Those 70's Lesbians Love Their Nylons

Tip Top magazine billed itself as a "cultural, scientific, and sociological publication produced and distributed as adult educational material aimed at illuminating on-going changes in contemporary patterns of societal behavior" -- but that was just to be allowed to sell & distribute smut. The magazine's tagline, "From the Tip of the Toes to the Top of the Hose," tells a better story of its true nature as a mag for nylon, pantyhose and stockings fetishists.


It's not a teasing peek-a-boo type of men's magazine but an explicit retro publication, with lots of natural (i.e. hairy) pussies shown spread wide open above those stockings, garters, & high heels. Not only does this magazine clearly remove any notions that "old porn was always classier", but I couldn't resist saying that this woman with glasses was no Tina Fey.



Not only do the babes wear hosiery, but they love it so much the lick it -- and of course, that leads to licking and screwing one another.




Tip Top, a Parliament Publication, Volume 10, Number 1 (August, September, October, 1970)' published by Jaybird Enterprises, Inc.

Whoopie! I'm A Lesbian!

From the long line of lesbian erotica for men, this one I call "I Groped A Girl & She Liked It."

High-Five Fridays, The Breast Edition

This week's High-Five Fridays...

1) Artist Lisa Melita's 21 Breast Salute for cancer.

2) The Top 50 Hottest Sci-Fi Girls. (Yes, they have breasts; I know sci-fi worlds can be confusing.)

3) An interview regarding the Ultimate Burlesque anthology, part of Burlesque Against Breast Cancer.

4) CR/LF points out The Joyful Bosom Affair, an art project where women paint with their breasts. I want to know, would you buy my boob-prints? Or would you collectors insist upon the originals? *wink*

5) Gracie becomes breast friends with a Cold Case. (A review -- with clips -- of one of my favorite episodes.)

Be My Cheeky Friend

Every now and then I have to whore... Tip to get in my Top Spot List or pay for an ad -- and everyone will know you're a cheeky little supporter of Silent Porn Star.

Eve Arnold: Master Photographer & Living Legend

Eve Arnold is most famous for her intimate photos of Marilyn Monroe...



But there's so much more to the master photographer's portfolio & talent.

Deanna on Eve Arnold's photographs:

If the mark of a really good novel is that you think of the characters long after the book ends, then photographs of people ought to do the same. Eve Arnold’s photos do that. Even if you think you know the people in the portraits.

And when you don’t know the people in the photographs? You long to…

I agree that the photos of "unknows" are even more amazing -- or is it that I am, like Deanna, intrigued by what I do not know...

In fact, if I have one complaint about Arnold’s works, it’s that I can’t find out enough. I know that photographers believe that a photo is worth a thousand words, but often they do not seem to document the details which I long to know… A perpetual problem for me, I know; but still, why can’t I find out more about Charlotte Stribling aka ‘Fabulous’? Or Girl Holding Head, Insane Asylum, Haiti 1954?

I'd love to find out more about Lesbian Wedding celebration, England 1965.


Then again, Angelica Huston is showing off her panties to her dad seems worthy of an explanation...



Arnold currently has an exhibit at the David Gallery.

I Miss Retro Lesbians

Call me a product of my parent's porno stash (and who isn't?), but I miss the 70's porn. I'm not just saying this for the film quality (vs. video), or the full-length artistic film presentations (and the humor, which I love with all my heart), or even the natural look of men and women with (gasp!) pubic hair, but for the lovely, lingerie wearing, lipstick lesbians.

Like these two, from the Rodox classic gallery (via Sex-Kitten's forum):



Now, even "lesbian" films made for men (and straight women), have harsh looks -- more predatory & slick than soft and beguiling. Today, a faux lesbian flick says "lipstick lesbian" with an all nude babe with dragon-lady fingernails -- which just freak me and my pink parts out. (Even the way they hold their hands to spread labia is completely unnatural in its cautionary approach, almost surgical. :shudder:)

I know it's not particularly pc of me, a straight chick, to complain about lesbian porn -- and I do applaud real lesbian films made for lesbians, which are showing what that audience wants -- but I can't help but miss the old school girlie lipstick lesbians. They were entertaining fantasies for those of us who wanted to dream -- and let me tell you, plenty of women enjoy porn sans men because everything they see they can imagine being done to them. There's no need to service a dude. How relaxing.

And arousing.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a woman who enjoys vintage porn & pinups would feel this way. Not only about the prettiness of the female form, but the tease, including lingerie.

In the 80's, porn made a descent. And not just in terms of video quality and close-ups which (for many of us at least) seem foreign and, I'll say it, yucky for it's lack of mystery & tease (what some would call romance), but for the look and attitudes of the women in it.

In pornos, women stalked for sex. But it wasn't really in the name of "equality", for female viewers could see what was really going on...

She prowled for male and female victims to have her way with -- even her begging for it was a command -- but we women (and sex connoisseurs) know, that she was skipping most of the thrills, the chase and foreplay which gives chills. In short, she was acting out the quickest of male fantasies.

It wasn't purely the fault of porn makers; it was part of the times.

In the 80's the look became either big and predatory &/or cold and distant -- hard muscles, huge helmet hair (or slick 'sharp' hair), suits with shoulder pads to present the female form in the male linebacker triangle -- even the makeup was about looking cold and remote. What's feminine about that?

Sure, we women had to do battle with men in the workplace (and elsewhere), but did we have to look like football players to do it? (Me thinketh this is part of the problem we're still facing today.)

Those who didn't don the professional predator costume wore floral Laura Ashley dresses to match their drapes and tried to move back into the 50's suburbs. They didn't accept, let alone make, porn.

The closest they got to heating up the bedroom was bringing in those matching Laura Ashley sheets fresh from the dryer.

Yeah, most of this is nice, neat, generalizations.

But I don't really care today.

I just miss my lovely lipstick lesbians, with their soft hair, glossy lips, silky lingerie, and tender tease which worked its way to a hardcore frenzy.

BDSM & Fetish Publication History

Gwen's Leather/BDSM/Fetish History Scrapbook has lots of information of interest to collectors. Look by years for landmark publications, issues & publishers, as well as clubs, persons and events -- including censorship actions.

Note: There are more female covers/images at the site, but few larger than thumbnails; hence the male & gay focused erotic works here.

Risque Valentines

Participating in Mute Monday, the Valentine's Edition...



Vintage risque Valentine via ebay.


Risque Black American Valentine via eBay.




Altered arts cards by Scarlett's Society of Quirky at Etsy.



Cupid Dr. Dan postcard (1908 By Walter Wellman No. 1080) at eBay.

Allan Grynnerup

Via Libida's gallery:

Allan Grynnerup lives in Denmark where he has been an actor since 1981. It wasn’t until 1990 that he seriously began his interest in photography, largely to learn something about himself and his own sexuality.

“I am still fascinated about how many ways you can define motive in a photo,” he says. “When doing a sexy photo shoot, I always try to find the borderline between the erotic and the pornographic. It might be something as subtle as a slight difference in light, camera angle or choice of lens.

“Erotic expression is of course always difficult to capture. It depends not only on the person perceiving the photo but also on the model who is sending the message to the viewer. It’s interesting to me, the varied feedback I get on the same photos -- a range from joy to indignation. It really does come down to what each person brings to a photo in terms of attitude, experience and history. Naturally, the biggest challenge is to communicate and share the experience with as many people as possible.”

More of Grynnerup's erotic works here.

Nude Tarot

More images from the deck of tarot cards I mentioned here.



As mentioned, the deck offers two versions of The Lovers cards for sexual preference options.




The Daughter of the Moon Tarot, originally called A Matriarchal Tarot, is built on Dianic Wiccan principals and features many female goddesses -- and lots of nudity. Shown below are Kali, Pele, Mawu, Calafia, & Malama; examples of many cultures, colors and physical types.







The round card shape is also considered to be more female in symbolism. Those familiar with tarot cards will note the uniqueness presented with round cards -- depending upon your grace in reading them, round cards are that much more challenging or fluid to read.


The book gives brief legends for each female archetype, goddess, and image used; and yes, because I'm one of those kind of womyn, my copy of the book is autographed by author Ffiona Morgan at the National Women's Music Festival in '93 (in Indiana that year).

"A Chorus Line Of Mocking Queens"

"We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair...
We wear our dungarees
Avove our nelly knees!"

Chant sung "Rockette style" by a "chorus line of mocking queens." Duberman, Stonewall, p. 200.

Via Columbia University Library's online exhibition, Stonewall and Beyond: Lesbian and Gay Culture.

Elsie de Wolfe

Most folks think "Lesbian" and "decorator" when they hear the name Elsie de Wolfe, but she was also an avid promoter of cancer-sticks -- and not just with ads like this Lucky Stikes ad (in the Delineator, February 1929) either.



When Elsie said, "I recommend a Lucky in place of a sweet - when your figure must be considered," she meant it. She wrote a book on it too: Elsie De Wolfe's Recipes for Successful Dining (1934).

Of course, one must remember that smoking was not just fashionable; such promotion was well compensated.

For more on Elsie, see Band of Thebes birthday tribute where they say, "Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings."

Feminizing The Female Through Enema

I'm not into enemas ("not that there's anything wrong with that"), but what strikes me the most about this particular artwork is the soft, intimate nature of the women -- right down to the lingerie -- which is in stark contrast to an action which seems rather harsh & strong in-and-of-itself. Very iron hand in the velvet glove, and so atypical of BDSM art where sharp, angled Femdoms wear shiny black as they wield hard objects in bleak dungeons.

Found in Montorgueil and other Erotic Cartoons set at Flickr, I don't believe this is the work of Bernard Montorgueil because he had his females dominate men -- and his works tend to have more of that crisp quality.

You can find lots more of these drawings via manuel1960ar Flickr set.

More Leda

More women and swans, ala Leda...





I find the last one, with two women, really interesting... It could just be my imagination, but is the message here that lesbian love ends or controls the male rape?

1970 Raquel Welch Interview

Just after the premier of Myra Breckinridge, Raquel Welch was on the Dick Cavett Show with Janis Joplin:

"Come on, man. I doubt if you'd recognize a hippie. I'm a capitalist, baby. I work for my living, not suck off somebody else."

One of my favorite late night television watching is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sometimes, the Fox Movie Channel will play it over and over again and I can watch the last half-hour, then the whole thing, and fall asleep some time during the third viewing. Ahhhh. Heaven.



You can see why it would be so addicting, yes?

Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay, has this to say about the film:

Remembered after 10 years, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" seemsmore and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics tookover the asylum. At the time Russ Meyer and I were working on "BVD" I didn't really understand how unusual the project was. But in hindsight I can recognize that the conditions of its making were almost miraculous. An independent X-rated filmmaker and an inexperienced screenwriter were brought into a major studio and given carte blanche to turn out a satire of one of the studio's own hits. And "BVC" was made at a time when the studio's own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble that none of the studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even cognizance) from the Front Office.

We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made. Whatever its faults or virtues, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is an original -- a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters and success formulas, heavily overlaid with such shocking violence that some critics didn't know whether the movie "knew" it was a comedy.

A cult favorite, yes. It combines sex, drugs, 'rock music,' humor, violence, sex and also explores some pretty nifty social issues. Like should you trust the lesbian who wants you to give you advice on keeping or aborting your baby?



Did I mention it has sex?



Since I'm a huge fan of the flick, you know I'm diggin' these tarot cards by Howard Hallis.




I just wish they were larger and made into PDFs or something I could print. Better yet, sell me a nice glossy set in a box (with your signature, of course!).






How am I supposed to live my life -- understand it -- without these cards?!

To paraphrase the movie dialog, "Howard, you've made me a whore -- and I dig it, you little freak!"

Homosexuality Closeted In Historical Museum Exhibit

John Addington Symonds opened his landmark 1883 book A Problem in Greek Ethics by warning his fellow Victorians, "To ignore paiderastia is to neglect one of the features by which Greek civilisation was most sharply distinguished."

Now, 124 years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is still guilty of that neglect. Their astonishing new Greek and Roman Galleries reopened last Friday, and after four visits we’re left astonished that no where do they mention homosexuality. Although the cases are full of drawings depicting males together, often nude or half-clad, drinking wine side by side in bed, oiling each other up at the gym, the display cards never acknowledge the widespread same-sex relationships that other museums tell their visitors were considered "honorable." Whenever Carlos Picon and his fellow curators have an opportunity with this topic to illuminate and educate, they look away and abandon their visitors to silence. In their descriptions of thousands of images on ancient pottery, they have whitewashed homosexuality out of history.

From Erasing History at the Met at Band of Thebes (which is authored by Stephen Bottum and is most worthy of a nod all on its own -- and so has been added to the sidebar).

Amazing that Zeus cannot be shown with Ganymede, but Zeus as a swan can be in bestial (sexual) repose with Leda. And how can Sappho be 'de-sexed' as Bottum states? Sure, she had many human interactions which were not sexual, but to remove the aspect of sexuality for which we have the term Sapphic Love is rather insane.

Ah, but that's the point -- homophobia is insane.

Photo: From the Gay City News reprint of 's article.

Antique Sapphic Vase

I so would have
bid on this at the auction -- she's lucky I wasn't there!

Look at all the lovely ladies! I too wouldn't fault the chips and paint flakes on this old chalk piece.

The Paintings of Alice B. Sheldon

After reading this review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, I ordered the book -- and I just finished it. An amazing book, an amazing life.

Curious about her earlier years, I've been searching Google and today I bring you this extraordinary woman's art.

Few of Alli's works exist on the web. These I found at the biographer, Julie Phillips' site. (One imagines that since I'm having difficulty locating Tiptree works at the thrift stores -- where I am normally quite lucky with old paperbacks -- that the art must be under lock and key. And for good reason.


In 1939, Alice (then Alice Davey) submitted a nude self-portrait to an exhibition of American painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This photo is from the show's catalog.

This next one I love the most, and not just for the nude woman either ;)


I love the lines, the darkness of it all. There's something tortured, yet warm about it. According to Phillips this watercolor is part of a series in which one of the others depicts soldiers marching beneath a monstrous caricature of Hitler.

I continue to search for and read more Tiptree Jr, et all. Of course, I shall post where I've consumed more ;)

A Day Late, But Not A Dollar Short (Thank God!)

I just got back from a day at an out of town auction and I had to post this right away!

I know it's a day after my anti-suffrage post, but damn if I can help the luck of the find -- and I think I am darn lucky to find this:

I Hate To See A Woman Do A Man's Work

Another thrust at male fears -- the dreaded lesbian! If she votes, she'll become one!

Even the elderly woman in more Victorian garb will turn lezzie if women get that right to vote.

No mark for maker, just 125 on the right side near the bottom (click to see a larger image and you should see it). No date, but is there really a question as to the time period? lol

At an estate sale, for only a dollar!

GBLT Pulps

The University of Saskatchewan Library celebrates GBLT pulp novels this month. Visit the site, if you can't make the trip, and see what their collection holds.

Pulp Novels

Pulp novels are quite popular -- so much so that collectors find slim pickings. And it's only more likely to be difficult to find the books themselves. However, it seems that there are plenty of folks writing about these books.

If you are educated about these books, authors are looking for information on lesbian erotica of the 1920s-1940s. And The Earl Kemp makes a request for suggestions of cult type magazines.

If you are a collector who buys more for the art, you may wish to see this review of Illustration Magazine.