It looks like they could use a bigger room. Hidden away in the basement of the Clifton United Methodist Church, the Ohio Lesbian Archives is bursting at the seams. A table is strewn with newspaper articles and old event flyers, which have recently been removed from the rows of filing cabinets just a few feet away. Nearby is a collection of vinyl records from the 1970s and ’80s and back-to-back bookshelves, which are stuffed with novels, poetry collections and books on art and history; stacks of plastic storage tubs hold more memories.
One of only a handful of lesbian-centric archives in the entire country, the OLA has spent decades chronicling lesbian history in Cincinnati and beyond. The organization celebrates its 30th anniversary this September.
In the mid-1970s, OLA co-founder and Miami University post-grad Phebe Beiser was in her 20s; the Stonewall Riots were a fresh memory, the beginning of the AIDS crisis was just a few years away and the American Psychiatric Association had only recently declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. But amid the turmoil of being a member of the LGBTQ community in America in the ’70s and ’80s — and inarguably in the decades to follow — there was still refuge to be found in Cincinnati.
There was the “Lesbian Commune,” aka the no-men-allowed West Clifton Avenue house where Beiser lived with five other women, sharing dinners on weeknights and fighting over shirts in the fashion of all 20-something roommates. There was Adam’s Rib, a gay bar on Calhoun Street that has since been replaced by a parking garage and a Smoothie King. And a neighborhood away, there was the Crazy Ladies Bookstore.
Founded by Carolyn Dellenbach in 1979 in the “safe zone” of Northside, as Beiser puts it, the bookstore was a hub for lesbians, gay men, feminists and forward-thinkers.
“You couldn’t find gay and lesbian books in bookstores back then,” Beiser says. “This was B.E.: Before Ellen (DeGeneres). Where else could you read the stories of our lives?”
And then there was Dinah. First published by the now-defunct Lesbian Activist Bureau under the name Dinosaur News, Dinah was born under its new moniker in 1975 as a response to a lack of LGBTQ literature and inclusion in society. A grassroots effort headed by a just a handful of women, including Beiser, the monthly newsletter was vital in connecting the local lesbian community in the era before social media. The team covered concerts, wrote personal essays and columns on political and social issues, published photography and event calendars, ran ads for local LGBTQ-friendly businesses and reviewed novels by lesbian and feminist publishers. More than just a newsletter, Dinah came to be a pillar of the community: the women hosted fundraisers, parties and even started a softball team.
Dinah was a solidly indie effort, partially due to the reality that not everyone wanted to hear what a feminist, lesbian collective had to say. “We had to print it ourselves at first,” Beiser says. “A couple of the women went to this little family print shop. (The employees) saw it and said, ‘Are you for or against?’ Well, we’re for. They said, ‘We’re not printing it. We won’t take this job.’ ”
Over the years, the Dinah team collected dozens of novels, but after they’d been reviewed for the publication and passed around among friends, they couldn’t find much use for the books that began collecting dust on their shelves.
“We said, ‘What are we going to do with this now? We can’t throw it away. The downtown library might not even want this.’ So people would just hold onto it,” Beiser says.
They also had hundreds of flyers and copies of other LGBTQ publications from across the country.
“Pretty soon we had a collection started,” she says.
In 1989, Beiser and Victoria Ramstetter, a fellow Dinah editor and “commune” roommate, turned that donation-based collection into the Ohio Lesbian Archives in a room on the third floor of Crazy Ladies Bookstore. It stayed there until the store’s closing in 2002 before finding a new home in the Clifton United Methodist Church in 2006, where it has remained for the past 13 years. Visitors to the archive, which is open by appointment, are mostly local students and researchers, Beiser says, but anyone with an interest is welcome to pore over the collection, which has grown to include nearly 1,000 books bearing titles like Lesbian Art in America, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage and Gone is the Shame: A Compendium of Lesbian Erotica.
There are piles of Ms. Magazine from the ’70s, photos and banners from Pride marches through the decades, and drawers filled with newspaper clippings and every issue of Dinah. There are tins of political buttons adorned with Pride flags and messages like “Gay & Lesbian Voters for Clinton & Gore.” There’s an original, yellowed copy of a 1982, 27-page Cincinnati Enquirer feature titled “Homosexuals: A Cincinnati Report” that detailed the lives of gay and lesbian Cincinnatians, and articles about the 1981 kidnapping of 19-year-old Stephanie Riethmiller, whose parents paid to have her “deprogrammed” from a lesbian lifestyle.
Although the OLA now has artifacts ranging across the LGBTQ spectrum in its collection, Beiser and Ramstetter decided to prioritize lesbian stories at its inception due to the exclusion they felt, even among gay activists.
“In the earlier days, when there would be a gay archive, it would 90 percent be gay men. So Vic and I and some of the Crazy Ladies women, we were really firm in that (the OLA) was lesbian,” Beiser says. “We wanted to make sure lesbian stories were not lost.”
On their own, these artifacts offer glimpses into the past, but together they reveal a more complete portrait of lesbian life through the years.
“This is history” Beiser says. “Once a rally or march or event happens, then it’s over. There would be no record of it happening. These flyers add up. They tell the record of a story of a partially underground community. I remember back in the day, (being) invisible. We don’t want to go underground again.”
The Ohio Lesbian Archives is located at Clifton United Methodist Church, 3416 Clifton Ave., Clifton. More info: facebook.com/olarchives.
This article appears in Jun 12-19, 2019.