- They saw perversion where we see love.
My camera was sort of a barometer of what was happening.
Black people or gay people or disabled people,
you want to be reflected.
You want to see that you're not alone.
The more of us who are out, the more safe it is.
- This is Joan E. Biren.
People strive to see people like themselves.
Representation in art and media makes us feel real,
less alone, seen, and like our feelings,
are not something otherworldly or wrong.
Joan E. Biren, known as JEB
wasn't seeing lesbians like herself in any of the images
of women circulating in the early '70s,
the height of the feminist movement.
So, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
At a time when just the act of being out
meant risking losing your job and your family
or even your children,
JEB and her muses fearlessly documented
authentic images of lesbians showing the world
the true story of the lesbian community.
Now, decades after beginning this project
that inspired a movement,
JEB is installing versions of her portraits
in the windows of the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City,
reminding everyone who might be feeling invisible,
that they are never alone.
I'm Javier Muñoz, and this isn't just our history,
this is Legendary.
- There were very, very few images of lesbians at all,
and most of them were what I called faux lesbians.
They were people pretending to be lesbians.
Most of those people were young, slim,
blonde women, white women.
The other kind of image was that instead of romanticizing
and making beautiful in exactly the same way all lesbians,
were the ones that turned them into vampires and monsters,
and were really kind of scary.
I decided to make my own images
of what I considered real lesbians
and I didn't know that many at the time.
So, I borrowed a camera 'cause I didn't even have a camera.
And I asked my lover to kiss me
'cause I really wanted to see a kissing picture.
And I held the camera out and took a picture of us,
and made an early selfie,
before I even knew that was going to be a thing.
And here's a larger version of that very picture,
my lover Sharon and I kissing.
A large part of what I had to do
was earn people's trust
because people did not want
to be disowned by their families.
They did not want to lose their jobs.
They did not want to lose custody of their children.
They did not want to be forced out of the country
if they were here on certain kinds of visas.
So, there were all kinds of things
that could happen to people
if their photographs were identified as them being lesbian.
They were very brave and courageous.
And, you know, you can't do it
if people aren't willing to be out.
It was a privilege for me
to be able to make these images of these brave women.
My camera was sort of a barometer of what was happening.
As more people came out,
more people were willing to come in front of my camera.
And as more of my images went out into the community,
more people saw that it was safe to come out.
Well, one of the things that happened very early on
in my making lesbian images was
nobody wanted to buy them.
So the way that I supported myself as a lesbian photographer
was to travel around the country with a slide show,
and everybody called it the dyke show.
I liked this so I made a postcard of it
that I made of myself in Dyke, Virginia.
And people would buy the postcard
and you know, people put things up on their fridges,
so one of the ways that people came out to each other
was they would go in someone's house
and see this on the fridge,
and then they'd know they found another lesbian.
And then, suddenly, a right-winged,
bigoted, anti-gay group,
the Moral Majority wanted to buy them.
So of course, I wasn't going to sell them my images
so that they could fight against our having our rights.
I think they saw perversion where we see love.
(upbeat music)
I'm very excited that in this year
of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall,
I've been invited to be part of many other exhibits
as well as the one at the Leslie-Lohman.
One of the great things about this windows installation
is that it's not just lesbians.
It's lesbians and gay men, and trans people,
and bisexuals and drag queens, and everything.
And I hope what it will do is inspire
other people to be active
because there are lots of threats
to our liberties and our freedoms.
And there are people that would actually like to push us
back in the closet.
I may not be the one to get us there
but I hope we reach the goal of having all of us,
including the most vulnerable and most marginalized,
represented in authentic ways in mainstream media.
One of the things that kept me going then,
and that fills my heart now,
are the people who write me or tell me
how much my images meant to them.
People tell me sometimes that they saved their lives.
People tell me that they made them feel
like they could be creative.
People tell me that they were just somehow empowered
by seeing these images,
and it is the reason I made them,
and it's the best part.