DIVA: As a historian, are you concerned that young
lesbians may forget their history, or not have access to
it?
Joan Nestle: I am a grassroots historian, I
have never formally taught history. Every generation has its own
story to create. I'm not one who says: "Oh, why don't they know
this?" No, no, no, no. Part of my reason for [travelling from
Australia to take part in the Lesbian Lives conference] was to see
how well these images from close to 50 years ago, some of them,
will live in new times, in new lesbian imaginations? If I don't
take the risk of offering them, I can't really judge the
forgetfulness of another generation.
I do think… under the pressure of the present, it's hard to make
a compelling case for young people worrying about jobs, about
education, but they have different tools, they have the internet…
It's a struggle to keep alive the past but I believe that [you can
do it] in a way that connects to what young people are exploring.
That was one of the wonderful moments, how many young women came up
to me and it didn't feel as if they were looking at something
antique, you know. They saw their lives.
We just have to work harder, those of us who feel there's
something important [to communicate]. We can't blame the young
ones. Those that have access to privileged educations, they'll have
the opportunities. It's more about bringing history in a living way
into communities that are struggling to survive.
When I helped create the Lesbian Herstory Archive, I did it
consciously to have a place for those images because in 1973 there
was no place [that ensured] the survival both of the image and the
cultural artefact, which gives room [not just] for a continuing
historical story of desire, but of the life itself. Societies
didn't give us public memory; we created it. They gave us public
humiliation and public defamation and pathologizing but we created
our own public memory. I can date from when in America a public
movement of gay and lesbian and queer history began. And we're very
lucky to have that.
You spoke at Lesbian Lives 2011 about a journey you made
to Israel, and also made connections to the situation in Egypt,
where former President Muburak had very recently
resigned.
Yes. This is one of the things about conferences, they are
wonderful, they're like a retreat, but then the danger of that too
can be that the walls do close in. There's a whole world happening
outside and what hit me that morning when it was my time to speak
was that I had to say something about this massive liberation
struggle going on. I could not have stood there without [making the
connection between] the black liberation movement, the civil rights
movement, the women's movement, the gay liberation movement.
I know that there are many in those liberation movements who
want nothing to do with us. But the truth is that we who have
experienced the struggle for a kind of autonomy have connections.
They're not the same connections, but we have connections. So it
was important to me to do that; it seemed to be an insult not
to.
So yes, I did go to Israel under the auspices of Hana and
Dahlia, two lesbian women, who helped found Women In Black, and I
stood in Haifa and in Jerusalem, and they were being called whores
and told "you should die" from the Israelis and bombs were falling
from the Gaza insurgents, and these incredibly brave women have
been holding Women In Black vigils for years and years.
[With them] we went to East Jerusalem, where we met this
wonderful group called Aswat, a Palestinian lesbian group. It
changed my life because I saw the wall, I saw the humiliations. I
saw the history. I live the Jewish history, like I live queer
history, in my body. I know the offered rationales, but to me they
lead to the exact opposite of my sense of Jewish history.
There was a group, a radical young queer Jewish Israeli group
called Black Laundry who would carry anti-occupation banners, with
their bare bodies, half naked, the new generation of queers,
risking beatings in the streets. And I met with them when I was
asked to give a talk at a queer studies event in Tel Aviv. And that
night in Jerusalem in a back yard [we met] these beautiful young
femme women and handsome beautiful bois, just aching to hear how we
survived another time. And I have never forgotten how the young
femme women said: "Come back to us, we need you, when the
occupation is over." So there is the intersection. The hard
struggle is that our intersections all come in different
places.
The rest of this interview appeared in the May 2011 issue of
DIVA magazine.
Additional image credit: Maria Short, University of
Brighton
