Blame it On the Edit: Frontiers 's Special Issue on Lesbian History

Abstract: This article tells the story of the fraught publishing history of a special issue on Lesbian History published by Frontiers in 1979. The community-based lesbian historian Judith Schwarz first pitched the idea for a special issue on lesbian history in September 1978. Though Frontiers sought to serve as a bridge between women inside and outside the university, its collaboration with Schwarz proved contentious. At the time, Schwarz attributed her struggles to the interpersonal homophobia of the primarily heterosexual editorial collective. This article reconstructs this conflict based on Schwarz's meticulously preserved collection of manuscripts and correspondence at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Rather than seeking out evidence of interpersonal homophobia, this article asks how and why the submissions for the Lesbian History issue looked different from the sort of work that Frontiers most often published. In doing so, this article uses Frontiers 's special issue as a case study to understand the material and intellectual specificity of early gay and lesbian history as well as the larger structural forces that simultaneously propelled and circumscribed the field in the late 1970s.