Review by million_year_picnic - Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line

million_year_picnic 's review for:

Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt

2.5

informative slow-paced

I enjoyed this book’s overview of the UK’s recent decades of lesbian history. For the call logs, I would personally have much preferred fuller quotations of the archival source material (with any identifying info and names changed/redacted, of course) to be analyzed/discussed rather than imagined descriptions.

I do want to bring up that on page 17, the author says that a queer archives being referred to as a “special collection” is “…evidence of its role as a deviation from the implied heterosexual norm of the mainstream archive” (Lovatt, 2025, p. 17). The Society of American Archivists Dictionary of Archives Terminology (which is available online for free if you’re interested!) defines a special collection as “a cohesive collection of noncirculating research materials held together by provenance or by a thematic focus” (SAA, 2025). Just about anything in an archives can be a special collection. While there are definitely some large and important conversations to be had about the biases that can be found in archives, I don’t agree that the use of this term is an example of bias.

P.S. Skip p. 137 if you haven’t seen the movie “The Watermelon Woman” yet and don’t want massive spoilers!

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