ABSTRACT
In 1991 GMP published a book of Della Grace’s lesbian erotic photographs called Love Bites that became instantly controversial when some feminist bookstores refused to stock it because of its explicit sexual and sado-masochistic content. Since 1991, Della Grace has gone on to achieve a prominent profile in lesbian and gay culture (with photographs regularly appearing in the pink press and exhibitions in trendy London venues). In this article I am going to return to the moment of Love Bites in order to assess how its content and reception fit into a wider cultural formation concerned with the representation of SM and lesbian sex. As a book that came out some months before Madonna’s Sex—which in contrast had no problems with censorship legislation—Love Bites provides a good focus for an exploration of the changing boundaries of internal (lesbian and gay) and external censorship: it raises questions about the diverse, but not always unrelated, reasons behind lesbian feminist or state legislative censorship; the role of representation in the formation and articulation of socio-sexual identities; and the impact of SM on the understanding and representation of lesbian and gay issues in the cultural sphere.
