California writer/singer-songwriter BETH ELLIOTT is one of the most accomplished lesbian activists ever to be blacklisted by her own movement. The first person younger than 21 ever to be elected an officer of a Daughters of Bilitis local chapter, she was a founding member of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, an alternate delegate for Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 California Democratic primary, and a Director of the California Committee for Sexual Law Reform, the lobbying organization that won repeal of California’s sodomy laws in 1975. Already having run afoul of radical lesbian feminist orthodoxy and its enforcers, she didn’t work in that (metaphorical) town again till 1983, when Telewoman brought her back as a columnist and reviewer.

Since then, her essays have appeared in publications from off our backs on the Left to FrontPage Magazine on the Right, and she wrote a weekly contrarian commentary, “Sapphistication,” for the Bay Area Reporter for three and a half years during the mid-1990s. She has been anthologized in Bi Any Other Name and Closer to Home, and was the as-told-to biographer of Mirrors: Portrait of a Lesbian Transsexual.

The “gray sheep” of a pioneer Marin County family, descended from Scottish-English Virginia colonists on one side, and Northern Italian immigrants who became Napa Valley winemakers on the other, Beth Elliott is settling into her role as her California family’s Eccentric Maiden Aunt Nobody Talks About. Don’t Call It Virtual is her first published novel; she is working on its prequel, Target Audience, as well as a collection of experimental erotic short stories.

You can find Beth’s opinions on an unpredictable variety of subjects in her blog, The Beth Zone.