Today, seeing graffiti on small businesses or a library upsets her. "I don't want to say, 'We were right in those days and they're wrong today,' because the political arena has shifted. I felt completely justified 15, 20 years ago in what I did. But the graffiti I see now doesn't have the same potency, except for AIDS graffiti. AIDS has a voice, but not in politics, so it becomes an arresting message." She believed in the graffiti she supported, which was against advertisers, against corporate culture, against the defense industry, against major pillars of the patriarchy. "I could defend that. It wasn't just private property, it's public domain."

Looking back now, some of her pictures disturb her. The politics contained in them are harsh. "I think of the stencils saying, 'Dead Men Don't Rape.' To see it written like that and know that I promoted that idea as a possible viable solution sort of scares me. I don't pull back from my feminism, but I am old enough now to see the results of it; a feminism without compromise, a feminism without compassion."

Posener reflects, "Feminism has been so discredited that it's always healthy to remember that what we believed in was fundamental: a woman's right to choose, equal pay for equal work; equal opportunity under the law, in terms of education and work opportunities; a woman's right to not be in an abusive or rape situation, a woman's right to have the same laws apply to her in her marriage or whatever else. But we can't assume that, we couldn't assume it then and we can't assume it now."

She started off in the 70s as a serious radical lesbian feminist separatist. Her position on censorship and porn was that censorship was an absolutely necessary evil, and that porn was, "in effect, violence against women, and there was no argument about that whatsoever." After going into porn/sexual areas and closing places down with protest marches, she began to have serious questions about her stance. A turning point came during one march when women shouted from doorways, "You're taking our business away from us! Is that what your feminism has brought you to? Think about it." Posener did, and later realized she was saying, "Well, you're so self-oppressed you can't even see it." It was the beginning of a change, and she retreated from a strongly censorious, anti-porn stance.

Britain was in the middle of the Thatcher era. Section 27, the anti-gay and lesbian ordinance, had just passed. "I felt demoralized by a proscriptive feminism. The debate around S/M had begun, the so-called 'sex wars'. I didn't take a pro or anti position. I had begun to feel it was a matter of choice."

Posener decided to make a change, to move from Britain to the US, and is glad of it when she thinks of some people she knows in Britain who are still rooted in the 70s culture, which was the era in which they had all come out, and become politically active. "The second wave of feminism which began in the late 60s and built its stride in the 70s - is something I'm still enormously proud of. I'm not proud of rejecting men as we sometimes did. That cost me personally."

San Francisco was a revelation. She came here in '86 and met Susie Bright and Honey Lee Cottrell. "It was very liberating, almost like a second coming-out. When I came here, horrible battles were taking place in Britain around sexual ideology. I had begun to change my position around issues like porn. My head was really turned around by some of the sexual libertarians I met here. I did what I could to stay." Posener is now a permanent resident.

That's when the erotic photography began. "I began to photograph a new community for myself, a new set of people that I had never seen before, a new set of ideas that I'd never thought of before." 1987 to 1992 was a period of high activity for her erotic photography.

"For me it was on a continuum of what I'd always done before. It was simply an extension of women taking control of their own lives and expressing desires in a way that was most appropriate for them. It didn't seem any different to me than the radicals of the 70s I'd known, whose very existence as lesbians was considered to be the highest insult to the society they lived in."

"Now women were taking it further and were saying, not only do women have the right to be lesbians, but we have the right to express ourselves in ways that traditionally, women were not supposed to express. We were sexual beings, and we were going to talk about it. It wasn't just a question of falling in love with the first woman that kissed you. We always said back then that this was not about sexuality, this was about love, about resisting the patriarchy, and we made a conscious choice to love women. That above all, is the greatest signifier of lesbianism. That is what it is all about."

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