Hello! It’s been a while. Between moving (not exactly a gas, but I’m happy to have done it), traveling to the Midwest for some book events (a gas, and a joy to meet a bunch of women who read this newsletter), and hosting some American visitors (massive fun), I’ve been a bit distracted. But as we approach the last quarter of the year, I’m ready to return to routines (the good kind) and productivity (the non-masochistic kind).

Later this week I’m going to be starting a part-time freelance editing gig at The Mill, a very exciting local-media startup in the UK. “Very exciting” is usually business-speak for “dull as ditchwater,” but in this case, I mean it. I wasn’t looking for work, but the energy of founder Joshi Herrmann and the kind of writing they’re publishing made me want to re-commit to the 9-to-5, at least for a couple of days a week!

Now that Q4 is right around the corner, I’m also keen to get back to work on the proposal for my next book. I’ve been researching, my favorite bit, for a while, and I’ve discovered some CORKING nuggets, but I have to pause that fun and do the less exciting job of writing the proposal.

The other week, a book on a topic unrelated to spaces that shaped queer women’s culture helped me realize something important about why feminist bookstores were especially successful in the 1980s and ‘90s.

The book was Lawrence Wright’s Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (1994)—which mentioned that The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, had sold more than 750,000 copies. Wright, whose work I generally admire, didn’t note this fact with admiration, but rather to remind readers that a book that had exerted a tremendous impact on American society, an impact he clearly thought was in excess of what it should have had, was written not by psychologists or scientists, but rather by a poet and a journalist. (The horror!) The case Wright chronicled in Remembering Satan was egregious—the sexual assault investigation at its center was handled extremely poorly. It would also be silly to deny that there were unsubstantiated cases of sexual abuse in the “satanic panic” of the 1980s. Nevertheless, The Courage to Heal helped hundreds of thousands of women make sense of their childhoods and their lives in a way that nothing before had managed. It was sold in all kinds of stores, but I am willing to bet that feminist bookstores sold more copies than any other kind of bookshop because women felt more comfortable asking about it, looking at it, and buying it in a feminist setting.

There were other publishing boomlets of the time that I am confident were overindexed in feminist bookstores. Titles on women’s spirituality by authors like Starhawk (every lesbian household had at least one copy of The Spiral Dance: The Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess) and Z. Budapest were part of an entire section at Lammas, and I can only imagine the reaction a bookseller at Crown Books might have to a woman asking for a title about Wicca or goddess rituals. Alcoholics Anonymous dates back to the 1930s, but in the 1980s there was a big boom in small volumes of meditations and daily reflections for people in recovery or who grew up in families affected by addiction, and I just know that a store like Lammas, where we sold lots of copies of books like Each Day a New Beginning, were more of a safe shopping environment for these books. The same is true, of course, for lesbian novels, anything about queer culture, and also for books about what was then called “domestic abuse.” Shopping for resources on those topics was noticeably different in a feminist bookstore than in any other kind of bookshop.

I rarely see those books anymore. I imagine that a lot of that content has moved online, but I also think they represent a phase the world as a whole, and women especially, needed to go through. There is still an immense need for healing in the world, of course, and I hope there are safe places to find it these days.

This newsletter comes to you a couple of weeks after I had intended, because, despite moving just two years ago, I had somehow forgotten how incredibly disruptive and utterly knackering the whole process is. Our possessions are now in the new place; what’s more, most of the boxes that we are living among are even empty! (Unfortunately, boxes don’t just evaporate once the contents are removed!)

After a month or so of sorting, packing, and unpacking, I have some thoughts on moving:

1. Never challenge a mover to a game of Tetris.
2. All boxes are not created equal, but a precision-cut box that aligns perfectly and tapes evenly is a true thing of beauty.
3. You know you’re really packing—at least if you use the tape dispenser we did—when your thumb is all nicked up by the teeth of the dispenser biting into it.
4. Yes, professional movers are physically strong and impress by toting three boxes at once, but their true display of mastery is their ability to get large objects through small doorways without touching the frame.
5. Meanwhile, relocation planners show their expertise by estimating exactly how many boxes—and how many of each size—will be needed just by looking at a rushed video “tour” of your old apartment. (Truly impressive.)
6. It is never not shocking how much room “used” packing paper takes up when tossed into Edinburgh’s communal recycling bins.
7. There are three distinct stages in every move: Stage 1, where you spend a lot of time sorting and making tough decisions about keeping, donating, and recycling; Stage 2, when you just shove everything into boxes; and Stage 3, right at the end, where almost everything goes directly into the trash.
8. You know the way babies and toddlers glom onto all the other babies and toddlers they spot out in the world? A week ago, the mere sight of a total stranger holding a box was all it took for me to run up to them and ask, “Hey, are you moving?”
9. Most people I know think their place is too small, so how come the last few visits to the old apartment reveal dozens of items stored in previously overlooked/forgotten cupboards?
10. Cats hate moving even more than humans.

Welcome to the post-publication era of A PLACE OF OUR OWN! The book is now available in stores on both sides of the Atlantic—and the Pacific, as my pal Brandon Tensley recently proved to me by sending a photo of APOOO lovingly displayed in The Bookshop Darlinghurst in Sydney, Australia.

It was fabulous to see so many people at the events in Washington, New York City, and Edinburgh, if a little frustrating that there was so little time to spend with anyone. In DC, I was shocked and delighted to see about half of the off our backs collective from my era. (I’m rounding up slightly since I’d seen another member in Athens, Georgia, just a few weeks before. Hi, Tricia!) It was also great to see pals from Slate (who were kind enough to arrange a quick pizza and beer gathering following the Politics & Prose event), and from Lammas and the old days in DC. The New York events were similarly splendid, with lots of media pals and Slatesters and my Brooklyn landlord. (My New York dentist even popped by P&T Knitwear, which is, let’s face it, the dream.)

After returning from the States, the Edinburgh event also felt like a blast from several eras of my past. Along with friends from high school and college—all of whom had zipped up to Scotland from the nation to the south, as did Sarah Savitt, publisher of Virago Press—amazing writers Ellen Galford (if you seek a great read, get your hands on a copy of The Dyke & The Dybbuk), Kate Charlesworth, and Mary Paulson-Ellis were also part of the fantastic intergenerational crowd. I am so grateful to Alison Bechdel for pausing en route from St Andrews to London to be my conversation partner. As I have said several times in interviews, Dykes to Watch Out For was a regular reminder of how important community spaces were to Mo and pals and a major inspiration for my book.

Please enjoy some photos from my travels.

My book, A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, will be out in the U.S. on Tuesday, May 28, and nine days later in the U.K. When I sent out the most recent issue of this newsletter, finished copies of the handsome U.S. edition had already reached Edinburgh, and now I also have the extraordinarily attractive U.K. edition on hand! In an unusual reversal, the British version is bigger. (I may be exaggerating when I say that British apples are the size of American cherries, but only slightly!)

Since a couple of people have asked, there WILL be an audiobook version of A PLACE OF OUR OWN, narrated by me, but for various reasons too dull to go into (though I will just take a moment to restate for the record that Maggie Cooper is the world’s best literary agent), it will come out a wee bit later—around July 30.

A few takeaways from the experience of narrating the audiobook:

We’re only three weeks away from the May 28 U.S. publication date of A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, which seems absolutely impossible. At the start of an episode of the Outward podcast, recorded two weeks ago, I reported feeling “about 23 months pregnant” with the book. At the same time, it seems like only yesterday that the pub date was YEARS away. So, I guess the takeaway is, “I can’t believe I’m only 23.5 months into this 24-month gestation period!” (Fact-checking June feels the need to point out that the writing of this book started 36 months ago!)

So far, I’ve done four interviews about A PLACE OF OUR OWN, and I have to admit, it felt odd. I am much more used to being the person who asks the questions, and while I’ve done radio interviews about stories I’ve written in the past, it has been a while, so I’m a little out of practice. Needless to say, I am very much NOT complaining about this rapid refresher course on the dos and don’ts of being a good interview subject. (Be concise, be interesting, don’t get lost in the weeds!)

My finished books arrived from the States on Thursday. I was in the middle of a bonkers busy day, so I didn’t do an extensive photo shoot. You already know what the gorgeous cover looks like (a reminder for those who need one), so I’ll instead share this goofy “I’m opening a box!” shot!

This newsletter erred from its self-appointed schedule last weekend, because I was in Athens, Georgia, where I gave the 30th Annual Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies. It was a fantastic experience—apart from the lecture, I visited an LGBTQ+ Studies class and got to meet and dine with a bunch of UGA professors and old and new friends—but I had forgotten how disruptive travel is. Not that I was forever popping back and forth across the Atlantic before the pandemic, but I swear plane seats have gotten smaller and jet lag has gotten worse. Or—just spitballing here—I might also have gotten used to doing all my work sitting at the desk in my apartment, which is a blissfully jet-lag-resistant zone.

We are now about five weeks from the May 28 publication date of the U.S. edition of A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, and six weeks from the June 6 U.K. pub date, which means I am once again in a kind of limbo.

I’ve come to realize that limbo is a regular part of the publication process. There’s a tense-but-nothing-you-can-do-about-it waiting period after you file the first draft of your book. (That’s the most short-lived “nothing you can do about it” sensation, because once you get your edits, there’s a lot you can do about it!) Another with the revision. And then the big one, when you’ve pretty much done what you can do with the text, and it goes off to potential blurbers and reviewers.

That last stage is the tensest, because even though you don’t know exactly what your editor is going to make of the manuscript, especially since it might well have been a matter of years since you last discussed what you intended to write, they’ve committed to the project and to you, so unless you go off on an unexpected tangent or develop an entirely new writing style, they’re unlikely to rip it to shreds. But when you’re waiting for reviews and to hear what readers think? That could totally happen!

Some days, you wake up and all you want to do is make zines. I made this one for my publishers to send to booksellers. (My publishers are very indulgent!) Because it will be sent as a PDF and will need to be printed by the recipient, it is in black and white rather than my usual red and blue, so I hand-colored a few copies. (This is the U.S. version—the U.K edition has a different pub date, and Brits have bookshops.) Apols for the image quality/size. I don't have a scanner.

Much as I love to make broad, “they changed the world,” claims for the places I wrote about in A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, it’s not entirely true to suggest that lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, dyke softball teams, lesbian land groups, feminist sex-toy stores, and queer vacation destinations were the first places of their kind to address customers and potential customers in a direct, friendly style. Still, they adopted an unusually friendly tone—often taking great pains to establish that they were part of the community they were marketing to.

This is true of most of the ads pioneering lesbian-feminist businesswomen placed—though I admit it’s surely relevant that the only places they could afford to advertise were the kinds of small publications and community newsletters they would have read whether or not they had seized the entrepreneurial mantle. I laugh every time I see this joint ad from the 1990s for Manhattan bars the Cubbyhole and Crazy Nanny’s that mentions the Cubby’s new exhaust fan. WOW, A NEW EXHAUST! That is the very definition of inside softball. (Or bad advertising, but I prefer to think of it as showing that the proprietors had a good sense of what their patrons valued.)

This “hey, we're just talking, dyke to dyke” approach is also clear in the greeting owners Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning placed on the inside page of the first mail-order catalog for their company Toys in Babeland (later just Babeland). The familiar tone and the smiling avatars, drawn by cartoonist Ellen Forney who also created the catalog’s product illustrations, reminded readers that Claire and Rachel weren’t just businesswomen, they were also family. If a reader had taken up the suggestion offered in Claire and Rachel’s last sentence and dropped into the store when they found themself in Seattle, they would’ve found a place where they could get expert advice about local bars and activities as well as help finding a good sex toy.

Yesterday, we had lunch in the cafe of the Edinburgh John Lewis department store. The food is decent enough, the views are spectacular, and it’s close to a bookstore and an Italian deli where we like to shop. But for me at least, the cafe’s biggest draw is the collection of books that for reasons I’ll never comprehend are shelved (but not for sale) in the corner nook where we always sit. The selection is really good!

The books don't really have a uniform look—they're basically hardbacks with the dust covers removed—and while there’s no overarching theme, most fall under the general category, “Books That Appeal to June Thomas.” Many’s the time (yes, more than once) I’ve ordered a book after flipping through it while eating lunch.

I like books, and I like any eating establishment that provides books for customers to peruse while they’re dining, but my feelings for these places aren’t like the absolutely PASSION I felt for the feminist bookstores I write about in A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE. There was something “extra” about those stores—perhaps related to all the other stuff that was crammed onto their rickety shelves: the women’s music albums, the magazines, the T-shirts, the labrys pendants, and other etceteras.

I’m in Manchester, visiting my mom, for a few days, and on Friday I popped into the city center to meet a friend and take a look around. As anyone who has watched the original British Queer as Folk (or any of Russell T. Davies’ many Manchester-set dramas) knows, it’s now a very queer-friendly place. The Gay Village is one of the city’s main nightlife centers, and it’s marked on neighborhood maps for all the world to see. (I admit, though, that part of me loves this cheeky, very Mancunian, map calling the Village “3 gay people and 500 straights,” though I have no idea if that’s true.)

I was checking out queer bookstores, and it felt relevant that one of them is in Afflecks—”an emporium of eclecticism, a totem of indie commerce in Manchester's Northern Quarter”—in other words, one of those buildings that houses a warren of stalls, mostly selling things like anime, fetish clothing, and items that appear to be pre-seeded with the aroma of pachouli. It’s a magnet for outsiders, and the building is packed with signs reminding visitors that it is “no place for hate.” I don’t know the background there—if there have been incidents in the past, or if it’s part of a general campaign of positivity—but it feels like a nice encapsulation of the difference between Old Manchester, which is to say when I grew up there, and the city as it is today.

Back in the 1980s, I mostly went into the city to catch the train to Nottingham, where I went to university, or to go shopping at Grass Roots, a classic “radical bookshop” down near Piccadilly station. (There was also an amazing place called Paramount Books near the Arndale Center that sold American magazines. I assumed it was long gone, but a search suggests it’s still there, which is mind-blowing.)

In the last newsletter, I wrote about the camouflage that some big-city lesbian bars were obliged to adopt in order to avoid unwanted attention while still attracting enough desired attention (i.e., patronage from lesbian customers) to say open. Today, I want to share a poem by Chocolate Waters that Big Mama Rag published in December 1979. It beautifully encapsulates the problems that were more common outside of compact, public-transportation-friendly New York City: the out-of-the-way, often sketchy, locations lesbian bars found themselves in.

(I'm using the whole poem because Chocolate Waters gave me permission to run it in Slate in 2011, and the book it's from, Charting New Waters, is out of print. You can still support Chocolate by buying her newer books, though.)

That last stanza is a killer. I don’t want to agree, but I know I’ve spent evenings stewing about the crumminess of dyke bars while also feeling frustrated that I couldn’t just go somewhere else, because there were no other clubs in town where it felt safe to dance/flirt/make out with women.

There are photographs at the start of every chapter of A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE, five of them by the great JEB (Joan E. Biren). I also included a few images interspersed with the text to help readers get a (literal) picture of some of the situations I’m describing. I want to share one of those today.

This is the holiday card Elaine Romagnoli, who ran the bar Bonnie & Clyde (and, later, the original Cubby Hole and Crazy Nanny’s), sent out in 1978. It might seem odd for a canny businesswoman to choose such a crappy photo of her place—all that trash, grubby posters covering the bar’s windows, and the scruffy woman boozing outside—but it’s a great example of the camouflage many lesbian bars were obliged to adopt if they wanted to stay in business.

The card was sent with a bit of a wink. The message on the reverse said, “Thank you for not judging us by our cover,” a reference both to the bar’s cover charge (unusual in New York at the time) and the appearance it presented to the world.

I love to read about tech bros so that I can get in touch with my inner tutting mechanism. They’re such narcissists, with their compulsive monitoring of follower counts and body-fat index! Of course, I am just as obsessed, albeit about different things. For many years I have kept a list of the books I read, and less systematically of the other bits of culture I enjoy.

Why do I do this? It’s a free time-travel device! Scanning the list of books I read in a particular year, I can almost always remember where I was, what I was doing at the time, and who I was with. I wish I had such clear recollection of the books’ content! Glancing at the list of books I read in 2023, trying to identify a book title I could barely recall, I was transported to a July holiday in Crieff. I couldn’t tell you much about that book (contestants in a reality cooking competition fall in love—honestly, it was decent), but I remembered the group dinners we ate while I was reading it and a trip to an amazing tourist spot. (See below!)

I promise I’ll stop navel-gazing soon, but the last couple of weeks have been prime reading time, and I added a few excellent books to my 2023 list since the last newsletter. Since I’ve already confessed to being a wee bit self-absorbed, there’s nothing to lose by linking to the full list, and providing some bonus pie charts. (One note: The “other” category in the gender chart represents books written by mixed-gender teams or nonbinary authors.)

Before I get to the main topic of today’s newsletter, check out this gorgeous Advance Uncorrected Proof that winged its way across the Atlantic earlier this week. The photo is, in fact, A Place of Our Own right next to our place. (Sadly, not our own.)

I submitted my proofreading tweaks earlier this week, so I’ve officially done what I can for the book itself, and now the focus shifts to letting the world know of its existence. A few people are reading for blurbing purposes, and soon it will be going out to reviewers. I’m both relieved to be done with this phase and (very) anxious to see what readers will think of it.

And speaking of reading … One of my favorite parts of this time of year is getting to learn about the reading habits of complete strangers. And since I often learn about fabulous-sounding books from these lists, the end of the year tends to be full of good reads. I figured I might as well get in on the act.

We just got back from a vacation in London, which was my first time in the city in many years—and the last visit was a quick day trip, so it might have been a decade or even longer since I spent proper time there. London, like all good places, is constantly changing, but I must admit that I was a bit dazzled by some of the transformation. King’s Cross! What??? We went to dinner in what I guess is now called Pancras Square, and let’s just say it was nothing like the place where I used to hop¹ on the Tube back in the 1980s, and certainly nothing like the horror show of the 1970s, when “King’s Cross” was short-hand for “the place where runaways are exploited.”

We mostly shopped, ate, and visited galleries. (I didn’t care for the National Portrait Gallery rehang, but I was properly ENRAGED by what they did to the NPG Cafe, which is truly the most inefficient eating establishment I have ever visited. However, I was delighted to get a chance to check out JEB’s work at the RE/SISTERS show at the Barbican.)

I also got to … have lunch with my U.K. publisher, because I am happy to share that A PLACE OF OUR OWN is going to be published by Virago in the U.K. I still can’t quite believe that my name will be on the spine of a book with that classic apple logo, but it is great for the book (and for me!), and I’ve loved learning about the U.K. way of doing things. More info—including pre-order links—shortly!

RECOMMENDATIONS: Believe it or not, one of the reasons we went to London was to visit stationery stores. It’s not that either of us needs any more stationery—if I took up a pen and made shapes on paper every minute I was awake, I’m pretty sure I would be able to keep going until I were approximately 123 years old without restocking—but I love stationery shopping, so off we went. Londoners will surely find this recommendation obvious, but I swear that U.S. stationery blogs and podcasts that talk about where to shop in London rarely mention the London Graphic Centre, and I would say it is the best multi-brand option in London. (No shade on Present & Correct—very amusing, and handily located right next to the fantastic London Review Bookshop—but it reminded me that it is possible for a store’s stock to be too highly curated.) The London Graphic Centre’s inventory is a little eccentric—every Midori product and a ton of Freitag bags in stock, but only two or three pen brands—but I didn’t mind because its strengths were the things I am interested in and its deficiencies products I am already loaded up on. It’s right in the heart of Covent Garden, so if you are a stationery person and you have limited time in London, pop to Covent Garden and visit Muji and London Graphic Centre.

First, thanks to everyone who responded to my last newsletter with suggestions for dishy lesbian-feminist texts from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. I can’t believe I forgot about Kate Millett’s Flying, especially because it was one of the books I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about. (I long ago lost said dissertation—I was at a tennis tournament in Eastbourne when I should have been picking up my copy in Nottingham—but given how unfamiliar Flying seemed when I started to re-read it, I’m pretty sure 20-year-old me failed to comprehend the pain Millett was expressing in the book—and it’s a big book, stuffed with suffering.) But check out the Amazon description: “In the heady atmosphere of instant fame, while she is constantly moving between New York and London, Cape Cod and her farm in Poughkeepsie, Millett's days and nights are filled with flashes of anger, moments of intimacy, appointments, funerals, divorces, parties, and meetings. Her response is to write it all down.” Yep, sounds like just what I was looking for!

Speaking of things people are looking for … may I introduce the cover of my book!

Doesn’t it look fabulous? The photograph is by the incomparable JEB, whose work also appears inside the book. It’s such a perfect image, encapsulating the way the places I write about—the lesbian bar, the feminist bookstore, the softball diamond, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy emporia, and queer vacation destinations—drew women together to hang and interact, flirt and conspire. I wish I could join those women on the steps of Lammas Women’s Shop right now. (Someone asked me how I feel about the pink, and despite the undeniable baggage, I have to say I love it. Best of all, it stands out across a crowded bookstore.)

In the last few weeks I’ve been having a blast doing research for what might be my next book. In addition to generally spending time with the subject, I’ve been concentrating on a two-year period that will probably form the basis of the sample chapter.

In my admittedly limited experience, the sample chapter is the trickiest part of a book proposal, if only because you have to write several thousand impressively smart, impressively well-researched words before you know whether anyone’s interested and while you’re juggling all your other responsibilities. (It’s incredibly useful, though. I couldn’t have written A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED QUEER WOMEN’S CULTURE without having devoted more time than I really wanted to the sample chapter.)

Ah, but the research … that’s the fun bit, right? Certainly, in this case that’s true.

Flipping through old feminist publications decades after they first appeared really is one of my favorite pastimes. This is especially true of the magazines from the very early days of “women’s liberation,” when everything was so new and exciting (and schismatic). In the last few years, several women who were present at the creation of the movement have released memoirs, so I’ve also gotten to compare their contrasting descriptions of the events and people that will make up this chapter.

I delivered my manuscript revisions! (When I tried to add a date to that last sentence indicating exactly when I filed, I couldn’t remember if it was two or three weeks ago. I just consulted my calendar … and it was six days ago! Draw your own conclusions about the current state of my brain.) Now only copy editing remains before the writing process is finished.

The last few months were intense, but I had a blast. This stage can be fraught if you aren’t on the same page as your editor. I’m glad to say that even when I didn’t particularly want to return to a topic I thought I’d nailed down, I never had any doubts that my incredibly sharp editor (Madeline Lee of Seal Press) was right to push me a little bit further. The book is far better for it.

I already miss digging through old magazines, looking for articles, letters, ads, and whatevsies related to the six places I’m writing about. (Altogether now: the lesbian bar, the feminist bookstore, the softball field, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and queer vacation destinations.) So while I re-collect my senses, let me share two bits of writing that remind me/us why these places matter. (Neither made it into the book, which indicates how universal these shitty experiences were.)

These two pieces, about a terrible Chicago bar, are from Lavender Woman, a lesbian magazine published irregularly between 1971 and 1978 out of Chicago. (There’s a great Wikipedia entry about Lavender Woman. I particularly enjoyed the section on “The Final Edition.”)

Is it OK to invent stories? Novelists, journalists, and historians will answer that question differently. As with so many things in life, context is all.

My first book, which, inshallah, will be out just about a year from now, is a work of cultural history—all factual and footnoted. But I have always felt that the border between fact and fiction is especially porous when it comes to queer history. Maybe this isn’t as true for people growing up and coming out today—or in some glorious moment five or ten years ago—but like most queer people my age, I spent a lot of time indulging in obfuscation. Where was I going? Who was I going with? What would we do there? The accuracy of my answer depended on who was asking.

To tell a lie is to betray a trust. But stretching the truth for reasons of safety? Passing off a porkie to keep a job or protect a friendship or maintain a relationship with a family member? Perfectly understandable in the circumstances.

I wrote a paragraph on this topic in one of the strangest (certainly most revealing) Slate articles I ever wrote:

I’m spending a few days at my mom’s house, which also happens to be the house I grew up in. I haven’t lived here in more than 40 years, and it is a very small house, so I rarely happen upon stuff from my youth during my visits here, with one notable exception: In my bedroom, there’s a jar full of badges, or buttons, as we Americans would call them.

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who lived through the ‘70s and ‘80s to hear that I was one of those people who always a) wore “T-shirts with things written on them,” as my college roommate, who hated such garments, always called them, and b) covered any items of clothing that didn’t come covered in words with buttons bearing right-on slogans.

The last few times I’ve been here, I pawed around at the top of the jar, but today I really dug deep, emptying the whole thing out. (I am already convinced I’ll get stuck with a rusty badge-back during the night, since I laid them all out on the bed.)

Sadly for my hopes and dreams for this newsletter, there were very few buttons commemorating great moments in lesbian history. Also, shockingly, nothing with Margaret Thatcher’s name or image. I had assumed this jar would establish my bona fides as a precocious political activist. Instead, it mostly reveals that I was a pathetic teenage nerd!

I submitted the first draft of my book! There’s still a ton of work to do, but I took a week off to recover—and I have to say, I didn’t really know what to do with myself without the book to shape my days.

One of the chapters I finished in the last month was one I’d been slightly dreading writing: the one about feminist sex-toy stores. My hesitation wasn’t because I doubted the topic’s importance or relevance—quite the opposite—but because I’m a wee bit prudish. (Even though I work from home and have absolutely no one looking over my shoulder, I was embarrassed every time I had to do research or fact-checking on a “pleasure products industry” website. You’d think there were rules about the minimum number of dildos that must be present in every ad—and they’re never the cute dolphin or corn cob ones.) In the end, though, it was one of my favorite chapters. I spoke with a bunch of people from Good Vibrations and Babeland, and they were uniformly delightful and helpful. Also, it’s a fascinating story, even though it takes a slightly depressing turn around 2017.

Yes, yes, I hear you muttering, but why am I telling you this now? Because of a funny coincidence I noticed in the course of my research.

Two women—one on each coast—opened the first feminist sex-toy stores in the mid-’70s. Dell Williams opened Eve’s Garden in Manhattan in 1974 (originally as a mail-order operation), and Joani Blank launched Good Vibrations in the Bay Area in 1977. What distinguished these stores from the existing “adult” emporia were a focus on sex education and high-quality products; a sex-positive, shame-free attitude; and a very different aesthetic. Instead of sleazy porn shops in “bad” neighborhoods, they opened appealing, cosy boutiques in cool downtown areas.

Hello! Remember me? It’s been a minute. I’m in the final push to finish my book, so I’ve been a bit heads down of late. I’m massively grateful to my Working co-hosts and the Outward podcast team for taking up some slack so I could have a month of uninterrupted focus.

And then I went and interrupted my own focus earlier this week by taking a couple of hours to attend First Minister’s Questions at the Scottish Parliament. I’ve put off most of the exploration of Edinburgh and Scotland that I’d like to do until after the book is delivered, but when Nicola Sturgeon announced that she was stepping down as leader of the Scottish National Party, I knew I needed to go sooner rather than later. I’ve seen some good silver cast performances at the opera, but let’s face it, the gold cast is usually better. (Sturgeon’s replacement should be chosen by the end of the month, and I intend to check whoever wins some other Thursday at noon.)

My verdict? Nicola Sturgeon is an amazing performer. I was in the debating chamber for a few minutes before FMQ, and when she came in, she was immediately the focus of attention. This wasn’t just because she’s the most important person there, or for reasons related to government policy, it’s because she’s tremendously charismatic. I was reminded of being at the Eastbourne tennis tournament back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was always obvious where on the grounds of Devonshire Park Billie Jean King was. I’m not quite sure how radar works, so it was either like radar or the opposite of radar—she would involuntarily send pings off into the air so you just had a sense that there was a charismatic presence nearby. (When I went back to Eastbourne 15-20 years later, I was surprised to learn that Anna Kournikova had a similar presence.)

Dame Carmen Callil died on Oct. 17, 2022. She was born in Australia, but she was an exceedingly British kind of feminist businesswoman. She was the publicist of landmark British magazine Spare Rib, but her main claim to fame was launching Virago Books in 1973.

As the Guardian’s obit of Callil noted, Virago was undoubtedly a feminist press.

Each dark green volume carried on its second page the declaration that “Virago is a feminist publishing company”, followed by a quotation from Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution: “It is only when women start to organise in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society.”

Still, I’ve always been struck by the contrast between British feminist presses and their American sistren. As a matter of trivia, the British presses were often run by immigrants—Callil at Virago, the Women’s Press’ Ros de Lanerolle was South African (after she died, I learned that she had been an anti-apartheid activist who was on the regime’s ban list—she had seemed such a bossy, posh English lady; I was absolutely horrified when I realized how much I’d misjudged her!), and Onlywomen’s Lilian Mohin was (practically if not technically) American. (I believe all the Sheba team were British-born, though they were diasporic.) A more significant difference was that the the “big” houses—Virago and the Women’s Press—were run by women but financed/ultimately owned by men.

As I was wrapping up the chapter on lesbian land—the first draft anyway!—I came across an interesting concept that offered an explanation for something I’d been struggling to put my finger on.

Even sympathetic observers of the landdyke world note that the community is running out of time. Heather Burmeister, who wrote a delightfully readable Master’s thesis on landdykes and their culture, said, “The founders of the southern Oregon lesbian land communities are aging, and without a new generation of women to take over the lands there may not be a lesbian land community in the future.”

There are lots of reasons for the slow fadeout. Life in rural isolation hasn’t gotten much easier since the 1970s, and while it’s now theoretically possible to do remote work from the land—though I’m not sure most landdykes would see that as escaping the patriarchy—that requires better Internet connection than most of them have. (They are, after all, low-income rural residents, with the digital and medical/dental divides that confers.)

The more divisive issue, though, is that as a matter of policy, almost all lesbian land communities still refuse access to anyone but “womyn-born womyn,” or WBW as it usually appears in country-lesbian publications. This doesn’t just exclude trans and nonbinary people, but also cis women who find the policy offensive and/or wrong.

I’m aware that in the last two newsletters I’ve leaned rather heavily on the challenges and downsides of living on lesbian land, and having just watched* a bunch of landdykes, some of whom have been on land for more than 40 years, talk lovingly about the experience, I figured I should share some of the reasons they gave for being drawn to and for staying on the land. (*It was a recording of a Zoom presentation organized by Older Lesbians Organizing for Change. You can watch it here.)

Among the sources of landdyke joy offered in the roundtable:

• Living on the land with other creatures

• The community, specifically landmates

• Being part of a movement of ecologically minded women

• Solitude

• The ease with which you can give landmates space

• Getting to live on beautiful land, which wouldn’t have been possible without the women’s land movement

• Knowing that help is always near

• Skill-sharing

• A sense of family, especially for women who had bad experiences with their birth families

• The knowledge that they have protected a piece of land from less favorable uses. (The land trusts that many land projects have formed often include covenants that protect the land from, for example, subdivision.)

• Providing safe, loving environments

• “Connecting with women, with land, with spirit”

• Living with possibility rather than in fear

• Healing. Land is “a place to release betrayals and scars”

• A place to relate to other women in a non-superficial way

For an even more brass-tacks take on what women seek on lesbian land, let me share a quote from Jae Haggard, who I’ve been corresponding with lately, and who always begins her emails with a reference to the beauty of the day in the high desert of New Mexico where she lives. Back in 1991, in Maize, the country-lesbian magazine she now edits, she wrote of the new property she and a partner had just moved onto:

Three weeks further into my investigations of lesbian land, my attitude has shifted from “Yes, the patriarchy is heinous, and it was even more blatant in its heinousness 50 years ago, but I could never go live in a tipi miles away from civilization” to “Yikes, these women’s commitment to founding an entirely new society took them to some crazy extremes but way to be on the vanguard!”

That said, some of those crazy extremes are wild to contemplate, so let’s cherry pick a few, eh? For history’s sake. (These are gathered from Lesbian Land, a 1985 anthology edited by Joyce Cheney, who was herself a veteran of communal living—her story of her time in Vermont’s Redbird collective is one of the most eyebrow-raising of the bunch.)

I think even Cheney—who says in her introduction that while she wanted the book’s contributors to be honest about their experiences on land, she didn’t want to discourage anyone from moving to rural communities—was a bit shocked by the strictness of one group. As part of her final push to provide as broad a picture of the scene as possible, Cheney did some last-minute outreach to a Francophone community on land at Kebec, outside of Montreal. Unfortunately, she never heard from them. “Later,” she reports, a friend told her, "they reject any part of technology, including the written word!”

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on the chapter about lesbian land, and it’s a tricky one.

There are several reasons why this chapter is moving kind of slow. Separatism is certainly a factor—and while the vast majority of internal debate was around permitting male children or straight/bisexual women onto lesbian land, rather than trans exclusion, this is the place where I get to grapple with contested access and (sometimes literal) gatekeeping. I will not traffic in transphobia, but I want readers—especially younger people whose only experience of queer life is from the last decade—to understand why women made certain decisions in 1975 or 1985. (Don’t ask me why they or others made similar decisions in 2015 or hold transphobic views today, though.)

Perhaps a bigger stumbling block is that I’m such a keen and confirmed city dweller that I simply can’t imagine turning my back on all the benefits of urban community. As soon as I made it to a city with a significant queer community, with bars and bookstores and cultural events, I couldn’t imagine choosing to live anywhere else. (Young queers may have the internet, but I’m sorry they never got to go to a Sweet Honey concert in D.C. in the 1980s—now THAT was a scene!)

Maybe because I grew up without a bunch of mod cons that I now enjoy VERY MUCH INDEED, I cannot fathom why women who had indoor bathrooms, running water, and electricity (for the record, I grew up with some of those things!) decided to move to remote, undeveloped land, many without the skills required to thrive in a rural/farming situation, at a time when moving out there effectively isolated them from all the institutions that women were building in the city. Worse, I could feel myself assuming a condescending attitude toward those women—dismissing them as deluded romantics who had no idea what they were getting into or how hard it would be to survive in the country.

The last time I sent out this newsletter I was in Brooklyn, fretting about traveling to Edinburgh with Kipper via Paris and a “pet taxi.” In some ways that was the part of the entire move that I was most anxious about, and I’m glad to report that it went smoothly.

If you ever need to fly with a cat, I’m sorry to inform you that when you go through TSA, you have to take your pet out of its carrier and hold it as you both go through the scanner thingy. (The empty carrier then goes through the X-ray machine.) This was perhaps the most anxiety-producing part of the whole anxiety-producing event, because Kipper isn’t terribly fond of being picked up and had made us chase her around the apartment just a couple of hours before so we could put her into the carrier in the first place. Fortunately, she was compliant (and a wee bit sedated) in the crowded airport.

If you’re wondering what a pet taxi is, it’s essentially a taxi driver from Folkestone in England, who drives their taxi to Paris (or Amsterdam or wherever), picks you up from the airport, takes you to Calais, guides you through the various pet procedures (people needing to get their pets into Britain represent a sizable chunk of the shuttle’s customers, so Le Shuttle has an entire Pet Reception area that is a lot less of a party than the name suggests, though it was probably more fun for social animals like dogs than it was for a hermit like Kipper), and then drops you off wherever you need to go on the other side of said Channel. In my case that was Folkestone West station, where we caught a train to Edinburgh, via London.

This was Kipper about 12 hours after that 30-hour journey, which involved three taxi rides, a transatlantic plane journey, two trains, and two short walks in the rain. Kipper is the only member of this household pictured, because the rest of us could barely operate a camera at that point, much less pose for a photo.

It’s summer—and more precisely, the summer of 2022—so I guess it’s theoretically possible that the absence of my newsletter from your email inbox hasn’t been your biggest concern. But if you were wondering where it’s been, let’s just say that an international move is a bit of a time suck.

Since the last newsletter, R and I have been to Edinburgh, found an ADORABLE apartment in Dean Village, and returned home to throw out some stuff, give away a ton more, and sit quietly while a hyperefficient team of professional movers packed up all the items we are keeping and put them in a truck, ready to be loaded onto a ship and sent to Britain.

I fear that most of the last month has been a bit of a bust when it comes to working on my book. Though not entirely, thank goodness. I had a couple of fantastic conversations about ALFA, the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, one with a member of the ALFA Omegas and the other with an archivist. Pici, the Omegas catcher (who went on to be an umpire in the Atlanta rec league after she hung up her cleats), was incredibly helpful in giving me a sense of the era—the Omegas played in 1974 and ‘75—and what it felt like to play on an out lesbian team nearly 50 years ago.

I kept Pici talking for longer than we’d originally scheduled, mostly about softball, but I was also curious about another topic that keeps coming up over the course of my research: the telephone.

In this issue of the newsletter, I was all set to regale you with stories about ALFA, the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, and its “softball strategy,” which in 1974 led it to create a team to play in the city rec league. (On June 23, I attended an ALFA reunion on Zoom, which gathered together a whole bunch of the original members, 50 years to the day after their first meeting. The group disbanded in 1994, but that doesn’t make their achievements any less impressive.)

But I’m not going to because … I have some personal news. Rosemary and I are moving to Edinburgh, Scotland!

If you’re a pal of mine and you hadn’t heard about this possible relocation, I apologize. We filed the application for Rosemary’s visa back in March, and we should have had a response within six weeks, but because of the Ukrainian conflict, the U.K. visa-issuing authorities were overwhelmed and took much longer than usual to make a decision. We didn’t know if the application would be successful, so we didn’t shout it from the highest peak. But since we got the green light, consider this me yelling the news from one of those cool New York City rooftops with fairy lights and amazing views that you see in pharmaceutical commercials.

I never thought I’d return to Britain—I let my U.K. passport lapse years ago (having to renew it caused yet another delay!), and I’ve spent more time in Japan than in the U.K. since 2008, though the pandemic put a stop to that.

Last Saturday, I left my house around 8 a.m. and headed out to Randall’s Island to watch some queer softball games. I got there around 9:20, to find a game already in progress. I mention this not so much for you all to go “wow, June, way to sacrifice couch time for your art”—well, maybe just a little bit—but more to say that YOIKS, those softball players are keen.

It’s June, the time of year when every queer person has a calendar as full as a Kardashian’s. Personally, I was in bed at 10:30 the night before, but I know that pretty much every single one of the members of Resting Pitch Face I hung out with were out celebrating Pride month, teammates’ birthdays, and the general joy of being young and healthy in the big city until the wee small hours. One woman told me she’d had two hours’ sleep the night before, and I’m pretty sure she was rounding up. (She still played really well.)

Since I think of all the people who receive this newsletter as friends, here I will admit that this was my first time watching dyke softball. (Technically, RPF play in the women+ division of the Big Apple Softball League, which means that all but cis men are eligible and welcome.) I am embarrassed by this till-now open space on my lesbian bingo card, so let me run through my excuses right quick:

1. I am not, in any way, shape, or form, sporty. (I can almost hear the audible guffaws from people who know me IRL, even from several states away.) My hand-eye coordination is so terrible that I would be a danger to myself and others wielding a bat or being around a ball. (Besides, think of all the money I’ve spent on dental work.)
2. I do not enjoy being out in the sun. I’ve had a couple of eye operations, as a result of which my eyes don’t respond to light, which means being outdoors is pretty much a guaranteed headache. (Honestly, though, even before those surgeries I was a tad heliophobic.) I was very grateful that RPF invited me into their dugout. Not only did this let me eavesdrop (respectfully), it also provided very welcome shade.
3. C’mon, we don’t all have to do everything. Just know that come the revolution—or the apocalypse—I shouldn’t be assigned any tasks that involve throwing or catching.

I have finally moved on from the world of bars, but I have to tell you about a cool side road I took a turn down en route to the softball diamond.

As I’ve mentioned before, in 2011, I interviewed Elaine Romagnoli, who spent many years operating lesbian bars, starting in the early 1970s. But she first worked in Manhattan straight bars, starting in the early 1960s. She told me that back then, New York law prohibited women from working behind the bar after midnight, so at that point she had to switch roles.

Even though there were no red flags that Romagnoli’s memory was faulty when we spoke or that she’d been giving me an air-brushed version of her biography, I knew I had to fact-check this detail.

I thought it would be pretty straightforward. A quick Google search involving words like “women,” “bar,” “New York,” “midnight,” and “1960s” would cough up the information I needed pretty quickly, I reckoned. Many days later, I was still trying to dream up appropriate search terms. (I had not been working full-time on this, I hasten to add, but it was something I returned to pretty frequently whenever I had a few minutes to spare between larger tasks.)

There’s no doubt that things are pretty terrible right now on all kinds of fronts. Roe will likely be overturned next month, after having been severely undermined over recent years, and that surely won’t be the end of the great undoing. So this is very much NOT in the spirit of “look how great things are now compared with the bad old days.” But, JFC, some things used to be really bloody awful.

Just check out the opening paragraphs of the 1973 New Women’s Survival Catalog section on restaurants:

Seldom is a woman more acutely aware of her second-class citizenship than when she goes to a restaurant “unescorted” by a man. If she does, she knows she risks being treated with condescension by the maitre d’ and/or waiters; stared and leered at by waiters and diners (male, naturally); hassled for an I.D. to prove her drinking age, even though she is thirty-three and looks it; being “joined” by uninvited males who regard any single women out by themselves as fair game; and insulted if she asks an intruder to take his unwanted attentions elsewhere. Two women together fare little better.

This is just one side of the subtle, but powerful ploys used by men to discourage women from exerting independence–on a par with street harassment and violence which is meant to remind women that the world outside the home belongs to men, especially after dark. “What is a nice girl like you doing out alone (sans male) by yourself.”

It was only when reading this a few months ago that I remembered being invited to a gentleman’s table on my first visit to the States back in 1980. It was probably the first time I’d eaten alone in a restaurant in any country—so of course I said yes, thinking that was just what people did in restaurants, certainly American restaurants. As I recall, the guy was perfectly harmless and dull. (I was a college freshman at the time, but since I was an American Studies major, we got to spend the summer at Carroll College [now Carroll University] in Waukesha, Wisconsin. This dining experience was after that, when I spent a week or so in New York at the U.S. Open. I stayed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women! Lots of short-story-prompt-level-strange facts in this parenthetical, but let’s move on!)

One thing I’ve been pondering as I work on the bar chapter of my book (yes, still!), is why bars get so much more attention than coffeeshops, restaurants, and so on. (I for one am CRAZY for so ons.)

On one level, the answer is obvious: sex. Booze, dim lights, music, and dancing set a mood that just isn’t accessible when there are napkins on the table and it’s bright enough to read a menu. I enjoyed many a tasty veggie burger at Food for Thought, D.C.’s de facto dyke restaurant, in the 1980s, but I never experienced the kind of transcendence that is pretty much guaranteed by a decent DJ and a pleasantly packed dance floor. Food and clothing might come first on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it’s the stuff higher up the pyramid that gets people excited and keeps them coming back.

OK, but still, some of those restaurants and coffeeshops sound supercool. Why are there no annual celebrations of the Fedora and Aldo’s, Greenwich Village restaurants that, according to a Ph.D. dissertation I read, “were not exclusively gay restaurants but welcomed women wearing slacks, and lesbians felt comfortable there.” One woman remembered “You could hold hands, sit close, and enjoy being treated like any other couple.”

Similarly, I’m pretty sure there’s no plaque commemorating Pam Pam’s, a diner that was a popular post-bar destination. That same dissertation quoted Carolyn Kovac describing Pam Pam’s as “an absolute scene. Every gay person … wound up there at some point. It was like a bar that served coffee.”

On one of my first visits to the Lesbian Herstory Archives more than a decade ago, I came across an amazing article in the July 1977 issue of Pearl Diver, a long-defunct lesbian-feminist publication out of Portland, Oregon. (Sadly, it was not a Black lesbian magazine, as one online source suggests. Consistently mind-blowing covers, though. The July ‘77 cover showed a naked woman—artistically rendered, and all, but it left nothing to the imagination!)

The story, titled “The Bar Tapes” is an exercise in radical transparency—to such an extent that it’s a good reminder of why business owners aren’t usually so forthcoming.

The genesis of the piece was that parties unknown had plastered a sign reading, “THIS BAR EXPLOITS WOMEN” on the door of Rising Moon, a woman-owned and operated bar that had been in business for a little over a year at the time. The issue was that Rising Moon charged more for beer than the other gay bars in town, and political women concluded that this was because the owners were price-gouging. The piece’s anonymous author explained:

Last week I spent several mornings looking through the archives of OutWeek, a New York LGBTQ magazine that was published between June 1989 and July 1991. Wikipedia says OutWeek was “the initiator of a cool new sensibility in lesbian and gay journalism,” and Wikipedia isn’t wrong. I was looking for stories about the dyke bars of that era, but I’m insufficiently disciplined to restrain myself from reading around the search results.

One of the stories I couldn’t resist was “Queer Night” a shaggy 11-page chronology of how the paper’s writers and editors spent one Friday night in the spring of 1991. (It starts on Page 35 of this issue.)

Being a very nosey person, I’ll read just about anything that masquerades as a series of diary entries, and there was certainly a lot to eavesdrop on in “Queer Night.” This was the heyday of go-go dancers, back rooms, and fetish bars, and all the correspondents managed to stumble onto something salacious before the night was over. (I was worried about the guy who was vacuuming his apartment at 11 p.m., but he rallied and made it to Loony Bin by 2 a.m.)

Apart from the snoop factor, though, it was good to be reminded of all the things that constitute a queer night. Because I no longer [glances through 11 pages of sordid shenanigans] spend my weekends in bars where videos show “a woman doing things I have never seen done with a dental dam,” I sometimes think my nightlife days are over. But that simply isn’t true. Those indefatigable (or, more likely, artificially stimulated) night owls of 31 years ago weren’t ONLY watching strip shows and squeezing into the overcrowded Clit Club. (Though one OutWeeker’s arrival there provided the feature’s most relatable line: “As I step into the club, my glasses fog up.”)

The last few weeks have been a bit bonkers, but I don’t want to neglect this newsletter. Clearly, it is time to use an old blogger’s trick and do a photo post. That’s right, it’s the old View From My Window gambit.

I loved this 1991-ish ad for both Crazy Nanny’s and The Cubbyhole. It’s an indication of how much lesbian institutions have worked together rather than indulging in cut-throat competition, and it provides evidence of longstanding trans-inclusive attitudes in lesbian bars–but while it probably made sense to the women who saw it when it first appeared, it’s a bit opaque in 2022. So let me elucidate.

The ad was signed by Tanya Saunders and Elaine Romagnoli, both of whom were serial lesbian bar owners, and both of whom have now passed away, Saunders in 2018 and Romagnoli in 2021.

As I research the places lesbians have gathered, I’m sometimes reminded of the spaces we didn’t have—like bathhouses.

As I wrote in Issue 5 of this newsletter, the urge to wonder why lesbians lack a thing that is plentiful for gay men is stinkin’ thinkin’. Lesbians and gay men have some shared experiences, but we’re definitely not identical, and that kind of side-by-side comparison treats gay men’s culture as the norm—the template that lesbian culture should be measured against. That’s not the case. Obviously, lesbians are from Venus, and gay men are from Uranus.

Still, I can’t help wondering if I would’ve been a patron if lesbian bathhouses had they been “a thing” when I was coming out. (Who am I kidding? Almost certainly not!)

The 2013 documentary Continental made the Continental Baths, which operated between 1968 and 1975 at 74th and Broadway in Manhattan, seem like very heaven. The Continental contained an indoor pool that the owner claimed was the largest in the world at the time, a sauna, a steam room, an upscale restaurant, a hair salon, a boutique, a disco in which towel-clad men danced 24 hours a day, a room that held religious services on Friday and Sunday nights, and the spaces it was best known for, 400 individual rooms and two large orgy spaces—one with lights and one that was kept in almost complete darkness—where men could screw with complete abandon. (The Continental closed before the AIDS crisis, but it did operate a clinic where patrons could get tested for STIs.)

Sometimes my delight in stumbling upon an incredible resource is tempered by annoyance at having been ignorant of it until that point. Fortunately, you get to experience the pleasure without the irritation.

This week’s first discovery was a New York Times feature from Oct. 12, 1913, titled, “Drinks Chosen for Color, Not Taste, at Women’s Bar.” It’s the kind of piece you can go crazy quoting from, as the lede suggests:

There is a place in New York where there is a bar for women–just a regular bar like the one the male person drops into to get his morning morning. It is run exclusively for women, and no man can buy a drink there unless chaperoned by some member of the other sex.

This bar is patronized not by women of a doubtful class, but by women of social standing and assured position. It is the Café des Beaux Arts, at Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, of which Louis Bustanoby is the proprietor.

The Beaux Arts did most of its business in the afternoon, rather than the evening, because that’s when the potential clientele shopped and took in matinees. “When Milady has made her round of the department stores, or has come out of the theater, she feels the need of a little refresher and drops into the Café des Beaux Arts and rests her dainty foot on the bar rail while Francois and Gabriel, the two bartenders, ask her whether it shall be a cocktail or a highball.”

I’m now working on the bar chapter of my book—which, for the record, has thus far involved a lot of reading and zero bar-hopping. I had a head start on this section, since I wrote a big Slate series on gay bars back in 2011. (The navigation is broken—thanks, Flash!—but you’ll find links to all the sections here, and if you’re superkeen, you can buy a Kindle version for a bargainiforous $2.99.)

The more I read, the more I’ve been thinking about a fun slide show (also broken!) that ran alongside that series. Called “Is This a Gay Bar?” it was a riff on gay-bar naming conventions.

In it, I rounded up a few tropes like names that refer to long tunnel-like things (Mineshaft, Pipeline); to hard, pointy things (The Spike, The Stud); to male birds (The Cock, Cockpit, The Cock Ring, yeah for real); to men named Richard (Dick’s Bar, Moby Dick, Swinging Richard’s); to hard, pounding things (Jackhammer), to things that get pounded (The Anvil); and what could be summarized as double-entendres (White Swallow, Three-Legged Cowboy, Backdoor).

You may notice a certain dudeliness to those funny names. In one way, that’s understandable—after all, there have always been many more bars catering to men than to women—but it still makes me feel a bit bad. Do lesbian bar-owners have less creativity than gay men?

To get the answer to the question posed in the subject line of this newsletter out of the way: Yes, Virginia, lesbians do exist. But so do sapphistry skeptics.

I was recently flipping through Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices From the 1950s and 1960s—ONE, of course, being one of the first gay-rights organizations in the U.S. and the name of its monthly publication—when I came across this amazing missive, which was published in the October 1955 issue of the magazine:

Santa Barbara, California

To all you MEN:

I just read your magazine for the first time—and I want to tell you how horrible you all are. You know very well all homosexuals are men, and there are not any women homosexuals. How dare you have a “Feminine Viewpoint” section when the only feminine viewpoint comes from the feminine men? I see lots of homo men but never in my life have seen a homo woman. I’ll bet that Ann Carll Reid is a man and you’re just trying to fool the public. Why don’t you leave women alone and out of your lousy magazine. You don’t have any respect.

Mrs. B.

For some Brits, this attitude will bring to mind Queen Victoria, who, the story goes, caused lesbians to be left out of an 1885 law that criminalized male homosexuality, because, she declared, “Women do not do such things.” Consequently, U.K. Pride parades and other queer celebrations sometimes design their routes to include a stop at a statue of Queen Victoria. (Most towns have one somewhere.) Sometimes they even pause to lay a wreath there.

This week, I present to you some highlights from a 1979 publication called The Lesbian Community. It was written by Deborah Goleman Wolf, who, as it happens, is Naomi Wolf's mom.

I admit that I'm cherry-picking from this book, which is essentially a repurposing of Wolf's Ph.D. thesis in anthropology, describing the Bay Area lesbian community between 1972 and 1975. Much of it consists of very earnest and basic explanations of feminism and lesbian culture, written from the perspective of a heterosexual feminist. But there is enough unintentional hilarity in some passages to justify my typing them out.

Take, for instance, this helpful description on how lesbians dress:

Feminist and lesbian-feminist clothing is virtually indistinguishable except for subtle indications in dress or accoutrements. The dress for both groups begins with a body that is clean, healthy, unshaven, unbleached, and without makeup. Feminists may wear no underclothing at all, except possibly panties. Most women, unless they have uncomfortably large breasts, do not wear bras, which they say artificially distort and enhance the natural shape of the breast. The women who cultivate such a natural appearance are refusing to conform to the "degrading artifice" which the male-oriented culture dictates as appropriate, but which these women feel makes them into unwilling sex objects.

The outer garments that the women wear tend to become almost a uniform of utilitarian clothing. The women feel that in their choice of clothing, they are striking a blow against the consumerism of a capitalist society as well as leveling class distinctions that might exist in the community. Their clothing mostly comes from "free boxes," in which people discard their still usable clothing to be recycled by anyone who wants it; from secondhand and army surplus stores, and from flea markets. Typical clothing consists of levis or other sturdy pants, T-shirts, workshirts, and as a top layer in cooler weather, heavy wool shirts or utilitarian jackets. Heavy hiking boots or tennis shoes are the usual footgear, and a rather endearing trait is the use of inexpensive boy's socks, often mismatched. Many women wear sunglasses or tinted prescription glasses, earrings, rings, and bracelets. Hair is worn long or short, but it is not artificially treated.

I was off on vacation in Britain for the last two weeks, and, to my surprise, it ended up being a “real” vacation, which wasn’t exactly what I had intended, but I can’t say that I’m mad about it.

If you’re a sane person, you might be wondering what on earth I mean by that last sentence—basically, I’d been hoping for the impossible: to take a true break from work (that is, work-work and book-writing work) while also ticking several titles off my book-related to-read list. In the end, I probably spent more time making that list in the days before our departure than I did actually reading. Between jet lag and vacation-related exhaustion, my eyes would close a few minutes after I turned on my Kindle. After a few days of that, I quit pulling it out of my bag and instead watched a little TV and read some of my favorite British magazines. (As if to prove what an intellectually catholic or possibly just intensely confused person I am, I will note that the latter include the posh-boy’s mocking mag Private Eye, the home of the cleverest British literary lads London Review of Books, and my very favorite, the down-market-est of British women’s magazines, Take a Break, where the subjects of the stories range from medical mysteries to murderous love rats.)

Despite my reading-list failure, I did take in some books. I’m a relatively recent convert to Libby, the incredibly easy-to-use app that allows people to borrow ebooks and audiobooks from their local libraries, but I have quickly become a superfan. I listened to Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, read by Shayna Small, and to two books by Leif GW Persson: Linda, as in the Linda Murder, and The Dying Detective, both read by Erik Davies. All three were really well done, but I was especially impressed by Davies’ narration of the Persson books. He did the voices thing very well, as in giving all the characters a distinctive sound, but he also did full-on Swedish pronunciations of all the character and place names. I think I’ve read all of Persson’s books—Linda earned me my completist badge—but I didn’t recognize many of the characters in the audio version because in my head Lars was pronounced, well, “Lars” not “Loarsh”; “Backstrom” wasn’t “Beckstrehm”; and I won’t even attempt to transliterate the Swedish place names Davies pulls off.

I’m not a lover of Nordic Noir—other than the Persson bibliography, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten further than Chapter 3 in any of the classic Scandinavian murder mysteries. They seem too grim, gritty, and blood-and-gutsy for me. But Persson’s work is weirdly compelling, and his trilogy about (more or less—he’s not a “this book is about” kind of writer) the investigation into the assassination of Prime Minister Olaf Palme, and Sweden’s loss of innocence—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End; Another Time, Another Life; and Falling Freely, as if in a Dream—are among my favorite books, period. Pretty much everyone in his work is flawed, and several of his recurring characters are racist, misogynist, lazy jerks, but since he’s writing about the Swedish police, that feels like credible realism. Persson’s Wikipedia page makes me think I’d probably find him a little bit on the unbearable side if I could experience him in his native setting and tongue, but I love the English translations of his books, and now that I’ve found Libby, I’ll probably listen to the audio versions of the Palme trilogy.

I’m nearly finished with the first draft of the chapter on feminist bookstores, but each of the six archetypal lesbian spaces the book is structured around also has some related secondary places. For bars, that might be restaurants and coffeehouses; for lesbian land (or maybe vacation resorts—oy!), that might be women’s music festivals; and for feminist bookstores, it’s women’s centers and women’s buildings. So, today, a bit about those last two locations.

By “women’s center” I mean the kind of multi-use building that started to sprout in the early ’70s. The sorts of projects found in these centers might include a library, a space to hold consciousness-raising-group meetings (many of which evolved into counseling centers), a clinic or at least a source of medical information and referrals, offices for theater groups or magazine collectives, maybe a coffeehouse or cafe, and sometimes informal classrooms. According to Daphne Spain’s book (the best source I found on the topic), by 1975 there were more than 100 women’s centers across the country. A few still remain—the in San Francisco, and the have both been in operation since 1971—but these days, the remaining women’s centers are mostly on college campuses, which means, practically speaking, that they’re only accessible to people associated with those institutions. ()

I spent the last two weeks researching and writing, and because R was away, not really speaking with anyone, so before I am pulled out of my own little world and forced to accept that there are topics other than lesbian spaces worthy of my consideration, here are a few weird things I discovered while obsessing:

Humans Are Not Rational Creatures

STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES, AMIRITE? I know, I know, but … Listening back to some of the interviews I did with current and former feminist booksellers, I heard how insistent I was in DEMANDING that they tell me why on earth they had made the bone-headed decision to get into a field that was so obviously DOOMED to financial failure. Not that that isn’t accurate—it’s an absolutely terrible business—but I know exactly why people make irrational choices about what to do with their time and energy: They really LIKE doing those things.

I could tell that this was not the first time they’d ever pondered this question—duh; they’re incredibly smart, credentialed people who are or were making poverty-level wages by choice; they’ve thought about this—and there was never a moment’s hesitation about the answer. Deb Morris, who managed Lammas’ Dupont Circle branch in the ’80s, told me that she had first started to work at the original Capitol Hill branch when she had a full-time job at the phone company. She had persuaded owner Mary Farmer to let her open the store on Sundays, in exchange for books. You should hear the SHOCK in my voice; “So you VOLUNTEERED to work six days a week. WHY?” Deb, being an indulgent person, didn’t end every sentence of her response with “you idiot,” though she totally could’ve: “I was in the place that I loved,” she told me “I loved being in bookstores, loved being around books.”

I am getting ready to spend two weeks working on my book!

To be clear, I’ve been working on it for about a year now—the first conversations with my fabulous agent, Maggie Cooper, were in October 2020—and since July I’ve been spending what feels like every waking moment (when I’m not doing my extremely time-consuming day job) researching, reading, and making notes. But other than these newsletters, I really haven’t written anything. For the next two weeks, though, I am on vacation from Slate, and I’ll be taking all those notes and turning them into pages, paragraphs, and at least one chapter. That’s the plan, anyway.

A slight detour this week to talk about the slang that never got shared--or maybe the slang that never got used. Let me explain!

The gay world--by which I mean the gay man's world--is full of coded language. Just search for "gay lingo" on YouTube, and you'll find an undergraduate degree's worth of tutorials and 101s. Drag Race created a dictionary to decode the show's slang, gay Filiipinos have "swardspeak," and for more than 100 years British gay men spoke Polari, some of which has now entered the lexicon. (The sentence "Vada the naff strides on the omee ajax,” ² which means "look at the awful trousers on the man nearby," contains a couple of words that are now in general usage.)

But search for lesbian lingo, and you get a list of offerings so skimpy it would've embarrassed Ask Jeeves in 1998. Sure, there are a few terms that people actually use--UHauling, gold-star, hasbian, LUG--but those very short lists always get padded out with a few obvious variations on butch/femme and top/bottom that stretch the definition of code.

Then one day I happened upon a really fascinating blog post on this topic by an eminent linguist who blogs as debuk. I recommend reading the whole thing, as the bloggers used to say.

I came out around gay men–and quite a “classic” type of gay man at that: My earliest lessons in queer culture mostly involving learning to tell the difference between June Christy and Blossom Dearie, Barbara Cook and Ethel Merman, and distinguishing Verve-era Ella from Pablo-era Ella. Consequently, it was a bit of an adjustment when I moved to the States and had very little contact with men of any kind, including gay fans of musical theater, the golden age of Hollywood, and camp interior decor.

I suspect that’s pretty typical. Once you move beyond college friendship circles, gay men and lesbians tend to go their own ways for political organizing, activism, and socializing. (A couple of important exceptions to this tendency are AIDS activism and the fight for marriage equality. As Sarah Schulman’s great book Let the Record Show makes clear, ACT-UP New York was a broad coalition, at least in part because its meetings were held at the Gay and Lesbian Center, a known location that lots of people went to for their own reasons and that wasn’t thought of as a “men’s place” or a “women’s place.” And since marriage brings such clear financial benefits in the U.S.–I’m thinking about health-care coverage, taxes, etc.–it makes sense that everyone would be equally sick of being denied them.)

I’m still in the very early stages of writing this book–in the early stages of research, really–but I’m already wondering how to handle the specter of “interference” in lesbian projects by state entities like the FBI and sometimes by more shadowy actors. In my notes, I’ve been using terms like “FBI shenanigans” or “agents provocateurs?,” but that’s too gentle for some of the behavior I’m thinking of. Words like infiltration, deception, persecution, and are much more accurate there.