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"Dear Sisters": The Visible Lesbian in Community Arts Journals

Amazon Quarterly announced its editorial agenda as a “Lesbian-Feminist Arts Journal” in the fall 1972 inaugural issue: to discover “what might be the female sensibility in the arts.” According to Gina Roberson and Laurel Holliday Akers, editors of the Oakland-based, nationally circulated publication, “freed from male identification, lesbians are obviously in a very good position to be the ones to cross the frontier Doris Lessing has told us the ‘free woman’ stands at.”1 In November 1974 Evi Seidman, editor of So’s Your Old Lady, the newsletter of Minneapolis’s Lesbian Resource Center, countered the love poetry that had recently flooded its pages with a proposal that just as “whatever a woman says expresses her feminism,” so anything written by a lesbian expressed her lesbianism. Seidman encouraged contributors to submit nonromantic prose and poems that would appeal to readers outside the center’s immediate community.2 Two assumptions that concern lesbian identity and cultural production were at work in these editorial positions and constituted an idealized lesbian sensibility: that lesbians were women ungoverned by patriarchal conventions and that lesbians reflected their sexuality in all of their material expressions. Sensibility, in the context of 1970s feminism in the United States, was a naive formulation of gender, where anatomy determines an essence that corresponds to biological sex but is not reducible to it. From this formulation it was clear that women and lesbians had a common essence or sensibility because they had female bodies, and the problem for lesbians was to differentiate a lesbian sensibility on the basis of same-sex desire. According to Amazon Quarterly, lesbians could move into a privileged position outside the heterosexual economy; like Martha Quest, the heroine of Lessing’s Children of Violence series, the lesbian pursued liberation from oppression and sent missives back to her sisters still caught within patriarchy. So’s Your Old Lady took it for granted that a woman’s lesbian identity influenced what and perhaps