Product Description

A FRAGILE UNION is Joan Nestle's collection of intimate essays and narratives about lesbian sexuality, butch-femme relationships, sex writing, the importance of preserving gay and lesbian history, the love that is possible between lesbians and gay men, and the "often-shaky camaraderie among lesbians that as community continues to flex its diversity."

Readers of A REDISTRICTED COUNTRY and other Nestle writings are familiar with the Nestles themes of unity and difference. In A Fragile Union, Nestle delves still deeper. Living with cancer, Nestle now explores other "fragile unions": the fragility of her sexual desire in the face of her illness, the fragility of memory in the face of enormous loss, and always in the face of fear, her hope, her love for her people - women, lesbians and gays, working class, Jews, and all who struggle against injustice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1512903 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 495 pages

Amazon.com
A rich new collection by poet, historian, and lesbian activist Joan Nestle, ranging from meditations on her femme identity to arguments for a diversified college curriculum. Cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which were housed for 20 years in her New York apartment, Nestle has made no clear division between her erotic and her political writings, a stance that has irritated many feminists. The archive itself is a ceaseless, passionate response to the first time that Nestle ever tried to "find out about" herself by writing a high school paper on homosexuality. She began her research at the New York Public Library, and in the card catalog "found the word Homosexual, followed by a dash and the words, see Deviancy, and next to this, see Pathology, with suggested subcategories of prisons and mental institutions." Her inclusive sensibilities have informed the acquisition policies of the archive, which has collected everything from pulp novels of the 1940s and 1950s to the diary of a lesbian prostitute to the pasties of a lesbian stripper. "If we ask decorous questions of history," Nestle argues, "we will get a genteel history." Essential reading in the social history of postwar America and the particular struggles of lesbians to be included in that history. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
A leading light of lesbian and gay history (she founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn), Nestle presents a collection of her writings over the last 10 years. An effort to chronicle the lives of working-class lesbians lies at the heart of Nestle's work, and her essay "The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by a White Woman" shows why the pursuit is so important: Hampton was a black lesbian from the South who worked most of her life as a domestic but also participated fully in her community and culture. She did not have to "come out" because, Nestle tells us, she was never "in," and so provides us with "the vision of an integrated life." In "On Rereading Esther's Story," Nestle shares her new "understanding of butch and fem, of the drama of gender" with regard to a Puerto Rican taxi driver named Esther, whom Nestle had years ago thought of as "merely butch." Some of Nestle's stories of lesbian erotica are included, and Nestle recalls that, during the 1960s, many lesbians were as shocked as heterosexual women by her boldness. Some of the best writing in the volume appears in Nestle's moving accounts of what it is like to live with colon cancer, as she not only tells of the extended and painful treatment but also includes poetic (and erotic) tales of sexual desire and its frightening ebb, and of sexual fun in the midst of devastating illness. Nestle is by turns earnest, pedantic, funny, bold and courageous; her collection is, clearly, the work of an irrepressible, principled woman.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Poignant and vigorousand some sexually explicitessays on both personal history and the ``herstory'' of the lesbian community in America. In her introduction, Nestle (co-editor, Sister and Brother, 1994) describes herself as a ``fifty-eight-year-old white Jewish fem lesbian woman with cancer living in New York City in the United States of America at the end of the twentieth century.'' This collection comprises reflections on those particulars, ranging from commentary on her working-class mother's eloquent journals through the history of lesbianism as it began to accumulate in the Lesbian Herstory Archives (now housed in a Brooklyn townhouse), which Nestle founded. Included are chapters on Nestle's plunge into 1960s political activismmarching and demonstrating against nuclear arms and communist-baiters while keeping her sexual preferences secret from her socialist comrades. Beginning in that decade, however, lesbianism began to come out of the closet and the basement bars (Nestle recalls the latter somewhat fondly). In ``The Politics of Thinking,'' however, the author reveals her concern that in the 1990s, not only has ``religious moral fervor'' dampened free discussion of sexuality, but so have certain kinds of political correctness within the gay community, where anti-pornography factions had developed strength. Many of the stories that Nestle wrote then were descriptive tales of lesbian love affairs, and she found herself wondering whether those stories had ``hurt lesbian women,'' as the anti-pornographers suggested. The author also raises questions about the meaning of gender and about the devaluation of the feminine. In the section titled ``A Gift of Touch'' are some detailed reminiscences of erotic encounters with loversas well as reflections on coming to terms with cancer. Not for the erotically faint of heart, but work that demonstrates the author's tenderness, courage, and concern for her chosen lesbian community and for ``those who have lived in a ghetto of any kind.'' -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Smoldering Politics
Only Joan Nestle can mix a batch of essays that makes politics flame and smolder and lesbian sexual desire ignite an erotic revolution in the mind's eye.

"a fragile union" is an intellectual and emotional odyssey that takes the reader from the '50s butch/fem bar culture smack in the middle of McCarthyism to 21st century assimilationist politics both left and right.

Nestle's razor sharp analysis misses nothing when examining and mining the queer "community," as well as straight society's triumphs, failures and acts of kindess, both large and small--even the small undergrowth of hope that swells in both G/L/B/T activism and lesbian mouths and cunts.

At sixty, Nestle's words and world brim with the intellectual and erotic power that fueled the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the '70s, drove the writing of two collections of essays in the '80s & '90s, co-editing of a dozens books of women's writing and volumns of lesbian erotica throughout the later half of the 20th century.

Get thee to the local women's bookstore and buy "a fragile union." Buy more than one and give them out as gifts of both desire and revolution.

A Fragile Union
What can I say? Joan Nestle does it again - a fabulous collection of short pieces exploring issues of lesbian sexuality. Her writing is so beautiful and evocative, she captures moments and meanings of sexual encounters and identities so well.

In this collection, Nestle - an iconic femme - introduces us to her new Australian lover, who is also, in an American sense, a femme - or at least not a butch. The effect this has on Nestle's own sexual identity is explored, and this may be challenging for some past fans of Nestle's celebration of the butch- femme asthetic.

Buy it, read it, you'll love it.