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Creator
Jay, Karla
Call number
MssCol 1554
Physical description
27.68 linear feet (59 boxes, 1 tube); 82 audio files, 49 cassettes
Preferred Citation

Karla Jay papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Repository
Manuscripts and Archives Division
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.Restrictions apply

Karla Jay is a lesbian feminist activist, author, and former professor of English at Pace University (New York). The collection contains correspondence, typescripts, and other items chiefly documenting Jay's work as a professor of English and as author and coeditor of books on the experiences of lesbians and gay men. The bulk of the collection pertains to her work as a writer and academic and includes some documentation of her activities as a pioneer feminist and lesbian activist with the consciousness raising group Redstockings and the Gay Liberation Front. The correspondence includes letters from many prominent writers and gay and lesbian rights activists, her literary agent, publishers, contributors to her anthologies, and alternative presses, as well as with academic and professional organizations. The collection also includes typescript drafts of the text of The Gay Report (which she co-authored with Allen Young) and the questionnaires returned by lesbian respondents; drafts of Jay's dissertation and other writings; slides; and audio recordings, chiefly of interviews with Jay or conducted by her from the 1970s to the 1990s. Interviewees include Rita Mae Brown, Andrea Dworkin, Jeanette Foster, Barbara Grier, Jill Johnston, and Anaïs Nin.

Biographical/historical information

Karla Jay was born Karla Jayne Berlin in Brooklyn, New York, on February 22, 1947, the second of two children of Abraham Berlin, who worked for a dunnage company on the Red Hook (Brooklyn) docks, and Rhoda Berlin. She attended the Berkeley Institute, a private girls' school in Brooklyn, and Barnard College, where she majored in French, graduating in 1968 after having taken part in the student demonstrations at Columbia University that spring.

While she shared many of the goals of the radical left of the late 1960s, Jay was uncomfortable with the male-supremacist behavior of many of the movement's leaders. In 1969, she became a member of Redstockings, a newly-founded leftist-feminist group started by Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis. At around the same time, she began using the name Karla Jay professionally.

Jay, who had been aware of her feelings for women since high school, came out to her consciousness-raising group in Redstockings. When activists founded the Gay Liberation Front in the wake of the Stonewall riots of June 1969, Jay was an early member, and became an active participant, balancing attendance at meetings with working and attending graduate school at New York University, majoring in comparative literature.

Interested since childhood in writing, Jay, with the gay activist Allen Young, edited Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, which appeared in print in 1972 and met with a wide and appreciative audience. Jay and Young followed it with After You're Out; Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbian Women (1975), Lavender Culture (1978), and The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles (1979). It was also during the 1970s that Jay first learned of the writers Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien, members of the expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Her interest in their lives and work led her to write her doctoral dissertation about them, which Indiana University Press published in 1988 as The Amazon and the Page.

Jay received her Ph. D. degree in 1984, and was professor of English and the director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Pace University in New York. Her publications include her memoir, Tales of the Lavender Menace (1999); Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (1990), co-edited with Joanne Glasgow; the anthologies Lesbian Erotics (1995), and Dyke Life: A Celebration of the Lesbian Experience (1995); and the series she edited, The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature. She lives in New York City.

Scope and arrangement

The Karla Jay Papers consist of personal and professional correspondence, typescripts, research materials, publishing contracts, audio recordings, and other materials. A large portion of the collection pertains to her work as a writer and an academic. Documentation of her involvement with Redstockings and the Gay Liberation Front is present in the Miscellaneous Correspondence files of 1968-1970, the Redstockings file in Box 43, and early correspondence from 1968 to1971 (Boxes 35 and 38). Some files document her activism and consciousness raising efforts, and the dynamics of feminist publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. Many files contain a mix of material, reflecting the range of Jay's activities, and the intersection of her academic, writerly, political, and private life. Personal Correspondence includes letters from many prominent writers and gay and lesbian rights activists. Business and Professional Correspondence contains Jay's correspondence with her literary agent, publishers, and alternative presses, as well as with academic and professional organizations. This series also contains material concerning conferences, workshops, and other events in which Jay participated as an author and academic. Writings consists of drafts of Jay's dissertation, her books, published essays, and articles. Series IV, Other Materials, includes printed matter, Jay's dissertation note cards, and four carousels of slides for her presentation on notable Lesbians and Feminists in Paris. Audio Recordings is comprised mostly of interviews with Jay or conducted by her from the 1970s to the 1990s.

The Karla Jay papers are arranged in five series:

  • I. Personal Correspondence
    1961-2002, undated

    This series consists of outgoing and incoming correspondence (chiefly the latter) with relatives, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues of Jay, mostly from the 1970s to the 1990s. Among the notable correspondents represented in Boxes 1-8 are Rita Mae Brown, Barbara Deming, Jeanette Foster, Barbara Grier, Anaïs Nin, Felice Picano, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Vance Rule. Of note in the file for "Parents" in Box 6 are letters from Jay to her father and an aunt, 1976, in which she discusses her sexual identity.

  • II. Business and Professional Correspondence
    1970-2000

    This Series includes Jay's correspondence with publishers, periodicals in which she published articles, files documenting her student years at N.Y.U. and her early years teaching at Pace University, her involvement with the establishment of the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and her work with a grant agency, the Money for Women Fund. These files include draft and prepublication typescripts and copies of Jay's critical, literary, and journalistic writings; as well as typescripts by other writers, mainly those who contributed to her anthologies. Photocopies of published articles by or about Jay appear frequently throughout this series. The files of Jay's literary agent, editors, and publishers contain contracts, records of sale, and royalty information.

  • III. Writings
    circa 1970-2000s

    The materials in Series 3 are mainly typescripts and computer printouts of drafts of Jay's works. Box 22 also includes readers' completed copies of the surveys that were the basis for The Gay Report. Of additional interest are the two drafts of Dyke Life (Box 28), which differ somewhat from the published version. Short Works include articles, essays and chapters by Jay.

  • IV. Other Materials
    circa 1980-1995

    This series includes a typescript, "Making the World Safe for the Missionary Position", by Kay Adams, for Lesbian Texts and Contexts; two photographs of Jay, ca. 1995; four carousels of slides for Jay's lecture on feminists in Paris; a French lesbians' magazine, La Grimoire ("The Book of Spells"), a spiral-bound, photocopied journal of politics and the arts, produced in limited quantities (Box 30); and Jay's note cards for The Amazon and the Page (Box 31).

  • V. Audio Recordings
    circa 1974-1999, 2013

    The audio recordings include interviews with Jay and others, recordings of radio programs, and academic panels.

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Donated by Karla Jay, 1995, 2011, 2014, and 2015.

Processing information

Compiled by Laura K. O'Keefe, February 1997. Additions from 2011, 2014, and 2015 processed by Amelia Carlin in 2016.

Separated material

Typescripts and questionnaires for the Gay report. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Using the collection

Location

Manuscripts and Archives Division
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788
Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room, Third Floor, Room 328

Access restrictions

Some correspondence and other files closed until 2070. Some sound recordings are currently unavailable pending digitization.