Out of the Closet, Into the Archives

Researching Sexual Histories

Amy L. Stone, Jaime Cantrell, Amy L. Stone, Jaime Cantrell

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438459059
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Anthology presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Out of the Closet, Into the Archives takes readers inside the experience of how it feels to do queer archival research and queer research in the archive. The archive, much like the closet, exposes various levels of public and privateness—recognition, awareness, refusal, impulse, disclosure, framing, silence, cultural intelligibility—each mediated and determined through subjective insider/outsider ways of knowing. The contributors draw on their experiences conducting research in disciplines such as sociology, African American studies, English, communications, performance studies, anthropology, and women's and gender studies. These essays challenge scholars to engage with their affective experience of being in the archive, illuminating how the space of the archive requires a different kind of deeply personal, embodied research. " Out of the Closet, Into the Archives represents the exciting directions for scholarship enabled by this rapid growth of new LGBTQ archives. Although mindful of critiques of the archive as an institution of power and attentive to experiences and ephemeralities that can escape it, the essays published here practice forms of the archival turn that put relentless curiosity and unapologetic passion to use as methods for intellectual invention." — from the Foreword by Ann Cvetkovich

PART I

ARCHIVAL MATERIALITY

Chapter 1

Making a Place for Lesbian Life at the Lesbian Herstory Archives

Agatha Beins

Most people think of “an archives” [sic] as a dreary, dusty and dark place filled with boxes of papers of interest only to a small group of academic researchers and writers. Erase that image from your mind.

—“Virtual Tour: An Introduction,” Lesbian Herstory Archives1

Maxine always brings bagels—crowded in a brown paper bag, their warmth lingering. By the time I arrive at the Lesbian Herstory Archives she has already put the small tub of whipped cream cheese in the refrigerator, chopped the red onion and scallions, and sliced the tomatoes that, if it is late summer, may have come from her garden. Small boxes of cookies sit unopened on the table. The Special Lesbo Blend coffee is dripping into a glass carafe, and I search for a mug from one of the cupboards above the counter. Perhaps another volunteer is sitting at the heavy wooden table in what would have been the dining room in this building’s former life. A boxful of colorful plastic archival-quality paper clips, a pile of archival-quality folders whose color falls somewhere between beige, gray, and olive, neatly sharpened pencils, and what for me became a surprisingly valuable tool, a staple remover: the tools of the archivist about to dive into a swath of papers, ephemera, photographs, or books ready for cataloging. If it is summer the air conditioner positioned in one of the bay windows noisily blows cool air, or if it is winter those windows may be accumulating steam against a cold gray afternoon. Such a scene is typical for the once-a-month special collections workday, a Sunday when the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) is open only to volunteers. Between winter 2007 and summer 2011 I traveled there on an almost monthly basis for these workdays, making the journey to Brooklyn from central New Jersey, where I was working my way through a PhD program in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

My work at the LHA has highlighted the ways in which an archive extends beyond the manuscripts, photographs, and other ephemera held in personal and organizational collections. It is also made up of a building and rooms, art on the walls, plants on windowsills, shelves and file cabinets, the people in it, as well as the words and images that introduce us and keep us connected to the space. Recognizing that spatial configurations shape how people enter, move through, and feel about a place, I ask, how might we rethink the organization of archival space? How do the arrangement and location of archival collections affect how they are accessed and used, and by whom? Which artifacts from which collections are on view to the public? How does a person’s body fit into the archives and how does that affect what a visitor feels in the archives? How are our identities reflected in and created by the archive? These questions are not just intellectual but political, and they are not only about an archive’s content but also about how the space of an archive is curated.

To address these questions I consider the organization of space in the LHA, in contrast to the space of conventional archives.2 I focus on the characteristics of the LHA as a community archive, specifically how these characteristics affect people’s access to and use of the archives as well as how they reflect the archives’ political and institutional priorities. Thus, I’m less interested in examining the significance of specific archival objects held in the LHA and instead analyze how these archival objects—along with people—rest in and move though the archive. Through this analysis I argue that the LHA is a multiuse space that exposes and interrogates the practices of conventional archives. The qualities of the LHA as a community archive, in relation to its spatiality, allow us to reshape our understanding of the archive’s users, the archival object, and the purpose and uses of an archive’s space.

In this essay the LHA serves as my main point of reference for a community archive, and in my examples of conventional archives I draw primarily from my time as a researcher at the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC) at Smith College and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. Community archives exist in relation to and in tension with conventional archives, a term I use to denote a connection with a formal institution and the adoption of archival practices that reflect the traditional principles of archival science. These archives do not encompass the variety of archives that exist, nor do they encapsulate the range of political values and ideologies that shape archives. The box of photographs in my closet, the records in a community organization’s file cabinets, the art on a museum’s walls, and the tweets collected by the Library of Congress are all different kinds of archives, embodying different archival practices. Thus, rather than generalizing about how archives should or should not operate, this paper argues that we take seriously the spatial configuration of any archive. Such a focus allows us to examine how the composition of a space affects and reflects the work of archivists and organizes and disciplines researchers; to be more purposeful in our work as archivists, volunteers, researchers, and scholars; and to gain a more complex understanding of the effects of archival practices on the ways the spaces of an archive are used.

Space is not neutral, static, and empty, waiting to be occupied and transformed by humans into a particular place, nor is place a transparent, coherent, uncontested, unchanging locus of human activity.3 Rather, as many have argued, space and place are produced—discursively, materially, and affectively—through interactions at different scales.4 The archive, therefore, is a place of relations and interactions, exchanges and negotiations, all of which have a spatial dimension.5 Although in this paper I subordinate sexuality to space, the two are inextricable. The LHA is clearly a lesbian place, created by lesbian women in the 1970s, when a particular set of discourses, politics, and practices characterized lesbian identity and activism. For example, lesbians’ place making reflects not just a response to homophobia but also to sexism, and, as a result, “gay men and lesbians have tended to interact with space in very different ways.”6 In her study of a lesbian community in Vancouver, British Columbia, Anne-Marie Bouthillette observes that lesbians tended to occupy already existing spaces, perhaps only temporarily, rather than formally creating places specifically for lesbians.7 Maxine Wolfe additionally notes that “many lesbian bars are not ‘places’ in the sense of a consistent physical location that one could designate permanently. Often they are ‘women’s nights’ at other bars.”8 The ephemerality of lesbian places, especially in the 1970s, gives even more weight to the founders’ decision to create a specifically lesbian archive and contextualizes coordinators’ decision to purchase a building to provide a permanent place for the archives.

Therefore, when I refer to something like the art on the walls as part of the construction of space, it is significant that the art in the LHA makes a place for the lives of lesbians. The exhibit Queer Covers: Lesbian Survival Literature highlights book covers of lesbian pulp fiction; when the LHA featured this exhibit it was located in the first-floor hallway. Volunteers arranged books on the wall, so as you entered the building you were greeted by an array of voluptuous women, often in some state of undress, often in provocative, suggestive poses, hinting at what might happen behind closed doors.9 These objects matter, and my intention is not to minimize or erase their significance. Rather, I am interested in querying how the presence of these objects affects our interaction with the space and how the space of an archive affects our interaction with these objects.

Physically, politically, historically, and affectively, the LHA also exists as a community archive.10 The LHA’s current physical location in a brownstone building in Brooklyn, New York, its reliance solely on volunteer labor, its willingness to accept “ ‘any materials that are relevant to the lives and experiences of lesbians,’ ”11 and its refusal of government funding all interact to produce archival space based on certain ideals of lesbian grassroots community building. In 1975 cofounders Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel offered their shared apartment as the first place for the archives, and the LHA’s organizers and curators have worked diligently to maintain the archives as a welcoming, warm space since then.12 Nestle explains that “entry into our archives should be entry into a caring home” with a “nourishing” atmosphere.13 From the “At Homes” events for women (first held at Nestle’s apartment, then the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, and now the LHA), to the comfortable couch in the main room of the first floor, to the third-floor apartment in which the archive’s caretaker lives, this space differs quite starkly from the spaces of conventional archives. In fact, the archive’s founding is grounded in a suspicion of conventional institutions, as explained in one of the radical archiving principles first outlined by Nestle: “The archives should be housed within the community, not on an academic campus that is by definition closed to many women.”14 And one of the LHA’s current archival principles states that “the Archives will always have a caretaker living in it so that it will always be someone’s home rather than an institution.”15 Thus, as a community archive the LHA explicitly distinguishes itself from conventional archives not just ideologically but also by using the space of the archives differently.

In this essay I consider a community to be “a group who define themselves on the basis of locality, culture, faith, background, or other shared identity or interest.”16 Those who are part of the community develop a sense of belonging, at least in part, through choice.17 A community archive, therefore, is the province of a community, or an intentionally self-identified group, and it comprises “collections of material objects, paper and digital records, audio-visual materials and personal testimonies, all created or collected and held within the community.”18 Although an archive may not fall easily into one category or the other, this essay uses examples that do. The LHA explicitly identifies as a community archive and has actively labored to maintain a firm control of its distance from both government and academic institutions. While colleges have exhibited LHA materials,19 the coordinators are careful about not relying on these institutions for the preservation of archival objects. Not all LGBT archives, however, maintain such independence; the June Mazer Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, and the Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Ft. Lauderdale, have institutionalized in a way that closely resem...