Long before "mutual aid" was a hashtag, lesbian networks were quietly running informal safety nets — rides, meals, rent money, childcare. That instinct never really went away.
During the AIDS crisis, lesbian volunteers were disproportionately represented among the people showing up to care for gay men that institutions had abandoned — cooking meals, running errands, sitting in hospital rooms family members refused to enter. That instinct toward informal, unglamorous care work didn't start there and it hasn't stopped since.
It didn't start there, either. Go back further and you find lesbian feminist health collectives in the 1970s teaching each other to do pelvic exams with a plastic speculum and a hand mirror, because doctors were routinely hostile or simply refused to treat them. You find land dyke communities pooling money for a well or a tractor because no bank would lend to a group of women with no husband's name on the paperwork. You find phone trees — literal chains of rotary-dial calls — built to warn a bar's regulars about a police raid twenty minutes before it happened. None of this was called mutual aid at the time. It was just what you did when the people who were supposed to help you wouldn't.
A woman who tended bar in Oakland through the eighties and nineties remembers a coffee can behind the register that everyone just called "the jar." No sign-up sheet, no accounting. If someone's car got repossessed, or a kid needed shoes, or a partner's chemo co-pay was due, the jar emptied out by closing time and refilled itself the following weekend, five and ten dollars at a time. "Nobody asked why," she says. "You just knew whoever needed it needed it more than the rest of us needed a second round."
Today it looks less dramatic but no less real: group chats that quietly cover a member's rent for a month, carpools built for someone who lost a license, meal trains that outlast any official support system's timeline. A mutual aid organizer who has run a small emergency fund out of a shared spreadsheet since 2019 says the requests she gets now aren't so different from what an older generation would have called "getting people through it" — gas money for a four-hour drive to the nearest clinic that still does the procedure they need, a security deposit after an eviction, a phone bill paid so someone doesn't lose the number their kids call. None of it makes the news. Most of it isn't organized by any nonprofit.
Part of why this pattern keeps recurring has to do with who gets left out when formal systems do exist. Shelters that misgender or turn away same-sex couples. Charities with waitlists longer than the crisis they're meant to address. A benefits office that requires documentation someone fleeing a bad situation simply doesn't have. Lesbian, bisexual, and queer women have learned, generation after generation, that the fastest and safest path from "I need help" to "I have what I need" runs through people who already know you, not through an intake form. That's not a rejection of institutions so much as a realistic accounting of how often they're really reachable at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
The tools have changed — Venmo and CashApp instead of a coffee can, a Discord server instead of a phone tree, a shared Google form instead of word passed at the bar — but the underlying architecture is nearly identical: a small, trusted network deciding collectively that nobody in it falls through the floor if they can help it. It's slower to scale than a real safety net and it burns out the people running it faster than anyone would like. But it has also outlasted several actual safety nets, which is its own kind of evidence.
The burnout part doesn't get talked about enough. The same organizer with the spreadsheet says she's had to build in rules for herself she never wanted to need — a monthly cap on what she'll personally front before payday, a rotating list of two other people who can approve a request when she's not reachable, a hard line about not covering the same person's rent three months running without a longer conversation about what's really going on. Informal doesn't mean unstructured forever; most networks that survive past their first year end up reinventing some version of the bureaucracy they were trying to avoid, just smaller and run by people who genuinely pick up the phone.
There's also a quieter, less quantifiable side to all of this: the aid was never only material. A meal train is also a way of checking in on someone every single day without it feeling like a wellness check. A rideshare chain for someone who lost their license is also three or four people who now know exactly how that person is doing on a given Tuesday, because they were just in a car with them. The logistics are the excuse. The actual product is contact — regular, low-stakes, hard-to-fake contact with people who would otherwise slip out of your life the moment a crisis stopped being acute enough to justify a phone call.
That's arguably the piece institutions are worst at replicating, even the well-funded, well-meaning ones. A caseworker can authorize a rent voucher. A caseworker's caseload rarely allows for showing up at 9 p.m. because someone said they were "fine" in a way that didn't sound fine. The lesbian, bisexual, and queer women who've been running these informal networks for decades aren't claiming to have solved poverty or a broken healthcare system. They're pointing out, gently and mostly without credit, that when nobody official is coming, someone still has to be the one who shows up — and that showing up, done consistently enough, starts to look a lot like an institution of its own, even if it never gets a name, a 501(c)(3), or a line in anyone's budget.
We want to start collecting and pointing to these networks directly — local mutual aid funds, informal support groups, emergency contact lists — rather than letting them stay word-of-mouth only. If you run one, tell us about it.
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