The Gender of Desire: Joan Nestle...
The Gender of Desire: Joan Nestle’s Last Interview
Explicit
Our Dyke Histories by Jack Gieseking with Sinister Wisdom
S1 · E6
Dec 22, 2025
56:28
Episode notes

In this deeply moving and often electric episode, Our Dyke Histories sits with legendary writer, activist, and Lesbian Herstory Archives co-founder Joan Nestle in her last interview as she reflects on the queer worlds that shaped her life in the 1940s–1960s. Joan guides us through her Friday night walks from a condemned Lower East Side tenement to the Sea Colony bar; the dangers and solidarities of queer street life; the violent policing and erotic possibility inside lesbian bars; and the role of race, class, and labor in shaping queer women’s worlds. Along the way, she brings us into Harlem drag balls with Mabel Hampton, the lesbian feminist relationship to the Women’s House of Detention, the labor histories behind Massachusetts’ Moody Gang, and the erotic power of  ... 

Keywords
lesbian history
queer history
lesbian bars
queer parties
Jack Gieseking
queer nightlife
LGBTQ bars
feminist history
trans history
queer geographies
queer spaces
rent parties
queer archives
Jack Jen Gieseking
Black queer women
lesbian spaces
queer geography
Harlem history
Joan Nestle
Lesbian Herstory Archives
Mabel Hampton
lesbian writers
anti-fascism
prisons
Greenwich Village
Lower East Side
Jews
New York City
Jewish lesbian history
LGBTQ persecution
Deb Edel
Jonathan Ned Katz
1940s queer culture
1950s queer culture
1960s queer culture
trans spaces
Hugh Ryan
Women’s House of Detention
butch-femme
butch
fem
femme
queer desire
1950s sexuality
queer resistance
gender history
HUAC
Elizabeth Kennedy
queer pulp
lesbian pulp
Audre Lorde
Sea Colony
New York City history
queer intergenerational
Black lesbians
Lillian Foster
Harriet Lane
Dorothy Allison
Amber Hollibaugh
Andrea Dworkin
Allan Bérubé
Marie Cartier
Sandi Toksvig
Paula Grant
Merril Mushroom
Lowell
Abingdon Square
Lowell, Massachusetts
Bonnie and Clyde’s
Clit Club
Blind Charlie’s
Bagatelle
Moody Gang
Gateways Club
The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader
off our backs
Under the Mink
Lisa Davis
Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Malinda Lo
A Restricted Country