Did your utopia already exist?

Getting jealous of old community spaces in my town

✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here.✨

Getty / New York Radical Women meeting

The other weekend, poking around drawers and thumbing over manila folder tabs in the Lesbian Herstory Archives, I tried to think about what people usually do in archive libraries. My friend was downstairs deep in his own research. Feeling basic, I slid out the folder marked Connecticut in faded pencil. 

And then I didn’t get out of my chair for another hour. 

My relationship to Connecticut is a repeating cycle of underestimation and surprise; I grew up here, live here now, and nod knowingly every time someone makes a joke about how it is mainly a place to drive through on your way somewhere better. And then the universe makes a jerk out of me as I’m reminded of the friends, family, spaces, and love that makes me so glad to be back here.

It was no different in the archives. I expected a thin folder. Maybe a few newspaper clippings about Bloodroot, the feminist vegetarian restaurant that’s existed since the 70’s, or maybe a few random events at a library. Stories of people who lived here but exported their coolness to New York City. 

fwiw most things were not centered around Yale even though this picture does a bad job showing that!

Instead: issue after issue of a feminist newsletter listing events and potlucks and opportunities. Tiny business card ads of gay bookstores and dance clubs. An entire Women’s Liberation Center – part gathering space, part office space, and part coffee house – right across the street from Nica’s where I recently panic-bought vanilla icing. Photos of pro-choice billboards on the same main street I take every day to go anywhere in New Haven, and an ask for $24 to get more ads just like that one on more buses and more billboards.

“We have taken entire freaking leaps backwards,” I said quietly, but panickedly, to my friend who was looking through old newsletters from Santa Cruz thinking the same thing. 

I was throttled by a feeling that was both thrilling and painful; this existed, this all existed. Even in a place where you wouldn’t expect it because this wasn’t San Francisco or New York City. It was still a place people drove through to somewhere better even then, too. But we managed to have multi-floor gathering centers and Women’s Liberation Rock Bands and clubs and meeting spaces and venues. They had addresses. I walk by those addresses today. They were real!

I know this feeling is the whole point of connecting with history, especially alternative histories. And so many of these specific women, lesbian, and feminist spaces were also transphobic and racist so they’re far from being actually utopic. 

But seeing the sheer infrastructure – holding the evidence of it all in my hands – really knocked me out! It made me think:

• Our idea of something utopic is actually just table stakes. It’s not wild to want a huge physical space to gather with people. It is not even that utopian! We’ve had them before!

• Even the least likely places – like HARTFORD CONNECTICUT, PEOPLE – had meaningful infrastructure of community space. We all deserve spaces to come together, wherever we live. Not just the big cities!

• Entire ecosystems of information and care made them possible. My favorite thing was looking at the newsletters, the classifieds, the zines – across town, the state, the region (NEW JERSEY!) – that connected these spaces and people to each other. And all the little gatherings in between: potlucks, meet-ups, talking circles, book clubs, classes. And the SERVICES: credit unions, childcare, divorce advice, job centers, political alliances and unions. There are so many parts to play in how we get to one another.

• We don’t have to start from scratch. Even in this tiny slice of alternative community history, I found so much wisdom in the systems: formats for sliding scale, genius prompts for classifieds listings, pricing menus for monthly newsletters (that would get mailed to your house! How cool is that?!) Again, I know this is How History Makes You Feel 101 but it really humbled me to hold the evidence in my hands of how much wisdom we’ve already come up with, and how foolish I have ever been to think I’m the first one.  

Swiping through my pictures showing another friend back in New Haven what I found, she summed up the feeling perfectly: “It makes me sad? But also excited? For what was and what could be?”

Let these histories be a reminder: it isn’t so wild to want the spaces, experiences, and social infrastructure of our dreams. We have decades of wisdom to look back on, to learn from, to riff on and make better. May they show us we’re on the right track.