As
an undergraduate at Wellesley
College, I clearly
remember one of my first encounters with the college’s student
organization for lesbians and bisexuals, in the pages of a college
yearbook dating from the 1980s. In a photo in the clubs section
were about half a dozen students wearing paper bags over their
heads, with their group identified as “Wellesley Lesbians and
Friends.”
By
the time I was an undergraduate in the early to mid-1990s, the
paper bags had been removed, and Wellesley Lesbians, Bisexuals
and Friends (the name would, of course, later be modified to
include transgender students) was sponsoring “Straight Talks”
across campus to bring lesbian and bisexual students into the
open.
For
many lesbians coming out these days, their first source of community
and support is from a similar organization at their college,
in their communities, or even in their high schools.
But
these kinds of organizations are a relatively recent phenomena
dating back only to the mid-1950s, when four lesbian couples
in San Francisco
gathered together to form a social group that they saw as an
alternative to the bar scene.
In
1955, these women formed the Daughters of Bilitis, the first
national lesbian organization, and a year afterward began publishing
the first nationally distributed lesbian magazine, The Ladder.
Until
it ceased publication in 1972, The Ladder was the preeminent source of information for lesbians across
the U.S.,
teaching them how to dress to avoid police arrest, encouraging
them to accept themselves, and providing a positive message
to counter the overwhelmingly negative coverage in the mainstream
heterosexual media.
Indeed,
the magazine was titled The Ladder to symbolize a means to escape
from the “well of loneliness” (popularized by Radclyffe Hall’s
famous novel) that was
largely understood to be the life of a lesbian.
Before
The Ladder
was published, the only previous lesbian magazine was the short-lived
Vice Versa, published in Los
Angeles from 1947-48 by an anonymous
woman who later identified herself only as Lisa Ben, an anagram
for the word “lesbian.”
The
product of a lesbian who found herself with too much time on
her hands during her secretarial job at RKO Studios, Vice Versa was typed up during her work
hours on the company typewriter, and reproduced using carbon
paper. The magazine’s print run totaled a tiny 12 copies
each, but each copy—which Lisa Ben handed out at local bars—was
passed on to dozens of additional readers.
In
the nine issues of Vice
Versa, Lisa Ben created a forum for lesbians to communicate
with each other by printing letters from readers, personal essays,
short fiction and poetry. It
was a format that would be copied by The
Ladder and many other lesbian publications that followed. Lisa
Ben went on to write a couple of stories for The Ladder, but after publication of Vice Versa ceased (she was transferred to a different job that did
not give her the time to pound away at the typewriter during
work hours), she mostly vanished from the lesbian media.
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