Interview with June Thomas on A Place of Our Own

Cassidy Hunt: In the book, you discuss six spaces that are historically important to queer women. How did you decide on these six spaces?

June Thomas: Oh goodness, some of them were obvious—lesbian bars, for example. Bookstores too, they’re my happy place. They’re the places where I learned, and discovered the possibilities of what life could be like as a queer person. Softball was a tricky one because I like sports, but I’m not sporty myself, so I’d never even been to a softball game, but I knew how important that was. Lesbian land was another tricky one because I knew how much important stuff had happened there, and still is, but at the same time I do have issues with some of the trans-exclusionary politics that are involved with some—not all—of these spaces. When I was writing this book, though, I wanted to make accessible to people information about lesbian history, and so I wanted to cover things that are really important, regardless of whether or not I liked how they turned out. Sex toys, well, I have a real sense of how sexual liberation is so important to queer liberation. At this point, I also had a sense of how business was going to be a running theme throughout this book and, well, vibrators, dildos—they’re a good business! But of course, capitalism still has its ways of getting its claws in. And finally, having gone to so many queer vacation destinations in the US myself, I just thought it was so important, especially now that they’ve become so much more expensive, and have become such a privilege. I wanted to highlight that these places exist, and that they’re so important to our culture.

Cassidy: Were there any others that you wanted to include, but didn’t make the cut of the book?

June: There were definitely a couple of contenders before the end. One of them was definitely women’s studies programs, because these were places you could learn, you could meet people, you could share ideas, but then at the same time—it’s college. It’s not something that anybody can do, to just get together and start a women’s studies program. I also thought about television, or maybe online spaces and the ways that people respond and react to television communities, but I didn’t want to break too much from these in-person spaces. So in the end it felt like there wasn’t too much competition.

Cassidy: You talk about lots of different places in your book, but is there any one specific space that you first felt a queer connection with?

June: Oh absolutely, I actually think the first queer space where I found what I was looking for was a tennis tournament. I just had a sense that tennis was the queer women’s sport at the time, and so I bought tickets, and I was right! And that tournament really helped me make contacts, and that was one of the centers of my queer community. Again, when I moved to the US, I found Lammas bookstore—it was in my town, and it was feminist, and I could just pop down to the store and meet people, make friends, find out about other events in town. It felt so special because it had all of these amazing ideas, and all these amazing people, and every time I went there, there was something new. And the woman who owned the store at that time was somebody who every lesbian in town knew and loved, wanted to talk to and see, and seeing somebody like that who seemed to be so successful was incredible.

Cassidy: You say in your book that you “lesbian for a living.” When did you first discover that lesbian history was such a passion of yours?

June: Well, I was probably about thirty-five before I had a job that wasn’t in the women’s community, whether it was working at Lammas, or at off our backs, or the Outwrite collective in London, and all that was wonderful. They paid terribly, if anything, but at the same time, you were doing the thing you most wanted to do, and at the same time you were surrounded by all these amazing people from different backgrounds. And this was much more doable than it is today, because the world was less expensive! Back then, people always talked about their “straight jobs” and their “movement jobs,” so a woman could be a bicycle courier by day, and a feminist bookseller by night. So it almost felt sometimes that we were removed from the outside or mainstream world. But then, later on, I think it was around 2014 when the debate surrounding marriage equality was gaining momentum, and a lot of straight people around me seemed to realize that they had no education or understanding about queer culture. And so I thought, all of these things that are so central to my life, I wanted to share both with people who have never thought much about the culture of queer people who are very close to them, and also younger lesbians and feminists who want to delve more into their own history. That was definitely an inflection point that made me think, yeah, people will definitely be interested in this.

Cassidy: You talk about a lot of changes in the lesbian community that you’ve noticed in the last couple of decades. What would you say is the biggest change that you’ve noticed about lesbian spaces?

June: Well, interestingly, one of the main reasons that I wanted to write this book was that I felt there was this really strong narrative of “disappearance;” that lesbian bars are disappearing and lesbian spaces are disappearing. And, yes, there are fewer lesbian bars, that’s not disputable, but as somebody who’s been living in this community for decades, it just seems crazy to me to say that there are fewer places for the community now. Yes, there are fewer spaces that meet this narrow definition of ‘lesbian bar,’ but there are so many places we can go! Not necessarily lesbian bars, but other spaces for queer women and the queer community. It feels like there are many more spaces where queer women feel comfortable existing, but that they’re less likely to be labelled explicitly as ‘lesbian’ spaces. So, I suppose in a way the queer spaces themselves have changed a lot, alongside the community.

Cassidy: What do you think are the main challenges that lesbians face with regard to declining lesbian spaces in the last decade or so?

June: Well, I think the problem ultimately is capitalism. When I was writing the book, I tried to be practical and research all of the different spaces separately, but the overarching theme was that people wanted a community center. They wanted a community space for lesbians, but to have one they were usually forced to open a business! So, one of the things I think we should move away from is this culture of self-sacrifice, women working themselves to the bone and sacrificing themselves—which of course, I understand the motivation! But, we have to find ways of making projects sustainable within capitalism.

Cassidy: How are these challenges different to the ones that dykes were facing in the 1970s and 1980s?

June: I’ll just talk about bookstores. When feminist bookstores started in the 1970s and 1980s, people really appreciated this new space that was available to them. They wanted to be there, and they could socialize with other lesbians, but then the 1990s hit and the chain bookstores came in, and then later, amazon.com came in. People realized, you can get your books cheaper there, but they don’t care about you. To them, it’s just a category in a bookstore and doesn’t matter anymore than a bible, or a cookbook—and that’s the nature of capitalism! But that’s not the same as what we want, or what we as a community of people who are trying to build a better world are trying to achieve. So right now, we have the gift of hindsight to know how important it is where we spend our money, and we’ve certainly learned from our errors in the past.

Cassidy Hunt conducted this interview on December 16, 2024.

June Thomas, a journalist and podcaster, is the author of A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture. After 40 years in the US, she now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Cassidy Hunt is a Philosophy and Politics graduate from the University of Edinburgh. She volunteers at the Lavender Menace Queer Books archive, based in Edinburgh, and interns for Sinister Wisdom.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
Fannie Flagg
Random House, 1987, 416 pages
$9.99

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Growing up queer in a small Georgia town, I was always searching for glimpses of myself in the stories around me. Representation wasn’t just hard to come by—it often felt impossible, especially in a community steeped in religious traditions where queerness wasn’t something openly acknowledged, let alone celebrated. Enter the 1991 film adaptation of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I didn’t read the book until this year when it was kindly gifted to me, but the book and the film are quite similar.

The story deeply resonated with me as a teenager, offering a rare depiction of what I identified as sapphic love. The bond between Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison was unlike anything I’d seen on screen before. Before I watched it with my family for the first time, my mother described it as a “movie about two friends who start a café together and kill an abusive husband” (sorry for the spoiler there about the husband, but the book and movie have been out since the nineties, my friend). As soon as Idgie and Ruth interacted in the film, I already doubted they were just besties. Talk about a “historians will call them friends” moment—those women were not straight.

The novel makes their love clear. When Ruth first comes to visit the Threadgoodes, Idgie’s mother tells her siblings that Idgie has a “crush” on Ruth and that no one ought to laugh at her (81). The author describes Ruth and Idgie as “happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be” (87). Ruth’s description of Idgie as her “bee charmer” (87) is a sweet pet name to me—no different from calling my partner “darling.” When Ruth leaves to marry Frank, Idgie tells her she can’t go—that Ruth loves her, not him (90). It’s baffling to me that people often reduce this relationship to platonic friendship; maybe that says something about the reluctance to recognise queer love in media.

However, Fried Green Tomatoes only centres the relationship for a small portion of the work, and the work as a whole necessitates serious critique. Watching the movie as a white, queer teenager, I didn’t engage with the pretty blatant racism and focused solely on the queer relationship. There’s a lot wrong with the portrayals of Blackness. There’s a split in the book of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white people. The ‘good’ white people could be the wikipedia entry for ‘white savior.’ Even the ‘bad’ white characters are barely and rarely bad, except Frank, who is portrayed as ‘bad’ primarily because he’s a rapist first, racist second. Grady is a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), yet Idgie remains close friends with him.

The author writes Black characters as loyal servants happy with subservient positions. Ninny and Evelyn treat Black people as some sort of strange ‘other.’ Throughout the book, the descriptions of Black characters’ physical appearance, speech, and behaviors are terrible. Their appearances often directly correlate to their characters’ supposed morality (particularly how ‘light’ or ‘dark’ they were (pp. 73-75). Fried Green Tomatoes is a fictional work—any argument that the work is trying to ‘reflect reality’ is selective; remember that the book portrays an openly sapphic relationship in Alabama in the 1930s. The stances presented are of the author’s own volition. The work seemingly only considers racism to be racism when it crosses a constructed line—one that separates a KKK member from a white woman’s othering of Blackness; but both hold the same racist ideologies.

Fried Green Tomatoes gave me representation that felt personal and tangible, watching Idgie and Ruth live, love, and build a life together—raising a child, running a café, and supporting each other—gave me a lot of validation during a time when I didn’t get to see much of myself in the world around me. But Fried Green Tomatoes reiterates a narrative of whiteness and white saviourism that we cannot and should not ignore. I encourage you to read “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe aka A Little Old Lady’s Charming and Sweet and Racist Memoir” by Marcie Alvis Walker for a more pointed explanation of the issues, with text examples, in the book and film.

For those considering reading Fried Green Tomatoes because it’s a southern lesbian classic, I would urge you to explore and invest your time and money in a different sapphic classic—one that doesn’t downplay racism or pretend colorblindness is a viable form of anti-racism. You can find a post here by Katrina Jackson about some great queer romance recommendations. If you’re interested in reading explicitly southern queer love stories, I’m working my way through Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History by E. Patrick Johnson and like it so far, but if you’re looking for something a little more story-like, you may like Johnson’s Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) works in the UK non-profit sector. They enjoy a good duck-watching session on weekends and a nice oat milk latte.

El Círculo Sáfico: Lesbianismo y bisexualidad en el Madrid de principios del siglo XX
Paula Villanueva
Levanta Fuego, 2024, 288 pages
18,00 €

Reseñado por Angela Acosta

Read this review in English

Las mujeres sáficas que vivían a caballo de los siglos XIX y XX formaban un núcleo de escritoras y artistas vanguardistas en España y, tras una dictadura y varios métodos de censura y silenciamiento, por fin las podemos nombrar y conocer en pleno siglo XXI. El Círculo Sáfico es el primer libro de carácter didáctico escrito para lectores que aún no conozcan las historias de las lesbianas y mujeres bisexuales que fueron llamadas “invertidas” en aquel entonces. Así es, el tercer volumen de las memorias de la dramaturga lesbiana Victorina Durán, y las investigaciones de Vicente Carretón y Eva Moreno Lago sobre dicho Círculo Sáfico madrileño y el que existió en el exilio bonaerense sirven como los puntos de partida del presente volumen sobre las redes epistolares, románticas y de amistad entre escritoras y artistas sáficas.

Paula Villanueva reivindica la presencia de nombres y textos sáficos, algunos ya aparecidos en los documentales de Las Sinsombrero de Tània Balló (2015, 2019, 2021), a través de una exploración de los espacios de encuentro y el “quién es quién de las bisexuales y las lesbianas” (119) que comprende la mayoría del libro, nombrando a la Condesa Gloria Laguna, Ángeles Vicente, Elena Fortún, Victoria Kent, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Rosa Chacel, Victorina Durán, Carmen Conde y las parejas de estas. Estas mujeres sáficas se integraban en el ámbito cultural modernista junto con Federico García Lorca y Luis Cernuda, los intelectuales queer más célebres de su generación, pero todavía resulta difícil encontrar evidencia de ellas en los archivos y los manuales de literatura sobre la llamada “Generación del 27” y la “Edad de Plata” de la literatura española.

Si bien es cierto que todas estas mujeres eran blancas y la mayoría provenían de familias acomodadas, las mujeres destacadas en este ensayo representan un abanico de experiencias y expresiones de género y sexualidades de tal modo que Villanueva hace hincapié en la importancia del asociacionismo femenino en su capítulo sobre el Lyceum Club Femenino y la Residencia de Señoritas. Estas instituciones brindaban educación y amistades que apoyarían a estas mujeres por vida, a pesar de que cerrarían después de la guerra civil.

“A mi juicio, esta asiduidad o costumbre es lo que crea el Círculo y no la previa consideración del Círculo Sáfico como una asociación fundada, registrada o semi-institucionalizada. Que las mujeres sáficas se han necesitado y buscado a lo largo de la historia es una obviedad—igual que los hombres gais o bisexuales—, y por ello considero que es aquí donde debemos poner el foco” (88).

El Círculo Sáfico recapitula los frutos de las investigaciones contemporáneas sobre las mujeres modernas de forma accesible, tanto en términos del lenguaje como en la presentación del marco histórico y cultural. Los capítulos preliminares sirven como una introducción a la mujer moderna y el asociacionismo femenino, contextualizando a estas mujeres vanguardistas que “atentaba directamente contra las visiones dicotómicas y binarias del mundo” (43) dentro de las conversaciones sobre la patologización de la sexualidad en el contexto occidental y la modernidad sáfica en el mundo angloparlante con Gertrude Stein y El pozo de la soledad de Radclyffe Hall.

El libro no es una mera reseña bibliográfica, sino un estudio pormenorizado sobre los desafíos personales y profesionales a los que se enfrentaron las mujeres lesbianas y bisexuales (incluso cuando los propios familiares negaban las relaciones que tuvieron con otras mujeres) que al mismo tiempo cuestiona por qué no se ha considerado la sexualidad en algunas investigaciones sobre ellas. Los apartados reúnen a nombres ya reconocidos como Victorina Durán y Elena Fortún junto con nombres de mujeres poco mencionadas aun en el ámbito académico, como la Condesa Gloria Laguna cuyo “lesbianismo, fue una íntima amiga suya” (125). Estos perfiles de mujeres sáficas logran un buen equilibrio entre la discusión de textos sáficos como Zezé (1909) de Ángeles Vicente y Oculto sendero (escrito entre 1939 y 1948) de Elena Fortún y cómo estos textos fueron inspirados por las tertulias y las relaciones epistolares que nutrían las vidas de escritoras y artistas sáficas.

La voz de la autora está presente de principio al fin, guiándonos por el Madrid de los años 20 y 30 y el Círculo Sáfico de Buenos Aires establecido por Durán durante su exilio bonaerense. Sobre todo, agradezco el cuidado con el que Villanueva cuenta las historias de amor en tiempos de guerra, de esposos celosos como Antonio Oliver quien destruyó varios poemas de Carmen Conde y de “la bisexualidad no declarada y conflictiva” (239) de la actriz Margarita Xirgu.

“Todas necesitamos olvidarnos, al menos durante unas horas, de las violencias del mundo; del mismo modo que necesitamos habitar una burbuja en la que nuestras vidas pueden ser plenas, junto a amigas y amores con las que compartir luchas, construirnos políticamente y cuidarnos” (238).

Me conmueve mucho cómo el libro resalta la solidaridad y la hermandad entre las mujeres queer: desde los compromisos políticos de la abogada Victoria Kent y la poeta Lucía Sánchez Saornil hasta la valentía con la que Victorina Durán, Rosa Chacel y Elena Fortún escribieron sobre las redes sáficas de su generación. Espero que estas mujeres modernas nos inspiren a sumar más nombres y voces diversas a estos “antecedentes tribadistas” (89) mientras les rendimos homenaje en nuestras investigaciones y versos.

Dra. Angela Acosta es profesora asistente de español en la Universidad de Carolina del Sur. Sus poemas han aparecido en Yellow Arrow Publishing, Heartlines Spec y Apparition Lit. Es coeditora con la Dra. Rebecca Haidt del número especial de Feminist Modernist Studies sobre la modernidad sáfica española (vol. 7, no. 3).

The Sapphic Circle: Lesbianism and Bisexuality in Madrid at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Paula Villanueva
Levanta Fuego, 2024, 288 pages
$19.60

Reviewed by Angela Acosta

Lea esta reseña en español

Sapphic women in Spain who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries formed a core group of avant-garde writers and artists, and after a dictatorship and various methods of censorship and erasure, we can finally name and get to know them in the twenty-first century. The Sapphic Circle is the first educational book written for a general readership who don’t yet know the histories of lesbian and bisexual women at the beginning of the twentieth century, then called “inverts.” The points of departure for this volume on the networks of epistolary correspondence, romance, and friendship among sapphic writers and artists are lesbian playwright Victorina Durán’s Así es (That Way), the third volume of her memoirs, and Vicente Carretón’s and Eva Moreno Lago’s research on the Sapphic Circle of Madrid and the circle that existed among women exiled in Buenos Aires.

Paula Villanueva recovers sapphic women’s names and texts—some of which already appear in Tània Balló’s Las Sinsombrero (The Hatless Women) documentaries (2015, 2019, 2021)—through an exploration of female gathering spaces and a “who’s who of bisexuals and lesbians” that comprises most of the work (119; All translations in this review are my own). These names include Countess Gloria Laguna, Ángeles Vicente, Elena Fortún, Victoria Kent, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Rosa Chacel, Victorina Durán, Carmen Conde, and their partners. These sapphic women were vital contributors to the Spanish modernist milieu along with Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda, the most famous queer male intellectuals of their generation. But it remains difficult to find evidence of these women in archives and textbooks about the “Generation of 1927” and “Silver Age” of Spanish literature.

While all of these women were white and the majority came from well-off families, the women discussed in this book represent a diverse range of experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality. To this end, Villanueva emphasizes the importance of social institutions in her chapter on the Female Lyceum Club and the Unmarried Women’s Residence in Madrid. These institutions provided education and friendships that would support their members for life, despite later closing due to the Spanish Civil War.

“In my opinion, diligence or custom is what created the Circle, rather than the previous view of the Sapphic Circle as an association that was [formally] founded, registered, or semi-institutionalized. The fact that sapphic women have needed and sought each other throughout history is obvious—just like gay or bisexual men [have done]—, and for this reason I consider that this [unstructured creation of the Circle by upper-class women seeking community] is where we need to focus” (88).

The Sapphic Circle brings together the fruits of contemporary scholarship on modern women in an accessible way, both in terms of language and in the presentation of the historical and cultural background. The preliminary chapters serve as an introduction to the concept of the modern woman and women’s groups. Villanueva contextualizes these avant-garde women who “directly challenged dichotomous and binary worldviews” (43) within conversations about the Western pathologization of sexuality, while also considering sapphic modernity in the English-speaking world as represented by works by Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

The book is not merely a literature review, but a detailed study of the personal and professional challenges faced by lesbian and bisexual women (including when their own relatives denied the relationships they had with other women), that at the same time questions why their sexuality remains unmentioned in some research studies. The book’s sections bring together already well-known names like Victorina Durán and Elena Fortún with women hardly mentioned even in academic conversations, such as Countess Gloria Laguna, for whom “lesbianism was a close friend” (125). These profiles of sapphic women strike a good balance between discussing sapphic texts—like Ángeles Vicente’s eponymous Zezé (1909) and Elena Fortún’s Oculto sendero (Hidden Path), (written between 1939 and 1948)—and discussing how these texts were inspired by the tertulias (social gatherings) and epistolary relationships that nurtured the lives of sapphic writers and artists.

The author’s voice is consistently present, guiding us through Madrid of the 1920s and 1930s and the Sapphic Circle of Buenos Aires that Victorina Durán established during her exile. Above all, I appreciate the care with which Villanueva tells love stories in times of war, describing jealous husbands like Antonio Oliver who destroyed some of Carmen Conde’s poems, as well as the “undeclared and conflicted bisexuality” (239) of actress Margarita Xirgu.

“We all need to forget, at least for a few hours, the violence of the world; in the same way that we need to inhabit a bubble in which our lives can be full, alongside friends and loves with whom we can share struggles, construct ourselves politically, and care for one another” (238).

I am deeply moved by the resounding solidarity and sisterhood among queer women on display in this book: from the political commitments of lawyer Victoria Kent and poet Lucía Sánchez Saornil to the courage with which Victorina Durán, Rosa Chacel, and Elena Fortún wrote about the sapphic networks of their generation. I hope that these modern women will inspire us to add more names and diverse voices to those of our “tribadic predecessors” (89) as we pay tribute to them in our research and poetry.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Yellow Arrow Publishing, Heartlines Spec, and Apparition Lit. She is co-editor with Dr. Rebecca Haidt of the Spanish Sapphic Modernity special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (vol. 7, issue 3).

The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies
Maggie Cooper
Bull City Press, 2024, 49 pages
$12.95

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

Maggie Cooper’s The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is a short book of stories, or more accurately, portraits, of a wide variety of fictional environments formed around women. Each story is just a few pages long but depicts an intricate world that is vividly and beautifully imagined: a convent that specializes in making jams, a vast system of caves and the women exploring them, a ship of female pirates who leave their old lives behind, a lush, growing island formed by bodies. Although some stories have characters who develop and change, for the most part, it is entrancing enough just to watch each world unfold and discover its inner workings. It was with reluctance that I moved from story to story, wishing I could remain longer in each.

Cooper masterfully moves between genres, styles, and tones, with each story having a unique voice. Some stories are fantasies, some are dystopian, and some are more grounded in reality with hints of magic or the supernatural. Some read like fables, and some are blunt and conversational. The overall effect is a rich and rewarding reading experience that kept me excited to see what would come next.

Often, one brief detail adds a huge amount of depth and imagery to a story. I found these details often—details like the mention of a cathedral ceiling in “The Cure,” which introduced a huge amount of new context and implications, or a brief remark made by a jaded tour guide at the end of the titular story, which flipped my perception of how much of the tour was officially sanctioned and how much was just commentary. These worlds easily stretch beyond the limits of the pages and raise many unanswered questions, creating opportunities to think more deeply about each story after reading. In this way, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is an immensely rewarding and thought-provoking read.

What is The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies trying to say, though? The blurb on the back of the book indicates an intention to “point to the ways that narrowly defined femininity feeds exploitation and violence, inviting readers to consider the breadth of ‘woman’ as a category with a wide-ranging history, present, and future.” This is most successful in “The City,” which at first presents a society of women that seems almost utopian but gradually reveals its limitations and narrow, exclusionary nature, as well as a bit of context about the outside world. Without giving too much away, this story deals with queerness in a way that is interesting and unexpected and leads to more speculation once the story ends.

Of the other stories that more overtly address the theme of narrowly defining femininity and the harm this causes, many depict environments where women are reduced to the acts of giving birth and raising children and where those who don’t—or can’t—face consequences. Other stories center on the harm and exploitation women uniquely face and depict environments that harness this exploitation for a variety of purposes. For the most part, though, these themes aren’t explored in a particularly innovative way or one that differs from other media that addresses these same ideas. Like “The City,” many allude to or overtly address queerness with a broader understanding of the category of ‘woman’ than this book’s older counterparts. However, the motif of queerness generally isn’t factored into the plot or worlds in a significant way—for the most part, it often feels like an added detail without which the story could have easily existed.

But in the end, nothing detracts from what makes The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies a truly memorable, intriguing, and beautifully-written read. What will stay with you is the sticky feeling of jam and sun in vineyards, the dark, damp echo of an ancient cave, the creak of limbs twisting into a tree, the sulfurous scent of a pool of water, and the taste of a red cherry shake.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and educator living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive. She has previously worked with Sinister Wisdom on A Sturdy Yes of People: Selected Writings by Joan Nestle.

Payback
Penny Mickelbury
Bywater Books, 2025, 436 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Penny Mickelbury’s fifteenth novel is a switch from her well-loved detective fiction and a foray into the historical. Payback is a jam-packed, fast-moving story of gay Black life in Harlem in the early 1950s.

Mickelbury’s background as a playwright is in full view here, as Payback’s rich cast of characters drive this fast-paced story. The lead player is Elleanor Roberta “Bobbie” Hilliard, a handsome, no-nonsense butch. She not only works the bar at her Black-women-only night club, the Slow Drag—she owns the building and one or two others. Her generosity and street smarts are apparent as soon as we meet her—dressed to the nines in high butch drag, she rescues a young gay man from a bashing, brings him home, and from that point on makes him her fast friend and unofficial little brother. In short order we also learn that Bobbie has provided a livelihood for her dear friend Jack—a woman who has survived a gang rape and a beating—by employing her as a driver. She has also provided fair and decent employment for all the women who work in her club.

Central to Mickelbury’s story is Bobbie’s romance with alluring femme Grace Hannon. Grace is an accomplished OB-GYN at Harlem Hospital, beloved by her patients and nurses, and put upon by her disrespectful white male colleagues. And while we readers spend a good amount of time with Bobbie and Grace together—eating Grace’s wonderful cooking or munching on burgers from the local joint; luxuriating in satin pajamas in a beautifully made bed; or throwing fabulous parties, the two are more than just a socializing power couple. Grace is called on repeatedly to aid a battered woman and Bobbie is always ready to take part in a protest or jump in with a crowbar when some eponymous payback is needed.

The historical people and places who make cameos in Payback add to the richness Mickelbury has created here. In addition to her entrepreneurial and fisticuffs skills, Bobbie is a talented pianist and an early supporter of Black Mask, an evolving arts organization in Harlem. Notorious, real-life gangster and madame, Stephanie St. Clair, makes multiple heroic appearances and forges an unlikely community alliance.

The combination of Mickelbury’s skilled storytelling and complex characters makes Payback a rich, fast-moving, feminist adventure—as satisfying as one of Dr. Grace Hannon’s legendary meals, and as generous and open-hearted as Bobbie Hilliard herself.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels, and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Sally!, 2024, 1h 34m
Directed by Deborah Craig

Reviewed by Evelyn C. White

Memo to Milk director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black: You’ve been cold-busted.

For Sally Gearhart, the firebrand lesbian feminist who played an irrefutable role in the ascent of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, was summarily scrubbed from your 2008 Academy Award-winning biopic.

The evidence? Check the footage in Sally! that depicts Gearhart’s takedown of then-California State Senator John Briggs (of failed anti-gay Prop. 6 fame) while Milk, laughing, revels in her mastery.

In a brilliant split-screen editing move, director Deborah Craig juxtaposes shots from the 1978 televised debate against a clip from Van Sant’s film in which Sean Penn, in his Oscar-winning role as Harvey Milk, is shown debating Briggs solo.

Moreover, screenwriter Black appropriated Gearhart’s powerful oratory from the debate and gave her lines (ventriloquist style) to Penn.

Not surprisingly, Gearhart, who died in 2021 at age ninety, had a ready response to her erasure in Van Sant’s Hollywood feature. “It happens to women all the time,” she declares in Craig’s magnificent documentary.

The blatant misstep in Milk is also underscored by Craig’s riveting footage of Gearhart as she tries to calm the enraged throng of gay activists (and their supporters) who flooded the streets to protest the voluntary manslaughter sentence (seven years) that Dan White received for his November 27, 1978 assassination, in cold blood, of Harvey Milk and then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

Had White been convicted of first-degree murder, his sentence likely would have been, at a minimum, twenty-five years to life.

With megaphone in hand, a visibly distraught Gearhart implores the crowd to vent their anger peacefully: “Harvey would not want violence,” she says, repeatedly, as the irate “White Night” rioters hurl rocks, smash windows, and torch police cars throughout the city.

Aside from Gearhart’s passion for lipstick (“I’ve never been without it,” she quips in the film), the native of rural Virginia routinely defied the norms for women of her generation. She eschewed marriage, earned a doctorate at age twenty-three, and secured college teaching positions in Texas. There, after being gay-baited, she bid farewell to the Lone Star state and landed in San Francisco where she soon emerged as “a radical lesbian lighthouse,” as noted in the film.

Indeed, as the first openly lesbian to score tenure at San Francisco State University, she helped to launch one of the first women’s and gender study programs in the country. Gearhart was also among the ass-kicking Amazons who appear in Superdyke (1975), the iconic comedy by pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). Craig includes engaging clips from the release in Sally!. Ditto for Gearhart’s appearance in the landmark documentary Word Is Out (1977).

Gearhart’s acclaimed novel The Wanderground (1978) features a group of women who’ve fled the city to live together in the wilderness. The book has been hailed as an early ecofeminist text and reportedly influenced Gearhart’s purchase (with several other lesbians) of a large property in Mendocino County where they built homes and formed a community.

Sally! features engrossing footage of the women working on the land and is especially noteworthy for its candid discussions about the sexual liaisons that strengthened and strained the group. It also highlights Gearhart’s polyamorous relationship with her long-time partner, Jane Gurko, also a distinguished SF State professor, who died in 2010 at age sixty-nine.

At a time of growing racial divisions in the country, all praises to Deborah Craig for including the voices of women of color activists such as Gwenn Craig, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherrie Moraga, in her outstanding documentary.

Originally published in The Bay Area Reporter

Evelyn C. White A former reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, Evelyn C. White is the author of the acclaimed biography Alice Walker: A Life and Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships. She is also the editor of The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking For Ourselves.

Iridescent Pigeons
Candace Walsh
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024, 82 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Iridescent Pigeons is a fitting title for Candace Walsh’s enchanting debut—a body of work that ponders the many contours of love, that rejoices in the splendour of the everyday and the profound beauty of the overlooked and discounted. In this chapbook, Walsh traverses seamlessly across time and poetic forms, tracing themes of queer love, desire, nature, loss, motherhood, childhood, and the engravings of trauma. Each poem teems with life, beckoning readers to take a second glance, to embrace stillness, drawing us into a heightened state of awareness of ourselves and the environment around us.

Images of nature abound in Iridescent Pigeons as Walsh revels in both the fecundity and the awe-inspiring intricacies of ecological design. In “Then Suddenly I Know” Walsh exults the healing properties bestowed by nature: “Sometimes I can’t get back to sleep, / while lemon balm breathes / let me soothe you beyond the window screen / and frogsong trembles webs seedpearled with dew” (40). Walsh’s poems unveil worlds within worlds that only begin to unfurl to those who remain attentive and curious, to those “who do not shirk from hills and swerves and barks” (17). However, nature is not just a physical phenomenon in these poems, but a site of memory imbued with deep evocative power.

Walsh pays homage to the many queer women poets who came before her, thus situating her work as part of a long lineage of lesbian and queer love poetry and writing. Virginia Woolf is celebrated in Walsh’s cento “Wild and Frail and Beautiful,” composed of lines from Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room. Woolf is again invoked in the poem “I Want To See You in the Lamplight, in Your Emeralds,” (21) the very title of which is a sentence from a love letter written by Woolf to Vita Sackville-West in 1927. The influence of Sappho is also apparent in Walsh’s use of the sapphic stanza. Midway through the collection, “Sapphic stanza 1,” “Sapphic stanza 2,” and “Sapphic stanza 3” connect readers directly to this vibrant queer legacy of desire-driven poetry. Indeed, much of Sappho’s oeuvre today only exists in fragments, and Walsh’s completed compositions can be read not only as a commemoration of the poet, but as a process of historical restoration. However, Sappho’s impact extends beyond poetic form to Walsh’s use of the natural world as a metaphor for queer love and sensuality. In the poem “Not Fell but Fall” Walsh muses, “How do oceans feel / about these languid vagabonds? / Against her skin I knew, I think, / how seaweed feels. / The sea must feel a thing like love” (5).

Iridescent Pigeons speaks to how queer women have historically articulated desire for one another in coded ways, negotiating through a labyrinth of social hostility and marginalisation. Walsh’s poem “Lesbians and Their Dogs” poignantly reflects on this reality: “I think of dogs with docked tails, / their bumpy rumps wagging nothing. / It reminds me of queer love, / how they used to try to / cut off or drug-numb what offended, / how we sniffed out the invisible / and guess-read the signals” (59). These lines honour the lesbians and queer women throughout history who have loved quietly, transgressively, and ferociously in spite of structures that sought/seek to deny our longings and desires. We continue to love because “We know how much it costs / to cut it off” (59).

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a musician, arts worker, and freelance writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Old Stranger: Poems
Joan Larkin
Alice James Books, 2024, 100 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Laura Gibbs

Joan Larkin’s Old Stranger records what it means to sit with the discomforting thought of one’s mortality without flinching. As Larkin’s sixth poetry collection, it is the latest addition to a long line of celebrated work that is unceasingly direct, expansive, and unguarded.

The first of the poem’s compact sections, fittingly titled “Girls Department,” deals with the beauty, the awkwardness, and the violence of youth. My personal favourite from this opening sequence is the poem, “Hexagon-Tiled Bathroom Floor”—a transformation of her quotidian childhood experience of staring at tiles into a musing upon the difficulty her adult self will face in achieving intimacy; like the grout between the hexagons, she will stand “aloof from love” (5). There is a certain breathlessness that pervades many of these early poems due to Larkin’s regular deployment of lengthy stanzas and minimal punctuation, as can be seen in “The Body inside My Body,” “Chain of Events,” and “All at Once.” Youth, in these poems, means ceaseless and often destructive movement.

As the reader progresses through the collection into the middle sections, titled “Old Stranger” and “Whisper Not,” a lingering and mournful voice begins to be heard. The once heady and overwhelming atmosphere of youth is bitterly altered as Larkin reflects upon what it means to live in the face of the deaths of others, including her father, in poems like “The Green Box” and “Gilmore Road.” “Show Jumper” is particularly arresting in its melancholy as Larkin’s speaker levels directly with an unknown figure who has fallen from sporting stardom into the throes of suicidal ideation.

“Crouching Woman,” the final section of Larkin’s collection, is a fitting conclusion to the considerations that pervade her collection—from the unspoken alienation of childhood to the inevitable frailty in old age, including a microscopic focus on quotidian details as well as abstract meditations upon the blurred boundary between creation and destruction. Larkin incorporates a meta-artistic perspective into the majority of these poems, such as “Crouching Woman,” dedicated to the French figurative sculptor Camille Claudel, and the visually arresting “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Six Paintings,” in which Larkin’s stark use of white space resembles the inability to avoid the inquisitive glare of the pregnant subject found in the eponymous painter’s Portrait of Myself on my Sixth Wedding Anniversary. Larkin’s contemplation of other artists leads to the crescendo of her final poem, “Ampersand,” where she considers the intersection of her life and poetic craft as “A pregnant roundness” and “a needle threading itself, / a snake encircling Mercury’s staff” (71).

Larkin’s collection could be seen as something of an “Old Stranger” to its readers, in its strange blending of the known and the intimate with what is alienating and, therefore, largely repressed. Old Stranger is a refusal to give in to the binary thinking that would have these juxtaposing modes of human life strictly separated. It is for this reason that I would recommend Larkin’s collection to anyone willing to sit within the unblinking gaze of her most rattling reflections.

Laura Gibbs is a former Sinister Wisdom intern and master’s student based in Scotland. Her poetry has been published in Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Gentian. Her hobbies include spending all her money in bookstores and sitting by the sea. You can follow her on Instagram @lauramusing.

Lucky Red
Claudia Cravens
Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2024, 320 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

According to author Claudia Cravens, Lucky Red was inspired by the “limited menu” of character archetypes in Westerns, like the “mysterious stranger who rides into town” and the “hooker with a heart of gold.” Lucky Red plays with, and in many ways inverts, these tropes. The hooker is the protagonist, Bridget, and the center of her own adventure, instead of contributing to someone else’s. Bridget is a young girl who finds herself orphaned, far from home, and with no money in the semi-fictional town of Dodge, Kansas. There, she finds work at the only female-run brothel in town, the Buffalo Queen, where she meets a variety of characters and finds herself in the center of trouble more than once.

Lucky Red centers on Bridget’s relationships: with Spartan Lee, a female gunfighter who brings a notorious criminal into town for his trial; Jim Bonnie, Dodge’s deputy sheriff; and her fellow workers. Jim initially has an arrangement with the Buffalo Queen’s owners to spend time with Bridget for free in return for providing security. However, over time, he falls in love with Bridget and asks her to marry him, which she ultimately declines because, well, she’s gay. She has various infatuations with women at the Buffalo Queen, first Sallie, an out-of-town friend of one of the owners, and then Spartan, who makes a similar deal to Jim—time with Bridget in exchange for elevating the Queen’s image through association.

Bridget’s romance with Spartan escalates quickly: it begins as a few brief interactions, then a drunken tryst on a night off, and then sanctioned sexual encounters that mean far more to Bridget than those with her regular patrons. I can’t say it’s unrealistic for gay girls to get swept up in their first “relationship” so quickly and act recklessly because of it. However, as a reader, I felt like a frustrated friend on the sidelines, totally unconvinced by their relationship. It seemed far too rushed to warrant Bridget’s extreme feelings and actions. Bridget’s relationship with Jim was much more well-developed, with more time to grow and a real rapport between the characters.

This wasn’t the only frustrating part of Lucky Red; Bridget is often a frustrating character and can be difficult to root for. She is naive and impulsive, which is part of her initial charm to the Buffalo Queen’s owners and patrons. However, her immaturity often leads to trouble and sometimes unintentionally wrongs people. In the end (spoiler alert), one of these people returns for revenge and, with Spartan’s help, robs the Buffalo Queen—which they get away with because of a lack of security. Almost every element of this betrayal was inadvertently caused by Bridget, from trusting Spartan too easily to losing the security Jim once provided. However, as is a pattern throughout the book, she doesn’t realize her fault in this when it happens.

In the end, though, Lucky Red was satisfying. While I thought Bridget and Spartan’s relationship would end with a literal “riding off into the sunset” moment, I was surprised to see it plummet into disaster in a way that made far more sense—and is more realistic for a first whirlwind lesbian love. Bridget hunts down Spartan, helps take back the stolen money, and kills her in an epic showdown. This was a sort of redemption for Bridget, who proved that she could recognize and begin to learn from her mistakes. I can’t help but hope everything works out for her.

There are other great parts of Lucky Red, too. The worldbuilding of Dodge is full and vivid, true to the lively atmosphere of the Western genre. It has a fun array of side characters whom I grew to genuinely like and some twists and turns that are hard to anticipate. And ultimately, Bridget is a complex character, and for a book with a goal of reimagining the Western genre and bringing new depth to a two-dimensional archetype, that is an achievement.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and educator living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive. She has previously worked with Sinister Wisdom on A Sturdy Yes of People: Selected Writings by Joan Nestle.