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In early November 1993 in Toronto, almost 300 people gathered for a reading by Buffalo-based Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis from their new book, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of a Lesbian Community. The organizers of the event, myself included, were astounded by the turn-out. First, we attributed the numbers to the recent successes of the Canadian film "Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Canadian Lesbians" (1992) and the independent American film, "Last Call at Maud's" (1992), two splendid chronicles of lesbian bar life in the 1950s. Second, the strong attendance may have been, in part, reflective of the legacy of friendship networks established between gay women who traveled regularly between Toronto and Buffalo. And third, we recognized a profound curiosity about, and yearning for, knowledge of female homoeroticism that dug deeper than the mainstream media's preoccupation with manufacturing the superficial glamour of "lesbian chic." Indeed, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold is a book that many of us involved in the reclamation of lesbian and gay history have anticipated for the 15 years it took the authors to write it. Elizabeth Kennedy, a Women's Studies professor, and Madeline Davis, a librarian, have not disappointed devoted fans who were introduced to their material at women's and lesbian/gay history conferences, and/or in the pages of feminist journals and anthologies.
In Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Kennedy and Davis present lesbian stories from the 1940s and 1950s in ways that challenge and unsettle the equation of post-war America with suburban sprawl, (white) middle-class prosperity, Betty Crocker, the baby boom and (heterosexual) nuclear family bliss. "The Lesbian" that Davis and Kennedy feature is not rhyming off sentimental love poetry on a faraway Sapphic isle, nor is she bound up in ex-patriate, Left Bank intrigues and excesses Natalie Barney-style. The voices captured in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold are those of working class women, white, African American and Native American, who built a community for themselves and their female lovers in Buffalo bars and house parties in hard times prior to the emergence of modern day feminism and gay liberation. Forty-five life stories were conducted with women who were in or around "the life," and they are supplemented by analysis of archival sources (newspaper...