Avengers
Created in 1992 by three women who had met through the radical lesbian organisation The Lesbian Avengers, Dyke TV was essentially born of this movement for visibility, fearlessness and power. Although many episodes include features on Avengers actions, these are a few that exemplify the work of the organisation and its impact.
Archives
Now, Dyke TV exists as a digital archive collection, which shapes the way we understand its historical significance. But even before it’s legacy, Dyke TV was concerned with archives as institutions that had the unique potential to preserve histories that are often written out of the official narrative. The Lesbian Herstory Archives located in NYC were featured frequently in a segment called “From the Archives:” here are some of the episodes with those features.
Lesbian Chic
While the Lesbian avengers stormed the streets in Dyke Marches, protesting in AIDS actions, and eating fire, wholeheartedly embracing their queerness, their power and their resistance, another kind of lesbian visibility was on the rise. The same year Dyke TV came out, K.D. lang made it onto the cover of New York Magazine, which proclaimed the issue “lesbian chic.” This term would be used to describe the simultaneous 90’s phenomenon of lesbians making their way into the upper echelons of popular culture. They were most often thin, white, wealthy, sexy, and most importantly, not protesting anything in particular. Here are some times Dyke TV considered this cultural shift.
Paradise and Shangri-la
One of the threads that interested the weekly Dyke TV group most was the reoccurring presence of Northampton, which was (and still is) often referred to as a Paradise City for lesbians. In nearly all the segments that highlight our town we saw visions of progress rather than struggle, these were the segments that featured lesbian mothers, the election of out and proud city council members, and the passage of domestic partnership ordinances. Northampton also happens to be the place where the entire digital collection of Dyke TV exists, alongside 12 years worth of the show’s paper records.
Province town, called a “Shangri-la” by a woman interviewed on Dyke TV in episode 186, who came of age in New York in the 1940’s, represents a similar progressive vision, where lesbians live and work and frolic alongside gay men.
These episodes look at these little New England towns as safe places, queer hot spots and places where queer history tends to coalesce outside of struggle.