“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.