Virtual tour provides look at SF lesbian historic site
ebar.comAs viewers use their mouse to scroll around a computer-generated reimagining of the living room of the home owned by the late lesbian pioneers Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, an audio clip plays of the couple recalling the genesis for the country's first lesbian social organization that they helped to form in September 1955.
The screen includes a black and white photo of the women at one of the group's gatherings in Sausalito four years later."We Daughters of Bilitis was really founded as a very secret secret social club and a means of getting together without going to the bars which were frequently raided," recounts Martin. "And to be able to, you know, meet in each other's homes and have socials and ...""...
to dance that was a really important part of it," interjects Lyon.The snippet from an oral history the couple recorded in 1987 for Manuela Soares' Herstory Video Project can be heard during the roughly 20-minute virtual tour of their San Francisco residence.
It comes during section seven titled "Founding Daughters of Bilitis."Their residence at 651 Duncan Street in the city's Noe Valley neighborhood became a hub in the 1950s and 1960s for the Daughters of Bilitis.
