ABOUT IVY
Ivy Joan Young (December 23, 1947 - April 24, 2023) was an African American lesbian journalist, activist, poet, and photographer who actively campaigned for improved LGBTQ and civil and political rights in the United States and beyond.
Ivy’s archive will live in on at
Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Her books and vinyls are at Baldwin for the Arts.
Letter from Mariah to Ivy Young - July 3, 2023
For hours each week, I comb through the archives of Ivy Young. She has saved so much in these boxes — letters and photo albums and postcards and programs and newspaper clippings of good and bad times. But as I pore over each sacred piece of this woman, I realize much of what she left behind is not actually Ivy, but the love she had for and received from others. Birthday cards she did not sign. Lengthy updates on a life that is not hers. Poetry books, not written by her but for her.
I am trying to remind myself that it is a beautiful thing — to be remembered by the ways we made others feel. It is supposed to be comforting to know we live on in the hearts of others. But when I sit here, surrounded by boxes of one-sided conversations and unanswered questions — I can’t help but feel a slight pang in my chest. It’s like I am so close to her, but always just out of reach.
In some ways, I navigate the boxes as if we share a single mind. I understand why she put certain things together. I smile like she must have when reading worn letters for the first time, and take deep breaths to get through the conservative press releases she’d fire back at. In other ways, I feel that the archive is taunting me. A single (mostly-blank) notebook, a few journal entries, and scribbled annotations in margins. No matter how far I dig — beyond her published writing, this is all I have of Ivy’s own voice.
I can tell she was committed to any struggle she could get her hands on, by the countless memos and emails and itineraries from a variety of organizations. I can tell she must have been soft, in the gentle ways she was addressed — “Sweetheart” or “Girlfriend” or “Honey” scrawled instead of her own name. I can tell she was thoughtful, through marked up radio transcripts and curated manila folders, and academic journals. I can tell she was nostalgic, by printed emails and filled guest books and a shoebox of envelopes. I can tell she was curious, by thick albums of film negatives, a different country Sharpie’d at the edge of each page. I can tell she was a good listener, and even better at keeping secrets. I can tell she was a soothing presence, for everyone seemed to be in better spirits once receiving a letter from her in the mail. I can tell she was affectionate, for many friends sign off with “I love you” — as if the single word in the middle was not enough.
I feel these things, though I cannot know them for sure — and with this archive, I am constantly surrounded by all of the people that do. The many souls lucky enough to love and be loved by Ivy Young have their own proof of it stashed somewhere, and I am a green, envious thing because of it. I sit and think, If I had never seen all of this love around her, I would have never known there was this much to miss. I would have never known of another Black lesbian writer and organizer I didn’t get the chance to meet. I reread her unfinished short story and the unfinished screenplay and the list of women's names I suspect was a record of past lovers, and I wish I had never seen any of it at all. Then I read it again.
There is so little of ourselves that we keep, or savor, or feel good enough to leave behind. Of course, one can hope (and be sure, in this case) that we can trust the people we love to save us. To keep our halves of the whole, safe and sound somewhere once we are gone.
But in the case of a self-made archive, or a collection of self created by self, I have to wonder if that is enough. Or, really, I worry if there’s not much else we can do. Letters are meant to be sent. Art is meant to be shared. Photos are meant to be taken, and many of the best ones don’t have ourselves in it. The sum of who we are largely does not belong to us by the time we sit and put it all together. Though, maybe it is not meant to.
Perhaps it is just the sensitive little historian in me that sits and frets about lofty things, like legacy and archives that most would just call hoarding. It could be naive or even desperate to wonder if there is a way we can give all of ourselves to the present, yet still save some of it for the future. I am afraid that we do not value our own selves in the same way that history will once we are gone, and I know that I have lost some of Ivy in this way. I know I have lost some of myself in this way.
Most of all, I am terrified that archives might be just as much about letting go of things, as they are about holding on.
Letter from Catherine Gund to Ivy Young - April 17, 2026
My dearest Bissau, I'm not losing you again.
Today, two years and ten months after April 24, 2023, the day you slipped beyond the veil and joined the ancestors - your beloved mother, your radiant brother Ronnie - your flotsam and jetsam are leaving our office.
I have been sitting with that phrase all morning. Flotsam. Jetsam. The language of shipwrecks and survival. Flotsam is what the sea claims by accident, what floats loose after catastrophe. Jetsam is what is cast overboard on purpose, lightened in distress so the vessel might endure.
Your archive has been both.
There were days after you died when everything felt like wreckage, papers and photographs and drafts and letters rising around me like debris after impact. And yet, you did not leave me wreckage. You left me purpose. You left me stewardship. You left me your life, gathered in boxes and folders and hard drives and open reels (your reel to reel radio show recordings) and your marginalia. You left me your thinking. Your becoming. Your unfinished sentences. Your brilliance.
You left me to take care of your stuff.
For over three years you and I filmed and cajoled and laughed and listened to each other in your house on Blaine Street, where you grew up and where you returned to, for the last years of your life. When you left, your house exhaled you into my hands.
Since then, I have lived with you here. I have filmed you. I have read you aloud. I have questioned you and wept with you and organized you. I held your notebooks, journals, letters, and scraps of poetry, like sacred texts. I opened envelopes as though they might breathe. Your archive has not been static. It has been a living companion in the room, sometimes mischievous, sometimes demanding, always luminous.
Where you had kept your friends and family separate, we made ourselves visible to each other after you left. We came together because you were gone. We cherished our Saturday Zoom meetings. We fell in love with one another.
We were life rafts and I named our group Ivy Love because ivy binds what otherwise might fall apart. The Ivy Love group spent an hour or two every Saturday from April 29 to October of 2024, from six days after your passing to two weeks after your Celebration of Life. We shared stories and tears and much laughter (we channeled your dry, dry, and consistent, sense of humor). We got to know each other's families and favorite ways to spend time, to spend the time of your death. We planned your memorial.
We "made the path walkable again."
And I was never alone walking the path of your legacy. I brought you to careful, creative, loving hands. Many of your people - and mine, and ours - created a village around you and me. Starting with my growing relationship with your niece Jade and your grand-niece Joy.
With enthusiastic devotion, Mariah moved through your materials, starting with the love letters. Flavia loyally carried your intellectual fire and commitment, aligning herself with the story of your life, never losing sight of its radical significance. At the beginning, Noa held your manifestations tenderly and then passed the entire project to Beth, who built the architecture of order without flattening your wildness. Heather recognized you with her steady and clear eyes. Emerson, Niani, Kofi, Dawn and Dana, Donna, Gina and Angela, Jos.
And then Melissa at Yale. With her profound charisma, intellect, and care, Melissa truly saw you, felt the voltage of you immediately, did not require explanation for why this stuff mattered, why you matter.
Before Yale, there were so many conversations. We began with the most singular institution, the Library of Congress, with its unparalleled credibility, a cathedral of public knowledge, which requires donation without any compensation, a model rooted in a long history of extracting Black brilliance and contribution without economic recognition. And anyway, we sensed, and then sadly confirmed, an unspoken, structural absence there. They hold not one collection from a lesbian of color. The gap is palpable. You would have had so much to say about that.
In fact, I feel like we dodged a bullet with this current era of institutional unraveling venerated,
cornerstone democratic institutions. Evidence is destroyed. History is rewritten. Truth is erased. And I wouldn't want Trump anywhere near you.
We also spoke with the Lesbian Herstory Archives, treasured keepers of our stories, our treasures, the handwritten and hand-saved evidence of our existence. But they do not yet have the capacity or institutional strength to promise you the long horizon your life's work deserves.
We explored the possibility of Duke University, Cornell University, the DC Public Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. We considered the legacy of In the Life, the Black Queer collection at the New York Public Library, and what it would mean to place you in communion with that lineage of witnesses, that fierce and radiant genealogy of Black queer truth-tellers. To shelve you beside them would have been to braid you into a living ancestral line, a bloodline not of biology, but of courage. (But they are no longer collecting.)
Each possibility carried dignity.
Each carried care.
And then there was Harvard University.
They did not see you.
Or rather, they saw you through a calculus that diminished you. They offered a fraction of what your life’s work warranted, a small percentage of our asking price. I remember the tightening in my chest when that number came through. It was not just about money. It was about valuation. About whether your archive, your intellectual labor, your political courage, your erotic and philosophical daring, would be treated as essential or peripheral.
And then, dear Jackie opened the door, connecting us to her archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Melissa met us there.
And from the first conversation, it was different. There was no pause. No hedging. No diminishment. Yale agreed to the full asking price without hesitation. Not because of market logic, but because they understood that your archive is a cornerstone. That it belongs in a rare books and manuscripts library not as ornament, but as infrastructure. That future scholars, especially Black queer scholars,especially lesbians of color, need you.
Ivy Joan Young, always Bissau to me, your name will live in that building. Your papers will be
catalogued with precision. Your marginal notes will be preserved in climate-controlled rooms. Students will open your boxes and feel the heat of you in their hands. They will write dissertations with you. They will argue with you. They will fall in love with you.
And we have been able to do something else, something that feels aligned with your ethics of redistribution and care.
Of the purchase price, we are able to give Jade the lion’s share, a material gesture of love, of continuity, of family. An acknowledgment that your legacy is not only intellectual but relational. That your niece stands inside the arc of this history.
Another portion honors the labor, the two years and ten months, of Mariah and Beth organizing the contents of box after box that I delivered from Blaine Street to Grand Street. That labor was not clerical. It was devotional. It was in service of the film, yes, but more than that, it was in service of you. Every folder labeled, every fragile page sleeved, every digital file stabilized, an act of reverence.
Today the boxes leave our office.
The Aubin space has been your harbor, with the radiator banging, the smell of coffee rising, and layers of dust that it took years to lift from the framed photographs. We have lived alongside your flotsam and jetsam, not as debris, but as constellation. What was once scattered has been gathered. What was once vulnerable is now anchored. If there was ever wreckage, we have turned it into vessel.
You trusted me with your stuff.
I have tried to be worthy of that trust.
I have tried to ensure that nothing essential was thrown overboard in distress. That nothing incandescent was ever mistaken for cargo to be cast away. That your life’s work would not float anonymously on the tides of history, but would be moored, named, cited, held.
Today, when the archive leaves, I know this: I am not losing you again.
You are expanding.
You are moving into shelves where precious things are appropriately cared for, into reading rooms with call slips and call numbers. You are moving into the hands of a young Black lesbian who does not yet know she will find you. You are moving into classrooms and footnotes and quiet astonishment.
And still, you remain here.
In the grain of this table.
In the echo of your laughter.
In the way I still turn to tell you things.
My dear one, my brilliant, unruly, exacting loved one.
Your flotsam and jetsam are seaworthy.
Your ship did not sink.
It multiplied.
Forever your steward.
Forever your companion on this rocky, walkable path.
Love, Trout