WICKED WOMEN REVISITED

I must admit, before we start that, when it comes to Wicked Women, I have always felt a sense of imposter syndrome. 

Well, why wouldn’t I? I have claimed to be many things in my life and been accused of many more, but no one could ever accuse me of being a lesbian. Yet I am eternally, inextricably linked with a lesbian sex mag from the ‘80s and ‘90s called Wicked Women, not to mention, the many spectacular spinoffs it inspired.

But looking back at that period of my life, I must admit, Wicked Women was my story. Not only is it my story, it’s my origin story.

As a storyteller myself, I’m quite obsessed with origins, with beginnings, with finding out where the story starts. What is that moment that, if erased, causes the narrative to collapse, or disappear entirely.

We all have our own beginnings, our own entries and exits, so it can be difficult sometimes to find the starting point, especially for something as incredible as Wicked Women and its creators.

Well the obvious starting point in this story begins the day that Jasper met Lisa, an explosive connection that was the romance that sparked the revolution.

For me, the Wicked Women story starts 40 years ago when I met this bloke who I would come to know as Jasper. I was handing out flyers for the Newcastle Gay Rights Lobby, an organisation of which I was, at that time, the only member. We became fast friends, and that friendship lasts till this day as one of the most precious of my life.

Newcastle of the ‘80s was not the place for two enterprising queers and soon we found ourselves in the fleshpots of Sydney. We were not to find our place in Paradise immediately, but within a few years, Jasper would have changed not only his name but his identity but also the course of his own community,

And me? Well I went along for the ride, feverishly taking notes along the way. Literally taking notes, as my progress as a writer coincided with the rise of Wicked Women and I found myself reporting on the scene within the pages of the Sydney Star Observer and Campaign, not to mention Wicked Women itself, where I became this kind of correspondent for all things kinky and queer.

It was a great place to be for a writer, to be part of the action but slightly separate. I was a kind of trumped-up Truman Capote, bathing in the reflected glamour of my subjects and the scene around me, but unlike Truman, I didn’t slay any swans. Instead, I set a spotlight on them, those exquisitely wicked creatures that graced the pages and the stages of that remarkable showcase that was Wicked Women.

So how did this all begin, what was the context and how have we all come to be here this week to look back at the weird and wonderful times of Wicked Women?

Wicked Women was from the very start a protest movement. Of course, it stood up against patriarchy and homophobia, and all the oppressive systems that would seek to subjugate a lesbian in the ‘80s. It was fiercely political, created from the most fundamental of feminist principles, the need to expand experience and opportunities, to offer agency and control over women’s minds and bodies, and by that token, their desire.

But the prohibitions that dictated lesbian sexuality in the ‘80s did not come from the law as it had with gay men.  It came largely from other lesbians who policed pornography as a tool of violence against women, pointing quite rightly to an industry that exploited women and sex workers, and simulated sexual violence on screen and was believed to encourage it off.

But what separated Wicked Women from other manufacturers of erotica was that it was pornography that was thoughtfully conceived and ethically produced. If pornography had failed feminism, then an argument was made for the need for feminists to create and control pornography themselves, but there was a staunch resistance from gatekeepers, from booksellers and other agencies, and some early events were disrupted and targeted by abusive audience members.

It would have caused even greater consternation if those feminists had realised that many of the primary influences of Wicked Women were not lesbian at all. This was because of the simple fact that the culture Jasper and Lisa created did not exist before them. Their influences were drawn from overseas, from publications like On Our Backs and writers like Pat Califia. Local influences were more likely to be found in sex clubs, in strip clubs and dungeons, and in the company of sex workers and kinksters of all kinds.

So how do you create a sexuality from scratch? Well, if you want to know Lisa’s influences, you’ll have to read about them on her blog the queer gaze. Jasper would draw his inspiration from pop culture and parallel culture, the iconic imagery of Hollywood and rock & roll, personally I blame Allvin Stardust and Suzi Quatro myself, but importantly he found his reflection in gay male fetish culture, where he could indulge, among other things. his serious military fetish. Jasper and I spent many nights nervously navigating leather bars, independently or together, in hope of finding our home, our tribe, our identity.

But as I’ve always said, if you can’t find the culture you crave, create it yourself.

Whatever Jasper would find in gay and leather culture, he would soon eclipse, when he along with the boundless creativity of Lisa, created a lesbian subculture that would soon surpass anything the boys could offer.

But to be fair, the boys were very busy. If you lived in the gay community in Sydney in late ‘80s and early ‘90s, or if you were even just gay adjacent, you lived through the AIDS crisis. While lesbians weren’t in a high-risk group like gay men, they were in the forefront of our advocacy and care, and their acts are among the least recognised support given in the period. Wicked Women was closely associated with the gay leather community, which was adversely affected, and so this community felt the toll as well.

It's my opinion that anyone who was affected by AIDS during this time carries its lifelong influence. Even if you did not personally lose friends or icons, you were invested with a sense of mortality that no one had any right to feel at such a young age. It shaped us in ways we probably don’t even realise. You’re not supposed to lose your peers in a time of peace, to mourn repeatedly and randomly while the world goes on around you. It was a unique experience and I have been trying to find an equivalent ever since and I am yet to find its equal.

It left us with a sense of posterity, a desire to leave something behind, and a deep understanding of how limited a time we might have achieve this. So not only were we trying to create in an environment of prohibition, but we also felt the limitations of life itself. Finally given the opportunity to burst out of the box and express our true selves, we were painfully aware of how short a time we might have been in the spotlight.

It was this sense of posterity that made recording the events of the time seem essential, that accounts in part for the energy and vitality of the period, that led us to engage so purposefully. We spoke of “writing ourselves into history”, or maybe it was just me that said it, I don’t remember. But there was an urgency to our intentions and actions, a recognition that what was once forbidden whatever freedoms we found may be only fleeting. I still have that feeling but it’s because of the recent rise of fascism worldwide. Then as now, we had to not only make our mark we had to leave a mark as well.

One thing that made space for us was the fact that we were living in a time in Australia when the welfare state was far more kind than it is today. You could live on a government benefit and many of us did. We may have crammed into crumbling terrace houses, ate a vegetarian diet, drank cask wine and ingested cheap drugs, but me and my mates treated the dole like an arts grant, we were all gainfully unemployed or studiously exploring our sexuality through academia.

This allowed us to serve a kind of apprenticeship in community arts and management, and frankly society has benefitted ever since. Many of us have gone beyond our humble beginnings, our downright sordid start, to become significant figures in our own field of endeavour. Indeed, those early years feel to me now a time of tuition, a period of learning and it felt as if the entire inner city of Sydney was one big queer college campus. We learned what books to read, what records to listen to, what movies mattered; we constructed a canon purely on the recommendation of the company we kept.

In the days before social media, that’s how it worked. We had to use physical means, word of mouth, posters and flyers, or rely on existing technology, street press and community radio. Looking back, I wonder how we organised anything at all but although we didn’t have the ease and reach of social media, we did have a degree of privacy and gatekeeping that protected us. There were no camera phones, there wasn’t even an internet to distribute the images. That gave the producers and participants confidence that they could control the sensitive material they created.

Although there was no internet, the ‘80s saw a revolution in desktop publishing that made the medium of magazines more accessible and allowed Wicked Women to flourish beyond its origins; printed on some ancient technology called gestetner and written on an electronic typewriter with no automatic letter W.

The ‘80s also saw a revolution in dance parties and club music, in the art of dancing and partying as an artistic practice. This is something Wicked Women embraced with a series of superlative parties and unforgettable events, that became possible due to the collaboration with the brilliant production designer and event manager Jade Kemety and the visionary music of DJ Gemma. Together with Jasper and Lisa, this fab four created some of the most remarkable events I ever attended.

In that spirit before we finish, I’d like to give a shout out to all the wonderful spinoffs that emerged from the Wicked Women’s stable. It may have started off as a magazine, but very soon their entrepreneurial spirit ripped the words off the page. So many parties followed it’s hard to remember them all.

So many spin offs, cultural events, the exhibitions, film nights, sex parties and soirees, the personal highlight for me was the GOD slave auctions. Jasper and Lisa formed a gang called GOD, G.O.D. standing for girls of disgrace, and soon there was an offshoot called guys of disgrace and for the first time I had a chance to join in the fun.

I along with my offsider Jean Piere, JP, served as guards, henchmen, once even a centurion at one particularly roman themed event, one of many times I would serve as a prop in a tableau of perversion.

If you were ever part of Wicked Women, as a writer or reader, photographer or viewer, as performer or audience, as exhibition or voyeur, you were part of something unique and extraordinary. It’s the kind of thing that only happens once in a lifetime or once in a generation. To have been but a bit player in this crazy, sexy circus was a thrilling, dizzying thing.

There are so many stories that I could tell that would echo the incredible queer scene, subculture, community, clique, club that was called Wicked Women. More than that it was a movement, more than anything else, an art movement. There is abundant evidence of this. It’s all around you. Wicked Women created space for all kinds of artists to play and for sex play to become art. I’m so glad we have reunited in an art gallery. It seems so appropriate, although sometimes I do feel like museum piece myself, a relic, if you like.

The funny thing I’ve found about getting older is that you soon become more interested in your own story, particularly your origins. And if you’re not interested, you may find other people who are.

The perverse cruelty of this phenomenon is that at the point you want to remember, you are most likely to forget. But if you have survived significant times, you won’t be allowed to forget.

So I’d like to personally thank Lisa Salmon for curating this incredible exhibition and series of events, and all of you that have kept the dream and memory of Wicked Women alive, for reminding many of us where we began.