Back in the Day: The Ladder, America's First National Lesbian Magazine

In 1963, as the lesbian and gay rights movement became more militant — along with the rise of the feminist movement — Barbara Gittings became the new editor of The Ladder, and immediately took actions that adapted the previously conservative magazine to the growing radicalism of the time.

In 1964 she added “A Lesbian Review” to the front cover of the magazine, thereby proclaiming that the word “lesbian” was no longer unspeakable, and declared that women could wear the pants if they wanted to, abandoning the Daughters of Bilitis’s conservative stance on butch fashions.

Gittings and her partner, Kay Lahusen, who also acted as The Ladder’s assistant editor, replaced the line drawings that had illustrated the front cover with photos of actual lesbians.“It definitely was a political statement,” she told Streitmatter. “Every one of those women was saying, 'We’re here, we’re proud, and we’re beautiful!'"

Much more radical in her politics than Martin and Lyon, Gittings wanted The Ladder to advocate for gay rights, but after a series of disputes — including an incident in which Gittings removed the statement “For Adults Only” from the cover without consulting the Daughters of Bilitis — Gittings was ousted from the magazine in 1966. Martin took over temporarily until Barbara Grier became the editor in 1968.

Initially aiming to turn The Ladder into a high-quality literary journal, Grier too developed political differences with the founders, and after two short years she and the magazine split off from the Daughters of Bilitis. Grier took the mailing list and what submissions she had from the magazine’s office and moved to Reno, Nevada, where she removed the word “lesbian” from the cover and, with its broader focus on women’s issues and feminism, tripled the subscription rate.

One of the main issues that faced The Ladder — and other lesbian publications that followed — was the financial stress involved in running a magazine that had a low subscription rate. During the 1950s, The Ladder had about 700 subscribers (though its readership was substantially higher), and it faced initial difficulties in getting the magazine onto newsstands. Though it reached print runs of around 3,800 when it folded in 1972, The Ladder was always on the brink of disaster, and depended on the generosity of anonymous benefactors and passion of its editors — who often worked for free — to keep it alive.

In the introduction to an anthology of essays from The Ladder published in 1976, Grier wrote, “No woman ever made a dime for her work, and some worked themselves into a state of mental and physical decline on behalf of the magazine. I believe that most of them believed that they were moving the world with their labors, and I believe that they were right.”

The 1970s saw the rise of a number of lesbian publications in the wake of the end of The Ladder, many of them reflecting the lesbian feminist movement.

The Furies, founded by a collective of lesbians in Washington, D.C., including Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle), was one of the most well-known and politically radical of these magazines. Though only ten issues were published from 1972-73, members of the collective went on to found the Diana Press, one of the major lesbian publishers of the time, and Olivia Records, which eventually became Olivia Cruises and Resorts.

But the major lesbian news magazine to follow directly after The Ladder was the Lesbian Tide, which began its life as the newsletter of the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis in 1971. In January 1972 the magazine became an independent monthly and was the first lesbian magazine to publish all news.

Other lesbian magazines that erupted during the 1970s included the suggestively titled Amazon Quarterly, Dyke, Sinister Wisdom, Sisters, Tribad, and the evocatively named So’s Your Old Lady. Lesbian Connection, founded in 1974 and still active today, became one of the major sources of lesbian networking in the U.S.; its lists of “contact dykes” gave traveling lesbians someone to look up when they were in a new, unfamiliar city.

Fifty years after the founding of the Daughters of Bilitis and nearly 50 years after the first issue of The Ladder was published, lesbian publishing has arguably gone mainstream. Lesbian celebrities grace the covers of mainstream magazines such as Vanity Fair and People, and heterosexual celebrities cross over onto the covers of lesbian magazines like Curve.

The internet has also provided a new forum for lesbian connections — sites like AfterEllen.com are simply high-tech extensions of those carbon-copied issues of Vice Versa that Lisa Ben used to pass out at the local lesbian bar.

In addition to playing a major role in building the political consciousness of lesbians and bisexual women in the U.S., lesbian magazines such as The Ladder provided support in extremely homophobic times, always encouraging lesbians to accept themselves and each other, to come out, and to connect with each other.

Without those connections, we’d all still be, to some degree, wearing paper bags over our heads.