Opening Up

We’re thrilled to share the digital version of the Tight Lipped zine, Opening Up, and begin breaking the stigma, shame, and silence around vulvovaginal and pelvic pain conditions. The zine includes art, poetry, and prose compiled from more than fifty contributors who submitted their stories about living with vulvar burning, rawness, itching, and pain; pain with penetration, or UTI-like symptoms without an infection present.

Opening Up is divided into four sections: secrets, desire, treatment, and healing. You’ll find pieces about navigating sex and intimacy, medical gaslighting, and how these conditions profoundly influence our relationships to our bodies, identities, and sexualities. You can choose to listen along as you read--throughout the zine the author or another member of our community recorded audio of each piece.

By creating opportunities for people to talk openly and share their experiences--many for the first time--we’ve built a powerful community of folks who understand they’re not alone. This zine was a labor of love that took almost a year of volunteer labor to collect, edit, curate, produce and distribute.

Tight Lipped is committed to accessibility of all forms, and we are pleased to offer the online version of our zine for free! If you feel moved by our work and have the means to do so, please consider a donation so that we can continue to make this resource accessible to all and build the first and only grassroots movement dedicated to these conditions.