THE LADDER Magazine (1956-'72) and MEAKER aka ALDRICH - 1929 - Gay Lesbian Bi Trans News

The Ladder, a publication of the nation's first lesbian-rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), went through a series of growing pains; first as a mimeographed house organ, later transmorphing into a slick political and literary magazine that included lesbian biographies, history, and criticism. The first editor was DOB co-founder Phyllis Lyon, activist Barbara Gittings also did a stint, and Barbara Grier (aka Gene Damon) was the last. At its best The Ladder included featured pieces by novelists Jane Rule and Alma Routsong, sci-fi writer Marion Zimmer Bradley, and reviews by Jeannette Howard Foster and Valerie Taylor. Cover art varied from drawings by Jane Hogan to photography by Kay (Tobin) Lahusen. The Ladder also engaged readers in dialogues on issues of the day. Chicago-born African American playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote letters on heterosexually married lesbians, discrimination, oppression, and separatism. After a schism in 1970, the magazine separated from the organization and Grier decamped with the subscription list which, after the Ladder folded, became the bedrock of Naiad Press's direct-mail success.

Negative comments by DOB women on Marijane Meaker writing as Ann Aldrich abound. At various points in Lesbian/Woman (Glide Press, 1972) Martin & Lyon criticize Aldrich who 'led her readers through Lesbos' lonely groves dwelling mostly on bizarre examples and giving only fleeting reference to those women who are well adjusted, productive citizens in society.' Also, 'Like Ann Aldrich, who wrote We Two Won't Last, Claire figured each affair to be an interlude and that inevitably the partners would grow apart and split.' And re Aldrich's non-fiction of the 1950s 'we have been struck anew by her sense of defeatism, her use of the words 'abnormal', 'perverse', 'neurotic'. Activist/academic Maida Tilchen characterized Aldrich as among those that presented 'lesbians as disgusting or unnatural creatures'. ('Some Pulp Sappho', Lavender Culture, Jove/HBJ, 1978). In her reviews of the Aldrich books We Walk Alone (1955), We Too Must Love (1958), and We Two Won't Last (1963), Barbara Grier characterizes Aldrich as 'running down her relatives' and 'a topic of discussion in every lesbian household however unflattering the discussion may have been.' ('The Lesbian Paperback', Tangents, June, 1966). Valerie Taylor, was less kind calling her work 'poisonous but entertaining', a 'prolific and negative author ... her books hardly worth the time or price.' (Women Loving Women, Womanpress, 1975).

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985