This morning at the chiropractor, I spied a lesbian in an adjacent office, a tall, rangy, well-seasoned specimen. Oh, I do love seeing a lesbian when I’m out and about! It pains me that a friend was just telling me about a colleague of hers, a fierce, radical lesbian who teaches at a local university and who told my friend that she feels completely irrelevant these days, when none or her students even identify as lesbians anymore. I know what she means although, happily, I have the pleasure of meeting and working with young lesbians in my organizing and advocacy.
And to the professor’s point, I read in Lesbian Connection that the New Alexandria Lesbian Library in Holyoke, MA has been renamed The Sexual Minorities Archives. I don’t know the full story behind that, but it feels sad to see the lesbian go.
At a recent event given by the History Project, the presenter spoke about the importance of staying independent rather than allowing the archives to be taken over by a university or other organization. “We want to keep the archives available to the community and cared for by the community,” he said. “If we handed it over and there were to be a change in administration, for example, the archive could be unfunded or even discarded.”
History Project, you get one pingy-dingy! Thank you for your generous and fabulous work for the queer community, for keeping the focus on the queer community and in the queer community’s hands and hearts.
http://www.historyproject.org/
I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online.
At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life prevents posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”)
The Total Femme 