Susie Bright papers and On Our Backs records

Overview: Susie Bright worked for the feminist sex store Good Vibrations, and in 1984 launched the first U.S. lesbian sex magazine, On Our Backs, with photographer Honey Lee Cottrell, publisher Deborah Sundahl, and Nan Kinney. Susie served as the magazine’s editor. An expert on the history of the pornography business and its censorship, she has reviewed erotic movies and written broadly about sexual issues.

Detailed biography: Susannah "Susie" Bright (also known as Susie Sexpert) (born March 25, 1958) is an American feminist, author, journalist, critic, editor, publisher, producer, and performer, often on the subject of sexual politics. Known for her founding role in the magazine On Our Backs, she is also an expert on the history of the pornography business and its censorship and has reviewed erotic movies and written broadly about sexual issues. She is one of the first writer/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist.      As a teenager, Bright was active in the 1970s in various left-wing progressive causes, in particular the feminist, labor, civil rights, and anti-war movements. She was one of the members of the high school underground newspaper, The Red Tide, and served as Plaintiff suing the Los Angeles Board of Education for the right of minors to distribute their own publications without prior censorship or approval. (Judgement in favor of Plaintiff).      She was a member of the International Socialists from 1974-1976 and worked as a labor and community organizer in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Detroit, MI, and Louisville, Kentucky.      Bright was one of the founding members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and wrote under the pseudonym Sue Daniels in both The Red Tide and Workers' Power.      Bright trained with San Francisco Sex Information in 1981. From 1981 to 1986, she worked for and managed Good Vibrations, which Joani Blank had opened in San Francisco in 1977, the second feminist sex toy shop in the country (after Dell Williams’ Eve’s Garden). Bright wrote Good Vibrations’ first mail order catalog, the first sex toy catalog written from a women’s point of a view to a female audience. She founded the Good Vibrations Erotic Video Library, the first feminist curation of erotic films available at the time. During this time, she got involved with a group of artists called "Mainstream Exiles" and co-wrote and starred in two plays: "Girls Gone Bad" and "Knife, Paper, Scissors."      In 1984, she launched the first women-produced magazine on the topic of sex and erotica, On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian," with photographer Honey Lee Cottrell, publisher Deborah Sundahl, and Nan Kinney. Susie served as the magazine’s editor until 1991. Known as the "Pauline Kael of Porn" Bright wrote feminist reviews of erotic films for Penthouse Forum from 1986–1989. She was the first mainstream journalist who covered the adult industry trade, and Bright was the first female member of the X-Rated Critics Organization in 1986.      She taught the aesthetics and politics of erotic film imagery starting in 1986 at Cal Arts Valencia, and then in the early nineties at the University of California. Her film-reviews of independent and mainstream films and videos are widely published, and her commentary on gay film history are featured in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet.      Bright founded the first women's erotica book-series, Herotica, in 1988 and edited the first three volumes. Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, the first collection of her own stories, came out in 1990. She started The Best American Erotica series in 1993, and has edited it annually since then. She published the only portfolio of lesbian erotic photography, Nothing But the Girl, co-edited with Jill Posener, with 30 interviews and photographs from photographers around the world. It won the Firecracker Award and the Lammie Award in 1997. She was voted into the XRCO Hall of Fame, 5th Estate, in 2005.      Bright worked a screenwriter and film consultant in several films: Erotique, The Virgin Machine, The Celluloid Closet, and Bound, and appeared as herself in an episode of the HBO television series, Six Feet Under.      She started a website in March 1997, and began her blog, Susie Bright’s Journal, in 2004.      Since 2000, she has produced and hosted a weekly program In Bed with Susie Bright on Audible, Inc., where she discusses a variety of social, freedom of speech and sex-related topics. Interviews, book and movie reviews are common, as are letters from listeners.      Since 2012, Bright has worked as an editor-at-large executive producer at Audible Inc, and was nominated for a non-fiction Audie Award as executive producer in 2013.