By Anastasiia Fedorova

How did you first know you were different? How did you find your power?

Was is it in a gay bar, or in your quiet bedroom? Was it music, was it a photograph, was it water streaming down your skin, or noticing sunlight in the trees? Was it gently touching someone’s hand for the first time or a brush of a leather jacket — when your whole body suddenly reverberated with ecstasy? That moment, loud and beautiful, frightening and exciting, the recognition of queer energy pulsing within: remember how you smiled? 

This book is an exploration of queerness. It is an exploration of what it means to exist in a queer body and mind in today’s world. It is about queerness in a world going through a global pandemic, in a community which still carries the grief of the previous century’s AIDS epidemic. It is about queerness in a world which is burning — and in a world which is being reborn. It is about queerness as shapeshifting, as something hopeful, nourishing, open and radical. The queer community depicted here belongs in London, but the ideas we share and discuss transcend borders. It is a book of more questions than answers. 

Well —  there are at least some answers. In these pages, I interviewed 14 people who all identify differently, gathering their take on transness and beauty, creativity and love. We discussed being non-binary, lesbian, dyke or fag; sex, leather, slime wrestling and polyamory, queer spaces, disability, art and memory, acceptance and the shimmering surface of water. The beautiful portraits were taken by artist Anya Gorkova, who is known in the LGBTQI+ community for making you feel seen just the way you want to be seen. The book itself was designed by art director Ester Mejibovski, put together under the creative direction of Ella Boucht, and includes the works of eight international artists who belong to the LGBTQI+ community. Most of the elements that make up this thing you’re holding in your hands are queer. 

“I’m not even sure how you identify queerness anymore. Or if that’s even important,” said curator Iarlaith Ni Fheorais in an interview for this book. “Is it your sexulaity or gender? Is it the way you view the world? Is it the kind of life you lead? Is it the people you surround yourself with?” Sometimes, queerness is a portal, or the future. As Cuban-American academic José Esteban Muñoz wrote, “queerness is an ideality… We are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”. Sometimes, queerness is something you grow into gradually, day after day, until you look around and realise it has completely reshaped your world beyond what was ever expected of you. It is sipped through queer books and queer embraces, queer teachers and queer lovers. 

The idea for the HÄN archive and community was conceived in 2020 by fashion designer and creative director Ella Boucht. It emerged from gaps and voids of history — from hours spent researching dyke, lesbian, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming communities and their creative heritage. It came from exchanging books, lists of names, links and images, and wishing that we had more accessible resources in which to find our own reflection and our own joy. HÄN is an archive which connects the queer past with queer futures, and this book serves as a bridge. It’s an offer to look at an archive as something we could all be actively contributing to, and something we are already constructing through our existence. Archives are a living breathing strategy. Archives are sexy. 

In his book Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art, American author Andy Campbell describes archives as “both a temple and a cemetery”, “an aspiration rather than a recollection”. He describes them as a form of time travel, a vector which spans historical imagination, memory, emotion and hope. He also highlights the importance of archives for those on the fringes of mainstream culture. “Queer, feminist, and POC projects are painfully aware that narrow definitions of archives increase the probability that racialised, queer and gender non-conforming lives will be left uncollected, and therefore unconsidered in traditional scholarship. David Román, in writing about those who are ‘undocumented and unexamined,’ proposes that many archives exist ‘in oral history, cultutal memory, social ritual, communal folklore, and local performance – media that do not rely on print culture for their preservation’”.

Campbell also mentions the importance of the “embodied forms of archiving”. The stories we tell each other could be archives. Dance, touch, street protests, gender euphoria — all of these are archives too. It is how we know that the act of kissing in a queer bar is history. A memory of that kiss is history too. The very fact it happened and altered our bodies forever is history, even without documentation. 

While interviewing people for this book, I’d secretly rejoice every time I’d spot a recurring name, event or thought, whether that was activist group Sisters Uncut, or club nights such as  Butch, Please! and Big Dyke Energy. Even the Covid-19 lockdowns seemed a strangely fruitful time for understanding one's gender identity. Each time I saw these recurring names or patterns, I felt as if I’d managed to identify a few little signs of our queer times and thus preserve and celebrate them. 

“It is difficult to write a love letter to the unloved, the invisible. How audacious it is to say that these artists and their passion changed the world! Yet no one knows their names,” wrote Susie Bright in the foreword of Nothing but the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image. “They are famous, not in the tabloids, but in a million coming-out stories: the day someone saw a picture and relised they were “that way” — or more profoundly, realised they were sexual, that they were hungry, and that this taste had to lead to more. Men and women, people who will never be lesbians, have been touched by these photographs that I love; they see here something of the defiance, and tenderness, of women’s sexuality and spirit that has never been addressed before.” A former editor of On Our Backs magazine, Bright is passionate about the authentic representation of sex, queer bodies, emotions and thrills. But more importantly, she outlines the far-reaching impact documentation of these lived ecstatic freedoms have in all kinds of contexts and places. Ironically, many of us might have realised that we’re really anything and everything but the girl — but the radical power is still there.

The first edition of HÄN is dedicated to the exploration of gender. We have picked this topic partly to honour the history of pioneers like Leslie Feinberg, Jack Halberstam and Patrick Califia, who have navigated the notions of masculinity and transness in relation to the dyke and broader queer community. But we are also living in an era when the understanding of gender is shifting rapidly. Today, we have language for gender which our queer ancestors never had – something that opens so many new paths and possibilities. At the same time, it opens a host of new difficult, confusing, heated, and cathartic conversations. 

What are the boundaries of our queer communities in this shifting gender landscape? How can we be more welcoming and inclusive? What is the best way to fight the UK's endemic transphobia? There are quiet and private conversations too: maybe the first try of changing the pronouns, maybe confessing the attraction you can’t quite explain, maybe just realising that so many things about your identity and self are constantly, and will always be, in flux. 

We want this radical vulnerability to always be met with love and appreciation. We want to admit that sometimes we can be lost or not yet certain. We don’t pretend to know everything — rather, we offer real stories and experiences. We offer this as a start of another conversation. 

Trust yourself. Trust your desire. I hope you see your reflection in this book — and find your own power. 

The first edition of HÄN is a compilation of stories, images, poems and art, uncovering gender anarchy, sex, love, transness, beauty, leather, queer spaces, memory and the transformation of community. It’s about the search for one’s identity, and the right to determine your own life and body. It is about queerness as shapeshifting, as something hopeful, nourishing, open and radical. HÄN is an archive which connects the queer past with queer futures — and this book serves as a bridge.

This book is an exploration of queerness. It is an exploration of what it means to exist in a queer body and mind in today’s world. It is about queerness in a world going through a global pandemic, in a community which still carries the grief of the previous century’s AIDS epidemic. It is about queerness in a world which is burning — and in a world which is being reborn. It is about queerness as shapeshifting, as something hopeful, nourishing, open and radical. The queer community depicted here belongs in London, but the ideas we share and discuss transcend borders. It is a book of more questions than answers.

The first edition of HÄN is dedicated to the exploration of gender. We have picked this topic partly to honour the history of pioneers like Leslie Feinberg, Jack Halberstam and Patrick Califia, who have navigated the notions of masculinity and transness in relation to the dyke and broader queer community. But we are also living in an era when the understanding of gender is shifting rapidly. Today, we have language for gender which our queer ancestors never had – something that opens so many new paths and possibilities. At the same time, it opens a host of new difficult, confusing, heated, and cathartic conversations.

14 interviews, 9 artists. Photography, poetry, illustration, mixed media art, essays.

HÄN TEAM

Learn more about HÄN and the team behind it here

Say hi → hi@han-archive.com

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