Amazon Publishing

Gina and Laurel, editors of the Amazon Quarterly, were guests at the rooming house on Green Street  late July of 1973. They didn’t at the time use their patronymns Covina and Galana, in common with many other radical lesbians. They had started to publish the lesbian feminist arts journal in the basement of their Oakland California home the previous summer. Now, with the loan of a VW camper van, they were making a three month circuit of the U.S. and Canada visiting the Quarterly’s readership. This “lesbians around the country expedition” would eventually encompass 12,000 miles, gathering a collection of fifty-two taped interviews with lesbians along the way, as well as new contributors and subscribers.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 1972

Despite, or maybe because of, “having heard much about you women from Robin Morgan,” they just collapsed in the Kollwitz room at Green Street when they arrived in Northampton. After nearly two months on the road, they needed several nights here to quietly decompress. Gina later wrote a thank you note to me:

 I want to let you know how important the space you allowed was for me, & for Laurel too. That week was the first time on the trip we’d stopped long enough to think at all, and understandably we found ourselves far from ourselves. We were able to change after that, & continue a more mythic journey than the professional lesbian ambassadress headset had allowed. I hope (& expect) to see you again when I don’t feel the need to reserve myself as I did then just because it was allowed and understood.

Your vision of community is still strongly with me. We met other women the rest of the trip, not groups but a few women here and there, who also are living out of the same vision. I hope some of the best that’s happening__no not that but the highest visions__ will show in A.Q. this time.

         Love to you & the sisters there. Gina

The note included a request for artwork, some of which I sent to them in Oakland. They published a double issue in October 1973  to begin to share the material they had gathered on the trip. It included five of the many newly transcribed interviews as well as an extensive directory of the feminist and lesbian activity that they had discovered on the journey. The listing of women’s centers and feminist or lesbian groups; publications; bookstores; art groups (radio, theater, film, music, visual); presses; and lesbian bars included the Valley.

 

The next issue of Amazon Quarterly (Dec. 1973) included two of my woodcuts. Also printed was a review by the Northampton Women’s Film Coop of Jan Oxenberg’s film short Home Movie, one of the first (and positive) self–portrayals of lesbians.

My woodcut published in AQ Dec. 1973 issue

More of my artwork was published in the July 1974 issue as well, which also included an excerpt from Northampton author Elana Nachman’s (later, Dykewomon) just published novel Riverfinger Women. Laurel’s review describes the hardcover ($3) from Daughters, Inc. Plainfield VT as “a whirlwind picaresque psychedelic nostalgic piece about the author’s often ill-fated adventures in youth and lesbian cultures of the late 60s and 70s.” (This AQ issue also had work from their poetry editor Audre Lorde!)

The July 1974 issue was the first to be published on the East Coast. Gina and Laurel had just moved to West Somerville Massachusetts from California. One reason for the move was to enable them to teach an ovular on contemporary lesbian culture as part of the Cambridge-Goddard School for Social Change Master’s degree program in feminist studies.

Despite their intentions, only two more issues were forthcoming. The editors sought to leave the city for a home in the country somewhere, perhaps the New England woods. An anthology of Amazon Quarterly content was published instead in 1975 as The Lesbian Reader, followed in 1977 by The New Lesbians: Interviews with Women Across the U.S. and Canada.

The Lesbian Reader: An Amazon Quarterly Anthology. Dec. 1975. Barn Owl Books. Amazon Press Oakland CA.

The New Lesbians: Interviews with Women Across the U.S. and Canada. 1977 Moon Books. Reprinted 2000 Random House.

In some ways, they had prepared their readers for this discontinuation through their last two issues. In the final issue, March 1975, they focused on sexuality, noting that it would be the last time they focused content on lesbianism per se. Future issues, rather, would be about what passionately interested lesbians. The next issue was to be devoted to energy: kinds of energy, how to create, share, and use it. They introduced this subject with a Ouija reading on sexual energy.

In the previous issue, Nov. 1974, they completed the three installments of Laurel’s “How to Make a Magazine,” sharing the hard-won knowledge gained over their three-year publishing history. The do-it-yourself demystification of the newly available offset printing press publishing process for magazines, books, and newspapers encouraged others with no experience to try it. Typesetting, layout, printing and distribution were all covered step by step.

Amazon Quarterly Nov. 1974

Accompanying this DIY message was an annotated directory of “the Feminist Press,” those women around the country who were already doing it. The listing by Gina of fifty-two U.S. feminist periodicals was limited to those having more than a local newsletter-type content. Eight English Language periodicals outside the U.S. were also listed.

Of these sixty periodicals listed in the October 1974 issue, nine were noted as being lesbian. In addition to the Amazon Quarterly, two Daughters of Bilitis chapters in San Francisco and Boston, and lesbian feminists in Chicago, Lansing, Iowa City, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Palo Alto were producing newsletters, newspapers, magazines and pamphlets. Northampton lesbians in the early 1970s shared news, opinions, as well as creative work, in at least some of these new publications: The Lesbian Connection, Lavender Woman, Lesbian Tide, and Off Our Backs. Focus, the Boston DOB publication, also included some news of the Valley.

The AQ was prescient in encouraging self-publication.  The 70s witnessed the greatest explosion of lesbian periodicals seen to date. Prior to Stonewall, only four U.S. lesbian publications are known: Vice Versa (1947-48), The Ladder (1956-1972), No More Fun and Games (1968-73), and Maiden Voyage (1969-71). In a partial compilation on Wikipedia from archive holdings, at least seventy-eight titles from the 1970s have been identified. I would note that the overlap with feminist publications is fuzzy. Also some (probably many) smaller, obscure periodicals are missing, such as Northampton’s Old Maid and Dyke Doings.

Like Northampton lesbians’ novice attempts, many of these new 70s publications around the country produced just a few issues. It was joked that if any four lesbian feminists got together they would produce a newsletter. Only about a quarter lasted a handful of years or more. The words and art of local lesbians were also printed in some of the more successful of the lesbian magazines that started in the later 70s, including Sinister Wisdom and Womanspirit. In this way, local lesbians joined a country-wide community of ideas, a network of shared information and vision claiming an identity, creating change, and shaping a new world.

 

FYI: Gina and Laurel eventually returned to the West Coast. Gina Covina is, according to internet info, farming in Northern California. She published the authoritative Ouija Book (1979 Simon & Schuster) and a speculative fiction City of Hermits (1983 Barn Owl Books.) Laurel Galana Holliday got an advanced degree from Antioch College, became a Psychologist, and has been teaching Psychology and researching gender identity in Seattle, Washington.

SOURCES:

__Gina. Undated [early Sep. 1973] letter to Kaymarion.
__ pdf’s of the 9 issues of AQ can be found online at the lesbian poetry archive: http://www.lesbianpoetryarchive.org/AmazonQuarterly

__Potter, Clare. the Lesbian Periodical Index. Naiad Press. Tallahassee FL. 1986.

__Wikipedia. “List of Lesbian Periodicals in the United States.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lesbian_periodicals_in_the_United_States

__Latimer,Tirza True. “Amazon Quarterly: Pre-Zine Print Culture and the Politics of Separatism” in Rachel Schreiber, editor, Modern Print Activism in the United States, Ashgate Publishing, Burlington VT. 2013. http://www.lesbianpoetryarchive.org/sites/default/files/ModernPrintActivismintheUnitedStates pdf

__Further reading, some brief background on lesbian magazines: https://www.autostraddle.com/six-lesbian-magazines-that-changed-the-world-and-then-disappeared-140806/