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Jesse Monteagudo's Book Nook

A Fragile Union
By Joan Nestle

A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings by Joan Nestle; The Cleis Press; 206 pages; $14.95.

Joan Nestle is a "fifty-eight-year-old Jewish fem lesbian woman with cancer living in New York City in the United States of America at the end of the twentieth century."

Out of the closet since the fifties, Nestle marched in Selma in 1965, joined the feminist movement in 1971, and helped create the Gay Academic Union in 1972.

In 1996 Schulman reviewed Jonathan Larson's hit musical Rent, a modernization of Giacomo Puccini's opera La Boheme, for the New York Press (she didn't like it).

In 1973 Nestle co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which grew from a small collection in her apartment into a three-story building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Nestle's books -- A Restricted Country, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, the Women on Women series (with Naomi Holoch) and Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together (with John Preston) - have won every important lesbian and gay book award, including the American Library Association's Gay and Lesbian Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

In 1996 Nestle won the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Lesbian and Gay Literature. Nestle's new collection, A Fragile Union just won a Lambda Literary Award in the field of Lesbian Studies ( see below).

Previous Reviews from the GayToday Archive:
Review: Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star

Review: Lonely Hunters

Review: The Empress is a Man: Stories from the Life of Jos� Sarria
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"With this book, I offer you the fragile unions that are my life ... I give you these details not as markers of identity the way we often did in the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s and '80s, thinking that if we laid out our particulars, we had cleared away all ambiguity about our lives, but precisely for the opposite reason. ... My writing grows out of desperate quandaries - both personal and national. How to love when I keep falling, how to be brave when I am so fearful, how to protest injustices when I am so tired, how to embrace difference when I do not even trust myself?"

In A Fragile Union, Nestle struggles with the "fragile unions" of her life. Like all good writers, Nestle has the gift for taking her lifetime experiences, and the issues and causes she cares about, and expressing them in such a way that would allow the reader to empathize with her experiences and care about her issues and her causes.

Topics like the Lesbian Herstory Archives, lesbian sex writing, butch-femme relationships and living with cancer are important to us because they are important to the author, and because in some corner of our psyche we can relate to them.

As a dyed-in-the-wool, Kinsey 6 faggot, I have no experience with the female anatomy and little interest in lesbian sex. Even so, when Nestle writes about her experiences as a woman-loving-woman, and its effects on her world view, I can relate:

"For over four decades, I have made my way in this world as a lover of women. I have spread my legs and lowered my lips for the love of women at night and taught my students during the day. The way I love filled the way I taught, the way I loved shaped the books I wrote, the way I loved shaped the politics of change I fought for. Hundreds of thousands of us held our passions close as we created public beauty in this country ..."

Here Nestle's experiences parallel my own, for it is my passion for other men that inspires my activism and my writing - unlike many "straight" men, I perceive other males as brothers who I can make love to rather than as enemies who I must kill.

Though lesbians and gay men are different in many ways, we also have a lot in common, not least of which is the fact that we do not behave the way that "straight" society expects women and men to behave. Nestle explored the ways that queer women and men relate, and the ways we differ, as co-editor of Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together:

"In my writing about John Preston, my co-editor ... and comrade in the writing of what some call pornography, I offer the portrait of a friendship based on a mutual respect for the difficult task of erotic writing. John died of AIDS before our collaborative work was finished, but he educated me about the generosity of friends who are writers, even when they are under the deadliest of sieges. ... What John and I did not know at that time was that I, too, was harboring a cellular battle for life that would change my days. ... Like John, I use writing about the body and my need for touch as a way to negotiate my terror and to honor life."

Preston's experiences as a PWA affected and inspired Nestle's attitudes as a person living with cancer. If, God forbid, one of us has to experience a life-threatening or debilitating disease, we can turn to Nestle's words for reassurance and inspiration.

Nestle does not mince words, and her sexual writings (both fiction and nonfiction) anger the close-minded and politically-correct. There is something in A Fragile Union to anger, upset and arouse everyone, which is what a good, thought-provoking book should do. In a society that still doubts our right to exist, and that often demands our silence, Nestle's words speak loud and clear. We should listen to them.

IT'S AWARDS TIME!: