Lesbian Consciousness-Raising and "Raps"
Though LSWB was a “lesbian” switchboard, its callers were diverse and included a broad spectrum of women (and men) in search of advice, connection, and information. Some callers knew nothing at all about lesbianism or feminism; some had dedicated their adult lives to lesbian and feminist activism. There were calls from straight men asking about their wives and daughters, bisexual women and men looking for dating advice, gay men seeking a woman’s point of view, trans women and men hoping for a willing listener, young people looking for adult advice, and of course men looking to harass, harangue, and threaten staffers.
Despite its radical origins, the LSWB collective specified in an early handbook that “aside from our basic support of lesbianism, we do not advertise or endorse any one political viewpoint over another.”[1] The truth was more complicated, especially in the early years. Inevitably, volunteer staffers brought their own ideas, political viewpoints, and personal experiences into their work at the Switchboard. Most had liberal or left politics; all were supportive of feminism and lesbian feminism; many were critical of racial and class oppression. For the most part, however, they were there to listen.
The policies of the switchboard, including training protocols, were adopted by majority vote during monthly general meetings, which all staffers were required to attend. Staffers could also join the fundraising, training, or resource committees if they wanted to take part in other duties related to running the Switchboard. Fundraising was especially vital, as LSWB did “not have a budget” and relied “solely on contributions” to fund its operations, according to staffer (and later President) Naomi Goodhart.[2] Dances and benefits, often in partnership with lesbian bars and other gay and lesbian organizations, were a common tool for fundraising, as were the sale of raffle tickets and novelty items like buttons.
As Linda Smukler explained in her 1983 article for Womanews, “fundraising is not a simple issue of asking for money and receiving it, but reflects the self-perception of lesbians—the connections we make between our personal and professional lives.” Whereas some professional women did indeed donate money to the causes that mattered to them, “There are still many closeted lesbians who, out of fear and in the interest of maintaining their careers, keep a careful appearance of heterosexuality on the job. These women are not usually those who donate back to the community in which they secretly live on nights and weekends.” This problem was further complicated by the reality that, along with job precarity and unequal wages for out lesbians, and especially lesbians of color, women “in general are not accustomed to giving money. Although this is rapidly changing, there is a fear—even if a woman has money—that it will be gone tomorrow and must be held onto in case of future disasters.”[3] Lesbian activists’ unique relationship to money and spending could be a challenge, but it could also be a benefit in that lesbian groups could not afford to be in competition with one another. As a result, they often circulated resources within their own lesbian grassroots ecosystems—for example, when Lesbians United disbanded in 1990, the group gave LSWB $400 from its checking account.[4]
As an entirely volunteer-run operation that did not require its staff to have any professional training, the Lesbian Switchboard began as a truly grassroots collective modeled on contemporaneous grassroots informational networks.[5] The only concrete prerequisite for joining the LSWB collective was that the staffers “must be lesbian and at least 18 years of age.” Other than that, no formal experience as a counselor or telephone operator was necessary. An early version of the group’s handbook, written in 1979, specified that “staffers must be Lesbian (not Bisexual),” but the provision excluding bisexuals was never officially adopted.[6] In practice, staffers advised many bisexual callers over the years, especially bisexual women. They rapped with them about their sexuality and sometimes referred them to bisexual support groups or activities. It is hard to say how many staffers identified as bisexual, as these kinds of identity affiliations were not recorded.
In order to begin volunteering, new members were required to attend trainings run by veteran members and “be willing to work within Switchboard ideology and follow procedures and guidelines,” including agreeing to respect the confidentiality of all calls. The handbook also specified that “staffers must not promote or exhibit racism, classism, ageism, sexism, heterosexism, and/or discrimination against women on the basis of physical ability, appearance, or religion.”[7]
In nightly call logs, written by hand in spiral notebooks, staffers took notes on each call, with greater and lesser degrees of detail depending on the day and the person staffing. These documents, later donated to the LGBT Community Center National History Archive at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in New York City, are a rich source of information about the everyday lives of lesbians, bisexual women, and trans people in the last two decades of the twentieth century.
Many of the women who called the Switchboard were simply lonely. It was not uncommon, for example, for a caller to ask if they could meet the LSWB staffer they were talking to in person, desperate as they were to meet other lesbians and form meaningful social relationships. In-person meetings between staffers and callers were discouraged, according to the LSWB handbook, except for “rare, unusual or extenuating circumstances.” The practical reason for this rule was that in-person meetings “could legally be considered ‘soliciting’ and could jeopardize the organization.” In addition, “it creates, or tends to create, the impression that the Lesbian Switchboard is a dating service, which it is not.”[8] These requests for in-person meetings illustrate the isolation experienced by many of the women who turned to the Switchboard for advice and support in those early years and emphasize the importance of lesbian institutions and social networks in New York in the years before the internet.
In its founding years, LSWB adopted a horizontal leadership structure similar to other radical social movement groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The Switchboard collective’s leadership structure mirrored that of the Women’s Liberation Center itself, which journalist Marilyn Bender described in a 1970 newspaper article as “open to all women regardless of degree of feminist belief.” Bender explained, “It has no officers—‘so we don't become elitist,’ one of the women said—or employees and is run by volunteers from a number of women's liberation groups, ranging from the radically oriented to those primarily concerned with the defense of the Black Panthers.”[9] The Switchboard defined itself as a “Lesbian collective” whose aim was to “share responsibilities and decision making equally through consensus.” To uphold this principle of consensus-based decision-making, the Switchboard specified that the “politics and opinions of individual members do not necessarily represent the collective.”[10] This structure, which valued anonymity and collectivism over leadership and individual achievement, reflected LSWB’s core feminist mission by preventing any one voice from becoming representative of the collective, a dynamic that some feminists considered to be patriarchal in nature.
Because the parameters of staff training were determined by the collective, and the collective was made up of women’s liberationists, LSWB’s unique style of peer counseling and resource-sharing was closely linked to the models pioneered by feminist consciousness-raising (CR) groups in the late 1960s. A central pillar of consciousness-raising, as Sheila Ruth explained in a 1973 article on the topic, was that socio-cultural institutions “must follow upon, and are secondary to, another more radical change, the change of consciousness, an alteration of the psychic, emotional, and phenomenal stance of the woman vis-à-vis her environment and her experiences.”[11] A woman’s consciousness could not be “raised” through personal reflection and insight alone, and neither could collective action lead to meaningful change without individual changes in consciousness to match. This method reclaimed women’s emotionality and lived experience as a source of collective power and expertise, rather than a political liability, and centered liberation as an ongoing process of accountability and structural change.
In this way, feminist consciousness-raising constituted an important expansion of 1960s left organizing principles and methods. Its early architects, including Kathie Sarachild, learned revolutionary group discussion techniques through their participation in civil rights organizing in the U.S. South. Though the term “consciousness-raising” was coined by members of New York Radical Women in 1968, its methods were familiar to women who had been active in civil rights, Black liberation, and New Left movements. The method also had roots in Maoism, though CR groups eschewed the masculinist rhetoric of many New Left groups, whose doctrinal Marxism regarded women’s liberation as secondary to socialist revolution and discounted sexism and homophobia as bourgeois concerns.[12]
At the same time, CR groups eschewed the post-World War Two ascendency of psychoanalytic feminism, whose purview extended only as far as the analyst’s office and often prioritized self-examination over collective struggle. This rejection extended to psychotherapy more broadly, a practice that elicited suspicion from women and lesbians who had too often been victims of institutional homophobia and sexism at the hands of therapists and psychiatrists. In July 1972, for example, the Switchboard received a call from a woman seeking a referral for a therapist. In response, the staffer “suggested maybe rapping, a CR group and meeting people instead.”[13] One month later, a staffer received a similar call from a “♀ who thinks she is a lesbian, but not sure. Wants 2 meet people. Took her 2 put her into contact with CR groups.”[14] As these examples suggest, consciousness-raising groups were a common resource offered by staffers in LSWB’s first years and a core vector of feminist organizing in New York City writ large.
In addition to recommending CR groups to callers, the LSWB collective was invested in using consciousness-raising methods for the development of its own staff. One particularly fruitful LSWB consciousness-raising session from July 1977 culminated in a list of agreed-upon policies for staff, including a policy titled “Consciousness Raising,” which stated: “The Lesbian Switchboard should hold C/R’s on a regular monthly basis.”[15] It is unclear how long these monthly CR groups lasted, but consciousness raising remained a key tool and tactic for LSWB for at least the first five years of its existence.
Aside from facilitating consciousness-raising groups, staffers also recommended lesbian dances, film screenings, picnics, and bars—any kind of group activity or women’s institution that might help callers make in-person connections within the burgeoning lesbian community. Though staffers often “rapped,” or informally talked, with callers who expressed doubts about their sexual orientation, it remained an important goal of Lesbian Switchboard staffers to go one step further, putting callers in touch with tangible resources for further community-building. Staffers were more or less free to converse with callers as they saw fit, but they were discouraged from giving direct advice or sharing too much about their personal lives. As historian of technology Cait McKinney has argued, “Answering the phone for other women in need does not build anything concrete or lasting, like a newsletter or an archive; instead, hotlines are ephemeral technologies that make living a feminist life endurable, even joyful, within the often-daunting present. Commitments to consciousness-raising, meeting women where they are at, and understanding the personal as political saturated the hotline’s practices with information.”[16]
This emphasis on community-building and informational activism was part of what differentiated the Lesbian Switchboard from other counseling-centered hotlines, which had gained popularity throughout the 1960s as alternative technologies for crisis intervention outside of traditional clinical settings. As Lennis Echterling and Mary Lou Wylie explain, crisis centers and hotlines emerged in the 1960s as a means of dealing with “people in an immediate, nonbureaucratic manner.” This meant that "they were to be both available and accessible services.” These hotlines offered “assistance to those who felt alienated by established helping agencies” and “young people, gays, drug users, and members of the counter-culture were the most common target populations.”[17]
Sometimes, LSWB staffers referred callers to other hotlines that they felt would be more helpful, including Identity House, a peer counseling center and “counter-therapy environment for gays and lesbians” founded in 1971 in New York City.[18] Staffers also referred some callers to the Gay Switchboard of New York City, especially when they assumed the caller was not a woman, whether correctly or incorrectly. Trans callers, most often identified as “transsexuals” or “transvestites” by staffers in the call logs, were often referred to Identity House or the Gay Switchboard, even if they were explicitly asking for lesbian resources and advice (the term “transgender” was not widely used until the 1990s).[19] Staffers may have assumed rather than verified callers’ gender identities and affixed the labels they saw fit in their notes, with “transsexual” commonly denoting someone who had transitioned both socially and medically and “transvestite” commonly connoting someone who socially transitioned without medical assistance—though the line between the two was often blurred.[20] It is likely that these words were used somewhat interchangeably by staffers and that “transvestite” was more commonly used for trans-feminized callers (along with male pronouns), whereas the few trans-masculine callers who reached out to LSWB were more likely to be referred to as transsexual.
[1] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook.
[2] Letter to N.Y.C. Parents + Friends of Lesbians and Gays from Naomi Goodhart, February 27, 1986, Box 2, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[3] Linda Smukler, “Sister, Can You Spare,” 1983, Box 2, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[4] December 27, 1990, Meeting Minutes, Box 1, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[5] See Cait McKinney, Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke University Press, 2020).
[6] Draft of The Lesbian Switchboard Handbook, 1979, Box 1, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[7] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook.
[8] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook.
[9] Marylin Bender, “Women’s Lib Headquarters,” New York Times, July 1, 1970.
[10] Draft of The Lesbian Switchboard Handbook, 1979.
[11] Sheila Ruth, “A Serious Look at Consciousness-Raising,” Social Theory and Practice 2, no. 3 (1973): 289–300.
[12] Lazz Kinnamon, “‘We Stayed Up All Night Rapping’: Toward a History of Feminist Consciousness-Raising, 1964–1986.” Signs 50, no. 1 (2024): 145–88.
[13] July 5, 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[14] August 26, 1972 call log, Box 3, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[15] “Lesbian Switchboard Consciousness*Raising Session,” July 17, 1977, Box 2, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[16] McKinney, Information Activism.
[17] Lennis Echterling and Mary Lou Wylie, “Crisis Centers: A Social Movement Perspective,” Journal of Community Psychology 9, no. 4 (1981): 342–46, 343.
[18] Regina Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 156.
[19] For a discussion of the origins of the word “transgender” in the United States, see Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, 13.
[20] Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, 2nd ed. (Seal Press, 2017).