The images offer a dense visual archive: Lulu de Montparnasse, the club’s owner, in tailored menswear; patrons whose postures and gazes index intimacy, ease, and self-fashioned gender; the juxtaposition of elegance and risk that characterized interwar lesbian nightlife. The most reproduced image depicts the butch athlete Violette Morris and her partner.

Morris’s life, both extraordinary and troubling: she was an Olympic-level athlete with over 50(!) medals, gender nonconformist who had a double mastectomy because she said it was thus easier to drive her racecar, and, tragically and violently, a collaborator with the Nazi regime. Morris’ life speaks to the complexity of queer history, and how we complicate and must confront the fascism of today.

Viewing the Le Monocle photographs nearly a century after they were taken, we’re struck by the similarities between patrons of Le Monocle and modern dykes. Many of us still dress to the nines to stare pensively into the distance. These photographs resonate not because they romanticize the past, but because they show a lesbian place that is recognizable: a room where dykes and trans people gather to see and be seen, to craft gendered and erotic worlds with one another.

Notably, Le Monocle lasted on for decades, a rare accomplishment for a lesbian bar. It was also a hub for sex workers and a place where working-class dykes gathered.

Paris rang all strata to its urban enclaves, like a clear bell of where to find home. Paris was brimming with wealthy lesbianism the likes of Natalie Barney’s salons, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ walkabouts and rideabouts, and many other many dykes. If you want to dive deeper into the historical muff of a century of lesbian Paris, we heartily recommend Tamara Chaplin’s thick and detailed Paris Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France. And if you just want to know about the wealthy, or you too are obsessed with the birth of modernism, Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians is the perfect beach read.