When people think about the major queer meccas of the United States, they may think of New York City’s West Village, San Francisco’s Castro district, and Philadelphia’s Gayborhood. Less well known is Womontown, a neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri that was transformed into a lesbian utopia in the early 1990s.

While public opinion on queer people began improving in the 1990s, the legal climate towards the community remained harsh. Same-sex marriage was banned at the federal level, and many states, including Missouri, banned “homosexual conduct”—effectively, sexual contact between men. A 2003 Supreme Court ruling that overturned a similar Texas law made Missouri’s unenforceable. 

Womontown—which is not a misspelling, but rather how the neighborhood’s residents demonstrated their intentions to exist outside of patriarchal structures—was started by couple Andrea Nedelsky and Mary Ann Hopper. It functioned as a rare enclave where lesbians could unapologetically be themselves, love their partners openly, and establish both community and financial autonomy by purchasing homes.

At its largest, Womontown was home to 80 people and operated as an organized community in a 12-block span of Kansas City’s Longfellow neighborhood. Residents purchased 28 homes and 14 apartment buildings, despite facing discriminatory lending practices and intimidation from the local community. 

Nedelsky had purchased a home there in the 1970s and wanted Hopper to move in with her, Hopper said in Womontown, a 2022 Kansas City PBS documentary on the neighborhood. But at the time, the area was not considered particularly hospitable. The neighborhood had a reputation for being a home to drug dealers and people involved in gang violence, according to former residents and the film’s producer, Sandy Woodson. 

Hopper, who recounted being heckled on the front porch and hearing gunshots nearby, was not interested in trying to fix what she felt was a bad situation. 

“It was like, ‘I don’t think I can live here unless we really make some changes,’” she said in the documentary. “So then we just started imagining, what if we could just walk hand in hand, freely down the streets, a bunch of lesbians all in this neighborhood?” 

That conversation spurred a call to action. Nedelsky and Hopper began to encourage people to join them in the neighborhood, where, according to Hopper, purchasing a three-story house could cost between $15,000 to $20,000 at the time. 

Because the neighborhood’s real estate had been considered undesirable, it offered Womontown residents an economically viable opportunity to build financial stability through home ownership. They were also able to create their own safe space, where they had control over who was invited into their........

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