Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle (born May 12, 1940) is a Lambda Award-winning writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. She is openly lesbian and sees her work of archival work as critical to her identity as "a woman, as a lesbian, and as a Jew." Cited by feminist civil liberties activist Nettie Pollard for having written about age-gap sex and childhood sexuality, Nestle also consistently advocated against censorship of dissident views and for other sexual minorities to have the right to speak.

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 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, as well as speeches she gave at feminist conferences and events in later years. 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.