On Our Backs: The Online Collection
Here’s another great reason to love the internet: a large digital collection [gone now, here’s the Wayback machine URL proving I didn’t dream it] of On Our Backs, the lesbian magazine from the 1980s and 1990s (I’d call it “seminal” if that word weren’t so manifestly unsuited to carrying the freight I need carried) published by, among others, Susie Bright.
The collection is from Independent Voices (“an open-access collection of an alternative press”) and though it doesn’t claim to be complete, it is very substantial, containing 68 issues of the magazine. (Gaps in the collection are evident from the numbering, but how many of them coincide with publication gaps is something I can’t easily check.)
Enjoy!
2019 Update: I’m sorry to report that Independent Voices has removed public access to the On Our Backs collection, for stated reasons that strike me as reflecting either cowardice or insincerity. It can be humiliating when the #pornocalypse comes for you, and not everybody is willing to admit when it happens.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=15996
Heh-heh… Now THAT takes me back.
I had a subscription. The older woman who worked for me at the time and opened my mail, really gave an odd look the first time a copy arrived in the company mail. I think it came all the way from “Oz”…
It’s where I first ran into mentions of Honey Cottrell, Tee Corinne, and someone who called HERSELF Pat Califa at the time (now PATRICK). I still have the entire lot in a box somewhere in storage along with a load of Playboys and copies of Penthouse, Oui, Lui, some Irving Klaw stuff and a rare copy of a Chris Burden catalog that I bought in some gallery in New York around November of 1973. I think I even have a copy of the less exciting OFF Our Backs in that box. You’re making me nostalgic. Now I’ll have to see if I can dig them out for a memory refreshing perusal.
Maybe I have the missing volumes!
As I recall there was some trouble with postal authorities at the time…
If I remember correctly, you weren’t very likely to find any pics of “lipstick lesbians” in that publication… It was the real thing! By women, FOR women… Er… It might have been “womyn” now that I think about it…
Nothing wrong with “seminal”- yes, it shares a root with “semen”, but both come from The Latin “semen”, which means “seed”, in both the literal and figurative sense.
Nothing “wrong” with it but its connotations are entirely wrong for this context. We are symbolic creatures who do not easily divorce the literal from the figurative.
Ive tried to read a few files but they’re all locked grrrr
Josh, possibly a browser issue? Because they all seem like functional links when I open a spot-check selection of them.