photos by Bell Beecher Pitkin
What happens when you pack 700 lesbians in blazers into an academic conference in New York City? On a crisp autumn day, they descend into a university building for the annual Lesbian Lives Conference to unite lesbian pasts, presents, and futures. Three days of programming include historical walking tours, panels on topics like Lesbian Print Culture, The Sapphic Pop Star, and Lesbian Resistance in Brazil, and a raucous reunion for the now-defunct lesbian bar Meow Mix, where conference-goers can flirt and love and scheme, as many have for decades now.
“This is the best day of my little lesbian life,” one conference-goer tells me, who has driven up from Maryland to watch her friend present. This is her first conference, an initiation into a lesbian tradition she hardly knew existed.
The annual Lesbian Lives Conference is now nearly three decades old since its inception in 1994 in Ireland. But 2025 marked its first iteration in the United States, a country facing historic queer repression of its own. Lesbian Lives’ American manifestation is a labor of love by organizers like Dr. Ella Ben Hagai, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton and editor of the Journal of Lesbian Studies. This year’s theme, The Lesbian International, feels particularly urgent.
“Once Trump was elected, many international attendees were hesitant or unable to travel — some were denied visas, and others feared coming to the U.S.,” Dr. Ben Hagai says.
The lesbians in attendance are undeterred by our authoritarian times: “We resist by building networks and supporting one another,” Julie Enszer, publisher of the lesbian magazine Sinister Wisdom that co-hosted the conference, says onstage during the conference’s opening program.
The lesbian network in question spans the globe, with attendees traveling from the UK, Ireland, Turkey, Poland, Italy, France, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Palestine, Greece, Portugal, and Hong Kong. They cover generations and political orientations, from O.G. lesbian separatists to professors to current gender studies majors at Smith College. Luminaries like Demita Frazier, one of the founding members of the Combahee River Collective, Dr. Sarah Schulman, the longtime lesbian novelist and historian of ACT UP NY, and the French lesbian councilmember Alice Coffin, mingled with attendees.
“I believe that when our governments attack us because of who we are, we need to talk and network with people who have been through this in other countries,” says Dr. Ben Hagai. “You always need escape routes. As a journal editor, I think some of the most interesting theories, research, and art is coming from outside of the US, especially in this particular historical moment.”
On the first night, hundreds gather in a hushed auditorium for a talk on the life and legacy of Urvashi Vaid, the legendary lesbian activist, lawyer, and writer. Vaid, who died in 2022 of breast cancer, was a staple of the community, and this loss is felt strongly by those who have gathered in her honor. A volume of her writings has been compiled into a book by her sister, the neuroscientist Jyostna Vaid, and the writer and activist Amy Hoffman, who also identifies herself onstage — to knowing laughter — as Vaid’s ex. Hoffman and Vaid shared decades of struggle together, watching their present times crystallize into history behind them, while organizing to confront the future. Both Jyostna Vaid and Hoffman wanted to preserve Vaid’s radical legacy for future generations and were brought together by Vaid’s widow, the comedian Kate Clinton.
I luck out and get a seat in the front by a stately older lesbian with short white hair, who turns out to be the historian Deborah Edelman, founder of the first-of-its-kind Lesbian Herstory Archives. In 1974, Edelman and her comrades started the archives out of a brownstone in Brooklyn. Now Edelman is here to attend and speak at the conference, accompanied by her partner of decades, Teddy. I am starstruck, not the least because I have never seen so many older lesbians in one place. But really, they have always been there — I am the one who is new.
“You’re an academic?” I ask, and Edelman corrects me: “Most of us are activists, not academics.”
There is a strong activist ethos uniting the conference — a punk spirit, anti-institutional and distinctly DIY, lesbians coming together to take care of business for themselves. It is both a matter of historical record, but also activist foresight, to preserve a history and culture that would otherwise be erased by mainstream accounts. It makes perfect sense that the writings of an icon like Urvashi Vaid would be edited by her ex. “I found it hard to read the letters that chronicled the time we were involved,” Hoffman admits onstage. “They were a revelation to me.”
The resulting book, Dreams of a Common Movement, is now presented to a packed auditorium in conversation with the Russian journalist and lesbian heavy-hitter M. Gessen. Gessen, too, knew Vaid in life, describing her onstage as a “social connector,” and a “fun and volatile person” known for her dinner parties. There’s an unmistakable sense that, particularly among the older generations, all the lesbians know, or knew, each other.
In the ensuing conference, I meet so many lesbians — at the coffee station, during panels. I meet younger lesbians from Uruguay, Thailand, India who share insight on queer culture from their home countries. I meet representatives from the incredible Bay Area Lesbian Archives. I am shocked to discover I somehow have mutual friends with most people I meet.
There is also an edge of horniness with so many lesbians gathered in one spot — why wouldn’t there be? I spend some time perusing a wall where people can write flirtatious notes, Missed Connections-style, to fellow conference attendees. “Marxist Dyke of a frat boy tendency seeking wet kisses with grey haired butch,” one note declares — this could reasonably describe many. Others more specific: “To the butch in the Wild Fang blazer … meet me in the bathroom!”
One panel I am particularly excited about is Deborah Edelman’s: “Listening to Our Elders: Preservation Practices, Art Making, and Research From Lesbian Spaces.” There, to an audience of a few dozen lesbians sitting on folding chairs, many taking notes, scholars — some freelance, some activist, others institutionalized academics — discuss the power of preserving history. They have made life’s missions out of excavating lesbian life, intimacies, and sensibilities from the archives they leave behind.
Archives, the writer Sarah Archibald says to the audience, “come to be by some act of grace or love.” “Which lover or friend or child made this happen?” she wonders aloud, and I think of the deep care that brought Jyostna Vaid, Amy Hoffman, and an auditorium full of lesbians to preserve the legacy of Urvashi Vaid.
“A lot of our work is digging through overstuffed closets,” she continues. “Literal closets. The closet is a big metaphor,” she says, and everyone laughs.
Edelman is asked to speak on founding the Lesbian Herstory Archives for the benefit of audience members who are interested in starting similar projects. “Never take money from the government!” she announces thunderously, and people nod. “Never take money from someone who tried to write you out of history!”
I see her partner, Teddy, in the front row with her walker, filming this advice on her iPhone — the archival project continues, in real-time.
Perhaps because it is such an intergenerational space, and replete with nerds, I spend the conference in a state of heightened consciousness of our historicity. I think of something Amy Hoffman shared the previous night: how, after Urvashi Vaid was diagnosed with cancer, she pulled together a support group. “We learned how to do that during the AIDS epidemic,” Hoffman said.
I understand that this room contains lesbians who have lived through so many eras, including the AIDS crisis, a collective consciousness that predates social media and will endure through conferences like these. What’s more, this consciousness is playful, erotic, fun.
“My students are undergrads, but they loved being around stylish, and knowledgeable older dykes,” Dr. Ben Hagai said. What a special thing — the knowledge that people’s future collaborators, friends, and lovers are in this conference space, unknown to them. Perhaps even the lovers and students who will archive their closets, after they are gone.
