Making a Scene: Lesbians and Community Across Canada, 1964-84(Sexuality Studies)

Starting in the mid-1960s, Canadian lesbians started leaving their closets en masse to find each other and build community. After decades of being pathologized or erased from public view, lesbians were ready to make a scene – both by bringing attention to themselves and by creating physical spaces and opportunities where they could meet to form relationships, debate politics, and forge their own culture. Making a Scene documents the lesbian movement that emerged in Canada between 1964 and 1984. Not just a story of big-city life, it chronicles the range of spaces lesbians created across rural and urban Canada, from physical locations, such as lesbian and gay centres, bookstores, and private members' clubs, to ephemeral sites of encounter, such as conferences, festivals, and Dykes in the Streets marches. Enriched by interviews and excerpts from letters, club meeting minutes, diaries, and more, Making a Scene brings to life the exuberance and determination of these young women.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part 1: Creating Places 1 "The Lesbian, Drinking, Is Never at Her Best": Beer Parlours, Taverns, and Bars 2 "No Drugs, No Straights": Members-Only Clubs 3 "Let's Decide What We Are – A Drop-In or a Café with Entertainment": Buildings Part 2: Overcoming Geography 4 "It Was an Incredible Conference": Getting Together 5 "An Event That Is Talked About as Far Away as Toronto": Claiming Public Space 6 "Be Daring – Live the Unbelievable and Challenging Life of a Rural Lesbian!": Outside the Big City Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Liz Millward is an associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba. Her work on lesbian place-making has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, Feminist Media Studies, Women's History Review, and Australian Feminist Studies. Her book Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922-1937 won the Canadian Women's Studies Association Annual Book Prize in 2010.

Review :
This well-researched study of twenty formative years of lesbian community-building in Canada covers a lot of ground … Millward has captured the flavor of an era by combining data from previous studies with eyewitness accounts and black-and-white photos from private collections. She proposes a symbiotic relationship between self-defined lesbians and their "scene" or social milieu: a lesbian identity requires a social context, and vice versa. - Jean Roberta (The Gay and Lesbian Review)