Joan Nestle (born May 12, 1940) is a Lambda Award winning writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which holds, among other things, everything she has ever written. She is openly lesbian and sees her work of archiving history as critical to her identity as "a woman, as a lesbian, and as a Jew."[1][2]
Nestle had been part of the working-class, butch and femme bar culture of New York City since the late 1950s. In an interview with Ripe Magazine, she recalled that the center of her social life as a young lesbian was a bar called the Sea Colony, which, typically for the time, was run by organized crime and that, in an attempt to avoid raids by the vice squad, allowed only one woman into the bathroom at a time:[6]
The bathroom line went from the back room through a narrow hallway to the front room to the toilet which was behind the bar. This butch woman would stand at the front of the line and we each got two wraps of toilet paper. ... It took me a long time to realize that while I was fighting for all these other causes, that it wasn't okay for me to get my allotted amount of toilet paper.
After the Stonewall riots in 1969, gay liberation became a focus of her activism. She joined the Lesbian Liberation Committee in 1971 and helped found the Gay Academic Union (GAU) in 1972. The following year, she and other members of the GAU began to gather and preserve documents and artifacts related to lesbian history. This project became the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which opened in 1974 in the pantry of the apartment she shared with her then-partner Deborah Edel, and later with her good friend Mabel Hampton,[7] and moved to a brownstoneinPark Slope, Brooklyn in 1992. Today its holdings include more than 20,000 books, 12,000 photographs, and 1,600 periodical titles. It holds everything written by Nestle.[4][8]
Nestle began writing fiction in 1978, when a prolonged illness prevented her from teaching for a year.[9] Her erotica focusing on butch and femme relationships made her a controversial figure during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s; members of Women Against Pornography called for censorship of her stories.[4] In her political writings, Nestle, a self-identified femme, argued that contemporary feminism, in rejecting butch and femme identities, was asking her to repress an important part of herself.[10][11] She said she "wanted people, especially lesbians, to see that the butch-femme relationship isn't just some negative heterosexual aping."[4] Her writings on the subject were highly influential; Lillian Faderman describes her as the "midwife" to a revised view of butch and femme,[10] and her 1992 anthology The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader became the standard work in its field.[12]
In 1992, Nestle delivered the first Kessler Lecture for the CUNY Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies titled "I Lift My Eyes to the Hill": the Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by a White Woman.[14] Her life was the subject of a 2002 documentary by Joyce Warshow entitled Hand on the Pulse, and she appears in the 1994 documentary about lesbian history Not Just Passing Through.[15]
^"Jewish Women and GLBT Pride". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 21 August 2012. As a woman, as a lesbian, as a Jew, I know that much of what I call history others will not. But answering that challenge of exclusion is the work of a lifetime.
^Nestle, Joan. "My Mother Liked to Fuck". In Golding, Sue (1997). The Eight Technologies of Otherness. New York: Routledge. pp. 159–161. ISBN0-415-14579-1.
^ abcd"Joan Nestle". Gay & Lesbian Biography. St. James Press. 1997. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center (2007). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale.
^"Joan Nestle". Contemporary Authors Online. Thomson Gale. 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center (2007). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale.
^Rapp, Linda (2005). "Nestle, Joan". glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. Archived from the original on 2007-07-07. Retrieved 2007-07-11.
^ abFaderman, Lillian (April 1992). "The Return of Butch and Femme: A Phenomenon in Lesbian Sexuality of the 1980s and 1990s". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 2 (4): 578–596.
^"Joan Nestle". Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution. Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
^Stone, Martha (October 31, 1997). "What is called fem(me)?". The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. 4 (4): 51.
^Nestle, Joan (July 18, 2001). "The River Diaries". JoanNestle.com. Retrieved 2007-07-12.
