Dreams Are Made Of

Text by Mabel Pickering. Image courtesy of Deb Edel.

Deb Edel grins as she holds up her semi-finished needle-felted barrel cactus.

Today, Deb rides in the slow lane.

For the past five decades, however, she dared to make room for what she was told to hide. Long before institutions were eager to preserve Lesbian histories, Deb arranged them into view.

Thousands of books, letters, diaries, photographs, periodicals, tapes, magazines, journals, graphics, zines, films and more now live among one another in a Park Slope brownstone. The materials all share two common threads – they are Lesbian artifacts, and they have been gathered, and protected by Deb and a band of grassroots archivists since 1974.

This is the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a prominent, self-sustaining New York institution devoted to preserving and providing public access to records of Lesbian lives and activities. 

“The act of preserving history is an act of revolution,” says Deb, who co-founded the organization.

Raised in Jamaica, Queens by parents who were hounded during the McCarthy era for their political leanings, Deb’s activism was born with her, but ask her about the archive’s content, and she’ll shrug. 

“My interest has always been in the physicality of the space and the preservation of ephemera,” she offers.

It’s not the artifact itself, but the geometry of it in the space it sits, she adds. She didn’t fall in love with the contents so much as where to put them. 

“I was the one who figured out how we could get the best spacing of material that people could see, Deb continues, “but still house as much as we could.”

She built the first shelves herself – boards balanced on two-pound coffee cans, later graduating to bricks scavenged from New York sidewalks. She mapped emotion in linear measurements, balanced visibility with capacity and forged rhythm and conversation between collections. 

So, next time you’re in Park Slope, book an appointment and go and see the archive that, according to Deb, is both art and magic.

And one that preserved an otherwise forgotten history.

You probably won’t see Deb. She’s easing into that slow lane, stepping away at from life at the archives, living in an assisted-living facility.

She was recently asked to file the facility’s archives.

“I felt like saying, ‘I can rearrange the room for you,” she says with a laugh.