Book Shows How Debates Over Sex, Identity Raged in ’80s Lesbian Magazines
In a pre-digital media landscape, niche magazines could breathe life into new ideas, eventually making a cultural impact far beyond what you'd guess from their circulation numbers.
A new book from Old Dominion University professor Elizabeth Groeneveld illustrates how that was possible and why it matters.
"Lesbian Porn Magazines and the Sex Wars: Reimagining Sex, Power, and Identity" tells the story of how a group of publications from the 1980s created a space where readers, writers, and advertisers could, as Groeneveld explains, "imagine new possibilities for lesbian identity and community."
The "sex wars" is a name given to a set of feminist debates about issues including pornography, S/M, and sex work. Battle lines were drawn. Anti-pornography feminists argued with self-described sex radicals — or later "sex-positive feminists" —about how women's erotic lives could embody personal ethics, freedom, and power.
Groeneveld currently chairs ODU's Department of Women's and Gender Studies, but she has been writing about sex, relationships, and culture since high school — when she inadvertently touched off controversy by interviewing classmates about their sexual experiences for a French class project. As a result, young Groeneveld became the subject of unwanted public attention.
"When the kinds of sex people are actually having, or even fantasize about having, become topics for public conversation, some seem to grow fearful of what such conversations might unleash," she writes in a preface.
Below, Groeneveld answers questions about this new work and the research that supports it.
Q: The book describes how letters to the editor, advertisements, and advice columns in these magazines helped create community for people who were often marginalized or worse. Was that the intent of the people who created the publications?
A: I think that was partly the intent, and certainly that was part of the effect. What these magazines did was create spaces for lesbians to see visual and literary representations of themselves that were just not being seen in other places. These were the very first erotic magazines created by lesbians with a lesbian audience in mind. Along with video production companies like Blush Entertainment and Femme Productions, these magazines created an entirely new genre. Whether one likes their content or not, what these magazines did, representationally, was truly ground-breaking. In addition to providing adult entertainment, these magazines were one of the few places where lesbians could find sexual health information, which became particularly important during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Q: Looking back now, would you say that sex-positive feminist won the sex wars? If so, were these magazines key to that victory?
A: I think the sex wars remain ongoing in many ways. There are certainly some aspects of sex-positive feminism that have infiltrated into popular culture: the emphasis on the importance of affirmative consent is completely indebted to sex-positive feminism. Yet, questions of bodily autonomy remain very active and far from settled. It's also perhaps quite telling that many of the people I interviewed wished to remain anonymous, speaking to the continued stigmatization of those who engage in sex-based work both in the past and the present.
Q: You interviewed people who worked on and created these magazines. Were they surprised, amused, or pleased that their work from 30-plus years ago was the subject of this kind of scholarship?
A: Some were certainly surprised! Many were honored and happy to have their work being treated as valuable and worthy of academic inquiry.
Q: You look at how race figured into these explorations of sexuality and identity and describe some telling silences. Did anyone you interviewed for the book say their attitudes about race have changed since the era of the sex wars? Do similar silences show up today in different forms?
A: Yes, similar silences continue to show up! There's huge resistance to talking about critically about racism and whiteness in our broader culture. In terms of the book, some of the people I interviewed did not agree with how I analyzed their arguments about race, particularly when I highlighted certain limitations to their perspectives. I think it's fair to say that all the people I spoke to are highly committed to anti-racism, even when they fell short or missed the mark entirely when it came to racial representation.
Q: Why is the kind of research you did for this book important?
A: I think it's important to acknowledge that sexual minorities deserve to be represented as fully human and as having erotic lives. In all their forms, gender and sexuality comprise important aspects of people's humanity. There's a significant culture war happening right now and trans people are in the crosshairs of a number of repressive laws and policies. The people who made these magazines really tried to be inclusive and non-stigmatizing of a whole range of identities, even as they also made mistakes along the way. They represent an important archive of what a diverse, expansive, and inclusive vision of gender and sexuality could look like.