Last Night at the Telegraph Club

your dream?” Shirley asked.

“Well, step one is to go to college, maybe major in aeronautics or engineering. Step two—”

“I didn’t think you were college material,” Shirley said.

Lily stared at her friend in shock. She had no idea what had gotten into her, but Kathleen didn’t seem entirely surprised. She merely smiled slightly before she responded.

“Cal takes anyone in the top fifteen percent of their graduating class,” Kathleen said. “I’m not going to have a problem. Neither will Lily. But I don’t think we’ll see you there.”

In 1956, a new mayor launched an anti-vice campaign to put many gay bars out of business. It’s no coincidence that 1956 was also the year that the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded; this early gay rights organization aimed to provide a way for lesbians to socialize outside the bar scene.

Expressing a butch identity involved cultivating a masculine appearance, which could involve wearing men’s clothing. Many cities outlawed cross-dressing in public; San Francisco’s law was not repealed until 1974. As lesbian Reba Hudson relates in Wide-Open Town, gay men and lesbians were often harassed by police for cross-dressing in the 1940s and ’50s, but women who cross-dressed would wear women’s underwear, because then “they couldn’t book you for impersonating a person of the opposite sex.”

“Butch/femme” has sometimes been misunderstood as an imitation of heterosexuality, but in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explain: “Butches defied convention by usurping male privilege in appearance and sexuality, and with their fems, outraged society by creating a romantic and sexual unit within which women were not under male control. . . . Butch-fem roles were the key structure for organizing against heterosexual dominance.”

The first Chinese landed in San Francisco in 1848, and soon afterward settled in the center of the city near Portsmouth Square in an area that would become known as Chinatown. For the next several decades, anti-Chinese bigotry tangled with demand for Chinese labor. White American entrepreneurs needed Chinese workers to build railroads and wash laundry, but white American workers resented the Chinese for taking those jobs. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration ban in the United States targeting a specific ethnic group. It remained in place until World War II.

The first lesbian pulp novel, Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres, was published in 1950 and sold a million copies. It was followed in 1952 by Spring Fire, which sold at least a million and a half copies. Spring Fire’s author, Vin Packer, was a pseudonym for Marijane Meaker, who would go on to write young adult novels as M. E. Kerr. Lesbian pulps were widely available in drugstores across the country, and although many were written with the male gaze in mind, plenty of lesbians also found them. Despite the publishers’ requirement, due to obscenity laws, that these books end in punishment for the homosexual characters, they still created a kind of imagined community for lesbians scattered across the nation, who could read these books and discover that people like them existed.

Senator Joseph McCarthy began his paranoid crusade against Communist infiltration in 1950, and although he was censured by the Senate in 1954 and dead by 1957, McCarthyism pervaded the decade, resulting in the deportation of Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien, a Chinese scientist who cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and had aided the United States during World War II. Once he returned to China in 1955, Dr. Tsien became known as the father of Chinese rocketry. McCarthyism also led to the so-called Lavender Scare, in which queer people were forced out of their government jobs because homosexuality was believed to be linked with Communism.

Lily Hu’s story was inspired by two books. In Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Nathalia Holt introduces us to the female computers who worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab starting in the 1940s, including Chinese American immigrant Helen Ling, who went on to become an engineer at JPL and hired many more women to work there. In Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, Nan Alamilla Boyd notes almost casually, “San Francisco native Merle Woo remembers that lesbians of color often frequented Forbidden City [nightclub] in the 1950s.” Both books gave me glimpses into Asian American history that has too often fallen through the cracks, and I wondered what life might have been like for a queer Asian American girl who dreamed of rocket ships, growing up in the 1950s.

She began to feel as if she had been split in two, and only one half of her was here in this living room. That was the good Chinese daughter who was delicately chewing her way around the bones in each piece of hsün yü, carefully extracting them from her mouth and laying the tiny white spines on the edge of her plate with her chopsticks. The other half had been left out on the sidewalk before Lily walked in the front door. That was the girl who had spent last night in the North Beach apartment of a Caucasian woman she barely knew. Everything would be all right, Lily understood, as long as she kept that girl out of this Chinese family.

Each time Lily finished a task, Aunt Judy gave her another one: peel and chop garlic, then the scallions, then the water chestnuts.