Butch Is Not a Dirty Word x Sinister Wisdom
Interview with Esther Godoy
by Li-Anne Wright




Lesbian Films and Media: Curating the Lesbian Lives Film Festival
Interview with Meghan McDonough
by Mel Oliver




Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations Editor Interview
Interview with Alexis Clements






Sinister Wisdom 103 Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival & 110 Dump Trump Interview
Interview with Red Washburn






Sinister Wisdom 94: Lesbians and Exile Editors Interview
Interview with Joan Nestle and Yasmin Tambiah






Sinister Wisdom 98: Southern Landykes Editors Interview
Interview with Merril Mushroom, Rose Norman, and Kate Ellison

stay
A poem
By Debra Anderson




a late bloomer's guide to chaotic lesbianism
"An ode to my messy dating life."
By sparrow Gore




October 9, 2025
"Though bittersweet, Barbara still walks the trail in memory of what they shared and what she’s lost.”
by Barbara Johnson




onFrom the typewriter,the floor
A non-fiction poem
by Quintessence




in reflections
"water, be my memory" & "loving the bone mother"
by angel bista

by Dot Persica

View previous newsletters and subscribe to the Sinister Snapshot!

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Dot Persica is a singer/performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a great cook, a dyke cartoonist, a cis femme passing trans man, and a cancer sun with a gemini venus. They also write poetry, like all dykes.

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Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!

by Julie R. Enszer

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Early in my tenure as editor of Sinister Wisdom, someone emailed me (and I apologize, I cannot recall who for the life of me! If it was you, please tell me! Upon further thought I believe it might have been Maggie Jochild, now of blessed memory) and encouraged me to restore the “Sinister Wisdom logo.” I had to ask my interlocutor what exactly she meant. What logo? She replied, the round one! Ah! I went back to early issues of the journal and found it.

When I took the reins of Sinister Wisdom, I received some paper files and some electronic files, but this round logo was not among them. I scanned a few versions of it that had been printed in early issues (this was before we had the entire archive of Sinister Wisdom online and available for free) and then emailed it to our designer asking if she could clean it up and make it useable for future projects. She did and now we regular use this round logo in Sinister Wisdom materials.

On the occasion of our fiftieth anniversary, I share the genesis of this logo because it connects not only to Sinister Wisdom’s history but also to an important lesbian of yore.

In Sinister Wisdom 16, Harriet and Catherine wrote “A Domestic History” about the first five years of Sinister Wisdom. Catherine Nicholson explained in this article, “The logo comes from Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion (p. 275), a Boeotian plate painting of the Corn-goddess (Demeter and Persephone in one figure) which Catherine feels graphically represents the title.”

Catherine was a scholar, and I suspect owned a copy of Harrison’s book. I have encountered some stories about Jane Ellen Harrison, but I had to look up this particular book, which is freely available at the Internet Archive. This passage is where Harrison explains the Boeotian plate image:

“On the Boeotian plate* in fig. 66 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or Maid it is difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She is a great goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high polos on her head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch; before her is an omphalos- like altar, on it what looks like a pomegranate—is she Demeter or Persephone? I incline to think she is both in one; the artist has not differentiated her.”

Harrison continues with a long exegesis of the image explaining that in Greece, “the Mother and the Maid take mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and her daughter Persephone, their individual functions tend more and more to specialize. . . . The mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual—the Mother is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of the underworld.”

Harrison concludes reflecting on this image (which becomes the Sinister Wisdom round logo):

“At first we have merely the figures of the Two Goddesses, the Two Thesmophoroi, the Two Despoinae. Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia, in Arcadia she is at once Erinys and Lousia. But it is not surprising that, as will later be seen, a religion like Orphism, which concerned itself with the abnegation of this world and the life of the soul hereafter, laid hold rather of the figure of the underworld Kore, and left the prosperous, genial Corn-Mother to make her way alone into Olympus.”

From Jane Ellen Harrison, a scholar of ancient Greece and a linguist, who made her life with the poet Hope Mirlees in Paris, Catherine Nicholson adopted the round logo for Sinister Wisdom. What an extraordinary lineage. I am grateful for the person who told me sixteen years ago to seek this round logo and to Catherine Nicholson for opening this portal into the lesbian past.

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Julie R. Enszer is the editor of Sinister Wisdom.

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Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!

by Rivaa Ubrani
‘the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent princess Duchess of Newcastle’

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Years before Ursula K LeGuin’s gender-bending sci-fi writing and Olivia Butler’s queer speculative futures, early modern poet, author and duchess Margaret Cavendish of Newcastle (1623-1673) was making queer worlds of her own. I stumbled upon Cavendish’s work and history in the midst of my Master’s Degree in Early Modern Literature & Shakespeare, though the Renaissance era predated any contemporary notions of homo- or hetero-sexuality, its categories of gender and sex were fluid, unfixed and constantly being contested in fiction and on the stage.

Extending the Shakespearean stage conventions of cross-dressing and intimate same-gender friendships, Margaret Cavendish prolifically described worlds of female empowerment and all-girl utopias at a time when writing, playwriting and acting were deemed to be unsavoury pastimes for women. Arriving from the French court to London in 1660, Cavendish was notorious within English elite and courtly circles for her eccentric and fabulous way of holding herself. Before even putting her pen to paper, she turned her body into a readable manifesto, wearing self-designed and ‘scandalous’ gowns proudly. In a culture that prized female modesty, she styled herself as a scandal in silk and even earned the diminutive nickname of ‘Mad Madge’ for her boldness.

How very scandalous?

Where Cavendish really made a name for herself, though, was with her fictional and non-fiction literary explorations. The Duchess saturated her writings with intense female relationships: admiration, devotion, intellectual communion, and erotic possibility that never quite settle into heterosexual expectation. Her letters and poems teem with passionate addresses to women; her female characters often love other women with a tenderness that exceeds conventional friendship. Foreshadowing the intimacy of her literary predecessors Virgina Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Cavendish writes to one of her friends:

‘the truth is, my mind and thoughts live always with you, although my person is at distance from you (..) my Soul will attend you when my Body lies in the grave; and when we are both dead, we may hope to have a Conversation of Souls, where yours and mine will be doubly united’

In this sense, she is a forerunner of later lesbian literary traditions—not by modern identity labels, but by emotional architecture.

Her most outstanding work is her science-fiction romance The Blazing World (1666). Written before both science fiction as a genre and queerness as a way of life could even be conceived of, The Blazing World depicts a female-led universe ruled by an empress and her best friend. Ruling thus amongst a cast of genderless man-animal hybrids, Cavendish’s duo test the boundaries of knowledge itself, becoming immaterial spirits and entering into spheres of political, philosophical and geographical tension—areas of knowledge denied to women at the time.

Today, Cavendish invites us to think of queerness not only as sexuality, but as a way of being in the world—imaginative, unruly, speculative, and embodied. She reminds us that lesbian lineage is not only about who slept with whom, but about who dared to dream otherwise.

Read The Blazing World for free online: link

Where to read Cavendish’s other works: http://digitalcavendish.org/complete-works/

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Rivaa Ubrani (she/her) is an Indian poet, editor and aspiring children's book author, based in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Shakespeare Studies and interning at Sinister Wisdom. Her work often traces the intersections of mental illness, myth and the hyperreal.

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Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!

By Bell Pitkin

In March, Proof: Photographs Documenting Lesbian Life, a new exhibition featuring the work of photographer Angela Brinskele is set to open at One Gallery in collaboration with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, California.

As a longtime volunteer, board member, and now the Director of Communications for the Archives, Brinskele has spent her life dedicated to documenting and preserving lesbian life and culture. This exhibition will honor Brinskele’s important work, centering images of the local lesbian community engaging in pride marches, protests, celebrations, and casual gatherings—as well as several from her time photographing on the set of The L Word, whose premiere had a profound impact on Los Angeles’ lesbian community.

Growing up in Orange County, Brinskele began photographing as a teenager; she and her friends were interested in making pictures of the different stars and starlets who buzzed around the city. In college, she fell in love with photography as an art form and turned her camera to her own community. Like many lesbian photographers, Brinskele’s motivation to document was intrinsic; she understood the urgent miracle of photography—the medium gave her the nearly magical ability to stop time; she took care to observe and photograph important moments shared by her community, allowing them to live on forever in her film and prints.

Brinskele hasn’t put her camera down since she began documenting in the mid-1980s. She began photographing Pride in 1984 and hasn’t missed a single one since. She’s photographed events at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, for Women on a Roll, Dinah Shore Weekend, and protests like the 1991 March in Sacramento over AB101.

However, despite bearing witness to so many important and historic moments, Brinskele wasn’t always sure there was an audience for her work. In a 2013 interview with Ben Sher for UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, Brinskele says, “I thought I was the only one for most of my life, until I was about 16. So when I got to college and studied photography I wanted to document our community, especially women and lesbians, because I wanted to make really, really sure that nobody else felt that they were the only one on the planet…I used to look at my pride photos for years in boxes and think ‘I love these,’ but I was sure that nobody else would ever care about them.”*

It wasn’t until 2006, when Brinskele became involved with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, she realized there were indeed many, many people who cared about her images. In fact, there was so much support that in 2013 Brinskele donated a selection of several hundred prints to bolster the Archives’ contemporary photographic collection. As time passed, Brinskele remained involved with the Archives, first as a volunteer, then as a Board Member, and now as the Director of Communications, overseeing marketing and donor engagement. This exhibition will be a celebration not only of Brinskele’s important photographic visions, but also of her longstanding dedication to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives and their mission of preserving lesbian life, community, and history.

*See full article at: csw.ucla.edu/2013/09/16/from-the-june-l-mazer-lesbian-archives-angela-brinskele

The exhibition will open on Saturday, March 21st with a reception at 2PM at One Gallery in West Hollywood, CA. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, April 19th. One Gallery is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 1-7PM.

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Bell Beecher Pitkin is a lesbian photographer, artist, and curator from Charlotte, North Carolina who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Within their practice, Bell works primarily with medium format film photography, exploring the intersections of identity, desire, and imagination. Bell received their BA in Cinema and Media Studies with a concentration in Photography from Wellesley College in 2023. See their website at beecher.cargo.site.

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By Julie R. Enszer

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If you look closely at the typography for the title Sinister Wisdom, you will see that there have been a lot of different typefaces used to render its name. For example, Sinister Wisdom 4 has a hand-lettered rendering of the name.

Sinister Wisdom 17 through 21 and Sinister Wisdom 26 all have a chunky, all-caps and bold rendering of the name.

Many of the issues published during Elana Dykewomon’s editorship (1987-1994) use the lowercase rendering of the name, as you can see for Sinister Wisdom 35 through 60.

Beginning with Sinister Wisdom 87, the current presentation of the name begins. I began editing the journal with Sinister Wisdom 81 and used the template from editor Fran Day. Six issues into my work, I designed the new rendering of the name on my computer. It uses Bodoni 72 Oldstyle as the title font. The tagline, “A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal,” is set in the font Eurostile. Why did I make those choices? Quite simply, they pleased me. Although if you look closely at the font used for the name, you will note that it echoes with other presentations of the name in the past.

The presentation of the name that intrigues people the most—and is a throwback to our 1970s roots—is the stylization of Sinister Wisdom on the cover of Sinister Wisdom 3, which also features the iconic photograph by Tee Corinne.

This rendering of Sinister Wisdom appears in Sinister Wisdom 5 through 13 and returns in Sinister Wisdom 15. It is also in Sinister Wisdom 27, 28, and 31. It was clearly a favorite among the early editors.

From what I can tell, this is not a font that is currently in use anywhere. (We would be delighted to find it though if it is an active font!) My speculation is that someone designed and printed this rendering of the name, and it was pasted on the cover for Sinister Wisdom 3, then reused, that is, literally ripped and repasted, onto the covers for the other issues.

The current Sinister Wisdom fundraising committee is looking at that font presentation of the name and exploring how we might use it in our contemporary work.

What Sinister Wisdom font and presentation is your favorite? What meanings do you read into the covers and typeface of Sinister Wisdom as she evolves over the years?

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Julie R. Enszer is the editor of Sinister Wisdom.

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Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!

by Sam Carter

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In cataloging books mentioned throughout numerous issues of Feminist Bookstore News (FBN), a trade publication providing exactly what its title suggests, I’ve been awed (and quite frankly, a little overwhelmed) by the sheer amount of books, publishers, and bookstores involved within each issue. Something particular that has struck me, however, is the similarly frequent open letters from bookstore owners and workers regarding break-ins! In 1991, Volume 13, Issue 6 of Feminist Bookstore News includes three depictions of robberies.

Although these may not seem like striking numbers, the inclusion of violent break-ins consistently disrupts FBN’s stream of book recommendations and reviews. These short, sometimes unsettling descriptions link the feminist, queer, and radical themes of featured titles with the physical spaces where such books are bought and sold.

Nett Hart, the owner of a small storefront studio, described a particularly disturbing robbery, writing “there were several minutes any or all of us might not have survived,”(p23) as Hart, their sister, and former lover were attacked. After reading this jarring encounter, I began to wonder how one maintains a space’s integrity once it has been violated. In answer to this, Hart wrote “resistance to violence against women diminishes the power of violence” (p23), remaining sober but confident in their insistence on both relaying and denouncing forces of violence. However, Hart’s successful resistance against the perpetrator is not a victory. Instead, fighting back is a necessity to maintain one’s identity, “because whether he killed us or not he was not going to violate our sense of self” (p23).

Another break-in at the feminist bookstore Sisterspirit in San Jose, California, offsets the robbery with a touch of humor, as bookstore proprietor Clarice laughs at the robbers with “a sack full of women’s music” (p17). Still, however, Clarice is shaken by the encounter as “when something like this happens you never feel quite safe again” (p17). Rather than a simple financial loss of stock, robberies within FBN are an affront to the self as well as a violation of community space. As Hart lamented, these spaces are fought for, and there is not one single battle defining an overarching victory.

These overt threats to feminist spaces thus imbricate readers both past and present and engage us beyond the growing list of titles we’ve added to our TBR (to be read). Instead, FBN issues encourage an affective relation between the numerous books recommended to readers and the physical bookstores they’re located in. The aggressors don’t have a face. Even when writers such as Hart directly encounter theft, they don’t spend any time configuring an image of the attacker. Robberies within FBN were not included to sniff out thieves through an international feminist network, but rather to lament and advocate for feminist bookstores and spaces. Regardless of the aggressor’s intent, the open letters serve as a call to action, reminding readers that we cannot remain passive in feminist circles. Violence inevitably occurs and must be fought against with community, humor, physical strength, or the occasional visit to your local bookstore.

Sisterspirit photo from Queer Silicon Valley

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Sam Carter is a spring intern at Sinister Wisdom as well as an MA student at University College Dublin in Archives and Records Management. Her upcoming dissertation research will explore the significance of archival spaces and nostalgia within queer southern archives.

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Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!

The Sinister Snapshot is Sinister Wisdom's biweekly email newsletter, full of lots of fun links to articles, events, and other captivating works. As of the second installment, the Sinister Snapshot begins with a featurette showcasing part of Sinister Wisdom's history, current happenings, or platforming other lesbian stories. May this archive of queer culture inspire, enthuse, and rouse you to lesbian actions!

Subscribe to the Sinister Snapshot for free!

“When Someone Dies”: Lesbians and Memory Work
Featurette 102
By Julie R. Enszer




An Intergenerational Visit to Nett Hart
Featurette 101
By Ella Stern




Report from Lesbian Lives in Cork, Ireland
Featurette 100
By Sam Carter




In Minneapolis, new lesbian bar aims to create community, inclusivity, and abundance
Featurette 99
By Ella Stern




Mandy Wallace: Artists with Early Work in Sinister Wisdom
Featurette 98
By Izzy Drake




Diving into 1980s Asian Lesbian Newsletters
Featurette 97
by Li-Anne Wright




A Speculative History of the Sinister Wisdom Typography
Featurette 96
by Julie R. Enszer




Fighting for Feminist Spaces and Against Violence
Featurette 95
by Sam Carter




Angela Brinskele’s Proof at One Gallery
Featurette 94
by Bell Pitkin




Margaret Cavendish: The Mother of Science Fiction
Featurette 93
by Rivaa Ubrani




An Idiosyncratic History of the Round Sinister Wisdom Logo
Featurette 92
by Julie R. Enszer




Sinister & Unwise
Featurettes 70, 73, 76, 87 & 91
by Dot Persica

by Li-Anne Wright

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I am lucky to have grown up in a time and place that made it possible for me to never know the fear that I might be the only queer Asian person in the world. By the time I had come to understand myself through the word "lesbian," I had access to the internet (where Hayley Kiyoko had released her music video "Girls Like Girls" in 2015, which I might suggest is a canonical text for Gen-Z queers) and had already met a number of Asian queers—in fact, most of them were my friends.

And still, it wasn't until my early twenties that I had a sense that Asian American lesbians might have a history or where to look for evidence of our past. I became very curious about newsletters like Anamika and Phoenix Rising because they reminded me a lot of the zine world I loved so much. (If you are unfamiliar with zines, I wrote a featurette on dyke zines for Snapshot #74. I also wrote a featurette on Anamika in Snapshot #46, and two issues of Anamika have now been digitized on SAADA.)

Recently, I’ve been working on a paper about Asian American lesbian newsletters and politics during the 1980s. I’ve been diving into a number of ‘80s newsletters that were published by Asian lesbians based in the United States/Asian American lesbians—so far, Phoenix Rising, ALOEC, and Shamakami. Did you contribute to any of these newsletters, or do you know anyone who did? I'd love to talk to you about them and what it was like for you to be an Asian lesbian during that time (you can just reply to this email, as I check the Sinister Wisdom email inbox every few days).

In the meantime, here’s a bit about Phoenix Rising, which ran for ten years between 1984 and 1994. This newsletter had a number of different elements—articles, editorials, news bits, book and movie reviews, an events calendar, classified ads, spot art, etc. Here are some of the more lighthearted tidbits.

Some of the earlier issues had horoscopes by “Madame Ree”! Here was the advice for December 1985 that was published in Issue 8 (September–October 1985). Patriarchy getting on your nerves only three times in a whole month sounds like a pretty good month to me.

Not everything published in Phoenix Rising is related to lesbian topics. A number of issues had recipes, like this one in Issue 12 (August–September 1986) for “Chicken with Peanuts” by S. P. Kwong. Other useful tidbits in some other issues included reminders about taxes, photography tips, and requests for roommates.

Lori Lai was one of the founders of Phoenix Rising and was involved for many years. In Issue 18 (July–August 1987), she wrote about visiting Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (ALOEC) and this play that ALOEC staged about “four Asian lesbians playing mahjong and discussing their lives.”

Despite the various difficulties of putting out a newsletter—not to mention the tensions of doing a project for a panethnic coalition with many different people and priorities—Phoenix Rising had an amazing run, with ten years and over 40 issues. Looking back on these newsletters as a young Asian American dyke certainly inspires me to think about how to build Asian lesbian coalitions in the present, both through print and otherwise!

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Li-Anne Wright is a Chinese American dyke in Michigan; puts together the Sinister Snapshot every two weeks; and is enthusiastic about crochet, queer print culture, and Asian American queer history, among other things.

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Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!