"Dear Sisters": The Visible Lesbian in Community Arts Journals

Amazon Quarterly announced its editorial agenda as a "Lesbian-Feminist Arts Journal" in the fall 1972 inaugural issue: to discover "what might be the female sensibility in the arts." According to Gina Roberson and Laurel Holliday Akers, editors of the Oakland-based, nationally circulated publication, "freed from male identification, lesbians are obviously in a very good position to be the ones to cross the frontier Doris Lessing has told us the 'free woman' stands at."¹ In November 1974 Evi Seidman, editor of So's Your Old Lady, the newsletter of Minneapolis's Lesbian Resource Center, countered the love poetry that had recently flooded its pages with a proposal that just as "whatever a woman says expresses her feminism," so anything written by a lesbian expressed her lesbianism. Seidman encouraged contributors to submit nonromantic prose and poems that would appeal to readers outside the center's immediate community.² Two assumptions that concern lesbian identity and cultural production were at work in these editorial positions and constituted an idealized lesbian sensibility: that lesbians were women ungoverned by patriarchal conventions and that lesbians reflected their sexuality in all of their material expressions. Sensibility, in the context of 1970s feminism in the United States, was a naive formulation of gender, where anatomy determines an essence that corresponds to biological sex but is not reducible to it. From this formulation it was clear that women and lesbians had a common essence or sensibility because they had female bodies, and the problem for lesbians was to differentiate a lesbian sensibility on the basis of same-sex desire. According to Amazon Quarterly, lesbians could move into a privileged position outside the heterosexual economy; like Martha Quest, the heroine of Lessing's Children of Violence series, the lesbian pursued liberation from oppression and sent missives back to her sisters still caught within patriarchy. So's Your Old Lady took it for granted that a woman's lesbian identity influenced what and perhaps how she wrote; her sexuality was tangible in whatever she did. Scores of regional and national lesbian feminist periodicals explored what it meant to be a lesbian beginning in the early 1970s. Examining them today, we discover how the notion of lesbian sensibility was elaborated to support representations of lesbian identity that were in fact far more diverse than a unified sensibility would seem to imply. In the interplay of text and graphics in the pages of these periodicals, the alignment of femininity and lesbianism was examined, and lesbian sensibility was less self-evident than self-consciously constructed.

Of all the feminist art and lesbian feminist periodicals published in the 1970s, Amazon Quarterly and So's Your Old Lady distilled the themes of sensibility and identity that preoccupied their editors, contributors, and readers. Although sensibility and identity were used synonymously in these journals, their conceptual emphasis differed. Sensibility was a fundamental essence in which identity, its particular expression by an individual, was grounded. These terms reflect the questions that framed the way these journals described what it meant to be lesbian: What do lesbians have in common? And what makes every lesbian unique? In Amazon Quarterly, the equation of lesbian and feminine sensibility was expressed by representations of female bodies that invited their recognition as lesbian. These bodies were pictured in different media, clothed and nude, to suggest that lesbian identity took many forms. So's Your Old Lady's audience was offered a more unified lesbian identity in the form of what was known in feminist art circles as female or vaginal imagery, relatively abstract renderings of female genitalia. These publications served a subculture that perceived itself as marginalized by sexism and homophobia and constituted itself through cultural expression. They had to balance being inclusive and positive—to appeal to variously rural and urban, middle- and working-class lesbians—with setting the boundaries of what was acceptably lesbian feminist.

The pervasive interest in sensibility as represented in images of the female body aligns Amazon Quarterly and So's Your Old Lady with essentialism, the notion strongly associated with the 1970s women's movement that, contrary to...