I recently had a conversation with Joan Nestle, one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The archives are housed by the Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, a grassroots, community-based not-for-profit. For many years the archives was housed on the Upper West Side, but in 1992, it was moved to a four-story limestone building in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.
Joan provided me an extensive tour of the archives, which included books, essays, periodicals, photographs, t-shirts, art, buttons, posters, bar cards, and all kinds of historical documents. She also explained what made her undertake this as a lifelong project.
Q: What inspired you to do this?
A: As someone who was never a librarian or an archivist, I was never trained as those things.
But it was my own coming out experience into a criminalized, pathologized world of the late ’50s and the incredible rich and brave community of women I met in those bars. I was also a civil rights activist and many other things while I was humiliated daily in the bars [in New York] … the bars were our theater … as a young woman I found love and touch and an incredible community of women …
The McCarthy era feared all kinds of “deviants” and tried to police it and this created a consciousness in me … then I was participating in the Civil Rights Movement, so that was another message that people could take history into their own hands and then there was the women’s movement. And all of these things came together …
In 1966 (I’m really a New York girl I was born in the Bronx), I started teaching at the Seek Program … the first open admissions program at the City University.
In order to teach my students, who were from many different places in the world in 1966, I started to read about colonization and that really influenced my thinking as a queer woman, as a femme woman, that’s how I came out, about how my life was controlled by the state. I read a book called The Colonized and the Colonizer. In it, he gives a portrait of the colonized and the controlled consciousness of the colonized. This would be as true for women’s history as for queer history.
There was one paragraph that I couldn’t get out of my mind … it was a paragraph about history … how the colonizer controls the colonized sense of a historical self. It was this:
“The colonized are condemned to lose their memory.”
I know there had been women like me … but because the larger society—just like with women’s history—had marginalized these stories and these lives, and had even done worse, which was to criminalize them … that became what I call my trope, my anthem for a lifetime of work, besides teaching and writing, was this place!
So, a group of us in 1973 were involved in something called the Gay Academic Union, which was to get gay voices on the CUNY campuses and out of that was a CR [consciousness raising] group, which was a famous way of politicizing things in the ’60s and ’70s …
The irony was, I was going to a police bar called the Sea Colony … What really stands behind this place, which I feel has great dignity to it, is the very humiliating experience [women faced] which was because these bars were policed and we were considered sexual deviants, we were watched … our bathroom habits were watched … but I knew from the very beginning how the state could control the body, as I think every woman has a sense of.
Out of that group in ’73–‘74, we started talking about doing a Lesbian Archives. We decided to take our history back from those who saw us as less than fully human. There were women’s history movements at the same time doing the same thing … we’re a throwback because now there’s technology.
Q: How did you go about starting the archives?
A: We didn’t write a grant for money, etc. We just knew what our community needed and because it was in my apartment, we didn’t have to pay rent … we gave a percentage of our salaries to keeping the archives growing: buying the materials, etc. It was a communal effort from the beginning. There’s no hierarchy, no board of directors. We have consensus meetings. Really, a throwback to another time.
So, when we started, we were the first one in the world … Now there is an international movement of gay and lesbian and bisexual archives. And now, major universities are fighting to get this material because so many of their students are interested in gender studies … You’re actually sitting in an artifact!
Q: Explain what you mean by “artifact.”
A: Something that was created by another time … by women’s visions, possibilities, and refusals. Anger is as important as yes!
Q: What do you mean by “possibilities and refusals”?
A: … People had said “You can’t do an archive. You don’t know how to do it!” ... We said, ‘it has to be done.!’ We’ll start with our own private collections … it was a time (if you know the sixties), when people who were dispossessed in many ways did not wait for the government to all of a sudden see them as human. But we took our own responsibility in a certain way for our own humanity. That’s what fueled the Civil Rights movement. I did voter registration work, I marched from Selma to Montgomery … no one can ever forget who did that, the courage of everyday people, of children, facing firemen’s hoses, for the simple fact that they wanted to vote in their own country. When you see that, nothing is impossible … I’m also a socialist, so any resources I had I felt should be shared.
And the refusals come with it. The refusal is: not to stay in our place. Not to let our memory be shaped basically by those who hated us, who thought we were not fully human … It’s a story that’s never old because unfortunately power creates new oblivions every day, in particular this world.
This is part one of a two-part article on The Lesbian Herstory Archives. Click here to read Part II.
