world of the sex trade and sham-marriages in Hollywood of the fifties, she realised she was attracted to women, and that show-biz is as cruel as they say.

Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful, she studied at Berkeley; paying her way by working as a pin-up model and burlesque dancer, hiding her lesbian affairs from the outside world. At last she became a brilliant student and the woman who becomes a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer and ground-breaking pioneer of gay and lesbian scholarship.

Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, Naked in the Promised Land is the story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Part One: Lilly

1 How I Became an Overachiever

2 Going Crazy in East L.A.

3 Crushed

4 Men I

5 Shedding

Part Two: Lil

6 Hollywood

7 My Movie-Actress Nose

8 The Open Door

9 Getting the Gift of Wisdom

10 Kicked Out

11 A Jewish Prince

12 A Married Woman

Part Three: Lillian

13 Higher Education

14 How I Became a Burlesque Queen

15 Men II

16 Professor Faderman

17 How I Became a College Administrator

18 Sheaves of Oats

19 Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Details