Our Dyke Histories

**

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 comment...

**

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 comment...

Recorded just before the ICE invasions of the Upper Midwest, this episode takes up queer people’s enduring creativity in making life possible in the Upper Midwest during the 1970s—and why these histories matter urgently now. In this first of a two-part conversation, host Jack Gieseing interviews historian Finn Enke about lesbian, queer, and trans spaces with a focus on Detroit, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Chicago. Moving beyond bars ...

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, lesb...

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...

While we'll back next, this short holigays hallo is sharing one of the queerest songs in blues history. Enjoy!

B.D. Woman’s Blues

Song by Lucille Bogan

Coming a time, B.D. women ain't gon' need no men Coming a time, B.D. womens ain't gon' to need no men Oh, the way treat us is a lowdown and dirty sin

B.D. women, you sure can't understand B.D. women, you sure can't understand They got a head like a sweet angel and they walk just like a ...

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 po...

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 r...

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 Mil...

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 se...

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 cabaret...

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 shindig...

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

**

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...