Lesbian Archives
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For this Moving Image Review we brought together lesbian and queer artists, academics, activists, and archivists who look to and save media objects and practices of the past and present, using a range of methods and vernaculars, in the name of marking, sharing, and preserving lesbian culture. If we think of this collection about lesbian archives as itself an archive, that makes us the archivists, GLQ the institutional home, and you the researcher. We invite you, the readerresearcher, to join us in activating and perusing this lesbian archive. You might consider why these eclectic writings were made, saved, grouped, and presented and what this tells us about queer media, archives, and lesbians past and present. The same questions were asked when one of us (Juhasz) gained access to the Women’s Building video archive or when another of our contributors, Catherine Lord, delved into and across the covers of lesbian pulp fiction. Our other contributors study or practice media archiving itself—Kristin Pepe of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation; Yvonne Welbon, who speaks to Julia Wallace and Alexis Pauline Gumbs about their Queer Black Mobile Homecoming; and David Oscar Harvey, in conversation with Sarah Schulman about the ACT UP Oral History Project, which she creates with Jim Hubbard. They bring to this lesbian archive their individual and communal reflections of the will to save and preserve via media (this print archive, videos, films, interviews, websites, books, RVs) so as to remember lesbian love, death, activism, and generation. In this sense, then, perhaps queer archives is an even more fitting title, given the tenuous—if gendered, raced, generational, and sexed—forms of authority, connection, and interest that hold us.
The history of our queer archive—the quasi-academic regulations of its shaping, the varied nature of its objects, and the multiple conditions of its reading—is bound by contemporary assumptions about identity, community, and media and how these are, in turn, shaped, understood, and connected to media from the past. Lord suggests that “culture requires memory. Memory requires an archive.” Yet [End Page 619] lesbians’ lack of material resources ensures that our “moving images disappear,” according to Pepe—that is, until we save them. And so ours is a project of salvage, and then a giving and receiving of the many media forms that hold our memories. Perhaps not surprisingly, the activities and processes that take place at the lesbian archive (a community-based salvaging, giving, interviewing, connecting, separating, reading, and receiving) become (as for feminists most generally) the important thing, more than the archived materials themselves. According to Welbon, the black lesbian archive is a “spiritual journey full of lust and discovery” for some and “social organizing . . . surviving and thriving together,” for others. Juhasz sees it as “allowing for multiple and conflicting looks between feminists of the 1970s and their progeny,” while Schulman believes that her “oral history project lays the groundwork of data” for others. And for Pepe, and this archive, this is in the end about more than “a film negative, it represents the courage, passion, and guts of the gay rights movement.”
Alexandra Juhasz is professor of media studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV (1995), Women of Vision (2001), F Is for Phony, coedited with Jesse Lerner (2005), and a borndigital online “video-book” about YouTube available for free at MIT Press (2011). She is the producer of the lesbian features The Watermelon Woman (dir. Cheryl Dunye; 1997) and The Owls (dir. Cheryl Dunye; 2010).
