“‘Older’ is a euphemism, just like ‘elder’ and ‘senior’ and ‘golden’ — these are all terms that soft-pedal around a word of denigration,” said Arden Eversmeyer, the late founder of the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project (OLOHP), in an interview that opens the documentary short “Old Lesbians” (2023). “So it’s like taking back the word ‘lesbian,’ we take back the word ‘old.’”
The activist and retired school teacher, who died in November 2022, is at the center of the 29-minute film, which continues the autobiographical archival work to which she dedicated the last few decades of her life. It spotlights Eversmeyer’s “herstory” — a history viewed from a woman’s perspective or through a feminist lens — and that of others preserved through OLOHP. She founded the initiative in 1998 upon seeing a time-sensitive need to preserve the life stories of aging lesbian peers battling serious medical issues. Tape recorder in hand, she began the process of documenting the herstories of her local community.
Twenty-six years later, OLOHP (now an official nonprofit) has conducted around 940 interviews with approximately 900 women from “all walks of life,” including several who have been reinterviewed, current board president and project manager Margaret Purcell told Hyperallergic. The project has also expanded to 39 states and countries including Japan, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica.
The initiative centers a growing population of LGBTQ+ community members. In the US alone, the American Psychological Association estimates that there are 2.4 million LGTBQ+ people age 65 and older — a number expected to rise from 12.8% of the country’s total population to an estimated 19% in 2030.
“We are unabashedly single-minded: [We] find the women 70 and older who identify as lesbian and are willing to tell us their experiences in their own words,” Purcell said.
Carrying on this initiative, the “Old Lesbians” documentary paints a portrait of Eversmeyer and her fellow self-proclaimed old lesbian community through an assemblage of video interviews, stop-motion animated collages constructed from archival materials, and digitized OLOHP oral stories from the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Massachusetts. Divided into three acts focusing on early life, coming out and initial queer experiences, and retirement and activism, the film is structured according to “the way Arden described her own life,” the film’s Director Meghan McDonough told Hyperallergic.
“I found the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project through my research online and was surprised I had never heard of it — hundreds of lesbian life stories collected across the country over a quarter-century,” McDonough said.
Many of these voices are included in the film, which spotlights OLOHP participants continuing Eversmeyer’s work including Air Force veteran Barb Kucharczyk, activists Edie Daly and Mandy Carter, and singer and musician Gaye Adegbalola. Last month, Kucharczyk and Daly joined McDonough in a panel discussion at a screening hosted by the American LGBTQ+ Museum at The Center in New York City. In October, the documentary will be presented in Los Angeles at the second edition of the Circa: Queer Histories Festival cultural showcase, which will feature 60 programs with LGBTQ+ artists, writers, activists, and community groups.
“Arden [Eversmeyer]’s work was really about legacy, documenting these joyful, resilient life stories in all their fullness, in participants’ own words,” McDonough said. “In her quiet way, she made hundreds of women feel that their lives were worth living — and in documenting their herstories, she allowed future generations of lesbians and queer women (including me) to see that we have so much to celebrate and look forward to.”
This article, part of a series focused on LGBTQ+ artists and art movements, is supported by Swann Auction Galleries. Swann’s upcoming sale “LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture & History,” featuring works and material by Dinh Q. Lê, Harmony Hammond, Tom of Finland, and many more will take place on August 22, 2024.
