all images courtesy of the author

Two months ago, we lost Deborah Sundahl — a fierce, compassionate, and prolific queer elder. Despite having revolutionized lesbian culture in the 1980s, paving the way for contemporary queer sexuality and the many ways we express and enjoy it now (including through community spaces like Autostraddle), few of us know Debi’s name.

In 1984, Debi did what was, at the time, unthinkable. Together with her then-partner Nan Kinney and a group of like-minded dykes, she put on a strip show at a San Francisco lesbian bar and used the profits to launch one of the first lesbian sex magazines, On Our Backs. A year later, she and her collaborators put out one of the first hardcore lesbian sex videos, Private Pleasure/Shadows, made by lesbians, featuring real-life lesbian lovers, and intended for a lesbian audience.

It was the first time in history that lesbians created commercial sex media for themselves, and it marked a crucial turning point in both the evolution of feminism and the adult film industry. It also had a global ripple effect, encouraging women in communities across North America, Europe, and even Australia to not just explore their own sexual desires but launch their own commercial sex projects, resulting in a small but tenacious lesbian sex industry that included magazines, hardcore videos, erotic audio cassette tapes, personal ads and hotlines, live strip and sex shows, and more.

Debi’s projects — and all those that followed — were primarily an offering to the lesbian community she loved, an attempt to provide it with sexual entertainment and affirmation. But the projects were also an important political statement. Since the 1970s, the lesbian community had been dominated by conservative feminist politics that vilified any sexual practice seeming to mimic heterosexual power dynamics, including butch/femme gender expressions and relationships, the use of dildos or other sex toys, and — especially — BDSM. Many women involved in the women’s movement attempted to discipline their desires, making them conform to “politically correct” feminist sexual politics. But desires are unruly and rarely submit to our attempts to control them. As a result, many lesbians — including Debi — developed intense sexual shame, unable to feel or not feel the things they’d been told they should.

But at the height of the 1980s feminist sex wars, when antipornography feminists were picketing academic conferences on sexuality and outing leatherdykes to their employers, when butch and femme lesbians were being shunned by their communities, and when all queer people were being targeted by Evangelical Christians for eroding the moral fabric of American society — Debi dared to make pornography.

First, she made a sex magazine that featured a butch dyke centerfold. She had ads for sex toy stores and strip theaters, and she featured erotic fiction about power exchange, fetishes, and intergenerational fantasies. Then, she made a video that featured two dykes fucking in a penthouse and a dungeon, the butch bottom fisting her femme top in both scenes. For the next ten years, she continued to push the boundaries of lesbian sexual representation, showing queers of all gender expressions having every kind of sex imaginable: sweet, nasty, tender, tough, scary, nurturing, submissive, dominating, mutual. No one had ever seen lesbian sex represented like this before.

Debi didn’t make history just once. She made it over and over again — not because she sought a legacy but because she dedicated her life to serving her community’s unmet needs. She was relentlessly curious about how we experience gender, where our desires come from, and how we come to express those desires.

She was also acutely aware of the many systems of control and violence that both inform and regulate our sexuality, and she believed — because she had experienced it herself — that shedding sexual shame and fully embracing one’s sexuality was a form of resistance and a step toward liberation for both the individual and the broader community.

Debi was born in 1954 and raised in Minnesota, where she married at 18 and had a son with the husband she later divorced. In the early 1980s, she enrolled in the University of Minnesota, where she was a double major in History and Women’s Studies. She was heavily involved in the local women’s movement, working as an advocate for a shelter from domestic violence and organizing Take Back the Night marches with the local chapter of Women Against Violence Against Women.

Through her work in the women’s movement, she met her longtime partner Nan Kinney, with whom she went on to found On Our Backs and Fatale Video. In 1982, when they both became disillusioned with the direction in which the women’s movement was headed, they moved to San Francisco seeking a more sexually liberal community in which they could explore their desires and live freely. Shortly after arriving, Debi answered an ad in the paper soliciting dancers for the legendary Lusty Lady peep show theater, where she performed for years before moving to the equally legendary Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre. She was a celebrated performer at both venues.

In her journals, housed in the Cornell University archives, Debi describes this period as one of sexual discovery, during which she shed the values of both her working-class, Catholic upbringing and her earlier radical feminist political identity. Finding and then exploring her sexual desire for women opened up a door for her, making her curious not just about her own sexuality but human sexuality as a whole. Her sex work allowed her to not only explore and express herself as a sexual being but witness how others did the same in a space that actively welcomed that journey and discovery.

What Debi learned from these experiences was that sex work was not, as antipornography feminists had framed it, inherently degrading. With good labor conditions and fair pay, it could be fun, fulfilling, and educational. She also learned there was a significant disparity in who provided sexual entertainment and who consumed it. Reflecting on her time at the O’Farrell Theatre, she noted that over half of the dancers were lesbian but the audience was almost entirely men. Shortly thereafter, she poached lesbian dancers from both the Lusty Lady and the O’Farrell Theatre for the lesbian strip shows that funded her lesbian sex magazines and videos.

Debi Sundahl

Debi’s time as publisher of On Our Backs and co-owner of Fatale Video was a complex period in her life, one marked by significant achievement, creative expression, and close connection with her collaborators. It was also marked by struggle and strife. She directed and performed in multiple videos, photographed and modeled in multiple magazine spreads, and authored dozens of articles and interviews, but she was also suffocated by the day-to-day difficulties of keeping afloat a business endeavor that had no outside support. She developed close personal and creative partnerships with some of the greatest queer artists of her time, but many of those relationships grew strained or fell apart as a result of differences in personal, creative, or business interests.

By 1996, Debi had relinquished her stake in both On Our Backs and Fatale Video, but she continued her work as a champion of sexual self-expression by becoming an educator, teaching workshops on vaginal ejaculation around the world up until her passing. Recognizing a gap in scientific research on the clitorial structure and the mechanisms of vaginal ejaculation, Debi sought to provide others with both the knowledge and skills to fully access their entire sexual capacity. Her work on this subject is still the most comprehensive to date.

Debi made history because she looked for the things that didn’t exist, either because no one had imagined them yet or they didn’t have the courage to make them. She looked for those things, she found them, and then she found comrades as passionate — and as punk — as she was. Together, they scraped together the necessary resources and threw themselves entirely into projects meant to help us all be a little bit freer.

And they succeeded in their efforts. Because of Debi and her collaborators, we have the queer dating service Lex, which was explicitly modeled off On Our Backs’ personal ads. We also have a more robust, diverse queer pornographic market than has ever existed before, both because of the groundwork laid by lesbian porn pioneers like Debi Sundahl and changing technologies that have made production and distribution cheaper and, therefore, more accessible to marginalized people.

Pink & White Productions has been at the forefront of this change, but they have also been stewards of this history — Debi’s history. Until a couple years ago, there was no way to watch Debi’s films, but in the past few years, Pink & White (owned by queer porn producer Shine Louise Houston) has worked to collect, digitize, and then offer Fatale Video’s masters through their streaming service PinkLabel.tv so that they can find a new audience. When I asked Shine why she felt it was important to preserve this history, she said:

These videos are queer and feminist before there was queer and feminist porn. Fatale, a lesbian run company, was making successful commercial work by lesbian directors in a time where that was incredibly rare and that needs to be remembered… I’m here because she was there.

Debi not only pioneered queer and feminist adult filmmaking itself. She also expanded queer representation. Jiz Lee, one of the most prolific and respected queer adult film performers today, credits their own career in part to Debi’s work: “Were it not for Debi’s work, I might not have thought that my gender expression or sexuality had a place in porn.”

Debi Sundahl

While Debi’s film work can be streamed on PinkLabel.tv, it’s harder to read her writings. Most of her work — which included everything from erotic fiction to political analysis to cultural reporting — was featured in On Our Backs, which has yet to be digitized and made available online. Only a few archives in the U.S. have copies of On Our Backs, and as far as I know, only two have the complete run of issues that Debi published. In my last communication with her, Debi asked me if I thought that anyone would be interested in her publishing a regular newsletter, but sadly, she never did.

Debi lived long enough to see the fruits of her labor. She watched the lesbian pornography market she’d dedicated so much of her life to grow and evolve as new technologies and new communities followed in her footsteps. She also lived to see the sex positive queer culture she worked so hard to cultivate absolutely bloom in the decades following her work. But there is so much more recognition owed to her, so much more celebration that she deserves. Hopefully her passing marks the beginning of this.

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