How Lesbians Found One Another, From the Softball Field to the Sex-Toy Shop

A PLACE OF OUR OWN: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture, by June Thomas

June Thomas’s ability to resurrect the past in “A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture” is a testament to her meticulous research. But it’s her voice — charming, irreverent, tender — that makes the journey through lesbian history so worthwhile.

The book starts in the lesbian bars of the 1960s, and travels on to feminist bookstores, rural separatist communities, women’s sex-toy shops, vacation destinations and, yes, the softball field. (A longtime Slate editor and podcaster born in England, Thomas confesses to this last phenomenon as a gap in her “sapphic scholarship.”)

Thomas doesn’t tap gently on the glass at these spaces; she flings herself in, starting (metaphorically) in their basements and working up. She scours accounting records, tax receipts and lawsuits going back decades. She reviews the minutes of softball league meetings. She tracks down the women who helped create placesthat transcended to spaces.

None of these pioneers were in it for the money. They drained their savings and dodged creditors. Purists scoffed at the merch for sale in feminist bookstores, but the refrigerator magnets and Lavender Menace pins kept the lights on. Lesbian bars had the misfortune of a customer base that drank a fraction of what men drank in gay bars, so they had to get creative, like serving a complimentary buffet lunch or sponsoring teams in sports leagues. Go Tower Lounge Hotspots!

Why are queer people so tribal in their need for gathering places? “Unlike other minority groups,” Thomas suggests, “where parents teach their children about family history, religious traditions and systemic prejudice, our birth families are generally ignorant of queer codes and culture. We have to work out their rules, rituals and rich history for ourselves.”

In her chapter on the lesbian land movement of the ’70s and ’80s, Thomas writes about the idealism that pushed women to sleep in a frozen shack in Oregon, and what it took to survive. “We were creating a new women’s culture, living our dreams and visions, and pushing ourselves to our limits,” one says.