They Kept Us Out

Fig 1. Sakhi T-Shirt

The Archive has a large collection of queer feminist t-shirts, handmade by political activists with limited resources (4). The process of making these objects of dissent and solidarity were intimate. In the public sphere these objects acted, in a sense, as vagrant translator allowing the wearer and the viewer to engage in a dialogue, to expand the poetics and politics of queerness beyond the site of the wearer’s body. In the archive, they query absence. Tactile and multi-sensorial objects, such as photographs and audio tapes, due to their transformative nature, often lend themselves as the first archivists of the history of/ from the margins, especially in the absence of the storyteller. They often appear in-between and beyond the oral and the literate, carrying histories of the moment of dis/appearance in the archive, as yet another fugitive tool to assess the gaps - in what could have been, and what is.

Making merry inside enclosed spaces is a place-making strategy used by lesbians of colour to register their resistance against the aesthetic and social elision of coloured bodies in movement (Adeyemi 550). For the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA) Madison Square Park in the 90s was a site for demonstrating dissent (5). Music and dance were an inseparable part of the group’s anti-homophobia protest gathering known as Desi  Dhamaka (6). When the organisation was banned by the Federation of Indian Associations (FIA) from marching at the India Day Parade, they forged newer solidarities within the South Asian community of New York (7). In 1994 Sakhi for South Asian Women invited SALGA to join them in the parade and to “carry signs to protest SALGA’s exclusion” (Sinha 1994) (8). Members of Sakhi joined SALGA at Madison Avenue to protest against the homophobic organisers of FIA as a means of “challenging the status quo” (9 +10).The t-shirt (fig. 1.) from the LHA’s T-Shirt Collection embodies these entangled histories of solidarity and hurt. It features the double entendre “stonewalled!”, written above the image of an erotic stone sculpture of a maithuna (coitus) scene found inside the recesses of the Rajarani temple in India (11 + 12). Apart from signaling at the project of putting lovers back into an enclosed space (a literal wall made of stone, a tomb, a frieze), it invokes the legacy of Stonewall uprising of 1969, while exposing the double standards of Indian organisers of the parade.  

Fig 2. Black Lesbian New York Map

For some lesbian of colours, enclosed spaces were safer spaces for gathering and organising. “My spot was by the window where I could see everyone…Over to 5 Avenue, down to 110 street, up to the top floor railroad apartment of Blind Charlie’s…There was a thriving Black Lesbian and Gay community within a vibrant Black community…”, reminisces Jeanne Flash Gray, author of the first known Black Lesbian New York Map (fig. 2), while writing about lesbian nightlife in the 1930s and 40s Harlem (13). Women and coloured people’s struggle to enter bars predates the Stonewall uprising (Gutierrez). In the safety of queer homes, away from the disciplining gaze of police, profiling by male bouncers, and suspicious neighbours, the coloured lesbian danced. Born out of the need to organize outside the bars, Salsa Soul, the country’s first organisation dedicated to lesbians of colour, was founded by Rev. Delores Jackson in New York City, in 1974. Photographs from the Third World Women: Salsa Soul Sisters Special Collection (fig. 3,4,5,6) brings us closer to the project of place-making undertaken by lesbians of colour in New York City in the 1970s (14). The living room, kitchen, and outdoor spaces, enclosed by surveillance and disciplining, that hosted defiant bodies were in turn, rearranged by them (15). Bodies in joyful movement adorned by riotous colours burst through the photo album. Novelty printed shirt and geometric patterned sets, dashiki with embroidered yoke and a silk turban, batik printed jumpsuit, a kufi cap - everyone brought their own altar of belonging to the party, to be party to the vision of freedom (16, 17, 18 + 19). 

And yet, archives are incapable of containing trenchant lives. Presence of women of colour in the Lesbian Herstory Archives coheres with the disappearance of coloured women’s invisibility - in the archive and elsewhere. The city, in this case, New York, emerges as a queer site that witnessed, persecuted, and celebrated multiple convergences of such invisibilities.