FEMSPECTIVES 2020 - The Archivettes
The work of an archivist is a unique and never-ending job; preserving history is a vital tool — one future generation can use to study and learn from the past or simply know it existed. Stories of minorities and groups like the LGBTQ community are stories that paint a different picture of the past, stories that are more than often lost to it. The Lesbian Herstory Archives is aware of that, as it has grown to become the largest collection of materials belonging to lesbians and the subject of Megan Rossman’s documentary The Archivettes.
Growing out of the civil rights and activist movements of the sixties, the LHA opened in 1974 in a small apartment. Their mission of preserving the diverse history of lesbians came at a time when gay bars were being raided by police and LGBTQ individuals were openly persecuted. The archive eventually moved to a bigger location in Brooklyn during the eighties, where it’s been since. Many of the materials in the archive range from diaries and letters to mixtapes made for partners and even personal items of clothing.
Clocking in at sixty minutes, the documentary may be short in length but is not short on information. Footage and photographs, along with interviews by many of the early women who helped build LHA to what it has become, fill out the history of the archive — only a portion of the documentary. What’s remaining is filled in with the what the archive does: we’re shown the day to day operations and how generations of women continue to come together to keep the archive going, as well as the personal histories of some of the women who’ve contributed — the most compelling involving women going to save materials donated to them that were going to be destroyed by the family of a woman who came out during her will reading.
Megan Rossman’s The Archivettes is not only a concise and intimate look at the history of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the women who keep it going but a reminder why preservation is so important for future generations. While the documentary could have benefited from a longer runtime to grow upon some of its threads, the conciseness of it creates a great portrait of a unique and vital door to a history that’s all too important to not let slip away.
