Joan Nestle Thanks Mayor Mamdani — NYC Department of Records & Information Services

In his community remarks, he told the story of Joan Nestle and her close companion, Mabel Hampton. Nestle is a Jewish fiction writer and co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a non-profit, volunteer-led community archive in New York City. Hampton is a Black lesbian dancer and entertainer, who had met Joan as her employed caretaker. By the end of Hampton’s life, in addition to being her dear friend, Nestle acted in many ways as Hampton’s biographer: capturing her life through oral histories, leading to film and writing. The archive reveals Hampton as holding court for younger dykes to learn about lesbian life in 1920s Harlem, or for her cataloguing of the pulp fiction collection, affectionately branded as “survival literature.” Mayor Mamdani illustrated the impact of their connection: 

I think of a story told by Joan Nestle, an archivist of queer history in New York City. In the 1950s, her mother had briefly employed a woman named Mabel Hampton. Mabel was an activist, a domestic worker, and a dancer during the Harlem Renaissance. One day, Joan’s mother approached Mabel and said, “I don’t know what to do.” She suspected that her daughter was gay…. Mabel turned to Joan’s mother and said, “So what?” Mabel was a lesbian, too. She took Joan under her wing as a second mother.

In his retelling, the mayor referred to Joan and Mabel’s home in the upper west side, at 215 West 92nd Street, now otherwise occupied, and earmarked as an LGBT historic site. This site later became the home to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the largest and oldest lesbian archive in the world. The organization is now located in Brooklyn, at 484 14th Street, also designated as an historic site.