Hand on the Pulse

Joan Nestle, gay activist, writer, and co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (the largest and oldest lesbian archive in the world), has firmly secured her place in the history--err, herstory--of the contemporary American women's movement. A once controversial figure in the gay and lesbian communities, Nestle was encouraged by friends in the late 1970s to write lesbian erotica, and her descriptions of lesbian sex (together with a controversial article on butch-femme relationships) eventually helped cast her as the political “bad girl” during that era's anti-pornography movement and helped fuel the “sex wars” that followed in the 1980s. In Hand on the Pulse, director/producer Joyce Warshaw allows Nestle to freely draw the arc of her life and thought: including her sexual awakening in the 1950s, her increasing awareness of the importance of her mother's influence as a positive role model, her political activism at Queen's College during the late 1960s and 1970s, and her contemporary work. Buttressed by photographs from the Herstory Archives, Nestle's personal story provides a nice overview of the changing patterns of feminist activism through the last half-century. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (A. Cantú)