I’ve been going to the Lesbian Herstory Archives on and off for years. I kept showing up, and people there would ask, “What are you researching?” I didn’t know. I didn’t go in with a series of questions, or even any intention to have a show. I was interested in the Archives before I even moved to New York; I learned about them when I was first coming out. I lived in North Carolina, and my girlfriend at the time had gone to Duke University, where someone from the Archives came to give a slide presentation. One of the images she showed was of the Buffalo women with the blue star tattoos, and so we got those tattoos. So I’ve always wanted to do something there.

I think I was just interested in the place itself, too. I’m interested in the marks on the walls and the scratches on the handrail. I’m interested in the colors. It was a lot less linear than just doing a research project with a defined outcome. Obviously I was searching for something, and they were really open to my wanderings.

The entrance to Shame is the First Betrayer. Courtesy of VICTORI + MO and Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

What drew you specifically to the photographs and writings in the Special Collections?

I really got into their Special Collections, which are in these banker boxes in a closet in a former bedroom. For some reason, something kept calling me upstairs to those boxes. They felt so personal in a way. I started pulling them off the shelf, and one happened to be Joan Nestle’s box, who is one of the founders, though I didn’t know that at the time. She was a writer that wrote poetry and very poetic prose. As I was reading her work, I got drawn in, and the spark for the show came really in reaction to her writings. Once I discovered she was one of the founders my mind was blown. The title for the show is actually a line in one of Joan’s poems, “Stone Butch, Drag Butch, Baby Butch.”

I wondered where the title came from.

When I discovered it, I instantly thought, “Oh, that’s it!” because so much of the show is an exploration and a reaction to her work. The line comes from a poem in which she’s talking about traversing through Prospect Park at night from a butch’s point of view. She writes a lot about butch and femme dynamics, as well as being queer in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. That line specifically is speaking to this internalized homophobia. I also liked that the poem was so Brooklyn-centric.