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.”

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."