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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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

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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.

In this episode of Our Dyke Histories, we follow the astonishing life of Eve Adams — 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 Emma Goldman and meeting Mae West; 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.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.

**

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.

What if Paris and Berlin were the first great dyke bars*? In Episode Two of Our Dyke Histories, Jack Gieseking, Lillian Faderman, and Cookie Woolner follow the trail of queer women, trans patrons, and gender rebels from Harlem across the U.S. as well into the theaters and hotel parties of Black artists and performers in the U.S. We then head across the Atlantic to trace queer modernisms into the salons and show of Paris and cabarets and clubs of Berlin. This episode is brimming with Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Natalie Barney’s infamous salon, and the urban legend behind Ma Rainey writing "Prove It on Me Blues" after getting bailed out of jail for lesbian pursuits. The 1920s to 1930s shimmer with both liberation and backlash. From Black vaudeville circuits and Bessie Smith’s private train car parties to the queer glamour of Paris’ Le Monocle, the episode captures the dazzling creativity—and the precarity—of queer life between the wars.

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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, Syd Guntharp, Sophie McClain, Paige LeMay, and Sarah Parsons

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.

Before the first lesbian bars, there were queer worlds built in rented rooms, smoky clubs, and parlor parties. In our premiere episode of Our Dyke Histories, host Jack Gieseking joins historians Lillian Faderman and Cookie Woolner trace the roots of lesbian and queer nightlife to the 1920s—a time before the first official “lesbian bars” in the 1930s, when parties, salons, and underground theaters created fleeting but fierce shindigs as sanctuaries. We visit spaces like Harlem’s rent parties and salons, Los Angeles Jane Jones’ Club and Tess’ Café Internationale, San Francisco’s Finocchio’s, Eve Adams’s legendary Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village, and even fly off with Amelia Earhart to South Dakota. Through stories of performers like Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, and A’Lelia Walker, we reveal how queer women of color shaped nightlife, pleasure, and possibility even under segregation, censorship, and prohibition. These were the rooms and places where we made dykedom public.

**

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, Syd Guntharp, Sophie McClain, Paige LeMay, and Sarah Parsons

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.

Come for the history; stay for the revolution, gossip, and desire that built it. 🤌

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About Us

Decade by decade, Our Dyke Histories dives deep into the living, breathing past and present of lesbian, queer, trans, & nonbinary communities. Each season traces how we made space for ourselves—sometimes in bars, bookstores, and protests; sometimes in basements, alleyways, and prisons; & always against the odds.

Our Dyke Histories is hosted by historian, geographer, and environmental psychologist Dr. Jack Jen Gieseking, and produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, the oldest lesbian multicultural literary and art journal.

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Season One

Our first season traces the history of dyke bars* - yes, with an asterisk - including lesbian bars, queer parties, & trans hangouts.

Before Pride marches and hashtags, there were bars, parties, and whispered invitations that built whole worlds. Our Dyke Histories uncovers the stories of the women, trans, and nonbinary people who turned repression into resistance and nightlife into liberation.

From the 1920s tearooms of Eve Adams to Harlem rent parties, from the Women’s House of Detention to 1970s consciousness-raising collectives and 1980s synthesizer-lit dance floors, each episode uncovers how we turned danger into joy, censorship into art, & survival into community.

**

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 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, Syd Guntharp, Sophie McClain, Paige LeMay, and Sarah Parsons

Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen

Music:

• "Hot Water" by National Sweetheart
• 1920s-1930s background:
• 1940s-1960s background:
• 1970s background:
• 1980s background:
• Radio fade:

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