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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Dyke, A Quarterly



“Dyke, A Quarterly,” is a very cool part of our history. Usually I blog about GLBT music, but I love it when archiving our history is done so well. Liza Cowan and Penny House were the editors and their website states: “All over The United States Lesbians were getting together to make culture: music, literature, theater, art exhibits, film, poetry, and all kinds of media. We were right in the thick of it, enjoying every minute, and decided that making a magazine would be our contribution.” 

That’s right, I said website, as you can now read, and soak up the period culture of the times – 1976 through 1979. It’s a labor of love, and most of the issues are already available to see. For some reason I always love the 70’s ads and put several of them in the collage above, of course including one for Alix Dobkin.


We take for granted these days, when it seems every third person has their own blog, literally How Much Work this was. I understand. In 1978-79 I was Editor of “Our Own Community Press,” Norfolk’s gay & lesbian newspaper. I know the nights of typing the articles, finding and sizing graphics, photos, ads (when you were lucky to get them), etc, etc. 

And the headlines…that’s a time travel trip itself..we used something called Chartpak, where you find the size of a letter you need on a transparent sheet and place it over where you need it, and rub it, with a coin, pen or whatever, until it transfers…one…letter…at…a…time. Every headline had to be done that way. Then of course you have to layout everything by hand on the page, get the proofs to the printer, get them back and collate them and fold them into size. And, of course someone had to write all those articles to begin with…and there were never enough willing to do that. Editors must be very much into S&M. We surely were a dedicated bunch.

Below is a collage of their intro flyer and five of the six magazine covers. Please visit their site. It’s not just an archive, as there are current articles to feast on.



1 comment:

  1. Thanks so much for putting this on your blog. And you are so right about the technologies of the time. Not quite Gutenberg, but sheesh. Every article had to be sent to the (Lesbian) typesetters, who sent back proofs which we corrected then sent back and then got final versions. We had to cut these up, and paste them onto page sized sheets. And yes..the headlines were all Letraset, which half the time cracked when you applied it. It took Penny and me a week to layout each issue after we got the galleys back. The writing and etc took months. Yes..a labor of love. So thanks so much and I hope your readers will enjoy this. I'm still in the process of getting the archive online, one article at a time, and I'm retyping most of the articles so they will be searchable online. Another labor of love.
    cheers. Liza

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