OVERVIEW

Chicago Women's Liberation Union housed the Chicago Liberation Graphics Collective. Helen Factor was a member. The 1970s were when lesbian feminists became “the point from which all directions start,” to quote the infamous “Isis” poster. This generation created lesbian feminism which I came out into in 1979. My first lover and I had “Isis” above our bed in New Hampshire as did other lesbians we knew in Boston. The poster “Midwest Lesbian Conference” was hanging in the lesbian household I moved into, in Colorado, 1983. These anonymously created posters were everywhere within the lesbian nation—sold at women's bookstores, where you could also buy women's or womyn's music and find consciousness-raising groups and services like women's health clinics, rape hotlines, and battered women's shelters. The lesbian separatist world sought to be separate from the patriarchal or male-centered world. Within a surprising amount of time, approximately a decade, this lesbian world would flower in every urban area from Los Angeles to Des Moines to New York. Lesbians were no longer mentally ill (since 1973) and this gave them the ability to open services such as health centers as openly lesbian health centers.