Lesbian Interiors, Part 4 (Fantasy Edition): Lavender Lane and Phyllis Birkby

Some lesbian interiors exist only in the mind. Plus, a good soup

Greetings to all my Sapphics, Satanists, and Saturn Returners. And hi to the rest of you as well! We are slowly creeping toward the Winter Solstice. My household is taking turns acutely struggling with seasonal depression and collectively mainlining Emergen-C. Clover made a very good white bean and broccoli rabe soup recently (vegan, or vegetarian if you put parmesan on top, as we did!) from a cookbook of soups published by a French monestary that I randomly have. I will put the recipe at the end of this newsletter - I heartily recommend it. I’m also re-reading Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and marveling yet again at how good it is and beginning to plot a potential of fiction writing project of my own. If anyone has any good resources/pieces of advice for writing fiction, please share them in the comments!!

Today I’m sharing a little tale of Lesbian Architecture History that I learned about from Steven Vider’s book The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II. The whole book is really great, and if you’re interested in twentieth-century gay and lesbian history, I recommend checking it out. It’s an academic book, but I found the writing very engaging and Vider’s archival research and analysis are so excellent. Delightfully, part of the chapter I’m drawing on is published for free online here! So feel free to check that out for a taste of the book.

Anyway, from Vider’s book, I learned of Phyllis Birkby, a lesbian architect who came of age in the 1960s - a time when there were very, very few women in the profession. Birkby graduated from Yale School of Architecture in 1966, and while she was enrolled there, she was one of six women out of about 200 students. After graduating, she worked for a New York architecture firm and taught architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy, positions which required her to be closeted. However, as she began to connect with the growing women’s movement and grow into her lesbian identity, this became intolerable. In 1973, she resigned from her job and came out in her professional life.

Around this time, Birkby began to think about how her newfound lesbian feminist politics and her career as an architect might intersect. She became interested in the idea of built space as emerging from fantasy, writing: “All we had around us was originally fantasized by men since they were the ones, I too acutely felt, that dominated the very processes that controlled and led to physical form that shaped our very existence.” While many feminists would become preoccupied with the overlap between patriarchy and male sexual fantasy, Birkby drew attention to the grander scope of how male fantasy structures the world. Indeed, if every building begins as an idea or fantasy, and nearly all the people employed in the business of transforming fantasy to built reality were (white) men, was everyone not living in an architecture of male fantasy?

In the 1970s, the feminist movement provided opportunities to rethink women’s relationships to the built environment. In 1971, Birkby participated in an action in New York City to take over an empty building in the East Village and establish a women’s center there. (This type of action happened in other cities too, like Cambridge!) The action was initially organized by a group of white women, but Latina participants rose to leadership roles over the course of the occupation of the space. This multiracial group of feminist activists held control of the building for twelve days, serving meals, organizing childcare, and doing building repairs necessary to transform the space into a women’s center. Eventually, the city arrested some activists and expelled the women from the building, but the experience remained an inspiring one for Birkby and likely others. In a silent film about the action, Birkby captured banners and decorations on the walls of the building installed by the women: “Lesbians Unite! Love Each Other Love Ourselves Love Each Other,” “Adelante las Hermanas en la Lucha (Go Forward Sisters in the Fight),” “This Building is Ours. The Price? Our Commitment.” The women had transformed a vacant space into a monument of feminist solidarity and care.

In 1974, Birkby recorded the following questions in her notebook: “Is there a woman’s aesthetic? Do women design differently than men? If so it is it a biological fact or rather a culturally induced phenomena? How much does ‘myth’ play a part in woman’s own conditioning? In a man’s conditioning? Does the term ‘man-made environment’ do anything to you? Would you ever say ‘woman-made environment?” What I enjoy about these questions is that they show Birkby, in real time, working through questions not just around gendered architecture, but about what gender really is. Is it essential and biological, or socially conditioned? To what extent is it shaped by myth, or the body, or aesthetics, or social roles? Her questions reveal a willingness not to know for sure, and to explore possible answers.

Ultimately, Birbky didn’t need certainty about what gender was in order to pursue her belief that lesbian feminist architectural fantasies would diverge from straight male ones, and that they were worth exploring. To that end, she began leading a series of workshops in 1973 in which she facilitated groups of women to dream up and draw their own architectural fantasies.

An image from one of Birkby’s workshops

The output of these workshops is really what made me interested in Birkby. Many drawings by participants are preserved in her papers at the Smith Archives, and Vider published images of several in his book. The spaces that were dreamed up in Birkby’s workshops ranged from (somewhat) practical to fantastical, but nearly all are designed around a desire to create spaces that could facilitate pleasurable and functional social relations between women. Below is “Lavender Lane,” an interconnected city block imagined by a woman named Joan that included spaces to exercise, lounge, dine, study, scream, record music, party, prepare food, and look at the stars. Her subtitle, “in the City of Sisterly Love,” makes me think that Joan perhaps envisioned this lovely living space in Philly!

Another fantasy drawing, more fantastical, depicts a dome that can be opened and closed to let in love, friends, and breezes while keeping out noise and demands. A road leading to the dome screens out hassle, and unlimited hot fudge sundaes are found on tap inside. Unlike Lavender Lane, this drawing represents a fantasy focused not on communal living but on a life free from stress; “In other words, everything when I want it,” writes the artist, clearly aware of the outlandish nature of the fantasy. Vider points out that domes were very common in drawings from Birkby’s workshop, as domes had come to represent utopianism and futurism in the western architectural vernacular stemming from the work of Buckminster Fuller. If suburban homes were built to contain and articulate the nuclear family, domes offered a possible vision of more fluid relations.

A drawing by Birkby offers a more abstracted, but still dome-based, architectural fantasy. A web of interconnected domes are designed to facilitate a variety of relationships, from the “Alone Dome” to the “Rotating Relationship Domes” to the “Freak Out Dome” and “Competitive Domes.” Birkby’s city of lesbian romantic relations is funny in its mix of utopianism (a world built around lesbian dating!) and its candid realism (even in that world, we will still freak out and break up).

Though of course most of the ideas pictured in workshop drawings did not become built realities, Birkby was always interested in the possibility of feminist architectural fantasies translating to the physical world. Indeed, during the 70s women were designing and building a whole range of new spaces designed to suit their needs. Publications like Country Women offered instruction for women embarking on these ambitious projects. In 1977, an artist named Caroling wrote to Birkby to tell her that she’d read an article Birkby had written and been so inspired that she built a dream space of her own in California: a dome made entirely of stained glass called Wholeo, fourteen feet in diameter. She wrote that she built her dome based on her “‘female’ intuition” after a life of being trapped in a “‘male’ vision of reality,” though she placed “male” and “female” in quotes as she was “not sure of these assumptions and sorting bins labeled male and female.” Much like Birkby’s notebook entry, Caroling here used her exploration of feminist architecture as a moment not to consolidate fixed and essential understandings of gender but rather to question such binary views.

Birkby responded with enthusiasm, and she eventually traveled to visit Wholeo. Here is a picture of her recording a video inside the dome.

And here is a glorious color image of Wholeo! After years dismantled in storage, it was installed for a time at the Farm School in Summertown, Tennessee. It is currently de-installed and some panels are being repaired; hopefully, it will eventually stand again.

In part because she was most interested in working with lesbian clients and there weren’t too many lesbians financially capable of commissioning custom homes in the 1970s and 80s, Birkby was only able to build a small handful of fully custom building designs during her career. She did a number of remodeling jobs for women clients, and she was contracted by New York State to work on public projects including a halfway house for women on Staten Island, remodeling suburban homes into transitional housing for psychiatric patients, transforming a former school into the Bronx into a day treatment center for adults, and developing low income housing in Brooklyn; these projects aligned with her ideals of designing supportive architecture for oppressed and marginalized people. Her workshops touched hundreds of participants and her published writings contributed greatly to the the development of feminist architectural critique. She passed away from cancer in 1994.

So now, to transition abruptly, here is a soup recipe. It would be the perfect thing to cook up for your polycule while they crouch on the ground drawing geodesic domes on butcher paper, or for anyone else you enjoy. It’s made of simple ingredients, but something about the bitterness of the broccoli rabe really takes it to a level that surpasses most veggie soups, IMO.

Broccoli Rabe and White Bean Soup

Ingredients:

• A few tablespoons olive oil

• 1 yellow onion, chopped

• 6 garlic cloves, minced

• 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped small-ish

• 4 roma tomatoes, chopped

• 3 cups of cooked white beans or 2 cans white beans, drained

• 7 cups broth or water mixed with Better than Bouillon (veggie or chicken)

• 1 bunch broccoli rabe, chopped small-ish

• salt and pepper, to taste

• Chopped parsley and grated parmesan for topping, optional

Instructions:

In a big pot, sauté onion for a couple minutes, until softened. Add garlic and cook together, stirring, for one minute. Add potatoes and tomatoes and cook over low-medium heat for about 5 minutes, stirring often.

Add beans and broth and bring to a boil. Add broccoli rabe and cook the soup covered at a simmer for about 30 minutes. Uncover, add salt and pepper to taste, and simmer for about ten more minutes. Serve it with parsley and/or parmesan <3

Stay cozy and stay dreaming! Xo