LOCATION
GLBT Historical Society Museum
4127 18th Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
ADMISSION
$10 admission; Free for GLBT Historical Society Members
Lesbian businesses have never been just businesses. They have been sites of creativity, survival, mutual aid, and collective imagination.
This conversation emerges from Directory of Dreams: Bay Area Lesbian Economies and Radical Care, 1970–1995, an exhibition tracing the networks, businesses, and mutual aid infrastructures built by lesbian feminist communities across the Bay Area. The exhibit highlights bookstores, print collectives, galleries, service networks, and cafés as interconnected sites of survival and self-determination.
One central chapter of this history is the Brick Hut Café in Berkeley. As a lesbian-owned and collectively operated restaurant, the Brick Hut became more than a place to eat. It functioned as a political home, a community anchor, and a lived example of feminist ethics of care in action, from hiring practices and wages to protest closures and everyday accountability. This panel creates space to hear directly about the café’s origin story and what it took to cultivate and sustain such a space within a broader ecosystem of lesbian economic life.
This panel invites reflection on what it took to cultivate those spaces, what they meant to the communities that depended on them, and how they modeled mutual aid before that language was widely used. The conversation will also explore contemporary infrastructures of care and the ongoing work of bringing communities together consistently across generations while building institutions with staying power.
From queer media networks to open mic nights, from public art to nightlife, today’s organizers continue to hold space, transfer knowledge, and cultivate the know-how required to access collective queer power.
What does it take to build spaces that hold us and last?
Moderator
Dr. Kerby Lynch (she/they) is the lead researcher and curator for Directory of Dreams: Bay Area Lesbian Economies and Radical Care, 1970-1995. Kerby is a Black lesbian scholar, community archivist, and cultural organizer based in Northern California. She is the Executive Director of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives and Director of Research & Facilitation at Ceres Policy Research. Trained as a geographer, her work centers Black queer histories, lesbian feminist economies, and community-based archives as tools of resistance, care, and collective power.
speakers
Photograph courtesy of KQED
Joan Anotuccio (she/her) was born in San Francisco to a Catholic Sicilian dad and an LDS French-Irish mom, which meant Joan grew up religion-free. Being indecisive about one profession has led Joan to many careers -- her favorites: cooking, sound engineering, back-up singing, voiceover, and she has also produced several concerts. Joan has been out of the closet most of her life. Joan has had the privilege of being in amazing places at extraordinary times: in the recording studio for Cris Williamson’s The Changer and the Changed, she worked with Teresa Trull, Linda Tillery, Vicki Randle, Holly Near, June Millington, and others. She co-owned the most amazing cafe the world has ever known -- the Brick Hut in Berkeley, Calif., from 1976-1990, a safe place where the LGBT community gathered to practice activism and create LGBT culture.
Photograph courtesy of KQED
Sharon De la Peña Davenport (she/her) is a radical lesbian feminist. Her life work as an archivist and poet is instructed and inflected by being a lesbian. An independent, professional archivist, Sharon’s contributions include the papers of the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Alliance Against the Oppression of Women, and the papers of Aileen Hernandez (with Lenn Keller), accessed at Smith College, Northampton, MA. She has also been a research assistant and copy editor for books and exhibitions by Tirza True Latimer, Renate Stendhal, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and Arlene Goldfarb.
Sharon was a co-founder of the lesbian owned Brick Hut Café (1975 – 1997) in Berkeley, CA. She is the mother of Bart Davenport, a musician living in Los Angeles, CA. Sharon has published two books of poetry, Mountain Singing and Between Us. She has presented casual exhibitions of her watercolors at cafes and cafeterias. She earned a BA from Smith College and an MA from San Jose State University.
Kin Folkz (né Monica Anderson) (they/them) is an award-winning educator and multidisciplinary artivist building and sustaining community-rooted cultural ecosystems and equity-centered practices that uplift marginalized LGBTQIA+ communities.
As founder of the Queer Arts Center Gallery (QAC), Racism Under the Rainbow, and Spectrum Queer Media, Folkz has curated decades of exhibitions and cultural programming while establishing direct-service initiatives, including a Food Justice program that delivered over 40,000 meals during COVID-19 shelter-in-place. Their social justice practice extends to large-scale public art, serving as lead artist and creator of the eight-block-long “All Black Lives Matter” mural at Lake Merritt—featured internationally, including in Complex—and as a lead designer for the “Black Trans Lives Matter” mural in San Francisco.
Folkz is a 2018 San Francisco Pride Grand Marshal featured in the award-winning documentary State of Pride, recipient of four Oakland mayoral proclamations, and honored with a State Citation of Honor from the Alabama House of Representatives.
Members Perks
Interested in becoming a member of the GLBT Historical Society? Members enjoy all sorts of perks, including free access to this event. Learn more.