the cornell university library has digitized its really incredible 2022 exhibition “radical desire: making on our backs magazine”––cannot recommend strongly enough taking a look at the fascinating and funny and sexy and bittersweet collection of materials curated here
On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” The photographic images on the cover and throughout were central to its mandate to deliver sexual content for lesbians. The photography also created the greatest difficulties for the magazine’s circulation at a moment when many feminist leaders decried pornographic photographs and film as a form of violence against women. This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade. Made by staffers and freelancers, professionals and amateurs, members of the magazine’s inner circle and its far-flung readership, they convey the fantasies, imagination, humor, rigor, radicalism, political engagement, and ethos of community-building and inclusion that defined On Our Backs and made it a touchstone in the queer press. Additional photographs and documents elucidate the political and erotic contexts into which the magazine emerged, the women behind it, and their business practices and strategies. All materials are drawn from Cornell Library’s Human Sexuality Collection.
Exhibition curators: Kate Addleman-Frankel, Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, Johnson Museum of Art, and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Picking strawberries with a beautiful girl and I’m not even smiling I’m just picking the most strategic berries so we can leave and I can go answer emails
honestly the human brain is so small that you *will* forget how much beauty there is out there to experience unless you leave your house every three days. ik its fucked up but i promise its true
