In this season one finale, Jack talks with historian Roey Thorpe about lesbian and queer life in Detroit from the 1930s through the early 1970s, before and beyond Stonewall. Centering working-class bars, sex work economies, and informal gathering spaces like softball and picnics, the episode traces how Black and white queer women—especially those who were poor, working-class, and gender nonconforming—built lives under conditions of criminalization, surveillance, and police violence.

Thorpe highlights the central role of sex work as labor, survival, and community infrastructure, and shows how bars functioned not only as sites of leisure but as workplaces, political hubs, and mutual aid networks. The conversation foregrounds Detroit as a major site of lesbian and queer history, shaped by industrial labor, racial segregation, and the Great Migration. Together, Jack and Thorpe show that resistance, world-building, and dyke life were already flourishing for decades.

The season closes with a powerful reminder: dyke history has always been rooted in labor, risk, pleasure, and the ongoing creation of livable worlds.

**

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

Co-Editor: Becca Moses

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.

**

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.

**

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 first of a two-part conversation, host Jack Gieseing interviews historian Finn Enke about lesbian, queer, and trans spaces in the Upper Midwest during the 1970s, with a focus on Detroit, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Chicago. Moving beyond bars as isolated sites, the episode explores how networks of movement—what Enke calls “travel stories”—connected house parties, dollar parties, bookstores, coffeehouses, softball fields, warehouses, and bars into living constellations of queer life. Drawing on Enke’s book Finding the Movement, the conversation foregrounds how race, class, gender, music, and the built environment shaped who could gather where, who could dance, and who felt welcome.

Particular attention is paid to Black lesbian dollar parties in Detroit, feminist institutions like Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis, the impact of blue laws in Detroit, and the role of print culture such as Lesbian Connection and Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as the economic precarity and feminist organizing that structured all of these spaces everywhere. For example, Black lesbian dollar parties in Detroit—vital spaces of dancing, economic mutual aid, and community building that often equaled bars in their importance. It also examines how music, race, and design structured belonging, explaining why many white lesbian bars did not feel accessible to Black women, and how segregation persisted even within queer worlds. The episode frames queer space not as permanent territory but as fragile, imaginative world-building sustained through movement, care, and resistance.

**

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.

Episode 8 of Our Dyke Histories takes us into the revolutionary cultural work of the late 1970s—from consciousness-raising circles to the birth of women of color feminism with all of the work that preceded the creation, production, and envisioning of the most core women's studies text of all time, This Bridge Called My Back. With SaraEllen Strongman, June Thomas, and Maxine Wolfe, host Jack Gieseking explores lesbian archives, lesbian newsletters, house parties, lesbian feminist presses, and dyke bars.

All together, these spaces created a vast dyke ecosystem of queer life beyond nightlife alone. The episode spotlights Kitchen Table Press, the Combahee River Collective, and the grassroots publishing networks that preserved lesbian histories and made political coalitions possible. This is the story of how activists labored—in libraries, activist groups, non-profits before they were part of the non-profit industrial complex, prisons, community centers, and bars—to build the world we inherit today.

**

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.

Episode 7 of Our Dyke Histories breaks open the messy, brilliant contradictions of 1970s lesbian life. Join host Jack Jen Gieseking in conversation with lifelong activist Maxine Wolfe, historian and podcaster June Thomas, and literary scholar and historian SaraEllen Strongman.

Together, they trace a decade shaped by separatism, softball leagues, racist bar door policies, the rise of the Christian Right, and the fierce groundwork of lesbian feminism. From Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children crusade to the Shescape Seven’s battle against racial discrimination, the episode reveals how queers built dyke infrastructures—publishers, collectives, consciousness-raising groups, bookstores, and bars—while fighting right-wing fearmongering that still echoes today. This is the decade where lesbian potentiality explodes.

**

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 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.

**

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 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.

**

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.