Widening the Circle of Our Friends . Arena Three . Hove Flat Murder? . Paul Richards, 1964-1996 . What I Did in my Holidays

What I did in my Holidays

In October this year, Margaret and Joyce visited the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York which was quite a thrill. The archives originally opened in 1974 in the pantry of Joan Nestle and deborah Edel's New York apartment in response to the failure of mainstream libraries and archives to represent and value lesbian culture. It started with their own books and papers and, as word spread, other individuals and organisations sent materials. By 1978 the Archives filled most of the apartment but the coordinators didn't stop there. They developed a travelling slide show of archive materials, taking it to homes, bars, synagogues and church halls to spread the message that every lesbian life could and should be represented.

Volunteers

More and more lesbians trusted the Archives with their lives and in June 1993 the Archives reopened in a wonderful three-storey brownstone in Brooklyn, purchased from donations from lesbians countrywide. The mortgage of $315,000 was paid off in just over four years, all from contributions from the community. Volunteers renovated the building to make it wheelchair accessible and archive friendly.

When everything was ready the coordinators, now numbering around twenty-five, invited all the neighbours in the street to an open day. Once in a lesbian environment, the men professed to be fascinated by architectural details - which walls had been knocked down, the shape of the rooms - while the women concentrated their attentions on the food - how had this been cooked, what lovely cookies!

We were bowled over by the building, the size of the collection, the wealth of material, the amount of new material arriving, the entire scale of the project. The collection includes books, unpublished papers, newsletters, conference proceedings, photographs, slides, periodicals, oral histories, videos, films, music, posters and ephemera ranging from badges and cards to the rhinestone jewellery worn by a lesbian stripper. There are feminist texts and 1950s pulp novels (these shelves were labelled Survival Literature), T-shirts, a guitar, a hard hat, everything representing lesbians and lesbian lives. We saw subject files of clippings, fliers etc on hundreds of topics such as Lesbian Mothers and Passing Women, geographic files with worldwide information. Books and biographical files are arranged by the first name of the lesbian (or suspected lesbian!) out of respect for lesbians in bars in the 1950s where the culture was only to give our first name.

There are intensely moving special collections containing letters, diaries, photographs, personal papers from names you recognise and names you don't, all of equal importance to the Archives, some willed to the Archives, some given during the contributor's lifetime. There are filing cabinets substantiating the claim that when two lesbians get together they produce a newsletter and we were delighted to add the Brighton Ourstory newsletter to the collection. There is a darkroom and microfilm equipment used to prepare exhibitions and publications.

Frenzy of excitement

When we'd stopped dashing from room to room in a frenzy of excitement we presented a copy of Daring Hearts to Maxine who has been involved with the Archives for fourteen years. We were invited to a workshop that evening on How to be an Archivette. Around a dozen women and six coordinators attended and we were given a tour of the Archives and learned about it's aims and the way it operates. Archival skills are taught, one generation of lesbians to another; no-one is paid for their work.

Volunteers are encouraged to work on existing projects such as T-shirts or Periodicals or on Adopt-a-Collection projects where the volunteer takes responsibility for a collection and decides how it should be organised and displayed. They can work on organisational projects, filing, cataloguing on computer, newsletters (one a year), or opening the post (a daunting task). No-one has to prove their lesbian credentials and the Archives aim to be inclusive of all lesbians whatever their lifestyle. One of the volunteers expressed disappointment that other women couldn't be frisked to determine their lesbianism.

The building is already groaning under the weight of the Archives and there is talk of buying the house next door, currently owned by two gay men. Perhaps a whole street of lesbian archives.

Six months by motorbike

There is a tremendous commitment to spreading the word about the Archives and reaching out into the community. Last year one of the volunteers moved to San Francisco. It took her six months to get there on her motorbike with a detour to twenty-seven cities in seventeen states to show the Lesbian Herstory Archives slide show. Mmmmmmm, that sounds like a fun idea. Now I could learn to ride a motorbike and then...

Postal address: LHEF, Inc, PO Box 1258, New York, NY 10116

Contact the Archives to make an appointment if you want to visit: opening times vary. You don't need a special reason to go there; browsers are very welcome.