Background

Joan was born on May 12, 1940, in New York, United States. Nestle's father died before she was born, and she was raised by her widowed mother Regina Nestle, a bookkeeper in New York City's garment district, whom she credits with inspiring her "belief in a woman's undeniable right to enjoy sex".

Education

Joan attended Martin Van Buren High School in Queens. She also studied at Queens College and received a Bachelor of Arts (English) in 1963. Joan finished New York University with a Master of Arts (English) in 1968.

Career

After studies, Joan Nestle turned her attention to events in the South. In 1965, she traveled to Alabama to participate in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. She worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and in registration drives to bring out black voters.

In 1971, Nestle once again acted on her political and social convictions by joining the Lesbian Liberation Committee. The following year, she helped form the Gay Academic Union, an organization known as the GAU. Through the efforts of the GAU, gay and lesbian speakers such as Nestle speak at the campuses of colleges and universities across the United States. Nestle met other lesbians with similar social and political concerns through the GAU, and in 1973, they began a collaborative project to assemble historical information about lesbianism in America before the development of the feminist movement. This project became known as the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

A Restricted Country, Nestle’s autobiography, was published in 1987. A Restricted Country’ represents the synthesis of Nestle’s experiences as an activist against prejudice, an educator, and a writer, all within the story of her life and sexual development.

With Naomi Holoch, Nestle edited Women on Women: An Anthology of American Lesbian Short Fiction (1990). A compilation of material by lesbian authors, its selections exhibit the range and diversity of the available material, its subject matter, and its authors. According to Booklist contributor Ray Olson, this diversity gives the volume “sociological interest” and makes the book a valuable addition to public libraries. Holoch and Nestle also edited Women on Women 2 (1993) and Women on Women 3 (1996).

In between the second and third installments of Women on Women, Nestle edited a project with her longtime friend John Preston. The book, Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write about Their Lives Together, is a collection of pieces describing various relationships between gay men and lesbians. “Each story is illuminating, showing lesbians and gay men playing indispensable roles in each other’s lives as mentors, muses, best friends, families, even lovers,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who also called Sister and Brother “richly rewarding.”

Nestle’s work A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings includes a series of portraits of working-class lesbians and Nestle’s account of her bout with colon cancer.

She retired from Queens College, City University of New York in 1995 due to an illness that was eventually identified as colorectal cancer.

Achievements

• Joan Nestle is a prominent activist in the lesbian community. Her writings include books as well as contributions to various anthologies and periodicals. One of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Nestle has edited a number of anthologies with gay and lesbian themes. While Nestle’s writings and lectures educate the general public about lesbianism in an attempt to foster tolerance, the author also addresses the tensions and controversies within the lesbian community. Her most famous works are A Restricted Country and A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings.

Works

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  • The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader

    (The book surveys a decade of the attempt to reconstruct a...)

    1992
  • Women on Women: An Anthology of American Lesbian Short Fiction (No. 1)

    (The 29 stories in the volume range from the daring and er...)

    1990
  • The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction

    (The book presents a range of literary voices - from twent...)

    1999
  • Women on Women 2: An Anthology of American Lesbian Short Fiction (No. 2)

    (Twenty-eight short works address a range of issues releva...)

    1993
  • A Restricted Country

    (Joan Nestle has stood at the forefront of American freedo...)

    1987
  • A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings

    (Nestle explores the ''fragile unions” of contemporary les...)

    1998
  • Sister & Brother: Lesbians & Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together 1994

Views

Quotations: Joan Nestle said she "wanted people, especially lesbians, to see that the butch-femme relationship isn't just some negative heterosexual aping".

Membership

Joan Nestle is a member of Lesbian Liberation Committee, Gay Academic Union.

Connections

Nestle lives in Australia with her partner, Dianne Otto.

Mother:

Regina Nestle

coworker and friend:

Yasmin Tambiah

Partner:

Dianne Otto

References

• The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
  1995
• The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage
  1995
• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 181