Last May, even in Scotland, it was brightly hot. As I dragged the heavy suitcase to my borrowed flat, I wondered once again if I was doing the right thing. Packed in between my pants and my pyjamas were files full of crumpled, handwritten letters and dog-eared postcards, badges, newsletters, club flyers, hot women torn from magazines decades ago, the minutes of a magazine collective long since dissolved, even a dress handmade for me by a gay friend… My life, perhaps – the material evidence of everything that had made me me.
And not just me, since when I started talking about my mission to donate my collection of endless queer lady-bumph to the Lesbian Archive at Glasgow Women’s Library, I soon found myself agreeing to deliver other people’s yellowing bundles of old paper, too. I started to refer to it wryly as “precious lesbian crap”. Perhaps that made it easier to part with my long-ago-girlfriend Vicky’s awkward funny letters, the year after I heard she’d died at only 49. So much of this material is hidden from public view, stored in attics and boxes under beds, often considered unimportant to anyone else by the women who collected it. But it is important – it represents a hidden history of queer female activism, community and cultural production.