The Business of On Our Backs

The process of funding, marketing, and distributing On Our Backs was complicated from the beginning. None of the original staffers had access to the necessary capital to go to press, and censorship laws, antagonistic feminist bookstores, and the unique, untested nature of the product left many of the avenues available to other publishing ventures inaccessible to them. The lesbian community did not, at that time, have the financial support for an alternative erotic press, as the gay men’s world did.

To raise money, the magazine’s founders staged a women-only lesbian strip show at Cesar’s Latin dance club in the Mission District.[1] With the profits, they printed 2,000 copies of their first issue, which they introduced at San Francisco Gay Day in 1984.[2] They sold 500 copies that day, Debi Sundahl and Nan Kinney recalled later, leaving them with much of the remainder until back issues started selling several years on. According to Sundahl and Kinney, only five percent of the gay and lesbian bookstores they first contacted in 1984 agreed to carry the magazine; by 1989, only five percent did not.[3]

The fundraising strip shows continued weekly for three years at The Bay Brick Inn, a South of Market lesbian bar, under the name BurLEZk.[4] In 1985, Sundahl and Kinney launched the video production company Fatale Video, which created porn videos for a lesbian audience, and put these three landmark lesbian sex businesses under the umbrella of Blush Entertainment.[5] Blush eventually generated sufficient profit to support a small staff for On Our Backs and pay its contributors.

Another major piece of the solvency puzzle was technological. The 1985 debut of Aldus PageMaker for Macintosh marked the advent of desktop publishing and gradual abandonment of manual layout and typesetting practices. Under Sundahl’s leadership, On Our Backs became an early adopter of this still rudimentary but ultimately revolutionary system, which allowed the team to produce a magazine at a fraction of the traditional cost.[6]

While On Our Backs’ business practices and office culture were unique, work at the magazine was not the nonstop riotous party of some readers’ imaginations. An article in the magazine’s five-year anniversary issue satirized this idea, presenting the On Our Backs office as a daytime version of an after-hours sex club. Photographers Phyllis Christopher, Honey Lee Cottrell, and Jill Posener pictured their colleagues in various states of undress, fluffy kitten heels, and dark sunglasses; in bondage; rolling on the floor; pleasuring each other in corners. This fantasy version of office life was a running joke at On Our Backs. The year before, Cottrell had created a promotional image of the staff, showing them clustered around a desk in a nondescript office space pants-less and topless, in knee-high boots and leather jackets, holding whips and feather dusters and tending to business. Debi Sundahl holds a Macintosh and a feeding bottle, minding her baby in the midst of the fray: perhaps the photograph’s truest detail, along with its representation of On Our Backs’ sense of humor.

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