How Lesbians Found One Another, From the Softball Field to the Sex-Toy Shop
A PLACE OF OUR OWN: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture, by June Thomas June Thomas’s ability to resurrect the past in “A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture” is a testament to her meticulous research.
But it’s her voice — charming, irreverent, tender — that makes the journey through lesbian history so worthwhile. The book starts in the lesbian bars of the 1960s, and travels on to feminist bookstores, rural separatist communities, women’s sex-toy shops, vacation destinations and, yes, the softball field. (A longtime Slate editor and podcaster born in England, Thomas confesses to this last phenomenon as a gap in her “sapphic scholarship.”) Thomas doesn’t tap gently on the glass at these spaces; she flings herself in, starting (metaphorically) in their basements and working up.
She scours accounting records, tax receipts and lawsuits going back decades. She reviews the minutes of softball league meetings.
She tracks down the women who helped create placesthat transcended to spaces. None of these pioneers were in it for the money.
