paper cut of 5 people standing outside the Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe, arms around eachother, looking cool and fun.

The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe

An Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene

The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe: an Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene is full velocity multi vocal noisy alive jostling storytelling about a visionary time and place that continues to inspire, challenge and invite generations of queer punk feminist experiments. I love how this book is so specific in where it comes from and who it’s about and yet splashes far past those borders to bring us all into our own understanding of fierce, lively, necessary community.

—Madeline ffitch, Stay and Fight

With the promised utopia of Gay Liberation in ruins amidst the apocalypse of the AIDS crisis and the rise of the Religious Right, the young and feral crew that came of age at The Bearded Lady practiced a form of radical queer time travel, reinventing gender freedom together in real time and helping to create the greatly expanded queer expression and language we know today by simply living it. This valuable history of practice, poetry, and performance blurring with activism in place arrives just in time to offer strategies for facing our own present-day dystopia.

—Erica Lyle

interviewee’s include trans icons Silas Howard, Daniel Sea, and Lynn Breedlove; authors and artists Harry Dodge, Ali Liebegott, Shoshana von Blanckensee, Stanya Kahn, and Lisi DeHaas; filmmakers Sarah Kennedy, Sini Anderson, and Tai Uhlmann; cultural activists Cara Page, Zeph Fishlyn and Elissa Sloan Perry; tattoo artists Idexa Stern and Elitrea Frye Jimenez; astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo and many, many others. Includes personal photographs and art by Miriam Klein Stahl, based on photos by Chloe Sherman

Coming out in late May of 2027 on AK Press!!

If you are a journalist or book reviewer and would like to receive an advance readers copy, email me!!

To be kept updated, email me at BeardedLadyCafeBook@gmail.com

Read Chapter 7 in LIBER: A FEMINIST REVIEW, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 4

Black and white photo of two fabulously dressed people., wearing boots, crop tops, sun glasses. They are standing close together talking in an outside park
Two masc/butch appearing people with their arms around each other behind a crouded counter and flanked by packed shelves in a cafe. Menu on chalkboard behind them. One is wearing a flanel and has a red tiny mohawk.
Gay Pride/Freedom parade in SF, background is a line of marchers with Maitri AIDS hospice banner, in the forground is two shirtless men kissing holding large signs that say "It's Clear We're Queer" and "Thank God We're Gay!"

Advance Praise

The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe: An Oral History of the San Francisco Dyke Scene is both a much needed history of The Bearded Lady, an important queer feminist space in San Francisco in the 1990s, and a fascinating dive into the world that The Bearded Lady was created to resist. Crabb’s interviews explore everything from slam poetry, to AIDS, to the rise of the internet, to Riot Grrrl, to DIY, to intersectionality, to burgeoning trans identities. The oral histories are so thorough and embodied, reading the book felt like returning to a place I’d never visited. This is a tremendous resource for future historians. For everyone who was there—and for everyone who never got to go—The Bearded Lady Truckstop Cafe is an incredible record of what bold, wily dykes can do with a space, a community, and a little (very little) money.

—Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer

Paper cut of a woman with her hands in her curly hair, nose ring and flowered sweater, at a cafe