The Lesbian Herstory Archives: Part II

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.