Investigated by the FBI, blackmailed, but bold enough to keep going, Billye Talmadge was one of the early members of the earliest lesbian rights organization in the U.S., the Daughters of Bilitis. Read a brief biography of Billye Talmadge in this proudqueer.com article by Billye’s friend Suzanne Deakins.  A short obituary of Billye appeared in the Bay Area Reporter. Billye Talmadge’s oral history can be found in Eric Marcus’s book Making Gay History.Watch a May 12, 1987 interview with Billye Talmadge from the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ Daughters of Bilitis Video Project.Check out Beyond the Mist, a book of Billye’s musings and poetry here. To learn more about the Daughters of Bilitis, read Marcia M. Gallo’s Different Daughters A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Movementand be sure to listen to our episode with DOB co-founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, too. For information about The Ladder, the magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis, read Malinda Lo’s AfterEllen.com article. And take a tour of a GLBT Historical Society exhibit about The Ladder in this video. The episode talks about the risk of arrest for male impersonation faced by women wearing fly-front jeans. In our MGH Shirley Willer episode, Willer, who was the one time president of DOB, talks about how wearing masculine attire made her the target of police brutality.