This is part two of a two-part article on the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I spoke with Joan Nestle, one of the founders of the Archive.
Q: Tell me about the relationship between the gay rights movement and the women’s movement.
A: I was of the bar community … I came out of a working class sexualized bar community. The women I was with in bars were sex workers, a wide variety of women, many of whom were not welcomed in the early women’s liberation movement … One of Betty Friedan’s [author of The Feminine Mystique] fears in the mid-1970s was that the women’s movement would be tainted if lesbians were a part of it … So there was a public conference in Washington, DC, where she talked about the ‘lavender menace’ [lavender is a color associated with gay women] … and at that speech, people like Rita Mae Brown stood up all wearing lavender menace t-shirts saying “We Are Here.” There was definite tension. Part of it was the need to be respectable.
This is an ongoing discussion about the role of lesbians in the women’s movement; whether it was good for the movement; whether if you took away the lesbian energy, would there have been a women’s movement; would the women’s movement be in a different place today if lesbians weren’t associated with it? The critics, of strong women of any kind, can call you two things: a queer or a whore. So there were tensions. And we founded this as a lesbian separatist movement. We were never really separatist though, I worked with men.
When we started, people asked us “why do you call it a lesbian archive, why don’t you call it a women’s archive?” And we said “we can’t, because lesbians disappear under the name of women,” at that time.
Q: Talk about the collection in the beginning.
A: … This collection grew and grew … I lived in the Upper West Side … thousands of people lived with me, because it was a public space (in a private home). People would come through to use the collection, to hand deliver creations to us. In 1992, I turned fifty, and we decided the archives had to have a home of its own. We found a bank who would willingly lend a group of lesbians money—without a board of directors! We paid the mortgage back the quickest ever, in their loan history, from thousands and thousands of small donations—because we’d spent twenty years building trust …
Q: How did you build that trust?
A: First of all, I was part of the community and people knew me. But I’ll tell you how we did it: we sent out letters to all the existing lesbian periodicals … saying there’s this new project ... we’d pooled our own collections and we’d go on speaking engagements … we had shopping bags and in the shopping bags would be some of the artifacts that we had [from the archives] … the bags got too precious, so then we started doing a slide show … we did the slide show all over America and then in Europe … little by little women knew we were coming and they’d have their albums …
It was just this wondrous time when a vision of possibilities met a need—my way of saying it was “we had to turn deprivation into plentitude.”
Q: What do you mean by this?
A: Deprivation meaning a community that feels they’re small and fragile and hasn’t done much. But actually, lesbian women, or women who love women or women with erotic imaginations that were complex had been creating culture—rich, rich culture. So we just gathered in one place. Particularly women my age … would walk in and actually weep and say “I didn’t know we had done so much.” And then they’d add their voice to the story.
Plentitude is the opposite. Deprivation can cause bad things. Like for me, the rush to gay marriage comes from deprivation. I’m not sure marriage is good for anyone … or should gays serve in the military … To me, not everyone agrees with me, this comes from deprivation. It means if you’re not allowed to do something, all of a sudden it becomes so important to do it, whether it really makes sense or not in a larger social vision goes by the board, because you’re so hungry for the recognition, for the pat on the head that says, now you can be like everyone else …
Q: What about financial benefits of marriage?
A: For me, the reason I gave a life to doing this was because I envisioned a different world, in many different ways, besides gender. Economically. A different use of power … I recognize that as citizens of a country, gay people should have the choices and human rights.
But, finances are an interesting thing. This is my own personal politics … but: I think our battles should be not to attach rights to institutions like marriage. Not to attach rights if you enter an agreement with the state, but to broaden the definition. Everyone should have health care. Everyone should have access to a friend’s or lover’s estate. All of that—but not in terms of shoring up oppressive institutions, like the military or marriage.
No, I don’t think Women’s history and lesbian history are the same thing … I don’t speak anymore about a women’s movement, there are many movements; there is not one feminism, there are many feminisms. God knows what the word lesbian means anymore … the young people are changing.
Q: How are they changing?
A: A lot of young people don’t even want a gender title … they don’t want to be a gender as is created in the prevailing social structure ... So that’s what I mean, when we started we thought we knew what lesbian meant, but now we’ve just expanded with the times … We really see that all these labels are historic creations—even the word woman. It means so many very different things.
… If a gay woman went to the public library in the 1950s ...
