โ€œIt was one of those years,โ€ says queer and feminist theorist Gayle Rubin of 1984. A โ€œperiod of ferment over sex and feminist politics,โ€ 1984 was a year of revolution, rebellion, and revitalization. It was also the inaugural year for the trailblazing lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs.

Created by, for, and about lesbians, On Our Backs came about in the tumult of the โ€œfeminist sex wars,โ€ a deeply polarizing internal debate in the feminist movement regarding sex, sexuality, pornography, erotica, and BDSM. Divided into sex-positive and anti-porn camps, the sex wars saw rabid disagreement on what the nature of things like pornography were doing for lesbians and for society as a whole. Many feminists argued that pornography and erotica were inherently objectifying and abusive. Writer and theorist Andrea Dworkin argued that not just pornography but heterosexual sex as a whole was a โ€œmeans of physiologically making a woman inferior,โ€ and claimed that anyone aroused by porn that depicted sexualized violence (whether real or scripted) โ€œwas evidence of a mind thatโ€™s absorbed the propaganda of the patriarchy and eroticized the subjugation of women.โ€ On the flipside, sex-positive feminists argued that pornography itself was not an inherent evil, but rather its morality was dependent upon the creators and participants. Rubin, one of the founders of the lesbian feminist BDSM group Samois, believed sexual liberation was a key component of the feminist movement and that public expressions of female sexuality were crucial in asserting womenโ€™s existence as fully realized beings.

Both sides of this movement used media as a weapon to push their points across. off our backs, a radical feminist periodical first published in 1970, was created to discuss feminist lives and activism. However, several feminists believed the magazineโ€™s take on sexuality to be โ€œprudishโ€ and its avoidance of properly addressing sexual liberation to be a huge oversight. Fourteen years later, in 1984, these feminists responded with On Our Backs.

On Our Backs, which originally ran from 1984 to 1990 and was revitalized from 1998 to 2002, existed for one central purpose: to portray lesbian sex and sexuality, with real lesbians. By โ€œreal lesbians,โ€ the magazine meant lesbians who allowed themselves to be photographed in expressions of sexuality that felt true to them. โ€œThere were those of us who were very skeptical about the anti-pornography movement in feminism,โ€ Heather Findlay, who took over the publication of OOB in the late 90s, tells me. โ€œWe thought it was censorious and anti-sex.โ€ Findlay recounts a college experience of hers, partially inspired by OOBโ€™s activism, in which she and a friend protested Playboyโ€™s presence on Brownโ€™s campus with their own magazine, titled Positions:

โ€œEvery year Playboy published its Women of the Ivy League issue. And they would advertise in the local Brown newspaper called the Brown Daily Herald for models. So somehow we got advance wind of this and on the same day the ad came out for this in the Brown Daily Herald, we bought a quarter-page ad and put out the call for women and men to model for Positions. [My friend] identified as straight and I did as gay, and we were going to make what we would now call in todayโ€™s language a pansexual publication. It just caused a huge media explosion. It was headlining in newspapers all over the country, that โ€˜Brown students were putting up a porno magazine.โ€™ I just thought that that was the most creative and the most celebratory way to respond to the ills of pornography โ€” not to censor it but to do our own. And to do it better.โ€

โ€œTo do our own, and to do it betterโ€ could very well be considered the rallying cry of OOB (Iโ€™m also partial to โ€œcome one, come allโ€). The magazine began in San Francisco as the lovechild of two lovers and three friends: Debi Sundahl, Nan Kinney, and Myrna Elana. Susie Bright and her lover Honey Lee Cottrell were attached to the project as well and became pivotal cogs in the โ€œlusty lesbianโ€ machine as editor and photographer respectively. OOB entered into a long lineage of lesbian periodicals โ€” other publications like the Daughters of Bilitisโ€™ The Ladder, Jeanne Cรณrdovaโ€™s Lesbian Tide, Lesbian Connection, Sinister Wisdom, and others had been publishing (and some shuttered) by the time OOB entered onto the scene. Sundahl, Kinney, Elana, Bright, and Cottrell were intimately familiar with such magazines and were ready to throw their proverbial hats in the ring.

The work in OOB could be called a cavalcade of words, but subtle would not be among them. The first ever issue, available in full online thanks to the non-profit Internet Archive, is enough to make most blush. (I learned quickly that certain articles are not meant to be researched in a public coffeeshop.) 1984 is described as the โ€œYear of the Lustful Lesbian!โ€ on the first few pages, and the content makes good on this promise, with short-form erotic fiction and poetry accompanied by lascivious illustrations; advertisements for sex toys and sexual health clinics; features like โ€œApril First, 1984: Satire: English S/M group meets Anti-Porn Crusadersโ€ and โ€œLesbian Strippers: Erotic Dance Benefits for On Our Backsโ€; and classifieds, proclaiming โ€œwitch wants same,โ€ โ€œnovice femme wants experienced single (butch?) top,โ€ and other discreet-yet-detailed personals. If the creators of OOB wanted to fill the niche of hard lesbian sexuality literature, theyโ€™d done a bang-up job (pun intended). The issues that followed were full of the same, and often accompanied by names that now vibrate in the lesbian/queer and larger literary canon with great power: Dorothy Allison, Patrick Califa (whose work was in the first issue), Sapphire, Joan Nestle, Jewelle Gomez, Leslie Feinberg, Alison Bechdel, Lea Delaria, to name only a fraction.

But such self-expression didnโ€™t come without complications. โ€œThe big deal wasnโ€™t getting people to take their pants off, it was seeing their faces,โ€ Susie Bright, co-founder and iconic lesbian writer also known as Susie Sexpert, said in 2011. In the beginning (and throughout), many if not most of the contributors were behind the scenes as well. Bright discusses the first issueโ€™s centerfold featuring Cottrell, a โ€œBulldagger of the Seasonโ€ meant to replicate Playboyโ€™s โ€œPlaymate of the Month.โ€ In the photo, Cottrell is โ€œgnarly,โ€ her โ€œbrushy, silver hair sticking straight upโ€ in nothing but white underwear and an unbuttoned white menโ€™s shirt. While some women reacted favorably (Bright fondly remembers a woman mailing a photo of her masturbating to the photo), the staff also received immense vitriol, letters calling butches โ€œdisgusting,โ€ and others decrying the sexualization of women by women.

OOB faced several complications when it came to distribution due to these reactions โ€” Bright says โ€œif it werenโ€™t for the gay menโ€™s bookstores and commie bookstores,โ€ the magazineโ€™s life may have been much shorter. She remarked that while gay men posing for similar magazines were much more open about using their faces, names, and identifying facts, lesbians were much more hesitant. Many letters of criticism were received by the staff, asking why the magazine couldnโ€™t feature women who were โ€œbankers, librarians, someone who wears pantyhose,โ€ instead of just โ€œrock chicks and strippersโ€ โ€” but as Bright says, the staff wanted to feature such women. The women themselves were just much more hesitant to actually volunteer for their sensuality to be photographed and printed for the masses. Likewise, the big ask of contributors and models to be โ€œoutโ€ prevented involvement. But for many lesbians, OOB provided a relief.

โ€œIn those days, many of us queer women identified as either an OOB lesbian or an off our backs lesbian,โ€ says Findlay. โ€œTo know that I could be gay and that I could be fully sexual and that I could define that the way that I wanted to, and that I could be creative and experimental. That was like the second-best news after knowing that I could be gay in the first place!โ€ Findlay came to OOBโ€™s staff in 1992, after a written correspondence with Kinney led her from Providence to San Francisco to work on the magazine. โ€œThe fact that Nan and Debie basically gave me their baby and let me take care of itโ€ฆthat was a blessing.โ€

However, Findlay expressed frustration at the financial reality of OOB โ€” namely, that it didnโ€™t make any money. Findlay says the original creators of the magazine werenโ€™t interested in making money, but in โ€œmaking wavesโ€ โ€” Findlay, however, dreamed of creating a lesbian publishing company able to pay its contributors and staff. After OOBโ€™s first folding in 1994, Findlay was a part of the creation of Girlfriends, an offshoot of OOBโ€™s motivations less interested in sex as a focus, and more interested in โ€œcritical coverage of culture, entertainment, and world events from a lesbian perspective.โ€ In 1998, due to the marketability and subsequent better financial straits of Girlfriends, Findlay as editor was able to purchase and open OOB back up for publication and distribution.

โ€œIt was very difficult as an editor to be working with huge figures in lesbian literature at the time and be promising them $25 for a short story!โ€ Findlay laughs as she says this. โ€œThat made my work very difficult. And when we couldnโ€™t even pay them the $25 weโ€™d agreed upon, that was even worse.โ€

Advertisement
Don’t want to see ads? Join AF+

Findlay describes resurrecting OOB as a โ€œlabor of love,โ€ which lasted until 2006 when, similarly to the first shuttering, the magazine came to a close due to financial instability. While she says this was โ€œpersonally devastating,โ€ OOBโ€™s newfound irrelevance was something of a bittersweet progression: With the advent of the Internet, print magazines were going out of fashion, and lesbians and other queer people were more easily able to find one another in chat forums and email chains. The early aughts and the years after found an explosion of forward progression for LGBTQ+ rights, and while we are nowhere near a queer utopia, itโ€™s no question the world OOB was created for has changed for queer people for the better โ€” in ways that, unfortunately, made that same magazine obsolete.

Admittedly, โ€œobsoleteโ€ is quite a harsh word, and not quite the right one: While the magazine doesnโ€™t exist in the same capacity it used to, its influence on lesbian sexuality and literature cannot be forgotten, even though some may try. I think about this while reading Susie Brightโ€™s Substack, interviewing Heather Findlay, or walking through a warehouse party in Austin, Texas: The bravery of lesbians young and old still astounds me, and the reverence for those that made OOB come to be is palpable. Whoโ€™s to say if a place like Autostraddle would even exist without it! I am thankful to be a descendant of folks like Bright and Findlay and thankful still that the legacy of OOB is being remembered so many years after the fact.

Elegizing a magazine like OOB today is in service of not forgetting history. Queer history builds on itself and lays groundwork for the present and beyond. Could we truly have Chappell Roan singing about โ€œgetting the job doneโ€ on Saturday Night Live to raucous applause without Cottrellโ€™s erotic photography? Could we have Bottoms, a sleazy lesbian-sex comedy, without the lesbian strip shows hosted to pay for the printing costs of the magazine? We do not live in a vacuum โ€” it is easy for those of us lucky to live through โ€œthe lesbian renaissanceโ€ of our pop culture, to forget to pay our respects to those who made it possible to be inundated with this sapphic deluge. Queer art like Chappell and Bottoms, while popular and successful in the mainstream, are so appealing because of their refusal to be palatable to heterocentric audiences. Despite Chappellโ€™s fiery rocket to the top of the music world, her work at its core is extremely disinterested in shrinking away from her lesbianism, but more specifically, away from her distinctly-lesbian horniness. Thereโ€™s โ€œRed Wine Supernova,โ€ which boldly begs for the โ€œlong hair, no braโ€ female muse to โ€œput her canine teeth in the side ofโ€ Chappellโ€™s neck. Or โ€œNaked in Manhattan,โ€ where she desperately repeats โ€œtouch meโ€ in increasing volume. Her music is not just about being a gay woman, itโ€™s about being a lesbian who fucks. Bottoms is a gay Superbad, in which the central conceit is sad horny lesbians doing whatever it takes to get laid.

Many lesbians may not see this as progressive or good (similar to lesbians of the 1980s sending hate-mail to OOBโ€™s HQs). And to be fair, the oversexualization of lesbian relationships is an unfortunately time-honored tradition in media, pornographic or not. However, to assume artists like Chappell fall into this category is to deny lesbians the agency of their own sexuality, much like the very media such critics seek to malign. It is different: Marti Noxon quotes TV execsโ€™ response to Buffy the Vampire Slayerโ€™s lesbian relationship, as โ€œThey can [kiss] once, but not twice โ€” because that means they enjoyed it.โ€ When lesbians own their sexuality, when they prove they are doing it for themselves, and because they like it, this is still a radical, crucial ownership, the kind that OOB made a pillar of its mission. Perhaps even especially now, in a time where interest in lesbian culture by the straight mainstream feels exciting but also treacherous, this is what we should return to. Itโ€™s not that we canโ€™t share with the mainstream โ€” but it is special to remember we do not exist and prosper because straight people gave us permission. We do so because lesbians and queer people before us demanded it, in the street and in print.


If youโ€™re interested in learning more about the history of OOB, subscribe to Brightโ€™s Substack, watch this video, or peruse Cornellโ€™s โ€œRadical Desireโ€ exhibit. If youโ€™re lucky enough to have access to it, Brown Universityโ€™s John Hay Library contains extensive archival materials of the magazine as well. The GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco also has archival materials of the magazine.