Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle was born in the Bronx in 1940 and spent most of her life in New York City, where, in 1958, she entered public lesbian life in the bars of Greenwich Village. She taught writing in the SEEK Program at Queens College from 1965 to 1990. In 1974 she cofounded the Lesbian Herstory Archives which still thrives today in its Brooklyn home. Her own provinciality ended, she hopes, when she moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2002 to be with her lover, Dianne Otto. At seventy-three Nestle is most...See more

Joan Nestle was born in the Bronx in 1940 and spent most of her life in New York City, where, in 1958, she entered public lesbian life in the bars of Greenwich Village. She taught writing in the SEEK Program at Queens College from 1965 to 1990. In 1974 she cofounded the Lesbian Herstory Archives which still thrives today in its Brooklyn home. Her own provinciality ended, she hopes, when she moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2002 to be with her lover, Dianne Otto. At seventy-three Nestle is most grateful when she is forced to see with new eyes that which she thought she knew. She is the author of A Restricted Country (Cleis Press, 2003) and A Fragile Union (Cleis Press, 1998) and editor of seven other books exploring the lesbian body and imagination. See less