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.”

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.”