America’s first gay magazine was secretly written by a 1940s lesbian secretary
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 […]