Our Dyke Histories is a podcast about how we built queer life one gathering at a time. Hosted by historian, geographer, and environmental psychologist Jack Jen Gieseking, and produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, the oldest lesbian multicultural literary journal, the series brings together historians, elders, artists, and everyday dykes to remember how bars, parties, bookstores, and basements became our sanctuaries.

Season One traces the history of dyke bars*, including lesbian bars, queer parties, and trans hangouts. These spaces are our first public spaces and our forever private ones. From the 1920s tearooms of Eve Adams to Harlem rent parties, from the Women’s House of Detention to 1970s consciousness-raising collectives and 1980s synthesizer-lit dance floors, each episode uncovers how we turned danger into joy, censorship into art, and survival into community. Guests include Cookie Woolner, Lillian Faderman, Jonathan Ned Katz, Hugh Ryan, Joan Nestle, Alix Genter, Maxine Wolfe, SaraEllen Strongman, June Thomas, Sarah Schulman, Valarie Walker, Katherine Forrest, and Roey Thorpe.

Future seasons will move decade by decade through other defining places, objects, and ideas in lesbian, bi, queer, and trans history—mapping the worlds we’ve made and the futures we’re still imagining. Smart, sexy, and politically alive, Our Dyke Histories is more than memory; it’s a living archive of how we’ve loved, gathered, and refused to disappear.

Stay tuned for links to episodes here, and listen wherever you get your podcasts!

More about the host: Jack Gieseking's first book is A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, and he is now working on a second monograph now on the history of dyke bars*. For more of their takes on lezbiqueertrans spaces and places across history, follow Jack’s newsletter "Queer Geographies" here