This Musician Collects the Everyday Items That Comprise Lesbian Life

Musician Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is a self-described collector, hanging on to things such as pictures, admission stubs, and note scraps as reminders associated with the memories and relationships that shape her queer identification.

Her reverence for components of emotional value has led her to invest many years performing artistic arts research and searching the publications, photographs, videos, along with other products on display during the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a Brooklyn brownstone that holds the world’s collection that is largest of materials produced by and about lesbians and their communities. Reminded of her collection that is own searched for to generate a display of individual items, papers, and symbols of lesbian experience, both general general public and private. “I wished to come up with a few of the significant items that had been very important to my queer identification throughout my entire life, and ask everybody to own this general public event that could simply actually highlight everybody’s stories, ” said Lindsey-Hall in a phone meeting.

Testosterone pipes. Picture by Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

A participatory art project installed at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn as part of the BRIC Biennial near the end of last year, Lindsey-Hall opened submissions to Lesbian Matters. The display explores the private and material items which commemorate lesbian life, define queer identities, and act as collective reminders of individual queer records. Lindsey-Hall invited anybody determining as lesbian, butch, queer, non-binary, and trans to deliver individual things like pictures, postcards, buttons, trinkets, or clothes products for display. “The items are really a placeholder that invite an account, ” Lindsey-Hall stated.

Over 100 individuals from around the world delivered products representing a spectrum that is wide of and lesbian experiences, along side a description of these importance. Numerous individuals delivered hand written records, leaflets, concert seats, and a number of queer anarchist and punk items including a key that reads “dykes versus cops. ” Clothing things like worn-out overalls, work boots, and tees from ex-girlfriends had been additionally popular submissions. “Lots of denim coats which can be all ripped up and loved, ” said Lindsey-Hall. One participant, a musician and woodworker, donated a couple of paint-splattered Carhartt coveralls. “They knew to be able to squeeze into this boys’ club, they necessary to have Carhartts, ” Lindsey-Hall stated, explaining the story this individuals a part of using their distribution. “They went and purchased their Carhartts as a type of expression, to claim their area in this masculine industry. ”

Picture by Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

Jeanette Sears, A brooklyn-based movie content producer and tuba player utilizing the Lesbian & Gay the big apple Corps Marching Band, presented a stainless ring they purchased at their very very first Pride festival in Columbus, Ohio if they remained a university student struggling to get to terms due to their sex. “It had been a reminder, also simply to myself, that I became courageous adequate to go, ” Sears explained over email. Sears wore the band to their remaining thumb for many years as being a fashion that is queer, and finally relocated it with their right hand after getting involved. “It’s a ring that is cheap’s worn and never totally unique, however it’s been something I’ve had in for pretty much 10 years, and intend on having it for considerably longer, ” Sears said.

Other products on display hold and therefore could be even less obvious at first. Lindsey-Hall remembered starting an envelope containing just a little scrap of faded cotton material and a note describing that the fabric scrap came through the sender’s favorite childhood blanket, which stayed to their sleep well within their teenager years in their very very very very first intimate experiences. Some things, like this 1, take short-term display and certainly will fundamentally go back to their owner, although some will end up an element of the Lesbian Herstory Archives permanent collection.

Picture by Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

This display of individual queer items additionally serves as a general public statement against lesbian erasure and stereotyping. “In queer communities, ‘lesbian’ is such as for instance a curse term, it is not a term we could also state, ” Lindsey-Hall stated. She references the soon-to-be rebooted lesbian canonical TV series The L Word, a name that associates “lesbian” with profanity, privacy, and pity. As lesbian pubs and lesbian-specific social areas gradually become extinct, Lindsey-Hall thinks preserving the patient, private stories that comprise lesbian culture, community, and experience is much more essential than in the past, though she additionally acknowledges that “lesbian » has, on numerous occasions, been laden with trans-exclusive connotations and often utilized to exclude trans females from queer and lesbian areas.

Picture by Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

But, Lindsey-Hall rejects these connotations that are transphobic. Lesbian Matters welcomes all participants who feel attached to woman-loving tradition to explore and reclaim the term “lesbian” as a term that is intersectional includes trans lesbian, bisexual, and gender non-binary people and communities. Lindsey-Hall received lots of submissions from trans-identifying people, including a Ziploc case packed with used testosterone pipes that the participant explained act as a reminder of the psychological and journey that is physical change. “I happened to be actually floored and felt really honored that somebody would believe me as a musician therefore the task in general to borrow something which’s therefore individual, ” Lindsey-Hall said.

For a few, queer and identities that are lesbian fixed and lifelong, but also for other people, they could evolve and expand as time passes, growing into much much much deeper, more complicated expressions of sex and sex. The items that are personal display in Lesbian Matters, therefore the personal tales they represent, honor all of the these experience with an email of radical acceptance and inclusivity. Lindsey-Hall’s objective to construct community and amplify marginalized voices expands to all the ready to share and protect their tales.

Lesbian Matters is on view at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn until April 3rd.

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