Original subtitles

If you begin your work and your career and your path

hiding essential things, even later on, it's

almost impossible for them to be seen clearly.

Here are these pictures of Willa in suits and ties and men's hats. And I'm

thinking, whoa, what is this, you know?

And then I talked to the women there about what was Willa like and all this.

of course, they hadn't known her personally, but they knew her

And that's what she did. She dressed like a man, a boy.

And everybody's like, well, that's Willa. She dresses like a boy.

And I don't know what happened to her in college. I think it was second year in

college. All of a sudden, she turned it around, started dressing like a girl.

But there are these photographs in that.

Brooke, I'll let you know.

And she's in amateur theatricals, and she's always playing the man with the

beard and the mustache and the whole thing.

She called herself Will.

Yes, she was Will.

My visit to Red Cloud. Because, you know, there's the memorial.

Okay, there's a big memorial there for Willa.

Scholars come from all over the world.

There's no mention ever of her lesbianism.

This is the Willa Cather childhood home in which Willa herself moved here when

she was a young girl from her home state of Virginia.

Willa Cather had always wanted to be known strictly for the work she

not for the manner in which she lived her life. That's why.

And two women living together in so intimate a relationship had reason to

their privacy closely against public attitude.

So they developed a habit of extreme discretion.

And before her death, they burned all of the letters.

Let us pray for a lesbian granddaughter in the Cather family.

Lesbians disappear, first of all, because of being women.

I mean, women disappear. Just look at how many biographies there are of women

opposed to men.

They disappear because they're deviant, because it's still shameful.

They disappear because, for whatever reason, lesbians are writing not very

biographies of our own. When I was a kid, and I invented this game where

is sick, and you take them out to the ambulance, and I always had my arms.

around them, and they liked the game very much. This goes back to the Dark

There was a scandal about one of the Vanderbilt women, and she had a lesbian

affair, and I heard my mother talking to another woman, and my mother said to

me, I was a little kid, she said, don't go near strangers, near women.

I start looking for that strange woman. I feel I was born that way.

You know, and having those feelings, it was always my preference.

Sex is a continuum.

You can like anybody, but the real preference is for another woman.

How old are you?

Seventy -seven, in the shade.

I was six years old and I was doing things under the stairs with little

and little boys.

I was a very sexy child.

You know, we were playing doctors and nurses, school, the teachers. I would

crushes on teachers. Oh, unbelievable.

In the assembly room, I would, you know, pick out one little girl and, you know,

follow her around. It was terrible.

Up until this generation, basically, if you didn't have that concept of yourself

as important enough to write stuff down about, or if you just weren't a writer.

And I was very, very shy.

What else are you going to work from after somebody's died?

Because of my romancing around and wanting to kiss women, I would start

class, but I would never finish.

Because this was more important to be around the girls and the women.

Biography of lesbians, biography by lesbians.

I was born in 1929, the year of the crash.

I was born in Brooklyn.

But I've always known I was a lesbian. I always knew from the word go. I always

knew that I was different from everybody else around me.

One of my mother's friends.

I loved her and I was afraid of her at the same time.

I always looked forward to her coming. When she came, I had a very peculiar

feeling.

One of fear, too. Don't ask me why.

But I left her and I feared her at the same time.

I don't know. I'm 62 years old. I was very young.

But she told me this woman lived in the village.

And I always wanted to see what the village looked like.

I think there's some real interesting questions, especially like the history

consciousness. How do ideas percolate?

I had this peculiar fantasy that the village was a village with white picket

fences, you know, and trees and grass, really.

I also know that there were lesbians in this wonderful, beautiful little

village. But that was my fantasy, so I went to see her.

Minta was going to set me straight, quote -unquote.

But instead, guess what? She seduced me.

And we became lovers.

Always felt that I was a lesbian. I always had crushes. There were women,

teachers, friends, neighbors.

Always had crushes. In my fantasies, always.

But I never acted upon it, okay?

And I could never be as I wanted to be. I never came out and said I'm a lesbian.

I was born in 1904.

I guess I looked gay. It didn't bother to really ask me whether I was or not.

Okay, so you get to be queer, but then you don't get to be female.

You get to be female, but you don't get to be queer.

Hey, what else is new?

Yes, I did wear skirts.

I wore skirts when I went to work after I graduated from high school.

I even stopped wearing bras, and I used to wear those bandages. I had much more

breast fat, but too large still because I didn't want them at all, and I would

tie them up. I would tie them up so I looked slack -chested.

Another factor is how the culture values people's documents and whether people

themselves have a sense that they should save their documents.

So if you don't, there's not much a biographer can work with.

I didn't want to pass as a man.

I was disturbed by my feelings, too, of course, because I'm like the only

one. I don't know, maybe I wanted to pass for a male.

I certainly felt like one.

When I left home, I changed my name to Sandy Kern.

That was kind of, it could be either male or female.

One big piece of it is how...

how things get saved and who gets attracted to it. And that's true not

lesbians. It's true for women. It's true for blacks. It's true for, you know,

Latinos and Latinas.

I was always afraid of getting discharged from the WAC because of being

And if I got thrown out for doing something, it would be shattering. It

horrible. Yeah, it had to be the 30s.

Not a lot of biographies of lesbians by lesbians.

Rosemell first denominated.

Let him disappear that way.

Because I was working, my first job was artificial flower house, and we were

making the rose with the velvet belt as his campaign

thing. But you do have to know, and that gets into coding, you do have to know

what things mean.

You need to do some background work and try to see if you can find out what some

of those icons are.

Jerry was one of the first women to take a man's place in a factory, and I've

forgotten what she did.

I operated a lathe, drill press, but the standard lathe, the

big one, was what I did mostly.

I worked for Ford Instrument.

Then I went out to California and I worked on the boat as an electrician.

I mean, Rosie the Riveter thing. I gave an interview for that. They didn't take

me because they were taking women who had husbands or sons, if you noticed the

movie. They weren't going to take someone who was single and a lesbian.

But they had my whole story down there.

You know, how I had to fight the men and fought.

the union to be able to get the other women to get their amount of money that

they were supposed to get, because they tried to hold me back, you know.

Oh yes, I fought like crazy, and that was the first time. And Fatten did

for months until they would hear my story.

I used to go to Harlem. I used to go to Smalls.

I'm gay myself, and my best friends are gay guys.

I lost about 10 or 12 of them.

Hasn't everybody?

It's terrible.

I see people, I'm with them, and all of a sudden they're dead.

The first person who had AIDS was a dear friend of mine, a boy of 30.

I'd known him since he'd been about, you know, 12, 15 years old.

I knew him and his mother.

And I took him to his first opera.

He was only 30 years old.

He's one of the first people to die of AIDS.

At Christopher Street, there were both men and women, gay men and women.

In case they were raided, which they were at times, we would just switch

partners and dance with the male.

I was in one bar, one bar on Barrow Street that was raided, really raided.

And I was really frightened. And here I am, like, in my 50s, I think.

And I was more protective of the young boys who were

in drag.

Also, there was some underage. Our group stood up for them.

We went down to the police station with them.

when you start looking at people who were social change agents, writing

biographies of them from that perspective, then you start to have

voices for the outgroup.

So, like anything, it's a tool in a political context.

You think white lesbians have a problem? Try being a lesbian of color. As

different layers kind of manifest themselves, the subject almost can

On the one hand, I'm saying, like, you need, if you're honest, to try to leave

the subject her own space.

But in another way, she's nothing but a kind of bare canvas on which people are

inscribing all these issues.

And words are very important to me, and those titles really threw me for a loop.

I was not playing a role.

I was who I was, and I happened to be, I was perceived as being Butch.

And this is who I was, and this is who I am.

Pulp novels from the 40s and 50s, and any books

that had lesbian content, whatever they were.

Things began to change.

I was looked down upon by other lesbians. I felt like an outcast because

of the way I looked and the way I dressed.

And I saw that lesbians were beginning to look more like women. I saw couples,

to me, they both looked quite feminine.

I thought, I don't know what's going on here.

They were swinging between butch and femme and then they were swinging

being a lesbian and being straight.

I couldn't accept my body. I couldn't accept sex.

The girl who I was very attracted to, in fact, she was the first one who taught

me clitoris. You know, I had no idea. I couldn't understand what, you know, as I

say, mine was necking and petting, and here we are in bed. Her folks are away

for the summer.

We're in bed, you know, and it's the first time I'm really naked with a

And then all of a sudden I feel my shoulder, her arms on my shoulder, and

pushing me down.

I took to it like a fish takes the water. I mean, it was unbelievable. I

never understand how it happened. And women have taught me how to make love,

know, for I see what they want, and I picked up on it.

Yeah, I do it, and nobody caught me.

So as I got a little older, we would go down to Grand Central or Port Authority,

take train rides, because women together and even hugging and kissing in the

street was not a no -no.

Even though I looked the way I looked, I used to get away with it. I mean, we'd

pretend that we were leaving one another and we'd be able to kiss goodbye.

You know, I had this going quite a bit.

I was drinking very heavily, you see. A lot of people drank, many alcoholics.

And the liquor was very strong.

1934. The bars were still run by mafia.

They used to raid the places at least once a week.

Before the raid, they'd say, girls, take your neckties off. You're going to be

raided. They would flash on the lights on and off, on and off. That would be a

signal to us that, hey, there's going to be a raid. Get out.

If you wore three pieces of feminine underwear, they didn't book you. If you

wore male underwear, you were booked in a raid.

Well, I was never frightened because I was drinking.

Certain things that probably happened to me, people probably didn't insult me,

I'm sure of it. It didn't register.

The boys on the corner would yell out, Les and Dyke.

It was tough.

People shouted at me.

Hey, dirty lesbian, dirty lesbian. They used to throw things at me. The kids,

terrible. I was with my lover in Prospect Park one night. It was early

It was still night.

And these kids jumped us. It was terrible.

It's much easier today.

Much easier.

These categories are so deeply embedded.

They're so dichotomous. Start thinking about orders of analysis more complex

than... binary oppositions, which seems to be really hard.

There's a lot of ageism in the lesbian community.

Woof! Boy, it's a lot of it. And often I feel absolutely invisible.

Invisible.

Now did you ever hear the story about that boy in a boat?

Don't wear no shoes or no overcoat.

Rod told me that it happened like this.

Fragments not only is what's left us historically oftentimes, but that's

the reality, I think. And I think, in fact, I think that's one of the reasons

that people get uncomfortable a lot of times with...

with film that is more experimental or that is not narrative because it makes

uncomfortable. It makes us, it's a little bit more like life, like all

things that are just kind of flying past that we don't have a whole lot of

control over.

He loved to dive and also to fish.

He went roaming in that shallow boat with his head hardly rising and his

eyes hot to go.

Face is all wrinkled and his breath smells like soap.

Talking about that boy in a boat.

And the variety and diversity of experience that there were for men with

homosexuality in the 30s is vast.

It came out when I was 15. I'm 64 now, and so that was in 1943.

i went back in for a good period of time when i was married but not totally

the third position then hetero or homo you've got a bi position but even that's

very simplistic and does not accurately represent the complexity of how people

really live their lives it

was great after going to

black cat or something to cruise down lower market street There would be

and marines walking slowly, and if there was a single sailor, that was great.

Just go around the block and pull up ahead of him and let him come abreast

show that you were interested.

That's when the port was bustling, and there was lots of Navy in San Francisco.

When you look at history, if you bring with you this binary framework, or even

the third part of bisexual,

It's so limiting. You just can't get what's there. It blinds you to seeing

what's there.

Especially when the world is not split into a world of gay people and a world

straight people, that there is much interaction.

Not gay people living in a straight world, not that framework, but where

people's sexualities are very complex and are coming up with a variety of

strategies for making those complex sexualities work from day to day.

His face is still wrinkled and his breath smells like soap.

Still talking about that boy in a boat.

The Bible, especially the saints in ancient Greece, have become over the

centuries ways that men have been able to portray and look at other men

or present themselves in a sensuous, physical way without clothes on.

But that's...

Legitimate because it has to do with the Bible or ancient Greece so you can see

some of that tension

The

dominant interest of the biblical story about Sodom is not about Sensuality at

all. It's about the status of strangers

and about rape and about violence.

Biblical scholars have begun to say that the story itself is not about

homosexuality as such.

When you have young, athletic, dancer -type men using the exaggerated

makeup and gestures of silent films in the company of each other without women

around, it becomes very feminized, very aesthetic.

It's not certainly the makeup that gay men, that fairies or sissies would have

worn on the street because it's theatrical makeup.

But it does suggest a kind of an artifice, an exaggeration, going too

That has a lot to do with camp.

It's sort of a mirror that's held up to gender.

Self -awareness, self -consciousness, and the exaggeration of gestures, the

theatricality of it.

One of the things at camp is all the awareness of the levels of

and performances that are necessary to get through everyday life as a

homosexual.

There was a gay culture which was quite supportive, furtive, but supportive, and

it had to do with two institutions to which I owe almost everything, the U .S.

Navy and the Boy Scouts of America.

Motion picture production code, it was administered by the Hays office, and

really it's run by Joseph Green. The code was...

drawn up by the Hollywood studios with self enforcement.

95 % of the theaters in America in 1933 and 34 were agreeing that they would

only show pictures that had been approved by the code.

When you talk about the code, it's this blatant mind control, miscegenation,

mixing of the races. This is a social control device.

We do not want the races mixed, therefore we will not show that it could

The World Code has been gone for 25 or so years now, but whole arguments and

discussions and discourse were all taken out of the main mass media. It's no

coincidence that...

In the 1990s, we're still having a debate about homosexuals.

From 34 to 61, gays were wiped off. In 61, there's this new rule that says it's

okay with care, discretion, and restraint.

Yes, you can show them, but care, discretion, and restraint means you kill

off at the end, or that they're punished one way or the other.

In African -American communities,

There were many, many, many different African American communities.

In some of them, homosexuality was integrated into the fabric of everyday

so that people knew who was with who.

And you can see this in the blues, where you have a man in the late

20s, early 30s, singing about his sissy man being taken away from him by another

man. And in our language, You might say, our language meaning, you know,

1970s, 1980s, 1990s, that there's a heterosexual man who has a lover who is

gay man who is being taken away by another straight man, but that's not

going on.

In the blues, there is an awareness that fairies and sissies are part of the

fabric of everyday relationship.

In the 30s, it's often martyred saints, Jesus on the cross,

St. Sebastian, Greek athletes during the Olympics, or men interested in looking

at other men's bodies in a sensual way. Those are the forms that have come down

through the centuries and remain alive.

All that language...

doesn't often translate into the 30s. My girlfriend sat on my right, I sat in

the middle, and he sat on my left.

And I soon became aware of wonderful calf touching my calf and then a

wonderful thigh touching my thigh.

He was gorgeous. Dark curly hair, wonderful skin, tanned.

I woke up this morning with my business in my hands.

If you can, bring me a woman.

Bring me a sissy man.

Homosexual gaze has... Well, there's sex in the eyes.

There's desire.

There's flirtation.

It was simply obvious from the fact that someone stared at you.

ways that men have been able to portray and look at other men or present

themselves in a sensuous, physical way.

But that's legitimate because it has to do with the Bible or ancient Greece.

None of the men in Sodom have shirts on or pants.

They have loincloths or posing straps or

nothing.

Turnabout and turnabout and just...

wonderful, wonderful screwing. It was the beginning of absolute bliss.

This is

Scoutmaster, who was tall and hunky and gorgeous and sexy and

also loved to screw. That's what What got me through my senior year was the

assistant scoutmaster.

All

the

heroes turn out to be real schmucks like everyone else.

We want to know what the next page is going to be before we turn it.

It's okay to have surprises if it's building up and they're warning us.

Surprises are coming here, but when the hero dies halfway in...

Throughout history, those stories have been also excuses for being able to

portray male sensuousness with other men.

In the context of the moral tale, where you're supposed to learn the lesson of

the tale, but in the telling of the lesson, it becomes very seductive.

Wonderfully erotic and playful.

Because it works against the story.

Because, in fact, they don't seem like they're doing anybody any harm.

And these characters are seductive. They're looking at each other, these

And they're being incredibly seductive to the camera.

Wanting to be looked at.

Willingly being looked at.

Positioning themselves so that they are being looked at.

I would see these men as men who are

Being presented to us in a world where there is male sensuality and feminacy

the boundaries are fluid around this, that is coded clearly to

me as effeminate homosexual.

And it's a completely different issue whether those men are homosexual because

that language, those codes are circulating through the culture in the

so that it may be a young man impersonating these gestures,

impersonating a fairy.

When that hand came out and started to shake her, it was like you will do as I

say, and not as you are.

You will grow as I direct, and not as you would.

Pressure to marry was strong. I liked women very much

as friends, and I fell in love with...

While I was living with him, I fell in love with a colleague, a woman.

She fell in love with me, and we were married in 1952.

Many gay men, as I did in the early 1950s, married, but

stayed married, often unhappily.

The very people who could contribute Information on the gay lifestyle in the

1920s and 30s and 40s are not utterly willing to do so. This group of people

getting on, these things should be recorded. I see that as a problem.

There's still a lot of men who aren't out.

men my age and a little older, with wonderful stories to tell, wonderful,

wonderful yarns that they still like to spin when we get together, but unwilling

to even go to the Gay Freedom Parade.

There were too many, too fast, too young. I had many young friends die.

Many. At one point, my partner and I had...

14, not in one year we lost 14, not just acquaintances, but

friends. It was relentless.

It was appalling. I would guess that the World War II experience and that loss

didn't do anything to prepare me for this.

It's just too grim.

The story is one of change and adaptation.

And there are always unexpected things that come up in people's lives relating

to homosexuality that have to be renegotiated and reinterpreted.

There is this tendency, which I think has been heightened by the rise of

and the fact that we're all immersed in mass media. We have a real tendency to

want to have a narrative to everything and want to see a...

a beginning and a resolution and a conclusion to everything in the world

it can all be understood and put in context and we've mastered the world

we understand it. And the reality is that's not true.

Life doesn't work that way. Life comes in fragments and we may understand

something and we may not and who knows if the meaning we apply to anything

really, you know, it's whatever it is.

Biographies. Most of those

women were heterosexuals.

Yeah, and this is another part of the story, of the sad story.

Even after the Third Reich,

It wasn't very nice to be a prostitute or a criminal or

to be asocial.

So the lesbians

didn't raise up their voices.

The other women, the heterosexuals, Jewish women,

women who had been in the concentration camps for political reasons, they could

raise up their voices.

Their social status was better.

And it's still.

The only hints we have is from those heterosexual women.

Now, the way they interpret lesbian life is very different from the way we would

interpret, because I found that by reading biographies written by a

woman. I can tell.

But it is not written by a lesbian.

Yes, of course. It sounds terrible how they describe them in a very, very,

very negative sense.

They all put them into the schedule of butchers and of asocial

human beings.

Even those women who had been in the concentration camps.

Some of them are more positive.

But the interesting thing is that those heterosexual women who say,

yeah, there were lesbians and who didn't sacrifice them, that they

divide them into two parts.

I tell you we must die. I tell you we must die.

I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die.

They said there were...

Lesbians were the butch type of women and

they found them amongst the criminals and amongst the prostitutes

and amongst the asocial.

And on the other side, there were lesbians

amongst the Jewish and the politicals.

And the important point is that they

say that Jewish women or those political

women would live another love together,

more idealistic love.

Physical lesbians were amongst the...

Criminals, prostitutes and asocials.

And platonic love.

And platonic love were amongst the women who were Jewish or political.

The first one is from Krystyna Zywusk. She was a Polish woman

and she was in Auschwitz.

So she said, or she writes, I look into the toilets.

A lot of women there.

On one toilet there was a German woman, a very male type of woman.

On her knees sat a very, very female, long -haired girl.

They looked in each other's eyes and then suddenly they started to kiss.

This kiss was eternal.

One can't imagine something more...

Disgusting?

Yes.

Oh, don't ask why.

Oh, don't ask why.

I tell you, we must die.

I tell you, we must die.

I tell you, I tell you, I tell you, we must die.

The next woman is Isa Vermeeren.

And she was captured in Ravensbrück.

This is important.

A lot of hymns come from Ravensbrück, women's concentration camps.

And she divides into orderly and disorderly love.

The orderly love is this mental love between the Jewish and the Christian and

the political women.

But she says, amongst the...

criminals, prostitutes, and asocial women, there would be

this real lesbian love with all its disgusting effects.

That's what she says.

And then she describes this butch type and...

What is she

saying when she describes... Yeah, the word... male in their behavior and they

were aggressive they were tall and they were short -haired and

nearly none of those lesbians she saw would have carried a pink

triangle yeah they were in prison because they were asocial and to be

one can say yeah asocial is a woman

If we go back to Unter der Linden, in that street, and the women putting their

description of themselves on a piece of paper on the wall.

And they made something, signs, for example, you have to wear a rose and

on your jacket when you come.

But it's oral history.

I don't know the details.

It was told by an old writer, a lesbian writer, I know her.

And she was young in this time, but she had an older lover. So it's the second

oral generation to know about it. We have not very much details.

I don't have this detail.

Some women here in West Berlin try to get this history, but it's very hard to

find something out.

Because the Nazi side was a very, very hard time for the lesbians. And

because after the war, the lesbian and gay people were

like the people we call Sinti and Roma, gypsies.

We had the same problems like the gypsies or the lesbian and gays who were

cassette, for example. We had to hide our history and to work with the hurting

inside.

The lesbian and gay people here in Germany and the gypsies, they don't have

anybody who listens to their stories.

When they get work and the one who gave them works asks them,

where were you in the time from 30 to, for example, 42?

They say, nowhere. I was in another country or something.

They cannot say I was in a concentration camp.

So they had to hide this story.

And it is very hard to ask them what happened because they had...

They had no words for it. For so many years nobody asked.

And after 40 years there comes a man and asks, what happened?

They have no answer anymore.

They are very much hurt inside because of the silence which came after the

concentration camp.

It is hard to ask them of this time because the silence inside of them

is so deep.

So it is very hard to find out what happened in this time.

What else can you tell me about Mühlerstrasse?

Mühlerstrasse is very famous.

It's a very famous bar, and everybody in Berlin can tell you that the singer

Clara Waldorf was there.

Clara Waldorf was an open lesbian. She was married with another woman in her

house, and she made big parties for lesbians and gays.

She was the most famous singer in Berlin. She's like a symbol for

most of Berlin people because she sang Berlin songs

where there's the whole feeling of being a Berlin person.

And nobody said she was a lesbian.

But she was singing and smoking and she was always wearing

men's clothes.

She was talking like a man, walking like a man. If you listen to the records,

you'll hear it, that she's a cofao. We call it cofao. But

nobody knows that she's a lesbian.

I think in the time when she was a singer, she had enough power to make it

Everybody knew it in the 20s.

Over her death, she's not able to use it for longer.

That's another way our history is suppressed.

Yes, I think that's the main thing.

Because many women, I think many women, have the power to do it when they live,

to show it and make it open. But when they die, the history is eating

them. We have only our own history.

The main thing is if you write it down and say something about you and make it

book and put it everywhere, there's a little chance that someone knows it all,

what you do, making films.

They'll live longer than you.

So you have to live and to say it every day, to be it. But when you are dead,

they do what they want with you.

We are just part of a very long, ongoing revolution, and it just takes different

shapes and forms.

I didn't really know what history was of gay culture until a lot later in life.

I didn't have a problem with my sexuality.

But when I started to realize certain things that I was attracted to,

You know, like old books I would pick up or old photographs of women.

I later realized what I was looking at. I was looking at a dyke in

male drag.

I think it's really important to know what gay culture and gay history is.

Alice had to move out and leave that place of memory.

You feel like you could be airbrushed out of history?

There's definitely within the dyke community a part of it that they don't

to show.

What we value and how we want to place ourselves with what we do.

isn't in the realm of what a lot of lesbians consider valuable.

Visibility of lesbian sexuality.

They can lay their jive just like a natural man.

BD women, BD women, you know they so will grow.

We really are talking about lesbian visibility on a very personal level.

J 'espère que cette géographie lesbienne d 'un des plus beaux quartiers vous

aura aussi donné envie de relire celles dont nous avons croisé les pas.

Et ne me prenez pas pour une rêveuse si je vous dis qu 'un jour, au 20 rue

Jacob, se tiendra le plus beau des musées.

At the heart of the archives is a vision of intergenerational connection, which

means dykes from the 90s understand witches from the 60s, and they

bull daggers from the 30s, at least through the cultural artifacts that have

been left.

We're an international archive, and that's really important to us. Send us

something in the language you make love in, and we have wonderful lesbian...

materials, books, and articles, and periodicals, and I think now, I think

to 15 different languages. And just yesterday, a woman from Yugoslavia came

the first anything published lesbian that's ever appeared in Yugoslavia. And

oftentimes, women come here on pilgrimages. The Italian women brought

lesbian book by Italian lesbians. There are newspapers from, again, in print and

out of print, from all over the country.

The archive in a certain sense is almost a collection of New York lesbian

history.

And I want you never to stop thinking of yourselves as history, and that all

your stories have a place in the archives.

Her name's Susan, and her history in the book. And Susan was, and perhaps still

is, an African -American lesbian woman, and she's still alive.

And at this time, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, it was the prevailing belief that

were less than human because our bodies were not normal.

And the doctors had a whole... scientific body of thought to prove

of the ways they did was to measure our nipples, our clitorises, to show that

they were larger than women's were supposed to be, or the nipples were

than women's were supposed to be.

And this was taken very seriously by the medical profession. I remember my

mother bringing me to a doctor in 1956 because she suspected I was queer.

And he had this book on his shelves, and he looked at me, and my mother told me,

later he said, you know, I think your daughter has a hormonal imbalance.

She might indeed be a member of the third sex because she has facial hair.

Now, it was on the basis of things like this that women were put in mental

hospitals, were put into prison, were put into marriages, and sometimes lost

their lives.

Whenever society wants to

dehumanize a group, the first thing they do is to show biological difference.

And you know that if you know, for instance, African -American history.

When Africans were deemed the ones to be enslaved, it was a whole supporting

biology of their difference from Caucasian biology.

When the Nazis were intent on wiping out Jews, they established a whole body of

material of Jewish physical difference.

of the Nazi soldiers measuring the nostril thickness of Jews to prove they

less than human.

When women were fighting for their rights, it was biological truths that

brains were smaller than men. So in this way, lesbians are from, share a long

history of biology used to prove we are less than human.

So the men who did this will never do it to us again. So Susan will not just be

body parts.

She'll be her body and her mind and her heart because we'll be the ones

commemorating.

These artists who have their minds in the gutter are free to do whatever they

want to do.

on their own time and with their own money.

I have often said that people who want to scrawl dirty words on the men's room

walls are free to do it, provided it is their own walls and their own crayons.

I voiced concern then and I voice concern now about the assault

on the nation's basic values by some of these.

self -proclaimed artists who insist upon mocking the American people and

shocking the sensibilities of the American people and who shield

behind the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Thank you.