How this Plaza Midwood house birthed nation’s longest running lesbian journal
A little known piece of Charlotte’s history celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
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The nation’s longest running lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom was founded in the Queen City. Its history is intertwined with Charlotte’s old Women’s Center and neighborhoods still recognized as LGBTQ-friendly.
Catherine Nicholson, a drama professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and her then-partner Harriet Ellenberger founded and ran Sinister Wisdom for five years before they passed it on to new editors in 1981. The current editor, Julie Enszer, has led the publication since 2010. And in recent years, Sinister Wisdom expanded to publish a book series and offer educational programs, and it still prints quarterly.
As Pride Month comes to a close, the journal is about to reach its founding date: July 1976.
“It was the best part of my life,” Ellenberger told The Charlotte Observer. “The one time when what I could give was needed.”
Ellenberger and Nicholson met in the 1970s at the Charlotte Women’s Center. Ellenberger helped found the center in 1971, according to an ongoing oral history project through UNCC’s J. Murrey Atkins Library. The CWC operated through the early 1990s in Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood, providing a gathering space for those rallying for women’s rights.
In the 1970s, there wasn’t an LGBTQ community in Charlotte, partially because the term didn’t exist yet, Ellenberger said. There were a few gay bars, but the CWC was the only place for lesbian activism.
In 1975, Ellenberger, Nicholson and other lesbians in a group known as the Drastic Dykes split from the CWC due to infighting. Historian La Shonda Mims, who focuses on urban history with a particular interest in queer and women’s studies, said this break allowed Ellenberger and Nicholson to create Sinister Wisdom in a space separate from the patriarchy.
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“What I try to explain to my students who really have a hard time understanding the power of separatism is ‘How many spaces and places do we see that are women supported, women operated and women populated?’” said Mims, who teaches at the University of Birmingham in England. “That just is not something we see very often and there is a power in it, and it’s a rare power.”
Sinister Wisdom operated out of a little white brick cottage Nicholson bought in East Charlotte at 3116 Country Club Drive, which Mecklenburg County added to its prospective historic landmark list in 2021 to be considered for the designation.
Amazon Quarterly, a prominent lesbian literary arts journal, had ceased publication in 1975, and Ellenberger said there was a gap to fill. The couple published the journal’s first issue in July 1976, which included notes from the editors, essays and poems. Over the years, they traveled nationwide to get submissions.
In 1978, Nicholson and Ellenberger moved to Nebraska. A group of lesbian students at the University of Nebraska volunteered to work on the journal one night a week.
Despite Sinister Wisdom’s short-lived time in Charlotte, its impact on the area carries on, Mims said. It led to a “constant, queer publishing movement” in the city, including QNotes, still active today. And, although Charlotte doesn’t have a specific LGBTQ neighborhood, Dilworth, where the CWC was located, and Plaza Midwood, where Nicholson’s house was, are still recognized as queer-friendly spaces.
Nicholson and Ellenberger’s ability to fund and publish their own words and the words of other lesbians was also significant given the nationwide protests against male-dominated publishing houses in the early 1970s, Mims said.
“It meant we were free. We were free to accept anything we wanted to, and we did,” Ellenberger said. “We were very open to different viewpoints.”
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This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
