Remnants of Resistance: It's the 1950s—Where's My Lesbian Bar!?

October 13, 2023

As part of the One Institute's Circa Queer Histories Festival, CSUN's University Library and Queer Studies Program have partnered to produce a limited podcast series called Remnants of Resistance. Episodes will be hosted by Queer Studies faculty, and will delve into the unique and hidden stories in queer history contained within the Vern and Bonnie Bullough Collection on Sex and Gender and beyond.

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About the Episode

In It’s the 1950s—Where’s My Lesbian Bar!? Dr. Marie Cartier addresses how women could find gay bars in the 1940s, through to the 1950s and today, and discusses how finding a lesbian bar has evolved throughout time. The episode explores the legal loopholes gay bars enacted in order to not be accused, what it meant to have the bar raided, and also what it meant to be part of the community. It also engages with the subtle ways in which women found "gay girl bars" to visit within lesbian pulp novels, advertisements, and from other different resources as the decades passed, including organizations that blossomed to help women find community.

Image of sources consulted in this episode are viewable below. They include Albert Vallerga and Mary Azar, petitioners and appellants, v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, Baby, You Are My Religion, Bar Hopper's Review, Beebo Brinker, The Blue Book: A Guide to Gay/Lesbian L.A., Bohemian Bugle, Citizen's News, Columbia fun maps, mapping the gay and lesbian world. Los Angeles. Long Beach & Laguna Beach, Contacts Desired, Damron Women's Traveller, Different Daughters, Frontier Bulletin Gazette, Gaia's Guide, Gay Bar, The Grapevine, I Am A Lesbian, One, The Phoenix, The Price of Salt, Stranger On Lesbos, The Voice, Well of Loneliness, and Whisper Their Love.

Special thanks to research assistant Mariah Gonzales.

About the Host

Marie Cartier is a professor, poet, writer, artist, and scholar. She holds a BA in Communications from the University of New Hampshire; an MA in English/Poetry from Colorado State University; an MFA in Theatre Arts (Playwriting) from UCLA; an MFA in Film and TV (Screenwriting) from UCLA; an MFA in Visual Art (Painting/Sculpture) from Claremont Graduate University; and a Ph.D. in Religion with an emphasis on Women and Religion from Claremont Graduate University. Her acclaimed book Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars And Theology Before Stonewall was published in 2014 by Routledge.