Lucy Lloyd

Lucy Lloyd is the former co-owner of La Papaya, a vegetarian restaurant for lesbian and queer women, that was open from 1980 to 1983 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Lucy co-ran the space with her then-partner Elie [last name withheld for privacy]. She also opened a women’s bookstore called “Women Works” above the restaurant. The following conversation was recorded on Friday July 1st, 2021 at 1pm in Lucy’s apartment in Chelsea, New York.

La Papaya’s sponsored softball team. Image courtesy of Lucy Lloyd.

Gwen Shockey: The first question I always ask is to try to remember the first place you ever were that was mostly occupied by queer women or lesbians and what it felt like to be there. Perhaps it was a bar or a community center or a political group…

Lucy Lloyd: Hm. It’s hard to remember. I was relatively old when it happened. Meaning in my thirties. (Laughing) I was married and had six children by the time I decided to give this a go [seeing women]. It’s hard to remember but I guess it was in Chicago. My kids were at a free school and one of the teachers was a lesbian and she asked me out and I was excited and thrilled and that was the beginning of the whole thing.

GS: Wow! That is exciting! Was that when you were still married to your husband? 

LL: Maybe, yes. I can’t remember.

GS: Ok. And if you don’t mind me asking what made you realize you were interested in women?

LL: Hard to say… I think I always had a penchant for women and I remember some incidences as a kid. But, I don’t know. I can’t answer the question. (Laughing)

GS: (Laughing) That’s ok! Ok, so she asked you out and I assume you said yes?

LL: Yes! And we were together for about three years.

GS: Was she the first lesbian or queer woman you’d met?

LL: No, I had had a relationship with a woman in college briefly who I was completely enamored of. I guess that was my first. But, you know, first of all I never even thought about the possibility of being a lesbian. My main goal in life was to have a bunch of kids.

GS: You made that happen!

LL: (Laughing) Yes I did!

GS: Did you have them all before you were thirty? 

LL: They were all born between 1960 and 1970. Four of them were birth children and two of them were adopted.

GS: So, it sounds like you had met some queer women here and there through your life but the process of forming community was more gradual but you always knew…

LL: I had a feeling, sure. But I never really thought about it. I knew I was more interested in being around women than men and, uh, but I didn’t think about actually being a lesbian. It was something you read about perhaps – you read The Well of Loneliness and stuff like that. But it wasn’t something I considered for a very long time.

GS: Did you grow up in a fairly conservative household?

LL: No! I was completely a “pink-diaper” baby. My father was a working socialist and my mother was a card-carrying member of the communist party. (Laughing) They were atheists and completely open-minded about everything. As a matter of fact when I came out to my father and introduced him to my girlfriend he said to me, “Don’t forget, class differences are the hardest thing to overcome in a relationship.” That was his whole reaction. 

GS: He’s not wrong! Where did you grow up?

LL: I grew up all over the place. I was born here in New York and lived here until I was seven and then we moved to South America and lived there until I went to college.

GS: Were you involved with politics alongside your parents?

LL: No, not really. By the time I was older they were out of politics.

GS: It’s really wonderful how accepting your parents were… That they didn’t make a big deal about your sexuality…

LL: Not at all, as a matter of fact, I think my mother was more upset when one of my daughters came out. I had already presented her with all of the grandchildren that she wanted and everything but here was this person who was probably not going to do that.

GS: If you don’t mind me asking, what was your experience like moving from more of a traditional heterosexual family structure to then…

LL: It was great! It was freeing and it was just great. My current wife and I have been together for thirty-nine years!

GS: Wow! That’s a long time! Do you have any tips?

LL: Try to keep out of trouble! (Laughing)

GS: (Laughing) How did you meet your wife?

LL: She came to La Papaya! Most of the dykes in Brooklyn from a certain generation met each other at La Papaya. There was a time when I would run into a lot of people who would tell me, “Oh yeah! I met my lover at La Papaya!”

GS: You’re a matchmaker!

LL: I was!

GS: So, you were living in Chicago and then you moved back here?

LL: Sort of! I went to Costa Rica for two years with the kids when I left their father. And then we came back here. Costa Rica is a very lovely place. It’s very peaceful and I knew it was a place where I wouldn’t need to worry about my kids. Everything is very safe and civilized there. No army and they’re very proud of it. They had more school teachers than policemen. That was their big boast. I don’t know if that’s still true but it was fifty years ago! (Laughing)

GS: We could take a lesson from that. So, tell me a little bit about your transition back to New York. Did La Papaya come about right when you moved back here?

LL: I moved back to New York because every time I read a Lesbian Connection – you must be familiar with that publication – there were millions of dykes in Park Slope looking for roommates. So, I thought: This is a place I need to be. Being that I was born in New York, I have always felt like a New Yorker. So, I came back with the kids!

GS: Do you remember what year that would have been?

LL: Maybe 1975?

GS: What was Park Slope like in 1975?

LL: Lot of lesbians… Not so many families as there are now. I met my at-that-time girlfriend and restaurant partner, whose name was Elie, and we thought it would be fun to open a women’s restaurant!

GS: Where there any other examples at that time of similar spaces?

LL: There was Bloodroot up in Connecticut. Have you heard of that? That was a fabulous place. It was a women’s collective restaurant. I think they’re still there. There was Mother Courage and Bonnie and Clyde’s had a restaurant upstairs.

GS: What was the process like of conceiving of the restaurant? I know it was challenging for women to get loans without a male signature in the ‘70s… Did you face challenges in opening a business?

LL: Somehow it seems to me – and I’m trying to remember – Elie had some money and she bought the building. I had some money and we invested what we had. It was kind of a shoestring operation.

GS: Yeah. It seems like, from a lot of other conversations I’ve had, that many women have regretted not purchasing property in the city when it was more affordable. I spoke with Cassandra Grant from Salsa Soul Sisters and she expressed to me how much she regretted not purchasing a building through the group to pass down to younger generations of Sisters.

LL: Sure. Everybody should have. That was the time to do it! I bought a brownstone in Park Slope for eighteen thousand dollars. (Laughing)

GS: (Laughing) Oh my god!

LL: It had been completely abandoned and it was being sold by the bank and I had to replace most of the plumbing and all of the electricity but after I did all of that I had a Brownstone in Park Slope! 

GS: That is just unreal! Eighteen thousand… (Laughing) Having the foresight to buy a building in which to open a restaurant really seems like the way to go.

LL: It seemed like it. Once you’re renting you really lose control.

GS: Right. You always run the risk of having to relocate or close.

LL: Exactly.

GS: How was it working with a partner and a lover to open a business together?

LL: Oh, it was fun! It was fun until the relationship ended. The restaurant outlast the relationship. But it was interesting. I don’t know if you remember when all of those Cubans came to the United States pretending to be lesbians? And a lot of them of course were not. They just needed to get out of Cuba. They came and the government put them in these camps all over the place and in order to get out of them they had to be sponsored. Since we all thought they were lesbians and since we had a brownstone with four stories in it we sponsored about five or six women out of bondage in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or someplace… Wherever they were. (Laughing) They helped us work on the restaurant. You know, carpentry and that kind of thing, which was great. Except that we were picketed immediately by some fringe militant group who felt that aiding Cubans who had left Cuba was counter-revolutionary and politically a bad thing to do. That stands out in my mind as very typical of the kinds of politics that were going on all over the place at that time and that seem to be going on again. People just go off without thinking through the whole story – having no idea what they are talking about. (Laughing)

GS: How did you deal with the picketing?

LL: Well, what could you do. We just sort of ignored it and it didn’t last for very long. But like I said it was so typical of the kinds of stuff that was happening at that time.

GS: Politics aside, it’s great that you had a lot of help building out the space! Did you have a vision for how you wanted it to look and feel?

LL: Yeah! Pretty much! There’s nothing much to tell. We had an idea of what we wanted – we wanted it to be vegetarian, we wanted it to be as international as possible, and we just wanted it to be a safe place for women to come and do whatever they needed to do. We had art shows and we had poetry readings and all that stuff. It was a community center. 

GS: Did you have experience with cooking prior?

LL: I cooked a lot! When I was in college some guy at the Hillel house was looking for someone to cook Kosher meals and I said I could do it and so I did. That was my first job in college. For three years I cooked dinner every night at the Hillel for about nine guys who wanted to eat Kosher food! (Laughing) I knew nothing about Kosher food!

GS: Do you remember things that were on the menu at La Papaya?

LL: Not really. It was very varied. We tried to make it as varied as possible.

GS: What was the address? Do you remember?

LL: It was right where 7th comes into Flatbush. I don’t remember the exact address.

GS: And do you remember what years it was open?

LL: I would say… Maybe ’76 or ’77 until about ’81 or ’82. It was open for about five years. 

GS: Ah ok, that’s quite a while! So, you had art shows and a lot of community gatherings there and… 

LL: And poetry readings! All that stuff.

GS: Do you feel that La Papaya drew a particular crowd – for instance more creative types or something?

LL: It was pretty diverse. I mean, it was not the drinking crowd. Actually one incident that really pissed me off was that we used to do a Seder every year and you had to have a reservation obviously because we only had a certain amount of space. One year some Jewish woman came to me and said, “How come you’re letting non-Jewish women come to this? There’s not enough room for all the Jewish women! And I was like: What are you talking about? The whole reason we’re doing this is because the non-Jewish women are not welcome in the family homes of the Jewish women they’re with! Where else would they go! The politics then were very violent at that time. Another thing that happened at that restaurant was that I had two little boys and they used to bus tables and do stuff sometimes and my lesbian daughter had a huge crush on a woman who was an intense separatist and she told my daughter that as long as she hugged her brothers she couldn’t have anything to do with her. So, that’s like the sort of stuff that went on. (Laughing)

GS: That’s really intense and must have been hard for you to navigate!

LL: Yes! It was.

GS: I suppose it always is the case within a group of lesbians but was there a lot of internal conflict within the restaurant?

LL: (Laughing) Well, there were instances like that and people who thought we should charge more or less for food. They didn’t understand that our grocery store across the street did not do that therefore we couldn’t. (Laughing) Stuff like that. As I said before people don’t think very deeply.

GS: Yeah. On one hand I think it’s really important and wonderful that you opened a space that was alternative to the bar scene – because even now I know so many queer women and lesbians who crave alternative types of spaces – but also simultaneously have a really hard time keeping them afloat! The lesbian community is fairly small – was it hard for you to stay afloat financially?

LL: No! It was ok! I think the women were just more interested in having separate spaces to be together from men. Like, I’m in a book club now and we’re having a debate about whether we want to read male authors or not and it’s just interesting that I think a lot more women now are more interested in reading men than would have been fifty years ago.

GS: How do you feel about it?

LL: I’m not interesting in reading men! (Laughing) Especially not fiction, which is what we mostly read.

GS: Yeah! Makes sense to me! (Laughing) Can you describe what the inside of La Papaya looked like? When you walked into the door? Or actually when you stood out front first!

LL: Well, when you stood front… It’s still there I think! The building. I think there is still a restaurant there. We put in a window – a big window, with a lot of little panes in it. We had a very fancy neon sign made. My daughter has it and had it hanging on her wall. It was kind of a long space. The kitchen was right in front of everybody. I did most of the cooking and Elie took care of the front. It’s hard to describe but we had benches all along one wall with tables and then there were individual tables.

GS: Lots of places to sit and talk.

LL: Yes, lots of spaces.

GS: Cool. From every, kind of, interview I’ve done with former bartenders or bar owners it always comes up that the lesbian community likes to have a lot of movable seating so that different group formations can be arranged. (Laughing)  

LL: There was that indeed! 

GS: Did La Papaya ever host political meetings or groups?

LL: No it didn’t. There were a lot of other places that did that. There was a martial arts group which was not far away on 9th Street. There were plenty of places that did that sort of stuff. We were more social.

GS: Gotcha. And you mentioned a lot of people met lovers and partners there – do you have any juicy memories from that time? I’m sure you saw a lot from the kitchen!

LL: (Laughing) Well, we had one woman who was a Muslim. She would come in and go to the bathroom to take off everything she had on and put on her blue jeans and her shirt and hang out with her lover and then put herself together again and go back to her husband. That was pretty cool! Otherwise I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about that stuff because I knew so many of these people so for so long and I can’t just out them.

GS: Of course, of course. And you don’t have to mention names, but do you have any favorite memories from La Papaya?

LL: Not really. I mean it was fun to do. It was always fun! Every evening when the doors opened – we only served dinner, except on Sundays when we served brunch – it felt like the curtain was going up every night. It always felt that way. It never stopped feeling that way.

GS: Mmm. It seems like there was an emphasis on visibility in the restaurant? In other conversations I’ve had with women who ran spaces in the ‘70s and ‘80s I noticed a prioritizing of visibility and moving away from bars that were hidden or more illegal feeling, to spaces with more light and big windows like Sahara, for instance, uptown. Was this a consideration at La Papaya? 

LL: Yes! Sahara was a beautiful place. I went there a few times.

GS: Mhm. Ok. And you mentioned your children were sometimes involved?

LL: They were there once in a while. Not all the time. I’m trying to think how old everybody was. I think the two boys were the only ones who actually worked there.

GS: Did you enjoy your role at the restaurant and in the community?

LL: I was like the mother of the community. It felt like… (Laughing)

GS: Did people come to you a lot for advice?

LL: Oh, sure. (Laughing) We had a bookstore too upstairs. There was a bookstore on 7th Avenue called “Women’s Works” and she went out of business so I bought her out and we turned one of the apartments in the building into a bookstore. That was really fun for me. I’m a big book person. 

GS: How did the bookstore and restaurant interact?

LL: Oh, just that it was there. People would come up and hang out.

GS: Did the former owner continue to run it? 

LL: No, I ran it!

GS: Wow! You were doing a lot! You must have been tired!

LL: I had a lot of energy! (Laughing) 

GS: Were the other apartments in the building occupied by community members? Were you living there too?

LL: Yes! We lived in my brownstone.

GS: The whole building sounds like it was really a community hub.

LL: Yeah! It was fun.

GS: That’s so great! So, how did the closing of the restaurant happen? You said it outlasted your relationship?

LL: Yes, it outlasted my relationship. And then I got into another relationship with Diane. We’re still in a relationship. And, uh, I don’t know! It felt like it was time to close the restaurant. It was too much work and not enough anything…

GS: Did you end up keeping it going after your previous partner left or did she keep it going?

LL: I kept it going.

GS: I imagine the time and effort it would take to keep a space like that going would be really overwhelming.

LL: Oh, it’s horrific. And you also have to shop and cook and all that stuff…

GS: And the cleaning…

LL: Everything!

GS: Yeah, it’s a lot. For a younger lesbian or queer person who wanted to open a business like that now would you have any advice? Don’t do it? (Laughing)

LL: No, I would never ever consider advising anybody not to do anything! I’m completely in favor of people doing things. But I don’t know about advice… Anybody who wants to do something like that has their own ideas of what they want.

GS: How did you feel about the closing of La Papaya?

LL: It was sad. But then I started working at Womanbooks, which I loved.

GS: Can you tell me a bit about Womanbooks?

LL: It was on 92nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue I think. There was a woman named Karyn London who owned the store. It was a huge bookstore! It was a fabulous bookstore. They had everything. She really knew what she was doing. It was right down the street from the Lesbian Herstory Archives at the time when it was uptown. It was really fabulous. It was a big space. She had lots and lots of books.

GS: Did you let go of the bookstore that was above La Papaya?

LL: I had to let go of everything. The building belonged to Elli. She did sell it eventually.

GS: Ok gotcha. Did you ever do any writing of your own? 

LL: Not really! (Laughing)

GS: Do you know how the community felt about the closing of La Papaya?

LL: I think people were sad to see it go. It’s impossible to keep businesses open in New York. One in ten restaurants in Brooklyn closes within the first year.

GS: Did you have the desire to open anything else after La Papaya?

LL: Not really. That was it. Well, that’s not true what I’m telling you because Diane and I ran a hardware store in Cherry Grove for about five years. It was a hardware and gift shop. I can’t remember how we decided to try that out. It was really fun. I loved doing that. I loved shopping for it. Diane did the hardware and I did the gifts. It was lots of international stuff. We sold lots of things like candles and beach-y stuff.

GS: That’s so cool! And have you maintained communities between the city and Fire Island for all these years?

LL: Well, no because we live in Huntington, Long Island too. After we closed the hardware store Diane had to get a job and she got a job working for a hardware distributor in Long Island some place.

GS: She’s an artist?

LL: Yes. She tried commuting from Brooklyn for a while but she couldn’t stand it so we moved out to Huntington. We still have an apartment there. That’s where her studio is.

GS: Wow, so you have the best of all worlds! (Laughing)

LL: We do indeed! I have to tell you, we do indeed. It also maintains our relationship having several spaces. We can get away from each other because both of our apartments are one bedroom.

GS: So important! When you’re in your apartment with a partner and there’s nowhere to go where you can’t see each other it’s very difficult! (Laughing)

LL: Hard indeed! I’m glad you understand that! (Laughing)

GS: I used to sit in the bathroom to get some private time. (Laughing) We all do what we can. It’s so great how many businesses you were able to open and run. It seems like in the ‘70s and ‘80s when real-estate was cheaper it was more possible to just do things that you wanted to do and not lose all of your money trying to open something and potentially failing. Was the hardware store pre-existing or did you start it from scratch?

LL: We started it from scratch!

GS: In a building you also purchased?

LL: In Fire Island? Not a chance! (Laughing) In the commercial business? No. As a matter of fact the thing that put us under there was our rent eventually. It was a lot of money.

GS: I’m curious how you’ve experienced changes on Fire Island over the years you’ve been going out there?

LL: Oh, it’s changed tremendously. First of all there are kids all over the place, which is great because I have two grandchildren and they’re there all summer and there are tons of kids there. There are also a lot more straight people than there used to be. It’s very hard to explain this because now we’re the people who were there being ourselves then – when we bought the house thirty-some years ago. But the whole thing feels like it’s changed. People are more interested in their own house than in the community. I mean, it was never very political. It was always just a fun place to be, which was somewhat difficult if you felt any political stuff. But aside from that, I don’t know. Within the old guard, men always hated the women and it’s still an issue out there.

GS: Mmm yeah. It does seem like for such a small piece of land there are a lot of different dynamics going on. I can only imagine that these issues are amplified when they exist within a smaller community like on Fire Island. It becomes personal.

LL: It does. It’s hard! One of the wonderful things about Cherry Grove – on the topic of lesbian spaces – one of the things that was fabulous that I loved about the Grove was that we used to have a doctor’s house there. The way it got there was that years and years ago – like in the ‘40s there was a dentist who was the only medical person there and everybody used to call him up whenever they got a splinter. Finally he bought a house and donated it to the community to be a doctor’s house. They formed a committee and we had volunteer doctors who would come out in exchange for a week or two at the beach and you could go to the doctor and there would always be a doctor there. There was something about the whole community sense of that, that was so fabulous and then some people among the big muckety-mucks invited Northwell Hospital to buy our doctor’s house and that was the end of that. So, now Northwell has a branch out there and yes, it’s easier for them to get doctor’s, that’s true but we never had a problem getting doctors. 

GS: I’m sure! For two free weeks on the beach on Fire Island!

LL: Exactly! It’s hard to explain that type of change, but that is the type of change that seems so fundamental to me and so sad. 

GS: Yeah, like more corporate takeover.

LL: Exactly.  

GS: That is just the case everywhere. God, the most obvious example is the pride march which isn’t a march at all anymore, it’s just a corporate shit show!

LL: That’s right.

GS: This is one of the reasons I love having conversations so much like this because you have seen the city and the dynamics shift so much over several decades and hearing memories of when things were maybe more collective and community-based… It’s happening on a grassroots level among younger people now too of course but the general corporate takeover is just hard to compete against. And with assimilation…

LL: And now the idea that we’re just like everybody else has always pissed me off from the get-go.

GS: It’s the antithesis of everything queer politics has tried to fight for.

LL: That’s right.

GS: Are there still a lot of the same people out on Cherry Grove?

LL: Oh, a lot has changed. First of all a lot of people have died in the thirty-odd years that we’ve been there. As you get older it becomes a lot harder to navigate the bullshit of having to catch the boat and bring your groceries and blah, blah, blah, so they sell their houses and they move on. 

GS: Who do you notice is buying the houses now?

LL: People in their forties and fifties.

GS: Queer people?

LL: Mostly! Still mostly gay I would say.

GS: Well, I appreciate so much hearing your memories of La Papaya and Fire Island…

LL: We had a lot of fun in those days.

GS: Yeah! It sounds like it! And it’s just really cool to hear – as we’re witnessing the disappearance of a lot of lesbian bars and people are trying to figure out how to create alternate gathering spaces when it’s so impossible to buy anything – it’s cool to hear about how other women have done things. 

LL: Yeah, it’s so sad that it’s become so difficult. The Duchess was like the hub where we all used to go. All the political meetings we all used to go to, none of those things exist anymore. I used to belong to a thing called Dyke Anarchists and Dykes Opposed to Nuclear Technology and there was all kinds of stuff. There was lots of stuff going on at the Firehouse on 19th Street. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. There were things going on all the time! They’re just not happening anymore it doesn’t seem. The Duchess was where we’d go after all of the meetings. We’d go to Bonnie and Clyde’s occasionally and we’d go to the Sahara very occasionally but that was so far away. I lived in Brooklyn at that time. We used to go to the Cubby Hole. We used to go to a place that used to be a church…

GS: Limelight?

LL: Limelight. (Laughing)

GS: Well, I don’t want to take up all your time today Lucy. If there are any more memories from La Papaya that you’d like to share with me that would be great but I really appreciate this so much. Oh, and I wanted to ask you – you don’t have any images of La Papaya do you?

LL: Probably not. We did have a softball team that we sponsored! There was a picture of our softball team… I’m trying to think. I know I gave it to somebody. I gave it to a friend of mine who lives right across the street in the same complex. You should probably talk to her too! She was around LOTS at that time. Let me give her a call and see if she’s available.

Lucy calls Rosalie Regal. 

Hello miss Rosalie! How are you?

Rosalie Regal: Oh god. I’m exhausted. I rushed out of the house to return that heart monitor and I walked to 32nd Street and then it started to drizzle, which is ok. I just made it home and I didn’t have a minute to call you. Sure enough I made it right to the front door as started really coming down.

LL: Oh dear. Well, listen – don’t talk anymore now because I have somebody visiting me and I’m calling to ask you a very specific question. This is a lovely young woman from Brooklyn who is interviewing old lesbians who were involved in “the life” in the old days and she’d like to take a picture of the softball team, which I believe you have hanging on your wall. Would you be up for a visit?

RR: When?

LL: We can come now! She’s here now. She says she can come back too…

RR: No, no. Give me about fifteen, twenty minutes.

LL: Okie dokie. We’ll see you then!

GS: Thank you! That’s so kind. I can’t wait to see this photograph! Let’s go over and chat for a bit and then I unfortunately need to head back to Brooklyn but if she wants to talk with me for longer I will gladly come back to record her stories! Oh, I also meant to ask you before we go over to Rosalie’s – how did you come up with the name La Papaya?

LL: Well, Elie and I went to Cuba on a vacation and papaya is the vernacular for vagina.

GS: (Laughing) That’s a really good name.

LL: It was the perfect name for a lesbian restaurant.