In this deeply moving and often electric episode, Our Dyke Histories sits with legendary writer, activist, and Lesbian Herstory Archives co-founder Joan Nestle in her last interview as she reflects on the queer worlds that shaped her life in the 1940s–1960s. Joan guides us through her Friday night walks from a condemned Lower East Side tenement to the Sea Colony bar; the dangers and solidarities of queer street life; the violent policing and erotic possibility inside lesbian bars; and the role of race, class, and labor in shaping queer women’s worlds. Along the way, she brings us into Harlem drag balls with Mabel Hampton, the lesbian feminist relationship to the Women’s House of Detention, the labor histories behind Massachusetts’ Moody Gang, and the erotic power of butch-femme desire. This is Joan Nestle at her usual: always generous, political, and brilliant—offering a vivid map of mid-century queer survival and community.

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Credits

Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking

Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom

Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo

Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell

Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson

Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain

Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen

Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/

CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at ourdykehistories@gmail.com for permission to use any of our content.

In this episode of Our Dyke Histories, we travel deep into the smoky lesbian bars, queer parties (house, rent, and otherwise), and clandestine love affairs of the 1940s–60s with three powerhouse historians: Joan Nestle, Hugh Ryan, and Alix Genter. Together, with host Jack Jen Gieseking, they explore how desire itself created new genders, new communities, and new forms of resistance inside spaces policed by the state and shaped by racism, class struggle, and McCarthy-era repression.

From Greenwich Village’s lesbian bar circuits to the Women’s House of Detention and the surprising queer history of Coney Island, the episode uncovers the joy, danger, and erotic electricity that defined mid-century queer life. Featuring the first half of Joan Nestle’s final interview, this conversation offers an emotional, intergenerational look at the bars, books, femmes, butches, and bodies that made public lesbian life possible.

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Join Our Community

Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!

• Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
• Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
• Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
• Email us questions and comments at ourdykehistories@gmail.com

**

Credits

Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking

Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom

Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo

Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell

Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson

Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain

Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen

Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/

CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at ourdykehistories@gmail.com for permission to use any of our content.

In this episode of Our Dyke Histories, we continue to follow the astonishing life of Eve Adams into exile — the butch, Jewish, immigrant anarchist who opened Eve’s Hangout, a tea room in 1920s Greenwich Village that became one of the earliest proto–lesbian bars in the United States. Drawing on Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking research, Jack Jen Gieseking, Katz, and Julie Enszer trace Eve’s friendships with Anias Nin and Henry Miller; her bold self-published book Lesbian Love (about many of her exes, so delightfully gay); and the policewoman who entrapped her, triggering a sensational raid, trial, and her deportation.

We track Eve from New York to Chicago, LA, and back, and finally Paris, where she and her partner Hella Olstein evaded Nazis for years during World War II before being murdered at Auschwitz. And yet the episode insists: Eve was not just a victim. She was an agent, a flirt, a hunk, a radical democrat, a community-builder — someone who lived with astonishing boldness. Through speakeasies, slumming cultures, rent parties, tea rooms, and censorship battles, this episode unearths how Eve Adams helped shape queer public life long before lesbian bars existed — and why her story still electrifies us a century later.

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Join Our Community

Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!

• Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
• Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
• Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
• Email us questions and comments at ourdykehistories@gmail.com

**

Credits

Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking

Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom

Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo

Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell

Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson

Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain

Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen

Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/

CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at ourdykehistories@gmail.com for permission to use any of our content.