On the cover of the summer 1987 issue of On Our Backs—a magazine with the subtitle “Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian”—a woman with winged eyeliner and boldly moussed, shorn hair bites the shoulder of another woman, who looks like she’s wearing a dog collar. Both are naked, sultrily smirking ever so slightly. The cover of the summer 1988 issue focuses the viewer’s gaze on a butch Asian woman’s broad, bare back as she leans against a wooden ladder. A fall 1991 cover shows four women in bras and overalls beneath the text “[Editor] Pat Califia on Getting Girls to Give it Up.” The issue’s other big story? “Exploring G-Spot Orgasms.” And the fall 1993 issue features a white woman in plastic wrap fondling the breast of a black woman. “How Gender Bent is the Silver Screen?” reads one headline; “Hallowe-en Treat: Lesbian Sex in Modern Witchcraft” reads another.

It may sound a lot like some contemporary queer-friendly media, but On Our Backs was highly unusual for its time. As one of the first women-run erotica publications in American history, the magazine charted new territory. And though it contained plenty of tongue-in-cheek playfulness and humor, its primary aim was to take lesbian life — and, in particular, lesbian sex — seriously.

During the 1980s, the feminist sex wars were continuing to rage, as radical feminists fought each other over questions of sexual ethics and power. On one side were those who believed that pornography was merely the product of patriarchy, that it justified violence and subjugation and was harmful to women (and men, according to many). On the other were those who thought pornography — depending on the context of its production and consumption — had the unique capacity to further emancipate and empower women by granting them control over their sexuality. In generating representations of sex that lay outside of the less imaginative stock imagery of patriarchy, so-called “pro-sex” feminists sought to do no less than redefine desire.

The 1980s were also the peak of the AIDS crisis in America, as well as (and not coincidentally) the height of the religious right’s influence, and the growing push among conservatives to police sexual behavior more rigorously overlapped with the anti-porn feminist agenda. Though they made for strange bedfellows, the two groups formed a potent political alliance in many instances. As gender scholar Judith Halberstam has written, “instead of the anti-pornography position…developing into a call for sexual education or for the fostering of sexual diversity…it actually fed into moralist fears about perversity and a religious right-wing effort to legislate against certain forms of sexual expression.” Some radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin saw porn as the clearest possible distillation of woman-hatred and thought it should be banned outright.

On Our Backs, summer 1987.

Lesbianism in pornography had hitherto been largely a hetero flight of fancy. Pornographers (a very male-dominated field) conjured and produced images of girl-on-girl love that catered to male desire. On Our Backs was different — very. In 1984, Susie Bright, Nan Kinney, and Debi Sundahl published the first issue of the magazine, which wasn’t terribly well received. For one thing, the name was a riff on (and jab at) Off Our Backs, another feminist publication which started in 1970 and came to hold stringent anti-pornography views in the 1980s. The editors of Off Our Backs warned the editors of On Our Backs not to use the abbreviation OOB, for which they were pursuing a copyright. (They also called the magazine “pseudo-feminist.”) As Josh Sides writes in Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, some feminist bookstores refused to stock On Our Backs, and its editors received “threatening letters.” When Kinney and Sundahl showed clips from their new porn production house at the 1985 Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco, audience members “hissed, threw food at the screen, and came very close to physically assaulting Kinney.”

On Our Backs was seen as both unserious and a real obstacle by anti-porn feminists. Throughout the 1980s, groups like Women Against Violence Against Women and Women Against Violence in Pornography were working not simply to turn public opinion against porn but to censor and, in some cases, ban it. They were also lobbying companies to pull advertising that glorified violence against women. The depictions of bondage, group sex, and rough sex that were common in the pages of On Our Backs offered a stark and graphic reminder that some of their feminist “sisters” saw no problem with such images, and in fact delighted in them. Even many of those who supported efforts to change the way women were objectified in the broader culture fought for their right to explore and represent their own sexuality however they chose.

As Deborah Bright writes in The Passionate Camera: Photography and the Body of Desire, the magazine featured “fantasy images by photographers…of seduction scenes, girl-gang sex, sculpted bodies, pierced labia and nipples, leather and lace, and eager fingers, fists, tongues, and dildos.” As a showcase for queer art and sexuality, it served as a jumping off point for what would become a robust grassroots market in lesbian-produced porn films.

The magazine would go on to find success, particularly as its founders became prominent on the sex-positive scene. Bright wrote an advice column for the magazine under the name Susie Sexpert, reviewed porn movies for Penthouse Forum in the late 1980s, and has gone on to become one of the country’s best known sex writers and educators. By the late 1980s, Sundahl and Kinney’s production company, Fatale Media, was the largest producer of lesbian pornography in the world. In 1990, Sundahl (whose Twitter account identifies her as a “female ejaculation pioneer”) made a popular porn film called Suburban Dykes, which film scholar Heather Butler in the 2004 academic anthology Porn Studies calls an “important stepping-stone.”

Susie Bright (right) was a founding publisher and contributor to the magazine.

On Our Backs was a way to play with newfound sexual freedoms. It also, however, offered much more than porn. The magazine published letters from readers (which offered a snapshot of the complex schism within the women’s movement) and erotic stories, becoming an unprecedentedly large and varied repository for lesbian fiction. In addition, it advertised itself as “the largest collection of sex-oriented business advertising for lesbians ever assembled under one cover.” There were articles about AIDS, reflections on race, and reader contests for erotic photography. And importantly, the magazine connected lesbians internationally as nothing else had before.

Facing financial woes, On Our Backs was sold to a new publisher in 1994, after which it petered out, though a photo book featuring the artists who’d been in the magazine appeared in 1996. But among feminists of many stripes, the legacy of On Our Backs — which challenged gender conventions, broadened sexual horizons, and created a new visual vocabulary for queer women — continues to endure.

Part of the magazine’s appeal, Heather Butler writes, was that it represented a joyful and subversive lesbian sexuality — it portrayed lesbian sex after some of the victories of Second Wave feminism. “The lesbians here grew up and came out under the protective wing of cultural feminism,” she points out. “Eventually, they left that behind and cancelled their subscription to Off Our Backs in exchange for On Our Backs, though they do not engage in any of the ‘deviant’ sexual behavior the magazine condones. Not yet, at least.”