Images taken from New York Times
I saw an article about Susie Bright on my twitter feed with a NYTimes.com link and I thought that they had interviewed her. So you can imagine my surprise, and glee, when I read that Susie, 62, and Jon Bailiff, 61, had quietly tied the knot on July 14th (Bastille Day) after 32 years of togetherness.
I had been reading Susie since I was in my 20s when she was one of the founders of On Our Backs, a lesbian feminist radical magazine that was one of the first sex positive places anywhere in the feminist movement. And then she was the editor of a bunch of best women’s erotica books, as well as the consultant on the hot 90’s lesbian flick Bound.
Then she had a daughter and had kind of shacked up with some guy, who was always portrayed as cool and accepting of everything about her. They had wild naked tea parties at her house.
She was kind of an inspiration for me.
At about the same time that I became an editor of Ravenous Romance, an erotic romance epublisher, Susie surprised us all and became an acquiring editor of Audible, and worked with her now grown daughter, Aretha.
So I was kind of shocked and happy to see the matrimonial news, which she told the Times was on the advice of a lawyer as a result of all the life challenges of COVID-19.
“It was Covid-19—we were already devoted but needed to pull the wedding trigger to cover every weird possibility in today’s existential apocalypse,” she explained.
Her new husband added, “It’s taken all this time to iron out the prenup.”
The New York Times reflected that “to many in their large circle of friends, the real joke was that Ms. Bright and Mr. Bailiff were already the most married of couples.”