Amazon.com Review
A rich new collection by poet, historian, and lesbian activist Joan Nestle, ranging from meditations on her femme identity to arguments for a diversified college curriculum. Cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which were housed for 20 years in her New York apartment, Nestle has made no clear division between her erotic and her political writings, a stance that has irritated many feminists. The archive itself is a ceaseless, passionate response to the first time that Nestle ever tried to "find out about" herself by writing a high school paper on homosexuality. She began her research at the New York Public Library, and in the card catalog "found the word
Homosexual, followed by a dash and the words,
see Deviancy, and next to this,
see Pathology, with suggested subcategories of prisons and mental institutions." Her inclusive sensibilities have informed the acquisition policies of the archive, which has collected everything from pulp novels of the 1940s and 1950s to the diary of a lesbian prostitute to the pasties of a lesbian stripper. "If we ask decorous questions of history," Nestle argues, "we will get a genteel history." Essential reading in the social history of postwar America and the particular struggles of lesbians to be included in that history.
--Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
A leading light of lesbian and gay history (she founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn), Nestle presents a collection of her writings over the last 10 years. An effort to chronicle the lives of working-class lesbians lies at the heart of Nestle's work, and her essay "The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by a White Woman" shows why the pursuit is so important: Hampton was a black lesbian from the South who worked most of her life as a domestic but also participated fully in her community and culture. She did not have to "come out" because, Nestle tells us, she was never "in," and so provides us with "the vision of an integrated life." In "On Rereading Esther's Story," Nestle shares her new "understanding of butch and fem, of the drama of gender" with regard to a Puerto Rican taxi driver named Esther, whom Nestle had years ago thought of as "merely butch." Some of Nestle's stories of lesbian erotica are included, and Nestle recalls that, during the 1960s, many lesbians were as shocked as heterosexual women by her boldness. Some of the best writing in the volume appears in Nestle's moving accounts of what it is like to live with colon cancer, as she not only tells of the extended and painful treatment but also includes poetic (and erotic) tales of sexual desire and its frightening ebb, and of sexual fun in the midst of devastating illness. Nestle is by turns earnest, pedantic, funny, bold and courageous; her collection is, clearly, the work of an irrepressible, principled woman.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
