History of the Parties

I came out relatively late in life, in my mid-to-late twenties. So, when I finally realized I was a lesbian, I needed to make up for lost time.

My friends turned me on to a club called the Hill Haven on 8th St SE (now the offices of Shakespeare Theatre). I loved it at first. However, after a few months, I started to get bored of the club. It was always the same women every Saturday night, and the same songs played in almost the same order. I also noticed there was a distinct lack of professional women, like myself. At first I was just happy to be amongst women, any women. However, once I came out of my shell and started talking to these women, I found there were no real mental connections being made. I needed more than just physical stimulation. So, my friends and I started renting small spaces to throw parties for ourselves. We didn’t charge much because it didn’t cost us much. We weren’t in it for the money. We just wanted to have a good time and do something different, mix it up a little. We still went to the Hill Haven, but we now had an alternative.

I started using the name Women in the Life. I liked that name because it said something without saying everything. It was 1993.

As luck would have it, a big gay march, the March on Washington was being planned in DC for the first time, and we decided to host the “Unofficial Lesbian After Party!” I rented a warehouse in Bladgen Alley (off 9th and N Sts NW) for $500 and we got a 1-day liquor license to buy and sell liquor.

We distributed hundreds of flyers at the March to women who had come from all over the world and it paid off big time. By 9pm that night, there was a line of women down the alley and halfway down the block waiting to get in. Over 1,000 lesbians partied that night. They were White, Back, Asian, Latina, and German just to name a few. At some point, the Asian contingent took off their bras and danced topless swinging their bras above their heads in unison. It was off the chain! It was a sea of women as far as the eye could see and it was a beautiful sight!

The Fire Marshall came in with a large posse, and we thought he was going to shut us down. After he saw all those women dancing peacefully with no shoving or fighting, he asked if he could “stay and observe the crowd, just in case things got out of hand.”

Things were already out of hand, but in a good way. The two toilets were flooding the dance floor. The security guards were letting friends in the side doors. The police came several times to “observe.” The bar was running out of liquor, but nobody cared. We were having the time of our lives. So, that was the party that put Women in the Life on the map. Prior to that, we’d only had 2 or 3 parties.

Well, fast forward a few years, and before I knew it, I was throwing parties once a month, for holidays and later at the Hung Jury on the first Friday of every month. By then, Hill Haven had closed. There were private, member-only clubs like Encore, where men and women partied together, but they closed after a year or two. So, Women in the Life became the place to be if you were looking for mature lesbians of color. As time went by, we discovered mature women don’t necessarily want to come out every month, but younger lesbians do. The problem with that was younger lesbians very often couldn’t hold their liquor or their tempers. So, fights started breaking out, and they required more security. They complained that we played too much house music and not enough hip-hop.

Bottom line, it wasn’t fun anymore. We started a non-profit arm, the Women in the Life Association that dealt with other community issues that needed attention, and left the party business to the young up and coming promoters.

So, 13 years later, in 2006, we threw our last party at Aqua Nightclub___ and never looked back, until now.

History of the Magazine

The magazine was created back in November 1993, as a newsletter, with this letter on the cover. I remember it like it was yesterday!

Letter From The Editor

The party organization WOMEN IN THE LIFE grew out of a simple need to entertain ourselves. We wanted a unique environment that women like ourselves– black women that were 25 and up, educated and ambitious–could call their own. Hopefully each function would be different and therefore constantly new. After a year of producing and promoting successful parties, we now realize that’s not enough.

There is more to being a black lesbian than just partying. Hopefully we’re deeper than that. We are multifaceted and therefore require more forms of stimulation. Thus, WOMEN IN THE LIFE is expanding to producing ski trips, Sunday brunches, book clubs, weekend excursions, poetry coffeehouses and most importantly this newsletter. In addition to entertainment, we think we should provide a source of information, a resource guide that is useful, thought-provoking, informative, and maybe even enlightening. Up to now, no single publication is filling this void for Washington’s lesbian community. WE plan to do this. Although, this is a very ambitious undertaking, we look forward to the challenge.
- S. A. Reid

We distributed the first issue at a party held at a club/restaurant called the Blue Penguin near 8th and Penn Ave SE.

That was also the Women in the Life debut of DJ India! I printed 100 copies at work, and we ran out of them within an hour. So, I ran 5 blocks up to Kinko’s and printed 200 more. It was a simple 4-page newsletter, full of typos, with a couple of short stories, and maybe a poem or two, but it took us from promoters to publishers in 1 night and we were forever changed. From that point on we were hooked. We worked our asses off to find talented writers, photographers, advertisers, and subscribers to make it work. Over the next 10 years, we continued to hustle and publish what became a quality magazine. This was pre-Internet, pre-cellphone, pre-WNBA, and pre-Myspace. We took the time to read books, write letters and buy albums. Phyllis Hyman was alive and singing about her pain. We were young, black and out (well, some of us were), and the world was our oyster.

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