From Brooklyn to Berlin: Queer Temporality, In/Visibility, and the Politics of Lesbian Archives

Abstract

The strongest reasons for creating the archives was to end the silence of patriarchal history about us—women who love women. Furthermore, we wanted our story to be told by us, shared by us and preserved by us. We were tired of being the medical, legal and religious other —Joan Nestle, Co-Founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives There is no political power without control of the archive, or without memory —Jacques Derrida, theorist of the archive POST–SECOND WORLD WAR culture is fixated on memory and, by association, the archive, which collects, preserves, and houses documents or artefacts to be used by researchers and laypeople to confront, understand, and share the past. The range of archives in Germany and the United States of America, the two countries housing the lesbian archives I explore in this chapter, is too large to detail here, but both countries have archive cultures. US archives focusing exclusively on LGBTQ+ subjects include: the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles); the June Mazer Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles); the Archive at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center (New York City); the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum (San Francisco); the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives (Chicago); the Barbara Gittings Gay/Lesbian Collection at The Independence Branch Library (Philadelphia); the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Minneapolis), while Germany's queer archives include the Centrum Schwule Geschichte (Gay History Center, Cologne) and the Schwules Museum und Archiv (Gay Museum and Archive, Berlin). Such archives house information while offering us an opportunity to think critically about systems of oppression and the interlocking mechanisms of the personal and the political. A link between archives and non-normative sexuality makes sense, for as Laura Doan and Sarah Waters suggest, “retrospection is a condition of homosexual agency,” and Heather Love locates queers among the “groups constituted by historical injury” for whom “the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.” The archive may be a site of melancholy, and the LGBTQ+ archive houses the lost and sometimes scared and scary lives of queers, but I argue that this situation exists alongside a more positive space in LGBTQ+ repositories.