The Lesbian Herstory Archives: Part II

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 ...