“The thing that I am fighting against is the same thing that I think that the impulse to found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974 was. We are in a life struggle project, which is to stop erasure and build stronger coalitions with people that are battling a lot of repression. And I think that liberatory projects absolutely depend on intergenerational knowledge sharing.”

-Ariel Goldberg

Last year, the Jewish Museum of Maryland presented an exhibition titled Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. Curated by Leora Fridman and presented in partnership with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, this groundbreaking show featured 30 Jewish artists dealing with themes like chosen and biological family, queer and trans identities, embodiment and sexuality, diasporic homes, ritual reinventions, activist movements, political histories, and so much more.

One of the artists featured in Material/Inheritance, Ariel Goldberg, contributed to the exhibition by creating an episode of the Disloyal podcast with co-hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub. 

Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City who curated a show titled Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s. That exhibition, which is on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through August 4, 2024, explores photographic documentation of activism, education, and media production within lesbian, trans, queer, and feminist grassroots organizing from the 1970s through the 1990s. It was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, and was on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City last year. 

On this episode of Disloyal, Goldberg talks about their research into the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) traveling slideshows, reading texts related to that project, and playing audio from interviews they did with the LHA’s Joan Nestle and Alexis Danzig. They also spoke to Disloyal hosts Mark Gunnery and Naomi Rose Weintraub about queer imaging practices, the importance of intergenerational knowledge sharing in queer communities, and ways that images and education fit into social movements.

Read Ariel Goldberg's curatorial statement here.

This episode features “Angry Atthis” by Maxine Feldman and “Prove it on Me,” a cover of a Ma Rainey song, by Bell’s Roar aka Sean Desiree. Thank you to Helen Thornton and Sean Desiree for permission to include these songs.

You can see Ariel Goldberg on Tuesday, May 14, on Zoom or at the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn, New York, where they will be hosting an event called Abundant, Rich Lives: Returning to the Lesbian Herstory Archives Slideshow. Ariel will be in conversation with longtime activists Alexis Danzig and Deborah Edel about the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow, and they will screen clips of a recently digitized version of it. The panel will also reflect on media production within lesbian, queer, and trans grassroots organizing of the recent past and its relevance for today’s social movement struggles. Click here for more information.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought, ideas and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff, management, board or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Mark Gunnery: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm your co-host, Mark Gunnery, director of communications and content here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. And I'm here with Naomi Rose Weintraub, the other co-host of Disloyal. They are the communications and public art coordinator here at the museum. Naomi, how are you doing?

Naomi Rose Weintraub: I'm doing pretty good, Mark, how about you?

Mark Gunnery: I'm doing good too. I'm really looking forward to today's episode.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Me too. So, as some of our listeners hopefully know, the Jewish Museum of Maryland showed an original exhibition last year titled Material Inheritance Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. The show featured 30 artists whose work has been supported by the new Jewish Culture Fellowship. This exhibit featured some truly cutting edge artists dealing with issues of Jewishness, queerness, transness, family, both biological and chosen, political movements and so much more. If you want to know more about that exhibition, visit Materialinheritance.com and listen to our last two episodes. But we're doing something a little different with this episode.

The show explores photographic documentation of activism, education and media production within trans, queer, and feminist grassroots organizing from the 1970s through the 1990s. It was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 Photo Focus Biennial and was on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City last year. It's currently on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. You can see it there through August 4th of this year. To keep up with the latest on the exhibit sign up for Ariel's newsletter at Arielgoldberg.com.

You can see Ariel Goldberg on Tuesday, May 14, on Zoom or at the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn, New York, where they will be hosting an event called Abundant, Rich Lives: Returning to the Lesbian Herstory Archives Slideshow. Ariel will be in conversation with longtime activists Alexis Danzig and Deborah Edel about the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow, and they will screen clips of a recently digitized version of it. The panel will also reflect on media production within lesbian, queer, and trans grassroots organizing of the recent past and its relevance for today’s social movement struggles. That’s Tuesday, May 14th, doors 6:30, conversation starting 7 PM, at the Center for New Jewish Culture at 17 Eastern Parkway in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. You can also attend virtually on Zoom. For more info, visit new jewish culture dot org slash events.

What Ariel proposed to the curatorial panel of our exhibition Material Inheritance is creating an episode of Disloyal along with Naomi and me, with the goal of bringing their research to life by using audio in a dynamic and creative way. And we are really into Ariel Goldberg and their curatorial work and writing and especially this exhibit, so we were happy to say yes.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Absolutely. So today we're not just interviewing Ariel Goldberg, but we're sharing the mic with them so that they can read some texts that relate to their exhibit and play audio from interviews that they did with Joan Nestle and Alexis Danzig about their work at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Ariel pulled images from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, traveling slideshows as source material for their exhibit. So without further ado, here's Ariel Goldberg.

Maxine Feldman: I hate not being able hold my lover's hand, except under some dimly lit table, afraid of being who I am.

And I have visited the Lesbian Herstory Archives looking at flyers like this in folders from a section of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which is in a limestone building in Park Slope called Archives on the Archives. And this is what I do to study the sort of minutia of community building. And I'm particularly interested in how photography was a tool for getting people together like these slideshows. So they were showing photographs and other documents of lesbian life telling an audience how they could grow their collection or make their own, and how photographs could really, basically build power on a very personal level and also on a community-wide level, and also offer a place for connection to a culture. And I understand that this was the sort of goal of the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow. I've learned this, I would say, mostly through conversations that I've been very lucky to have with Lesbian Herstory Archives co-founders and coordinators who have volunteered to build the fabric of their lives into this sort of lively work of preserving Lesbian Herstory.

I first encountered Alexis Danzig's story with the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow within a digitized version of the Lesbian Herstory Archives newsletter, which I should mention or digitized online, all of the LHA newsletters from the '70s through the '90s. And I was amazed to see the headline in this newsletter, number 16, from December 1996. And this was the year that I was bat mitzvah'd. So I was like, when this was happening, I was 13. The title is Tales from the Road, Diaries of a Biker Chick. And they reprinted email messages that came over the '90s version of email and the internet from Alexis Danzig's three month 27 city 17 state tour with the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow.

So to me, this kind of encapsulates how fun and sexy these slideshows were. So some things that Alexis Danzig wrote in, and these are quotes from her from the LHA newsletter. "Austin was great. A standing room only crowd at the bookstore Book Woman." And then, "Howdy from Hotlanta, last night at Charis Books was a hoot!" And I should also mention Charis Books is still around. It's one of the few gay bookstores still around. "The evening started at the Flying Biscuit with Maria, I promise I'll find out her last name. Maria writes a history column for the local queer paper." So lots of abundance there.

Maxine Feldman: We run half of our lives, from that damn word “queer!”

Ariel Goldberg: Well, I have a training in photography. It's what I studied when I was in college and slide film and analog photography was sort of, I learned it, I guess is one way to say it. It was the materials that I was working with and I noticed that image culture really started to change when things moved into a very fast digital pace. And I started to feel like not just there were social methods that matched the analog methodologies, especially within grassroots, lesbian, queer, and trans organizing that I was very interested in writing about. So I have been working sort of as this photographer turned poet turned photo historian for about 20 years now. And it's taken lots of different forms. I am really interested and was, maybe 15 years ago, in developing a performance art practice. And I think that slideshows kind of hold all of the things that enchant me about photography.

They are highly relational. It's about talking about photos with people, literally, their performance art, I mean, Joan Nestle has called the slideshows performance art, and it's also a way to write with a live audience. I think that Joan Nestle's first book A Restricted Country was very much drafts of that were written in giving slideshow presentations that were not just about introductions to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, like the flyer that I read from, but were also about Butch Femme. She wrote a famous essay about that and also about the life of Mabel Hampton. So other really key factors, topics within the Lesbian Herstory Archives history.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: That's really interesting. In my art practice, I've gotten really into overhead projectors. And so I'm just thinking about how that kind of relates to a slide projector and putting something up there. And I think something that's empowering for me is turning my back to the audience as manipulate the projector. And it's kind of like, yeah, it's just cool to think about the slideshow and the role that the artist plays in directing it and going to the next one and then how much they're present is interesting.

Ariel Goldberg: Yeah, the overhead projector is definitely a compatriot of the analog slide projector. They were both like educational tools.

Ariel Goldberg: So there are six projects within images on which to build. It's sort of six shows within one show, I should say that the Lesbian Herstory Archives represents one section of the exhibition, which is entirely focused on the vast and resourceful ways that artists were working with grassroots archivists. And of course, many people held multiple roles like people were artists and archivists, or they were social workers or librarians and archivists. And what did they do during this timeframe from the 1970s to the 1990s to collectively learn together? So I was looking specifically for projects that were using photography in educational ways and slideshows. I mean, I'm sorry to say there's no overhead projector project in my exhibition, but I think there could have been, and that would be a cool kind of offshoot. But there are four slideshows represented in the exhibition, and I actually could only fabricate what was possible within the time constraints.

Mark Gunnery: Can you speak a little bit more about those tours? What were they like? What kind of venues were they showing slides at? And also where did these tours fit into the larger political and archival projects that Lesbian Herstory Archives were doing?

Ariel Goldberg: Well, I think that the Lesbian Herstory Archives is still organized around a structure of volunteers who are called Archivettes sometimes. There's a fabulous film called the Archivettes that I recommend to anyone interested, full-length documentary about The Archives. Basically, whoever would volunteer my understanding to do a project would then just take it on. So Paula Grant, Morgan Greenwald and Georgia Brooks were the co-curators of the Keepin' On Exhibition. There was one on Irish American lesbians. There was also one on Pulp book covers. And these were produced in the same sort of foam core boards. And so it was whoever they knew in their extended networks that would want to host the exhibition and could pay for the shipping back and forth. The Archives exhibitions and the slideshow are sort of two different nodes and different people that were volunteers took them on.

So my understanding is that Paula helped with the music for some of Jo Nestle's slideshows, but Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel were more like the original presenters of the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow. So that was sort of like the mother of all presentations. So when that toured probably hundreds of times, I think Joan did go internationally with it. And of course now she lives in Melbourne Australia and is actually working with a younger lesbian grassroots, archivist minded person named Anj to digitize the original Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow. So the work still continues, and it was sort of always changing depending on who took it up. They would determine the new order. It was sort of the slides were on a carousel and it would go sometimes into a cake. I've heard Alexis Danzig told me that she had a sort of a Tupperware for a cake that she would put the carousel in, and there were sometimes cassette tapes that went with it, with readings of people's notes from the guest book at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

So I think the tour really went to anyone who also had some sort of lesbian community in some part of the country. And when I go through The Archives of these tours, I'm super fascinated by seeing traces of tours that literally went everywhere that I could have imagined. Like handwritten directions for Alexis Danzig on her motorcycle, traveling the US going over two dozen states before ending up in San Francisco in the late '90s, how there's handwritten directions to Mobile, Alabama. So things like that.

I would say gay bookstores, feminist bookstores, basements, anywhere that had a lesbian archive. There's worlds within worlds. So there's the exhibitions and then there's the slideshow, and it was all kind of happening, I think overlapping and feeding off each other with different people spearheading them.

Mark Gunnery: So like I mentioned at the top of the show, Ariel is going to share some audio from interviews that they did with people who were involved with the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshows over the years. First up is a clip from a conversation between Ariel and Joan Nestle, one of the founding members of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Joan Nestle: Remember we started the slideshow in the birth of a new thing called Lesbian Queer History Studies, really all Lesbian Queer history. And it was the most thrilling thing to take these images we had collected and we're constantly collecting because when people would see the slideshow, they'd come and give us new images for the next slide. It was always generating itself, but to see in a darkened room, to hear the noises of historical recognition of the moment when a community recognized it had a history not of despair, not of deprivation and not of shame, and we were always running shame. That was my legacy coming out in the fifties and the slideshow in the darkness, you could hear new life being generated, a new sense of historical self. I can't find that words that are dramatic enough if you have to go back to the '70s, and you have to know what it felt like. So the slideshow, they are underappreciated and they did enormous cultural work.

Ariel Goldberg: Yeah, I mean, I guess the heart of my research is people say images were empowering and then they often stop there and images themselves are actually surface level things. So I think of my book as captions wandering back to their images. That's what I'm writing is about the process and the ethics and the relationships and the experience of seeing photographs and learning who you are through this social experience of looking at pictures together.

Joan Nestle: Yes, but it's such a political moment, and I think that's what you, I can't recreate for you enough, the loneliness, visual and otherwise that was brought into those rooms. It's just like that intimacy that happens in an old time movie theater. Remember, we're showing this slideshow and every conceivable space, we're showing it in people's living rooms where no one gives their real name. We're showing it in churches and synagogues and schools, wherever we were invited. And the minute the lights went off and the clicking sound, that another episode of a valuing of a secret scene of a judged thing. See, it's different, I think. And now's the time to do the analysis in the languages. You all have to do analysis, but at that point, it was a raw encounter.

Ariel Goldberg: It was visceral, it was survival.

Joan Nestle: It was the breathing in the room, you could hear, you could hear the changes in the room, you could hear people crying, "Oh, I knew her! Oh, I was there! Oh yeah" and you could just see the web of community.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: You called the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow survival tools for building lesbian community. Can you speak more about what you mean by that, and especially how you see these images as survival tools?

So she was a black woman butch, and living a life where even walking down the street you could be incarcerated for, so-called, sex work. So there were a lot of really extreme policing tactics at that time. And she was incarcerated at Bedford Hills prison. And it's interesting, because I think that in answering this question, like survival work, hearing or learning about Mabel Hampton's history, in her own words through what she donated to the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the interviews that she did with Joan Nestle, they have now spawned and offered resources to writers and historians like Hugh Ryan. I was just listening last night to the Women's House of Detention books, Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, there's a whole chapter on Mabel Hampton. So I think that seeing pictures of Mabel Hampton throughout her life with her longtime partner, Lillian Foster, I think was her name.

There are photographs of her throughout her life in the Keep It on exhibition as well as in the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow. As it evolved, there were probably photographs of her. So I think that in hearing Joan Nestle talk about the experience of showing these slideshows, we are in a current moment back to that digital thing where we're just, we have so many pictures now. It is now our struggle is working with the glut of image and visual information, whether it's on social media or on our own cell phones, because we're not taking a photograph in the sense of it's sort of expensive. It's expensive to update your iPhone every few years because they're now designed to break, etc. And these digital materials are actually mined and extracted and difficult to recycle and all these things.

So when we look at photographs now, it's a fairly isolating experience. Someone looks at a photo of people dancing at a club and they're like, "Oh, why wasn't I invited?" Or They're home alone. Or these were experiences where people were building community in real time while looking at photographs. So I think there was lots of layers of survival, just the basic gesture of saying, we're going to look at photographs together and have space to eat wine and cheese afterwards, or whatever the snack was in the room or that sort of thing.

Mark Gunnery: Speaking of the collective, you situate this work both within an educational and a political context, and in your curatorial essay you wrote, "Collective Learning generates power." First, I'm curious what you mean by that. And second, I'm curious what you see as the educational and political possibilities of showing these photographs today.

Ariel Goldberg: So let's take a case study of a slideshow that is promoting the fledgling collection of lesbian materials. And that amazing list that I gave earlier, other flyers had other lists of things that the LHA slideshow was showing. So they would photograph book covers, magazines, journals, news clippings. They would have personal snapshots. So for example, there's photographs of, somebody was telling me that it's wild that there's photographs of Audre Lorde as a teenager, and then also that's from her personal collection that she donated as somebody affiliated with The Archives or something like a poster of a music concert or a headshot that Storme DeLarverie circulated. So to show photographs like these that have this cross section of being like fine art portraiture, personal snapshot, news clippings, whether it's from alternative press or the mainstream press or graphics from covers of cultural materials like journals, things like that, to be experiencing those and disseminating those within a trans or queer or lesbian specific community grassroots space, the collective learning generates power.

I'm very interested in stimulating and learning from organizational structures that are not within our current landscape of privatized education. And/or, and it's very much connected, in my opinion, centuries of defunded public education. So people were electing to go to a slideshow. It was social, it was fun. You could meet someone that you would maybe fall in love with and et cetera. You could be in the room with an ex, and there could be a moment where Jeb, one of my favorite moments from the Dike Show, which is another slideshow in the exhibition, is when she says, "Even when you go through a breakup, save your photographs, don't destroy them." So the collective learning was it was people taking their education into their own hands because the mainstream culture had pretty violently rejected their existence. We now have so much visual evidence that trans and queer people have existed, but at this particular juncture of the late '70s and then onwards through the eighties, it was still very dangerous to be seen as queer publicly.

People could lose their jobs, they could lose their papers if they were here on let's say a visa or something. There was so many risks, especially in this time period where I think the conservative backlash against queer people, that was a direct response to the Black Power Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement that was going strong in the sixties and all of the other movements for struggle, The Chicana movement, that I tried to chart in my exhibition, all these solid, the solidarity work, anti-imperialism, that kind of thing. I think it was a space for people to really come together in ways that were also about fighting legislative battles. So there was oftentimes with these slideshows, even I've come across slideshows that were against specific propositions that we're trying to ban gay school teachers, for example.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: I feel like jealous, I don't know. Wow, it sounds like beautiful type of space to be in, even if it was at a time that was the survival tool just seems like space of belonging in a certain way.

Ariel Goldberg: Absolutely. I think about that word a lot.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Yeah, something that's interesting. You talk about and trans imaging practices in relation to photography. What do you mean by that? And what are some examples of queer and trans imaging practices in the slideshows that you explore in your project?

Ariel Goldberg: I'm really interested in correspondence because that's how we see people holding images with care. There's another section of my exhibition that looks at another slideshow called Lesbian Masquerade that then was called Sheave and Chew Tobacco, and actually the group of grassroots archivists through the what was then called the Lesbian and Gay History Project in San Francisco, Alan Beirut Bey, a lot of his flyers for this slideshow that then was taken on by Estelle Friedman and some other lesbians. Their slideshow flyers are inside the same folder with the Lesbian Herstory Archive slideshow flyers. And I talked to Jeb about her memories of meeting with and visiting the early form of The Archives. So one thing that I see within the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a slideshow of this, the practice of building these image cultures is that they're interested in building relationships that can hold and transmit these images.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives gave images from their collection copy standards. They took a photo of photos to make duplicates, and they were in the Lesbian Masquerade slideshow, or they were in Jeb's slideshow. So these images were circulating to create this sort of repetition. So when I started doing research, those are really meaningful moments where I find the same image appear in two different places, for example, because it shows that people were communicating and sharing resources as opposed to being proprietary over it. And the culture within academia today with research even around and trans archives, I think is very... People I think want to have something be their thing, whereas liberation work was everyone's thing and more in this grassroots model.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Yeah, it's interesting. It's like now we see slogans being reused by people, but not necessarily the same images because people are pretty protective over that. But it also reminds me of, I mean maybe this is super watering it down, but on Tumblr, when people would reblog each other's photos and then you would go to someone else's blog and see similar aesthetic or vibe or actual pictures, you would be like, "Oh, we're all in the same kind of conversation about something." So it's just funny to think about it like that.

Ariel Goldberg: We inherit a lot of the slideshow methodologies in these other... Instagram is like a scroll. It has a similar form to a slideshow, like an image appearing and disappearing.

Mark Gunnery: And it also makes me think of the way that Xerox machines used to be such a big deal for '80s, '90s, liberation. I don't remember who said it, but I feel like maybe it was Lesbian Avengers, there was something around, "Own the means of production, use the Xerox machine at your job," or stuff like that. I just think that some of that was such a major thing for the sharing of this imagery.

Ariel Goldberg: Yes, and I should say that the Keepin' On exhibition was color Xeroxed, and most of, to my knowledge, the Lesbian Herstory Archives exhibitions that traveled on these foam core boards were color Xeroxed and they look incredible today, I mean, actually it was like... But it was that using your job thing.

There was one other thing I wanted to say about your question, Naomi, about what are the practices. One thing I do know about the Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow, which I should say the end goal of my research is to remount the slideshow and to create a memory event or a place for people to share memories of either experiencing the slideshow or giving it. Because like I mentioned, lots of different volunteers took on that project in the early days of The Archives when it was growing exponentially within Joan Nestle's apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, she showed how the archive was on this one...

They took slabs of wood and then put coffee cans that used to have coffee grinds in them as to build bookshelves. And it used to be in this one little sort of tiny guest room closety type space that I've seen pictures of. And then the Archive, you look at it even in the early eighties and Morgan Greenwald's photos, it's like every single inch of the wall has art on it or a photograph, and they have file cabinets that are just proliferating. I think also storytelling about the growth was another big part of the affirmation or the survival work was, and the fact that it's now, to my knowledge, one of, if not the largest repositories in the world, and it's all grassroots built.

I think that alone is pretty inspiring, where you could start with people literally going in the middle of the night to rescue materials from a dumpster that someone tipped off someone in New York to get, which I think is one of the stories that the slideshow begins with. And then it sort of goes from there to, I even went to Ginger's Bar this year and saw a younger, younger than Joan, volunteer at The Archives giving a Lesbian Herstory Archives slideshow that was just a PowerPoint. It wasn't like this analog fetishism that I sometimes fall prey to.

Alexis Danzig: What Joan had done by sending around the VHS tape for fundraising was people all over the country, mostly lesbians, had put together house parties and had raised money in small donations. Sometimes they'd send $30, sometimes they'd send $300 back to LHA so that LHA could buy the building.

Ariel Goldberg: It's an incredible story,

Alexis Danzig: But these were women, mostly, from all over the country who were never going to make it to New York. They were never going to get to see The Archives holdings. So I thought-

Ariel Goldberg: "I'll go to them."

Alexis Danzig: ... "I'll bring it to them."

Ariel Goldberg: Yeah, nice.

Alexis Danzig: And this will be fun for me, and that's a very important part of activism-

Ariel Goldberg: Fun.

Alexis Danzig: ... is that it is fun. We don't do things that are not self-interested, but we do them as activists in a way that is fun for other people. So I already knew how to ride a motorcycle. I already knew how to do the slideshow. I knew that I was bored.

Mark Gunnery: One of the things that really struck me listening to the audio that you shared is the intergenerational aspect of this. These interviews that you've recorded or conversations with your elders. And by putting them out there on this podcast and by putting these photos and these slides into a gallery space, you are putting them in conversation with people of all kinds of different ages. Can you speak about the role of intergenerational communication and the intergenerational sharing of knowledge in your curatorial and research practices and maybe in photography more broadly?

I think that the reason why trans and queer grassroots culture is not well known is because oftentimes books are out of print. I've read a book about the lesbian and feminist and the gay bookstore movement. These bookstores literally have closed and not just those bookstores. It's hard for any independent bookstore to stay afloat these days because of Amazon. So it's like we're experiencing in our version of neoliberal capitalism, the same sort of repressive stuff that the evangelical Christian right was doing to squash these liberation movements 30-40 years ago. It's different, but I think the more we get together and depend on each other to disseminate information, the stronger our movements will be.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Do you see links between the photographic work you're interacting with from the '70s and '90s and photography especially by queer and trans artists today?

Ariel Goldberg: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that people want to see their lives represented, and I think that more important than just visibility or representation is our work, is to build context. And I think that the material conditions of the lives of those in photographs, that's the difference, is that what I'm showing are projects that were a slideshow was telling a narrative alongside the images. And so the link that I want to make is to all of the amazing work that's being done to also build context and build space for learning where people can encounter information together and work through it together. We don't really have consciousness raising groups, but a lot of this material was developed in that style of really extremely vulnerable conversations. So I think I would like to see more links, these cultural projects that I'm including in my exhibition, whether they're fabricated or original materials fabricated digitally, I should say.

Yeah, I think they offer some models for organizing. And the link that I would like to draw out in my exhibition is really this question of where is education in our movement work? And how was education a part of the activism in these projects? So I think that's the link that I'm interested in in asking because right now, in terms of what are the insurgent moments, it's really fighting a lot of this censorship of books, and there's just hundreds of state level bans against trans existence basically, that are escalating. It's not just about children, never was, and it's happening very quickly. So I think educating one another about what's happening and how to fight it is really important. So I think that's the link I'd like to emphasize. I don't necessarily have the answers. I think I just want to share inspiring materials with people.

Ariel Goldberg: Thank you for having me. It was a real honor, and I do want to say that I think podcasts are the way that I study and learn. By and large, I listen to a lot of different podcasts, and I'm excited about new media like this where I can share my research and progress and hopefully connect with other people who are thinking in similar ways.

Before we sign out, I want to share a few corrections and clarifications from the interview.

Ariel mentioned a person named Anj who helped Joan Nestle digitize an early Lesbian Herstory Archives slide show. That Anj is Anj Hansen.

The film that Ariel mentioned, The Archivettes, was directed by Megan Rossman.

When I mentioned the 90s practice of activists using copy machines in their workplaces for movement purposes, that was a misquote of something Sarah Schulman wrote in The Lesbian Avenger Handbook: A Handy Guide to Homemade Revolution. The actual line, in a section of the handbook about identifying resources for protests, is, quote, “Find out who has access to free xerox at their offices, or a fax machine. Give them advanced warning and assistance transporting the guerrilla copies.” Sarah told Disloyal that this was probably a reference to Kate Huh, an ACT UP member who worked at a Xerox store in New York City and did thousands of pages of guerilla copying at night for ACT UP.

I want to thank a number of people who helped make this episode possible, whether it was by helping us with fact-checking, allowing us to use interviews they recorded with Ariel, or giving us permission to use their music. Thank you to Joan E. Biren aka JEB, Sarah Schulman, Alexis Danzig, Morgan Greenwald, Deborah Edel, Sean Desiree, Helen Thornton, and the late Maxine Feldman.

And big thanks to Ariel Goldberg for putting so much care and attention and thought and patience and creativity into creating this episode with Naomi and me. And also thank you to Leora Fridman for curating Material/Inheritance and to the New Jewish Culture Fellowship for being a partner in this project.

Naomi Rose Weintraub: Thank you for listening to this episode of Disloyal. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. Visit Disloyalpodcast.com or send us an email to Disloyal@jewishmuseummd.org. You can follow us on Instagram @jewishmuseum_md.

If you're interested in learning more about our exhibit Material inheritance Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows, visit Materialinheritance.com.

Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and it's produced and hosted by me, Naomi Rose Weintraub and Mark Gunnery. Mark Gunnery produced our theme music. Today on the show. You also heard "Angry Atthis" by Maxine Feldman, and "Prove it on Me," a cover of a Ma Rainey song by bell's roar, also known as Sean Desiree. Learn more about Sean at Seandesiree.com. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, take care.