Issues Archives - LIBER Review

“The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report” by Rosa Campbell

Leora Tanenbaum

The Netflix series Bridgerton features a plotline about a nineteenth-century noblewoman desperately seeking a sexual “pinnacle” that coitus withholds from her yet not her husband. Meanwhile, the New York Times Wirecutter product review site recommends vibrators you can buy at Walgreens. My, times have changed. Fifty years ago, when feminist writer Shere Hite (1942–2020) published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, one of the best-selling books of all time, conventional wisdom dictated

On the Cover 3.4

Charis Caputo

The June Leaf sculpture depicted on this issue’s cover, Shooting from the Heart (1980), lends its title to the Leaf retrospective on view at NYU’s Grey Art Museum through December 13. Photographed here is the artist’s hand by Leaf’s third husband, the Swiss American photographer and documentarian Robert Frank, the 18 × 8 inch figurine—composed of tin plates, rods, spring, and gears—appears both ancient and futuristic, both sleekly high-femme and monstrously composite. There is a

Editor’s Letter 3.4

Jennifer Baumgardner

On my dining room wall, mixed with family photos and a blind contour self-portrait by my son Magnus, is a diptych titled “Robert and June in front of 7 Bleecker Street, 1982.” In it, Robert (Frank, famed documentary photographer) looks like a lot of fun. He’s climbing into a giant packing crate on the street to, I assume, make his wife June Leaf and the photographer Brian Graham, his longtime assistant, laugh. June, the artist

Poetry Comments 3.4

Katha Pollitt

Kim Addonizio’s poems have a messy intensity I can’t get enough of. They have everything: hatred, fear, disgust, and self-disgust, and also delight, desire, forgiveness, and love. “Everyone’s aspiring to something, it’s exhausting,” she writes in “Target Audience” (brilliant title). And not likely to end well. Her poems have a lot of agitation, and also a lot of agita—they’re both mournful and aggressive: “I stamp my foot and say ‘ENOUGH’ to drown out the sound

Weimar Vibes: Taking in “Cabaret” and the Neue Galerie in the time of Trump

Rebecca Saltzman

Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, a friend dragged me to Cabaret. The Broadway revival had begun during the Biden administration, when it felt like, perhaps, the center still might hold. Now the rough beast had returned, like the horror movie villain you think you’ve defeated: ominous music, tiny orange hand catching the door right before you can slam it shut. I was less than eager to spend several hours at a musical about

Yas, King: El Daña, Mo B. Dick, and Buck Wylde Talk Three Generations of Drag

Tinamarie Ivey

Left to right: Mo B. DIck, El Daña, and Buck Wylde at the King of Drag premier, 2025. I attended my first drag king show in 2018. Two friends invited me to join them at Spectrum, a queer nightclub in Eugene, Oregon. I’d seen quite a few drag queen shows by then—audiences packed with bachelorette parties and tourists seeking exotic experiences—but the atmosphere at Spectrum was intimate and insurgent. The room pulsed with a collective

Watching Out for Dyke History

Dylan Jordan

I was on my daily journey to my summer internship when I heard a familiar tune from high school by the Massachusetts queercore band DUMP HIM. “Dykes to Watch Out For” (the title track) was almost spookily aligned with my daily life this summer. Take this lyric: “Your home is now a monument / How radical just to document you exist.” I was interning at Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA), located in the former home

Live from Red Dora’s Bearded Lady

Cindy Crabb

On The Way To Folsom St. Fair, 1994. Photo by Chloe Sherman. The Bearded Lady opened in San Francisco on Fourteenth and Guerrero in 1992, born out of the need for a lesbian-centered meeting and performance space. “Our only idea was we were going to have a coffee machine and a wrestling mat,” recalls cofounder Harry Dodge. Cindy Crabb’s manuscript for The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe: An Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene,

There’s Something About Mary

Jennifer Baumgardner

Last fall (2024), I needed a few tethers to keep me from free fall in my new life, new apartment, new job, new freedom. So my friend Katie Cappiello and I instituted a weekly meeting at my apartment on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to noon. There were no rules about what we did with the time (she, too, was processing lots of change): we could vent about the world and our personal lives, we could

The Virgin

Katie Cappiello

Scene: Between 4–6 BC. The home of MARY, JOACHIM, and ANNE. Minimalist (obviously). MARY, 13, is on her knees scrubbing robes in a large tub. In the midst of her work, MARY tugs a bucket toward her and vomits. She smiles with relief until the nausea overtakes her again. She vomits. ANNE, 54, enters carrying more laundry. She waves at the air. It reeks. ANNE. Too much wine for you, Mary. I’ve told . .

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