stay

she’s pussy juice

slick against leather,

mashed against your thigh greedy.

a plant so desperate for sun she strains.

I burrow fingers

inside her.

find a place

to call home.

the curve of smile rising

in lowered eyes.

clench fists in sleep.

grind teeth to sand every night.

ink sprawls

across canvas of her back.

kisses crackling up tattooed spine.

muscles,

thick and coiled

to squeeze you, boa-like.

she’s boy’s briefs underwear

hiding her girl.

chocolate bar binges at 4 a.m.,

head in your lap.

sweet simmering on tongues.

she’s the break

of pool balls spattering

across the table unpredictable.

she’s mapless,

a road trip

you don’t have gas money for.

but you juggle

to ensure you have enough

for the long, enticing haul.

a bra-snapping troublemaker.

she’s back talk

craving

to be put

in her place.

she’s impulse

breathing fire,

molten motorcycle buzz

roaring between your legs.

she’s white teeth sharp.

she is a six-pack drunk easy

on the beach,

on an overcast afternoon

you don’t want to leave,

although you should have

better things to do

then stay.

Bonnie Netherton Obituary

Compiled by Star Woodward

Gail Frances Richter was born on July 17, 1945 in New York City, though when her Nana saw her and said “such a Bonnie baby,” the name stuck! Bonnie Netherton died on the evening of June 9, 2026. Beside her were Trey Anderson her son Cass with his wife and two kids, Eve and Eli.

Bonnie lived many places, including—but not limited to—Hawaii, Virginia Beach, Indiana, San Francisco, Atlanta, St. Simon Island, and the Florida Keys, as well as Gainesville, Florida, where she made her transition into pure positive energy.

Bonnie Richter became Bonnie Netherton when she married Lloyd, and together they had two kids, Cass and Andrew.

Coming out in the 1970s in Atlanta, Georgia, she lost all custody and had very limited visitation rights with her sons. But she gained a lesbian feminist community. She was involved with Alpha House, and red Dyke Theatre, as well as playing on a softball team!

She eventually moved to Saint Simons Island, Georgia, with Star Woodward, and from there down to Key West and Sugarloaf Key, where she befriended a dying Barbara Deming and the Sugarloaf lesbian community surrounding her.

Bonnie loved adventure, and didn’t mind getting her hands dirty! Her next chapter was buying an old school bus and outfitting it with antiques she inherited from her parents and grandparents who had acquired many things from around the world as Merchant Marines. She traveled around Mexico and Guatemala both alone and with a friend Skyler. Although they occasionally were stopped by federales, nothing bad ever happened to her.

After a few years, she drove her bus back to Gainesville, Florida, and hooked into that Dyke community until she and Trey Anderson, along with Trey’s daughter, Aimee, moved to Fort Lauderdale. There, they transformed an old Florida Hotel into a lesbian paradise called the Mermaid Inn.

She eventually made her way back to Gainesville, where she got her Realtor license and helped find homes for many lesbians who probably would not have been able to buy a house otherwise.

Eventually she headed back to the Florida Keys, via her newly purchased and renovated, beloved Chinese junk. The antiques moved from her bus to her beautiful house, to the boat! After a living on her boat for seven years, she lost it in a hurricane, and moved the Sugarloaf Women’s Village, where she had been an active member since the early 1980s.

There she did what she always did—make it more beautiful inside and out. Bonnie could take almost any space in any condition and turn it into something beautiful. Rooms, houses, hotels, cottages, bus, boat, and definitely yards and gardens! She had an abiding love for gardening.
She made Sugarloaf Womyn’s Village into what it is today—a safe, beautiful, cozy place for gathering, vacationing, and pitching in to make the space many lesbians come to over and over, feel their own. Bonnie made so many women feel at home.

The last three years of her life, she lived in a little trailer on Trey’s land just outside of Gainesville. There, she was embraced by old friends who eventually took care of her in her last months. Beckie, Madeline, Lynda Lou, Orit, Marilyn. And Aimee and Eileen and Quay. Trey was “her person,” there for her every day.

Bonnie was a passionate lesbian feminist most of her life, as well as a femme with power tools. Just as she loved to adventure in the world, she was an avid reader her whole life. She also had a strong spirituality, enjoying books by Jane Roberts/Seth and listening to the teachings of Abraham Hicks.

She certainly did not believe life ended when the body died, so look around you and you may find yourself seeing or hearing from her. She will be missed by many.

Remembering Bonnie Netherton

A Personal Remembrance of Bonnie Netherton

By Star Woodward

Last week, one of my dearest oldest friends made her transition into non-physical. She is now Pure Positive Energy. That is a belief that we shared, and I just have to know it’s true.

Gail Frances Richter was born on July 17, 1945 in New York City; though when her Nana saw her and said “such a Bonnie baby,” the name stuck! Bonnie Netherton died on the evening of June 9, 2026. Beside her were Trey Anderson, and her son Cass with his wife and two kids, Eve and Eli.

Bonnie surely had joie de vivre. She made the most out of anything in front of her, and she always made everything she touched more beautiful. She touched a lot of people in her life with her generosity and joy and welcoming spirit and her magical smile.

Bonnie was a magical being. When she was eight, she and her big sister Mike did some magic in order to create a little sister. Turns out, Mike knew a little bit more than Bonnie about biology, because part of the magic included poking a hole in a rubber in the bedside table of their parents. Baby sister Cricket was born nine months later.

When Bonnie and I lived in St. Simons Island, Georgia, there was a Chinese junk out of the marina that we always had to go look at. We took all our guests there and took pictures of it. And then one day, it just sunk. Bonnie really, really wanted that boat. It took about fifteen years, but she did eventually get herself a Chinese junk!

Long before she got that boat, after we had moved down to the Florida Keys, she got herself a full-size school bus. She outfitted it herself with antiques she had inherited from her merchant mariner father and grandfather. The most prized ones ended up in the boat.

She was in Red Dyke Theatre in Atlanta, and she was also very involved with the lesbian variety show in Gainesville. One of her favorite roles that she performed both places was “Bonnie Blameless,” selling emotional insurance to lesbian couples who clearly had no business being together!

She was also an avid reader. I remember when we were together in the early days, how funny it would be to find her with a stack of books on the bed, reading one, two others open-faces beside her. She wished she could put them under her pillow or under her arm and just absorb more information. At the time it was Mary Daly and Jane Roberts.

Bonnie loved women and loved lesbian community! I think her most proud thing was what she was able to create at Sugarloaf. I don’t know if it was easy for her, but Bonnie could take almost any space and make it not just more beautiful, but very beautiful. She and Trey did it at the mermaid Inn in Fort Lauderdale, and she did it with whoever was around to help her at Sugarloaf Womyns’s Village. And while creating and renovating, she was also making so many women feel welcome there. I’ve heard that from so many. No one felt like they were visiting Sugarloaf, they felt like they were coming home and Bonnie was there for them.

She loved playing cards and was known as the queen of nasty canasty, what we called canasta. She was a beautiful high femme, with a power tool. She was elegant, but sometimes loud and bossy. She was opinionated, but she would stop and listen to what you had to say. She was tender to the bone. She never got to have much of a relationship with her sons, but Aimee was like a daughter to her, even though she didn’t reach out much. Like a lot of us she was full of contradictions, but her sincere smile will stay with us.

Bonnie always loved cats, and though I don’t think she had one when she lived on the school bus, she did have one on her boat. One of the things she missed the most when she was in assisted-living towards the end of her life was cat energy. But she still had her sense of humor! She commented on the nice ass of more of an aid, showing her humor as well as her still good appreciation of women.

She always believed that we are more than our physical bodies. She was very into Seth and Abraham. She was a powerful deliberate creator as well as lesbian feminism. It may seem an odd combination, but it worked in her!

The last three years of her life, she lived in a little trailer on Trey’s land just outside of Gainesville. There, she was embraced by old friends who eventually took care of her in her last months. Beckie, Madeline, Lynda Lou, Orit, Marilyn. And Aimee and Eileen and Quay. Trey was “her person,” there for her every day.

This is very personal and doesn’t include all the people that Bonnie loved and that loved her. There are more stories! Hopefully we will all keep telling them to each other. Bonnie had many friends and lovers over the years. So many adventures that I don’t even know about.

So, if you knew her at all, she is there with you right now. She is whispering in your ear that you are good enough just the way you are. She is telling you that she sees your beauty. If you are sad, she is saying “There, there, everything will be OK.” She is probably also saying something silly!

When you read this, try to remember your happiest moments of her, and that’s how she would like to be remembered, I’m so sure.

My Beautiful Bonnie By the Sea.

Bonnie Netherton Obituary

Dyke Bar* History: Butch-Femme in NYC’s Greenwich Village, 1940s-1960s

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Alix Genter. “Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945–1969.” Feminist Studies(42)3, 2016, 604–31.

Is a butch always a butch, a fem always a fem? Who knows! But it’s sure as heck clear that what we thought was a butch or a femme in the 1950s was not always the same thing. We’re guessing you need more of an example like we did, so meet Sunny and Doris, and Miriam and May. Cutie patooties! And everyone but Sunny identified as butch.

Our collective minds were blown wide by this. And delighted! Look how wide and rangey and possible gender was and still is!

Alix Genter spent years collecting oral histories from New York City dykes in the post-WWII period, including Lesbian Herstory Archives originator and co-founder Joan Nestle (wow and swoon forever–see her photo on the left) and a swarm of other well-known dykes of the period. In her article, she digs into butch self-making to show us that butches were never (so boring as to be) imitating cis-het men’s masculinity, rather butches circumvented or even adapted feminine dress styles to convey their gender nonconformity. Genter shows how butch presentations varied between straight and queer spaces, with lesbian bars and other queer nightlife locales being essential sites of gender construction, expression, and butch mentoring.

Across race, class, and ranges of masculine signification, Genter encapsulates the flexibility of butch identity at a time when gender variance was a dangerous expression of visible queerness. And, wow, were our hearts and loins inspired by her work. We also deeply recommend her entire dissertation, Risking Everything for That Touch, available here for free and with many more delicious images and tales of mid-century lezbiqueertrans lives. Desire and danger to the max.

Alix Genter, “Appearances Can Be Deceiving- Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945–1969,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2016), pgs. 604-631

Joan Nestle https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2020/10/joan-nestle-sixty-years-of-di...

Butch/Femme Couple at Mona's, Circa 1950s https://www.glbthistory.org/wide-open-town-records

Dyke Bar* History: Leslie Feinberg in Buffalo, 1960s

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1993.

Being pointed to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a young and/or recently out lez, bi, queer, trans, or sapphic person is as much a dyke trope as running into an ex-flame at the bar or fighting the urge to U-Haul after the first date (or second or third…).

And you know why it’s a trope? Because it’s fucking amazing and, yes, we are telling you to go read this book.

Feinberg’s perfectly devastating and epically beautiful novel follows Jess Goldberg, a working-class, stone butch lesbian-cum-trans man, through childhood into adulthood in New York. Throughout the book, the dyke bar serves as an important backdrop in Jess’s life. In Buffalo, it’s a place where Jess navigates growing up, finding queer community, gender exploration, heartbreak, and romance while facing violence at the hands of the state and police. In adulthood, New York City dyke bars become a place where Jess can reconnect with old friends and–wait for it, my trans friends and countryqueers–apologize to a butch friend for not respecting her butch4butch relationship in the past. Feinberg/Jess are classy shes/hes/zes, I tell you. Though fictional, Feinberg’s intimate book explores classism, racism, anti-semtisim, sexual violence, homophobia, and transphobia that were a reality for butches, trans mascs, and gender non-conforming dykes in the late 20th century–and still today.

We admit that Stone Butch Blues is occasionally a difficult read due to the graphic nature of the many different forms of violence Jess endures. Make sure you have some tissues handy. Ultimately though, this book is a classic we keep handing down–like Audre Lorde’s Zami and editor Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color–because it carries both historical and present eternal lives. Whenever you’re ready to read it, please remember to tell the next dyke you meet to read it too.

Feinberg selfie from The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/17/leslie-feinberg-author-tra...

Dyke Bar* History: Audre Lorde in NYC’s Greenwich Village, 1950s-1960s

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography. New York: The Crossing Press.

It’s safe to say that all dyke roads can and should lead back to the queen of wisdom, insight, calling in, and brilliance: Audre Lorde. Best known for her leadership, activism, poetry, and essays–including “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle to Master’s House,” Black lesbian and feminist Lorde is also one of the key sources for personal stories of 1950s lesbian bars and queer parties. She was a long, steady customer at the Bagatelle or “the Bag” in Greenwich Village, New York City, one of the many mafia-owned and -run working-class, butch-femme bars that inspired mid-century queer pulp alongside our current lez bar imaginaries. Through her positionality, experiences, and theorizations in her mythoautobiography–a term Lorde invented for her semi-fictionalized autobiography or what we now often call creative nonfiction–she shares the struggles and realizations that still shape queer, feminist, BIPOC, and Black lives. These include severe ups and downs in bar life, and all of which led her to her brilliant ideas she left behind for us to grow from and in.

First, let’s be up about the worst of it as Lorde was. Most of the bar patrons were white butch-femme, and working-class, and a white aesthetic, culture, and attitude dominated the space. The racial segregation of lesbian bars, unlike other spaces, was not discussed between white and Black or even among Black lesbians, but was clearly visible. Lorde wrote:

The Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other's names, but we seldom looked into each other's Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness. Some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned-away eyes. … Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different.

The ache is profound. It was the structures of oppression within and inside the bar that perpetrated this hurt. Bartenders, owners, staff, and some patrons openly discriminated against BIPOC, even as they knew that they had so few spaces to share as lesbians.

But the positives of lesbian bars kept bringing Lorde back. She writes, “What we both needed was the atmosphere of other lesbians, and in 1954, gay bars were the only meeting places we knew.” While antiracism was a nascent concept at best in the 1950s U.S., it’s fledging moments are sometimes found in or as a result of dyke bars* as queer sexualities forced groups of people together across race and class lines who would otherwise never had the chance to meet together. As Lorde puts it so beautifully: “We met women with whom we would've had no other contact had we not all been gay.” She later adds, “Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other; we learned lessons from each other, the values of which were not lessened by what we did not learn.” Wow.

We will not be revealing the end, clearly, because you must read this book! (Truly, we devoured it for the first time or tenth time in a few days.) But in the end, we can reveal, Lorde lands in theorizing how we can and must connect across difference:

It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.) It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own.

It’s amazing how much dyke bars* informed Lorde’s life–and ours still!--and these generous, insightful words. If you need more Lorde, she wrote oodles or you can the recent and fabulous biography of Lorde from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (2025). It’s what we’re reading to feed our holidays with delight.

Dyke Bar* History: Mona’s Candle Light in San Francisco, 1950

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Mona’s Candle Light (1950). By unknown. UCLAFilm & Television Archive and OutFest.

Where would dykes be without blurry amateur films and gender fuckery?

Discovered amid rolls of unmarked film at a flea market, Mona’s Candle Light is a testament to the power of the archive, transporting viewers to a hazy evening at the legendary lesbian nightclub for just six ephemeral minutes.

Mona Sargent deserves to be a bigger name in the dyke world – in the 1940s she cornered the market on San Francisco’s lesbian nightclubs and drag events, bringing queer culture to the “bohemians” while still cultivating some of the earliest lesbian community spaces. (Read more about the history here or listen to an entire episode of the Cruising Pod podcast with actual archival audio with Mona herself).

As the video begins, neon signs blink against the night sky until the camera lands on one that reads “Mona’s Candle Light” – femme lounge singer Jan Janssen comes into focus, spotlighted onstage in a corner of the shadowy room. Introduced by drag king Jimmy Reynard, she performs two songs while apathetic straight couples watch from the audience (this is my one complaint: where are the dykes? These people don’t even know how lucky they are!).

Mona’s stayed open for decades in various forms since 1935, making it one of the oldest and longest-running lesbian bars in the country. It hosted the famous and fabulous Gladys Bentley and other so-called “gender impersonators” as a form of racial and sexual tourism, per historian Nan Boyd’s Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, the definitive history of LGBTQ+ San Francisco. Along with her in-depth oral histories of people like Mona herself and regulars like Reba Hudson, Boyd collected a series of photos of Mona’s which the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco has made public. Swoon.

Back to the documentary, this invaluable footage makes your queer/trans bodymind feel invaluable and loveable too, even to witness it. It’s a cinematic candle illuminating the darkness of the lesbian underground scene. As dyke bars across the country disappear, it’s powerful to witness this fragment of queer history – every city deserves a place like Mona’s, “where girls will be boys!”

Dyke Bar* History: Lily Hu in San Francisco, 1954

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Lo, Malinda. Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Scatter of Light. New York: Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2021, 2022.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club is the ultimate queer YA novel: it’s mature enough to enjoy as an adult while still speaking directly to your (gay and scared) inner teenager, while simultaneously offering itself as a genuine place of solace for young people who might be struggling to understand themselves.

The book is set in 1950s San Francisco Chinatown and follows 17-year-old Lily Hu, a second-generation Chinese-American trying to navigate life as a “good Chinese girl” as she realizes she’s falling in love with her classmate Kath. Kath and Lily soon venture to the secret-not-secret lesbian bar The Telegraph Club, where they find refuge, find themselves, and find each other. While Last Night can be a beach read, company for your public transport (who among us hasn’t cried over a novel on the bus?), or something to tuck you in at night, it’s fair to say that the intensity of the scenes gives you a hint of what the 1950s felt like for LGBTQ+ people, especially Asian lesbians. (Of note: there’s still remarkably less literature on Asian and Asian-American lesbians, so check out Sinister Wisdom’s special issue 120: Asian Lesbians).

We also devoured Malinda Lo’s blog series “Notes from the Telegraph Club”, where she discusses the incredible research she did for the novel. Our absolute favorite is “The True Story of a Raid on Tommy’s Place” – it’s everything you imagine dykes had to live through in the 1950s but, well, real. There’s even photos of folks like Grace Miller, Joyce Van de Veer, and possibly Jeanne Sullivan at bar. Lo writes:

That Wednesday night at nine p.m., what could have been a comfortable, casual weeknight with friends at the local bar abruptly changed. San Francisco police arrived bearing warrants for two of the bar’s owners—Miller and Van de Veer—who were charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors by serving them alcohol. The bar’s patrons were told to leave, which they probably did as quickly as possible, plunging into the night and hurrying away from the neon-lit intersection of Broadway and Columbus.

Meanwhile, the police conducted a search of the premises and claimed to find a heroin kit hidden in the restroom at 12 Adler. Miller and Van de Veer were arrested, and the next day San Francisco’s newspapers printed photos of the two being charged, along with their home addresses. In the San Francisco Examiner image, both women have short hair and wear blazers, and though they must have been afraid, they look nonchalant, even a little annoyed that their night had been interrupted.

Now, you get it! Woah.

Two of us teared up multiple times reading Lo’s books (ages 26 and 46, respectively), and also felt so freed by how much the dykes of our past did for us. And we laughed at times too, to see such consistent sagas of dykedom (but does she like me?!?!!?) reflected back at so many decades later.

We equally endorse the follow up novel, Scatter of Light, but we’ll save the spoilers and just tell you our dear Lily keeps on queering up the West Coast. Both of Lo’s books help us dive in to go back in time to the 1950s, and remind us to keep fighting like hell for the living we are doing today.

Dyke Bar* History: The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, 1957-1962

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Bannon, Ann. Beebo Brinker. New York: Gold Medal Press, 1962.

Meet Beebo Brinker, the most popular book of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, a six-part lesbian pulp series (1957-1962), a.k.a. the super sexy dime store novels of the mid-20th century where the queers usually die…but(!) Beebo doesn’t. Bannon writes of the iconic, tall, hot, mildly-unhinged Beebo as she tries to make a life for herself in late 1950s Greenwich Village, New York City. After being chased out of her conservative Midwestern hometown at only 18 for cross-dressing at a fair, Beebo turns her humble beginnings on their head.

Our hero Beebo wastes no time becoming the hottest butch in the city, aided initially by a semi-closeted gay man who takes her to The Colophon, her first lesbian bar. While the Colophon is where she has her official gay awakening, it is not the central point of her gay chaos. Rather, it is her status as “pizza delivery dyke”--a perfect turn of phrase penned by Autostraddle’s own Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Through her pizza delivery job, Beebo meets 1) her sexy archnemesis, Mona, 2) her will-they won’t-they lover Paula, and 3) her tragically unattainable movie-star girlfriend Venus Bogardus. Throughout all this, The Colophon shimmers behind the scenes as the catalyst into Beebo’s self-acceptance and ensuing queer chaos.

Stay tuned!

Dyke Bar* History as Told by Beebo, Lily, Audre, Leslie, Alix, & Mona: 1940s-1960s

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

You can enjoy the episodes here!

Queer Pulp, Dark Bars, & the Police State, 1940s-1960s with Joan Nestle, Hugh Ryan, and Alix Genter

We Made Our Own Gender, 1940s-1960s NYC with Joan Nestle

While the 1920s and 1930s were all about queer women slipping in and out of smoky speakeasies and tea rooms with monocles and bad gin, that radically shifted by the mid-20th century. The 1940s through 1960s turned the volume way up on danger, desire, and dyke ingenuity.
World War II moved women into military bases, shipyards, and cities, suddenly offering networks of possibility that, once the war ended, was often economically kaput but psychologically and socially forever. On (and in) the heels of Prohibition, “gender impersonator” acts continued to bring trans, nb, drag, and genderqueer presences to stages and audiences in urban bars across the country–all the while trans and gender non-conforming people were targeted for being themselves. While parties continued to thrive underground, the public lesbian bars became a beacon in this era: part sanctuary, part battleground, and always a little bit messy.


Basically, if you’ve ever locked eyes with a hot stud/butch/masc/nb across a sticky bar floor and thought, “This is dangerous but worth it,” lift a toast to this era and the dykes who survived it. The period from the 1940s through the 1960s gave us the blueprint for dyke drama, bar crushes, messy hookups, police raids, and the complicated joy of finding each other in the dark. So next time you’re two bevvies deep (of course, seltzers count) and arguing about whether flannel is a lifestyle or a symptom, remember: Leslie Feinberg walked tall so you can too.


From San Francisco’s lesbian-trans bar Mona’s Candle Light (immortalized in a grainy six-minute film clip that still makes our hearts pound) to Greenwich Village’s fictional Colophon (for Beebo Brinker) and real life Sea Colony (and the very real Joan Nestle and friends), lesbian bars promised the intoxicating mix of safety, sex, and chaos. Inside, femmes dazzled in pin curls, heels, and pencil skirts, butches swaggered in leather jackets or collared shirts with a firm duck’s ass (see left), and gender impersonators made chanteuses faint in the bright light of the stage. Outside, police wagons waited to raid, arrest, and humiliate. This contradiction—the thrill of self-discovery and the constant threat of violence—was the air lesbians, queers, and gender rebels were forced to breathe daily.


Stay tuned!