With a fabulous group of colleagues, I am presenting at the NWSA conference today in Minneapolis, MN on the black lesbian newsletter, Onyx. My comments are below. If you are interested in exploring further, you can read the full archives of Onyx here: https://archive.org/details/glbthistoricalsociety?and%5B%5D=creator%3A%22onyx%22&sort=date

A formatted copy of the presentation is below.

“We are ONYX…an elegant crystal, a treasure on earth, a thing to be desired:” Onyx and the Emergence of a National Black Lesbian NetworkBy Julie R. EnszerIn the fifth issue of Black Lesbian Newsletter dated November 1982, Joyce Penalver describes “Coming Out in ’61” going to a Lesbian club in Harlem that “was named for, and run by, a Black lesbian named Tubby.” There she met friends “entered into lover relationships (one at a time, that is, monogamy was the ‘norm’ in 1961) and developed close ties with people I could depend on.” Penalver concludes, “it was wonderful being out in 1961.” In the same issue Paula Ross writes about “Black Lesbian Theatre” and a group of nine black lesbians interested in exploring how to organize a theatre company. Ross notes, “We all, in one way or another, expressed dissatisfaction with the Bay Area’s women’s community, for all its talk of political consciousness and political progressiveness: It’s still a lonely, isolated world if you’re Black.”In the sixth issue of Black Lesbian Newsletter, Marlene Bonner, one of the editors, wrote about an “Encounter at Ollie’s,” a lesbian bar in Oakland, California that operated from 1980 until 1986. On November 10, 1982 six black women were asked for IDs to enter the bar while two white women were not. The African American women protested and the bouncer at Ollie’s called the police. Bonner concludes the detailed account with these notes: “This same type of harassment has happened many times before to women of color at Ollie’s, and it has never been documented.” She notes that the bouncer, the bartender, and the management of the bar “who did not deem the situation important enough to come and mediate” are all racist as well as the other bar clientele “who were not concerned about the harassment of six black women in their midst.” Six demands of Ollie’s also accompany the account.These three articles from the early issues of the Black Lesbian Newsletter provide a window into the content of the Newsletter which became, in the first issue of 1983, Onyx. The editors explained the name as “a beautifully layered and multicolored precious stone…one of the oldest and darkest gems found in the world [and] an elegant crystal, a treasure on earth, a thing to be desired.” As editors they pledged with the newsletter “to maintain the strength of the stone, the beauty of the gem, and the determination of this crystal.” (February 1983, vol 2, issue 1, p 2.).Onyx is an important component of Black lesbian-feminist print culture from the early 1980s. The period between 1978 and 1983 is a vibrant one for black lesbian thought, and I am interested in mapping it more robustly. Notable recent scholarship engages black lesbian print culture, particularly iconic texts. The Feminist Studies forty year retrospective issue on This Bridge Called My Back as well as work by by Proctor and Bliss in Feminist Formations that explores their encounters with Conditions: Five and Home Girls, work by Adair and Nakamura tracing the publishing history of This Bridge and how different modes of distribution, particularly print and electronic, implicate uncompensated labor, LeRud’s exploration of self-revision and replication of Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” as well as the anthology in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Mallette on Beverly Smith’s piece in Conditions: Five “The Wedding” published in WSQ demonstrates the vitality of a handful of publications now at forty and fifty year milestones. My interest is in what created the conditions for books like This Bridge, Home Girls, and Conditions: Five to become bestsellers with enduring cultural power in feminist circles. As always, forgotten and overlooked print culture objects and projects intrigue me. Chapbooks like Top Ranking and the periodical Onyx have not received the same scholarly attention, but I think they tilled the ground for these important anthologies. In this short presentation, I am going to describe the Onyx archive. Then I sketch important contributions Onyx made to broader activist formations. Finally, I think more broadly about the five years from 1978 until 1983 and gesture to other elements of lesbian of color print culture to invite more people to investigate it.The GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco digitized sixteen issues of Onyx published between August 1982 and the final issue October/November of 1984. There was a seventeenth issue, the first issue, published in June 1982; it is not included in the digital archive, and I have not seen a copy. A handful of African American women in the San Francisco Bay Area published Onyx for just over two years before it folded. To invoke the women who worked on Onyx, I read the names of women listed in the staff box: A. C. Barber, Marlene Bonner, Vivienne Walker-Crawford, Anita Countee, Lindsay Elam, Joyce Penalver, Sarita Johnson, Janet Wallace, Deborah Steele, Gwen Bishop, Carole Cole, Anne Sandifer, Midgett, Nubian Woman, K.D.F. Reynolds, Pandora Carpenter, Pam King, Lynn Scott, Gerri Ewart, Paula Ross, Maryann Turner, Camille Barber, Roz Darensbourg, Monifa Ajanaku, Marge Green, and Janet Wallace. Onyx first published with the name “Black Lesbian Newsletter,” and in fact it is a community newsletter for Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the issues featured a black and white drawing on the cover by Sarita Johnson as well as interior artwork. Issues generally include a calendar, events listings, and classified advertisements. They also include a masthead, submissions calls, and distribution outlets. In many ways Onyx is an organizational newsletter without an organization, though the women involved in published it forged a relationship with the San Francisco Women’s Center that allowed them to receive tax-deductible donations to support the work.Beyond the items that appear in each issue, Onyx mixes articles and announcements of interest to readers. Publicizing conferences of interest to African-American women and reports from conferences are important in the pages of Onyx. Conference reports as a genre appear in a number of feminist and lesbian magazines, newsletters, and newspapers (famously I think of conference reports in off our backs). They served a crucial activist function: helping communities know about what happened at conferences and providing critical reflection and follow up for planning future gatherings. The contemplative time of conference reports, often they appeared two weeks to two or three months after the conference and were still relevant for six months to a year to the communities of concern, feels significant today when conference reports appear on Twitter or other social media and are gone within twenty-four hours. In addition to conference material, Onyx featured other articles, including notably two reprinted articles by Cheryl Clarke, a call by Lenn Keller for unity, and a wonderful piece “Spoken from the Heart” on lesbian separatism which documents voices of Black women engaged in separatism as a politic, something that is generally overlooked in scholarly conversations. Onyx also contains dialogues with people responding to a single question, a format often found in Lesbian Connection. And of course there is poetry, one currency of lesbian-feminism.Compared to other lesbian periodicals, the Onyx archive is modest in size, but it is rich as a document of black lesbian experience and it highlights key elements of black lesbian thought in the influential San Francisco Bay Area. In my reading of the archive, I identify five revolutionary assertions made by the creators of Onyx. These assertions are: • We (black lesbians) need to meet together in our own spaces to know one another• We (black lesbians) need to communicate with one another• We (black lesbians) need to build bridges with other allies• We (black lesbians) need to articulate and extend our identities and connections with one another in significant ways• We (black lesbians) need to support one another and lift up each other’s work.Onyx supports the leadership of local lesbians of color regularly in its pages including politician Pat Norman, musician Linda Tillery, the musical duo Casselbury-Dupree, and local author Alice Walker. Onyx’s coverage of The Color Purple is extensive. Onyx made things happen; it animated activist networks, built writer’s profiles and galvanized activism.Each issue of Onyx emphasizes a communal nature of its creation, publication, and distribution. This communal approach is different from publishing projects today which emphasize personality and singular voices (think of substack and other online newsletters). The collectivity of Onyx is crucial to its work.During the period when Onyx published, African-American lesbians were highly networked nationally and in local communities. Onyx is neither unusual nor isolated. It joined a vibrant network of local, regional, and national newsletters and magazines being published by lesbians, and a cadre of periodicals organized by black lesbians. This years of Onyx publishing corresponds with the emergence of the racial formation “women of color.” African American lesbians are deeply invested in that work. Significantly, Onyx joined Azalea, a more literary periodical based in New York City but with national attentions and distribution. Onyx overlaps with BLK, a periodical of black lesbians and gay men connected with the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum. On the pages of Onyx an emergent national network of black lesbians and gay men emerges networking and organizing for action. Multiple other Black lesbian periodicals publish after Onyx. Ache, another San Francisco bay area publication founded by Pippa Fleming and Lisbet Tellefsen, situates itself as an heir to Onyx. Other lesbian of color periodicals include Women in the Life from Washington, DC, Kick Magazine, a black gay and lesbian journal published in Detroit, Michigan, and Blacklines, a periodical published by Tracy Baim in Chicago.As I page through the work of Onyx, I continued to mull the question, Is there something special for lesbian-feminism, particularly black lesbian-feminism, about the years between 1978 and 1983? This period marks a specific shift economically and culturally in the United States with a much more regressive approach to race and the social safety net, a description that also fits our contemporary moment. What emerges from this period is a powerful critique of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and other systems of oppression articulated by black lesbians. The collective voice of Onyx, its insistence on creating space, lifting up voices, and supporting one another provides a model for how we might live and work today. onyx-presentationDownload