The tone of the magazines in the pre-Stonewall era was apologetic. There was no woman’s movement to speak of at that time, and they found voice for their concern in The Ladder.Īs the 1960s progressed, the Mattachine Society and the DOB seemed out of date. That was Vice Versa, which was distributed privately in Los Angeles between 19.Īt first the DOB cosponsored events with the Mattachine Society, but they quickly found the men to be condescending. This was not the first lesbian magazine to be published in the US, however. In 1956 its co-founder Phyllis Lyon became the editor of The Ladder. The first lesbian organisation, The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), was founded in 1955 with chapters in New York and Chicago. Its focus was on public education and not political activism. One magazine worked to dispel these myths through a combination of articles by doctors and psychologists to the personal accounts of its members.
Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society in 1950 in the wake of a clampdown on homosexuals, who, according to a US Senate committee, lacked “emotional stability” and would “frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices.” Members of the Mattachine Society attempted to emphasise their respectability, for example, turning up to events wearing hats and ties. The demonised figure of the homosexual was swept up in this hysteria. Nevertheless, the late 1940s witnessed the beginnings of a moral panic in the United States that led to the Communist witch-hunts. In 1948 two books that would bolster the cause of gay liberation were published: Gore Vidal’s fiction The City and the Pillar – which argued that homosexuality was a normal impulse and not a perversion – and Alfred Kinsey’s ground-breaking study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male – which showed that there was a discernible gap between the myth of heterosexual mainstream and the fact. The first gay magazine of consequence, One, was published in 1952 by the Mattachine Society. In the English-speaking world, gay liberation took longer to take hold. Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Brand, formed the world’s first gay liberation movement, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, in 1897. This mode of sale lasted until the 1920s when gay and lesbian magazines could be found in German kiosks alongside newspapers and mainstream magazines. It was not sold on the market stand but could be obtained from listed sources and underground merchants. The first gay magazine, Der Eigene, was published in Germany in 1896. It was not until the 20th Century, with the advent of cheap printing technology, that magazine publishing became a more commercial affair, with its main source of income from the advertiser and not the reader. The formula for a magazine included lengthy pieces of fiction as well as articles known as ‘improving material.’ By the 19th Century, the target audience changed: middle-class women were the new readers of titles like the Englishwomans’ Domestic Magazine and Charles Dickens’ Household Works. Other magazines followed in the eighteenth century, coinciding with the rise of literacy – The Lady’s magazine and The Lady’s Monthly Museum were however only affordable to a small section of elite female British society. Although periodicals had been published before, it was first used to describe a publication in 1731 with advent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
The word magazine is an Arabic term for storehouse. An historical timeline of gay magazines, from 1897 to 2008.