Recently, I was fortunate to catch up with a roundtable on “Lesbian Publishing in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and Beyond.” Cosponsored by the Lesbian Herstory Archive and the LGBT Oral History Project of North Florida at Florida State University, the event marked an exhibition at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts, still available online, featuring a collection of work from the Naiad Press and exploring its legacies in the Tallahassee lesbian community. You can check out the flyer for the event here, and a recording of the event has been posted on YouTube. The FSU Museum exhibit focuses on Naiad Press, which was “one of the largest and earliest publishers of lesbian literature in the United States,” but the roundtable was made up of women associated with Naiad and other small presses, such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and BLF Press, as well as scholars, artists, and a founder and archivist from the LHA. At this moment when queer lives and literature fall under attack across the country, especially in Florida, this roundtable offers an empowering reminder of the centrality of publishing to community building, memory, and resistance. It’s also an opportunity to learn from folks like Barbara Smith, Stephanie Andrea Allen, and Joan Nestle who have dedicated their lives’ work to documenting, publishing, and preserving the experiences, works, struggles, and beauties of their communities. As writers, we should be so fortunate as to find such dynamic publishers, and as publishers we should consider how we can both continue to honor and respect this work and protect the public sphere that makes it possible.
One of the real striking things about the exhibition and the archive it draws on is the importance of what might otherwise be considered ephemera to this kind of work. As Joan Nestle says, in the “gritty beginning … it wasn’t just the books, it was the newsletters, it was these fragile, mimeographed and stappled things that you all made into a solidified culture.” This kind of do-it-yourself publishing is familiar to punk rock fans, guerilla presses, and underground zine distributors, and those early days of lesbian publishing produced so much more culture than just books, much of which folks might not even consider varieties of publishing, but which are even more relevant for that. The Herstory Archives, for example, include everything from biographical files of “well-known and not-so-well-known lesbians” and geographical files of “materials ranging from local ‘lesbian/gay maps’ and guides, to flyers of events, listings of bars, newspapers clippings, or a local newspaper” to collections of periodicals, newsletters, and zines, photo collections, banners, and even button collections. Especially intriguing is the collection of “org files” that includes “materials on groups and organizations, past and present, that have focused on lesbian, feminist, and/or women’s issues.” Lessons in community and organization building stored in meeting minutes, agendas, and ephemera.
Of course, community-minded publishers could learn so much from these archives about the role of artists, writers, and publishers in the work of documenting and preserving culture (often in the face of great adversity, including, as Barbara Smith points out, racism and discrimination within the movement). “We change the world,” Joan Nestle says, “and then the archive remembers.” For Barbara Smith, in her book Black Lesbians, that change comes in the imperative to record history as it's being made: “We must document ourselves now.” This heroic archive, and the history of publishing it collects, also reminds us of the deep need for and real value of representation. How even pins and stickers, banners and flyers, constitute acts of public making that call to others, remind them they are not alone, and offer the sustenance of community. As Donna McBride, co-founder of Naiad Press, describes representation, “I think that all of the generations now and forward do not have a concept of the leap of joy that we all had when we found something like a book that we were in. … It was kind of like falling in love.”
The influence of these extraordinary women is now visible in nearly every aspect of our shared culture. We have more and more prominent LGBTQ+ culture than ever before. As Nestle says, we’ve entered a time of plenty and “we celebrate the fullness.” But, she continues, “in some ways, the forces that do not want us to speak in all our differences are gaining strength. And I worry about fascism.” Nestle is right to be worried. According to PEN America, “more” is also the “operative word for [their recent report] on school book bans” reflecting “the work of a growing number of advocacy organizations that have made demanding censorship of certain books and ideas in schools part of their mission.” PEN reports 2,532 individual instances of book banning in 2021-22, affecting 1,648 unique titles, and LGBTQ+ content accounts for 41% of those bans, followed by issues of race at 40%. Nearly half of these instances, PEN reports, are also connected to legislative attempts to restrict the teaching or presence of certain books or concepts. Indeed, in just the last few months we’ve seen backlash against Target, Bud Light, and even Cracker Barrel for daring to publicize (publish) their willingness to support or even tolerate the LGBTQ+ community. As writers, artists, and publishers we are uniquely positioned to help turn the tide of culture, to recall that even the most seemingly ephemeral acts of public making can nurture resistance and community and help preserve the vitality of our democratic public sphere for everyone. We can listen and learn from those who’ve come before us, and we can resist book bans, support queer publishers, and demand our politicians reject hateful laws. We can also publish and protest. Like the brave women gathered at this roundtable, we must refuse to let the opposition silence us in our many differences. Happy pride.