In her new book Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line, Elizabeth Lovatt writes, “Lesbian knowledge production feels dangerously precarious, and so much of it I had stumbled over by chance.” Lovatt, a London-based writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, demonstrates how LGBTQ history is piecemeal and hard to find: Our histories have often been ignored, erased, or obscured by educational institutions, archives, and museums. In this absence, many LGBTQ people stumble upon different sources — books, TV shows, Tumblrs and TikToks, indie queer websites — that help us make sense of ourselves, our feelings, and our relationships.
Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line documents Lovatt’s process of researching and writing about the history of volunteer-run lesbian phone lines in the U.K. During a residency focused on the LGBTQ history collection of the Islington Local History Centre, she came across the logbook of a lesbian phone line and was immediately curious about it. This was the “Women’s Line” or “Lesbian Line” that operated out of the LGBTQ community organization London Friend.
London Friend’s Lesbian Line, which opened in 1989 and closed in 1999, was one of many gay and lesbian phone lines across the UK. As community-run phone services, these lines “acted as part information service and part phone counselor”: volunteers took calls and answered questions on a wide range of issues related to lesbian life, including coming out, relationships, family life and parenting, lesbian sex, and sexual and domestic violence.
Lovatt’s book is part memoir, part history, part work of feminist and queer theory. As she writes about her experience researching in the archive and interviewing the women who volunteered for the Lesbian Line, she also shares her own life experience with the reader. Lovatt describes coming out to herself and eventually to her friends and family in her late twenties, tells us about her first queer crushes, and shares what it was like to fall in love with her wife.
With a critical self-reflexivity, Lovatt uses these anecdotes to illustrate the themes and questions she sees explored in the logbook: What does it mean to be a lesbian? What does it mean to be a woman? How do lesbian relationships work? And who gets to be in the lesbian community? Lovatt demonstrates how these are both contemporary and historical questions, ones that we continue to grapple with as our understanding of LGBTQ community evolves over time.
Lovatt honors the women who created and ran the Lesbian Line but isn’t interested in lionizing them as heroes. In the second half of the book, multiple chapters examine how the phone line primarily served the needs of white cis lesbian callers, often falling short for bisexual and trans women as well as for women of color. Her analysis reveals the way structural racism, transphobia, and biphobia impacted LGBTQ community spaces in the 1990s.
When I ask her about this, Lovatt shares: “It was really important to me that I did talk about those things. I think there’s a narrative that we like to tell sometimes around lesbian history or queer history that we pick out the heroes and we just talk about them as these heroic figures. It’s just not true. I really wanted to talk about ordinary people, ordinary lesbians, and the complicated ways that they acted. They could be so kind and thoughtful towards certain callers and then towards other callers, they could be racist or ableist or transphobic.”
Lovatt’s straightforward approach to discussing the complexity of this history is refreshing. One chapter is aptly titled, “Trans Lesbians Exist—Get Over It”. It was important for Lovatt to claim trans lesbians as a crucial part of lesbian history, particularly because, as Lovatt told me, “our media in the UK definitely prioritizes transphobic voices.” Lovatt is deftly able to balance both the innovation and limitations of the Lesbian Line, while making clear the historical and political context of the UK that shaped these organizations.
A work of creative nonfiction, the book immerses the reader in the stories of the phone line volunteers and callers. At the start of each chapter, Lovatt quotes a line from the logbook and then writes a speculative narrative about the call. Here she employs a method that Black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which uses speculative storytelling to explore archival and historical omissions, particularly of marginalized people.
“It’s really important to note that the calls that the women made were confidential and that they never would have expected them to be made public in any way,” Lovatt says. “I really needed to honor that and to find a way to protect their anonymity. Also, there’s a practical point: There’s actually no way I could find the women who did call because they often didn’t leave their name. I came up with the solution that I would retell their stories in a fictional way. Fiction allowed me to tell what was a true story, an honest story based on the research that I had done, but it wasn’t their real story. Everyone’s name has been changed. A lot of the details are changed. Some of the calls are amalgamations of different people, my own experience, someone else’s that I know about, research that I’d done, or interviews that I’d done with some people that had worked on lesbian lines and other help lines.”
Protecting the anonymity of the callers was crucial to Lovatt, even as she wanted to represent their stories. As she writes in the book, “To write about the logbook will require an exchange of fact and fiction but also of my life and theirs, a layering of truths and could‑be‑truths….This is what I aim to do: not recreate the calls to the Lesbian Line but retell them, to make them into something that happens now, as immediate as anything can be when written down, so that I might capture the intimate traces of their lives. It’s a projection into the past that might show a way forward.”
The result is a beautiful work of lesbian knowledge production and community history. As the Trump Administration demands staffing cuts to and cancels grants funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, our histories are in peril. These grants fund community archives, museums, and history projects at the local, state, and national level. Without these grants, LGBTQ librarians and archivists will lose their jobs and queer history projects will be paused, discontinued, and defunded.
In the wake of this moment, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line speaks to the myriad ways queer people have organized together to build community and to the crucial importance of recording this history. As Lovatt writes towards the end of the book:
“There are so many stories in the logbook I’ve not shared, and there are so many lesbian lives not told. The story of the Lesbian Line is an unfinished and incomplete one— deliberately so. The logbook is only one part of the story of what it means to be a lesbian. And in those other gaps are more stories and more people and more thoughts and more feelings. I hope you see, like me, that these are not silences or elisions but an opening, an invitation to you, to lesbians, to all queer people, to write and tell our stories.”
Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt is out in the UK and comes out in the U.S. on May 27.
great article, adding this book to my list!