Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (29 page)

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 thou
ght 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 insight 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 eve
rywhere, 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.

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

D
ebi 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 a
rt 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 entirely 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.