Conclusion
In September 1997, LSWB volunteers wrote about the progress of their work in the collective’s handwritten call logs. “SLOW,” one staffer wrote. “It’s so slow I had to go home and cry,” wrote another.[1] The Switchboard had seen its demand plummet in recent months as it struggled to recruit women to staff the phones. As 1997 wore on, the Switchboard’s once full calendar showed more and more blank days, until whole weeks would pass by without a staffer present. Calls went to voicemail.
For the women who had staffed the Switchboard in the 1970s and 1980s, when demand was at its peak, the withering of the LSWB collective may have come as a surprise. At its zenith, the Lesbian Switchboard had received upwards of a dozen calls a night, every weeknight from 6:00-10:00 p.m. Callers of various nationalities, sexual orientations, genders, abilities, and racial identities used the LSWB as a resource for lesbian advice and information.
It is difficult to say just how many lesbian lines like the Lesbian Switchboard of New York City existed between 1972 and 1997, but one thing is clear: telephones and answering machines constituted a revolutionary technology for women and lesbians in this period. The telephone connected lesbians and feminists at all stages of their personal and political journeys and made regional, national, and even international networking more accessible than ever. Lesbian lines provided relatively safe and reliable information for women on topics of lesbian identity, culture, politics, and sex. They did what mainstream phonebooks, switchboards, and publications could not do—affirm lesbian identity by asserting its prevalence and giving women access to grassroots lesbian communities both at home and abroad.
Lesbian lines helped women envision a world in which they could go anywhere and still be at home in lesbian community. Lesbian lines also acted as a connective tissue among lesbian, feminist, and gay movements, widening the audience for these movements’ political actions and helping to spread activist knowledge and resources beyond ideologically narrow groups of activists. In addition, the infinite replicability of lesbian lines meant that lesbian consciousness-raising was not limited to major metropolitan centers. Women started lesbian lines in small towns and cities across the United States and shared ideas, resources, and best practices with other collectives. Together, these connections helped create a vast informal network of lesbian information with no obvious historical precedent.
By the end of the 1990s, however, the technological and political landscape of the dawning millennium made the work of the LSWB increasingly obsolete. Internet message boards and email lists were faster, cheaper, and more reliable than telephone lines in many cases, and LGBT organizing was becoming both more mainstream, more commercialized, and less likely to be split along gendered lines. One helpful comparison is the history of the Gay Switchboard of New York, which had initially served a majority-male population of callers in 1971, changed its name to the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard of New York in the mid-1980s, and later became part of the LGBT National Help Center network under the name LGBT Switchboard of New York. Unlike the Lesbian Switchboard, which dissolved in 1997, the LGBT Switchboard is still in operation as of 2026.
This speaks to the fact that many gay organizations founded in the 1970s, after changing their names to include lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s, successfully navigated the transition to internet communication while lesbian organizations did not. This was due, in part, to the fact that gay organizations tended to have more financial backing to start with and tended to increase their financial footing over time. Indeed, many lesbian groups and institutions dissolved or joined umbrella organizations under the LGBT acronym toward the end of the twentieth century. Many diverse historical forces undergirded this trend, including the increased focus on same-sex marriage and formal equality as the focus of gay rights organizing and increased cooperation between lesbians and gays in the battle against AIDS.
The legacy of LSWB is intangible, at best. Rather than creating any lasting, formal institutions of lesbian organizing and community, LSWB created connections between people, places, and resources that transcended and outlasted the Switchboard itself in ways historians cannot hope to measure. Women found support for their identities, encouragement in their coming out journeys, advice for their relationships and sex life, addresses of safe places to go, mental health support when no one else would give it, resources in times of crisis, and hope in times of despair. Sometimes, women and men who loved lesbians received compassionate advice and context to understand and support their loved ones. Other times, non-lesbian women and men received referrals to potentially life-saving services. Many people fell through the cracks, especially people we would now refer to as transgender. Some people were certainly harmed or disheartened by their conversations with the Switchboard. Many more were recognized and accepted by the women of the Switchboard, maybe for the first time. This patchwork legacy is a defining characteristic of the Switchboard’s history.
[1] January 27, 1997 call log and April 4, 1977 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.