Beauty Queen

counseling.
    But the third novel, The Beauty Queen, seemed to look in vain for its readership. Despite Morrow's high hopes for the book, the hardcover pulled only modest sales, and went out of print after just a few years, although the Bantam paperback still shows on Ingram's monthly report.
    Today, with the authoritarian revival swirling into an advancing tornado whose vortex is engulfing the whole country, and with homosexuality now a major political issue, I believe that The Beauty Queen has finally found its time and its public. For this reason, I have bent my efforts to getting the book back in print.
    To the young person of 25 today, who was a toddler when I created The Beauty Queen, the Seventies are already a terra incognita blurred in distance and time. This short commentary is not the place for a detailed map of the Seventies. But I can offer a few personal radio signals on latitude and longitude.
    When The Beauty Queen was first being read, there were vague and terrifying rumors that men were starting to die of a mysterious disease. Over time, our nation has shuddered into a wide-angle MAX view of AIDS killing women and men of all sexual orientations, on a global scale.
    When I wrote these books, in the 1970s, many Americans still dreamed that the noisy questionings of the '60s were the birth-cries of a new America, where racial, ethnic and sexual minorities could enjoy more dignity and respect. An America where even the sexual majority—those culturally despised beings known as Women—might at last take command of their destiny. Over time, the bright dream of the Sixties and Seventies flashed high like a rocket. Then it arced back down, amidst a shower of failing sparks, into what has been called "the growing conservatism" of the Eighties and Nineties.
    Government and religion have learned that periodically they must allow a little tolerance. Briefly they lift the lid of the social pressure-cooker, to let one super-heated generation blow off steam. Then they try to clamp it tight again.
    Lift, clamp. Lift, clamp. That is the cyclic chug of history.
    If necessary, the powers-that-be engineer an economic vise in which they can squeeze the public's fingers, ensuring greater conformity through terror of poverty. This torturers' tactic is always effective. Today we are clearly in a clamping-down phase. As the American public shudders with the pain and terror of surviving the '90s Depression, many of us have difficulty recalling those 60s questions with courage and clarity.
    As I write this foreword, the Clinton administration and the '96 Presidential campaign are being rent with controversy about morality, political ethics, family values, sexuality, censorship. I am aware that The Beauty Queen and my other books are among those currently being yanked from school and public libraries by the authoritarians who aim to control the life of every U.S. citizen. And yet these are the perfect times to go on writing and publishing books that challenge the controllers. So I have founded my own publishing company, Wildcat Press, with an office in Los Angeles. And my series of novels continues, with the 1994 publication of Harlan's Race, sequel to The Front Runner.
    Meanwhile, The Beauty Queen stands as a mile-marker of my own personal race to stay ahead of that advancing tornado, as it chews up the American land.
    — Patricia Nell Warren
    The Beauty Queen
    Chapter 1
    It was going to be a beautiful June day, Jeannie Laird Colter thought.
    Another God-given day for her to pray, and then to agonize about when, and if, God would answer her prayer.
    It was one of those summer days in Manhattan when you could sit in a penthouse garden, as she was doing now, and have the illusion that you could see forever; that you could see to the Second Coming, and the fiery end of the world. In reality, the smog had lifted today so that a person could see out across Manhattan to the Jersey flats, and the nearest shores of Long Island, and the green rolling country of upstate New York.
    But in this life, things were never what they seemed, were they? God had made the real world, and Satan had made illusions. So a nice day like this had to be one of Satan's tricks. She did not dare put too much stock in this nice day.
    Her father's penthouse garden, on top of the high-rise apartment building on East 69th Street, was one of her favorite places, and it certainly did give her a good view of the most amazing and frightening city on Earth.
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