Reading Vulva Zine in the Graveyard
May. 3rd, 2026 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: we’re back from our trip, and we had a great time!
Me and Mac used to have little romantic getaway weekends once a year or so before COVID, but once the pandemic hit, all our usual fun romantic things got axed: going to movies or restaurants, mainly. We have started going to movies again, but we hadn’t taken a pleasure trip in ages. But hey, if we had to be in Northampton for work anyway...
So we went a couple days early and had a great time. We did a lot of wandering and window shopping. We sold some books to a local occult/zine/used bookstore and ransacked the used bookstores in town for anything we might want. We bought a couple Buddhist works for bupkis at a hospice consignment store (RIP, whoever’s books those were) and then... well, that occult shop had a couple exciting gems in it! Namely...
A FIFTY-YEAR OLD BETTY DODSON ZINE! Liberating Masturbation, from 1974, just sitting on their zine rack next to stuff like Manly P. Hall’s “Solving Psychic Problems and Submerged Personalities” (which seems to be equally difficult to get so MAYBE I WILL SPEND EVEN MORE MONEY). I was unsure about spending thirty bucks on a fifty-year-old zine, but I suspected the beastie was unobtainable except at ludicrous prices and turns out that I was right! And Mori was like “my lesbian moon woman soul needs this” and Mac was like “there are gorgeous art of pussy in there, as a pussy connoisseur I too want this” so we bought it and holy crap, fifty years later it remains just as topical, relevant, and revolutionary now as it was then! Damn! There’s a screenreadable version of just the typewritten text online, but in my opinion, a lot of the charm is lost without the beautiful illustrations and handwritten portions (which aren’t transcribed or mentioned). Zero regrets buying!
(Also, it turns out you will instantly endear yourselves to the lesbians running the B&B if you burst in going “I FOUND A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD BETTY DODSON ZINE LOOK LOOK!” and pass it around.)
I want to digitize this zine for posterity, since Dodson died in 2020 and thus I’m not depriving her of business. Her estate (or whatever) is selling remaining copies for $1000, but those are pristine and clearly for collectors, not everyday folks like us who just want to contents. What do you think? Digitize time?
Mac and I ended up reading the zine in the nearby graveyard, listening to a marching band play in the nearby park (we came out to see what was going on, learned it was someone’s birthday party, and vanished back into the graveyard whence we came, like a proper death-touched). There were a couple other people wandering the graveyard, accompanied by a black cat (on a full moon day no less), who I presumed theirs until they came up to us and asked, “is this your cat?”
(Upon telling him about this, Janusz suggested it was the graveyard guardian. The B&B lesbians suggested it was the spirit of Betty Dodson conferring her blessing. Roomie just said it was the most LB thing we could’ve done.)
The graveyard cat decided to hang with us while we read, hopping up onto our lap even. (“I’ve been choosened!” I whispered to Mac.) We spent a good time together till the sun started going down and I left, whereupon the graveyard cat tagged long until we intercepted a family with children, where it switched to them.
One of the rules of our romantic getaway weekends is happy queer movies (no tragic endings allowed!), and we ended up watching Filibus, which is a ton of silly fun and we recommend it! 1915 silent film from Italy involving an air pirate jewel thief who uses male, female, and other guises to try and troll the detective after her that IT WAS HE who did the crimes. Very genderful protagonist.
We also got to meet a friend of ours for dinner and meet her teeny tiny gray cat. She is not a half-grown kitten; she just looks like one.
We also bought a sacred kink book for our friend which has a whole chapter on “the Horse Path,” which is kinky spirit possession as sacred act. What a bonanza!
What a good fucking time.
Me and Mac used to have little romantic getaway weekends once a year or so before COVID, but once the pandemic hit, all our usual fun romantic things got axed: going to movies or restaurants, mainly. We have started going to movies again, but we hadn’t taken a pleasure trip in ages. But hey, if we had to be in Northampton for work anyway...
So we went a couple days early and had a great time. We did a lot of wandering and window shopping. We sold some books to a local occult/zine/used bookstore and ransacked the used bookstores in town for anything we might want. We bought a couple Buddhist works for bupkis at a hospice consignment store (RIP, whoever’s books those were) and then... well, that occult shop had a couple exciting gems in it! Namely...
A FIFTY-YEAR OLD BETTY DODSON ZINE! Liberating Masturbation, from 1974, just sitting on their zine rack next to stuff like Manly P. Hall’s “Solving Psychic Problems and Submerged Personalities” (which seems to be equally difficult to get so MAYBE I WILL SPEND EVEN MORE MONEY). I was unsure about spending thirty bucks on a fifty-year-old zine, but I suspected the beastie was unobtainable except at ludicrous prices and turns out that I was right! And Mori was like “my lesbian moon woman soul needs this” and Mac was like “there are gorgeous art of pussy in there, as a pussy connoisseur I too want this” so we bought it and holy crap, fifty years later it remains just as topical, relevant, and revolutionary now as it was then! Damn! There’s a screenreadable version of just the typewritten text online, but in my opinion, a lot of the charm is lost without the beautiful illustrations and handwritten portions (which aren’t transcribed or mentioned). Zero regrets buying!
(Also, it turns out you will instantly endear yourselves to the lesbians running the B&B if you burst in going “I FOUND A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD BETTY DODSON ZINE LOOK LOOK!” and pass it around.)
I want to digitize this zine for posterity, since Dodson died in 2020 and thus I’m not depriving her of business. Her estate (or whatever) is selling remaining copies for $1000, but those are pristine and clearly for collectors, not everyday folks like us who just want to contents. What do you think? Digitize time?
Mac and I ended up reading the zine in the nearby graveyard, listening to a marching band play in the nearby park (we came out to see what was going on, learned it was someone’s birthday party, and vanished back into the graveyard whence we came, like a proper death-touched). There were a couple other people wandering the graveyard, accompanied by a black cat (on a full moon day no less), who I presumed theirs until they came up to us and asked, “is this your cat?”
(Upon telling him about this, Janusz suggested it was the graveyard guardian. The B&B lesbians suggested it was the spirit of Betty Dodson conferring her blessing. Roomie just said it was the most LB thing we could’ve done.)
The graveyard cat decided to hang with us while we read, hopping up onto our lap even. (“I’ve been choosened!” I whispered to Mac.) We spent a good time together till the sun started going down and I left, whereupon the graveyard cat tagged long until we intercepted a family with children, where it switched to them.
One of the rules of our romantic getaway weekends is happy queer movies (no tragic endings allowed!), and we ended up watching Filibus, which is a ton of silly fun and we recommend it! 1915 silent film from Italy involving an air pirate jewel thief who uses male, female, and other guises to try and troll the detective after her that IT WAS HE who did the crimes. Very genderful protagonist.
We also got to meet a friend of ours for dinner and meet her teeny tiny gray cat. She is not a half-grown kitten; she just looks like one.
We also bought a sacred kink book for our friend which has a whole chapter on “the Horse Path,” which is kinky spirit possession as sacred act. What a bonanza!
What a good fucking time.
