American writer, editor and archivist Joan Nestle was BOTD in 1940. Born in New York City to a working-class Jewish family, her father died before she was born and she was raised by her mother. After graduating from City University of New York in 1963, she became involved in the civil rights movement, joining the Selma to Montgomery March and volunteering for registration drives to help register Black voters. Returning to New York, she completed post-graduate studies at New York University and became a lecturer at CUNY. In the early 1970s, she joined the Lesbian Liberation Committee and co-founded the Gay Academic Union to collect and preserve artefacts of lesbian life and culture. Working with her then-partner Deborah Edel and activist Mabel Hampton, she opened the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974. She began writing lesbian erotica in the late 1970s, focusing on butch-femme relationships. In her 1992 anthology The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, she argued that butch-femme culture was a legitimate part of lesbian experience and not an attempt to copy heterosexual gender roles. In 1995, she retired from CUNY following a cancer diagnosis. She now lives in Australia with her partner Dianne Otto, and teaches at the University of Melbourne. Her life and work was profiled in the 2002 documentary Hand on the Pulse, and she appears prominently in Not Just Passing Through, a 2004 documentary about lesbian cultural history.