Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle (born May 12, 1940) is a Lambda Award-winning writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Cited by feminist civil liberties activist Nettie Pollard for having written about intergenerational lesbianism, age-gap sex and childhood sexuality, Nestle also consistently advocated against censorship of dissident views. In her 1980 talk titled “Some Understandings,” Nestle defends the right for gay men to speak about their experience of intergenerational sex, and advocates against scapegoating.

As a lesbian who came to erotic awareness in the 1950s and into young adulthood in the 1960s, Joan defended the lesbian activism and sexual culture of the 1950s against charges that it was reactionary, rather than a product of its time. Based on her experience living through periods where lesbianism was considered a sickness / mental illness, an aberration and highly stigmatized, she advocated for solidarity with other sexual minorities and against censorship and lesbian co-operation with the carceral State.

Nestle was part of the Mid-_to_late_20th_century butch and femme bar culture of New York City since the late 1950s. In an interview with Ripe Magazine, she recalled that the center of her social life as a young lesbian was a bar called the Sea Colony, which was run by organized crime and, in an attempt to avoid raids by the vice squad, allowed only one woman into the bathroom at a time.

After the Stonewall riots in 1969, gay liberation became a focus of her activism. She joined the Lesbian Liberation Committee in 1971 and helped found the Gay Academic Union (GAU) in 1972. Nestle began writing fiction in 1978, when a prolonged illness prevented her from teaching for a year. Her erotica focusing on butch and femme relationships made her a controversial figure during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s; members of Women Against Pornography called for censorship of her stories. Her life was the subject of a 2002 documentary by Joyce Warshow entitled Hand on the Pulse, and she appears in the 1994 documentary about lesbian history Not Just Passing Through.

Joan Nestle and childhood sexuality

In her 1987 non-fiction book A Restricted Country, Nestle narrates various stories from her life, for which she won the Stonewall Book Award in 1988. Sexual contact and desire involving large age gaps is mentioned in multiple stories, including both unrequited desire, wanted and unwanted experiences. Nestle writes how she had been having oral sex, “making love with my best friend Roz Rabinowitz,” since she was 10-years-old. By age 13, she writes of persistent intergenerational desire directed at older women in her life.

In her story “Liberties not Taken,” Nestle describes her childhood in 1953 at the age of 13, staying in a rural area with Mac (“a big man”) and his wife Jean who had 5 children together. Nestle vividly describes her youthful longings for Jean which went unspoken and unconsummated, much to her regret when she discovers that Jean died of cancer only 5 years later...

I didn’t call myself gay yet. For three years [i.e. at 10 years old – Newgon] I had been making love to my best friend Roz Rabinowitz with my mouth, and I knew the word lesbian, but I was terrified of its implications and could not say it. [...]

With Jean it was different; I was not afraid of being anything she was— except Mac’s wife. We spent the long weekday nights playing cards with the older women who shared a cabin down the road. Every night before we went to bed she asked me to massage her back. I would straddle her, marveling at her body that was her ally, the muscles lying lean on her bones. I longed to slip my hands around her, to catch her small pointed breasts in my hands, to extend the travel of my fingers down the small of her back to her buttocks, to slip gently into her, and to give her all the pleasure there was in my thirteen-year-old imagination to give. I wanted to lie beside her, hoping that she would wrap her long legs around me and carry me with her in her leaps for freedom. I never had the courage to do these things. I just whispered “I love you,” as she stretched under my hands. [...]

I longed for Jean’s lips. But because I did not tell her clearly that it was my yearning, my choice, my passion that wanted her, a 13-year-old knowledge that was deep and fine, she and I did nothing, and Mac kissed me and fucked her. [...] My whole body was tuned for another sound. I knew she would come, and I wanted to show her I recognized my difference. I will bide my time until she touches me. I want her hands on me, her tongue in my mouth. I want to hold her head against me and throw my legs around her. [...] You heard their voices, not mine, because I was a girl-woman and it was a dangerous thing to touch me, and yet I had been touched so many times before by men who did not pause to think of innocence. Your touch would have healed me.

Again in 1953 at age 13, Nestle describes her attraction to an older woman named Susan Bender.

Susan attracted me. I thought she was butchy and I sensed a strong body under her unattractive clothes. I was looking for this secret strength even then. I remember one afternoon trying to seduce her in her bedroom, and somehow handcuffs were part of the game. I soon realized, however, that even though Susan looked the part, she was slow to follow my lead.

Joan writes extensively about her mother Regina, who was born in 1910. Regina lived a difficult, poverty-stricken life working as a bookkeeper in New York while also occasionally selling sex. She was heterosexual and did not accept her daughter Joan’s lesbian sexuality until close to her death. In “My mother liked to fuck” and “Two Women: Regina Nestle, 1910–1978, and Her Daughter, Joan, 1940-”, Nestle reckoned with her mother’s extensive, active and difficult sex life. This involved much casual and paid sex after the death of Regina's husband who had died when she was 29 years old, leaving two unborn children behind. Upon death, Regina had no money or possessions, but left Joan a series of letters and scrawled notes which gave her frank and innermost thoughts on events in her life, including her childhood, sexual experiences good and bad, and her children and work life. Joan quotes these evocative writings, which include Regina’s own recognition of her childhood sexual feelings:

I remember as a little girl, the impatience with my own youth. I recognized that I was someone, someone to be reckoned with. I sensed the sexual order of life. I felt its pull. I wanted to be quickly and passionately involved. God, so young and yet so old. I recognized my youth only in the physical sense, as when I exposed my own body to my own vision, saw the beautiful breasts, the flat stomach, the sturdy limbs, the eyes that hid sadness, needed love—a hell of a lot of grit and already acknowledging this to be one hell of a life. I was going to find the key. I knew the hunger but I did not know how to appease it.

Teenage experience

In the chapter “A Restricted Country,” Nestle describes a double date with “Bill, the tired, aging cowboy who ran the corral,” alongside her brother Elliot who “was with Mary, a woman in her twenties who worked at the ranch.” It is not stated how old Bill was, but as he is described as having a "bony hand" (and later as being the lover of an elderly woman with cancer), we can presume he was in his 60s or older.

We had been to see a movie and were now parked behind the ranch house. Bill kissed me as we twisted around in the front seat. His bony hand pushed into my crotch, while his tongue opened my mouth. I pushed his hand away, sure of what I wanted and of what I did not. I did not want his fingers in me, but I did want to see his cheek against my breast. My brother and Mary gave up their squirming in the back seat and left the two of us alone. Bill was respectful. One word from me was enough to get him to stop his efforts at penetration. “Lie in my arms,” I told him.

His lips pulled at my nipples. We sat that way for a long time as the Arizona sky grew darker and darker. Right before he fell asleep, he said, “Best thing that’s happened to me in twenty years.” I knew this did not have very much to do with me, but a lot to do with my 16-year-old breasts. I sat there holding him for what seemed like hours, afraid to move because I did not want to wake him, when suddenly he jerked in his sleep and knocked into the steering wheel, setting off the horn. The desert stillness was split by its harsh alarm, and I knew my idyll was coming to an end.

One by one the lights came on in the guest cottages. My brother was the first to reach the car, his pajamas shining white in the moonlight. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” I whispered, as I maneuvered my body away from Bill’s. I wanted to escape before the other guests came pouring out, to save Bill from having to explain what we were doing. He would be held responsible for breaking the boundaries between guests and workers, between young girls and old men, and I would never be able to convince them that I knew exactly what I was doing, that tenderness was my joy that night.

Anti-censorship views and support of dissident views

In her 1980 talk titled “Some Understandings,” Nestle defends the right for gay men to speak about their experience of intergenerational sex, and advocates against scapegoating.

In these painful and challenging times, we must not run out on gay men and leave them holding the sexuality bag. It is tempting to some lesbians to see themselves as the clean sex deviant, to dissociate themselves from public sexual activity, multiple partners, and intergenerational sex. While this may be the choice for some of us, it is not the reality of many others, not now and not in the past. Lesbian purity, a public image that drapes us in the cloak of monogamous long-term relationships, discreet at-home social gatherings, and a basic urge to recreate the family, helps no one. It does justice to neither the choices it supposedly venerates nor our sexual independence. Long-term couples are often struggling with huge issues of lust and changes in sexual patterns. Discreet social gatherings were and often are the way close-knit sexual communities found a safe place to play. Public bathrooms have been social bedrooms through the years for young lesbians who had no safe home to take their lovers back to, and we have long documented the lustful crushes of young lesbians on older women, many more of which have been consummated than we encourage to be discussed.

Thus, by allowing ourselves to be portrayed as the good deviant, the respectable deviant, we lose more than we will ever gain. We lose the complexity of our own lives, and we lose what for me has been a lifelong lesson: you do not betray your comrades when the scapegoating begins.

In the chapter “My history with censorship,” she discusses living through McCarthyism and later, the feminist sex wars and anti-pornography feminism. During this time, Nestle became associated with the "pro-sex" or "sex positive" wing of feminist thought. She argued that, in the 1950s, "Any dissension became a heroic act."

If you spoke the wrong words or supported the wrong people, you were labeled un-American. You were sent into national, and in many cases private, exile. I watched people in their forties and fifties shrink from their children, withdraw into long, slow deaths. I heard read over the radio the names of those who were to be called in front of the Committee, before the Committee even reached a city. Long enough in advance for employers to fire the accused, long enough to give neighbors time to ostracize the marked family, long enough to give the stigmatized individuals time to take their lives. None of this was done by legal power. It was done by the power of orthodoxy, of one prevailing view of how to make the country safe. It was not trial by jury in a court of law: it was conviction by innuendo, by association, by labeling.

This is my historical and emotional starting point on the issue of censorship. Those were the years I learned about censorship, the overt kind and the more subtle kind; the years I learned about a mentality that reserves for itself the words that mean everything good, and labels dissenters with any term that will set off the alarm. Those were the years I learned about anonymous telephone calls warning people about the undesirables among them; the years I learned about visits to places of employment to make sure employers knew who they had working for them. It was the time I learned about silence, enforced by the fear of losing whole communities, about words and pictures never born because difference was a curse.

While unstated, these descriptions are arguably very similar to the situation faced by MAPs, AAMs and their allies (LGBTQ or not) who face intense stigma and censorship. Even more similar, Nestle's lesbian sexuality in the 1950s meant that she was part of a criminalized sexual minority. Historians such as Rachel Hope Cleves have used Gayle Rubin's theory of the "Charmed Circle" to explain how sexual minorities in the past were more proximate, and therefore more likely to form alliances and support each other because a broader array of sexual practices in general were stigmatized and/or criminalized. Nestle wrote of her criminalized sexuality:

But all along I had another world to sustain me, the deviant criminalized world of butch-femme lesbians in Village bars. Here, also, I was part of a judged community. We were moral dangers. Here I learned that vice squads existed to keep obscenities like myself from polluting the rest of society. Here I learned how to take brutal insults to personal dignity and keep wanting and loving. Here I first learned what a community of women could do even when we were called the scum of the earth.

When speaking at the famous Barnard Conference of 1982 (where Gayle Rubin was also a speaker), Nestle faced backlash from anti-porn feminists. She described this as the "second McCarthy period in my life."

Women called the organizers of conferences where I was speaking and told them I was a “sexual deviant,” labeling me a dangerous person who betrays the feminist cause. A member of Women Against Pornography, who saw it as her duty to warn a group of students and professors about me, visited the place where I earn my living, Queens College. “Don’t you know she is a lesbian?” “Don’t you know she practices S&M?” “Don’t you know she engages in unequal, patriarchal power sex?” (Butch and femme is what she meant here, I think.) I was called to the Women’s Center on campus and asked by a group of women students gathered there whether the accusations were correct. Only those who remember the cadence of those McCarthy words — “Are you now, or have you ever been...” — can know the rage that grew in me at that moment. These young women, so earnest in their feminism, were so set up for this sad moment. “I cannot answer you,” I said, “because to do so would bring back a world I have worked my whole life to see never come again.”

She ended the chapter by stating:

All I have are my words and my body, and I will use them to say and picture the truths I know. I have been homeless before and I can be homeless again, but I almost think I have lived too long when I see lesbians become members of the new vice squad.