GLBT History Museum: PANEL | The Business of Care: Lesbian Economies Across Time

$10 admission; Free for GLBT Historical Society Members

RSVP and reserve tickets here
https://glbthistory.ticketing.veevartapp.com/tickets/view/list/panel-the-business-of-care-lesbian-economies-across-time

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?