by Li-Anne Wright

View previous newsletters and subscribe to the Sinister Snapshot!

I am lucky to have grown up in a time and place that made it possible for me to never know the fear that I might be the only queer Asian person in the world. By the time I had come to understand myself through the word "lesbian," I had access to the internet (where Hayley Kiyoko had released her music video "Girls Like Girls" in 2015, which I might suggest is a canonical text for Gen-Z queers) and had already met a number of Asian queers—in fact, most of them were my friends.

And still, it wasn't until my early twenties that I had a sense that Asian American lesbians might have a history or where to look for evidence of our past. I became very curious about newsletters like Anamika and Phoenix Rising because they reminded me a lot of the zine world I loved so much. (If you are unfamiliar with zines, I wrote a featurette on dyke zines for Snapshot #74. I also wrote a featurette on Anamika in Snapshot #46, and two issues of Anamika have now been digitized on SAADA.)

Recently, I’ve been working on a paper about Asian American lesbian newsletters and politics during the 1980s. I’ve been diving into a number of ‘80s newsletters that were published by Asian lesbians based in the United States/Asian American lesbians—so far, Phoenix Rising, ALOEC, and Shamakami. Did you contribute to any of these newsletters, or do you know anyone who did? I'd love to talk to you about them and what it was like for you to be an Asian lesbian during that time (you can just reply to this email, as I check the Sinister Wisdom email inbox every few days).

In the meantime, here’s a bit about Phoenix Rising, which ran for ten years between 1984 and 1994. This newsletter had a number of different elements—articles, editorials, news bits, book and movie reviews, an events calendar, classified ads, spot art, etc. Here are some of the more lighthearted tidbits.

Some of the earlier issues had horoscopes by “Madame Ree”! Here was the advice for December 1985 that was published in Issue 8 (September–October 1985). Patriarchy getting on your nerves only three times in a whole month sounds like a pretty good month to me.

Not everything published in Phoenix Rising is related to lesbian topics. A number of issues had recipes, like this one in Issue 12 (August–September 1986) for “Chicken with Peanuts” by S. P. Kwong. Other useful tidbits in some other issues included reminders about taxes, photography tips, and requests for roommates.

Lori Lai was one of the founders of Phoenix Rising and was involved for many years. In Issue 18 (July–August 1987), she wrote about visiting Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (ALOEC) and this play that ALOEC staged about “four Asian lesbians playing mahjong and discussing their lives.”

Despite the various difficulties of putting out a newsletter—not to mention the tensions of doing a project for a panethnic coalition with many different people and priorities—Phoenix Rising had an amazing run, with ten years and over 40 issues. Looking back on these newsletters as a young Asian American dyke certainly inspires me to think about how to build Asian lesbian coalitions in the present, both through print and otherwise!

Li-Anne Wright is a Chinese American dyke in Michigan; puts together the Sinister Snapshot every two weeks; and is enthusiastic about crochet, queer print culture, and Asian American queer history, among other things.

Continue reading the Featurette on the Sinister Wisdom Blog!