Mysteries of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives: Martha Foster Collection

One of the joys of working in an archive, for archivists and researchers, is coming across tantalizing mysteries. A huge range of women have donated to The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, ranging from public figures like Margarethe Cammermeyer to lesser-known, but no less historically important, women. Occasionally, a very intriguing collection will come with a minimum of identifying information about the woman to whom it belonged. I interviewed Stacy E. Wood, a Graduate Student Researcher working on processing the Mazer collections for UCLA, about one such collection: The Martha Foster Collection.

While looking through the Mazer holdings at UCLA, Wood came across Foster’s papers, which included a small amount of poetry and many striking photographs, taken in her backyard in Echo Park in the early 1930s. “They’re really gorgeous,” says Wood. “They almost look like test costume shots. There are hundreds of them. And I couldn’t find any information about her. Even Angela Brinskele (photographer and board member of the Mazer Archive) couldn’t find a death certificate or birth dates.”

Wood became fascinated with Foster, and went above and beyond the call of duty to find out more about her. She and Brinskele emailed friends and colleagues to try and unravel the mystery. Wood even went to Foster’s house to inquire about her.

“There was one letter with her old address on it,” says Wood. “So I went to her house and asked [about her], in case maybe her grandkids lived there. I felt really strange about my pilgrimage to her house, but I did it anyway! I went and knocked on their door, asked if they knew the previous owner, and said her name. They said no, and I took it at face value.”

Wood had given up on solving the mysteries of Martha Foster. However, six months later, strictly by coincidence, a new clue emerged.

“There is an accordion room divider at The Mazer‘s headquarters in West Hollywood, and it’s from the Esther Bentley collection. It is sort of a collage that she’s done. It’s called ‘The Women in My Life,’ and it’s rumored to be all of her ex-girlfriends. Peeking out, I saw Martha Foster’s face, and I freaked out, because this meant that she was sort of real and had real connections, and maybe I could find something about her.”

To her surprise, as Wood continued processing various Mazer collections, more fragments of information and memorabilia about Foster began to emerge.

“Looking through Esther Bentley’s collection, I found Martha’s ID card and some tax information about the house they shared in Echo Park,” says Wood. “And then these other bits of her life were in another person’s collection. Nobody at the Mazer knew that [any of these people] were connected.”

So far as Wood can tell, The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive contains the only evidence of Foster’s life.

“Angela has been tracking down everything for the collection’s deeds, for legal purposes, and she even asked me to dig out Foster’s tax document because it says that she died, and we can’t find out through the city or online that she even existed. The only traces of her are in these collections, and some of them are in her ex-girlfriend’s collection. But we don’t know when they dated, or when they knew each other. There are just these sort of weird suggestions.”

Foster’s relationship with Esther Bentley makes the lack of information available about her even more confounding, as Bentley was a very well-known and well-connected member of the Los Angeles LGBTQ community.

“That’s the weird thing,” says Wood. “We know almost everything about her. Her collection is huge, everyone knew her. She was super active in L.A., everyone at the Mazer knew her. There are all sorts of stories about her. What’s strange is that the picture of Martha in the ex-girlfriend collage was taken when she was older, so I assume people would have known her or had some contact with her. But nobody knew her. She was with somebody who was very known in the community, but she herself doesn’t have any ties. The pictures are so beautiful. It’s like a silent film star posing in her backyard, in these beautiful, sort of Moroccan prints. You imagine who was taking those pictures, and you’ll never know. It drove me crazy for so long, for so many months.”

Before she began processing the Mazer archives, Wood anticipated that they’d contain more mysteries than they actually do. Her assumption seemed to be confirmed when the first collection she processed belonged to another very enigmatic subject named Tiger Woman. “Her poetry and some of her art work were in the collection, and again she dated someone who ended up being a famous and recognized artist,” says Wood. “I tried to contact the artist, and she would never respond to me. But it was a situation that was really frustrating, because I had all of these photos, and she felt more accessible because they were from the early 1990s. I couldn’t believe that someone would just drop off the planet, and that there was no trace of her.”

However, in spite of these archival mysteries, Wood has been surprised at how comprehensive the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive is in its historicizing of lesbian identities. She believes that the archive can be so comprehensive because of its deep, strong roots in the community that it documents.

“Since Tiger Woman was the first collection I worked on, I expected it to be the norm: some of it due to mystery, and some of it due to a choice made by the subject of the collection,” says Wood. “A lot of people have collections that they gave at times in their life, and now they have different identities and politics. So I just expected it to be a little harder to pin things down in a traditional archival way. But [such challenges] haven’t happened as much as I would’ve thought, and I think that’s due to the organizational structure of the Mazer and the grassroots nature of it. If you can’t find something out, you activate the network, and it will come back to you. It might not come back soon, but in nine months somebody will send a facebook message to somebody else, and eventually it will come back to you: Here is what she is doing now.”

Wood admits that her own personal tendency to become passionately fascinated with the subjects of the collections she processes can sometimes drive her crazy. At the same time, it likely makes her perfect for the job. “I get very attached to the collections, and also sort of like to communicate some sort of story [from them]. There are false hopes attached to that desire. I think that especially with a project like this, when the idea is unearthing these lost, hidden, or less public histories, it seems even more important if you get almost obsessive about representing people in whatever way you can. So it’s almost more frustrating when you can’t put a picture together.”

Wood emphasizes that the more identifying information she can find about a collection, the more potentially useful it will be to a researcher. “Ultimately, it’s about people using this collection,” says Wood. “If you think about it that way, it’s important to have as much information as you can, so that people can know it’s there, and how they can use it. It’s hard to fit that sort of affective sense [that surrounds mysterious collections] into a finding aid. It’s hard to say: Oh, there are these beautiful pictures, and they’d be great for artists, designers, and period study, and there’s this poetry that’s not really great, but… It’s hard to say why a collection is important without giving it shape or context. It’s hard to piece it together.”

However, while there are abundant professional reasons for solving the mysteries of the archive, Wood has become an excellent detective because she loves the work. “I think I have some narrative greed, but that’s my own sort of personal problem,” says Wood. “I think it is in a lot of ways a hindrance to my actual job sometimes, because within the context of what we’re doing it’s actually not always practically important to know all of the information that I seek out. But it’s hard to work with these materials and not want to know.”

--Ben Raphael Sher

PS Do you know anything about Martha Foster or Tiger Woman?  E-mail ben.sher.csw@gmail.com!

Ben Sher is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher at CSW.

The finding aid for this collection will soon be available for viewing at the Online Archive of California(http://www.oac.cdlib.org). Digitized materials from the collection and the finding aid will be available for viewing on the UCLA Library’s Digital Collections website. This research is part of an ongoing CSW research project, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles,” with Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW DIrector and Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s.

For more information on this project, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/making-invisible-histories-visible. For more information on the activities of the Mazer, visit http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org

From the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives: Daughters of Bilitis Records

The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives at UCLA are exciting because they allow researchers to investigate important historical institutions and events in the lesbian community from multiple angles.  The Daughters of Bilitis records collection gives the researcher a unique opportunity to understand how one of the earliest LGBTQ organizations developed during a time of profound oppression and invisibility for LGBTQ people.

In 1955, a group of eight lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). The group, founded to counteract the loneliness and isolation they felt as lesbians, became the first national combined lesbian organization and support network. DOB began publishing its monthly magazine, The Ladder, in 1956.

The  Daughters of Bilitis records include documents related to the running of the organization's national and local chapters. The collection contains files related to the production of The Ladder, and the organization’s national conferences in various cities.  It also contains personal and professional correspondence to and from various members of DOB (including, prominently, founders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin), as well as documents from several other homophile organizations. 

The DOB Collection includes many treasures.  Its administrative papers give a clear and detailed understanding of how one of the earliest lesbian organizations was run, beginning in the 1950s.  At the same time, correspondence among the organization’s members offers portraits of the personal and professional lives and relationships of lesbians during this time period, including those of “ordinary” women whose stories might not be found in history books.

–Ben Raphael Sher

Ben Sher is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and a graduate student researcher at CSW.

The finding aid for this collection is available for viewing at the Online Archive of California (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c89c6z56/). Digitized materials from the collection and the finding aid will be available for viewing on the UCLA Library’s Digital Collections website. This research is part of an ongoing CSW research project, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles,” with Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW DIrector and Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s.

For more information on this project, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/making-invisible-histories-visible For more information on the activities of the Mazer, visithttp://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org

Edge of the Map: An Experiment in Science and in Theater

It seemed extravagant to fly to Boston from Los Angeles just to see a play, but in the end I couldn't resist.

Early in February of 2013 I had received an email from my friend Jonathan Beckwith, a distinguished microbiologist and geneticist at Harvard Medical School, telling me about a new project he had organized. Jon had recently participated in a collaboration at the Free University of Berlin with science students and members of the English Theater Berlin. They had all read Caryl Churchill's play, A Number, on the subject of human cloning, and discussed the social issues it raised. Excited by this experience, Jon decided to try something similar with his students at Harvard. But instead of having them discuss existing plays, he and a former student, Ben Morris, recruited Sightline theater director Calla Videt to work with students in his "Social Issues in Biology" class to create a new theater piece altogether.

Their collaboration produced Edge of the Map, a collage based on real-life and invented scenarios involving ethical and social dilemmas in genetics. One of the texts for the "Social Issues" class was Mapping Fate, an autobiographical book of mine about Huntington's disease experience and research. [1] One of the real-life narratives in the theater piece involved a character named Alice, based on the book, who learns she is at 50% risk for this disease.

It was certainly flattering to learn that I was going to be a character in a play! But even more intriguing was the opportunity to see how experimental theater might engage with difficult ethical and social dilemmas emerging out of the new molecular genetics—dilemmas posed by the increasing number of predictive genetic tests, by new technologies for manipulating genes, and by the commercial possibilities of genetics research. As a long-time lover of theater as well as an influential science activist (he was one of the founders of Science for the People in the 1970s), Jon was excited by the opportunity to explore new ways of communicating scientific knowledge and of investigating the social dimensions of science. He also thought that the process of creating a theatrical performance could open up new ways of thinking about science. Calla Videt too had thought deeply about these issues. As a Harvard undergrad with a major in theater and physics, she had created a highly successful theater piece, The Space Between, about theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. Her New York theater company Sightline was specifically interested in exploring scientific questions. Calla and other members of Sightline tossed ideas back and forth with the science students, who sat in on rehearsals with the student actors and created materials and visuals for the piece. Everyone wished they had more time.

Genetics was not Calla's field, but she learned fast and the students in Beckwith's class helped focus the major questions for the piece—how much do we want to know about our genetic identities? How much of our biology can we or should we try to control? What do we wish to pass on to our children and what do we think our genes say about who we are? Can theater create new ways of learning and communicating about science? Can science help create new forms of theater?

Anna Hagen as Alice and Eli Wilson Pelton as her father Milton on a road trip.  

Edge of the Map, 2013. Photo by Chris Masterson, courtesy of Sightline. 

On Saturday evening, April 13, at the first performance I attended (I went twice!), I joined other attendees seated in rolling chairs lining the corridor outside a converted classroom/physics lab/performance space in the Harvard Science Building. Roaming actors blindfolded us. After a while they rolled us into the large concrete space where we were bombarded with genetic and genealogical data from young voices that seemed to be dancing around us. Suddenly we were told to remove our blindfolds, as if we were about to make our own discoveries. A somewhat frantic young scientist in front of a whiteboard was explaining the basics of DNA while other actors moved among video projections and changing scrims. Stories unfolded in fragments—a young woman is institutionalized and, on a table surrounded by a screen, sterilized against her will, a sequence based on the historical case of Leilani Muir, who sued the Canadian province of Alberta for forcibly sterilizing her in 1959. A stressed-out young couple try to create a "perfect" baby, producing instead a whining monster. A young man on a TV talk show broadcasts that his sperm is genetically "perfect" and finds himself besieged with seductive phone calls from women seeking a donation. The young scientist we encountered at the start discovers to his horror that his sperm sample has been mislabeled and lost. And then there is Alice, who learns her mother suffers from Huntington's disease and is confronted with her own 50-50 risk. Her father Milton takes her on a road trip across the country while they consider what to do.

Mariel Pettee as Leilani Muir in Edge of the Map, 2013. 
Photo by Chris Masterson, courtesy Sightline.

All of these narratives unfold in pieces, interrupting each other across different parts of the space, blending dialogue, dance, physical movement, video and slide projections, sounds, music, and changing lights. Playing out over the course of an hour, the piece disturbs and exhilarates, engaging all the senses at once. At the close the actors walk around and address audience members individually, intoning "your child will inherit your grandmother's blue eyes," "your offspring will possess your uncle's musical talent," "you have inherited your father's weak heart." But they deliver their lines with a sense of irony, knowing that such straightforward predictions are precisely the problem they wish to engage.

What then did we come away with? Certainly the piece focused on the ways that genetics has been exploited for negative social purposes, such as the forcible eugenic sterilization of women deemed inferior and the promotion of stigmatizing notions of biological perfection and control. For this reason, perhaps, my scientist friends were somewhat critical, although they enjoyed the experience. One wanted the piece to include a story about the medical benefit of a genetic discovery. Another found the fragmented form confusing, the moving chairs distracting and dizzying. A third, a medical student, worried that the piece could have drawn on more recent discoveries.

And yet, for me the multiple dimensions in which the piece unfolded brilliantly evoked the interconnectedness of our biological and social natures and the complexity of our so-called "genes." It beautifully satirized the ways in which our consumerist culture of competitive acquisitiveness and desires for control extended even to our genomes. The sterilization story was devastating (an indication of the historical time frame would have been helpful), conveying the anguish of Muir through the stark beauty and restraint of Mariel Pettee, an accomplished dancer as well as actor. The Alice sequences were also haunting, with Anna Hagen as Alice and Eli Pelton Wilson as her father projecting a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty—feelings I had tried to describe in Mapping Fate—as Alice learns of her 50-50 risk for Huntington's and considers the potential consequences of getting more precise genetic information through testing.

I came away from the Sunday evening performance of Edge of the Map with a sense of exhilaration that was tempered only by the tragedy of the following day, the day when two young men launched deadly explosives in the midst of the Boston Marathon. At least no one was talking about their genes.

—Alice Wexler

Wexler is a CSW Research Scholar. She received a Ph.D. in History from the Indiana University in 1972 after completing a dissertation entitled “Historians, Society, and the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.” She has taught at UC Riverside, California Institute of Technology, Claremont Graduate School, Occidental College and UCLA. Her books include Emma Goldman in America (1984), Emma Goldman in Exile (1989), Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research (1996), and The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea: Huntington’s the Making of a Genetic Disease (2008). 

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[1] Huntington's disease is a fatal genetic, neurological and psychiatric illness emerging typically in mid-life and causing involuntary movements (chorea), emotional disturbances such as depression, irritability, and apathy, and cognitive decline often leading to dementia.