For years, the true identity of the writer “Lisa Ben” – a clever anagram for lesbian – remained a mystery. But in the 1940s, the creator of Vice Versa, the first known lesbian magazine in the country, had to write anonymously.

People who valued their safety and livelihoods had no other choice. Technically, sodomy laws banning “unnatural sexual acts” made gay relationships illegal throughout the country. So in the summer of 1947, Edythe Eyde, a secretarial assistant at RKO Pictures in Los Angeles, began anonymously publishing a tiny, short-lived lesbian journal called Vice Versa, dubbed by its creator as “America’s Gayest Magazine.”

---

---

It was a free, very plain publication with typed pages stapled together under a blue cover – no advertisements, no photographs, no masthead, and, of course, no bylines. 

Eyde used her downtime at work to type the almost entirely self-penned issues. She used carbon paper to create duplicates and made only about 12 copies per issue, distributing them by hand to friends, at gay bars, and sometimes through the mail.

Eyde – a 26-year-old lesbian who moved from Northern California to Los Angeles to escape her oppressive family – introduced Vice Versa in June 1947. On a page titled “In Explanation,” she wrote that newsstands offer countless publications on so many subjects, but never about gay people.

“Yet, there is one kind of publication which would, I am sure, have a great appeal to a definite group. Such a publication has never appeared on the stands,” Eyde wrote. “News stands carrying the crudest kind of magazines or pictorial pamphlets appealing to the vulgar would find themselves severely censured were they to display this type of publication. Why? Because Society decrees it thus. Hence the appearance of VICE VERSA, a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of convention… This is your magazine.”

Brave but naïve 

Eyde’s secret project was very risky, Lillian Faderman, an emeritus scholar at California State University, Fresno, told LGBTQ Nation. It took bravery for women to even go to gay bars, which were regularly raided by police, but they risked it to find a community. Not a single state in America, even California, lacked anti-sodomy laws in the 1940s, said Faderman, known as the “Mother of Lesbian History.” she said Eyde, whose writing was passionate and smart, was brave but naïve.

“Somebody had to tell her that it was against the law to mail homosexual publications, and her response was, ‘Well, I didn’t say anything dirty in there.’ Well, you didn’t have to.” Herself a lesbian, Faderman remembers being harassed at gay venues in the 1950s. 

“Just the fact that she wrote that publication was wonderful,” Faderman said. “It was written out of a certain naivete… It’s a wonderful piece of history.”

The ninth and final issue of Vice Versa came out in February 1948. Eyde had lost her job after Howard Hughes bought out RKO, and rather than working as a secretary in a private office, she worked in a crowded typing pool. 

“Although this little magazine does not contain much lace, hearts, or other decorations appropriate to February, I would like to express, through VICE VERSA, my heartfelt personal Valentine greetings to all of you to whom this magazine is dedicated,” Eyde wrote in that final issue.

After Vice Versa, she continued a secretarial job and started singing in lesbian bars and clubs. In 1956, another lesbian publication, Ladder, debuted. The Daughters of Bilitis, a San Francisco-based lesbian organization, ran the underground magazine, which used pseudonyms for authors – including Eyde, who contributed. She adopted the clever pen name Lisa Ben after an editor rejected her first choice, Ima Spinster. 

A tragic end to a radical life

Sometime after the 1950s, Eyde’s identity as the mysterious author Lisa Ben became known. But, strangely, she withdrew from the gay community in her later years and seemed to cut ties with her past. She stopped doing interviews after the early 2000s. Faderman said it’s not clear why. 

But echoes of her harsh upbringing and her disillusionment from not finding lasting love with a woman – Eyde lived with a woman for three years and said it ended badly – may have led to her withdrawal.

“It could be explained by a couple of things,” Faderman said. “I think if you have parents who are so strict and authoritarian and unloving, it makes life very difficult for you as an adult… She was not a happy woman; I think that’s the only way to characterize that. Her relationship with her parents colored the rest of her life. She didn’t find a lasting love, and that colored her life.”

Eyde likely carried intense internalized homophobia from her upbringing. As Faderman put it, “It’s that voice in your head that you don’t totally get rid of.”

“Somehow as she got older, she went back to the attitude her mother had when she was a teenager.”

Eyde lived a long but difficult life. She died in 2015 at age 94 and was buried at California’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park. 

“I think I and others who are interested in lesbian history should be forever grateful to her for doing Vice Versa, but she had a very sad life,” Faderman said. “It’s really very tragic.”

 All Vice Versa issues are now available at Queer Music Heritage.