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.

I watch way too many productivity videos on YouTube. That's a pretty broad category, of course--like "true-crime podcasts" or "TV dating shows"--but there's one piece of advice that gets echoed again and again, and it's the original nugget of shoe-box wisdom: Just do it. If you want to change a habit or take on a big project, don't wait until the weather conditions are ideal; you've picked out the perfect pen, ink, and paper combo; and your vision board is on point. Just start.

Yes, yes, stipulated. But if that big project is writing a book, and your delivery date is 18 months out, what do you do the week after you make a deal?

Fortunately, I'm not starting from scratch, since I spent about six months working on the proposal. That was a mildly grueling, hugely fun collaboration with my genius agent, Maggie Cooper. I researched and read--and did a tiny bit of reporting--in order to write the sample chapter, but by its nature that was an isolated piece. I didn't have to connect it with larger themes and other chapter topics--other than in the "promise language" of the proposal.

But now I do--and before I start digging six separate Buneary boreholes, I decided to try to get into a 1970s frame of mind. It's not that all the places I'll be writing about originated in the '70s--though several did--but even the locations that pre-dated that glorious decade were transformed in those years. So I need a good grip on the period. I started by reading Rick Perlstein's amazing series of histories of the period, which may well fall in the "too good to read in the early stages of a writing project" category!

Now that I am officially writing a book, every interaction with media and humans is potential subject matter. A birthday trip to Provincetown is an opportunity for field research. And as at least seven people have told me, this vacation is now deductible.

Friends P and C, who I have known for many decades--so long, obviously, that we are of an age where I have to take care to avoid calling them "very old friends"--kindly offered to drive us to Provincetown. Instead of taking the train from New York to Boston and hoping that delays wouldn't keep us from catching the only Provincetown ferry that was even theoretically possible with the Sunday train schedule, we would take a leisurely train to Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday afternoon, enjoy a Restaurant Week meal out in that city of gustatory delights, then head to Ptown by car on Sunday morning.

It worked wonderfully--certainly for us. We had a fabulous meal in a restaurant with valet parking--which, like a walk around any supermarket bigger than a Brooklyn bodega, always seems like an exotic treat--and got to stare at C and P's books. (They're academics, so there are walls and walls of them on every floor.) And in the morning, we got to eat breakfast on the screened-in back porch before heading out to the Cape.

P and C take the hard-copy New York Times on weekends. I'm a digital subscriber, but I hadn't touched an actual copy of the paper in years. Over the time we've lived in New York, newspapers have become much harder to get hold of. In 2005, there were at least two vendors selling papers on my four- or five-block morning walk to the subway, as well as several bodegas with papers out front. Now the vendors are long gone, and only one of the bodegas still offers newspapers (and, perhaps reflecting the vastly increased cost, they're now inside the store rather than sitting unguarded on the curb). I probably spend more time with the Times now than I did in those days--it's a lot easier to navigate from section to section on the phone app, and I never did perfect the broadsheet origami that made it possible to page through the paper on a crowded train--but sharing one paper between four breakfasters exposes the slow-grabber to sections she might not usually peruse, like Vows.