Dyke Bar* History: Eve’s Hangout, Greenwich Village, 1926

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes, Mel Whitesell, Paige LeMay, Syd Guntharp, and Sarah Parsons

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.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. Chicago Review Press, 2021.

The famed (and likely apocryphal) story of sign hanging in Greenwich Village that read “Men are admitted but not welcome” has circulated widely. It remains one of our favorite urban legends of queer history, and its imagined presence gestures to something real: Eve’s Hangout was the first recorded, proto-lesbian tea room in 1920s Greenwich Village, in NYC, and in the U.S. Jonathan Ned Katz’s biography offers a deeply researched account of Eve Adams—born Chawa Kotchever in Poland—whose migration, political organizing, book peddling, and self-fashioning illuminate the contours of queer life across transnational and urban geographies.

Katz traces Adams’s trajectory into anarchist circles with Emma Goldman, her self-publication of Lesbian Love (arguably the first lesbian community study in the U.S.), and her creation of a space that gathered artists, poets, theatergoers, and queer women. Eve’s Hangout a social space: a room where non-normative desires, Left politics, and gender variance could coexist. Because she offered a “setup”--the non-alcoholic elements you’d mix with the flask in your pocket–she even survived alcohol. Although, like today, you might have just gone in for the tea. Given the segregation at the time mixed with Eve’s radical politics, these were likely primarily white people, and working-class Leftists at that.

Tragically, J. Edgar Hoover himself deported Goldman, Adams, and so many other important organizers. But this isn’t the end of their adventures–which we shall not spoil here. If there’s anyone who can show us all how to live and keep fighting, it’s Katz on Adams.

• The LezQueer World before Bars: 1920s-1930s with Lillian Faderman & Cookie Woolner (Part 1)
• When Paris and Berlin Were Dyke Bars* of the 1920s-1930s with Lillian Faderman & Cookie Woolner (Part 2)
• Tea, Anarchy, and the First Dyke Bar: Eve’s Hangout 1925 with Jonathan Ned Katz (Part 1 of 2 with Katz)
• Books, Bulldaggers, and the Birth of Lesbian Research with Jonathan Ned Katz & Julie Enszer (Part 2 of 2 with Katz)

Read the rest of the series:

Dyke Bar* History: 1920s-1930s #1
A reading guide for the decades.
by Jack Gieseking & the Our Dyke Histories podcast team