The first time I picked up a copy of Girlfriends at the magazine rack in the middle of The Promenade in Santa Monica, I was skeptical, wondering if this would be a publication, due to it’s glossiness and bright-eyed, airbrushed cover subjects, that would “whitewash” the lesbian politics and entertainment it claimed to represent. Even the name "Girlfriends" as it appears on the nameplate looked a little too Seventeenish. Even though it may not explore issues as much as I would like sometimes (think of People magazine covering lesbian communites), it’s still resourceful as far as the new music, art, and sex laws and talk emerging from lesbian communities, albeit more publicized ones.

One of the articles I found interesting in this most recent issue (February 2003) is the interview with sexologist Tristan Taormino (sex columnist for The Village Voice and Taboo/ writer of various informational sex books/ topless cowgirl on the cover). Bare ass cheeks and all, the “sexpert” divests her fluid sexual orientation and identity as a lesbian and current relationship with her "tranny" boyfriend, which affirmed some of my beliefs as far as exceeding gender lines (I realize that I'm going to hell for saying that). You can find many sites that feature Tristan Taormino and her work, of course, but I really liked The Nifty Archives site because it listed many different queer bookstores, publishers, and book titles to peruse.

Also, there are some cool mini features on visual artists like photographers Leta Evaskus and her androgynous subjects and Tee Corinne, using zippers for her subjects (words can’t describe…). There's more of Tee Corinne's work on the American Lesbian Photography site. One of my favorites of her featured work on this site is "Isis in the Sand." (When I was researching Tee Corinne, it was cool to see that she did a cover in 1977 for Sinister Wisdom. There's an article in here about her too.)

Of course the “controversial” (Jesus people!) MoSex (this web site is a bit dizzying, so be prepared) gallery in New York is covered in this issue along with more of the lesbian centered material in the museum’s opening exhibit “NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America” which was left out of some of the other articles I read previously on this exhibit that only went so far as to safely distinguish the works of art in this exhibit as basically remnants of this country’s history of women and sex. Just to remind us of how puritanical our society is the article’s author, Amy Heibel, opens her piece with the fact that “perhaps the most historic aspect of new York City’s new Museum of Sex is that it opened at all. Berlin, Barcelona, and Madrid have ‘museums of the erotic.’ Prague has the Sex Machine Museum…Just outside Toronto, Canada, you can visit the Hall of Contraception…Even the Chinese province of Guangdong has a Museum of Sexual Education. But until now, the U.S. really didn’t have a single institution dedicated to collecting artifacts relating to the history of sex and sexuality.”

To make financial matters worse, the ad for First Run Features (a very addicting website for indie movie fiends) tipped me off to this movie I’m now going to spend some of my rent money on: History Lessons, a film of lesbian archives ranging from lesbians in film to "old nudie pics" (that's what the ad said!) compiled by celebrated filmmaker Barbara Hammer who also made the documentaries Nitrate Kisses and Tender Fictions that along with History Lessons makes up her trilogy on lesbian and gay history. If anyone has these other two movies or any other great queer movies, I'd be down with doing a film swap (contact me if interested).

Speaking of old nudie pics, my roommate who’s a graphic designer lent me this book called Ready-To-Use Naughty French Spot Illustration, which has great cabaret and burlesque style drawings of women, by themselves and with other women, that I’m dreaming about using in some of my new collages.