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: