Deborah Sundahl, the founder of Fatale Video and co-founder of the groundbreaking explicit lesbian magazine, On Our Backs, passed away on June 13. According to the email shared by her son, Aaron, Deborah died after a rare form of cancer which was recently diagnosed.
Deborah, along with her business partner, Nan Kinney, created explicit lesbian videos under the name of Blush Entertainment and Fatale Video. Starting in 1992 with the films Clips and Suburban Dykes, the groundbreaking videos differentiated from the typical girl/girl videos produced at the time and featured the more realistic roles of butch/femme in their characters. Often, the women were self-identified lesbians in real life and felt their work contributed to the acceptance of lesbian women and their sex positive lives.
Under the name Fanny Fatale, she, along with Myrna Elana, founded On Our Backs magazine in 1984, which published through 2006, although Deborah and her business partners sold the company in 1996. Joined over the years by prolific author Susie Bright, photographer Honey Lee Cotrell and many others, On Our Backs pioneered lesbian sex positive feminism and defined the movement in the mid-80s through the mid-90s by publishing explicit photos and erotica.
In 1992, Deborah released her first educational video, “How to Female Ejaculate” which, after describing the anatomical breakdown of how female ejaculation happens, then explicitly demonstrated it. As the first educational video on the topic, she also subsequently published several books female ejaculation and taught the subject in in person workshops around the world and online throughout her career.
A GoFundMe site has been set up by her son to help with https://gofund.me/fadf72a3 to continue her groundbreaking work and legacy.
