The Cutprice Guignol

When twenty-six-year-old Lisa Ben began work for RKO Studios in 1947, she didn’t have a whole lot to do.

After taking a secretarial course in 1942, she moved from her parent’s apricot ranch in Freemont, California, first to Palo Alto, and then to Los Angeles in 1945. Though it wasn’t work she particularly enjoyed, it offered financial stability, and, despite the studios being one of the most prominent movie producers in the country, the slow workdays left her with plenty of time to fill.

So much, in fact, that her boss fretted that her lack of engagement would make him look less important; he ordered her to keep busy at her typewriter, not caring much what she wrote as long as she was typing something.

And, so, Ben began work on what would become one of the most significant lesbian publications of the twentieth century: the magazine Vice Versa.

(a quick note: as I’m sure most of you have noticed by now, Lisa Ben is an anagram of lesbian, and, yes, is a pen-name; the real name of Lisa Ben is pretty easy to find should it be of particular interest to you, but she preferred to be known by her pen name, and that’s what I’ll be using for the rest of this article)

Ben herself had realized her attraction to women as a teenager, when she’d developed a crush on a fellow student – when she was rebuffed by the object of her affection, she went to her mother for comfort, whose disapproval led Ben to contend with the cultural, social, and legal stigma of being attracted to women. After her move to Los Angeles, she noticed that a few of the women who lived in her apartment block seemed to have little interest in the boyfriends and break-ups she’d come to expect from her straight friends; when one of these women asked Ben if she was gay, Ben realised she was, and started to identify as a lesbian in 1946.

Though Ben made an effort to engage with lesbian culture in Los Angeles at the time, the gay scene in the city – and, indeed, the rest of USA at large – was riddled with institutional violence. Raids on gay establishments were common throughout the century, with patrons facing arrests, violence, and discrimination from police for refusing to abide by the oppressive heteronormative standards of the time (women, for example, were expected to wear at least three pieces of “feminine attire” to avoid being accused of trying to pass as men). Lesbians in the 1940s also reported suffering instances of stalking, harassment, and corrective rape from police.

Ben attended a few lesbian bars with her newfound friends, but constantly found herself wary of being the victim of a raid, sticking to soft drinks for fear of being arrested when she was under the influence. After she was present on the night of one of these raids and questioned, she retreated from involvement in the lesbian nightlife of Los Angeles for her own safety.

But Ben soon found herself craving connection with other lesbians, and, when her boss ordered her to keep busy during her office hours at RKO, she decided to make use of the opportunity to do just that. In the early 1940s, Ben (under the pen name Tigrina) had been involved with the nascent science-fiction fandom community, which was mostly propagated through zines and fan-created content; drawing influence from those experiences, Ben began to craft the first issue of Vice Versa.

In the evenings, Ben would return home and plan her writing for the first issue; the next day, she’d come into the office and type it up. Reliant on office supplies she could discreetly use without attracting too much attention, Ben hand-typed every issue, and used carbon copies to create around twelve copies per issue in the bustling offices of RKO Studios. “If anyone came around,” she remarked. “I had to zip it into my briefcase real quick”.

The first issue, released on May 20th, 1947, opened with an introduction, entitled An Explanation. In it, Ben bemoaned the lack of material available on magazine stands for those who did not “adapt…to the iron-bound rules of convention”, and stated her intentions for Vice Versa – a place for lesbians to “utilize [their] creative urge by directing it into literary channels”. Ben wrote the first issue herself, filling it with reviews (one of the cinematic adaptation of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness) and poetry: the issue ends with the poem Window-Shopping, a beautiful ode to the clandestine lesbian affection that could be passed off as platonic in public –

“I saw you, strolling down the street together;

“Two girls out shopping,” smug convention said.

Convention is at times so unobserving,

Convention overlooked the carefree tread

Of steps aimed towards pursuit of happiness

Rather than mundane errands; did not spy

The intertwining of slim, gentle fingers,

The furtive glances, half bold and half shy.”

Lisa Ben distributed the first issue amongst her lesbian acquaintances, asking them to pass it on to other gay women they knew in order to keep it in circulation, and passed out the limited run at the If Bar, one of the few lesbian-only establishments in the city. By the time the second issue came out in July 1947, it had already earned a subtitle: America’s Gayest Magazine, and soon the demand for copies outstripped Ben’s effusive efforts. She invited contributions from readers, most of whom stayed anonymous, and began mailing out copies to some readers to expand the magazine’s reach.

Vice Versa ran for nine issues, and they have all been preserved online; if you haven’t had a chance to read them, I can’t recommend them enough. Reading through these issues is a reminder of just how much has changed and just how much hasn’t in terms of the culture and experiences of women who love women. It’s full of reviews of mainstream movies that view these stories through a sapphic lens, explorations of books that explore lesbian themes, and poetry and fiction that captures these vignettes of lesbian life and love at the time. In Ode to Lesbian Lovers, an anonymous author writes “You want her – she loves you – you make her your wife”, a simple but strikingly passionate sentiment about the profundity of these relationships, one that could have easily as come from a hundred years before as it could a hundred years after.

As a person who grew up loving women nearly fifty years later, it’s striking to me how many of these are still so relatable – there’s a poem in the third issue that ends with the lines “The sisterhood may have no badge, the members are unknown/And only fate determines if we meet or walk alone”, something that instantly jumped out to me as a markedly similar sentiment I had considered when I was first coming out to myself in a small community (though obviously not facing anything close to the discrimination or abuse that lesbians in 1940s America did). It’s enormously sad to think that these struggles were shared across so many generations of women who loved women, but, at the same time, there is a comfort in knowing that these feelings have been felt before.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the magazine from a historical perspective is the Watchama-Column, where reader’s letters were published and responded to by Ben. From complaints about bad adaptations of lesbian novels to musings on the appropriate slang terms for gay women (“Clyffe”, derived from Radclyffe Hall, “Our Matron Saint”, was my personal favourite), it’s reflective of the immediate culture of the time, and what Ben and her readers and contributors hoped it might become – a nascent but recognizable version of modern lesbian culture.

More than that, though, it underlines the dearth of content like this for lesbian women at the time, and the hunger for a community and culture that catered to lesbians: “I, personally, felt that sought-after feeling of belonging to a group somewhere in “society” while reading with you”, wrote one contributor. My favourite edition of this column features a letter, signed simply from A Sympathizer, which ends ””Seraphic” rhymes with Sapphic. May your jaunt into journalesbianism have the angels’ support!”. Ben herself described the Watchama-Column as a place for her to “fantasize… I imagined that perhaps we would have a lot of magazines and that perhaps even movies might be made about us.”.

The focus on keeping the magazine solely for lesbians (“just between us gals”, as Ben put it in an early issue) gives Vice Versa an authenticity that often wasn’t allowed in contemporary media about gay people – this was just lesbians talking amongst themselves, without the expectation of shame, self-doubt, or apology for their sexuality. Not explicitly catering to the watchful, judgemental, and oppressive eye of heteronormative society surrounding it, the unobservant convention Ben mentioned in her poem, Vice Versa is a relatively unselfconscious and straightforward expression of lesbian opinion, art, and culture.

And, though Vice Versa came to an end after only nine issues when Ben was re-assigned to a new position at RKO Studios (and became fearful of being accused of distributing obscene material when she began mailing copies to readers – despite relatively innocent subject matter, Vice Versa fell under the Comstock Act’s obscene publications restrictions regarding work discussing homosexuality), Ben’s work as a lesbian activist, writer, and magazine contributor was only just starting. She would go on to write for The Ladder, the first nationally-distributed lesbian magazine in the USA, starting in 1956, which was where she first invented the pen name Lisa Ben (after her initial suggestion, Ima Spinster, was rejected). She later focused her creative efforts on creating LGBT-themed parody covers of popular folk songs (I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write my Butch a Letter is the best one, by the way). Before she passed in 2015, Ben rightly received recognition from a number of organizations for her work in elevating lesbian literature and gay rights in the USA.

I think when we look back at the history of LGBTQ people, it can be easy to be overwhelmed by the discrimination, violence, and institutional abuse that affected (and continues to affect) the community. And, while it’s vital to acknowledge and understand that oppression to tend to the harm it’s done and prevent it in future, it’s also important to see the individuals and their experiences beyond that suffering. The contents of Vice Versa were a little budding bloom of connection for the lesbian community, one that humanized these gay women beyond the contemporary struggles they faced with their hopes, dreams, art, and wit. Vice Versa, even now, feels like such a profoundly special piece of media: a snapshot of a small corner of lesbian culture and community that’s full of warmth, personality, and, more than anything, humanity.

Sources and further reading:

Vice Versa Magazine Archives

Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America by Ellen Lewin

Making Gay History Podcast

Unspeakable: The rise of the gay and lesbian press in America by Roger Streitmatter

Happy Endings: Lesbian writers talk about their lives and work by Kate Brandt

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(header image via Queer Music Heritage)