Envisioning LOVE: The Lesbian Activist Videos of the LOVETapes Collective

Fig. 1. Screenshot of Flo Kennedy leading an LFL event from L.O.V.E.'s video

“And I’m tired of fuckers fucking over me [eeee],” belts out Flo Kennedy as she leads a group of lesbian activists in a sing-along.  Kennedy’s raspy voice, a defining hallmark of her impassioned speeches during the 1970s, is the first sound the viewer hears in the L.O.V.E.Tape Collective’s 1975 video. As the image of Kennedy comes on screen, she is seated in a wicker peacock chair which doubles as her throne and evocatively affirms her power (Fig. 1) - her attempt to carry a melodious tune appears so at odds with this regal image, as to become nearly comical. The seeming incongruity between sound and image, or the tension between Kennedy’s commanding presence and the unassuming, collective aesthetics of a lesbian sing-along, unveil the particular charm of the video and the L.O.V.E.Tapes larger documentary project. Captured on the newly available medium of portable video, is a genuine moment of building liberatory politics and collective action, which, like video as a medium, is more about process than product, in its recognition that the work is never truly done (1).

Fig 2. Lesbians Organized for Video Experience Logo 

Founded in 1972, the L.O.V.E. (Lesbians Organized for Video Experience) (Fig. 2) Tapes Collective was a group of artists, media activists, and technology enthusiasts, dedicated to utilizing video to document and promote lesbian life. The collective originally consisted of Betty Brown, Doris (Blue) Lunden, Tracy Fitz, Barbara Jabaily, Denise Wong, and Delia Davis (2). Each member brought a unique set of skills and perspectives to the group while learning to shoot and edit video together; with the help of Susan Milano and Rochelle Schulman, they experimented with the new medium at local studios including the Public Access Center, Downtown Community Video, and most importantly, the Women’s Interart Center (3). Between 1972-1977, the brief period when they were most active as a collective, L.O.V.E produced nearly 70 half-hour black and white ½ inch open reel video tapes documenting the revolutionary spirit and momentum of lesbian activism in and around New York City. 

Donated to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the collection represents a significant, yet largely overlooked moment in the histories of lesbian media activism. When the L.O.V.E.Tapes collective was first formed In 1972, video was still a new and not yet widely understood technology. Portable video, or the portapak as it was often referred to, was a groundbreaking medium. Unlike its bulky, unwieldy, and far more expensive predecessors, the portapak was relatively accessible; affordable, easy to use, and light enough to carry on one’s shoulder – a point often misogynistically highlighted in advertisements – the portapak made casual video recording possible (4). With televisual images of women no longer solely the territory of male producers, a powerful new feminist media politics emerged. With a portapak on her back, a camerawoman could more easily enter the crevices of women’s everyday lives – their homes, their work spaces, and their collective political meetings – recording deep moments of anger and frustration, but also joy and pleasure in a visual politics which manifested the personal into the political (5). With the freedoms afforded by the flexibility of the portapak, it was newly possible to not only produce the kinds of images of their own lives not normally broadcast on television, but to also easily reproduce and share those images. “The revolution,” Gil Scott-Herron famously sang in 1970, “will not be televised” (6). But at least now, with the portapak, a tiny slice of it could be recorded and later broadcast.

Fig 3. Second Annual Women's Video Festival Program

The L.O.V.E.Tape’s videos exemplify this historic shift in the use of VHS and manifest a “vision of activism” in the fullest sense – one in which visibility, representational politics, and remembrance are at the center. These tapes frequently couple scenes of fierce activism and collective fervor with intimate moments of affection and profound mutual care in the lesbian community, at a time when that community was still attempting to craft its own political identity (7). One of the collective’s most well-known works, a documentary video of the 1973 Gay Pride March in New York, exemplifies these tensions. Screened at the 1973 Women’s Video Festival, which was co-organized by L.O.V.E.Tapes member Betty Brown (Fig. 3), the video captures the infectious exuberance of the march. As Fritz’s naive handling of the camera echoes the visually-saturated, distractible attention span of an onlooker, the tape’s focus seems to wander through the joyous, but dizzyingly chaotic crowd, peeking in on scenes of everyday intimacy and affection, such as when she zooms in on two women holding hands. These moments reify the parade’s premise, highlighting visual declarations of lesbian love, life, and belonging. 

Fig 4. Screenshot from L.O.V.E.'s "Edited 1973 Gay Pride March & Rally" of an unidentified parade attendee being interviewed on camera by Tracy Fitz

Fritz again highlights this spirit of declaration further in the tape when she interviews different onlookers and captures their coming-out stories. In a particularly beautiful scene, a woman can be seen hiding away from the camera, until we hear her teasingly chided back on screen by her friends. “Why are you here,” Ftiz asks the woman on-camera, to which she giggles and shyly responds, “Well, I love women.” (Fig. 4) The moment is defined by a sense of genuine emotional generosity as the woman onscreen confesses her desires not just to Fitz, who stands in front of her with the camera, but also for us  as the viewers, as she looks directly into the camera. What her bashful confession offers is in fact a bold declaration of her lesbian identity as it is inscribed in seeming perpetuity on tape. It is this coupling – the recording of important historical events with the evanescent, ephemeral and affective – which speaks to the significance of the Lovetapes’ project and video collection. The tapes reflect what Raymond Williams famously theorized as “structures of feeling”, ways of feeling still outside of official discourse vying to emerge (8). “Well, I love women,” she professes, revealing the feelings which guide and anchor her political awakening; feelings for which a political vocabulary is only just beginning to emerge; feelings which will push towards the surface, coalescing into the sedimentary ground that will form the bedrock of a lesbian revolutionary politics. 

Fig 5. Screenshot from L.O.V.E.'s "Edited 1973 Gay Pride March & Rally" of Sylvia Rivera.

Even as L.O.V.E.Tape's celebrates these public declarations of lesbian life, it also captures some of the conflicts which arose during the parade. An especially prophetic moment occurs towards the end of the tape when attendees gather in Washington Square Park where a stage has been erected for speeches and performances. Sylvia Rivera, a co-founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), gets up on stage to address the harassment of the trans community, she is booed off by the crowd (Fig. 5). Jean O’Leary of the Lesbian Feminist Liberation takes the microphone from Rivera, denounces drag performers as misogynist, and crticicizes the 1973 march as being too male-dominated. Captured on tape, the incidence foreshadows the Lesbian Feminist Liberation’s split the following year from the Gay Pride Parade and signals the political schisms emerging between lesbian and trans activists. In this brief, but powerful moment Rivera emerges as what Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke compellingly describe as the “figure of the trans woman [as] interloper” (9). Rivera “as interloper” disrupts the fantasy of “stable and harmonious relations within the community of women,” reminding viewers of even radical feminism’s failures to speak for “women-in-general” (10). More importantly, however, Rivera disrupts the festivities to remind attendees that liberation cannot be achieved by representational fulfillment alone, but rather, through a refusal of oppressive material conditions.

By the time L.O.V.E. stopped collectively producing work in 1977, the era of analog video was coming to an end. Within the next decade, electronic tape and the wonderfully grainy, textural effects of familiarity which was one of its defining qualities, would be replaced by the slick and glossy visuals of digital media. The L.O.V.E. collection in the Lesbian Herstory Archives is an incredible time capsule of this brief moment when video helped redefine lesbian politics. Within the context of the archive, each individual tape blossoms, transformed from mere documentation and information gathering, to a "LOVE" letter addressed to the burgeoning lesbian community of the 1970s, as well as a community of viewers to come.