Sara Duell (born in Stockholm, 1987) works at the intersection of art and graphic design, with a focus on visual literacy and social justice. Working within a feminist, antiracist framework, Sara uses design to disrupt normative discourses* and create transformative, pleasurable spaces. She also writes about the hidden politics of visual language. She has a bachelor degree in design from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, Canada) and lives in New York City.
I sit to write this preface the day Putin started a military attack on the Ukraine. I sit in Berlin, Germany, in my apartment built two meters from where the Berlin Wall once stood. Cherry trees mark the path today. They are not blossoming yet, it’s cold and gray here still, end of February, the month no one wishes to be in Germany. My partner, a beautiful pale tall Norwegian dyke, is watching the news coverage: Ukrainians are fleeing in cars, buses, trains. Polish people are welcoming them at the border. Europe is bracing for a new wave of refugees. We watch the news together for a long hour, still struggling with the German we both learned when we immigrated. Eventually I move to the bedroom, to try and focus on writing. I move there also to stop watching the images: tanks, flames, soldiers with guns. I grew up in the Middle East, where images of these sort haunted my days. No, not images: this was the reality of my world. A war was the routine, soldiers were everywhere, all the time. It is the first time, since I left the Middle East, that there is a war on the continent I chose to live on, rather than on the one I left. The images are heartbreaking. If a cool city like Kyiv can fall, any European capital can fall. Rationally I know that there won’t be a third world war. Rationally I know that I am safe where I am. And yet, I think about asking my partner, where would we go if the war reaches here?
Nayana Guanipa, Sadhana 2021
If Putin takes Kyiv, I think suddenly, then Queer life in Ukraine will come to an end. I’ve followed Russia’s homophobic political propaganda in recent years. I google “queer bars Kyiv” and look at the faces of Dykes who might be on the run now. I look at their faces and then at the blank Word document where I am supposed to write the preface to this issue of WMN Zine. Nayana Guanipa’s work struck me from the first page: both of her works in this issue illustrate a woman’s face revealing itself (or disappearing) in a gray liquid. The faces symbolize both the hiding of our true selves in the process of migration, as well as the constant feeling of almost drowning by the mundane experiences of relocation. I feel sometimes, when I try to express myself in the language of where I ended up living, as if I am talking under an overwhelmingly heavy, thick layer of my past life and language. We—lesbians with an experience of migration, dislocation or displacement—let the world surround us in its thick gray liquid, and we try and reemerge out of this liquid pulp or reality. We strive to arise from within it with a smile.
We—lesbians with an experience of migration, dislocation or displacement—let the world surround us in its thick gray liquid, and we try and reemerge out of this liquid pulp or reality.
I look at the beautiful art works in the issue, I read the words of poetry, and I remember that no matter what happens around us, we, Lesbian-identified people, will keep on writing and creating. When we leave, like the three earlier issues of WMN zine, is a culmination of beauty and struggle, intimacy and power. This issue features works of art and poetry by Lesbians who have an experience of migration, immigration, international relocation, displacement, refuge and borders. I am grateful to the WMN team for opening up such an important and unique space. May we continue to move where our hearts draw us, may we keep creating art about what we left behind and what awaits us in the future, may we only move when we choose, and to where we choose. And may platforms like WMN keep portraying our works. For all the Dykes.
Dr. Hila Amit is an award-winning author. She was born in Israel in 1985 to a Jewish family with Iranian-Syrian ethnic origins. She studied creative writing at the Tel -Aviv University and holds a PhD in the field of Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London. Hila Amit’s fiction appeared in Lilith, Jalta, Emrys Journal & The Washington Square Review. Her short stories collection, Moving On From Bliss (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2016), was awarded the Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for Debut Authors, and was recently selected as one of the 10 best literary works in Hebrew for the years 2010-2020. Her non-fiction book, A Queer Way Out – The Politics of Queer Emigration from Israel (Albany: SUNY, 2018) was awarded the AMEWS (Association of Middle East Women’s Studies) Book Award. In 2014 she established the International Hebrew School, through which she aims to advance Hebrew learning using a queer, feministic and pluralistic method. She is the co-founder of “Anu אנו نحن: Jews and Arabs Writing in Berlin”, and is curating literary events which bring together Jews and non-Jews with a Middle Eastern heritage together.
In this WMN Studio visit we talk with with Ecuadorian poet Milena Díaz Rojas (She/ her – they/them). Her poem “Serranía/Mountainous” was featured in issue 4 When We Leave. Each studio visit highlights one of WMN contributors in the space where they make their art and poetry, as a way to get to know all of the amazing talent that contribute to the zines.
Háblanos un poco de dónde vives y en dónde trabajas
Ahora mismo estoy en Quito, en un barrio en la periferia norte de Quito, llamado Carapungo, aquí, aunque la mayoría de calles están pavimentadas, el polvo baila en el aire.
Al momento no dispongo de un estudio, me atrevería a decir que la mayor parte del tiempo trabajo en mi habitación y en la terraza, porque son los espacios en donde me siento más confortable. Pero, como la poesía para mí acontece en cualquier lugar y en cualquier momento, me atrevería a decir, que incluso e escrito largo en algún trayecto en el transporte público.
Tell us a bit about where you are based, and where you work.
Right now I am in Quito, located in a peripheral neighborhood of the North. This place is called Carapungo, although most of the streets are paved there is a lot of dust dancing in the air.
At the moment I don’t have a studio, I would dare to say that most of the time I work in my room and at the terrace, because those are the spaces where I feel most comfortable. But, as poetry for me happens anywhere and at any time, I would dare to say, that I have even written long on some public transport journey.
Cuéntanos sobre tu formación y cómo y cuando empezaste tu práctica creativa
Mi acercamiento a la práctica artística se dio primero por el teatro y por la danza -clásica y contemporánea-. En un tiempo sufrí una lesión bastante fuerte en el tendón inferior de la pierna izquierda, lo que me impidió continuar bailando como único medio de expresión, y sobre todo supervivencia. En ese tiempo, comencé a escribir y retomé lecturas que habían sido sustituidas por contenido meramente de artes escénicas. Recordé que había aprendido a leer a los tres años de edad, y que amaba escribir cuentos cuando era niña. Apliqué a varias convocatorias, que me hicieron sentir/ver que había encontrado, por fin otro medio que hacía que la vida tuviese sentido.
En cuanto a la performance, nace de la imposibilidad del movimiento corporal, es decir, por ejemplo, la performance, a diferencia de la danza, permite que todos los cuerpos expresen, sin importar las limitaciones (pensando en que la hegemonía e hiperfuncionalidad en los cuerpos es algo que está presente en la danza – clásica y contemporánea-). La performance me permite, entonces alargar mi trabajo y posturas políticas a un plano sensorial.
Tell us a bit about your background and how and when you started your creative practice
My approach to artistic practice was first through theater and dance -ballet and contemporary-. At one time I suffered a fairly severe injury to the lower tendon of my left leg, which prevented me from continuing to dance as the only means of expression, and above all survival. At that time, I began to write and took up readings that had been replaced by merely performing arts content. I remembered that I had learned to read when I was three years old, and that I loved writing stories as a child. I applied to several calls, which made me feel/see that I had finally found another medium that made life make sense.
As for performance, it is born from the impossibility of body movement, that is, for example, performance, unlike dance, allows all bodies to express themselves, regardless of limitations (thinking that hegemony and hyperfunctionality in bodies is something that is present in dance – ballet and contemporary-). The performance allows me, then, to extend my work and political positions to a sensory plane.
¿Cómo y en qué momento desarrollas tu trabajo?
Depende, generalmente, si se trata de poesía, sucede de forma random, una idea transcurrida por una emoción o sentimiento viene a mi mente, hay algo que detona que eso llegue a mi mente. A partir de ahí, lo escribo en lo que tenga a mano, prefiero que sea en un cuaderno, pero si no, lo hago en las notas del celular, después, me toma días seguidos editarlo literariamente hasta que tenga sentido. Aunque también me ha pasado que un poema me agrada a la primera.
En la performance, en cambio, puedo llevar meses con una idea en la cabeza, retroceder-avanzar. Hasta que finalmente sé cómo llevarla a práctica.
When and how do you make your work?
It depends, generally, if it is poetry, it happens randomly, an idea passed by an emotion or feeling comes to my mind, there is something that triggers that comes to my mind. From there, I write it in whatever I have on hand, I prefer it to be in a notebook, but if not, I do it in the notes of the cell phone, then it takes me days in a row to edit it literally until it makes sense. Although it has also happened to me that a poem pleases me at first.
In performance, on the other hand, I can carry out months with an idea in my head, go back-forward. Until I finally know how to put it into practice.
Compártenos sobre algún proyecto actual o algún proyecto que hayas finalizado recientemente.
Estoy trabajando en dos libros, el primero es de poesía. En él quiero hablar sobre relaciones familiar, lo territorial, y mi identidad lésbica. En el segundo que es narrativo, estoy hablando sobre mi identidad racial “chola”.
En performance, estoy aprendiendo de memoria un texto larguísimo de una escritora que admiro un montón, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano. Haré una video-performance con su texto. Y también, como homenaje al paro en Ecuador de junio de 2022, haré una performance en conmemoración, irrumpiendo en el palacio de Carondelet.
Share a bit about a current project you are working on or something you just finished?
I am working on two books, the first is poetry. In it I want to talk about family relationships, territoriality, and my lesbian identity. In the second one, which is narrative, I am talking about my “chola” racial identity.
In performance, I’m memorizing a very long text by a writer I admire a lot, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano. I will make a video-performance with her text. And also, as a tribute to the strike in Ecuador in June 2022, I will do a performance in commemoration, breaking into the Carondelet palace.
¿Ha afectado de algún modo ser Lesbiana en tu trabajo? Y si es así ¿De qué manera?
En poesía es en donde más influye, ahí escribo muchas cosas que son evidentes aún sin ser explicitas. Siento también que cada identidad que atraviesa el cuerpo, irremediablemente traspasa todos los ámbitos. No es necesario que una persona trabaje en torno a sus identidades, es una elección. Pero, aunque no lo estés haciendo enfocada en cierto tema, tu trabajo siempre estará salpicado de tu identidad, lugar de enunciación, y posturas políticas.
Does being a Lesbian/Dyke inform your work? If so, how?
In poetry is where it influences the most, there I write many things that are evident even without being explicit. I also feel that each identity that crosses the body inevitably crosses all areas. It is not necessary for a person to work around their identities, it is a choice. But, even if you are not doing it focused on a certain topic, your work will always be dotted with your identity, place of enunciation, and political positions.
Basada en tu experiencia como artista y poeta lesbiana ¿Qué consejo le darías a otras artists lesbianas?
Creo que es importante nuestro trabajo, aún vivimos en un mundo lleno de lesbo-fobia, lo cual hace que nuestra existencia aún sea considerada “peligrosa” para ciertos círculos. Tengo la impresión de que en el 2022 todavía estamos construyendo/abriendo camino para las siguientes generaciones lésbicas (y aunque a mí no me interese la maternidad biológica), me hace ilusión que las nuevas infancias puedan vivir en una sociedad más justa en cuanto a identidades sexo-genéricas.
Based on your experience as a lesbian/dyke artist and writer, what advice do you have for other lesbian/dyke artists?
I think our work is important, we still live in a world full of lesbo-phobia, which means that our existence is still considered “dangerous” by certain circles. I have the impression that in 2022 we are still building/paving the way for the following lesbian generations (and although I am not interested in biological motherhood), I am excited that new childhoods can live in a fairer society in terms of sex-generic identities.
Quito, 1999.
Milena, mula se mueve en la excolonia de lo que hoy es Quito. Explora la escritura, el performance y las artes visuales, con el fin de pasar del cuerpo al papel y del cuerpo/cuero a lo material.
Investiga y experimenta en torno al antirracismo, disidencias sexo-genéricas, decolonialidad, e identidad chola.
Quito, 1999.
Milena, a mule (a stubborn woman, a woman who’s always does what she wants, even when the worlds tells her that she can’t) moves in the former colony of what is now Quito, exploring writing, performance and the visual arts, moving from the body to paper and from the body to matter.
Through her work she investigates and experiments with anti-racism, sex-gender dissidence, decolonialism and the chola identity.
In this Studio visit WMN meets with writer and musician Alex “Fairything” Masse (she/they). Their poem “Sensory Issues ” was featured in issue 3 Taking Space. Each studio visit highlights one of WMN contributors in the space where they make their art and poetry, as a way to get to know all of the amazing talent that contribute to the zines.
Alex in their studio
Tell us a bit about where you are based, and where you work.
I’m based in what’s colonially known as Surrey, BC. This places me on the lands of the Stó:lō, Semiahmoo, W̱SÁNEĆ, Kwantlen, Tsawwassen, Katzie, and Stz’uminus peoples (native-land.ca). Also, for international folks: I’m just outside what you know as Vancouver, Canada.
Much of my work is done in my bedroom, at my desk–unless I’m performing live, of course. Back in 2020, this was out of necessity. Now, I suppose it’s what I’m used to. I can get pretty much everything done from there, anyway: drafting, recording, writing, producing, editing… I’ve become pretty DIY.
Tell us a bit about your background and how and when you started your creative practice?
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, finishing my first novel at about 15. It wasn’t great, but I’d found a passion for words, so I just kept writing.
Around the same time, I picked up music through school, and greatly enjoyed that. It started as playing concert band flute, but soon expanded into singing, songwriting, and production.
I started taking things seriously in 2020. I was just completing my first paid, professional writing mentorship with a local theatre, and between the pandemic and some personal stuff, I was feeling a lot of strong, scary emotions–so, I told myself, “Let’s try this art thing.”
I signed up for more mentorships, released my first EP, and started writing a webnovel, all by August 2020. They were a bunch of chaotic, feelings-driven, “I need to start this now or I never will” projects, but they put me out there, opened some doors, and became the foundations of some pretty exciting connections.
When and how do you make your work?
That depends on the day! As someone in university, I’ve spent the past year and a bit alternating between courses, full-time work placements, and periods where I’m just gigging around. That said, I think I’ve found myself a rhythm, and much of it comes down to the concept of “daily minimums,” something a mentor told me about a couple of years back.
The way I see it, as long as I can get through a few hundred words or a good half an hour tweaking something, it’s a productive day. And of course, I squeeze these daily minimums into my schedule wherever I can–though admittedly, sometimes that’s rather late into the night.
Share a bit about a current project you are working on or something you just finished?
This summer, I released a collaborative LP, Outta the Woods! It’s a rerelease of some older work I did with a now-defunct theatre company, as well as some guest tracks from former coworkers, and some brand-new songs from yours truly! You can listen to it on your streaming platform of choice. You can also just find it by looking up “Fairything” on most platforms.
I’m also doing a lot of long-form writing these days–I have an #OwnVoices Young Adult novel I’m wrapping up about some solarpunk fantasy genderfuckery and defying fate. Also a webnovel called Freakspotters that I’m writing about a college supernatural club, girls kissing, the desperation to belong, and the pitfalls that come with that.
Does being a Lesbian/Dyke inform your work? If so, how?
Being a lesbian/dyke informs everything from my gender presentation to how I move through and interact with the world, so of course it’d inform my art.
I often find myself compelled to tell lesbian stories–a concept that contains multitudes. Sometimes it means writing about a baby dyke’s exploration with gender nonconformity, sometimes it means writing about my relationship to the word lesbian itself, and sometimes it means odes to lesbians of eras past, who often couldn’t be as open about their identities as I am today.
Being a lesbian means I seek out a lot of queer content, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that content in turn influences my own work. My art is the way it is because of other lesbian creatives across time & medium–it’s a lineage!
My art is the way it is because of other lesbian creatives across time & medium–it’s a lineage!
Based on your experience as a lesbian/dyke artist and writer, what advice do you have for other lesbian/dyke artists?
Lesbian stories deserve to be told, and lesbian art deserves to be made, and don’t let anyone tell you that yours doesn’t count or isn’t important. However “weird” or “niche” you’re worried you are, someone understands. Allow your identities to interact, intersect, and colour your work–tell the stories you wish your younger self had had, the stories you wish that younger self could’ve shown those around them, or the stories you hope your communities can find solace in. As storytellers, one of the best gifts we can give people is the ability to identify and resonate with new ideas, whether that’s new ways of approaching life, or fighting the system, or loving yourself.
Also, don’t forget to have fun; not every piece you make has to be a rallying cry. Lesbian stories that are sweet and silly and simple are revolutionary in themselves.
Alex’ poem Sensory Issues for WMN issue 3 Taking Space
Alex Masse, AKA Fairything, is a writer, musician, and student (and possible changeling) from what is colonially known as Vancouver, BC. Their work has been seen everywhere from the Scholastic Writing Awards to Autostraddle, as well as in collaboration with Penelope Scott, Vancouver Pride, Simon Fraser University, and more. They’re also a neurodivergent nonbinary lesbian, which greatly affects their process.
In this Studio visit WMN meets with Mancunian poet Carson Wolfe (they/them) who just published the chapbook Boy(ish) Vest. Their poem “It’s not a ‘Support Bubble’. Bitch. It’s a Coven” was featured in issue 3 Taking Space. Each studio visit highlights one of WMN contributors in the space where they make their art and poetry, as a way to get to know all of the amazing talent that contribute to the zines.
Carson by their computer, as they say “The photo of me is how I am usually slumped around the house on my laptop. I have some work to do in the ergonomic area lol. “
Tell us a bit about where you are based, and where you work.
I am based in Stretford – a shit Manchester suburb in the midst of gentrification. I always say you can’t polish a turd, but the espresso machines popping up on every corner are proving me wrong. I was raised here, travelled a lot, and now live on the same street I grew up on—two doors away from my mum. I share a desk in a studio for artists, but I often write from my bed or the floor with one of those TV dinner trays. I have a wife, three children, and a cat at home, which means I’m lucky if I get five minutes with Google Docs on the toilet, the only door with a lock.
Tell us a bit about your background and how and when you started your creative practice?
I have been writing for as long as I can remember, but I only started editing in 2020, which is the same time I began my publishing career as a poet. Before that, I worked as a freelance portrait artist selling very kinky artwork on the side. I stopped painting to write poetry, which is mostly unpaid at this point, but I don’t mind. I was lucky to land a very flexible job to subsidise my income.
When and how do you make your work?
I work in random spurts and at the absolute whim of my ADHD brain. However, when my life looks more orderly, my best time to write is after the kids have gone to school. I don’t eat, I just drink coffee and write from 9am until 1ish. By then I’ve worked up an appetite and usually stop for the day. Sometimes I carry on into the night and become a ghost to my family, but that’s been harder to do since my wife and I welcomed baby Sojourner, who is now eight months old. Those chubby little cheeks are a major distraction.
Carson’s desk in a communal artist’s studio
Share a bit about a current project you are working on or something you just finished?
I just published Boy(ish) Vest – a chapbook of my best published work mixed with exclusive new poems. This was published in Autumn of 2022 by Hidden Voice Publishing (a local publishing house run by a lesbian/gay dreamteam). Further to this, I am working on my debut collection of poetry which has been twice a finalist for a book deal with Write Bloody UK (and I am twice the sore loser). This project explores a lot of the travelling I spoke of earlier. I left two abusive relationships, and then England altogether to live in a hippy commune in Spain with my three year old daughter. Since then, we have had a lot of adventures. One summer I bummed around twenty odd states with my small child and girlfriend/not-girlfriend (the label depends on who is telling the story, haha). We lived VERY wild, VERY free, and a lot of these moments are working their way into my manuscript. I’m obsessed with subverting the American travelling hobo ideal. IE. Jack Kerouac and his pals. I want to show people that women can be hedonistic arseholes too. Lol. Feminism.
Basically, I am rewriting the classic road trip story from the perspective of me, a dyke mother confused by my own tits, and a femme lesbian who—and I don’t mean to stereotype—can’t live without red lipstick.
Does being a Lesbian/Dyke inform your work? If so, how?
I write about my family, gender, sex, and dildos. Therefore, my queerness is usually always in conversation with the poems I write. There are themes I explore that aren’t explicitly queer, but that leads to a big question. What makes a poem queer? Is it queer in the subject matter, or is it queer because I wrote it?
Based on your experience as a lesbian/dyke artist and writer, what advice do you have for other lesbian/dyke artists?
Never stop writing about your period or fisting. No matter what anyone says, the world has not heard enough.
“I took a photo of the fire escape because I love the birds singing out there”
Carson Wolfe is an award winning Mancunian poet. Their work is forthcoming with Rattle, and has appeared with Button, Fourteen Poems, and The Penn Review, among others. They currently serve as a teaching assistant to Megan Falley on her renowned writing workshop Poems That Don’t Suck. You can follow them at @vincentvanbutch andhttps://linktr.ee/carsonwolfepoet
In this inaugural WMN Studio visit, meet literary artist and experimental filmmaker kevanté ac cash (they/she), their poems “that night” and “views from ella’s old room” were featured in issue 4 When We Leave. Each studio visit highlights one of WMN contributors in the space where they make their art and poetry, as a way to get to know all of the amazing talent that contribute to the zines.
Wide shot of kevanté sitting on the floor handwriting in their sketch pad
Tell us a bit about where you are based (which city and neighborhood), and where you work (in a separate studio, in your bedroom, in the kitchen, everywhere?).
I’m based in Nassau, New Providence, which is the capital of The Bahamas. In being based here, I acknowledge my privilege in having access to more resources that allows my practice to fully exist, in comparison to other artists based on our Family Islands who may not have similar access. As a literary artist and experimental filmmaker, I work primarily from my living room space (literally sitting on the floor, drafting texts in my sketch pad, then typing them up on my laptop); a local coffee shop; or in my friend’s press shop library space.
Tell us a bit about your background and how and when you started your creative practice?
I think I was about 7 or 8 when I first started writing. I didn’t know how to express my feelings verbally at the time, so I used letters to communicate to my parents and friends what was going on internally. I’d write love letters and apology letters and design little elements like colorful hearts, and glittery flowers, to make them more personable and visually appealing. Then, in third grade, I joined a creative writing after-school club that pushed me to write more prolifically, and tap into my imagination to produce stories that at the time, I considered were pretty cool and imaginative. I think I’d credit my third grade teacher Ms. Johnson for making me believe writing creatively could be something I can pursue long-term.
Fast forward to a year after undergraduate studies in 2018, and I found myself needing to express my internal world in a way my BA in journalism could not afford me; so I began writing prose poetry, because I couldn’t quite understand how poetic form worked just yet. I joined a writers’ circle called Big Poets! at home, that included, and still include, some of the most amazing Bahamian women writers I’ve ever known, and have the privilege of reading. It was through their encouragement that I felt I could take creative writing seriously, and even pursue it at a graduate level, to continue my development. A year after obtaining my MA, and a few publications later, here we are lol.
When and how do you make your work?
I think I make work when I get random spurts of inspiration via reading, or watching a show or film, or after a good conversation with a friend or family member, or an upsetting conversation with a friend or family member, or while people-watching at the beach. I get inspired to make work prolifically, then I have moments of down time where I go weeks without making work, and I’m just in the editing phase – like where I’m at, at the moment.
Close-up shot of working space in kevanté’s living room. Items in image: Audre Lorde’s TheBlack Unicorn, Nita Tyndell’s Who I Was With Her, two notebooks – one for poetry, one journaling, and laptop.
Share a bit about a current project you are working on or something you just finished?
Currently I’m working on producing a photographic and poetic exhibition that discusses the impact of colorism on the mental health of queer Afro-Bahamian people, as well as my first pamphlet exploring themes of queer self-love.
Does being a Lesbian/Dyke inform your work? If so, how?
Most definitely. I’ve been openly queer for five years now, but have just adopted the label of lesbian in the last year. (So I’m a baby lez lol). But I think because a lot of my work is introspective, the work I’m making now especially has been informed by my lesbian identity. Recognizing and claiming this identity has helped me to pick apart and interrogate the many false versions of myself, and write about them with radical honesty and self-forgiveness. I truly do love who I’ve become, and am continuing to shape into.
Based on your experience as a lesbian/dyke artist and writer, what advice do you have for other lesbian/dyke artists?
As a baby lesbian artist, I’d say to other baby lesbian artists, to not be afraid to fully embrace who you are, and share that within your work in ways that are obvious or coded – whichever feels right for you. I find there is a healing element in showing up to your practice as all of who you are, celebrating the beautiful parts, and holding tender space for the parts not so beautiful. Just be you.
“that night” and “views from ella’s old room” by kevanté ac cash in WMN issue 4 When We Leave
kevanté ac cash is a Nassau-Bahamian literary artist who sometimes experiments with scratch film. Their practice explores the emotional landscapes of living with mental illness and a queer Afro-Caribbean identity. This manifests as poetry and poetic films, creative nonfiction, and personal essays. They make work to keep a record of their existence.
With a BA in Media Journalism and MA in Creative Writing, kevanté has been published across the Caribbean, US and UK. you can follow them at @alexia_chatelle and https://linktr.ee/alexia_chatelle
Lens-based mixed media artist and archivist Alanna Fields spoke with WMN editor Jeanette Spicer about creating Black queer dream spaces and the mundane and vulnerable intimacy in her work.
Jeanette Spicer: How do you source your images? I noticed most of the subjects seem to be male-presenting and I am curious about your choice to work with these specific images (just conceptually/compositionally/and in terms of subject).
Alanna Fields: My process of sourcing images happens in a few different ways but primarily through online sellers on sites like eBay. Depending on the project that I am working on or just my general curiosities, I curate my research terms to whatever the subject matter is that I am trying to generate. When I have been particularly interested in scenes of intimacy that exist around the home, I’ve used search terms and phrases that relate to the home space, such as “bed, sofa, kitchen, porch, bathtub.” These terms might seem on the surface mundane and non-specific in terms of queer imagery, but what they do is relate to the home space and how it is experienced and lived in.
You asked about the frequency of male-presenting subjects in the images that I work with. It is not a choice to focus on male-presenting subjects however the reality is that there is a void of imagery of black queer women and fems. It is why I cherish the images that I am able to source that feature black queer women and feminine-presenting people. I believe there are many reasons for the historical lack of visibility of black queer women in vernacular photo archives, but likely most importantly there is an erasure of legibility of black queer women who present as feminine as they are read as heterosexual in the absence of overt queering. There is also an erasure of black queer masculine-presenting women in the archive as they are often misgendered or assumed to be male and further, heterosexual. In my sum of about 300 vernacular photographs, I would say less than 50 of the images have subject who are presumably women or non-binary. In making works of mine like Come to My Garden (2021), You Lived Here Inside My Mind (2021), Untitled, Blue (2019), and Our Love Was Deeply Purple (2022), it was important to me that these works took up the most space, were exalted, and commanded the attention of the viewer.
Fireflies We Make, Bright As Stars
JS: In the image, “Fireflies We Make, Bright As Stars, 2021” I am curious about how you decide what effect to create onto the image. It looks cracked in a beautiful way. I see that you use various materials like museum board, encaustic, and panels and I’d love to hear more about your decisions around that.
AF: The beautiful thing about working with found images and the original photographs is that you get a document of that photograph’s life, the hands it has traveled through, the patina in the color over time, the signatures, and the residue. I think from that you are really able to tell how a photograph was cared for, gently or if it was constantly handled by a loved one reflecting on their love. In Fireflies We Make, Bright As Stars, the source image is from a Polaroid photograph which is heavily cracked on the emulsion side. I found the latticework that the crack creates through the photograph so beautiful so I chose to leave it visible and enhance it more with repetition. In terms of my materials, I love the ability that I have to shift visibility and work in layers with the encaustic wax. Because that process requires high and concentrated heat, I need to be able to work on rigid surfaces that can withstand the heat of the hot wax during my painting process. My panels vary from wood to plexiglass.
Canyons Beyond Time
JS:The repetitive quality of the work is powerful. At times it really creates a kaleidoscopic effect that also makes me want to see more, but also sometimes, I see less. Can you elaborate on the use of repetition and your decision to do that?
AF: That body of work, Mirages of Dreams Past aims to create a Black queer dream space that channels the viewer into past visions and recollections of intimacy and vulnerability using dreams and the dream space as a vehicle to venture through memory. Repetition is central in this work as it creates constant stages of revealing and concealing what can’t be accessed in real-time. Through kaleidoscopic framing, these works pull you in to look closer at the introspective nature of dreams and the haziness of memory. The utilization of wax to block colors of various transparencies over these archival images creates portals that visualize both distance and nearness.
JS:The images seem to be pulled from the same era (I could be wrong). If this is the case, is there a reason for choosing this particular time?
AF: These images all are dated between the late 1960s and early 1970s. I chose this particular time period as I found it to reflect a time of wider expressions of queer identity and gender presentation for Black queer people. When I look at early photographs in my archive, the images between 1890 and 1950 are much more muted in terms of queer expression. There is this hiding in plain sight that I’ve found to be prevalent during that period. The 1960s marked a time of more audacious documentation of Black queer people and queer life. In dreaming about a Black queer dream space I wanted to highlight images where there was no hiding, no masking, but instead out loud imagery of Black queer everyday life in the 1960s and 1970s.
You Lived Here Inside My Mind
JS:Did your practice always circulate around materials and sourced images? If not, how did it begin, and if so, what led you there?
AF: Although I’ve always had an interest in archives and vintage photographs, it wasn’t until I started thinking more about how photography archives inform the way history is documented and whose story gets told and told accurately. I quickly found that there was a significant lack of available images representing Black queer people in historical archives which pushed me to find and work with these lost and hidden images to strengthen the visibility of Black queer life from a historical context.
JS:What are you most concerned about in your art making?
AF: In my artmaking, I am most concerned with working through memory, both individual and collective memory, and how working with photography that has existed before us can reshape and counternarrative our understanding of history.
A history of the hanky code and an appeal to PunkFemSub@aol.com by Brooke Palmieri of CAMP BOOKS
The WMN zine custom make DYKE hankies
I want to trace histories of desire, its textures and forms, the way it has manifested amidst the moving targets we try to pin down as ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ over time. I love the hanky code because it depends upon—in theory—clarity, communication, and consent, at the same time as it highlights the contingencies of desire. There are several hanky codes. Some of them assign colors to kinks differently, but no one really argues about it. And I think that’s great! In a world where we are still living with the damage that Imperialist-Enlightenment hierarchies of knowledge have wrought upon humanity, I think we really need something like the hanky code, which provides potentially useful information at the same time as it seems to allow us to laugh about how miserable we risk making ourselves with cataloguing and absolutes. As usual, within crushingly oppressive systems, kink advises that the only way out is through.
“As usual, within crushingly oppressive systems, kink advises that the only way out is through.”
Color-coding is hard to separate from the past 50 years of LGBTQIA+ activism. Gilbert Baker’s pride flag, first flown in 1978 assigned meanings to each color of the rainbow, a practice that has become tradition both in Baker’s lifetime with the addition of colors like lavender, and with initiatives like Philadelphia’s 2017 “More Color, More Pride” project, and Daniel Quasar’s “Progress” flag. If flags otherwise have an upsetting relationship to nationalism and imperialism—we’re back to the horrors of the so-called Enlightenment again—their profusion across LGBTQIA+ identities has always been as much about communication as camp-critical engagement. David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia (2000) describes the problem this way:
“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body — usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic….Colour is either dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.”
Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag, as much as a rallying point to lead us Somewhere Over The Rainbow, intuitively taps into this connection between the suppression of color and the oppression of people. To actively choose wild, vibrant patterns of color, must be remembered in exactly these terms if we are to be precise in the kind of liberation we’re fighting for.
The hanky code (or bandana code, or hankie code) helps keep those intentions up front: even if you don’t know what the color means specifically, you can’t forget that it’s still flagging up some meaning. The colors of the hanky code pre-date the pride flag and are less certain: by 1976 the hanky code was questioned within the S/M community as a potential “media hoax,” fabricated as a joke in the early 70s, maybe with origins in the 1950s, maybe earlier. And for just one example outside of sex, red handkerchiefs were significant among unions in the early 20th century. Yet as early as 1974, Scene and Machine magazine had published the code in earnest, according to Andrew Campbell in Bound Together (2012). Things only got increasingly real: Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics (1977) depicted the meaning of each color in handkerchiefs stuffed in the back pockets of gay men, and has been recycled, referenced, and reissued in iterations and exhibitions to the present day. But the ambiguity of the code—is it serious? is it a joke?—is still apparent in Fischer’s work, insofar as his photographs are all black and white. And that’s part of the fun.
Samois Collective’s hanky code from their 1981 publication Coming to power : writings and graphics on lesbian S/M : S/M, a form of eroticism based on a consensual exchange of power
“[W]hile there were individuals whose tastes undoubtedly ran the gamut, the more exotic colors were often worn more for humor than serious cruising.”
Jack Fritscher, the founding editor of Drummer magazine, claims to have published “the first lesbian hanky code” in Drummer 31 (1979), written by Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin for their Samois Collective. Samois in turn self-published Coming To Power which included the code in 1981. By 1984, that version was also in circulation by the Mr. S Leathers shop in San Francisco (which was fitting, seeing as they had circulated one of the earliest gay male codes), featuring thirty-four colors. The same year, On Our Backs was selling silk hankies in eighteen different colors by mail order. But as Gayle Rubin writes: “[W]hile there were individuals whose tastes undoubtedly ran the gamut, the more exotic colors were often worn more for humor than serious cruising.” After all, it’s hard to tell the difference between all those colors in the dim light of a club.
In yet another deviation from Fischer, Fritscher, Califia and Rubin’s work, I recently found an example of communally adapting and updating the code, written by a person identified only as PunkFemSub@aol.com and titled the “New Women’s Hanky Code,” a slip of paper now living among many similar papers at Duke University.
Here, there are classic colors like fuchsia for “spanking” and orange for “anything goes,” but newer hankies including checkered for “safer sex,” black and maroon for “vampirism,” and silver lamé for “sci-fi roleplaying.” I want to conclude with an appeal to the person who is behind this initiative.
I was cruising an area of Bolerium Books in San Francisco known as the midden heaps—a section of mostly uncatalogued materials, old trade unionist pamphlets and poetry chapbooks and stray issues of The Black Panther Community news, assortments of flyers for parties in the Bay Area I wish I had gone to, that kind of stuff—when I first found you.
I was practically swimming in the familiar feeling of all these papers—I make a living selling secondhand stuff like this—when I noticed yours among the sargassum: lime green (Food Fetish, according to your own code) printed over a faint paisley. Like a handkerchief, but photocopied. Meant to be cut into quarters and distributed. You had written about the hanky code and how it needed to be updated for dykes who had made it to the end of the century. You included a list of 42 colors and your meanings for them, and you asked for feedback via phone, address, or email: PunkFemSub@aol.com.
I wanted to write to you, PunkFemSub@aol.com, but your contact details are out of date, your email doesn’t work any more. So I have to try here, publicly, not just because I care but also because there were so many amazing femmes in the Bay Area in those heady days around the Y2K scare, I feel wild about the possibilities of who you might be.
A little about myself: When your email worked, I would have been in the position to write to you as Crucio_Wolf@aol.com. That was my screenname for a time as I roleplayed—at times dissociated—pretty heavily as Professor Severus Snape in a private RPG called “The Slytherin Common Room.” My address’s profile picture would’ve been a photoshopped image of Trent Reznor—Young Snape—who actually didn’t look too different from me and helped me deal with the dysphoria of having longer hair than I wanted. My character was basically the adult I grew into at one point: a tall, shadowy figure, luxuriating in solitude among rows of rare, antique books, exquisitely bound, fingering their painted or gilt fore-edges with my pale hands as I read, leaning upon the polished oak of my desk to brood and write in naught but the purplest prose, which was so popular in the fan culture at the time.
The name “Crucio_Wolf” came from “Crucio,” the spell that inflicts pain on people—although the H**** P***** series never explored its consensual use in kink—and “Wolf” because that was the animal I identified with. So basically as a GothMascAlpha I might have been your dream dyke, PunkFemSub, except at the time I was 15-17 years old and not “out.” Then again, I was “out” in lots of other ways that would have been legible to you, even if they didn’t fit the strict rules of “mainstream” narratives. Which, ugh—the closet was an outdated image by that time anyway. But it might not have mattered in the space that was America On Line. You would have fit into one of the two streams of friendships I maintained: people my age in the RPG, who nearly all turned out queer, and a smaller cadre of older straight women who were fans of the actor Alan Rickman, and confided in the late hours of the night that they wished I was a man! I was boyfriend material! Maybe in a past life I had been their boyfriend, I was so wise beyond my years and so like Alan! Somehow I didn’t lie once to anyone about my name, age, sex, didn’t let anyone pressure me into doing past life regression therapy, and didn’t die.
My screenname changed every few months because we couldn’t afford the internet. So I would go to the local drug store (the CVS on MacDade Boulevard) and take handfuls of “AOL Free Trial” CDs that offered 500 free hours online. This worked for several years, producing many variations of Crucio_Wolf. But you would always know it was me. I feel the need to tell you this so you can see where I am coming from, PunkFemSub, as I respond to your flyer across the decades. We need to sync up a little, because your hanky code is still something I want to contribute to. Since “marbled white & grey” is already taken (“Public Bathrooms”), and so’s “White Lace,” (“Victorian”), I would like to propose “Quilt Patch,” to signify a kind of transhistorical hookup. Which I am also trying to initiate with you in this letter.
“I would like to propose “Quilt Patch,” to signify a kind of transhistorical hookup. Which I am also trying to initiate with you in this letter.”
The kinds of play this Quilt Patch might involve are all about cruising the past, seduction and sex magic(k) across time, as a form of conjuring forth lost historical artefacts and suppressed queer narratives. In my personal life I call this work my archival rites: assembling powerful old stuff and engaging with it in a ritualistic way to unlock its secret history. I don’t just do this work in order to find items to add to the sum of what survives, and what histories might be told—although that’s a big part of it—but also I do it to add erotic depth to my own life. It’s simply a turn on to think of queers of the past and what they got up to. It’s mostly solitary work, but it doesn’t have to be. Anyone can engage with kitsch for magical purposes and this quilt patch is about finding people to do it with.
I imagine the Quilt Patch to be enhanced by colors from across the code. For instance, if it is predominantly in blacks and greys, the ritual itself might emphasize the use of pain. If it is hunter green it might be about recovering the energy of daddies long gone—get out the pomade. Where I live in London, a brocade pattern might invoke the energy of the molly houses that thrived in the hundreds over the course of the 18th century. Better yet if you can source actual fabric from the time period you aim to conjure up. All of this is not to be confused with your magenta handkerchief—“Roleplaying”—because this takes roleplaying to a heightened level of research, intention-setting, and consequence. We begin in archives, we interview elders if possible, even make pilgrimage. I can promise that the rigor of my research process guarantees intensity, and requires endurance.
To get into the headspace I am talking about—to get a kind of high from channeling the past in service of the present—I will end by bossing you around a little, PunkFemSub. Here’s something you can do to cruise the past with me: begin by meditating with your hallowed, historic, hanky code itself. Meditating with color is a really old esoteric tradition—all colors are imbued with power, meaning, correspondences (mineral, vegetable, animal, celestial) that you can build off of. In our case, to reach the level of adept you must learn the meanings of the hankies you are working with and check in with the parts of your body whose pleasure they invoke. The light blue of your crotch, the dark blue of your ass, your hands making fists to honor the color red, corresponding to that red place however deep within yourself a fist might go. Connect these colors in their handkerchief forms and in their bodily correspondences with their occurrences in the world around you—marvel upon how deeply infused with meaning everything is, the light blue sky at noon, the red of sunset, the dark blue just before dawn. Then imagine everyone who has looked upon these colors and felt the same stirrings. Consider that your visions and yearnings in this moment connect you with a long line of others who desired in similar ways, and feel more enriched by that chain of longing, the genealogy of your needs. And once you have practiced this exercise a few times, you’ll be ready to work beyond these archival rites from what has happened to better sense the moments in which your pleasure is unlike anything that has come before. But that’s only the beginning—you have to write me back if you want to know what comes next.
Let me know how it goes,
Brooke
Brooke Palmieri is a writer, printer, and bookseller specialising in rare books & archival material from LGBTQIA+ activism and the wider history of gender non-conforming people. Since 2017 they have taught “The Queer Book” at London Rare Book School, a class focused on DIY queer printing history, and in 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS, a travelling book & print shop. “Archival Rites: The Hanky Code,” is part of a longer collection about sex, magic, and sex magic as modes of engagement with queer history.
You can order your own hankie here and see more about our avaible WMN DYKE merch here.
WMN have been invited to participate in the Everpress’ first ever Holiday Collection 2020. Designed by WMN co-editor Florencia Alvarado inspired by The shell as a lesbian icon and 80s punk zine aesthetic.
Everpress supports independent creators to produce shirts and clothing in a sustainable way, by using a pre-sale method. They only print and ship the amount of shirts ordered and therefore eliminates waste. The t-shirts will be available to order until November 19th, and will be shipped about a week later.
Storytelling archivist and founder of the Black Lesbian Archives Krü Maekdo sat down with wmn editor Sara Duell to talk about the importance of home, ownership of your own stories, grassroots organizing and how term lesbian is an Aries from New York. Featured photos are from her recent archive highlight about Aché: a Bay Area journal for Black Lesbians from the 1980’s.
“Seven months in, co-founder Pippa Fleming moved to London. Question: How do you publish a 44-pg. monthly journal by yourself? Answer: You don’t–you call in some serious cavalry. This is what serious cavalry looks like.” (photo by Annie Valva) – Lisbet Tellefesen
For the month of June Black Lesbian Archives focused on ACHÉ (a Black Lesbian Publication) & how we can use this organization as a conduit (Oakland, CA 1992) for Grassroots organizing & community building through these current times. We will expand more on this in the upcoming months. Stay tuned!
Most of lesbian history is so hidden and obviously Black lesbian history is even more so. Can you share how the Black Lesbian Archives came to be and what it is?
One day in 2017 while I was staying with my Auntie in Williamsburg VA, I saw this documentary The Last Lesbian Bars, about how some of the lesbian bars have been disappearing around the world. Once I finished watching, something inside of me sparked: if these lesbian spaces shut down then we don’t have places to connect and commune besides the internet. Don’t get me wrong I’m always talking about the internet, I appreciate it, but meeting in person is a completely different kind of energy.
I started researching and realized that there wasn’t a lot of information on Black lesbians even online. A lot of what I found about Black lesbians was diluted into other gay and lesbian history, I was just like “hell no! I know I’m not the only one out there searching for this info”. So, I immediately set up the Black Lesbian Archives Instagram, Facebook, website, and twitter. I was just mad and wanted to see what I could do about it. I’m that kind of person. I’ll definitely talk about shit, but best believe that if I’m talking about that shit you are going to see me doing something about that shit.I’m not all talk and no bite, I’m talking and I’m biting, too! I knew that Williamsburg, VA wasn’t the place for me to be able to grow while doing this research, so I went from Williamsburg to Chicago. I was between moving to DC, New York, or Chicago. I wanted to go to New York, but it was just too much for box. I love DC, but couldn’t see myself living there. I had been to and lived in Chicago, so I moved there.
As I was settling into Chicago, I happened to find Tracy Baim, one of the co-founders of Windy City Times, a LGBTQ+ newspaper. I emailed Tracy and I was like “Tracy! Where is the black lesbians history in Chicago? Where are they at?” She hit me back, and I always say this because I thought it was funny, because this is the culture that we live in: she was like “Is this a threat?” And I was like “No no no, no threat, I’m just really genuinely interested.” She told me I should come to this exhibit going up at Reunion Chicago called Lost & Found – the dyke spaces of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s with Kristen Kaza and Ruby Western. The exhibit was beautiful, but I wanted to see more black lesbians. I wanted to know more history about the black lesbians that I knew were at the front lines of a lot of these movements. It went from me seeing the exhibit, connecting with Tracy, connecting with Imani at the Black Gold Affair fundraiser, and research by talking to people that were in the community. We ended up doing an exhibit at Affinity Community Services (a non-profit organization serving Chicago’s black lesbian and bisexual women’s community) on June 14, 2018. At the exhibit we had Yvonne Welbon, a dope filmmaker, producer, and screen writer, doing a book release for her book Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, and, we had a room for what I call the BLA confessional so you could sit in there and tell a story. I had a list of questions if you got a little stuck. On the other side I had a movie room, where you could go in and see the reels of people in the community being played; then the archives were plastered all over the building at Affinity. We had a film screening with Coquie Hughes’ films The Homestretch and My Mama Said Yo Mama’s A Dyke, a mixer so people could come in and mix, and a panel discussion with Chris Smith, Anna Deshawn and Pat McCombs. At the end, in August we also had an archiving on-on-one workshop. It was a full course meal! Then we did a nine day pre kick off tour the next year with an opening reception at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives. After that, we also went to D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. We were going on the Grassroots 2020 tour starting in March but then shit hit the fan.
What was your goal for the planned 2020 grassroots tour?
The grassroots tour was something I planned that would allow me to go to different cities and research how Black lesbians have done grassroots organizing in the past. Giving out flyers, being able to communicate with people face to face, building centralized places where people come and meet, organize, talk, connect, and be able to distribute information without having to distribute it online. Everyone does that differently no matter where you go; the south does it way differently than the west coast does it, and the north, the east coast, mid-west; we all do our shit differently. But there is one connecting factor that we’re all connected, right?
Even though the internet is a great way for us to connect , we don’t have control over it, the power of the internet is not in our hands and it could go at any time. I want to find out how we can build efficient communities between each other right now, as we’re seeing each other’s faces, as we’re riding these things out, as we’re communicating with each other, because if the internet were to ever shut down – what would we have? I want to be able to give people enough information on the internet, and I want people to be able to come and experience the archives for themselves in person. We live in such a scrolling, quick, fast and in a hurry of information that we are not actually taking the time on the internet to read, to really read the information that is in front of us.
I’m not sure when the grassroots tour will come back up, I said 2021, but honestly, the way things are looking right now I don’t know, we’ll have to see!
“I need a space where when you come there your worries are gone, and I want that space to be somewhere you’re not only coming to meet, but that’s your home.”
You’ve mentioned wanting the Black Lesbian Archives to be housed in a home in the future, can you share more about that vision. For example, what and where do you foresee that to be?
When I first started thinking about the vision for Black Lesbian Archives long term and what it would look like, I envisioned this home that everybody could come to. I see it as a place where people would come in and feel comfortable. A lot of archives that I have visited are very cold. I get it, because of the temperature and the way the materials need to be preserved. But the insides of a lot of these archives are just very cold, and they don’t have any life, it’s very dead, and it’s no shade to all the archivists out here doing the work. When I think of my culture, when I think of my people, and where I’m from, there is so much life and energy that goes through us and I need that in a space. I need a space to feel inviting. I need a space where when you come there your worries are gone, and I want that space to be somewhere you’re not only coming to meet, but that’s your home.
Now as far as a central location? I feel like that could be multiple homes. I’m going back and forth on that. Yes, I want it to be a place where Black lesbians can come but I’m thinking about even making it multi-cultural and having a full spectrum of lesbian history in one place. I’m all for building community in different places, but we still need these spaces where we are able to collaborate with people who don’t look like us, that’s how we learn. A skill set one person might have, or a gift could be something you do not and you can teach each other Regardless if it seems like things are changing, we still need spaces for lesbians to commune, and think, and take action.
What are your short term plans?
Right now, I’m starting to expand the archives. I don’t want to do this alone. I am not saying that I have been doing this solo the whole time, because there have been people that have been coming in and out. I do not want to carry on the legacy of these women alone, because these stories are very sacred. I’m seeing myself as a storytelling archivist; these stories need to be told, and they need to be told in a way that is respectful. I’m in a place right now where I’m looking to find a council, committees and volunteers for the Black Lesbian Archives so that we’re able to expand.
I’m also hoping to build out a mobile history van. I see it as a group of us being able to travel to different cities in this van with people showing us around their cities and how they’ve done grassroots organizing. I see it as the pretense to the actual home. Teaching and learning to story tell; how to build an archival collection. My short-term goal is really to buy this bus, gut it out, build it, and take small trips to different places to get information and do more research. This will give people a glimpse of what Black Lesbian history is and has been.
What are some of your favorite pieces or stories out of the archives?
Vernita Gray, I will always tell the stories of Vernita Gray! Tracy Baim, gave me a book she wrote about her: Vernita Gray: from Woodstock to the White House and she was a Sagittarius soldier! She had a home for those who had gotten kicked out of their house for living their truth. She also had a hotline for people to call in, and it was on the FBI list; that’s a whole other story. She had people living in her home and sleeping in her tubs. She kept her home open to people in the community who didn’t have nowhere else to go.
There is also this story of how she and her roommates had a party at University of Chicago, it was the first gay lesbian party that they had, and they didn’t think nobody was going to come. At that time people were very much in the closet, it was a hush-hush thing, so when they had this dance, all these people showed up and it got so wild and out of hand they had to shut it down. Even though they didn’t know the outcome of what that would be they still did it anyways. They still strived to create that space for people who were, regardless if they knew what it was or they were questioning, all those people came to connect to other people. I love that sense of community building and people risking it all. Risking it all to change shit and do something that is beneficial to the community.
That’s definitely one of the stories I love to tell, because to me it really shows her heart; shows where her mind was. The reason people were in that house was because she genuinely cared about these people who literally didn’t have a place to go. What does home look like when you don’t have it? Or what does home look like when you do have one, but are still searching for that community base?
Around 1991 (?) we moved into our new office on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley across the street from La Peña. And as I would find out later, next door to the former office of the Black Panther Party! The beautiful cowries were painted by Adalia Claywomon Guarani-Kaiowá Serenata. Photo by Skye Ward.
What does the word lesbian mean to you?
A lot of people have a hard time identifying with the term lesbian. But to me there is something so revolutionary about the term. I feel like the word lesbian, the term, it’s bravery, coming from nothing, like the rose that grew from the concrete. I think of the women who weren’t afraid to be who the fuck they were, and just be out with their shit and not give a damn. That was very in your face. I think of that Lilith energy, I think of an Arian energy. If the lesbians had a zodiac sign it would probably be Aries, because it’s just so much “yeah, I’m here. I’m not going to rely on you”. It takes charge, stating your claim you’re not shying away from who you are. The term is more than just who you’re sleeping with, it came from the concrete! It probably came from New York, yo!
A lot of us wouldn’t have been able to integrate in bars if it wasn’t for the lesbians. I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now! Or I probably would, because I’m that motherfucker. I could talk about the lesbian term all day. Honestly I’ll probably do an exhibit about it. Not just the Black Lesbian Archives but the term lesbian, and the roots that this term comes from. And digging into that. It’s powerful, it’s a powerful word to use. It’s a powerful way to state your claim. I love it, it’s amazing.
“If the lesbians had a zodiac sign it would probably be Aries, because it’s just so much ‘yeah, I’m here. I’m not going to rely on you’.”
Are there lesbians that you look up to? From the past or current, living?
Oh yes, Chris Smith from Affinity, Imani Rupert-Gordon out of Affinity, and Pat McCombs, for sure. These women aren’t typical women, and I hate to use the word typical, but they ain’t no basics. It took a tribe; it took a community of people to make shit happen. They knew the odds were against them; they knew what they would be going up against, but they still chose to do it anyway.
Affinity would not be here if you didn’t have a group of women, who we’re having meetings, having meetings and trying to dodge bullshit to create this space for lesbian women to come together and commune! If they hadn’t been looking around realize that we need these spaces, how are we going to get it? Not having much but still being able to manage and create a space that is still living and breathing. Affinity is on its 25th year this year, and it’s the only Black lesbian organization that I know that is still living and breathing our history.
You have to know your past before you can shoot fast forward into the future! You have to understand it, you have to really sit down and tune in with that it before you can just carry on or you’ll forget where you come from. I could talk about all these things: me being Black, me being lesbian, me being a woman, I could talk about these things all day but if I don’t know where I come from? All of this shit don’t mean a goddamn thing. It really don’t!
These women that have been doing this work, I commend them all, I pay my respects to them and I always will even, if they are still living, or gone.
“I could talk about all these things: me being Black, me being lesbian, me being a woman, I could talk about these things all day but if I don’t know where I come from? All of this shit don’t mean a goddamn thing. It really don’t!”
What kind of support does the Black Lesbian Archives need right now?
I would definitely say that funding is one of the biggest things, because this work is a lot. I have also been trying to adjust the scope of how I’m bringing in the archives. When I first started, I encouraged everyone to just submit their archives, but we hadn’t created a submission process of how we were getting the archives, the dating, getting that contact info and scanning. I’ve been learning that as I’ve moved on, but I came into this from a storytelling perspective, so I have been able to piece together enough to share a story, however, the backend stuff is what I’m really trying to figure out. I want to make sure that wherever we are putting our archives, it goes to a place where people are actually going to take care of them, and preserve them. I think that’s why I want to expand too; so we can have more conversations about how to build archives with other people as well.
I talked to Bay Area lesbian archives and even though they have been in this game for a long time, they just started off on their first 5 years of actually archiving the stuff that they have. I want to learn from other people and figure out what would be the best method for the BLA. I get that there are resources out here, but it is important for us to establish and create our own. That’s another reason why I want this in a centralized place because we need to be sharing our own stories versus other people sharing and telling our stories for us.
Tell me more about the importance of Black lesbian telling Black lesbian stories? Is it so it’s not just pushed away in mainly white archives or becomes a subsection of that?
You need the people that were there telling the stories, and not letting other people tell those stories for you. What happens is that we go through these periods of time where we have other people telling our stories and we go off thinking that these things are true, but then when we go back to the original texts and say “wait a minute”. That’s one thing that I love about archives because I can go back and I can follow up. We have to be able to interpret and tell our stories, the honest to god truth, no matter how scary that shit is, no matter how fucked up or great that shit was. We have to share it and we have to tell it.
I have had so many people come up and tell me that if they would have seen the Black Lesbian Archives years ago, they probably would have been out. We have to be on the front end, whether we’re writing or we’re organizing. When you have someone telling a story that is like you, or that has been in the same shit that you’ve been in, you will connect to that person and you will listen.
We have to understand how vital and important it is to be able to share stories, to be able to preserve them, and keep doing that work of passing them along. Itt can change the scope of the world.
Krü Maekdo (make-do) is a multi-media artist known for her work as an archivist with the Black Lesbian Archives. An ongoing archival herstory project to uplift the voices of Black Lesbians. To educate, preserve and bridge inter-generational gaps between communities. Kosmic Rootwork Astrologist @ Aranae Storm and CEO of Maekdo Productions. A multi-media production company producing media & event programming. Serving women’s arts, community & culture in the LGBTQ+ community.
An interview with art historian Ksenia M. Soboleva
In late may 2020 Soboleva sat down with in WMN co-editor Sara Duell over a video chat discussing lesbian invisibility, being a grumpy dyke, and the value of criticism. Soboleva is currently PhD Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU where she is writing her dissertation on lesbian artists and the AIDS crisis in New York (1981-1996), framing it within a larger genealogy of lesbian (in)visibility.
Soboleva in Brooklyn photographed by Florencia Alvarado
Would you describe a bit of your background and how you ended up in New York?
I was born in Moscow, but I mainly grew up in Arkhangelsk, Northern Russia—I lived with my great-grandmother. When I was eight my mother and I moved to the Netherlands, and that’s where I came of age. I studied art history at Utrecht University for my undergrad, but I didn’t find it to be very rigorous or exciting, so at the time I had no intention to pursue grad school. It was only when I visited Madrid in 2012 and saw the Sharon Hayes exhibitionHabla (curated by the brilliant Lynne Cooke) at the contemporary art museum Museo Reina Sofía that I realized what art and exhibition making could be. I didn’t really learn that much about queer history or queer artists during my undergrad, so I would say it was really this exhibition that made want to pursue grad school. But I knew that I didn’t want to stay in the Netherlands, and I had this dream of moving to New York to study with Linda Nochlin, who wrote the famous essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, so I applied to the Institute of Fine arts, NYU. I got in, came to New York, but unfortunately Nochlin retired a year later. I was fortunate enough to see her lecture, but sadly never got the opportunity to take a class with her. But anyway, that’s how I ended up in New York; I loved it, so I stayed and pursued my PhD.
I’m assuming your interest in lesbian artist started well before grad school.
The interest definitely existed, but I was a huge closet case until well into college. Funny story; when I was six years old, I took drawing and painting classes at an art gallery in Arkhangelsk, of which my aunt was the director at the time, and I had a huge crush on my art teacher, who kind of looked like Liza Minneli in Cabaret, with short black hair and bright green eye shadow. It’s such a cliché, but I just adored her. The way I decided to make sense of it at that time, was to conclude that the passionate feelings I was having were not for the art teacher, but for art itself. So if I hadn’t been a lesbian, I might not have become an art historian. But I only started seriously studying queer art and culture in grad school.
“So if I hadn’t been a lesbian, I might not have become an art historian.”
How did you end up focusing on lesbian artists and the AIDS crisis in New York for your dissertation?
The AIDS crisis in an art historical context only entered my consciousness when I visited the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011 (this was during my undergrad). The Norwegian pavilion that year was taken over by the artist Bjarne Melgaard, whose project Baton Sinister centered on the stigma around HIV and AIDS. One of the pieces was this poster that said “Don’t get fucked up the ass. Period.” It addressed the government homophobia and what the solution to AIDS was according to the government, basically: don’t be gay and you won’t get AIDS. I was really captured by the project, I guess because I hadn’t really been confronted with AIDS in an art context, and especially not in a language context before, and it really resonated with me.
At the time, I didn’t think twice about the fact that the project presented HIV/AIDS as a gay male issue. It wasn’t until I moved to New York, when I was doing preliminary research on lesbian artists of that generation, that I kept encountering references to the AIDS crisis in their biographies, in catalogue essays on their work; they were all crucially informed by the AIDS epidemic. But then when I would read art historical scholarship on art of the AIDS crisis, the lesbian was almost entirely absent. Even the most recent large survey exhibition on art and AIDS: Art AIDS America (Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts’) barely mentioned lesbian artists, and only included a few women artists. I thought that was strange and that’s how I first started thinking about it. The first conference paper I ever gave was about the lesbian activist art collective fierce pussy, and their role during the AIDS crisis.
I was very drawn to the sense of community queer people who lived through the AIDS crisis all seemed to have felt, and that was something I personally had not experienced in my life. My dissertation is driven by a profound admiration for that community; doing research on it was a way to getting closer, and also making sense of my own identity.
What are some interesting takeaways from your research?
It’s been a challenge to study a history of visual culture that is so rooted in invisibly. You can’t underestimate the extent to which lesbian contributions just tend to magically disappear both from feminist discourse and from queer discourse. Lesbian invisibly is no joke. There is a lot of contemporary stuff happening on lesbian visual culture which I think is wonderful: Instagram accounts dedicated to lesbian culture, TV shows, films. I think Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the first truthful depiction of the lesbian gaze. But if popular culture doesn’t somehow bleed into academic scholarship, then there is still a real lack. Especially in the field of art history, there are surprisingly few serious considerations of art and lesbian identity. Lesbians also haven’t held the same amount of tenure track positions in academia, or prominent museum-jobs, as gay men. It’s not only lesbian artists who haven’t received enough career opportunities throughout history, but also the lesbian historians who are most likely to write on them. Whereas gay men have always had a network, a support system. Historically, the art world was one of the few spheres in which gay men could get prominent positions. It wasn’t the same for lesbians. When Harmony Hammond organized “The Lesbian Show” in 1978, many lesbians declined the invite to participate, because it was still dangerous to come out and it could really hurt your career. One lesbian artist was even threatened by her gay male gallerist that he would drop her from the gallery if she participated in the show. Harmony Hammond’s Lesbian Art In America is a great source for lesbian art history, by the way. She was really one of the pioneers for creating a context for lesbian art.
Which historians do you look up to?
My go to is Catherine Lord, who is just a brilliant writer, curator, and artist. She has written a ton about art and lesbian invisibility; there’s an essay on Louise Fishman’s Angry Paintings that I could probably quote from memory. Then there is Terry Castle, who is an English Professor at Stanford. She wrote The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993), which was a great starting point for my research. Ann Cvetkovich has made an invaluable contribution with An Archive of Feelings, which explores lesbian trauma and has an entire chapter on ACT UP’s lesbians. Elisabeth Lebovici, who’s in Paris, recently wrote a great book on how AIDS affected her life, with a particular emphasis on lesbian artists as well. She maintains this very personal voice throughout her scholarship which I really admire. Also, Helen Molesworth is a big inspiration in terms of curating, and also a wonderful writer; the exhibition catalogue of This Will Have Been is a staple on my desk. My scholarship is also very informed by queer theory; I love Sara Ahmed and Heather Love’s work.Last but not least, there’s Jan Zita Grover and Laura Cottingham, who don’t write on art and lesbian identity anymore, but were powerful voices in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I actually dedicate an entire chapter of my dissertation to the disappearing lesbian, or the lesbian who drops out. So many people who were actively writing about lesbian visual culture during the AIDS crisis just sort of seem to have dropped out.
Why do you think that they dropped out?
It has a lot to do with trauma, as Ann Cvetkovich argues as well. I also think that they didn’t receive the recognition they deserved, and when that period of the AIDS crisis started to be historicized, lesbian contributions were excluded. Even though it was the lesbian sex wars that informed much of the theory during the AIDS crisis. Cindy Patton was crucial to Douglas Crimp’s scholarship, for example, which he acknowledges. A lot of queer theory emerged out of AIDS activism, and AIDS was informed by lesbian writings of the sex wars. Lesbians brought so much to AIDS activism, because they had already become politicized during women’s liberation and then the sex wars. They knew how to organize. I’m certainly not the first to point this out, but people tend to forget, overlook, or just not care about the lesbian contributions. Everybody knows who Douglas Crimp is. How many people remember Cindy Patton? I’d be interested to know.
Anyway, I can’t reach Jan Zita Grover, I think she opened a puppy rescue and wrote a children’s book about dogs. I also heard she was teaching cooking class somewhere. I have no idea where Laura Cottingham is, last I heard she was traveling through Egypt. But what’s sort of comforting is that other queer scholars of my generation seem to have the same issue. In Spring 2019, I organized this symposium, Queering Art History, which is how I met a lot of other young queer scholars working on similar stuff. After the symposium we went out for drinks and as we were chatting we realized that we all were running into the same issues with the same people, like: “this person won’t talk to me”, or “I can’t figure out where this person is,” or “this person emailed back but they seemed kind of rude.” It was hilarious, and a good reminder that we shouldn’t take things personally.
And even though you might encounter more gay and queer art today than before, I find that it’s harder to just come by lesbian art, which was one of the reasons I started WMN with Jeanette and Florencia because I realized I knew very little about lesbian art and history. I’ve learned a lot over the last year, but it takes a lot of research even just for something as simple as posting on Instagram.
To me that’s the beautiful thing about being queer. Coming out tends to incite this passion for research, for a lot of queer people at least, it is the way we make sense of ourselves. Most of us don’t have queer parents, or any queer family members, but queer ancestry extends beyond familial and biological relationships. So we go to the library, or I guess today you can look under the queer category on Netflix. We look at history to show us proof of our existence, that others like us existed before we came along.
“We look at history to show us proof of our existence, that others like us existed before we came along.”
What does the word lesbian mean to you?
So many things. I think it’s a common misconception that lesbian is a fixed identity, while queer is so fluid. I think that the term changes over time, it means different things to different people in different places. It’s funny, when I tell people in New York I’m a lesbian it comes across like I’m using this super outdated term and am like a 75 year old lesbian separatist or something. When I tell people in Russia I’m a lesbian, it’s super shocking and radical and just like “whoa she said the L word out loud.” The reason I insist on the meaningfulness of the term lesbian is because of the history that it carries, a history that hasn’t been sufficiently documented. Studying the ways in which lesbian identity has shifted over time is absolutely crucial to the history of queer identity. Lesbian and queer aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s not an either or. A lot of people assume that if you identify as a lesbian you must have some problem with the term queer or you must be essentialist, which is not at all the case. I hope that my own scholarship shows how lesbian can exist alongside queer, and how the two contribute to one and another, how they can strengthen each other, and how both have flaws and challenges.
“The reason I insist on the meaningfulness of the term lesbian is because of the history that it carries, a history that hasn’t been sufficiently documented. Studying the ways in which lesbian identity has shifted over time is absolutely crucial to the history of queer identity. Lesbian and queer aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s not an either or.”
Another fun fact, thanks to Terry Castle. The first time the word queer was used in a gender sexuality context, it was used as a code word for cunt, by Anne Lister in her coded diaries from the 19th century. So queer has this inherently lesbian origin, yet it has somehow swallowed up the lesbian. I’m constantly asked why I identity as a lesbian instead of a queer woman, and none of my gay male friends seem to get the question why they identify as gay instead of queer. The lesbian is such an awkward term to many people, which is sort of what I love about it. You know, my yoga teacher always says something like “the way we become comfortable in uncomfortable positions, is if we stay in them.” I like meditating on the awkwardness of lesbian.
Which makes me think of your article about artist and AIDS activist Tessa Boffin in Hyperallergic, where you mention how scholars who started writing about gay history intentionally focused on the fun parts, but how important it is to also to highlight the darker aspects of LGBTQ history.
Yes, and I should mention that it’s Heather Love’s book Feeling Backwards that truly shaped my approach to this. People tend to act like we always got along, and were one big happy family. And sure, on one hand there has always been a strong sense of community to some extent. But queer history is full of exclusions and frictions. It’s valuable to study those messy histories just as closely as the histories of pride and victory.
What are your thoughts on lesbian visibility currently and for the future?
I co-chaired a panel The Return of the Lesbian? Examining Lesbian Visibility in Art History’s Present, Past, and Future at the art history conference CAA with my friend Alexis Bard Johnson, who is the curator of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles. The panel explored the recent re-emergence of lesbian visual culture in the form of Instagram accounts, TV shows, etc.. but at the same time an increasing reluctance for people to identify as lesbian. The panel tried to make sense of these opposing trends. But what we concluded at the end of the panel is that there cannot really be a return of the lesbian if the lesbian has never been turned to. That’s what I’m trying to say when I talk about popular culture versus academic scholarship, it’s not that I’m discounting the former, in fact my work is very much informed by it, but I think that in order to properly turn to the lesbian we need to create a solid, rigorous discourse on the history of lesbian identity, which is on its way but we’re not there yet. Laura Cottingham said: “Without any sense of our historical place, how are we to understand or produce our meaning in the present?” I’m very happy that there are groups like you [WMN zine] who keep insisting on the meaningfulness of the lesbian. I was also so moved by Barbara Hammer’s last interview before she passed away, with Masha Gessen in the New Yorker, where she said “we don’t want to forget the lesbian, and we don’t want her to be lost”. Thank you, Barbara.
You’ve described yourself as a grumpy dyke, but no wonder you’re grumpy if you’re continuously having to try to work against a field that is ignored and people that don’t respond.
You know, I should clarify that I don’t mean this as a complaint. I like being a grumpy dyke! I like disagreeing with people, I like being at odds with a lot of contemporary writing on queer art. I think there is a tendency within the queer community to be overtly praiseful, which I understand because of course we want to support each other, but I also think that in order to create a rigorous discourse, art criticism should make no apologies for itself. We should disagree, argue, hold each other accountable. As long as we don’t drag each other down. Catharine Lord once told me that criticism is a form of generosity, and I couldn’t agree more. To sit down and think about somebody’s work, whether you’re critical of it or not, is a form of praise in itself.
Soboleva in Brooklyn photographed by Florencia Alvarado
Which is funny working within an American context. I think it’s pretty unamerican to disagree.
Totally, I remember my first graduate seminar, I raised my hand and said something along the lines of “I disagree because…” and then later a classmate told me that in America first you say ‘I really like the point you made about X, and I really appreciated your careful consideration of Y, however I just wonder if in this particular very specific respect you could have perhaps potentially elaborated a little bit on…” That’s another thing I had to learn when I moved here.
Also, when I first started writing about lesbian artists of the AIDS crisis, I remember emphasizing that gay men had come to define the period and there was very little art historical scholarship on lesbians simply because there was this misguided notion that they weren’t affected by AIDS just because female-to-female transmission was rare (but not impossible, and some lesbians have sex with men, or were intravenous drug users). The AIDS crisis affected the entire queer community; it was more than a medical crisis, it was a socio-political crisis. People were dying because of government neglect, because of homophobia. Lesbians weren’t allowed to donate blood because the entire queer community was considered to be dirty, basically. AIDS was viewed as symptom of being queer. But anyway, I was pushing so hard for the consideration of how the AIDS crisis affected lesbian artists, that at some point I read over my proposal and I was like: Oh my god. It sounds like I hate gay men, and don’t think their art deserves the attention it has received—which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Needless to say, I completely rewrote it. I’m by no means discounting their work. I just want to bring in the lesbian voices too.
Ksenia M. Soboleva is a Russian-Tatar writer, art historian, and curator based in Brooklyn. Currently, she is completing her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Soboleva’s dissertation focuses on lesbian artists and the AIDS crisis in the United States (1981-1996), framing it within a larger genealogy of lesbian (in)visibility. Previously, Soboleva has curated exhibitions at the 80WSE Project Space, Assembly Room, Honey’s, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and Stellar Projects. She has taught at NYU and the Cooper Union, and presented her research at various institutions in the United States and abroad. Her writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, art-agenda,and QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, among other publications. Most recently, she launched a virtual series of artist talks in collaboration with The Center in New York, to highlight lesbian and dyke visibility. Soboleva is the 2020-2021 Marica and Jan Vilcek curatorial fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York.
