Founding the Lesbian Switchboard
In the intense political and cultural crucible that opened the 1970s, radical lesbians increasingly sought the company of other women, choosing to become involved with feminist institutions rather than (or in addition to) gay male-centered ones. The LSWB collective was one such example. As New York’s first known lesbian hotline, LSWB contributed to a growing network of feminist and women-led information services across the country whose goal was to connect women to one another and to fledgling feminist institutions. Indeed, LSWB members witnessed the migration of the LFL collective from the GAA Firehouse to the women’s Firehouse on West 20th Street in 1973. This marked an important turning point in the cultural life of the Women’s Liberation Center, solidifying its core commitment to lesbian community-building.
The mission of LSWB was to run “an informational, referral and telephonic support system for the lesbian community,” using the simple, yet powerful technology of the telephone. The goal was to reach women across the city and even across the country who struggled with the isolation, loneliness, and violence of lesbian existence.[1] The Switchboard was a simple operation, according to journalist Jennifer Slote: “A desk, a chair, a phone and the wall-sized bulletin board plastered with notices.” The wall was covered in posters, including an American flag with the words “Women for Freedom” and “Stars and Dykes Forever” in place of the stripes “and ♀’s for stars.”[2]
As for the women who volunteered for LSWB, staffers were drawn from the local community, many having never worked in counseling positions before joining. One volunteer, interviewed by Slote in the 1970s, said that she became involved in LSWB when she met “representatives of the Switchboard at the LFL (Lesbian Feminist Liberation) meeting and staffed for them for six months.” After six months off “to do intensive training in karate,” she returned to the Switchboard “because the women here are dedicated.” In fact, she had been a user of the Switchboard before she signed up to answer calls: “Once my mother was there and I called up and heard ‘Lesbian Switchboard’ and hung up. It was enough to hear that there was a living breathing lesbian somewhere. I thought I was the only one.”[3]
As a community-run telephone hotline that was active in the nation’s largest city from 1972 to 1997, the LSWB both reflected and shaped the U.S. lesbian movement in its formative years, helping spread information about lesbian life in New York City while contributing to ongoing negotiations over the meaning of lesbian identity and belonging. LSWB was only one among a vast network of lesbian hotlines that existed in the 1970s and 1980s, all of which contributed in big and small ways to the elaboration of a specifically lesbian culture distinct from, though connected to, feminism and gay liberation.[4] In small rooms and dark hallways across North America, Europe, and Oceania, women set up phone lines and passed out calling cards for their services. Some “lesbian lines,” as they were often called, lasted a year, maybe two—others, like LSWB, lasted for decades.
There were several lesbian and lesbian-inclusive women’s switchboards in the United States around the time of LSWB’s founding. Early examples included the Lesbian Switchboard of Madison, WI; the Women’s Switchboard of Philadelphia, PA and later the Lesbian Hotline of Philadelphia; the Women’s Switchboard of Venice, CA; and the Peninsula Gay Women’s Switchboard in Redwood City, CA.[5] Nonetheless, the Lesbian Switchboard of New York City stood out among its peers as a relatively well-resourced, highly trafficked hotline, even in its early years. Because of its prominence, LSWB not only shaped lesbian culture and politics in New York City but helped to define lesbian identity for women beyond city limits and national borders.
By the 1980s, lesbian lines had become increasingly popular in the United States and Western Europe as grassroots corollaries to local lesbian archives, lesbian resource centers, and lesbian bookstores. A 1987 list of lesbian telephone hotlines published in the London Lesbian Line’s book Women Like Us, for example, listed at least thirty-two lesbian lines in operation in the United Kingdom alone.[6] Very few of these switchboards or hotlines, however, kept records of their work. If they did, these records have yet to be donated to archives, where historians can access them.
This makes the records of LSWB a particularly important source for understanding the work of lesbian telephone lines: the collection offers a rare window into the quotidian interactions and conversations that helped raise lesbian consciousness and build lesbian community in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Through conversations with callers, the women who founded and staffed the Lesbian Switchboard shaped and delineated the lesbian community in real time. Their records speak to the inventiveness, drive, and perseverance that it took to create grassroots lesbian institutions like LSWB from the ground up with few resources. These records also help us understand the key issues that troubled and inspired lesbian community-builders at the tail-end of the twentieth century: from the joys of lesbian sex, through the invisibility of lesbian domestic violence, to the political meaning of gender identity and embodiment.
[1] “The Lesbian Switchboard” Handbook, no date, Box 1, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive, New York City.
[2] Jessica Slote, “Lesbian Switchboard: Raps and Referrals,” manuscript, no date, Box 2, Lesbian Switchboard of New York City Records, LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
[3] Slote, “Lesbian Switchboard.”
[4] See, for example, Elizabeth Lovatt, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line (Legacy Lit, 2025).
[5] Partial records of the Madison Lesbian Switchboard are held at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY; the Women’s Switchboard of Philadelphia is mentioned in Ellen Wooters, “An Expanded Switchboard,” Tell-A-Woman, March 1976, JSTOR, 1; a later issue mentions The Lesbian Hotline of Philadelphia, founded in 1978, Amy E. Harrison, “The Lesbian Hotline of Philadelphia,” Tell-A-Woman, April 1988, JSTOR, 9; artifacts of the Women’s Switchboard of Venice, CA exist in the “Communication and Technology” Subject Files, Drawer 08-04, June L. Mazer Archives, West Hollywood, CA; and the Peninsula Gay Women’s Switchboard is mentioned in the periodical Mother, dated June 1, 1971.
[6] London Lesbian Line, Women Like Us (Trojan Printing Co-operative, 1987), 50-51.