File #1620: "Transcript of MAxine Wolfe and Anne Maquire Oral History"

Transcript of MAxine Wolfe and Anne Maquire Oral History

SAVING PRESERVATION STORIES:
DIVERSITY AND THE OUTERBOROUGHS

The Reminiscences of
Anne Maguire and Maxine Wolfe

2017, New York Preservation Archive Project

PREFACE
The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Anne Maguire and Maxine
Wolfe conducted by Interviewer Liz H. Strong on November 5, 2017. This interview is part of
the Saving Preservation Stories: Diversity and the Outer Boroughs oral history project.
The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word,
rather than written prose. The views expressed in this oral history interview do not necessarily
reflect the views of the New York Preservation Archive Project.
The Lesbian Avengers, founded in the early 1990s, was an action group that worked to raise
public awareness of lesbian issues. The first action the new group took was to advocate for
rainbow curriculum in New York Public Schools by organizing a march and event at a public
school in Queens. Alice Austen House was brought to their attention by Amy Khoudari who was
at that time writing her Ph.D. dissertation on Alice Austen. The Lesbian Avengers staged a
protest on the day of a nautical festival, dressed in old-style bathing suits as lifeguards, bearing
life preservers with “Dyke Preserver” written on them. They stated that the board of the Alice
Austen House was denying Alice Austen’s existence as a lesbian and were advocating for the
museum to tell the whole story of her life, including her partner Gertrude Tate who was
unmentioned at that time. Both Maguire and Wolfe comment on the erasure of lesbian’s
contributions to the modern LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer] movement
and in history. They also speak about the importance of visibility of lesbian and gay history in
general, and lesbian figures and history in particular, which has been under-represented, noting
that the Alice Austen House is the first queer national historic landmark to be given to a woman.
Political and lesbians activists, Anne Maguire and Maxine Wolfe founded the Lesbian Avengers
in the early 1990s. Anne Maguire, originally from Dublin, Ireland, came to New York City in
1987 and was one of the founders of ILGO, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. Maxine
Wolfe, a native of Brooklyn, was a professor at the City University of New York for over thirty
years and before she retired. She now volunteers with the Lesbian Herstory Archives and
previously was active with ACT UP.

Transcriptionist: Matthew Geesey

Session: 1

Interviewee: Anne Maguire, Maxine Wolfe

Location: Brooklyn, New York, NY

Interviewer: Liz H. Strong (Q1), Anthony

Date: November 5, 2017

Bellove (Q2)

Q1: All right.

Q2: Lights on. Watch your eyes.

Wolfe: Okay.

Q2: And it is November 5, 2017. We are at the home of Maxine Wolfe with her dear
friend, Anne—

Q1: Maguire.

Q2: Maguire, a nice Italian name. And we’re at Park Slope, Brooklyn. And here we go,
clapping.

Q1: Anthony Bellov is the videographer—

Q2: Yes, Anthony Bellov—

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 2
Q1: Liz is the interviewer; this is for the New York Preservation Archive Project.

Q2: That’s all right. Now I’ll clap again.

Q1: All right, thank you so much for being with us. As I said, we like to learn a little bit
about who you are to get started. So each of you in turn let me know when and where you
were born and a little bit about your life growing up.

Wolfe: Okay, I’ll start, Maxine Wolfe. I was born—you asked me where I was born. I
was born in Brooklyn, New York in Maimonides Hospital, which is not too far from here.
I grew up in Brooklyn and I’ve lived in Brooklyn all my life except for two years when I
lived in Copenhagen actually.

So I moved to Park Slope in 1970. Otherwise I lived in Borough Park, Flatbush,
Midwood, everywhere in Brooklyn you could live. And I moved to this house thirty-three
years ago. Before then, I was a renter who was gentrified out three times as Park Slope
got gentrified.

I’ve been a lesbian activist for a very long time. I’ve been a political organizer for a really
long time in lots of different movements. I have two daughters who are now in their—one
is fifty and the other is forty-seven. And that’s about it. I guess it’s good enough unless
you need more information.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 3
Q1: I’m going to ask some follow-up questions. How did you—I guess to go back
further, just tell me a little bit about your family life as a kid and what your life growing
up was like.

Wolfe: My mother was an immigrant. She came to this country when she was fourteen
years old in 1927 and she was the first person—her father was here beforehand. He came
somewhat earlier, like seven years earlier and sent for her as the first person. And then
when Hitler was elected in 1933, he borrowed money and got everybody else out. So her
mother, my grandmother and my two uncles and one aunt came in 1933. We grew up in
Borough Park. My father’s family was originally from Austria and then moved to
England and then came here but they were here in the early part of the twentieth century.
He was the only one of his siblings that was born here. His other siblings were born in
Europe.

I grew up in Borough Park and I went to PS 131 and I went to [John J.] Pershing Junior
High School [I.S. 220] and New Utrecht High School. And then I went to Brooklyn
College and I stayed at the City University [of New York] and got my Ph.D. Then I
became a professor at the graduate school of the City University in 1969-1970 and I
taught for thirty-some odd years and then I retired. And put my full time into both the
Lesbian Herstory Archives which I started volunteering at in 1984 and I still am a
volunteer there and a coordinator and doing all kinds of other political work which I’ve
done since I was a high school student.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 4
Q1: Talk to me about that transition in high school of getting involved in activism and
politics.

Wolfe: I always tell this story, which there was a girl that lived in my neighborhood
whose parents were very political and she invited me one time to hear Pete Seeger sing
when he was blacklisted. And he sang This Land is Made for You and Me and I believed
him. Seriously, that sounds stupid but it was true. I always—my family was not political
at all. My mother and father were not formally political or even at all political in the
sense that people think about it. Although from what I understand my grandfather was
but I never knew him. My grandmother just became more religious as she got older but
he died five years after he brought everybody to this country. So she was alone most of
that time.

But they always had basic politics, in the sense of sort of very common sense working
class politics. For instance, once I asked my mother who she was voting for. I think I
must have been eleven. It’s when Adlai [E.] Stevenson [II] was running and she said she
wasn’t voting and I gave her a big argument about being an immigrant and why wasn’t
she voting. And her answer was, “Because none of them are for us. None of them are for
the working people.” That was my mother, okay [laughs].

My father just never basically said much about it but she had those kinds of basic
understandings of the world. And she made us stay out of school when it was the Jewish
holidays even though she wasn’t religious at all in the sense of highly religious because

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 5
she said, “You always let people know you’re a Jew.” So that was the sort of legacy of
the Holocaust and losing so many people in her family. You always let people know
you’re a Jew.

So those kinds of basic politics and I always felt—I think the first stuff that I got involved
in was about the Civil Rights Movement. Well, actually [Joseph] McCarthy probably
because I remember watching the McCarthy hearings at a neighbor’s house, but also
anything that had to do with civil rights. It just seemed like totally natural to me that
something was wrong with the world, that people of color were not—especially AfricanAmericans were not being treated right in this country.

So that’s sort of my history. Then I just went from there to everything else. I did antiapartheid stuff, I did work about unions. I always feel like I have to be out there doing
something. It’s basically my modus operandi. I just feel like with the world being the way
it is, people have to speak up. And I think that was one of the premises what I learned
from my family, was that people have to speak up.

Q1: Thank you. I’m going to ask you to go on the same journey. Start telling me when
and where you were born and just a little bit about your life.

Maguire: Okay, I was born in Dublin in Ireland in 1962 and grew up there, left when I
was twenty-five and came here to New York in 1987. So I’ve been here for thirty years
this year. October 1 was my thirtieth anniversary which I had forgotten until now.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 6

So I grew up in Ireland, attended Catholic school, Ireland’s version of public school, on
the north side of Dublin, the eldest of four kids and also it’s interesting to hear the stories.
I also started to become kind of political or aware of politics in high school. It was around
the prisoner, Irish Republican prisoner stuff and the Dirty Protest or the Blanket Protest
as it was called because prisoners wanted to be treated as political prisoners—Irish
Republican prisoners in the north of Ireland, not in the south where I grew up. And they
were not being treated as political prisoners. They were in the regular criminal status.

It culminated in what was called the Dirty Protest. So basically they weren’t allowed to
clean out their cells. I mean I’m not going to go into details because it was so kind of
disgusting but I was in the city when I was about fourteen in Dublin on a Saturday and
there was a big protest going through the streets. There were people just wearing blankets
because that was another term for it, it was also called the Blanket Protest because they
refused to wear prison clothing. So the authorities decided no clothing then. These
prisoners wore blankets.

So it was the Blanket or the Dirty Protest and I do very clearly remember standing and
not being able to cross O’Connell Street and being furious that I couldn’t go about my
business because of this stupid protest. What were they doing down here anyway? It had
nothing to do with us in the south of Ireland.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 7
Then just for a split second, I thought, you actually don’t know anything about this, so
until you learn a little bit about why these people are marching in the streets in blankets
when it’s freezing cold, go off and like read about it or learn about it. I also had the
thought at the same time of, uh oh, this is not good because if I think this now and I go
and do the reading and figure out what’s going on and I think it’s wrong, then I have to
do something.

So it was kind of like uh, oh, this is trouble. I know this is trouble. I can already tell this
is trouble. I guess that was the beginning of my road to trouble [laughter]. I’m causing
trouble and feeling like this is what you have to do sometimes. You should probably ask
a follow-up [unclear] [laughter].

Q1: I will, yes. I’m just wondering—I’m waiting for you to finish your thought if you had
more but from there, tell me how you went about causing trouble. What were some of
your first engagements?

Maguire: So the first demonstration I went on, I was still in high school and it was during
the hunger strike. This was under Margaret [H.] Thatcher, same battle more or less, but
the next phase of it. It was when Bobby [Robert G.] Sands died. So he was the first of ten
political prisoners who died on hunger strike. When it happened, the country was kind of
waiting and waiting and waiting and not actually believing it would happen and thinking
Thatcher would have to figure out something. Then it came on the news that Bobby
Sands had died.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 8

And I think I was fifteen and my brother was a year younger than me and we just sat at
home, looking at each other and then thought we need to go into the city center. It was
just an automatic thing. We went into the center of Dublin, outside the general post
office, which is kind of a spot—you just knew to go. We knew to go there. There was a
big demonstration. We were still very young. We didn’t understand everything but it was
a feeling of absolute rage and disbelief, and needing to do something, needing to be able
to put all that fury and confusion and grief into something.

So we showed up at this thing and that was basically for both of us. He also got
personally involved and that’s where I started. I started with going on demonstrations,
going on marches, going to meetings. Then from there, I eventually found some people
that I was interested in hearing their point of views.

So I would go to things that they were doing in particular. That’s where I learned about
feminism. There were a huge amount of feminists involved. So it was really political
prisoner stuff where I started and then the rest of my work in Ireland really was around
reproductive rights, abortion stuff, very little lesbian and gay stuff.

I also worked on two general election campaigns for the civil rights leader, Bernadette
Devlin McAliskey, who ran against the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), and leader of the
Fianna Fail Party, Charles Haughey, in the early 1980s. Haughey happened to be running
in the constituency I grew up in, Dublin North-Central, which included Donnycarney. His

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 9
mother and two sisters lived on the street next to the street I grew up on. Since then I
have never worked for a candidate in an election in Ireland or in the US.

I came out when I was in Ireland but didn’t do—besides letting everyone know that I was
a lesbian, doing this work and doing this work. I was not involved in any kind of gay
rights movement. I feel like that really solidified when I came here. I mean I went on Gay
Pride parades, like the first one in Dublin in 1985 or 1986. But the AIDS [acquired
immune deficiency syndrome] activism was just starting before I left. So basically I came
to New York and it was where I really met what I consider to be absolutely ferocious
lesbians and gay men [laughter]. That like blew my mind. I thought okay, this is the right
place at the right time [laughs].

Q1: How did you come to the United States? What was that transition like?

Maguire: I won a green card in a lottery and was basically desperate to get out of Ireland.
It was really—I mean the political stuff that had been going on had been horrifying. The
misogyny and the Catholic Church and it was totally homophobic and there was a whole
set of cases where a young fifteen-year-old died giving birth in a grotto in Leitrim, like in
the church car park. A teacher had been fired from a school because she was involved
with a separated married man and she had a child.

There was just a whole series of absolutely horrifying political things going on. And I felt
like I just needed to get out of here for a while, just to get out. I just wanted to get out. I

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 10
did not want to come here. I didn’t want to go to England. I had been to London a few
times and found that anti-Irish stuff because it was extremely political and the IRA [Irish
Republican Army] were quite active. The anti-Irish sentiment in London I would not
have been able to handle it at all. It was really awful. Like for example, every time we
went, only Irish people had to fill in a really long form, which was called the Prevention
of Terrorism Act. It’s the kind of thing that’s going to be happening here soon. But Irish
people on the plane or on the ferry were the only people who had to fill in this form and
hand it in at customs or the passport check going to England.

So there was a lottery and the whole country came to a standstill. There was very high
unemployment. Almost fifty percent of the population was under the age of twenty-five.
The unemployment rates were skyrocketing. I actually had a job but this was a whole
move here, which has now been discussed again. What is the visa, they’re calling it?

Wolfe: Diversity.

Maguire: Diversity. This happened in the ‘80s and it was really focused on Irish people.
So it was Irish politicians worked this whole Donneley visa thing. You sent your name,
your date of birth—your name, address and your date of birth to a P.O. box in
Washington, D.C.

And the country came to a total standstill because there were so many people applying. I
think the odds were a couple of thousand—couple of hundred thousand to one that you

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 11
would get it. I didn’t really want to come but as soon as I got that piece of mail from the
embassy, I was like I am so out of here. So I was one of the lucky ones and came here.
Within three months, I was gone.

Q1: To New York?

Maguire: Yes.

Q1: What was New York like? Was it your first visit?

Maguire: Yes. I had a sister here. My younger sister was a nanny in Larchmont. From
high school, she had gone immediately out of high school to Larchmont and I had two
friends that I kind of knew, that I had gotten in touch with. So I moved in with them—
one, and she was moving right around the time that I was planning on coming. She said,
“You want me to look for a place for the two of us?” I said, “Yes.”

So I moved into Park Slope actually, Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue for a year and my
sister eventually moved as a live-in nanny in Brooklyn. So we were like a little posse and
there were lots of Irish people here. Marie [Honan] knew Maxine already. This was the
woman I moved in with, the Irish woman, who I ended up being with and have been ever
since. But Marie had already met Maxine at an Irish political event. But there was also
the lesbian stuff. I think Maxine gave Marie her first ever tickets to the dance on the pier
around Gay Pride. So that connection was made immediately. And this Thanksgiving, I

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 12
went to my first ever Thanksgiving meal here in November 1987 and this year, I’ll be
back for my thirtieth at Maxine’s house. So I’ve basically known Maxine since I came
here.

Wolfe: Yes.

Q1: You were having Thanksgiving here in this very house?

Wolfe: Yes, in this house.

Q1: Tell me about that night if you can remember.

Wolfe: I just remember Anne and Marie coming. We always used to have a big crowd
and I asked them to come because I met Marie at some political meetings and we hit it
off. And she said that Anne was coming and I said, “Well, bring Anne.” And that was it.

Maguire: It was amazing. I mean I had been here a month and most of the table besides
Karen and Amy, Maxine’s daughters, were lesbians and gay men from ACT UP [AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power].

Wolfe: ACT UP.

Maguire: Feisty and ferocious and—

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 13

Wolfe: Loud [laughs].

Maguire: And loud and opinionated and out there. I didn’t open my mouth for the whole
meal. It was just like oh, my god. It was culture shock. I also got quite a shock because I
thought, I’ve been out. I’ve been out in my life and I thought oh, my god, I so have not
been out. I don’t even know what that is anymore. So it was such a big deal. It was kind
of amazing.

Wolfe: It was a lot of people too.

Maguire: Huge.

Wolfe: Probably fifteen people for dinner and it was all people from ACT UP other than
my daughters. Yes, people were just going on and on and on and having opinions about
everything. When Anne told me afterwards, many years afterwards, what a shock it was.
I was like, right, it must have been horrifying [laughter]. She didn’t know anybody
except for Marie and everybody was blah, blah, blah which was the way Thanksgiving
always is here, which is that people just talk forever, cover every topic under the sun
from anything political to anything anything. Sex, politics, art—

Maguire: Art, books.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 14
Wolfe: Books, whatever.

Maguire: Family, everything.

Wolfe: Everything.

Q1: How did you become connected with ACT UP originally?

Wolfe: The way I became connected with ACT UP was in 1984, which was when I went
to the archives, in the early ‘80s, almost every group that I belonged to had fallen apart.
When [Ronald W.] Reagan was elected—people don’t really get it. So the way that I got
connected to ACT UP was that nothing was going on and I kept looking for something to
do politically. So I did individual things like there were demonstrations against Cruising,
the movie, and there was some bars in Times Square that had been raided by the cops.
There were just sort of these disparate demonstrations.

Meanwhile AIDS had started but at that time, I was not really focused on that. The men
that I knew, I had been active in a couple of different mixed groups, men and women, gay
men and lesbians, and the men were not talking about AIDS at all at that time. In fact,
fortunately for them, most of those men never were infected.

So I kept looking for things to do. Then this group started at the City University that I
was part of at the beginning which was called CUNY Lesbian and Gay People. I had also

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 15
done some things around the sodomy rulings and this incredible action, I think it was the
Statue of Liberty Centennial where we sort of busted downtown without a permit, to
protest against the sodomy ruling by the Supreme Court. That was when they upheld it.

Then I went to some meetings of the Gay and Lesbian—what’s now called GLAAD [Gay
and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] which then was called Gay Anti-Defamation
Group. But it was very top-down and I didn’t love it [laughs]. I had also gone to
Democratic Party things. I was just looking for what I could do that I would feel good
about.

Then I was in this CUNY group and we went to Gay Pride that year as CUNY Lesbian
and Gay People and we were behind ACT UP on the march. I saw ACT UP and it looked
amazing and a friend of mine had also said, “There’s this new group that started that’s
meeting at the center. Do you want to go?” And I said, “Yes.” We said we’d go that
Monday. And this was Sunday.

They were in front of me and they had this amazing tableau that year. It was the first year
of ACT UP and they had this concentration camp because it was at that time what’s his
name, Bennett⎯was it Bennett? No, it was—the other right-winger, who had sort of
suggested that gay men should be tattooed? Okay? It was sort of this whole concentration
camp mentality. There was a huge amount of homophobia around the AIDS stuff. And
they had built this concentration camp. They were wearing gas masks and they were

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 16
handing out these leaflets. And I went over to a woman and I said to her, “Are there
women in this group?” And she said, “Oh, yes, definitely.” I said, “Okay.”

So Monday, I went to this meeting and I walked into this room and there were like four
hundred gay men and like four visible women [laughter]. I said, “Well, whatever.” I had
done some—and I didn’t know—one of the things that people don’t know about ACT UP
is that originally the group was not made up of people who had been active in New York
City lesbian and gay politics, at least no one that I knew—radical politics. Nobody that I
knew was in that room.

So I just sat there for a month and I didn’t say anything. I just listened to what was going
on. I really thought it was a great thing because anybody could do anything. People had a
lot of energy, a lot of anger. If you had a good idea, you could do it and you could get up
and speak your mind.

In fact, one of the first things that I did was to speak against something that Larry Kramer
said and I had no idea who Larry Kramer was at the time because I had not been involved
in kind of the mainstream gay part of the movement. And he stood up and we were doing
this action. He said something and I stood up and disagreed with him and everybody
gasped. I thought, “Oh, my God, what did I say?” I must have said something terrible and
no, the only thing was that I disagreed with him.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 17
And he never cared. He liked that people disagreed with him. Even if he would yell back
at you, it was only because he was arguing. I just felt really comfortable in the place. I
just felt this was a place that I could do something about something I cared about which
was AIDS and I stayed. I was very active in ACT UP for ten years, organized a lot of
actions and stuff. That’s how I got involved in ACT UP.

Q1: Now you guys are part of the founding core group of the Lesbian Avengers here in
New York. Tell me what led to that. What were some of the conversations that made you
think this group would be necessary?

Wolfe: Well, you also ought to ask Anne about ILGO because she was one of the people
who started the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization—

Q1: Oh, yes.

Wolfe: That did all the protests at the St. Patrick’s Day parade. That was sort of
dovetailed with ACT UP.

Maguire: And the Avengers.

Wolfe: And the Avengers, yes.

Q1: Thank you. Let’s get those stories first.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 18

Maguire: Well, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, we started that in 1990 because
there were so many Irish immigrants here and it turned out a lot of people had fled
because they were gay or lesbian. And we started this group, met at the center. The vast
majority of the people in the group were undocumented and totally and utterly closeted.
Because I was such an experienced political activist at that point given that there were
very few people in the group that were, so there was a bunch of us who wanted to do
stuff.

Basically the first political discussion we had was over naming the group, which
happened at our very first meeting. And there were a lot of people who wanted to give it
a Gaelic name like cairde which is friends in Gaelic. We’re like, uh-uh, nobody’s going
to know what that is. It’s so closeted, you know? So that was the first battle, whether we
were going to use a Gaelic name or say who we were.

Then when it came to saying who we were, we wanted lesbian to come before gay and
that was a whole other battle. We wanted to be the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization
and not the Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization. So we had a little battle and at but one
meeting, after the very first meeting, we had a name. So I thought it was really important
one, that we were not going to be closeted and two, that lesbians were going to be
welcome in this group and were definitely going to be part of the leadership.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 19
So I think the kind of tie-in between that and the Avengers was the lesbian thing being
part of the leadership, saying we are here, we’re not going anywhere. We’re feisty. We’re
interested in power. We’re not backing away. So the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization
was very much like that. We had policies, like if anyone is invited anywhere, it has be a
gay man and a lesbian. Gay men do not go anywhere on their own representing us.
There’s always going to be a lesbian. And it turned out that most of the work in the group
was done by lesbians anyway.

So at one point within our first year, somebody brought up at a meeting, “Wouldn’t it be
kind of funny if we marched in the St. Patrick’s Day parade?” Most of us were like, “Are
you kidding me?” But anyway, we sent in an application and it just completely blew up.
It totally blew up. Including ACT UP and AIDS, it was so totally and utterly homophobic
in the ‘90s. It was a massive wave and I think a lot had to do with the AIDS crisis.

So we sent in an application. It was rejected. We were on a waiting list but Joe [Joseph]
Nicholson [Jr.] who was a gay reporter at The New York Post; he didn’t work as a gay
reporter. He was a gay man who was a reporter at The New York Post. And feisty and
willing to do the work. He tracked us down and the next day, it was on the front page of
The New York Post, “Irish Gay Furor”, or “St. Patrick’s Day Furor”. And the whole thing
blew up.

So basically the group, we had to meet and decide are we going ahead with this or not?
And the people in the group who were quite political and active were saying we’re not

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 20
backing down. This is like they want us to be closeted. They want us to go away. We
cannot back down now, despite the fact that eighty percent of our membership were
completely closeted and terrified and also undocumented.

So I stayed in that group for ten years and we marched in the first and only parade ever in
1991 with Mayor [David N.] Dinkins as an invited group, not as the Irish Lesbian and
Gay Organization, and were pelted with stuff, had people throwing beer cans and
screaming at us for the whole thing. Dinkins actually said it reminded him of Selma. He
never expected to experience anything like that in his life in New York City. He was
appalled by it.

Then it turned, the group got quite radical. A lot of people totally came out of the closet,
told their family in Ireland so they could work on this. The Avengers started. The
Avengers got involved, people got involved in different stuff. And basically I stayed with
this for ten years and then it went on for twenty-five years. The first group got to
march—the first Irish gay group got to march this past March. So that’s twenty-five,
twenty-six years later. That’s how long it took them.

So I think the Avenger thing tied in for me with the fact that a lot of lesbians were really
shocked that a lesbian was like so upfront in a group that was for gay men and lesbians
and it was a big deal. It was a big deal to have like an opinionated, tough, strong, very
political lesbian being a spokesperson for this group. It was quite unusual at the time for a

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 21
mixed group. So I think there must have been something simmering underneath, Maxine,
with the Lesbian Avengers and the timing.

Q1: Give me a little bit—both of you can help me with this, a little bit of context on that.
What were the expectations for women in queer rights organizations? What were the
dynamics that you were coming into in the ‘90s and why was it so unusual to see lesbians
in leadership?

Wolfe: Well, for a long time, if you read histories of the lesbian and gay movement, first
of all, they all focus on electoral politics and very few lesbians were involved in electoral
politics. Lesbians were involved in radical politics. So in organizing against the war, like
lesbians surrounded the Pentagon while other people were marching. So it was that kind
of thing or they formed like the peace camps or Greenham [Common Women’s Peace
Camp], where lesbians climbed over the fence and tried to destroy missiles.

This is what lesbians were doing. They were part of the feminist movement and the
women’s movement, but the radical end of that, not the National Organization for
Women although there were lesbians there as well. I always—on the left, I had been
involved with mixed groups, it was never an issue but they were never like big mass
organizations. They were small ones, like a group called CRASH, which was the
Committee Against Racism, Anti-Semitism, Sexism, and Heterosexism and it was like a
leftie male and female group. But it was never anything that was visible or that was in the
newspaper or anything else.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 22

Most of the other groups because of finances and also the difference in politics, were run
by gay men. They never gave any attention—and also the mainstream media, to them,
gay means men. They can’t pronounce lesbian. Getting the word out of their mouth
doesn’t work. If they described any organization, they would say it was gay. Even if
people eventually wrote about ACT UP, they would say all gay men or mostly gay men.
Well, the leadership of ACT UP was largely lesbians. We were the people who
organized, taught people how to do civil disobedience, organized the marshalling, did the
logistics of the actions and got arrested. My affinity group had loads of women in it and
we were organizing all the time. But originally that was not the way.

So when you read the history, it always sounds like it was gay men. Then when people
describe what did lesbians do in the ‘70s, well, they were cultural. They did cultural
work. Yes, we had to start our own publishers, our own record companies, our own
everything because gay men wouldn’t publish our books. The straight press wouldn’t
publish our books and they wouldn’t publish our music.

So yes, we did that but we also did stuff about the murder of children in Atlanta because
we also didn’t only do lesbian and gay politics. We did other politics. We did civil rights.
People marched at Selma who were lesbian. People did a lot of stuff around the murder
of the black children in Atlanta in the ‘80s and other kinds of issues like that. So in the
same way that in the Vietnam War movement, eventually women left to form the
feminist movement, lesbians left both of those to form a lesbian movement because none

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 23
of them were giving any play, any perspective on lesbians. So that was one of the biggest
issues.

So everybody always talks about ACT UP as being one of—the AIDS crisis actually as
being one of the only times that lesbians and gay men worked together or one of the first
times that they visibly worked together in some kind of a radical movement. In ways
that’s true because beforehand, it was lesbians who were radical, not gay men, with
radical politics. So I think that was the big difference.

But we also, when we started the Avengers, we felt, even though we had worked with
gay men and I kept working in ACT UP and Anne kept being in ILGO, we also felt really
strongly that we wanted to work with other lesbians to focus on lesbian issues because
there were lesbian issues that nobody was dealing with. Even in AIDS, people would
make fun of the fact that there could be lesbians who had AIDS and we knew lesbians
who had AIDS and they didn’t get it from a needle. But nobody would ever talk about
lesbian sex, so people couldn’t imagine. Like how could lesbians spread AIDS? Well,
they could spread AIDS because they have blood and other bodily fluids that are involved
in sex, if they’re not just doing sex the way people think that lesbians do it but they’re
actually having sex the way that lesbians have it.

So even in the AIDS crisis, that became an issue. And also as lesbians in the AIDS crisis,
we did a lot of stuff about women in AIDS and that’s the other thing that people never
talk about when they talk about ACT UP, they always talk about drugs into bodies and it

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 24
was all about that—no. We also did work on changing the Centers for Disease Control
[and Prevention] definition to include women and poor people and the people who
spearheaded that were lesbians.

We had these groups that worked together and my affinity group which had sixteen men
in it and eight women—I think it was sixteen and eight—those men worked on getting
the definition changed. They spent—and several of them are dead. They didn’t work on
drugs into bodies for themselves. They worked on making sure that other people could
get access to medication who were not even thought of as having HIV.

So I think that those ideas and the idea of trying to work also in an all-lesbian group—
and also at that time, I should say that at that time, this group started—what was the name
of it? The one with the—the women’s group that you went to the meetings of?

Maguire: WAC, Women’s Action Coalition.

Wolfe: And they started doing stuff about abortion again. People called me and said,
“We’re going to start this group.” A group of lesbians called me to say, “We’re starting
this group.” And I said, “Is it a lesbian group?” They said, “No, it’s a women’s group.” I
said, “Been there, done that.” Fifteen years of working on abortion and then tried to get
people to deal with lesbian issues and they threw me out [laughs]. So I said, “I have done
that already. I’m not doing that again.”

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 25
So then I wanted to do some kind of an action group and I was friends with Sarah
Schulman at the time and I said to her, “We need to do something about getting lesbians
to do some actions.” There were those two women that I think were attacked on the
Appalachian Trail and nobody did anything.

Maguire: Yes.

Wolfe: Nobody did anything. And I said, “We’ve got to do something that’s like that.”
And she knew that Ana [M.] Simo who is a lesbian who was out for many, many years
and ran this theater company called Medusa’s Revenge, this theater group, the first
lesbian theater in New York, that she was interested in doing something as well. So Ana
and I met for lunch that May and we talked about different ways, different things that we
could do and we decided that we would each invite some people to a meeting. And so we
each asked our friends to come and the end result of that was Anne, Marie—her partner
Marie—Sarah Schulman, myself, Anne-[Christine] D’Adesky and who else?

Maguire: That’s it.

Wolfe: That was it?

Maguire: Yes, six, only six of us.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 26
Wolfe: Six of us, yes. So we met at Ana’s house and we decided that we wanted to do
something and somehow we came up with the name, Lesbian Avengers. We said, “What
about the Avengers?” And somebody said, “Lesbian Avengers.” We said, “Great.” And
Ana’s son is the one who came with the logo, which was the anarchist bomb. He was the
one that suggested it. And we decided as a group that we wanted to do something.

At that time, a big issue in New York was the rainbow curriculum. Well, we decided a
couple of things. We decided that we didn’t want to integrate gay bars, that we wanted to
do serious politics but in a really good way, a fun way and not like dour, but in some way
that would involve people. But it had to be not minor issues. Like sometimes people do
things, like oh, it’s an all male bar; we should go there and make them take women. We
didn’t care. That was not important to us.

The rainbow curriculum was important. They were going to create this curriculum for the
public schools and it had three lines in it about gay people, three lines. And already these
people, superintendents and stuff were lining up against it. But really what they were
against was not just that it had three lines about gay people, it also had stuff about people
of color and it had the truth about Native Americans, minor things that had not been
included in the curriculum beforehand.

So we decided we would do something about that. We decided that we would do it on the
first day of school but other than that, I think that the thing that made it work—and we
made up a club card, a little card that basically said—I have one inside. It said something

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 27
like lesbians, gay men, dykes; cold-blooded liars are in the White House, what are you
doing about it? Help us take revenge. Then it had a phone number. The phone number
was the one that was upstairs that was my daughter’s extension, their phone, because I
was getting phone calls. They were getting phone calls when they were teenagers. So I
got them a phone. The message said, “You have reached the Lesbian Avengers. We are
doing an action on the first day of school. We’re having a meeting on July sixth. Come to
the meeting and leave a message.”

And the first message was from Lydia who left this message saying, “You are either my
dream or my nightmare. I hope you are not the sergeant behind the local desk.” And that
tape is at the archives. Anyway, so we decided that we’d hand out those at Gay Pride—

Maguire: Thousands of them, six of us.

Wolfe: Yes. But we would not give them to any one that was already in a group, that we
would only give it to people on the sidelines because they were not committed to
anybody else. And we decided that—we also decided that we would not create the whole
action, just the concept so that people could own it.

All of us were incredibly democratic and we did not want a top-down organization. We
wanted one from the bottom-up. But in the lesbian community at that time, when we had
tried to do that, it never went anywhere. If we called a meeting, everybody had their own
interests and nothing would happen.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 28

So we decided we had to make it fait accompli. The group existed and by giving these
out, the women who came were taking a risk because who were we? We didn’t have our
names on it. It didn’t say who we were. It just was a phone number and telling people to
come to a meeting. So the women who came were definitely risk-takers, which is what
we wanted. What else did we do that was—I think that was it.

Maguire: That was it. It was really the palm card, like thousands of palm cards at Gay
Pride.

Wolfe: We gave them out the entire time.

Maguire: Yes.

Wolfe: So the first meeting was on July 6 and sixty lesbians showed up. And we each
took a head—ran a committee. Like I did the logistics and Ana did—well, Sarah did
media. And who did research? I think you did—

Maguire: I did research on the rainbow stuff—

Wolfe: Did you do research?

Maguire: Yes.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 29

Wolfe: Research and then somebody did props or something like that. Then other people
in the room joined those committees. So by doing that, it wasn’t us running it—and we
didn’t even pick the place. The research committee, totally luck involved, ended up
picking this district in Middle Village, Queens where nobody goes to do actions because
most of the people who do organizing, they don’t go to places where they’re not wanted.
They go to the [Greenwich] Village. Who wants to give out things in the Village? It’s
like speaking to the converted.

So this was Middle Village and the woman who was the superintendent was a
homophobe par excellence. She had basically said that would be no rainbow curriculum,
over her dead body [laughs]. She was like so amazing. Mary Cummins was her name.

Maguire: Yes, she was pretty bad.

Wolfe: She was terrible. She was the worst and she was getting all this publicity. So she
basically gave us publicity. So we arranged this first action out in Middle Village,
Queens. We arranged to do a march through the village, through the main street to the
public school and to do something on the first day of school. And we ended up having a
band, a women’s band was in the front singing, We Are Family. And then we had a big
banner that said “Teach About Lesbian Lives.”

Maguire: And t-shirts.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 30

Wolfe: And t-shirts that said, “I Was a Lesbian Child.” And then we had balloons. The
balloons said, “Ask about Lesbian Lives.” I think that one of the interesting things was
we decided, the six of us that we would do this if nobody else wanted to. The six of us
would do it. So when we had at the first meeting, as I said, were the risk-takers and they
were all totally behind it. But at the second meeting, other people had come who had
heard about it and they were the naysayers. So they would say things like—

Maguire: “Stay away from children.”

Wolfe: Right.

Maguire: “We cannot be near children.”

Wolfe: Right, and they would say, “This is the first day of school and you’re going to
make it terrible.” I said to them, “Do you have any kids?” I said, “I have two kids. This is
going to be the best first day of school they have ever had. There’s going to be a
marching band and balloons and everything.” [Laughter].

Wolfe: I said “And the second day is going to be totally disappointing and depressing.”
Then they would say something like, “Well, but the balloons, it’s like manipulating kids.”
I said, “If it said, Save the Whales, would it be okay?” It’s like homophobia and fear
which people have—because we were going into this hostile environment basically.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 31
Well, we went to Middle Village, Queens and we marched down that street and there
were loads of people supporting us. They came out—

Maguire: The children took the balloons. Some of them didn’t have parents saying,
“Don’t give my child a balloon.” They walked to school holding their balloons and asked
about lesbian lives.

Wolfe: One woman made her kid—

Maguire: Yes, one out of all of them.

Wolfe: One out of all of them and nobody got arrested. The cops were there finally when
we got to the school and of course, they tried to tell us that we couldn’t march on the
sidewalk and we told them what the law was. They had to let us do it. And then it was all
over the newspapers and that sort of launched the Lesbian Avengers.

So those were the kinds of actions that we tried to do the whole time. We did a lot of
really wonderful—we actually worked on Boycott Colorado stuff and prevented the
mayor of Denver from continuing his economic development tour of New York. He left
because every radio station he went to asked him questions about the anti-gay proposition
because we did demonstrations in front of everyone while he was there. We called in on
the phone. We followed him around, including to the Plaza Hotel. We were just fearless.
We really didn’t care.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 32

Maguire: I wouldn’t say we were fearless. I always have a tremendous amount of fear
and anxiety going into these things but fearless in a different way. Doing all those
actions, it can be—I guess part of it is you never really know what’s going to happen and
if some maniac is going to be there. There’s always an element of fear and anxiety—

Wolfe: Which is good.

Maguire: Yes, I think it’s normal. But I also think people don’t get that about activism or
activists. We’re just out there shouting our heads off, waving banners and never about the
thought that goes behind it and what it actually means for a person to go out there with
our bodies and do this thing.

Wolfe: We always plan things very, very well. We always had somebody who was there,
a legal person. I mean I agree, when I say fearless, I mean we went and did it.

Maguire: I know.

Wolfe: But you always have to be anxious enough to be careful and to see what’s going
on. So we did things like that here and also one of the things that grew out of the Lesbian
Avengers was a civil rights organizing project. In 1994, there were all these bills around
the United States that were anti-gay bills. There was a proposition in Oregon that would
make it legal to discriminate against gay people and these two people were killed. A

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 33
bomb went off in their basement apartment, a disabled gay man and a lesbian of color
and both of them were killed. And people didn’t get that. This was the same kind of stuff
you were seeing during the civil rights movement.

So we got in touch with people across the United States—lesbians across the United
States to ask them if they needed help. In all of these different states, we traveled.
Usually two of us would go to introduce ourselves because we knew that we had
resources and in a lot of the smaller places, they didn’t.

So we did some work first with some people in Maine about an anti-gay resolution or bill
there and then we ended up doing a big action in New York around the anti-violence
march that pointed out the information about all the anti-gay bills that were in the United
States and the killing of these two people.

That was when we started eating fire which was our trademark and people always think
that that was a joke but we did that because on this anti-violence march, one of the
Lesbian Avengers gave—the anti-violence project asked people to do something at
different places. So we set up a shrine and we actually slept out there for four days from
the night of Halloween to the election which was the following Tuesday. And people
could bring candles and people brought candles for people with AIDS and not just for the
people who were bombed in Oregon. So it became a shrine to all the violence that people
in our communities had experienced.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 34
And one of the things, the first night there was a march and you stopped at each of these
places. And we stopped. This woman, Lysander gave a talk and basically one of the
things that she said was that people, that you’re are afraid and there’s a reason to be
afraid but what you should do is take the fear and put it in you and then make it your own
and have it come out as anger and determination to do something.

So we had one woman who taught us how to eat fire and a group of women stood in a
circle and swallowed the fire as other people chanted, “We take the fire within us and we
take it and make it our own.” And that was the point of it. It wasn’t like a joke. It was to
basically say you can be afraid but you need to do something and not let people’s fear get
you to run away. Instead you should come out and do something.

Q1: On that thought, I kind of wanted to go back. It struck me that you said a lot of
people don’t understand how activists feel. You mentioned fear but we didn’t really get
to go into a specific experience and I was wondering if you could say a little more about
that and draw out that experience and what is important for people to understand about
how you feel going into a situation like this.

Maguire: Well, I guess every action is kind of different. I think the thing with direct
action in particular is that everything is involved. You are going out with your body and I
think for groups like the Avengers and for ILGO and experience direct activism makes it
easier because you know everyone has your back. While you can never predict what’s
going to happen, the great thing is—I mean I always have anxiety. I’m always scared.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 35
I’m always worried that the thing I’m supposed to do with the banner is not going to
happen and very recently I did have a whole banner thing that didn’t happen and it’s
disappointing but we got to keep our banner.

But I think it’s just being aware of everyone around you, being aware that people have
your backs. While I am always scared, I’m also always like totally, full on for it. Okay,
I’m going out here and all these people are with me. We also have support and if
something goes wrong, I kind of know we’re all going to figure it out together. It’s not
going to be I’m going to be left here on my own because I fell or I got thwacked or
something went wrong, I went in the wrong door, where we’re supposed to be going
somewhere else.

It’s a commitment. I mean it’s a commitment everyone makes. We make it to each other.
We make it to this action we’ve all been working on for quite awhile. I do know that
people think, oh, also now we’re paid. We don’t have jobs. We’re like on George Soros’
payroll. In fact, no, I’ve had a full-time job all this time for the last forty years. I have
always had a full-time job. I take my vacation time. I take my personal days to do actions.
And most activists are like that.

I don’t think it’s people who don’t agree with your position. Sometimes it’s people who
feel guilty because they feel like, “Oh, I should really be doing something but I go on one
march a year and I know it’s not enough.” So I think sometimes there’s a kind of attitude
about out there, shouting your heads off, waving your placards, blah, blah, blah. But you

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 36
know, you’ve been doing it for your entire life. I’ve been doing it for my entire life and
there’s a reason why we’re doing it and it’s valid and it takes guts and it takes a huge
amount of commitment.

Wolfe: I would also say that there’s real fear. I have been pushed around by the police. I
have been handcuffed too tight and my wrists have turned blue. I’ve been on a bus in
South Carolina with a cop who had a knife in his boot. The very first ACT UP action we
did at Cosmo [Cosmopolitan Magazine], the women’s committee, there was a cop that
came after me with a club.

It’s also, there are actual reasons to be afraid about the possibility of physical harm and
it’s often coming from police. But it can also come from counter-protestors as we saw in
Charlottesville and so when you go out and you make a commitment to do this, you have
no idea who’s going to be out there. One of the things that we do when we teach civil
disobedience and teach marshalling is to teach people how to handle hecklers and people
who come after you, so that you don’t engage them and you don’t escalate it but
sometimes you don’t do anything and they do it.

And if you’re going to resist arrest, if you’re going to do civil disobedience and resist
arrest and police pick you up, they throw you into the van and they don’t care if you hurt
your back. And there are people who have hurt their backs. There was a woman at the
Matthew—what was his name?

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 37
Maguire: Shepard.

Wolfe: Shepard, a very spontaneous action that happened in New York where thousands
of people showed up and nobody originally organized it. It’s just like thousands of people
showed up. And it’s sort of like the first Occupy [movement] thing. So some of us who
had experience as marshalls, we just immediately—it kicked into gear even though we
hadn’t organized it. One woman got hit by a horse and to this day, she limps. There’s a
guy that I know who got a concussion. So there are things that can happen that are
actually physically terrible. Most of the fear is about what can happen that you have no
idea what’s going to be out there. So you have to sort of go—and that’s why what Anne
was saying is true. One of the best ways to do it is be with a group of people who you
know and you know you can count on.

So in ACT UP, we had an affinity group structure where small groups worked together.
So you knew those people really well and whatever you organized to do together, you
knew that they would be there. It’s also how you organized support structures, so
somebody who’s going to follow, find out what jail you’re taken to and be there while
you’re there and when you come out. One action that I was in ACT UP, we were strip
searched, which was illegal. We knew that was illegal. When we came out, there were
lawyers there. We said we’ve got to do something about this, this was illegal, and we
ended up suing the city.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 38
So there’s actually the possibility of physical violence as well as just the pumped-up-ness
of the fact that you’re going into this situation that you have no idea and also, that when
you’re in those situations, you have to be self-confident because the police lie. No offense
to the police, actually, in that sense. We have a job to do. They have a job to do.

Now that’s not excusing physical violence but I’m saying even in general when they’re
not physically violent, when we do the Dyke March, the cop will say—I’ll say to one of
the police, like, “We need to stop because there’s a gap in the march.” “Oh, no, there’s no
gap in the march.” I never believe them. Okay, it’s just something you learn. It’s not to
do that. So that’s what the physical—just the courage that you need to do things and the
confidence.

Q1: It’s significant then that you target specifically bringing in people that have never
been involved or not currently involved in anything before. So talk to me about working
with people you personally didn’t know. Talk to me about training people who didn’t
have the skills already. Do people stick with it after this initial onboarding? Was there a
lot of turnover? Just talk to me about that whole process and experience.

Maguire: You have more to say. You were more involved at the beginning of the
Avengers and I was back with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization.

Wolfe: People stayed. ACT UP had people come and go but a huge number of people
stayed and a huge number of people kept doing activism when they left ACT UP, other

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 39
kinds of activism. That is one of the points but one of the things is we did trainings. One
of the things again that people don’t know is we did teach-ins first of all. When we did
work with—

Q1: As ACT UP or as the Lesbian Avengers?

Wolfe: Both. So if we were doing something about an issue that we wanted to target, we
learned everything we could about it. So in ACT UP, one of the things we did was, we
did teach-ins about the [United States] Food & Drug Administration, when we did a big
action there, about the National Institutes of Health, about the Center for Disease
Control’s definition of AIDS. We wrote booklets. We wrote books actually. The ACT UP
Women’s Caucus wrote a book about women in AIDS but before we wrote the book, we
did a teach-in and we made a photocopy booklet which ended up being—we made fifteen
hundred copies and not only did we give them out at all of our teach-ins at ACT UP but
we sent them all over the world.

And eventually when we needed support from people in other parts of the world to get
that definition changed, they came to do it because they understood how it affected them.
So the teach-ins were one way that people learned but we also did trainings. We did civil
disobedience training. So whenever we had an action, we asked if there were any people
who hadn’t been trained and if they hadn’t been, we did civil disobedience trainings. We
did marshal trainings. We did facilitator trainings, so that if you were facilitating a
meeting, you were trained. We did those in the Avengers; we did those in ACT UP.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 40

Maguire: And then the booklets.

Wolfe: The booklets, yes.

Maguire: The booklets, the Lesbian Avengers have a handbook and it is just the best
thing ever. It’s the A to Z of how to have a direct action group, what you need, if you’re
doing an action, a check-off list of all the things you need to have covered, running a
meeting, facilitating, organizing outside—

Wolfe: Examples of leaflets.

Maguire: Leaflets, yes.

Wolfe: Press releases.

Maguire: Press releases, everything. And part of it came from an ACT UP handbook and
we did the same thing in the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. It’s like okay; this is
your first year doing this. Here’s a history, here are the players, here’s what we do. This
is when our trainings are. So those things get moved around from group to group. And
now the Lesbian Avenger handbook is being used in Rise and Resist which formed after
the election of Donald [J.] Trump and people open it up and start reading and go, “Oh,

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 41
my God. This is the best thing I have ever seen.” So it’s like okay [crosstalk]. Here you
go. It’s fantastic.

Wolfe: And one of the big things that we did in the Lesbian Avengers was the civil rights
organizing project and we ended up in Idaho because there was a group—we wanted to
make sure that we were invited somewhere. We didn’t just come somewhere. And there
was a group of Lesbian Avengers that formed after—we did the first dyke march in
Washington, the night before the 1993 march on Washington and twenty thousand
lesbians showed up without a permit and we marched to the White House. And from that,
all these chapters started and they started all over the country.

So this group in Idaho invited us to come and help them because there was an anti-gay
amendment in Idaho. So six lesbian—we raised money from our friends and six Lesbian
Avengers went and lived there for ten months. And then ten of us came on weekends,
various weekends and we organized. And we organized direct action in Moscow, Idaho;
Boise, Idaho; Sandpoint, Idaho, all over Idaho to get—not just to be against the anti-gay
amendment but to organize people there to come out. And we got support. We did
actions. We also wrote stuff up for people there.

So we ended up finding one lesbian who lived in a small town that was sort of a center
for the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations] because they had logging unions. And she ended up getting—we ended
up going with her to the local AFL-CIO chapter. They wrote a letter that we put in a

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 42
brochure. Then we went door to door with her and gave it out and we had the support of
the AFL-CIO. We went to the Nez Perce reservations and worked with Native
Americans. We went to Sandpoint and worked with the local librarian because part of
this law would have eliminated gay books from the library. This was a straight man and
he had no problem working with the Lesbian Avengers. We did a march in Sandpoint,
Idaho.

So eventually the proposition was defeated and one of the things that was in the local
paper was that the most surprising thing was that the rural areas that we worked in, voted
against the amendment and that that was something totally surprising that nobody
expected. The mainstream lesbian and gay groups that were campaigning were doing all
top-down campaigning with videos and television advertising and whatever but they
weren’t going to these places. We went to these places and also in one of the small towns,
a group of lesbians and gay men who had never been out, came out. They did a panel at
the local community center and then eventually when we left had formed a group to
continue the work.

So when I say that we wanted to do serious stuff, that’s what I mean. What we did there
was fun. We had things like we went to the county fair and did all kinds of actions that
people could relate to but they were about a serious issue and we followed through on it.

So those kinds of things, for instance being in Idaho, that took courage because a lot of
the—Sandpoint had a big right-wing community. A lot of places have that and we just

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 43
said, “If we’re not willing to go there, then what’s the point?” Every movement teaches
another. One of the things that the civil rights movement made clear is that you need to
go to the belly of the beast. If you’re not going to go there, what’s the point?

So that is something that ACT UP did, that the Avengers did, that ILGO did which is you
don’t just stay in your neighborhood. You don’t just go where there are people who agree
with you. You have to go to places where people don’t agree with you. And the one other
thing that I guess where we differ from as just sort of a—I don’t even know the word for
it but kind of this touchy-feely thing, is that it’s not about having to just have dialog with
people. It’s showing people that you are someone to be reckoned with.

And that was always especially important for the gay movement because the image of the
gay movement and especially of gay men but also just of gay people in general was that
we kind of were like these sort of flimsy faggots and dykes who really weren’t going to
do anything because we didn’t have any courage. So Stonewall [riots] started the image
of no, don’t screw with us. But it’s a very important thing to say to people, “You cannot
tell me that I am less than you and you cannot do something that makes me less than you.
So I have to be here as a full human being. I’m not going to stand for certain things that
you’re going to do and I’m not going to be nice about it.”

I’m not going to be violent about it. Everything that we’ve ever done has been nonviolent but it was strong and definite and courageous, I think. I met some wonderful
people. I mean the people who did all this were just amazing people. And you wouldn’t

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 44
meet them on the street and say, “Oh, that’s an amazing person.” But they were amazing
people. They basically did things that were way out of their comfort zone.

Q1: Thank you for that. Let’s take a short break.

Q2: Perfect.

Q1: And then we’ll move on and talk about the Alice Austen House [laughter].

Wolfe: When we went to the middle of the belly of the beast.

Maguire: Yes.

Q1: Yes.

Wolfe: The women with rolled gloves who were so nasty.

Q1: Oh, my God, I can’t wait for that story. How long does it take to change your
battery?

Q2: Oh, I don’t have to change the battery out. I actually—I need to break just to create a
new file.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 45
Q1: Okay.

[INTERRUPTION]

Q2: Okay, and this is the November 5, 2017 interview with Maxine Wolfe and Anne
Maguire.

Maguire: Maguire. I’m going to give you my name, the spelling too.

Q1: I have it. He doesn’t.

Wolfe: And it’s Wolfe with an “e”.

Q1: Yes, it is.

Q2: Anthony Bellov’s videographer, Liz Strong is the interviewer and I’m going to clap.

Q1: So tell me a little bit about how you heard first about what was going on with the
history of the Alice Austen House, whoever wants to take that away.

Wolfe: Do you want to start?

Maguire: I think you probably heard first from the academic.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 46

Wolfe: [Laughs] So how did we hear about the Alice Austen House? This researcher,
Amy [S.] Khoudari, is how I think you pronounce her name, came to an Avenger
meeting. She had also been at the archives doing research but she came to an Avenger
meeting and she basically said to us that she had been doing research about Alice Austen
who was this very famous photographer. And that she had been doing her research at
Alice Austen House and it was for her Ph.D. dissertation.

And she did a talk in Staten—so the Alice Austen House is in Staten Island and she did a
talk in Staten Island. She was invited to do a talk, not at the Alice Austen House but
somewhere else and I don’t even know where and she gave that talk. The next time she
went to the Alice Austen House, she sort of was cold-shouldered and they started telling
her that she couldn’t have access to everything. And previous to that, she had gone there
and done a lot of research but suddenly they were restricting how often she could be there
and what she could see, et cetera. And she knew that it had to be about the fact that when
she gave this talk about Alice Austen, she mentioned that she was a lesbian, that she had
lived in the Alice Austen House with her partner, Gertrude Tate for more than thirty
years. And that they must have been homophobic and they really didn’t want this to be
the perception of the Alice Austen House.

And she also kind of implied that it was a very conservative board that ran the Alice
Austen House and that they were never going to be happy about it. So she told us that
they were having this nautical festival that they have every year and that it would be a

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 47
good place to leaflet people because the whole board would be there and then all these
people who come to this festival and some of them are members. I guess there was a
membership thing that you could be at the Alice Austen House.

So we got together and we decided to leaflet—we don’t just want to leaflet. What can we
do that’s more interesting than just leafleting? So do you want to pick it up from there?
Go ahead.

Maguire: Well, we both went out to Alice Austen House. We thought we should go out
and check out the whole place, how to get there and what was there to see. And we found
they had a video, so you could sit and watch this little video about her life and her work.
The house had a name, it was like Sunny—I can’t—

Q1: Clear Comfort.

Maguire: Clear Comfort, that’s it. So basically a little bit of history about the house but
absolutely nothing about Gertrude Tate, her partner and nothing about the fact that she
was a lesbian. And this is a fake of the brochure they had. So they had a brochure in the
little store where they also showed the video. So we bought a copy of the brochure and
then we made our own. And decided because it was a nautical theme and there would be
song, that we needed to write our own songs and that we should go dressed as turn of the
century, so it would have been turn of last century in the funny bonnets and stripy—
[crosstalk].

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 48

Wolfe: Like lifeguards, we were going to save her.

Maguire: Lifeguards. So basically we were going to come and save Alice Austen from
the board of the Friends of Alice Austen House.

Wolfe: And the homophobia, right. So we sort of had these shower caps and we wore
striped tops so that we looked like we were from the turn of century, bathers or
lifeguards. Then we made these life preservers from the inner tubes of tires and we wrote
Dyke Preserver on it. Then we made up this brochure. Anne wrote everything in this
brochure. It’s funny. I don’t know if you want me to read any part of it.

Q1: Sure, if you have a favorite piece. Go for it.

Wolfe: I’ll just read the end of it. The end of it says, “We have come as lesbian lifeguards
to rescue Alice Austen from the homophobes. Too often our history is denied us. Our
papers, diaries, photographs and letters have been destroyed, lost, buried and deliberately
misinterpreted. Here at the Alice Austen House museum, there is a wealth of lesbian
herstory. Because Alice can’t tell the liars on the board to take a hike and to get the hell
off her lesbian land, we’re here to do it. We demand that Alice Austen’s lesbian identity
become an integral part of the museum’s interpretation of her life. If the board refuses to
embrace the real Alice Austen, they should resign and take their sinking ship of
lesbophobia with them. We are dyke preservers and we know all about Alice Austen. We

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 49
will preserve and celebrate Alice Austen’s life long after the liars and the homophobes
are gone. This here is a lesbian museum.”

And we called it a national historic lesbian landmark. The thing that was interesting, I
think, besides the thing, she was an amazing photographer and she took photographs of
many, many parts of the city. She was amazing, A, that she was a woman photographer at
her time. She carried around heavy photographic equipment. It wasn’t lightweight and
she took it to the Lower East Side. She took it all over the city.

But she also took these amazing photographs of her friends in these very funny tableaus
that were kind of in drag. She has one where three women are dressed as men. She has
women dancing with each other in couples. One of her most famous ones is this one of
women couples dancing. She had them dressed as Romeo and Juliet characters. She just
used her friends to make the most funny, lesbian, gay photographs. And they’re historic
because they were of that moment which is from the turn of the century really. And none
of that was there.

None of those photographs were there and no mention of it and no mention of Gertrude
Tate and it’s a sad story because Alice Austen was a spendthrift. She threw away her
entire family fortune and at the end of her life was a pauper. And the only place that there
was for her—for years, she and Gertrude Tate lived in an apartment of their own and they
couldn’t afford it. Then Gertrude had relatives out on Long Island, but they didn’t want
the two of them to come together.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 50

And so Alice Austen ended up in a poor person’s—a pauper house and died there alone.
Gertrude would come and visit her but she was alone. And then this entire history was
erased. It was so sad and angering that she would get no—that Gertrude would get
absolutely made invisible and that no one would know that these people were devoted to
each other, these two women, for thirty years.

So that’s why we wanted to do something, but in the typical Avengers fashion. So we
made these brochures, which by the way, at the end of our action, we went into the
bookstore and put them in every single book in the bookstore. So that anyone who bought
something would find the actual—

Maguire: The real story.

Wolfe: The real story of Gertrude. But we also—it was a nautical day and we wanted to
engage the people that were there. So we started by walking down the street with—oh,
we started on the Staten Island ferry and before we got on the ferry, we sang all the songs
waiting for the ferry. Then we sang the songs on the ferry which believe it or not, turned
out to be the Alice Austen ferry which we were just like oh, my goodness, we got the
Alice Austen ferry. Then we marched from the ferry to the house and we came down the
block and we marched into the nautical thing singing, [singing] “Ho, Ho, Homo Sex,
Homosexual. Alice and Gertrude were lesbians and we are as well!” [Laughs].

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 51
Maguire: Over and over.

Wolfe: Over and over and over. And by the way, these songs were written by Anne and
myself and my friend, Ed [Edward T.] Rogowsky who is no longer with us. He died some
years ago, but who loved music and he was so happy to write these songs with us. And
they were really great and some of them were exactly about what it was. This one was
about the photos that she took.

Maguire: Oh, yes, so we made blowups—

Wolfe: Blowups of her photographs.

Maguire: —of her photographs. So we had these big black and white blowups of her
photographs and then we had a song to go, so we could hold up the photos we were
actually referring to. We did this because they had singers there. So what actually
happened was they sang one song—and we actually worked this out with them, under
their little tent and then it was our turn. Then they sang one and then we sang our next
one. So it actually got completely incorporated into what was going on at the time, which
was great.

Wolfe: Yes. This one—you just have to read this. Okay, [singing] “Alice Austen was a
dyke, Alleluia. Alice Austen on a bike, Alleluia. Alice Austen dressed in drag, Alleluia.
Alice Austen with a fag, Alleluia.”

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 52

Maguire: It goes on.

Wolfe: So we had all of these where we pointed out all her different photographs—

Maguire: Her work. We had Alice Austen drinking beer.

Wolfe: Right and Alice Austen, you were queer. “Alice Austen, your lesbian life was not
in vain because we’ll come back again and again.” Anyways, it was about preserving
history, Yellow Submarine. We used a lot of songs. And they were all water songs. It was
amazing and then we also had like a dance routine that we did.

So after we did our whole thing and we tried talking to these women on the board and
they were just, get out of our faces. They were just so nasty and there was a gay man who
was on the board, one gay man who was on the board actually supported us. The other
gay man who was on the board was the director and he was totally closeted and he was
furious. So these two young women who were not lesbians, they were just women who
were there with their families. They were maybe fourteen or fifteen, those girls, they
came over and they said, “We understand why you’re saying this but maybe if you were
nicer about it, maybe if you sent letters.” So we said, “We sent letters and they just don’t
pay any attention to us. So we need to do something for them to get their attention.”

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 53
So we didn’t know this but she had gone over and spoken to this guy on the board, the
director of the board. Anyway, we did this whole thing and then we marched through the
whole thing. Then we went into the bookstore and stuffed every book with the brochures
that we made.

Maguire: And we left a life preserver on—

Wolfe: On the front fence.

Maguire: On the picket fence before we left.

Wolfe: Then we walked out and these two young women came up to us and they said that
they had gone up to the guy who was the director of the board and told him, that he
should listen to us because we had something important to say. He gave them his card
and said that they should bring it to us and tell us to call him and come and meet with
him. So that was just nice that they actually were moved to do something because that’s
why we do stuff, right? It’s not just to do it; it’s to have an impact. So we did that and
then we went home on the Alice Austen ferry. It was there again. So actually Alice
Austen was with us all the way. Then we tried to get in touch with them.

Maguire: We did write a letter. We had a follow-up letter—

Wolfe: A lot of people, yes.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 54

Maguire: And other people wrote letters and the offer of the meeting disappeared
immediately. I mean those two girls said he’s going to meet you. It didn’t happen. We
were stalled. We were told it wasn’t going to happen. And my recollection is we got
really busy doing other stuff—

Wolfe: Other things, yes. And we dropped it.

Maguire: Yes. We didn’t keep—

Wolfe: We were going to go and do a protest at the board meeting—

Maguire: A follow-up thing.

Wolfe: But at that point, we were doing this work in Idaho and something about the radio
station, MEGA KQ which had a very homophobic guy who did the morning program and
we did stuff there. So it just never happened. But there were articles in the paper. So it
became known that Alice Austen—who Alice Austen was. It was in Staten Island papers.
So everybody there knew. And eventually what happened was they kept—the board
composition changed and people wanted to make it known. So now it was made a
national historic landmark and so the people there decided that they had to take her out of
the closet and make it—so now all the information is there about her and Gertrude Tate
and the fact that they lived together, et cetera. And so twenty-five years later but this is

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 55
the way activism works. You don’t always know what impact you’re going to have and
when. You just do it.

Q1: What happened with the woman doing her Ph.D.? Did you ever hear her story?

Wolfe: She did her Ph.D. She got her Ph.D.

Q1: Did she ever get access to the archives again?

Wolfe: I don’t know if she ever did. She did her thesis so she obviously had enough
information. So I don’t think they let her back in. But she had enough information at that
point to write the paper because there had been one other paper that was written in the
‘70s that I have a copy of. And she obviously by that time had enough to write about.

Q1: So tell me about your own rediscovery of this history. Had you been aware of the
Alice Austen House and that story before this woman approached you and if not, after
she approached you, how did you go about rediscovering the history and doing the
research yourself?

Wolfe: Well, I am a coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives which is the oldest and
largest lesbian archives in the world and I’ve been there since 1984. And we have a file
called—well, first of all, we have people there who are photographers but we have a file
called biographical files. So actually when she came, she came to the archives to do

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 56
research. So when someone does that, you can’t possibly know everything that’s in the
archives. And I’m not an art historian. Now we have a coordinator who is an art historian.
I’m sure she knew who Alice Austen was before then.

I had seen this photograph, which is very famous and a lot of lesbians know it because
there used to be historical postcards made that you could buy and this was one of the
things that was always—you could always get a postcard of it. So I’m sure that
somewhere in my head I had her name but not really knowing what all that she did. But
when this woman came, I went upstairs to the biographic files as I would do with
anybody, and I said, “Well, let me see what we have.” And sure enough, we had two
folders on Alice Austen. So from that point on, I started finding out about Alice Austen.
So I think that that’s the other thing about when I said you do research. We couldn’t have
written this brochure. There’s much more inside about who Alice Austen was and what
she did and that came from research that we did in order to do the brochure.

Maguire: I didn’t know her at all. The same thing, I recognized this photograph. I had no
idea who Alice Austen was. No idea she was so close by, like Staten Island. So it was
only from that woman coming to the meeting, that I discovered who she was really. And
also realized after doing some research, I actually recognized a lot of her photographs,
including the photos of newsboys on the Lower East Side, like lots of her photography
was very familiar. And I had no idea it had been a woman in the first place, never mind
Alice Austen. So that was kind of fantastic.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 57
Wolfe: Yes.

Q1: So rediscovering her story, somebody who was openly long-term coupled in that
particular period in history, what did rediscovering that kind of history mean to you?

Maguire: Well, I think at this time, I was just completely appalled that they were
covering it up. I can’t believe they’re doing this. That was really appalling because it was
so obvious. Once we started doing the research, I think they had been together for forty
years. It was more like forty years and Gertrude Tate broke an engagement to a man to be
with Alice Austen. And Alice Austen was clearly—they were devoted to each other.
Their friends and their family knew that they were in a relationship, that they were
lesbians.

I think part of what was going on at this time in the ‘90s too, horrifying statistics coming
out about gay teens killing themselves. So one of the things was if you’re a kid, your
family in Staten Island is going to the Alice Austen House on a Sunday afternoon to have
a look at her photos, her house is beautiful and the situation is gorgeous. That was also a
really nice surprise. It’s right on the water.

So it’s probably the kind of place families would go and you go into the museum and
there’s a little videotape. It would be really nice for your children and yourself and
especially your gay children that nobody knows they’re gay yet, to be told that Alice and
Gertrude were together for forty years and here are her gay friends and some of her

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 58
photographs. Here are some of her photographs on the Lower East Side in the early
twentieth century. But she also documented her life as a lesbian.

That kind of thing would have made a huge difference to me as a kid, going oh, okay,
that’s interesting, good. I mean I was appalled by that, that they had totally, totally
closeted her. It was really shocking.

Wolfe: I think I was more aware because of working at the archives, I know what people
have done. I have so many stories of older, especially about older lesbians whose families
have thrown out their stuff or don’t like their—there was a labor organizer whose name
was Eleanor [G.] Coit. Her papers are at Harvard [University] and Radcliffe [Institute for
Advanced Study] in the Schlesinger Library and they never mention that she was a
lesbian.

But there’s a guy who was an archivist, his name is Bert Hansen and he was walking
down the street one day and he saw this paper on the ground. When you’re an archivist,
you pick up paper on the ground. You pick up paper everywhere. So he picked up this
thing and it was a love letter. And so he picked them all up and they were a whole bunch
of love letters that she and her partner had written to one another over the years. And she
had just died and her family was throwing it out.

That happens all the time and it still happens. It’s one of the things, like at the archives
when I take people on tours of the archives and especially when I get to the individual

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 59
files because we have organization files. We have a lot of things at the archives. When I
get to the individual files, one of the things that I say to women, young women, old
women, it doesn’t matter who, “Your life is important. People are going to want to know
about it. They’re going to want to know that you were here.” So if you have things, start a
file.

We are not an archive about famous women. We are an archive about any lesbian. So we
have lesbian secretaries, we have lesbian strippers. We have lesbian writers, we have
everything. So send us ten pieces of paper about your life. We’ll give you a special
collection. Then from then on, you can keep adding to it all the time and someone can
come because we tell them stories, which we have several of, of people whose families
threw all this stuff away. You don’t want that to happen. You want somebody to know
you existed and this is a place, which will honor the fact that you existed.

So a story like Alice Austen and this thing about the Alice Austen House and how they
had to be pushed into acknowledging who she was, is a way of saying to people, see, this
is what could happen. So you need to be somebody who puts your life somewhere that
somebody can find out about it because everyone who comes into the archives should see
an image of themselves. That means a whole range of people. In this case, it’s a famous
photographer but it can also be a secretary that nobody knows was ever around.

So that’s one of our principles at the archives. I’ve been living with that kind of concept
for a long time because I’ve been a volunteer and a coordinator at the archives. But it is,

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 60
it’s always shocking. It’s still as shocking to me that people throw away somebody’s life
like that, not because they’re just getting rid of things but because they don’t want
somebody to know. During the AIDS crisis, if I tell you how many families destroyed
any evidence of their sons, didn’t want anybody to know they existed, didn’t want them
to know they were sick, horrible stories.

So it’s across the board in the gay community for different reasons. It’s always shocking
when you find out about it. Then when you can do something about it, it’s great. When
you can be one of the people who makes sure that somebody remembers them, it’s
really—

Maguire: I’m so glad they didn’t destroy her photography.

Wolfe: Her photography, yes.

Maguire: I mean these were not even family. These were friends of Alice Austen who
had decided—they had decided they were going to tell a version, which was not the real
version. And they could have decided they were going to destroy the photographs.

Wolfe: Well they didn’t have a lot of the—she sold a lot of the plates that she had in
order to have money. So actually, the Staten Island Historical Society had more of her
stuff than the Alice Austen House did.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 61
Maguire: Good.

Wolfe: I think that was one of the reasons that—well, I think it was one of the reasons
that some things got preserved.

Q1: In this context of preserving history, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the
relationship between survival and visibility.

Wolfe: I have a pin that says lesbian visibility means lesbian survival. Okay, that was
from a group that I belonged to a long time ago but I think it is a big thing.

People—one of the other things that I often say to people on tours is that everybody
thinks that we’re so far advanced and we have gone so far that life is wonderful. And I
say to them, “You know, there are kids in Brooklyn that are still killing themselves.” In
Brooklyn. We’re not talking about some rural place somewhere that you think from your
own—I don’t know—superior attitude are backwards. We’re talking about the City of
New York, okay, that people think of as being sophisticated and advanced and
everything.

Yes, we have definitely made strides and definitely many more of us are out and many
more of us lead lives that are good and supportive and we have friends and our families
haven’t thrown us out, et cetera. But there are still kids being thrown out of their homes.
There are still kids being abused because they’re gay. There are still people being killed

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 62
because they’re gay or lesbian or trans. The world hasn’t gotten that good yet. And
there’s still a huge amount to do.

So definitely visibility. Visibility exposes you to violence but visibility eventually means
survival because if you’re not going to be visible, if you’re not going to say to people that
your life matters—I always say to people, “This is not a lifestyle. This is a life.” It’s not a
style. It means that you have to be out there in order for people to see as I said, an image
of themselves, so that they know that who they are is a good thing, not a bad thing. And
there are still plenty of young people and older people, there’s still plenty of closeted
older people who still are afraid to come out. Now there have been a lot of discussions
about older people in nursing homes—gay people who are separated from their partners,
who can’t admit that they’re gay and the need to do trainings in those places.

So across the life span, there are still so much for us to do and it’s not about marriage. It’s
about life, it’s about being able to live your life as anyone else would live their life and
not have to hide and not be afraid. So I think that that’s—

Maguire: Yes, I think it’s still really important.

Wolfe: That’s a very important part about life, survival and visibility go together. As long
as we’re hiding, people can do things to us that are worse than what they would do if
we’re out because hiding says that we know that there’s something wrong. That’s what
hiding says. I know why people do it. That’s not a judgment to these people but definitely

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 63
that’s the message that comes to the rest of the world, that if you have to hide something,
it must be a bad thing, a secret.

Q1: I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too.

Maguire: You’ve kind of said it all. I mean I don’t feel like much has changed for me
around visibility since I was quite young. I mean I had this thing growing up where I
thought, I’m completely comfortable with who I am. It’s everybody else who has the
issue. It’s not me, it’s everyone else. But that for me, I now know in hindsight was a way
for me to stay closeted.

I didn’t come out to most—like my friends and my family, until I was about twenty-one.
I had told my sisters like much earlier, when I was in my—fifteen maybe, and a couple of
close friends. But I moved out of my family home and that was it. I mean I came out
everywhere. Once I did it, I did it. I came out at work and I got transferred out of the
office because people were so uncomfortable. People thought I was joking at first
because it was such a funny thing to say. Yes, it was like I was hilarious. That was a
really good joke I just made and I’d say, “I’m not joking. I’m serious about this.” And
three weeks later, I was transferred.

So I kind of felt once I had done it once, internally I had figured out, no, what you’re
telling yourself there is a way for you to maintain keeping it to yourself. Because you’re
totally fine with it. It’s just like once you put it out there; all the people who are not are

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 64
going to be trouble. So when I figured out I was protecting myself because I didn’t want
to come out. I think that’s all a visibility thing.

Then when I came out, I wanted to—basically I had a really good role model. An English
woman who was in the Labour Party who came to conferences every once in awhile in
Dublin that I would show up to, and she basically said that every sentence that came out
of her mouth was, “As a lesbian.” Then she would give her political opinion on anything
and everything. So I thought, okay, this is the way it has to be now. I wasn’t as in your
face as Sarah [Roelofs] but I really loved that. I loved that she was political. She was
working on all kinds of campaigns on women’s reproductive rights, lesbian rights,
disability issues and anti-racist stuff, Irish politics, everything, but everything was, “As a
lesbian, here’s my position on this.” So she was fantastic.

So the visibility thing, now also I think it’s really important to be visible as lesbians.
Lesbians we’re in the moment of disappearing again. One of the things I really can’t
stand is the LGBTQ everything because nobody has to say the words. I much prefer when
I hear anything on radio and I hear people standing up at meetings. But when I see it
written down, I want to hear you say every single word because you are talking about us.
We are not initials or letters. You are talking about real people here. So I want to hear
everything. I want to hear lesbian. I want to hear trans. But mostly at the moment, I want
to hear lesbian again because we are in a mode of being disappeared. So I think visibility
is always essential, always essential for our survival, totally.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 65
Q1: It occurred to me that the first inclusion in the St. Patrick’s Day parade was just this
past one and the first announcement and embracing of the Alice Austen House as a
national LGBTQ [Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Queer] landmark was just this year. Why
twenty-five years? Why is that a magic number? What are your thoughts on that—being
involved as you have been the whole time?

Maguire: I think it’s a coincidence in these things. I think the St. Patrick’s Day parade
was the first time an Irish—they messed it up the previous year and they invited a group
of gay corporate—NBC, like we are all friends, straight and gay together at NBC
basically. It’s a corporate group. There were eruptions. It’s like oh please, it’s been
twenty-five years. Just let Irish gay people march if they want at this point.

But the parade thing, my analysis of it was NBC were going to pull the broadcast.
Guinness was pulling out. The sponsors were pulling out. And then it’s like okay, we
better let the gays in now. So that’s what I think it was with them. Otherwise, they were
determined. They did not want gay people in the parade—Irish gay people.

Wolfe: And I think we need to say that Irish gay people—

Maguire: It was Irish gay people.

Wolfe: Because we’d get crazed. They would say, “Gay people want to march in the
parade.” No Irish people want to march in the parade who are gay. They would just

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 66
eliminate the Irish part and they would make it seem like just some random group of gay
people want to march in the Irish—who wanted to march in the Irish, the St. Patrick’s
Day parade? Why would you want to march in it, because you’re gay? That wasn’t the
point. The point was you were Irish. And they just kept eliminating it.

Yes, I agree with Anne though, this year it was all about losing sponsorship and a lot of
corporate entities have realized that it’s in their better interest to support gay and lesbian
people because first of all, we are purchasers and there’s a certain segment of the gay
community that does marketing, that has pushed out this thing that we have—

Maguire: Tons of money.

Wolfe: Tons of disposable income. Who are those people? I don’t know. They’re not the
people I know. But still that’s what the marketing shows because they go after all these
high-income, mostly gay men. So I think the parade stuff—but even there, they didn’t ask
the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. They didn’t ask the Fed Up Queers. Who did
they ask? The Lavender and Green [Alliance].

Maguire: Closet-y name, very closet-y. When that group started, people thought it was an
environmental group. This was the argument we had at the first meeting and the guy who
started the Lavender and the Green was at the first meeting and he wanted the boys to be
upfront and he wanted a closet-y name. It could be very safe. The message was it’s safe
to be in the closet and basically the other crowd was, no, the message is here. We all left

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 67
Ireland and now we are coming out and we are not going back into the closet. It was just
so interesting and the contingent was mostly straight people. Irish writers and politicians
and people who think they should have gotten a clap on the back for marching with Irish
gay people, twenty-five years after the fact. To me it was like twenty-five years too late.
You can stuff it.

Wolfe: Yes, yes.

Maguire: Really. It’s like everyone else has moved on and you think you’re being
magnanimous now. I don’t think so. Stuff your parade.

Wolfe: Yes, right. The Alice Austen House—I think what might have spurred that is that
this year, there was a whole move to create national lesbian and gay monuments, historic
sites.

Maguire: Landmarks, yes.

Wolfe: It didn’t start with the Alice Austen House. It started with a group of gay people
who decided to make a list of spaces across the country that were known to be lesbian or
gay or trans spaces. The Archives is one of them but there were others. They picked the
Alice Austen House.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 68
So basically it was defensive for the Alice Austen House to name themselves, rather than
to have somebody else name them that because they were going to be on a list anyway.
So if I had to pick why it was now—and I think also to their credit, I think that there are
people now who are involved at the Alice Austen House who actually want this to
happen from their own point of view, not just because of that. I think they can get support
for it because it was going to be out there anyway. It’s kind of like if you know your
enemies are going to come after you, you might as well put yourself out there first. But I
definitely think on the positive side, that there were people in the Alice Austen House
who decided that it was time and that they knew all this stuff and this was a good time to
do it.

Q1: Did you have anyone from the original protest who wanted to go down and see the
proclamation or be involved in any way?

Wolfe: You know, they did it so fast.

Maguire: It was very fast.

Wolfe: I couldn’t even go. I couldn’t even go. First of all, they did it during Gay Pride.

Q1: That’s right.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 69
Wolfe: They did it the week right before the march, a few days. I think it was the
Thursday of the week that the Gay Pride march was on Sunday. I didn’t get a notice of it
until a day beforehand.

Maguire: Yes, I think the day before it, I think we heard.

Wolfe: I couldn’t go.

Maguire: No, me neither.

Wolfe: There was no way. Nobody from the archives could go because the month of
June, we have a zillion events, not just things that we go to but things we do ourselves.
And nobody could go. I would have loved to have gone.

Maguire: I got to put up a Facebook post. That was it. Going back to the action that we
did and some photographs, because when we heard there was a copy of the proclamation.
So to be able to say it’s now a landmark, look, this is so many years later. But no, we
couldn’t go to that.

Wolfe: They really did it like in an instant.

Maguire: Yes.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 70
Q1: Do you think—?

Q2: Liz, just to let you know, it’s four o’clock.

Q1: Oh, it’s four o’clock. I’ll just ask you a few more questions then. But do you think
your action and actions like it started to push people to think about making lists like this?
What is the line between what you did back in ’94 and what’s happened just this past
year?

Wolfe: I think there are a couple of reasons. There is an association of lesbian and gay
archives. There have been several theses that have been written in the past couple of
years. Like for instance, I know two that are about lesbian spaces in New York and I’m
sure there are more. Those are women I know that came to the archives to do their
research.

Maguire: And then there’s stuff like Barbara Hammer’s movie. She has a retrospective.
Someone has a retrospective—

Wolfe: She’s having one now.

Maguire: Yes, exactly. It comes up again and people would be like, oh, my god, this
place in Staten Island.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 71
Wolfe: And I also think that there’s a feeling in the lesbian and gay community that it’s
time to mark these spaces because people are dying, older lesbians and gay men who
managed to survive the crisis, that their people are dying of natural causes. And their
memories are going to be gone.

I know for instance that there’s a group of women who have done—it’s called the Old
Lesbian Oral Herstory Project. So I think people are starting to realize—I mean we’ve
done oral history—we have three thousand oral histories at the archives. People are
starting—it actually started with ACT UP, this whole focus on history, on documenting
your history. It was the first organization that I was in where people actively made videos
about the actions and who was involved and what was happening, there’s the ACT UP
Oral History Project. There’s a Lesbian Avenger project. There’s just a lot of these that
are happening now because people realize unless we do it, it’s not going to be out there.

So I think that there’s a whole move to document the history of the community because
we’ve been out. We weren’t out for a really long time. It’s been only since the ‘60s, the
end of the ‘60s that there’s been a visible community. And people are starting to have
anniversaries that are meaningful in the whole world. Like for instance, the Pride march.
It’s coming up on its fiftieth year. The archives, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, we’re
going to be our forty-fifth year.

So the things that have survived, people want to make sure that they’re documented and
that we document the history of the things that didn’t. People coming to the archives this

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 72
year, there’s been a lot of theses on the Lesbian Avengers. ACT UP again has sort of
reemerged. My friend, Avram [Finkelstein], just published his book about the oral history
of the images in ACT UP. People are doing histories of the movement in various ways,
videos about it, the one about Sylvia [R.] Rivera, the one that’s out there, that was done a
few years ago about Blue London [phonetic], about individuals.

I just think it’s a moment where people have been out long enough, that they feel that it’s
time to say we’re here and we’ve been here. I always think that takes time because people
always feel, well, how can I write a history one year afterwards? But now it’s thirty years
after the beginning of the AIDS crisis. It’s twenty-five years after certain other things. So
people feel it’s enough time to look back and be able to document it before the people
who are involved disappear.

Q1: I also want to point out just as we’re wrapping up that the Alice Austen House site is
the first queer national historic landmark in New York State to be given to a woman.

Maguire: That’s right.

Wolfe: Yes.

Maguire: That’s one of the things I put in my post when we heard that was happening.
Yes, it’s just interesting. Is it the only one that’s been dedicated to a woman anywhere
though? Not just in New York?

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 73

Q1: I’ll have to check.

Maguire: I think it was the first one—

Wolfe: Anywhere.

Maguire: Across the board, yes. I think it was. Yes, that’s good we did that action twentyfive years ago. We can say we did that action. We knew about her then.

Wolfe: [Laughs] Yes.

Q1: But I think it just speaks to this idea that you were saying, that lesbian needs to be
underscored—

Wolfe: Yes.

Maguire: Absolutely.

Wolfe: It’s always true. When we get asked about things—I’ll just give you an example.
When the New York Public Library did their first exhibit, it was called Becoming Visible:
[An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth Century America], which is
really funny because it was becoming visible to them. But anyway, most of the

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 74
information they had in the library at that time, were what we call our enemies. In order
to do that exhibit, they had to borrow things from everybody because they didn’t have
any of that information.

One of the things that happened was this person came to the—had a meeting at the
community center. Like three hundred people showed up. And they had five people from
the New York Public Library and one guy stood up and he said, “It’s really important.
We definitely need material but we specifically—” and this is what everyone says “—we
specifically need lesbian material because we don’t have lesbian material. It’s very
difficult to get lesbian material.” And a woman stood up in the room and said, “Come to
my basement.”

The truth is that most of the archives, even the gay archives that exist, they say that they
are LGBTQ but they are really G and T. And the L and the B are gone and that is true. So
there are only two—well two big women’s archives, lesbian archives. There’s the June
Mazer [Lesbian Archives] collection in California and the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
There’s the Cincinnati Ohio Lesbian Archives which is a small one but it’s there. And
there’s a couple in Europe. There’s Spinnboden which is in Germany but that’s it. All of
the other archives, most of their material is from gay men. That’s number one. Secondly,
most of their material is about famous people, which is not true of either lesbian archive
or any of the ones that I know.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 75
So definitely that’s part of the issue is that is missing and people say that they don’t know
where it is. I say, “Come to the archives. We have twelve thousand books.” Twelve
thousand books that are by or about lesbians. I bet you had no idea there were twelve
thousand books by or about lesbians and that’s what women say when they come in,
visitors. They go, “Oh, my God, these are all about lesbians?” Because who knows? It’s
not stuff that’s around, where there’s so much more about gay men out there then there is
about anybody else really.

It’s just a statement of the way the world works, which is the patriarchy. That’s what
we’re dealing with here. It doesn’t matter whether it’s straight or gay. It’s not any
different. It’s who has the power in the world and the people with the power define what
is history.

Q1: On that thought, I’d love to get both of your thoughts on the meaning of a physical
space, not just an archive, not just a history but a space that is rooted to a person and to a
place in time, you can visit with your kids. Talk to me about the meaning of that site
being recognized as openly lesbian.

Wolfe: That’s incredible. That makes it so—obviously it’s material. It’s real. It’s
something that somebody can touch. It’s not just an idea. That’s why I think it’s so
important that they have information of the relationship between those two women,
because it’s something that you see where they lived and then you read about them, it

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 76
makes it real, whereas just reading about them, you have to kind of imagine what was
their life like and stuff. That way they’re in a place.

So anything like that—that’s why people wanted to make Stonewall Inn like a national
spot and the Lesbian Herstory Archives and other spaces that the community has used in
the same way that you make that about straight people. If you know where Audre Lorde
lived, why shouldn’t there be a plaque on her building? She was the Poet Laureate of
New York State besides being an amazing lesbian poet. Or Adrienne Rich or any of those
people. They lived places. And I think that’s—

Maguire: It’s really important. One of the first things I thought when I heard it got the
landmark—I have a niece and nephew here and I thought fantastic, now I have a place to
bring them. I don’t need to give them the streets. It’s going to be there. But it’s like she
walked around and she saw the river from this angle at some point.

That’s so important and I was thinking that when I told you about one of the first things I
did when Bobby Sands died, and my brother and myself, we knew to go to the general
post office in Dublin. We knew that this was a place because it had history. It had
meaning. It was where the rising, the people who revolted in 1916 took over this
building. So it has meaning. You know that these people were in this building trying to
rise up against British rule.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 77
I kind of feel the same about Alice Austen House. This is where she lived and we are
marking it. We are saying this is really important. It’s important to us. It’s important to
everyone to know this and here it is. It’s like, you can touch it.

Wolfe: Well, what you’re saying about the post office, in New York, whenever anything
goes down, any kind of Supreme Court ruling, where do people go? Stonewall. You don’t
even have to ask. Show up at Stonewall after work and there are going to be people there.

Maguire: I don’t think Alice Austen House is going to become a place like that but it
might be like you want to go do something. You think you might have a gay nephew or a
little—

Wolfe: Or just to tell—[crosstalk].

Maguire: Let’s go out in the ferry and go visit Alice Austen House.

Wolfe: It’s a beautiful place besides—

Maguire: It’s gorgeous. Yes, it’s really gorgeous.

Wolfe: It’s a really nice place to visit.

Maguire: And great photographs and great history. So yes, it’s really important.

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 78

Q1: I’m just going to say thank you very much. Is there anything I should have asked you
during this time that we spent together?

Wolfe: [Laughs]

Maguire: I haven’t talked so much in a long time.

Wolfe: Me neither [laughs].

Q1: I really appreciate all the memories you guys shared today, absolutely beautiful.
Thank you again for the work that you did twenty-five years ago, making many things to
be accomplished.

Maguire: Thinking up funny songs. That’s what we love doing.

Wolfe: We had such a great time.

Maguire: Yes, I really like fun actions.

Wolfe: We had such fun doing this. It was really—that’s what I mean, doing serious
things but in a way—

Maguire, Wolfe – 1 – 79
Maguire: You need to have fun every once in awhile.

Wolfe: And it gets to people when you do something like that. They get it in a way they
don’t otherwise.

Q1: Well, a revolution without dancing.

Wolfe: Thank you for asking us to do this.

Maguire: Exactly, yes, not interested.

Q2: I’m going to stop blinding you now.

Q1: Thank you very much.

Wolfe: Thank you for doing this.

Maguire: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]