Sinister Wisdom 118: Forty-Five Years / A Tribute to the Lesbian Herstory Archives

By Sinister Wisdom

As the title suggests, 45 years ago movements of liberation made possible the birth of a new project in the world: the Lesbian Herstory Archives. A grassroots collection, the Archives was intentional about engaging with all facets and complexities of lesbian life, inclusive of diversity in race and gender-identity, from the bar life of the fifties and before, to the lesbian-feminist cultural richness of the mid-twentieth century and beyond, to the gender richness of the twenty-first. This issue honors an Archives that articulates the complexities of how lesbians make our way in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781944981464

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

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Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Editor: Julie R. Enszer

Guest Editors: Elvis Bakaitis, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, Red Washburn

Photo Editor: Morgan Gwenwald with technical support from Saskia Scheffer

Graphic Designer: Nieves Guerra

Copy Editor: Brynn Warriner

Board of Directors: Roberta Arnold, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Julie R. Enszer, Sara Gregory, J.P. Howard, Joan Nestle, Rose Norman, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Yasmin Tambiah, and Red Washburn

Front Cover Art: WomonSpirit jacket, 1989–1991 - Artist: Linda McKinney

Media: Painted, embroidered and stitched denim

Description: This richly embellished jacket was created and worn by Archives coordinator Linda McKinney. It is painted and embroidered with iconic imagery suggesting an alternative woman-centered history and spirituality. Amazon Knights, Matriarchy, and the labrys, a symbol of the goddess, are proud signifiers of McKinney’s involvement in the politics of re/definition that were so important to the movement. McKinney juxtaposed these symbols with markers of her everyday life, Greenwich Village NYC and West Harlem USA.

Back Cover Art: The Archivettes - Artist: Prisca Edwards

Media: Digital photograph

Size of artwork: 300 dpi

Description: Pictured in photograph from left to right, first row: Maxine Wolfe, Paula Grant, Teddy Minucci, Deborah Edel, Polly Thistlethwaite, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz; middle row: Saskia Scheffer, Elvis Bakaitis; back row: Red Washburn, Colette Denali Montoya-Sloan

Artist Biography: Prisca Edwards is a queer documentary photographer and video producer, passionate about social rights and community storytelling. Prisca mentors young filmmakers with the organization Reel Works and holds a degree in photojournalism from Rochester Institute of Technology. Based in Brooklyn she lives with her cats Dali & Matisse.

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976

Former editors and publishers:

Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson (1976–1981)

Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981–1983)

Michaele Uccella (1983–1984)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983–1987)

Elana Dykewomon (1987–1994)

Caryatis Cardea (1991–1994)

Akiba Onada-Sikwoia (1995–1997)

Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss (1997–2000)

Fran Day (2004–2010)

Julie R. Enszer & Merry Gangemi (2010–2013)

Julie R. Enszer (2013–)

Copyright © 2019 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

All rights revert to individual authors and artists upon publication.

Printed in the U. S. on recycled paper.

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Sinister Wisdom is a US non-profit organization; donations to support the work and distribution of Sinister Wisdom are welcome and appreciated. Consider including Sinister Wisdom in your will.

Sinister Wisdom, 2333 McIntosh Road, Dover, FL 33527-5980 USA

In Memory

Vicki Sherman

Arisa Reed 1957–1986

Rota Silverstrini 1941–1987

Mabel Hampton 1902–1989

Julia Penelope Stanley 1941–2013

Georgia Brooks 1943–2013

Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Notes for a Special Issue

Founding Members

Coordinators Over the Years

BEGINNINGS

Deborah Edel

How the Archives Got Its Name

Joan Nestle

Don’t Worry, I Will Find the Room: An Appreciation of Deborah Edel

Ann Allen Shockley

Remembering Apartment 13A

Lisa Tollner

My Time in 13A

Naomi Replansky

My First Encounter with the Lesbian Herstory Archives

Janet Jones

Stones

Katie Moore

Painting of Joan Nestle

Karin Lützen

A Dane at the Archives

Irare Sabasu

Legacy

Polly Thistlethwaite

To Tell the Truth: The Lesbian Herstory Archives: Chronicling a

People and Fighting Invisibility Since 1974

Judith Schwarz and Joan Nestle

An Exchange of Letters From LHA Newsletter # 6, July 1980

Joan Nestle

Archival Fragments

REFLECTIONS

Jewelle Gomez

I am Here Among Women

The Living Room

Alexis Danzig

Tales from the Road: Diaries of a Biker Chick

Lepa Mladjenovic

In a Lesbian Wonderland:

A Short Love Note from Eastern Europe

Kate Conroy

Lesbian in America, American in Ireland

Jean Taylor

Happy 45th Anniversary Lesbian Herstory Archives!

Kathy Hogan

Remembering a Time

Lisa E. Davis

From the Village to the Archives: Crooners, Strippers,

and Spies I Have Known

Rosita Angulo Libre de Marulanda

Titi Liberation

Lucinda Zoe

Sleeping with Joan (A Multigenerational Collection

Development Memoir Tale)

Elana Dykewomon

Naming the Lesbian Herstory Archives Again and Again

It’s All Herstory Now

AT HOME

Tracy Fitz and Barbara Jabaily

L.O.V. E. and LHA

Sharon Thompson

Powers of Suggestion:

From LHA to Lesbian Home Movie Project

Megan Rossman

The Archivettes

Alexis Clements, with Catalina Schliebener, Ellen Baxt, Luciana Pinchiero, and Elvis Bakaitis

Bringing the Newest Generations into the Archives

Elvis Bakaitis

By the Force of Our Presence

Stevie Jones and Red Washburn

Lez Create!: The Dyke Arts Workshop

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

What the Trees Said: Archiving a (Fictional)

Black Lesbian Forest

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz and Flavia Rando

On Teaching Community Radically: In Conversation about the

Lesbian Studies Institute at the Lesbian Herstory Archives

Fran Winant

The Lesbian Studies Institute at the Lesbian Herstory Archives

MARCHING FORWARD

Stefani Echeverría-Fenn

Archival Moments/Survival Moments

Melissa Tombro

Translation

AJ Rio-Glick

Trans and Lesbian Solidarity at the Archives

Meenakshi Poolapalli

The First Thing I Saw Was the Plaque

Nana Azatútyan

Queer

Grete Miller

Still

Mio Proepper

Someone Opens the Door

Editors

Archival Fragments

Roberta Arnold

Sinister Wisdom Censorship in Prison

Dorothy Randall Gray

Donna Allegra: A Personal Remembrance

Donna Allegra

Stilled Life

Obituary

Jean Shewolf Boudreaux - March 19, 1932 – April 24, 2020

Contributors

Notes for a Magazine

This first time I went to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, it was cold; the lesbian who greeted me at the door showed me where to hang my coat and encouraged me to take off my wet, heavy boots. Entering the brownstone, I was enchanted: the buttons, the t-shirts hanging on the walls, the rows and rows of books. I felt like Sarah Schulman in The Watermelon Woman would emerge at any moment from behind one of the doors and greet me without the celluloid distance. I had made it, in person, to the sacred archives dedicated entirely to lesbians. It may have been cold outside, but inside the Lesbian Herstory Archives was a warm embrace.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives is an august institution in our lesbian-feminist community, and I am thrilled to present Sinister Wisdom 118: Forty-Five Years / A Tribute to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. This issue gathers a variety of testimonies, documents, and stories about the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and its work today. Deftly assembled by a collective of women who also work with the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Sinister Wisdom 118: Forty-Five Years / A Tribute to the Lesbian Herstory Archives knits together two vibrant lesbian institutions; I could not be more proud to present it to you, our readers, our shared beloved lesbian communities.

Sinister Wisdom 118: : Forty-Five Years / A Tribute to the Lesbian Herstory Archives celebrates forty-five years of the Lesbian Herstory Archives as Sinister Wisdom publishes in its forty-fourth year, demonstrating the continued vibrancy and relevance of lesbians, lesbian-feminist literature, art, culture, and life. Enjoy the stories in these pages—and think about how you can support the organizations that continue this work.

As you read these Notes for a Magazine and read the full issue, I hope you have had the pleasure of attending one of our Zoom gatherings. Begun as a response to the social isolation of the spring, we have had a few gatherings that have been meaningful to people and wonderful celebrations of the work of issues of Sinister Wisdom.

It is fall with its seasonal changes; each fall Sinister Wisdom conducts a fall fundraising campaign, reminding our readers of the importance of both subscriptions and also of charitable giving to Sinister Wisdom. Sinister Wisdom exists because people, primarily though not exclusively, lesbians invest in our work, buying subscriptions, giving subscriptions to friends, and making donations to support the work of the journal. I hope you will join in this annual ritual of the journal.

Every year, I remind you as a reader and supporter of Sinister Wisdom that the work of Sinister Wisdom is done nearly exclusively by volunteers. My time is given freely to the journal as is the time and energy of guest editors. All of the writers and artists give of their gifts freely to the journal and receive no compensation. Sinister Wisdom runs on volunteer energy, on a love for and commitment to lesbian communities here today and imagined in the future.

Can you make a gift this fall to support the work of Sinister Wisdom? It is a simple proposition, your gifts support the paper, printing, binding, and mailing of Sinister Wisdom to a community of women around the United States and around the world. Your subscriptions and your donations help Sinister Wisdom to continue to be a force for lesbians in the world. In advance, thank you.

Thank you for all you do for lesbians and all you do for Sinister Wisdom.

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

October 2020

Notes for a Special Issue

From a conversation around the Lesbian Herstory Archives dinner-work table, 1979. The speaker, a Jewish woman in her sixties, says, "I had a chance to read The Well of Loneliness that had been translated into Polish before I was taken into the camps. I was a young girl at the time and one of the ways I survived in the camp was by remembering that book. I wanted to live long enough to kiss a woman."

Forty-five years ago, give or take a few months, movements of liberation made possible the birth of a new project in the world, the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Here on these pages some of the founding stories will be shared, telling what it meant to walk first into an apartment and then into a four-story limestone building, where shame became history, secrets became shared connections, complex lesbian, queer histories enriched by new generations. Our vision was of an inclusive, grassroots collection that welcomed all expressions of lesbian life, from the bar life of the fifties and before to the lesbian feminist richness of the mid-twentieth century and beyond, to the gender richness of the twenty-first. Not a role-model archives but one rich with the complexities of how we made our way in the world.

Creating the archives was an extension of our activist visions, of our belief in a collectivist site of cultural memory, the refusal of prevailing historical amnesia because we were a deviant people. Deborah, Joan, Julia, Sahli, and Pam came to this project with different lesbian histories, but shared ground as well. We carried the history of the labor struggle with us, of our involvement in the anti-war movement, the civil rights struggles, the women’s marches for reproductive rights. We were radical and of the Left and this was important. In building the archives something much larger than ourselves was taking shape. First the space, dear 13A, then the stability of our jobs, then the growing support of the communities, then our increasing joy at the growing collection, the comradeship of Ms. Mabel Hampton, Judith Schwarz, Georgia Brooks, the transforming of an apartment into a public lesbian world of discovery, the at-homes, the traveling slide shows, the Thursday night work groups, the pilgrimages of overseas lesbians carrying in their hands the first cultural creations of their communities, marches, and demonstrations with our images of lesbians of the past, our homemade banners proclaiming in the streets of Washington and New York, we were there in memory of the voices we had lost.

At the beginning Deborah and Joan had taken a vow, that if our personal relationship changed, which it did ten years later, no chaos would befall the Lesbian Herstory Archives. And it did not. The Archives grew and expanded, supported by so many of you reading these pages and beyond. A grassroots vision of lesbian, queer, feminist rethinking of what is history and who gets to remember. Oh, the stories we could tell, but here, in this special issue of Sinister Wisdom, it is time for many other voices, new and old, to share their journeys with shaping the cultural richness that is the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Now in these times, our places of cultural autonomy hold the stories of how we used our imaginations and our bodies to refuse ordained national brutalities. Thank you, Julie and all those who work so hard to keep Sinister Wisdom flourishing, for this opportunity. And thanks to all of you who have kept LHA flourishing for these past 45 years.

Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle

October 2019

Biographical Information about Founding Members

From LHA Newsletter #1, 1975

Sahli Cavallaro: Founding member of the Women’s Caucus in the Gay Academic Union, briefly affiliated with Identity House as a peer counsellor and part-time poet and graduate student in psychology. She is currently interested in exploring ways of creating an intellectual and agricultural Amazon lifestyle on the periphery of the system with other lesbians.

Deborah Edel: A Lesbian/feminist working toward a community of women. More traditionally, she functions as an Educational Psychologist with children with learning problems.

Joan Nestle: Lecturer in English, SEEK Program, Queens College, CUNY. A lesbian activist who is old enough to remember the darkness of weekend bars and young enough to joyously believe in the liberation of our future—a cherisher and wishful creator of Lesbian literature.

Pamela Oline: Has been involved in the lesbian feminist movement in New York since 1970. She is a member of the Feminist Therapy Referral Collective and Identity House, a counseling service for Gay people. (One of the important functions of identity House is to provide peer counseling for the Lesbian community.)

Julia Stanley [later to be known as Julia Penelope]: Although presently out of the system, she is sometimes a controversial linguist, exploring sexism in English. An independent scholar, she is now interested in finding ways to become a self-sufficient agrarian with other Lesbians.

Coordinators Over the Years, 1974 to 2018

Alexis Danzig, Amy Beth, Annette Spalling, Arisa Reed, Ashley Bowers, Ashley-Luisa Santangelo, Barbie Painter, Beth Haskell, Beth Levine, Caitlin Featherstone, Carol O’Donnell, Claire Moed, Colette Denali Montoya-Sloan, Constantina Constantinou, Deborah Edel, Debra Rothberg, Desiree Yael Vester, Devin Lindow, Ed Vegas, Elvis Bakaitis, Flavia Rando, Gabrielle Korn, Georgia Brooks, Ina Rimpau, Jan Boney, Jane Van Ingen, Janet Prolman, Jennica Born, Joan Nestle, Joy Rich, Julia Penelope Stanley, Judith Schwarz, Kayleigh Salstrand, Lauren Gulbrandsen, Leni Goodman, Linda McKinney, Lisa deBoer, Lucinda Zoe, Marguerite Campbell, Maxine Wolfe, Mimi Lester, Monica Neal, Morgan Gwenwald, Nancy Frohlich, Nancy Robertson, Nicole Martin, Paula Grant, Pam Hicks, Pamela Oline, Polly Thistlethwaite, Rachel Corbman, Rebecca Hoffman, Red Washburn, Robin Riback, Sabrina Williams, Sahli Cavallo, Saskia Scheffer, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, Stevie Jones, Suzanne Bernard, Teddy Minucci, Terry Collins, Valerie Itnyre, Vicki Sherman

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BEGINNINGS

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How the Archives Got Its Name

Deborah Edel

Memory is a strange thing. Some people remember conver sations almost verbatim; I don’t. I remember some of the visual aspects more clearly, so having said that, let me tell the story of how the Lesbian Herstory Archives got its name.

In the winter and spring of 1974, a group of women inspired to collect Lesbian history met regularly to begin the process of building an organization. The group meetings varied in size, but averaged around ten or more women at any one meeting. I don’t have a strong recollection of what went on at these meetings, but I do remember the naming meeting. By June 1974, we realized that it was time to come up with a formal name for the work we were intending to do and the collection we were intending to build. The June meeting was held in the apartment of Naomi Holoch and Barbara Levy. Joan Nestle, who had been a driving force behind much of the meeting and planning, was not at this meeting, as she had started out on a cross-country car journey.

I remember that the room was full, and I found a chair by the hall doorway. There was no disagreement about the first word: lesbian. We all knew that we did not want to use one of the popular terms at the time—womyn, woman, wimmin—as we felt that was not an accurate reflection of the work we wanted to collect. We knew also that homosexual and gay were not the right fit and that dyke was also not inclusive enough. So lesbian it was. The next word we came up with was her-story: herstory. Though we were sure we had not coined the term, it was not one we heard around