In January 2011, the special issue of: GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Rethinking Sex, (Volume: 17, Issue: 1, edited by Ann Cvetkovich, Annamarie Jagose, Heather K. Love) featured my artwork on the cover. I was commissioned to reproduce an image from the 1982 Diary of a Conference on Sexuality which accompanied the conference “Towards a politics of sexuality”, organised by Carole Vance. My photograph tried to be faithful to the original (its beauty and atmosphere) but at the same time bring something of the present into it.

The issue marks the influence of Gayle Rubin’s canonical essay (Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, 1984) on gender and sexuality studies. Heather Love (2011) notes how the debates about porn, S/M, and butch/femme in the late 1970s and early 1980s (the so called ‘sex wars’) connect with queer theory and politics. She suggests that we need to acknowledge the debt of sexuality studies, in its contemporary form, to feminism.