ABSTRACT
Activist and environmental psychologist Maxine Wolfe wrote, ‘That more lesbians go to bars than to women’s centres, and that the women who use them are more diverse in terms of age, race, and economics emphasizes the major role they still play in lesbian lives’ (1997, p. 315). In a similar vein, my research participant Sarah asserts in her quote that most roads to lesbian-queer spaces lead back to the lesbian neighbourhood and the dyke bar. For decades, the geographies of sexuality literature and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) activists alike have often highlighted these key spaces as essential in the work towards LGBTQ liberation. Even alongside the sea change in LGBTQ acceptance and/ or tolerance, LGBTQ spaces are also marked as untenable and/or unwelcoming for women often because they work differently for lesbians and queer women (see Valentine 1993b, 1993c; Podmore 2001, 2006; Bain and Nash, 2007). What are we to make of the production of lesbian-queer spaces, specifically bars and neighbourhoods, which play such a key role in general LGBTQ life?
