Dr. Rachel Corbman’s Response to George, Jameson, & Pearson

Earlier this week, I learned that Frontiers published three open letters by Kathi George, Betsy Jameson, and Carol Pearson on their blog. These letters respond to my article, “Blame It on the Edit: Frontiers’s Special Issue on Lesbian History,” which was published in the Autumn 2025 issue of Frontiers. My article, which you can read here, tells the story of a special issue on Lesbian History that was guest edited by Judith Schwarz in 1979. Schwarz found her experience as a guest editor frustrating. My article explains why and, in the process, offers a snapshot of a network of lesbian researchers working inside and outside the academy in the late 1970s. In their responses, the letter writers read my article as a brutal attack on the Frontiers collective. They seem to think that my article accuses the collective of being homophobic, an accusation that they vigorously contest.

I found these letters disorienting to read. I do not recognize my argument in their characterization of it. My article does not argue that the collective either was or was not homophobic. I specifically state that I am not invested in “seeking out evidence of interpersonal homophobia” in the abstract and introduction to my essay (p. 26, 27). To be sure, I explain that Judith Schwarz attributed her struggles to the interpersonal homophobia of the primarily heterosexual editorial collective. Do I agree with her? Well, I am not going to be the one to prove her wrong. Homophobia exists in overt and insidious ways, and I’m generally inclined to err on the side of suggesting that homophobia probably played some role in x, y, or z over suggesting that it absolutely did not. But this question is beside the point of my article. I am interested in what sort of work lesbian researchers submitted to the special issue, why the collective found some of this work intellectually suspect, and what this can tell us about the material conditions under which lesbian researchers wrote in the late 1970s.

In making this case, my article is most invested in reconstructing the lives, experiences, feelings, and thinking of a network of lesbian researchers. I am less invested in telling the story of the Frontiers collective. Kathi George is the only collective member who is at all individuated in the article. For what it’s worth, I don’t see her as a villain in my historical account. I write about the kind editorial help that she extended to Schwarz after Schwarz submitted a graduate seminar paper to Frontiers (p. 31). I explain her early enthusiasm for the special issue on Lesbian History (p. 31). And even though George read my article as out of touch with the precarious early history of the journal, I attempted to give readers some sense of this history. I know the journal ran on a shoestring budget—this is mentioned in the first paragraph— and am well-aware that underfunded feminist projects relied on the tireless volunteer labor of women like George. I tried to acknowledge what a persistent champion George was of this special issue, and my intent was never to diminish the thankless time and energy she devoted to this issue and beyond. Her work created the foundation that has allowed generations of scholars, including me, to contribute to feminist knowledge.

Perhaps George found it painful to see her contributions recede to the background of an article that is truly about lesbian history. I sympathize with this, as someone who has also dedicated untold hours to volunteer-run projects that I care deeply about. ​​But George’s experience of this as upsetting does not mean that the essay lacks rigor, as George goes on to suggest in her response. George faults my article for being partial, subjective, and inflected by the present. The same thing can, of course, be said of all history. Generations of feminist and queer historians have taught me to embrace this. In all my writing, I try to be very clear about what I am doing and why. I wrote this article based on a collection that Schwarz donated to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I explain this in the abstract and introduction to my essay (p. 26, 27). Schwarz’s collection offers insight into her experience putting together the special issue, which is what my article is about. I suppose I may have made a different argument if my article was based on Frontiers’ records at the Bancroft Library, but it is not based on this collection and doesn’t purport to be. My article also candidly explains my personal and intellectual attachments, particularly in its conclusion (p. 37-38). I have been a coordinator of the Lesbian Herstory Archives for most of my adult life and, thus, feel a kinship with Schwarz, who joined the collective six years before I was born. Readers don’t have to do much digging to figure out what’s partial, subjective, or presentist about my article. I clearly specify all this because I think that’s what responsible historical work ought to do: ​​acknowledge situatedness rather than make false claims to tell the whole story from a neutral and complete perspective.

I appreciate the work of the founding members of the Frontiers collective and have spent a good deal of time reading early issues of the journal. Despite my use of the word “blame” in the title, I do not “blame” the editors for the existence of a special issue on Lesbian History that has long been a source of fascination for me. The title of my essay, “Blame it on the Edit,” is a joke borrowed from the vernacular of reality television. Contestants and fans sometimes accuse producers of manipulating footage to make a contestant look bad. “Blame it on the edit” is an ironic retort that suggests that producers cannot invent footage. In the chorus of a song that shares the same name as my article, RuPaul Charles instructs Drag Race queens to “take the credit,” as they are “the one who said it.” My title loosely borrows from this idea. Judith Schwarz blamed the editors in the heat of her anger. With more historical distance, I instead offer a larger structural analysis of why many lesbian researchers struggled to produce work that was “legible as sound scholarship” in the late 1970s (p. 38). I hope that this response helps others read my essay in the spirit in which it was written.