A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle

A Restricted Country Reviews

• 
  mark monday

  in college, in the late 80s and early 90s, i discovered that i had two aunts. this is one (and
  this is another). aunt Joan was kind, amiable, flirty, sweet-tempered, clear-eyed. she was filled with gentle strength; her spirit glowed. a generous aunt, one who loved the world around her and who shared that love with me. she loved women, she loved life. she told me stories of that life and those stories were filled with poetry and passion. she told me about her jewish identity; she told me what it felt like to be a lesbian. she told me about the birds and the bees and how to be a person and how sexuality and identity can be of my own making, can be many things. she showed me how to make my own world, to invite others into it, to connect my world with other worlds; she showed me how to make myself my self. she challenged me to move past the restrictions, the fences and barriers, that this mundane world will try to put around me. she laughed and she sang and she widened my spirit. i fucking love you, Joan Nestle! such a guiding influence.
• 
  Hannah

  Written in the Reagan & feminist sex wars era, this collection of essays is an essential piece of queer, feminist, femme, and butch/femme history & lineage. Included here are stories of working class 50s dyke bar culture, early involvement in Movement work including the march from Selma to Montgomery, tracings of the relationships between Joan Nestle’s femmeness & her mother who liked to fuck, an explicit but brief history of how lesbians & sex workers have always shared community & struggle, and coalition/solidarity politics between lesbian feminism’s most hated women: sex workers--butch/femme dykes--leatherwomen, aaand a fair few erotica stories including a femme4femme one that I especially appreciated as a longtime butch/femme femme who’s constantly deepening her femme4femme love & life.
• 
  T’Layne Jones

  This is very much a book of its time, particularly in terms of Trans people - there aren’t any. All diversity of gender, in people assigned female at birth, seem to be attributed to gender expression, being butch, or hiding a lesbian relationship by passing as a straight couple. No apparent consideration that any of this diverse representation may have included Trans men. There are also mentions of attending the Michigan Women’s Festival, but no mention of the controversy about excluding Trans women.
  In addition, the discussions of the birth of lesbian feminism seem to be largely about white feminism, but that distinction doesn’t seem to be clear.
  However, having said all that, I was fascinated and challenged by these essays. I really appreciated having this insight into the life of a fierce and vulnerable Queer, cis, Jewish, white, sexual, lesbian activist, who came of age in 1950s America. Nestle shares autobiographical stories about growing up as a Jewish child of a single mother in the McCarthy era, and goes on to her time in the civil rights movement. Nestle then writes about living as a sexual queer woman. About being sexual. About being a writer, and about being an activist.
  I sincerely hope that this curious and thoughtful mind continued to challenge herself, and broaden her understanding of the world. I was intrigued by this insight into a little bit of what queer life was like in mid 20th century USA. Recommended.
• 
  Jo

  Just wonderful. Inspiring, heartbreaking, poignant, truthful-an absolute revelation. From the first story, I was hooked. Thank fuck for Joan Nestle. This book gives me hope. One to revisit. Recommended!
• 
  moriah

  joan taught me so much in these essays. borrowed this from my school’s library but need to buy a copy to keep and hold close to me. butch/femme love 4ever and ever <3
  
  “She put out the light and turned towards me. I leaned into her, fearing her knowledge, her toughness—and then I realized her hands were trembling.
  Through my blouse, I could feel her hands like butterflies shaking with respect and need. Younger lovers had been harder, more toughened to the joy of touch, but my passing woman trembled with her gentleness.”
• 
  Sarah

  I love this book. It is one I will keep, refer back to, read again, and lend to people. I had never read any of Joan Nestle's writing before. Now I plan to look up her other work and would like to read it all. I truly enjoyed this book. Although it is history, it reads like a novel. It consists of short essays and stories that deal with her life, politics, her experience living as a working class, Jewish, lesbian, feminist woman. She deals with so many important ideas and issues including the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion... I am especially fascinated with her analysis of the tensions between feminists and lesbians, the policing of morality, censorship, how history is written, who writes it, and who is left out, and the connections between women, lesbians, and sex workers.
• 
  Sarah Campbell

  This important book from lesbian HERstory details the author's experience of coming out in the 1940s and then being out in the 1950s and onward. The book is a collection of essays and short stories, all arranged chronologically. Of course, Joan Nestle was instrumental in starting the Lesbian HERstory Archives in Brooklyn, so this slim book felt like a particularly good find in the library shelves. Every lesbian searching for a sense of her history and community should read Nestle's account of her experiences. While she's a far superior essayist/memoirist than she is a short story writer, all these vignettes are important glimpses into American lesbian culture.
• 
  Liza

  I will never be able to put into words what reading this book meant to me. I'm so glad I've read it and I have it and Joan wrote it and Joan exists. I fucking love Joan <3
• 
  Shoshanna

  One of the best books I have ever read, I put it up there in the same category as "Whipping Girl" by Julia Serano! A woman, a socialist, a feminist, a lesbian, a femme, a Jew, Nestle shows how these identities intersect in her life and in the lives and histories of others. This book is a series of entries, most of which are personal essays, some histories, and later on in the book, some very intense blushy lesbian erotica (it's so good but don't read it around other people! ;) ).
  
  The way Nestle talks about the different ways her Jewishness and her lesbianism are similarly experienced, it's the first time I have read about this, outside of the watching Transparent. Her defense of butch / femme relationships in lesbian culture, past and present, are so thought provoking. I had never thought of how the androgyny that lesbian feminists advocated erased that part of the culture before.
  
  Also the way she talks about being despised on multiple sides, as a femme lesbian, remind me of Serano's triple oppression from different groups.
  
  Not to be missed! A feminist gem! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
• 
  Abigail

  I think Joan Nestle is an excellent essayist and I've really enjoyed this collection. Writing about desire and eroticism is a difficult thing to do, and I think that Nestle does an excellent job of addressing such a touchy subject in a way that is clear and understandable but is also rich with feeling and thought and passion.
  ----
  Favorite essays (for my reference):
  Liberties not Taken
  Esther's Story
  Lesbian Memories 1: Riis Park, 1960
  Stone Butch, Baby Butch, Drag Butch
  Voices From Lesbian Herstory
  My History With Censorship
  
• 
  Kieren

  I loved this text. It made me want to visit the Lesbian Herstory Archives in NY.
  
  Quote, "History is not a dead thing or a sure thing. It lives with our choices and our dreams... It is always a collective memory as complicated and as contradictory as the people who lived it, but it is always a people's story."
• 
  Kay

  This is really a good one. It covers so much ground so well, from the stories of the 1950s bars to her complicated mother to the erotica she writes in the second half. It all fits together so clearly, too. Really a great introductory volume of queer history, to so clearly capture so many different moments and the way they rub against each other.
• 
  Sean Estelle

  A wonderfully layered collection that holds many secrets and joys despite its short length; moving from comparative history to erotica to eulogy is not easy, but Nestle does that and more here.
  
  “All I have are my words and my body, and I will use them to say and picture the truths I know.”
• 
  Jenny

  I dipped in and out of this book, but I know I’m going to go back to all of it because it’s so dense. A mixture of essays and erotica, this gets 5 Stars simply because it’s such a fundamentally important part of lesbian/queer history.
• 
  Addie

  Liked it and had a lot of lesbian erotica if that is something u are into
• 
  M Caesar

  Truly incredible!! The more things change the more they stay the same, kind of sobering to see how many problems from the 50s and 80s we're still dealing with, or that made a resurgence.
• 
  Sara G

  "Lesbians and Prostitutes: an Historical Sisterhood" was certainly *the* standout for me but this book overall feels very valuable and personal, still. Even in 2024.
• 
  E.J. Frost

  "To live without history is to live like an infant, constantly amazed and challenged by a strange and unnamed world. There is a deep wonder in this kind of existence, a vitality of curiosity and a sense of adventure that we do well to keep alive all of our lives. But a people who are struggling against a world that has decreed them obscene need a stronger bedrock beneath their feet. (110)"
  
  Absolutely.
• 
  Stephy

  If I recall correctly, the author was involved many decades ago in a lesbian newspaper collective called Lavander Woman. My, she has come a long way. Some of the women from Lavender Woman Collective have gone on to write incredible works of Woman's Studies. See Bonnie Zimmerman, Michal Brody, others. I love her work.
• 
  Jessica

  Finally I was able to find it at Pegasus books in Berkeley. I had a FEELING it would be waiting for me there, and I was right. SO GOOD that while I was reading I accidentally got on the wrong flight back to New York-- had to be brought back by a fast-moving attendant who raced down the airplane sleeve after me. Restricted Country, indeed.
• 
  Laurel Perez

  This is a very important book. A seamless collection of essays, written with such fierce passion, such hope in the worst of it. Nestle is an important woman, who speaks for those perhaps most harshly judged & over looked, in a way that they have not been spoken for before. A powerful collection you should not miss.
• 
  Emmi

  I love Joan Nestle, one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in NYC. I have always envied people with a consuming passion in their lives, and hers is fighting for the preservation and recognition of lesbian herstory.
• 
  Tina

  Joan Nestle is one of the most important lesbian figures and activists of the late 20th century. She claimed the right to be a lesbian and femme at a time when that was much more controversial as today.
  This book is a collection of her autobiographical writings, in a quite unusual form.
• 
  Laura

  Wonderful book, can't wait to read more by Nestle. It's a great joy to read queer history and get a sense of the people, movements, and politics that came before it. As Nestle says, as queer people we often feel history-less. This book alleviates some of that pain.
• 
  Kelly Applegate

  Joan Nestle rocks my world.
• 
  Monica

  Been reading parts of this again recently. Some beautiful and powerful essays in here. One of my favorite books.
• 
  Mel Luna

  This book of essays is deeply compelling and important.