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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered. Today I want you to meet Edith Ide,

a visionary who fought to make lesbians visible in pop culture decades before most others had the guts

to do the same. When I'd was 25 years old, she worked as a secretary at RKO Studios, a movie

production company in Los Angeles. The job wasn't very exciting, pushing papers,

running files around the office. I'd wasn't all that different from other movie company

secretaries. Her ambitions were creative, not clerical. She liked writing. She wanted to tell

stories. And she had an idea, a magazine for queer women. There was just one thing standing in her way. It was

1947. Those were different times in so many ways. I knew a traditional printer wouldn't dare

help her produce something as scandalous as a magazine for lesbians. So when she decided to launch

a magazine called vice versa, she designed and she decided to launch a magazine called Vice Versa,

she designed and templated the entire thing herself,

using her employer's typewriters.

She had to do it in secret,

because under California law,

her magazine wasn't just scandalous.

It was illegal.

At the time, writing or distributing information about life as a lesbian could have landed her in prison.

So she carefully cut and copied each issue of the magazine at her desk and then handed out copies in lesbian hotspots around Los Angeles.

She wrote under the pen name Lisa Ben, an anagram of lesbian, and wink to those in the know.

In 1989, I'd spoke with Eric Marcus for an oral history book, which he later turned into a podcast

called Making Gay History. She said, it was just some writing that I wanted to do to get it off my

...