Celebrating the Years of The Ladder

Off Our Backs, May/Jun 2005 by Gallo, Marcia M

Spring, 1957. San Francisco. You're a lesbian in your late twenties and you've lived in the Bay Area for a few years. You work in an insurance office and rent a small apartment in North Beach. It's a Thursday night around 8 and you're feeling lonely.

You decide to take yourself to the Paper Doll for a drink despite your worries about police raids-it's the only place you know of to be around other lesbians. Maybe tonight you'll meet someone new. Sitting at the bar alone, you overhear a couple talking about a new group they've just heard about.. .a social club for women. The Daughters of something...

When they get up to leave, you notice the little mimeographed magazine they left face down on the table. The slogan "From the city of many moods..." decorates the back cover, and when you reach out and turn it over, you see a pen-and-ink drawing of two women at the foot of a ladder that reaches into the skies above. You open it and notice that the two dozen pages are full of typed announcements, short stories, some poetry. You roll it up in your right hand and slide it into your raincoat ., pocket, thinking "I'll take a closer look at this later..."

You've just been touched by The Ladder and, like thousands of women throughout the United States and around the world, it will become an important part of your life.

From 1956 to 1972, The Ladder was the monthly national magazine by and for lesbians, the first of its kind in the United States. It was originally conceived of as a recruitment tool and publicity vehicle for the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the all-female homophile ("love of same") group, founded in San Francisco in 1955 by a group of eight lesbians including Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. But The Ladder soon became better known than the organization that created it and, to the surprise of the handful of women who got it started and kept it going, it helped launch a revolution in the publishing world.

Through The Ladder, whose official mailing list reached 4,000 only in the early 1970s, artists and organizers helped develop a new lesbian identity. They also contributed to the creation of modern feminist culture before the birth of the mid-1960s' women's liberation movement, providing an intellectual foundation on which later lesbian and feminist publications could build.

In today's "L Word" world, it can be challenging to understand the revolutionary nature of DOB's work to provide an alternative, and expanded, vision of who "the lesbian" was. But in the mid-1950s, when The Ladder began, the best place to go for accessible information about, and images of, lesbians was not television-it was the drugstore or the bus station. There, circular metal racks held cheap "pocket books" whose splashy covers featured curvaceous, young white girls in tight bright skirts and sweaters, or silky lingerie, posed as if they were just moments away from engaging in wild and wanton sex acts.

The other available image-under the counter at many bookstores or hidden away in the "restricted" stacks of the public library-was of the elite mannish woman, typified in the portrait of a foppish Radclyffe Hall featured on the book flap of her infamous novel The Well of Loneliness, first published in 1928 amidst a firestorm of censorship and publicity. Pictured in profile, dressed in a suit with her short dark hair slicked back and gleaming with oil, in the 1950s Hall appeared as an upper-class effete who did not betray her background or privilege despite her desire for women.

The Ladder changed all that. Every month, for 16 years, the women who volunteered to produce the magazine provided visual as well as verbal portraits of lesbians, expanding the range of possibilities.

For women who came across a copy in the early days, The Ladder was a lifeline. It was a means of expressing and sharing otherwise private thoughts and feelings, of connecting across miles and disparate daily lives, of breaking through isolation and fear. For female artists and intellectuals, The Ladder was an accessible workshop in which to try out creative efforts and new ways of analyzing experiences of same-sex love and eroticism. For political activists, it was a forum for debating tactics and strategies and publicizing meetings and public gatherings.

The Ladder also became the heart and soul of a nascent lesbian network that stretched across the United States and around the world. It was what held the Daughters of Bilitis together as a national organization for 15 years-a means of disseminating information about DOB activities as well as those of the other early gay rights groups. It was a focus for local chapter activity, especially in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Members of The Ladder volunteer staff (initially many of the same women who served as officers for DOB) contributed book reviews, short stories and poetry; reported on research findings; and reviewed media coverage of homosexuality and women's rights.

Further, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, The Ladder was among the few publications to present work from lesbian and feminist novelists and poets such as Ann Weldy (Ann Bannon), Eisa Gidlow, Iris Murdoch, Jane Rule, May Sarton, and Valerie Taylor. Lorraine Hansberry was an early admirer whose long letters to the editor were published in the magazine in 1957. The Ladder regularly printed pieces by science fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley and was the first publication to showcase the work of Dr. Jeannette Howard Foster, the author of the groundbreaking lesbian bibliography Sex Variant Women in Literature, self-published in 1956 after decades of research and writing. Foster-who in the 1940s worked for Alfred Kinsey and his research team at the University of Indiana with her lover, Dr. Hazel Toliver-was one of a small group of pioneering women who helped break the silence that surrounded lesbian lives and literature.