JILL POSENER, THE ON OUR BACKS YEARS

“When I first came to San Francisco in the late 80’s, I was running away from a Britain that I could no longer tolerate. Thatcher was Prime Minister and intolerance was pervasive. I couldn’t find a place to feel comfortable. The women’s community in London was becoming divided along what seemed intractable fault lines within the Women’s Movement.

My sense of individual liberty clashed with an increasingly proscriptive radical feminist community, and it culminated with meetings where - literally - if you considered yourself ‘pro-sex’ you sat on one side of the room while the stares of hostility bore into you from the other side of the aisle. When I was offered a short-term gig stage managing a theater tour on the West Coast in 1986, I jumped at it.

When I arrived in San Francisco I met the women who were to become my refuge in my adopted land, when I returned in 1988.

Susie Bright and Honey Lee Cottrell were at the center of a vibrant sex-positive lesbian cultural hub - strip shows at the Baybrick Inn, lesbian-produced porn, and the magazine On Our Backs. When Susie invited me to be their first official photo editor, I had the opportunity to work with photographers who were smashing stereotypes and creating imagery which both shocked and inspired.

For me, the images I took during those three years were not about self-exploration or the desire to create erotica, but a reflection of a deep streak of rebellion that informs everything I have ever done. That could be why, when I left OOB, I moved on to something else, new barriers or social attitudes to confront.

Susie and I co-edited the groundbreaking book NOTHING BUT THE GIRL, in 1996, which celebrated the work we nurtured and published in On Our Backs. It won the LAMBDA Book Award and the Firecracker Award for best art book that year.” - Jill Posener