“We’ve always been here”: How a lost 1960s queer novel found its way back

The full episode drops on Friday 20 March 2026. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

There’s something quietly radical about dialling a number from the phone book. That’s how Dr Christopher A. Adams first made contact with Mariana Villa-Gilbert, a queer author who had published six novels in the 1960s and 70s, gained a cult following in the lesbian press, and then, gradually, slipped out of print, out of libraries, and out of view.

Adams, a playwright and scholar, was deep in his PhD research on post-war queer publishing history when he realised he couldn’t find a record of Villa-Gilbert’s death. He looked her up. Found a listing in Cornwall. Picked up the phone.

“I mostly try to avoid making phone calls,” he admits, with a laugh. But he made this one. Villa-Gilbert answered. And so began an unlikely correspondence: typewritten letters sent back and forth, a millennial printing and posting replies, an elderly writer who had no interest in the internet but had, it turned out, never stopped writing.