Our Dyke Histories

In this season one finale, Jack talks with historian Roey Thorpe about lesbian and queer life in Detroit from the 1930s through the early 1970s, before and beyond Stonewall. Centering working-class bars, sex work economies, and informal gathering spaces like softball and picnics, the episode traces how Black and white queer women—especially those who were poor, working-class, and gender nonconforming—built lives under conditions of criminalization, surveillance, and police violence.
Thorpe highlights the central role of sex work as labor, survival, and community infrastructure, and shows how bars functioned not only as sites of leisure but as workplaces, political hubs, and mutual aid networks. The conversation foregrounds Detroit as a major site of lesbian and queer history, shaped by industrial labor, racial segregation, and the Great Migration. Together, Jack and Thorpe show that resistance, world-building, and dyke life were already flourishing for decades.
The season closes with a powerful reminder: dyke history has always been rooted in labor, risk, pleasure, and the ongoing creation of livable worlds.
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Join Our Community
Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!
Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
Email us questions and comments at [email protected]
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Credits
Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking
Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom
Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo
Co-Editor: Becca Moses
Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell
Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson
Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain
Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen
Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/
CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at [email protected] for permission to use any of our content.

**
Join Our Community
Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!
Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
Email us questions and comments at [email protected]
**
Credits
Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking
Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom
Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo
Co-Editor: Becca Moses
Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell
Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson
Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain
Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen
Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/
CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at [email protected] for permission to use any of our content.

**
Join Our Community
Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!
Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
Email us questions and comments at [email protected]
**
Credits
Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking
Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom
Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo
Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell
Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson
Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain
Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen
Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/
CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at [email protected] for permission to use any of our content.

Recorded just before the ICE invasions of the Upper Midwest, this episode takes up queer people’s enduring creativity in making life possible in the Upper Midwest during the 1970s—and why these histories matter urgently now. In this first of a two-part conversation, host Jack Gieseing interviews historian Finn Enke about lesbian, queer, and trans spaces with a focus on Detroit, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Chicago. Moving beyond bars as isolated sites, the episode explores how networks of movement—what Enke calls “travel stories”—connected house parties, dollar parties, bookstores, coffeehouses, softball fields, warehouses, and bars into living constellations of queer life. Drawing on Enke’s book Finding the Movement, the conversation foregrounds how race, class, gender, music, and the built environment shaped who could gather where, who could dance, and who felt welcome.
Particular attention is paid to Black lesbian dollar parties in Detroit, feminist institutions like Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis, the impact of blue laws in Detroit, and the role of print culture such as Lesbian Connection and Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as the economic precarity, feminist organizing, and dancing that structured all of these spaces everywhere. The episode frames queer space not as permanent territory but as fragile, imaginative world-building sustained through movement, care, and resistance.
**
Join Our Community
Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!
Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
Email us questions and comments at [email protected]
**
Credits
Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking
Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom
Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo
Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell
Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson
Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain
Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen
Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/
CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at [email protected] for permission to use any of our content.

Episode 8 of Our Dyke Histories takes us into the revolutionary cultural work of the late 1970s—from consciousness-raising circles to the birth of women of color feminism with all of the work that preceded the creation, production, and envisioning of the most core women's studies text of all time, This Bridge Called My Back. With SaraEllen Strongman, June Thomas, and Maxine Wolfe, host Jack Gieseking explores lesbian archives, lesbian newsletters, house parties, lesbian feminist presses, and dyke bars.
All together, these spaces created a vast dyke ecosystem of queer life beyond nightlife alone. The episode spotlights Kitchen Table Press, the Combahee River Collective, and the grassroots publishing networks that preserved lesbian histories and made political coalitions possible. This is the story of how activists labored—in libraries, activist groups, non-profits before they were part of the non-profit industrial complex, prisons, community centers, and bars—to build the world we inherit today.
**
Join Our Community
Want to be part of our community? We'd love to have you. 😏 Come comment, connect, and get your gayme on!
Newsletter to your inbox: Jack's Queer Geographies newsletter with detailed takes on each episode, & more about lezbiqueertrans spaces across time
Instagram for more dyke visuals and stories @ourdykehistories
Read and follow our co-producer and collaborator, Sinister Wisdom
Email us questions and comments at [email protected]
**
Credits
Producer, Editor, Host, & Creative Director: Jack Gieseking
Co-Producer: Julie Enszer & Sinister Wisdom
Co-Producer & Co-Editor: Cade Waldo
Assistant Editor: Mel Whitesell
Social Media: Audrey Wilkinson
Interns: Michaela Hayes and Sophie McClain
Consulting Producer: Rachel Fagen
Music: Our theme song: "Like Honey" by Kit Orion https://www.kitorion.com/
CC-BY-NC-ND 2025. Write to us at [email protected] for permission to use any of our content.