if she looked up homosexuality she’d be cross referenced to deviancy and then cross referenced to pathology and then … prisons and mental institutions … I learned later that many lesbian women had been imprisoned and put in mental institutions, for things like wanting to wear trousers and not a skirt and that was an incarcerated offense … It formed an idea in my mind that this cannot be. It was a journey in self-hatred … and so when we did our own subject files, [we used] our own nouns, like “coming out,” which had never appeared in public libraries … [Back then] you had to get a special letter because gay books are in the closed collections [of libraries] and they still are in many places.
Q: Describe the collection.
A: This is an erotic place … we don’t want the body to be erased … we want the full range of women’s history … We’re not a role model collection … we’re not deciding here who’s a good woman to include and who’s not. We want everything! For future people. Much of our collection has been put on microfilm and our collection is now moving in the public world.
It’s not the place for an archive to decide what markings the future will need. It was very important to me to honor those women I’d met in those bars: to have working class history, to have sex workers history. For me one of the great shames of the women’s movement was the treatment of prostitutes, and its treatment of sex workers … This is just my sense.
