I took a trip to the archive today to begin indexing the magazine. Alan told me the CLGA's room full of servers and some of their software choices are based on a decision to keep their data in Canada and away from the Patriot Act. Not the first I've heard of this kind of plan, but good to know. 

I'm hiding out at a McDonalds in Toronto right now because I missed my bus by three minutes. It's very hot inside the bus station, and the outside is very smoky. I feel a bit crabby, so hopefully this will pass the time until the next bus at 11.

Anyway. Today, the data entry began. 

It took about four hours to create the 39 records that comprise the index for volume 1, issue 1. The decision to index the advertisers was a good one: in the first issue, advertisers were mostly local to San Francisco, and many of them were also the magazine's publishers and editors. One of the things we will look at is how (if at all) the advertising and distribution bases grew over time. One of the ads, for a P.O. box company that may or may not have been related to OOB, reprinted the "hanky code" (originally a gay men's code for signalling sexual preferences). Very cool:

Of course, a code like that only works if everybody knows it, everybody agrees on it, and everybody uses it... Which is sort of what I mean about the magazine's role in consolidating the lesbian identity. 

Another great find -- and a welcome relief from the tedium of data entry -- was the short piece "April 1 1984: 'A Cup of Tea is Preferable to Any Sexual Encounter."

It reads like a news story -- but is there really a "Concerned Women Against Perverted Individuals" (CWAPI -- say it out loud). And surely Andrix Workin is just a bit too close to Andrea Dworkin? So after reading through, I figured out it's satire. 

But it's still a great find. The story describes the lesbian-feminist protesters' signs changing, as the protest wore on, from simple anti-sex or pro-feminist slogans, to a statement of their true feelings: "WHAT RIGHT TO DEFINE YOUR OWN SEXUALITY - BACK IN YOUR CLOSETS!" Because OOB has been inaccessible, documentation like this of the homophobia driving the "sex wars," contained in the magazine, is also inaccessible. And contemporary radical feminists (who still cast queers and especially trans women as threats to feminism) aren't exactly volunteering information about their history of building theory out of homophobic materiality. 

A little more sleuthing almost turned up all the people and organizations implicated by the piece. Who is Doormouth Leedheed? A feminist whose theories never caught on like Andrea Dworkin's? Someone who changed her name? A name I'm not recognizing? It's a mystery, and something to keep an eye out for as I index future issues (they might solve the mystery -- one of the ads I indexed on page 7 today happened to contain the title of a drawing printed on page 35... attention to detail and a keen memory are key for this gig).

Here's what the story, above, looks like as a record in the index:

Id
2710

Publication
On Our Backs

Issue
vol. 1, no. 1

Publication Date
84

Page Number
p. 23

Author
Knightly, Gladys Fewkes

Title
April 1 1984: "A Cup of Tea is Preferable to Any Sexual Encounter"

Name-Corporate
San Francisco Public Library

Type
Fiction

Significance
satire
Andrea Dworkin
Doris L. (?)
Concerned Women of America
Sisters Against Sexism

Date Created
21/05/2012 17:07:44

Date Updated
21/05/2012 17:07:44

Exciting, yes?

If you've seen the LGBT Life versions, then you can appreciate how much richer mine is. Honestly. 

Some of the work today involved setting up a "validation list" for the "significance" field, which contains keywords for each record, searchable by single words. While the single-word search is better than having to match a whole line exactly (and lets me put in some extra information for some records, like when there is an intertextual reference and I want to put in the title of the referenced text ["Flashdance"] and what kind of media it is ["(film)"]). That's work that only has to be done once, so it will go a bit quicker in the future, and when it's done, I can copy the validation list as the beginning of a thesaurus of terms for indexing lesbian pornographic periodicals. The CLGA carries Bad Attitude and Lesbo, too, so the same list could be used for those magazines, and expanded if they cover content that OOB does not, and at the end a tag cloud could be generated to make it easier to search all of the publications at once! SUPER EXCITING TAG CLOUD. 

Erm, but that plan might be a bit ambitious for this project. Indexing takes a really, really, really long time.