What makes an object queer?

Lesbian Matters is art project that explores the personal and material effects that lesbian people collect through their lives. These personal collections of postcards, trinkets, letters, photographs, and buttons serve as reminders of life’s queer moments. Additionally, everyday objects transform to represent our personal stories and identities. What are the objects that make up your life?

For an upcoming exhibition at Trestle Gallery as part of The BRIC Biennial, Brooklyn-based artist Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is collecting objects, stories, and personal artifacts that mark the beginning of your queer life. This will create a collective snapshot that reflects a contemporary Lesbian and queer consciousness The show opening is February 9, 2019. At the end of this public display, the Lesbian Herstory Archives will add donated materials to their permanent collection.

In the coming out process, and throughout exploring sexuality, we often assign objects with queer meaning, regardless of the object’s innate queer content. The first object to be donated to this project will be  Phoenix’s personal copy of “Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg. This book was given to her by her first girlfriend at the age of 16. Between its covers, she discovered the brutal hardships of my people and the tenderness of love. Now, 20 years later, it sits on her bookshelf held together with a rubber band to keep the loose pages from being lost.

This call for materials is open to anyone who identifies as lesbian, butch, queer, non-gender binary, trans or believes their voice should be represented in this collective examination of a contemporary queer objecthood.  In this way, we are preserving a living moment of queer history in real time.