The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe (An Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene)

A coffee shop that became a window into a queer movement.

In the mid-'90s, a little coffee shop and performance space in San Francisco's Mission District became home for a group of dykes, queers, and artists who'd spent their lives being told they didn't belong anywhere. The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe was where debonair butches roared up on vintage motorcycles, and inside was akin to Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris before the war—full of art that challenged the senses and people dressed in a controlled chaos of self-created fashion, passionately conversing on topics as diverse as performance art, music and feminism to astrology and love.

Cindy Crabb, the zine legend behind Doris, gathers forty voices, including Silas Howard, Harry Dodge, Ali Liebegott, Michelle Tea, Lynn Breedlove, Marci Blackman, Daniel Sea, Cara Page, and Jessica Lanyadoo, and weaves them together with artwork by Miriam Klein Stahl to create a story about a place and time where what it meant to be (or not to be) a woman was exploding. The Bearded Lady becomes a way into a much larger web of interlocking sites of resistance that helped pave the way for gender liberation in all its forms.

The result is a book about survival and the ones who didn't survive, about building a bubble to live unsurveilled, and about a subculture that mattered far beyond the people in the room. As the sign on the cafe's front door once read: "Dykes, Queers, Babes, Fags, Freaks & Other People WELCOME." This book is your invitation.