In this exclusive audio interview Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson host of OUTTAKE VOICES™ talks with author Sarah F. Pearlman about “Bar Time: A Lesbian Rite of Passage: Bar Stories by Older Lesbians” which is a new collection of writings by twenty-six older lesbians telling their not-to-be-erased lesbian history through stories, poetry, a play and a collection of beloved disco songs. “Bar Time” is produced by the Boston OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change) editorial team including Alice Fisher, Sarah F. Pearlman and Sue Reamer. The stories mostly come from the Boston area but also include contributors from New Hampshire, Connecticut, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota, California, Washington and Melbourne, Australia. Pearlman stated, “Some of our writers were adolescents when they entered their first lesbian bar. To our generation, lesbian bars were a part of our lives and an opportunity to meet women different than ourselves. Where lesbian-feminists met bar dykes.” For most lesbians of our older LGBTQ generation bars were the only place to go to connect with other women to have their first meeting of other lesbians and connect with a lesbian social world. Before Stonewall since it was illegal to be LGBTQ, bar owners had to pay off the police to keep bars from being raided because selling liquor to gay men and lesbians was also illegal. After Stonewall things slowly changed for our LGBTQ community and by 1987 there were an estimated two hundred lesbian bars nationwide. That number has dwindled to a mere fifteen lesbian bars left in 2021. We talked to Sarah about what she hopes to accomplish with “Bar Time: A Lesbian Rite of Passage” and her spin on our LGBTQ issues.
Sarah F. Pearlman is a teacher, writer and lesbian-feminist activist, nationally recognized for her pioneering role in establishing a psychology of lesbians. She was a founder and the primary coordinator of Boston OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), coordinated the Boston-based conference “To Bed or Not to Bed: Sex and the Older Lesbian” and was a member of the OLOC editing team that produced the booklet of the same name along with subsequent booklets of writings by older lesbians including “Erasing Lesbians and Virus Time”. She is the author of “Mother-Talk: Conversations with Mothers of Lesbian Daughters and FTM Transgender Children” (2012), “The Lesbian Erotic: Bad Girl Persona and Other Poems” (2013) and must-read novel about pre-historic lesbians “Where There Are Mountains” (2019). The booklet for “Bar Time: A Lesbian Rite of Passage” will be released in a few week but you can request a PDF. Request “Bar Time” PDF…
