Not to be Denied author Jan Anthony recreates her and Bea Lindberg’s fearless or reckless fate together in the first book in The Whistling Girls & Crowing Hens Series. These two straight married women risk families and careers to break away from society’s compulsory heterosexuality in 1974 and boldly succeed in an uncharted, intimate, challenging 40-year-relationship.
Anthony finds humor in impossible situations and digs deeply into scary family influences, past and present. Their decisions challenge and affirm their love and acknowledge their and the lesbian culture’s value.
Born in 1931 in the Midwest during The Great Depression, Anthony’s stories, based on letters, journals, memories and imagination, take readers tripping through decades of trauma, confusion, misadventures, personal growth, progress, political and societal change. “Travel is in my genes,” she explains. And she’s been around, even close to home with her affluent husband, son and daughter and then being ‘out’ and living successfully with her lesbian lover for 40 years.
Still active in her community and Unitarian church, Anthony likes to get out and about wearing her t-shirt that, she claims, is her motto: “Sweet old lady? More like battle-tested warrior queen.”