Reading Guide: Dyke Bars* 1920s-1930s

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, which is co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, I put together a reading guide with my interns Michaela Hayes, Mel Whitesell, Paige LeMay, Syd Guntharp, and Sarah Parsons. We begin in the 1920s through 1930s, covering three essential reads: Jonathan Ned Katz on Eve Adams, the Le Monocle photographs by Brassai (see below and above), and Cookie Woolner on rent parties.

When we talk about the 1920s and 1930s as a queer era, it’s usually framed in smokey Harlem cabarets, Greenwich Village speakeasies, and stolen glances around the world. Prohibition blurred the lines between respectable and illicit nightlife, creating underground spaces where coded glances, whispered introductions, and backroom gatherings could bloom into something bigger. Even as laws and morals tried to shut queerness, gayness, lesbianism, and transness down, urban centers were buzzing with creativity and connection. Lesbian, gay, and LGBTQ bars, cafés, and parties emerged as places to test out desire, find chosen family, and build lives beyond the reach of traditional expectations.

Our foremothers and fore-gender-expansive ancestors weren’t just surviving: they were innovating nightlife, creating dyke bars before “dyke bar” was even a recognized category, and leaving us receipts that are still hot a century later. These decades did not offer safety, but they did offer possibility. People built bars, cafés, salons, parties, and networks. These were spaces where lesbian life was not merely surviving, but generating new social forms. What constellated in these rooms—intimacy, style, mutual support, conflict, eroticism, art—was at once ordinary and transformative. The spatial politics of these sites reveal much about how lesbians negotiated risk, surveillance, class, race, and gender presentation to create something like a livable world.

The interwar period is often treated as an interlude, but they were foundational to our present day's lesbianism and lesbian spaces. These dyke geographies still structure how we inhabit nightlife, how we seek community in the day and night, and how we create lesbian belonging. From Greenwich Village to Montparnasse to Harlem’s rent-party circuits; dykes, bulldaggers, lady lovers, and gender-expansive people were inventing infrastructures of connection. A century later, the monocles and tea rooms might be artifacts—racecar-driving lesbians are still happening, of course—but the geographies they built echo in every lesbian bar, queer house party, and trans do-it-yourself gathering where we continue to make space for ourselves and one another.

While many of you already know the long-adored Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth Century by Lillian Faderman–a revered and trusted source of lesbian history–we’ll be reviewing two new amazing books and some venerable images of 1920s-1930s dyke bar* history on the podcast. Stay tuned for more reading guide, and enjoy our four ODH podcast episodes on that period in the meantime:

• The LezQueer World before Bars: 1920s-1930s with Lillian Faderman & Cookie Woolner (Part 1)
• When Paris and Berlin Were Dyke Bars* of the 1920s-1930s with Lillian Faderman & Cookie Woolner (Part 2)
• Tea, Anarchy, and the First Dyke Bar: Eve’s Hangout 1925 with Jonathan Ned Katz (Part 1 of 2 with Katz)
• Books, Bulldaggers, and the Birth of Lesbian Research with Jonathan Ned Katz & Julie Enszer (Part 2 of 2 with Katz)

This post was originally published with the Sinister Wisdom Blog, 19 Dec 2025.