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Thank you sisters for all of your support of Sinister Wisdom, in every form that it may take. Everyone at Sinister Wisdom truly appreciates the lesbian community and all of its creations! Enjoy this week’s “Sinister Snapshot” Sinister Wisdom’s biweekly newsletter. If you have suggestions for future editions, send them to info@sinisterwisdom.org
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Sinister Wisdom volunteer Max Backer has been working with Julie and the Sinister Wisdom team to produce our zoom events; Max sent us this wonderful report from the exhibition about On Our Backs at the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection in Ithaca, NY. It sounds like a great retrospective, and we encourage everyone nearby to check it out:
“My partner, Lisa, and I recently checked out 'Radical Desire: Making On Our Backs Magazine,' an exhibition presented by the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection in Ithaca, NY. On Our Backs, the first women-run erotic magazine, ran from 1984 until 2006. The installation featured photography, original covers, and documents from the magazine’s early beginnings to its trailblazing presence throughout three decades.
While I’ve seen queer-focused museum exhibits before, they typically leaned towards the tragic (exhibits that centered on AIDS or violence towards the community) or were filtered through a corporatized view of Pride. This exhibition felt like a celebration, and you could feel all of the hard work, creativity, and community that brought On Our Backs to life.
Dubbed 'entertainment for the adventurous lesbian,' I still have a couple of issues of On Our Backs from the mid-90s, coveted like relics from another time. I had very few positive images of sexuality in general, let alone queer images, and I am grateful that On Our Backs was a part of my sexual awakening. I knew all about Playboy and its ilk but to see healthy and fun lesbian sex in print, made by lesbians, felt like a portal to an unimagined future. Thank you On Our Backs and all the folks who contributed to its success.”
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Max (right) and their partner Lisa (left).
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Max besides a black and white poster of the original founders of On Our Backs.
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Display case containing bar photos, a lesbian/feminist support group business card, and an issue of Gay Community News.
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Various sultry covers of On Our Backs behind three free standing endorsement request letters.
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Join the Sinister Wisdom book club on March 29th for a discussion of Sarahland by Sam Cohen. Come even if you haven't had the time to finish the book! Register here.
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Watch the livestream of the March 20th event at Charis Books here.
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Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, edited by Briona Simone Jones is a Finalist for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. The Renunciations, by Donika Kelly (featured in SW 106), and Magnified, by Minnie Bruce Pratt are both finalists for the Audre Lorde Award! Congrats to everyone nominated! So many good new titles in lesbian print!
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I’m sure anyone with an internet connection and a whiff of queerness already also knows that the 2022 Lammy Finalists were announced…
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Janet Cooling, the “Post-Imagist” whose vibrant, unapologetic, erotic, depictions of lesbians brought “the homosexual presence” into contemporary art has died.
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doris davenport won the Lillian E. Smith Center’s Writer-in-Service Award! Congratulations, doris! We are looking forward to the issue of Sinister Wisdom that you are going to guest edit.
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Finally, Congratulations to Sinister Wisdom board of directors member and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom 123: A Tribute to Conditions for their acceptance into a PhD program at Emory University, AND congratulations to Sierra Earle, former intern and current assistant editor at Sinister Wisdom for your acceptance into the MLIS program at the University of Iowa!
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“I've seen Black woman get out of their cars and look up at the mural and just start weeping,” Read about the museum and mural honoring the women of the Black Panther Party (the West Oakland Mural Project).
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Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s photographs of her worldly travels are on display at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art from April until mid June. Though the Swiss gender-bender considered herself a writer, her photojournalism (and lesbianism) is what lives on in infamy.
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Where there is funding there is life in our global capitalistic system $750,000 was awarded by California State Library to the preservation of California’s LGBTQ+ History. Hopefully the trend towards funding lesbian arts/persevering lesbian history continues!
Emerald Faith recommends unsung classics of Black queer literature. | them.
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Speaking of archives... the archive of Eloise Klein Healy, LA’s first poet laureate, was acquired by The Huntington Library. Healy’s archive consists of drafts of poems and essays, diaries, personal journals, photographs, correspondence, recordings of poetry readings.
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We are entering the third year of the pandemic and yet there is no concrete data on how COVID has impacted the LGBTQ community this is especially problematic given the queer community is disproportionatley affected by HIV/AIDS. While the connection between HIV and COVID is still emerging, it is clear that the onset of the pandemic decreased access to HIV outpatient care and that any immunocompromised person is at higher risk of developing more severe symptoms due to COVID.
As Joan Nestle once said, "to live without history is to live like an infant, constantly amazed and challenged by a strange and unnamed world…"
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If you would like to support Sinister Wisdom's thriving lesbian community please consider donating or subscribing. Your support is vital to our mission of profiling, supporting, and nurturing lesbian culture as well as providing educational resources to women and lesbians. Thank you to our sustainers for supporting the advancement of lesbian art and culture!
Every week a lesbian teaches me something new and amazing. Something about how infinite “lesbian” is. Please read these stories as an invitation, like cuts of a scene that can’t stop unfurling around us, into what is, what was, what yet dared be thought! Thank you for reading another “Sinister Snapshot”!
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