Last Night at the Telegraph Club

About Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a novel by Malinda Lo, published in 2021 by Dutton Books for Young Readers. It is set in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1954 and 1955, at the intersection of McCarthyism, anti-Communist persecution of LGBTQ+ people, and the particular vulnerability of Chinese Americans during the era of the Immigration and Nationality Act immigration restrictions.

Lily Hu is seventeen, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant doctor, an excellent student dreaming of becoming a scientist. She discovers a pulp novel about a woman who loves women and recognizes something in it she has not yet named. She begins visiting the Telegraph Club — a lesbian nightclub in North Beach where women can dance with women without immediate threat — at first drawn by a female performer and then by Kathleen Miller, a white working-class woman with whom she slowly falls in love. The relationship between them is tender, uncertain, and conducted under severe constraints: the threat of deportation for Lily's father if her activities attract investigation, the specific dangers of interracial same-sex relationships in 1950s America, and Kathleen's own precariousness as a woman with no family safety net.

Lo researched the novel from historical sources including records of the real Telegraph Club, FBI surveillance files, and oral histories of the era. This ground-level historical specificity gives the novel texture and weight. The 1950s in San Francisco were not simply a time of repression; they were also a time when queer communities were building the institutions and cultures that would lay the groundwork for the movements that followed.

Awards and Recognition

Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2021 and the Stonewall Book Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and received starred reviews from major trade publications. Lo is one of the most respected writers working in young adult fiction, and this novel is widely considered her most accomplished work.

The novel serves as a corrective to the invisibility of LGBTQ+ people — and LGBTQ+ people of color in particular — in historical fiction. Its validation of same-sex love as something that has always existed, that has built communities and persisted through persecution, is one of its most important contributions to the canon of books available to young readers.

Why Last Night at the Telegraph Club Has Been Banned

Last Night at the Telegraph Club has been banned or challenged in 9 states across 53 school districts. The challenges are primarily focused on the novel's depiction of a same-sex romantic relationship between teenage girls. Some challenges also cite the novel's discussion of sexuality and the sexual content in its intimate scenes, which are relatively modest compared to many of the other challenged books in the dataset but which involve a lesbian couple.

The banning of this novel is particularly pointed given its literary recognition — it is a National Book Award winner challenged across 53 school districts. Advocates for the book have argued that its removal from school libraries sends a specific message to LGBTQ+ students of color: that their history and their love are inappropriate subjects for their schools. Lo has spoken extensively about the importance of historical novels that make LGBTQ+ teenagers visible in the past, giving them a lineage and a community that extends beyond their own lives.