Lee Lynch, novelist, interviewed by telephone at her home in the Pacific Northwest, January 18, 2022
In 1985, the lesbian writer Lee Lynch published her second novel The Swashbuckler, chronicling the life and loves of Frenchy Tonneau, a 21-year-old bantam-weight butch lover, breaking hearts in the lesbian bars and coffee shops of Greenwich Village.
The novel starts in 1960, where the young butch struts down Greenwich Avenue on Saturday night in her boots, pompadour, denim jacket and garrison belt. Frenchy is the cock of the walk. After a night of drinking, flirting and dancing in the Mob-owned bars, Frenchy takes the train home to the Bronx, undoes her pompadour and hides her boots, resuming her everyday life as a dour young checkout girl at the local A&P, supporting her mother, a depressed French widow.
The novel spans 12 years in Frenchy’s life. She starts an affair with a closeted femme teacher named Edie, then meets Mercedes, a sensual, traumatized single mother from Spanish Harlem. The early 1960’s are a time when there is still the danger that young lesbians could be arrested and incarcerated as juvenile delinquents. There is also a threat of anti-lesbian violence in the streets, usually directed at the butches for their male drag. The Village is changing, as are the lesbians who live and pursue romance down there. Frenchy meets Pam, a bohemian painter, who follows her lusts and seduces Frenchy, showing her that butches can take pleasure, as well as do the dishes. Despite the exploitative Mob bars and the ominous Women’s House of Detention that overshadows the lesbian world, Frenchy moves to the Village, her Jerusalem. In small steps, by the early 1970’s Frenchy is able to build a much more open lesbian life and creates a rich, intentional family, made up of a lover, a child she raises, old lovers and friends.
Born in New York City in 1945, Lynch came down to Greenwich Village from Flushing, Queens, as a 15-year-old butch with her girlfriend Suzie. She went to the coffee shops like Pam Pams and the Campy Corner, a drugstore, hanging out with other gay kids who barely had money for coffee. Lynch soon graduated to the Mob-run lesbian bars like the Swing Rendezvous on MacDougal Street and occasionally the working-class Sea Colony on 8thAvenue.
By the time she got to college, Lynch had started publishing in The Ladder(America’s first national lesbian journal), Common Lives, Lesbian Lives and Sinister Wisdom. The legendary poet Adrienne Rich told Lynch she should turn an overly long short story into a novel and thus her debut Toothpick House was born in 1983, being published by the Naiad Press, America’s first major lesbian press, founded by her former editor at The Ladder, Barbara Grier.
Lynch crossed the American continent three times for love, going from Connecticut to Oregon, to Florida, then back to the Pacific Northwest. While working various jobs, she always continued writing, publishing novels, short-story collections and several anthologies of lesbian literature, leading to roughly 20 books. Lynch’s work concerns the lives of working-class lesbians in bars, in small towns and cities. She has documented decades of lesbian history and lives through her fiction. Two dedicated publishers— first the late Barbara Grier and then Radclyffe of Bold Strokes Books, kept publishing her. Many of her books are still in print or backed up by e-books, and she has a new collection of stories coming out in 2022 with Bold Strokes.
In her early sixties, Lynch’s new intense romantic interest Elaine Mulligan (now her wife Elaine Lynch) convinced her to go to a Golden Crown Literary Society event in Atlanta. Golden Crown is a dynamic organization that promotes lesbian writers and literature. At this meeting and other conferences, Lynch gained new fans and hobnobbed with such prominent lesbian writers as Karin Kallmaker, Katherine V. Forrest and Lori Lake, who appreciate her work. She has also received numerous awards, including the Golden Crown Literary Society Trail Blazer award for lifetime achievement and the Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award. Lynch also received the James Duggins Mid-Career Author Award in 2010. In 2012, Lynch was awarded the Golden Crown Society’s inaugural Lee Lynch Classic Fiction Award for The Swashbuckler.
From 1986, Lynch wrote a nationally syndicated column on American lesbian life called “The Amazon Trail,” which ran in gay and lesbian newspapers for 35 years and resulted in hundreds of columns. Lynch retired “The Amazon Trail” in 2021. Collections of the columns have been published twice, with the second time being Lynch’s An American Queer: The Amazon Trail, A Quarter Century of Queer Life in the United States(Bold Strokes Books, 2014).
I spoke with Lee Lynch by telephone at her home in the Pacific Northwest. Lynch gave me a witty and frank interview about her own youth as a young butch walking the streets of Greenwich Village and going to the Mob bars, and her five-decade literary career.
Here is our interview:
DYLAN FOLEY: Where were you born and raised?
LEE LYNCH: I was born in Hell’s Kitchen and grew up in Flushing. I went to the local schools. My mother was Catholic, but my father, who practiced no religion, objected to bringing me up Catholic. I went to public schools, thank goodness.
DF: Were you torn between your mother’s Boston Irish Catholic side and your father’s Episcopalian family?
LL: My father’s side was slightly wealthier. If my mother’s family was blue collar, my father’s family was whatever was next, professionals. They had things like stocks.
DF: What was your father’s work background?
LL: During the Depression, he was in the merchant marine. Then he worked for the federal agency that later became the FAA. He worked his way up pretty high, so we could afford our $85-a-month apartment in Flushing.
DF: He was based in New York?
LL: He was based all over the country. For the 18 years I was in New York, he was based in New York, first at LaGuardia, then at what was then called Idlewild.
DF: When did you find out about the Village?
LL: At 15, I began to realize my sexual desires. To start from the beginning, my best friend Suzie, we’d been friends since aged 12, 7th grade. At aged 14, she attempted suicide, probably for the second time. She was taken to Elmhurst General, the adolescent psych ward. While there, she met a lesbian. Suzie and I were just friends. I didn’t know anything. Because my parents were from Boston, my mother was afraid of New York. They were really protective. I didn’t know the word homosexual. The boys at the school across the street would call me “butch.” I would be like “What?”
The lesbian on the psych ward took five cops to bring her in. She was a rough and tough dyke. She tried to bring Suzie out and Suzie was telling me all this by phone. I’m finally realizing, “Oh, that’s what I feel for Suzie.” She realized the same about me. We developed a love relationship because of the woman in the hospital. Her name was Kenny. Kenny was short for Noreen Kennedy. She’s dead, Suzie’s dead. They’re all dead. We can use their names.
Kenny told Suzie about the Village, places to go in the Village. Kenny was from a very rough background. She was rumored to have murdered another child. Where she led us was the working-class places.
DF: So you didn’t go to places like the more middle-class Bagatelle, but the working-class Sea Colony?
LL: Exactly. I wasn’t at the Sea Colony a lot. We hung around at the Swing Rendezvous Lounge. It was on Bleecker or MacDougal, one of the big streets in the Village.
I probably didn’t go to the actual bars until I was 16. Back then, it was pretty easy to go. There were always gay kids on the street. At one point, I had a friend who was so well known at the Swing that she loaned me her ID. They let her in and I passed through on her ID.
DF: Did you go to the 6th Avenue coffee shop Pam Pams first?
LL: When we were first out, that was the place to go. There were always gay kids out on the street in front of Pam Pams. This was the soda fountain Pam Pams, not the bar Pam Pams. Nobody seemed to have any money. If we had enough money for a cup of coffee, we’d go in and stay until they indicated we had been too long, then we’d go out on the street. We’d mill about. The only person I remember meeting was a sailor on a layover in the city. He had heard of Pam Pams, but was looking for bars. We filled him in a bit. He went off.
The crowd at Pam Pams was probably very mixed. I remember lots of kids from the Bronx. I remember a particular boy called Gypsy. He was very short. He may have been mentally ill. He had one of those personalities. He would entertain everyone and bring people together. You watched Gypsy. You watched everybody.
Sometimes we would follow older lesbians, to see how they lived, how they walked, how they talked.
DF: The opening of The Swashbuckler is amazing. Frenchy is strutting down the street, with her diddy-bop walk. She’s tricked out with her pompadour and her black denim jacket. Were there autobiographical elements to Frenchy or did you make her from fragments of multiple people?
LL: I just made her up, possibly from many parts. Possibly that’s what I wanted to be like. I was very shy. It was from observation. In my mind, there is such a thing as an arrogant, short dyke. A short butch, I should say. She’s a prototype for that. They can be any class, any education level. You get ‘em everywhere. That was my first one.
DF: If you are diminutive, you have to be tough. She has a garrison belt, and she’s ready to fight. What was the environment at Pam Pams like? What was the Campy Corner?
LL: They were a coffee shop and a drugstore. “Campy Corner” was a drugstore. You could go in and get a cup of coffee. We were not popular, the gay kids, at the Campy Corner. It was right across the street from the House of D. They were regular places that the gay kids would go to.
DF: In the novel, Frenchy goes back to the Bronx and has to undo her pompadour, hide her boots, and takes apart her butch outfit to hide her nightlife from her mother. Was this your own experience going back to Flushing?
LL: Yes, basically. I didn’t have a garrison belt, but I did have a Zippo lighter. I did have to hide my cigarettes. I didn’t have a jean jacket and I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans. We lived across the court from a family that owned the local drycleaners. We would get the castoff clothes. The father would bring them home from work and his kids would wear them. I would get David Langer’s hand-me-downs. I had male clothes that I was allowed to wear. More shirts than pants. I could get as dragged out as Frenchy. I would change at school and sneak out of the back door, meet Suzie under the clock and take the subway into the city.
DF: What do you mean by “under the clock”?
LL: Everybody knows what “under the clock” meant. It was Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street. It was a United Cigar store, and that was where the subway entrance was.
I haven’t been to Flushing in a while. I am a lover of New York. I read a lot about it.
DF: What was the Swing Rendezvous like?
LL: It was on one of the main Village streets. It was up some stairs. It was long and narrow. The bar was in the front. In the back, you walked up a couple of steps and you were on the dance floor. There were tables around. You could dance there, as long as you did not dance in any intense way. There was one waitress named Cookie. I remember her because she stole one of my girlfriends. I was newly out and I was in a different relationship. Cookie was another toughie. She or one of the other people in the bar would break up the dancers, if need be.
One particular night I remember very vividly. I was sitting at a table with Suzie and this other girl, as well as some other people. There was a straight man sitting there. He tried to get her [Suzie] to go home with him. I had been drinking and I got up to take a swing at him. They kicked me out of the bar. [Chuckles.] I was so innocent. I didn’t know that such kind of stuff went on. I was trying to protect my femme.
DF: In the novel, you referred to straight men in lesbian bars as perverts.
LL: They would sit in the back room at the Sea Colony, watching the women dance.
DF: What kind of women were at the Swing Rendezvous?
LL: There wasn’t much diversity as there was at the Sea Colony. I only remember white lesbians. I wasn’t there that much. I couldn’t go down there every night. Maybe one or two people of color, mostly white.
DF: Audre Lorde, is her memoir, writes about the Sea Colony. The standards were very white. The most impressive butch would always have the most impressive femme. It would be the Hollywood standards of beauty…the girls in the poodle skirt.
LL: That’s the 1950’s, Dylan.
DF: Would it be capris or toreador pants in the 1960’s?
LL: Yes, or a tight skirt, if you are a femme.
DF: Did you have much luck getting picked up?
LL: I never did that. I’m the type who has a friend first, then something might evolve from that.
DF: Did you ever feel a threat of violence while you were out in Greenwich Village in the early 1960’s?
LL: Yes. It wasn’t just me. We were constantly aware. If a gaggle of teenage boys came by, you’d kind of scatter. You didn’t act like Frenchy for a minute or two.
On the subway, we were very defiant, Suzie and I, and probably some of the others. We’d make out on the subway, hold hands and act out, throwing in people’s face that we were lesbians.
DF: There is a great scene in The Swashbuckler, where Frenchy seduces Edie, a closeted schoolteacher, at an isolated subway stop in Queens. Edie says, “Don’t you know, we are considered juvenile delinquents?” In their defiance and with the Women’s House of D. in the background, was there the danger of being picked up by the police?
LL: Yes, definitely. We were constantly aware of that. It was not so much ignoring it. I turned 15 in 1960. It was the era of defiance against nuclear war and nuclear weapons. I was operating on that level, too. There was some disrespect for the illegitimate laws that existed. I knew that Suzie and I could be thrown into an institution and kept there. I was not out to my family. You had to hide every bit of your existence.
DF: You have said you needed to write The Swashbuckler to deal with the stresses of leading a double life as a young lesbian. Why did you have such a visceral need to write this novel?
LL: It wasn’t just that novel, it was all of them. I was told that I had talent as a writer and I lived as a lesbian. I decided to devote my life to writing our stories. And that’s what I have done. I’ve had jobs because that’s what you need to live, but everything else I have done is about writing, writing, writing about lesbians.
DF: In Beggar of Love, you address how lesbians and gays are told from an early age that they have a different moral compass than people in the larger society.
LL: You have to create your own family and you have to adapt from established values. We’re different. Back then, there was no marriage and that was part of the reason why a lot of relationships didn’t last that long, not that they definitely last with marriage. That was the culture—you didn’t stay with one person. There was no concept of forever after for me. As I learned, though, there were women together in lifelong relationships.
Learning about lesbians in Greenwich Village did not lead me to any standard heterosexual values.
DF: Did you witness any police raids on lesbian bars?
LL: No, not in the gay bars. The police raided a straight bar in college. I was there with a boy.
DF: What college did you go to?
LL: Don’t ask. [Chuckle.] It was a mediocre college. I never learned a thing there. I thought I was the only lesbian on campus.
DF: Is it true that the legendary poet Adrienne Rich pushed you to write your first novel Toothpick House?
LL: There were two influences. One was Barbara Grier, who said she would publish my short stories, if I wrote a novel. She thought I was a lesbian John O’Hara, if you know who that is. [Editor’s note: Barbara Grier founded and ran the Naiad Press, a lesbian publishing house, for three decades.]
I had sent Toothpick House as a short story, which was like 42 pages, to Sinister Wisdom. They had already published “Oranges Out of Season.” Then Adrienne wrote back that it was too long for them, but I might have a germ of a novel.
DF: I hope you have that letter somewhere.
LL: If I do, it is at the University of Oregon.
DF: Do you have any memories of the mobsters who ran the bars like the Sea Colony or the Swing Rendezvous?
LL: My own memories of them is seeing them sitting with their mistresses in the back room at the Sea Colony, watching us dance, seeing us as entertainment. I was just so angry. I probably did more obnoxious things to throw our humanity in their faces.
There was another bar, The Territory, up in Harlem, that was very much a gangster-owned and operated place. It was like entering something out of Dante’s Inferno. There was a balcony up top and that was where we would be watched from.
DF: One Of my favorite parts of The Swashbuckler is Frenchy’s seduction by Pam, a bohemian. Pam is an over-the-top artist, who wears garish colors and wants to seduce Frenchy and give her pleasure. Forgive my stereotypes, but in the early 1960’s, the butch-femme dynamic was very strict, where the butch pays for the femme and takes care of her.
LL: These are not stereotypes. This is my life. I said at the beginning that I write about history, but it goes on today. I am not strict about it, but I walk on the outside, I open doors.
DF: Pam teaches Frenchy that she can accept pleasure and do the dishes. You wrote some beautiful sex scenes. What interested you in writing about the blurring of butch-femme dynamic?
LL: Thank you. Gosh, this is so long ago. When you are a lesbian kid or a gay male kid, you are different, you are not loved for yourself. You are loved for what they believe you are. Your parents see you as mini-me’s. The idea that someone can find you desirable, care about you, love you is hard to believe. For a butch kid, it is not a concept that occurred to me, and would not have occurred to Frenchy. I remember coming out with Suzie the first time, I felt loved. That is what I think Pam does for Frenchy, accepting love instead of putting up a wall all the time.
Pam allows Frenchy to relax enough, to recognize and acknowledge her feelings. Butches don’t have feelings.
DF: What kind of jobs were you doing while you were writing?
LL: The only job I had in New York City was the summer of my senior year, in the subscription department of the New Yorker magazine. I’ve been a subscriber since I was 17, but I must say Vanity Fair is doing a good job.
DF: Did you ever notice sex workers in the lesbian bars in New York City?
LL: I was not aware of that. When I was 18, I went off to college in Connecticut. I have not lived in New York since then.
I commuted to the bars from Connecticut for18 years. I was mostly at Bonnie and Clyde’s.
DF: Bonnie and Clyde’s was a women-owned bar. Was it an improvement over the old, dirty Mob bars?
LL: It was also a restaurant. I never had the money to eat there. It was another dingy bar, but with smaller tables. I didn’t like it.
Feminism had happened, we heard it was women owned, but I wasn’t trusting that. I felt uncomfortable in some of the same ways. It wasn’t as comfortable as the old gay bars.
DF: What were you doing in Connecticut?
LL: I was a reporter. I was an obituary writer at a newspaper. Richard Belzer, the actor, taught me how to write obituaries. [Editor’s note: Belzer is famous for cop roles on the shows “Homicide” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit”.] I decided to try for my masters. I went back to school and worked at the university and realized that these people couldn’t teach shit in terms of creative writing. I did have one good creative writing teacher at the unnamed university. Paul was a gay man who lived on East 10th Street. He was a wonderful teacher. He befriended me and a young man in the class. He walked me through the Village in the night and pointed out the gay men, the hustlers and those kinds of things. He was revealing a portrait of gay life that I would otherwise not have been exposed to.
DF: How old were you when you started writing for The Ladder, one of America’s first lesbian journals?
LL: You had to be 21 to subscribe. I didn’t want to get them in trouble, so I didn’t subscribe until I was 21. As soon as I subscribed, I started sending them stuff.
DF: You also were publishing things in Sinister Wisdom?
LL: And Common Lives, Lesbian Lives.
DF: The artist and photographer Tee Corrine was a long-term girlfriend?
LL: No, she was only four and a half years.
DF: How did your publishing relationship with Barbara Grier evolve?
LL: She said, “Write me a novel and I will publish your short stories.” She wanted to publish a novel first. As you know, short stories don’t sell. My first book with them was 1983. Writing Toothpick House was torture.
DF: In your novels, you are very adept at writing about class in the lesbian community.
LL: I am kind of straddling two classes. That makes me more aware than someone who just grew up middle class.
DF: You have written about 20 books and you are presently working on your Rainbow Gap Quartet, about two women lovers living in Central Florida.
LL: Sounds about right on the 20 books. Some of them are anthologies. Rainbow Gap is two books, so far.
DF: Will it be a quartet of novels?
LL: I hope to live that long. It will take place over a 50-year period, maybe 60. One of the points I am trying to make is that gay life hasn’t changed for a lot of people. They write off the Gay Pride marches. They say, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that. That’s dangerous. It’s going to work against us.” They are living their lives basically and coming up against the barriers that gay people face. I am not rewriting Pam and Frenchy over and over. For working-class dykes, many are very resistant to feminism. Some are extremely patriotic, many are veterans. You could be talking to a male logger rather than a working-class lesbian.
A friend of mine was a [military] nurse, a traditionally female occupation. She is basically my age. She wasn’t out to prove she was tough. She told me about going to the war zone in helicopters, and bringing out the injured. She didn’t sign up for that. That was horrible.
DF: What brought you to Oregon?
LL: I was in a 13-year relationship and things were not going well. I wanted to save the relationship. She wanted to move somewhere, anywhere. As it happened, Tee Corrine and her lover were at that time living in Sunny Valley, Oregon, which is in southern Oregon.
We had gone to San Francisco and met up with Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, Ann Bannon and all the literary lights. Tee Corinne invited us to see where they lived. We travelled up to Sunny Valley. Very rural. Because my partner at the time wanted to move, this was a good place because we had friends there. We moved next door, I mean rural next door, to Tee.
DF: Was it a good experience, moving to rural Oregon after being a city woman?
LL: I miss New York horribly. I collect books about New York, I read the New York Times and the New Yorker. I am very nostalgic about New York.
I’d been accepted to Hunter. I could have gone to college in New York. My parents, at the same time, had moved back to New England. I would not have had any structure. I would have become an alcoholic. I don’t have the personality to tough it out. It would have done something to me that was not positive.
DF: Has living in Oregon been conducive to writing?
LL: One of the reasons for moving out here was the idea that you could work part time because it was cheaper out here and you could write part time. That didn’t happen. A job is a job. They want you to put your all into it. I was still just writing on weekends for a long time.
DF: What kind of work did you do?
LL: The first job in Oregon was with the State of Oregon as an employment counselor. The second job was working with handicapped preschoolers, and then at a 7-11, where I got fired for being gay. I ran convenience stores in Connecticut for five years. I finally ended up being an employment counselor for injured workers with private companies, helping people find jobs and get training.
I had one job in Connecticut, a state job, where I could get my work done by noon and could sit in my office and write in a little notebook. That’s how I did a lot of my work.
DF: How many books did you publish with Naiad?
LL: It was probably about six books.
DF: What made you move to Florida?
LL: I was in an almost 13-year relationship in Southern Oregon. We moved over to the coast of Oregon. My girlfriend was wired differently than me. I was single for several years. Out of the blue, I started receiving correspondence from a woman in Florida. It got pretty intense. She was going to the Golden Crown Literary Society in Atlanta, Georgia. She invited me to share a room. She was a straight woman.
DF: She’s a fan of your writing?
LL: Yeah, a fan of lesbian writing. She came in though “Xena.” That became a love relationship. She had a very good job. My job was portable. We moved to Florida for what we thought was two years, but it turned out to be five before we could come back.
DF: Is this woman Elaine Mulligan Lynch?
LL: Yes, she’s my wife. We are legally married. We believe in that.
LL: Yes! Irish and Catholic, a banker and a golfer from (horrors) New Jersey. She was the last person I would have expected to go for but perfect For me. I’d always been attracted to East Coast Jewish women. When I went to Oregon, there were very few like Frenchy’s Pam. I obviously adapted.
DF: In a 2014 video interview, you said that you finally achieved major recognition for your novels in your 60’s.
LL: That’s due to Elaine, with her bringing me to the Golden Crown. I am now visible. It was torture for me, being public, but I met writers like Lori Lake, Karin Kallmaker and KG MacGregor, some old Naiad writers, who had respect for my work and wanted me to get recognition. Now I have lots of awards.
DF: I was very impressed that your backlist of 20 books is mostly still in print or supported as e-books.
LL: My publisher is Bold Strokes Books. I’ve been very fortunate that Radclyffe, who founded Bold Strokes, was a fan. She’s been very loyal. I have a book of classic short stories coming this year. It’s called Defiant Hearts: Classic Stories by Lee Lynch.
DF: In earlier interviews, you’ve talked about a fist-to-mouth existence, working to support your writing. With 20 books under your belt, do you find your financial circumstances are more comfortable?
LL: No, no. It’s worse. [Chuckle.] I am a general fiction writer. There is not a big audience for that, and apparently, for lesbian writing. I live on social security.
It’s not my publisher’s fault. It is the kind of writing and the audience.
DF: I just read The Swashbuckler for a second time and got all choked up. Lydia, the young hope for the future, who is basically Frenchy’s stepdaughter, is telling Frenchy, “I think you’ve always had a lot of courage, living like you did when it was so much harder to be a lesbian.” Frenchy, like a veteran of much combat, responds, “If courage is being scared and going ahead anyway. If that’s courage, then I am courageous every day of my life, being afraid to be gay and doing it anyway.”
LL: I have a niece 20 years younger than me. When she was young, I was reading to her. She asked what’s courage? I said, “Being scared, but going ahead and doing it anyway.” She and I, as well as my mother, were all diagnosed with a generalized anxiety and panic disorder. That revelation for me was very important and that’s how it got into the book.
DF: Was your mother ever able to read your books?
LL: Oh god, no. I was terrified she would find out I was gay. Every time I took her to a used bookstore, I cringed in the corner.
DF: You never came out to your mother?
LL: She already thought that I was going to Hell because my father didn’t want me baptized.
DF: Was your mother a religious Catholic?
LL: She dragged me to Mass every once in a while, until I refused to go.
DF: One of the funniest things you said in your 2014 interview was that your father wanted to send you to a boarding school in Switzerland, but you wanted to stay in the Village with your girlfriend.
LL: That’s true. I don’t know if he knew what was wrong with me, being gay. Later on, in college they made me go to a therapist, the college did. There was no conversion therapy, as such, but that’s what it was. The college sent me, but my father paid for it. He may have known by that time that I was gay.
My father and his sister had gone to prep schools, Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts and another one in New Hampshire. He tried to get me out of the city. Luckily, I failed the math exam.
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