by Julie R. Enszer

In 1985, Tee Corrine wrote in off our backs, “I fear we are losing the fabric of our past.” She continued “in our grief, pain and anger over someone’s death, we do not take the time to write obituaries to ensure the survival of work, to honor the dead in ways that will be visible and available to succeeding generations.”


I reread this article recently and these sentences strike me as remaining true today. We collectively in lesbian and queer women’s communities are losing the fabric of our past, and there are not enough people dedicated to honoring our dead and doing the labor to continue their survival. There are many reasons for this situation—and many remedies. The loss of the ReviewLambdaLiterary.org now over two years ago means that there is not a public, highly trafficked website for obituaries of lesbian writers, and too often our luminary literary lesbians are not of interest to mainstream publishers of obituaries like The New York Times. At Sinister Wisdom, we publish obituaries and remembrances in the quarterly journal, but I know we do not dedicate enough pages or attention to this important work. Lesbian Connection is publishing obituaries valiantly. Their obituaries are wonderful and provide portraits of a wide range of lesbians and lesbian lives. If you are not receiving LC, I encourage you to sign up for either the print or PDF version of the magazine. It is a treasure trove of our past—and our present (and the futures we are creating).


Corinne misses not only obituaries but also a wide range of activities that keep a lesbian / queer woman’s life and work alive and meaningful to new generations. These activities include republishing books, excerpting books in new contexts, continuing to circulate art, and more. Corinne writes in the off our backs article “When Someone Dies” about June Arnold, who died in 1982, three years before the article was published. Corinne notes that many women attending the women in print conference in Berkeley, CA in 1985 “had never heard of” her and that “no one . . . is working on a biography.” There is still no biography of Arnold. Corinne continued, “This is common within our movement, and it is a disaster.”


One person doing extraordinary work to preserve our lesbian past particularly through biography is Tracy Baim who has published a biography of Vernita Gray and Barbara Gittings, among many other important lesbian history books. We need at least ten more Tracy Baims!


In the article, Corinne also mentioned Jeannette Foster, who Joanne Passet wrote about in the biography Sex Variant Woman, Natalie Barney, Dolly Wilde, and Sonny Wainwright. Corinne’s concluding words were, “Who is going to write Sonny Wainwright’s biography, keep her book in print, gather our memories of her life and work?”


Who indeed? Sinister Wisdom is doing some work to keep books in print and gather memories of lesbians lives and works, but there is always more to do. I invite everyone to join in this work. Write obituaries; submit them to Lesbian Connection, to Sinister Wisdom and the Sinister Wisdom blog. Champion the work of our lesbian and queer women forbears. Edit them, publish them, keep them in our memories and on our shelves, give their work new contexts and new meaning. There is much work to do; it is incumbent on us all to contribute. Far exceeding the call of duty and obligation is what we gain in meaning and joy.