On the other, through the Austin-based party/digital series Lez Be In Touch: Dykes You Should Know, they’re getting underappreciated lesbian heroines into the actual Texas History Archive. In a recent conversation, Beth and Lex shared how having a good laugh goes a long way in the serious business of lesbian visibility.

Smashion: Lex, the last time I was in L.A., I was over by Echo Park Lake and saw you getting out of a station wagon with Hermlez vanity plates. Like, Hermès but Lez. 

Lex Vaughn: (Our mutual friend) Daniel said there was a sighting. 

Beth Schindler (mock posh tone): It’s an Hermlez bag. It’s very expensive.

Smashion: Did you make an Hermlez bag?

Lex: We do a lot of spoof work, a lot of copy culture tribute work. JD Samson did Lezzie Vuitton wallpaper. We did a Louis Vuitton logo T-shirt but instead of LV we put BV for bacterial vaginosis. I think Hermlez bags are possible. 

Beth (mock serious tone): We’re in preproduction.

Lex: There’s Gay Dregs. We really like to take an idea and keep twisting and turning it. Fuckface Twins really came out of that. What do you do with all the bullshit in your head? We were raised with the same television, raised with the same jokes. How do you do something with those things? How can parody create a new narrative for queer and lesbian history?

Beth: When people ask us about Gay Dregs I tell them we have given the Lesbian Archive Rejects a new home. People are like, “OMG, there are lesbian archive rejects?” And I’m like, no, lesbian archives reject nothing. They will take a dirty napkin that wiped the tears off a cheek from a breakup from 1975. Nothing is not precious to an archive. I think it stays a great joke.

Lex: It’s also a joke about the stereotype, the rift between gay men and woman as well, how dykes ruin all the fun, they’re  overbearing. I’m terrible at serious commentary, I usually just make a joke. We can make shirts that say Lesbians Aren’t Funny…Seriously! So you just have to keep playing on the trope to make the joke.

Smashion: How has the pandemic affected your life and your work?

Lex: In the pandemic, we didn’t want to send T-shirts and deal with returns and stuff. We generally source all old T-shirts for our projects. We don’t do anything on new T-shirts. So we had all these iron-ons and no shirts. So fuck it! It will be DIY. Everyone’s back to doing DIY again so we just started sending out the iron-ons for people to make their own shirts. It was pretty cool being able to move out of the depression to make all the iron-ons and shit. It was a bit of a slog, though, because we also do a lot of live events. Beth is a huge party producer.

Beth: Yeah, about a year before the pandemic, we started this event called Lez B In Touch: Dykes You Should Know. It was essentially a big dyke party with dancing, fun, bringing people in with those promises but all the while kind of tricking them into watching these performances that are tributes to dykes they should know about. We did that party for about a year and revived the Austin Dyke March out of it as well. That hadn’t happened in about 18 years. 

Before COVID hit, we’d received a nice grant to do the Dyke March again and continue with Lez B In Touch. But then everything shut down and we didn’t know how to maintain this momentum. People really loved it. It’s archives, it’s history, it’s fun, it’s dancing.

Lex: And there’s a water slide.

Smashion: So there was a real water slide. It wasn’t just Susan Sontag’s personal water slide, like the postcard you did? (Laughs)

Beth: Yeah, she dislocated a shoulder but all is well.

“How can parody create a new narrative for queer and lesbian history?”

Smashion: When it comes to LGBTQ topics, there seems to be real pressure to keep the conversation safe and within bounds. And I don’t think your work necessarily does that. Do these concerns factor into your thinking at all?

Beth: The jokes that we’re telling? We’re making those jokes about ourselves, we’re making those jokes about our friends and the people we love. This is how we move through the world. I hope there’s an element of forgiveness for our clown aesthetic.

Also, a lot of the conversations about safety, security, visibility and erasure are really relevant for lesbians. “Lesbian” and “dyke” and “fag” are in everything we do, in the title of almost every project we’ve done. That is us simultaneously fighting for that safe space, visibility and a seat at the table.