Uh...I expected you to look more like the picture on the back of the book," I blurted stupidly, eyeing the rather petite, ordinary looking woman who met me in Wordsworth Books.

"Oh sure, I go around in an evening gown all the time," Rita Mae Brown retorted bitingly.

Chastened, I followed her meekly into the room where I would interview her. This was the woman who had shown the world that there was such a thing as a lesbian, with her 1973 supermarket classic Rubyfruit Jungle.

Her latest book, Venus Envy, is a rather light-hearted tale about a beautiful, rich, successful woman named Mary Frazier Armstrong who is dying of cancer. She writes affecting farewell letters to her friends and family in her last moments, confessing her dreadful secret: she is gay. And then wakes up the morning after to the knowledge that she only has bronchitis, and will live for many more years.

But, unlike Rubyfruit Jungle, this book tries to juggle the sexy humor of the plot with issues of sexism, religion, AIDS, filial duty and all the other problems of the world. I mentioned this to Rita Mae Brown: "I found that there was far more philosophy in this book than there was in your first. How do you explain that?" "You probably haven't read all the books in between," Brown responded sweetly. "There's a fair bit of 'philosophy' in those, too. I could have written Daughter of Rubyfruit Jungle for the rest of my life, but I would have died. As I've learned, as I've developed as a writer, I've just been incorporating other things into the story."

At times, however, the "philosophy" is a little self-conscious. For example, a more or less random character suddenly starts an erudite discussion on the crumbling of the Soviet Union: "If we let Russia get away from us this time, if we don't help, then we've failed twice, you know. First at Archangel in 1917 and now."

But, as Brown showed at her recent reading at the Brattle Theatre, she is far more consistently appealing as a speaker. She convulsed her audience with swift one-liners: "You can't be saved if you don't sin," she explained persuasively. "Jesus died for our sins, I wouldn't want him to have died in vain." Or "Jesse Helms has accused me of single handedly converting American women to lesbianism. How wrong he is. It takes both hands."

Brown denies that Venus Envy is autobiographical. "People always think that...But Frazier and I are so different. The character--everything has to come out of the character." At her reading, she described herself as a "thief of souls," crawling into the skins of lots of very different people. Nevertheless, Frazier has enormous similarities to the woman I met.

Frazier is fiercely individualistic, without political or religious affiliations. Brown demonstrates the same resistance to taking sides on certain issues. During her reading at the Brattle, she declared that "the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the difference between gonorrhea and syphilis." Later, when someone asked for her opinion on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill affair, she blamed them both for being naive enough to play into the hands of the media: "It was so duplicitous, the way they pitted a Black man against a Black woman and sat back and licked their chops."

Frazier refuses to define herself as a lesbian. This is one of the most refreshing things about Rita Mae Brown: she does not construct a rigid gay identity for her characters. The dividing line between gay and straight remains very fluid. For example, the goddess Venus--who materializes near the novel's end--believes that the division of people into the two categories is "a silly concept, but then you know people think in polarities these days. That's very destructive." Similarly, during her reading, Brown remarked: "I am never immune to the charms of the opposite sex...I just think people are beautiful and life is short."

But Brown resents an attempt to pin her down. "I know you don't like being called a lesbian author," I said tentatively. (On the back flap of Venus Envy, she remarks that if anyone tries to define her as such again, she will "knock their teeth in.") "If you're going to label me, then you have to label everyone," Brown replied reasonably. "Then Norman Mailer has to be a Jewish heterosexual writer. See what I mean?"

Incidentally, another of the distinctions dismantled by Brown is the difference between fantasy and reality. She sets the end of her novel in a wickedly wonderful Mount Olympus, where a rainbow is formed each time Jupiter ejaculates ("Better than fire-works," comments Frazier).

Even when Brown of the characters in the book do express a decided opinion on an issue, it is not likely to be what you would expect. For example, Venus provides a rather odd rationale for having gays in the military: these are the people who are most expendable in a world "developed to protect the children." But Brown denied that she was depicting gay people as irrelevant to society. "Can you imagine what life would be like without gay people? There'd be no medicine, there'd be no arts, the school system would fall apart. It would be a disaster! But because heterosexual people don't realize who gay people are, they don't realize how dependent they are on us."

Or, as the goddess Venus notes: "I think if Michelangelo were straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white with a roller."

Which leads naturally to the main point of Venus Envy, the importance of coming out of the closet. "Tell the truth. Be who you are. I can't ever know you and love you until I know who you are," she told me. And later, when a member of the audience asked her for her opinion of media outings (adding, "I'm not talking about picnics, of course"), Brown said: "There is a part of me that leaps for joy every time one of those liars is yanked out of the closet." But she added regretfully: "I don't think any of us have the right to do that to another human being. It is such bad manners."