Dinah the Dykosaur’s Big Day at the Museum of Unnatural History: Lesbian Feminist Critiques of the Animal/Human Binary

On August 26, 1973, more than one hundred lesbian activists descended on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to participate in Lesbian Feminist Liberation’s first demonstration. Earlier that year, Lesbian Feminist Liberation formed as a splinter group of the Gay Activist Alliance, a group known for its flamboyant actions or “zaps.” Borrowing this tactic, Lesbian Feminist Liberation’s zap at the Museum of Unnatural History—as they playfully renamed AMNH—featured an eight-foot tall, 250-pound paper mache dinosaur with red nails and lavishly curled pipe cleaner eyelashes. On the morning of the protest, a group of women lugged Dinah the Dykosaur down Broadway from the basement apartment where she was lovingly constructed to the steps of the museum. Accompanied by the Victoria Woodhull marching band, the protestors circled Dinah the Dykosaur while chanting “hail, hail the dykes are here” and “museums hire feminists.”

Though purposefully silly, Lesbian Feminist Liberation came armed with a concrete set of demands. On the one hand, they critiqued the racial, gendered, and colonial logics that shaped the museum’s permanent exhibits. On the other hand, they demanded that the museum dedicate resources to the study of “women’s herstory and culture,” including the “matriarchal origins of human society.” In this paper, I draw from ephemeral evidence of the protest—including coverage in the feminist and mainstream press and a short video shot by the Lesbians Organized for Video Experience (LOVE) Collective— to unpack Lesbian Feminist Liberation’s intervention and what this action might tell us about lesbian feminist politics. Although it is easy to dismiss Lesbian Feminist Liberation’s investment in a matriarchal origin story, I explain how lesbian feminists creatively imagined the past as a resource for the present. In other words, if lesbian dinosaurs did not exist, Dinah the Dykosaur had to be invented.