by Susie Bright
We heard complaints from lesbian bank tellers and real estate agents and other carefully closeted professionals. A couple of them were sincere:
I appreciate your magazine, but can’t you get more models who look like NORMAL women? Everyone in your zine is punk rock or butch/femme and not like anyone who could walk down the streets of … Sacramento.
I remember the Sacramento one because I wrote that woman back. “We would love to have lesbian bank tellers in our magazine,” I told her. “But the problem is, the punk rock strippers want to show THEIR lives … they don’t want to put on panty hose. And the white-collar gay ladies don’t want their faces anywhere … until someone gets the nerve. Is that you? We would love to do a photo shoot of you in your best pantsuit or sweater set … You call me, and I’ll send a photographer!”
Miss Sacramento did that. I swear, she had more balls than 90 percent of our readers, and she didn’t even take anything off. She was simply willing to have her Sacramento face, and a knowing look, in a lesbian sex magazine.
There had not been a woman-made erotic magazine before On Our Backs. Not for straight women, not for any kind of woman. In the seventies, Bob Guccione, of Penthouse, started Viva, a magazine that was supposed to be for women, but the photographers and writers were overwhelming male. It was still that sexist tripe: Will he like me? Am I good enough? Is this cute?
The kind of models OOB attracted were women with little to lose. They’d already offended their family. They’d left the rules of school and proper employment. In the case of the strippers and whores, they combined their financial independence with a sense that there was no need to lie about their sexual preference any longer. Their johns didn’t care. If anything, dykes could charge extra for their bravado.
None of our dyke whores would have been let into a lesbian-feminist meeting of any mainstream persuasion. But the influence of On Our Backs created a guild of sex workers who embraced gay liberation on their own terms as fierce as any Stonewall trannie of 1969.
There were models who were oddballs and con artists, naturally. It’s not fair that we remember the crazies, but those are the ones Honey Lee and I laugh about now.
By far the most memorable nut job was Frances. One name only. She surprised us by writing a letter to our magazine’s post office box and saying, in her flowery script, that she wanted to model. No one knew her. She sent a Polaroid of herself, and it was breathtaking. She had long red curls, a face like a Sloane Ranger, and a delicate figure. Not a bank teller, but definitely someone’s Elizabethan fantasy.
When she showed up at Honey’s studio apartment, she brought an enormous can of Parisian talc and a powder puff the size of Milton Berle’s TV prop. “You’ll need to powder me, everywhere,” she said, handing me her makeup tools as if I were in a maid uniform.
George Washington's wig never took as much powder as Miss Frances demanded. My god, we vacuumed up after that girl for weeks.
The shoot itself was conventional; I was disappointed. This was a young woman who wanted to be gazed upon like a porcelain figurine. In theory, it should have appeased the critics who demanded we show “pretty” girls in conventional portrait settings. But they never wrote us with their approval. We never got a postcard that said, “Oh thanks, that latest pictorial was just what I was looking for. You’ve redeemed yourselves. Now I believe in your sincerity.”
Too late, I realized the women who “hated” us were fixated on images that offended them. They played this slideshow of atrocities over and over in their minds until you had to ask: What is your obsession? They beat off to our pictures in private and bullied us in public. It was like Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches … we weren’t allowed to their frankfurter parties, and we never would be.
Frances’s powder fest didn’t end at her debut in print. We never heard from her again, not once, but we got a phone call from some low-voiced butch lawyer who claimed to represent her. She warned us that Frances was running for Miss California in a national beauty pageant and that we had to burn all the copies of the issue we’d just printed so that we did not soil her reputation. Or pay her thousands in reparations. Or both.
What happened? That kind of thing set me in panic. “You lied to us? You’re in a straight beauty pageant? Where are your ethics?”
Honey Lee and Debi were more on the same page. Honey Lee wanted to size up the butch lawyer in person — thank god that didn’t happen. Debi asked to see Frances’s model release so she could find her address and “go slap her face.” She said Frances was a whore who thought she was going to rip off the other whores and turn OOB into an “opportunity.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Whatever happened to sisterhood, to dykes-in-arms?”
A year after Honey’s Bulldagger centerfold debuted, she wrote in our summer 1985 issue:
We all know a cute tomboy butch at 25 or even 35 is a little silly in the same outfit when she’s 40 or 50. So what’s an aging baby butch to do? It seems a natural profession to develop into a bulldagger. Right or wrong, I have it in my head that bulldaggers are old dykes, and I feel like I’m getting there fast. The image has such a fearsome negative meaning I hesitate to cross over the bridge. Like aging people everywhere, bulldaggers dress funny, have transcended their sexual impulses, and tend to be either very sensible or eccentric.
Bulldaggers embody my worst fears about aging within gay life. Like being bitter over the losses suffered in broken relationships. The one fear that has been my constant loyal companion, “When will I ever be a mature adult woman?” A blatant gay identity has always been considered childish. It’s not the position I had hoped to find myself in. So preliminary investigations are under way. Who shall I be for my 40s?
Those who see my picture first and meet me later say, “You don’t look so tough in real life.” Some sound disappointed.
It’s true I don’t look so tough in real life. Maybe that makes me a fake bulldagger. Because if I really believe in it, I would pay the price no matter what the cost.
I am still surprised Honey Lee doubted herself. If she, and every woman at OOB, didn’t pay the price of a very adult confrontation with the infantilists, the hypocrites, and the chauvinists — no one did. She had a vision, and like the best of OOB, that vision changed the female picture forever.
Les Belles Dames Sans Merci
Debi handled money pressures differently than I did. I always wanted to toss in the towel, give up, throw myself at the mercy of the public.
If we could have hired an ordinary press to print OOB, it would have cost us $5,000 in 1980. But because we were women, printing sex, there was only one printer who would “take the risk” — they produced gay men’s sex magazines, too — and they charged $1 apiece for a forty-eight-page black-and-white magazine. That’s before you even got them bundled up and loaded onto trucks. I would call printers, looking for a reasonable quote, and urge them to look at the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe in the New York Times … to no avail. On Our Backs’s taste in photos was more “avant-garde feminist art show” than “Times Square backroom” — (though hopefully we found the perfect synthesis) — but we were treated like pariahs of obscenity.
Joani Blank, my old boss at Good Vibrations, had warned me this would happen. She would put together serious sex education books — like Jack Morin’s Anal Pleasure & Health — with no photos: the book tat could be used by med school students. Then she would be stopped in her tracks because she couldn’t find a bindery to glue them together. “Some Christian at the bindery has objected to anal sex.”
We were too obscene to glue together. All of us, the women in erotica and in sex education, ended up paying what amounted to enormous bribes to be printed at all. And the printers’ risk? Zero. The U.S. Attorney General’s Office, to this very day, has the same attitude toward women’s sexual potential as those held by the Victorians. They really don’t believe lesbians have sex.
My FBI file — available upon request thanks to the Freedom of Information Act! — is entir
ely concerned with my labor and anti-racism organizing — what the feds considered “the big boys.” They weren’t going to press charges against a publisher involved in something as ephemeral as “feminist pornography” — they couldn’t even imagine it.
But the “boys-only” blockade never ended.
We couldn't open up a business bank account or get a credit card to process customer orders because we were considered “a risky business.” We couldn’t get fire insurance — why? Do lesbian pornographers burn down their cubbyholes often? Everywhere we went, men who bought whores every day turned us down because of “the nature of [our] business.”
Debi was pissed, too, but she considered these complications a “tax” for being in business at all — a potentially lucrative business. I never saw the lucre; rather, I feared being marched out of the office at gunpoint because we hadn’t paid our rent in three months.
Debi liked to say, “What would Steve Jobs do?” Steve Jobs was her number one favorite man in the whole world. She had me fooled for a year that she knew him personally; she quoted him so extensively that I thought they had met in the Copenhagen Room at the O’Farrell Theater for a lap dance.
“We’re not going to pay for typesetting anymore,” Deb announced one day. “It’s too expensive, and it’s irrelevant. Steve Jobs has a computer for us that’s going to change all that; we’ll do it right here in the front room.” She said this as she pointed at their living room, which had been transformed into our paste-up and layout den.
A computer? I imagined Hal in Space Odyssey. Impossible! I couldn’t man a rocket; I knew only how to write, edit, wax down copy, use a proportion wheel.
Debi came home with an enormous beautiful white box that looked like it belonged on a Milan runway. In it was the 1984 Macintosh desktop computer and a keyboard.
I started sniveling. “I can’t do it. You don’t understand … I barely passed ninth-grade algebra.”
She took a cassette tape out of the package and put it in her boom box. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Flute music started up on the tape as if we were about to attend a New Age seminar. I felt as though someone had placed either an egg or a bomb over my head, but I couldn't tell which.
A woman’s voice came over the speaker. She sounded beatific. “Take the monitor out of the box,” she said. She patiently explained how to insert the plug on both ends. Debi rolled her eyes.
The disembodied Apple Goddess said, “Press the Power button on.” It was like a priest declaring, “Body of Christ.” A heavenly tone came out of the computer, as if something was being born. The screen flickered, and a smiling little “box face” appeared on screen. It twinkled at me. It said, “I don’t care if you didn’t understand ninth-grade algebra.”
I blew my nose in my wet Kleenex one last time, and Debi said, “So how fast can you type?”
Debi wanted everything Steve Jobs had — like investors. Giant loans. People clamoring at our innovation. I felt she was ignoring political reality. “People don’t think Steve Jobs is a pervert,” I said. “No one’s trying to take him away in leg irons for frightening the horses.”
“He is frightening the horses,” Debi said, cupping her face in her palm like she and Steve had just spent all last night in pillow talk. She was going to be Doris Day to his Rock Hudson.
On Our Backs was embraced, at first, by San Francisco’s commie and anarchist bookstores. They loved us. That had to be good for about a hundred copies in sales. We were a big hit on the emerging Internet, too, circa “800-baud” modems. There was no World Wide Web. We picked up devoted Star Trek fans on Usenet.
Finally, the gay men’s bookstores opened their arms to us — they loved us, too. That meant a few thousand dollars — a glimmer of hope.
In every major city there were large women’s bookstores — the heart of feminist publishing — but each one took a different position on us. Mostly “against.” Some, like the Toronto Women’s Bookstore or A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin, issued press releases in which they accused us of being virulent racists and anti-Semites, of practicing female genocide, of endorsing white slavery, of being pimps masquerading as women. When I spoke on the topic of female orgasm in western Massachusetts, I got bomb threats at two different campuses.
There was one rumor that “Susie Bright” and sex theorist “Pat Califia” were one and the same, and that this individual was not actually a woman at all but a pimp hired by an entity composed of the Mitchell Brothers and a Japanese porn syndicate, which was selling women as sex slaves overseas. Yeah, we got Letters to the Editor like that.
This swell of protest against “lesbian pornographers” had two main charismatic leaders, both of whom were loath to mention our names in public. But we said theirs all the time: Catherine MacKinnon, a legal scholar, and Andrea Dworkin, a poet and writer.
I was fascinated by Dworkin because she was truly radical, a poet who took her manifesto into philosophical deep water. She wasn’t content just to whine about porn or “traitors” like On Our Backs. No, she questioned the very nature of penis-vagina intercourse itself. It didn’t make much physiological or psychological sense — her impression of intercourse was biblical rather than scientific. But she had … flair. Like arguing with Freud but being happy he took you for a ride. When I read her novel Fire and Ice I thought, “Look at this: She’s re-created de Sade’s Juliette.” She was de Sade’s most brilliant student. She could write sadistic sex scenes and vicious critiques of the bourgeoisie like few of her peers. If I could have gotten Dworkin to sheath her sword, I would’ve loved to sit down for a conversation. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time for most women’s minds — not mine, not anyone’s. She was a patriarchal opponent who preferred the company of the most cerebral male scholars.
MacKinnon, on the other hand was a square, a non-original. She had sterling judicial provenance from her family; her father was a judge and former congressman.
The same year I was editing my first issue of OOB, MacKinnon and Dworkin went to work for the Minneapolis city government to draft an antipornography civil rights ordinance that deemed “pornography” to be a civil rights violation against women. It allowed women who claimed “harm from pornography” to sue the producers and distributors for damages. It specified that “pornography” and “harm” was whatever you said it was. After all, we all know it when we see it, don’t we? They pursued the same strategy in Indianapolis. Most influential of all, Andrea and Catherine’s activism completely revamped the Canadian Customs code for what kind of literature could enter the country.
Let me give you an example of how that worked out in practice: I would submit a story for a feminist erotic publication … about two lovers who have a conflict but then make up and live happily ever after.
Snore? Not to the Canadian Customs Department! Our publication would be stopped and seized at the border because no woman can have an argument in an erotic publication — that is “violence against women.” No one could have anal sex because that is “violence against women.” No woman could masturbate with a sex toy because that is “violence against women.”
Of course, this was enforced against only small presses. If I wrote or edited a story with the same elements for a major New York publisher, it sailed across the border.
Catherine and Andrea were not naive about the consequences imposed on lesbian, queer, and feminist presses. Their slippery slope was greasier than a leather-boy bathhouse. Both women’s efforts in Minnesota and Indiana attracted the support of Christian conservatives, who joined them in their efforts to drive the legislation through. They didn’t always win in the courts — but the link between Bible thumpers and porn bashers was made perfect.
As traditional puritans like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly adopted “feminist” rhetoric about “the degradation of women,” any thought of eviscerating the patriarchy blew away like so much dust. Whatever MacKinnon’s plans were for women’s liberation, she ended up erecting a cha
stity belt around the First Amendment.
Of course, I took it personally. How could these leaders and their shock troops think they had more in common with crooked televangelists than they did with me, someone who drew pictures of clits on walls? I started to feel like the “crooked” part was what they had in common. Either that, or grudges so old we couldn’t fathom their origin.
In 1997, I got an invitation to speak in Madison, Wisconsin, with a slide show of lesbian photography from On Our Backs. It was work featured in Nothing But the Girl, a book on which Jill Posener and I had collaborated.
Curiously, our picture show was sponsored by A Room of One’s Own, one of the bookshops that had declared a jihad against OOB when we debuted in 1984. When I got to meet the bookstore staff, I was curious about them — and they were so happy to see me. Hugs and kisses all around.
“I don’t get it,” I said to them. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you never carried On Our Backs before; you led the protest against us. It was like Andrea Dworkin’s marching orders. Who died?” I was trying to keep it light.
The five women who’d greeted me looked down at the floor, guilty. My host adjusted her paper-clip necklace and tried to keep her voice steady. “Um, one of our founders died, actually. She’d been fighting cancer for a long time, and …”
That’s what it was like.
Our dreamed-of investors — the feminist foremothers, with whom we thought we’d be best friends — had made up their minds they were going to die before they let us in the door.
And Main Street America? Well, we were just whores to them; they didn’t talk to us during business hours. It didn’t matter what the Constitution said, how the Miller test determined non-obscene speech, what Henry Miller or D. H. Lawrence had accomplished in the courts. We didn’t have lawyers and civil rights leaders pressing our case. Most of our audience, no matter how sympathetic, was made up of men and women who didn’t admit their sexual preferences in public. They only dreamed of being out of the closet. They weren’t going to make a phone call.
