Poor Jim, I think, as I reread this ideological encounter over 30 years later. Here he was making a groundbreaking claim for his profession to open up to the possibilities of archiving gay material, even giving them advice how to do it, and there I was, pulsing with the righteousness of post-60s anti-colonial insights, thank you, Albert Memmi, and the fervor of a 50s- fem- queer turned 70s- lesbian- feminist quasi separatist. I laugh now at my use of Mary Daly, whose brand of Jesuit- trained feminism I soon would reject, whose refusal to teach male students enraged my teacher self and whose uncritical use of sources like “Mother India,” so touched by the white imperial hand, embroiled her in a public dressing down by Audre Lorde who implored white feminist thinkers to be careful of where they go for theoretical underpinning. And oy vey, my sweeping call to arms—lesbians will change history, my use of the word “people” to stand for all the complex communities that make up lesbian places, my announcement that historical understandings and academic institutions are failures—a putz, I can hear my working- class mother saying, who does she think she is. This is not how you speak to professionals. But I was fired up by a community of women, mostly lesbian, who were setting out to undermine the controlling hierarchies of the first part of the 20th century and were dedicated to creating a new land of culture, politics, and selfhood, a new understanding of what was herstorical.

Rereading the words of my younger self is one version of the intergenerational conversations I have always touted as the offered richness of an archives. At 70, sitting at my desk in a house in an inner suburb in Melbourne, Australia, I have had the interesting experience of reading myself as another person, as an historical entity, shaped by her times—the American urban 50s, 60s and early 70s and the passions they inspired, the dreams to which they gave birth. The McCarthy period from the late 40s through the 1950s is here, informing my sense of the need to live in exile from prevailing norms if one wanted to have freedom of thought and body; the civil rights movement is here, with its sense of a people having to take history into their own hands to undo inequalities, to create justice; the 1960s commitment to radical rethinking of educational opportunities is here—at the time of this conversation, I had been teaching in the SEEK Program, a radical higher education opportunity project created by the Black and Puerto Rican Political Caucus of the New York State Legislature under the guidance of Shirley Chisholm, for 13 years, discovering and teaching books like “The Colonized and the Colonizer” by Albert Memmi and the Narrative of Frederick Douglass; the embracing, collective energies of the lesbian-feminist movement gave me the power to issue declarations, to see all things as political, to dare to will creation of alternatives.

All of these forces also gave me little pity when I encountered “the enemy.” Poor Jim. Even now when I was rereading his essay, I found myself thinking if he uses the word repository one more time I will scream. Of course, he was trying to do express his historical insights as well, reasoning his way out of the clash between “separatist tendencies” and the need for professionalism that seemed to promise the only way to ensure gay inclusion in mainstream collections. The tensions between these two writers reveal another historical moment in the 70s American gay rights movement, the moment when many feminist gay women threw up their hands and said, we can’t work with gay men anymore; we are too invisible, they are too unaware of their privilege. All the places and terms that made Jim feel safe, made me suspicious, the formal institutions, the committees, the emphasis on security, on the limitations of accessibility. His professionalism was to me a sellout of what was possible. Here my class background came into play as well; I had longings for the ivy league world of marble institutions, for the tree-lined walks of the exclusive women’s colleges that later in my life I would so often speak at, but I came out in the sex drenched bars of the Village in the 1950s, where my community of women were a rich mix of sex workers, telephone operators and taxi drivers—so we were at cross purposes—he saw the limitations of a ghetto where I saw working-class life waiting for its historical recognition. Here I am sliding back into that much younger version of myself, for what I have come to see is that while I have come to value the professionalism of gay archivists working within their institutions, while I have come to see connections rather than the separations between queer folks of all sorts, while I now see how mainstream and so called marginal collections all contribute to making sure gay lives are not thrown out of history’s moving car, while in short, I say thank you to Jim for his vision and hard work, I find what endures is the reality of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, over three decades later, in its communal home in Brooklyn where nothing has been stolen in all its years and where access is defined by when the doors are open.

There is one huge piece missing from my younger version here—no where do I say that the archives is a place, must be a place, where the lesbian, queer body lives, where sexual encounters and mores, their songs, their images must be prized. Perhaps because I was trying so hard to be a good radical lesbian feminist, perhaps because I was censoring my dream for this more formal ideological public encounter or simply that we were not debating the home of the body—for whatever reason, what would become one of the main themes of my life is invisible. I am comforted by the fact that somewhere in my papers at the archives is a small black and white photograph of me, naked, reaching for a gray box. My body against the grains of preservation. Oh Jim.

By now, thousands of people have made the dream expressed in these 1978 writings a lived moment, in a new time. Dreams too are history, refusals and declarations are the conversations we have with historical desires, dreams of change.