Nestle: Blog on History; Women's House of D, 1931-1974

The Intimacies of Shame

by Joan Nestle. Copyright © Joan Nestle 2008. All rights reserved

Protected notice to be added here after Joan makes any final changes.

(With this essay noted author and co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Joan Nestle inaugurates OutHistory's series of personal meditative blogs on LGBTQ and heterosexual history.)

IMAGE OF HOUSE OF D GOES HERE

It seems the fortress-like building that was the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village, New York City, has been looming over my adult life.

First, in the late 1950s and throughout the 60s when I was a young fem woman making my way late at night from my railroad apartment on 9th Street between Avenue A and Tompkins Park, walking across town on 8th Street, my destination the “Sea Colony.” That was a rough butch-fem bar across from Abington Square — east to west, my route went, and always past the dark medieval building that housed so many poor and working women, so many lesbians.

IMAGE OF THE SEA COLONY GOES HERE

How to account for what stands solid through the years and changes of geographies, for what will become a basic structure of one’s historical memory?

The hot summer weekend nights that I stood and watched and listened to the pleas of lovers, butch women shouting up to the slit like windows, to the hands waving handkerchiefs, to bodiless voices of love and despair. “Momi, the kids are okay.”

Tourists taking in the Village would sometimes stop and wonder at the spectacle of raw queer women love, need, anger in the streets. Not all the stares in the world from bewildered visitors to the Village stopped this ritual of necessary and naked communication.

I stood those days, convinced I was a criminal too, on my way to my haven, a policed place where deviants were kept under a watchful eye, but given a small patch of freedom.

In the bar, with that subversive sense of humor that undercuts hardship, the Women’s House of D was called the “Country Club,” and friends were always asking after someone’s woman who was incarcerated. It was a presence in our lives—a warning, a beacon, a reminder and it was a site of community.

Erected in 1931 on the bones of an older jail and market place, this urban prison reflected the changing mores of women’s imprisonment, that Estelle Freedman wrote so well of in Their Sister’s Keepers, beginning with a progressive plan for the betterment of the incarcerated women and then giving in to disdainful neglect as race and class chased out ideals.

As long as it was right in our faces, this building was available for political action. Dismissed as the prison for hookers, and other “obscenities,” city officials paid little attention to the poor treatment of the women forced to spend time there.

Then in 1965, attention of a different kind was brought to the prison. Andrea Dworkin was arrested during an anti-Vietnam War protest, and like all the inmates, she was strip searched. But Dworkin refused to accept this lack of respect, and being a college student from an upper middle class family she had the connections to make her outrage known. We read about her arrest and outrageous treatment in Murray Kempton’s celebrity column in the New York Post.

All of a sudden the prison and its world became an eyesore to the city, an embarrassment, bad for real estate and tourism. As one journalist wrote, “from their stylish deco aerie, female inmates would regale passersby’s on busy 6th Avenue with obscene gestures and shouted courses. This obscenity was demolished in 1974.”

The inmates were an insult to the structure. A shroud of shame fell over the prison, the street scenes, the inmates. The Women’s House of Detention disappeared from the heart of the village, from our daily observation.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, I was unpacking a donated box of books at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and found a paperback expose of the prison, Hellhole, which opened with a quote from Dworkin about “the disgusting lesbians” with whom she was forced to come into contact during her stay.

Yes, the building was torn down and replaced with a pretty garden, and the women’s prison was moved to an island in the middle of the Hudson River, where no one has to be reminded of its presence unless someone you know or love is imprisoned there.

Because of my own queer historical roots, shame is an endlessly interesting source of ideas, not a memory from which to flee. Sites like the Women's House of D are prisms of shifting queer historical concerns; urbanity, what it will bear and what it will not, race and class divisions and connections--imprisonment both within jails and without. My prism reflects my intimacy with shame, a gift of my time which serves, if for nothing else, as a marker to new generations of queer historians that this lost citadel of punishment is worthy of our attention.

The Women's House of Detention was not a site of assimilation but romantic notions of outcaste citadel fail to capture its gritty reality in the lives of so many women.

Perhaps shame makes us question the idea of change as always progressive, shame that can be a moment of solidarity with the struggle to be.

As I have thought and written about queer history, about the years of surveillance, about what it took to walk the public streets as a queer in Joseph McCarthy’s America, I have always had a companion, the shamed body, and I have always learned from it—from its angers, its laughter, its sadness, its ecstasies, its moments of resistance and its communities—the Country Club, indeed.