1. I read a book by Albert Memmi called The Colonizer and the Colonized and in that
book he had a paragraph that ended with a quotation: “The colonized are
condemned to lose their memory.“ And that became for me the overlying
understanding that fed both my teaching and the Archives.
I met Joan when we were both active in the Gay Academic Union. And there was a
women“s group that got going, but we ended up in the same CR [consciousness-
raising] group.
And we started talking about how much was happening in lesbian cultural
production, but then “ I call us the old-timers “ remembered that there had been
much lesbian cultural life before the 70s, even before the 60s and yet we had no
place to really have tangible evidence of this. And out of this discussion came
what was to really, besides teaching and perhaps sexual desire, became the main
thrust of my life which was the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
From Hand on the Pulse. Video by Joyce Warshow.
Credit: Hand On The Pulse. Producer/Director: Joyce Warshow, Activa Productions.
Distributor: Frameline.