But Do We Get to Stay?: Sex, Space, and the 1980s, with Sarah Schulman, Katherine V. Forrest, & Valarie Walker

[upbeat music] Welcome to Our Dyke Histories.

I'm your host, Jack Gieseking, historian, geographer, and environmental psychologist.

We dive into the past and present of les, queer, trans, sapphic, enby communities decade by decade in collaboration with multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, Sinister Wisdom.

This season, we're all about dyke bars with an asterisk: lesbian bars, queer parties, and trans hangouts, the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we made from them.

Our Dyke Histories.

Come for the history, stay for the revolution, gossip, and desire that built us.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to the 1980s.

We have returned to again jam in this episode two of our focus on dyke bars in the '80s with the fantastic authors, Sarah Schulman and Catherine Forrest, and the amazing activist, Valerie Walker.

We're gonna continue from part one and continue to talk about race and racism in the bars, the activism against it.

We'll talk about the deep, complicated, amazing way that fiction, both in text and screen, has significantly shaped our ideas of ourselves.

Of course, we will not be able to stop talking about sex parties.

We're also gonna dive into all things gentrification, which I'm a tad giddy about.

We're also gonna talk a little bit about what happened to feminism during the 1980s, the Barnard Sex Conference, the porn sex wars, the essentialism, social constructionism debates.

I promise it's utterly fascinating, and it will make you think again about what you know about lesbi-queer-trans history, about the world, about dyke bars, and about geography too.

Again, we'll be diving into all things sex in bars and parties and how that goes along or doesn't with the religious right.

We're gonna pick up right where we left off by talking about how segregation and racism structure these spaces and at the same time create a place to be among your people, whomever they may be.

We can also see how Black queer bars that really grow in number in the 1980s give so much a sense of community and home that wasn't available previously.

We're also gonna come back to talking about this moment in the 1980s where people increasingly realize if bars are the main place that defines you, there's gonna be a huge amount of alcoholism that they're part of by being part of bar society.