ON OUR BACKS:
Time for a little lesbo-porn herstory! All ye who are too young or have not been obsessively following the ascent & success/decline of all lesbian/feminist/grrl/outsider media for years may not know about On Our Backs Magazine: Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian. The rest of you already know. Although the mag ceased publication in ’06, the website and its ancient material remains online, which’s weird, yeah? Like an internet ghost town.

See, once upon a time, there was an American lesbian porn magazine with national distribution, and now there isn’t. With a title inspired by anti-sex feminist newspaper Off Our Backs, sex-positive feminist On Our Backs launched in ’84 and was named one of Utne’s “ten magazines to make a difference in the 80s.” Early contributors included Pat Califia, Tea Corrine, Dorothy Allison, Joan Nestle, Sarah Schulman, Sapphire, Honey Lee Cottrell, the magazine is credited with bashing down the anti-sex sentiments simmering in lesbian feminism at the time and making lesbians talk about stuff like dildos and FISTING.

More about On Our Backs:

A model from 2000 posting her On Our Backs pictoral. This interview with Beth Ditto of The Gossip mentions that she posed nude for On Our Backs.

Felice Newman, author of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, describing how she was a “somewhat shut-down lesbian living in middle America when On Our Backs came along and totally flipped me out.”

A 2007 “interview with Lesbian Pornographer” [and OOB co-founder] Nan Kinney who also started Fatale Media, the video-production offshoot, about how although she knew lesbians loved sex, she couldn’t find anything about it anywhere — “the problem was that the anti-porn lesbians controlled the general lesbian culture, including the press.”

Salon interviews Susie Bright about the “sorry state of American porn” and the experience of starting On Our Backs.

Susie Bright has a complete history of On Our Backs available online, and it’s fascinating; all about the early photographers and models, the response from feminist bookstores and queer women, the challenges of finding advertisers and even printing presses and stories of the politics & operations behind-the-scenes, including their eventual falling out.

It was no coincidence that the S/M, punk-era women were the first to show their faces to the public… they were the first to have the nerve. It was as if you had to be a career whore, a dedicated outcast, to show your face in a lesbian magazine… let alone your pussy.

In the Boston Phoenix in ’98, by Tristan Taormino writes about what On Our Backs was supposed to change and asks, “In the lesbian sex wars, the ‘pro-sex’ contingent came out on top. So where’s the porn?”

The On Our Backs Guide to Lesbian Sex and On Our Backs: The Best Erotic Fiction are still totally available at your local internet bookstore.

On Our Backs went bankrupt in ’95. H.A.F. Publishing outbid The Advocate in ’96 to start publishing On Our Backs again in ’98 [this MetroActive article had mixed feelings about the relaunch]. H.A.F. also published Girlfriends. Both magazines went under in ’06, much to our collective dismay.

So, what do you think? What would you want to see in a lesbian porn magazine? Did you read On Our Backs? Would you? Are there lesbian sex ‘zines out there that we don’t know about?

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NEXT:
Cake & cunnilingus day! Gay media sex addiction!
Cute tumblrs for lesbos! and so much more!

THINGS THAT EXIST/HAPPEN:
Did you miss cake and cunnilingus day? (@trishwilson)

GAY MEDIA LOVES SEX:
Does gay media have a sex addiction? Once you get over how annoying it is that this entire article is written as if there is no lesbian or transgender media of note/consequence, it’s interesting about the controversy between sexuality.(@mediaite)

BEST SEX WRITING 2010
Curve talks to Rachel Kramer Bussel about The Best Sex Writing 2010 : “The essays here, whether explicitly queer or not, show that sex is complicated, that it’s not as straightforward as we’d like to think. From the opening piece, which basically asks if you can tell a girl’s a slut just by looking at her, to the last one involving a different kind of voyeurism, these works force readers to consider the ways sex makes us think about ourselves. For many of the authors, their sexuality is itself unnerving. There are some pieces that specifically address LGBT sexuality, such as the chapters by Betty Dodson, Kirk Read and Seth Michael Donsky, but I think as a whole this volume is very queer in that it tackles the basic assumptions many of us have about sex.” (@CURVEMAG)

BODY ROCK:
Is the economy making your body type more attractive? According to two studies analyzing the faces and body shapes of famous actresses and models throughout the years, tough times call for ladies who look more “mature.” No, not in a Golden Girls kind of a way but in a taller, sturdier, slightly heavier form than when the economy is booming. (@shine)

MORE VIAGRA:
The Neverending Female Viagra Story. “After enough coverage of other drugs under the headline “new female viagra” the marketing folks at Pfizer must have realized that any new sex drug for women is going to be called the Female Viagra so they might as well go with it, despite the fact that all their previous research has failed.” (@about)

TANDEM BOOB PRESS:
Introducing the Tandem Boob Press: “Let us introduce to you the tandem boob press, which is basically one girl short of a boob circle. This pose was brought into the mainstream primarily by British lad mags, like Nuts and Zoo and their busty babes. But we thought it needed some more exposure. Enjoy!”

CUTE TUMBLR ALERT:
Hello Girls is girls who like girls posting pictures of girls for your viewing pleasure. I’ts not like “just about sexy stuff” but then sometimes it is. It’s like a surprise, sort of like sexy girls themselves.

TRANSWOMEN:
“Doing it Ourselves: The Trans Woman Porn Project is a hot collection of trans women and their partners of all genders engaging in sex the way they want to be represented. Starting with a group of trans women who are tired of the way that they have seen trans women portrayed in porn, this film tells the story of its own creation when the decide to, well, do it themselves.” (@handbasket)