Sapphic Spaces — in This Economy? Reframing Lesbian Failure with June Thomas

A International Lesbian Day Q&A with the journalist behind "A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces that Shaped Women's Queer Culture."

It’s International Lesbian Day, and there’s nothing I love talking about more than where and how queer women have found one another, particularly when being a lesbian felt both isolating and, at times, impossible.

In A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces that Shaped Queer Women’s Culture (available now), June Thomas details the most significant meeting places for lesbians and bisexual women, with a focus on the generations succeeding women’s liberation and Stonewall. A professional lesbian such as myself, Thomas has been steeped in lesbian culture as long as she’s been living it. In the 1980s, she worked at D.C.’s feminist bookstore, Lammas, while a member of the Off Our Backs collective, and went on to work at Seal Press, which naturally published her book. June has since been covering lesbian subjects (among other things) at Slate, where she founded their LGBTQ section, Outward, and is currently co-hosting their Working podcast.

All of this makes June perfectly positioned to author a book like A Place of Our Own, which integrates her personal experiences with expert reporting and research into the lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, softball diamonds, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations that have proven to be historic meeting spots. Instead of bemoaning the losses of lesbian culture past, June celebrates the Sapphic present with optimism. She carefully considers how we view community space shifts as a failure to thrive and suggests that the lenses of our rose-colored glasses might require a little dusting.

June was kind enough to Zoom with me from where she lives with her partner in Edinburgh, Scottland — an international lesbian, indeed!

In your chapter about lesbian bars, you write about Madonna going on “David Letterman” with Sandra Bernard and talking about The Cubby Hole. The Cubby is famously very small and tight already, and you say they were fielding all these phone calls tying up the line from people dying to know if Madonna was there?