When I was 21 years old and searching for a thesis topic during the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought about the first lesbian photograph I remember seeing. This photo wasn’t for a brave celebrity’s coming out in Them magazine. Nor was it from On Our Back or the cover of a pulp novel, although I won’t lie about enjoying those too. It was the first photograph I remember seeing of just plain old lesbian living—common lesbians without a hidden message behind their image. This photograph was Priscilla and Regina, taken in Brooklyn, New York in 1979 by Joan E. Biren. In the image, two Black women are photographed from the chest up laying down in a field of grass. One woman lays partially on top of the other, her tank-top clad back to the camera. The women lay on top of folded, soft-looking sweaters; the entire image is soft, the first woman’s arm stretching across the chest of the one on the ground, their closed eyes and expressions in peaceful repose. Their lips looked like pieces of a puzzle in waiting. When I saw this picture circulating online as a teenager, I was filled with a desire so complete and innate it scared me.
I thought the photographer must know this want, too. Joan E. Biren (or JEB) was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C. She earned a college degree in political science, and dropped out of a PhD program at Oxford when she became disillusioned with the American government, joining a lesbian separatist commune in the 1970s called the Furies Collective. Biren taught herself to photograph using her Nikkomat film camera and a correspondence course, after she learned in self-criticism sessions with the Furies’ members that her academic voice was a privilege that could alienate potential political allies. To replace her written voice with the voices of others, she began making images of lesbians as “propagandist[s],” capturing positive images of lesbian separatists for the Furies’s magazine. When the Furies disbanded, she continued to make photographs, and published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians in 1979, one of the first photo books published whose cover identified the women inside as lesbians.
When I chose this book to study in college, I still couldn’t imagine the broad scope of what the word ‘lesbian’ could be, could offer me and others like me. JEB wanted people like her to see that possibility, too. She describes the creation of her first photograph—a photo of her and her then-girlfriend Sharon Deevey kissing—as coming out of her desire to just see a photograph of a lesbian for herself! With the uncontrolled access and constant subjection to images we have today, or even our ability to see every day lesbian lives by taking a quick iPhone image or watching a friend’s Instagram story, perhaps the absence of positive images of lesbians is now difficult to imagine. But one key thing that Eye to Eye and photographs like JEB’s continue to offer us is the opportunity to see everyday images of lesbians, images that don’t have to do with selling a commodity or representing a whole. These images also don’t exploit: they’re not made with the goal of making us miss something we don’t have; rather, they might encourage us to seek community among other dykes. I find the images in this book moving because they don’t pretend to be anything but what they are. Even today, these photos offer a way to imagine a life as a lesbian.
A second photograph that appealed to me as a young art historian reading Biren’s book was Rusty, taken in Washington, D.C. in 1979. Rusty is leaned forward across a pool table, lit up from above as she emerges from the dark of a lesbian bar. Her lips are pursed as she concentrates, aiming the pool cue at one of the eight-balls in front of her, veined hands flexed on the table. Her short hair is visibly waxed back in a style that recalls the T-birds in Grease, hair shining under the lamplight. Her masculinity is something I envy as a rather scrawny butch; reading about the Furies Collective, I remember one member’s reflection after the group’s breakup that they had difficulty bridging lesbian communities, particularly lesbians who followed butch/femme dynamics at a time when many political lesbians were adopting a kiki, neither a masc nor femme style. As a teenager I coveted images of butches. To collect them felt forbidden—what would a family member guess about my aspirations if they found this burly stash? Rusty’s is one of the photographs with a direct quote from her: “In a bar, if you’re scared to meet people, all you have to do is get to the pool table. Pool is a poetic game and it’s one of the few games that I play. I play chess and pool. I don’t have time for games because I have to play games all day long. I sell office supplies. And I can’t be Rusty in that store. I have to be Mary Ellen. Pool is a way to relax and calm down.” As a transmasculine dyke from Dallas, Texas, I can relate to having to switch to different names to navigate spaces. I can relate to having to play straight people’s games. And I know the comfort of darkness in a lesbian bar, where poetic games can save you from your shyness. Biren’s photograph conjures that social space we desire in the future, and the visited one we long for in the past.
As many gay and trans teenagers do, I had a difficult time imagining possible futures for myself. I didn’t know I was going to be able to change my body in the way my body had been asking me all my life, and I couldn’t imagine women would return my feelings. One of the more difficult aspects of this for lesbians remains the things straight people have historically denied our relationships.
© JEB (Joan E. Biren) from ‘Eye to Eye, Portraits of Lesbians’, published by Anthology Editions
In the portrait of Darquita and Denyeta, Denyeta is shirtless with several necklaces falling toward her chest, adorned with earrings and a gold bracelet. She wears her hair in a small afro, and she smiles slightly as she leans forward to kiss her daughter, one hand holding a spoonful of cereal. Her daughter, Darquita, wears matching earrings, her hair in tiny braids; she leans forward too, and they are mirror images of each other with their eyes closed. JEB published an accompanying quote with Denyeta on the opposite page. Like the mothers in Biren’s first photograph of lesbian parents, she imagines the bright future ahead for her daughter through teachings from feminist communities. “[…] It’s like having the sun shine on me every morning. She is a child of the world. I want her to listen, learn and experience from her womyn-folks because they have stories to share with her.” Echoing this description of her daughter’s sunny personality, Darquita and Denyeta are lit by the sun shining from a window in their home.
I am not the first young dyke to stumble on JEB’s images, and I won’t be the last. When her first book was published, it traveled to many venues across the United States, including feminist bookstores and small presses, as well as people’s garages and underground gay spaces. At Carol Seajay’s bookstore in San Francisco, Old Wives’ Tales, JEB presented her accompanying slideshow on the history of lesbian photographers, Lesbian Images in Photography 1850-1984 (nicknamed The Dyke Show) to celebrate the release of her book. Seajay wrote in her review that Eye to Eye “was being the most looked-at book in the store,” and writes of Biren’s slideshow that she represented “pictures of lesbians by lesbians for as long as there have been cameras.” As Seajay’s quotation demonstrates, Eye to Eye has meant many things to many people over the years since its first publication; and with Biren’s 2021 reissue of the book with new essays by historians, it is sure to continue to do so. I am grateful every day we are celebrating and preserving queer visual history with the tools our dyke ancestors have kept and passed onto us.
Llewyn Blossfeld is a writer and a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute living in Chicago, Illinois. They work at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, and wrote for the forthcomingFwd: Museums 2025 – Guide To { }.
