Like all good dyke art, the first lesbian porn magazine was born out of deep frustration and a need for something new…
On Our Backs founder Debi Sundahl was a femme fearful of losing her recently granted dyke card to militants who confounded even consensual penetration with assault in the 1980s. She spent evenings kissing butches for hours, getting nowhere at a lesbian retreat in Lesbos, until she laid nude under the Grecian sun alone, so horny that she came from feeling the heat of the sun’s rays on her pussy. Fitting, since Sappho’s legacy lives on in fragments of yonic yearning written under the same sky. Sometimes it is the yearning that keeps us going, but Sundahl knew dykes deserved more.
As I read Sundahl’s story and organize hundreds of issues of On Our Backs at the June L Mazer Lesbian History Archive in West Hollywood, glimpses of queer and dyke history from the 1980s to the 2000s jump out to me. Keith Haring’s Absolute Vodka ad and black and white photos of sweaty half naked women working out at Golds Gym sit next to a pull-out mailer from a boutique leather manufacturer running a sweepstakes to fund On Our Backs. Fake “Tipper stickers” on covers playfully inform readers that the NEA never funded a single article, a reference to the US Government’s attack on queer artists like Ron Athey and Holley Hughes in the 1990s. Hot cover models pose with chains, on cars, and in pools, promising stories as varied as “Leslie Feinberg Bends Your Gender,” “Sucked Off by a Vampire—Photos Inside,” and “Sex in Cyberspace.” I’m reading smut in an archive; I know that the dykes who created this magazine and this reading room would be so proud. They wanted us to carefully trace their steps like a map back to the best parts of our history, and despite the lesbian bed death rumors, they wanted us to fuck.
More than a lesbian erotic publication, On Our Backs created an aggressively sex positive dyke gaze in writing, photography, visual art, events, and film at the intersection of the body, politics, and culture. Not everyone in its pages were explicitly lesbians but the big dyke imaginary is wider than most outsiders would ever account for. Straight porn is not appealing to dykes, not because of the presence of men, but because of the absence of women’s perspectives. In the 1980s images of naked women were used to sell products, a topic that lesbian feminists frequently tackled in essays that rightfully critiqued capitalism’s co-option of women’s bodies. On Our Backs was the first magazine which published images of women by women and for women, creating a lesbian gaze in pornography that was playful, hot, and political.
The magazine’s title On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian, is a play on the feminist paper Off Our Backs and Playboy’s early tagline that promised “entertainment for men.” Off Our Backs was an important women’s liberation news zine, but they weren’t happy about the nod since they often published anti-porn think pieces and even threatened legal action for referencing the name. On Our Backs built on Sundahl’s lessons in Lesbos and in the bustling 1980s S/M scene in San Franscico. She got her start as a writer working on the newsletter for the lesbian feminist BDSM org Samois. When the chapter announced their closure and the end of their newsletter, she and her partner Nan Kinney knew they had to fill the gap.
Debi Sundahl stripped at the Lusty Lady as her alter ego Fanny Fatale, often disarming anti-porn feminists with her pro sex worker position. She and Kinney organized a series of women only strip nights to fund On Our Backs which were so successful they birthed BurLEZk, the nation’s first all women strip event that continued for three years. Using revenue from strip fundraisers, pre-order subscriptions, and Fanny’s tips, Sundahl, Kinney, and a small team launched the magazine in 1984, with Myrna Elena, editor Susie Bright, and her butch lover Honey Lee Cottrell as their official photographer. Sundahl even wrote an advice column as her alter ego called “Ask Fanny” tackling topics ranging from nun fantasies to healing past traumas.
Early issues were a mix of artsy labia photos, reviews, erotic fantasies, poetry, comics, a “bulldagger of the season” centerfold, anonymous letters, and personal ads that let anyone from anywhere fly their freak flag high. The advertisements in On Our Backs catered to sexually liberated queer women; not only could you find ads for fetish gear and lesbian sex toys, but you could learn about workshops to become a dominatrix and even find ads to become a lesbian stripper. The magazine grew over the years and ran features about musicians, activists, and writers like Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, and Del Martin. On Our Backs covered issues such as censorship, rights for transgender people, and the lesbianization of Hollywood. It was the first magazine completely designed on an Apple computer, and it revolutionized porn by and for women, a mission it was successful at because it came from within the community.
From “butch fags” and “bulldaggers” to “femmes,” “transsexuals,” and “older women,” On Our Backs lovingly sexualized everyone in their diverse dyke community, people that would never be celebrated or understood in straight porn or even by assimilationist lesbians. As Sundahl wrote in On Our Backs, S/M Leather Dykes in the 1980s were rebelling against “white bread, uptight, Birkenstock and flannel wearing, radical separatist feminist lesbian culture.” It sounds harsh, but at the time this stereotype was synonymous with lesbians who wanted to control narratives, style, and the movement, often because of very real traumas of losing control and autonomy coming together with powerful and necessary 1970s feminist awakening.
During the so-called lesbian sex wars, anti porn lesbians had a difficult time seeing the value in porn and even protested stores who sold On Our Backs into the 1990s. These lesbian feminists often strongly disliked butch/femme couples: they accused butches of aligning with patriarchy and accused femme lesbians who wore make up of being complicit in funding the beauty industry who they thought only existed to profit off the male gaze. Leatherdykes had a broader understanding of gender and sexuality and were often members of kink and activist communities during this period, communities that were not embraced by wider society.
Kink and leather were central to the magazine. Photospreads featured real life couples in kink dynamics like Gabrielle Antolovich and Raven getting bound and whipped against a Griffith Park chain-link fence, shot by Catherine Opie. Or Rachel and Alexis in head-to-toe leather fetish gear looking tough on a graffitied train before fucking completely nude (except for the leather hats), giving Tom of Finland’s men a run for their money. Fisting was frequently shown. “Lights Camera Latex” found feminist porn pioneer Annie Sprinkle locking eyes with the reader as she pushed her clit against a Hitachi magic wand. Below she declared that dental dams could be sucked and popped, a wild new sensation more like a toy than a barrier in a sexy scene with Sarah Samuels. It captured the emerging kink scene in SF which was part of how queers reimagined sex during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Promoting safe sex was important to On Our Backs because lesbians and women were also getting sick and dying of HIV/AIDS. No outlet reported on it until On Our Backs did in 1986. Their 1991 article “A Decade of Denial: Lesbians and HIV” refused shaming women for sleeping with men, using IV drugs, or being sluts, and argued that the biggest risk facing any woman in the 1990s was denial. Later articles like “Look Before You Lick” educated readers about the possibility of HIV transmission summarizing an Italian study about transmission in women, important because the US government never disseminated such international research.
The staff at On Our Backs wanted to create a lesbian porn empire because they firmly believed that dykes deserved access to hot and horny videos, not just written erotica. Fatale Video, named after Fanny, was an extension of the magazine and produced lesbian erotic films with the same mission as the magazine. They created titles often with real couples like the cult classics “Suburban Dykes,” “Hungry Hearts,” and “Shadows,” along with tapes of live performances of BurLEZk, and “Safe is Desire” that eroticized safe sex. Fanny Fatale even got to make an educational video: “How to Female Ejaculate,” which outsold lesbian titles 2 to 1.
At the 10-year anniversary of the magazine Sundahl dropped a bombshell on the community: she was bisexual, and in love with a cisgender man who helped her figure out a business plan for the magazine. She and Nan broke up, but the pair continued to work on the magazine together until Nan could no longer financially afford to work at the magazine as it became less profitable. On Our Backs filed for bankruptcy in 1996, paused operations for two years, returning in 1998 with a new editorial team and the same commitment to lesbian and queer porn, ultimately shuttering in 2006 due to financial troubles. On Our Backs is revered as a legendary publication in queer, lesbian, and BDSM culture for its representation of real queer porn at a time it was desperately needed.
The founders of Sweet Action: Porn for Girls also saw the need for the female gaze in porn in the early 2000s. In 2004 Robin Adams and Micole Taggart created the first self-funded (large format) print porn magazine created completely by and for women attracted to men. Filled with full frontal nude photographs of hot guys hanging out in real houses and backyards, it was indie art porn that provided an original perspective in erotic print media that differed in subject but felt very similar to On Our Backs. Aesthetically somewhere between a zine, a calendar and a glossy magazine, Sweet Action celebrated authentic guys not just beefcakes, it was filled with cartoons, interviews with punk musicians and artists, and included tutorials on how to eat your man’s ass and give great hand jobs. They included male contributors and often printed nude photographs of them next to their articles. The magazine’s creators described it as a project created for boy crazy women who admired their men as equals, creating a DIY feminist gaze in porn.
Out of all of the articles I read while researching, On Our Backs 1994 future fantasy “Sex in the Year 2014” keeps pulling at my mind. The sci-fi inspired piece envisioned that by 2014 humanity would have healed itself from oppression and war, a revolution started in the bedroom and the sex club. The protagonist boards a hovercraft to consensually watch internationally attended queer orgies held in healing hostels, landing at a ranch that was once a military base where humanity declared that love would win over war, welcomed by people who appeared to be both or neither gender. The magazine imagined that the future would feel like a “warm pool of possibilities.”
Standing firmly in the future in 2026 it feels extra disappointing that instead of getting sexy hovercrafts and orgies on former military bases turned lush gardens, we got Waymos that run on invisible labor, and AI data centers that are destroying the Earth to make exploitative deepfake porn or power military drones. We may be grizzled enough to balk at “love wins,” but the promise of the plea remains as powerful as it was 20 years ago. We might not have On Our Backs or Sweet Action, but radical porn is blossoming with collectives like Aorta Films, and expansive queer leather clubs like Cruise LA are still taking up space for the next generation of creative and smart leather queers to revel in what makes us feel alive.
In a political climate that wants to push queer and trans people back into the closet, we must remember that age old Queer Nation adage: when we fuck we win.
*Special thanks to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives and Alisha Graefe
