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.
If you were being slightly unhinged, you could say that it was the absence of the cellphone that made the archetypal lesbian spaces I’m writing about so important. If you were looking for lesbians (which is a thing lesbians do), and you couldn’t just call your friends to discover their location or their plans, you had to know the spots where you were likely to run into them or other dykes. Bars. Bookstores. Softball fields. Etcetera.
The women who answered the telephone in bookstores, centers, and bars played an essential role in the community. They were the town criers, the agony aunts, and the matchmakers (albeit in a passive way!).
Lesbian feminists of the 1970s were like podcast producers in the 2020s: They knew that their biggest problem was discoverability. When ALFA was first established, members wrote to the city’s alternative paper, the Great Speckled Bird, to announce that they had rented a house where they’d be organizing all kinds of activities, and although they provided the address, they knew that many of the Atlanta-area women who were curious about the group would feel more comfortable calling before they stopped by. They told the paper, “A phone will be put in so by next week we should be listing a number with the Bird.” What’s more, when women in other parts of the country learned that Atlanta had an active lesbian-feminist organization—with its own softball team no less—they might be drawn to move there. But first they’d call to learn more.
I found ALFA’s listing in the 1975 Atlanta phone book. There they are between the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and the Atlanta Life Insurance Company.
In Britain, in what was essentially a 1970s version of SEO optimization, the feminist magazine Spare Rib used to pay to be listed in the London phone book under “Women’s Liberation” in addition to their regular spot.
One of the most touching mentions of phones I came across was in a book called Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, in which Marie Cartier told the story of a woman who had “left the life” and married a man after exploring the lesbian scene in the 1940s. She told Cartier that she would call local gay bars to recapture the thrill through the phone line: “I would just hear the noise and the laughter in the background. I just wanted to be there.”
When I worked at Lammas in the ‘80s, we often got phone calls from women asking for information that people would now obtain through a simple Google search—the names and locations of the bars, queer-friendly 12-step meetings, referrals for minimally homophobic doctors and lawyers, etc. I assumed that that kind of phone call would have disappeared in the age of the Internet, but Sara Look, one of the owners of Charis Books & More in the Atlanta area, told me that they still get calls, though these days they are mostly about issues relating to trans youth. The store hosts a trans youth group and a gender-creative parenting group, both of which show up in web searches, and people with questions tend to call Charis because they’re the only place that provides a phone number.
Phones have at least one other use these days. Back in June, I went to Randall’s Island to see some women’s-plus softball games in the queer Big Apple Softball League, and during Resting Pitch Face’s second game, against the best team in the league, a couple of players yelled into the dugout imploring someone to connect their phone to a bluetooth speaker and blast some tunes. (I assume to spur them to new heights of greatness.) The woman sitting next to me obliged, though the songs wouldn’t have suited ‘70s separatists. She played “Anaconda,” by Nicki Minaj, “Call Me By Your Name,” by Lil Nas X, and "Tití Me Preguntó," by Bad Bunny.
We head out on Wednesday—Kipper and me via Paris, because you can’t fly into Britain or Ireland with a pet—so the next newsletter with come at you from Edinburgh. (Inshallah.) If you are in New York, I’m sorry we didn’t get together. Between all the stuff we had to do and a heightened desire not to get COVID just before we set off, we ended up not having a farewell gathering. I’m sure I’ll see everyone again on one side of the Atlantic or the other, though.
RECOMMENDATIONS: The "scouting" trip to Edinburgh was exhausting—so much walking, so much stress—and, finding it really hard to concentrate on reading, I searched Libby, the app that lets you borrow ebooks and audiobooks for free via your local library, for “lesbian romance.” What a genius idea, because it led me to the work of Harper Bliss, an insanely prolific author of super-soapy relationship stories. I put it that way because she writes about friendships and co-worker relationships as well as love stories. And I’m not kidding about soap opera: Her 10 “Pink Bean” books—so-called because they’re all loosely connected to a queer-owned coffee shop—revolve around a series of businesses in Darlinghurst, Sydney, and tell the stories of an entire community of characters who pop up from book to book. A couple even show up in Bliss’ other extended universe, the French Kissing series, which is so openly soapy that the five books are known as “seasons” and the chapters as “episodes.” FK is set in Paris among the worlds of PR, politics (at the highest level!), and medicine. I highly recommend the French Kissing audiobooks (Audible only, sadly), read by the great Abby Craden, who pronounces the French names beautifully but makes a bit of a Dick Van Dyke of the accent of the one Aussie character who shows up in Paris. I’ll stop typing about my new favorite author soon, but I must mention that she also has a co-written book in which the main character is the second daughter of the queen—as in the queen of England—who in the first scene is posing for photos with her fiancee in what is to be the first gay royal wedding in British history. You gotta love the ambition, right?
LISTEN TO ME: A long list of podcast appearances, since it’s been a while since I sent out a newsletter. On Working I spoke with Eliot Laurence, the creator and showrunner of Motherland: Fort Salem; animal trainer Sarah Clifford, who trained the Rottweilers on FX’s The Old Man, among many other credits; Angelique Midthunder, the casting director of Reservation Dogs, who specializes in casting indigenous roles; and with Rob Walker and Josh Glenn about their long-term collaboration on a series of arty projects. On Working Overtime, Karen Han and I talked about beginning a new creative hobby and finding a new creative community when you move. (Guess whose idea that last one was!) Finally, I subbed in on last week’s Culture Gabfest to discuss Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Paper Girls, and the legalities of the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. The archives are here. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.
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