Feminist Pioneer Joan Nestle Speaks at Queens College

Acclaimed Jewish feminist author Joan Nestle addressed a group of 60 students, teachers and alumni at Queens College on Wednesday, April 6. Tackling topics ranging from queer oppression in the '60s to the role of folk singers as an organizing tool, Nestle inspired assembled students to continue their own fight for equality in a rapidly changing world.

"Here I and other working-class queers-as we called ourselves then-met at a small table in the cafeteria bolstering our private self-images with insider gossip about the gay or lesbian authors we had just read, surrounded by homophobic institutions... and by a McCarthy-fueled hatred of the workers," she said. "We worked very hard to convince ourselves that we were not the grotesques of our campus world. We never thought then that we had the right to ask the university to care about us, our minds, our imaginations, our lives."

Nestle is a Lambda Award-winning writer whose butch-femme erotica attracted controversy during the feminist "Sex Wars" of the '80s. Her 1992 anthology, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader became the standard work in its field. Other notable works include A Fragile Union: New and Collected Writings and A Restricted Country. She helped found the Gay Academic Union in 1972, and she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the pantry of her Upper West Side apartment in 1974.

The archives were moved to a lesbian-owned brownstone in Park Slope in 1992. They currently house more than 20,000 books, 12,000 photographs and 1,600 periodical titles.

Nestle graduated from Queens College in 1963, and quickly joined the civil rights movement. She participated in the Selma to Montgomery march and in voter registration drives. Several years after receiving her Master's degree in English from New York University; she returned to Queens College to teach writing in the SEEK Program. Cancer forced Nestle to retire in 1995.

Nestle recalls fellow queers asking the university to invite Malcolm X to speak on campus. The administration refused, saying he was too controversial. College officials asked them to hold their event at the site of a "tombstone of an African-American who was buried" on campus, "No, we want a living person," countered Nestle. "But we did go to that tombstone; and we wanted to know what happened to that person, what their story was." Nestle said that Queens College eventually built a gymnasium on the site.

She drew parallels between that incident and a guided trip she took between Tel Aviv and Haifa. "See those prickly-pear cactuses? And she slowed the car down so we could focus on them," recalled Nestle. "Every time you see a cluster of them, you are looking at the ruins of a Palestinian home. The farmers used the plants to form a natural corral for their grazing animals, and also ate the fruit borne at the tip of the rounded leaf. We started to look deeper, longer, and soon we could see the tracings of another people... stone foundations were here, buried underneath the shrubs."

She ended her talk by reading the Jewish lesbian poet Muriel Rukeyser's 1968 Poem-Rukeyser was a favorite among those in the feminist and anti-war movements.

Nestle then welcomed questions from students, who asked her about the experiences of her and her peers at that time. She spoke of insisting upon archiving the gay presence in the civil rights movement, and of her friends-Communist "red diaper" babies. Nestle talked about the conversations that went on at that "Queer Table"; and the self-styled "freaks" that occupied it, like her beard/partner-in-crime Carl Hirsch.

Nestle discussed the power of hootenannies-large conflagrations of folk singers-as a political organizing tool. She waxed nostalgic about Odetta, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. And Nestle also spoke about the threat of McCarthyism that surrounded the idealist young Communists with whom she associated.

"We knew we were deviant," she said. "McCarthyism was purging homosexuals from government jobs. Our deviance made us different in a way that the government deemed dangerous."

Nestle also spoke of the specter of homosexuality in academia. She recalled a time during the '70s when a young lesbian student, Nivea Castro, strode into the office Nestle shared with professor Ruth Siegel and asked her point-blank if she was a lesbian.

Nestle remembered one could have heard a pin drop as her fellow professors strained to catch her answer. "Yes, I am," she replied. And although her leanings could be discerned from her writings, Nestle's coming out eventually led her to teach Queens College's first lesbian literature class.

Her time on campus, however, was not always easy.

Nestle served as a teacher in the SEEK Program, launched in 1966 to help high school graduates who would not otherwise attend college. Because the program was only intended to operate for 10 years, she found herself going to yearly meetings to justify her work. Nestle was continuously passed over for promotions, in spite of the fact she published regularly. She eventually went public with her grievances, and administrators soon offered her a promotion and a graduate-level course to teach.

Nestle also took issue with the idea of the university as a for-profit business; including Queens College, which was tuition-free in her time. "Universities should be free," she insisted. "Ideas belong to everyone. But instead, universities are highways to power," with the moneyed elite from Ivy League schools advancing the furthest in life.

She also shared her views of the current gay civil rights movement; which focuses on marriage equality, gays in the military and other issues. Nestle described them as "the politics of co-option."

"I'm not so enamored of marriage and the military, but I understand that the politics of depravation can cause people to want most what they are excluded from," she said.

Nestle urged the students to maintain their sense of integrity in the face of right-wing bullying. She praised them for a rise in student activism that led 75 Queens College students to block the Long Island Expressway for 10 minutes in April 1 to protest state education cuts. "Other people have walked this path," said Nestle. "Ideas have body, and they will give your body ideas. I support stopping business as usual by non-violent means. Like activist Grace Paley said, 'just sit down together, and don't get up. Use your body in love for all human bodies.'"

Log onto www.joannestle.com for more information.