The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History

Report by Tamara Chaplin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In a spirited session at the close of the 2012 AHA in Chicago this January, Nathan Wilson (PhD Candidate, York University) and Ryan Jones (PhD Candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) asked us to reconsider how we understand the history and content of both homosexual experience and emergent gay rights activism during what we’ve termed the “long” 1950s. Although treating disparate nationalities (the USA and West Germany, and Mexico), both panelists argued that the strategies, tactics and language used to propel gay liberation during the late 1960s and 1970s had important precedents in the immediate postwar decades. In this, they join historians like Julian Jackson and Scott Gunther, who likewise argue for the French case (with which, as a French historian, I’m most familiar) that we need to re-read the 1950s as a more politically potent precursor to the activist politics of post-Stonewall gay liberation movements than is often presumed.

Nathan Wilson’s paper, “The Gestapo Lives On: West German and American Gay Activists and the Politics of Memory,” was resolute on two points: first, that gays and lesbians in both West Germany and the United States began deploying linguistic and symbolic references to the Holocaust and the Nazi past in the 1950s (decades earlier than usually thought), and second, that they did so in order to counter what he terms, “the pernicious myth that homosexuals in general and gay men in particular were Nazi-like in temperament and outlook.” Both of these arguments intervene in a very rich body of extant scholarship (by scholars like Eric Jenson, Robert Beachy, and Dagmar Herzog, for example—not to mention new work by Jack Halberstam). While Wilson agreed that references to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals were commonly deployed in the politicized context of gay liberation, he nevertheless maintained that, “in the 1950s and 1960s the events now known as the Holocaust…became an inextricable part of both West German and American gay and lesbian political discourse.” Although he offered little evidence of lesbian engagement, Wilson’s paper provided convincing material from the few “widely circulating” gay magazines in the USA (such as the Mattachine Review and The News) and Germany (Der Weg and Der Ring) to support his claims.

One of the bolder aspects of Wilson’s talk was the way that it challenged those who maintain that memories of the war—and especially the Holocaust—were repressed throughout the West until at least the late ‘60s, if not the 1970s. It is interesting to contemplate the broader stakes of this reframing. Were gays and lesbians unique in using these tropes first in their battles for political and social emancipation (before civil rights activists or 68ers)? And were they, hence, the instrumental avant-garde of a larger social coming to terms with this painful portion of the contemporary past?

Rightly condemning popular assumptions that describe Nazism as a homosexual movement, Wilson’s paper usefully illustrated how during the 1950s and ‘60s uncoupling the links between homosexuality and Nazism—and Communism—was critical for gays and lesbians if they were to advocate for equal rights within the context of the Cold War. Of course, this story may not be as neat as it first appears. Some homosexual men (both within and outside of Germany) were seduced by Nazi ideology (Robert Brasillach—the collaborationist French writer executed for “intellectual crimes” in the purges following the war is just one famous example). And, as the existence of neo-Nazi gay groups in the US, France and elsewhere demonstrates, an unfortunate fascination with fascism persisted amongst some homosexuals in the postwar period. It is interesting to think about how to reconcile such facts (not to mention the near simultaneous emergence within gay culture during the late 1950s of leather bars) with Wilson’s narrative. I hope to hear more from him on these parallel developments, which raise important questions about the connections between such historically slippery concepts as sexual desire, politics, violence, voyeurism, fantasy and debasement.

Ryan Jones followed with a compelling talk on “Homosexual Narratives in the Long 1950s: the Mexican Case.” Jones argued for the existence of diverse, even exuberant arenas of homosexual expression, activity, identity formation and community building in Mexico City during a period that has commonly been understood as exemplified almost exclusively by repression and censure. Offering fascinating evidence regarding how, despite police extortion and a “growing pattern of homophobic vice raids,” his historical subjects resisted arrest, hired defense lawyers, and participated in the creation of gay public spaces throughout the 1950s, Jones made a convincing case for the dynamism of homosexual life in Mexico during the 1950s. Indeed, as he demonstrated, it was precisely this dynamism that became a motivating trigger for escalating levels of police and government repression in the decade that followed—repression that escalated, rather than began, in the aftermath of the 1959 Cassola murder with the crackdown on queer social venues promoted by Mexico City’s mayor (the aptly nicknamed “Iron Regent”).

Jones nuanced his larger claims by reminding us of the importance of resisting imperializing models that uncritically presume that Latin American gay identities (like the global south/nonwest at large) were necessarily what the French would call “suiviste”—their term for a person or country who follows the herd—incapable of initiating their own activist histories prior to the occurrence of the Stonewall riots in New York—rather than capable of self-consciously developing independently of Western influence. His point regarding the fact that Western bias imagines that “sexuality is only a concern when individuals have all other areas of their life in order” is well taken. Indeed, it is gratifying to see such theoretically sophisticated work being undertaken by young scholars like Jones on the history of homosexuality in this relatively understudied part of the world.

That said, despite a professed interest in debunking the “myth that queer life [in Mexico] before the 1970s was limited to the wealthier classes or was largely experienced in isolation,” Jones’ talk mainly described the existence, growth and strength of working-class gay life. Consequently, his work raises questions about whether his narrative is equally applicable to the middle-class. Where exactly were middle-class Mexican homosexuals (over whom heterosexual social codes—and doctrines of machismo—presumably exerted a stronger influence)? If the very existence of middle class homosexuals challenged normative conceptions of Mexican masculinity more than did the homosexuality of an educated elite or the (presumably debauched) working class, then were middle-class Mexican homosexuals more accurately represented by the conservative politics evident in America, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands (from the Matachine society, to the Daughters of Bilitis, or, in France, André Baudry’s Arcadie)? Was there a homophile movement in Mexico, and if so, of what did it consist? Such questions aside, Jones’ intervention was a rich example of precisely how the complex tensions between class, sexuality and national identity can play out in particular historical contexts.

Taken together, both Nathan Wilson and Ryan Jones provided stimulating evidence of the intellectual strength and vitality of new work being produced in the field of LGBT history. Anne Hardgrove of the University of Texas at San Antonio chaired. The pleasure of commenting was mine.

By Marc Stein, York University

This panel encouraged scholars to revisit the history of the sexual
revolution and think more deeply about intersections between race and
sexuality in post-World War Two U.S. history. Political scientist Cathy
Cohen (University of Chicago) chaired the session, which featured papers
by Heather R. White (New College of Florida), Gillian Frank (Stony Brook
University), and Timothy Stewart-Winter (Rutgers University-Newark).
Marc Stein (York University) was the commentator.

Heather White’s paper, which focused on the Council on Religion and the
Homosexual in San Francisco during the 1960s, argued that religious
liberals—mostly white, straight, and Protestant and very much influenced
by the use of religious discourses and practices in the civil rights
movement–played important roles in the homophile movement. The paper
offered a balanced assessment of the contributions and limitations of
homophile religious liberalism and explored the uses and abuses of
race-based analogies by gay and lesbian religious advocates. The
conclusion of the paper suggested that these analogies tended to erase
not only the existence of gays and lesbians of color but also the
existence of gay and lesbian clergy.

Gillian Frank’s paper examined the intersecting politics of gender,
sexuality, and race in Michigan’s debates about busing and abortion in
the 1970s. More specifically, the paper argued that racialized
discourses of child protection and family values were central in local
and national debates about busing and abortion, which in turn helped
constitute the politics of the New Right. Exploring the racialized
aspects of abortion politics and the sexualized aspects of busing
politics, the paper emphasized that conservative discourses of child
protection ultimately proved more powerful than liberal discourses of
child welfare.

Timothy Stewart-Winter’s paper argued that the development of upscale
gay white neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s should
be understood in relation to the city’s persistent patterns of racial
segregation. Borrowing the concept of the “second ghetto” from Arnold
Hirsch, the paper emphasized that this was not Chicago’s first “gay
ghetto” and criticized local Democratic politicians and gay business
interests for encouraging “ethnic-style gay mobilization” and promoting
the development of a predominantly white and upscale gay neighborhood.

“Bodies of Evidence: Queer Oral History Methods”
By Kevin P. Murphy, University of Minnesota
This panel presented work from the newly published anthology, Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2012), edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez.

Boyd, Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University, introduced the central concepts and themes of the book in her introductory presentation, “Close Encounters: The Body and Knowledge in Oral History.” She explained the dual meanings of the book’s title: not only does “Bodies of Evidence” refer to the “body of knowledge created by decades of queer oral history projects” but to the interactions of “sexual bodies” that take place in the collaborative process of the oral history interview. According to Boyd, this embodied interaction is a transformative one, in which narrator and interviewer can form bonds of friendship and political commitment and also negotiate gender and sexual subjectivities. The social space of queer oral history also has erotic dimensions, wherein narratives about sex and desire, as historical forces, are produced through the interactions of the sexual bodies of interviewer and narrator.

Boyd pointed to two kinds of sexual intimacy in queer oral history collaborations: both the intimacy created in the physical encounter between narrator and researcher and “the less predictable intimacy of the sexual feelings that emerge between narrators and researchers as their conversations broach the subject of sex.” Boyd also elucidated the four overlapping themes that structure the volume: silence, sex, friendship and politics.

Roque Ramírez, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, gave a brief genealogy of queer oral history methodology, tracing its origins to the important work of feminist scholars including Sherna Berger Gluck and Susan H. Armitage. In the remainder of his presentation, “Sharing Queer Authorities: Transgender Latina and Gay Latino Meanings,” Roque Ramírez offered a powerful and moving account of the shared authority he established with transgender performer Alberta Nevaeres (aka Teresita la Campesina) in the 1990s. Roque Ramírez focused on the power of bonds of friendship in queer oral history work, narrating the gradual development of an intimate relationship with Teresita that, although not devoid of tension and conflict, eventually “produced a kind of queer reciprocity and a feeling of social and political responsibility.” This intimacy, in turn, influenced his scholarly trajectory as an oral historian attuned to producing analyses of a queer past that attend to multiple nodes of difference, including education, gender expression, sex, sexuality, HIV status, age, and class.

Jason Ruiz, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, addressed the challenges of talking about sex in oral histories. His paper analyzed a compelling oral history interview with Chuck, a gay man and Lutheran pastor who came of age in the 1960s. In the interview, conducted for the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, Chuck shared a number of sexual “secrets” in what Ruiz describes as a confessional manner. Chuck delighted in telling stories of his sexual exploits, especially with regard to cruising for sex with men in public parks in San Francisco and Minneapolis. However, he was careful to describe his enthusiasm for public sex as belonging solidly within the past and made vexed efforts to distinguish himself from those he referred to as “bad gay boys” and “trash.” Ruiz interpreted Chuck’s complex relationship with public sex through the lens of an ascendant politics of homonormativity, in which, in Ruiz’s compelling formulation, “gay and lesbian politics de-emphasized sexual freedom in favor of identity-based civil rights as it became more visible and more viable.”

Daniel Rivers’ illuminating paper, “Race, Class, Oral History, and the Liberation-Era Divide,” demonstrated that queer oral history methodology can foster a complex politics that does not rely on fixed notions of sexual identity. Rivers, a visiting assistant professor at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University, spoke to his experience growing up in a poor Native American lesbian feminist household as providing a shared language — based on an understanding of white supremacy, multiple forms of racism, and an engagement with freedom struggle history — for collaborating with queer African American narrators who raised children in the “pre-Stonewall era.” He offered a rich portrait of the complex lives of same-sex oriented men and women, who, as he put it, “often moved in and out of non-heteronormative communities.” Rivers made the important and productive case that we must see heterosexual marriage as part of LGBT history but that, in order to do so, we must move beyond the binaries constitutive of the post-Stonewall semiotics of the closet. Rivers’ contribution made a very strong case for the power of oral history praxis to disturb and subvert a simplistic linear narrative of sexual liberation that reads presentist assumptions onto the past.

Roundtable: Doing Queer History in the 21st Century

Report by Marcia Gallo, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

At the second CLGBTH-sponsored panel of the 2012 AHA meeting, which convened on Friday, January 6 at 9:30 a.m., approximately 35 people gathered to hear four scholars discuss their explorations in developing accessible queer history – in print, through a museum exhibit, online, and as performance. Organized by Marcia Gallo, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the roundtable’s participants included John D’Emilio, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Jennifer Brier, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and chair of Women’s Studies, also at UIC; Gallo; and E. Patrick Johnson, Professor in the Department of Performance Studies as well as Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. The audience provided insightful commentary and questions.

Legendary gay historian and activist John D’Emilio led off by discussing his experiences writing a local GLBT history column for the Chicago gay weekly Windy City Times. “What does it mean to write history in 1200-word self-contained segments?” he asked, noting that the ways in which historians are trained, and the rewards we receive from our professional colleagues, are not necessarily conducive to reaching audiences of community members. Community audiences may shift from week to week, may not have read other GLBT history, and may have been participants or observers in the events being written about, with very definite opinions about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of our (re)presentations of their lived experiences. He also announced that an exciting new project will bring him further from the printed page into cyberspace: D’Emilio recently assumed the co-director role, with founder Jonathan Ned Katz, of OutHistory.org, launched by Katz in October 2008. They intend a redesign of the site in the near future. http://outhistory.org

Jennifer Brier’s presentation focused on her involvement in working with the Chicago History Museum as guest curator for its LGBT history exhibit, Out in Chicago, featured on Thursday, the day before this session, as one of the AHA’s special tours for conference participants. Brier led the tour, which was the first queer tour conducted in conjunction with and as part of the program of an AHA meeting. For this session, she discussed some of the perils and possibilities of doing LGBTQ history in a “traditional” public history institution. Brier relayed not only the amazing process of putting such history into three-dimensional form and the possibilities for experiential learning this creates but also the substance of the compromises made in bringing the exhibit to fruition in a space that historically shied away from sexual content. Using PowerPoint images of the tour, Brier commented on the ways in which themes, rather than chronology, allowed them to tell stories about queer Chicago from the perspectives of people too often left out of such narratives, especially people of color and trans people. The exhibit Out in Chicago runs at the Chicago History Museum through March 26, 2012.

http://chicagohistory.org/planavisit/exhibitions/out-in-chicago

Tracing her interest in lesbian pulp novelist and poet Valerie Taylor to research conducted at the Gerber/Hart archives in Chicago for her first book, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, Marcia Gallo described Taylor as one of the few lesbians who helped launch the queer paperback publishing phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s and was a radical homophile activist. Taylor spent many years in Chicago and, later, Tucson organizing gay and women’s liberation as well as anti-war and pro-human rights protests. To introduce her in her own words, Gallo read Taylor’s 1979 poem, “The Sweet Little Old Gray-Haired Lady in Sneakers.” Referencing “old pups learning new tricks,” Gallo then illustrated her own challenges in learning how to transform a talk on Taylor given last summer to a small, non-academic audience at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan into an online exhibit at OutHistory.org. She showed images from the Valerie Taylor Photo Album from Cornell’s online Human Sexuality Collection. http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/eguides/manuscripts/7627+/

Chicago-based scholar and artist E. Patrick Johnson has performed nationally and internationally, and published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, and performance. The final presenter, he detailed his experiences creating his one-man show, “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Stories,” based on excerpts from his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – An Oral History, for which he gathered narratives of black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. He described his commitment to utilizing all of the tools at his disposal – verbal, visual, and political — in sharing the stories told him by his narrators, who hail from fifteen different states and range in age from 19 to 93. Johnson made his projects come alive as he showed clips of himself in conversation with one of his narrators, “Countess Vivian,” and then performed as “Freddie,” the self-described “mean little sissy.”

Perhaps the best line of the session came when Johnson related the reaction to his performance from a Southern Baptist minister: “The preacher said, ‘God was there for the first wet vagina. God was there for the first erection. And he said, ‘It is good.’” The same can be said about “Doing Queer History in the 21st Century,” which was a bright, lively, and informative two-hour conversation among queer history-makers working in increasingly varied venues.

“The Queer Politics of Managing Youth and Sex in the 1920s United States”

by Nick Syrett, University of Northern Colorado

This panel explored the ways that reformers, mental health professionals, and reform schools regulated young people in the decade of the 1920s, especially in regards to their sexuality. While the primary focus was on adults’ understandings of childhood, adolescence, and sexuality, there were also crucial moments of youthful agency revealed by the panelists, and of course that was one of the elements that most disturbed the adults who attempted to regulate them.

Don Romesburg, an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University gave a paper entitled “Wayward Sexualities, Delinquent Mentalities, and Early 20th-Century Youth Experts.” In it he focused on the way that experts treated delinquent boys and girls who exhibited queer tendencies, including same-sex sexual behavior, differently from other kinds of delinquent youth. The former group was more likely to be segregated within institutions and be subject to surgical intervention and diagnoses of psychopathy. Treatments for those understood as seducers (as opposed to seduced) were particularly dire. Romesburg provocatively suggests that we need to look to the early twentieth century for the origins of the sexual psychopath; that figure, emerging later in the 1920s, was built on the backs of psychological and penal discourses about incarcerated queer youth in the 1910s and early ‘20s.

I, Nick Syrett, an assistant professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado, gave a paper called “Child Marriage and Contests Over Non-Normative Sexuality in the 1920s.” Using the celebrated case of “Peaches and Daddy” – the 1926 marriage of a 15 year-old working class girl to a 51 year-old NYC real estate magnate – and the work of New York-based child marriage reformers, I argued that concerns over child marriage reflected worries about changes in female adolescent sexuality more broadly. I also demonstrated the differences between reformers’ treatment of girl wives in comparison to their reactions to sexually active single girls: they cast them as victims, refusing to recognize their agency, precisely the problem in the case of the single girls. Both sets of reformers, however, were dealing with the same issue: increasing sexual self-assertion by younger women.

Allison Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Rutgers University, gave a paper entitled “Therapeutic Discipline and Queer Youth in a School for Delinquent Girls, c. 1926.” In a fascinating case study of renowned prison reformer Miriam Van Waters and one of her charges at the El Retiro School for Girls, a queer girl named “Johnnie,” Miller demonstrated the ways that what she calls “therapeutic discipline” was marshaled by prison officials like Van Waters to regulate and to reform the girls who were incarcerated at “schools” like El Retiro. Using Van Waters’ own phrase to describe her interactions with girls at El Retiro and elsewhere, “virile warmth,” Miller elaborates the ways that a form of transference and queer fellow feeling became one of the tools used by Van Waters and other juvenile justice workers in order to do their reform work. In some cases it succeeded so well that Van Waters and others maintained correspondence with former inmates for many years after their incarceration.

Amanda Littauer, an assistant professor of History and Women’s Studies at Northern Illinois University, commented on the papers, prodding each of us to think about some of our claims, and situating them in relation to certain other works in the historiography. A lively conversation then ensued, focusing on changing notions of childhood and adolescence; the figure of the sexual child; the role of parents in regulating sexuality in children; the growth of state intervention in the lives of youth; the specters of intergenerational sex; and the understandings that guided reformers in their work with sexual children. How much did these reformers acknowledge the sexuality of their charges? And how often did they refuse to acknowledge it? These shared themes made for a really valuable discussion, even as the papers themselves took different material as their subjects.

“The Politics of Respectability Reconsidered: Using the Framework of Respectability to Examine Southern Lesbian History.”

By Ben Wise, University of Florida

I was fortunate to be chair of this panel, which included papers by La Shonda Mims, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, Megan Taylor Shockley, a professor at Clemson University, and Janet Allured, a Professor at McNeese State University. Carolyn Herbst Lewis of Louisiana State University delivered the comments.

Megan Taylor Shockley’s paper entitled, “Respectability and Lesbian Motherhood: Sharon Bottoms and Linda Kaufman,” discussed the child custody cases of Sharon Bottoms and Linda Kaufman though the lens of respectability. In the early 1990s, Sharon Bottoms’ mother sued for custody of her grandson because of her daughters’ harmful “lifestyle” as a lesbian, and the Virginia courts, citing the state’s sodomy laws but turning a blind eye to many other custody case precedents, gave her custody in 1996 (despite the fact that she, too, was living in an unmarried sexual relationship, albeit with a man). Shockley detailed the ways Bottoms was portrayed in the media and in the trial, and argued that—in addition to the obvious homophobia at work—the discourse relied also upon portraying Bottoms as too mobile, too dependent on state welfare, and too unpredictable: in short, she was not a respectable woman in terms of class and social comportment. In contrast, Linda Kaufman was an ordained Episcopal priest who sued the Virginia Department of Social Services in 1999 because they halted her attempt to adopt a child, again citing the state’s sodomy laws. But Kaufman, who was portrayed as an “excellent mother,” a stable worker, and a rooted middle class woman, won her custody case. Shockley worked through the nuances of these two cases and raised questions about the role of the state, the law, and the family in constituting not only our cultural values about sex and gender, but also the well being of children.

Janet Allured’s paper, “Fashion and the Performance of Lesbian Feminist Identity,” opened with a compelling vignette: a group of women were boarding a bus to travel to Baton Rouge to fight for the passage of the ERA, and some women were not allowed to board the bus because they were wearing pants (not skirts, not dresses). Allured invited us to consider fashion through the lens of respectability, because that was a major split among activist women in the 1970s: on the one hand, women wanted a platform from which to speak, and appearing “respectable” allowed them to do that (quite literally—women wearing pants were not allowed on the floor of the state legislature). On the other hand, some women (lesbians in particular) viewed this as a capitulation to the demands of middle class, patriarchal values. Allured drew upon theories of fashion and gender performance to raise questions about the nature of activism and women’s political lives. Fashion, she argued, should be interrogated more fully, alongside other aspects of women’s public lives, in order to give us a more complete view of politics, activism, and American gender norms.

La Shonda Mims’s essay, “Activist or Apathetic? Lesbians and Bar Space in the Post WWII South,” examined bars in Charlotte and Atlanta in order to raise questions about homosocial spaces, political discourse, and the nature of activism. In her research in oral histories and queer newspapers in particular, Mims has found evidence of thriving queer bar scenes in the South during the 1950s and 1960s. Her aim has been to figure out what these spaces meant to those who frequented them, and how these meanings did or did not translate into a political vocabulary. Mims argued that in most cases, her evidence suggests that women who went to lesbian or gay bars (most queer bars at the time served a male clientele, since they tended to have more money) seemed to have wanted mainly to drink beer and meet other women. They wanted a place to socialize after a softball game, not a place to organize political networks. Though lesbian bars suggest disrespectability and a segregated social space that is potentially political or pre-political, the women in Mims’ story did not necessarily conceive of their queer identity as a political identity. Mims’ essay provoked a very fruitful discussion of queer activism, the nature of “space” in politics, and the cultural work of homosocial spaces.

On the whole, these papers addressed questions about the viability of respectability as a political strategy among women. Carolyn Herbst Lewis, in her comments, discussed the ways lesbian identity was always mediated by race, class, and gender presentation, and that “respectability” has been only one of many strategies employed by women activists. Whom we call activists, in turn, should be broadened to include not only those demanding entrance into political buildings, but also those whose priorities may be less explicitly political but no less important. The important part of these stories, she noted, was that these were all stories about lesbians fighting against heterosexist laws, policies, spaces, and customs. In some cases they won; in others, there is work yet to be done.

“The Pleasures and Perils of LGBTQ Public History”

American Historical Association Annual Conference
Sunday, January 8th, 2012

Report by Lauren Jae Gutterman

Held bright and early Sunday morning, “The Pleasures and Perils of LGBTQ Public History” was one of the last panels of the 2012 AHA conference. Panelists included Kevin P. Murphy, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota; John D’Emilio, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Don Romesburg, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University; Joey Plaster, a first-year student in Yale’s American Studies Ph.D. program, and Pastor Megan Rohrer, Candidate for Doctorate of Ministry from the Pacific School for Religion. Lauren Jae Gutterman, a doctoral candidate in History at New York University, organized the panel and served as moderator. One of the panel’s overarching themes was the difficulty of engaging public audiences who often desire a purely positive, “It Gets Better” telling of LGBTQ history, while maintaining a scholarly and political commitment to a more inclusive, critical, and complicated queer past.

Kevin Murphy’s paper, “Sexuality and the Cities: Interdisciplinarity and the Politics of Queer Public History,” discussed Queer Twin Cities (2010), a collaboratively written book based on a collection of around 100 oral history interviews with residents of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. While the writers intended their book to reach a public audience, surprisingly Queer Twin Cities has not been reviewed in any of the Twin Cities’ gay newspapers, and its sales have been underwhelming. Murphy pointed to several issues that may be behind the book’s failure to engage the local LGBTQ community members. The book’s tone is uneven: while some essays are clearly and accessibly written, others are more theoretical pieces that could be found in a scholarly journal and may have turned off non-academic readers. Local community members had trouble with the book’s content as well as its style. Murphy explained that two essays in particular inspired angry responses from the community. The first argues that gay gentrifiers in Minneapolis are part of an effort to revitalize the city without challenging racial discrimination or economic inequality, and the second, reveals how Target—a major sponsor of the Twin Cities’ AIDS walk—has helped produce a shortage of public funding for HIV/AIDS medications. Murphy fears the book may have alienated, rather than engaged, its intended audience.

John D’Emilio, Co-Director of OutHistory.org—a website on LGBTQ U.S. history created by Jonathan Ned Katz—addressed similar problems involved in engaging a broad community of LGBTQ public history “consumers.” Some of OutHistory.org’s issues are unique to the project’s digital medium. As many users have conveyed to D’Emilio, OutHistory.org is confusingly designed, which makes its valuable and original content all but impossible for users to access. And while Katz modeled the site after Wikipedia, D’Emilio believes that the MediaWiki platform has fundamentally failed. LGBTQ history is simply too narrow a topic to attract the mass community of users needed to make a wiki website work. These issues can be addressed with a redesign of website (which will hopefully go live in October), but the solutions to other challenges facing OutHistory.org remain unclear. Even though Katz imagined that the general public would be the primary producers of LGBTQ history on the website, in fact, academics are the authors of most of OutHistory.org’s content. Like Murphy, D’Emilio acknowledged that it is not easy for scholars to put aside their professional language—to step outside the “abyss of academic professionalism”—and write for a broader audience and he questioned whether or not it will be possible for a scholarly-driven website to attract large numbers of visitors.

While Murphy and D’Emilio turned a critical eye on their public history endeavors, in “Going Viral with Brick-and-Mortar Queer History: Opening the GLBT History Museum,” Don Romesburg celebrated the unforeseen, international media attention and more than 15,000 visitors the recently opened GLBT History Museum has attracted. Showing pictures of some museum highlights—a collection of matchbooks from gay bars, a sex toy display, an exhibit about the divisions between sex-positive and anti-porn lesbian feminists, the male physique magazines of a Japanese American man interned during World War II—Romesburg argued that the GLBT History Museum is successfully meeting queer museum studies scholars’ demands to demonstrate belonging in multiple and contradictory ways, and to make plain the way structures of power operate. Still, the Museum does face challenges: some of the media attention its opening generated has been hostile, fundraising is not easy, and the Museum would not be possible without its committed corps of volunteers. Romesburg closed by emphasizing the importance of an independent GLBT History Museum that is not beholden to a more powerful, well-established institution that could censor exhibits (seen most recently with the Smithsonian’s “Hide/Seek” show), or enforce a less complex, progressive narrative of gay history.

Finally, in “Queer Histories of San Francisco’s Tenderloin,” Joey Plaster and Megan Rohrer discussed their Vanguard Revisited Project, a collaboration between the GLBT Historical Society and Rohrer’s WELCOME: A Communal Response to Poverty. The Vanguard Revisited Project was both a community organizing endeavor, and an attempt to directly intervene in linear histories of LGBTQ life that leave out those who don’t fit into the conventional story of progress and pride. Vanguard was an organization originally founded in the 1960s by street youth protesting police sweeps, lack of housing and employment opportunities, and laws criminalizing homosexuality in San Francisco. Vanguard Revisited—which met weekly between February and June 2011—encouraged queer homeless youth in San Francisco today to see their lives as linked to those activists who contested social stigma and economic inequality in the city decades ago. Plaster and Rohrer conducted oral history interviews with Vanguard Revisited’s participants, and helped them create a zine that blended the artwork and writing of Vanguard activists past and present. Rohrer stressed the project’s success and longevity, as many of those involved with the project last year still consider themselves to be part of the “Vanguard group” and continue to agitate for queer homeless youth in the shelters and in the Castro.

Though there were only around 10 people in attendance, the papers sparked a lively debate among those queer scholars, teachers, and documentarians present about the urgent need for LGBTQ public history projects and the issues involved in building them. In the ensuing discussion, audience members shared their own challenges practicing public history, and offered suggestions for and critiques of the four projects the panel highlighted. One audience member, in particular, raised questions about the ways that the GLBT History Museum may be collaborating in a repurposing of the gay past for the benefit of the local tourist and real estate industries. Rohrer countered that, surprisingly, the GLBT History Museum has become somewhat of a haven for the queer homeless youth the Vanguard Revisited Project served because their stories and images are highlighted in the exhibits, and because it is one of few places in the Castro where they can get in for free. Perhaps most importantly, this panel pointed to the need for greater collaboration and sustained communication between LGBTQ public historians.

Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Saturday, June 11, 2011

Report by Ellen Zitani

During a Saturday afternoon session, attended by approximately 50 people, we held a roundtable discussion on the methods of doing transgender history. Organized by Shane Landrum, a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Brandeis University, the roundtable’s participants included Landrum; Brenda Marston, an archivist for Cornell University Library’s collection on the history of sexuality; Raymond Rea, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Minnesota State University (Moorhead); and Ellen Zitani, a Ph.D. candidate in European History from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Ellen also served as moderator/chair. Read the rest of this entry →

Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Saturday, June 11, 2011

Report by Alex Warner

I had the honor and pleasure of chairing the first panel on Leather history at the Berks. The panel included presentations by three scholars: myself, Alex Warner (Rutgers Ph.D., 2011), Andrea Zanin (Ph.D. student, York University) and Jennifer Tyburczy (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Rice University), and a response by public historian Sarah Humble (founder of the Women’s Leather History Project). It was followed by a lively question-and-answer period and was well received by those in attendance. Read the rest of this entry →

Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Friday, June 10, 2011

Report by Leisa Meyer

Leisa Meyer, Chair; Participants: Evelyn Blackwood, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Matt Richardson, Leila J. Rupp, Susan Stryker, Ruth Vanita, Martha Vicinus

The “Lesbian Generations” Roundtable was framed by a series of questions posed to all participants, which focused on the definitions and meanings of “lesbian” as an identity, experience, and idea historically and transnationally. Read the rest of this entry →