The first time I read Vice Versa was in a class at near the end of my Masters Degree before I transitioned into the PhD. My professor at the time was lenient with my research that term and allowed me to study feminist periodicals, even though if I remember correctly the class was about Writing Programs at colleges and universities. At the time I was deeply into feminist periodicals, things like lit magazines or write-ups from conferences, but once I found lesbian periodicals I was a goner. My paper for my Spring 2016 Methods class was called “Rhetorical Positioning in Letters to the Editor in On Our Backs, 1984-1986,” but I quickly settled into my relationship with Vice Versa.
When I went back to confirm the date when I first wrote about Vice Versa (Spring 2014), I found my midterm draft, and thought it would be fun to revisit. Here’s part of my introduction from that paper:
I was drawn to research Vice Versa because of two interests: non-institutional, community-based, radical forms of education; and the potential communal rhetoric of queer women—particularly in terms of how those voices are represented historiographically. In order to investigate women’s voices in private or secret extracurricular spaces, I return to a time when these voices were silenced and community was threatened: the late 1940s. My focus is on the first documented lesbian magazine published in the United States, Vice Versa, and my questions about Vice Versa are multiple:
1. Did Vice Versa help to create a community for queer women?,
2. How does the text recognize both communal attitudes within and oppressive attitudes towards the queer community?, and
3. How might this publication inform contemporary readers about queer women’s experience with writing outside of traditional schooling?
I hope that answering my third question might inform contemporary queer writing in spaces that are still threatening and dangerous for queer women. Indeed, queer women continue to be silenced or threatened, and such community-building venues may offer a space for alternative education or alternative use of writing.
Reading this back over a decade on, I note a few things:
1. It’s freaking COOL that my initial read of Vice Versa is still informing my fascination 12 years later.
2. I ended up tracing the threads of questions 1 and 2 in my dissertation
3. It’s fun to look at my initial reaction to reading Vice Versa: how can I apply what Edythe Eyde did then to what is happening now? At the time, I hadn’t yet learned her story and come to care for her as I do now, so I was focused on the periodical itself. The more I researched her, the more I was pulled into history, what was happening at the time politically and jouralistically and medically and socially, and my dissertation ended up focusing on what she encountered in the 1940s-1950s. (It’s wild how a hundred-plue-page dissertation can truly only cover so much ground)
My hope with my book project is to develop the story further, looking at Eyde’s life as a whole but focused on the ways words fueled her, as a reader and a writer, as a musician and a singer, as a hilarious and deeply thoughtful person. And to think it all started with a Google search for “lesbian + magazine.”
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