Hand on the Pulse

Joan Nestle is the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City. This documentary traces her life; finding her community in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, celebrating the body in her writings and in her public readings in her black slip, having a lesbian archives in her home for 25 years, participating in the Black civil rights movement as a freedom rider, becoming a feminist, and helping to forge a new queer consciousness through grass roots organizing. This 2002 documentary features interviews with Joan in her sixties, as she continues to celebrate the body as an aging woman and as a woman with cancer.