Invitation to a Feast: 'A Sturdy Yes of a People: Selected Writing by Joan Nestle'

Joan Nestle's writings are wide-ranging with something to challenge, delight, or spark the imagination for a variety of lesbians: well-read lesbians, nonbinary lesbians, academic lesbians, lesbians of color, queer folk, activist lesbians, women-loving lesbians, trans lesbians, Jewish lesbians, feminists, women, womxn, people of all genders or none, and people of all races, religions, ages, classes and political persuasions.

Nestle writes about every-day lesbians and the people who travel with them in all their diversity. Her stories, essays, speeches, and treatises energize the past as a vibrant part of our present political understanding and welcome an ever-more-liberated future where people can glory in their full selves and identities, whichever way they overlap.

[Joan Nestle shows us how lesbians made social change from the second half of the twentieth century to the first quarter of the twenty-first and inspires readers to imagine expanded possibilities for freedom in the new millennium.

As a queer lesbian who came to writing late in life, it is both daunting and exhilarating to invite new and familiar audiences to enjoy Joan Nestle's work. Born in the mid–twentieth century, I came out in the 1980s during a time that was not as open to varied forms of lesbian expression.

In the community where I came out, there was a right way and a wrong way to be a lesbian. Never one to follow someone else's right way, I ended up making my own circuitous queer path in life. Medical training and practice, then raising children meant that for years, I was lucky to be able to read a few short stories or an occasional novel about lesbians, let alone eke out the time to put pen to paper.

Around 2014, I started to write poetry and to read more widely, with a particular emphasis on poetry and literature about people of color, feminists, queer people, and Jewish people. I set out to become a well-read Black Jewish queer lesbian.