Desperately Seeking Women: My On Our Backs Personals Empire
Why are young women fascinated with the personal ads of their mother’s generation?
Once upon a time there were magazines.
Once upon a time there was a wildly-radicalized lesbian intelligentsia that was coming out of the closet.
And . . . in these halcyon days, there were tiny letters looking for love in the back pages of my old underground magazine, On Our Backs. Everyone read them.1
No one had seen personals like On Our Backs’, when we debuted in 1984. Dykes had never been this frank about their sexual interest before. Nor had straight women.
I got a letter last week from a scholar in Berlin:
Dear Susie,
My name is Mad Sunquist. I am a student reaching out to see if you would answer a few questions regarding the personal ads section of On Our Backs.
I’m working on my thesis, which is focused on these ads and their insights into queer/lesbian desires during the AIDS crisis.
What follows is our interview:
1. Why did it feel important to include a personal ads section in OOB in the first place?
“For the money!” — Classified ads were a typical income-maker for every newspaper and periodical— and we were scrounging for pennies.
But as I think about it, there were two other compelling reasons:
We were highly tuned to the fact that lesbians had never had a glossy magazine, a nationally distributed, out-of-the-closet-zine, with all the bells and whistles of modern journalism.
Like the marionette Pinocchio, we yearned “to be real” — to have all the features of a popular rag: op-ed’s, letters to the editor, high end pictorials, cartoons, hard-hitting investigations, and great wit.
Readers would joke that we were the “lesbian Playboy,” but we also thought, “the lesbian New Yorker.” Even though we were wildly inconsistent, we hit some of those marks, at times. It’s because the talent was so great, and open lesbians literally could not get published anywhere else.
The true value of the classifieds was revealed to us, as they started pouring in. They were down-to-earth, hilarious, self-aware It hit our staff, just how silenced everyone felt by the then-flourishing mainstream feminist press.
There was no where else you could say this stuff out loud as a woman! It was a dam breaking. I would have run the personals for free after that.
2. Do you feel that the significance of the personal ads section changed over time?
Yes. It opened a vein. In the 80s and 90s, after OOB, other gay weeklies (not erotic necessarily, and serving both gay men and women) started running more audacious ads from lesbians.
It became a “popular thing to do”— really, you have to remember this is before the internet and dating apps. It was an alternative to the bar scene, or playing softball— which, I must say in the 21st century, everyone misses! But at the time, it felt exciting that you could be hearing from the big wide world, making friends everywhere.
Like every new fad, the highs and lows were extreme. I think by our second year, people were making fun of our ads. . . but so many of them had a sense of humor, it was hard to outdo the original.
There of course were the scandalized critics— they could not believe women were interested in kink. Or that women had such pointed sexual fantasies. I remember straight women friends reading them, jaw on the floor. They couldn’t imagine being so frank. This was not your Cosmo magazine.
The larger legacy of OOB Personals is only something I’ve discovered recently. You, a contemporary student, are interviewing me. There is an Instagram account run by YOUNG women to reminisce solely about OOB personals. A lesbian couple in LA make tshirts with silk screens of our ads, which have sold out.
Why do dykes in their 20s and 30s think On Our Backs personals are the best thing ever? What touches them?
Some have said to me, “I wish I could live in a dyke community like this, I wish I could go back in the Time Machine.” Which is ironic, because I was wistful in the 80s that I had missed the heat of the 1960s, or the Paris Bohemia of the 20s.
At the time, early 80s, we were struggling, battling. The censorship, the cruelty of mainstream feminist community to our work, the criminalization and persecution by the police, getting beaten on the streets, the bias we faced as a business to get the simplest things (bank accounts, insurance, etc) — it was a war.
Our friends were dying of AIDS, in numbers that left us flattened. To the extent that we were brazen in our creativity and erotic life, it was full out rebellion, raging against the dying light.
One reason I think the ads have been re-discovered today, is because they are bite-size, like social media. No one is re-issuing our stories— they’re long reads. And the photos would be banned most American places, even more today than back at the time! We’re living in a backlash that’s a violent slap to everything we reached to the stars for.
3. Did you experience conflict about what personal ads were appropriate to publish? What was the vetting process like for ads, if you were a part of this?
There were just a handful of us in the office. In the beginning, we all read each morning’s mail, savoring the ads. It was fun to gossip about them, or laughingly guess who might have sent one in.
As we got busier, our distribution and subscription wrangler, Greta Christina (a great author in her own right) took over the day-to-day of the classifieds. She handled all the admin but also got to know the people who sent in the ads. Sometimes she’d hear success stories, of hook-ups!
Despite the spicy nature of our magazine, we were such a wholesome crew, naïve about what could come with a little publicity and success. It never occured to me that someone might send in a fake ad, or pretend to be something they were not. Goodness, no! There was this sense that lesbians were the last credible honest dealers, and we relied on that.
Eventually we discovered the bad apples, and I can never forgive them for ruining the mood. The single biggest offenders were a couple men pretending to be submissive women, (yawn, some things never change) just to have snail-mail sex talk.
Remember, this was all introductions through the post office!
We did discuss whether we would accept ads from bisexual women and men, who wanted a threesome. We didn’t want to be inundated with them. We wondered if the man in the couple was leading the charge, or whether his girlfriend/wife was truly into it.
But how would we know? We certainly knew plenty of bi women who were sincere. Any couple who advertised with us, would know the audience was not a bunch of suburban “swingers.”
We acquiesced and held our breath. It was fine. We didn’t get more than a couple dyke-oriented triad-seekers.
Did we have no-no’s? We did, but we didn’t have to argue about it.
Our staff was united; we hated the fact that in OTHER gay newspapers, they would run ads with language like, “No fatties, no butches.” Appalling.
You see this in gay men’s ads too: “No fats, no femmes, hairless.”
Like, why not just run an ad that says, Conceited Asshole looksfor admirer?
I cannot imagine a person like that being someoone you could fall in love with, or even be good in bed. Ugh.
It’s not that people don’t have fantasies about a certain look, a kind of beauty— sure. There’s tactful ways of approaching that, and they are profoundly diverse. But anyone who is sexually experienced knows that what makes a situation erotic is deep and wide… you would never parade a facile generalization.
4. I’m interested in language around transness and bisexuality. Were there discussions about ads related to those identities?
We, ourselves, the staff and contributors, were an eclectic group. We were gay, bi, old school bulldaggers, high femmes, punk rockers, trans, sex workers, sex educators, into everyone and everything.
The ads were normal to us, they were our milieu. There was no awareness of divisions, other than we knew the straight world disapproved. And that straight world included the puritan division of the feminist movement, the Ms. Magazine crowd.
Sorry, gotta say it.
At the time, the terms “butch” and “femme” were lesbian vernacular, even though they’d changed in meaning since our mother’s generation. We did write about those subjects in the magazine, the change in boomers versus GenX, the expansiveness of what it meant to be butch or femme in a punk rock generation. It had nuance. It wasn’t Ozzie and Harriet.
We esteemed the theatricality and erotic symbols of masculinity and feminity, of what we called “Gender-fuck.” I loved that period.
At the time, I knew a few women who were transitioning to passing and living as men (both with gay and straight lives). I remember wondering if they wanted to leave the queer community we were a part of. Most of them didn’t. There was the beginning of the non-binary scene, although no one called it that,2 and the 21st century determination of pronouns was not yet a thing. It was more bohemian, Celluloid-Closet-vibe. Like, anyone might get called “she,” if SHE was acting like a royal bitch or a diva. Or a MOTHER.3 And any dyke might be called a “Daddy” if she took a protective stance. —And then “Mommy” in another minute. If you didn’t understand camp, you’d never catch on . . . I miss those days.
As far as the ads went, during my tenure every sexual p.o.v. was welcome.
5. I was surprised by the simultaneous amount of content related to safer sex/lesbians’ relationship to the AIDS crisis and the lack of personal ads that included mention of either of those things. Do you have thoughts on why this might have been?
Editorially, we were dedicated sex educators living in San Francisco— the center of HIV and AIDS calamity. There was no way we were going to downplay AIDS, and we were aghast that the mainstream feminist press, and the other lesbian papers, were turning their heads away, as if it had nothing to do with them.
This is another one of those historic disgraces where I have to say: “None of the pooh-poohers ever recanted. No one has come forward to apologize. No one ever said, thank god you did something.” The indifferent and callous deniers at the time, carry on as if they forgot they were so cruel and stupid. They all care so much now... Grrrrrrr.
AIDS was, in the beginning, a virus of the zip code. Those who didn’t live in the hardest hit places, didn’t get it. And, lesbians who rarely sleep with men, it never occurs to them that when and if they do, it might very well be a bisexual men, or a man who’s mostly with other men. The Kinsey Institute research proved that. On Our Backs was the only one who published their conclusions.
And even more than the taboo of lesbian hook-ups— was IV drug use. You know, this was ground zero of the harm reduction movement, which was really about the SHAME-reduction movement. Because you just couldn’t keep living in denial.
I used to do a workshop on campuses and social clubs, called “Safe Sex for Sex Maniacs.” It was very popular. People WANTED to know.
I think the rare people posting kinky, adventurous, non-monogamous personals weren’t going to pay-per-word, just to say, “I use condoms and gloves.” But there was certainly that understanding.
If you slept around, you knew what was up. And yes, we were in the minority.
If you were (serially) monogamous, as most lesbians were, you often got tested, instead of using latex.
And, lesbians got more conservative, like everyone else. —Started refraining more from sex during menstruation, stuff like that. Everyone was scared in their own way.
Conversely, and you’ll see this in the personals, people became attracted to the “act of the vampire,” the sero-positive scene, blood sports. Tattoos exploded. Blood-sharing on any level was the ultimate in trust with one’s lover, and the ultimate “fuck you” to a world that seemed to have deserted us.
This is when you saw Anne Rice’s vampire and Sleeping Beauty series skyrocket. Speaking to the intimacy of blood in a time of peril, was an act of mortification and I think people have a hard time talking about it now. It got shoved under the rug, because after all— we were desperate for a cure. There’s still a reckoning in the wings. Reminds me of how we don’t want to deal with the latest epidemic . . .
Hey, thank you, Mad, for making me think about these times.
From Susie to Readers:
Did you take out a racy personal ad in the “snail mail” days of newspaper back pages?
Did you take out an OOB ad?
What happened? I’m dying to know.
My scholar interviewer didn’t ask me, but no, I never took out an ad myself! I don’t know why. I was already a busy bunny, I lived in the center of GIRL CITY. I loved helping other people write their ads, or paw through the replies to pick the perfect date.
And, if you’re one of the younger people who are fascinated by our old personals, why do you think it is?
What attracts you to them?
In Case You Missed It
The History of the Blatant Lesbian Image
I wrote this, as a love letter. It's a letter evoked by many authors before me— a story written secretly, without fanfare of any sort, for as long as women have conjured up a picture of their sex, and their sex together.
I was OOB’s editor 1984-1990
Now that I think about it, one’s social/sexual identity in SF was understood by what “club” you went to. If you went to Trannyshack, or the Stud, or the End Up, Café Flor and San Marcos, the Folsom Street Fair, the Baybrick BurLEZk nights, you were understood to be in a free-thinking scene.
A classic to read: The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon
Whenever you travel back to the 1980s in your Time Machine, I’m right there with you. I remember the OOB ads and how fun they were to read!! I got way too much play (what can I say) to ever consider answering - much less posting - one myself, but I do recall seeing the “no heavy drugs” criteria (it popped up often) in the hardcore partying days of the 80s and wondering “what the fuck does that actually mean?” LOL
Oh Susie this so brought back memories. I was reminded that in the late 1980s when I taught Queer Politics at UCSC, one of the class assignments was writing a personal ad to run in the Good Times (because they were free to run there). It was a great exercise to do and to talk about.