[GeorgiaMa'am]

I didn't come out until 1984 in Atlanta, and by that time, there were quite a few venues that weren't bars. Of course, we had bars too - The Sports Page was probably the most well-known. There were at least two others that I can't remember the names of (one on Glen Iris, which I think is still there - and one on Piedmont at Pharr Rd., which I think was torn down.)

We also had Charis Books, a feminist bookstore that is still active. There was the Dyke and Dine - ahem, I mean, the Dunk and Dine - which was technically a mainstream establishment, but everyone _knew_ that was the place to go. It's still there, but I don't know what the crowd is like any more. There were also women's music festivals where you could go camp for a weekend and meet women and see the likes of Lea Delaria and the Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge. (That was in my day - earlier than my time had been the era of Meg Christian, who I am sorry to have missed. But we had Lucie Blue Tremblay, Cris Williamson, Holly Near and many more.) There were also lots of support groups and organizations (a shout out for the Atlanta Feminist Women's Chorus!). The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) (of _Our Bodies Our Selves_ fame), which had a clubhouse of sorts that housed meeting space and a library, and hosted a softball team, had started to decline around the mid 1980s.

Then around 1986 we got a dance club. (I think it was called The Other Side?) It had a VIP room, a great dance floor, and _everybody_ in the world seemed to know about it. Women came from all over the country to go. It was like, finally! We had a dance club to equal anything the gay men had - and they had at least four big dance clubs in Atlanta at the time. (There was Backstreets, a 24-hour club where women and also everybody else went at 4 a.m. when the other bars closed, only to stumble out into the sunlight at 7 or 8 a.m. The other men's bars were usually friendly towards lesbians, but none of them were good places to go to meet women.)

Oh, and I almost forgot the DeKalb Farmer's Market in Decatur, GA (a small city next door to Atlanta)! It's like a giant produce stand/fish monger/butcher/bakery/restaurant inside a warehouse. Produce was/is cheap and fresh, organic products are/were readily available, and there are any number of things to recommend this amazing place. But foremost in my mind, it was one of the best places to meet lesbians in Atlanta. It may still be.