Four women help put up a sign at 20 Rue Jacob, a lesbian bookstore located at 200 East and 800 South, as it opened in Salt Lake City in 1979. The Rue, as it affectionately became known, was a women's-only space — part of the movement for feminist separatism from men that emerged around the time.| Updated: Jan. 12, 2022, 1:53 a.m.
“And they said, Well, why don’t you make it a walk-in business?” Maestas recounted in a recent interview from her home in an all-women’s community in Arizona. “And I said, ‘What? Are you nuts? I don’t want to own a store.’”hosting its grand opening later this month in Salt Lake City — there was 20 Rue Jacob, a lesbian bookstore and coffee shop that was born shortly after that road trip conversation and existed in Utah’s capital city from around 1979 to 1984.
“It was a place for us to talk about what it was like to be in a place where we were so isolated,” she continued. “And how do we deal with our children? And how do we do it? You know, many of these lesbians were married to men. ‘How do I do this?’ ‘Honey, I don’t know. But let’s find out what other women are doing.
That’s when Hage came up with the idea to name it 20 Rue Jacob — a nod to the Paris address where Natalie Clifford Barney, an American writer and lesbian, held weekly salons from before World War I to the 1960s. She brought together some of the best-known thinkers of those decades to share their ideas and creative pursuits.
It was an early indication of how the Rue, as it affectionately became known, would operate in a time when its owners weren’t advertising their presence as a lesbian bookstore: “Girlfriends would tell girlfriends would tell girlfriends,” Maestas said. “We did everything quietly,” she added. “We had to.”
On those latter nights, Maestas said, she would lock the doors and hand women a flashlight and a mirror so they could discover and reclaim the most private parts of their bodies, in a practice that wasn’t uncommon among some feminists during the period. “We didn’t know how afraid we were,” Maestas remembered. “Until somebody would say, you know, ‘One of our own got beat up last night.’ Or we’d hear in the news that a couple was killed camping. And we’d hear a lot of that.”
And for young people who had grown up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there was a fear that their families would disown them if they were outed, Malin remembers.“They’ve lost all their family connections, all their cultural traditions,” she said. “It’s a hard thing.”
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