Speaking with the amazing lesbian writer of her youth in the outlaw culture of the Sea Colony Bar, in pre-liberation Greenwich Village, her writing, her 60 years of political activism and the lasting legacy of the Lesbian Herstory Archive she co-founded in 1974.
By Dylan Foley
(Joan Nestle, at home in Australia)
Joan Nestle was born in the Bronx in 1940 and was raised there and in Queens by her widowed mother. At the age of 17 in Greenwich Village, she embraced the outlaw culture of the Mob-run and Vice Squad-policed lesbian bar the Sea Colony on 8t h Avenue. She immersed herself in the butch-femme world of the 1950’s as a proud femme, with her glorious mane of dark hair and tight sweaters that showed off her curves.
Nestle went to Queens College in 1958. She later became a writing teacher there for the next 30 years, from 1967 to 1997, teaching students from historically underserved communities and new immigrant young people in the SEEK Program.
Her two classic essay collections are A Restricted Country (1987) and A Fragile Union(1988), where her writing is permeated with history, desire and dissent. Nestle has been a staunch and passionate defender of the butch-femme culture, and has written gorgeous essays on the pre-liberation lesbian life in the Greenwich Village of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
In 1974, in her large Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment, Nestle and a small group of lesbian activists founded the Lesbian Herstory Archive, which set out to document, record and archive the history of lesbian life in America. The women collected the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950’s, work boots and a helmet used by a butch steelworker in Buffalo, lesbian newsletters and journals, and pasties used by a lesbian stripper. Volunteers tithed their incomes to keep the archive going.
With the Archive, Nestle was steadfast about keeping lesbian history complex, avoiding the pitfalls of portraying lesbians as “a model minority” and including infamous artifacts like the files of a Greenwich Village lesbian who spied for the FBI during the 1940’s, whose court testimony destroyed the socially progressive Photo League.
The Lesbian Herstory Archive eventually outgrew Nestle’s apartment and was moved to a townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1992, where it has thrived. The archive takes no government money.
Nestle has edited numerous anthologies, including The Best Lesbian Erotica 2000 and The Persistent Desire: The Butch-Femme Reader(1992), which is out of print and sells for more than $200 online.
Nestle has also published numerous scholarly articles, personal essays and erotica. She has also written extensively about Mabel Hampton, a former performer from 1920’s Harlem, and later a housecleaner and janitor, who became a legend and elder in the New York lesbian community. Miss Hampton was a family friend, and Nestle took care of her at the end of her long life.
In 2001, after successfully surviving colon and breast cancer, Nestle moved to Australia to live with her lover and partner, Diana Otto, a law professor at the University of Melbourne.
Nestle’s 19 years in Australia has not meant retirement. She works with ALGA, the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives; AJDS, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, co-founded the People’s Performance Project, serves on the board of Sinister Wisdom and still keeps her hand in with LHA. In 2018, she gave a talk, “Reflections on Legacies and Solidarities from the perspective of a 50s Femme: Fragments of Stories, Encounters, Perils and Cries of Possibilities,” at a conference celebrating the 40th anniversary of ALGA. She has written, among other things, about the founding of the LHA, the tortured history of the Occupied Territories in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an American Jew, and about a lesbian publisher in Slovenia who translated A Restricted Country in 2014.
Nestle and I spoke by Skype on July 7, 2020 at her home in Melbourne. Nestle, now 80, was witty and vibrant, discussing her complex youth at the Sea Colony as a young femme lesbian, her years of activism, the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archive and her writing. It was wonderful to bask in Joan Nestle’s keen intellect for two hours.
I had sent Joan Nestle some questions in advance, which provoked some memories.
JOAN NESTLE: I have a lot on my mind. Reading your questions is a way to live in another place for a while.
DYLAN FOLEY: What inspired you to become a political and social activist?
JN: Actually, it started with the fact that both my mother and my brother had police records, been on parole for separate reasons, for much of my childhood. Their crimes were survival crimes, but I saw myself as an exile from expected domesticities for most of my early life. Always wearing a key around my neck since my mother was at work all day, I was one of the dreaded “lock-key” children that right wingers said were causing the downfall of America. This taught me that prevailing national stories about who was human and who was unwanted were lies. I started working at 13, managing to stay in high school by leaving my mother in the basement apartment in the Bronx and going to live with my Aunt Miriam and Uncle Murray in the new neighborhood of Bayside, Queens in the early 50s. As a child, my mother took me to the Village site of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, where 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, jumped to their deaths or were burned alive after being locked in a burning sweatshop. All of these knowledges led me to both to social and political questioning from the ‘50’s on, and allowed me to enter the doors of the Sea Colony, a public deviant gathering place.
It was at Queens College, 1958 to 1962, that I joined organized protest movements such as the anti-HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) movement, the Congress of Racial Equality, which led to freedom ride bus trips to Maryland and protesting the segregated lunch counters in Flushing, Queens. I was involved with SANE, the movement to end nuclear testing and took part in early reproductive rights marches in Manhattan.As a closeted queer woman, I marched with civil rights protesters from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. All this time I was living another life, that of a sexual deviant in the words of the times.
But in 1971, my world of social justice protesting and my criminalized sexual life came into open tension when flannel-clad lesbians came into Kooky’s, a large lesbian bar on 14th street, shouting and throwing Gay Liberation Front leaflets into the air. I looked up from my drink and found one of the flyers and went to my first gay liberation meeting the next week. But I always carried with me my bar communities that first gave my desire life and their courage to claim a public space.
My experiences in the complex world of marginal communities, sexual and political, the fear that in the boundless energy of the new days of lesbian liberation, these bar communities were going to be exiled yet again, inspired my own prolific writing on the lesbian community.
DF: Your two essays on the Sea Colony, “The Bathroom Line” and “Esther’s Story” are devastatingly beautiful pieces. How did you finally write them?
JN: You said to me, you must have more details. Those essays took 20 years to write. The initial experience of entering a risky territory with very little to go on, grew sharper as time went on, not less. There were three themes that structured my time in the Village: desire, dissent and community.
I wrote those two pieces and many more, to say thank you to the women, already well schooled in surviving exile and marginalization, whom I met at the Sea Colony, my Village bar in the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s. I wrote them to preserve the memory of a cultural space, a community of so- called deviants who were the first to claim a public space for us. I was in my late teens, early 20s when this Village bar became central to my life and so the older women I met there had already lived years of policed and yet full lives. “The Bathroom Line” was our nightly ritual of humiliation and yet I saw resistance there and community bonding. I stood on the line, getting my allotted amount of toilet paper, but I knew all around me people were on the march and soon we would join them, but I would never forget that line and my comrades. I kept this memory deep inside.
“Esther’s Story” was written because I had to. All around me in the brave new world of lesbian feminism which I celebrated there was also a prevailing narrative that judged my bar communities harshly or forgot about them all together. In the freedom of lesbian feminism, I had the strength to dissent. I wrote this story, to both portray and honor a young femme’s erotic journey, an older butch woman’s gift of touch in the early ‘60s of the East and West Village. I wrote to celebrate our bodies while at the time of actual writing my own body was faltering.
I was living on the lower East Side in the early ‘60’s, before it became fashionable, and on the weekends usually around 9 in the evening I would leave on my walk from one part of the Village to the other, a young wanting woman intent on finding her needed touch.
I see that young woman leaving her tenement apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen on 9th Street, in the East Village. The first thing I ever published was something I wrote that happened when I was on one of those walks. One experience I had on the border between East and West Village stands as a metaphor for that time. Going down a dark side street, cobblestoned, empty street, I saw a large drunken man sprawled in the middle of the road. I knew I should have kept walking, worried about being a young woman alone on this dark street where no respectable girl would be--remember the time--but I thought he will be run over if I leave him there. That voice, “Joan, he’s not safe.” We were comrades of the night. I stopped, went back, walked into the road, telling him he had to move to the sidewalk for his safety. He could not do it and so I put my hands under his shoulders, he was a large heavy man, but somehow I dragged him to the safety of the sidewalk. Only then could I continue on my journey. I thought he was like me, a deviant, living dangerously, and I could not leave him. I think back to that 18-year-old young woman, who knew she would walk streets other women were too frightened to walk on, she would be the unprotected freak but desire and all I was learning about the abuse of power, gave me strength and so did that Village bar I was heading to, where respectable people never ventured. I was a young wanting woman, and my steps from the East Village to the West Village took me from my working-class family, where my widowed mother who might sometimes be called a sex worker, but most times was a bookkeeper. Here I am at 80 remembering that dark night between the two Villages.
The history of dissent and that was the dissent of the body, as well as political dissent was a gift from my mother. My mother taught me very little of traditional domesticities. But she told me of the greatness of Paul Robeson, a great internationalist and thus considered a traitor by the McCarthy ‘50’s. One of the first things she did was take me to the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire where she recreated the terrors of the entrapped women workers and the resulting birth of the garment unions.
Now to accommodate your desire for details to bring the queer Village alive, my queer Village. When you ask about the Mob, the hardness of the Mob, we often felt, the old timers at the Sea Colony, an affection for Bruno, the Mob representative, if you want to call him that. Bruno stood at a high table and vetted everyone who came in. He did have a special relationship with the police, because the police were paid off every weekend. We saw that. The Vice Squad was more of the intrusion. In an ironic way, the organized criminals who ran the bars gave us protection from the organized terrorists of the government, the Vice Squad and the police. Often it was Bruno who offered aid both financial and in terms of jobs to women in the bars. Again, a complex moment in the night life of the Village. Criminals all we were.
How did I find the Sea Colony? I’ll tell you. I used to walk the streets of the Village. Before I moved out on my own when I was still in high school, I knew I was queer, and somehow even then I knew I had to get to the Village to find others like myself. That subway ride into Sheridan Square was a rite of passage.
I was already having sex with a friend. I made love with Roz, the kosher butcher’s daughter, in high school in Queens. That was going on since I was 14 or 15. I also had a crush on a girl a year younger than I when I was working at my uncle’s five and dime. He was the manager of a Bayside, Queens store. Her name was Sheila. Maybe I was 15, maybe it was 1955. On our breaks, we’d sit on the bench facing the parking lot and I would lay with my head in her lap and one time she looked down at me and said, “You know, Joan, I don’t think you will ever marry.”
In Washington Square, there was this really hot scene of interracial romances. Sheila had a boyfriend and she wanted me to go down with her, to keep her company. While we were walking in the night streets, I can remember this clearly, at this time, the Village was a place of danger for me. Danger and revolution. She said, “You know, Joan, my boyfriend said, I’m the kind of girl that lesbians really like.” So I froze. I shoved her into a plate glass window on 6th Avenue. I was so frightened by that revelation.
I went to the Village alone, as I often did. I was looking for a sign. The Village was such an important place, because it was a designated queer place...I used the word “queer” as an old queer. I’m looking for butches because that’s what I can recognize and that was my desire. It was a style and you could recognize it. This searching was a rite of passage.
On 6th Avenue, there was a place called Tam Tams. Do you know Earnest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”? Tam Tams wasn’t a bar. No alcohol, just donuts, tea, coffee but they didn’t check for age identification either. And so early on weekend nights, a lot of young butches--we didn’t call ourselves lesbians, butches and femmes were the names of how we lived-- There was a full-length mirror when you came in, right on 6th Avenue and the young ones would be combing their DA’s.[Editor’s note: A DA was a pompadour popular in the 1950’s, and DA stands for “duck’s ass.”] This dreary little Village bare-bones joint was a launching pad of young desire. I think now how much of our lives were lived in public, this so-called secret history of queers. [Joan notes: Please see my essay on the Women’s House of Detention on OutHistory website for more of this and perhaps even more important for a fuller sense of the Village communities.]
I went into Tam Tams the first time by myself, 1957. Sitting down with my cup of coffee, I saw what I then thought of as an older woman—she was probably in her middle twenties, early thirties—sitting across from me. It was a two-aisle place, very bare tables and bad coffee. She looks across at me. It’s around 8 o’clock at night. She says, “Have you been to the Colony? How are things there now?” She recognized me as a queer. I’d never had that before. It was the opening of a door to me, a place. This is how I learned about the Sea Colony. Through an oral tradition, rich in the air of the Village. Finding whatever bravado I could, I said, “Things are slow,” giving the impression that I’d been there already. I’m trying to think how I found its exact location. I must have looked it up. Did I follow her?
Because I was a working woman, I was working since I was13, I didn’t want to endanger my job. I would go to the Sea Colony on Friday night, Saturday night. I’d wake up with a lover somewhere in Coney Island, or we’d stay up all night and a rowdy group of us would go down the street for a big breakfast.
I wrote about these things because women weren’t writing about these kinds of desire.
I know you are interested in the bohemian Village and my Village was gritty and surviving but as my lesbian world expanded, I saw the Village that interests you and should. Look into Caffé Cino, which was a wonderful little theater in a back room on Cornelia Street. It was six rows of seats. I was with an older lesbian woman. She was the playwright. I was surrounded by wonders. It was a two-person play on a tiny stage. In one scene, a heterosexual couple are dining on a baby. They were having a dialogue that I could barely follow. My great fear was that the playwright would ask me what I thought of her work. I just spent a lot of time lighting her cigarette. Or the Village Vanguard down the steps. One other memory.
There was a wonderful little Village Italian restaurant, with red-checkered table clothes and candles in waxed dripped bottles, called Bruno’s--and he welcomed all of us with cheap good food. Almost a stereotype, but it was real. Several decades ago now it was turned into shop selling erotica. The Village could be haven or a very dangerous place because it was known you could find queers there. In fact, in one edition of New York Confidential, Winchell writes, the police were glad for the Village because they knew where the queers were, could keep them under control.
DF: When did you start college?
JN: I started going to Queens College right after I graduated from Martin Van Buren High School in 1957. I was living with my mother at the time. My mother was a gambling addict and so often rent would go unpaid and we would be evicted. Sometimes I lived with my aunt and uncle in Bayside, Queens. When I started working at 13, my mother wanted me to quit school and continue working in the basement of Klein’s department store. I could not do this and left my mother to go back to live with Miriam and Murray in Bayside, Queens and thus I was close to Queens College.
Like many working-class kid, I was the first to finish high school in my family and had no idea about college. I was in this fast English class because I was good at English. All the kids around me were making college plans, they were going to Berkeley, to Brandeis. They were middle-class kids. I had no idea. My English teacher then was Mrs. Desser, who said to me, “So Joan, where are you going to college?” I said, “Mrs. Desser, I am not going to college. I can’t afford to, I have to work.”
She put her hand on my shoulder, a very proper straight woman’s hand, with her wedding ring. I was very aware of these things. “Joan, there is a free college right near here, a few minutes from here. I’ll help you.” I had to work the whole time through all of it, but that’s how I went to Queens College. I just found my records. That was a whole education in dissent and queerness, because I was already queer. It was a path. Mrs. Desser lives with gratitude in my heart, the caring weight of her hand on my shoulder gave me a world, the literature that I studied there, the Red Diaper babies that I met and the ensuing political engagement which I have written about. This free university was one of the greatest gifts of my life. On the weekends I would go to the Village and live another life but we were coming into a sense of self at Queens, as well. We had a queer table on the little cafe where all the odd students are their lunch. When I started teaching there in the late ‘60’s, I remember walking under a hand-written message on the stairwell, “Kill the homosexuals.” There I met my SEEK students and colleagues and taught the first course on lesbian and literature taught on the QC campus.
DF: What year did you move to East 9th Street?
JN: It was during Queens College. My mother had many boyfriends, one of whom was a boss, who had offices on 16th Street. She was working there. She said “You have to move out and get your own place. I would have been 18. My first place was on East 6th Street. That was an education, as well. My queerness started in the East Village.
DF: Could you describe the first time you went to the Sea Colony?
JN: I wish. It’s not that easy. I had many, many years before the Sea Colony of deep desire. I was reading the lesbian paperback books like The Sexual Variant, and my dearest friend at Queens when I was a student there was a gay man. We dated and explored. On our first date he took me to the Village to see “Mother Courage,” one of my first Village cultural experiences. I digress. I wasn’t shocked by what I saw in the bar, but I was frightened that I wouldn’t pass muster. I was frightened of not knowing the erotic rituals. Quite soon, I had a group of friends. When you are in a subculture, you very quickly pick things up. I was trepidatious that I wouldn’t succeed in a place that I wanted desperately to belong.
When I read your questions, I remember these were really hard times. It was romantic, too. We are talking about a period of time when we had a country filled with hatreds of all kinds. The streets of the Village were the most integral place for queer people to be, that was where they were known to be, so that was where the people who wanted to beat us up went. That was where the people who followed us in their cars knew exactly where to find us, as did the police. It was the Vice Squad, it was the deviant watchers.
The Sea Colony wasn’t smokey. The windows were blacked out, so you couldn’t look in. Bruno stood at his desk. You went into a narrow room. That’s where the bar was. There were two rooms. The bar with a long mirror, maybe 7 or 8 barstools with Maria from Barcelona behind the bar. Here old timers sat, like Esther. Facing the bar was a raised platform with more formal tables and chairs. These were reserved for friends of Bruno’s who came in to observe the queers. We never interacted with them. Forgot they were there. They were a paying audience to see the freaks. I didn’t sit at the bar, because where I was headed was to the backroom. And the straight onlookers never came through the little door that opened to our haven.
To the left, behind the bar, was the bathroom where the bathroom line was that I’ve written about. On the right side was the door to the world that I wanted, the world of butch-femme women, dancing, flirting fighting sometimes.
This was our outlaw world. The big feature was the red bulb. This has been written about. We weren’t allowed to dance. It was against the law in America for same sex couples to dance together.
On Friday nights, late in the night, the red light would start flashing. That was a symbol that the cops were coming to get paid. That was the signal for us to sit down and to steel ourselves. There was always the possibility of something bad happening and it happened. The cop would come in and make cracks to the women sitting there. He was always carrying a huge wad of money. We could clearly see the payoff. Sometimes he might flirt with one of the femmes and then maybe her butch girlfriend would rise to the occasion.
There was verbal violence in the bar, but there would be physical violence outside the bar. The incident I saw was outside the bar. The cop grabbed a butch and pushed her up against the wall. The cop said, “You think you’re a man? Well, I’m gonna check.” He pulled down her pants in front of her girlfriend. There was a group of us standing out there. He just left her like that. He left her like that, and we took her in. The daily violation was the bathroom line, where we had to get our allotment of toilet bathroom paper.
DF: What did you take from those brutal moments at the Sea Colony?
JN: I take the awareness that history happens in such places, that class and powerlessness control but that communities find a way to subvert the ordained script. All over America, not just in the Village, queer men and women were finding these places and doing more with them then the society around them ever knew of. We were laying the foundation for another time but we were also creating, loving, refusing to hide. When things were hard, I knew something important as happening. I always saw myself as a writer. You asked me if I had lifelong friendships from the bar. I had lifelong knowledges. Even when I was struggling to get an education, because for me that was the only way that I could get a life. That and work. I was a witness to many things, like the drug scene on the Lower East Side. I really walked a narrow path.
My two books, A Restricted Country and A Fragile Union, were the rawness of my memory. I thought that this was a unique world, particularly for a young woman in the 1950’s. Women have been doing this from the 1930’s and 1940’s, once you get a history of the bars. The Village and places like it which through all kinds of bargains with power allow for illegalities of the body and rebellions of the spirit are essential for now hopes. May I say, real estate prices are a killer of the bohemian.
I was at Kooky’s in 1971 the night the GLF [Gay Liberation Front] women came in. That captured the complexity of lesbian activism. I had already been active in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, and protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even when I marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, I did it as a closeted queer person.
Kooky was a particularly obnoxious proprietor. One night, she came by and put a pinky in my drink. I was a particularly bad drinker. I didn’t like scotch. I drank 7 and 7s. The music in the bar was laden with the culture we created. There was Johnny Mathis on the jukebox.
Kooky’s was a well-lit place, a large place on 14th Street.
I had a history of resistance. That one night, when these plaid-wearing dykes came in with their flyers, Kooky got really upset. “There’s a meeting, a liberation meeting, you don’t have to be here,” they said. She pushed them out the door.
I am sitting there. I heard this noise. That’s a noise I’d heard in other settings. That’s the noise of protest. That lack of historical reaching out lasted well into the lesbian feminist period.
I said to myself, something’s happening here. I was excited. As soon as they left, I grabbed one of their flyers. I can’t say I went the next week, but I went to their meetings. I do remember that meeting of worlds that happened in Kooky’s. I somehow knew that I was saying goodbye to some place that had been a home.
Some of my life’s work, like A Restricted Country, was saying thank you to the women I met in the Village bars. I heard of the other bars, but didn’t go to them. The Sea Colony was my bar. There were many of them up and down 8th Street.
DF: What were the style of the butches at the Sea Colony?
JN: Do you know the actor Sal Mineo? If you look at Sal Mineo as a young man, you’ll look at what the butches were wearing. There were styles.
The Sea Colony was mostly working-class and lower-middle class. There were teachers who would often meet their students there, not by design. That could be a hard time. It often happened because it was such a gathering place.
There were formal butches who wore suits. There was a whole range of attire. For femmes, there were high femmes and low femmes. They wore dresses, heels and heavy makeup. I was a low femme, wearing tight sweaters. This is so funny. My goal was to seduce. I am a great fan of seduction. The challenge was to seduce. I wasn’t a beautiful woman. There were many beautiful women at the bar. It was a foray into possibilities. That’s how I will put it.
At work before I started teaching, in my office jobs, I called my girlfriends “he” when I spoke to them on the phone, I had to pass as a straight unsexual young woman which perplexed many bosses. My sexuality was saved for the weekend, to the community that I looked to be desired in. It all gets more complicated. It doesn’t get any simpler.
DF: I was told by the novelist Ann Bannon that at the Bagatelle, the butches asked the femmes to dance. Would that be the case at the Sea Colony?
JN: I never found that, but maybe it was that way for others. Once you went there regularly, you made friends. There is this expression, ki ki or kai kai, where butches and femmes exchange roles. “Oh, she’s femme in the bar and she’s butch in the home.” There are all these kinds of things. There were patterns of seduction.
Someone who saw it from the outside might think, “Poor sad women trying to ape heterosexual behavior, blah, blah, blah.” There is a language, a dance and courage. What women like myself were looking for was sexual expertise in the body of another woman, which butch women represented. It was an incredible moment. May I say now, that these details of what we wore, how we interacted, what mores we created, pale for me now in importance to the larger deeper moments of our being, in a hating America we created culture and some lost their lives for it.
In that bar, gender became something else. The strength and the use of the body only happened in those bars. That’s what drew us there.
DF: The writer Audre Lorde said she experienced racial tension and outright racism in some of the 1950’s lesbian bars.
JN: There was racial tension in all the bars. Again, this is America. At the Sea Colony, I’d say there were five or six African-American women who were regulars at the bar. There were Hispanic women who were regulars. It was predominantly working-class women and some immigrant backgrounds. There were also some daughters of the famous.
The butches worked at whatever job they could get. They were usually the lowest jobs. Some didn’t work. The femmes could survive because they could pass into the workforce or were sex workers who were an essential part of our working-class bar community. They were partners of women like Esther. [Editor’s note: Esther was the subject of Nestle’s essay “Esther’s Story,” about a woman in her 40’s, who escaped a straight life in Puerto Rico to live in New York as a butch who often passed as a man.]
A deep part of the history of the queer Village was the Women’s House of Detention, from 1932 to 1974. Not a bohemian Village but our lives Village. On my walk from East to West along 8th Street from my apartment on 9th Street, I always passed the Women’s House of Detention. That was an education. On hot summer nights, butch lovers and usually butch women of color would stand on the street. Even then, there were such high rates of incarceration. They should yell up. The building had these narrow, slitted windows. You’d see their lovers’ hands waving handkerchiefs. The butch women would yell up in Spanish, “I’m here, I’m here, the children are fine.” There would be this exchange, and it was raw and moving.
Many of the women who entered the Sea Colony wound up in the House of Detention, for shoplifting, for sex work, for any kind of minor infractions they would end up there. I’ve never forgotten their cries—“Mamacita, Mamacita, I am here.” Meanwhile, the life of the Village is swirling around. You have the tourists, you have the more affluent gays, and at the same time, you have the calls of connection of an exiled people.
At the bar, the prison was often talked about it, lovers excitedly announcing when their girl was being released. This moved me so much; it was called “the Country Club,” that grim irony.
I had a double consciousness. I was hearing things and was taking everything in.
Two things happened with the House of Detention...there was an anti-war demonstration and some of the women were taken to the House of Detention, including Andrea Dworkin. She was an upper-middle-class woman and that prompted outrage. And then embarrassment. This prompted Lindsay to shut down the Women’s House of Detention. The deep Village scene of obvious lesbians calling up to their incarcerated lovers embarrassed the Mayor and now I see it as the beginning of the end for the Village we knew, and the growth of real-estate interests.[Editor’s note: Dworkin was later known as a famous anti-porn feminist. She was a college student at the time she was arrested. All new women prisoners were given an invasive, abusive virginity test.]
DF: Could you tell me more about the Sea Colony clientele?
JN: There were working women of all kinds. There were out-of-work women, department store clerks. There were taxi drivers, like Esther. There were students. It was a range of women. It was known as a tough bar. Fights would break out.
I remember one night one of the regulars came in and her face was bloodied. We all gathered around and asked, “What happened?” She had needed to make a telephone call and stopped in a bar, still in the Village but a few blocks from the Sea Colony. She was holding the receiver and a man said, “You’re one of those freaks.” He smashed her in the mouth with the phone. She ran into the Sea Colony for protection. The Sea Colony was a home base, but it wasn’t for the faint hearted.
When I started doing interviews of older lesbians for the Lesbian Herstory Archive, many of the women were too scared of the Sea Colony. “I heard it was tough. I heard there were fights.” There were whole places for lesbians to gather, more discrete for the professionals who didn’t want to take the risk.
DF: Some lesbian writers, like the semi-closeted playwright Lorraine Hansberry in the 1950’s, were critical of butches when they were prominent in the public eye.
JN: She was critical of the butch-femme couple appearing openly on the street making their sexual identity clear to everyone. This is one of the contradictions. Hansberry saw a need for another kind of respectability. Because of the queer identities, the butch-femme couple became instantly visible. I’ve written about what I felt and what I saw. They were the most enraging symbol. Not of heterosexual mimicry, but of heterosexual challenge, saying this could be a world without men, where there could be many genders.
Men saw themselves excluded from this world of eroticism and thus were often enraged at the butch-femme public couple.
There is a wonderful book called Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. It’s an oral history of the butch-femme community in Buffalo, NY. Liz Kennedy, a dear friend, created it. We were all part of the work of the Lesbian Herstory Archive in the 1970’s. This book is a masterpiece. We became dear friends. We were all interested in oral history. Liz’s partner Bobbie is an old-time butch, who worked in the Buffalo steel mills, when they still had steel mills. She gave the archives her hob-nailed boots and her hardhat with the lambda on it, which took great courage to wear.
The butch-femme bars were so judged by the new generation that was carving out wonderful new territory, but was not able to take in what was behind them. The bar communities opened up public territory, so that everything else could follow through.
DF: In the Sea Colony once, the long-time bartender Maria saved you from police entrapment. Could you tell me the story?
JN: Yes, she did. It was the afternoon. There were often undercover policewomen in the bars. I was down in the Village and I seldom went to the Sea Colony during the day. This time I did and it was open. Maybe it was a Saturday during the day.
This I remember. I was probably sitting at one of those tables in the front room. I could see her sitting at the bar. She was sitting in the wrong kind of way. We had such nuances of self-preservation, to make each other known to each other in the outside world. It looked like a stern code of dress and behavior. It was easily broken once you won the trust of this so policed community. She wasn’t sitting on a bar stool in a way that was right. She was giving off mixed signals. She did not know the language. I went into the bathroom. I was washing my hands and she appeared. It was a very small bathroom and she was standing right behind me. I knew immediately that this was entrapment. We would not have been allowed into the bathroom together, and no one would have gone in.
I ran out, and that’s when Maria said, “You didn’t touch her?!!” I just laughed. No. She broke all the rules.
One thing I’ve given my life to is complexing things. These oversimplifications of what women are, and what it was like to be queer women in the 1950’s. Women are like “These things never happened to us,” but they did and they were happening all across America. There was entrapment. It happened in the bathrooms of the Midwest, where there were these major scandals. We were sexually active women sometimes in public places. We lived our own version of a queer life. Sometimes our history is not as complex as it needs to be.
All of this was embedded in struggle.
We were criminals. It was different, it was something else. Once, when I was living on 9th Street, I experienced the height of closeness to greatness. I was walking to 2n d Avenue to get my bagel. Who should I see but W.H. Auden, who had a place nearby. There was so much going on in the Lower East Side. [Editor’s note: Auden was an acclaimed British poet, who lived on St. Mark’s Place.]
The Bagatelle must have been maybe one class up [chuckle], I think, from the Sea Colony.
Something else...the women I knew were always working. The bar life was a weekend life, but we had work to do.
I had started teaching. I was a very low-paid editor during the day for a technical periodical.
I started teaching at the SEEK Program at Queens College. I was a student, then I taught from 1967 to 1997. At the same time as I am going to the bars, I’m reading for my students.
You asked me how the Archive came into being. For me, the impetus was exactly the bar community. I felt such a love and a hurt for them. They were thrust aside, judged and oversimplified. The SEEK Program came out of the rebellions in 1964, in all the major cities by Latino, Latina and African-American youths. In preparation for teaching, because I had never taught before, I read a book called The Colonizer and the Colonized. There was the irony that I was going to a bar called the Sea Colony. There was one line that I read for my students, but then I realized I was reading it for myself: “The colonized are condemned to lose their memory.” That became a trope of the rest of my life with the archives. [Editor’s note: the 1957 book was by the French-Tunisian Jewish author Albert Memmi.]
DF: The Archive became a way to preserve this memory?
JN: Yes. The archives continued my love, my need for a public space, I saw the archives as a place of seduction, where the women who had felt denigrated by the homophobic society they were queer in, then later by some lesbian-feminists, could walk through the door and into the embrace of history. It was the look on the faces of these women from the 1940’s and 1950’s, they came and held something in their hand, and would say, “You mean this is history?” They told stories of how they had these paperbacks, these lesbian survival books, which were called trash. So much of what I was doing was the work of dissent. Whether it was the dissent from America of the 1940’s and 1950’s, where I worked against the House Un-American Activities Committee, or the dissent from the prevailing certainties of a new lesbian feminism. The women told stories of how they had these paperbacks and ripped them up.
Everything I’m telling you, I’ve written someplace. On the page is where my memories take form again. There is nothing I held back. They said, “I was riding in a car with a friend and I took a stack of paperbacks and ripped them up, and I could see the pages in the wind behind me.” I have often said, the work of the archives is to turn deprivation into plentitude, to turn shame into history. The Archive was, is, my way of saying “Thank you” to the women who touched me. That is the most basic way I can say it.
DF: From the beginning, the LHA had an ethnically and racially diverse group of women.
JN: Paula Grant has been there since the beginning. Miss Hampton and Georgia Brooks were at the heart of the archives. And dear Arisa. Racism and white centeredness are a continuing concern. New generations of archivists bring their varied worlds to the table. We made sure all our presentations had many faces. White people can always do better at removing themselves from the site of power.
DF: Did the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village become better when they were women owned?
JN: It was a different experience. It was a better experience for younger women because they weren’t so frightened. I remember Bonnie and Clyde’s. Bonnie and Clyde’s served spaghetti on Sunday. The big joke was that we’ve come into this new world and we have consciousness-raising groups and it’s out of this world the Archive came. We’d sit in the consciousness-raising groups and we said, “We aren’t going to do this, we aren’t going to do that.” As soon as it was over, we went to Bonnie and Clyde’s and broke every rule we laid down. There was a dialectic between a self-conscious explanation of lesbian feminism and the enactment of seductions. There was a wonderful interrogation of each other.
The new bars were different. At that time, I also became active in gay liberation at the Wooster Street Firehouse.
There is no doubt that in traditional terms, the new bars were healthier. As I’ve often said, it’s like James Baldwin writing about the Old Country, I’m glad I have my history in the Village bars. It’s informed everything I’ve done since. You don’t throw away histories as they layer in your life, not if you are smart. It isn’t about progression, but it is a conversation about what is to be cherished.
The women I knew, many never made it to the new bars, though there were other women who crossed over into lesbian feminism. They were very different, and the whole world of culture that came with it.
I didn’t publish anything as a writer until 1980. Lesbian feminism gave me the way to say thank you to my butch-femme community. It gave me new life and force. I needed both of them.
DF: At the Sea Colony, what did you used to wear?
JN: I favored tight sweaters. I was trying to be sexy. I am not a small woman. You take on all this self consciousness. I wore lipstick. I still wear lipstick. I did myself up the best I could. But mostly, I was very good in bed.
I never felt beautiful...women honored me with their touch. It was in their arms that I felt loved and cared for.
DF: Could you tell me about Esther, your short-term butch lover, a cab driver who often passed as a man?
JN: We were both aware that we were from very different worlds. I was this young woman, trying to stay in college. It was almost as if we couldn’t believe we were in each other’s company, let alone each other’s arms. I want to complex this. I wrote these stories in the 1980’s, when there were already these prevailing, self-convincing attitudes towards butch women, towards femme women, towards sex workers. I wrote another piece about Esther in A Fragile Union, where I questioned much from the perspective of the transgender moment. In A Restricted Country. what I was trying to do with Esther was rush with her life under a closing gate, to get her into history before the gates of judgement crashed down. In doing that, I oversimplified. When re-envisioning that story, I wrote “I do not know if Esther wanted to be a man.” I read her in a new way. It’s just the complexity of living, aware of the histories flowing around you. The Archive was my way of saying all these stages need to be honored, and none need to be exiled. The one place you can do this is in an archive. I had to fight so that the lesbian sex worker pasties could sit next to the “lesbian menace” t-shirt. I found a place where all the knowledges my life had given me could live.
DF: Were the LHA volunteers disturbed by the raunchier elements of historical donations to the Archive?
JN: No, because we had worked out a way to respect each other’s different histories. There was Deborah Edel, who came out into lesbian feminism, and Julia Stanley, who was a lesbian separatist I knew in the bars. It’s amazing we accomplished what we did. We put the project before everything else. There were struggles, but there was respect because the project had to flourish.
Because I was sometimes called a pornographer, I had to quickly make clear my writing was my voice, not the archives.
I have the Village voices behind me. I have those who made their way to the Sea Colony. I went there for the sublime first touch.
DF: Could you tell me the story of the men who would uriniate into the Sea Colony?
JN: One recurring event at the bar was a symbol of the world outside the bar. in the second room in which we danced and laughed and sometimes fought, there was a mail slot in the unused door. Men who knew lesbians gathered on the other side would aim a stream of urine through the slot. We took it in our stride. I write these words and know what a different world I live in now. Crowded on the weekend, with 50 women in this tiny room. There’d be this stream of urine through the mail slot.
DF: Such a horrible image.
JN: It didn’t stop us and we laughed. It was like going to Riis Park, when a father came over and said, “If you don’t stop holding each other, my son is going to come over and beat the shit out of you.” More frightening than a stream of urine. We lived with fear, ignorance, hatred and we loved. When I think about what was happening to Black people at the time--this was America. Maybe this was the world. You go to the Sea Colony because you are pretty tough. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt. I just laughed at it. I thought it was sad.
DF: In the late 1950’s, you made the decision to go to the Sea Colony, and entered an outlaw culture.
JN: Yes, we took care of each other, as best we could.
Violence was all around us. That’s why I started with the story of lugging the huge man out of harm’s way. I still look at the young girl, walking out into the world. They would have locked someone like me up in a minute for being a deviant. I’ll get to my outlaw space in a minute. I am amazed. It comes from living with my mother, the way we did. All of our histories begin in the psyche. I’m an old Freudian, a dirty word. I’m an old Marxist, all of those things.
DF: When you were a young lesbian, you read the lesbian pulp novels by Ann Bannon and others. Did you enjoy them?
JN: Yes, I loved all those paperbacks. They are important. They are very important. My own energy in the world is through my words. I coined the term survival literature for them--and Beebo Brinker featured mightily.
DF: What were the most thrilling items that came into the LHA at the beginning?
JN: How we started was by combining our own collections. One of the most important things was Miss Hampton giving the Archives her paperback collection, These were the paperbacks that for so many of us were our first public records of lesbian touch, going back to the 1940’s. Then Deb and I saw a small sign advertising a lesbian library for sale on a telephone pole in Provincetown. It turned out to be the library of the NY Daughter of Bilitis. [Editor’s note: One of the first American lesbian groups.] We raised the money from the community and now it lives as the red dot collection. Just recently the papers of what was once Salsa Soul have come to LHA.
If you go to my Facebook page, you’ll see the first Kessler lecture I gave on Mabel Hampton. [Editor’s note: this was the First Annual David R. Kessler Lecture in Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1992, at the City of New York, Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies.] You’ll see all the images from Miss Hampton’s collection. There is also a butch-femme slideshow.
DF: What led you to start interviewing older lesbians for the LHA in 1983? How did you find the performer Buddy Kent? [Editor’s note: Kent was a lesbian who performed as a chorus boy and male drag singer at the Mob-owned Club 181 in the late 1940’s East Village.]
JN: My main focus at the archives was finding the butch-femme women who had given me my lesbian life. I had many friends from the old days and every time we presented the archives slide show I pleaded with old-time women to tell me their stories and become part of LHA. One of the older women I knew was Gerry. I had met her in the bar. Another was Sandy. I wanted to put the complexity, the challenges, the victories of their lives into lesbian history. Through these contacts I met Buddy Kent, who carefully let me into her Village apartment and shared her life story with me. A performer, a Village person, a rewriter of what a woman’s life could be. I collected these stories and images into a book called The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Again, this was my way of saying thank you, if asking for attention to be paid.
The interviews were something I undertook because of the attitudes in the larger lesbian feminist community, as well as to document the fullness of the butch-femme lives. I did it to dissent from a prevailing image. I had to enlarge the conversation. It got back to SAGE [Senior Action in a Gay Environment]. I am not sure how I got to Buddy Kent, but it was the genealogy of butch women I have.
DF: What were some of the first highlights of the LHA collection?
JN: Some of it was the early international posters that came our way, first editions of books, or when Valerie Taylor, one of the authors of those so-called trash novels, came to the Archive when it was a little thing, holding her original paperbacks and saying, “I am so proud...in apartheid South Africa, they ban me as being revolutionary. Why do they call me trash in my own country?”
It was these encounters, with women bringing in their own work, like the first Italian anthology of women’s love poetry, as well as women encountering their own history for the first time.
What are the best parts of the collection? I have my own favorites, like the lesbian stripper contribution of her pasties and the hard hat and hobnail boots [worn by a lesbian steelworker]. Angela Calomaris was an FBI informer in the 1940’s. It was three women...an African-American and two white women, her old friends who showed up with these two boxes. I happened to be at the Archive. I had been to Provincetown for many years, like a lot of women. They said, we have a collection, but you are probably not going to want it. What do you mean? It’s our friend, and they said her name. “Oh, you mean the woman who ran Angel’s Landing in Provincetown?” “Yes, this is about her days as an FBI informant.”
I had to sit down and say, “Yes, yes, yes.” This is what we need.
When we started the Archive, I was very concerned that it not be a “role model” archive. In the feminist ‘70’s, it was “Why need to tell the world how wonderful we are.” The future will call for greater complexities.
This collection, Angela Calomaris’ files, is one of the most precious we have. [The historian] Lisa Davis has mined it. Lisa is an old good friend, as is her partner.
One last thing I want to say is that the archives was and is a grassroots project with all that means. We have grown now for almost 50 years and we owe it all to our supporters, to our communities, we and other grassroot cultural change projects show that there is something beyond the capitalistic world we move in.
Jonathan Ned Katz is one of those grassroots dedicated critical thinkers. It’s an honor that I’ve shared my life with him. [Editor’s note: Katz is an independent historian, who published the groundbreaking Gay American History in 1974.]
At the LHA, we weren’t academic anythings. Deb Edel, a cofounder of the Archive, is a child psychiatrist. We’d go to the Berkshire Women’s History Conference, with all the leading historians. I won’t mention names, because they are friends, they’d look askance at us and say, “Who is the professional historian?” We did this work because of our passion. Many of us worked full time and then worked at the Archive. We tithed our salaries. That’s how the Archive existed for the first 20 years. The grassroots story is part of it. Like Jonathan, Judith Schwarz who worked as a records keeper but was a grassroot historian who wrote the study of the Heterodoxy Group, which met in the Village in the 20s and 30s, joined us in the late 70s and transformed lesbian, American history.
DF: When did you move to Australia?
JN: 2001. I started my relationship with Australia and Di in 1998. I was made an honorary fellow to help graduate students at the University of Melbourne. I don’t get paid for it, but I get a visa, a six-month visa. And now 20 years later we still make our way together, the hennaed-haired Australian and me, a round old lady from the Bronx.
I thank you for finding my words and for finding me, because I am 23,000 miles from you.
