A smiling person at a table displaying copies of the Sapphic Sun at New Moon Makers' Market — Credit: c/o New Moon Makers' Market

On average, four lesbians and sapphics touch each physical copy of The Sapphic Sun by the time it reaches your doorstep in an orange envelope. That’s not including the writing, editing or designing, which is all done on computers. It also doesn’t account for lesbian mail carriers, who we assume make up about half of St. Pete’s delivery people.

The Sapphic Sun begins with the written content. Each month, several contributors gather in my apartment to discuss the previous issue, brainstorm pieces for the next, and settle on a theme. Once we finish writing and editing the words, we pass them on to the next step of the process.

The Sapphic Sun is designed primarily by Alexis Thompson, with input from creative director and founder Kelly Dunsmore. Alexis designs each page specifically from a handful of colors available at Print St. Pete, our local community letterpress. Kelly picks up reams of paper from a Tampa-based supplier and brings them to the shop. There, our printing team (usually Alexis, Sara Rocks and Syd Shine) feed sheets through the RISO printer, which uses an environmentally-friendly soy-based ink.

The team loads up a few hundred sheets in the RISO printer and watches as the yellow-inked pages emerge on the other side. Next, we take all those sheets and feed them through again to layer on the red ink, making orange where the two layers overlap. One person watches carefully to make sure the layers line up, stopping the press and making adjustments as needed. The sheets are reloaded again, and black ink is layered over top.

The printing team does this for each color, on each side of each sheet. Each 16-page issue requires 4 sheets of paper printed on both sides. It takes the printing team several hours of attention to detail and meticulous realignment. We have a few rejects for each issue where the alignment was WAY off. These usually get chopped up and used as material for the Scissor Sirens sapphic collage club.

When printing is finished, contributors gather to collate and fold each issue by hand, placing each one into an envelope where we apply a label and a two-dollar stamp. Kelly brings a crate of issues to the post office where they eventually make their way to the doors of hundreds of subscribers in our immediately-recognizable orange mailers. Readers regularly tell me that The Sapphic Sun has made them excited to check the mail again.

This month, we are also partnering with Creative Loafing Tampa Bay through their donor-driven Tampa Bay Journalism Project. They’re letting us leech off their print copy so we can bring The Sapphic Sun to everyone with no financial barrier. Traditional newsprint may not have the same flavor or durability as RISO (read: please give us money so we can give you art), but it’s been an important tool for the freedom of information for centuries.

As a general rule of thumb, we don’t do digital copies of The Sapphic Sun. Print helps people connect with the work in a way screens can’t replicate, and lots of our readers want to keep connecting that way. However, when there’s a reason to put an article online that outweighs our stubborn desire to remain in print, CL typically lets us co-publish on their website.

That’s how The Sapphic Sun gets made, and how we make sure we are providing a genuine service to the community along the way. We’ll keep uplifting queer artists and organizers who deserve the spotlight, while holding bigger LGBTQ+ organizations accountable to the queer and trans people they claim to serve.

The Sapphic Sun is part of the Tampa Bay Journalism Project TBJP, a nascent Creative Loafing Tampa Bay effort supported by grants and a coalition of donors who make specific contributions via the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. If you are a non-paywalled Bay area publication interested in TBJP, please email rroa@ctampa.com. Support Sapphic Sun by subscribing to its monthly print edition.

Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.