Our Vexed Affection for "Lesbian Connection"

A conversation with Clover about finding a place for ourselves on the pages of the longest-running lesbian periodical

Hello readers! I’m pleased to bring you a long, juicy convo with my girlfriend and frequent newsletter collaborator, Clover, about Lesbian Connection, featuring lots of complicated feelings and LC excerpts. Let’s jump right in!

Julia: Clover, thank you for joining me for this discussion about Lesbian Connection, a magazine by and for lesbians that has been in circulation for fifty years. We’ll discuss what LC is, what its history is, and where it sits currently in the lesbian cultural landscape. We’ll also discuss some of our feelings about LC, and what makes it difficult to engage with as lesbians committed to transfeminist politics (in your case, as a trans lesbian and in my case, as a cis partner to you/friend to many trans lesbians). We subscribe to LC as a household, and it has been free to lesbians worldwide since its inception. You tend to read every issue cover to cover, and I am more of a dabbler/mostly enjoy dissecting it together. Maybe because I read a bunch of old lesbian periodicals constantly for my dissertation research, I don’t always have the juice to read LC for leisure. We both agree that LC is an important cultural institution both historically and now, and we both have a LOT of criticism of the way that LC has navigated the changing world of queer gender politics. So let’s get into it!

Lesbian Connection was founded in 1974 by a group called the Amazing Amazons, which really is the type of thing groups of lesbians called themselves back then. It is published in Michigan (hands-down hotbed of baby boomer lesbian culture) but has global circulation, and it’s the longest-running periodical for lesbians! It definitely skews heavily white in the racial makeup of its readership/writers, as you may notice reflected in images later in this newsletter. A lot of what’s published in LC is reader-submitted: short essays, letters responding to essays in the last issue, reviews of books and music, listings of local lesbian events, etc. There are frequent calls for women to make Lesbian Connection a beneficiary of their wills. Each issue features a Dykes to Watch Out For strip and a Contact Dyke directory listing contact info for lesbians in various places. Contact Dykes are people to whom you can reach out to, like, ask about lesbian-friendly cafes when you visit a new city or whatever, and in some cases they might be willing to host you for the night. There was a recent LC kerfuffle because this NYT article described the Contact Dyke directory as “a list of lesbians around the country who are open to receiving correspondence and visits from women making sense of their sexual identities,” which is not at all what it is. They could not get the NYT to issue a correction, lol. LC also contains ads for various women-owned businesses and the like. Apparently the Biden campaign tried to place an ad in LC (totally pointless, as their target demo definitely already turns out to vote and votes Dem) but they turned him down. Clover, how would you describe the baseline vibes of Lesbian Connection?

Clover: The baseline vibes are definitely old, earnest, and a little cantankerous. There’s a feeling of them being “trusty”, almost. Every LC has the same basic setup, and a lot of the filler stuff like ads for events and meetups across the country and real estate and books and all ends up being the same things every time. I really enjoy picking up local periodicals from places I don’t live, like if I’m passing through a small town diner or something and see the free local paper. LC is kind of like that, except for lesbian continuity.

LC will have extremely regular stuff like “A lesbian astrophysicist was given a medal at the White House” and it’ll also have some readers writing in talking about how a lesbian romance novel about how a woman with a dog fell in love with a woman with a horse helped her heal her relationship with her daughter. It will also have longer format stories from readers just about living in a camper van and traveling across America, or life as a gay twin, or something. It’s also chock full of quick little notes like you said Julia, and those notes are full of words like “wimmin” and “amazons” and other old separatist words that I find kind of endearing and adorable. Every once in a while there are younger lesbians writing in being like “I’m young and I read this! I love what you do!” and it kinda gives me YouTube comments on classic rock songs vibes, like, “Anyone else listening to this in 2024 and think this is real music???”

It’s just really fun in the sudden clear glimpses you can get into completely random lesbians’ lives, and especially lesbians of a different generation than my own. 

Julia: Totally. A friend of ours was over the other night and was paging through an issue of LC that was lying on the coffee table, and he was like, “it’s a lot of responses!” Like, so much of the content is people writing in responding to something in the previous issue, or responding to the general existence of Lesbian Connection. In this way, it’s very much in keeping with the tradition of lesbian feminist periodicals from the 1970s and 80s which were chock full of reader responses, which would sometimes result in conversations in the reader letters section stretching over months. 

I love that you pointed out that the ads section remains basically the same from issue to issue, because I think that indicates something about the strange position of Lesbian Connection in 2024. I was scanning through some old 1977 issues of Sojourner (a Boston feminist newspaper) for my dissertation research today, and the ads are much more diverse from issue to issue, which I imagine is due to the fact that the “women’s community” was a much more identifiable base then, both culturally and economically. If you had just like a random women-owned business, it made sense to advertise in your local lesbian and/or feminist paper. Lesbian Connection is still kind of operating on this wavelength, but it’s not really local to any one particular place, and it’s catering to this demographic that’s not particularly culturally prominent or wealthy, so, like, who’s going to advertise there? The fact that the ads basically stay the same from issue to issue seems to indicate the weakness of this corner of the lesbian economy.

Speaking of ads, you actually wrote into LC to question the fact that they consistently run ads for a group that is basically an anti-trans hate group. Would you care to share with readers a bit about your letter and how they responded? We can also use this as an opening to discuss the larger issue of LC’s handling of trans issues.

Clover: This is true, I sent a pretty long email about the repeated advertisement of a small group that I won’t name. The wording of the advertisement for their retreat or festival or whatever had big TERFy language, and I mean TERF in a very traditional way, like “womyn-born-womyn” vibes, but was notably also open to detransitioned butches, and I was like “who the fuck are these people” and looked up their website. They are basically a small handful of extremely bitter lesbians running a group that, from a single slogan, seems to want to empower women in general, but clearly only writes about how trans people are destroying lesbianism and society. It’s unclear how much they actually do as a group, but I was obviously upset to see so naked an anti-trans hate group actively advertised, not just mentioned or referenced, in every newsletter. Usually, like I said, the kind of trans-exclusionary stuff is a little more couched in personal anxieties and preferences and no one’s really actively saying “Trans people are a problem that needs to be eliminated”, so I thought I would send a message to the staff of LC and let them know that I, a trans woman who reads and enjoys LC, was hurt and disappointed to see something like this constantly advertised.

LC staff basically said they don’t discriminate on who wants to advertise, and hold space for any and all types of queer women’s activities and spaces or whatever, which is a pretty common sentiment in this newsletter. Like, people saying things like “Well this festival is for women-born-women, but we have no problem with trans women having a space for trans women only, or someone else making an integrated space. That’s just not this space.” In my opinion, women doing this are kind of putting on blinders to this type of logic, kind of blithely accepting that it’s an acceptable exercise in identity politics or something.

I responded to this basically trying to call them on their bullshit, that they would indeed discriminate who advertises in their newsletter if it was, say, a racial hate group, because the people who run LC are likely unified to some extent by shared ethics and politics, and that to me this reads more like a shared ethic that thinks of trans people more as a conceptual thing than real people hurt by stuff like this. They did not write back.

Anyway, this has led to me deciding maybe the real way to participate is to write into the actual newsletter as opposed to private grievances with the staff, and attempt to more positively fill the space up with more portrayals of trans lesbianism, instead of just fighting over inclusion in an abstract way. I haven’t done it yet though, lol. Issues come out so infrequently that I always forget about writing on something until after the deadline has passed. 

Julia: Totally. Because LC is so reader-response heavy, it does feel like it’s at least possible to be part of a conversation in the pages. Earlier this year, someone wrote in to LC in response to a cover image that included a button that says “Female by birth…Lesbian by grace…and if you happen to see Grace tell her I say HI.” While this is admittedly a funny joke, the reader expressed discomfort with the TERFy valence of “female by birth” verbiage appearing on the magazine’s cover (and with LC’s general refusal to take an explicitly trans-inclusive stance) and said in the letter that she was considering canceling her subscription. The magazine ran a defensive editor’s note after her letter basically saying that she was misunderstanding the context of the button and it actually had nothing to do with trans issues (which I actually do believe is true of the button in its original context, but is not true of putting it on the cover of a lesbian magazine in 2024 - and the whole response obfuscates the larger pattern that the reader was objecting to). Then, in the two subsequent issues since then, there have been multiple letters from older lesbians basically berating the original letter writer and expressing utter dismay that anyone would cancel their LC subscription over this. There’s an overall implication that people calling for LC to take a trans affirming stance are creating divisiveness, while the divisiveness that’s created by LC’s general caginess on this issue goes unremarked upon.

Here’s the cover that started buttongate:

And here are some of the demoralizing/offensive reader responses:

Clover and I could not stop laughing at how the LC editors bolded and capitalized “OFFENSE to the BUTTON.”

The LC issue with these letters in it (Volume 27, Issue 2, Sept/Oct 2024, if you’re wondering - the most recent issue) was actually a particularly packed example of the neuroticism and anxiety around trans issues in LC. To give you a sample, here is a letter about distributing copies of LC at the WoLF Conference, which is basically a reactionary TERF organization:

There was also an article by a woman complaining about being booted from her local LGBT community Facebook group after members looked at her profile and saw what she’d posted there, which she describes as such: 

Sorry, but we absolutely laughed at this woman being outraged that people on Facebook saw what she said on Facebook. TFW you want a “safe, nonpolitical place to find other women to socialize with” and it turns out they don’t like your conspiracy theories about how schools are doing gender schemes. 

There were also some trans and trans-friendly perspectives expressed in this issue! The issue theme was lesbian visibility, so there were a bunch of short essays on that topic. One nonbinary lesbian wrote this: 

We were so happy to see this included in the magazine. “There have always been, and always will be, trans and gender-nonconforming lesbians, even if you choose not to see us.” I was also delighted to see an essay by Sue Katz, an extremely rad lesbian elder who I have had the pleasure of speaking with. She founded a women’s liberation group in the early 70s called the Stick It in the Wall Motherfucker Collective whose primary activity was taking revenge on rapists, so, like, that should give you a taste of her whole deal. Now she writes erotica about older lesbians. Her essay was about how older lesbians are often invisible to younger lesbians. She wrote, “Young queers need us - maybe more than ever. If things continue to go downhill, we elders will have to teach them how to be in the closet. We need them, too, and not only to flip our mattresses and teach us about pronouns.” Katz!!! I will come flip your mattress and teach you about pronouns any day.

UNFORTUNATELY, this was followed by an essay from what I might venture to call a self-hating lesbian zillenial:

This depressed us, and also kind of made me feel bad for this person. Like, you’re saying that you basically prefer to be closeted….deal with your issues before casting stones at your fellow young lezzies, perhaps. Although I hesitate to generalize too much from one letter, this seems to reflect something about younger people who might be drawn to LC - basically, reactionary young lesbians seeking respite from what they perceive to be the excesses of queer youth culture. It does not bode well!!!

Clover, I’m sure some people reading this are like, why even engage with this TERFy magazine at all? What is the point? I’m wondering if you’d like to speak to the value that you see in LC as an enduring institution, even as we are frequently disappointed by it. 

Clover: People are definitely asking us “Why do you do this?”, sometimes in person when they see an issue on our table or in my car, and the answer is sorta myriad. 

1. It’s the only surviving lesbian newsletter from the 70s, so the oldest continued lesbian periodical in the United States (the world?), so that’s pretty impressive by itself, and gives LC an inertia to it that I want to latch onto in some way. It feels important to be a part of something so old and enduring that feels, to me, like it still has potential. But potential for what? Well,

2. It’s one of my only main connections to a world of older lesbians that often feels so far away and hard to get to. Like the many ways that we are divided and kept distanced in this world, the gap between younger and older queers has levels of systemic and institutional power behind it – the force of history. It’s incredibly hard to overcome things like that as an individual. But LC is an institution of its own, and one populated mostly by older lesbians. Reading their stories, when they aren’t weird anxieties about “lesbian erasure”, is usually a really sweet, endearing activity. They’re kooky! They’re earnest! Sometimes they are really touching and even heartwrenching. I enjoy finding some connection with elders, which, despite what some people might think, is rarely a totally easy and 100% beneficial thing to do, for lesbians in particular or anyone. Finding common ground between people of different generations can be hard and unrewarding, and it can take a lot of work and adjustment to move through different perspectives on the world and different personalities. LC is this site where I see possibility in that kind of work. It’s either gotta die because there aren’t enough young people interested, start picking up young people who are more radicalized to the right than the current readership, or get with the times and be a place that more accurately reflects what modern lesbianism looks like – more gender-expansive, more trans, more focused on bridging difference. I think it does still have that potential. 

3. I am of course obsessed with lesbian and queer ephemera, and LC is completely free. I just love reading what people say, and looking into the specific world of these older lesbian-separatist style dykes and what they’re into. It’s got a charm to it. It makes me laugh a lot! I’m not as interested in an also old, also still existing newsletter like Maize, which is about women’s land (sorry, wimmin’s land), because it’s way more serious and poetic, that kind of humorless lesbian style that I’m not so into. LC publishes Dykes to Watch Out For strips and actually refuses to publish poetry. I really oughta write in and support my friend MG Nederhood. 

Julia: Well said. MG Nederhood, we stand with you.

I thought I’d take a little look at the first ever issue of Lesbian Connection from 1974, which is available on JSTOR’s Independent Voices online archive. In that issue I found THIS, proving that some dykes out here have always been obsessed with maintaining the boundaries of who’s in and who’s out:

BISEXUALS, I’M SORRY THAT LESBIANS ARE SOMETIMES LIKE THIS. Please come be in all my lesbian spaces, we literally need you.

Anyway, I thought we’d end on a semi-positive, semi-wistful note by talking about one of the best parts of Lesbian Connection, which is the obituaries. The obituaries, as far as I’ve seen, are generally not marred by weird lesbian boundary policing. They are just really sweet, often colorful essays about women who have passed, typically written by a close friend. I’m going to include the full obits section from the most recent issue here, to really give you a taste. It’s got everything - the first “Survivor” contestant to ever be kicked off the island, a gentle butch, a lesbian volunteer firefighter, the proprietor of a women’s inn called the Sea Gnomes’ home. This line, from the final obit, made us cry: “Robin will be remembered when the coffee is hot and the pipe is full, when the sun is out and the clothing is optional.” Sob!!!

To me, the obits capture what remains truly worthwhile about Lesbian Connection: these beautiful tributes to friendship, to lesbians living out and proud lives, sometimes under terribly difficult circumstances, and to the quirkiness and magic of lesbian culture. I understand that engaging with this type of thing is not for everyone, but it is for us. <3