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. Volunteers tithed their incomes to keep the archive going. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 8 t h Avenue. Joan Nestle was born in the Bronx in 1940 and was raised there and in Queens by her widowed mother.
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