The House That Jill Built: A Lesbian Nation in Formation

Sara Stratton teaches history at York University.

The House That Jill Built is a study of the Lesbian Organization of
Toronto (LOOT), which was conceived in 1976 and laid to rest in 1980.
LOOT was in part born of frustration with the larger feminist movement,
which was both reluctant to acknowledge and hostile to its significant
lesbian component. Neither were these lesbians part of a unified gay and
lesbian community, a notion that Ross effectively dismisses through a
reading of the gay and lesbian press. The book is superbly researched;
Ross appears to have ransacked the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and
the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives in her quest to reconstruct
this important period in lesbian history, and she has enlivened this
with a comprehensive oral history of LOOT members.

The desire to create a strong lesbian community was part of LOOT’s
strength and its downfall. By all accounts, the women involved in LOOT
found it an empowering organization, but as Ross argues, it also
attempted to be all things for all lesbians, and did not succeed for
long in trying to meet “all the social, cultural, recreational, and
political needs of lesbians in Toronto.” Ross admires LOOT’s
accomplishments and believes that the organization helped pave the way
for a better life for lesbians in Toronto today. Nevertheless, she fears
that her status “as an out lesbian at times seems contingent and
precarious, even temporary,” and so “there is considerable urgency
in excavating the substance of what worked and what didn’t in the
ongoing fight against forces determined to contain and even obliterate
lesbian and gay realities.”

Ross emphasizes that LOOT was a middle-class movement, and highlights
the cleavages between LOOT lesbians and “bar lesbians.” This is an
important contribution to our understanding of the diverse lesbian
communities in Canada, but it assumes a knowledge of bar and butch/fem
culture that a novice reader in lesbian history might not have. However,
this is a minor quibble in terms of this marvelous book.