Deborah Edel, one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the home of a lesbian history trove in Brooklyn, New York, said that sometimes when she gives tours of the archives, people will get very quiet.
“I think, ‘Oh, am I boring them? Should I throw in a joke and try to be funny?’ she said. “Then I realize, I’m very familiar with the collection, but this for them is the first time, and they are overwhelmed by the material, by being in such an environment, by being surrounded by so much lesbian material and lesbian history, and they’re taking it all in quietly.”
Edel, who co-founded the archives 50 years ago, in 1974, with writer and activist Joan Nestle, among others, said people from all over the world come to visit.
“Some people come to do research, they’re very focused, and other people come because they just want to get swallowed up by lesbian culture,” said Edel, who will turn 80 this year.
From the outside, the building that houses the archives looks like all the other brownstones on the picturesque, tree-lined Brooklyn street, just off Prospect Park.
Once inside, the first floor looks like the combination of a library, a home office and the private apartment of a retired literature professor. Books line most of the walls, which are painted a pinkish purple, and historical photographs and posters are displayed wherever there’s a bit of wall space.
The bookshelves lining the first floor have a diverse array of Sapphic titles, where one could find anything from a groundbreaking lesbian memoir published in 1939 to a lesbian cookbook from 1983. In the narrow hallway next to the stairs, one of the must-see items is a uniform jacket of a lesbian Army medic who was stationed in Vietnam.
Looking through the seemingly endless folders and file cabinets on the second floor, one may be surprised at the rich history that can be uncovered, from photocopies of the short-lived 1940s lesbian magazine Vice Versa to a 1983 issue of The Gayly Oklahoman.
One of the larger framed images on the wall of the second floor is a poster from the 1974 Midwest Lesbian Conference and Music Festival in East Lansing, Michigan.
Edel said the archives were founded because she and members of a group called the Gay Academic Union, which worked to make academia more accepting of LGBTQ people in the ‘70s, began talking about how difficult it was to find reliable information about lesbian history.
“A few of us said, ‘Hey, why don’t we just start collecting our history? We’re the ones who best know what we need, what we want. Why let other people do that for us, because they’ll control our history?’” recalled Edel, who now splits her time between New Jersey and Arizona with her partner. “We were all people who really knew that our history was disappearing too quickly.”