In the 1970s, a group of women with ties to the Gay Academic Union formed the Lesbian Herstory Archives in an attempt to catalog and save pieces of lesbian history, which they felt was rapidly disappearing at the time. Since then, the Lesbian Herstory Archive has found a permanent home in a brownstone in Brooklyn, and it’s a focal point in full-time book publicist and debut author Amelia Possanza’s hybrid memoir Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives.
“I wanted to write an angry essay like Andrea Long Chu’s ‘On Liking Women,'” Possanza tells The Mary Sue. “I was like, ‘It’s going to be short and it’s going to ask where is this history? Why is no one taking care of it? Why do some people in the queer community take up more space than others? Are we really a community?’
“I wrote some of that and then realized some of this energy would be better channeled toward doing the work I wish was out there instead of being angry. The original essay was going to predominantly be personal experience. I’m a Scorpio, so it could be my personal grudge list. Then as the project morphed into actually going out and doing the work I wish more people were doing, the memoir stayed [in the book] because it was so much a part of the origin story.”
This is how Possanza finds herself discussing her own queer history in connection with the lives of seven 20th-century queer women whose romantic love stories caught her eye because she’s self-admittedly “a hopeless romantic.” But as Possanza wrote and researched Lesbian Love Story, she says the figures she studied gave her a different understanding of the term—one centered in community building and preservation.
In the introduction to the book, aptly titled ‘Collecting Lesbians,’ Possanza writes of her subjects, “These lesbian love stories spanned decades, from the turn of the century to the 1980s, and crisscrossed the country, though every single one made a stop in New York City. … I chose them because their stories are singular, each a match struck against the grain of their eras until their lives burned bright, and yet they also represent the broader history of lesbians at each moment in time.”
During our interview, Possanza says she chose people who self-identified as lesbians (with the exception of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, an athlete, who never outright said she was queer) who were also marginalized in other ways and “pushed out of this system that’s supposed to provide us support. This beautiful thing happens in most of their lives where it’s like, ‘The state is not going to take care of us so how are we going to take care of each other?'”
Whether she is quoting Rubyfruit Jungle author Rita Mae Brown, penning a love letter to her gay best friend, John, or reflecting on why she gravitated toward more masculine-presenting people for her book, Possanza remains focused on her passion for archival work and what it can offer to LGBTQIA+ individuals, especially in light of how many elders were lost to the AIDS crisis and how historically few queer people actually had the ability to archive their own histories or the histories of their communities.
“Prisons were taking in queer people and writing things down about them and their mission was certainly not to preserve queer love stories,” she says. “I wanted to make it really clear [in the book] that these were love stories. The first person I wrote about is Mary Casal and she wrote her own memoir, but it was edited by these two men who were amateur scientists studying sexuality. Who knows what they took out? She uses a lot of euphemisms like ‘we shared these tender love kisses’ but there’s no dramatic, rom-com-worthy first kiss scene. I want our history to have that!
“I almost wrote fanfiction of these historical lesbians because I just wanted to have a heartbeat and not be as clinical as some of these edits or other eyes that shaped the archive made it.”
Luckily, in addition to Mary Casal’s memoir, Possanza also had access to recorded interviews with her conducted by Joan Nestle, one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archive. Through these, Possanza uncovered other types of love stories, broadening her initial research and altering her relationship with herself and her romanticism.
“It was this community caretaking act of love, act of keeping archives,” she explains. “I found this one postcard that gives me goosebumps of Joan writing to Mabel from Switzerland saying, like, ‘I’m in the Alps. What do you think? I’m going to buy a mountain for us and we’ll go live there someday.’ That is the most romantic postcard I’ve ever read and it’s not between two traditional lovers.
“It went from me being like, ‘I’m a hopeless romantic who’s watched too many rom-coms trying to find my partner in New York City’ and became this political radicalization of studying people who had some big romantic loves, but also practiced love in so many other ways. Taking care of elders, taking care of the community, fighting for the community. Gloria Anzalduá [a Chicana who claimed ‘lesbian’ as a political identity] assembled anthologies and created this literary community that didn’t exist before her,” Possanza continues. “It was a lot of isolated people thinking they were working alone. That was the big transformation I went through. I ended up being like, ‘Wow, there’s a much bigger world out there,’ almost suspicious that these romantic stories are supposed to distract people from this system we’re all trapped in together.”
Writing Lesbian Love Story not only altered Possanza’s relationship with her own lesbian identity (which she says “can freak people out”), that “ties me to these people that I studied” but also gave her the space to understand and create new types of community, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I couldn’t physically be with my queer community and it was wonderful to be in community with people who are doing this care work of trying to preserve and track down these stories,” she says. “I want other people to go out and do this work. The most flattering feedback I’ve gotten so far is from people who are like, ‘I read your book and now I have my own curiosities that I’m following up on.’ Great! We need more of us!
“This is my naive, rosy-eyed, radicalized self, but I think we’re in the world we’re in because we tell these stories and they’re reflected back at us and we try and be like the people in these stories. The predominant narrative is about wars and terrorists and the economy and healthcare, and a really cheesy part of me believes that if we told other stories… What would that inspire people to do and what would our world look like?”
Meanwhile, as a book publicist, Possanza helps authors “usher their books into the world,” which she describes as its own kind of care work. She shares that she wants to write a Shakespeare-inspired novel for her next book, exploring “our New York City flooded queer future.” She also says she wants to rewrite the New York City budget, which she might stick right in the middle of that novel.
Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives is available everywhere books are sold.
(featured image: Catapult Books)
Published: Jun 2, 2023 05:39 pm