I’m the evil twin.”[2] She also had two half-siblings (William Frederick and Brewster Grier) from her father's previous marriage to Iva Schackenberger.
When Grier was fifteen, her mother gifted her a copy of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Of Lena Geyer (1936) by Marcia Davenport.
Grier began writing book reviews for The Ladder, using multiple pen names in her writings including Gene Damon, Marilyn Barrow, Gladys Casey, Terry Cook, Dorthy Lyle, Vern Niven, Lennox Strong, and Lee Stuart.
The magazine gained a more professional and sleeker layout and increased to more than 40 pages from the 25 average under previous editors and tripled in subscriptions.
She described her roles in editing the magazine, "In 1968, I became editor of The Ladder, and I had to write three hundred letters a week, edit the magazine, run a staff of fifteen people spread all over the world, work a part-time job, keep house, read the books, and write my 'Lesbiana' column.
DOB founders tended to encourage a more assimilationist stance for the organization and came in direct conflict with more radical separatist lesbians, including Grier.
LaPorte took both copies to the ignorance of DOB founders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, and relocated the magazine to Reno, causing an uproar.
"[8] After The Ladder ceased publication in 1972, the continuing demand for that material resulted in four cumulative volumes that Grier edited by herself or with Coletta Reid.
Grier rated lesbian literature on a letter scale for how prominent the lesbian subject was to the story and a range of 1 to 3 asterisks for the quality of the representation: In 1973, Grier co-founded Naiad Press along with Donna McBride, Anyda Marchant, and Muriel Crawford (Marchant's partner).
The press also reprinted classics of lesbian writing, including Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker series.
Authors represented by Naiad include Valerie Taylor, Katherine V. Forrest, Jane Rule, Sarah Schulman, Barbara Wilson, Lee Lynch, Isabel Miller, Ann Bannon's reprinted Beebo Brinker Chronicles, and Gale Wilhelm.
In 1992, Grier and McBride donated Naiad's entire collection to the San Francisco Public Library, which consisted of a tractor trailer full of 14,000 books estimated at $400,000 US.
Bella Books was founded in 2001 by Kelly Smith, who spent eighteen months working for Naiad in the late 1990s.
[4] In 2002, Grier and McBride received the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award for their work in lesbian publishing.
But Grier said repeatedly that what she wanted was to reach the lesbians in Middle America who were in the closet and who deserved to have books about their lives, too.
[2] Naiad Press' most controversial publication was Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, a work of non-fiction that was banned in Boston and criticized by the Catholic Church.
In 1995, Grier and McBride donated their collection of lesbiana to the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library.