50 Years of 'Lesbian Connection'

A lesbian magazine that lives on

This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends. Upgrade your subscription for more, including weekly dispatches from the lesbian internet, monthly playlists, and a free sticker.

Conversations about lesbian culture today often center on the topic of disappearance – the disappearance of lesbian spaces and practices that proliferated in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. What people forget is that some of these traditions still exist. Enter Lesbian Connection, a grassroots, community-driven lesbian magazine that has been in publication bimonthly since 1974. 

Lesbian Connection emerged from the Midwest Lesbian Conference after organizers realized they needed a better way to promote lesbian events – there was no such thing as a lesbian phone line, after all. This group of lesbians called themselves the Ambitious Amazons, and they envisioned Lesbian Connection as a worldwide forum where lesbians could discuss issues that interested them. Not writers themselves, the Ambitious Amazons saw their group as “caretakers of this forum.” 

Lesbian Connection still runs entirely on donations, as it did in 1974. The Ambitious Amazons did the painstaking work of producing the magazine by hand, with upgraded tech – first, an IBM typewriter in 1976, and then in 1984, two computers – purchased through community fundraising. The printing of the magazine was eventually outsourced, but the ethos remained the same. “We started this because we wanted to establish a truly grassroots network for all lesbians and we still rely on all of you – our readers – to submit what we print,” the Amazons write. 

Lesbian Connection prints a broad range of content in their magazine. Subjects include travelogs from lesbians' adventures (“Dykes on the Road”), reviews of lesbian books and music, missives on relationships, health, vents, and various forum topics (“Lesbian Adoptees,” “Lesbians Around the World,”). Upcoming topics are listed on the first page of LC as well as on their website, along with deadlines for submissions. The magazine also prints images, including a section of photographs depicting readers holding their copies of LC out in the world. 

The magazine publishes a smattering of ads within its pages, primarily those promoting lesbian books or events. The back end of LC contains the “Passings” section, which consists of extensive, lovingly written obituaries about readers who passed away recently. This section of the magazine serves as a powerful reminder of just how many amazing lesbian stories and lesbian lives exist(ed) in the world, though they often receive little recognition outside of their inner circles. 

LC encourages connections between readers beyond the pages of the magazine in their “Contact Dykes” section. Contact Dykes (CDs) “are women on our mailing list who volunteer to provide information about their area to women who are traveling or are new to town.” The magazine includes CDs from many of the fifty states as well as a few international locations, with emails and/or phone numbers listed. Some of these Contact Dykes have a bed icon next to their name, which means they may be able to offer a place to stay for a night or two. 

Though Lesbian Connection includes various types of content – the Contact Dykes, obituaries, event listings, a reprinted Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip in the middle – the magazine is, at its heart, a published forum. Because so much of our contemporary communication occurs online or is mediated by technology in some way, LC offers a unique insight into how discourses emerge in a slow-moving, analog context. 

When I asked Liz, one of the managers at LC, how they decide what to print in a given issue, she told me they “make every effort to include as much as we possibly can of what we receive from our readers.” While they suggest specific topics that readers can write in about (as mentioned above), they also receive letters on a wide variety of issues. 

When it comes to topics that might generate debate, Liz told me the Amazons “don't "handle" conflicts or disagreements among readers – we’re a forum.” This means that readers can share their thoughts with LC about a wide range of topics without fear of censorship. As Liz wrote, “we don't print personal attacks, and we try to stay out of local disputes,” but the editors endeavor to publish as many submissions as space allows for. “As for determining what to print, we try to consider the scope of relevance – would other lesbians get something out of this writing?” Liz explained. 

Obviously, online forums like Reddit – whose layout echoes the early days of the World Wide Web – still exist, and provide an anonymous space for discussion and the ability to create community guidelines. But what makes Lesbian Connection such an interesting community forum is its pace, which is significantly slower than any digital forum. When I asked Liz about how discussions in LC differ from those in other environments, she told me “The biggest difference about the conversations in LC is you get to eagerly await the response - for two months!” 

If an LC reader sees something in the magazine they disagree with and want to respond to, they are free to do so, but the lag time between submission and publication means everyone involved has time to really sit with their thoughts. No one is being doxxed or bullied offline by the LC community, in part because things move more slowly than they do online.

This is not to say that arguments can’t get heated in print. In her deep dive into the personals app Lex, Julia Gold Harris looks back at the radical feminist periodical off our backs,¹ providing a few examples of some angry back-and-forth responses in their letters section. (One of these letters is signed “Disgustedly yours.” Amazing!) Notably, off our backs was published monthly rather than bimonthly, which could have affected the ferocity of these disagreements. 

A recent issue of Lesbian Connection included several letters from readers responding to a discussion about trans inclusion from the previous magazine. Many of these letters were in response to an essay about detransitioning – some readers disagreed with the assumed intention of the essay, while others voiced their support. One reader wrote in to express their disappointment about the anti-trans sentiment sometimes voiced in the magazine and asked to be taken off the mailing list. 

The longest response in the issue came from a reader worried that younger lesbians feel alienated from the lesbian community because they perceive older lesbians as gender essentialist or hateful in some way. This reader argued that the most pressing issue for lesbians today is not the “trans issue” but the lack of community among younger lesbians, which is in part due to this perception of lesbians as transphobic. The letter writer concludes by suggesting we stop debating this tired issue and instead focus on nourishing the lesbian community. 

Several of these responses made me quite angry, and they probably would have made me want to shut my computer or throw my phone down had I been reading these takes on social media. The fact that these responses were published in print rather than online doesn’t necessarily make the rhetoric less harmful or upsetting, but it does provide us with an interesting – albeit troubling at times – record of the spectrum of lesbian opinions. These letters are not impulsive Twitter posts nor are they researched and edited articles in a newspaper. Instead, they are missives from members of a community wherein debate is a common practice. 

If the reader photos and stories included in the magazine are any indication, it’s likely that the readership² of Lesbian Connection skews older, though the Amazons don’t keep demographic information. (Liz told me that many readers “have maintained subscriptions since the early days of LC”.) This means that Lesbian Connection is a living archive of a generation(s) of lesbians who aren’t often represented on social media or in other forms of pop culture. LC contradicts the notion that lesbian community – especially one predicated on 20th-century organizing – no longer exists. At the same time, the magazine also illustrates that ideological and cultural gaps between older and younger lesbians persist.

Nearly fifty years since its founding, Lesbian Connection remains a fascinating example of pre-digital lesbian community and networking, though it now lives on in the digital age. To be sure, it may not represent or connect with all lesbians, especially since the meaning of the word lesbian has shifted over the years. But as a record of lesbian existence and the daily joys of lesbian life, there is something here worth preserving. 

1. off our backs spawned the lesbian-specific erotica magazine On Our Backs, which was in part created as a response to the perceived prudishness of off our backs – in case you needed more evidence of the feminist/lesbian drama of the 70s and 80s!

2. If you’ve read or subscribed to Lesbian Connection, let me know! I’d love to hear about it.