I’ve been more than a little in love with Joan Nestle lately. She co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1972, and is a beautiful and fabulous activist, writer, historian, and all-around lesbian. Watch this clip from a documentary about her called Hand on the Pulse (that I will hopefully be able to one day locate and see):
She’s so confident, so articulate about her desires and her entitlement to them. And trust me, that’s not something that lesbians are taught to be. I love this quote by her, from her essay “Butch-Fem Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” which I found a few years ago in a book called Queering Religion, and found so moving much that I wrote it down right on my folder, and hadn’t realized until recently that it was by her:
In the fifties, when we walked in the Village holding hands, we knew we were courting violence, but we also knew the political implications of how we were courting each other and chose not to sacrifice our need to their anger.
That last part is my favorite: “we…chose not to sacrifice our need to their anger.” That’s something that queers of all stripes would do well to keep remembering today, as assimilation has become the new order. We’re allowing our identities to become subsumed under the umbrella of capitalistic identity politics, something that we consume, rather than something that we carve out ourselves and wear proudly in the world. Oh, but for a few more Joan Nestles in the world!
