By the Force of Flavia Rando's Presence

This article is part of Hyperallergic’s 2026 Pride Month series, featuring interviews with queer and trans elder artists throughout June.

Far too many queer elders are not as widely known as they should be, precisely because their queerness, and often their gender, led others to place barriers in their path. And yet, many have carried right along regardless. Flavia Rando is one such person. A Brooklyn native, a child of immigrants, a lesbian who came out in her late teens in 1961, Rando went on to join the Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians, found her own photo research business, participate in the first art exhibition to include the word lesbian in the title, and wheat-paste her work and that of other lesbian artists across Midtown. Later on, she would influence thousands in classrooms throughout the New York City area as a professor teaching women’s and gender studies, as well as art history. More recently, she co-curated the exhibition By the Force of Their Presence: Highlights From the Lesbian Herstory Archives, mounted in 2019 at the New York Historical Society in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.

I met Rando when I enrolled in the Lesbian Studies Institute she started at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in fall 2011. She and I have since collaborated on Archives projects and developed a friendship I cherish. We spoke over the phone about her pathway into art-making and politics, her teaching, and some of what she’s learned along the way.

Hyperallergic: When did you start making art?

Flavia Rando: I'd always drawn, I called it scribbling. And it was very easy for me. Language had always been a problem, because I grew up with my parents speaking Sicilian. But I wasn't to learn it, or speak it, because we were going to be American. I understood [Sicilian], but I never spoke it, in deference to my parents’ strongly expressed wishes.

I had one course left over as a high school senior and I took an art course. There was no real context for it in my life, but I took this course and I really enjoyed it. And I remember the teacher encouraged me.

And somehow from that, I leapt to: I'm going to be a studio art major at Brooklyn College. It was a huge leap. Huge. And I had pretty good teachers. I had Ad Reinhardt. I really wanted to continue working with Reinhardt, but somehow I found myself working with Burgoyne Diller, who was really just trying to get his pension.

I think as a woman and as a pretty openly, for that timeframe, let's just say not-heterosexual woman, I was a little disposable in the art department.

H: And when you say you didn't have a context for art-making, what do you mean?

FR: I came from an immigrant Sicilian family. I was first generation. My parents did a tremendous amount with what they had been given in life, which was a very, very hard go, with very little education. There were two art items in the house. One was a brochure from my father’s one trip to The Met as a, probably, very homesick young man, when the great paintings of Italy came. And the other was a wonderful book of photographs of what would have been called “the everyday people” or “peasants” of Mexico, from the 1930s. I have no idea how that arrived in my house. And I would leaf through it endlessly.

Flavia Rando at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (courtesy Alexis Clements)

H: When you were in grade school, did you get brought to the museums by teachers?

FR: I think we went to the Brooklyn Museum and saw the rooms once. When I was in high school I made friends with a very worldly other student who had transferred in and we went to MoMA maybe once or twice. That was it.

H: How did you feel able to be out as an undergraduate in the early 1960s?

FR: Well, Brooklyn College had a gay table.

H: When you say “gay table,” do you mean like at a student orientation?

FR: No, no, no. Are you kidding? Never. There was a huge cafeteria, it was a very large student body, thousands, and there was a gay table.

H: How did you find out about it?

FR: I would have learned about it from a friend, probably, or recognized it when I walked by.

H: To what extent, if at all, did being an artist and being out intersect in your mind, at that time?

FR: Only in that I wanted to be as much of myself as I could be. And I really had not had that opportunity as a kid.

H: At what point did you begin to become an activist?

FR: I tried to join the Daughters of Bilitis [an early homophile organization for women]. In fact, I met with them in a building I can see right now, from my window, ironically. I was just 18, I'd been out more than a year. We were in a small room, a small office in a huge, deserted building. I didn't know then, but they were very frightened because I was too young, I may have been sent to entrap them. And I was terrified, not of them, but I didn't know how we did this. The word lesbian was never mentioned. Finally, I got up and I thought, you know, this is not going to help me. These people, what are they so scared of? What am I going to do to them? And so that was extremely discouraging.

Gradually, my partner and I tried to go to bars and met a few people. We met Martha Shelley that way, who was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front [GLF] and came from an activist family. We met her on the 14th Street crosstown bus. I remember it very clearly. And she said there was a new organization, the Gay Liberation Front, and would we like to come to a meeting? This was early July 1969. And I said, I've been waiting for this all my life.

Once I joined GLF, everything changed for me; my whole spirit lifted. It allowed me to think of myself as someone who could not just survive but begin to control my own life.

H: Were there moments in your art-making after that point that felt particularly impactful?

FR: There was one action that the lesbian art collective did. We printed copies of our work and had a stamp that said “This is Lesbian Art” and pasted all of Midtown with those, at four in the morning. And I remember pasting the office buildings where I often had projects. So many of us had day jobs, and we were not, shall we say, comfortable there. And the idea of doing something that would allow us to signify who we were in that vicinity, on the very doors of those buildings, seemed really powerful at the moment. I loved that action.

H: I love knowing you were doing that two decades before fierce pussy was pasting their posters all over the city, there’s a kind of continuum there.

Thinking about your collective, I want to ask about something mentioned in the 1977 Heresies interview with your group. A painting of yours was included in a 1976 show organized at Mother Courage Restaurant, a feminist space in Greenwich Village. Someone from Mother Courage asked that your painting be removed from the show because it depicted genitalia. In the end only your work was removed, no one else’s. Thinking back on that experience of censorship and the rift it created in your collective, is there anything that stays with you?

FR: What remains for me is how easy it is for so-called liberated people to fall back if the path to their liberation impedes their comfort.

H: Well said.

Now, we’re gonna jump forward, past your choice to end your photo research business, the completion of your PhD, your time teaching in academia, and go to your decision to start the Lesbian Lives class at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, where you and I met. Why did you start that class?

Flavia Rando (center) with Fran Winant (left) and Saskia Scheffer (right) at her exhibition By the Force of Their Presence (courtesy Alexis Clements)

FR: Well, I was dropped at Brooklyn College [where Rando was teaching in the 2000s]. Homophobia sort of won out. I successfully fought it, but I didn't get much for it. And I had joined the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I really wanted to teach, and I said, what better place than this? So I proposed a course and everybody said, yes, let's do that.

H: It felt so important that it was not an academic setting.

FR: It was very important because knowledge is not the province of academic settings. And in a way, it looked back to the conversations I had as a member of GLF and Radicalesbians, the discussions we had. So to me it was perfect.

H: We didn't want it to end. You thought it would last for a semester and we were like, no, we refuse, it has to keep going.

FR: Oh, that was wonderful, really wonderful.

H: I want to end by saying thank you. That was really, hugely important to me, in terms of both my queerness and politically, helping me to build my consciousness through those conversations.

FR: I want to say that was what I retained from my childhood, that culture of speech. That was the communication: Everyone spoke to each other. Conversations went on forever, and of course, I listened avidly, trying to learn something, anything. It seemed like a good way to go, I thought, as a kid.