Lesbian Herstory Archives

Park Slope

Brooklyn

When I lived in Glasgow for a year, one of my favorite places in the city was the Glasgow Women’s Library and Lesbian Archive and Information Center. I remember it being a warm, welcoming place that offered a unique collection geared toward women and the queer community. The Library hosted support groups for battered women as well as book clubs and poetry readings for everyone. Men probably didn’t find the space quite as inviting. A gay friend of mine wanted to use the Lesbian Archive and was told only women were allowed to access the archives, nor were men allowed to visit the Library during support group hours.

I don’t know how much the Glasgow Women’s Library has changed in the thirteen years since I last visited it. Their website seems to suggest a more male-friendly space, or perhaps they don’t post their women-only policies online. I was excited to discover Brooklyn’s very own Lesbian Herstory Archives, expecting to find a similar environment as the one I experienced in Scotland.  I have to admit I was initially disappointed. The Lesbian Herstory Archives is dark, jumbled, and painfully quiet. Though, if you can manage to get past the confusing filing systems and awkward silence, you can easily lose yourself exploring the Archives’ holdings.

Librarians will be scandalized to learn that the Archives alphabetizes books by the author’s or the subject’s first name. Which means Jean Strouse’s biography on Alice James would be found under A for Alice, while Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith is found under S for Sarah. I know. This is the system started by Joan Nestle when she founded the Archives in her apartment in 1972 and it seems to be a point of pride to maintain her system throughout the ages, no matter how frustrating it might be. There is one computer available for searching the catalogs, but it didn’t appear to be working. Nor did it seem that most of the Archives’ holdings were thoroughly cataloged. For example, the Archives has 1,569 Subject Files that fill four five-drawer filing cabinets plus several overflow boxes on the second floor. These a filled with newspaper clippings and photocopies about subjects ranging from Abortions to Bars to Music Festivals to Violence. Really the only thing a visitor can do is pick a topic and start browsing.

I decided to try to find information on Edmonia Lewis. The first floor was a bust, but the foyer and staircase up to the second floor were completely dark. After pacing the first floor for twenty minutes I figured out which of the women in the Archives was working there and asked if the second floor was open. “Of course,” she responded. Why of course? No lights on generally means closed. I walked up the stairs and turned on a light switch, bathing the entranceway and hall in light, glorious light. Then I encountered a new obstacle. The Archives is housed in a brownstone apartment and the second floor landing had four closed doors with no labels. I opened all of them before I figured out which way to go.

The second floor is, frankly, a mess. It is rooms and rooms filled with boxes and file cabinets of papers. There are entire file cabinets filled with zines and pamphlets and newsletters from women’s organizations around the country. The second floor also has two filing cabinets filled with unpublished papers, including some 1,000 theses, dissertations, and poetry written by lesbians over the past thirty-five years. These are alphabetized by title, so good luck finding anything there. I managed to finally find some actually useful article clippings on Edmonia Lewis in the Individual/Biographical Files.

Amongst the claustrophobic, overwhelming space that is the second floor is an odd display of buttons and t-shirts in the hall formed by what was once connecting bathrooms. The linen closets are filled with the hundreds of t-shirts that form the Archives’ t-shirt collection and the sinks are filled with all sorts of queer paraphernalia, including stickers, buttons, bags, and dildos.  I did not venture down to the basement level which houses the Music and Spoken Word Collections.

The Archives looked admittedly more welcoming once the lights in the foyer were turned on. I suspected that budget constraints caused pennies to be pinched wherever possible, even if it meant a forebodingly dark entranceway. The place is run pretty much entirely by volunteers and is open at random, odd hours.

With lights on I could see the didactic information for the Archives’ current exhibition, “Straight to Hell: 20 Years of Dyke Action Machine!” DAM! is a two-person public art project started in 1991 by Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner. The Archives is currently displaying three cases of their various public propaganda campaigns, including posters, reviews, buttons, stickers, and catalogs. With the lights on visitors could also see the boxes of free stuff set in the hallway for them to take with them when they go.

The stairs leading up to the brownstone are handicapped accessible, which I found very confusing, as the rest of the Archives is not. Sure, the electric ramp will get you up the stairs, but then you have two heavy doors and a cluttered hallway to deal with. Not to mention there is no way to get up to the second level or down to the basement level. Even if a handicapped visitor were contented with the first level, most items are found up on high shelves or cabinets. The Lesbian community seems to have always been at the forefront of accessibility, yet the electric stair ramp seems like an empty gesture considering the inaccessibility of the rest of the space.

With all of its flaws and imperfections, I actually found it difficult to get myself to leave the archives. If I had allowed myself, I could have spent the entire afternoon browsing through boxes and cabinets. The Archives also offers lesbian studies courses which draws on the documents contained within the library. And, while the lesbian studies program insists on annoyingly spelling the word women “wymn,” the classes actually sound really interesting—they’re even taught by NYC college professors.

When I finally managed to make it back to the foyer, I got caught up a little bit longer reading the Archives’ own publications, which include yearly newsletters and historical publications like Radclyffe Hall’s 1934 letter about what she termed “The Well of Loneliness.”

Grumbling aside, the Archives actually has some useful resources and plays a small but important role in preserving queer women’s history. When I first went I thought I wouldn’t find anything that couldn’t already be found using Google. I was quite wrong. After all, where else can the lesbian researcher find Iowa’s “Better Homes & Dykes” newsletters from 1977?

www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org