“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.