Laura Aguilar, Plush Pony series

Laura Aguillar, a Chicana lesbian artist who works in photography and video, has done extensive photographic work documenting the Los Angeles Latina lesbian community. One of her works, the “Plush Pony” series (1992), explicitly centers around the Plush Pony bar. The “Plush Pony” series is described this way in her biography: Aguilar set up a makeshift studio in the back of Plush Pony and offered to photograph women alone, in couples, or in groups. The resulting series of photographs is an amazing document of working-class Chicana lesbian culture, a group whose existence is relegated to the margins of both Chicana and lesbian social formations. The “Plush Pony” series records the highly stylized bodies of the women—in particular, their Chicana configuration of butch/femme tattoos and hairstyles and their poses.

Open-Access Digitized Grassroots Media

Dr. Margaret Galvan, (professor researching 1960-1990s American LGBTQ  cartoonists) released a collection of free open-access online resources, focusing in on feminist and LGBTQ periodicals. Share and enjoy, and contact her if you have more to add to the list!

Specific digitized grassroots periodicals:

Bay Area Reporter, SF LGBTQ periodical 1971-present

BOMB Magazine, cross disciplinary NYC artists mag, 1981-present

Chicago Defender, long-standing black newspaper, founded in 1905

Cultural Correspondence, New Left review out of Providence that published 1975-1985  

Dyke, A Quarterly, ran for five issues, 1975-1979

The Empty Closet, Upstate NY LGBT periodical, 1971 to present

Heresies, feminist art journal, 1977-1993

HotWire, journal of women’s music and culture, mid 1980s-mid 1990s

Lesbian Tide, Los Angeles lesbian publication, 1971-1980

Lesbian Herstory Archives newsletter, newsletter of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, from 1975 onward

Liberation News Service, New Left, anti-war underground press news service, 1967-1981

Outweek, LGBT NYC weekly, 1989-1991

Sinister Wisdom, multicultural lesbian literary & art journal, 1976 to present

Unicorn Times, DC area arts newspaper (1973-1985)

The Washington Blade, oldest LGBT newspaper in the US (since 1969), based out of DC

Washington Free Press, DC underground newspaper, 1967-1969

Larger collections of grassroots periodicals:

Chicana Por Mi Raza, “Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era” 

Civil Rights Digital Library

Digital Transgender Archive

DC Punk Archive Zine Library

The Freedom Archives, “progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice”

Houston LGBT History Publications, mostly Texas publications but also others like Lesbian Tide (Los Angeles)

Independent Voices, “open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals” 

Lesbian Poetry Archive

POC Zine Project

Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP)

Roz Payne Sixties Archive

Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project

UC Berkeley, digitized periodicals largely from the Bay Area

Additional grassroots media digital projects:

Asian American Little Magazines, 1968-1974

Bay Area Reporter Online Searchable Obituary Database

GLBT Historical Society Digital Collections

June Mazer Lesbian Archives, digital collections at the bottom of this page

Lesbian Herstory Archives, digital resources

The Panther and the Lash: Black Literary Movement Publications and the Black Aesthetic

Adolf de Meyer, 1912

52 International Horror Films

9/52: Vampyr (Der Traum des Allan Grey) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

Self-portraits by women photographers in the early 20th century (Part I)

Ilse Bing (1899 - 1998)

Germaine Krull (1897 – 1985)

Marianne Breslauer (1909 – 2001)

Florence Henri (1893 - 1982)

Marianne Brandt (1893 –  1983)