Last Night at the Telegraph Club

your dream?” Shirley asked.

“Well, step one is to go to college, maybe major in aeronautics or engineering. Step two—”

“I didn’t think you were college material,” Shirley said.

Lily stared at her friend in shock. She had no idea what had gotten into her, but Kathleen didn’t seem entirely surprised. She merely smiled slightly before she responded.

“Cal takes anyone in the top fifteen percent of their graduating class,” Kathleen said. “I’m not going to have a problem. Neither will Lily. But I don’t think we’ll see you there.”

She lay in her bed for quite some time trying to catch that scent again, as if she might call it into existence out of the sheer force of memory.

If Lily Hu didn’t do these things, the girl in the mirror surely did.

She couldn’t put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look—and, by looking, to know.

and tearing the article out beneath the table as quietly as possible. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had needed to have the picture in a way she didn’t consciously understand.

In 1956, a new mayor launched an anti-vice campaign to put many gay bars out of business. It’s no coincidence that 1956 was also the year that the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded; this early gay rights organization aimed to provide a way for lesbians to socialize outside the bar scene.

Expressing a butch identity involved cultivating a masculine appearance, which could involve wearing men’s clothing. Many cities outlawed cross-dressing in public; San Francisco’s law was not repealed until 1974. As lesbian Reba Hudson relates in Wide-Open Town, gay men and lesbians were often harassed by police for cross-dressing in the 1940s and ’50s, but women who cross-dressed would wear women’s underwear, because then “they couldn’t book you for impersonating a person of the opposite sex.”

“Butch/femme” has sometimes been misunderstood as an imitation of heterosexuality, but in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explain: “Butches defied convention by usurping male privilege in appearance and sexuality, and with their fems, outraged society by creating a romantic and sexual unit within which women were not under male control. . . . Butch-fem roles were the key structure for organizing against heterosexual dominance.”

The first Chinese landed in San Francisco in 1848, and soon afterward settled in the center of the city near Portsmouth Square in an area that would become known as Chinatown. For the next several decades, anti-Chinese bigotry tangled with demand for Chinese labor. White American entrepreneurs needed Chinese workers to build railroads and wash laundry, but white American workers resented the Chinese for taking those jobs. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration ban in the United States targeting a specific ethnic group. It remained in place until World War II.

The first lesbian pulp novel, Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres, was published in 1950 and sold a million copies. It was followed in 1952 by Spring Fire, which sold at least a million and a half copies. Spring Fire’s author, Vin Packer, was a pseudonym for Marijane Meaker, who would go on to write young adult novels as M. E. Kerr. Lesbian pulps were widely available in drugstores across the country, and although many were written with the male gaze in mind, plenty of lesbians also found them. Despite the publishers’ requirement, due to obscenity laws, that these books end in punishment for the homosexual characters, they still created a kind of imagined community for lesbians scattered across the nation, who could read these books and discover that people like them existed.