Multiple advertisements were pulled from DYKE A Quarterly of Lesbian Culture and Analysis, which was published in New York City from 1975 to 1978. Editors Liza Cowan and Penny House created a magazine that was both beautiful in design and revolutionary in politics. Before 2010 it was inaccessible to most researchers until curators from the New York MOMA and the Schlesinger Library compiled newsletters, ephemera, correspondence and collateral materials into the DYKE quarterly collection.
DYKE Action Machine
What was once an agitprop subsection of Queer Nation quickly the anonymous art collective DAM!. Dyke Action Machine! campaigns presented a hybrid form of public address where civic issues such were packaged to fit seamlessly into a commercialized New York City streetscape. Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!) was a two-person public art project founded in 1991 by artist Carrie Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner. Between 1991 and 2004 DAM! blitzed the New York street with public art that combined commercial context with Situationist tactics.
DAM!’s “Are You A Man-Hater?” advertisement came from a project instigated by the growth of right-wing Christian militias and mercenary publications. The DAM S.C.U.M. project re-contextualized the concept of separatism through a fictional lesbian militia movement. Publication materials advertised an interactive phone-line that played Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto. The series was composed of 2-color offset matchbooks and cards, an artist page commissioned by Art Journal in 1996, and over 2,000 pieces distributed nation-wide that advertised the S.C.U.M. phone-line.
The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) committed to increasing the accessibility of transgender history through an international online hub for pre-2000s digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and call listings. Though the DTA is based in Boston at Northeastern University it is composed of holdings from many colleges, universities, nonprofits, public libraries, and private collections.
www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/
Images from the DTA:
Blue Dahlia Show Lounge in Chicago, IL
A multi-ethnic group of trans women, female impersonators, burlesque and musical artists in Chicago Illinois. Found through the Digital Online Transgender Archive. On the inclusion of female impersonators in a transgender archive: Because of the term transgender is US-centric and relatively new, publications before the 1990's did not use transgender in descriptive information, which makes researching trans cultural identity even harder. Outside of the US, many other words are used to describe trans-related practices, often in ways that completely diverge from the American understanding of transgender people. As such, the DTA uses the term transgender as an active cultural practice rather than an identity.
Women: A Journal of Liberation, Inc. was a feminist Journal published in Baltimore, MD from 1969 - 1983. Quote from the October 1972 Androgyny Issue:
“I've noticed that people if they see someone they can't clearly identify as male or female, they freak out, you know. They don't know how to categorize this individual and they're at a loss. They don't know what to do, they don't know whether to snicker or kick it or to shoot it or attack it or love it.”
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