Edythe Eyde wanted to make art for lesbians.
At 25, she was working as a secretary at RKO Studios, a Los Angeles movie studio, and coping with boredom by imagining a magazine for queer women. She liked writing. She wanted to tell stories. From her job, she knew plenty about printing and copying. There was just one thing standing in her way: It was 1947.
On Tuesday, Entertainment Weekly reported that Showtime is reviving “The L Word,” its groundbreaking television series about gay women.
But 70 years ago, Eyde knew a traditional printer wouldn’t dare help her produce something as scandalous as a magazine for lesbians. She would have to do it in secret. So when she decided to launch Vice Versa, she designed and templated the entire thing on the RKO work machines — not to save money or cut corners (though those were definitely bonuses) but because under California law, her magazine wasn’t just scandalous.
It was illegal.
At the time, writing or distributing information about life as a lesbian could have landed her in prison. So she painstakingly put together each copy of the magazine and then handed them out in lesbian hot spots around Los Angeles. Eyde wrote under the pen name “Lisa Ben” — an anagram of “lesbian,” a wink to those in the know.
“It was just some writing that I wanted to do to get it off my chest,” she told Eric Marcus for an oral history book that he later turned into a podcast, “Making Gay History.” “And I was a very lonely person, and I could sort of fantasize this way by writing the magazine, you see. I would also say to the girls as I passed the magazines out, ‘Now when you get through with this, don’t throw it away. Pass it on to another gay gal.’ ”