"I’ve spoken about this a lot — it was at the height of the AIDS epidemic, so, late ‘80s. It was a terrible time for all of us. We were watching our friends die. The women’s community was sort of having to be strong and develop a voice out of that grief. We were really partying hard and having to demonstrate constantly. One of the reasons I was interested in photographing sex was, for one thing, no one ever talked about lesbian sex in the mainstream press. So we wanted to communicate and develop a language and educate each other. It was also a time when you had to graphically talk about sex. People were dying because they were having sex, and the government, the doctors — no one was telling us anything. We were learning new things every day, and we had to communicate it. It became necessary to be very graphic."
Phyllis Christopher, ‘Heads and Tails’, 2021, exhibition view, Grand Union, Birmingham
"Do lesbians cruise hands?"
cartoonist Kris Kovick, 1992, San Francisco, CA
photography by Phyllis Christopher