Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings

A Fragile Union is Joan Nestle's collection of intimate essays and narratives about lesbian sexuality, butch-femme relationships, sex writing, the importance of preserving the history of pre-Stonewall gays and lesbians, the love that is possible between lesbians and gay men, and the often shaky camaraderie among lesbians as that community continues to flex its diversity. Readers of A Restricted Country and other Nestle writings are familiar with the author's themes of unity and difference. In A Fragile Union, she delves still deeper. Living with cancer, facing death, Nestle now explores other "fragile unions": the fragility of her sexual desire in the face of her illness, the fragility of memory in the face of enormous loss and fear, her belief in the possibility of hope, her love for her people -- women, lesbians and gays, the working class, Jews, and all who struggle against injustice.

Kirkus Reviews

Poignant and vigorousnand some sexually explicitnessays on both personal history and the "herstory" of the lesbian community in America. In her introduction, Nestle (co-editor, Sister and Brother, 1994) describes herself as a "fifty-eight-year-old white Jewish fem lesbian woman with cancer living in New York City in the United States of America at the end of the twentieth century." This collection comprises reflections on those particulars, ranging from commentary on her working-class mother's eloquent journals through the history of lesbianism as it began to accumulate in the Lesbian Herstory Archives (now housed in a Brooklyn townhouse), which Nestle founded. Included are chapters on Nestle's plunge into 1960s political activismnmarching and demonstrating against nuclear arms and communist-baiters while keeping her sexual preferences secret from her socialist comrades. Beginning in that decade, however, lesbianism began to come out of the closet and the basement bars (Nestle recalls the latter somewhat fondly). In "The Politics of Thinking," however, the author reveals her concern that in the 1990s, not only has "religious moral fervor" dampened free discussion of sexuality, but so have certain kinds of political correctness within the gay community, where anti-pornography factions had developed strength. Many of the stories that Nestle wrote then were descriptive tales of lesbian love affairs, and she found herself wondering whether those stories had "hurt lesbian women," as the anti-pornographers suggested. The author also raises questions about the meaning of gender and about the devaluation of the feminine. In the section titled "A Gift of Touch" are some detailed reminiscences oferotic encounters with loversnas well as reflections on coming to terms with cancer.