June Thomas on 'A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women's Culture'

A conversation about space and community

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Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of reading June Thomas’ book, A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women's Culture. The book looks at six physical spaces that were essential to queer women in the second half of the 20th century. Thomas uses archival evidence and interviews as well as her own experience inhabiting these spaces in order to paint a picture of how they functioned as community meccas. The stories Thomas tells may be familiar to older lesbians and queer folks and are likely to teach younger readers something new.

Thomas has years of experience in journalism and is the host of Slate’s Working podcast. She is also the founding editor of Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ section. I spoke to Thomas about her intentions in writing the book, how she sees generational differences among queer folks today, and if it’s really true that lesbian spaces are disappearing. If you have any interest in lesbian and queer history and culture, you should check out A Place of Our Own, which is available now. Buy it at Hachette Books, Bookshop, or, even better, at your local feminist bookstore.

What inspired you to write this book? Why are you the best person to write it, and why now?

First, I’m obsessed with lesbian history, and I desperately wanted an excuse to root through archives and pore over magazines and newsletters from decades past. I also wanted to commemorate and celebrate the institutions that queer women built, without idealizing them.

Why me? I’ve been going to queer spaces since the early ‘80s. I was part of what was called the women in print movement—the informal network of magazines, publishers, and bookstores that was created starting in the 1970s. I was on the off our backs collective, I did my time behind the counter at Lammas women's bookstore in D.C., and I worked at Seal Press back when it was an independent feminist publishing company based in Seattle. I then spent more than 25 years in mainstream journalism. I wanted to use those journalistic skills to tell the story of the lesbian-feminist world I knew and loved.

There seems to be something of a generational divide among lesbian and queer folks today, both in terms of experience and perspectives on what it means to be queer. As someone with firsthand experience of many of the lesbian spaces you discuss in the book – some of which now feel like bygones – is there a particular idea you’re interested in imparting to young queer folks without these same experiences? What can younger lesbians learn from 20th-century lesbian culture?

I’m not going to deny that there are generational differences in our communities, but one thing that is unique about queer culture is that people realize their queerness or transness at different points in their life and relate to it differently over time. People who have been queer their whole lives might not have been engaged with the community or shown any interest in its history or culture until now; someone the same age as me could be coming out and have no knowledge of queer history. But yes, part of my motivation in writing this book was to complicate and maybe correct some of the ideas that younger people express about spaces that had been important to me when I was their age. I wanted to provide more context to the questions many of us find ourselves asking all the time: Why do lesbian bars look the way they do? Why do lesbians always have so many books? Why did feminists start opening sex-toy stores? How did we go from holidaying in muddy fields to heading off on luxury cruises?

I was struck by how the spaces you recount do (and in some cases, do not) engage with capitalism. Do you think there’s something unique about how lesbian communities, particularly in the 20th century, have related to capitalism and money-making? Has focusing less on monetary success made these spaces successful in other ways?

One thing I kept hearing, often from women who had devoted their lives to building stores or companies, was that what they had really wanted was to open a community center, but that proved impossible, mostly because there was no business model for such a place. (Obviously community centers do exist, but they tend to be focused on physical and mental health, sobriety, and other issues that have a funding source. Those services are crucial, but the centers that provide them aren’t the informal, “hey let’s get together here on Tuesday to discuss this thing that’s happening in our community” places women dreamed of.) So instead, they started businesses, which often turned into informal community centers, because women would call to ask questions about health and housing and life advice and all kinds of other things that had very little to do with the product the store was selling!

That could cause tensions—in feminist sex-toy stores, for example, employees were often effectively acting as therapists, but the business couldn’t support paying them anything like what a therapist earns. Bookstores can return books to distributors, and chain bookstores are constantly returning books to keep their bills down. Feminist bookstores didn’t do that because they had a mission to ensure the best books on key topics were always available to women that came into the store. There are lots of other examples of how feminist and lesbian-feminist projects had motivations beyond the maximization of profit—and in a time when it is so difficult for any independent business to compete with ever-larger corporations, that made it very challenging to stay in business.

I absolutely believe these businesses were successful, even if they eventually closed, because they did such important work. Feminist bookstores got books and music and magazines and so much more into people’s hands and changed lives. At the same time, my determination to avoid idealization forced me to acknowledge the cost of working on lesbian-feminist projects. Many paid/pay very little, which not only restricts options at the time but also has a long-term effect on the people who work in them, for example in terms of how much Social Security they’ll receive when they get older.

I’m not sure the challenges that have affected women's and queer spaces—lack of access to capital, competing priorities, an urge to cooperate with other like-minded businesses rather than compete with them, etc.—are unique to lesbian and queer spaces. Projects by and for people of color and mission-driven projects generally have a hard time succeeding for the same reasons, and all independent businesses are struggling these days, but as I chronicle in the book, women and queer people did and do face extra hurdles in building institutions.

You’re originally from the UK but lived in the United States for many years. What do you think are the biggest differences between lesbian culture/community in those two places?

One big difference between the U.S. and most other places in the world is the minimum drinking age. In the U.K. you can legally enter bars and other places that serve alcohol once you turn 18. For better or for worse, bars are still the first officially designated queer space most people go to when they come out to themselves. Being excluded from that key homosocial location in our prime socializing years has a massive effect on American queers.

The rhetoric about lesbian spaces right now often centers around the concept of disappearance. Do you think this is an accurate way to describe lesbian culture and spaces today? Would you propose a different narrative?

Yes, for me the narrative feels very much one of (positive) evolution rather than (negative) disappearance. To use the most oft-cited example, there were more than 200 lesbian bars in the United States in 1987, and today there are 32. Is it shocking that there are only 32 lesbian bars in a nation of 332 million? For sure! Still, I think it's an absolute nonsense to suggest that our world is 80 percent smaller now than it was four decades ago. For all of the homophobia and transphobia that’s being weaponized by forces on the right today, there's more acceptance of queer people and queer relationships than ever before. Nowadays, socializing in a lesbian bar is one option among many for queer and trans people. We’re redefining our culture and our community in positive ways.

Do you think lesbian and queer spaces have a different function today than they did in the past, or do they function similarly? 

The basic function of lesbian and queer space remains the same as it ever was. When you realize you are lesbian or queer or trans or nonbinary, you want to find people like yourself. That might be for a romantic relationship, a sexual relationship, it might be to experience the strength and solidarity of a community. It might be so that you don’t feel alone. For all these reasons and more, you want to go to a place where you feel a sense of belonging. I don’t think the drive to find friends and lovers and to experience the joy that being in these places brings will ever go away.

Do you see this book as having a happy ending? 

Absolutely! It’s a celebration. It’s way too easy to see a business closure as a failure. Instead, I want to locate these bars, bookstores, softball teams, land communities, sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations in the long arc of our history. For people to know more about the incredible achievements of lesbian-feminist pioneers and to build on them. To be aware of the problems they faced, know how they countered them, what they achieved despite all the structural challenges. Knowing why a bar or a store closed 30, 20, or 10 years ago is helpful to projects that will launch tomorrow.

What are some contemporary movements or spaces within the lesbian community that make you excited for the future? 

I’m really encouraged by the new queer and feminist bookstores that have opened in recent years—and the persistence of pioneers like Charis Books & More in Atlanta, Women and Children First in Chicago, and A Room of One’s Own in Madison. Those last three have all been in business for more than 45 years, but they have evolved over time in really inspiring ways. I've also been excited by the grass-roots queer and trans communities that are developing in rural areas. They don’t publicize themselves much, for obvious reasons, but what I hear reminds me of the positive aspects of the lesbian land groups that started in the ‘70s. Women felt alienated and damaged by the city and the patriarchy so they headed off to the country to build new, supportive societies. Unfortunately, many—though not all—of those projects got stuck in an ideological bubble and in what now feel like outdated notions of gender. Still, I understand the desire to be in nature and the appeal of the countryside as a location for experimentation, and I’m glad people feel empowered to create something new and different for themselves.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you can purchase A Place of Our Own at Bookshop or your local independent bookstore.