Networks of queer reproduction in Sappho magazine (1972–1981)

In 1978 the London Evening News ran a series of ‘exposés’ on the UK lesbian organization and magazine Sappho and their Artificial Insemination by Donor (A.I.D) network. This article situates the Sappho A.I.D network in relation to the many literary, artistic and activist groups that Sappho also helped to establish and participated in. By considering for the first time the connections between Sappho’s poetic, political and fertility clinicpractices, this article contributes to growing scholarship on queer reproduction and stresses the role of feminist print media networks asvital nodes for altering reproductive possibility and life. Although evidently before IVF, before the Internet and before HIV/AIDS-related queer activism and queer theory, this article argues that Sappho evidences forms of interdependency useful for imagining beyond today’s liberal reproductive politics, focused around questions of access, choice and rights. This new study of Sappho magazine proposes feminist media activism in transition as a conscious methodological movement in the reading across the nodes of literary experimentation, family creation and activist struggle, as well as a self-reflective transiting in time to address the politics of recovering Sappho today.