New York City is full of urban legends. There are the alligators that supposedly stalk the sewers. There’s the pirate who’s said to have buried treasure on Liberty Island. And then there’s the Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League.
“I’d heard whispers of this game for so long,” says the photographer Kate Owen, 35. For a year, she’d wondered where the mysterious tournament was held and who exactly was behind it. Then, on Valentine’s Day, she saw an Instagram post by the queer collective GayJoy calling for “a few more artsy gays to play backgammon” that evening. At 7:30 that night she optimistically made her way to the third floor of Bortolami, the contemporary art gallery in TriBeCa, where she’d been directed after responding to the post. “I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the game,” she says. “But as soon as I walked in, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This is it.’”
A few dozen women, along with a handful of men and nonbinary folks, were milling around the airy space, sipping wine and rolling dice. Candlelight illuminated rows of backgammon boards atop long tables; Kylie Minogue and Destiny’s Child played in the background.
The Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League — known as L.B.B.L. for short — formed in 2017 after Ellen Swieskowski, 35, the founder of the gallery-guide app See Saw, struck up a conversation with Hester Hodde, 36, an interior designer, at the West Village lesbian bar Cubbyhole. Swieskowski had been introduced to backgammon the previous summer and had the zeal of a convert; growing up, Hodde played with her family on ski trips. “It was a fun, jokey idea to bring people together,” Swieskowski says.
