In 1972, a group of New York lesbians turned their Upper West Side apartment into the first-ever lesbian archive. They collected photographs, T-shirts, buttons, candlesticks, and letters; stuffed them into shopping bags; and went to teach in lesbian bars and homes. These women later founded what would become known as the Lesbian Herstory Archives, one of the few repositories in the world committed to the documentation of a queer past. Reflecting on the archives’ origins, Joan Nestle, one of its founders, explained that her experience of “the criminalizing 1950s” underscored the importance of documenting history in a way that made sex visible. She did not want the archives to become a “collection of respectable lesbian role models. … Yes, we wanted the papers of Samois, the first national public lesbian S/M group. Yes, we wanted the diary of a lesbian prostitute. Yes, we would cherish the pasties of a lesbian stripper. Yes, we wanted collections of woman-with-woman pornography.”
Nestle’s archive symbolizes the first wave of LGBT history, which was written and read not by academics but by people within the gay community who were hungry for history about their ancestors. In 2006, while researching my book on gay liberation, I met with Jonathan Ned Katz, whose pioneering 1976 book Gay American History was the first serious study of American LGBT history. When modern gay liberation began to heat up in the early 1970s, Katz began a sweeping research effort at the New York Public Library, reading newspapers, court cases, and other surviving materials to tell the history of gay people.
When I asked Katz why he turned to history amid the political excitement of the queer revolution, he recounted a scene from Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht’s short play about Galileo’s imprisonment during the Inquisition. The Roman Catholic Church had imprisoned Galileo for his theory that the Earth revolved around the sun and threatened to persecute him if he continued to promulgate this claim. Galileo ultimately succumbed to this pressure and recanted his heliocentric views, Katz explained, but at the last minute he passed along his thesis notes to his assistant, who spirited them out of the country. “I find it so moving,” Katz said, “because that’s the way we felt. This might be our only chance to sneak everything we learned into this book.” He decided to become a historian to ensure that his people’s history would not be forgotten.
When I pushed Katz further on who might prevent gay history from being told, he looked up at me and said, “The AHA.” Not having a Ph.D. or even a college degree — Katz was a trained textile artist — he worried that the American Historical Association’s intellectual chauvinism and inherent homophobia would discredit and erase gay history. That fear did not, however, stop Katz from continuing his research. He has published many books, devoted countless hours to creating online archives to preserve queer history, and remains a leading scholar in the field.