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 sectionwere 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.
It wasn’t until Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 that another lesbian publication was launched. Martin and Lyon both had backgrounds in journalism – they had both studied journalism and worked as reporters – and they founded The Ladder to provide a “feminine viewpoint” to counter the predominantly masculine one in the other gay publications of the time (ONE and The Mattachine Review were both focused on gay men).
In the first issue, published in October 1956, Lyon wrote, “It is to be hoped that our venture will encourage women to take an ever-increasing part in the steadily-growing fight for understanding of the homophile minority.”
Early issues of The Ladder published personal essays, fiction, editorials, reports of research on homosexuality, lists of books and publications about homosexuality, and letters to the editor. It avoided publishing anything that was sexual in content, advocated a relatively conservative tone – advising women to conform to heterosexual fashion norms, for example – and soon began to publish news about lesbians and the homophile movement.
It took a leadership role in progressing the issue of gay and lesbian rights in 1959, when San Francisco Mayor George Christopher was accused of turning the city into “the national headquarters for sex deviants,” and the Daughters of Bilitis was singled out as a menace to young heterosexual women.
In reaction, Lyon and Martin published a special edition of The Ladder to counter these arguments with a reasoned analysis of the situation that compelled the straight press to look more closely into Mayor Christopher’s actions.
It was discovered that his opponent had planted someone within the local Mattachine Society to praise Mayor Christopher and then leak the society’s supposed support for mayor to the public. In the end, Mayor Christopher won re-election, and, as Rodger Streitmatter noted in Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America, “The Ladder could rightly take credit for making homosexuality – for the first time – a political issue.”
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.
