During the Great Depression, which outlasted Prohibition until the start of World War II, alcohol was more tightly regulated, and many were too broke to party and buy booze. Lesbian bars, like recreation and leisure more generally, lagged in the 1930s. In the general climate of lawlessness, gay folks had an easier time escaping notice. When alcohol was illegal and bars and speakeasies went underground, people got off on breaking the rules. Prohibition banned alcohol from 1920 to 1933. For that reason, they socialized in more private settings-mainly apartment parties. While white women could go to a bar in Harlem and be relatively safe from exposure, black women risked running into their neighbors. "Queer districts blossomed in black areas with less policing," says Cookie Woolner, a historian who has written about African American queer women in the early 20th century. Harlem in particular was a destination for wild nightlife. "If the police raided, they danced together," says Gieseking. Gay men and women needed each other, and early gay bars were not usually single-sex, says Jen Jack Gieseking, a professor of women's studies who has researched lesbian space in New York City. During the 1920s, middle-class morality that discouraged drinking and socializing in public had little sway over working-class women's lives, and they were more apt to kick up their heels.īut it would be decades before lesbians could safely gather in women-only spaces. Gay bars in cities like Baltimore and Chicago that mostly catered to working-class whites were often in rundown neighborhoods with little police presence. Women, turning to each other faute de mieux, found they liked sex with other women just fine.
Because bars allowed a lesbian to see herself as one of many, rather than a lone, mentally ill pervert, these spaces would become "the single most important public manifestation of the subculture for many decades," according to Faderman. While not all of those women were gay, some of them were, so the saloons became very early incarnations of what we now think of as lesbian bars. In bigger cities, saloons started serving food to unaccompanied women. There were Broadway shows with lesbian themes. Lots of them read Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, where "invert" upper-class Englishwoman Stephen Gordon loses her lover, Mary Llewellyn, because of social pressure. Gay gals moved to cities and fell into close primary relationships with other women.
In the midst of this social upheaval, "women, turning to each other faute de mieux, found they liked sex with other women just fine," wrote historian Lillian Faderman in her seminal history Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America. Industrial expansion made it possible for working-class women to get jobs that didn't involve changing diapers or scrubbing floors, and they started moving to cities for work. World War I meant fewer men were around keeping lesbians apart, however. Because a lady who wanted to enjoy the company of other ladies had to do this in private, same-sex socializing was possible for rich women and prostitutes, and off-limits to pretty much anyone else. However, before the 1920s, lesbian socializing was limited mostly to parties and gatherings in private homes women unaccompanied by men were often labeled prostitutes and refused service in bars or restaurants. In an era of legalized gay marriage, lesbian talk show hosts, and billboards selling cell phone plans to queer couples, our lesbian ancestors' clandestine and closeted pasts are more fascinating than ever.Īs long as there have been people who are women, some of them have had sex with each other. Even though Reed is part of a vibrant queer community, she is still "aching for dyke-focused spaces with a link to my elders-physical spaces where I could meet people younger and older."Īn exploration of the information we do have turns up colorful names-Maud's, Bingo's, Sisters, Charlene's, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Duchess, Meow Mix-and evocative stories of establishments that can seem like foreign countries. For a song in their recent show, "Rocky and Rhoda's Lesbian Past," queer performers Ariel Speed Wagon and Damien Luxe crowdsourced a massive list of lesbian bars this September, artist Macon Reed also compiled her own list of bars and dance nights for a dyke bar installation at a Brooklyn gallery. Lauren Tabak and Susie Smith have made a film about the Lexington Club, an iconic San Francisco dyke bar that closed in 2014. In New Orleans, which currently has no lesbian bar, artists are collecting stories and images from the bars that thrived during previous decades.