The end of World War II signaled the beginning for many movements in the United States such as the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, and, what was at the time called, The Homophile movement. The gay and lesbian communities of America started blooming underground through bars and secret meetings in large cities in a more drastic way than before. While the community was beginning to blossom, early life for gay and lesbian Americans was still isolating for many and dangerous as police raids were increasingly becoming more and more prevalent with the rise of McCarthyism. Homosexuals were seen as an attack on “family values” and thus considered just as threatening as Communists during the late 1940s and 1950s. (Streitmatter, 1995) While many organizations popped up during this time, as a way to commune without going to a bar, one of the most effective ways that grew this community was its press and publications. With magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, people could find news, advice, literature, and a community through text and images and still feel connected in a way that bars and secret organizations could. Not only did the formation of the gay press connected this minority together, it also reflected and shaped the LGBTQ movement and community. Gay bibliographers have compiled a list of more than 2,000 American lesbian and gay periodicals (Campbell & Carilli, 2017) and so it cannot be denied that these staple bounded books are important to this community and movement.
While the LGBTQ community of today has the luxury of connecting and having access to relative news, information, and literature via the internet, the early LGBTQ community relied on print to stay connected and find the rest of the gay world.
I am specifically focusing on LGBTQ magazines due to their ability to communicate and hold much more content than a newspaper can. There’s also a more artistic and creative edge to magazines with the ability to focus on art and literature, but also the format can hold longer stories and research papers than the average newspaper. Magazines with their visual and textual format have the ability to showcase growth and change not only in the individual periodicals publication history, but also the LGBTQ movement as a whole. The contents of these magazines—the literature, the news, the research studies, letters to the editor, book and movie reviews, and resources—affect the overall larger movement and are important to the history and culture of this community. These magazines usually aimed to educate and connect members of the community in their neighborhood or across the nation, but while they were doing this, they were also influencing the overall community with the certain content they were publishing.
The beginning of the queer press starts at 1947 when Vice-Versa was first printed in Los Angeles, California, by Edythe Eyde who hid under the pseudonym, Lisa Ben. While working at RKO Studios, Ben found herself with extra time and a private office. There she used her typewriter to create a magazine focused around lesbians. Ben, a lesbian herself, wanted a way to connect and share stories, poetry, and essays with the small local lesbian community she was in. On the first issue of the front page of Vice Versa was a statement with her intent:
“There is one kind of publication which would, I am sure, have a great appeal to a definite group, such a publication has never appeared on the stands. Newsstands carrying the crudest kind of magazines or pictorial pamphlets appealing to the vulgar would find themselves severely censured were they to display this other type of publication. Why? Because society decrees it thus—hence the appearance of VICE VERSA, a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron bound rules of convention.” (Streitmatter, 1995)
The periodical had no bylines, photographs, advertisements, masthead, and did not contain the editor’s name or address. At first glance, the magazine looked more like a term page with the table of contents right on the front page under the title that appeared on all, but the first issue: “Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine.” It didn’t focus on news, because the network for distrusting of lesbian interest didn’t exist yet, so rather she focused on lesbian literature and culture such as fiction, book and movie reviews, and opinion columns.
While Ben was the main contributor of Vice Versa, she did allow people to contribute to the magazine. She wanted the concept of gay periodicals to be used as an open forum for readers, writing in an issue, “This is your magazine. Vice Versa is meant to be a medium through which we may express our thoughts, our emotions, our opinions.” Every issue had at least one item by a reader, and eventually a half dozen readers contributed a variety of materials such as letters, poems humor items, and short stories. This was the first printed dialogue among Gay and Lesbian American citizens.
Ben created a section exclusively for contributions, called “the Whatchama-Column.” She wanted the heading to indicate that this section was a “potpourri, a sort of melting pot to air opinions and exchange ideas on pertinent subjects.” Those who contributed to the column were diverse, especially considering the first contribution came from a straight man. The man’s letter introduced a topic that would become common conversation in early gay and lesbian periodicals: attacking the psychiatric community’s position on homosexuality.
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