Radical Desire

This site contains sexually oriented material, presented for research and scholarly use.

On Our Backs was a magazine of photography—of photographers, photo editors, photo stories, and models—as much as it was a magazine of lesbian feminist sexuality. Within its pages, the two are indivisible. Photographers engaged with developing a lesbian visual culture from the 1970s have spoken often about the potent connections between photographic imagery and identity, community, and visibility, which were crucial for survival and the struggle for equal rights. Photographs were necessary to “fill a perceived void, to fill these blank spaces where desire and questioning and transcendence converged” (Tee Corinne) and for “the construction of a women’s ‘language’ and culture” (Honey Lee Cottrell). JEB framed the stakes succinctly: “Making ourselves visible is a political act.”[2]

But photographs were also troublesome. From photography’s beginnings, types of pictures considered acceptable in other visual media, where the viewer could easily imagine that the subject or scenario is fictitious, have been deemed obscene and subject to censorship as photographs. In the case of On Our Backs, censorship came not only from the straight world but also from the anti-pornography branch of lesbian feminism that dominated at the time. A further dilemma was that photographs could “out” people, at a time when the social and economic repercussions of open queer life could easily be severe. On Our Backs wanted authentic representations of its entire, diverse readership; it wanted pictures of lesbians from all backgrounds, with all tastes, who existed in all social arenas. But in the magazine’s early days, finding people to pose who could take the risk was difficult. Most models were activists or came from the punk scene or sex-work milieu, or were On Our Backs staffers, who posed in a variety of roles and characters.

As the popularity of the magazine and national queer visibility grew, more courageous women who believed in On Our Backs’ project and wished to portray their own erotic identity came forward to be photographed. This was particularly challenging for women who were “firsts” in the magazine. The writer and bodybuilder Kitty Tsui, On Our Backs’ first Asian-American cover model, spoke of facing pressure to represent an entire cultural community on the one hand, and derision from its more conservative members for posing at all on the other.[3]

Amateur photographers and photographers unknown to the editors submitted images on spec or to contests run by the magazine. Some, like Penny Jerome of Boise, Idaho, lived so far away from any lesbian hub that On Our Backs may have been their only connection to the world it represented.[4] Their images were published alongside those of a remarkable group of staffers and close contributors like Mariette Pathy Allen, Phyllis Christopher, Tee Corinne, Honey Lee Cottrell, Morgan Gwenwald, Leon Mostovoy, Catherine Opie, Jill Posener, and Jessica Tanzer. Preeminent in lesbian circles, few of these photographers have gained acceptance by the mainstream art world and a wider audience for their work.

Footnotes

[1] Bright and Posener, Nothing, 8.

[2] Corinne and Tasmin Wilton, Intimacies (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2001); Cottrell, “On Looking at Myself Over a Period of Time,” The Blatant Image 1 (1981): 14–16; Joan E. Biren (JEB), “Lesbian Photography: Seeing through Our Own Eyes,” Studies in Visual Communication 9.2 (Spring 1983): 81–96.

[3] Bright, September 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bds79JZnq1M

[4] Ibid.