Riis Park
The Heart
Kaitlin Prest
4.5 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2015
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the summer of 1960 Joan Nestle was 20 years old and in love. At the time she lived in a Lower East Side tenement apartment and the city was hot, sweaty and humid. Joan and her girlfriend Carol would ride the subway for an hour and half to Riis Park. Riis Park was and still is an easily accessible queer beach in New York.
Joan wrote about these memories in her book, A Restricted Country. Beach goer and producer Cassie Wagler brings us her adaptation of one of the essays found in Joan’s book – Lesbian Memories 1: Riis Park 1960. Poet Iris Cushing is the voice of Joan.
Joan Nestle is a femme, a lesbian, a writer, activist and editor, and a scholar of butch-femme history and theory. In 1974 she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives – and the archives were housed in her apt for years. You can read more of Joan’s work on her blog.
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| 0:00.0 | Hey heart listeners! I hope you're enjoying this show. We just have a quick request. |
| 0:06.0 | We are conducting a survey to hear from you, our listeners. |
| 0:10.0 | Just go to survey.prx.org slash heart to take the survey today. |
| 0:15.0 | Let us know what you think. We're so excited to hear from you. |
| 0:18.0 | That's survey.prx.org slash heart. Survey.prx.org slash heart. |
| 0:26.0 | It means a lot to us. Happy listening! |
| 0:29.0 | From PRX's radio topia, welcome to the heart. |
| 0:36.0 | I'm Caitlin Prest. |
| 0:41.0 | In the summer of 1960, Joan Nestle was 20 years old and in love. |
| 0:47.0 | The one place that working class queer people could go was to respawn because you could get to it through public transportation. |
| 0:56.0 | Well, one time, Caroline I stayed late on the beach. It was just too beautiful to go back to the hot city. |
| 1:03.0 | And there was a family and there was three grown sons and two parents. |
| 1:09.0 | And all of a sudden, we have this dark shadow standing over us. |
| 1:14.0 | And it was the father and he said, you better stop that because I can't control my sons. |
| 1:20.0 | They want to come over and beat the shit out of the two of you. |
| 1:24.0 | There was nobody around us to protect us because the beach had emptied and we did stop and we did leave. |
| 1:30.0 | So at any minute, the balance could shift. You needed others around you and you had to be brave. |
| 1:37.0 | You had to know that if you go to that beach, you will be associated with criminality. |
| 1:45.0 | But that didn't stop us. That didn't stop us. |
| 1:51.0 | Reese Park became one of those places where queer people would go. Could go. |
| 1:56.0 | That will sound not so important perhaps in these days. |
| 2:00.0 | But in those times, you risked your life when you did this in any kind of public setting. |
... |
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