by Susie Bright
She sounded so normal. I imagined Kenny’s father was like some Minnesotan version of Alan Alda … doing his share while Debi got her turn to follow a dream. But my thoughts wavered. I knew it was backward, but I thought women gave up their children only because they went mad, flew out the window, lay sick at death’s door.
One of the girls turned up the stereo, Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girls.” Vanessa drew her arm across her body like Gypsy Rose Lee and stepped in front of Goldie’s throne. She began to dance for our momma-to-be, her belly trembling, executing a perfect back bend. The other dancers screamed and ululated. A dance-off for Goldie! How was she ever going to choose who was the best?
I cheered — but cleared plates. I’ve never moved like that in my life.
“Frannie, I love you!” Goldie shouted over the music, blowing kisses in Debi’s direction.
“Who’s Frannie?” I asked.
“That’s my stage name,” Debi told me. “Frannie Fatale. This is so great you’re here.”
Fanny’s business plan was one-part subscription presales, one-part advertising, and a Hefty bag of dollars that she and Myrna were making on their backs and in their high heels, strutting stages with gold chains around their waists.
The dancers’ physical prowess was one thing — but the shocking thing about any stripper gathering, I discovered, was that you have never heard women talk so fast and so explicitly about money in all your life. They make the guys on the trading floor on Wall Street look like a bunch of pansies.
Debi was older than most of the others: twenty-seven. She was all about The Plan. “You can only buy so many pants,” she explained to me. “You’ll make more money dancing than you could ever spend on shoes and earrings. Your body is only good in this business for a few years. You have to think like you’re in the NFL. You gotta buy a house, buy investment property, buy stocks — or be like her” — she pointed at a platinum blond” — go to med school. Get straight A’s.”
“But if you fuck up and give it all to your lover” — her eyes shifted back and forth, like there were a few culprits in the room — “you might as well not have bothered!”
“What about her?” I asked, pointing toward a gorgeous girl, visibly tipsy, standing at the lasagna table. She’d had something more than pasta.
“That’s bullshit!” Debi’s afro, like Medusa’s, grew in size every time she tossed her head. “I’ll tell you one thing: That girl might piss it all away on coke, but everything she spent tonight getting loaded — she spent ten times that much on some loser who’s sucking her dry.”
“You mean a guy, her pimp?” I was such a tourist.
“No, her “boooyfriend,” Debi said, drawing out the word like a sick lollypop. “Or her butchie. Her fucking parasite. Same difference.”
Every woman in the room seemed to have a lover. Were they the ones she was talking about? The straight dancers were, come to find, members of that same Rajneesh commune I lived below on Valencia Street — they must be the ones paying the rent, not their orange-sashed boyfriends.
Some of the strippers were butches who worked in drag. They brought their femmes, other working girls. Who made more? I hadn’t figured that out yet.
I remembered Debi’s financial “seminar” many times as the years went by at On Our Backs. She was right; very few strippers took the fortune they made and protected their interests. The manager of the Lusty, Tamara — she sent her fiancé to law school. He insisted she stop stripping — and she was so proud he cared. Then she caught him racking up charges to whores on her credit card. He cracked her hard across the face when she confronted him. She swallowed a bottle of pills that night, and we sat around her deathbed at the UCSF emergency room until her parents flew in from Idaho to turn the machines off.
I thought they were going to kill us with a look. But we were her family, too. The lawyer “fiancé” was nowhere. Her mother and father thought sex work killed her, we whores. But betrayal killed her, and I don’t know when that started — it wasn’t on a brass pole.
“That’s the story,” Debi said. “The girls who wanna work one man — they put all their eggs in that basket. Or they want the perfect butch prince to save them. They give them all their money, they buy them a house, then the jealous prick insists they stop working. When our girl isn’t dancing anymore, the prince loses interest. He busts her flat, and she’s left with nothing.”
I floated around Goldie’s shower that day with such cheer. I remember everyone’s names, stage and real.
Debi was right about the short time many of them had left. Mary Gottschalk would die of breast cancer when she was thirty. Ramona Mast ate a Fentanyl patch, and her “lover” tried to make money off her suicide. Laurie Parker, the most talented lover in all of San Francisco, hanged herself when her girlfriend left her. Nicole Symanksi had her kids taken away, lost her teeth, froze to death on the street. Cindy Ricci disappeared back to Yosemite with nothing but a duffel bag on her back. She was a friend of mine. And another, and another. To paraphrase Dylan, “she was friend of mine.” Those girls each made a million dollars in five years of work, and it did not save them.
“I don’t do that shit,” Debi said. “Don’t want a work wife who’s into that. I walk on the stage and I say, ‘We’re going to make a thousand dollars in the next forty minutes.’ And you turn over laps like pennies, until you hit the mark. I want a million wallets in one night; I don’t want one trick’s charity.”
Debi’s partner, Nan, was true blue. She had a “real” job, although it wasn’t glamorous in the least. She worked for the gas company, one of the few women at the time. Nan climbed up a fifty-foot telephone pole with only spurs & a butt strap to get that job.
She had taught physical education at the University of Minnesota, and when I told her about the Long Beach Women’s Studies Department, she had the best belly laugh. It was familiar. The other dancers looked at her — able-bodied, articulate, loyal — and sighed. Debi had someone for the long haul.
“We used to bomb adult book shops in Minneapolis, can you believe that?” Debi raised her cigarette like an imitation of a Molotov cocktail. “‘Violence against fucking women.’ The university’s whole Women’s Studies Department was in on it.” She smoothed out the apron around her waist. “That’s how Nan and I fell in love, back in the old separatist days. I was organizing a Take Back the Night rally in Minneapolis —”
“No, that was before.” Nan interrupted her with a wave of her champagne flute. “You were volunteering at the Harriet Tubman Shelter for Battered Women, and I was teaching street-fighting self-defense courses.”
Debi winked and took a sip. “It was love at first sight.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t already meet you at Spinster Hollow,” I said, telling them about my insemination adventures.
“We all know where we’re coming from,” Debi said. “Now we’re going to make something erotic for women, the kind of sex we want,” she said. Her green eyes twinkled at you like a wish coming true. “Our little magazine is going to blow them away.”
Models Crying
Susie Bright: Do you think lesbians have a different relationship to what their genitals look like than heterosexual women?
Photographer Tee Corinne: I think they have a different impetus to learn.
Last summer, in 2010, I was at my friend Eddie’s Open Art Studio in Santa Cruz, eavesdropping on a patron who complimented his photographs’ sensitive approach.
“You don’t abuse the models, dear, do you?” she asked him. Ed somehow kept a straight face.
I couldn't resist. “Oh, my ex had a different philosophy,” I said, turning to her without introduction. “She was the staff photographer for On Our Backs. Honey Lee always claimed to be quoting Helmet Newton, but she’d say, ‘The shoot’s not over until the model cries.’”
Eddie shook his head at me — and put his arm around his fan. Yes, Ed, protect the audience — they don’t wanna know what we go through for this.
&nbs
p; I’m glad I can make a joke about it now — I was often that very model, crying. I gave Honey Lee Cottrell, Tee Corinne, and every other photographer at our magazine, what they needed, no matter what the cost. They taught me everything I know about pictures.
The On Our Backs pictorials were the most visible, controversial part of our magazine. But the scandals arising from their debut were never on the mark. The critics who despised us said our photo shoots were sadomasochistic, which seemed to be code for other, unspoken faults.
Our photo shoots were masochistic, but not in the way they meant. I froze my ass off getting a shot many, many times.
The doubters asked whether one could look at a model and be aroused without knowing her résumé; “What if she was a racist?” What if she was a poor example of a human being?
These critics had never analyzed a single piece of art or advertising with this method before, but The Crucible atmosphere in the women’s movement of the eighties was contagious. It was like an upperclassman marching into your dorm room, drawing herself up to full height, and saying, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Why did they make such a fuss? For real? My best answer today is that they were guilty, fearful, competitive, fascinated with power — but utterly thwarted in their own attempts to live large.
Our On Our Backs efforts had remarkable success. We distributed our zine all over the world. I still don’t know how we persevered. We were pushed down so many times, most forcefully by men with money, but most cruelly by other women, our peers.
Here was the real scandal of On Our Backs photography: We were women shooting other women — our names, faces, and bodies on the line — and we all brought our sexual agenda to the lens. Each pictorial was a memoir. That is quite the opposite of a fashion shoot at Vogue or Playboy, where the talent is a prop.
Most of our readers didn’t know that professional photography, particularly at that time, was an overwhelming male occupation — as macho as any steel mill, but without the affirmative action program.
The handful of women who worked as photojournalists were overwhelming lesbian — and closeted. Think how long Annie Leibowitz, the famed celebrity photographer, has been quiet about her life. When her lover Susan Sontag died, their relationship was not even mentioned in the Times obit. That is how mainstream lesbian photographers live, even to this day.
When we began our magazine, female fashion and portrait models — all of them — were shot the same way kittens and puppies are photographed for holiday calendars: in fetching poses, with no intentions of their own.
“Does this please you?” is the cachet of the entire pre-On Our Backs era of cheesecake and feminine glamour. Maybe the model is a “Betty,” or maybe she’s a “Veronica,” but the subject has no sexual motive of her own. Contrast a photograph of a Marlboro Man … he’s thinking as he smokes; his mind is ticking. Now consider Betty Grable looking over her shoulder at you … Am I cute?
That’s what the male centerfolds of female models were about: Am I pretty? Am I darling? What do you think? Do you want me? Could you want me? Rate me! Put me on a leash and walk me around the park!
The great relief of dyke porn was that all that went out the window. We had an objective on our minds; we didn’t need to be reassured that we were “hot.” We had a sexual story to tell. We asked each participant, “What’s yours?”
The first story was Honey Lee Cottrell’s. She and I met because she was the “heartbreak kid” who’d left Good Vibrations. I had inherited her job.
When she came back, we fell in love. I couldn’t wait to show her what On Our Backs proposed to do. Honey and her previous lover, Tee Corinne, had literally invented the erotic lesbian photographic scene of the seventies, entirely underground. At every turn, their photos had been censored by the small lesbian publications they approached. It wasn’t Honey’s or Tee’s idea to shoot pomegranates and succulents as metaphors — they were simply thwarted with their nudes, left and right.
Honey Lee made an elaborate self-portrait for the first issue of On Our Backs, in the manner of a Playboy centerfold. It was called the Bulldagger of the Month.
In her portrait, Honey stands like a gunslinger in front of a window, a ghetto apartment, light pouring in. A white shirt is covering her breasts; her belly is rudely pushing over her the elastic of underwear. Her short hair stands straight up, like a brush; her eyes are like a raccoon’s, burning into the focal point. She’s got a Sherman burning in one hand. She looks like she could eat you with one bite.
On the Bulldagger Data Sheet across from her photo, we reproduced the iconic Playboy silly-girl questions about “Turn-ons” and “Turn-offs,” along with Honey’s accurate measurements and weight — numbers never whispered in a fashion magazine before.
The centerfold was Honey Lee’s secret valentine to me, because under “Turn-ons” she listed: “Tall, smart, talkative, pretty.” That was me, her blushing, chatty bride. Under “Turn-offs,” which made me howl, she listed, “Andrea Dworkin’s hair, oral sex, the refrigerator with rotten food in it.” So rude! Honey wanted to make a point that not all lesbians were cunnilingus fans. She said, “Everyone acts like it’s going to be like chocolate syrup, and it isn’t.” We argued, but I had to love her honesty. The slag on Andrea was bratty, but it was such a relief to be flip. We were so sick of the Queens of Saintly Feminism. They put their pants on one leg at a time- just like us, and they probably fucked just like us, too. The difference was a closet.
Similar to the Playboy design, we laid out three childhood photos of Honey Lee under the Bulldagger Questionnaire. I picked those out. They are still so poignant to me. The first one is of Honey Lee propped up on the kitchen table in her dungarees, reading Little Lulu comix from the Sunday paper and determinedly ignoring the fact that her mother is curling her hair. The way her little mouth is set — This is not happening to me. This is not happening to me — brings tears to my eyes. In the next photo, we see her with the curled hair, radiant on her bicycle, standing on a tree-lined street in Jackson, Michigan. Her parents ran a boardinghouse there; her father was an over-the-road driver. She’s in a new dress, but I know the reason she’s thrilled is because of her shiny bike.
The last childhood photo was from many years later, when Honey Lee arrived, a baby dyke, in San Francisco in 1969. She looks like Janis Joplin, another lesbian, who, according to Honey, used to cruise at Maud’s lesbian bar on Cole Street.
Bulldagger of the Month was our first centerfold and maybe our best. I remember the time I marched into Playboy’s famous offices in Chicago and brought a copy to the reception desk of the Photography Department. “We’re from On Our Backs,” I said, “and we’ve caused a bit of sensation satirizing your centerfold — we thought you’d like to see it yourself.” The secretary turned red. She called security. A queen with a purple ascot came running in like the White Rabbit and scrutinized Honey’s figure: “Oh my!”
Our lesbian readers said more than “Oh my!” There were three distinct reactions.
One was exemplified by a raunchy fan letter addressed directly to Honey Lee. A woman in Port Arthur, Texas (where Janis was from!), sent Honey a photo of herself masturbating with an enormous dildo while she held Honey’s photo in her free hand.
“You fucking nailed it!” I said. My eyes were agog at this piece of flotsam. “This is the first documentation of a lesbian getting off to lesbian-made porn, ever. This should be in the Smithsonian.”
Outspoken fans like our Texan were the minority. The other two camps were furious.
Perhaps the biggest camp didn’t grok the satire or the sex. “Are you insane?” they wrote. “Pick up a copy of Penthouse magazine if you want to see what a good-looking woman looks like! No lesbian in her right mind wants to be portrayed as an ugly butch.”
It reminded me of a popular phrase in lesbian personal ads at the time: “No butches, No bi’s. No fluffs.” Geez, that kind of cleared the dating pool out, didn't it?
The sliver of insig
ht to their complaint was that it proved my theory that lesbians had been grazing on male porn leftovers for a long time.
The last reaction OOB got was the most bizarre — but it was the feminist currency of the time. We got dozens of reviews and letters that said, “I’m supposed to be aroused by your efforts. But I’m not. I should be aroused by women-made erotica. But I’m cold. I worry that this model is a bad person. What if she has done something bad in her life? And even if she is good, what if I am not attracted to her physically? Does that make me shallow? If I secretly wish the model was more feminine, thinner, less hairy, does that make me a bad feminist?”
No, it makes you oblivious and ashamed of your own sexual desires. Welcome to the feminine dilemma. What are the fantasies that wake you up at night?
On and on it went. The hand-wringers never confessed whether they ever had simple responses to portraiture, to beauty. Surely, they had seen a photograph in their lives that had made them swoon — a portrait of sensuality, nostalgia, or lust, one that shot its arrow clean through their cunts. But no one admitted that. It was as if they had never looked at a woman before.
And in a sense, they hadn’t. Up until that point, lesbians had not published self-identified portraits of themselves. Period. Gertrude Stein was the exception; that’s how far you had to look. Putting one’s face in the paper was considered suicide. The police might arrest you; your family might have you institutionalized. So here we were, in the eighties: Gay men already published their own image everywhere, and yet lesbian invisibility was Caspar-like, epidemic. OOB’s photographs caused as much mirror-smashing as saber-rattling.
It was natural, I suppose, for lesbians to greet our first issue of the magazine looking not so much for arousal as for recognition: Am I in here? What page am I on?
Our staff didn’t suffer these anxieties because we were in all the pictures. We put every creative fantasy we ever had on film. I had a half-dozen different wigs because we always needed a photo, and we didn’t always have the model ready to illustrate a story. Every day was like dyke improv theater for us.
