About Quim Magazine

Quim Magazine

Quim Magazine, published as Quim with the strapline for dykes of all sexual persuasions, was a British sex-positive lesbian magazine published in London from 1989. Edited by Sophie Moorcock and Lulu Belliveau, it appeared irregularly between 1989 and 1994, as funding and content allowed, with a further final issue in 2001: six editions in total. Its editorial stance was anti-censorship and pro-sex, and most of its content was submitted by volunteer contributors, covering fantasies, orgasm, masturbation, safe sex, sex toys and sadomasochism through articles, creative writing, art and photography.

Quim occupied a distinctive place in British lesbian publishing. It arrived during the feminist sex wars, the period of sharp argument within feminism about pornography, censorship and sexual practice, and it took an unambiguous side. Against anti-pornography feminism, Quim asserted that lesbians could make, publish and enjoy explicit material about their own desires. Against a commercial gay press oriented mainly towards men, it created a lesbian space in print. Small in output, it has had a long afterlife in academic study and is held by Glasgow Women's Library.

Editors and the On Our Backs connection

Quim was edited by Sophie Moorcock and Lulu Belliveau. Belliveau had previously been photo editor at On Our Backs, the American magazine widely described as the first magazine of women's erotica, produced by women in San Francisco. That connection gave Quim a direct line to the pioneering experiment in lesbian-produced erotica in the United States. The British magazine adapted the model to a different legal, funding and community environment: no comparable commercial base, a smaller scene concentrated in London, and a publishing operation dependent on volunteers and intermittent money.

The influence of On Our Backs is visible in Quim's first issue, which included an interview with Susie Bright, the editor of On Our Backs and one of the most prominent voices of sex-positive feminism. Opening a new British magazine with that interview was a declaration of lineage. Quim presented itself not as an isolated provocation but as the British counterpart of an existing transatlantic argument: that explicit sexual representation by lesbians, for lesbians, was a legitimate feminist practice, and that a magazine was the place to demonstrate it.

Influences: Shocking Pink and film

Two further influences are recorded for Quim. The first was Shocking Pink, the young women's zine produced in London between 1979 and 1992, whose do-it-yourself production, irreverent tone and willingness to address young women's sexuality outside adult editorial control formed part of the culture from which Quim emerged. The second was Sheila McLaughlin's 1987 film She Must Be Seeing Things, a work centrally concerned with lesbian desire, fantasy and the politics of looking, themes that Quim pursued in print.

Those influences help explain Quim's form. From the zine tradition it took voluntarism, irregular production and openness to first-time contributors. From sex-positive film and the On Our Backs example it took confidence that fantasy, including fantasy involving power and role-play, could be discussed and depicted without apology. The magazine that resulted was neither a commercial erotic title nor a conventional feminist journal, but a hybrid that its editors and contributors shaped issue by issue.

Irregular publication, 1989 to 2001

Quim's first issue appeared in 1989. Publication was irregular throughout its life, depending on when funding and content were available, and the main run continued to 1994. A further, sixth and final edition appeared in 2001, seven years after the fifth. Reference listings summarise the run as London, 1989 to 1995, plus one issue in 2001, a slight difference in the dating of the mid-1990s boundary that reflects the difficulty of dating irregular, volunteer-produced titles precisely. The essential record is agreed: six editions across a span of twelve years, most of them concentrated between 1989 and the mid-1990s.

Irregularity was a constraint, but it also shaped the magazine's character. Each issue of Quim had to be argued and fundraised into existence; none was produced to fill a schedule. Issues therefore tended to have strong identities of their own, most clearly in the themed fifth and sixth editions. For a volunteer title in a hostile funding environment, six substantial editions, including one produced after a long silence to document a specific campaign, represent persistence rather than failure. The comparison is not with commercial monthlies but with the many community titles of the period that managed a single issue.

Content and the volunteer model

Quim's editorial stance was anti-censorship and pro-sex, with little censorship of submitted content, most of which came from volunteer contributors. Its pages mixed articles, creative writing, art and photography on subjects including fantasies, orgasm, masturbation, safe sex, sex toys and sadomasochism. The inclusion of safe sex was practical as well as editorial: in the years of the HIV and AIDS crisis, explicit lesbian media that discussed safety within, rather than instead of, sexual pleasure performed a health-education function that official sources handled poorly for lesbian audiences.

The fiction published in Quim included work by Pat Califia, the prominent American writer on sexuality, alongside Jane Solanas, Jo Fisk and Leonora Rogers Wright. Its photography included work by Della Grace and Lola Flash, photographers with established reputations in queer visual culture. Those names gave the magazine weight beyond its circulation, while the open submission model kept it rooted in its own community. In 1991 the magazine circulated Quim Notebooks in gay and lesbian bars and bookshops to gather stories and ideas for submission, a pre-internet method of crowdsourcing content from the physical spaces of lesbian social life.

Issue five: Black Dykes Speak Out

The fifth issue of Quim, titled Black Dykes Speak Out, centred on the experiences of Black lesbians. In a magazine already defined by giving space to voices excluded from mainstream publishing, the decision to devote an edition to Black contributors addressed a further exclusion, within lesbian and feminist media themselves, where Black women's experiences were frequently marginal. The issue is one of the most cited elements of Quim's history in later research, including thesis work at Manchester Metropolitan University on Black British lesbian culture and representation.

The edition's significance lies partly in its mere existence as a printed record. Black lesbian life in Britain in the early 1990s is documented in few publications, and fewer still were produced by and for the community itself. By making Black Dykes Speak Out a numbered issue of an existing magazine, rather than a one-off pamphlet, Quim placed that testimony within a continuing publication that libraries and archives would later hold. Glasgow Women's Library's holdings of Quim preserve that record for researchers today.

The final issue and Bird in Bush Road

The sixth and final edition of Quim, published in 2001, focused on the eviction of a lesbian house and hub for direct action at Bird in Bush Road in London. The subject marked a shift from the magazine's earlier concentration on sexuality to an act of community documentation: recording the loss of a physical space that had served as home and organising base. A magazine founded to publish desire ended by publishing a piece of lesbian London's political geography, preserving the memory of a place that would otherwise survive mainly in participants' recollection.

The long gap before that final issue suggests it was produced because the subject demanded it, not because publication had become routine again. In that sense the 2001 edition completes Quim's story coherently. The magazine had always treated print as a tool for a community, to be used when there was something that needed a record, whether that was an interview with Susie Bright in 1989, Black lesbian testimony in its fifth issue, or an eviction in 2001.

Quim and the feminist sex wars

Quim is discussed in academic work on the feminist sex wars, the debates of the 1980s and 1990s in which feminists argued over pornography, censorship, sadomasochism and the meaning of sexual freedom. On one side, anti-pornography campaigners sought legal restriction of explicit material and regarded practices such as sadomasochism as incompatible with feminism. On the other, sex-positive feminists argued that censorship endangered sexual minorities most, and that women's own explicit expression was a form of agency. Quim was an artefact of the second position, produced in Britain at the height of the argument, and a 2026 study in a SAGE journal is among the recent academic treatments to examine it alongside its contemporary Suck in the history of radical sex publishing.

For scholars, Quim's value is that it embodies a position in contributors' own words, images and fiction, rather than in polemic about them. The magazine's pages show what sex-positive lesbian culture in London actually published: its humour, its erotica, its safe-sex information, its disagreements and its community notices. That primary-source quality explains why a six-issue magazine continues to be cited in theses and journal articles decades after its final edition.

Archive and legacy

Quim is archived at Glasgow Women's Library, one of the principal collections for British lesbian and feminist print culture, which ensures that complete issues remain available to researchers. Its place in the standard list of lesbian periodicals is recorded alongside the wider ecology of British titles from Arena Three onwards, where it stands as the principal British example of the sex-positive lesbian magazine.

Within WorldNM's directory, Quim documents a strand of British magazine history that commercial publishing histories omit: volunteer-produced, irregular, explicit and community-funded, yet connected to named editors, photographers and writers of international standing, and to debates that shaped feminist and queer culture. Six editions were enough. Quim demonstrated that a lesbian magazine could be pro-sex and anti-censorship on its own terms, documented Black lesbian experience in a dedicated issue, and left an archive that scholarship still uses. Few larger magazines achieve as clear a historical function.