You know, Molly Martin once wrote a series of stories for Prism & Pen based on some letters she found written by or received by her mother. The contents began to make her suspect that her mother had been a lesbian who had pursued community or relationships with other gay women in the early 20th century.

She didn't find definitive evidence for her late mother's own sexual orientation, but she certainly uncovered a thriving 1920s, 1930s lesbian demi-monde.

There were bars, literary salons, and other establishments in New York City, were her mother sometimes traveled, that not only catered to lesbians but that were very well known for it at the time.

One leading figure in that world was an immigrant from Germany, a Jewish lesbian, whom the United States deported to Germany because of her "unsavory" reputation.

She died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Of course, Germany itself had included prominent gay/queer cultures in the 1920s and 30s, which we can catch echoes of when we watch the film Cabaret, loosely based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin memoirs.

So much of our history is undocumented.

In the 1970s and '80s in Des Moines Iowa, for example, gay community centered around a couple of bars, one of which I started attending pretty regularly after I graduated high school.

The lives of at least hundreds of queer people intersected at this bar, which didn't even have a name, just a glowing neon question mark above a back-alley entrance.

I've written a series of stories about that bar, but I've never been able to locate any kind of documentation for it. I did once run into a Prism & Pen writer who'd been there, but other than that, the place might as well have been a fantasy.

That's how ephemeral some of our history is.

And for all of that, you'd think that I would have read, "How Long Has This Been Going On?"

I've read almost all the other books on your list at the beginning of this story. But not that one!

I think I need to get it on my reading list.

Thanks for the story!