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WHEN HER English teacher at Martin Van Buren High School assigned a research paper on any topic, Joan Nestle made her way to the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, tackled the mammoth card catalog and nervously looked up "homosexuality." The card said, simply, "see deviance," and then, "see mental institutions." She did her paper on Japanese interment camps instead.
Several years later, when she turned 18, she read a book by a physician titled "Sex Variants." It featured paragraph-long portraits of lesbians like "Irene K." and "Eloise B." and - the one Nestle recalls most vividly - Marvel W.: "Hated ruffly dresses . . . Feels bitter about inequality of sexes. Champion of the downtrodden."
"They meant these descriptions as case studies of pathology," says Nestle, now 55 years old, as she holds the book in her hand. "I was reading it as autobiography." She flips through the book almost lovingly, and then puts it back in its place among a wall, a floor, a building full of books. "This was the first book of the collection," she says.
Nestle is visiting the three-story townhouse in Park Slope that houses the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which started in her pantry two decades ago and is now billed as both the largest and the oldest collection of its kind in the world.
But talk of size misses the point. "How do you measure the hundreds of women who march under the Lesbian Herstory Archives banner every year in the gay pride parade?" asks Polly Thistlethwaite, whose day job is...