Bodies of Evidence

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Bodies of
Evidence
The Practice of Queer Oral History

Edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and

Horacio N. Roque Ramírez

1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bodies of evidence : the practice of queer oral history / edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez.
p . cm . — (Oxford oral history series)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-19-974273-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-989066-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Gays—United States—History. 2. Oral history—United States. 3. Gays—Interviews. I. Boyd,
Nan Alamilla, 1963- II. Roque Ramírez, Horacio N.
HQ76.3.U5B63 2012
306.76′60973—dc23 2011031590

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
We dedicate this book to Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments xi

INT RODUCTION C LO SE EN C O UN T E RS:

The Body and Knowledge in Queer Oral History 1
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez and Nan Alamilla Boyd

PART I: SILENCE
1 SEX, “SILENCE,” A N D A UDIO TAPE:
Listening for Female Same-Sex Desire in Cuba 2 3
Carrie Hamilton
Oral history by Carrie Hamilton with “Laura,” Havana, Cuba, 2005–2007

2 R EMEMBER IN G PRO VIN C ET O WN :

Oral History and Narrativity at Land’s End 4 1
Karen Krahulik
Oral history by Karen Krahulik with Marguerite Beata Cook,
Provincetown, Massachusetts, January 22, 1997

3 QUEER FAMI LY ST O RIES: Learning from Oral Histories with

Lesbian Mothers and Gay Fathers from the Pre-Stonewall Era 5 7
Daniel Rivers
Oral history by Daniel Rivers with Vera Clarice Martin, Apache Junction,
Arizona, September 2, 2006

4 SPIRALING D E SIRE :
Recovering the Lesbian Embodied Self in Oral
History Narrative 7 3
Jeff Friedman
Oral history by Jeff Friedman with Terry Sendgraff, San Francisco,
California, November 12 and 28 and December 6, 1990
viii | CONTENTS

PART II: SEX

5 TALKING AB O UT SE X : Cheryl Gonzales and Rikki Streicher Tell
Their Stories 9 5
Nan Alamilla Boyd
Oral history by Nan Alamilla Boyd with Cheryl Gonzales, San Francisco,
California, February 1, 1992; oral history by Nan Alamilla Boyd with Rikki
Streicher, San Francisco, California, January 22, 1992

6 PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC HISTORY: On Excavating the

Sexual Past in Queer Oral History Practice 1 1 3
Jason Ruiz
Oral history by Jason Ruiz with Charles W. Paul Larsen, Columbia
Heights, Minnesota, October 16, 2006

7 GENDER, DE SIRE , AN D F E MIN ISM: A Conversation between

Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vázquez 130
Kelly Anderson
Oral history by Kelly Anderson with Dorothy Allison and Carmen
Vázquez, Guerneville, California, November 19, 2007

PART III: FRIENDSHIP

8 FRIENDSHIP, INSTITUTIONS, ORAL HISTORY 1 4 9
Michael David Franklin
Oral history by Michael David Franklin and Dorthe Troeften with Carol,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 24, 2005

9 GAY TEACHERS AND STUDENTS, ORAL HISTORY, AND

QUEER KINS HIP 16 7
Daniel Marshall
Oral history by Daniel Marshall with Gary Jaynes and Graham Carbery,
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, August 6, 2008

10 SHAR ING QU EER A UT HO RIT IES: Collaborating for

Transgender Latina and Gay Latino Historical Meanings 1 8 4
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez
Oral history by Horacio N. Roque Ramírez with Alberta Nevaeres (aka
Teresita la Campesina), San Francisco, California, 1996
 CONTENTS | ix

PART IV: POLITICS

11 DANCING WIT H ST ELLA, LO S AN GE L E S D A U G H T E R S
OF BILITIS PIO N E E R 205
Marcia M. Gallo
Oral history by Marcia Gallo with Stella Rush, Los Angeles, California,
March 15 and 19, May 2, May 21 and 22, November 17, 2002

12 “YOU COULD ARGUE T HAT T HEY C O N T R O L P O W E R ”:

Politics and Interviewing across Sexualities 2 2 0
Martin Meeker
Oral history by Martin Meeker with Quentin Kopp, San Mateo, California,
April 16 and 17, 2007

13 DON’T ASK:
Discussing Sexuality in the American Military and the Media 2 3 7
Steve Estes
Oral history by Steve Estes with Brian Hughes, Washington D.C., January
25, 2005

14 THANKS FOR T HE MEMO RIE S:

A Narrator Asks an Oral Historian for Validation 2 5 3
Eric C. Wat
Oral history by Eric Wat with Ernest Wada, Los Angeles, California,
December 4, 1997

AFTERWORD “IF I KN EW T HE N . . . ” 26 9
John D’Emilio

Contributors 279
Index 283
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Acknowledgments

The idea behind this project began many years ago, while I was working with the
GLBT Historical Society’s oral history project. Everyone collecting oral histories
seemed to have a favorite story about a particular narrator—a lesson learned
that subsequently informed their style and method. These stories were some-
times funny but just as often poignant or sad. Then, in 2005, two things hap-
pened to bring this book into focus. I joined a panel on oral history methods at
the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, where Liz Kennedy and Ron
Grele pushed me to expand my analysis of queer oral history methods. A few
months later I attended a conference in Oregon, where I happened to be staying
at the same middle-of-nowhere hotel as Horacio Roque Ramírez. We had dinner
together and talked for hours about our mutual and overlapping projects. Later,
we excitedly discussed co-editing a book on queer oral history that would
include both oral histories and the sad, funny, poignant stories that oral histo-
rians swap with each other. I couldn’t have found a better person to share this
experience. Thank you Horacio!
Because this book has been years in the making there are too many people to
thank, but I want to quickly mention a few: my wonderfully smart colleagues in
the Women and Gender Studies Department at San Francisco State University,
Deborah Cohler, Julietta Hua, “AJ” Jaimes-Guerrero, Kasturi Ray, and Jillian
Sandell; my extraordinary friends at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco,
Daniel Bao, Marjorie Bryer, Rebekah Kim, Terence Kissack, Martin Meeker, Don
Romesburg, and Amy Sueyoshi; the dean of the College of Humanities at SFSU,
Paul Sherwin, whose consistent support has made all the difference; and the
folks at Oxford who believed in this project and ushered it through, Kathryn
Nasstrom, Nancy Toff, and Sonia Tycko. I also want to thank the contributors to
this volume whose remarkable patience is matched only by their genuine com-
mitment to oral history. Finally, a big thank you to Max, who brings an irrepress-
ible enthusiasm to all things, including his mom’s many projects.
—Nan Alamilla Boyd
xii | ACKNOWLEDGMENT S

Over the course of nearly five years, this project has truly been a collective
effort, and I want to thank all the contributors to the volume, and also those
who submitted proposals for chapters that unfortunately we could not include.
Queer oral history research has really taken off in the last decade or so, as this
volume proves. I also want to express deep appreciation to my amazing co-
editing colleague Nan Alamilla Boyd, whose leadership, camaraderie, and all-
around wise and caring partnership made all the difference. Thanks, Nan!
A 2006–2007 Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar Fellowship at UCLA through the
Institute of American Cultures, the Center for Oral History Research, and the
Chicano Studies Research Center allowed me to concentrate for a year on oral
history pedagogy, theory, and practice, which strengthened some of my ideas
leading to this volume’s Introduction and my own contribution. I want to thank
my UCSB Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies’ former Chair Chela
Sandoval and my Social Sciences Dean Melvin L. Oliver for allowing me to be
away from my home campus for one year. A University of California Office of
the President Postdoctoral Research Fund helped me hire undergraduate and
graduate students to support the extensive procedure of processing dozens of
oral history interviews.
Over the years Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Sherna Berger Gluck, Teresa Bar-
nett, Alva Moore Stevenson, Ricardo A. Bracho, Luis Alberto Campos de la
Garza, Karla E. Rosales, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Julia E. Curry Rodríguez, Linda
Shopes, Kathryn Nasstrom, Rina Benmayor, and Waldo E. Martin have been
caring allies and friends who have nurtured my oral history work, some of which
culminated in this project. I thank them all for being there for me. Finally, my
family has remained steadfast with me—in all our Latino immigrant queer-
ness—with love and care, making all the difference for me to survive and thrive
in what are too often treacherous academic moments. ¡Gracias!
—Horacio N. Roque Ramírez
 INTRODUCTION:
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
The Body and Knowledge in
Queer Oral History
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez and Nan Alamilla Boyd

Queer oral histories begin with an agreement between a narrator and a researcher
to record memories of queer genders, sexualities, and desires. If there is not a
narrator to claim that sexual space of queer historical being and its retelling, and
a queer researcher to hear, record, and draw out yet more details, desire, and
meaning from it, no queer oral history is possible. It is in the spirit of recog-
nizing more than three decades of queer oral history collaborations that we
offer this volume.
Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History asks questions about re-
searchers’ methods. How has queer oral history evolved? Are queer methods dif-
ferent than other oral history methods? What has it meant for narrators to talk
openly with researchers about queer life, especially when queer genders, sexual-
ities, and desires have been protectively hidden or vowed to secrecy? What has it
meant for researchers to focus their work on queer history? The title of our book,
Bodies of Evidence, refers to the body of knowledge created by decades of queer oral
history projects, but it also hints at untold stories and invisible lives. Recognizing
that queer histories often go unmentioned in mainstream historical texts, activists
and scholars have used a variety of methods to gather data and, thus, evidence of
the existence of queer lives. Like the criminal justice stories that dominate popular
television—and from which we draw our title—this book recognizes that an
injustice has occurred and that those seeking justice sometimes have to create new
methods. As such, queer oral histories have an overtly political function and a
liberating quality, which the essays in this collection repeatedly underscore.
Bodies of Evidence also draws its meaning from the concept of body-based
knowing.1 This concept asserts that the sexuality of the body (or bodily desires)
is an important, indeed material, aspect of the practice of doing oral history
2 | INTRODUCTION

work. It argues that the physical presence of sexual or gendered bodies affects
the oral history collaboration. In other words, in addition to documenting the
political quality of the oral history work done by generations of queer narrators
and historians, this volume seeks to better understand the role the body itself
has played in the way queer oral histories have been conducted. Because queer
oral histories are intense interactions, as the oral history collaboration proceeds
the contract between narrator and researcher often evolves into something
more: a bond, friendship, or political commitment. As the following chapters
explain, in the social space of the queer oral history, something transformative
seems to occur as new knowledge is produced.
The editors of Bodies of Evidence conceived of this book as a place where re-
searchers could reflect on their experiences in conducting queer oral histories.
We hoped the collection would reveal methodological patterns, but we also
wanted to include the voices of narrators that together would tell the story of
their collective experiences, so we asked contributors to pair an oral history
excerpt with an original essay that reflected on the practice of oral history. What
emerged, as we began culling through the manuscripts, were four broad themes
that often overlapped: silence, sex, friendship, and politics. Through the paired
interviews and critical essays collected here, these four themes demonstrate what
is queer about queer oral history methods. Bringing together scholars, commu-
nity-based researchers, and a host of narrators, Bodies of Evidence creates a critical
dialogue between narrators and researchers. It also bridges two seemingly minor
subfields in history: oral history and LGBT/queer historiography.2 It is surprising
that these two subfields have not come into more open conversation, given the
latter’s heavy dependence on the former and queer history’s ability to inform
larger theoretical and methodological debates in oral history practice. We hope
this book begins to fill this obvious gap and produces yet more productive ques-
tions and conversations about what it means to employ oral history methods to
explore queer genders, sexualities, and desires.

QUEER OR AL HISTORY’S FEMINIST BEGINNINGS

Although there were certainly many stories being told prior to the 1970s, it was in
that decade that queer oral history methods sprang from a combination of im-
pulses, including methods deployed by the new social history—a people’s history
from below—and the related political, historiographic, and academic move-
ments of second-wave feminism. This feminism, including lesbian feminism,
placed women’s bodies and perspectives at the center of historical renditions of
family life, labor and leisure, cultural production, health and disease, and social
change broadly defined. As part of these movements, Elizabeth Lapovsky Ken-
nedy and Madeline Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian
Community can be seen as a pivotal bridge between historicizing women’s bodies
and genders and the subsequent rise of queer oral history methods. In their
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 3

preface to this groundbreaking oral history–based study of working-class lesbian

cultures in Buffalo, New York, Kennedy recalls the following:
I resolved to use my skills to do useful, woman-centered research for a local group.
At this time my interest in the history of working-class lesbian community was
piqued by the wonderful tales graduate students told about older lesbians in the
bars. After coming out in the context of the feminist movement in 1976, I felt optimis-
tic that I could design a research project with older, working-class lesbians that would
focus on their culture of survival and resistance in the context of twentieth-century
U.S. history, and would meet my new standards for ethical and useful research.3

Coauthor Davis echoes these concerns from a slightly different perspective:

As a result of the influence of a burgeoning women’s movement that gave me a new
understanding of the confluence of economics, sexuality, oppression, and con-
sciousness in the lives of women with whom I had been associating since the late
1950s, I became interested in lesbian history. I also wanted to write an accurate and
compassionate chronicle of the lives of these brave women who had cared for me
so generously when I came out in the mid-1960s.4

A conscious 1970s woman-centered, feminist standpoint fueled Kennedy’s and

Davis’s commitment to “ethical and useful research.” But even more central than
these academic anchor points is the lesbian bar, which figures prominently in
both of their respective stories about the making of their community-based
study. It is in that erotic space that stories were first made and lived, told, and
then retold to a new generation of lesbians, eventually making their way into a
collaborative project coming together at the right time and with the right re-
searchers, fueled by the passion, commitments, and sense of liberation of the
1960s and 1970s. As Davis points out, just as an older generation of lesbians had
given of themselves to a younger generation coming out into a community as a
form of relative safety away from a hostile society, so, too, did Kennedy and Davis
reciprocate that generosity by turning their and their students’ audio recorders on
to engage in the mutually giving commitment that is telling and receiving a story.
Around the same time that Kennedy and Davis were beginning to record
working-class lesbian oral histories, another queer community historian, simi-
larly fueled by the political fervor of the day, began an oral history project of his
own. The late historian Allan Bérubé (1946–2007), an independent scholar,
explains his inspiration to write the history of gay women and men during
World War II as follows:
One day in the fall of 1979, I was sitting on my living room floor in the Haight-
Ashbury District of San Francisco sorting hundreds of World War II letters into
piles by author, date, and place. A neighbor’s friend had salvaged these papers and
photographs from a dumpster when he noticed that they included letters written
by gay GIs. Having stashed them in the closet for five years, he gave them to me
when my neighbor told him how interested I was in gay history.
4 | INTRODUCTION

As I carefully opened each envelope and read the letter inside, I found myself
entering the secret world of gay soldiers who served in the [U.S.] army during
World War II. . . .
Reading those letters . . .changed my life. It made me want to know more about
lesbian and gay GIs in World War II, so I set out to uncover and make public their
hidden histories. Sponsored by the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project,
I put together a slide presentation—“Marching to a Different Drummer”—that was
based on my preliminary research. Using it to spread the word about what I was
learning, raise funds for my research, and find veterans to interview, I presented the
slide show more than one hundred times throughout the United States and Can-
ada, sponsored by local community groups, churches, veterans’ organizations, uni-
versities, and informal networks of friends. . . .5

There are several critical facets in Bérubé’s story about how his pioneering work
came to being. First, the initial historical artifacts needed to be rescued literally
from the trash by an interested party. These rescues have been crucial for docu-
menting gay male and male-to-female (MTF) transgender histories, especially in
the early 1980s, when the advent of AIDS added yet another stigmatizing layer of
either denial or conscious disavowal by blood relatives of those dying from
AIDS. Second, an informal personal network among gay men facilitated trans-
ferring the rescued documents to yet another interested party, Bérubé, who
began to consider the historical potential of what he then held in his hands.
Third, as a grassroots community historian not beholden to an academic history
department—but also without access to its financial resources—Bérubé was able
to conceive and carry forth a multidimensional and engaging public history and
oral history project that itself generated yet more original documents. Finally, a
diversity of groups, institutions, and networks—including those bridging the
academy with the larger public, such as the Gay and Lesbian History Project of
San Francisco, established in 1978—supported his initial endeavors. That his
project began outside the academy and not from within its disciplinary regula-
tions speaks to the challenges he and others interested in researching and writing
queer history then faced. But this outsider research position also afforded him
the opportunity to venture into an innovative historical project without the for-
mal policing of overly rigid historiographical standards that privilege the papers
and collections of the literate and the archived.
Kennedy, Davis, and Bérubé were not the only feminist oral historians articu-
lating a new history—herstory, rather, to be semantically accurate about the pe-
riod. In the summer of 1977, barely two years into its existence, the feminist journal
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, based at the women’s studies program at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, devoted its first ever special issue to “Women’s
Oral History.”6 Initiated by Sherna Berger Gluck and Joan Jensen in the form of a
letter to the Frontiers collective in August 1976, the 1977 special issue (edited by
Gluck and Jensen) featured twenty-six women who individually and jointly
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 5

contributed oral history–based articles on topics ranging from trade union orga-
nizing to southern women, suffragists, and Chinese women.7 But it was Gluck’s
own gutsy contribution that set the methodological and conceptual stage for years
to come. Her provocatively titled essay, “What’s So Special about Women? Wom-
en’s Oral History,” spoke to the political moment of the 1970s and the multiple
exclusionary practices inside and outside the academy. Gluck’s pithy methodolog-
ical dictum on behalf of women’s oral histories retains its edge even today:

Women’s oral history, then, is a feminist encounter, even if the interviewee is not
herself a feminist. It is the creation of a new type of material on women; it is the
validation of women’s experiences; it is the communication among women of dif-
ferent generations; it is the discovery of our own roots and the development of a
continuity which has been denied us in traditional historical accounts.8

What remains useful to this day, more than three decades after her original
analysis, are the multiple levels of methodological and conceptual intervention
Gluck names in her essay.
Gluck’s claim that oral history among women is a “feminist encounter,” even
if the narrator has no personal or political investment in feminism per se, speaks
to the researcher’s commitment to challenge structures of power. Also, while
early narrators often deemed themselves unworthy of an audio recording, those
who worked to identify and contact narrators, often setting up and transcribing
recordings without any institutional support, have been quite articulate about
the liberationist urge that drove their early work in the field. Indeed, queer and
feminist oral history methods commit to the creation of new material, new
sources, and new records. Unlike researchers who choose to work with special
collections of well-preserved documents, those who study women, queers,
and—we might add—other subaltern groups such as communities of color and
migrant workers by and large have had to start from scratch: where no docu-
ments or acid-free folders existed, researchers set out to create them.
Creating a new vision (and version) of history requires a leap of faith. It
means taking narrators’ voices and oral history methods seriously. While the
self-understood and often unspoken validation of narrators’ subjective perspec-
tives does not entail taking every recorded declaration as factual truth, it does
require that researchers commit to listening carefully for what narrators’ recol-
lections reveal about their time and place in history. Gluck invokes the different
generations that become involved in the living method of oral history. Indeed,
there is a tacit mutual responsibility for elders to sit, reflect, and recall while
younger generations commit to recording, processing, and analyzing the pre-
vious generations’ historical knowledge. Finally, and related to the last feature,
oral history with subaltern or historically undervalued communities entails
making historical and generational discontinuities explicit. It necessarily dis-
rupts historical paradigms that do not or will not acknowledge the existence of
bodies, genders, and desires invisible to previous historical traditions.
6 | INTRODUCTION

Only six years after that first influential volume, Frontiers went at it again with
its 1983 special issue, “Women’s Oral History, The Second Decade.”9 Straddling
oral history’s then still precarious methodological position in the academy and
its more accepted and appreciated intervention into recording women’s every-
day historical lives, the journal sought to move the method forward, to go
beyond what Susan H. Armitage referred to as the surprise and euphoria of dis-
covery. Armitage explains:

There will always be a place for personal discovery, especially in the classroom.
Oral history is a wonderful teaching tool. Students are usually excited and fre-
quently amazed by the women they interview. When women “speak for them-
selves” about the activities and concerns of their own lives, they usually talk freely
and fully, revealing lives of purpose and significance. . . . That is a natural place to
start. It is important to celebrate the compelling stories that women tell about their
lives. But the truth is that those lives are not unusual; we just thought they were!
Furthermore, we can do much more than simply illuminate neglected lives. We can
push ahead to the harder job of analysis and connection. To move from the single
story to the whole picture requires that we be systematic and critical—while
remaining caring and appreciative. We need to move ahead without losing touch
with the personal and meaningful discoveries of women’s oral history.10

Armitage’s call to “be systematic and critical—while remaining caring and ap-
preciative” speaks well to the efforts behind and goals for Bodies of Evidence.
Recognizing that since the late 1970s oral histories with queer women and men
have in many ways created the field of queer history, we now take a break from
recording and transcribing and, with the many contributions that comprise this
book, shift our analytical lens to an engaged and critical analysis of the narrative
structures, living exchanges, ways of remembering, detailed contents, and inter-
actions across differences in our work with queer oral histories.
Finally, a pivotal 1991 publication serves as an important precursor to this book,
bringing to light the importance of racial and national difference as critical cate-
gories of analysis across a wide range of gendered subjects, geographies, and cul-
tures. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice
of Oral History heeds Armitage’s earlier call to move beyond the pleasant method-
ological “surprise” of discovering new narratives in oral history.11 Along with their
contributors, Gluck and Patai take up the more challenging space of critical social
analysis by acknowledging the field’s internal contradictions and some of its es-
sentialist assumptions. “Most striking, in retrospect,” wrote Gluck and Patai,

were the innocent assumptions that gender united women more powerfully than
race and class divided them, and that the mere study of women fulfilled a commit-
ment to do research “about” women. Although we had questioned the value of
traditional androcentric methodology, not all of us had yet learned to be skeptical
of the claims for a single feminist methodology. Our assumptions had the effect of
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 7

foregrounding gender while obscuring the possible centrality of other factors—race

and class, in particular—in the identity of our narrators. To define feminist schol-
arship as work done by, about, and for women had seemed simple. Experience,
however, demonstrates that these three little words positioned the scholar within a
complex web of relationships, loyalties, and demands.12

Exploring language, authority, research dilemmas, and community advocacy,

Women’s Words moved the field further as it reflected on the internal structures of
the research experience, without doing away with the centrality of women’s
words themselves. Indeed, Women’s Words was a welcomed and necessary inter-
vention into a still undeveloped oral historiography not yet explicitly conscious
of gender, sexuality, and the body.13

THE BODY AND KNOWLEDGE

The body, and how and what it remembers, should be central to all oral history
work, and Bodies of Evidence critically examines the role the sexual body plays in
the production of queer oral histories. For instance, the body’s memories are
particularly significant for narrators drawn to discussions of sexual conscious-
ness, erotic desire, and gender expression. Not at all the same, these fields of the
body can be sites for productive memory and dialogue about pivotal queer mo-
ments of the lifespan: the first childhood memories of feeling “different”; the first
encounter with a mirror of the self, that is, another “different” body in public that
communicates back an unspoken yet felt affiliation; or the first instance when a
queer body makes explicit its desires to a listening or viewing public. Indeed,
queer oral history as a genre works in many ways to generate a series of intelli-
gible (or predictable) sexual signposts that mark the queer body’s passage through
time. Interestingly, and as several contributions to this book reveal, these sign-
posts can become contested spaces during the oral history where narrator and
researcher engage in a dance between generating explicit speech about sex, sexu-
ality, and pleasure, and the no less valuable but more highly coded articulations
about how sex and desire have shaped individuals and communities in history.
In Karen Krahulik’s chapter, for instance, narrator Beata Cook eludes Krahu-
lik’s questions about Cook’s unidentified sexual identity. Similarly, narrator
Rikki Streicher in Nan Alamilla Boyd’s chapter resists direct conversation about
sex. Perhaps because queer oral histories have the added burden of document-
ing what we can argue have been until recently undocumented (or undocu-
mentable) bodies, there is no guarantee that all aspects of queer experiences will
emerge through the oral history exchange. Indeed, it would be foolish to expect
anything more than partial or fractured histories to emerge—and this is a limi-
tation but also the promise of queer oral history work. The gulf between tropo-
logical scripts that engage narrators in a predictable articulation of queer desire
or identity, for instance, and the near absence of scripts that code experience
8 | INTRODUCTION

outside or beyond culturally intelligible meanings (non-gay-identified same-sex

sexual expressions, for instance) makes knowledge production a rich but diffi-
cult project.
Storytelling, the most basic performative ingredient to oral history, is an
embodied practice. As such, it is a collaboration between at least two bodies
seeking expression through voice and gesture to create and document public
meanings. Despite the almost unquestioned assumption that oral history
must involve what we can refer to as an “auditorily legible” exchange between
a narrator and an interviewer, other types of recordings with differently abled
people, including those unable to speak, see, or hear, challenge this assump-
tion. A useful example of what new technologies (such as instant messaging)
can accomplish to broaden the meaning and possibilities for “oral history” is
the University of California, Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office’s Artists
with Disabilities Oral History Project. Of particular note are the interviews
Esther Ehrlich conducted with the playwright and performance artist Neil
Marcus, who has dystonia, by using a method that mixed instant messaging
at two side-by-side computers with interspersed spoken questions and
answers.14
Jeff Friedman explores another such methodology in this book by expanding
the concept of “verbal data” to include embodied performances through move-
ment and dance. In the process of producing formal oral history documents,
Friedman argues that nonverbal data provide alternative storytelling modes and,
thus, alternative representations of reality that allow nonnormative narrative
structures to emerge. In this way, queer storytelling can be an ideal conduit for
expanding living expressions of erotic desires because it permissively allows the
narrator’s body to “speak” in different ways. At the same time, queer storytelling
engages researchers in new modes of methodological and historical interpreta-
tion. The desire for new queer voices, both those of narrators and researchers, is
pivotal for generating projects, theses, conferences, and publications, such as
this one, where readers can examine yet more closely the relationship between
queer embodiments, narratives, and desires.
In addition to generating new modes of communication, the bodies of
knowledge that queer narrators and researchers often contend with during their
collaborations can be painful or uncomfortable in unpredictable ways. More so
than is the case for nonqueer narrators, women and men who experience same-
sex desires or transgender identities risk opening up themselves to vulnerability
or trauma during an oral history exchange. Even after discussing in detail what
it is that researchers and narrators seek from an oral history interview, there is no
way of predicting what will emerge in the dialogue and what kind of feelings
may be attached to a particular memory. Along these lines, Ann Cvetkovich’s
oral history work on public feelings and lesbian AIDS activism offers insight
into how queer oral history can be an especially apt tool to document the rela-
tionship between trauma, activism, and public memory:
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 9

Queer community histories share something with testimony, the genre that brings
together trauma studies and oral history. Testimony has been viewed by some as an
impossible genre, an attempt to represent the unrepresentable. Trauma poses limits
and challenges for oral history, forcing consideration of how the interview process
itself may be traumatically invasive or marked by forms of self-censorship and the
work of the unconscious. Gay and lesbian oral histories, as forms of insider ethnog-
raphy, have much to contribute to this project, including a sense of the complexity
of gathering information about sexual intimacy that can be applied to the study of
trauma’s emotional intimacies.15

Forms of collective knowledge that build on memories of disease, trauma,

and death have the potential to compound the narrator’s trauma in remem-
bering and also traumatize the researcher in listening, especially as researchers
are officially left with the evidence of the affective methodological exchange. As
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez has explored among queer Latina and Latino narra-
tors in San Francisco, recording queer life and death in the context of the 1980s
and 1990s AIDS epidemics has a double-edged quality; it allows a grieving com-
munity to address its current state of mourning, but it also risks the reenactment
of traumatic and painful feelings of loss.16 Just as memory work can offer the
opportunity for queer narrators to connect with previous generations, it can also
bring back to emotional life the feelings associated with unjust loss and death.
Sexual embodiment, as an aspect of body-based knowing, is crucial to under-
standing queer oral history methods because it flags important sociosexual sign-
posts in time, it generates new modes of sometimes nonverbal communication,
and it invites conversation about sexual trauma, vulnerability, or pain. But
sexual embodiment also invites pleasure and the possibility that sexual feelings
will emerge during the queer oral history exchange. There are at least two levels
of sexual intimacy in queer oral history collaborations: 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. As such, queer oral histories are
especially productive but potentially risky methodological encounters.17 An-
thropologist Esther Newton offers a candid assessment of how she as a queer
scholar maneuvered her self-identity in relation to her research subject. “My
research experience has been fraught with sexual dangers and attractions that
were much more like leitmotifs than light distractions.”18 The sexual, Newton
continues, cannot simply be “done way with,” as if it is not part of the method-
ological exchange; instead, she argues that it adds a level of intimacy-as-trust,
with both narrator and researcher being more to one another than is the case
during an exchange between two oral history collaborators who simply do not
understand what it means to occupy similar positions of sexual objectification:

By the “erotic dimension,” I mean, first, that my gay informants and I shared a very
important background assumption that our social arrangements reflected: that
10 | INTRODUCTION

women are attracted to women and men to men. Second, the very fact that I have
worked with other gays means that some of the people who are objects of my
research were also potential sexual partners. Partly because of this, my key infor-
mants and sponsors have usually been more to me than an expedient way of get-
ting information, and something different from “just” friends. Information has
always flowed to me in a medium of emotion, ranging from passionate—although
never consummated—erotic attachment through profound affection to lively in-
terest, that empowers me in my projects and, when it is reciprocated, helps moti-
vate informants to put up with my questions and intrusions.19

Particularly important in Newton’s description of the “erotic dimension” she

experienced with one narrator, Kay, are the cross-generational linkages that
bridge a mutual lesbian/queer identification. When a twenty- or thirty-year-old
researcher goes into a community to record memories with significantly elder
narrators (forty years her senior, in Newton’s case), the research equation is even
trickier as it positions the researcher—much more so than the narrator, though
this is often not acknowledged—as less capable and less experienced in han-
dling what may be the uncomfortable and unsettling space of negotiating erotic
attractions in an ethical, responsible way.
Generationally and erotically structured oral history collaborations are even
more accentuated when narrators and researchers belong to historically distinct
queer periods: before/after liberation movements, before/after AIDS, before/
after the availability of effective antiretroviral medications, and so on. Jason
Ruiz, in this book, analyzes the complexities of charting one man’s sexual his-
tory as he moved between vastly different and generationally informed attitudes
toward public sex during the course of the oral history. “There were stark con-
trasts between what he did with his body for sexual pleasure, what he thought
about sex, and how he talked about sex as a pastor and public figure. In other
words, he quite literally did not practice what he preached.”20 In his comments,
Ruiz notes the intimate nature of cross-generational oral history work but also
the sexual politics at play in determining permissible modes of speech. Simi-
larly, Daniel Marshall develops a theory of intergenerational queer kinship via
the oral histories he conducted with activists Gary Jaynes and Graham Carbery,
key figures in the 1970s Australian Gay Teachers and Students Group and con-
tributors to the 1978 collection Young, Gay, and Proud.21 Marshall argues that
cross-generational activism, particularly actions that involved students, were
“made impossible by profound and generalized fear about any contact between
homosexual adults and children.”22 In other words, the overtly politicized social
fear that teachers would seduce students thwarted cross-generational activism,
and the specter of sexual impropriety diffused the liberationist promise of cross-
generational mentoring and sexual freedom. Similarly, the intimate nature of
cross-generational oral history work and explicit talk about queer sex invites a
certain amount of sexual energy into the oral history exchange that, for some
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 11

researchers and narrators, produces intimacy and trust. As several contributors

acknowledge, these methodologically useful feelings are risky and difficult to
maneuver during the oral history exchange, but they are also difficult to discuss
as a methodological practice. The specter of sexual impropriety makes sexual
feelings (and the intimacies that accompany them) a vital but virtually unspeak-
able aspect of queer oral history work.

ETHIC AL, POLITIC AL, AND AC ADEMIC C HALLENGES

Conducting queer oral histories requires researchers to navigate a particular set
of ethical, political, and academic challenges—and this dramatically affects the
methods that researchers develop and deploy. It is still a relatively recent oppor-
tunity for scholars to be to able to research, write, and produce a history of queer
sex and genders without the risk of academic sanction or public reprisal. Wom-
en’s and gender studies programs; the few existing queer studies academic
majors, minors, and emphases; interdisciplinary fields such as racial/ethnic
studies and American studies; and the case-by-case opportunities in disciplines
such as sociology, history, and anthropology—these interventions still struggle
to seek and maintain institutional grounding and support that goes beyond the
volunteer efforts of researchers and scholars committed to these subjects.
In the United States, the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (CLGH) has
been an officially recognized affiliate of the American Historical Association
(AHA) since 1982, and it has grown to become a critical network for researchers
in the field of LGBT/queer history, many employing oral history methods.23 The
U.S.-based Oral History Association (OHA) has served as yet another annual
vehicle for bringing together scholars of LGBT/queer history more explicitly
engaged with oral history methods. For its 2007 conference in Oakland, Califor-
nia, for example, the OHA had ten presentations, panels, exhibits, and a recep-
tion on the uses of oral history in queer history—a record number. Still, neither
the useful CLGH panels and professional activities over the several decades nor
the more queer-inclusive OHA conferences in recent years have generally been
forums to engage in close and critical reflection on how queer historical inquiry
and oral history methods inform one another. As a result, many researchers have
the feeling of going it alone or reinventing the wheel. Without scholarly atten-
tion (or, in an ideal world, tenure lines) dedicated to queer history and its
methods, researchers attracted to the field face isolation and burnout, and meth-
odological approaches can be individualistic, idiosyncratic, or scattershot.
The challenges faced by researchers wanting to do queer oral history are mir-
rored by the challenges faced by many queer narrators: the heavy social stigma-
tization of queer desires, the active state policing of queer behaviors and public
expressions, the medicalization and psychiatric classification of bodies feeling
and expressing queer meanings, and the religious intolerance of queer and non-
nuclear family units and forms of spiritual kinship. As more and more grounded
12 | INTRODUCTION

historical scholarship continues to elucidate, these active forms of exclusion,

repression, and censorship do not manifest equally across time, regions, com-
munities, racial groups, and nations. These historical, political, and social forces
occur unevenly, often in contradictory ways, but also in conjunction with active
and subtle forms of counteraction by queer people, individually and collec-
tively, challenging repressive systems in their blood families, churches, schools,
and institutions of employment.
In this book, many such stories are told. Vera Martin, in Daniel Rivers’s chap-
ter, defends the custody of her children against accusations that lesbians are
unfit parents; Laura, in Carrie Hamilton’s chapter, recounts how she negotiated
same-sex love affairs during the Cuban Revolution; and Brian Hughes, in Steve
Estes’s chapter, uses his position as a war hero to publicly decry the U.S. mili-
tary’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Again, the liberating quality of many queer
narrators’ stories reveals the intensity and drama of the oral history exchange—
and the bond often formed between narrator and researcher.
To go public—through a recording—with the memory of one’s and others’
erotic bodies continues to be a challenging position to take. Beginning with the
activist-researchers and community-based historians who were energized by the
liberationist zeal of the 1960s and 1970s, there continue to be individual young
scholars both in and out of the academy eager to carry out queer community
history work. But this enthusiasm to seek out and connect with potential narra-
tors and begin to record oral histories often comes crashing against distinctly
queer roadblocks. Many of the recorded interviews John D’Emilio carried out
for his influential 1983 book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, were those of
pre-Stonewall era activists, women and men quite willing to go on the record
and narrate their struggles.24 For them, the historical record itself was part of
their ongoing struggle against queer criminalization and pathologizing. Less vis-
ible queer women and men, however, are not as easily reached by even the most
ambitious oral historian. For Bérubé’s work on World War II, while the majority
of interviewees (his term) recorded in the 1980s chose to use their given names,
a third opted for a pseudonym.25 For their 1993 community history, Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold, Kennedy and Davis go to great lengths to protect the
given-name identity of their forty-five narrators, even when some of them
desired not to hide. Writing from the historical moment of late-1980s and early-
1990s United States, the authors explain that

Research in the lesbian community—finding narrators, archiving oral histories, or

writing a book—raises immediately the problem of protecting the narrators’ iden-
tities. We had to be extremely careful in order for people to feel comfortable about
introducing us to others and supporting our work. But also for our own peace of
mind. Although the lesbian and gay movements of the past fifteen years have
achieved a less repressive social climate, the recent rise of right-wing social move-
ments and their homophobic positions, in the context of knowledge about the
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 13

persecution of gays and lesbians during the 1950s, convinced us that we did not
want a file with the names of our narrators.26

For Kennedy and Davis, recording the stories of women who occupied a small
and insular community required that they be extra careful about not betraying
confidences. However, Kennedy and Davis also raise the specter of the unfore-
seen future, informed by the past, where assumptions of social and political
progress cannot be taken for granted. In this regard, queer oral history cannot
afford to ask questions solely about the past and its narration but also about
how public memories in the present continue to have a politically implicated
life in the future.27
The fact that we do not all occupy the same historical time period and its at-
tendant politics of identity in relation to sexual consciousness makes queer oral
histories methodologically tricky. Just as repressive forces have not always been
evenly distributed across time and place, neither are forms of acceptance or sup-
port equally present today (nor are they likely to be in the future) for queer
women and men. Across all racial, national, religious, and economic groups,
there are different degrees of both acceptance and rejection: within our blood
families, at our employment sites, within our particular neighborhood, town,
city, school, and so on. For individuals in communities already historically
undervalued and stigmatized, taking on yet another stigmatized social identity
can add quite an additional burden to their existence.
It should not be surprising, then, that there is comparatively little oral history
research on U.S. queer communities of color and that white researchers have
been consistently unsuccessful in reaching these community members.28 The
exceptions to this pattern have most often come from the efforts of queer com-
munity scholars of color themselves reaching out to “communities of their
own.” But even in these so-called insider research experiences, there are other
vectors of social position, experience, and identity to negotiate. Even as insiders,
queer scholars of color continue to have problems when interviewing across sex,
gender, language, national origin, or immigrant status.29
Writing as a Bangladeshi American woman with political ties to multiple
communities of color in the United States, Naheed Islam cautions that in
researching everyday forms of racism experienced but also perpetuated in the
Bangladeshi community of Los Angeles, she encountered the methodological
paradox of how to acknowledge both forms of exclusion. “Scholars facing such
dilemmas,” she observes, “may choose to remain silent about how minority
communities can participate in and reproduce racist ideologies. Ultimately such
silences subvert an analysis and understanding of how racism operates and how
racialized systems of domination and inequality are maintained.”30
Queer oral histories still have quite a task ahead in terms of addressing the
differential investment queer narrators have in being out in terms of their desire
when compared with their working-class, butch/femme, national, or racial
14 | INTRODUCTION

ethnic identifications. Necessarily privileging the erotic, the sexual, and the
queerly gendered in terms of identifying potential narrators, queer oral history
work can benefit from an earlier generation of women’s/feminist oral history
that often failed to appreciate how women (and men) were not “essentially”
united along a sex/gender axis. We hope that the contributions in our collection
bring to light how language, class, gender, nation, and racial/ethnic positions
work alongside sexuality and desire to make queer oral history an intervention
not solely along the lines of sexual identity or queer visibility. Queer oral histo-
rians should be especially cognizant of internal stratification, given that we
engage with communities who have experienced and continue to experience
multiple challenges around AIDS, racialized gentrification, drugs and alcohol,
economic displacement, nationalist exclusions, and different gender phobias.
The queer oral history methods we explore here have taken place in a distinct
historical moment. In the academy, some universities and disciplines, such as
history, sociology, and anthropology, and especially interdisciplinary fields,
such as women’s and gender studies, comparative ethnic studies, and LGBT/
queer studies, have slowly opened up more intellectual and political space to
allow students and faculty to engage living narrators about their stories. Still, the
individual experiences of these scholars and the support they may or may not
find for their projects depend on the particular culture of their departments and
programs—the degree to which, for example, a thesis or dissertation committee
member will allow oral histories to be a primary source of evidence. Every form
of documentation or evidence is culturally constructed and open to interpreta-
tion within the context of its creation, whether a police report, a court transcript,
a novel, or an oral history. Though none of these is any more or less valid than
the others, many scholars still place more critical faith in police reports or court
transcripts and render more seemingly subjective documents like oral histories
to a secondary evidentiary status. By foregrounding a variety of nuanced and
carefully crafted discussions of method in relation to the production of queer
historical narrative, this book seeks to illustrate the rich and documented poten-
tial of oral history as a source for larger discussions about the relationship
between fact and fiction, truth and memory, self and subjectivity.

ABOUT THIS COLLECTION

Collectively, the contributors to this book represent more than three decades of
engaged oral history research with hundreds of women and men across varied
sexualities, genders, regions, nations, and political economies. We offer a variety
of approaches in our analyses, but as contributors, we each put oral history nar-
ratives at the center of our research agenda. Each contribution, as a result, begins
with a selection of an edited oral history transcript collected by the researcher,
followed by the researcher’s critical analysis of method and meaning. The book
is organized into four overlapping themes: silence, sex, friendship, and politics.
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 15

Silence, as a theme, surfaces in most of the book’s fourteen essays. Karen Krahu-
lik’s essay, for instance, carefully analyzes how narrators assert their stories, in-
cluding and omitting key aspects of the data put forward for the historical
record. Krahulik mines a particularly potent interview in which she struggled to
“get the narrator” to name her sexual identity, but the narrator refuses. Through
silence, Krahulik analyzes what she calls “the arts of remembering,” posing dif-
ficult questions about the meaning of historical memory. Also in this section are
chapters by Carrie Hamilton and Daniel Rivers that grapple with the silences
imposed by political repression and homophobia. Hamilton’s oral history work
stems from a project that documents the Cuban Revolution, and Rivers’s work is
based in a larger project on the history of lesbian mothers and gay fathers. Both
authors argue that silences imposed by political repression are accessible, to a
certain extent, via oral history methodology. The final chapter in this section, by
Jeff Friedman, questions the limits of oral history as a verbal genre, arguing that
dancers’ nonverbal communications suggest new ways of thinking about sexual
embodiment.
The second thematic section, on sex, presents a paradox. Although sex is
clearly an important aspect of queer social and political life, several researchers
note narrators’ reluctance to engage in candid discussions about sex and its
meanings. Two chapters specifically address this phenomenon. Nan Alamilla
Boyd analyzes the reluctance of lesbian narrators to engage with questions about
sex and sexuality in the oral histories she conducted as part of a project on the
history of pre-Stonewall San Francisco. Her close reading of two different oral
histories reveals narrators’ fears of addressing sex too directly, seeming sexually
improper, or stretching the limits of acceptable speech. Boyd argues that narra-
tors’ reluctance can be read as a symptom of the neoliberal uses of LGBT oral
history projects and their association with academic discourse. Jason Ruiz,
writing about the contradictions between sexual and social worlds, analyzes a
narrative that uses frank talk about sex to stage larger questions about social
propriety, moral goodness, and sexual pleasure. Ruiz also turns to an analysis of
neoliberal discourse to argue that epistemologies of sex construct queer subjec-
tivity in contradictory ways. An essay by Kelly Anderson makes an important
methodological intervention by inviting two prominent and outspoken lesbian
feminists, Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vázquez (who is also the lover of the
researcher), to talk with each other about the sexual politics of lesbian feminism
in the 1980s. By staging the oral history as a conversation and directly addressing
sexual politics, Anderson enables Allison and Vázquez to bounce their ideas off
each other and, perhaps, speak more candidly about sex than they might have
otherwise.
The third section of the book—on friendship—offers numerous insights
about the interpersonal dynamics at play during oral history interviews. Interest-
ingly, this section also underscores the community-based and activist impulses
of many researchers. The first contribution, by Michael David Franklin, provides
16 | INTRODUCTION

an analysis of how friendship between narrators and researchers can exceed the
limits of institutional review board (IRB) control. In his essay, Franklin analyzes
his relationship with Carol, a male-to-female (MTF) transvestite who, late in
life, comes to identify as transgendered. Franklin’s friendship with Carol mirrors
Carol’s vivid friendship experiences with other transvestites who met secretly as
part of Virginia Prince’s heteronormative Transvestia clubs in 1950s Minnesota
and Wisconsin. Friendship, Franklin argues, is an important aspect of queer oral
history because it functions as “excess,” moving beyond the grip of institutional
(in this case, IRB) control to a place where researchers can collaborate more ef-
fectively with narrators toward the goal of knowledge production. Two other
chapters on friendship echo these concerns. Daniel Marshall’s interviews with
two early gay liberation movement activists from Sydney, Australia, poignantly
describe the friendships, collaborations, and mentoring relationships that devel-
oped between queer kids and queer adults in the 1970s and 1980s. Marshall rea-
sons that cross-generational relationships are crucial to any future-focused queer
culture-building project, and the institutionalized fear of cross-generational re-
lationships, especially between gay men, has worked historically as a repressive
force. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez’s chapter pushes these insights further by de-
scribing a years-long process of interviewing and collaborating with the late MTF
transgender mexicana ranchera singer Teresita la Campesina. In his essay, Roque
Ramírez discusses shared authority by highlighting the complex negotiations
and intimacies that surfaced through an extended oral history process and also
by exploring how transgender Latina and gay Latino histories compete for atten-
tion in the struggle for queer memory.
The fourth and final section includes a variety of approaches to the political.
Two chapters use close readings of a single oral history to frame an analysis
about the formation of early gay and/or lesbian political organizations. Marcia
M. Gallo’s essay on the formation of the Daughters of Bilitis, a post–World War
II lesbian civil rights organization, argues that it was only through her five-year
research-based relationship with a central narrator that she was able to under-
stand the race and class dimensions of early lesbian organizing. A second chap-
ter focuses on an oral history by historian Martin Meeker with Quentin Kopp,
an important California state politician and a key player in early gay and lesbian
civil rights legislation. Here, Meeker explores the ethics of being closeted while
interviewing and argues for the value of cross-sexuality and cross-ideology inter-
viewing. A chapter by Steve Estes on the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”
policy circles back to issues of silence and political repression by tracing the
impact of this silencing military policy on the life of one gay Gulf War veteran,
Brian Hughes, who famously helped rescue Jessica Lynch and then used his ce-
lebrity to criticize “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Finally, Eric C. Wat’s chapter on the
motivations behind cross-racial relationships, specifically Asian gay men who
sought, through the 1980s, sex with white men (also known as “rice queens”),
centers on the politics of racial identity formation for Asian gay men who
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 17

participated in Los Angeles’s Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG). Wat’s

searing self-examination of his own discomfort with one narrator’s desire for
validation acknowledges the limits of shared authority in queer oral histories.
Wat’s insight into racial formation and the power dynamics of researcher-
narrator collaborations also functions as an appropriate conclusion to the book
in that it underscores the power relations that structure all oral history work.
Power relations are a fundamental aspect of queer oral history collaborations,
and each of the essays collected here grapples in some way with the inequities
that play out during the oral history process.
Oral history narratives’ multilayered textures and meanings make qualitative
analyses of sexuality and gender in history that much more important to under-
stand. Closely mined and diligently listened to, oral histories—including their
many silences—can bring personal affect, individual significance, and personal
memory to bear especially on sensitive themes and experiences such as sexual
consciousness, gender identity, and sex acts. How these aspects of human exis-
tence come to bear on what are considered historical events has become increas-
ingly important as social history and cultural theory cross paths.
As the work of current and future queer oral historians takes form, we need
to recall Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy’s wise words about the conceptual and
theoretical possibilities for queer oral history, and how to move it forward: “In
arguing . . . that there is a tremendous amount to be learned by fully exploring
the subjective and oral nature of oral histories, I have also suggested that the
‘empirical’ and the ‘subjective’ should not be falsely polarized. They are fully
complementary to one another. I am convinced that gay and lesbian oral history
is at a point where, to grow, it needs to fully embrace the subjective and oral
nature of its documents. By doing so its ‘empirical’ goals are not compromised
but expanded.”31 Echoing these words, we hope this volume inspires a next gen-
eration of queer oral historians by providing concrete examples of what has
been made possible by queer oral history collaborations—and what has not
(yet).

Notes
1. On the concept of body-based knowing, especially as it is discussed in queer and trans
theory, see Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006); Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Gayle Salamon, “Boys of the Lex: Trans-
genderism and the Rhetorics of Materiality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12,
no. 4 (2006): 575–97. See also Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction
to Transgender Studies,” in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies
Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006) 1–17.
2. The acronym LGBT (the most pervasive, as well as Anglo- and Euro-centric globally) is meant
to describe nonheterosexually identified women and men: lesbian women, gay men, bisexual
women and men, and transgender women and men who may be gay, bisexually, or lesbian
identified but also heterosexual or straight. The acronym, emerging from conceptual, histor-
ical, and political assumptions that these individual identity-based categories are fixed and
static, fails to capture a great deal of queer erotic life and gender expressions, especially when
18 | INTRODUCTION

we examine those that existed prior to the identity-based civil rights era and social movements
dependent on a public politicized identity. It also fails to capture many of the identities and
expressions emerging in nonwhite communities and non-European or European-descent na-
tions and populations. “Queer” was meant to respond to some of these conceptual limita-
tions by connoting sexual and gender transgression more broadly, but it carries its own
Euro-centric historical formation. The term (still derogatory to some while liberating for
others) was born out of the more in-your-face (rather than mainstream and assimilationist)
grassroots political struggles in the late 1980s and early 1990s in large urban centers in the
United States, among mostly white young adults generally affiliated with the multisited polit-
ical group Queer Nation. “Queer” was then taken up by some (queer) academics mostly in
the humanities (and in particular English, rhetoric, and the arts), eventually emerging into the
intellectual corpus now typically recognized as “queer theory,” which itself has numerous
manifestations and origins. It is important to note that, historically, academic queer theory
followed the grassroots innovations, not the other way around. We also note a serious limita-
tion in this anthology—and more generally—that the B in the acronym LGBT is left unex-
plored, not because we do not believe in bisexual practices and identities but because few
narrators or researchers take up an exploration of bisexual practices or politics in this work.
Two useful discussions of some of the political and historical implications of LGBT and queer
are Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii–xxxi; and Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Who Is the Subject? Queer
Theory Meets Oral History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (May 2008): 177, note 1.
3. Liz Lapovsky Kennedy, “Preface,” in Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis,
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge,
1993), xv.
4. Madeline Davis, “Preface,” in ibid., xvi.
5. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Women and Men in World War II
(New York: Free Press, 1990), ix–x. For the beginnings of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay
History Project (SFLGHP), see Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of North-
ern California, “MTF Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966–1975,” GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 367–68, note 2. According to Estelle
Freedman, the SFLGHP began at Allan Bérubé’s apartment in the late 1970s sometime
between fall 1978 and winter 1979, with original members being Bérubé, Jeffrey Escoffier,
Freedman, Lynn Fonfa, Amber Hollibaugh, Gayle Rubin, Bertie Yusba, Joanne Castillo, Eric
Garber, Robert Epstein, Frances Reid, Elizabeth Stevens, and, when in the city conducting
research, John D’Emilio. Freedman, personal communication, August 4, 2008. For more on
the life and significance of Bérubé and the now-renamed GLBT Historical Society, see John
D’Emilio, “Allan Bérubé’s Gift to History,” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 15, no. 3 (May–
June 2008): 10–13.
6. Sherna Berger Gluck and Joan Jensen, eds., Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2, no. 2
(summer 1977). In England, the journal Oral History dedicated a “Women’s History Issue”
also in 1977.
7. Sherna Gluck, Joan Jensen, and the Frontiers Editorial Collective, “To Our Readers,” Fron-
tiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer 1977): iv–v.
8. Sherna Gluck, “What So Special about Women? Women’s Oral History,” in ibid., 5. An
updated version of Gluck’s original essay is “Women’s Oral History: Is It So Special,” in
Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., Handbook of Oral History
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006), 357–83.
9. “Women’s Oral History Two,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 7, no. 1 (1983).
10. Susan H. Armitage, “The Next Step,” in ibid., 3. See also Susan H. Armitage, ed., with Patri-
cia Hart and Karen Weatheron, The Frontiers Reader: Women’s Oral History (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 2002), which brought together several of the original contributions
from the 1977 and 1983 special issues, including an updated and very useful exchange
between Armitage and Gluck.
11. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral
History (New York: Routledge, 1991).
 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS | 19

12. Ibid., 2. Two other anthologies, not emerging centrally from the academy, are worth noting,
given their inclusion of autobiographical narratives and also oral history excerpts. Cherríe
L. Moraga’s and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s now classic third world feminist collection, This Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002, 3rd
ed. rev.; first edition by Persephone, 1981), intervened into much of the white essentialism
and middle-class bias of the women’s and (lesbian) feminist movements in the United
States. The more lesbian-specific collection by Juanita Ramos, ed., Compañeras: Latina Les-
bians (New York: Latina Lesbian History Project, 1987; 2nd ed. by Routledge in 1992), simi-
larly included oral histories, although not from the more critical perspective called for by
the second generation of women’s oral historians.
13. Allessandro Portelli’s influential The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and
Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) addressed
“women” sporadically in its various essays, but neither gender or sexuality surfaced in either
of the other two influential and useful oral history collections by the early 1990s: Ronald
Grele, ed., with Studs Terkel, Jan Vansina, Denis Tedlock, Saul Benison, and Alice Kessler
Harris, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (New York: Praeger, 1991, 2nd ed. rev.; orig-
inally published in 1975 by Precedent); and Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the
Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1990). Portelli furthered his gender analysis more explicitly in his second collection of es-
says. See especially “Luigi’s Socks and Rita’s Makeup: Youth Culture, The Politics of Private
Life, and the Culture of the Working Classes” in his The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and
the Art of Dialogue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 232–48. In a similar vein,
the fourth volume of the International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, dedicated to
“Gender and Memory,” brought together a group of essays exploring femininities and mas-
culinities in relation to memory and silence. Because this volume was never available in
paperback, unfortunately also bringing to an end this brief Oxford University Press series, it
did not have a large circulation. Still, its wide-ranging and critical contributions are useful
here. See Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, eds., International Year-
book of Oral History and Life Stories: Gender and Memory, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
14. See http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/artistsdis/ and www.storylineshistories.
com/pdfs/OHA_Spring07_p3.pdf. See also “Telling Stories Reveals Power to Transform,”
OHA Newsletter 41, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 3.
15. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 167.
16. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “Memory and Mourning: Living Oral History with Queer Lati-
nos and Latinas in San Francisco,” in Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History
and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 165–86.
17. See Don Kulick and Margaret Willson, eds., Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in An-
thropological Fieldwork (New York: Routledge, 1995).
18. Esther Newton, “My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork,” in Newton,
Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), 250, emphasis in original.
19. Ibid., 250–51, emphasis in original. It is worth considering to what degree Newton’s useful
analysis of the “erotic dimension” compares with the insider-insider (but also insider-out-
sider) status collaborators of color (queer or not) conducting oral history work share in
white-/European-dominant societies. See Maxine Baca Zinn, “Field Research in Minority
Communities: Ethical, Methodological, and Political Observations by an Insider,” Social
Problems 27, no.2 (December 1979): 209–19.
20. Jason Ruiz, chapter 6 in this book.
21. An Autonomous Collective of the Melbourne GTSG, Young, Gay and Proud (Melbourne: An
Autonomous Collective of the Melbourne GTSG, 1978).
22. Daniel Marshall, chapter 9 in this book.
23. In December 2008, the CLGH voted to change its name to the Committee on Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgender History (CLGBTH).
20 | INTRODUCTION

24. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in
the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
25. Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 286–87.
26. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 18–19, 396–97, notes 67–70.
27. Sherna Berger Gluck has made critical observations about the potential dangers of carrying
out oral history research in the post-9/11 (U.S.) world, specifically about making available
online interviews with particular narrators whose subjects in the present or at some point in
the future may be deemed dangerous, subversive, and/or antipatriotic and have the poten-
tial of garnering the attention of the investigative and policing apparatuses of the state.
Gluck, “Oral History on the Web: Promises and Perils,” Oral History Association confer-
ence, Little Rock, Arkansas, October 26, 2006.
28. See Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 24–25, and Bérubé, Coming Out
under Fire, 285–86. Of the 55 interviewees’ names listed in John Howard’s “Southern queer
history,” there is no indication of how many of the interviewed men and women are of
African American descent, although we know from the text that several of them are. See Men
Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 307–9.
Similarly, Steve Estes does not specify a racial or ethnic breakdown for the fifty-eight U.S.
military veteran women and men he interviewed for his Ask & Tell: Gay & Lesbian Veterans
Speak Out (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 255–61.
29. These include E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2008); Eric C. Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community:
An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Horacio N.
Roque Ramírez, Memories of Desire: An Oral History from Queer Latino San Francisco,
1960s–1990s (forthcoming); María Cora, “Nuestras Auto-Definiciones/Our Self-Definitions:
Management of Stigma and Identity by Puerto Rican Lesbians” (unpublished M.A. field
studies report, San Francisco State University, 2000); Trinity Ordona, “Coming Out To-
gether: An Ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander Queer Women’s and Transgen-
dered People’s Movement of San Francisco” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Santa Cruz, 2000); and Karla E. Rosales, “Papis, Dykes, Daddies: A Study of
Chicana and Latina Self-Identified Butch Lesbians” (unpublished M.A. thesis, San Francisco
State University, 2001).
30. Naheed Islam, “Research as an Act of Betrayal: Researching Race in an Asian Community in
Los Angeles,” in France Winddance Twine and Jonathan W. Warren, eds., Racing Research,
Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 59.
31. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, “Telling Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-
Stonewall Lesbian History,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History
Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 281.
PART I
SILENCE
This page intentionally left blank
1 SEX, “SILENCE,” AND
A U D I O TA P E
Listening for Female Same-Sex
Desire in Cuba
Carrie Hamilton

Oral history by Carrie Hamilton with “Laura,” Havana, Cuba, 2005–2007

Between 2005 and 2007, I conducted three interviews with a Cuban woman named
Laura.1 The interviews were part of the “Cuban Voices” oral history project, under
whose auspices a group of eight Cuban and three British researchers collected stories
from some one hundred Cubans across the island about their lives since the revolution
of 1959.2 Our narrators were young and old, black, mestizo,3 and white, female and
male, urban and rural dwellers, religious people and nonbelievers, supporters and de-
tractors of the revolution. There were also a number of narrators whose primary sexual
relationships were with people of the same sex. As scholars with diverse backgrounds in
the humanities and social sciences, the interviewers have followed their own research
interests in analyzing the interviews. My work focuses on narratives of sexuality in the
interviews,4 and my analysis of Laura’s interviews here forms part of this wider
project.5

SEPTEMBER 2005
Interview with Laura by two interviewers, Nina and Carrie, at Laura’s house.

NINA: Your skin is black, the same as my partner’s; . . . have you had any diffi-
culties because of your skin color?
LAURA: Not so far. At least it’s never limited me from doing anything. . . . I was
checked out by Counter Intelligence but no, there was never any problem
because I’ve always led a quiet life, a normal life. I’ve participated in the CDR
[Committees for Defense of the Revolution],6 in normal activities, without
drawing excessive attention to myself. But yes, my family has also been a quiet
family, no conflicts or problems. . . .
24 | SILENCE

NINA: And your partners [compañeros], have they always had your skin color?
LAURA: No.
NINA: They’ve been interracial relationships?
LAURA: No, no, no. I’ve never had a compañero the same color as me. Fairer, more
or less mulato, but I’ve never been in love with a compañero of my skin color.
[. . . ]
NINA: How do you perceive . . . people who aren’t your, who aren’t heterosexual?
For example, homosexual?
LAURA: No, no, no, no. I have always had that sensitivity. . . . I’ve never had prej-
udices. I’ve never been a person with prejudices. I’ve always, I say I treat every-
one with their defects and their virtues. People who are homosexual and
behave properly in society, I don’t have any kind of taboo. And I have homo-
sexual friends, women as well as men. . . . They’re normal people, the same as
anyone else. As long as they maintain respect. Because depraved people, that’s
something I don’t like at all.
[. . . ]
CARRIE HAMILTON: And do you have a compañero? Can’t you come home with . . .
LAURA: He comes here as a mate but not as a relationship.
CARRIE: You have to have the relationship outside your house?
LAURA: My mother. My mother is, she’s selfish. . . .
NINA: Have you had stable, legalized relationships or only—
LAURA: No, I’ve had stable relationships.
NINA: Legally married?
LAURA: No, no. Not legally. No, not the signature, no. I haven’t. I don’t really
agree with the paperwork. But well, yes, stable, for some years, of course. Nine
years. Quite a bit for the times we live in. . . .
NINA: And have you never been pregnant or had a termination?
LAURA: No, no, no. I’ve never got pregnant. I’ve always protected myself. . . .
CARRIE: [. . . ] if you speak to your female friends . . . about the topic of contra-
ception. . . . Do women take responsibility for protecting themselves, or do
the men also take some? . . .
LAURA: No. Look. The campaigns that have been around here for some time say
that the couple should protect themselves. But it’s always the woman who has
most to lose. So the woman is the person who has to protect herself and
demand that men use protection. . . . But well, there are lots of young girls,
and when I talk to them they tell me no, in the case of condoms, no. “It’s a
problem for you young girls, because now we have AIDS.”

D E C E M B E R 2006
Interview with Laura and one interviewer, Carrie, in a friend’s house in Havana.

CARRIE: . . . you say you’re a religious person. . . . Can you talk to me a bit about . . .
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 25

LAURA: Yes. Of course. I practice the Yoruba religion . . . what is popularly known
here as santería. . . .
CARRIE: And you were raised in a Catholic family, or at least your mother was . . .
LAURA: She is. She is because, even though she doesn’t go to church, she’s
Catholic.
CARRIE: And were there other people in your family interested in, your religion?
Santería?
LAURA: At home we all practice Yoruba. All of us. . . .
CARRIE: And in your neighborhood are there many people who practice this
religion?
LAURA: Yes, of course. . . . All over Cuba . . . What a shame you’re leaving so soon,
because [a friend] is celebrating her saint day on January third. . . . They’re
lovely ceremonies. I like them. And they don’t interfere with my life at all.
CARRIE: I was going to ask you about that because we know that there was a time
when religion was not well regarded by people committed to the revolution,
right?
LAURA: That was a big mistake. But well. They say that to rectify is to be wise. . . .
And that’s been rectified.7 And well, things are more or less getting better. But
in this country, well. Cubans have been taught to have a doble moral.8 I’d say
even three morals. . . . Up to three and four or five, too. And I’m not going to
talk to you about that now. I’m not going to make your life difficult.
CARRIE: No? But have you not experienced any kind of prejudice? Comments
among your Party comrades, for example?
LAURA: The thing is my Party comrades, the vast majority of them also practice
santería.
CARRIE: . . . Is this all over Cuba or specifically in your neighborhood or at your
work? Or do you think many Party activists are religious?
LAURA: They practiced it before, but couldn’t say it because you would be sanc-
tioned. They adopted a doble moral. That happens with religion, and it hap-
pens with other things, too.
CARRIE: What kind of things do you mean by that? [Pause] This is all anony-
mous. Well, say what you want, there’s no pressure, but remember what I told
you the last time. . . .
LAURA: It happens like that as well with the problem of homosexuality. That’s
why I say that dobles morales exist and triples morales. You’re not repudiated as
such if you’re a homosexual now, and nothing comes down on you, as long
as you maintain a conduct that’s in accordance with the [revolutionary]
process. But it’s always poorly regarded, people talk about it, point at you. In
some things, I’m telling you, things have got better. But it’s like everything.
Because each person has their sexual conduct as they want to have it. I have a
lot of respect for that. But well, it’s something that hasn’t been achieved. I
don’t think much has been achieved in that. But, well, as long as the person
behaves well, I think they deserve respect.
26 | SILENCE

[. . . ]
CARRIE: And are you with someone right now? Do you have . . .
LAURA: Yes, I have my partner.
CARRIE: Yes? And how long have you been together?
LAURA: Almost eleven months.
CARRIE: Well, tell me something. How did you meet? What are they like?
LAURA: Ah! Now you want to know too much. Well, we’d known each other for
some time already. What I didn’t know was that there was an interest. Very
frank. We Cubans are very open, and one fine day he challenged me. He said
to me, “Girl, you don’t drink, you don’t dance, you don’t do anything.” I was
left like that, thinking well so-and-so’s a bit cheeky. But well, that’s where it
started and now we’ve been together a number of months; everything’s really
good. Not as we would like because he lives in his house and I in mine. But
well, we’re struggling along.
CARRIE: And where does he live?
LAURA: . . . Close by. So it’s someone with a very happy character. That helps me
because, I’m a bit more sedate, you know? . . . I like listening to music. But I’m
not much of a dancer. And he loves dancing, parties, beer. And since we don’t
have anything in common, it seems that’s what makes the thing work. . . .
CARRIE: I don’t know whether we talked the last time about how you feel as a
woman, if you’ve ever felt any kind of machismo in your life yourself, or if
you’ve seen it or how you see the relationship of women’s equality today.
LAURA: Look. Women have had a position in this society that they’ve never
ever had. But machismo, we ourselves foment machismo inadvertently. I
have three nephews, they’re boys, the three boys, my sister’s sons are all
boys. What happens? “Leave the house and go play in the street.” Women
are the ones who stay at home. Without meaning to, we strengthen ma-
chismo. But this society has changed a lot. Now men take children to child
care, pick them up from school, take them to the doctor. In that sense, so-
ciety has advanced quite a bit. My father, never. He paid for the clinic, but
that was my mother’s problem. In my house, I never saw my father cook.
Cook or help out. I see my brothers-in-law cooking, washing, cleaning,
everything, washing the dishes, everything. Not my partner. My partner is
lazy.
CARRIE: He’s lazy.
LAURA: Lazy. [Laughter] He doesn’t do anything. You have to . . .
CARRIE: Ah no?
LAURA: You have to do everything for him.
CARRIE: And who does it? His sister?
LAURA: Well, his sister. Because sometimes I take the clothes to my house, and I
wash them for him at my house, and I iron and that, but he’s lazy, lazy, lazy.
Bad habits.
CARRIE: Bad habits. But you see changes, nonetheless?
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 27

LAURA: Yes, of course. When I tell him that I don’t feel well, I have a pain some-
where, he does it. But he always has a way of looking for the weak point so
people do things for him or at least cooperate. My brother is the same. My
brother is super machista, but since he doesn’t have anyone to do things for
him, he ends up doing them himself. Because I don’t do anything for him. I
don’t cook for him or iron for him or wash for him or anything.

D E C E M B E R 2007
Interview with Laura and one interviewer, Carrie, at the house of a friend of
Laura’s.

LAURA: I feel good in my relationship. It helps me quite bit, emotionally.

[Pause] And yes, I feel good. At work I’ve had some positive successes. In
my work life, yes, I feel good. Everything’s good. Everything’s good, without
problems.
CARRIE: Tell me a bit about, about the relationship you began, I believe, not
much before the last interview. Just over a year ago. . . .
LAURA: Two years ago. . . . This relationship, up till now, is getting stronger and
stronger. We’ve adapted to each other’s ways of being. Things are moving
along. There are always things. We’re two people, aren’t we? Each one with her
things. But things are getting better. They’ve got better. There are always little
things, aren’t there? But well. That helps relationships too. [Pause] But there’s
a lot of exchange. And arguments; we’ve never argued. . . .
CARRIE: You told me last year, when we did the interview, that you were in a re-
lationship, a new relationship. But nevertheless, you talked about your
partner—now you’re laughing [laughter] because you know where I’m
going—You talked about your partner as if she were a man. And now it turns
out that your partner is a woman.
LAURA: Uh-huh.
CARRIE: So, I’d like to ask you, first, if you’ve had other relationships with other
women before that?
LAURA: Yes, I’ve had some other experiences. Not many, not many. But yes,
there’ve been other relationships.
CARRIE: And with men as well.
LAURA: Yes.
[. . . ]
CARRIE: Let’s see. There’s been a lot of talk about the history of repression against
homosexuals in Cuba. .  .  . Did you have an awareness that that was hap-
pening, that people talked about it, when you were young, or did you find out
later?
LAURA: This has always been regarded as something ugly in society. It’s never
been well received.
28 | SILENCE

CARRIE: Homosexuality?
LAURA: Yes, in the general sense. I don’t have much experience with that. Since I
never had relations with people with that, with that inclination. In the environ-
ment where I was raised, nobody talked about that. So there are a lot of things
you don’t know about. As you start to see things a bit, you start to learn a bit,
you start to realize about all the situations that have happened. But there’s
always been a lot of denial. In that sense, they seem to accept you. At work. But
there are comments behind your back. Unpleasant things. When they realize, of
course. They never see you as an upright person. . . . They always say, “Hey, look
at Florilla. Look. She likes women.” “He likes men.” They always say bad things.
. . . If you say it, you’re looking for trouble. You can’t live like that. That’s why
there’s a doble moral. I already talked to you about the doble moral, the triple
moral, up to four morals. They force you to live with the doble moral. Because if
you want to live, as I am. Because they renounce you. Your family. Your work.
Everyone. . . . And you can’t live like that. You feel bad. [Pause] You feel bad.
Because Cubans. We’re like that. There are even people who appear to accept
homosexuals. Because they have family members or because they have that in-
clination themselves. But they still speak badly about them. You know? But
how is that? Unfortunately, that’s how it is.
CARRIE: And have you had some experiences like that? You, personally? Negative
comments. . . .
LAURA: As a person? No, because I don’t publicize myself, as they say.
CARRIE: So your workmates don’t know?
LAURA: No, no. They may think it, but. . . . It’s my personal life. . . . If they find
out, they’ll talk about me too. . . . You have to have a double life. . . .
CARRIE: Well, we’ve talked a bit about the difficult aspects, of having a certain
sexual orientation, haven’t we? But you obviously also enjoy your relation-
ship with your partner. Have you also been able to enjoy a community of
female friends who also have relationships with women?
LAURA: Yes. You always know someone. Not a lot. Because, I’m a bit serious, you
know. I don’t have tons of friends in this world. My partner, yes. She’s also
been longer than me. She’s older. She’s not bothered. She’s not bothered if
people know. She doesn’t watch out a lot. . . . She’s much more open. Her
children know. Her mother knows. . . .
CARRIE: If you had to define your sexual identity, how would you define yourself?
LAURA: Normally. I feel good. Normal. For me it’s something very normal. I
don’t reject men, no way. But, I prefer women.9

Commentary

This essay is located at the crossroads of oral history and the history of
female same-sex desire.10 Scholars in both fields are interested in silences.
Oral historians, influenced in large part by psychoanalysis and literary theory,
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 29

have argued that what remains unsaid in an interview is often as important

as that which is spoken,11 while scholars of female same-sex desire and les-
bian history have sometimes used the tropes of “silence” and “invisibility”
to explain the absence of women who love women from the historical
record.12
In my title, therefore, silence sits in quotation marks between sex and audio-
tape to signal one aim of this essay: to explore the relationship between the
supposed silence surrounding female same-sex desire in Cuban history, on
one hand, and the usefulness of silence as an analytical concept for oral his-
tory and the history of female same-sex sexuality, on the other. Additionally,
with its debt to Steven Soderburgh’s 1989 film Sex, Lies and Videotape, my title
replaces lies with silence to make the point that omissions in oral histories
have a range of meanings beyond forgetfulness or deliberate falsification. I
focus on themes of absence, representation, and revelation in relation to Lau-
ra’s sexuality. In so doing, I aim to problematize the concept of silence and
suggest ways that listening to tales of female same-sex desire in Cuba can
contribute to the growing transnational scholarship on female same-sex
sexualities.
The themes chosen as the focus of the “Cuban Voices” project—race, gen-
der, class, religion, and sexuality—reflect both key social questions in the
history of the revolution and the researchers’ individual research interests. In
this context, sexuality was largely associated in our project with the contro-
versial history of male homosexuality and institutionalized homophobia
since 1959. This meant that interviewers were conscious from the outset of
the political nature of sexuality, but that sexuality was somewhat narrowly
defined as something specifically relevant to interviews with homosexual
men.13 Thus in the early stages of the project a number of men in homo-
sexual relationships were interviewed, whereas few women in same-sex rela-
tionships figured among the narrators.
To redress this imbalance, in 2006 and 2007, I interviewed ten women in
Havana and Santiago de Cuba who either identified as lesbians or had had
sexual relationships with other women. I met these women through contacts
with the lesbian discussion group at the Cuban National Centre for Sexual
Education (CENESEX) in Havana. Laura did not originally form part of this
subset of narrators; she had been selected by one of the Cuban researchers
who knew her through her local activism in the Communist Party in a poor
neighborhood of Havana. On Laura’s request, I subsequently arranged to
interview her alone, and this led to a friendly relationship between us.
During my final field trip to Cuba in December 2007, I met with her again,
and this time Laura introduced me to her girlfriend. Since I was in the course
of conducting interviews with women in same-sex relationships, I inter-
viewed Laura a third time, this time introducing questions about her sexual
relationships and identity.
30 | SILENCE

I first interviewed Laura in September 2005, along with a white female Cuban
colleague, Nina. The interview took place in the small front room of Laura’s
home in Havana. She was living with her eighty-seven-year-old mother, who
was present but did not speak during the interview. The two women also share
the house with Laura’s older brother.
Born in 1958, just six months before the revolutionary victory of January 1,
1959, Laura opens the interview by describing herself as someone “born with
the revolution.” She comes from a provincial black middle-class family
strongly committed to the revolution. Unlike many of the narrators, Laura
does not emphasize the poverty or humility of her childhood. But she does
attribute much that is positive in her life to the changes brought by the revo-
lution, either directly or indirectly. For example, the opportunity to study in a
boarding school (beca) gave her independence as an adolescent, and the
people she met in this period of her life have remained friends. Laura returns
to this period and these friendships time and again in this first interview. She
has been an activist since her youth—first in the Communist Youth and later
in the party. She takes this activism seriously and dedicates a lot of time to it,
although she complains of long meetings and prefers to get down to concrete
tasks. But her criticisms are reserved for individuals rather than the political
system itself. Similarly, she denies that she has ever experienced racism, at
work or elsewhere, even though Nina insists on this point more than once.
When I ask her what the revolution means to her, Laura replies with a stock list
of improvements in the areas of education, health, and economic equality.
Laura works for a state firm and claims that, notwithstanding Cuba’s economic
crisis and the thriving underground economy, she survives on her small state
salary.
In many ways, Laura’s story sounds like a success story of the revolution.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of her political commitment, yet her
contemporary situation is also a reflection of some serious social problems, in
particular, the ongoing housing crisis. The revolution gave Laura the opportu-
nity to become independent and not have to rely on her family. But both her
family’s traditional values and the problems with housing have kept her tied to
her family in middle age. At the end of the interview, Nina comments that Laura
is reticent about her personal relationships. Laura attributes this to her conserva-
tive upbringing. I agreed that missing from the interview is an exploration of
more personal relationships, as well as a sense of whether Laura sees contradic-
tions in Cuban society and politics.
I decided to try to interview Laura again on my next trip to Cuba. When I
called her, she agreed to a second interview but asked that I meet her without the
Cuban researcher and that the interview not be held in her home. She indicated
that there were things she had not said in the first interview because her mother
and brother had been at home. I arranged for Laura to come to a friend’s house
on one of my last days in Havana. This second interview is remarkably different
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 31

from the first. Whereas the year before Laura had spoken little about personal
issues, this time she goes into much more detail about her life, in particular her
religion. Once again, she speaks at length about the days in the boarding school.
Laura refers often to the fact that she is the youngest child. This may have
something to do with her identification with her generation (and would also
explain the nostalgia for the boarding school days), but it also seems to repre-
sent freedom in contrast to the restrictions and frustrations she identifies with
her family. Laura defines herself as someone who doesn’t like to have taboos in
her life, as someone liberal, especially in her respect for people with different
sexual identities, and contrasts herself in this regard with the rest of her family
and, indeed, Cuban society generally.
Following this interview in December 2006, Laura requested that the next
time I came to Cuba I call her so that we could meet as friends. When I returned
to Havana a year later, I arranged to go to the beach with her and a gay male
friend. I met them at the train station and when another woman, Nachy, showed
up, Laura told me this was her girlfriend. As we walked along, I laughed and
asked Laura why she hadn’t told me this before, but she didn’t offer a clear
answer. Later at the beach, when Laura and I were swimming together, I asked
her if she’d always dated women. “Usually,” she replied. Her family may know
but doesn’t say anything, and they are not supportive.
I interviewed Laura a third time at the house of Tania, another woman who
had accompanied us to the beach. Tania has a small and cozy place not far
from Laura’s house. As of a few weeks before the interview, Laura had been
sleeping in Tania’s living room; she had had an argument with her mother,
and though she was still going “home” every day to prepare food, by seven or
eight o’clock each night she was at Tania’s. Sometimes Nachy, who also lived
nearby, came to stay. After dinner, Tania went to her room, and Laura and I
chatted for a few minutes. I asked her about the second interview transcript,
which I had given to her the previous day. She said she’d read it—twice—and
didn’t have anything to add. The third interview lasted almost an hour. Laura
answered all the questions I had from the second interview but didn’t expand
a lot. I asked her about her partner and about her previous relationships with
women. She spoke of her relationship but only briefly, never mentioning
Nachy’s name. She did speak at some length about discrimination and nega-
tive comments about homosexuals (she used this term frequently to refer to
others, but never the word lesbian).
After the interview, we continued talking, and Laura spoke more directly now,
referring specifically to the problem of discrimination. She mentioned the
importance of the release of the film Strawberry and Chocolate in 1993 in helping
to change attitudes toward homosexuality in Cuba. She talked about the younger
generation, claiming that they are freer and take on a sexual identity more easily.
Earlier I had mentioned the lesbian wedding I had attended at CENESEX,14 and
Laura said it wasn’t the first—she had heard of others, but usually with one
32 | SILENCE

woman dressed in white and the other as el novio (the groom). After a while,
Laura accompanied me to a main road, where we said farewell before I caught a
communal taxi back to my Havana lodgings.
In the excerpts that accompany this essay, I have edited the translations to
render them more easily readable, but I have left in the interviewers’ questions
to convey the sense of the interviews as intersubjective processes. I have also
described the location of each interview. Although many histories based on oral
history interviews leave this information out, in this case the location and the
questions asked are fundamentally important to understanding how Laura pre-
sents herself and her past. For example, in the first interview Nina introduces
interracial relationships using the masculine Spanish word compañeros. Until
this point, Laura has made no mention of her intimate relationships, and Nina’s
question assumes that Laura is heterosexual. All further mentions of Laura’s
partners in this interview—by Laura, Nina, and myself—are in the masculine.
Later in the first interview, Nina introduces the issue of homosexuality by as-
suming that this is something different from Laura’s own sexual identity. In
both cases, the narrator’s sexual identity is constructed through the interviewer’s
question and the subsequent course of the discussion. In the second interview
sensing a hesitation on Laura’s part after I asked her to elaborate on the problem
of the doble moral15 in Cuban society, I remind her that the interview is anony-
mous. Laura replies that homosexuality, like religion, is subject to “two morals”
in Cuba. It is impossible to know whether Laura would have given me more
details without this coaxing. However, both Laura’s hesitation and my interven-
tion underscore the fact that naming the doble moral is a delicate and possibly
dangerous act.
Furthermore, Laura’s interviews and, most important, the differences among
them in tone and content cannot be fully understood without reference to their
location and the conversations that occurred between us outside them. In the
first interview, the lack of details about Laura’s personal life and the rather rosy
picture of Cuban society and politics can be explained partly by her reluctance
to speak in the presence of her mother and the Cuban interviewer. There is evi-
dence in other interviews that the presence of Cuban interviewers could prove a
hindrance to narrators who feared social or political repercussions of openly
criticizing some aspects of Cuban society. But even in the second interview, held
in a stranger’s house and without Nina, Laura did not discuss her sexual rela-
tionships with women. A year later, she had decided to introduce me to her
female partner, by which time I had also told Laura that I was dating a female-
to-male (FTM) transgender person. However, in the third interview, Laura was
still reticent about her personal relations. As with several interviews I did in
Cuba, some of the most interesting discussions occurred when the recorder was
turned off. But even if Laura and I discussed issues of sexuality, homophobia,
and personal relationships in more detail during our later meetings, it would be
naïve to assume that she had “revealed all.”
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 33

Over the past twenty years, oral historians have become increasingly attuned
to the importance of the interviewer-narrator relationship.16 But incorporating
the historian’s role in the interview process into the analysis can prove a difficult
balancing act. As Valerie Yow notes, while many scholars are sensitive to the
relevance of our own subjectivity to our research, there is a risk “that every
research article or book will deal with the researcher’s personal experiences and
the research topic itself will take second place in the presentation.”17 Indeed,
other oral historians have expressed concerns about the confessional tone of
some oral history studies.18 But I concur with Yow that an awareness of our sub-
jectivity has two aims, which follow one from the other: “1) understanding the
subjective aspects of the research and interpretation so that 2) we can carry out
the project with as much objectivity as possible and use subjectivity to
advantage.”19
My influence on the course of the interviews with Laura and other women
who had same-sex relationships in Cuba went beyond my questions during the
interviews to a range of other factors, including my sexual preferences, back-
ground and social position, and how these were negotiated and received in the
Cuban context. These factors are far from straightforward and are open to
changing interpretations. It might be tempting, for example, to suggest that the
progressive openness of Laura’s interviews was due to the combined factors of
my outsider status, my coming out, and our developing friendship beyond the
boundaries of the interviews. In addition, by presenting myself as what would
be called queer in a Western, English-language context, as well as a leftist and
feminist activist, I was no doubt able to make specific kinds of connections to
some of the women I interviewed.
At the same time, however, and following writing on the ethics of feminist
oral history,20 my interpretation of the interviews bears in mind the things that
distanced me from the narrators, specifically my position as a white, English-
speaking, European professional with access to significantly more economic re-
sources than my Cuban narrators. Thus, although on one level Laura’s interviews
could be interpreted as a progression from relative silence, omission, or cover-up
to greater revelation (a version that would fit comfortably with the common
metaphor of breaking the silence in some lesbian and oral history), such an
analysis would fail to take into account the array of things that I do not, and
perhaps cannot, know about Laura’s life, even when she may seem to speak di-
rectly about them. What I will do here is offer analyses of three related themes
in the interviews—sexuality, racial identity, and gender—and suggest how they
might help us to expand our understanding of the history of sexuality and the
Cuban Revolution.
Although in retrospect we know that in the first interview Laura’s sexuality
was misrepresented, or at least simplified, through the course of questioning, the
interview nevertheless provides important material for consideration of the his-
tory and memory of sexuality in revolutionary Cuba.21 Taking up the heterosexual
34 | SILENCE

position assigned to her by the interviewers’ questions, Laura discusses what she
perceives as generational changes and continuities in heterosexual relationships
(see the first interview), perceptions that echo those presented in interviews with
narrators in relationships with men. Laura positions herself as a mentor to young
people, encouraging them to use safer sexual practices, a stance consistent with
her revolutionary commitment. But absences in Laura’s narrative are likewise
consonant with gaps in other interviews, pointing to wider patterns of collective
memory in revolutionary Cuba.22 In both cases, Laura expresses nostalgia for her
days at boarding school during the mid-1970s. This memory resonates with con-
temporary popular discourse inside Cuba, in which the 1970s and 1980s appear
as a golden age of the Cuban Revolution, between the tumultuous first decade of
the 1960s and the economic crisis of the 1990s. Laura remembers her school days
as a time when she learned how to lend and share things and contrasts this with
her overprotected and even egotistical childhood, which may in turn be inter-
preted as a hangover from prerevolutionary Cuba. But it is equally interesting to
consider what this memory of coming of age in a period of socialist equality
does not represent: the repression of those years, including institutionalized ho-
mophobia. Laura’s boarding school years overlap with the “five gray years”
between 1971 and 1976, a period now remembered openly among Cuban intellec-
tuals as a period of intense repression, including state-sanctioned homophobia.
I do not suggest that Laura has no knowledge of the history of institutional-
ized homophobia in Cuba. When I ask her about this in the third interview, she
replies that it is something she has learned as she has grown older but does not
elaborate. This may reflect the lack of a public narrative within which to frame
this knowledge. Nonetheless, suggestions of a historical consciousness about
taboo topics in Cuban society can be garnered through associations in the three
interviews with Laura, in particular the implicit link between sexual, religious,
and racial discrimination (the word taboo is used by many narrators to refer to
silences surrounding these three themes in contemporary Cuba). For example,
two topics that were virtually absent from the first interview emerge in the sec-
ond: the importance of Afro-Cuban religion in Laura’s life and homophobia at
work and in the party. In the second interview Laura makes a direct link between
the persecution of religious practice and homophobia, citing both as examples
of the doble moral. Although she does not refer to it, there is a wider historical
link as well: homosexual men and religious practitioners were the main groups
committed to forced labor camps (the notorious UMAP—Military Units for the
Aid of Production) during the 1960s. Given this historical association between
religious persecution and homophobia, we might speculate that for Laura, Afro-
Cuban religion provides a space relatively free from homophobia. When I ask
her, in the third interview, how the issue of sexuality is treated in the Yoruba
tradition, Laura replies that some high-ranking figures are openly homosexual,
although she also insists that she keeps her religious and private lives separate
and that religion has nothing to do with sexuality. The importance of religion as
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 35

a refuge is also suggested by Laura’s repeated assertion that she became involved
in santería because of health problems, in particular, depression. While she does
not discuss the origins of her depression, the fact that Laura identifies religion
with both tolerance and healing, in contrast with the repressive atmosphere of
work and political life, suggests that social and institutional discrimination have
had a negative impact on Laura’s mental health.
Religion relates as well to a third aspect of Laura’s story: her Afro-Cuban her-
itage. In the early twenty-first century, Afro-Cuban religions are practiced by
Cubans of all racial identities. Nonetheless, they have a strong historical and
cultural association with Cubans of African descent, and the central place
accorded to santería in Laura’s life story may represent a way of claiming this
history in the context of a society that discourages discussion of racial identity
and, in particular, racism. Laura was part of the first generation in Cuba to expe-
rience the significant structural changes in race relations brought about by the
revolution. After 1962, however, the government declared that racism had been
eliminated in Cuba, thereby stifling public debate about ongoing discrimina-
tion. Thus, while Laura and her generation enjoyed the benefits of greater
equality after 1959, they lacked a framework within which to discuss racial differ-
ence and racism.23
It should come as no surprise, then, that Laura denies having experienced
racism, at work or elsewhere, even though Nina insists on this point more than
once in the first interview. The fact that Laura was speaking to two white women,
one of them a fellow party member, may have made Laura particularly wary. But
there are indications in this first interview that racial identity and racism have
shaped Laura’s life. For example, her remark that she passed counterintelligence
tests without a problem because she had led a “normal” life and came from a
“quiet” family may be a reference to the stereotype of black families as rowdy or
troublemaking. In the second interview, Laura tells us that her grandfather was
a mambí (a soldier in the Cuban War of Independence, 1895–1898) who was
buried with full honors, giving this as an example of her family’s “revolutionary
roots.” By telling this story, Laura locates herself and her family firmly in a polit-
ical tradition that has been dominated publicly by white men. Similarly, talking
about santería allows Laura to affirm her African heritage.
Finally, I want to look at gender as a third theme that may be best approached
in the interview via associations and anecdotes rather than direct references. By
gender, I do not only mean Laura’s perception of male-female relations in Cuba,
although she does offer some interesting reflections on these. I refer as well to
how Laura represents gender in relationships between women, including her
relationship with her partner, Nachy. In the second interview, following the dis-
cussion about the repression of religion and homosexuality in Cuban society, I
ask Laura whether she is “with someone.” This question comes after a discussion
about her difficult housing situation and the fact that she cannot invite people
to her own house. When Laura answers in the affirmative and I ask to know more
36 | SILENCE

about her partner, she protests that I “want to know too much.” But she then
talks about how she met her partner, using the masculine pronoun in Spanish,
él. This conversation continues for some time until I introduce the topic of Lau-
ra’s experience as a woman, asking her whether she has seen examples of ma-
chismo. She replies in the affirmative and claims that women are partly responsible
for machismo. However, she recognizes as well the advances in gender equality
under the revolution and gives several examples, including men doing the
housework. At this stage, she stops and says, “Not my partner. He’s lazy,” before
giving a series of examples to illustrate this, even comparing her partner to her
equally lazy brother.
Laura’s coding of her partner as masculine, then, is not a mere substitution
of the male for the female pronoun. She attributes to “him” a series of charac-
teristics popularly associated with masculinity in Cuban society. I want to sug-
gest that while Laura evidently chose to present her partner as male in response
to my desire “to know too much” about her love life, her characterization of
her partner as masculine may also reflect a gendered element to their relation-
ship. I do not argue that Laura thinks of Nachy as “a man,” as “male identi-
fied,” or as an example of “female masculinity.” Nor do I argue that we should
interpret Laura and Nachy’s relationship as butch-femme, with its clear West-
ern heritage. Certainly, when Laura eventually introduced me to Nachy, it was
as her novia (girlfriend). However, I do want to make some tentative sugges-
tions for further consideration of gendered subjectivities in Cuban same-sex
female relationships.
During my trip to Cuba at the end of 2007, I had several conversations with
women about masculinity and femininity among lesbians and women in same-
sex relationships. At a party for the Havana lesbian discussion group, I talked to
Daisy, a middle-aged black woman from the same neighborhood as Laura. She
told me she liked feminine women (“the more feminine the better”) and that
she didn’t like mujeres fuertes—literally, “strong women,” whom she described as
dressing “with men’s shirts and closed shoes.” Daisy called them mujeres de bajo
mundo (“low-life women”) and said she often sees them on the Malecón24 at
night. I was reminded of the comments made by Nancy, a young lesbian-identified
woman I interviewed in Santiago de Cuba, about “manly” (varonil) women in
the Plaza Dolores, with their knives and very feminine girlfriends. Later, I inter-
viewed Odalys, a woman of Laura’s age who has been a lesbian all her life. Odalys
defines herself as a mujer fuerte and talked about the homophobia she sees among
many Cuban lesbians. When I asked if she meant by this that many defend fem-
ininity and reject masculine women, she said yes.25 My friend Raquel also com-
mented that many Cuban lesbians rejected mujeres fuertes, even if they adopted
some characteristics associated with masculinity themselves or were attracted to
such women. Although it wasn’t easy to establish what exactly these women
meant by terms like masculine or feminine, and Cuban women in same-sex rela-
tionships have a variety of styles, which also reflect their cultural differences and
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 37

preferences, the mujer fuerte seemed to carry a certain stigma for many of them.
Laura, although seemingly wary of “lesbians” in general, did not mention mujeres
fuertes, nor did she express negative attitudes toward women she associated with
masculine gender characteristics, including her own partner.
In the growing fields of lesbian studies and history, butch-femme and, more
recently, transgender identities figure prominently. Although early studies
focused primarily on English-speaking Western cultures, since the 1990s, this
literature has paid increasing attention to gendered same-sex female relation-
ships and communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In these studies,
scholars emphasize the importance of understanding the formation of female
sexual subjectivities, relationships, and communities within the context of
day-to-day struggles against traditionalist gender regimes, racism, poverty, and
imperialism, as well as homophobia. In other words, although same-sex gen-
dered subjectivities and relationships among women are found in numerous
historical periods and geographical regions, they are neither universal nor
independent of wider material and cultural contexts. In Cuba, where both
female and male same-sex relationships have existed historically without nec-
essarily being named, sexual desire and preference need not be accompanied
by a spoken sexual “identity.” While my interviews suggest that there is a gen-
eration difference and that some younger women may describe themselves as
lesbians, the history of official and popular homophobia under the revolution
makes public naming of sexual identity difficult and even dangerous. Further-
more, the public silence that surrounds female same-sex desire in Cuba affects
women from different social groups on the island in different ways.
For this reason, listening for female same-sex desire in Laura’s interview
cannot be only about searching for signs of lesbian identity. It must also take
into account the intersection of sexuality with class, race, religious practice, age,
and other factors. In particular, I suggest that Laura’s representation of her rela-
tionship with Nachy should be understood in relation to changing construc-
tions of black masculinities and femininities in Cuba. Notwithstanding the
growing literature on race and blackness in Cuba, in addition to the substantial
work on gender and sexuality, this scholarship has not to date focused on the
intersections between race, class, gender, and sexuality. If research on Cuban
homosexuality should expand beyond its current focus on men to consider
female same-sex desire, this must be accompanied by greater analysis of how
changes in class relations, as well as racial identities and racism, inform women’s
and men’s sexual identities and practices.
Laura’s interviews, in which the themes of sexual and gender identity, reli-
gious practice, and racism emerge slowly, and often in the form of allusion or
anecdote, may at first glance appear to be an exemplary case of silence in oral
history. In lesbian history, silence as a conceptual tool has allowed scholars to
pay particular attention to the ways female subjects who had intimate and/or
sexual relationships with other women in the past expressed their desires and
38 | SILENCE

articulated their experiences without necessarily naming themselves lesbian.

But in spite of its potential usefulness in allowing historians to listen or read
for history between the lines, silence, like invisibility, is a problematic concept
because it places the burden of representation on the historical subject, casting
the historian in the heroic role of breaking the silence. I suggest that the task
of the oral historian or historian of lesbian culture is not to break silences, but
to act as a translator. Those of us who work across languages are particularly
sensitive to problems of translation in relation to oral and written sources.
But I am thinking as well of translation in the broader, cultural sense.26
Whether we consider Laura’s sexual relationship, her representation of her
partner’s gender identity, or her Afro-Cuban religion and heritage, what we
encounter is not silence so much as language and representations that do not
fit easily within existing public narratives in revolutionary Cuba or with dom-
inant constructions of female same-sex sexuality in Western English-speaking
contexts. What is perhaps most surprising in Laura’s interview is that in spite
of the lack of public representations of black and female same-sex experience
in contemporary Cuba, whether in official discourses, popular culture, or
scholarship on race, gender, and sexuality, Laura’s interview speaks to a com-
plexity of female same-sex desire, one that has comparisons with other con-
texts but is nonetheless grounded in the particulars of contemporary Cuban
history.

Notes
1. Laura and all other names used in this chapter (except my own) are pseudonyms, and I have
changed details that might identify the narrator, the Cuban interviewer, or other Cubans
mentioned in the essay. Some details have been changed to protect the narrator’s ano-
nymity. The interviews with Laura are the property of the “Cuban Voices” oral history
project.
2. Although in the early part of the project, the majority of the interviews were vetted
through contacts with governmental organizations, the other British researchers and
I later conducted a number of unvetted interviews. In most cases, narrators were
interviewed by a pair of researchers using the broad “life story” format, with the inter-
viewee encouraged to tell her life story according to her own memories. Nonetheless, in
the early interviews especially, interviewers asked a set of questions preagreed among
members of the team. The additional use of questionnaires reflected both the empirical
training of many of the Cuban researchers and the desire to focus on categories of analysis
central to the social and political history of the revolution: class, race, gender, religion,
and sexuality.
3. In popular language, mulato/a is still widely used to refer to Cubans of mixed African and
Spanish heritage. In choosing the term mestizo/a, commonly used in Latin America to refer
to mixed Spanish/indigenous heritage, the interview team recognized both the inadequacy
of mulato/a to describe people with Chinese and/or indigenous Cuban heritage and also its
increased use on the island.
4. See Carrie Hamilton, Sexual Revolutions In Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2012).
5. I wish to express my thanks to the project’s director, Professor Elizabeth Dore, funders (the
Ford Foundation and the Swedish development agency SIDA), and host institutions (the Uni-
versity of Southampton and the Cuban National Centre for Sexual Education [CENESEX]).
 S E X , “ S I L E N C E , ” A N D AU D I O TA P E | 39

Additional funding for this chapter was provided by the British Council, the Feminist Review
Trust and the University of Roehampton.
6. Mass organization established in 1960 to protect the aims of the Cuban Revolution of 1959
against counterrevolutionary activity.
7. Rectificar is the official term given to past mistakes that have been recognized and corrected
by the revolutionary regime. After banning religious people from party membership and
other positions of responsibility for many years, during the 1990s, the regime adopted a
more relaxed attitude toward religion.
8. Doble moral literally means “double moral.” The term is used widely in Cuba to describe the
ways people adopt different positions or views vis-à-vis delicate issues such as religion or
politics, depending on the company they are in. It implies a division between the revolu-
tionary stance that must be adopted in public and a more relaxed position in private.
9. Laura interviewed by author (Carrie Hamilton) in Havana, September 2005, December
2006, and December 2007. The audio version and transcript of this interview are the prop-
erty of the “Cuban Voices” oral history project, directed by Professor Elizabeth Dore and
held at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
10. Aware of the debates surrounding nomenclature, I have opted to use the term same-sex
instead of other words, including lesbian, bisexual, or queer, for reasons I outline later in the
essay. Same-sex is not without its limitations, but its use avoids imposing an identity on
Laura and other narrators that they may not claim for themselves. For a discussions of ter-
minology, see Leila J. Rupp, “Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality,” Journal of the
History of Sexuality 10, no. 2 (April 2001): 287–302.
11. Luisa Passerini, “Memories between Silence and Oblivion,” in Katharine Hodgkin and
Susannah Radstone, eds., Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003),
238–54; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1988), 154–57.
12. Recent examples include Elena M. Martínez, Lesbian Voices from Latin America (New York:
Garland, 1996), 12; and Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of
Post-War Britain 1945–71 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2007), 6–7.
13. Nonetheless, by including sexuality among our key themes, we were able to gather impor-
tant information on sexual relationships from narrators of different sexualities. See Hamil-
ton, Sexual Revolutions in Cuba.
14. In December 2007, two women celebrated a “wedding” at the National Centre for Sexual
Education in Havana. Although not recognized legally, the event, held in an official loca-
tion, was of symbolic importance at a time when the director of the center, Mariela Castro,
was proposing a change to the law to recognize same-sex unions.
15. See above, note 8.
16. Valerie Yow, “‘Do I Like Them Too Much?’: Effects of the Oral History Interview on the In-
terviewer and Vice-Versa,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History
Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 54–72.
17. Ibid., 63.
18. Susan H. Armitage and Sherna Berger Gluck, “Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An
Exchange,” in Susan H. Armitage with Patricia Hart and Karen Weatherman, eds. Women’s
Oral History: The Frontiers Reader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 75–86.
19. Yow, “‘Do I Like Them Too Much?’” 63.
20. For example, Ann Phoenix, “Practising Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender and
‘Race’ in the Research Process,” in Mary Maynard and June Purvis, eds., Researching Women’s
Lives from a Feminist Perspective (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 49–71.
21. For reasons of space, I do not include here references to the significant comparative litera-
ture on gender, race, and sexuality in Cuba and elsewhere. I develop these themes further
with reference to this literature in Sexual Revolutions in Cuba.
22. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
23. See Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth-Century
Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 259–316.
40 | SILENCE

24. The Malecón is the seaside area in Havana, known as a gathering and cruising area for ho-
mosexual men in particular.
25. Nancy and Odalys both come from families of mixed heritage, but neither named a racial
identity during the interview.
26. I am conscious of the limitations of cultural translation as a metaphor for wider processes
of communication across meanings and borders. But I think it is a more promising meta-
phor than silence, even when the latter term is subject to the subtle theorizations of an oral
historian such as Passerini (see above, note 11). As Mary Louise Pratt writes, “Translation is
a deep but incomplete metaphor for the traffic in meaning. It is probably not in the long
run an adequate basis for a theory of cross-cultural meaning making and certainly not a
substitute for such a theory. But exploring the metaphor may be a productive way of clari-
fying what such a theory might look like.” See Pratt, “The Traffic in Meaning: Translation,
Contagion, Infiltration,” Profession (2002): 35.
2 REMEMBERING
PROVINCETOWN
Oral History and Narrativity at Land’s End
Karen Krahulik

Oral history by Karen Krahulik with Marguerite Beata Cook, Provincetown,

Massachusetts, January 22, 1997

From 1996 to 1999, I founded and directed the Provincetown Oral History Project in
Provincetown, Massachusetts. Working with local archivists and librarians, I captured
residents’ experiences of Provincetown as it changed from a Yankee whaling seaport and
Portuguese fishing village into one of the world’s most renowned gay and lesbian resort
destinations. While most gay and lesbian community histories published at this time
focused on the evolution of a gay community, my history of Provincetown looked closely
at the effects of this evolution on local populations. The interview with Marguerite
Beata Cook, a Portuguese native of Provincetown, was one of more than fifty interviews
that I conducted using both audio and video recorders. The interview was set up by a
library volunteer and filmed with a video recorder in the home of Cook’s aunt, Ruth
O’Donnell. I had interviewed O’Donnell one hour earlier and met both women for the
first time on the afternoon of the interview, January 22, 1997. I published a community
history of Provincetown several years later, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to
Gay Resort (New York: New York University Press, 2005). My book on the oral history
project in Provincetown is forthcoming.

KAREN KRAHULIK: What was it like growing up in Provincetown?

MARGUERITE COOK: It was wonderful, it was really wonderful. You don’t appre-
ciate how wonderful it is when you’re a kid; it’s when you look back that you
know it was beautiful. We played games. You had very simple games, there
was no television of course, you listened to the radio—Jack Armstrong, the All-
American Boy, and then there was one, Just Plain Bill. And so you spent a lot of
time with the radio, listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats;
those were interesting to listen to even as a kid. And you played outdoors. You
had a lot of snow in the winter so you did a lot of sliding down hills, and
those were the things that you did that were fun.
42 | SILENCE

KRAHULIK: How about during the summer?

COOK: Summertime you went swimming. Because I lived up at the West End, we
would go swimming down at [the] beach [near Sal’s restaurant]. They talk
about the environment [now], my God, we swam in more dirt and sewage.
Sewage! Some of the houses [had] wooden sewers coming out into the harbor,
and they came from the houses that were right there on the harbor. Absolutely,
any older person would remember that. And the beaches, the local beaches,
were always full of cut glass, rusty cans. I was always going home with a cut on
my foot because I stepped on a piece of glass. But, I’m seventy-two. I made it.
We thrived on it somehow or other. . . . I’m sure if now all of these sewers were
emptying into the harbor, it would be one hell of a mess. [laughs] But we did it.
KRAHULIK: When you were growing up, were there a lot of tourists in town during
the summer?
COOK: No, not a lot, you couldn’t even compare it to what it is now. There were
the artists, it was a bohemian period of time, lots of artists, lots of would-be
writers.
KRAHULIK: What time period is this?
COOK: I was born in twenty-four, so up until the time I was six or seven or eight,
I don’t remember too much; I knew there were artists painting around. But it
was when I got older, when I was in my teens that I knew that it was bohemian
and that I got to know some of the writers, would-be writers, a lot of them
never made it.
KRAHULIK: So the artists were not rich people coming here from the leisure class?
COOK: Oh no, no, they were very poor people, they were struggling, struggling to
make the grade; it was not an easy time for them. But because it was a free town,
you could even sleep on the beach then, there was no National Seashore that
was going to stop you, so they could do that in the summer if they wanted to.
A lot of them camped out on the dunes and lived very freely. And I am not an
artist, but they say, our artists say, that the light here is perfect for painting. So it
would attract artists and writers. In fact, my father PC, when he was in the Coast
Guard, he was out at Peaked Hill bars [and] Eugene O’Neill used to have a little
shack out there where he would do his writing. And Dad would say, “Boy, he
came home rip-roaring drunk again the other night, hollering and hooting.”
Dad had some pretty good stories about Eugene O’Neill and his antics.
KRAHULIK: How did you meet the artists? On the street?
COOK: It was in my later years, after I was twenty-one, I was coming back home
in the summer time and I was a cocktail waitress in the Old Colony, that I met
some of those people that were into painting and into writing. And as I told
you, Norman Mailer would come in and they would talk, and they would
mingle with the Portuguese fishermen who used to come in there because
they loved the fishermen. The fishermen would give them a lobster if they
happen to pull it up in their nets, which they very often did, and they would
say, “Hey, do you want a nice lobster?” Of course they did, they were hungry.
So it was all very amicable, very democratic, and a wonderful period of time.
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 43

KRAHULIK: This was the forties?

COOK: Yes, this would be the forties.
KRAHULIK: What were some of the other clubs? Did you go to Weathering
Heights?
COOK: Oh, Weathering Heights I went to a lot, yes. I was a big bar person in
those days; I went to all of the places.
KRAHULIK: And were the crowds mixed or gay or straight?
COOK: Mostly they were mixed, yes, Weathering Heights was mixed, certainly the
Moors was mixed. I would say the Moors was mostly gay, but it was certainly
not strictly gay because people loved the sing-alongs. And the same thing was
true of the Town House, the back room of the Town House, that was mixed.
So most of these places were very much mixed. They were not as segregated as
they are now. There was not a place where you would say this is for lesbians,
or this is where the gay guys go, you did not have that so much. Even in the
A-House, I spent a lot of time in the A-House when Reggie was getting show
people down. But he did not have the macho room then, and it was a much
more mixed crowd. He had Billie Holiday, he had Jeanne Cooper, he had Ella
Fitzgerald. He had them all.
KRAHULIK: Back in that time, the forties, fifties—
COOK: It was more in the fifties when Reggie had those show people down.
KRAHULIK: How did people who grew up in the town identify? Did you call your-
selves locals or now I hear the term townies, or native, or Portuguese?
COOK: You see with me I had left town. I went to college for one year, but I kept
coming home summers, and then I would go to various places in the winter.
I moved around, I was a nomad, I moved here, I moved there. So I consider
myself a native. You never are not a native if you were born and brought up in
Provincetown. Nobody can believe anyone was born and brought up here.
KRAHULIK: When you say that no one can believe that someone was born and
brought up here, what is that about?
COOK: First of all, I think they fell in love with this town, most people do, and
to believe that somebody was hanging out where they hang out, that was not
put away in their own houses doing their own thing, was a native, was hard
for them to believe.
KRAHULIK: So were you almost famous?
COOK: No, I don’t think I was famous, but I was pretty well known in those days,
but famous? Infamous, maybe.
KRAHULIK: But as a native?
COOK: Oh, yes, you became kind of a spokesperson for the town and what went
on, you know, the feeling of the natives, the feeling of the locals, about the
tourists. I feel also that it was very friendly for the most part. You are going to
find a few that have animosities. And also it is true that when the season
ended, when every tourist season ends, the feeling was “Oh, I will be so glad
to see them go.” But then come March or April and they are saying, “Boy, it
gets lonely down here. Jeez, it will be nice when these people come back for
44 | SILENCE

the summer, won’t it?” So you can’t please them, but that is the way it goes.
[laughs]
KRAHULIK: When did you notice that the tourist crowd started to become more
gay?
COOK: Ah, there were always gay people here, there just weren’t as many, and in
those earlier days, they were not so flamboyant. And I think that trend, I
wouldn’t dare put a date on it, but maybe the eighties, maybe the late se-
venties. I think after the hippie era maybe came that openly gay kind of thing.
Or with the lesbians [saying] “I can beat up any guy around this place.”
Although that trend has changed. The lesbians are more, much more intelli-
gent, not butch and rugged and ready to beat anybody up. But the openness,
of course, has gone with the times. Things are much more acceptable now,
they are out in the open, probably as it should be.
KRAHULIK: During the forties and fifties, what sense did natives have of the tourist
crowd?
COOK: I think that of acceptance. Acceptance. There were some, if you said to them,
for instance, “Come on, join me.” Somebody that probably wouldn’t have gone
into a club, normally, on their own, but they went and they found they had a
good time. And they would say, “Gee, this wasn’t so bad, I had a pretty good time
here.” And then they would tell someone else. And I believe that that was the
feeling for most people. Again, you can’t speak for all people, I think that this
town is probably one of the most tolerant towns in the world. You know, that is
what got me mad one time with that Act Up thing, when they had that parade
was so disgusting—“I kiss butts” or “I fuck butts” or something like that—they
had on a sign. It created a divisiveness that should not have been there and that
never was there. Take this to the Midwest, take it to anywhere, take it down south
to rebel country, but certainly not this town; it is not the place for it because it is
a very tolerant town, and a very accepting town, and I think the coexistence is
wonderful. Gay, straight, no matter what, it is who you are. If they like you, you
are accepted. And if you are an ass, then you’re not. It’s just as simple as that.
KRAHULIK: When you were growing up in the thirties, as a young girl, a tomboy
about town, did you notice gay couples even then?
COOK: Not particularly, no. If they were around, I didn’t notice them, I was not
aware of them. There was one woman in town, I think she is now dead, I
would not even use her name, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because I think
she’s gone, and they used to say she was gay. And the term then was queer. “She
is queer, you know? She is a queer.” “Oh, yeah?” It was said in passing, it wasn’t
thought much about, it was just something to mention, that is all. And then
there were a couple of guys that I knew of growing up that they would say that
[about]. But you are not really aware of it because you didn’t really care about
it. You led your life, nobody was bothering you, and that is the way it went.
KRAHULIK: So you mentioned that they used the term queer, was that a term for
both men and women?
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 45

COOK: Yes, a queer. He is a queer, she is a queer.

KRAHULIK: Is that what they would call themselves?
COOK: No, I do not think they called themselves that. I think they preferred gay.
KRAHULIK: When did the term queer drop out or was replaced?
COOK: Probably the seventies, I suppose, around then. There was some gay bash-
ing at one point in this town, nothing like it now, but there was a witch hunt
on gay people and I can’t pinpoint that particular period of time. But I remem-
ber Cookies Tap, the boys were running it then, when I say the boys I mean my
cousins, Wilbur and Joe, and this set of bylaws came out from the selectmen
saying that you shall not knowingly, we used to call it the ten commandments,
serve a homosexual. And it went on and on, it was ten rules. And the boys said,
“This is insane. If a guy comes in here and he swishes a little and I say to him,
‘I can’t serve you, I’m sorry, you look gay to me,’ and he is not, he is apt to draw
up and nail me.” Which was true, you just can’t do that. So that did not last
long, it lasted maybe a year before the businesspeople, they put a stop to it.
KRAHULIK: The selectmen just came out with this?
COOK: I guess, I do not know why they did that, I really can’t tell you why. I just
know it was so overwhelming, it was such a shock that they did it, and I know
that the businesspeople didn’t like it one bit. So it didn’t last very long. So
after that hate gay people era passed, and that was not shared by everyone,
then the views became much more tolerant.
KRAHULIK: I have not seen the ten commandments that you speak of, but I did
see a different list, I think it was later, 1960, that said that no club could
employ any so-called female impersonators.
COOK: It could have been that time, that could have been one of the rules, it is
possible because they were so outrageous and so ridiculous that—what are
they crazy? You can’t do this. Later, everybody and their brother was a drag
queen doing a drag queen show. But I don’t think there were that many
[female impersonators] then, really. Phil Bayonne, though, he had his nice
wide hat on and the skirt over his trousers, and I bet you would call that
female impersonating.
KRAHULIK: Did you have a group of friends, you certainly were not the only na-
tive about town, were you?
COOK: No, I had a group of friends. I was living in New York, and we would
come down summers, stay at home. And those were the days of Billie Holiday
and Ella Fitzgerald and all that sort of thing and Kaye Ballard. And so we got
to know, not the weekend ones like Ella Fitzgerald and all that, but Kaye Bal-
lard would be down for a week or two weeks at a time and so we got friendly
with them. And then when we got back to New York, we would go wherever
they might be performing . . . just to say hi and to see them. So it was a world
that I loved, you know.
KRAHULIK: How about the minstrel shows? You mention just briefly that your
father was in them, did he help to produce them?
46 | SILENCE

COOK: He didn’t help to produce them, I think the Catholic church put them on,
St. Peter’s I believe, I may be wrong about this, but I think that was it. I think they
were produced by the interlocutor, whoever he might happen to be. He was the
man that asked these dumb questions—how did the chicken cross the road or
did the chicken cross the road, why did the chicken cross the road—to get on the
other side, would be the answer from the black man. And then they all would
laugh and holler and hoot and bang tambourines. But interspersed with all of
this would be music. My father was one of the end men, they call them end men,
the fellows in blackface, [and he] would get up and do his number. It was just a
lot of fun . . . until they were no longer. It wasn’t only that it wasn’t politically
correct, I don’t think that was totally the reason why it ended. I think the old
timers got tired of doing it, people moved out of town, some people retired,
some people died, and it was just one of those things that unfortunately dies out.
KRAHULIK: We spoke earlier about the shows and you had said that there were
black people in town but they, but the shows were not meant to—
COOK: No, they were not meant in any way to defame or disparage the black
people. They were not in any way thought about as different. There was one
black family, the Roaches, Nate Roache, long dead, very good friend of my
father’s, he would come to our house and my mother would fry fish, she
would fry these little tinker mackerel, Nate loved those tinker mackerel, he
would eat them bones and all. So he spent a lot of time at the house. So no,
there was no problem with them.
KRAHULIK: Where do you think the tolerance comes from in this town?
COOK: I don’t know because—I can tell you this brief story where there wasn’t
this tolerance. My father was Portuguese. My mother was Portuguese and Yan-
kee. Here’s the background: My mother’s father, Manuel Patrick, was a Portu-
guese man. My mother’s mother was on the Yankee side, her name was
Newcomb. Now big Yankees never liked the Portuguese, from what I under-
stand, and I saw it right there in my own family when [great] grandma New-
comb became senile and my grandmother, Sadie, had to take her into her
home. Now here is my grandmother Sadie, who is her daughter, and my
grandfather, Manuel, who is Portuguese, is also there—[great] Grandma New-
comb, not knowing that Sadie is her daughter, is saying, “Oh I would like to
know where my Sadie is, she has gone off with that God damn black Portygee
somewhere, I think she went to Gloucester with that black Portygee.” My
grandfather would yell, “Shut your mouth, Sarah!” and so it would go. There
was that intolerance. So the town was not born with tolerance.1

Commentary

In a town where performers, mostly in the form of drag queens, accord unusu-
ally high status as showmen and showgirls, and where native Portuguese cul-
tures are slipping with each passing moment into the margins of community
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 47

life, Portuguese American resident Marguerite Beata Cook held her own in front
of the oral history video camera. Beata began immediately by putting forth two
interrelated identities, one conscious and the other subconscious. With pride,
she identified as an “insider,” a native of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and she
also, perhaps subconsciously, identified as a “rebel,” a transgressive entertainer
in her own right. Throughout her interview, she maneuvered deftly between the
dual narrative identities of the “insider” and the “rebel.”
My analysis of Beata Cook’s narrative is methodological in its insistence that
the oral history interviews I conducted in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the
1990s warrant further investigation. In my book, Provincetown: From Pilgrim
Landing to Gay Resort, I emphasized content rather than form and used an array
of sources including, but not limited to, oral histories. The result was a cohesive
narrative based on empirical evidence, which produced an expansive view of
Provincetown’s past.2 I focused on change over time in a Portuguese fishing vil-
lage turned gay resort town, rather than on how people explained or made sense
of these changes.
By contrast, in this chapter I am more interested in the literary and performa-
tive strategies narrators like Beata Cook used to interpret and discuss the past.
How did residents reconstruct dignity, triumph, or defeat in their acts of remem-
bering? How do their stories illuminate not simply events that took place in the
past but relationships between the politics of the past and those of the present?
And how was I, the oral history interviewer, complicit in furthering some narra-
tives while hindering others?
To explore questions such as these, I’ve turned to a subset of historians who
focus on the methodological nuances of oral history practices. Luisa Passerini,
for instance, pays exquisite detail not simply to the content revealed by mem-
ories but to the form memories take. What do certain stories mean in a wider
cultural or symbolic context?3 Drawing on the work of anthropologists and lit-
erary critics such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci,
Lucien Febvre, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Passerini calls oral histories “highly relevant
to historical analysis” as “first and foremost, statements of cultural identity in
which memory continuously adapts received traditions to present circum-
stances.”4 Passerini led the field in arguing that personal narratives are valuable
not only for their ability to reconstruct the past but also, and more important,
for their ability to suggest how past events are related to present thoughts and
sensibilities. For example, oral history transcripts might allow historians to com-
prehend better how a person or group of people make sense today of successful
or disappointing experiences that took place years ago.5
Alessandro Portelli’s work also focuses on form as well as content. Parsing the
differences between written and oral sources—the former he calls “documents”
and the latter “acts”—Portelli insists that oral histories reveal less about the
details of an event and more about the meaning of an event both in the past and
the present.6 Memory, in this sense, might yield content, but the process of
48 | SILENCE

remembering, the telling, illuminates the investments narrators have in specific

versions of the past. Far from static entities, oral histories, according to Portelli,
help narrators conceptualize past situations and rationalize past choices.7
Taking Passerini and Portelli’s cue, Daniel James devoted an entire book to
the oral history of one working-class woman, Doña María Roldán. James sees
oral histories as “cultural constructs,” products of both the interviewer and the
interviewee that stem from “possible roles, self-representations and available
narratives.” Only by analyzing these narratives in detail can historians compre-
hend fully the structure and logic of the stories and the meaning these stories
held for the person recounting them.8 Through oral histories, James argues, his-
torians carry the ability to understand how people today process and articulate
difficult memories of the past.9
Despite a paucity of book-length projects on American history that utilize a
literary approach to oral history narratives, a number of scholars have contrib-
uted significantly to this methodology. Julia Cruikshank, for instance, argues
that historians must heed “the very real work that stories do.” Turning to the
theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin, Bakhtin, and others, Cruikshank
supports the “transformative potential” of oral histories and notes how “social
capital accumulates with practical competence that eventually reinforces who
has the capacity to be listened to, believed, and obeyed—the entitlement to
speak and to be heard.”10 Carolyn Steedman contends that oral histories are,
ultimately, “about how people use the past to tell stories about their life” so that
they can at least begin to “explain how they got to the place they currently in-
habit.”11 Each of these positions lends itself to the idea that people tell stories to
negotiate present circumstances with past experiences.
This last statement rings especially true in considering my interview with
Beata Cook. My conversation with Beata reveals three dynamics that often pre-
vail in oral history interviews. First, oral history interviews, regardless of re-
corders, cameras, or microphones, often generate an “informal conversational
narrative, framed as personal experience stories, anecdotes, gossip.”12 Second,
the topics, sequence of events, and time periods discussed are the result of a
“compromise” between the interviewer and interviewee, the latter of whom
may, if necessary, resort to creative uses of time and linguistic closure.13 Third,
the interviews themselves are best described as, in Portelli’s words, “learning sit-
uations.”14 Rather than the expert scholar leading the narrator down the road to
illumination, in my interview with Beata I learned from her refusals both at the
time of the interview and afterward.
Outlining theoretical approaches to oral history as a mode of knowledge
production frames my project, but I also want to convey a sense of my analyt-
ical practice. What am I looking for in the text that Beata and I generated? Re-
lying heavily on Passerini and James, I am interested in both “recurrent
self-representations” and “recurrent narrative patterns.”15 In the interstices of
Beata’s articulations lives the “tension between forms of behaviour and mental
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 49

representations expressed in particular narrative guises,” as Passerini puts it.16

My approach investigates competing visions of the past; it notes the function of
backstories, anecdotes, and asides; and it pays attention to macro community
myths, as well as micro identity tales.17 By shedding light on these tangled webs
of articulation, the parts that make up the sum, I aim to deliver a greater under-
standing of the ways in which people jockey for power over the interpretation
of their lives and over the way things in Provincetown were, are, and ought
to be.
I begin my analysis as I often did my interviews, with the narrator’s “origin”
story. In the following exchange, Beata’s first foot forward authenticates her,
without a doubt, as an insider to Provincetown’s unique community of natives,
residents, and tourists:

KRAHULIK: Welcome, Beata. Let’s start at the beginning; please tell us a little
about when and where you were born.
COOK: Born in Provincetown, July 13, 1924. So that makes me seventy-two. In a
house on Franklin Street, and delivered by Dr. Daniel Hebert, the famed town
doctor, who delivered all of my mother’s kids. I grew up here. Born and
brought up in this town.

Establishing herself as a native resident, indeed literally born at home with Prov-
incetown’s only doctor in attendance, Beata positioned herself at the apex of a
local pecking order—with natives on top, “wash-ashore” residents next (visitors
who washed ashore and decided to stay), part-time and seasonal residents in
third place (with workers slightly higher than second home owners), and tour-
ists occupying the lowest rungs.18 With this opening statement, Beata assumed a
kind of innate epistemological authority bestowed only on those who can claim
knowledge and authenticity based on length and form of residency at Land’s
End. This authority had evolved into a precious gem in Provincetown. It sig-
naled a form of residential status that could not be purchased or stolen, and it
was one of the last vestiges of native privilege in a town increasingly populated
and owned by middle- and upper-class gay and lesbian outsiders. Later in the
interview, Beata confirmed her enduring status: “I consider myself a native. You
never are not a native if you were born and brought up in Provincetown.” This
kind of “biological predestination,” or “the formula of ‘having been born some-
thing,’” as Passerini calls it, is common in personal narratives and “often appears
in the guise of boasting that where one comes from is better than anywhere else
in the world.”19
After establishing native status, Beata unleashed the flip side of her identity: the
rebel creating gender trouble long before drag queens and others monopolized
Provincetown’s streets and beaches. Elaborating on her childhood activities—a
recuperative gesture as Provincetown’s turn into a gay resort rendered children
and children’s activities nearly invisible—Beata set the stage for her complemen-
tary persona. “I was always a tomboy, so my games were marbles. You have these
50 | SILENCE

marbles and you have what they call iron bullets [and] you knocked these iron
bullets out of the ring. I was good at it too. Very good, better than the boys.”
Through the two fundamental registers of her life story, the native and the
rebel, Beata constructed “an image of herself that was worthy of authority.”20 Her
narrative emphasized her own cultural prowess, heightened by the fact that gen-
der bending is an esteemed trait in this particular locale. Her story was also
community oriented. With nostalgic aplomb, Beata positioned the local Portu-
guese community as one that valued respect, discretion, and fairness through
hard work and simple fun. Again, although Beata’s story seems unique and
noteworthy, other oral historians, such as Passerini, have also found a prepon-
derance of working-class women who cast themselves as “‘always having been
rebels.’” Symbolically, this is critical, as Passerini writes, “The rebel stereotype,
recurrent in many women’s autobiographies, does not primarily aim to describe
facts and actual behavior, but serves a markedly allegorical purpose. . . . It is a
means of expressing problems of identity in the context of a social order oppres-
sive of women.”21 I agree with Passerini’s assessment that the woman rebel con-
veys something of the tension regarding identity, but for Beata the tension
revolves less around her status as a woman and more around her gender as a
tomboy and her questionable sexuality.
Throughout the interview, Beata established herself as a unique bridge to
Provincetown’s other claim to fame—its status as uniquely artistic, risqué, and
queer—and she did so by relying on the trope of comedic anecdote. For instance,
to “prove” that she was one of the boys and to demonstrate that the vision of
herself that she created was consistent with her actions in the past, she relied on
humor with a punch line. When I asked her how she met or mingled with local
artists, she replied: “You’d see them on the beaches, [but] you didn’t really get to
know them that well. You didn’t want to disturb them when they were painting
because they were so absorbed in their painting.” But then she elaborated by
putting forth a backstory:

But what I used to do—we lived up near George Elmer Browne’s studio, and I think
I mentioned that I used to go blueberrying up there. So a neighbor kid and I, we
were about the same age, Joe Burgess, we called him Joe Blockie. Joe Blockie and I
used to go up the hill to George Elmer Browne’s studio, and he would say to me,
“Boy, they got a lot of naked women in there posing. That artist is painting naked
women.” And we would be peeking in the windows to see the naked women at
George Elmer Browne’s before we went on blueberrying. [laughs] But then I never
stopped and had any conversation with George Elmer Browne, but I knew full well
who he was. He was quite well known.

This particular anecdote held symbolic weight in two familiar arenas. First, it
showcased Beata as the rebel and communicated that not only was she “better
than the boys,” as she mentioned earlier, but also she eroticized women, just as
boys did. Indeed, the erotic import of her voyeuristic tendencies at first escaped
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 51

me. During the first half of the interview, I was not concerned with Beata’s sex-
uality. I had met her for the first time that day, and I was not told whether she
was gay or straight. Because no one had applied the “gay” tag to her as a poten-
tial interviewee (I used the snowball method for interviewing), I had assumed
she was straight. In other words, I had bought into the dichotomy of the
straight native versus the gay tourist. As Beata communicated her childhood
exploits to me, her gender-transgressive persona did not resonate with my—at
the time, meaning in the late 1990s—less pliable notions of coming out and
identifying. Indeed, despite Beata’s cues, I continued to think of her as straight.
Moreover, the anecdote about spying functioned to position Beata, despite
being a native, as controlling the gaze rather than being the object of the artist’s
gaze, as native Portuguese residents often were. Just before this anecdote, Beata
mentioned that her father “had some pretty good stories about Eugene O’Neill
and his antics.” Taking after her father, Beata, too, had stories to tell that posi-
tioned Portuguese residents as the authors rather than the subjects of humorous
tales or, in this case, of history.
Beata’s portrait of herself as the native rebel gained texture as she discussed
both her and Provincetown’s golden years—the 1950s. Despite the fact that Prov-
incetown had launched its own local witch hunt, Beata romanticized this pe-
riod as “just a great fun time.” So, too, on the one hand, her narrative challenges
one of the town’s long-standing dichotomies that positions straight, Portuguese
natives who work in Provincetown in opposition to gay tourists who play in
Provincetown. On the other hand, Beata reproduced this distinction continu-
ally by asserting the innate authority of native status and her position as both
outsider (to the gay community) and insider (to Provincetown and its glorious
entertainment culture). If Beata relied on the structure of the comedic anecdote
to suggest her transgressions before, in the following story she also used perfor-
mance to enhance the vividness and, hence, authenticity of the present and past
moments.
Providing the perfect stage for Beata’s acts of remembering was Province-
town’s post–World War II nightclub scene. Immediately, Beata established her-
self as an authority figure:

I was a big bar person in those days, I went to all of the places. I went to the Moors,
the shows up there, they had Roger Kent playing the piano, sing-alongs. It was a
ritual, here is what you’d did if you were in the club circuit. You went to the beach,
you went to Herring Cove, and then after the beach about four o’clock you came
down and you went to the Moors for their cocktail hour and did the sing-alongs
with Roger Kent. That ended at five o’clock, that went four to five. Five o’clock you
hightailed it to Weathering Heights where Phil Bayonne was putting on a show,
and he did a little review type thing. He used to have all his waiters and waitresses
a part of it, he didn’t pay them for the extra work, but he made them a part of it.
And he did the trapeze thing. He would come down from the ceiling on a trapeze
52 | SILENCE

with a great big wide hat on. He was quite, quite a showman actually. Then, when
you were through with that, you went to the Town House where again there was a
sing-along to a piano and everybody would sing. It was all the musicals, Broadway
musicals and a lot of show tunes.

Beata provided closure with the following statement: “It was just a great fun
time. Of course there was no disco. There was no loud rock, there was none of
that in those days.” Indeed, the 1950s, not today, brought out the best in show at
Land’s End.
The story did not end there, however. Beata also used humor to poke fun at
the tourists attempting to marginalize her or make her feel somehow primitive.
In this way, although they exposed her at the time as somewhat backward, she
overturns this now, in an aptly carnivalesque way, by revealing their ignorance
and her authority.22 At the conclusion of the story, she chuckles, providing clo-
sure with a proverbial last laugh.

People would introduce me to someone in the bar and say, “Hey, this is Beata, she’s
a native, you know?” like you feel like you ought to do a native dance or some-
thing. “She was born and brought up here.” Nobody can believe anyone was born
and brought up here . . . to believe that somebody was hanging out where they
hang out, that was not put away in their own houses doing their own thing, was a
native, was hard for them to believe . . . they would get all excited when they would
find out that I was a native. “She’s a real native, you know.”[laughs]

Beata not only refused to be marginalized by gay tourists in the past but also
refused to allow this gay interloper, meaning the intrusive academic, to pigeon-
hole her identity in the present. Indeed, despite my best efforts, Beata held on to
the coherence of her authority in discussing the way Provincetown was, is, and
ought to be. After hearing the now familiar butch coming of age story about
being a tomboy, and listening to Beata regale me with stories about the glorious
day of Broadway musical sing-alongs, I started to wonder if I was missing some-
thing about Beata’s sexual preferences and community alignments.23 My inter-
viewing style at the time—I was in my late twenties and still a graduate
student—was to ask nonthreatening questions that would open up rather than
close down conversations. Some might say I was being elusive and not direct
enough; I focused on being strategic yet amiable. Consistent with this demeanor,
I tried to elicit Beata’s sexual identity using a few subtle questions. My first pitch:

KRAHULIK: So, what did you like so much, you are a native Portuguese girl,
growing up in town, what did you like so much about these shows and the
nightclubs?
COOK: Well I loved it because I loved show business, I loved the minstrel shows,
my father was in them. I loved, I just loved entertainment, I love anything that
reeked of entertainment and singing and it’s a damn shame I can’t carry a tune
because I knew all the words to all the songs and I would sing them. And Dad
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 53

would say, Dad used to call me Tommy Tucker, and he used to say to my
mother, “By the jingles, Ninsy,” my mother’s name was Nelly, he called her
Ninsy, nickname for everybody. “By the jingles, Ninsy, my Tommy knows the
words to all the songs, and they all sound like ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”

My interest, Beata insisted, was in show business, not queer business. Thus, after
denying a queer component, she returned immediately to a gender-transgressive
theme, not only with her Tommy Tucker anecdote but also by following this
anecdote with an aside wherein she mentions living with the same woman in
New York City and in Provincetown. “And then by this time, the days of the
Atlantic House, and Reggie getting these name people down and all, I was living
with a girl who was a hostess at the A-House. I was living in New York and we
would come down summers, stay at home.”
With the distance of twelve years since I conducted this interview, I can detect
now that Beata and I were engaged in our own duel of sorts during this delicate
negotiation. Having latched onto the idea that the tomboy narrative was the
precursor to a coming-out story, I attempted get Beata to out herself as a lesbian.
Meanwhile, Beata had distanced herself from the gay community—“No, I do
not think they liked queer very much. I don’t know because I was too young to
ask them what they thought”—while also embracing many aspects of gay life in
Provincetown. Toward the end of the interview, I tried one last time to see if
Beata would come out as a lesbian. And she replied with a disciplining, but ge-
nial response. Note how many times she utters the word no:

KRAHULIK: And now you chose not to marry?

COOK: No, no, no, oh no, oh no.
KRAHULIK: That wasn’t for you?
COOK: Not for me, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, many years later I saw a boy,
then a man, that I had dated slightly in high school. And so I went my way, I
went away and I went here and went there and he married. And I saw him at
Cookies Tap one night. And he says, “Oh Jesus, Beata, you and I should have
gotten married.” And I said, “Oh yeah? You would be in the barroom drinking,
and I would be home taking care of the house, no, no, no, thank you very
much.” [laughs] No, no, no, no, that was not my cup of tea at all. No, I want
to move around and I wanted to wander, and I wanted to travel and I wanted
to go wherever I wanted to go when I wanted to go there. And I was never
crazy about kids, anyway, still am not. Not crazy about them at all.

In the end, Beata positioned herself as a tomboy and an “independent woman,”

a native rebel, not a native queer.24 The latter would have torn the fabric of her oral
narrative, while the former allowed her to retain the innate rights and privileges
of residential status. Native rebels understood the town’s priorities—frugality,
modesty, diplomacy—even as they transgressed some of the town’s neater dichot-
omies. To reinforce this understanding, Beata also externalized the contemporary
gay community as inappropriately outlandish: “There were always gay people
54 | SILENCE

here, there just weren’t as many, and in those earlier days, they were not so flam-
boyant. For instance, the queens would not run down the street with their little
pocketbooks in their hands and their high heels, they just didn’t do it, it was
unheard of. They might do it in a private party, but they do not do it on Commer-
cial Street. And they certainly weren’t kissing and holding hands on the street.”
Beata distanced herself from specifically queer entertainment by noting that
she loved all entertainment, even the minstrel shows. Later in the interview, I
brought us back to the topic of the minstrel shows—as much as Beata was inter-
ested in maintaining coherence, I was interested in learning how residents today
reconciled a thorny cultural past. Beata began by saying that the Catholic church
produced the shows, a move that might have been meant to legitimize their
presence—how could the shows be anything but “Christian” if they stemmed
from members of the cloth? She continued by explaining in detail the role of the
interlocutor, the jokes that were told, the blackface characters who became the
butt of the jokes, and the songs that were sung: “‘When the Sun Goes Down in
Dixie and the Moon Begins to Rise,’ I can just see them doing it now, it was just a
lot of fun,” she reminisced. To explain why the minstrel shows ended, an expla-
nation that was not solicited, Beata used an aside to neatly insert the backstory
and to locate the seat of power with the Portuguese residents responsible for the
shows. Like the decline of the Portuguese ritual of the Blessing of the Fleet, the
decline of the Portuguese-led minstrel shows took place not because other polit-
ical players exerted influence but because, in her words, “The old timers got tired
of doing it. It was just one of the those things that unfortunately dies out.”
Beata evaded the thorny issue of covert racism in Provincetown—a potential
tear more than a wrinkle in her hometown’s reputation as exceptionally
democratic—by adding that the shows were “not meant in any way to defame or
disparage the black people.” In fact, she put forth, “There were very few black
families that lived here, but there were black families nevertheless and they were
an integral part of the community.” To prove this she noted that Nate Roache, a
black man who came from a well-known family, used to spend time at her
house, fraternizing with her father and enjoying her mother’s cooking. “To my
knowledge, I can’t speak to all the black people, but to my knowledge,” she con-
cluded, “they didn’t object to it.” Beata’s story tells us a fair amount about the
actual shows but even more about the tension that still exists regarding the sym-
bolic violence that the shows enacted—at some level, Beata acknowledges that,
in her words, “political correctness” became an issue, but she is able to retain
Provincetown’s coherence as “friendly, amicable, and democratic” by assuring
her listeners that celebrating the minstrel shows was acceptable social practice
because the town’s black residents “didn’t object to it.” My empirical research
would find that they did not approve of it, either. In fact, one of the Roaches
wrote several letters to the editor protesting the minstrel shows. I included these
letters—along with opposing letters that supported the minstrels—in my book
to piece together a more complicated picture of Provincetown’s postwar
 REMEMBERING PROVINCETOWN | 55

linguistic community.25 In the context of my interview with Beata, the value of

this empirical evidence resides in its ability to say something about racial ten-
sions not only in the past but also as they are conceived in the present.
Ultimately, Beata’s split narrative identity as the native rebel and the comic
conventions she deployed as she regaled her audience with one anecdote after
another allowed her to make several important gestures. Her native authority and
participation in Provincetown’s 1950s entertainment culture meant she could cel-
ebrate a gay past (in the clubs) and, at the same time, be critical of a “flamboyant”
gay present. Interestingly, by showcasing the entertainment aspects of the clubs
rather than the opportunities they afforded for sexual exploration, Beata was able
to position herself as an authority figure of gay male culture even as she distanced
herself from a fixed sexual identity. Her performative role in the interview also
earned her no small measure of cultural capital and went recognized in an
economy that relentlessly celebrates staged performances. I was entirely com-
plicit in this not only in deciding to interview her but also because I put this
interview on Cape Cod’s local cable television channel. Beata stopped me on the
street more than once to tell me that she was, indeed, famous now. In this way,
she and I put a different vision of Provincetown into circulation. This vision
reframed Provincetown’s “golden era” as taking place in the 1950s, not today, and
it interrupted the straight native versus queer tourist dichotomy. During a time
when Portuguese residents felt increasingly disempowered in their own home-
town, Beata and I—a pair of tomboys—restored them as representative of Prov-
incetown, the landfall of the Mayflower Pilgrims and the home of America’s
peculiar form of democracy.

Notes
1. Marguerite Beata Cook, video recording with Karen Krahulik, Provincetown, January 22,
1997, Provincetown Public Library Oral History Collection, Provincetown, Massachusetts.
2. Karen Christel Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York: New
York University Press, 2005).
3. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4. See also Richard Bauman, Story, Perfor-
mance, and Event (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, 17.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and the Meaning of a
Nazi Massacre in Rome (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 9.
7. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral
History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 50. On remembering versus recol-
lection, see Daniel James, Dona Maria’s Story (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000),
154, 219.
8. James, Dona Maria’s Story, 124.
9. Ibid., 208.
10. Julia Cruikshank, “Oral History, Narrative Strategies, and Native American Historiography:
Perspectives from the Yukon Territory, Canada,” in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Clearing a Path:
Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6, 12, 21.
11. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986), 6.
12. James, Dona Maria’s Story, 134.
56 | SILENCE

13. Portelli, The Death, 64, 66.

14. Portelli, The Death, x.
15. See Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, 18–31; James, Dona Maria’s Story, 160, 183.
16. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, 31.
17. On the function of punch lines, see Bauman, Story, 59. Bauman’s intellectual debt here is to
Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
18. On “wash-ashores,” see Krahulik, Provincetown, 14.
19. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, 24, 25.
20. Penelope Ekert in James, Dona Maria’s Story, 182.
21. See Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, 17, 28.
22. Here I am referring to Bakhtin’s analysis of the topsy-turvy world of the carnival, when hi-
erarchical order is reversed, even if momentarily. Natalie Zemon Davis’s “woman on top”
theory also comes to mind. See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1968); and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and
Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe,” in Barbara A. Babcock, ed., The Reversible World:
Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 147–90.
23. On the prevalence and predictability of the tomboy as butch coming of age story, see Kath
Weston, Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins . . . (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
24. Provincetown was host to many “independent women” during the first half of the twentieth
century. See Krahulik, Provincetown, 13, 86–105, 162–68.
25. Krahulik, Provincetown, 64–67.
3 Q U E E R FA M I LY
STORIES
Learning from Oral Histories with Lesbian
Mothers and Gay Fathers from the
Pre-Stonewall Era
Daniel Rivers

Oral history by Daniel Rivers with Vera Clarice Martin, Apache Junction,
Arizona, September 2, 2006

This is an excerpt from a three-day interview that I conducted in 2006 with Vera Mar-
tin, a longtime activist in the Los Angeles lesbian community. Martin raised her chil-
dren in that city as an African American lesbian mother in the 1950s. Her recollections
of growing up in Louisiana, marriage, lesbian spaces in postwar Los Angeles, and the
struggles she faced as a lesbian mother in the pre-Stonewall era vividly illustrate his-
torical intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and reproduction. Her story shows how
people resisted heteronormativity, classism, sexism, and racism and created queer
possibilities in the pre-Stonewall era.1

DANIEL RIVERS: Vera, if you would give me your full name for the record.
VERA MARTIN: Vera Clarice Martin .
RIVERS: And what was your date of birth?
MARTIN: 6/18/23.
RIVERS: And where were you born?
MARTIN: In a place called Natchez. It’s a very historical place in Mississippi. My
mother was a student at a Black college there, called Natchez College, I think
is the name of it. She lived in a guardian household in Louisiana and wanted
to get out of it. She gave me away when I was a month old to these same
guardians, and that is something that I have never forgiven her for. I lived in
Tensas Parish, the capital of which was Saint Joseph’s. I would say that the
population was probably fifteen hundred. If you counted all the chickens and
the dogs, you might come up with two thousand. As a child, before I had to
go and stay on my farm all the time, I lived in St. Joseph’s with the mother of
58 | SILENCE

the female guardian. This woman that I lived with was nine years old when
the slaves were freed, and she married a man who was a preacher. I had pic-
tures of him—he always wore a top hat and that coat with a split in it that
well-dressed people wore. He was a traveling minister.
When I was five, I was sent to be with her [Martin’s mother]. I went in May
and stayed until the following Christmas holidays. The male guardian came
and got me and took me back to Louisiana. I didn’t see her again until I was
twelve. [After that] I didn’t see her until I was sixteen, and by that time she was
in California. I didn’t trust that husband that she had. I was afraid of him
because I knew he was going to molest me. So I got married at eighteen, ’cause
I didn’t know how else to get out of that house. I didn’t know there was such
a place as Phyllis Wheatley. I didn’t know there was such a place as Sojourner
Truth where I could have gone to live with a house mother, and I could have
worked part-time and gone to school part-time. I didn’t know how to do that.
I didn’t know enough about the city.
RIVERS: Do you remember having crushes or being in love with friends when you
were young?
MARTIN: I had this best friend whose name was Camille, and she’s the only per-
son those guardians ever let come spend any time with me. We just had the
grandest time. We just had a grand time.
RIVERS: Were you lovers?
MARTIN: Oh god, we just had a ball. We didn’t know what to call it. We didn’t
even know what it was. We were just playing grown-ups.
RIVERS: So you get married when you’re eighteen; tell me about that—you’re in
LA at the time . . .
MARTIN: I just couldn’t figure out how to make my life any better as long as I was
in that house, and they fought a lot, and that was terrifying to me. He [Mar-
tin’s first husband] kept calling and coming to visit. He was trying to get this
on another level. He was really heading towards sex. Well, see, in my head as
a child growing up, all I ever heard the grown-ups say was “She’s not going to
be anything; she’s going to be just like her mother.” Well, I didn’t know what
that meant, but as I got older, I concluded that that meant that I was going to
get pregnant. I was hell-bent that was not going to happen to me. I wasn’t
going to end up marrying somebody that I didn’t want to marry. So when he
got this relationship going off towards this sexual encounter, I just stopped
dead in my tracks and froze up. He would take me to an outing and bring me
back home and dump me and go see the other girlfriend who was going to
play the game. I guess he really liked me, so one day the subject came up
again, and he said, “Why don’t we get married?”And I said, “Well, we can do
that.” So we ran away—we went to Yuma.
He went to the military when my baby was six weeks old. He had a first
cousin who was a lesbian. Some of the women that she was running around
with were girls that I had gone to school with. I was always begging her to let me
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 59

go with them, wherever they would go. She said, “I’m not going to get into . . .
no, I’m not going to do that.” This was a diverse group; two of the girls that used
to come to the house were white and had been in one of my classes when I was
in high school. They would go out on Friday night or Saturday night. I don’t
know what they did or where they went, but they had a good time, and I wanted
to go. Like a kid looking through the store window at a candy store. [My daugh-
ter’s] memory is that I always had gay people around and [when] I had parties
that were basically heterosexual parties, ’cause I’m married at the time, I invited
my gay friends. I was always gay friendly, always gay friendly.
He [Martin’s husband] came back in December of 1945, which was a total
surprise. I didn’t expect him to come home. I expected him to get out of the
military, but I didn’t expect him to come home as he had so many women all
over the country, and one in particular that he was literally engaged to. She
was a student at Tallahassee down in Florida or Alabama or somewhere, and I
thought he was going to go and marry this person. So when he showed up in
my door, I had to do a lot of tap dancing. I must say, I was a bit relieved
because it was going to support my philosophy of my kid having two parents.
Biggest mistake I ever made in my life.
[Here Martin briefly discusses sleeping with another woman in the mid-
1950s after having her son in 1953 and leaving her husband in 1955.]
And then I just dismissed the whole notion. And then in the late fifties, I
met this beautiful, beautiful Japanese woman [Kay] who had married an
African American man during the war. He had been stationed in Japan and
was from New Orleans. That’s where he took her. It was a miserable, miserable
time for her. She had two kids—a girl and a boy. [Martin’s friend] Chuck said,
“I’ve got this wonderful girl that I want you to meet—she really needs a good
friend, and you make such a good friend.” So he told her about me. She in-
vited me to dinner and invited him, too. She called me at the office, and she
invited me to dinner again, and there was just the two of us there. She talked
about two women that I knew were lesbians. In the meanwhile, while I was
there—she was a call girl—some guys called her to set up a date, and she
didn’t want me to hear this conversation. But I heard enough of it that I im-
mediately knew what was going on, so I try and make her comfortable. I said,
“Did you really want to confirm that date, because I can leave,” to let her know
it was okay.
So then, by the time I saw her the next time, she let her guard down. We
talked about it, and I said, “I’m your friend and I’ll be here now.” We lived
about eight miles apart, and she’d call me up sometimes. She’d get very, very
depressed because she came from a very upscale family in Tokyo, and she
would say, “Oh, if my mother knew what I was doing she’d just have a fit.” She
would call me sometimes at two or three o’clock in the morning. One night,
Kay and I went clubbing; we went way up on Sunset [to a club] called the
Moulin Rouge. The drinks were just lined up in front of me. I was trying to
60 | SILENCE

drink all these damn martinis, and I hate martinis. Well, by the end of the
night, I got us this cab to go home. We got home. I got hysterical. We were at
her house. I got hysterical, and she was in the process of comforting me, and
the next thing I knew we were having mad sex. We were great partners, lovers,
for almost a year.
[Discussing the circle of women that Martin got to know through Kay]
RIVERS: Most of these women were lesbians?
MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.
RIVERS: Was this when you went out with Kay and hung out with Mimi, Juanita,
and Trudy? Did these women hang out in lesbian bars in LA? Was that part of
the scene?
MARTIN: Sure, there was a bar on—I believe it’s Sixth and Vermont or Eighth and
Vermont—called the If Club. Then there was a really nice one on Melrose and
La Brea called David. They were basically men’s bars, but women were wel-
come because both of them served dinner. You could go there and have this
great dinner with all this great atmosphere.
RIVERS: So you and Kay would go out to the clubs?
MARTIN: Yeah, we’d make this grand entrance . . . we’d always make this grand
entrance when we go to these bars, and of course all the men were sending
drinks. We’d just have them lined up. Kay couldn’t drink a glass of lemonade—
she turned pink.
RIVERS: And both of you would dress high femme.
MARTIN: Oh man, oh man. . . . We were dressed to the nines.
RIVERS: And were there a lot of butch-femme lesbians in these circles?
MARTIN: Oh yeah.
RIVERS: Did you all get hassled for being two femmes out together?
MARTIN: Oh yeah, “What in the hell are you, AC/DC?” whatever that was.
RIVERS: How did women explain to each other that they were in the life when
they were around straight folks?
MARTIN: Well the first thing that you would do is say, “Have you ever been to
such and such a club?” They had all kinds of signals—they had a certain way
they wore a handkerchief—they would say, “Well, have you been to such and
such a club?” They would wear their keys in a certain pocket—let them hang
out, then all kinds of crazy signals. If you were a femme and you saw the
person with the keys or the handkerchief or whatever, you’d just flirt. Yeah,
you’d just flirt. There was a club in town in Hollywood called Peanuts. We
went to Peanuts a lot because both straight and gay went there. They used to
get some pretty good fracases going on in there, because the straight guys
would come over.
RIVERS: So, I found myself wondering—thinking about—internalized homo-
phobia. What that was like for you and Kay? You become lovers, and during
that time Kay has two kids, you have two kids. What were your concerns about
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 61

being around the kids? I mean, did you keep your love relationship totally
separate from them?
MARTIN: Well, the oldest of the kids was my daughter, and she was old enough
to be the babysitter for the other kids. So my two kids and I would get in the
car, and we would go to Kay’s house and then get them all settled for the
evening. Then we would go out. And it worked, you know, I don’t remember
us ever talking about it and having major concerns about it. It was just—she
loved my kids, and my kids loved her. My kids loved her kids; her kids loved
my kids.
[Here Martin replies to a question I ask about the kids going with them
when she and Kay spent time with other lesbians in the late 1950s.]
MARTIN: Well, you know, none of the rest of them had any. We were the two that
had the kids, which also made us stand out because they weren’t tolerant of
the fact that we had kids. My sense of it was that the children were a bother.
They decided on the spur of the moment, “Let’s go do this.” We had to think
about what are we gonna do. They had no patience for that—there wasn’t
supposed to be any kids. And you know what? That’s going on today. I’ve
heard many lesbians say they would never get involved with a woman who
had children. Even in later years, even after the revolution, I’ve heard lesbians
say that if you got men and had kids and you weren’t a real lesbian.
I used to do panels that we defined as lifetime lesbians—meaning lesbians
who had never been married, who were insightful enough, strong enough, to
go on with their life and let their sexuality take them where they wanted to
go—with those who are so brainwashed by the mores of society that they did
get married and have children. They would tell their stories. The lifetime les-
bians have the notion that they are the heroines and that the ones that were
naïve enough or browbeaten enough were the weak ones, and that they were
superior to these people. My contention is that they are all heroines. They all
had to live in a very dangerous place and to give up a lot. The ones who got
married and had those children, when they decided to make that 180-degree
turn—everything was at stake. That took a lot of courage because you had that
sense of motherhood. You felt you had to protect those children. You couldn’t
go around making rash decisions and not include the children in the process.
Whereas if you never got married, and you never had children, you only had
to think about what you wanted to do and how much flak you wanted to take
from society.
We knew that we had to certainly be careful and to keep the knowledge that
we had kids very quiet, very quiet, because you never knew in that culture of
call girls. It was very competitive, and you never knew who was going to use
that information to destroy you—to turn your life upside down. [Here Martin
discusses the first of two scares she had about losing custody of her children
due to accusations of lesbianism.]
62 | SILENCE

Yeah, well, that was when I was seeing Kay. Somebody that knew me saw
me and Kay at a bar [the If Club]. It was somebody that he [Martin’s ex-hus-
band] knew. Even if I was dating a man, and he got the rumor, he would make
a point of showing up at my house and acting as if he still lived there with the
idea that this would chase the guy off. I said to her [Kay], “That was somebody
who knew me when my husband and I were together and they are still in
touch.” Now my head was going a mile a minute. I thought he would use a
pay phone and call them, and the next thing I knew I would be looking at his
face. It was not okay to be publicized. You really kept it under wraps. As a
matter of fact, in those years a few people that I knew who were in the lesbian
community, they always found a gay man as an escort, and one that wasn’t too
effeminate so they would look real—women who had jobs that they didn’t
want to lose. My fear was first of all losing my kid, and the other part of that
was the scandal was going to spill over on my job, and I could very well have
lost my job.
[Here Martin discusses Kay’s tragic death at twenty-nine, a year after they
had met.] She died at the age of twenty-nine. She got sick; they took her to the
hospital. They left her in the lobby for hours. By the time they gave her a room
and got the doctor there, it was too late. She hemorrhaged to death. I was
having a birthday party for my son. His birthday is in October. I had rented
this merry-go-round and a clown, and she was supposed to come and bring
her kids. My phone rang about noon. It was her housekeeper. Pinky said,
“Vera, this is Pinky,” and I said, “Well, how are you, and what’s going on?”
And she said, “Did you hear about Kay?”And I said, “No.” She said, “Well”—
this was on a Saturday—“I’ve been trying to get you since early yesterday,” she
said. “Kay’s dead.” Well, I dropped the phone and fainted. So we had a brief
service for her and sent her ashes to her parents. Her ex-husband waltzed in
and got the house and custody of the kids.
Oh, I wanted those kids so bad. She had specifically told a caregiver—
Annette was her name—“Annette, if anything ever happens to me, I want you
and Vera to take care of my kids.” Annette really, really tried, but she had
nothing to stand on because even if it’d been in writing, it wasn’t going to
help, because in reality, in the United States, she [Kay] was still married to
Cesar. She just had a divorce out of Mexico, which was useless. [Here Martin
discusses her marriage in 1963 to E., a man who she knew had same-sex rela-
tionships himself, to diffuse any custody threats from her first husband and
to keep her job.]
When I got that rumor that he was thinking about going after me, I just ran
in the closet and nailed the door. My daughter had gotten married at the end
of her first year at Long Beach State, and the company had shipped them off
to Columbus, Ohio. By the time they got back to California she was twenty—
the baby was born when she was nineteen. At the time they got back, she was
twenty. I was calling her two or three times a week in Ohio: “When you get
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 63

ready to come home, please let me know that you are on your way. Don’t go
to the place. Come home—I will move out the very next day, and you will live
here.” Well, they didn’t. The doorbell rings, and I go to the door, and there
stands my daughter and my granddaughter and my son-in-law. Yeah, so the
next morning I got up and called my office and said, “I have a family emer-
gency, and I won’t be to work for a couple of days.” I went outside and started
looking for an apartment. I left T. [Martin’s son] at the house with R. [Martin’s
daughter] because I didn’t want him to have to change schools. When the
word got out—their father—the rumors started again. So I had to hurry out,
and every morning I would get out, get him dressed and take him to her house
and let him go to school from her house to head them off, because at this
point he was married again. All I needed to do was end up in court by myself
with all this crap he could bring into court. And he’s now married.
RIVERS: Did he have any idea at that time that you were a lesbian?
MARTIN: He must have because whenever he ran into me, he would make state-
ments like, “I know what you’re doing.”
RIVERS: When you heard the rumors again that time when R. got home, you were
scared that he would bring that into it? That was about lesbianism?
MARTIN: Yeah, I was scared to death. I was scared to death, so I went over and got
T. and all of his clothes and brought him over to my place. I would get up in
the morning early enough to take him and dropped them off at her house. He
would have breakfast with her and then walked to school from the house. In
the evening, I would come by from work and pick them up and take them
home. When I got married the second time, I married this man who’d been
living in the closet all his life trying his best not to admit to himself that he
was a gay man. I had done all the research I needed to do. I worked in the
Civic Center for many years. I worked in vital records for many years in the
recorder’s office. So a short time after I met him and found out that there were
three marriages already, I went downtown and pulled every one of the
divorce papers and read them. Every damn one of them said “irreconcilable
differences.” That’s always a buzzword for sexual incompatibility. I knew ex-
actly what was going on. I knew exactly what was going on. There was a man
that I am now still friendly with who worked on his job with him at that time
that he was having a fling with. This is a white guy. I met him in 1962 before I
really married E. He represented cover, and even though he would never
admit it, I was a cover for him, too.
I would chide him now and then because I knew what was going on.
When he died, I was cleaning out the garage, which was the place which he
used as his workshop for the upholstery he did, because he did that beau-
tiful tucking like on period furniture. It was the Louis XIV furniture—that
was his specialty. He had more work than he could handle, because he had
a regular nine-to-five, and he did this in his spare time. He spent a lot of
time in the garage, and when he died, I found his batch of letters. Man, they
64 | SILENCE

were the hottest love letters you ever read in your life. But I never betrayed
him. I never said a word to his family about it and never said a word. As a
matter of fact, somebody called me one night from LA that knew me
because they had met him and recognized him. He was at this club with
one of the flings, and they called me up to tell me. I said, “Oh really? Well,
tell him hello, and I hope he’s having a good time.” I knew he was going
there. I thought it was all right because I was getting what I wanted. I had a
male figure for T. who absolutely adored him. And I had somebody to go
with me every time I had to go someplace in those different organizations
that I belonged to. Everybody in the community thought we were the per-
fect couple.
RIVERS: So when you say that you slam the closet door shut in 1963 after that
second scare, this is a question that comes up for me. How much of marrying
E. was about, “Look, I just can’t risk this—I have to . . .”
MARTIN: I didn’t feel safe. I just was too much of a coward to risk having that
custody thing come up again. I was working in the recorder’s office. That was
really a homophobic place, so I had to worry about the scandal of the custody
suit and the scandal of the custody suit causing me to lose my job, not to
mention the holy terror of losing my son. We got married in Vegas. We went
in an entourage. He had a brand-new Thunderbird. [The] couple that was
there the day that he first brought this up [getting married] had a brand-new
Thunderbird. Boy, did we create a sensation when we pulled up in front of the
Stardust Hotel to check in.2

Commentary

Malcolm X, in a 1964 speech, said, “History is a people’s memory,” arguing that

reclamation of one’s historical past was essential to liberation struggle. Without
a clear historical self-understanding, he noted, groups fighting repression could
not challenge dominant cultural paradigms that left them powerless.3 This sen-
timent has been at the heart of scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-
gender (LGBT) history in the United States since the early 1970s. However,
documenting LGBT historical presence in the United States is challenged by
both the obscuring effect of homophobic repression and the difficulties in-
herent in looking backward across the sharp historical divide separating the
pre-liberation and postliberation eras—one that includes changing definitions
of sexual identity. Oral histories have been crucial in addressing these challenges
and constructing pre-Stonewall LGBT histories in the United States, particularly
social histories attempting complex portraits of everyday lives that lay outside
heterosexual norms before the late 1960s. In this essay, I draw from my own
work on the history of lesbian and gay parents and their children, focusing in
particular on an interview I conducted with Vera Martin, to show how oral his-
tories in pre-Stonewall LGBT history in general and LGBT family history more
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 65

specifically illuminate historical intersections between race, class, gender, sexu-

ality, and the family.
Oral histories have been a vital part of LGBT activism and community self-
understanding. The importance of self-documentation itself is rooted in lesbian
and gay liberation. The coming out story was a commonly understood marker
of lesbian and gay life in the 1970s and an important part of a gay and lesbian
liberation-era politics of visibility. The publication of collections of interviews
such as The New Lesbians (1977) and The Coming Out Stories (1980) marked the
focus on personal testimony in lesbian feminist and gay male communities of
the period.4 In addition, as LGBT history emerged as a field of research and com-
munity inquiry in the 1970s and 1980s, there was increased interest in chroni-
cling the experiences of lesbian and gay elders. This grew out of a growing
internal criticism within lesbian and gay liberation movements that they were
too youth-oriented, as well as the despair of the first years in the struggle against
HIV/AIDS. Books published in this era include Quiet Fire (1985) and Long Time
Passing (1986).5
These oral traditions mirrored a reliance on oral evidence among early gay
and lesbian historians such as Jonathan Ned Katz, Allan Bérubé, John D’Emilio,
and Lillian Faderman.6 During this period, LGBT archives nationwide became
repositories for local and national oral history collections, and a number of re-
gional oral history projects were founded.7 In 1993, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy
and Madeline Davis published Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, an ethnographic
history of butch-femme communities in Buffalo, New York, from 1930 to the late
1960s, based on the Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project. A complex local his-
tory, imbued with a sense of respect for its participants, Boots of Leather, Slippers
of Gold inspired the push toward oral history–based, community studies in
LGBT history that followed its publication.8
In part, the importance of oral histories for LGBT historians reflects the spe-
cific historical character of homophobia: LGBT cultures have been, to a greater
or lesser degree, underground cultures; sexual minorities have long hidden for
fear of legal persecution and social condemnation or lived as social outcasts.
People who frequented lesbian or gay bars in the 1950s or 1960s risked incarcer-
ation and loss of employment. This atmosphere led to traditions of code and
guarded secrecy. One woman I interviewed, Annalee Stewart, who fell in love
with her partner in Minnesota in the late 1950s, told me that although they had
two close female friends they suspected were a couple, the four women never
discussed their relationships with each other; in fact, when they adopted chil-
dren in 1970, neither my interviewee nor her partner had ever mentioned their
lesbianism to anyone else.9 As a result of this kind of secrecy, historians have
relied heavily on oral history to supplement the relatively sparse material record
of gay and lesbian lives, particularly in the pre-Stonewall era.
The effect of this historical silencing and repression is particularly acute in
the case of lesbian and gay family history. In the postwar era, media images and
66 | SILENCE

political voices emphasized a heterosexual, middle-class, nuclear-family model

of domesticity in which women were homemakers and men were breadwin-
ners. This strongly heterosexual culture elided lesbians and gay men and ren-
dered lesbian mothers and gay fathers completely invisible. Mainstream society
cast same-sex sexuality and desire as antithetical to parenting, which it under-
stood exclusively as an outgrowth of heterosexual intimacy. Most lesbian and
gay parents remained underground during these years, in contrast to the period
following the emergence of lesbian and gay liberation movements. While doc-
uments exist that reveal parts of this history, they often provide only small
glimpses of the struggles of lesbian and gay parents. For instance, while an arrest
record might tell us that a man charged with “lewd vagrancy”—in this case a
euphemism for same-sex sexuality—was a father, it tells us nothing about his
fears of being ostracized from his children or the way he himself identified his
own sexuality.
Oral histories help us understand how lesbian mothers and gay fathers were
personally affected by homophobia. In a three-day interview, Vera Martin told
me about her experiences as an African American woman raising two children
in the 1950s, first in a heterosexual marriage and then while loving another
woman. My discussions with Martin and with other lesbian and gay parents of
this era illuminate the historical connections between reproduction and sexu-
ality. By the late 1960s, lesbian mothers and gay fathers were fighting custody
battles, and court records from this period reveal a powerful nationwide judi-
cial bias against lesbian and gay parents. But without the recollections of les-
bian and gay parents from the pre-Stonewall era, we would not know that
many lesbian and gay parents during the immediate postwar era also lived in
fear of being separated from their children. Through their life histories, we can
see that the injunction against lesbian and gay parenting has been a central
structural element of heterosexist prejudice for decades. It was, in fact, so strong
that it was largely unspoken; the heterosexuality of the family was a naturalized
cultural assumption until post-Stonewall communities openly challenged it.
However, lesbian and gay parents of the pre-Stonewall era lived in contradic-
tion to this assumption, and their recollections show us that they were acutely
aware of their own marginality and the dangers they lived with during this
period.
Understanding this experience allows us to put the modern struggle for LGBT
parental and domestic rights in its proper historical context. Seeing the right to
raise children as a fundamental civil right historically denied generations of les-
bians and gay men complicates the argument that the concerted effort by the
modern LGBT freedom struggle for familial, domestic, and marital rights is a
recent, assimilationist, and homonormative one that contradicts the historical
radicalism of the liberation era.10 Rather, pre-Stonewall life stories of lesbian
mothers and gay fathers show that these battles have long been at the heart of
sexual minority experience in the United States. These histories contextualize
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 67

the dramatic legal struggles of the 1970s and help us understand the place of
domestic and family rights in today’s mainstream LGBT freedom struggle.
Martin’s story also illustrates how systems of prejudice against gay men and
lesbians intersected with racism and classism and how reproduction has been
socially configured through categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She
described falling in love with a Japanese American woman named Kay in Los
Angeles in 1958 and living in fear that her ex-husband would use her lesbianism
to take away her two children. Like women in the later liberation era, this fear
restricted Martin and Kay’s activities, but unlike women in the 1970s, they had
no lesbian mother activist organizations to turn to for help. In addition to being
afraid of losing custody of her children, Martin recalled being afraid of losing
her job as a county employee. These fears crystallized when an acquaintance of
her ex-husband saw Martin and Kay in the If Club, a Los Angeles lesbian bar, in
1959. The couple stopped going out to lesbian bars after this incident. When Kay
tragically died that same year, Martin was aware that she had no chance of
raising Kay’s children with her own, even though that was what both women
explicitly wanted.
As lesbian mothers of color in 1950s Los Angeles, Martin and Kay were vulner-
able to both heterosexism and racism. These struggles were not only with het-
erosexual society but within lesbian communities as well; Martin remembered
that after the Second World War the two women experienced intense anti-Japa-
nese animosity and a general attitude of jingoistic patriotism both on the street
and sometimes in lesbian bars. The threat of unemployment was an ever-present
factor in Martin’s life as well. After leaving her husband in 1955, she was econom-
ically vulnerable, a situation compounded by her relationship with Kay. As a
divorced mother in the 1950s, deeply concerned about maintaining her employ-
ment, racism, sexism, and heterosexism limited Martin’s choices and made her
afraid for her own survival.
Martin connected her early sense of the cruel illogic of racism with her accep-
tance of her own lesbianism. She remembered refusing to address white play-
mates as “ma’am” when they all reached the age of puberty and linked this early
resistance to her ability to see through the homophobia she encountered in the
1940s and 1950s. “I have always had my own opinion, and I was never ever easily
brainwashed,” she recalled. Going to high school in Boyle Heights, after she
migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles at sixteen, taught Martin about the mil-
itarization of American racism against the Japanese, something that deeply af-
fected her. She visited the internment camps frequently—particularly the one at
Manzanar—and a hotel in Boyle Heights used as a temporary detention point,
bringing supplies and listening to the internees’ stories about their loss and fear.
In the early 1950s, during Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunism crusade, Martin
struggled with her boss over a demand that all state employees take a loyalty
oath. As a vocal union organizer and an African American woman, she faced
intense scrutiny. As a result of her resistance, she was blackballed from some
68 | SILENCE

lucrative work for which she otherwise would have been eligible as a county
employee. All of this was part of her commitment to live the life she chose for
herself and to oppose the social condemnation of others.
By the early 1940s, Martin, whose husband was overseas in the military, was
aware of a vibrant, butch-femme community in the Boyle Heights neighborhood
of Los Angeles. She longed to be a part of it but was snubbed by her husband’s
cousin and her young, butch-femme crowd because she posed trouble as a mar-
ried woman. Marriage often operated in contrast and opposition to women
loving other women in the lives of Martin and her friends during this period. But
women’s lives crossed these boundaries and were much more fluid than that
cultural opposition suggests. Martin remembered that a woman she lived with
during the Second World War whose husband was in the military was having an
affair with another woman from that same butch-femme lesbian community.
She also remembered going to see Billie Holiday at the African American–owned
Club Alabam with these women. This was all part of an urban emergence of an
African American women’s community that contributed to the growth of lesbian
cultural networks in the war years.
Martin resolutely tried to keep her first marriage alive, motivated by a belief
that her children needed to grow up with their biological father. In contrast to
the way she lived other parts of her life, she stayed in a marriage that made her
unhappy and took its toll in myriad ways. She had more than ten abortions in
the years before their separation in 1955 because her husband refused to use
birth control. She had already realized her attraction to women, and her mar-
ried world was not completely separate from LGBT communities in Los Ange-
les; as a married mother in Boyle Heights in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
Martin had parties that included gay men and lesbians, though she did not have
a relationship with another woman before her divorce. She explains: “Oh, I
didn’t trust him. I did not trust him. My making the effort to stay with him had
nothing to do with love; it had to do with fulfilling my commitment that I was
going to make sure my kids had two parents—and hopefully their biological
parents.” She called this “the biggest decision I ever made in my life that was so
wrong.” Originally seeing marriage as the way out of her mother’s house, Mar-
tin remained because she believed her children needed a nuclear family home.
Oral histories reveal the extensive pressure toward heterosexual nuclear
family formation in the 1950s and 1960s as an important facet of the homo-
phobia faced by lesbian and gay parents. Many lesbian mothers and gay fathers
of this era saw no other option but heterosexual marriage. Some of them lived
double lives and worried over getting caught or, like Martin, were divorced, had
lovers, and existed both in and out of the queer world of the pre-Stonewall era.
In an oral history done with Arden Eversmeyer in 2001, Barbara Kalish recalled
falling in love with another woman in her local PTA and having an affair with
her for eleven years while they lived two blocks from each other with their hus-
bands and children. This queer suburban history is part of LGBT life in the
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 69

United States in the 1950s.11 Vera Martin’s story and other stories of nonhetero-
sexual mothers of this era demonstrate the power of the heteronormative mar-
ried ideal of the family and the ways it intersected with other systems of
oppression to regulate those who sought to be independent in their reproduc-
tive, sexual, and economic lives. These regulatory and discriminatory forces are
the historical predecessors of explicit cultural and political attacks on lesbian
and gay parents and parental rights in later eras.
Oral histories of lesbian mothers and gay fathers of the pre-Stonewall era
also show that postliberation categories of sexual orientation cannot be
assumed to be transhistorical. Words and concepts that are common referents
today meant different things in a queer world of the 1950s. For instance, Martin
described how her ex-lover, Juan, who was strongly butch-identified, made fun
of the fact that a newspaper article about Martin and her activism had called
her a “dyke grandmother.” For Juan, Martin explained to me, the word dyke
could refer only to a butch, not a femme like Martin. Responding to Juan’s
taunt, Martin explained that after the emergence of a widespread lesbian femi-
nist movement in the 1970s, the word dyke had been claimed by many lesbians
as a badge of honor and that it no longer referred only to butches. These
changes in language and self-representation point to dramatic shifts in the
years directly following the Stonewall riots and the rise of large-scale liberation
movements.
In our conversation, Martin, who raised children in a complex African Amer-
ican queer world of 1950s Los Angeles, and I, raised in a poor Native American
lesbian feminist household, employed a shared vocabulary that included both
the languages of lesbian feminism and the concepts of butch-femme. My own
experience helped us speak about lesbian and gay parenting as a historical fact
and about Martin’s motherhood and her lesbianism as not mutually exclusive.
An understanding of white supremacy, institutional and extrainstitutional
racism, and the importance of freedom struggle history also underlay our con-
versation. All of these shared commitments and interests shaped the stories
told and questions generated. When Martin told me that her lover Kay, a
Japanese American woman, a lesbian, and a sex worker in 1959 Los Angeles,
died after being ignored in a hospital waiting room for hours, there was a
shared understanding between us that those things were linked and that this
was not the story of an accidental death.
These shared epistemologies do shape the way we see the past, but as part of
doing so, they also enable us to move beyond a post-Stonewall framework and
to articulate a queer family history. In the early 1970s, definitions of sexual iden-
tity and community shifted radically after gay liberation and lesbian feminism
demanded visibility for identities and communities that had previously existed
underground. LGBT politics became centrally organized around a politics of
coming out, of declaring one’s sexual identity clearly and unequivocally. Before
the advent of liberation politics, however, the lives of same-sex-oriented men
70 | SILENCE

and women were often much more complex than this politics of the closet
might assume.
Oral histories can help us understand the complexity of these queer lives
that could otherwise be invisible from a static, post-Stonewall perspective.
Definitions of lesbian and gay as fixed and known identities fail to capture
the ways that men and women in the postwar era often moved in and out of
nonheteronormative communities. Martin, faced with her lover Kay’s un-
timely death in 1959 and the increasing threat of a custody suit by her ex-
husband, married a man, E., in 1963 as cover, for financial security, and to give
her son a father figure. She was comforted by the knowledge that her new
husband was a closeted gay man himself, though they never spoke openly of
their sexuality to each other.
E.’s gayness made Martin feel safe. She believed he would never use her love
for other women to threaten her job or custody of her son. She also still felt that
her son needed a male role model, and E. and Martin’s son got along well. This
movement between a queer world and heterosexual marriage is part of LGBT
history in the 1950s and 1960s, but it is visible only when Martin’s history is read
separately from post-Stonewall definitions of sexual identity. Although we used
ways of thinking and speaking in our conversation that owe much to the libera-
tion era, in our dialogue, Martin and I spanned that period of dramatic change,
and the story moves historically beyond it. A shared sexual minority vocabulary
informed our conversation but also allowed us to challenge binaries implicit in
the semiotics of the closet. This process is essential for constructing a queer
social history of the postwar years.
In 1963, Vera moved to Altadena, a suburb of Pasadena outside of Los Ange-
les. A trumpet player in the 1950s, E. was by then working in furniture sales.
Martin had parties for the regional director of the civil rights commission and
visiting African dignitaries she met as an organizer for African exchange stu-
dents. In 1973, Martin finally came out for the last time and got involved in Los
Angeles’ lesbian and gay activism and community life: “I figured it was the right
time. I can do this now, and I don’t have to be concerned about the custody
junk. I want to get out of this place . . . and if I’m going to do it, I’m already fifty,
and it’s time to get on with it.” Martin went on to cofound Old Lesbians Orga-
nizing for Change (OLOC) in 1989. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she was an
active advocate for women’s reproductive rights and lesbians of color in the Los
Angeles area.
Martin’s life history captures shared moments in lesbian and gay history
that would have been less visible in a history based solely on nonoral evidence.
Blue Lunden, a working-class, white butch who grew up in New Orleans’s French
Quarter and, much later, a close friend of Martin’s and member of OLOC,
raised her daughter, Linda, within lesbian communities in New York’s East Vil-
lage, something we know about only because of an oral history with Lunden.12
Although their circumstances were in some ways very different, Lunden and
 QUEER FAMILY S T ORIES | 71

Martin both feared for their custody rights because they were women who
loved women.
In the 1950s, many parents lived queer lives. Like Martin, some men and
women moved in and out of married life, while others raised children while
remaining active in lesbian communities for decades. Vera Martin’s story is ex-
ceptional in many ways, but she shared struggles around sexuality and the
family with a whole generation. Hers is a postwar lesbian and gay family history,
one intimately connected to the world after Stonewall by the custody courts, the
backlash, and the move toward parental rights in the freedom struggle. But it is
distinct from the liberation era as well and takes place at a time when categories
of in and out were more porous and a lesbian could live married with children
in the Pasadena suburbs.
The stories of men and women like Vera Martin, who realized their same-sex
sexuality in the 1950s and had children, were very difficult. They are the stories
of men living in fear that they would be caught in a raid and have to call their
wives, possibly waking the children. Such struggles illustrate a fundamental ho-
mophobic injunction in American society that children be kept separate from
LGBT life and that the family be always heterosexual. Oral history helps us see
this and, at the same time, expand on earlier LGBT history by including child
rearing as a critical part of 1950s lesbian and gay historical experience, connect-
ing histories of the family and sexuality. The paths these lives took foreshad-
owed the lesbian and gay parental activism of the 1970s and 1980s and the
lesbian and gay parenting boom of the last decades of the twentieth century.
Oral history compels us to complicate our questions, along with the answers. It
can enable us to see the intersections of sexuality, race, gender, and class with
reproduction and offers us a more complex and richly rewarding queer history.

Notes
1. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of my participants for sharing their stories
with me. In particular, I am thankful to Vera Martin and Annalee Stewart for making this
essay possible by speaking with me about their life experiences.
2. Vera Martin, interview with author. Apache Junction, Arizona. September 22, 2006.
3. George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter
by Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 35–67.
4. Laurel Galana and Gina Covina, eds., The New Lesbians: Interviews with Women across the U.S.
and Canada (Berkeley, CA: Moon, 1977); Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe, eds., The
Coming Out Stories (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1980).
5. Keith Vacha and Cassie Damewood, eds., Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men (Trumans-
burg, NY: Crossing, 1985); Marcy Adelman, Long Time Passing: The Lives of Older Lesbians
(Boston: Alyson, 1986).
6. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two
(New York: Free Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The
Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian
Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Jonathan
Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: T. Y.
Crowell, 1976).
72 | SILENCE

7. Archives that began collecting large numbers of LGBT oral histories in this period include
the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) in Brooklyn, New York, and the Gay and Lesbian His-
torical Society of Northern California (GLHSNC) in San Francisco. Projects initiated under
VOICES, the oral history initiative of the GLHSNC, include the Uncles Project (1990s), Go
West Migration (1990s), Shedding a Straight Jacket (1990s), Fresno Project (1990s), Artists
Project (1990s), McCarthy Project (1980s), and the Tede Matthews Project (1990s).
8. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The
History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); original transcripts from the
Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project interviews are housed as a special collection at the
Lesbian Herstory Archives, Boots of Leather/Slippers of Gold Special Collection 98–1. In an
essay marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Kennedy noted the
importance of oral history to LGBT history, particularly in the pre-Stonewall era, in gener-
ating empirical knowledge, sharpening our understanding of queer subjectivities over time,
and heightening our sensitivity to the interconnections between the two. Elizabeth Lapovsky
Kennedy, “Telling Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-Stonewall Lesbian His-
tory,” in Martin Duberman, ed., A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
(New York: New York University Press, 1997), 181–98.
9. Annalee Stewart, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 19, 2006.
10. For an example of these arguments, see the introduction to the winter 2008 issue of Radical
History Review. The editors claim that “the current focus within gay and lesbian movements
and culture on the family and reproduction as vehicles for claiming citizenship and rights
works to suture reproduction to a privatizing neoliberal agenda, rather than to disrupt na-
tionalist and heteronormative ideologies.” Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin,
“Editors’ Introduction.” These critiques of the mainstream LGBT freedom struggle are cru-
cial but need to be tempered with an appreciation for the decades-long history of lesbian
and gay parental activism. I would second the editors’ emphasis on the need to interrogate
much of the current politics of the family. In particular, I think the ways in which children
of LGBT parents are being used as political symbols must be examined. However, I would
argue that this current phenomenon is only one part of a larger genealogy that involves a
contestation by multiple generations of lesbian mothers, gay fathers, and their children of
the family as always already heterosexual. I chronicle this history in my book, Daniel Rivers,
Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and their Children in the United States since the
Second World War (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press).
11. Barbara Kalish, interview by Arden Eversmeyer, Long Beach, California, January 2001,
OLOC .
12. Blue Lunden, interview by Quinn, December 1989. Blue (Doris) Lunden Special Collection
83–04, Box 1, Folder 2, Lesbian Herstory Archives.
4 SPIRALING DESIRE
Recovering the Lesbian Embodied
Self in Oral History Narrative
Jeff Friedman

Oral history by Jeff Friedman with Terry Sendgraff, San Francisco,

California, November 12 and 28 and December 6, 1990

In response to effects of the AIDS epidemic on the San Francisco Bay Area dance com-
munity, I founded the Legacy Oral History Project in 1988 to record, preserve, and make
accessible the life histories of Bay Area dance community members who were at risk
from life-threatening illness. For the next six years, a volunteer staff and I recorded and
transcribed nearly fifty oral histories with dancers, choreographers, educators, critics,
and administrators, including narrators from classical, contemporary, experimental,
folk, theatrical, and commercial dance genres. The oral history interview with Terry
Sendgraff was recorded for three hours on analog audiotape over three separate sessions
in 1990. All interviews were transcribed and edited according to the University of
California–Berkeley Regional Oral History Office’s formats and standards. Deposited
in 1992, the completed research transcript includes contextual tools and finding aids to
support future research. Interview tapes and transcripts are available for research and
public access at the renamed San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design.1

JEFF FRIEDMAN: Tell us where you were born.

TERRY SENDGRAFF: I was born in Fort Myers, Florida, 1933. That’s the west coast of
Florida. It was beautiful then, not so densely populated as it is now. I lived in
a beautiful home, I thought; wonderful gardens and lawns and trees and
flowers and a fishpond. Really a paradise. I thought my parents owned the
house, but they didn’t; it was just rented. My father was a golf professional so
it was a home that was given to him as part of his job. It was near the golf
course so I also had the golf course as a playground.
I spent a lot of time outside rolling in the grass and even playing in the
hurricanes. I loved to swing—I had a big swing in the backyard—and I really
enjoyed moving. I can remember those days so clearly. The big winds would
come up, and I’d be out in my swing. If it was raining, I’d quit. When there are
74 | SILENCE

hurricanes, there’s a kind of calm. But you feel the pressure. I can remember
as a child wanting to go outside. . . .
FRIEDMAN: Exciting! Was it a military town, Fort Myers?
SENDGRAFF: Yes.
FRIEDMAN: How many siblings?
SENDGRAFF: I had two older brothers, both ten years older than me. One was
adopted and one was a stepbrother. I also had an older sister who was
adopted. So that was Tommy and David, and Virginia. I don’t think Virginia
was at home the first year of my life. She moved to wherever she did, I don’t
know, and was not in contact with the family. I don’t really know the circum-
stances of her leaving. I grew up and was in Fort Myers for about nine years,
with my mother, father, and my two brothers.
Then there was the war—it wasn’t easy to be a golf pro at the time—so my
father managed to get some job in Pennsylvania. We moved to this coal town
in Pennsylvania—New Castle. Incredible shock for me. It was very dreary com-
pared to my paradise and was very depressing. Also the war and the atmo-
sphere was depressing.
My mother was physically abusive to both my brothers. . . . My brothers
went into the Navy, and so they left home. My mother and father separated
shortly after that, I didn’t really know the circumstances of that. All of a
sudden he was gone. I was in a state of shock about the loss because I adored
my father and my brothers. I continued to live with my mother, who was an
alcoholic. Her alcoholism got worse and worse, and so my teenage years
were pretty much dealing with that. My brothers and my father, I think,
came home once, and then after that they didn’t come back until I went off
to college.
I was very close to both my brothers, actually one more than the other. Tom
was really very special because he was a dancer too. . . . He’d dress me up so we
could play—[laughter]—and dance—he really did teach me to dance! So he
was a big influence, big influence on my life. He was also helpful in getting me
into college. He felt it was very important for me to go to college, so in some
way he helped to make that arrangement. My father contributed towards my
education and I did work some, too, to go to college, but it was really my
brother’s guidance there, in that respect. I felt he deserted me when he left for
the Navy, and then he got married and did his own life. So there was a strong
emotional cutoff from my brothers and my father; it was an unhappy time. . . .
I learned to swim before I could walk.
FRIEDMAN: Because you were on the coast?
SENDGRAFF: Because of the beach, yes. And diving.
FRIEDMAN: As a teenager, you were diving from the board?
SENDGRAFF: I went to a swimming pool, and I had swimming lessons and diving
lessons. I was afraid of diving though, actually.
FRIEDMAN: High diving?
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 75

SENDGRAFF: Oh—I remember the first experience just diving from the side of the
pool. It’s like diving into the unknown. But then I did it, and I accomplished
that and then moved onto the diving board, and then later, as a teenager,
from the high board. It was my favorite activity in high school [in Pennsylva-
nia]. Summer was going down to the lake where there was a diving board and
[I would] just dive, get up out of the water, climb the board, dive again, just in
again, out again. It was a big deal, and I was thrilled by the height and the
physical activity. I’d ride my bike to the lake and ride home.
FRIEDMAN: You went to Penn State?
SENDGRAFF: Yes, and then I went to Penn State University and enrolled first in
liberal arts, which I thought was going to be art! [Laughs] Well, there was no
drawing and painting or sculpture in that at all; it was all very boring. I was
not happy at college the first year, very, very unhappy. I think the loss of my
family, even though I was not happy with my mother, was still—I was not
secure. When I left home, I didn’t have a good solid home to leave, so there’s
always this kind of gap, always missing the home and family that I never had.
[At college] I had this counselor-kind-of-housemother-person, a very spec-
tacular student, who was given some honor to be a housemother. I was very
fortunate because she was extremely bright and insightful and helpful, and
she got me involved in a lot of activities, dancing in the Thespian theater
group. So I became very active in the second semester and, from there on,
throughout my years in college, I was involved in dance. I finished my school
years with physical education/recreation, which was more up my alley and
provided me with a social life as well as academics I could handle. . . .
So I went to California and studied with Betty Jones and Ethel Winter,
[Martha] Graham and [José] Limón technique, and ballet. I also enrolled in a
class with Al Huang, who was a Tai Chi and modern dance [master teacher].
He had combined these things, but his approach was process. It was like—
wow!—I saw this other way. Shirley Ririe and Joanne Woodbury were there
from Utah [teaching] Nikolais improvisation; here it is again, improvisation
and process. So I found something that was strong for me, that I could feel
comfortable in and excited by and creative and smart and because I was good
at it. I was good at being spontaneous, and I liked their thoughtful approach
to it. So that was California. I went back to my job in Arizona and I said, “I do
not want to teach ballet anymore. I do not want to teach modern dance, this
isn’t working for me. I want to go see what’s in California.” Some students
were [going to California] for the weekend in April, so I said, “Well, great! I’ll
go! Just check it out!” We went to see Anna Halprin’s studio and watched the
dancers, and I was just blown away, I really liked it. So I went back and quit
my job. I had divorced by then, too, so I was ready for a new life. . . .
Then, I met Al Wunder and he was the right teacher at that time. He had
worked with [modern dancer and choreographer Alwin] Nikolais; he’d been
teaching for Nikolais for about eight years. Al is an incredible, special teacher
76 | SILENCE

in that he really encourages you—encouraged me—to find my own thing.

Which wasn’t easy, I fought him all the way, but we became lovers, and very
best friends, and family, perhaps that was my first sense of family. . . .
At that same time I was getting involved in Gestalt therapy and a lot of the
growth work including Feldenkrais movement. I would go towards these
movements, schools of thought that were geared for personal growth and
awareness, and away from technique. And yet, now I know how important the
technique was for me. I’m glad I have it, I integrated it, and I was able to use
it in a way that was right for me. I couldn’t have done that had I kept studying
the techniques [that is, Graham, Limón, Nikolais, et al.]. There was nowhere
at that time, nowhere to take that technique and use it from the inside out. It
always was so external, with mirrors and everything.
FRIEDMAN: You had those vocabularies, you had those techniques, you chose to
play with them instead of . . .being formed by them?
SENDGRAFF: Yes, and seeing how we are also a product of our times and as well
as helping create the times. That time of play, experimenting and performing,
studio performing, was just right for me. . . .
FRIEDMAN: When you began to formulate Motivity, what were the roots of those
ideas?
SENDGRAFF: Well, I knew I liked gymnastics. I liked the feeling of going upside
down, and I liked the feeling of extending the body for what was clearly func-
tion. If you’re going to do an aerial cartwheel, you’ve got to extend your legs.
It wasn’t point your toes and straighten your legs because it looked good, it
had a purpose so you could feel it; I could feel that. It was exciting to do that
kind of movement. . . .
I started to experiment with the idea of rolling safely because I’d been really
scared [as a child in school]. You have to run and do this dive roll or some-
thing and—wow!—the neck and the head and my body didn’t like that! So
how could I do them smoothly? So I started to play with just very small seg-
ments of things. The idea of play was Al [Wunder’s], and the idea of slow
motion was Al Huang’s Tai Chi work, and then Gestalt awareness also came in
there—“What were you really experiencing in each movement?” So this style
began to develop of doing gymnastics work very slowly and transferring the
weight very slowly and doing a roll into weight on the hands, which [still
might look like] a handstand or a cartwheel, but conceptually changed.
Instead of thinking of these things as tricks, I started thinking of them [as]
ways of locomoting, transferring weight in any way that I could get in this
inverted work and do it safely, with care and awareness. At first, it was really
hard. Now everybody’s doing it fairly easily, but at that time I didn’t see any-
one doing it.
So, I was shifting then from the gymnastics I had known. Then Al’s influ-
ence about how to play with motion. . . . At first I didn’t know what he was
talking about and I would get very annoyed—“Why doesn’t he just give me
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 77

something to do, tell me what to do,” which is what I hated in the other
classes [laughs], and now I was rebelling about this. But he was so patient and
wouldn’t budge from his approach because he knew what he was doing. It was
developing and cultivating curiosity, . . . playing up and down: . . . when some-
thing’s up, something’s down.
Then I had this incredible experience with dance. For a while, when I came
out here, I was trying to teach modern dance the way I had been taught. I was
going to teach a class one night. I think there were maybe six or eight students
in the new study, our little Berkeley Dance Theater gymnasium. I started to
teach this class and I went blank. I couldn’t think of any combinations. I
couldn’t get it together in my head. I had to stop the class and say, “I’m sorry,
but I just can’t teach this way anymore.” And I never did again. It just didn’t
work. I was humiliated. I certainly went through a lot of wondering, “What
am I going to do?”
I did continue to teach gymnastics, pretty much like I had been taught. But
then that started to change, too, and then soon that wasn’t working either. So
I started to play with that. How could I play carefully and give people a chance
to do what they could do; play with inverted work. So then I started to de-
velop a whole way of teaching gymnastics that involved weight bearing and
weight transference and conceptually looking at it differently. I was playing
with motion. The combining of those two things, the dance and the gymnastics,
for me was like combining axial movement and locomotive movements.
Then the trapeze work came in about a year and a half later. I had used
high-flying trapeze at the YMCA in Denver when I was teaching in the early
sixties. I had also done a piece with Al with the big swing on stage and a tra-
peze. So I had this great idea. I gathered four women who liked gymnastic
kind of movements. I asked them to be in my birthday performance. I started
working on a piece with trapezes, and I made some more and hung them up,
unusually perpendicular to one another, and some very low to the ground,
and I started using this same concept of transferring the weight slowly, how to
move in the corners, fast or slow, bring your nose to your knees, all these odd
ways of moving on the trapeze. It was amazing what started to happen, and
that was the beginning. I saw this as totally fascinating to me—working on the
ground and then working in the air. Then we started to work double-lifting
each other, contact improvising work on the trapezes. That birthday perfor-
mance was my forty-second birthday in which I announced that I was going
to call my work “Motivity” and I introduced this piece as my first Motivity
piece. And so that was the beginning. Yes.
FRIEDMAN: It’s so useful to hear what the roots were, and the roots were deeply
connected to all the things we’ve talked about in the past [interviews] and that
you made that shift gradually until the point came, and then they began to
move toward one another. . . .
SENDGRAFF: . . . Yes. . . .
78 | SILENCE

Motivity founder Terry Sendgraff demonstrates the use of

her single-point trapeze as an exploration of three-
dimensional space. Photograph by Deborah Hoffman

FRIEDMAN: . . . almost inside you, in a cognitive way, intrinsically, and that the
equipment came later as an instrument. I’d thought you’d say, “I found this
trapeze and I liked doing that.”
SENDGRAFF: [Laughs]
FRIEDMAN: . . . and of course [Motivity] has got a larger and more deep process
through which it came to that point.
SENDGRAFF: Yes. The whole body of knowledge of Motivity is rooted in the work
of Mary Wigman, Hanya Holm, [Alwin] Nikolais, [Rudolf von] Laban, and
the early Gestalt psychologists and present-day Gestalt theory and therapy.
That school of thought is a very rich body of knowledge. I think it’s little
understood by many, very misunderstood, often like Zen. It’s basically simple
in that awareness, the continuum of awareness is a meditation. So, I was ap-
plying that and not really even getting all the connections myself. . . .
I think that, as I teach now, it’s still very much with the intention of bringing
people to their own form. When you slow down and encourage the students
to have awareness of themselves, then you have to take what you get. I’ve re-
ally become skillful at working with what’s in front of me and sensing what to
do. I teach totally improvisationally but know my material so well. It makes it
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 79

very exciting to teach that way because I really stay in the moment. I’m look-
ing to see what’s not happening and what is happening and where I can shift
if I need to. I teach like I would like to be taught.

Commentary

Cultural phenomenology is an interdisciplinary enterprise that studies the way

individuals use embodied experiences to ground and articulate their conscious-
ness of the world around them. Cultural phenomenology as a field foregrounds
a conflict between figural and field perceptual modes of embodiment. The more
normative figural mode emphasizes singularity, fixedness, and serial percep-
tions. In contrast, the field mode uses a holistic approach emphasizing multi-
plicity, simultaneity, and change. Cultural phenomenologists highlight this
conflict between the two perceptual modes when representing embodied expe-
rience through documentary media such as photography, video, or written or
spoken narratives. For example, anthropologist Thomas Csordas brings oral
interviews directly into this discussion. Csordas reminds us that culture emerges
first from “bodily processes of perception.” For Csordas, our world comes into
being as a consequence of being-in-the-world, a complex simultaneity of senso-
rimotor perceptions and our subcognitive awareness of ourselves as we move
through those perceptions. Regarding representation, Csordas notes, “There is
no special kind of data or special method for eliciting such data but [instead] a
methodological attitude that demands attention to bodiliness even in purely
verbal data such as written text or oral interview.”2 Extending Csordas’s call for
attention to bodiliness, this essay locates that methodological attitude within
the oral history interview, moving away from a normative figural mode toward
a more embodied field of representation.
Legacy’s oral histories directly access embodied experience through inter-
views with dancers. However, oral history narratives with dancers have proven to
be not, in Csordas’s words, only “purely verbal data” but also embodied perfor-
mances correlated to the particular being-in-the-world that emerges from a life
committed to dance. Those subjects’ embodied aesthetic generates a narrative
style characterized by a finely tuned awareness of the body’s multiple parts si-
multaneously and continuously moving through time and space. That these aes-
thetics are complex and difficult to analyze does not release us from attending
to their importance. Rather, dancers’ oral histories reveal a narrative erotics that
acknowledges alternative storytelling modes and representations of embodied
reality that deviate from normative language.
A dance studies perspective provides an analytic framework within which
those alternative storytelling modes can be articulated. My study of dancer and
choreographer Terry Sendgraff’s oral history interview exemplifies one such al-
ternative narrative. This essay links cultural phenomenology with the embodied
practice of dancers to articulate the desires of subjects, like Terry, as they express
80 | SILENCE

themselves outside the norms of narrative construction. For Terry, nonnorma-

tive desire is a form of queer storytelling that refuses categorization, and by
studying her story, we are challenged to open our critical lens further to encom-
pass their unique approach to self-representation through oral history.
During a difficult year in which I sustained back injuries while dancing on
tour in Alaska, I took a sabbatical. Determined to reclaim my body from chronic
pain and reduced mobility, I found Joah Lowe, a dancer, choreographer and
physical therapist, who provided professional therapy. After six months, I
returned to my regular work schedule. In December 1987, Joah visited his family
in Texas for Christmas. Not knowing he had become HIV-positive, Joah devel-
oped a serious case of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and died a week later.
Joah’s partner and his medical and dance communities were in shock, but
together they put together a memorial service for him. We gathered at a local
dance studio in San Francisco’s Mission District and watched Joah’s dancing
image flicker distantly on a small video screen. I was angry at our loss and also
the lack of documentation for Joah’s career as a performer and choreographer.
At that moment, I vowed I would do justice to the unseen, unheard, unfelt nar-
ratives of dancers’ lives.
Within a year of Joah’s memorial, I put together a plan for recording oral
histories of dancers with AIDS. Under the auspices of Legacy Oral History Pro-
ject, I began recording life histories with dancers challenging HIV and AIDS in
the San Francisco Bay Area.3 While engaged in my own community’s struggle to
respond to the AIDS epidemic, it became clear that HIV and AIDS were not the
only risk factors interrupting the historical record. Elders and dancers with other
life-threatening illnesses such as cancer were equally and sometimes more at
risk. I expanded Legacy’s project design to include multiple risk factors for select-
ing narrators. Under these new criteria, I became aware of Terry Sendgraff, a
significant Bay Area dancer and choreographer then battling breast cancer.
I contacted Terry through her partner, Aileen Moffitt, and Terry agreed to
record an interview with me for Legacy’s collection. We all hoped that Terry
would become a long-term breast cancer survivor (and twenty years later, she
is), but by then, Terry had already had recurrences and undergone a mastectomy.
Terry contributed an important narrative to Legacy’s collection that diversified
our collection in several ways: her multiple identities as a lesbian, as a survivor
with non-HIV-related illness, and most important, her unique contribution to
the San Francisco Bay Area dance and activist women’s communities.
Terry’s contribution to dance is Motivity, a unique amalgam of gymnastic
tumbling work and aerial dance supplemented by trapezes and other equipment.
By 2010, at least two generations of artists attribute their work as aerialist dancers
and choreographers to Terry’s movement aesthetic.4 These artists recognize Terry
and Motivity as generating a new field of creative inquiry focused on fully ex-
ploring the three-dimensional field of space through movement. While many
artists and audiences think of Motivity as equipment-supported movement, it is
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 81

in fact a more comprehensive inquiry into holistic embodiment. Based on her

interests in Gestalt approaches to human development and psychotherapy, Terry
developed a movement pedagogy based on supporting fuller movement expres-
sion. Movement begins on the floor, where the body yields to gravity without
hesitation or injury. Informed by her early gymnastics experience, Terry devel-
oped more complex three-dimensional tumbling moves within a dance frame-
work. She then encouraged use of vertical walls as support for movement, in
addition to floors. As students evolved their skills, Terry created low-flying tra-
peze equipment to encourage more engagement with three-dimensional space.
This equipment included one- and two-point rigging trapezes at varying heights
that allowed a variety of movement and choreographic choices. Though students
eventually developed virtuoso skills under Terry’s training and guidance, she
always kept her aesthetic vision focused on supporting embodied experiences
that encouraged three-dimensionality at all levels, from simple floor-based
movement to advanced and complex aerial choreography supplemented with a
variety of equipment.
A caveat to this physical aesthetic was Terry’s emphasis on group process that
encouraged the evolution of movement communities. Key to this process was
improvisation, keeping one’s moving body fully engaged with his or her inner
life, as expressed outwardly through movement. While Terry’s early work
remained inner-directed, her later work is concerned with community activism,
especially where women fully embrace three-dimensional space. For example,
Terry’s performance work “Women Walking Tall” used waves of women and girls
on stilts emerging from a large grove of trees at a local outdoor festival, ululating
powerful and joyful agency as they pierced the upper reaches of space, many
dancers looming over ten feet tall. Integrating feminist politics and activism
with Gestalt psychotherapeutic theory, Terry’s embodied practice activates three-
dimensional space as a holistic approach to a life committed to connecting
inner experience with outer action.
The feminist theorist Mary Gergen posits that narrators always tell their
stories within normative structures laid out by social parameters, “paradigms
deemed intelligible by their specific culture.”5 However, narrative theorists Ros-
enwald and Ochberg note that subjects conserve a certain amount of individual
agency, where tension between their actual experiences and the social conven-
tions invested in narrative production struggle toward resolution, but some-
times fail: “Desire (and the life stories in which it is represented) is inevitably
shaped by the forms each culture provides. At the same time, desire strains
against these forms. The silences, truncations and confusion in stories . . . point
out to us . . . what else might be said and sought.6
Often social hierarchies overdetermine the interview event, especially
between elites and nonelites. Perceived power differences between academic re-
searchers and their nonelite narrators force lower status participants to construct
an “official” story for the elite interviewer. Following discursive norms, subjects
82 | SILENCE

construct a narrative they believe the higher status interviewer wants and expects,
instead of one reflecting their experience. Under these circumstances, the official
story stretches to fulfill those norms and then begins to fray; the narrative frag-
ments and the subject’s desire for authenticity are revealed.
Although Rosenwald and Ochberg suggest the narrator is reduced to silence,
this description is faulty. Fragmentation of a spoken narrative reveals and fore-
grounds nonverbal communication channels. Rather than silence, fragmenta-
tion of semantic text reveals a significant visual-kinesthetic component: the
narrator’s body continues to express itself. Oral history interviews are embodied
performances with multiple channels of information delivery and reception.
Fragmentation of oral history narratives reveals not only silence, not just a desire
toward authenticity, but also embodied desire, a narrative erotics. Terry Send-
graff’s oral history provides illustrations of these narrative erotics.
While verbal silence reveals the ongoing communicative erotics in an inter-
view, this desire is not necessarily for a simplistically coherent narrative. Narra-
tive theorist Elliot Mishler cites studies supporting the argument that “personal
narratives serve a ‘coherence’ function, a teleological approach that chronologi-
cally lists specific events ordered around a problem requiring conflict resolution
through action.”7 However, Terry Sendgraff’s oral history resists simple coher-
ence. Demonstrated by Terry’s Motivity work, sensorimotor perception of the
world emphasizes multiple and simultaneous experiences received through sev-
eral perceptual modalities. This type of holistic perception of being-in-the-world
produces alternative narrative structures to represent the narrator’s embodied
perception of reality.
By rejecting the fixed stages of developmental theory where “each stage
build[s] on the resolution of earlier stages,” Mishler offers an alternative op-
tion: “Identity changes in adulthood do not follow the fixed, linear path of a
universal stage model. Their trajectories involve detours, recursions, embedded
cycles, that are responsive to culturally framed and socially situated alterna-
tives.”8 Mishler chooses distinctively embodied language to describe alterna-
tive narrative forms. He associates narrative production with an embodied
journey that is distinctively nonlinear, keeping the story moving in cyclical
turning and returning, a recursive spiral like Terry’s aerial movement on the
trapeze.
Both Gergen and Mishler find that these narratives disturb the norm, creating
what postmodernist theorist Jane Flax calls a “reality . . . even more unstable,
complex and disorderly.”9 Flax posits that representations of unstable realities
emerge frequently in women’s narratives. Gergen describes these narratives as
“more fragmentary, multi-dimensional, understated and temporally disjunc-
tive,”10 paralleling a field mode of perception. In Terry’s oral history, temporal
and spatial disjunctions are, in fact, part of a larger narrative whole. This narra-
tive is not so much destabilized as self-mobilizing, allowing fragmentation so
that another kind of coherence can emerge.
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 83

There are similarities between the creative process and oral history interviews.
Both are emergent processes involving a substantial amount of recursivity. Oral
history topics introduced earlier in a recording remain unarticulated until the
narrator returns to comment on this previous node of interest in the earlier narra-
tive. Similarly, the creative process in dance and other artistic forms often remains
opaque, even to the primary creator from whose mind-body the process emerges,
until the work is staged or completed. Even then, after many performances, a
work of choreography turns and returns on itself, revealing facets previously
unknown. In Jeffrey Evans’s study on choreographers’ narratives, neither subject
consciously wished to represent their life experience transparently; they resist pro-
ducing a narrative that is clarifying, coherent and achieves closure. Rather,

Their histories suggest that self-knowledge, traditionally understood as expressing

oneself through words, need not proceed parallel with development . . . develop-
ment proceeds with and without verbal self-understanding as persons clear a path
to mediate the forces moving their lives.11

Evans emphasizes how the oral narrative’s verbal expression circumvents the
choreographers’ desire. Both subjects are conflicted because “as we know from
rhetoric and body language, the clearest words are often too simple to convey
what an author intends or what an audience is able maximally to receive. For the
artist, artistry is rarely the shortest distance between two points.”12 We are
reminded of Mishler’s cyclical narratives that embody a recursive turning away
from Evans’s citation of normative “straight” narratives.13
In Terry’s oral history, two theoretical concerns intersect: Gergen and Mish-
ler’s nonfigural narratives and Evans’s project where choreographers’ embodied
expression seeks to violate discursive norms by creating alternative forms of nar-
rative expression. Based on my earlier description of Terry’s three-dimensional
movement aesthetic, her choreographic aesthetic helps us understand how nar-
rative erotics emerge from oral history.
Quoting from my introduction to Terry’s interview:

Alone in a spotlight, Terry was working with a low-flying trapeze to extend her
movement. Matching the trajectory of her body weight to the momentum of the
trapeze, she suddenly spiraled up from the floor to the full height of the equip-
ment’s capacity and then down in one effortless motion. In that moment, Terry
seemed to clarify the physics and metaphysics of the human body in motion. Some
people believe the spiral represents basic form in nature: the center of plant spores,
seashells, human muscle fibers, all seem to have adapted, incorporating function
and the forces of external physics into spiraling forms of one kind or another. Terry,
in that moment, seemed to have both understood that deep knowledge, become it,
and showed it to us.14

This excerpt exposes the core visceral reality of Terry’s performance, and the
excerpts that follow are purposefully framed by an image of embodied movement.
84 | SILENCE

First, Terry employs a narrative style that emerges from her dance aesthetic,
grounded in her ability to fully occupy three-dimensional space. For Terry, this
means emphasizing what her partner, Aileen Moffitt, calls “being”:

[Meeting with the board] was always more than business, because the business of
“being” always comes first with Terry. For example, board meeting agendas were
sometimes set aside to give each member an opportunity to check in on internal
feelings; feelings were then shared with the group and affected the direction of the
rest of the meeting.15

Terry’s emphasis on the present moment is supported by her art practice: a

Gestalt-based movement aesthetic that emphasizes holistic apprehension of
three-dimensional space through the full sensorium. Terry says,

Using technique from the inside out . . . gestalt awareness came in there: “What
were you really experiencing in each movement?” Let’s do something fast, let’s do
something slow, now incorporate those two. Play with the space between your
nose and your knees and relate to the space between yourself and the wall, play
with . . . working on the ground and then working in the air . . . . My first Motivity
piece . . . involved using the floor, the walls, the trapezes and each other to move
with, on, and against.16

Second, while being in the present, that is, “being-in-the-world,” in relation to

the external environment, Terry also accessed her internal emotional world, a
“being-in-the-self,” if you will. Consequently, her narrative style moves easily
out of the figural experience of chronological time and the normal limits of
geographical space because emotional coherency counts more in Terry’s field of
being that directly connects inner motivations with outer-directed action. By
accessing full emotional connection to her sense of self, as a body “being-in-her-
world,” Terry creates her own coherent connections among diverse temporal
and locational differences.
For example, during her narrative, Terry is able to leap from the present
decade backward in time to the far past and thousands of geographic miles from
her Oakland, California, present to her early childhood in Florida. Difficulties
associated with her father’s losing his job as a golf professional in Florida during
World War II forced Terry’s family to move to New Castle, a coal town in upstate
Pennsylvania. For Terry, the move was “an incredible shock for me; It was just
dreary compared to my paradise.” Terry then makes an emotionally logical shift
backward in time and returns to Florida to discuss a new but related topic:

My mother was physically abusive to both my brothers. My brother’s relationship

to my mother was not very pleasant either. They were, of course, eager to go away
from home.

Terry’s narrative then shifts forward in time to her adolescent experiences with
her brother Tom in their new home in New Castle, Pennsylvania:
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 85

Tom was very special because he was a dancer, too. He liked to dance and he
used to dress up in costumes.  .  . . I remember that I did some sort of perfor-
mance with him but mostly at home. I would stand on the stairway and jump
off the stairs into his arms, and he would twirl me around and throw me up in
the air and catch me!!—[now in present time and space] and so I can see why I
like to fly.17

Immediately spiraling backward in time to her previous location in Florida,

Terry recalls:

There are a lot of reasons why I like to fly. For my birthday, my brothers rigged up
this wire that went from the height of one [tree in my backyard in Florida] down
to the bottom [of the other tree]. They put this handle on [the wire] and a ladder
up to the top of the tree, and then I would take hold of the handle and slide all the
way down. . . . It was the biggest thrill! I pretended I was Wonder Woman!18

Then, Terry finishes up with another shift forward in time as she completes her
undergraduate degree in physical education at Pennsylvania State University:

I finished my school years [at the university] with physical education/recreation

[degree], academics I could handle. I was so distraught, emotionally disturbed re-
ally, that I couldn’t study. I didn’t know how. . . .

Then, she briefly shifts back in time and space to her teenage years in New
Castle, Pennsylvania:

I could never study in high school because I’d come home and my mother was
drunk, so you couldn’t study, the concentration is not there. I had no quiet envi-
ronment because there was emotional abuse and some physical abuse, so it wasn’t
exactly conducive to academics. So, I didn’t think I was very smart either.

In the next sentence, Terry returns to the Oakland-based present moment, with
an alternative self-assessment: “Well, since then, I’ve discovered I’m very smart,
I’m fine!” She immediately returns in time to Penn State University: “But, I
didn’t have a chance to develop in that way, so I had these doubts, a lot of
doubts about myself, a lot of self doubt.”19
Terry then moves into a virtuosic narrative performance, shifting fluidly back
and forth between her past and present and between local and distance space.
The interview with Terry had touched an inner nerve and, stricken with emo-
tion, her narrative fragments and then recoheres into what I call a narrative
spiral:

[Voice quavers, near tears] And just feeling all of the sudden, I mean, it’s not all of
a sudden, but—there it is—you know [pause, beginning to cry here]—family—
[more crying, taking a few breaths as she cries]—just seeing everything flash before
me—[pause, crying still]—just having finished the performance and being through
this feeling so vulnerable; I feel pretty vulnerable. My brother’s never seen me do
86 | SILENCE

what I do. I don’t know if he’s an alcoholic or not, I think he may be. His behavior
is alcoholic.

Shifting immediately to local space and recent time:

[Tom and I] reconnected when he was coming to this area one time when I was
doing a performance so I told him that I dedicated the performance to him. I
thought he was in the audience because he’d said he was coming, and he never
showed up. I didn’t hear from him for about six months. He wrote saying he’s sorry
he didn’t make it, but he had jet lag. I don’t know what his real situation was, but
that’s typical of the way he is with me.

Shifting to past time: “because there was another occasion when he was going to
come around Valentine’s Day. . . . I was living here and he was going to come
stay with us and he never showed up. . . .” And shifting again to present time:

So, talking about the family is difficult. I’m also studying right now for the [Mar-
riage, Family, Child Counselor] exam. I’ve been focusing on these emotionally dys-
functional families with their alcoholism, and physical and emotional abuse. I
think my family’s been on my mind a lot [long pause] how does that play part in
who I am and all of that.

FRIEDMAN: Have there been families that you’ve created for yourself?
SENDGRAFF: Well—[pause]—not really until now. Not really until I came out as a
lesbian. The women’s community and my partners have been more my family.

Shifting to past time and nonlocal space:

SENDGRAFF: I was married twice and it just wasn’t right for me. I was not the wife
type [laughs a bit], just wasn’t right, trying to do a family in that way just
didn’t work. So, when I came out, I was so happy. It was just right, you know?
It was like coming home to the home I never had. So coming out was a won-
derful experience for me. Actually, my brother Tom is gay too. He came out
when he was fifty-one years old. He has nine children. . . .
FRIEDMAN: Oh my!
SENDGRAFF: [Laughs] . . . and I came out shortly after he did, after he told me,
although I always knew he was gay, I just always knew he was gay, I was not
surprised. It coincided with my own coming out, so that was really a great
celebration. Coming out in the seventies was like—what a great time [laugh-
ing] to come out.

Shifting to present time and local space:

The women’s community is so special, and so supportive, and the community in

general, Berkeley, the Bay Area, is supportive of Motivity, supportive of experi-
mental work, period, supportive of trying to find yourself, to really figure out what
you like—do your own thing!20
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 87

The “fragmentation” of Terry’s narrative, as it traverses time and space, signals

where her embodied desire, especially as it approaches questions of personal
and sexual identity for both herself and her brother, deviates from narrative
norms. Rather than building a linear teleology enacting the agent-crisis-resolu-
tion narrative model, Terry spirals recursively back and forth in time and space
to create an emotionally coherent three-dimensional geographical and tempo-
ral field of memory.
Analyzing the transcript twenty years after the interview, I discovered my own
voice, as interviewer, responding to Terry’s virtuosic narrative performance by
trying to bring her back into chronological teleology: “Let’s go back to going
from Penn State to the next step and fill in.”21 This discovery reminds me that,
when I first confronted Terry’s verbatim transcript during the editing process in
1990, I attempted to reconfigure her three-dimensional narrative into a norma-
tive chronological teleology. After literally taking a scissors to the transcript, I
have a distinct memory of looking at my living room floor covered with strips of
paper, each with three or four lines of type. That sight convinced me I was evis-
cerating Terry herself. I stopped immediately and began listening carefully to
Terry’s voice and her nontraditional narrative style. In this essay, I pay my
respects to Terry’s indomitable voice and her embodied desire that resisted my
original impulse to distort them into a normative narrative.
As stated in the essay’s introduction, cultural phenomenology emphasizes
embodied experience of the world. The emphasis is on using a field approach to
perception. This field approach values the multiplicity of our world, where the
simultaneity of experience and the ever-changing evolution of those experiences
are hallmarks. The essay describes how figural norms reduce that life-world to a
type of narrative where a series of discrete perceptions become fixed bits of ex-
perience along a linear progression. However, feminist and other perspectives
on narrative support alternatives to this normative storytelling style.
Analysis of Terry’s oral history interview reveals what may be called a narra-
tive erotics, where her body desires to break open and expand the normative
figural narrative. When Terry repeatedly returns recursively to her memories, her
narrative moves forward and backward along a chronological time line, while
also shifting between geographic locations. The result is a time line with linear
movement in both directions, lateral geographic shifts among locations, and
recursive circling among memories. These three movements, forward and back-
ward linear, horizontal lateral, and circling actions, combine to create a spiraling
narrative trace-form. A trace-form is not a fixed form but a movement signature
that represents both Terry’s ability to spiral recursively across time and space in
her oral history and her spiraling aerial dancing. Terry’s movement signature
links her dance aesthetic and the oral narrative that represents her life in dance.
The signature balances field and figure orientation. This balance is found in a
dialectic between Terry’s strongly-grounded belief system and feeling states and
the multiple and simultaneous swirling world of embodied experience around
88 | SILENCE

her. The resulting balancing act is not stable or fixed, but a dialectic process em-
phasizing movement.22
Terry’s movement aesthetic drives the emergence of her narrative erotics in an
oral history format. Those erotics emerge from her desire to be experienced fully
and wholly as who she is: an evolving woman, a dancer who moves, a lesbian
engaged in activist change. Psychologist Elliott Jaques agrees with this hard-
fought battle for balance between modes of perception, where he notes:

Balanced oscillation between the poles of the [figure]-field duality is not simply
there for the asking. It must be worked for. In particular it is the field dominant per-
spective which can be lost sight of. The object dominant perspective is strong, it
pushes itself forward. It is the unbounded continuous field which is more difficult
to keep hold of.23 [my emphasis]

This dialectic suggests we need not choose between categorical figure and holis-
tic field perception approaches, but that field orientation, in Jaques’s words,
must be worked for. This work is revealed in Terry’s own aesthetic development.
From her oral history, we learn Terry challenged figural norms in her own dance
life, especially approaches to training. She struggled with a conflict between
dance techniques that focused on discrete steps and tasklike accomplishments.
In contrast, Terry preferred a fieldlike gestalt responsiveness to three-dimen-
sional space, represented in her Motivity work. Eventually, Terry rejected the
competitive and commodifying worlds of gymnastics and technical dance that
emphasized the figural approach. Instead, she developed a movement aesthetic
in Motivity that emphasizes three-dimensional space and recognizes contextual
intention through improvisation techniques. Freeing herself from the figural ap-
proach, Terry forged her own three-dimensional style of teaching and dancing
that emerges from her aesthetic interests. She describes resisting normative
constraints:

I think it was such a struggle for me having dance taught to me in such a left-brain
linear way when it’s just not my mode. The last modern dance class I went to was
Phyllis Lamhut’s. She came to Berkeley to teach a master class, and I thought, “After
all that therapy and finding my own dance, now I could go back and I wouldn’t care.”
Oh God, it was awful.
I had to leave. I was so upset, I had to call my therapist.
It was so intensely left-brain and she went so fast, explained everything so fast.
When I left, I said, “I will never do this again.
It’s not for me.” Didn’t work for me.
I’m just not—not—it’s not my mode, you know?24 [my emphases]

This excerpt from Terry’s oral history narrative represents how Terry’s conflict bal-
ances figure and field modes, even at the most granular level of individual words
and phrases. Semantic expression in Terry’s oral history interview uses words to
convey a figural approach to consciousness. Words are singular and fixed, using a
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 89

serial one-by-one approach to representing experience. However, when all the

embodied elements of speech are also taken into account, a field is revealed that
surrounds words. For example, vocal production such as Terry’s tone and volume
provide a field context for words by expressing embodied intentions of emotion
and emphasis. These field elements are received by a listener simultaneously with
the semantic content of the word, emphasizing a balanced approach to commu-
nication. In addition to vocal production, other embodied aspects of Terry’s ver-
bal expression include movements of her facial expressions, posture shifts, and
arm, hand, or other gestures. These movements provide another complex, simul-
taneous field context to the figural semantic content. Jaques notes:

The idea that verbalization might emerge from the oscillating interaction of two
modes of cognitive organization is a worthwhile proposition. We need to keep
strong contact with our intuitive sense of movement episodes in an unbounded
field—for without that contact, we lose our sense of purpose and we lose our sense
of contact with the intentions and the purposes, the desires and will, which make
human episodes human.25 [my emphases]

In the semantic content of this text, we hear Terry rejecting norms in the dance
field that emphasized figural consciousness. But in this text excerpt, I have delib-
erately emphasized where Terry’s body breaks through the semantics through
vocal volume and phrased repetition and rhythm. I use italics to show how
Terry’s words are highly inflected by her intense desire and will to resist the
norms of dance training. The italicized rhythmic repetition of phrases reveals
how Terry grows more frustrated, signalling her desire for a different mode of
dance expression. This field of desire leads to Terry’s characteristic fragmentation
in the last sentence. As Ochberg and Rosenwald stated, the gaps between her
words resound with desire, but not in silence, as they suggest, but in her body’s
yearning. This essay also shows that Terry’s desire resounds beyond the level of
semantic expression and its fragmentation; she resists narrative norms at the
level of structure. She de-emphasizes the figural approach to narrative and
reaches toward an embodied field consciousness in her desire to find balance in
a narrative erotics. Terry demonstrates that work in her own words: “I’m just
not—not—it’s not my mode, you know?” Within that brief moment of fragmen-
tation emerges Terry’s ongoing, intense embodied desire to find and be herself,
that is, being-in-her-world, being-in-her-self, and, finally, being-in-her-story.
Representing embodied erotics in queer narratives is activist work. Like Terry, we
can climb into the air, curve away from that straight line and explore the hori-
zon of possibilities. Work for it.

Notes
1. In 1994, with support from the California Arts Council, Legacy proactively reached out to
embrace the full cultural diversity of Bay Area dance for community members of Native
American, African, Hispanic, Latina/o, and Asian descent. By 2001, Legacy had received
funding support from many Bay Area and California private and community foundations,
90 | SILENCE

as well as several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts’s Dance, Service, and
Heritage and Preservation programs. Although Legacy had been regularly depositing
audiotapes, videotapes, and print transcripts in the San Francisco Performing Arts Library
& Museum’s archive, Legacy officially merged as a dedicated program of the library in
2001. With support from a Library Services Technical Assistance grant from the State of
California in 2009–2010, Legacy’s collection of approximately a hundred life histories
were selectively digitized with a Web site presence at www.mpdsf.org. The author ac-
knowledges Terry Sendgraff for her permission to substantially cite from the oral history
transcript, Terry and Aileen Moffitt for their feedback in the writing and editorial process,
Horacio Roque Ramírez and Nan Alamilla Boyd for their editorial guidance, and the J.
William Fulbright Association for a Senior Research/Teaching Fellowship in 2009–2010,
which provided time and space in Frankfurt, Germany, for completion of this essay.
2. Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology,” in Gail Weiss and Honi
Fern Haber, eds., Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersection of Nature and Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 147–48.
3. For additional archival sources on dancers with AIDS, see the Estate Project for Artists with
AIDS (www.estateproject.org) and the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection’s sound archive at
the New York Public Library in Lincoln Center (www.nypl.org).
4. For additional practitioners of Motivity-based performance work in the San Francisco–
Oakland Bay Area, see works by Joanna Haigood, Zaccho Productions (www.zaccho.org),
Jo Kreiter, Flyaway Productions (www.flyawayproductions.com), Amelia Rudolph, Project
Bandaloop (www.projectbandaloop.org), and Capacitor (www.capacitor.org). Other groups
in the United States, such as Cycropia Aerial Dance Company and Frequent Flyers Dance
Company, acknowledge Sendgraff as the important founding innovator of the now interna-
tional aerial dance movement. See www.cycropia.org for a more complete list of aerial
dance companies.
5. Mary Gergen, “Life-Stories: Pieces of a Dream,” cited in George C. Rosenwald and Richard
L. Ochberg, “Introduction: Life-Stories, Cultural Politics and Self-Understanding,” 7, in
George C. Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg, eds., Storied Lives (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 1–20.
6. Rosenwald and Ochberg, “Introduction,” in Storied Lives, 7.
7. “The essential markers of the well-structured narrative in the Western cultural tradition [are]
a temporally-ordered set of events” (Labov, 1972; Labov and Waletzky, 1967), coherence at
several levels (Agar and Hobbs, 1982), and the basic agent-conflict-action structures (Rumel-
hart, 1975, 1977), all cited in Elliot Mishler, “Work, Identity, and Narrative: An Artist-Crafts-
man’s Story,” in Rosenwald and Ochberg, eds., Storied Lives, 35.
8. Ibid., 36–37.
9. Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” in Signs, Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 12:4 (1987): 643, cited in Gergen, “Life-Stories: Pieces of a
Dream,” 128.
10. Ibid., 132.
11. Jeffrey E. Evans, “Language and the Body: Communication and Identity Formation in Cho-
reography,” in Rosenwald and Ochberg, eds., Storied Lives, 107.
12. Ibid., 95.
13. Rosenwald and Ochberg comment on Evans’s finding, where he suggests that “search for
identity is in jeopardy when [narrators] are asked to give a transparent account of their
commitments to an audience or interviewer.” These subjects consciously act to “violate
narrational norms,” because embodied expression serves the choreographers better than the
oral narrative. Rosenwald and Ochberg, “Introduction,” Storied Lives, 11.
14. Jeff Friedman, “Interview History,” in Dreams of Flying (San Francisco: Legacy Oral History
Program collection, San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design, 1992), vii.
15. Aileen Moffitt, “Introduction,” Dreams of Flying, iv–v.
16. Terry Sendgraff, Dreams of Flying, print transcript, 34.
17. Ibid., 3–4.
18. Ibid., 5–6.
 SPIR ALING DESIRE | 91

19. Ibid., 8–9.

20. Ibid., 9–10.
21. Ibid., 11.
22. For more on embodied signatures in oral history narratives, see Jeff Friedman, Embodied
Oral History: A Laban Movement Analysis of Dancers’ Life Histories toward Ontological Aware-
ness, unpublished dissertation (University of California-Riverside, 2003).
23. Elliott Jaques, The Form of Time (London: Crane Russak, 1982), 213–14.
24. Sendgraff, Dreams of Flying, 35–36.
25. Jaques, Form of Time, 221.
This page intentionally left blank
PART II
SEX
This page intentionally left blank
5 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X
Cheryl Gonzales and Rikki Streicher
Tell Their Stories
Nan Alamilla Boyd

Oral history by Nan Alamilla Boyd with Cheryl Gonzales, San Francisco,
California, February 1, 1992; oral history by Nan Alamilla Boyd with Rikki
Streicher, San Francisco, California, January 22, 1992

On February 1, 1992, I met Cheryl Gonzales at the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society
on Sixteenth Street in San Francisco. We sat at a metal table in the archives and dis-
cussed Gonzales’s memories of growing up in San Francisco. I was eager to meet her
because I had heard from other narrators that Gonzales started going to lesbian bars in
San Francisco as a teenager. I had gotten Gonzales’s name from Sharon Tracy, who had
co-owned the Highlander Bar on Potrero Hill in the late 1960s—an important venue as
lesbian feminism evolved within the bar scene. Gonzales was also connected to Thelma
Davis, whose oral history describes San Francisco’s African American queer bar culture.
In the interview that follows, Gonzales remembers her first foray into the bars via
Maud’s, the notoriously free-spirited Haight-Ashbury bar owned by Rikki Streicher.
Gonzales’s and Streicher’s oral histories, as well as Tracy’s and Davis’s, are among
forty-five interviews I conducted in the early 1990s for my doctoral dissertation. This
research led to the subsequent publication of Wide Open Town: A History of
Queer San Francisco to 1965 (University of California Press, 2003). While I
worked on my dissertation and book, I also worked as a volunteer at the Gay and
Lesbian Historical Society (now, the GLBT Historical Society), founding its oral
history program, helping to manage the archives, and serving on the board of direc-
tors from 1992 to 1994 and 2003 to 2009. The oral histories, ephemera, and docu-
ments I collected have been deposited at the GLBT Historical Society as the Wide
Open Town History Project.1

F E B R UA R Y 1 , 19 9 2
CHERYL GONZALES: My first involvement with the gay community was, uh, the
bars were really the only avenue for socialization, and so I had heard from a
96 | SEX

woman, one of my neighbor friends who was in the neighborhood, a gay

woman who I became intimate with, that there were gay bars—that there
were quite a few of them in San Francisco. Would I like her to take me to one?
I was seventeen years old at the time, living with my grandmother at the time.
My grandparents raised me. So I decided that sure. But basically I wanted to
go on my own. I’ve always been a real curious and very independent person,
and I wanted to do this on my own. I remember how she drove me up to
Maud’s, which was called The Study at the time. Basically, we sat in the car,
and I just sort of watched people come in and out. I was really fascinated, so
I proceeded to, uh, well, this was when I was in high school. So I went back
on my own. I took the bus up there by myself, no, actually I took a taxicab
and decided to venture in on my own without the accompaniment of this
older woman who was twenty-one. She was an older woman at twenty-one,
and I was seventeen. So I thought that was pretty far out.
So I walked in. I never even once thought about a drinking establishment
and having an ID. It never even occurred to me. So my first time in I got
carded. I thought, “This is real strange.” And I remember there was a bartender
named Jay. His name was Jayola, and he was a very small, little, diminutive
man. He kept seeing me because I went back the next week. I thought, well,
maybe he won’t notice. I went in again, and I got carded again. I was very te-
nacious. So I was able to finally put two and two together, and I decided to get
a fake ID. So I went ahead and got a fake ID. Illegally. My grandmother would
have died, rolled over in her grave if she knew I did this.
NAN ALAMILLA BOYD: Where’d you get your fake ID?
GONZALES: Well, I don’t want to say. Anyway, I went in and had gotten an ID. Or
I knew that I could get in when there were other bartenders there that didn’t
know me. So I started hanging out and proceeded to meet other women,
other gay women, older women. Very few were in their twenties. Then there
was that whole issue, there was a whole emphasis on at that point in time,
which would have been 1966, there was a whole emphasis on roles—defined
gender roles. And it was real weird to me because I didn’t really feel that I fit
into either one, either category. I remember this one time where I sat down at
a table, around the pool table, by myself, and this woman came up to me and
asked me if she could join me. I was just petrified, but I said well sure. So she
was really masculine. She was wearing a man’s flannel shirt with a T-shirt
underneath and real short crew-cut hair. Pretty similar to the way a lot of
people are dressing now. It’s real interesting. And desert boots. She came up to
me and sat next to me, and we started talking and she asked me what I was. I
thought well that’s a real strange question. I said, “Well, what do you mean?”
And she said, “Well, are you butch or fem?”2 I looked at her, and I told her I
didn’t know. I mean that was really kind of a weird question to me. I just
didn’t answer. I don’t even remember what I said, but I know I didn’t define
myself. I proceeded to go home with this woman, and it was just a disaster, an
absolute disaster. Not the actual intimacy part of it, but just the dynamics of
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 97

meeting this first person in a bar, and she turns out to be really, really into
substance abuse. It was just a disaster. And what she had done was ended up
calling my grandmother and telling her that she was sleeping with me. I was
devastated. I just thought this was just bizarre. So I basically ended the rela-
tionship but proceeded to pursue my sexuality because that’s what I wanted
to do. Then I started meeting other people up at the bar—meeting other
people that were a little bit more balanced psychologically.
Basically, the one thing that should be stressed as far as the bar community
in the work that you’re doing is that the bars were communities. They were
families. It was a whole sense of, well, there was the cliquish component also,
but there was a real sense of belonging. If you were having problems in your
personal life or you couldn’t make your rent, we’ll say that as an example,
people would really rally together. If someone had, i.e., breast cancer or some-
thing, people would set up funds. It was just a real sense of community. People
played softball between the different bars. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t sense
that happening now with the women’s community. And a lot of women are
getting clean and sober, which I think is wonderful, but there’s not a sense of
that closeness and that camaraderie.
BOYD: Maud’s was the place that you spent most of your time?
GONZALES: Maud’s, and then I went down to the Highlander, which is the bar
that Sharon owned. That’s where I really, say, cut my teeth on drugs—started
doing a lot of psychedelics. And down there, I got involved in more of a, my
friendships were much more solid. That’s where I feel that I had more of a
sense of family at that point in time. The Highlander was a wonderful place.
People just sort of hung out together. It was more of a sense of family. People
would be intimate with one another, and yet there were no strings attached. I
can’t say I had a real solid relationship with one person at the time, but I
formed some really good alliances with women. There was a sense of nonmo-
nogamy, but it was okay. People didn’t get hysterical about it—it wasn’t really
defined. It was real interesting. There was a lot of, I mean people really slept
around a lot. But like I said, there wasn’t a sense that we had to get married or
we had to form commitments right then and there.
BOYD: So the jealousies of sleeping with someone’s girlfriend didn’t happen?
GONZALES: I don’t know about that. I never got involved with people that were in a
couple. That’s always been personally a taboo for me. I try to keep my life uncom-
plicated as much as possible. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t
prefer triangles. I think they’re messy. I learned by other people’s mistakes. No,
there was a real sense of, it was just indicative of the sixties. It was what was going
on. Free love. That whole attitude was disseminated into the gay community.
BOYD: I have a couple questions for you. When you say intimate, you mean sex?
GONZALES: Sexual.
BOYD: Let’s talk a little bit more about that and in particular back to this ques-
tion of role-playing. Can you just describe that a little bit more for me?
GONZALES: What aspect of role-playing?
98 | SEX

BOYD: Like when you first started going to Maud’s, your first introduction into
the culture, you learned about the fact that there were roles by someone
telling you about it.
GONZALES: Right.
BOYD: But what did you learn?
GONZALES: What I learned. What I learned from it was I just sort of felt that, well,
I go this way and then I go this way about it. I feel that there are certain attrib-
utes that people have—there are certain women that like to react and behave
in certain ways. Their behavior and their psychological makeup may be much
more masculine. They look at the world that way. But I think for me, myself, I
was really caught in between because I never could play—although I passed in
society. I work in a corporate job as a feminine woman, and yet there are parts
of myself that are much more aggressive. I hate to align aggression with asser-
tiveness, but I sort of felt that I was in between. I was always uncomfortable
with having to pigeonhole myself. I was uncomfortable with the label of
being a lesbian not per se of being a lesbian, but I’ve always been very uncom-
fortable with labels. I don’t necessarily need to fit into the mainstream. . . .
The role thing was very difficult for me. I always ended up with seeming to
be with women that were very, very into what they called stone butches. They
were real tough, but I always tried to break through that shell. I was always
attempting to soften them up because I always saw another side. But the
image, the image that was portrayed in society was not that. So I would get
real frustrated with that whole roles issue.
BOYD: So there were two roles?
GONZALES: Yeah.
BOYD: It sounds like you were sort of taking up a third role, right? So maybe
there were three roles?
GONZALES: Um-hmm.
BOYD: Did you know other people like you who didn’t participate in the role
thing?
GONZALES: Yeah, I did. One woman I’m still in contact with who is in Colorado
right now, she and Sharon are really the only two people I’ve kept in contact
with through that whole period of time. She lives in Colorado, and she was just
pretty much, we were both sort of in the middle. Basically, to this day she is still
very much in love with me. Twenty-four years later, we’ve just had a real connec-
tion through that whole period of time. I saw her through a very hard drug pe-
riod for her where she took a lot of acid and really flipped out, ended up back
in a hospital in Oregon. I would write letters to her. I could say she was prob-
ably one of the few people who was in the middle. I keep saying “in the middle,”
and that sounds so boring, but in that place where roles were real weird.
BOYD: Do you think that other folks who were participating in butch-fem culture
could recognize that there were people who were neither? I mean, was “in the
middle” a social role that you could pick, as well as the other two?
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 99

GONZALES: Exactly. Well, you pretty much were forced to. Sexually, too, I think.
I do remember having an affair with a woman, a one-night stand—many
one-night stands. It was just real interesting because I just don’t know, I’m
in a couple right now, but I just don’t know with the younger gay commu-
nity, younger women, if they’re that much involved in one-night stands. If
they go out and just trick with somebody one night. I don’t have any women
in my life right now that are in their twenties that are single and that hang
out. But that was the norm. I went home with this woman, and she basi-
cally, we were in bed, and she wore men’s pajamas. I thought, “This is really
strange.” She didn’t want me to touch her. She didn’t want me to be inti-
mate with her. It was like a really one-way relationship. But that was very
acceptable. I mean it was like there were certain women that you didn’t
touch. An untouchable.
BOYD: So she would make love to you or have sex with you, but you couldn’t
reciprocate.
GONZALES: I think it was very much—this is just my theory—I think it was a
parody. I think it was an emulation of the heterosexual world again, one more
time. That it was a power trip, and it was a denial, a resistance to look at your
own, to look at the soft person. But I mean I’m not judging, I’m just
theorizing.
BOYD: In the bar, did people talk openly about sex and sexual behavior? Did you
know what you were getting into before you went home with someone?
GONZALES: No. It wasn’t pre—well, I was really naïve. I didn’t know what to
expect in the world. Up to that point, I hadn’t had, well, with the woman in
my neighborhood that I had been intimate with, it was all one way also. It’s
like I didn’t know that there was any other way that I could, you know, pos-
sibly make love to another woman, and it could be reciprocal. So I sort of had
no other frame of reference. So it was weird to me because I always felt you
had to be different.
BOYD: How did you have sex when it was just one way?
GONZALES: Do you mean technique? I would say oral sex and digital, using
hands. It was very mechanical. There wasn’t any passion in it. I didn’t feel
passion. It was kinda strange.
BOYD: Were women using dildos at all?
GONZALES: No. Oh, actually there was one woman that I lived in an apartment
building with. I lived in an apartment building right across from Sanchez and
Market. There was a woman upstairs and the manager downstairs, and they
were both best friends. I was sleeping with the woman upstairs, but I was ex-
tremely attracted to the manager. I remember going in to pay my rent one day,
and there was this gigantic dildo sitting on her coffee table, and I was just
blown away. I thought I had never seen anything like this before. What do you
do with that thing? So that was really funny—I’ll never forget it. I’m sure the
expression on my face was just priceless. It was sitting on the coffee table.
100 | SEX

But that was a whole different time in my life. But it was around the same
time. I was living on my own.
This will blow your mind. That apartment that is still there on Sanchez and
Market, I had rented for $70 per month. It was a wonderful apartment. That
was in 1973. So between that period of time and the sixties I had gotten
involved with, uh, I had started to do drugs. I had started to do psychedelics.
I smoked pot. I never did hard drugs. I did an incredible amount of drinking,
and I’m amazed that I lived through it with the combination of the drugs. I
took some amphetamines. Basically during that period of time, I just had
many affairs with people, and it was sort of like three months here, four
months there, and then you just moved on. I never really wanted a relation-
ship. So the whole atmosphere at that time was fine with me. It was fine. I
didn’t want commitment. I really can say that it wasn’t until the seventies that
my heart was really broken. I sort of came out of that nonmonogamy. . . .
It seems as though we’ve sort of made a circle. It’s real permissible now, and
this is a generalization, so correct me if I’m wrong, because like I said I’m not
that involved in the younger women’s gay community, but it seems like
[today] it’s very permissible for women to be very masculine and to wear their
clothing that way. Clothing is definitely a statement. There’s a certain nega-
tivism about lipstick lesbians. I hear that. “Oh, those lipstick lesbians.” So
there’s that polarization. I’ve gone to a couple dances where I’ve watched
women. There’s a real acceptance again of the butch and fem: the butch
wearing the tuxedo and the fem wearing the gown.
BOYD: Did that happen in the sixties?
GONZALES: Yeah. Oh yeah. There was a club out by the Cow Palace that was
called Leonarda’s, and it was a nightclub. Thelma Davis might have told you
about Leonarda’s because that’s where I met her. Women were in drag. Women
dressed in drag. It was definitely couples, and when you walked in, you knew
who the butch was and you knew who the fem was. There was unspoken rules
about dancing with someone’s girlfriend. There was a lot of fights in the bars
at that period of time. Coupled with alcohol, you know, it can be very
violent.
Fems . . . were a possession. They were definitely a possession. I guess it’s all
relative. I never felt that the more feminine of the couple was really looked
down upon. Definitely she had to stay in her place. It was really, uh, if you
ever saw two, well, I don’t know if you’ve heard this expression, ki-ki? Well, if
two fems got together or two butches got together, it was like a shock. It was
like wow, what a trip. Can you imagine? That was funny, too. It was funny.
That was sort of like breaking rank. It was like, “You don’t do that kind of
stuff.” Blah blah blah. So that was pretty much a rule, an unspoken rule.
BOYD: Was there a name for someone like yourself who refused to choose?
GONZALES: No. Probably “confused.” I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. I would
have probably been called fem.
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 101

Four male impersonators and butch performers relax between sets at Mona’s 440, about
1945. Mona’s was a popular lesbian bar in San Francisco’s North Beach, and male
impersonators drew both locals and tourists to the place. Courtesy of the Wide Open Town
Collection, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco

BOYD: Did people identify themselves as lesbians or butches or fems?

GONZALES: They never said lesbian. They said butches or fems. They never said
dyke or queer. Lezzie. Lezzie was one. But I never heard dyke. Butch or fem or
“that way.” But I never heard the term dyke or feminist. Gay. Gay was some-
thing that was at one point in time made reference to both men and women.
BOYD: Were there other ways when you were coming out that you sort of accli-
mated yourself, or was it exclusively in the bars that you learned how to be?
GONZALES: Basically exclusively in the bars. That’s really the only resource that I
had. Then parties. People would leave the bar and go to someone’s home.
Friday to Sunday night, it was just doing drugs and parties and staying up all
night and going to the softball game together and having meals together.
There was that real scene. Showering at other people’s houses and running
home to get your clothes. It was just a real, everyone was on the move and
everyone was playing. But it was very, the feeling was not one of doom. It was
one of awareness and exploration. For my twenty-first birthday, I’ll tell you
about this. This will be a great addition to this interview. For my twenty-first
birthday a real good friend of mine, a woman friend, gave me a birthday party
in her home in Potrero Hill. The home had a swimming pool. She had con-
structed a birthday cake for me out of lavender cardboard and had written
“Happy Birthday Cheryl” with joints, and the “i” in Birthday was dotted with
102 | SEX

amphetamines. So what happened through the course of the evening, the

cake basically was smoked [laughs] and the “i” disappeared constantly. We
just played all weekend. It was really a lot of fun. And when I say play, I mean
we’d just sit and listen to music and trip out and drink. People would drift in
and people would drift out. So that was quite an unusual twenty-first birth-
day. We got up the next morning and there were brassieres and panties all
around the pool area where people had just thrown them. It was pretty wild.
Pretty wild time. But real creative.3

Commentary

This essay is titled “talking about sex,” but I should have called it “why wouldn’t
the women I interviewed talk about sex?” I pose this as a methodological ques-
tion pertaining to the practice of oral history, but it has implications for thinking
about lesbian and queer history as well. For instance, Elizabeth Lapovsky Ken-
nedy and Madeline Davis’s history of working-class lesbian communities in Buf-
falo, New York, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, asserts that conversations about
sex played an important role in the construction of bar-based lesbian identities
in the 1950s. Beginning their research in the late 1970s, they assert:

Discussion of sex was one of many dimensions of an increasingly complex culture.

The instruction of newcomers even came to include sexuality. This public recogni-
tion of sexuality gave lesbians the support to affirm their own sexuality and explore
new horizons. At the same time, the community’s growing public defiance pro-
duced an increased concern for enforcing role-appropriate behavior. . . . Because
roles organized intimate life as well as the community’s resistance to oppression,
sexual performance was a vital part of these 1950s standards.4

Through oral history methods, Kennedy and Davis were able to analyze butch-
fem sexual roles and expectations, but also the role sexual pleasure played in the
formation of a resistant postwar lesbian culture. Sex was integral to socialization
and community formation, Kennedy and Davis argue, and narrators talked
openly and candidly about the sex they experienced and its meanings. In the
oral histories I conducted in San Francisco in the early 1990s, however, “les-
bians” were unwilling to talk about sex.5 Was this because the kind of commu-
nity Kennedy and Davis document (a sometimes mixed-race, bar-based, and
working-class butch-fem community) did not exist in San Francisco? Or does
this outcome have more to do with my approach? If sex was an important struc-
turing paradigm, why were the women I interviewed unwilling to talk with me
about it?
In the early 1990s, I conducted oral histories with forty-five mostly cisexual6
or nontranssexual men and women who had participated in some way in queer
public life in San Francisco prior to 1965.7 Most narrators I interviewed had been
born in the 1920s or 1930s, and few are alive today. The pool of narrators
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 103

included roughly one-third people of color, and more than half had actively
participated in bar-based communities.8 Strongly influenced by Kennedy and
Davis’s historical analysis, I was particularly interested in how sex roles affected
the formation of queer identity and community across race and class. However,
as the conversation turned to sex during the oral history interview or interaction,
gay men would talk endlessly about the subject, but the lesbian/queer women I
interviewed would not.
Gay men described in vivid detail the kind of sex they were having, the spec-
ificity of their attractions, and the minutiae of how to attract certain kinds of
partners. They described how to negotiate certain kinds of sex and, more impor-
tant, how racialized and class-specific social spaces like bars, parks, and parties
were organized around the production of these codifications or microsexuali-
ties. Gay men had theories about the way sex translated into social power and
how different kinds of desire (racialized, age-based, sex-specific, etc.) functioned
as a fulcrum for new social and political identities. Lesbians and queer women,
on the other hand, were mostly reticent and often resistant when it came to talk-
ing about sex. Most women did not offer up information about sex without
being asked directly, and when I posed questions about sex, I was often acutely
aware of their discomfort.
When lesbian/queer narrators did talk about sex, several different dynamics
evolved. The first dynamic was that narrators would sometimes become judg-
mental of their own sexuality (or sex practices) or the sexuality of others, in-
viting me to collude in the perspective that some sex practices were somehow
socially primitive or politically retrograde. This dynamic pulled me into a polit-
ical space that reinterrogated sex-war ideology and drew certain sex-specific
boundaries around the idea of lesbian community.9 A second dynamic that
emerged was that talking about sex invited a kind of flirtation. In these instances,
the narrator would sometimes flip the conversation, asking me about myself
and my sexual practices and positioning me as the sexual object or, in other
cases, the titillated voyeur. This dynamic sexualized me, and it opened up the
conversation in ways that were sometimes very productive.10 A third dynamic I
observed was that while some narrators were willing to talk about sex, they
seemed particularly vulnerable and expressed concern about their authority,
claiming that either they did not have enough sexual experiences to speak on the
subject or they were unsure of “what I was looking for.” This dynamic pulled me
into a counselor-type role in which I felt compelled to reassure the narrator of
her authority as a sexual subject.
When I started conducting oral histories, I had had very little training. In 1991,
as a graduate student, I received a small grant from the Center for Public Service at
Brown University to initiate an oral history project at the Gay and Lesbian Histor-
ical Society in San Francisco. The Historical Society’s archivist, Willie Walker (1949–
2004), gave me a handful of contacts, and Allan Bérubé (1946–2007), oral historian
and MacArthur Prize–winning author of Coming Out under Fire, coached me
104 | SEX

through my first round of interviews.11 Bérubé helped me generate a list of ques-

tions, reminded me not to forget to turn on the tape recorder, and allowed me to
use his release form as a template. When I contacted people, many were anxious
about talking about themselves and claimed that they had done nothing special
with their lives. The idea of gay and lesbian history was fairly new at the time, and
in the minds of many potential narrators, history seemed to center around politi-
cians such as Harvey Milk, activists such as Del Martin, or famous drag performers
such as José Sarria.12 I explained that memories of everyday life were just as impor-
tant as the lives of famous (or infamous) people, and these types of memories
would help preserve the history of gay and lesbian life in San Francisco prior to
1965. I also explained that each oral history would become part of the Gay and
Lesbian Historical Society’s archives, and I brought a brochure about the Historical
Society along with my tape recorder and release form to each interview.
Typically, I met narrators at their homes, where I thought they would be most
comfortable. At first, I studiously followed a short list of questions: “when were
you born?” “where did you grow up?” “when did you move to San Francisco?”
As time went by, I became more practiced at the nuances of these complex inter-
actions, and a loose structure emerged that was more conversational. In fact,
after just a few interviews, I realized that the structure of the questionnaire
limited the verbal exchange and seemed to restrict the narrator’s authority, so I
changed my approach and committed myself to trying to follow rather than lead
the conversation. Initially, I had felt a certain professional duty to control the
oral history interview, and I had a naïve (beginner’s) clarity about the kind of
information I wanted to cull from the interview.
With time, I lost that clarity. Narrators challenged many of the assumptions I
brought to the oral history project. For instance, many narrators challenged my
overdependence on the concept of identity, and many refused to use the iden-
tity-based categories (lesbian and gay) that framed the oral history project. Nar-
rators also frequently challenged a progressive approach to historical change,
arguing that “things were better” before the so-called liberation of the post-
Stonewall era. Similarly, some narrators challenged the concepts of pride and
liberation, noting the pleasures of social secrecy and surreptitious sex.
With time, my conceptualization of the oral history “interview” shifted to a
conversation or collaboration, and by the end of the year and a half I worked on
the oral history project, a method emerged where I started the taped conversa-
tion with a broad and open-ended question about the city of San Francisco. In
an attempt to decenter identity construction, I started with: “Tell me about your
relationship to the city of San Francisco. When did you move here and why?”
and then I let the narrator lead as much as possible. Because the project was
framed as a gay and lesbian oral history project, however, most narrators moved
immediately to queer culture and community, describing their favorite bars or
when and how they had met a particularly important lover. Through the course
of the conversation, I tried to remember to weave in a few topics that were
important to me, and one of them had to do with sex.
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 105

Two oral histories are emblematic of the dynamics that emerged in conversa-
tions with lesbian/queer narrators that ventured toward the topic of sex. The
first, with Cheryl Gonzales, describes butch-fem roles, as well as her experiences
at several different queer bars in 1960s San Francisco, especially Maud’s, a les-
bian bar near Haight-Ashbury.13 Gonzales’s narrative is richly conversational,
and I remember that I had fun talking with her. I was particularly excited to find
that she was willing to talk directly about sex. In the oral history we produced, I
ask Gonzales to explain butch-fem bar culture and to describe the social mean-
ings attached to certain gendered sex roles: How did she learn about butch-fem
culture? Did fems have sexual agency? What kind of sex was going on? Was it
possible to carve out an independent sexual role? Throughout the conversation,
Gonzales maintains that she had a lot of sex and a lot of fun in the 1960s, and
the culture that evolved around bars was a positive aspect of her life. However,
Gonzales also asserts that she felt constrained by butch-fem roles. They felt
“weird” to her, and she felt “naïve” and “in the middle.” She notes that one-
night stands and nonreciprocal sex were the norm at that time, but she expresses
negative judgment of these dynamics and a concern that present-day (1990s)
“gay women” do not engage in these activities. In other words, she seemed con-
cerned that future readers of the oral history might judge her so-called promis-
cuity or the value of nonreciprocal sex. Finally, Gonzales concedes that she did
not always enjoy the sexual interactions that positioned her in a passive or fem
role, and she experienced these interactions to be “all one way,” “mechanical,”
“strange,” and “weird.”
In this interview, I do more leading than following, despite my intentions.
I’m excited that Gonzales is willing to talk about sex roles and sex practice, but
as a narrator, Gonzales is on the young side of the cohort, entering the bars in
the mid-1960s as a teenager. As such, she is relatively close to my age (fifteen
years older). She is also a light-skinned and fem-identified Latina, like myself,
and these factors contribute to a certain amount of overidentification and thus
(I suspect) more casual conversation. Gonzales’s age puts her a whole genera-
tion younger than most of the women-identified narrators interviewed for the
project who entered the bar scene in the 1940s or 1950s, which may explain her
willingness to talk more openly about sex. And while her racial and ethnic
identifications do not register overtly in this excerpt—she does not verbally
identify with Latina/o communities—her reticence about her own racial/eth-
nic identification mirrors her ambivalence about structured sexual roles, as
well as her pleasure in the possibility of recuperating stone butches, trying “to
break through that shell.” For example, Gonzales’s desire for a sexual place in
the middle and her desire to pull stone butches back from their untouch-
ability, which to Gonzales seemed like a radical—even pathological—polari-
zation of sexual roles, may be a further expression of her ambivalence toward
or resistance to the social structures that define race and sex. As Gonzales as-
serts, “I was uncomfortable with having to pigeonhole myself. . . . I’ve always
been very uncomfortable with labels. I don’t necessarily need to fit into the
106 | SEX

mainstream.” More germane to the methodological questions raised at the

start of this essay, however, are the concerns Gonzales raises about promiscuity
and nonreciprocal sex.
Gonzales is conscious of her audience, her responsibilities as a historical nar-
rator, and my role as a historian. For instance, there are several moments during
the interview when she breaks through her storytelling to speak directly to me as
a historian. “Basically,” she interjects, “the one thing that should be stressed as
far as the bar community in the work that you’re doing is that the bars were
communities.” Here, Gonzales shifts from a story about one-on-one intimacy to
clarify what I would consider to be a political perspective. She wants me to
understand the important social role bars played in community formation.
“They were families,” she asserts, “there was a real sense of belonging.” Historio-
graphically, in the early 1990s when this oral history was conducted, the idea of
bar-based communities performing a social good was not a popular perspective
with regard to lesbian/queer history, and Gonzales goes out of her way to stress
this point. At the end of the excerpt, for instance, before launching into the story
of her drug-filled twenty-first birthday party, she states, “This will be a great ad-
dition to this interview,” certain that this kind of story is appropriate for our oral
history interview.
Gonzales is less certain about the story she wants to tell about sex, how-
ever. She expresses disdain for stone butches and decries nonreciprocal sex,
yet she tells several stories that affirm her attraction to stone butches. Simi-
larly, she is proud of her history of nonmonogamy and defends its meanings:
“It was real interesting . . . [and] there wasn’t a sense that we had to get mar-
ried or form commitments right then and there.” Still, she registers concerns
about contemporary misunderstandings: “I just don’t know with the younger
gay community, younger women, if they’re that much involved in one-night
stands. If they go out and just trick with somebody one night. . . .” Gonzales
includes this disclaimer prior to a story about a one-night stand she had with
a stone butch whose use of men’s pajamas was “really strange” and whose
untouchability meant a lack of intimacy and a dissatisfying sexual experience.
It is at this point in the interview when, trying to repeat Gonzales’s words but,
instead, sounding unnecessarily judgmental, I state, “So she would make love
to you or have sex with you but you couldn’t reciprocate.” And Gonzales, per-
haps following my cue, puts forward a theory of butch-fem sexuality that con-
flates nonreciprocal sex with heterosexuality and stone butch sexuality with “a
power trip and a denial.” While Gonzales is certain of her political position
regarding the value of bar-based communities, and she is not afraid to proudly
retell stories of free love and abundant drug taking (again, not popular topics
in the Reagan-Bush era), she is less certain about the value of nonreciprocal
same-sex sexual practices and, following my ambiguous comment (not at all
my political point of view), likens stone butch sex and butch-fem sexuality to
a parody.
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 107

The next excerpt is from a taped conversation with Rikki Streicher, a white, mid-
dle-class butch (not lesbian identified) woman, who, prior to owning Maud’s, the
Haight-Ashbury bar that Gonzales describes as a community, had spent a lot of time in
queer bars in San Francisco.14 For a while in the 1940s, Streicher had dressed in drag
(stylish male attire), pimped for her sex-working girlfriends (that is, negotiated their
sex for sale), and hung out with a rough crowd of butches and dykes in San Francisco’s
North Beach neighborhood. In the early 1940s, Streicher had lived in Los Angeles,
where she had also spent a lot of time in queer bars. In this excerpt, I ask her about
whether queer bar culture was a working-class culture, and we begin by discussing,
again, butch-fem roles.

JA N UA R Y 2 2 , 19 9 2
NAN ALAMILLA BOYD: So what about butch-fem lesbians?
RIKKI STREICHER: That’s my generation. That’s not Maud’s. That’s not the
sixties.
BOYD: That’s the fifties?
STREICHER: Forties and fifties, right. Butch-fem. There used to be, well, butch and
fem, you wouldn’t get—a dyke was low class. And I used to delineate between
butches and dykes by, now this is really, this is Los Angeles and how it was
then. Now, if you’re going to try to do all these things, and I see all these other
words and how they’re applied, and I think, “I wonder who in the hell thought
of that” because it’s not true. Obviously, people with power are men. So the
women that saw themselves as butches or dykes of today would emulate men.
Then further down, I called them the industrial set. [laughs]
BOYD: Uh-huh.
STREICHER: [mocking] Uh-huh. I mean, you know, snobbery is snobbery, no
matter what the generation.
BOYD: No! I’m interested.
STREICHER: So they perceived things on a fairly straight ahead and simplistic
sense. And they emulated men.
BOYD: How’d you differentiate between the industrial set and the butches?
STREICHER: Well, a butch is a butch is a butch, I suppose. In that sense of the
word. Then of course the industrial set, for instance, would hop up and hold
the chair for the little lady. They would do all of [that], where you wouldn’t
get that [with a butch]. [It’s like] the difference between a bar in Long Beach
or Venice West . . . as opposed to say Tess’ or out in the valley in LA. Out in
Venice West you’d get this sturdy little group of Mom and Pops right? In
Venice West you had, it was, well, somebody still took out the garbage. It
was still the same, the same thing was going on except that nobody acted it
out, basically. Then there was, then you get into the difference between oral
versus manual, and that was a delineating factor in a way, too, you know.
BOYD: Tell me about that.
108 | SEX

STREICHER: It’s hard to, not having been a part of one half of this equation. It’s
hard to really talk about it.
BOYD: Which part?
STREICHER: Well, I was hardly the industrial set, let’s put it that way.

Commentary

In this somewhat fragmented conversation, Streicher explains that butch-fem

culture was a product of the 1940s and 1950s, not the 1960s, as Gonzales asserts,
and that within queer bar culture, both in Los Angeles and San Francisco, a mul-
tivalent butch-fem culture thrived. She differentiates butches from dykes, or
what she calls “the industrial set,” which I understand to signify a working-class
culture or affect, and she explains that the industrial set “emulated men,” prac-
ticing more stereotypically gendered gestures like holding out a woman’s chair
while getting seated at a table. Streicher maintains, however, that most lesbian
relationships, even middle-class relationships, maintained gendered differences
(“somebody still took out the garbage”), but class differences could be expressed
sexually, “oral versus manual.” Streicher concedes, when pressed, that she was
more aligned with the butches or the middle-class nonindustrial set, and it is
important to note that when asked directly about her own sex practices, Streicher
backs away—“it’s hard to really talk about it”—but implies that she practiced
oral rather than manual (digital or penetrative) sex.
Streicher perceives that I expressed a certain “snobbery” with regard to her
use of the phrase “industrial set.” When I ask her about working-class culture,
she assumes that this kind of differentiation is a judgment used to criticize gen-
dered role-playing, and she corrects my assumptions and defends working-class
cultural practices. She also states, as an aside while differentiating between
butches and dykes: “Now, if you’re going to try to do all these things, and I see
all these other words and how they’re applied, and I think ‘I wonder who in the
hell thought of that’ because it’s not true.” I understand this statement as a cau-
tion to me, as a scholar, not to make assumptions or create new language or
define things incorrectly. At the time of this interview, 1992, Streicher was current
on the scholarship in lesbian history and critical of the knowledge produced.15
Also, in other parts of our conversations, Streicher often turns the interview on
me, asking me direct questions about myself, challenging me, flirting with me,
and practicing some of the stereotypically gendered gestures she describes, like
holding the door open and, memorably, cleaning my sunglasses for me. Still,
Streicher never returned to the topic of her own sex practices—and I taped three
fairly long conversations with her.16 This one short excerpt reflects the most
direct conversation we had about sex and sexual practices.
Rikki Streicher is an exceptionally important person in San Francisco’s queer
history, and her insights shaped, to a large degree, the analysis I brought to the
book I ultimately wrote on this topic, but there was little information about sex
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 109

to be culled for the public record. And in the end, I did not include this point of
analysis in my book.17 I was not able to follow up on Kennedy and Davis’s analysis
of the important role that sex and sexuality played in the formation of lesbian
culture and community in Buffalo in the 1940s and 1950s. Was this because a sex-
specific culture did not exist in San Francisco’s lesbian communities as it did in
Buffalo? Was it that conversations about sex were not useful to the formation of
queer culture and community? I don’t think so. Rather, I would argue that in San
Francisco, the value of certain sexual behaviors had changed so dramatically since
the 1940s and 1950s that narrators were unwilling to disclose them. Butch-fem
sexuality had become, in a sense, unspeakable in San Francisco.
Why? The most salient factors are the ideological structures of the oral history
interview and the identity-based terms I brought to the larger oral history project.
Narrators perceived the oral history experience to be a middle-class endeavor, and
despite my effort to control this image, they perceived me to be both middle-class
and a feminist of the kind that would judge the sexual role-playing prevalent in
their generation. For instance, several narrators mentioned the differences between
“digital” and “oral” sex, maintaining that lesbians of the 1970s-feminist variety
practiced reciprocal oral sex while butches, dykes, fems, studs, and girls practiced
a kind of retrograde and nonreciprocal digital or penetrative sex. For those who
would talk about it, there was an almost unanimous disavowal of stone butches,
as Gonzales maintains—even though these women were her primary sexual part-
ners—and a strong disavowal of the use of dildos or other sex toys, though many
women remember sex toys for sale in the bars, though “no one they knew” ever
used them. There was a similar disavowal of sadomasochistic practices.
Most, if not all, of the women I interviewed were able to describe in rich detail
the social nuances of butch-fem culture, but very few wanted to articulate how
butch-fem culture influenced sex practice or how sex practice influenced butch-fem
culture. Women, like men, were clearly engaged in fairly specific sex practices, as
Gonzales’s story exemplifies, but most of the women who agreed to discuss their
experiences with me in an oral history (across race, class, and sexual culture) did
not recount that these roles were liberating, healthy, pleasurable, or an important
aspect of community formation. Most embraced a fairly stereotypical critique that
equated gendered and sexual role-playing (that is, role-playing in and out of bed)
with heterosexism and misogyny. And they expressed shame and disavowal at what
they perceived to be prefeminist or preliberation-era sexual styles or behaviors.
Cheryl Gonzales’s narrative underscores these points in that as a self-consciously
rebellious person, she recuperates bar life, promiscuity, and drug use but not the
kind of nonreciprocal sex that was common among queer women in the 1960s.
Rikki Streicher is something of an exception in that she vociferously defends
the integrity of a highly sexualized bar culture, though she is fairly mute about
the role sex itself may have played in the formation of this community. Rikki
Streicher is also an exception in her disidentification as a lesbian and a feminist.
She’s openly critical of 1970s-style feminists and scholars of any stripe and, for
110 | SEX

that reason, was, perhaps, less judgmental of butch-fem sexual styles, even
though she wouldn’t talk openly with me about sex. Streicher also would not
talk about pimping or cross-dressing, though I asked her several times to describe
these experiences to me. I learned about these aspects of her life from others,
and while she hinted at them and, in fact, teased me with this information, she
wouldn’t discuss it openly with me. As with the other women I spoke with and
despite her critical position, Streicher was conscious of her self-representation
and aware that our interview would be transcribed and available to the public.
Butches pimping or cross-dressing or fucking their girlfriends, digitally or other-
wise, wasn’t going to be part of the public record, at least not in a celebratory or
recuperative sense. These practices are just too far outside the scope of mid-
dle-class sexual propriety.
The omission of sex talk during my interviews with “lesbians” reveals the
limits of oral history as a method. In both its identity-based construction and its
“public record” justification, the practice of lesbian and gay history making, or
oral history making, is often perceived by queer narrators to be a middle-class
endeavor, a political project aimed at social uplift. Indeed, oral history involves
the self-conscious production of a particular kind of representation—a repre-
sentation fit for public consumption. So while butches and fems, studs and girls,
might have talked differently among themselves, when talking with me—a dis-
sertation-writing grad student from an Ivy League institution—no matter how
working class I was before college or how much I tried to follow rather than
lead, and no matter how much I tried to disavow middle-class judgments of
queer sex and sexuality, the production of knowledge about sex practice was
limited to what narrators perceived to be permissible speech.
This does not explain why Kennedy and Davis were more successful at en-
gaging their narrators in conversations about sex and sexuality, but it does follow
up on a point that historian Kevin Murphy raises about queer oral history
methods: the veil of homonormativity allows certain speech acts and not others;
it polices our histories and renders the nonnormal impermissible.18 Unbe-
knownst to me, the lesbian and gay oral history project, as I described it to pos-
sible narrators, suggested a kind of neoliberal or homonormative public memory
that assumed the evolution of butch-fem sexual cultures into middle-class iden-
tity categories that worked to distance women, for example, from the pleasure of
“digital” or nonreciprocal sex.19 San Francisco, after all, was the city that gave
birth to homophile movements. By the 1990s, the highly sexualized butch-fem
cultures that existed in the 1950s didn’t exist anymore and had, in many ways,
been supplanted, first by the powerful rhetoric of gay and lesbian liberation
movements and, second, by lesbian-feminist and identity-based movements
that, over time, had become increasingly aligned with citizenship claims that
shunned nonnormative sex practices. Keenly aware of power, the dykes who
lived through the 1940s and 1950s and were around in the 1990s to tell about it
challenged my assumptions in many ways, including my assumption that they
 TA L K I N G A B O U T S E X | 111

would talk openly with me about sex. Where does this leave us as historians? It
leaves us, perhaps, more cognizant of the many ways sex and sexuality function
as vectors of political economy. In other words, as Foucault’s writings have made
clear, conversations about sex are never unmediated by the power relations that
situate them in time and place.20

Notes
1. I want to thank Horacio N. Roque Ramírez for his insightful comments on this essay. I also
thank Julian Carter, Mel Chen, Rebekah Edwards, and Don Romesburg for their critical
readings and lively conversation.
2. In keeping with Kennedy and Davis, I prefer the spelling “fem” to “femme” in deference to
its public rather than academic usage. See Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis,
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge,
1993), 391.
3. Cheryl Gonzales, interviewed by Nan Alamilla Boyd, tape recording, San Francisco, February 1,
1992, Wide Open Town History Project, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical
Society, San Francisco, California.
4. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 194.
5. While “lesbian” often functions as an umbrella term to signify women who engage in same-
sex sexual relations, I put the term in quotes because many of the women I interviewed did
not identify as lesbian, even though they were actively engaged in same-sex sexual relation-
ships and/or gender-transgressive communities; in fact, some narrators, such as Cheryl
Gonzales and Rikki Streicher, used the term lesbian as an othering term to differentiate
themselves from women (“activists,” “feminists”) who, like themselves, engaged in same-
sex sexual relationships but expressed a different political understanding of those
relationships.
6. For more on the term cisexual, see Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on
Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seattle: Seal, 2007).
7. In an attempt to prioritize the history of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, 1965 was the cutoff point
for my oral history project. For more on why 1965 is an important turning point in San
Francisco’s (queer) political history, see Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of
Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–19.
8. See ibid., 5–6, for a more thorough description of my method, terminology, and oral history
narrators.
9. On post–civil rights movement sex-war ideology, see Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex
Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006).
10. See Esther Newton, “My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork,” in
Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, eds., Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthro-
pologists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 212–34. See also the introduction to
this book.
11. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Women and Men in World War II
(New York: Free Press, 1990). For remembrances of Walker and Bérubé, see Terence Kissack,
“In Memoriam: Willie Walker,” Perspectives: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical As-
sociation 43, no. 5 (May 2005); and John D’Emilio, “Allan Bérubé’s Gift to History,” Gay and
Lesbian Review Worldwide 15, no. 3 (May–June 2008): 10–13.
12. For more on Del Martin and José Sarria, see Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town, especially
chapters 1 and 4. See also Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of
Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Seattle: Seal, 2006).
13. See the 1993 video documentary Last Call at Maud’s, directed by Paris Poirier and distributed
by the Maud’s Project, 32A Horizon Ave., Venice, CA 90291.
14. Rikki Streicher, interviewed by Nan Alamilla Boyd, tape recording, San Francisco, January
22, 1992, Wide Open Town History Project, GLBT Historical Society.
112 | SEX

15. For instance, Streicher had just finished reading Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight
Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1991), which, to her surprise, features a photo of the young Streicher on the
cover.
16. January 22, 1992; March 4, 1992; July 25, 1992.
17. Wide Open Town explores the history of how queer bar cultures and communities developed
an implicit political economy that challenged the more overt political ideology put forward
by lesbian and gay homophile organizations. As such, it analyzes political culture more
than sexual culture.
18. Kevin P. Murphy, “Gay Was Good: Progress, Homonormativity, and Oral History,” in Twin
Cities GLBT Oral History Project, eds., Queer Twin Cities (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2010), 305–18. See also Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory
Meets Oral History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 172 (May 2008): 177–89.
19. On links between neoliberalism and homonormativity, see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of
Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003).
20. Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage, 1980),
3–49, 81–102.
6 P R I VAT E L I V E S A N D
PUBLIC HISTORY
On Excavating the Sexual Past in
Queer Oral History Practice
Jason Ruiz

Oral history by Jason Ruiz with Charles W. Paul Larsen, Columbia Heights,
Minnesota, October 16, 2006

Charles Larsen, who likes to be called Chuck, spoke with interviewers Jason Ruiz and
Ann McKenzie at the dining room table in his suburban Minneapolis home. This was
one of dozens of interviews that we conducted as part of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral
History Project, a collective of students, scholars, and activists interested in the queer
history of Minnesota. Participants in this project were completely self-selected. Larsen,
an older man who was quick to laugh but also showed a melancholy side during our
long interview, responded to an advertisement in a local queer magazine. This excerpt,
which focuses mainly on his sexual life, is part of a much longer interview that details—
among other themes—how Larsen, an ordained minister, reconciled his spiritual calling
with his sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. Full transcripts of this and other interviews
conducted by the Project are archived as part of the Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota. Several of these
interviews influenced Queer Twin Cities, an anthology edited by members of the Twin
Cities GLBT Oral History Project (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).1

JASON RUIZ: How did you learn about sex?

CHARLES LARSEN: Well, that’s interesting. One day I went to the Aster Movie The-
ater on Hennepin Avenue. I think I was in high school. And I went there
because they’d have two movies for the price of one, and it was real cheap. So
I’m sitting there watching the movie, and I thought I felt some guy’s hand on
my knee. And I thought, What’s that? And I thought, Well I’m just curious. Let’s
just see what happens. And so one thing led to another and another, and finally
we were fondling each other. He invited me to go to his car, where he did
fellatio on me . . . didn’t know what the term “blow job” meant. I thought,
114 | SEX

That’s what it means! I had no idea. When I was sixteen, I’d saved up my money
and went to Europe because that was after my junior year. After my senior
year, I was going to join the Christian Brothers, and I decided that if I was
going to see the world, I have to do it then. I went to France among other
countries. I had been having sex with Dennis [a childhood friend] off and on.
And that was about it. In Paris, some man took my hand, and when he shook
my hand, he scratched my palm. I knew what that meant! How would I know?
I did! I knew that had something to do with gay, homosexual. Of course, then
it scared me, and I just walked away, but I knew what it meant. It was like . . .
a signal or something. And that was amazing. I had no sex in the thirty days I
was there. I was with a number of University of Minnesota students who were
gay. And they were just carrying on like trash on the boat and in London. So
while I knew I was having sex with Dennis, I wasn’t like them. In fact, I was
certain I was going to get married and then that would stop.
RUIZ: Could you back up a tiny bit and describe who Dennis was?
LARSEN: Dennis was a childhood friend I met in the second grade. In about the
seventh grade, we’d go over to his house after school and just started goofing
around. We ended up having sex. He’d tell me we couldn’t have sex because
every time we do, it’s a mortal sin. So he was supposed to wait for me to ask
so it wouldn’t be a mortal sin for him. I thought, Screw that mess! It’s not a sin!
As Catholics, you were supposed to confess masturbation. Well, that got old
hat. The priest would just go crazy. I thought, It’s not a sin, just forget that.
RUIZ: How would you have gotten that sense when so much around you would
have been telling you that sex was a sin?
LARSEN: Survival. To think that what Dennis and I were doing was a sin and I was
gonna go to hell was too heavy to deal with. However, when I graduated from
high school and entered the Christian Brothers down in Glencoe, I was totally
celibate for thirty-three days because I knew that just wasn’t the place to do it.
But then I when I came out, I decided, Well, now I can be who I am. I didn’t
know what I was. I just knew I liked having sex with men. In July [of 1961] I
went down to Glencoe, Missouri, with eighty young men to enter the Chris-
tian Brothers. . . . They’re the equivalent of a nun. They’re the male, nonpriest
religious who teach. I felt I could do it. If you love God good enough, you just
give up sex. But I went to the Christian Brothers to become a teacher. You’d go
there to become a Christian Brother first, and then teaching came second.
Well, I had teaching first, and I’d be a brother on the side, just say my prayers.
Decided that wasn’t going to work. The day I came out in St. Louis to get the
train to come back to St. Paul, I stopped in a Methodist church. And I said,
Someday I’m going to be a Methodist minister. I went back [to the Twin Cities] to
go to the U.2 Two years here at the U, I was a star in General College, but
bombed out when I transferred into education. I failed Introduction to
Teaching! So I [went] to St. Cloud, where I was an honor student for the rest
of my career. You’re dealing with a lot of farm kids who party [at St. Cloud
 P R I VAT E L I V E S A N D P U B L I C H I S T O R Y | 115

State University], and I didn’t. I was a history major. And when I came to the
Happy Hour, which was the big gay bar [in Minneapolis] in my day, I started
seeing a number of my classmates from St. Cloud. I came to find out the
entire History Club was gay! And I thought, Darn it, I didn’t know that! But
every weekend, I’d come home to work at the White Castle. So I never had sex
up in St. Cloud in two years. I never had any type of homosexual anything. I
was just there to study. And one day in November, I was walking from the
little house where I paid $4.75 a week to rent this really teeny bedroom. It hit
me. I don’t know how it hit me, it hit me. I was going to be gay the rest of my
life. This was not a phase. There was no right woman or girl. I was going to be
gay the rest of my life. But I had a choice. I could be a good gay boy or a bad
one. And I decided I would do my best to be a good one.
RUIZ: What did that mean to you, a good gay boy?
LARSEN: Not promiscuous. Not an alcoholic. The first time I walked into the
Happy Hour, I looked around and thought, Oh my! I was like seventeen. I
walked into the Happy Hour, saw what appeared to me to be drunks hanging
out in this dark bar. I looked around and thought, Is this how I’m going to end
up? No! This is not how you’re going to end up. . . . This was in the early sixties. I
walked in there, and it shocked me. I knew they were gays, homosexuals. And
I guess I was one, but I didn’t want to end up like that. And over the many
years that I went to the Happy Hour, I rarely if ever met somebody to have
sex—well, maybe five or six in seven or eight years. . . .
RUIZ: What drew you to the Happy Hour bar at the tender age of seventeen?
LARSEN: I wanted to see what gay people were like. My dad, one time—he was a
cop—said, Whatever you do, don’t go to Rice Park because there are strange men
there. . . . From decoding, I realized they were probably homosexuals. Well,
guess where I went. In the family car. And I’d pick up strangers. God, almighty,
I ended up in a funeral home with a guy. He was driving a black Cadillac and
dressed in a suit. I should have known! In that case, I followed him, and we
go up to this funeral parlor. And I go, Oh my God, this is going to be interesting.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and I just followed him in there. We
went to his bedroom, sort of made out. And I thought, I’m not too interested in
this. He went into the bathroom, and I got dressed and I ran out of that room
down a hall. And I thought, Where am I? How do I get out of this place? Well, I
found my way out and came home. I’m amazed at some of the strange things
and dangerous things I did.
RUIZ: How did you know how to cruise?
LARSEN: As a young person who was attracted to men, I obviously would usually
stare at their crotch or their body language. If they had an attractive body, and
they appeared to be friendly or whatever. It was just, I was just attracted to
men. I guess I would just look them over, and if they’d look me over back, I
guess you’d just see what happened.
RUIZ: What other dangerous things did you do?
116 | SEX

LARSEN: Oh my. When I was pastor in San Francisco, the board of directors gave
me a pass to the baths. They thought it would be nice for the pastor to relax. I
didn’t go to the baths that often. I enjoyed going to the parks. Lafayette Park
in San Francisco was a gay paradise. When the sun went down, the few straight
people who had been there during the day left, and it was ours. By ours, I
mean forty or fifty gay men walking around in suggestive poses. And what I
didn’t realize was you’d follow them into the bushes, and there were these
little clearings they’d made. And at any time there’d be forty or fifty men
having sex all over Lafayette Park. And you’d just walk through and you’d see
somebody and you’d follow them or they’d follow you. I left there in the end
of ’78 to become pastor in Houston. I left San Francisco one year before AIDS
hit. And I would have been a goner. There’s no way if I’d stayed there that
year—the sexual activity would be six or seven contacts in a night. I had legal
speed from a doctor in Florida, and I’d take one of those and a cup of coffee,
and baby I’d go from eleven until six in the morning and just have a great
time. What in the hell was I thinking? I realize now it’s a miracle I’m alive.
Some of the people I followed as a youngster or as an adult into their homes
or down dark alleys or out in the middle of fields, I can’t believe it. And how
do you tell this, as a pastor, well, I wouldn’t dare tell people half of what I’ve
done. I wouldn’t tell my partner half of what I’ve done. I’d tell him just enough
and hope he’s not as foolish as I was. At the time, I just thought it was great.
In San Francisco, I was considered a wallflower. They didn’t know, I was such
a sneak. I was the pastor, and I was real sweet and nice. Didn’t go to the baths,
didn’t have a lover every week. But boy, I’d hit the parks. And I thought, I can
match anybody in that church. At one time had a list I kept in a little book. It was
like 150 in the course of maybe a year. It was just way out of hand. But San
Francisco before AIDS was just wonderful. It was this wonderful place where
everything happened to anybody. You’d go to the baths, and there’d be a hun-
dred people. And literally just one after the other, walking through the halls,
the doors would be open. They’d have orgy rooms. One of the church mem-
bers got dressed, went down the bus stop to go to work, and some guy picked
him up. So he went home with this guy and had sex and didn’t go to work that
day. That’s what happened in San Francisco! Harvey Milk had his lover, and
then he’d have lovers on the side. A lot of couples had open relationships. The
prevailing thought was the only way a gay male couple can stay together is if
they have an open relationship. One actually had three in their family. Some-
body asked me once to perform a holy union for three people. I couldn’t do it.
I’m just so traditional. And yet I was doing things probably just as wild.
When I was pastor in Houston [I was] again a Goody Two Shoes. But at one
o’clock, I would go to these bookstores. And, ugh, I’d go from one until maybe
four, come home dead and get ready. One time the MCC pastors went to the
Holy Land. We went through this park and I thought, This looks hot. But I
didn’t say anything. The other guys, the other—Troy Perry—some of the other
 P R I VAT E L I V E S A N D P U B L I C H I S T O R Y | 117

guys went to the baths, which I missed. Oh, and they were bragging. One said,
I never got off the floor, and blah blah. And oh, I missed it. And as soon as they
were in bed, I went back to that park. I literally was in that park from midnight
until six in the morning. I crawled back to my hotel—literally. Got to my
room just as the others are getting up, and I said, I’ll be right there! Had sex
with all of these Hasidic guys. That was amazing. The black hat and the curls.
So that was just, it was wild.
RUIZ: Why did you maintain a public façade of innocence?
LARSEN: Because I was the pastor. And the pastor shouldn’t be a whore or a slut.
Even though a lot of the pastors were so comfortable with their sexuality. The
congregation just knew that I was old-time. I was raised Catholic, so you’re a
little more uptight. That one little shit of a nun telling me I was different. So
a little hypocritical in a way. I don’t know, I just, I felt that my sexual life
needed to be mine. Private. One time I remember [that a member of the]
Houston church saw me at one of the bookstores and said, Well, I guess you’re
human. And I said, Yeah, I am. Just keep your mouth shut. He did.
[Chuck goes on to describe how he found the MCC while he was the pastor
of a conservative church in Atlanta. After a while, we return to Chuck’s young
adulthood in Minneapolis.]
RUIZ: What was the social scene [in the Twin Cities] like at that time?
LARSEN: It was hit and miss. The thing is, though, you’d go to the Happy Hour,
and many times after closing, people would have parties. And that was a ball.
They’d have parties in Uptown. I remember going to a couple. I didn’t know
the guy who was having it. You’d walk in, there’d be maybe thirty or forty
people there. They’re having sex. It was mind-boggling and was just very ex-
citing. I didn’t have sex there, but other people did. But it was a total, total
subculture. You’d see some of those people on the street, and they wouldn’t
even acknowledge you. Everyone there was afraid of being exposed or black-
mailed. You just didn’t know who you could trust. Supposedly there were
cops around, too. You didn’t know if somebody was a decoy.
RUIZ: What were you risking if you would have gotten caught?
LARSEN: Everything. You’d risk your career. I probably never would have taught
again. As a Presbyterian minister, I would have been defrocked. I was scared I
wasn’t going to get through seminary because the Methodists were uptight.
Now they have gay caucuses at Emory. I went to Candler School of Theology,
and that’s Methodist from the Florida conference. They’re very strict. Yet every
Friday and Saturday night, I’d go to the gay bars in Atlanta, all these guys from
Alabama and North Carolina coming down. They were all so hot. One night
I went to the motel with this one guy who had a friend who picked up some-
body also. We got there first, did our thing, and we’re sleeping. Well, his friend
comes in with somebody, and they’re just acting like white trash. It was so
bad. So noisy. The next morning we wake up, I look over, it’s one of my class-
mates who’s the son of a Methodist bishop—and he screamed! There were
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fifteen gay seminarians in my class, but I was the worst. At that time I had dark
hair, and I bleached it. I bleached it beyond God knows what. It would turn
green sometimes. I didn’t care! And I was the minister of youth at Jonesburg
Methodist, and I got some speed. It was legal, and I lost all this weight. I was
really good-looking. Had this hair that—I liked red, I liked blond. This one
lady in the church, she said, “Chuck, what happened to your hair?” I said,
“Plenty!” I was just a sassy little thing at the time. . . .
RUIZ: Where were you when AIDS hit?
LARSEN: I was in Houston. MD Anderson Cancer Hospital called the gay com-
munity leaders together. They said, We have something new called “gay cancer”
and we don’t know what it is. It’s starting in San Francisco. And I’m going, Oh my
God, did I get out of there just in the knick of time.
All of a sudden it went from gay cancer to AIDS. In the early days, it was
horrible. We had twenty people in the hospital at some times. These were
people I knew, loved. They’d be in the same floor, and with each visit you’d have
to put on a gown, gloves, a hat, a mask. And then you’d put that down and go
to the next room and same thing. It just wore me out. And they died and they
died. They had the most horrible, horrible side effects. This one guy, his legs
looked like they were petrified wood. It was just so horrible and ugly, and they
were in such pain. It just appeared to be so hopeless. And it just kept on hitting.
It just wouldn’t stop. And I’m certain that was part—I was just so overwhelmed.
I just felt so bad. I went to so many funerals. Half the time the parents didn’t
even know their son was gay. Glen, my partner, says, You rarely show any emotion.
You rarely cry. I say, Well, after all that I’ve been through as a pastor, I couldn’t.
RUIZ: You were about to take us—you decided to leave Houston and go back to
San Francisco. How had San Francisco changed?
LARSEN: AIDS just was wiping out hundreds of people that I’d known. It was re-
ally something. Almost all of the really sexually active people—and these
were the really pretty ones that had dates all the time, always with new
lovers—all died. It was sad. I was like, Well, it’s good if you’re not quite so hot and
quite so active and don’t have quite so many lovers and you’ll live.
[Chuck goes on to describe his professional life in San Francisco and his
return to the Twin Cities in the late 1970s.]
RUIZ: Final question. Why did you contact us?
LARSEN: I think everybody would like to be remembered. For a lot of gay and les-
bian people, that may not happen. Even though Glen and I have an extensive
will and all this stuff and we’re going to be cremated, it doesn’t say where the
ashes are going to go. I don’t know where they need to go. As a gay person, I don’t
have a family that is going to want to visit my crypt or gravestone. And that’s
okay. Because most of the gay and lesbian, transsexual, bisexual folks won’t have
any of that. But in answer to your question, that’s why I wanted something on
record that at one time this gay person named Charles W. Larsen lived. And he
was involved, and he attempted to make a difference in the gay community.3
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Commentary

Gayle Rubin opened her now-classic 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Rad-
ical Theory of Politics and Sexuality,” with a simple but clear call: “The time has
come for us to think about sex.”4 The author does not suggest that we think ex-
clusively about sexuality (that is, the identities that we attach to sex), but, along
with sexuality, she quite literally urges us to think about sex itself—what we do
with our bodies for pleasure—and what sex means. What would happen if oral
historians took up this call? This is one of the questions that I explored when I
interviewed several dozen gay- and lesbian-identified men and over the age of
fifty from 2004 to 2006. I conducted these interviews for the Twin Cities GLBT
Oral History Project, which I had founded with Dorthe Troeften and Kevin P.
Murphy with funding from the University of Minnesota.5 Our intention was not
to produce a comprehensive community history, as other projects had success-
fully done, but to create an archive of life stories that would help to remedy the
dearth of oral historical evidence of queer life in the Twin Cities. Since the
founding of the project, we have grown into a collective that includes under-
graduates, graduate students, and faculty at the University of Minnesota.
At the time that we interviewed Chuck, our main goal in the oral history pro-
ject was to capture the life stories of GLBT Minnesotans, so we kept our ques-
tions quite general. This allowed the interviewees to choose how to narrate their
lives and, we hope, will allow scholars and community members with a wide
array of interests to access and make use of the archived interviews. Of course,
sex is an important part of most people’s lives, so it became an important topic
for our interviews. Despite the fact that many of our narrators tended to sub-
merge sex within narratives of love and affection, it was clear that many of the
men I interviewed considered it a driving force in their lives.
I reluctantly focus here on men’s life narratives because my interviews with
lesbian-identified women elicited mostly superficial discussions of sex. Queer
women were more reticent than men in talking about sex with me. Gay men
with whom I spoke inevitably turned to matters of sex in narrating their life
stories, whereas women carefully detailed the emergence of their sexual identities
and mostly avoided discussion of their sexual practices. This is undoubtedly due
in part to my own perspective as a young queer man and my (misguided) reluc-
tance to press such matters with women (and perhaps my eagerness to discuss
the topic with men).
When I did discuss sex with the women I interviewed, it was most often used
by the narrators to illustrate the bonds they shared with a particular partner rather
than to illustrate their routes to erotic pleasure, so narratives of sex were often
couched within the broader emotional histories that narrators constructed for
themselves. In other words, they talked about (or around) sex as a way to describe
their relationships with other women and girls—rather than to narrate their
own drives for erotic pleasure. As I reread the transcripts of my conversations
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with the lesbian-identified women I interviewed, I could not help but wonder
what might have happened if I had pressed for more information about these
matters. For example, I interviewed a lesbian-identified woman named Lynda,
who lingered for a long time on her first sexual experiences, with a German for-
eign exchange student who stayed with Lynda’s family when they were both
fifteen:

RUIZ: You described your relationship and your experiences with Krista as
scary—simultaneously terrifying and exciting and very pleasing. What does
that mean?
LYNDA: I mean the physical bond was . . . exciting—just to feel very connected on
a deep level with someone that you really care about. And the fact that she
was from another country and culture was very intriguing to me and she spent
a lot of time with me and she was dependent upon me in a lot of ways and
she was very sensitive to my feelings and I think that was really important. I
hadn’t really had anyone who was that sensitive and who understood that
emotional side of me.
RUIZ: What did she look like?
LYNDA: She looked like total innocence.

More than forty years later, the ending of their affair (which led Lynda to become
engaged to a man) still evoked powerful feelings for Lynda. She mentioned
several times in our interview the importance of the “physical bond” and then
couched that bond within an emotional narrative. I asked about Krista’s phys-
ical appearance in the hope that it would remind the narrator of her physical
attraction to her friend. Perhaps Lynda described her appearance as “total inno-
cence” to suggest that their connection was beyond the corporeal, a way to sug-
gest that she wanted to talk about love rather than sex. In this sense, she was
actively constructing the narrative she wanted me to follow. Lynda was one of
the few women interviewees who did—however obliquely—narrate their sexual
pasts; indeed, many silences remain regarding how the women we interviewed
found sexual pleasure with other women before they came to call themselves
lesbians.
The silences around lesbian sexual practices have been challenged in a
number of arenas inside and outside the academy. Cherríe Moraga and Amber
Hollibaugh’s discussion, published as “What We’re Rollin’ around in Bed
With,”6 challenged a lesbian-feminist audience to talk openly about lesbian
and, more broadly, women’s sex. In anthropology, Esther Newton has described
the role that her own lesbian desire played in her ethnographic work among
queer communities on Fire Island. “What else is going on between fieldworker
and informant?” she asks. “Is ‘the romance of anthropology’ only a manner of
speaking?”7 Newton bravely explores this question through her romantic
(though not sexual) involvement with an elderly doyenne of the Cherry Grove
community. The research conducted by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and
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Madeline D. Davis in Buffalo’s working-class lesbian community deeply affects

how we undertake oral history and queer history.8 Kennedy and Davis’s interests
in what the lesbians they interviewed were “rollin’ around with” enriches their
analysis of butch-femme dynamics in pre-Stonewall Buffalo. Boots of Leather,
Slippers of Gold helped to transform queer history into an intellectual field that
takes lived (sexual) experience seriously as a site of inquiry.
However provocative and important these interventions have proved to be
for lesbian history and politics, the experiences of many of us involved in col-
lecting queer oral historical texts suggest that silences persist around female-
female sexuality. “Silence,” however, “can not be equated with absence,”
according to historian John Howard. The task of the queer historian, Howard
says, is to read the silences that surround sexuality as much as read what is spo-
ken (or written): “Such reading, in order to offset the multitiered biases against
queer historical inquiry, must assume from the beginning the presence of queer
desire.”9 In the years that followed the important work undertaken by Kennedy
and Davis, scholars interested in male-male sex have produced a small but
important body of work that takes sex seriously as an oral historical field of in-
quiry, such as Howard’s own work in Men Like That: A Southern Queer History,
which was particularly successful in talking about sex with oral history narrators
and exploring the matter of where, how, and with whom pleasure was sought.
Perhaps more important, Howard demonstrates how sex illuminates a constel-
lation of important matters beyond the erotic, including race, sexuality, and
Southern identity.
Talking about sex means that we are asking oral history narrators to tell us
their secrets, but does telling secrets mean telling the truth? We must not take for
granted that talking about sex—even telling those sexual secrets that have been
suppressed—will uncover the heretofore hidden truths of queer history. To the
contrary, I want to read narratives of sex as the fallible, fragile texts that they are.
I use the term excavate to frame this discussion because it works on two comple-
mentary levels: first, and quite simply, we must dare to talk about sex with those
who tell us their stories; second, we must dig deeply into the stories that are
narrated to us to ask how memory shapes the construction of the past. We must
first gather the stories that are considered too vulgar or too personal by tradi-
tional modes of historical inquiry and then ask ourselves how these stories are
constructed and what they mean—both to the individuals who tell us stories of
their sexual pasts and, more generally, to queer history.
Sex is a particularly useful topic for oral history research precisely because
queer people are socialized not to talk about it. Homophobia has meant, of
course, that queer sex is both policed and silenced. As such, we are compelled to
politely talk about our identities as if they can be easily separated from our
erotic desires and practices.10 Today, with the push for cultural inclusion and
civil rights for gays and lesbians (and especially for same-sex couples), we must
reassert the question of what it means to be queer, as the contributors of a special
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issue of Social Text have asked, and what sex has to do with queer identity and
political formation.11 These questions are especially timely as I write this article,
for the legalization of marriage in California has been mired in discourse of
“love” and “commitment.” In this schema, gay rights are divorced from queer
sex. Even as queer love and identity increasingly dare to speak their names,
queer sex seems to be increasingly relegated to the personal and the private. Sex
has been central to certain queer qualitative research practices—particularly
those projects that engage with questions of AIDS and its prevention12—but it
often plays a small role in analyses of community and identity formation. In
this sense, talking about sex with our narrators helps oral historians unpack the
nature of oral history as a mode of knowledge production. Practitioners of oral
history are aware that oral history is an endeavor that is always at the mercy of
memory and often subject to the desire (on the parts of both the interviewer and
narrator) to tell a neater, cleaner, less shameful version of one’s life. Sex is one
location that makes it clear that what we get out of oral history is not the truth
but a truth that is tailored by both the story the narrator tells and the countless
stories she chooses to forget.
And sex is fun to talk about. As Newton, Kennedy, and Davis remind us, the
role that pleasure plays in community-based research matters to both the re-
searcher and the participant. Next I offer an in-depth look at the interview with
Chuck Larsen that begins this chapter. Here, he remembered cruising a St. Paul
park as a teenager:

My dad one time—he’s a cop—he said, “Whatever you do, don’t go into Rice
Park.” “Why?” “Because there are strange men there.” “What do you mean?”
“They’re strange.” And from all the decoding and stuff, I realized they were prob-
ably homosexuals. Well, guess where I went. In the family car! And I’d pick up
strangers. God almighty, I ended up at a funeral home with a guy, and we’re down
in this room next to the—and he was driving a black Cadillac and dressed in a suit.
I should have known! And in any case, I followed him, and we go up to this funeral
parlor . . . and I go, “Oh my God, this is going to be interesting!” . . . We went to his
bedroom, sort of made out, and I thought, “I am not too interested in this,” and
he went into the bathroom and I got dressed and I ran out of that room down a
hall. I thought “Where am I? How do I get out of this place?” Well, I found my way
out and came home. I’m amazed at some of the strange things and dangerous
things I did.

Not only did Chuck have a lot of fun as a teenager but also he seemed to find
real pleasure in the context of our interview while recalling the sense of sexual
power that he felt during his youth—the loss of which he later lamented. In
stories like this one, Chuck described sex as a matter that was only difficult inso-
far as one had to find sexual partners and spaces to engage in sex. Although I
think these stories demand more complicated readings, it is important to note
that the pleasure that we find in sex is not merely in the moments when contact
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is made; part of the pleasure in sex is thinking and talking about it later, whether
rehashing it with friends and lovers in the morning or telling our tales much
later. In this case, Chuck’s experiences cruising Rice Park forty years prior to our
interview remain a source of pleasure and help him narrate the broader story of
his life as a gay man.
Of course, sex can also be a painful thing to talk about, and memories of
abuse, trauma, and regret have been common in the stories that we have col-
lected for the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History. Although the moments these
memories surface are painful for narrator and oral historian alike, they are
equally crucial to tell. In the dozens of interviews I collected for the project,
there were two moments in which narrators took me up on my offer to stop the
recording because they were overcome by painful memories. In one case, a man
in his late seventies recalled the death of his longtime lover. In the other instance,
a lesbian-identified woman remembered being forced to give up a child for
adoption when she was a teenager. Much more commonly, when it came to
sexual trauma, narrators told me that they were driven to record their truth in its
entirety precisely because they had held it in for so long. This makes our roles in
the interview more complicated. Do we cause narrators undue harm by raising
questions about sex? Should we more clearly delineate ourselves as historians
rather than therapists? While taking these questions seriously, we must also
remember that in oral history we do not consult with dispassionate archives; the
moment of risk begins when we turn on the recorder.13
I interviewed Chuck in his suburban Minneapolis home in 2004. Project
intern Ann McKenzie and I immediately loved Chuck, with his quick laugh and
vivid memory. We sat at the dining room table surrounded by the bric-a-brac
that he and his partner had collected together. Chuck was eager to tell us his life
story, including details about the sex that he had throughout his life. Several
vignettes from Chuck’s sexual life illustrate the usefulness of sex to oral history;
however rife with contradictions and inconsistencies, the story of how Chuck
found and had sex illuminates a complex life story. My intent here is not merely
to expose one man’s sexual past, but to illustrate the important ways that sex
structures knowledge about the self and the past. Although his stories do pro-
vide insight into the history of sexual practice, what interests me most is how we
might read Chuck’s sex stories (beyond what they explicitly say about practice)
to glean insight into the epistemologies of sex, that is, the systems of sexual
knowledge that shape how Chuck operates as a queer subject.
Chuck was sexually active as a child and teenager, having regular encounters
with Dennis, a childhood friend. He remembered the casual way that it started
(“just playing around”) and the impact it made on both of them (their sexual
contacts lasted for years). Chuck was adamant that, despite growing up in a
deeply religious home, he felt no guilt regarding his activities with Dennis and
his attraction to men: “He said, ‘We can’t have sex because it’s a mortal sin,’ and
he was supposed to wait for me to ask so that it wouldn’t be a mortal sin for him.
124 | SEX

I thought, ‘Screw that mess! It’s not a sin!’” While I was interviewing Chuck, it
was difficult for me to grasp how he now regarded his sexual past—an important
question for his broader history as a queer person. At the same time he insisted
he was not subject to Dennis’s sense of guilt regarding their sexual contacts,
Chuck also had serious concerns about his burgeoning sexuality. Was Chuck
remembering a youth of careless abandon or was he, as the child of a strict and
religious household, more repressed than his stories suggest? What role did sex
really play in the production of Chuck’s sense of self and his gay identity?
Of course, there was no single truth to Chuck’s sexual past. Instead of vainly
looking for such a truth, I had to learn to listen for and read the contradictions
that made up Chuck’s past. For example, when I asked him how he learned
about sex as a child, Chuck said:

Well, that’s interesting! I went to the Aster movie theater on Hennepin Avenue. I
think that was in high school, and I went there because they’d have two movies for
the price of one, and it was real cheap. So I’m sitting there watching the movie, and
I thought that I felt some guy’s hand on my knee. And I thought, “What’s that?”
And I thought, “Well, I’m just curious, let’s see what happens.” And so one thing
led to another, and finally we were fondling each other. And then he invited me to
go back to his car where he did fellatio on me. . . . I didn’t know what the term
“blow job” meant. I thought, “That’s what that means!” I had no idea.

Chuck’s attitudes about sex, however, were not tinged exclusively with youthful
curiosity. A few minutes later, Chuck remembered a trip he took to Europe as a
teenager:

In Paris some man took my hand, and when he shook my hand, he scratched my
palm. I knew what that meant. How would I know? I did. I knew that it had some-
thing to do with gay—homosexual—and, of course, then it scared me, and I just
walked away. But I knew what it meant: it was like a signal or something, and that
was amazing. I had no sex in the thirty days that I was there. I was with a number
of University of Minnesota students who were gay, and they were just carrying on
like trash . . . and I was sixteen. So while I knew that I was having sex with Dennis,
I wasn’t like them. In fact, I was certain that I would get married and then that
would stop.

The narrator seemed to embrace his youthful curiosity in the movie theater
(and, as we saw before, in the park and with Dennis) but shied away from sexual
encounters in Paris and, he told me, throughout college.
Although he claimed that he was unashamed of his sexual behavior early in
life, Chuck also distinguished himself from the queer people he knew in child-
hood. He remembered being both attracted to and repulsed by queer people in
his extended family in the 1950s, including a “diesel dyke” who was partnered
with a femme cousin and a solitary rural uncle who fascinated the young Chuck.
Ultimately, he described himself as feeling sorry for these queers because they
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seemed to him to be “very sad.” When he developed a gay identity of his own as
a teenager, he disidentified with such sexual outlaws and, more specifically, with
abject queers that he saw at a gay bar in the city:

CHARLES LARSEN: It hit me. I was going to be gay for the rest of my life but I had
a choice: I could be a good gay boy or a bad one. I decided I would do my best
to be a good one.
JASON RUIZ: What did that mean to you—“a good gay boy”?
LARSEN: Not promiscuous. Not an alcoholic. The first time I went into the Happy
Hour I . . . saw what appeared to be drunks hanging out in this dark bar. . . . I
looked around and thought, “Is this how I am going to end up? No!” . . . But
that’s what I saw—these are my people, you know? You look both ways before
you go in. This was in the early sixties. I walked in there, and it shocked me. I
knew that they were gays, homosexuals. And I guess that I was one, but I
didn’t want to end up like that. And over the many years that I went to the
Happy Hour, I rarely if ever met somebody to have sex.

Chuck first entered a gay bar at the age of seventeen. The story of Chuck at the
Happy Hour suggests that he found no problem with his own same-sex attrac-
tion and activity but that he actively disidentified with the queers he found in
the increasingly public gay scene in Minneapolis. This differentiation between a
“good” and “bad” way to be a gay person set a pattern for his adult life, in which
he struggled to portray himself as an upstanding citizen and leader while clan-
destinely engaging in sexual activity that he found embarrassing or shameful.
The moment described in the bar establishes a theme that recurs throughout the
narrative.
After several stints as a reluctant (and closeted) schoolteacher, Chuck finally
resolved to fulfill his childhood ambition of a religious vocation. Although he
was raised in a mixed Catholic-Baptist household, Chuck heavily identified with
his Catholicism and entered the Christian Brotherhood in 1961. “I just felt that I
could do it,” he told us. “If you love God good enough, you just give up sex.” It
was not long, however, before Chuck realized that his sexual appetite was in-
compatible with the Brotherhood. He eventually found his way to Methodism,
in which he was ordained as a pastor after college, and to the Metropolitan
Community Church (MCC), where he spent most of his professional life.
His work with the MCC took him to San Francisco in the late 1970s, where he
headed a church and found pleasure in the city’s legendary cruising grounds:

I enjoyed going to the parks. Lafayette Park in San Francisco was a gay paradise.
When the sun went down, the few straight people who had been there during the
day left, and it was ours. By ours, I mean forty or fifty gay men walking around in
suggestive poses. . . . You’d follow them into the bushes, and there were these little
clearings that they’d made. And at any time there’d be forty or fifty men having sex
all over Lafayette Park. And you’d just walk through and you’d see somebody and
126 | SEX

you’d follow them or they’d follow you. I left there at the end of ’78 to become a
pastor in Houston. I left San Francisco one year before AIDS hit. And I would have
been a goner. There’s no way if I’d have stayed that year—the sexual contact would
be six or seven contacts in a night. I had legal speed from a doctor in Florida, and
I’d take one of those and a cup of coffee, and baby I’d go from eleven until six in
the morning. . .

Chuck again described his sexual life as wild and fulfilling, but with the caveat
that his role as an MCC pastor meant that it was also hidden from the public
that he served:

CHARLES LARSEN: I was such a sneak. I was the pastor, and I was real sweet and
nice. Didn’t go to the baths, didn’t have a [different] lover every week. But boy,
I’d hit the parks. And I thought “I can match anyone in that church!” . . .
JASON RUIZ: Why did you maintain a façade of public innocence?
LARSEN: Because I was the pastor, and the pastor should not be a whore or a slut.
Even though a lot of the [MCC] pastors were so comfortable with their sexu-
ality. The congregation just knew that I was old-time. I was raised Catholic, so
you’re a little more uptight . . . a little hypocritical in a way. I . . . felt that my
sexual life needed to be mine. Private. One time I remember [that a member
of the] Houston church saw me at one of the bookstores, and said, “Well, I
guess you’re human.” And I said, “Yeah I am. Just keep your mouth shut.”
He did.

Chuck’s description of his sexual life in the late 1970s echoed the paradox of
shameless-but-hidden sexuality that he used in describing his experiences from
childhood and throughout his adolescence. As Chuck told it, there were stark
contrasts between what he did with his body for sexual pleasure, what he
thought about sex, and how he talked about sex as a pastor and public figure. In
other words, he quite literally did not practice what he preached. This is what
haunts me about Chuck’s life narrative. Was Chuck a producer of retrograde—
even dangerously sex-negative—discourse by privileging love and commitment
for gay couples in his sermons and then fucking indiscriminately at night? Given
the spate of recent political and religious sex scandals, it is difficult to separate
this discursive split from that of, say, Ted Haggard’s. Or does he provide a model
for sexual liberation in his nonchalant and guiltless approach to narrating sex?
Perhaps Chuck lived a theory of homosexuality in which what one does with his
or her body does not necessarily need to align with how he or she conceptual-
izes or narrates sexual meanings.
My goal here is not to reinforce Chuck’s opinion that he behaved like a hyp-
ocrite for developing a public persona that was at odds with his sexual behavior,
but to offer Chuck’s story as an example of the fascinating tensions that emerge
when we talk about sex in oral history. Chuck’s role as an MCC pastor gave him
political clout. For instance, he worked with Harvey Milk and represented the
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gay and lesbian community to the San Francisco Police Department by serving
as an official advisor. This kind of influence depended at least partly on his
ability to produce a public image of himself as a “good” gay person—the same
desire that he had upon entering the Happy Hour bar almost two decades ear-
lier. Sexual promiscuity, along with kinky sex, public sex, drug use, and a wide
array of behavior that transgressed Chuck’s status as a proper gay subject, was
suppressed. We might read this as analogous to the gay and lesbian movement,
which de-emphasized sexual freedom in favor of identity-based civil rights as it
became more visible and viable. In that broader context, good behavior (or at
least an artifice of good behavior) has been central to the claim for citizenship
rights. It is compelling that, as an older gay man, his past “bad” behavior plays
such an important role in his life narrative.
Consider the story of Chuck’s sexuality in relation to Amber Hollibaugh’s
provocative comment, “The memory of our histories is often constructed to
work as our conscience as well as to configure our secret desires.”14 We see in
Chuck’s narrative that the “memory of his history” conjures both his conscience’s
desire to be a “good gay boy” (when no models for such behavior existed) and
his secret desires. Hollibaugh’s strange turn of phrase—“the memory of our his-
tories”—is apt here, for Chuck does not narrate an objective thing that we can
safely call his history. Rather, all that Chuck, or any narrator, can offer us is
memory. In this case, I have analyzed not Chuck’s sexual history but Chuck’s
memory of his sexual history. This is the precise reason that institutionalized
history has historically discounted oral history as a nonacademic, artsy-craftsy,
and community-minded endeavor. It is also what makes oral history so valuable.
I do not mean that oral history methods are valuable because they illuminate
the history of queers—that such methods will allow us to simply write ourselves
back into history, which was, perhaps rightly, the aim of the first wave of gay and
lesbian histories that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, queers who work
as historians are uniquely positioned to radically transform how history is made
by turning to the most subjective parts of ourselves to unpack who we are. Chuck
is, after all, not only a queer subject but—vis-à-vis the choices he made when
narrating his sexual life—also a theorist of sex. In other words, if we listen closely
we can glean what Chuck thinks sex is and should be.
In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin conceptualized “good” and “bad” forms of sexu-
ality on a spectrum. Only the highest forms of good sex are granted access to the
“charmed circle,” but some queer erotic forms are closer than others to “good”
sex. What is more, these erotic forms are not stationary through time and space
but can oscillate closer to and further from the imagined center that the author
establishes. Rubin, for example, noted that the 1980s saw certain forms of
homosexuality shift closer to the center of the circle:

As a result of the sex conflicts of the last decade, some behavior near the border is
inching across it. Unmarried couples living together, masturbation, and some
128 | SEX

forms of homosexuality are moving in the direction of respectability.  .  . . Most

homosexuality is still on the bad side of the line. But if it is coupled and monoga-
mous, the society is beginning to recognize that it includes the full range of human
interaction. Promiscuous homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism, transsexu-
ality, and cross-generational encounters are still viewed as unmodulated horrors
incapable of involving affection, love, free choice, kindness, or transcendence.15

Although the thought of unmarried heterosexual couples inhabiting the “outer

limits” of sexuality might seem like a quaint notion today, Rubin’s essay has
remained timely, for we can now see that society has more fully recognized that
coupled and monogamous homosexuality “includes the full range of human
interactions” and can therefore rightfully claim citizenship, rescued from the
darkest corners of the outer limits. We certainly see this process at play in con-
temporary gay marriage debates: same-sex marriage proponents couch theirs as
an argument for “love” and “commitment” while those working to “defend”
“traditional” marriage argue that gay marriage would open the doors for those
forms of queer sexuality that are further from the charmed circle (promiscuity,
sadomasochism, fetishism, etc.) to move closer. Lisa Duggan characterizes the
current political and cultural shift as “the new homonormativity,” and her
reading of it within the contemporary politics of neoliberalism has helped to
reinvigorate the scholarly interrogation of the shifts that Rubin observed twenty
years previously.16
By closing this chapter with the specter of homonormativity and its recent
critiques,17 I do not mean to suggest that queer sex has become normalized as
gay and lesbian politics and cultures have gone mainstream. To be sure, queers
have and will continue to find routes to pleasure and desire that transgress social
norms—and the law (as well as other institutions set in place to police how we
have sex and where we find it). Even so, the politics of homonormativity means
that transgressive modes of sex and sexuality must be submerged so that a mo-
nogamous, gender-conforming, and upwardly mobile class of gay men and les-
bians can enjoy the benefits of appearing “normal.” As a result, LGBT identities
are normalized at the same time that queer sex remains dangerous and—as in
the case of Senator Larry Craig at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Air-
port—increasingly under surveillance.
Most of the older queers I interviewed are heartened by the homonormative
turn and see gay and lesbian civil rights and cultural inclusion as the markers of
“progress.” Many of our interviewees fought for such inclusions and went to great
lengths to be—or appear to be—good gay and lesbian subjects. However we talk
about queer sex in oral historical practice—whether we work to undo the silences
around female-female sexuality, continue to talk about sex with older queer men,
or look for new connections between gay and lesbian and other modes of dissi-
dent sexualities—we must excavate the sexual past to develop a clearer vision of
queer histories, identities, and meanings that contradict normalization.
 P R I VAT E L I V E S A N D P U B L I C H I S T O R Y | 129

Notes
1. Special thanks to Aaron Carico and Adam John Waterman for advice on early drafts of this
essay. I also thank Kevin P. Murphy and members of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History
Project for their guidance and support. This piece is dedicated to Chuck Larsen and the
other men and women who talked about sex with me through the years.
2. Locals refer to the University of Minnesota as “the U.”
3. Chuck Larsen. Interview with Jason Ruiz and Ann McKenzie. The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter
Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, University of Minnesota.
4. Gail Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Politics and Sexuality,” in Carole
S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984), 267.
5. Project intern Ann McKenzie accompanied me on these early interviews and contributed
much to the initial success of the project.
6. See Heresies No. 12 (1981).
7. Esther Newton, “My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork,” in Margaret
Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000), 243.
8. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The
History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).
9. John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), 28.
10. This proved to be particularly challenging in the context of our project’s focus on the Twin
Cities, a Midwestern context where sex remains a taboo subject. I cannot help but wonder
how the sexual dimensions of the project would have been different in a place with a larger
population of older queer people (like Palm Springs, for instance).
11. David Eng, ed., “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text (2005): 84–85.
12. See Hector Carillo’s The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001) for a wonderful example.
13. The question of risk was of particular interest to the Institutional Review Board at the Uni-
versity of Minnesota. We secured IRB approval for the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project
even though the legitimacy of IRB oversight over oral history projects was (and remains)
unclear. The IRB categorized the project as low risk.
14. Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 8.
15. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 282–83.
16. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democ-
racy (Boston: Beacon, 2003).
17. See also Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2007).
7 GENDER, DESIRE,
AND FEMINISM
A Conversation between Dorothy Allison
and Carmen Vázquez
Kelly Anderson

Oral history by Kelly Anderson with Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vázquez,
Guerneville, California, November 19, 2007

I recorded this joint interview with Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vázquez in 2007 as
part of the Voices of Feminism (VOF) project at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
College. The Ford Foundation–funded project was initiated in 2002 to document the
full range of late-twentieth-century activism on behalf of women. Voices of Feminism
video interviewed more than sixty women who identified as feminists, and some who
did not. Our explicit focus was those previously left out of the historical record, in-
cluding labor movement activists, poor women, lesbians, and women of color. Narrators
include labor, peace, land-tenure, and antiracism activists; artists and writers; lesbian
rights advocates; grassroots antiviolence and antipoverty organizers; and women of
color reproductive justice leaders. These oral histories are extensive, ranging from four
to twelve hours and taking place over at least two days. The full transcripts are available
online at www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/vof-intro.html.1

KELLY ANDERSON: What is butch-femme? Tell me about its history for you.
DOROTHY ALLISON: But it changes depending on where you’re standing and
when. How old are you, darling? [to Vázquez]
ANDERSON: You’re both fifty-eight.
ALLISON: So we’re grown-ups, more or less.
VÁZQUEZ: We are, honey.
ALLISON: Of an age. And you grew up in New York, right?
VÁZQUEZ: Yeah. I grew up in New York, in Harlem. I came from Puerto Rico when
I was about five, spent about three years on the Lower East Side. And then my
family got this great three-bedroom apartment in the General Grant Projects
on 125th Street, in Harlem, and I lived in Harlem about fourteen years, and
then moved to the Bronx.
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 131

ALLISON: When did you realize who you were?

VÁZQUEZ: Really, about five or six. There was a little girl, a little German girl that
used to taunt me and I wanted to be with her. I wanted to play with her, I
wanted to kiss her. I wanted to do all those things. But my first sort of con-
scious experience of sex and sexuality, of being something—I don’t think
lesbian was even a word that I knew—was when I was fifteen. I was in some
home that I had been sent to for God knows what reason, because I was
acting out. And in there, there was a sexual experience with a girl, where I
definitely knew that that was not play. I was wanting to kiss that girl, and I
wanted to get up on that girl and do all kinds of things to that girl. Still,
though, it didn’t have a name, and it was just, like, something that happened.
Then there was another relationship, with someone that was about seven
years older than me, also a femme, who hung out with other femmes. I was
fifteen or sixteen.
ALLISON: You were a pet.
VÁZQUEZ: I was. I totally was. And I was taken in by these women, and it was
mostly in their home. You know, they’d have parties, and I’d come, and I was
the pet, and I was always the boy. Sometimes they’d take me out to, like, these
places where you had to have passwords and stuff like that, and it was all very
secret and very exciting, completely exciting. I would dress up in my shirts and
ties and things, and they took good care of me. I mean, I was never in trouble
because they took really good care of me, these girls. So that’s—I mean, that’s
my formative experience of what it meant to love a woman and to be involved
with a woman. It was a completely Puerto Rican subculture, these lesbian
femmes. I didn’t know that they called themselves anything.
ALLISON: There wasn’t even the language.
VÁZQUEZ: There wasn’t language that I can recall anyway, but they clearly were
that—high femme at that, with the heels and the tight dresses. And we’d go to
the dance clubs. And they’d all have to be worried about how much alcohol I
consumed because I was sixteen years old, and they could be in a whole lot of

Dorothy Allison and Carmen

Vázquez relax around Doro-
thy’s kitchen table in Guern-
eville, California, after a long
day of conversation. Their
reflections on San Francisco
during the AIDS crisis shed
light on the complexities of
lesbian culture and activism
in the 1980s. Photography by
and courtesy of Kelly Anderson
132 | SEX

trouble, but somehow managed to avoid the trouble. Then, for me, there was
not a conscious identity around butch, really, until I left New York. It was in
San Francisco that—all of what I talked about earlier in terms of discovering
a gay world and then a lesbian community.
ALLISON: And the language?
VÁZQUEZ: And the language. But the language then was, like, lesbian and lesbian
feminist. I had no idea what people were fucking talking about. I honestly did
not. And I did not have a word for myself that was the word butch. I knew that
I liked lesbians who looked like my mother.
ALLISON: Yeah, okay. [laughs]
VÁZQUEZ: And were girls. Then some language did come around. Okay, so, like,
“You’re a butch, and you like femmes.” And so then I started to incorporate
some of that language. But in my efforts to try and find a social life and a po-
litical life, and to integrate into the lesbian feminist community, it was hor-
rific. It was horrible, because I had no reference point. Flannel shirts.
ALLISON: Only if they’ve got a lace teddy underneath it.
VÁZQUEZ: Oh, baby.
ALLISON: I’ve dated some of those.
VÁZQUEZ: I mean, I couldn’t even wear a flannel shirt myself [laughs], much less
date a woman who was wearing one. So it was complicated. It was really com-
plicated to try and figure out what was going on. And there was an awful lot of
rejection, and there was an awful lot of, “What are you doing? You know,
You’re a traitor, you’re”—you know.
ALLISON: Who would say you’re a traitor? Family, friends?
VÁZQUEZ: No, no. White lesbians.
ALLISON: Oh for God’s sake, yeah.
VÁZQUEZ: Feminists.
ALLISON: Yeah, I remember.
VÁZQUEZ: Take the tie off. What are you doing? And a real push towards an as-
similation into more androgynous lesbian—whatever—presentation, even
though that was still never who I was attracted to or who I ever fucked.
ALLISON: They always read as asexual to me, that whole androgynous thing.
VÁZQUEZ: Well, that’s how I read it, too. So that’s sort of about twenty years ago.
ANDERSON: How did you know who you were? How did you get to that point?
[addressing Dorothy]
ALLISON: I figured out really quickly, when I was young, that I was just—in my
mind, I was just queer and—no, we should use the word weird. I figured I was
probably sick, I was probably crazy. But mostly what I figured was that I was
wrong. I did not want to get married. I was not interested in boys. I was not
interested in dating. In my family, it was like, Dorothy’s not like that; Dorothy
reads a lot.
But a lot of it was also protective, because I was getting raped on a regular
basis. And by the time I got old enough and strong enough to counter that
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 133

and more or less stop it, I found a place of safety, which was to be asexual. But
that doesn’t stop desire or fantasy or lust, so that a lot of my erotic fantasies
centered on being trapped with girls in terrible situations in which I alone
could rescue them by performing acts of enormous suffering.
So then a lot of that became a lot of my erotic charge for most of my
teenage years. I would fall in love with girlfriends, and I tended to fall in love
with the more butch girls, although I did not have a language. I didn’t have
the word lesbian, except that I read constantly, and gradually—and then I
discovered my stepfather’s porn, and that’s where I found lesbians. The things
I knew about lesbians was that they were rapists and they had hairy nipples.
It was porn that I was getting all my education from. I found that kind of a
turn-on. Big mean dykes. Ooh, where are they? How can I find them? Then I
went off to college and fell into a relationship with one of my resident advi-
sors, and she was aggressive enough to be interesting, but she really wasn’t
my stuff, and to a certain extent, she was kind of androgynous. I fell in love
with a Russian student, who was aggressive enough and butch enough to be
more of my stuff, but not quite. It took me a long time. But meanwhile, I
made do.
VÁZQUEZ: One has to.
ALLISON: One has to. And then I discovered, in the South, old dyke bars, most of
which were in bad neighborhoods. And pretty quickly, that’s where I started
seeing women who were more my erotic charge. And they looked so good and
so scary and, on some levels, were dangerous. Well, but quasi—mostly what I
found out was that, when I found the butch girls, they just all wanted to marry
me. [laughs] And I was supposed to do the laundry and the cooking and, you
know, tie their ties. And I didn’t want to get married. I had a horror of any
kind of marriage entrapment.
One of the things that I ran into really quickly when I did start finding
butch girls and having sex with them and dating them, was that they
thought I was a slut. And I was, in terms of—I don’t know about the North-
east, but in the Southeast, there’s a real—there’s a culture that disdains
women who want to fuck around. A good femme lesbian finds herself a
good butch, settles down, and plays house. I didn’t want to settle down
and play house. I just wanted to have a really great time and go home, or
send them home if they came with me. And so that was problematic and
troublesome.
After college, when I found the women’s movement in Tallahassee is when
I found the more lesbian feminist androgynous community, and that was—
they read. You could talk. I could be a feminist and do organizing, but having
sex with them was not satisfying at all, with a few exceptions. There were some
good butches hiding under those flannel shirts, but they tended to be more
working-class girls, and they tended to be older. And, without fail, they all
wanted to marry me. So there would be these constant dramas.
134 | SEX

So I had two lives. I had my lesbian feminist life. I lived in a lesbian collec-
tive. I was sleeping with a number of women in the collective, and it was okay.
Mostly I was fucking them, because it just didn’t work for them. To do me, you
had to have sincerity. You know what I mean?
VÁZQUEZ: I do. [laughs]
ALLISON: But they did not know what I was talking about. So I would leave the
collective and go to the pool hall and find sincerity, bring her home and
then—interestingly enough, and problematically enough, especially when I
moved further north—I was dating across color, because I found a better
quality butch girl. [laughs] At least for a time. Because there was such a huge
emphasis on androgyny among white lesbians, it became so asexual to me.
And let’s be clear, not much talent. Because it’s my opinion that the secret to
good sex is a willingness to be humiliated, and that means taking some risks.
And they were all so hesitant and tentative, and that doesn’t work.
VÁZQUEZ: They all talked about, why you are a lesbian is because it was safe.
ALLISON: For some of them, yeah.
VÁZQUEZ: Well, girl, that is not what sex is about.
ALLISON: No. And I had a huge bent towards being safe. I could organize a lot of
safe, because sex was really problematic for me—because I had a lot of resis-
tance to being helpless, but I eroticized it at the same time. So you really had
to be committed to have sex with me.
VÁZQUEZ: And, you know, there’s something else about a butch—well, for me.
My understanding and sense of wanting to be with a woman and wanting to
take care of her and wanting to please her had very little to do with expecting
that they would cook or clean the house, or do any of that stuff. That was not
part of the bargain. And I was never interested in femmes that were
submissive.
ALLISON: Oh, honey, let’s be very clear. I was not submissive.
VÁZQUEZ: No. I get that.
ALLISON: Unless you pushed it, and then I could become instantly submissive.
VÁZQUEZ: But you know what I’m saying? I mean, culturally, that was not a part
of the deal.
ALLISON: No. We’re talking about femmes with an enormous amount of
authority.
VÁZQUEZ: Enormous amount of authority, independence, and attitude. And
that’s gotten me in trouble. But I was never looking for the one that would
take care of me.
ALLISON: The little wife.
VÁZQUEZ: No. I was never looking for the little wife, and neither were the folks
that I hung out with. Everything that I’ve just been talking about in terms of a
sexual relationship that is charged—and, you know, that has changed com-
pletely for me, from, like, charged and I’m the one that’s in charge—thinking
that I was the one in charge. Thinking. [laughs] And I’m very happy that I’m
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 135

not, but it took me a long time to figure that piece out and go, like, okay, so,
really, why it works is because there is an exchange of power; that there is
surrender and submission, but it’s surrender and submission on both our
parts. Who’s in charge is not dependent on my identity as a butch or hers as
femme.
ALLISON: And it shifts.
VÁZQUEZ: And it shifts, but that was not something that I understood consciously
and could have even had language for.
ALLISON: Even once I understood it, I couldn’t talk about it, right? What language
did I have?
VÁZQUEZ: No. Twenty years ago, no. I could not have said what I just said. And
it’s evolved for me. And on a very personal level, erotically, it’s been this very
gradual sort of moving to a place where I understand that part of my desire to
please her involves her ability and her desire to take me. That just was not—
that little baby-dyke butch person, no.
ALLISON: Well, when I started finding those bars—starting in D.C., and then in
New York—it was just like, I’d just sit with my mouth open. And I would date
women who’d say, “You know, you mean well, but you spent too long in the
women’s movement. I mean, you’ll never be as good at this as you would have
been if you hadn’t done that.” And to a certain extent, they were right, because
I have this whole rebellion against the expectations of high-femme drag.
What would work for me is if we were going to be frank about how I can
fetishize it. Then I could do it, and enjoyed it and could play with it, especially
when I was younger.
Then, as I got older, I started to get annoyed at how much work this
involved. But when lust is riding the tide, oh Jesus God. And those girls—
man. I remember the first time I was in a dance bar in New York and they
played “Thriller.” All of a sudden, all of these women in tuxedo shirts, full
suits, and girls in heels so high I couldn’t see how they were dancing, hit the
floor, and it was like, Oh mama. I’m going home to change clothes and come
back. Presentation and courage. God, the sexual lure of courage, yeah.
But the lesbian feminist community actively, militantly rejected it and cri-
tiqued it and held contempt for it, which meant that a lot of my core stuff I
either had to hide or battle for, and at different times I did different things.
Early on, especially when I was young, I just took it as a given that there would
be only coded ways in which I would be a genuine femme in the lesbian fem-
inist community. That changed over time as I lost patience with them. Espe-
cially when I was in Tallahassee and I got some of my working-class butch
girlfriends to come to events in the lesbian feminist community. You only had
to treat one of my girlfriends bad once, when I became a terrorist. You know,
you don’t do that to a woman I’ve had sex with and admire and honor. I’ll rip
your throat out. So then I wasn’t so good at hiding for a while. It got tricky. But
it got bad and painful, and a lot of times I felt like a failed femme because
136 | SEX

I couldn’t live up to the expectations of the community that was my erotic

community. Meanwhile, lesbian feminism was absolutely vital to my life, and
the work was vital, and I’m meanwhile trying to get them to be just a little bit
more accepting, make some shifts there. Dancing on razors all the fucking
time. But to get them to actually look at their analysis and see the flaws. And
it was all about class and getting them to register class. Well, it’s larger than
class, but class is a big piece of it.
VÁZQUEZ: The androgynous-whatever thing—that got so elevated and still is. I
mean, I think that there has been a period of objectifying and glorifying male
identity in women. You know, it’s all well and good if you go out and articu-
late a defense of butch-femme, and if you can be titillating and you can talk
about it and everybody loves it and there’s an audience for it. But don’t you
fucking go and actually be that person and expect that you’re going to have
any real decision making or power in the movement, because you’re not. This
is not a movement that will tolerate male-identified people at its leadership.
It never has and never will. So for me, butch-femme is so fundamentally and
completely about an erotic signaling that that’s what it is, folks. Here we are
in the world and, actually, we fuck.
ALLISON: It’s prudish. It’s also prejudice, the same kind of prejudice that I found
when I was a slut. The first thing I discovered is that in a lesbian feminist cul-
ture in New York, when all the shit hit the fan, all of a sudden I was again a
slut. But I wanted there to be honor for sluts. I wanted respect. We’re acting on
desire. I believed that that was a feminist ideal. You know, autonomy of the
body, autonomy of lust. Let’s give it some respect and give it its place. But
there was a triumph of this asexual androgyny that was really problematic for
a lot of lesbians. I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t the compromise made
with heterosexuals in early feminism, but that’s too nefarious.
ANDERSON: How do you defend or explain butch-femme to the younger genera-
tion who feel more at ease with the identities of trans or gender variant?
ALLISON: I don’t think you explain; you model. You talk frankly about desire
and your own history. That’s the best way to do it, in order to get them to
speak and to feel that they have a safe place to speak. But you have to be
willing to be humiliated and to be wrong. I can’t tell you how many times—I
did a talk down in LA some years ago, and I knew not to answer the question
when it was asked. I knew it was going to blow up on me. There was no way
around it. And it was that same old question, which is, “Well, how do you feel
about the transgender young?” And, “You know, I read something in which
you said that you were dating a woman, and then she started to smell dif-
ferent, and you didn’t want to have sex with her anymore.” I was like, “Yeah,
well, that’s true. I am an old dyke. And if you smell like a boy to me, you step
off of my erotic markers. And the moment when you do that transition, we
can be friends and we can be a coalition, but we can’t be fucking lovers. It’s
not happening.” The immediate response was “Well, you are prejudiced
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 137

against transgender people.” I said, “Well, I don’t have sex with them; they’re
not my stuff. I’m a dyke. I am a dyke.”
But I can’t stop thinking about it, you know. Because I’ll train myself to be,
in many contexts, a dominant femme, an aggressive femme, but that’s not my
stuff. My stuff—I want someone who can, you know, make me, take me; it’s
safe enough for me to give it up and go down and be taken. There is an
exchange. But transgender people assume a different gender position in my
matrix. Now that doesn’t mean that doesn’t have anything to do with their
right to do this or be this or, in fact, all the cultural complications. I have
enough libertarian in me that I actually do fight for the right of people to shift
their gender and make those choices. Meanwhile, though, what I’m seeing
happening to a lot of butch women is that, it’s almost like a replication of the
triumph of androgyny. It’s the triumph of transgender, where all of a sudden
young butch women believe that, Oh, there is no butch. There is male or
female, and I’m going to shift the matrix.
VÁZQUEZ: And I do not accept the notion that the transgender experience is the
be-all and end-all of what is queer transgression. In fact, when you make a
decision that you will cross over and make the transition from male to female
or female to male, you’re entering the binary, baby. I don’t care what anybody
says, but it looks straight to me. I do defend completely the right of any indi-
vidual who feels that they’ve got the wrong body. Go change it. But that
doesn’t make you queer. You know?
And I know I don’t want the space that I occupy as a female-bodied person
who does identify as male in many ways to be obliterated. I want the right to
live in this female body as a male-identified person, and, you know, to the
extent that that space gets shrunk, I get really scared and pissed off, honestly,
because why should it be shrunk? What was the fucking point of feminism in
the first place if it wasn’t to create a space where women could make this
decision about our bodies?
ALLISON: I meet a lot of young women, especially when I go to colleges, who are
in some form of transition, are living not really as men, except that they pre-
sent as men. So on the street, they get treated as men. That means that they
step out of a lot of what happens to women in this culture. But meanwhile,
they want to still be in the queer community, and they want the authority and
position and—let’s be clear—privilege that we have ascribed to butches in our
culture, but they want to erase the concept of butches. Because they do want
more—they want to be the primary. They want to be honored because they
are gender outlaws, and in some way they have defined butch as not being
outlaw enough. And that’s where I get into trouble, because I grew up thinking
that the bravest thing in the world is a butch woman, and the second most
bravest thing is the femme. [There has to be] a more complicated discussion.
Show me what is queer about what you’re doing. And show me how, in fact,
it’s feminist, and what does it lay the groundwork for in the future?
138 | SEX

This is where I get in trouble.

VÁZQUEZ: Well, it’s also interesting that we’re having this whole discussion,
right? And some of what pissed us off thirty years ago was the androgyny
thing. And now, you know, thirty years later, we’re looking at the dissolution
of butch-femme and the evolution of transgender-something.
ALLISON: Long ago I decided, if you’re self-defining as a woman, I’m going to
take you as a woman. If you’re self-defining as a man, I’m going to take you as
a man. I just think people have the right. What’s troublesome is when they’re
self-defining as a man, but meanwhile they want to be taken as queer. I’m
having some hard time with it.
VÁZQUEZ: And running off with our femmes, damn it. [laughter]
ALLISON: Or snatching up the good butches and marrying them. That’s not an
issue for you.
VÁZQUEZ: No, baby. [laughs]
ALLISON: And since I’m an old married bitch, it’s not that big a deal. You know?2

Commentary

My lover, Carmen Vázquez, and I flew to San Francisco in November 2007 to

spend a few days with Dorothy Allison in her home just north of the city. I had
asked Dorothy to do an oral history with me as part of the Voices of Feminism
project. It was the Voices of Feminism project that had introduced me to Car-
men, with whom I had done an oral history in 2005. She joined me on the trip,
in part, because I hoped that I could pair Dorothy and Carmen for an interesting
conversation. They are both the same age, have similar political sensibilities, are
both writers and activists, and both spent a fair amount of time in San Francisco
and indeed overlapped there during the 1980s. Dorothy is as fervent a femme as
Carmen is a proud butch. I was enthusiastic about the rich possibilities for a di-
alogue about gender, sexuality, and feminism across generation, race, and class.3
My particular interest for the Voices of Feminism project was in both restoring
the central role played by lesbians in feminist activism and complicating the
historical narrative regarding feminisms, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I
wanted to explore the silences and mythology around the conflicts over sexu-
ality that erupted during the 1980s, what we now call the “sex wars.”4 Dating
back to the early twentieth century, sexuality has often caused conflict among
feminists, so this was something not entirely new. What were the race and class
implications of the attack on radical sexualities, including butch-femme, sado-
masochism, and propornography feminists? And what lessons have we learned
from these internal tensions that we are now bringing to discussions and policy
debates about women and sexuality, including transgender identities and prac-
tices? These questions led me to prominent feminist activists such as Cherríe L.
Moraga, Amber Hollibaugh, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Suzanne Pharr, Achebe Powell,
Joan E. Biren, Virginia Apuzzo, Katherine Acey, and others, including Carmen
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 139

Vázquez and Dorothy Allison. The ensuing conversations with these narrators
are rich and varied, addressing various topics in the context of lifelong negotia-
tions over sex, gender, race, and class. I often begin conversations with child-
hood and proceed chronologically, although occasionally I have approached
them thematically. This was the case with Dorothy5—she has written about her
childhood extensively in her novels and memoir—and so our focus was her ac-
tivism and sexuality. While I came into this interview, and all others, with a set
of open-ended questions, I let her lead in many ways, gently keeping us on track
but open to exploring the themes important to her.
In the course of my multiple-day interviews with both Carmen and Dorothy
individually, we had covered many topics that I knew had rich overlap: surviving
poverty and violence, finding the women’s movement, practicing sexual politics
within feminism, experiencing erotic culture and practices, and aiming for a
clear understanding of self that was informed by race, class, and solid footing in
butch-femme sexuality and culture. Moreover, they have a shared journey of
moving from New York to California within five years of one another (late 1970s
for Carmen, early 1980s for Dorothy), and both spoke of the struggle of adjust-
ing to a West Coast community whose politics looked very different from those
of New York. Dorothy’s center of gravity was the leather community, and her
activism was largely within the realm of culture at this time (after decades of
work in women’s centers and battered women’s shelters). Carmen’s focus was
lesbian feminism and the San Francisco Women’s Building. Despite these differ-
ences, both Dorothy and Carmen had encountered the classism and sexual con-
servatism that created much of the tension we now attribute to the sex wars of
the 1980s.
By the time Dorothy, Carmen, and I sat down for a joint interview, Dorothy
and I had spent the better part of three days together and had covered a lot of
ground. Carmen and Dorothy had also spent some time together off camera as
we all prepared for one last conversation before Carmen and I flew out the next
day. In the excerpt included here, we began by talking about butch-femme and
its meaning for them over time. They both told stories of young adulthood and
realizing “who they are,” shared their journeys through 1970s and 1980s femi-
nism and the ensuing emphasis on androgyny and hostility toward butch-
femme, and reflected on current debates within the lesbian community over
trans identities. The excerpt represents the last hour of our taping and has been
edited only slightly. We covered topics that have important and provocative im-
plications for scholarship on feminist movements, particularly the interplay
between sexuality and politics.
Representing a generation of butch-femme lesbians, including working-class
women and women of color, Dorothy and Carmen’s life stories offer important
challenges to dominant narratives of liberation politics and sexual freedom.
Committed to a radical politic that includes the right to self-definition and
sexual expression, Dorothy and Carmen experience themselves as having been
140 | SEX

marginalized voices in women’s movement leadership, middle-class lesbian

feminism, and the neoliberal leadership of the LGBT community. In the inter-
view, Carmen describes feelings of exclusion from movement leadership because
of her insistence on a male-identified presentation, noting the community’s
enthusiasm for “titillating” conversations about power and desire yet a reluc-
tance to place masculine women in leadership roles. Similarly, Dorothy describes
the immense effort involved in maintaining a double life—of lesbian feminist
organizing by day and the erotic culture of the bars by night. She reflects on the
struggle to integrate her worlds, to bring butch girlfriends to her lesbian feminist
collective, and to live up to the expectations for high femme within butch-
femme culture.
These voices are important correctives to the mythology and scholarship on
second-wave feminism. Not all self-identified feminists were adhering to the
sexual ethos of androgyny or the prescriptive of reciprocal or vanilla sex. For
these narrators, and indeed many others, erotic desire was born of a raced,
classed, and gendered experience that in many ways collided with a mainstream,
sexually conservative, feminist ideology beginning in the 1970s and that is now
in an embattled ideological conversation with queer and transgender politics. It
would be a mistake to assume that radical, prosex, or butch-femme sexualities
disappeared in the 1970s or that lesbians with these sex practices rejected the
language or imperative of feminism. Rather, women like Carmen and Dorothy
and many others insisted on and claimed feminism as an identity and locus of
their activism despite charges of being antifeminist, dangerous, or immoral by
mainstream movement spokespersons.6
Other key themes emerge that potentially challenge the mainstream narra-
tives of women’s liberation movements: the range and persistence of lesbian
activism within feminisms, the professionalization of the women’s movement,
butch-femme identity and culture versus the imposition of androgyny, and the
persistence of race and class in the shaping of desire. We turned to the topic of
transgender identities and the implications for categories of butch and femme
for the last twenty minutes of our interview, and while their observations may be
provocative, even problematic for some, the three of us felt it was important to
bring a sense of history and a feminist analysis to an issue that is often veiled in
silence. Through those lenses, historical and feminist, we were able to draw
some important connections between generations. Dorothy and Carmen’s nav-
igation of feminism and gay liberation politics is a rich story that will provide
future scholars and activists with new evidence of the complexities of sexuality,
class, and feminism.
Those of us who collect oral history and, moreover, those of us who rely on
oral history as primary sources know that this material is invaluable as evi-
dence—evidence of our tenacity, our resilience, and creativity, sometimes of our
very existence. The field of queer history is made possible, in large part, because
we have been willing to speak—about violent pasts, the terror of homophobia
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 141

and racism, our secret desires, our strategies for survival. But oral history is not
just evidence—and we know this already, as practitioners and as students of the
growing field on oral history methodology. Much has been written about oral
history as a relationship, the self-reflexive piece of conducting interviews, and
how to listen effectively and pay attention to this dynamic interaction. For the
queer subject and narrator, we often delve into subject matter that other oral
histories usually do not, including sexual identity and sex practices. It is not out
of bounds then (and it may even be necessary) to ask about earliest sexual mem-
ories, awareness of difference around erotic desire and gendered behaviors,
coming out and the vulnerability of exposure, and painful memories around
family violence and incest.
Given the vulnerable nature of these topics, my intention was to create a safe
environment where the narrator felt respected, trusted my intentions, and had a
sense of control over the outcome of the interview. For me, one key factor in
creating safety is reciprocity. Others have written about the usefulness of self-
disclosure at the beginning of the relationship with the narrator, and I cannot
overemphasize this, particularly in the context of queer oral history. I make a
conscious effort to share something intimate early on to establish some level of
vulnerability on my part. For example, because I am often not perceived to be a
lesbian, I make a point of coming out right away. The femmes always read me as
gay, as one of them, but butch women often do not. And once I do come out to
them, it shifts our interactions entirely. However, what I choose to self-disclose
is not uniform—it may be coming out, but often that is not necessary, so I may
share that I have a young son, or that I am divorced, that I am from the South
(an important detail for Southern narrators like Minnie Bruce Pratt, Suzanne
Pharr, or Linda Stout because they often feel unfairly judged by Northerners), or
that my lover is twenty years older than I am. Revealing something private about
me creates connection and trust, and sometimes the narrator and I find a shared
experience.
The existing literature on oral history methodology generally cautions
against group interviews. Typically, and for good reason, we are coached to
avoid having someone extra in the room, so many of us have shied away from
using equipment that requires a technician in order to preserve the intimacy
and authenticity of the two-person conversation. When I teach oral history to
my students, I insist that they find a way to create that space—no taping in of-
fices, no friends along, no extra relatives in the house, unless, of course, your
narrator feels more comfortable with an ally for herself or it is impossible (and
the conditions of interviewing are often out of our control). An interruption-
free environment and an audience of one are optimal. This interview was not
that. This may have cost us, but I also think it gave us opportunities. And as
public intellectuals on topics of gender and sexuality, Carmen and Dorothy
brought a comfort level to the conversation that allowed us to break with tradi-
tional oral history training.
142 | SEX

For the purposes of this particular project, I believe a collaborative interview

worked, and its success leads me to believe that group, or collaborative, inter-
views have the potential to be more productive than dyads in certain contexts. I
approached the conversation as an experiment with very low stakes. The inten-
tion of the trip to California was to record Dorothy’s oral history, and that had
been accomplished. A taping with her and Carmen was a bonus. But I also had
my concerns. Is it appropriate or ethical to interview your lover? Have we really
tossed the notion of objectivity out the window? Is a group interview still oral
history? And how could I be responsible to the dynamics between interviewer
and narrator in this context? Because so much of the success of an interview
depends on the interaction between the narrator and the interviewer, I was con-
cerned that a trio might not work. I could not control the relationship between
Dorothy and Carmen; what if it went poorly? Could I keep all of these factors in
check and still be facilitating a reflective conversation that felt worthwhile?
Dorothy and I had been taping for a few days, and the three of us sat down
together on the last evening of our trip to Guerneville. We were tired; Dorothy’s
partner, Alix, and her son Wolf were in the next room playing video games; the
dogs were going in and out of the kitchen screen door. It was not ideal, and yet
it was. Dorothy’s kitchen felt relaxed and easy. We were familiar with one an-
other since it was the end of our trip, we had spent time hanging out at the
house with Alix and Wolf, and there was an open bottle of wine on the counter.
And so we approached it as a friendly and informal conversation but with a clear
sense of structure and agreed-upon topics for discussion. I asked them to com-
pare their experiences in San Francisco during the 1980s, to reflect on their evo-
lution sexually, and to discuss the politics around sex and gender within
feminism at the time. While I remain fairly silent in the transcript of the conver-
sation, I provided the opening framework for Dorothy and Carmen, and we had
agreed on the agenda. During the course of the interview, Dorothy, Carmen, and
I each take responsibility for the direction and focus of their discussion.
In this context, a collaborative model was successful and opened up new
possibilities. The format was useful in sparking memories. The narrators often
helped to fill in information for one another—names or street corners—and
compared their recollections. In some ways, it was reading their distinct experi-
ences of the lesbian community in San Francisco against one another that cre-
ated a more cohesive narrative of fractiousness, professionalization, hostility
toward butch-femme and sexual radicalism, and race and class privilege. Doro-
thy’s tenure at Out/Look and leadership in the Outcasts dovetailed with Car-
men’s world of the Women’s Building and political organizing to begin to create
a piecing together of this decade in feminism and LGBT politics. My concern,
though, was that trios can be a challenge—in any situation. In hindsight, I see
that the way this trio worked was that within this group of three, there were
many ways in which we became pairs. And it shifted throughout. This kept the
power in balance during our conversation and prevented any one of us from
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 143

feeling outnumbered and therefore timid or intimidated. For example, Dorothy

and I have Southern roots, a femme identity, and motherhood in common. Car-
men is a Puerto Rican butch from New York. However, Carmen and Dorothy are
the same age and share the same class background. Carmen and I are lovers, but
Dorothy and I had spent the last few days together. And Carmen and Dorothy
can flirt. No side of the triangle ever became too heavy. This allowed us to get at
topics that are intimate and controversial. Sex and desire are not easy to talk
about—with lovers or with new acquaintances. We all had to take some risks to
talk in a way that was honest and compassionate.
In an exchange about safety, submission, and power, Dorothy talks about
butch desire to domesticate femmes and pushes back when Carmen calls
femmes submissive. And she shares her desire for “sincerity,” a lover who is as-
sertive, dangerous. Carmen talks about the exchange of power during sex and
the relinquishing of control. Both women take chances with one another and
also begin to chip away at some of the silences around power, control, desire,
and misogyny within butch-femme sexuality. While both Carmen and Dorothy
have talked publicly about sex and sexual identity in the past, this interview
covered new ground. For Carmen, I believe, her vulnerability and rethinking the
erotics of butch-femme happened, at least in part, because of our intimacy.
When we met three years ago for her oral history interview, Carmen and I talked
briefly about her former lovers, and she shared a few sexual encounters. She was
more self-reflective and open three years later, and it’s logical. We were strangers
in 2005. I was there to talk about politics and activism, and the gender difference
between us—her butch to my femme—meant that we played out those roles
with one another in the course of the interview. She was flirty and in charge, and
I was the supportive listener. Our intimacy now has created room for a different
and more vulnerable conversation.
While I am hesitant to generalize based solely on my own interviewing expe-
rience, I want to raise some questions regarding the role of gender in queer oral
history. I have observed significant differences in my conversations with butch
women versus femme-identified lesbians. In my experience, femmes are more
apt to confide, to explore places of pain particularly around sexuality, and to talk
more openly about past lovers and their own desire. Butch-identified women
have been more reticent to discuss past relationships and sexual practices with
me and tend to rely on butch-femme modes of behavior to shape our interac-
tion—flirtation, gentlemanly gestures, more bravado, and less vulnerability. Can
we apply what we know about gendered communication styles to lesbians?
Does gender operate in similar or distinct ways? Was this a dynamic at work in
this oral history? What if the interviewer was butch? Were Dorothy and I ques-
tion askers and attentive listeners? Were Carmen’s stories declarative and confi-
dent in a way that we ascribe to masculinity? Who was vulnerable or silenced?
Did my femininity and/or my status as Carmen’s lover open up space or close it
down for either of them? In terms of our self-presentations, gender differences
144 | SEX

are highlighted—mostly in a flirtatious kind of way—but the performance of

self is exaggerated by the presence of the other in the room. Does this raise ques-
tions about gender and authenticity, self and performance that look different in
a queer context?
Although I was not conscious of it at the time of our taping, as I reread the
transcript, I am keenly aware of the way that race dropped out of our conversa-
tion about sex and desire. This trio managed to create safety around class, desire,
and gender but not race or racism. We talked about women of color and femi-
nism in the first hour and cross-cultural desire at different times, but for the
most part, race was only given tentative and indirect attention. Sticking to shared
identities of class, generation, and butch-femme where Carmen, in particular,
knew there was some common experience to draw on was safer. I regret that I/
we had not made race a more explicit part of our agenda for the evening, and I
see that our silence echoes the larger community’s inability to navigate discus-
sions around race and queer desire.
Shared political sensibilities and investment in butch-femme sexuality led
us to the topic of transgender and gender-variant identities. Grounded in cur-
rent debates within the LGBT community over (relatively) new categories of
identity, Dorothy and Carmen shared their reflections on the meaning of trans
for butch-femme identity.7 In her observations about the erotics and the poli-
tics of transmen, Dorothy asserts her support of self-determination for trans-
gender people but acknowledges her erotic disinterest. Carmen echoes
Dorothy’s critical assessment of transgender expression and queer politics and
asks, “What was the fucking point of feminism in the first place if it wasn’t to
create a space where women could make this decision about our bodies?”
Both narrators offer important, though contentious, observations—grounded
in history, experience, and a commitment to gender and sexual freedoms—
that are often lost in an ahistorical queer discourse about transgenderism. And
in this historical moment, our shared concerns over continued feminist back-
lash, the homonormativity of the LGBT movement, and an investment in
butch-femme sexuality created something for us to push off of to carve out a
political stance that was grounded in personal experience. We may think dif-
ferently on this topic a few years from now, but its key contribution—indeed,
that of any oral history—is capturing a sense of self, embattled as it is, in the
moment.
Queer oral history is still in its infancy as a self-conscious methodology that
explores some of the theoretical questions I have raised here, but not as prac-
tice. While social historians and community-based groups have relied exten-
sively on oral history to create a narrative of the past, we are only just beginning
to look critically at our methods. We are learning as we go—to take risks, to
continue to challenge categories and assumptions, and to break silences about
sex, gender, and desire. More important, the overarching questions queer oral
historians raise as practitioners—the nature of memory, the construction of
 GENDER, DESIRE, AND FEMINISM | 145

self, the meanings of history—continue to push the discipline of history in

general in significant directions.

Notes
1. My sincere gratitude to Dorothy and Carmen for their time and trust. This Stonewall baby
walks in the trail you blazed. And I offer my deep appreciation to the Sophia Smith Collec-
tion at Smith College for their broad and just vision of women’s history that made this
project possible.
2. Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vázquez, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video re-
cording, November 19, 2007, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collec-
tion, pp. 26–45.
3. This conversation was partially inspired by “What We’re Rollin’ around in Bed With: Sexual
Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them,” a dialogue between Cherríe
Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh, more than twenty-five years prior, about race, class, and
butch-femme desire. Originally printed in Heresies, the sex issue, in 1981, it is now reprinted
in Joan Nestle, ed., The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson, 1992).
4. Barnard’s 1982 conference, The Scholar and the Feminist IX: “Towards a Politics of Sexu-
ality,” represents the apex of the “sex wars” among feminists. Many of the papers presented
there are collected in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). For a broader view of the conflicts over sexuality
during the 1980s and 1990s, see Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and
Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995).
5. Although it feels informal and out of step with academic publishing, I’ve chosen to use the
narrators’ first names in this essay because it more accurately reflects the tone of our rela-
tionships and conversations with one another.
6. For testimony around the complexities of butch-femme culture and desire, see Nestle, ed.,
The Persistent Desire. For the history of a butch-femme community, see Elizabeth Lapovsky
Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (New York: Routledge, 1993).
7. For an excellent collection of theory and testimony on queer politics and gender, see Joan
Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins, eds., Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual
Binary (Los Angeles: Alyson, 2002).
This page intentionally left blank
PART III
FRIENDSHIP
This page intentionally left blank
8 F R I E N D S H I P,
INSTITUTIONS,
ORAL HISTORY
Michael David Franklin

Oral history by Michael David Franklin and Dorthe Troeften with Carol,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 24, 2005

Along with my colleague, Dorthe Troeften, I first met Carol, an eighty-two-year-old

transgender woman, in June 2005 after she contacted the Twin Cities GLBT Oral His-
tory Project (OHP) at the University of Minnesota with the express interest of sharing
her oral history. For approximately two hours that first afternoon, and in subsequent
interviews in July 2005 and May 2008, Carol shared memories of her childhood, her
friendships with transvestites in the 1960s, her thirty-five-year marriage, and her
gradual identification as a transgender woman in the late 1990s. A Korean War veteran
and printer by trade, Carol practiced cross-dressing throughout her adult life as she
moved around the Midwest, and in the 1960s, she cofounded a Wisconsin chapter of the
national male-to-female heterosexual transvestite sorority established by transgender
pioneer Virginia Prince. Her oral history recounts memories of negotiating her feminine
self with her male social identity and of forming friendships with other cross-dressers.
Approximately seventy oral histories have been gathered so far by the Twin Cities
GLBT OHP. Once transcribed, they will be donated to the Jean-Nikolaus Tretter Collec-
tion in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Research Library. Car-
ol’s, as well as many other GLBT oral histories, are featured in Queer Twin Cities
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), a book that uses sexuality to chart
connections between people’s lives and the formation of urban spaces, political move-
ments, social groups, and identities throughout the histories of Minneapolis and
St. Paul.

CAROL: Myrtle, I met, Myrtle was the first . . .well, we used to call ourselves TVs.
DORTHE TROEFTEN: TVs, yeah.
CAROL: The first TV I met. Well, she’d been doing it for years, too. And she came
to visit me in Wilmer, and I, uh—
150 | FRIENDSHIP

MICHAEL DAVID FRANKLIN: And I’m sorry, how did she, how did you get in touch
with each other?
CAROL: Oh, they had, in the thing, letters to the . . .you could write to each other,
and that’s what we did.
TROEFTEN: How did you find them? How did you find—
CAROL: The TV magazine. Transvestia magazine. In some of the early ones, you’ll
notice in the back they had, you know, the names, and of course, you had to
send it through the company and then they remailed them and so forth.
TROEFTEN: But where did you find the Transvestia magazine?
CAROL: Oh. Oh, yeah, that’s—forgot that! I was, uh . . .come to the [Twin] Cities
every once a month, I’d go home to my folks once a month and then I’d stay
out there where I lived for two weekends. Well, I’d come down here, and I’d
go to Shinder’s, and all these places to see what I could find about cross-dressers
and so forth. And this one day I saw this one, it was about some party who
dressed, I don’t remember if he dressed part-time or what, but I bought the
magazine but took it back with me and read it, and there was Transvestia mag-
azine, the party who started this, so right away I wrote for the magazine and
got the magazine, and from there I wrote to this Myrtle and I wrote to this
Sally. And first Myrtle came to visit me, then Myrtle told me any time I came
through her town I should call her and we could have coffee or something, so
I would do that. And she lived in Hutchinson, and she’s not around anymore,
and she’s safe. But anyway, she used to put on shows at the National Guard
Armory, she was with the National Guard, and they put on shows every year,
and her and another guy were the old scrubwomen in the show. They’d come
down with mops and buckets and so forth, and kind of got their two cents in
the play, but they were dressed in a way that gave them an out there. And this
Sally I met and she came to see me, and she was from . . .Big Lake. And we met
in Saint Cloud, and visited and got to know each other better. And then from
there I moved out of Willmar, and I was working out in Wisconsin and I get a
letter from this party called Fran, who lived in Madison. And she was, I was
the only other one in Wisconsin, and she invited me down and that, and so I
went down and visited with her, and so we went to Chicago to a Transvestia
meeting, and met, oh, ten people there, and from there we thought we’d try
to get other people in for ourselves. We had, oh, I don’t know, I’d say ten
people come to meetings pretty regular. . . .
CAROL: Well, I went down to Madison on the Greyhound. As my original self.
[chuckle] Anyway, we went to Chicago, Fran and I did, and we stayed—we
went to this hotel where they were having their meeting down there. And I
don’t know, this Chicago chapter had a few meetings and Fran has been to
them before, but we thought we’d go down and really see what they did and
see if we could start our own. Of course, we didn’t know where we could get
any members from, but we came back and started our own. And we had,
uh . . .let’s see, there’s Fran and me, and, uh . . .we got a party from Appleton
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 151

whose name was Lynn. And we started out, the three of us would get together
every month, and sit there and have a little meeting and what we were going
to do. And then we decided we would make a little paper, so we bought a
hectograph—mimeo, no, mimeograph, it was a mimeograph. And Fran did
all the typing and that. And we’d do that and send it out to a variety of people,
and then we got associated members. We had associated members from
Ohio—which, we had Laura—and we had one from, uh . . .Indian . . .Indi-
ana, and I can’t think of her name right now. And we had several from Chi-
cago, even, joined the associated club. Then we’d, you know, hear from them
each month. They wouldn’t be at the meeting, but if they come through
town—I know the party from Ohio would come through town about twice a
year, and stop, and be at the meeting, and then he’d stop here in Minneapolis
and be here for a couple of days. And he did some big business here in Min-
neapolis with one of the big defense firms.
TROEFTEN: Hmm.
CAROL: And, uh . . .then, uh . . .we got more members—in fact I got a picture of
some of the members we have—uh, had. And, uh . . .[sounds of Carol getting
up from her chair to retrieve the picture]. . . .
CAROL: [standing away from microphone, searching for picture] And, anyway,
uh . . .you know, when you want to find things, it’s hard to find.
TROEFTEN AND FRANKLIN: [laughter]
CAROL: But I saw it in here, so I know it’s here.
TROEFTEN: Maybe if you come over and sit by the microphone, you can look
through while we talk. . . . Oh, there it is.
FRANKLIN: Oh, wow.
CAROL: And some, I don’t know their names. I figured there’s that one time, the
last meeting we had, when we kind of closed up things after that. And it was
this party’s—I think it was this party’s wife.
TROEFTEN: Oh yeah, you mentioned that. So we’re looking now at a picture of
eight . . .women—no, nine women.
FRANKLIN: Nine, yeah.
TROEFTEN: Dressed—
FRANKLIN: From March 1967, the photograph says. . . . And they’re all dressed up.
There’s a row standing behind the sofa, with four ladies sitting on the sofa
and five standing behind. It looks to be in a living room, possibly?
CAROL: Mmhmm.
FRANKLIN: Somebody’s living room, and everybody looks, you know, very well
put together.
TROEFTEN: Yeah.
FRANKLIN: Very well dressed. Very stylish.
CAROL: There’s Virginia.
TROEFTEN: Oh, there’s Virginia.
FRANKLIN: Oh, yeah!
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CAROL: And this is the Fran from Wisconsin. And I think Fran, from my opinion,
Fran was the big promoter of this thing in the early days.
TROEFTEN: Which one is you? . . .Yeah, okay, that’s what I thought.
CAROL: And this is June. She’s from Minnesota. And used to live in St. Paul. She
lives up north now.
FRANKLIN: Like, upstate? Up north in the state?
CAROL: Yeah, up north in Duluth.
TROEFTEN: Hmm.
CAROL: And, uh . . .otherwise, I know where this party [a TV in the picture] lives,
and I’m going to give her a call some day. But she doesn’t know me real well,
so I just don’t know. . . . I’m going to call her and tell her who I am. That I used
to belong to Theta. And she used to come to Minneapolis meetings, when we
used to have Minneapolis meetings, she would come here. And, well, a lot of
them would drive a far distance, because it was important to meet people
from . . .and talk to them and so forth. So. . . .
TROEFTEN: So in the meetings, you basically got together, and . . .?
CAROL: We’d have a short little meeting. Then the rest was talk. People who
wasn’t used to this, you know, they—you’d fill them in and kind of get them

Six transvestites sit primly along a brick fireplace during a sorority club meeting in
Madison, Wisconsin, in 1963. A network of sorority clubs for male-to-female trans-
vestites crystallized in the United States during the 1960s, thanks to the campaign
of transgender pioneer Virginia Prince to educate the public about heterosexual
transvestism. Courtesy of the Tretter Collection, University Libraries, University of Min-
nesota, Minneapolis
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 153

on the right road, you know, that they weren’t, they weren’t all bad. [laugh]
And so forth, and . . .
FRANKLIN: And would you socialize?
CAROL: You’re like a therapist, you know? And yeah, you’d socialize, and we’d
have a little lunch and coffee and that. . . .
FRANKLIN: I have another question, since I’m still so captivated by this photo-
graph you’ve shown us. It’s just so wonderful. But I noticed that you all look
very middle class, and it seems like everybody, I would say, would be white. So
do you remember any TVs who were not white, who were of another race, or
possibly a class background or maybe they struggled to buy things?
CAROL: There was no TVs in the group that was any other race but white. But this
Myrtle from Hutchinson corresponded with a TV years before, I don’t know
how she got—through some magazine she picked up. And she lived in Utah,
and she was a b . . .a porter on the train. And she was black. And . . .so, I knew
there was a black one who was there. Then there was talk once that they didn’t
think there was any Jews.
FRANKLIN: Who didn’t?
CAROL: Well, like, articles. Nobody joined Theta and that who was Jewish. It was
all Europeans, you know, and that. And then they thought this little celebra-
tion they have for Jewish boys—whatever they call it now, bar mitzvah. . . .
FRANKLIN: Bar mitzvah, yeah.
CAROL: They thought maybe that’s why they didn’t fit into this TV thing, but
then it turned out that they did. There was . . .finally ran into some Jewish
men who were cross-dressers. . . .
TROEFTEN: How long were you involved with these groups? Did it end when that
group broke up in Madison?
CAROL: Well, it kind of ended there. The meetings did. We did have some meet-
ings in Minneapolis, at different motels here. One . . .this is kind of a funny
thing. We held a meeting at the Fair Oaks, over by the [Minneapolis] Art Insti-
tute. Which is back in 1960s, you know? And that is where we had our meeting.
We had a good turnout. We had several meetings there. But this thing today
that they have, which is also from Virginia’s group—I can’t think what they
call it now—they had their first meeting over at the Fair Oaks. I told the party
that was doing the thing, “Well, you were the second ones there at the Fair
Oaks ’cause we were there first.” And this woman lives in a apartment house
over there. Soph . . .Sophia? She’s got such a funny name, I can’t think of what
it is. But anyway, I told her, “You live in this apartment house in the corner
across the street, the house behind this one is where we first got together to do
the job.” So we got together about the same area. So . . .
TROEFTEN: Did the people who come there have—did you feel like you had sim-
ilar experiences to the other TVs that you met with? In terms of their lives—
CAROL: Well, I feel like—you mean, growing up experiences?
TROEFTEN: Yeah, or sort of, your . . . yeah—
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CAROL: Oh, you mean I lived in poverty, and the other was rich? [chuckle]
TROEFTEN: Well, I was thinking—I don’t know. I mean, I was thinking, you know,
if you felt that was a place you could come and meet people who understood
who you were because you shared something, or did you feel like you didn’t,
actually?
CAROL: I felt like it was a place you come and talk to people. A lot of them didn’t
know much because they were . . .well, everybody was just kind of finding out
about everything. And I felt like at the time that I was one of the better posted
people. And Fran was real good posted. She was—her and Virginia were cor-
responding a lot and that. In fact, they wrote a book, and I forgot the name of
the book. But it’s at the library, I know. So . . .but . . .a lot of people didn’t—
well, you’re a guy who dressed. That’s how they felt, a lot of them, you know.
They’re a guy, and I think there’s a lot of guys today still think they’re a guy
who likes to dress as women. And, see, I don’t feel that way. I feel like I am a
woman, and I can’t come out and say directly that I am a woman, but I’m a
transgender woman, because I do have some of the other stuff, you know. But
. . .the people came to the meeting, they were out there searching to find out
stuff, and so forth. So . . .you have any books from the new organization out
in California. They used to be Transvestia?
FRANKLIN: Is it . . .? I just, I’m totally blanking.
CAROL: The Mirror.
FRANKLIN: I’m sorry, what’s that?
CAROL: The Mirror.
FRANKLIN: I guess not, no.
CAROL: I think they call it . . .I have some here. I only have a couple because I
joined the club, and I quit the club, because . . .because I didn’t think they
were like the old days, you know.
TROEFTEN: Hmm. And when was this?
CAROL: Oh, I joined it maybe in the [inaudible, as Carol searches through papers]
I don’t know where I got [inaudible]. Anyway, Tri-Ess is what they call it. . . . I
do have some other, and I’ll dig them out and get ’em so you can use ’em. And
these are—some of these are published papers from some of the clubs around
town. This is from the Californ—the big membership, you know?
TROEFTEN: Mmhmm.
FRANKLIN: So you said that Tri-Ess and what you were involved in just wasn’t like
how it used to be in the old days. How is it different?
CAROL: Well, I don’t—I just feel like that. Well, it could be that people are
better posted on stuff and that. Maybe. And I don’t feel that it’s as sociable
as it was.
FRANKLIN: Not as sociable?
CAROL: It’s more antisocial, you know. It’s more sociable back then—everybody’d
talk to each other and that, and now it seems like you can go there and you
can sit by yourself in the corner if you want to, you know.1
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 155

Commentary

What is the connection between oral history and friendship? Might the creation
of oral history sometimes spark a friendship between interviewee and inter-
viewer? If so, how can the evaluation of oral history as an incitement of friend-
ship offer new insight into the university’s regulation of relationships over which
it claims jurisdiction? To put it another way, what happens to friendships born
of oral history in an institutional context? And how can memories of friendships
that took institutional form help us reconsider the institutional management of
oral history as a method of knowledge production? Oral history lies at the inter-
section of two vectors of power within the university: the regulation of relation-
ships and the administration of knowledge production. The oral history of
Carol, a white transgender woman born in 1929 who lives in a subsidized retire-
ment community on the outskirts of Minneapolis, clarifies these vectors of
power.
This chapter weaves through Carol’s memories, her reflections about her cur-
rent living situation, and my interactions with her as a white cisgender gay man
who represents a university-affiliated project. As this itinerary might suggest,
“oral history” is defined here as both the resulting text and the process of pro-
ducing the text. Because her remembered experiences across space and time
cannot be neatly collapsed into one discrete identity, and indeed emphasize
transvestite friendships as superior to marriage, Carol’s oral history calls into
question rhetorical deployments of “the GLBT community” in current national
debates in the United States that frame gay rights in terms of marriage and mil-
itary service. Carol’s interview convincingly showcases oral history’s unique
potential among ethnographic methods to bring people together across divi-
sions of age and identity for transformative interactions: in this case, oral histo-
ry’s potential is produced through an interviewer and interviewee’s shared
commitment to interactively illuminate queer and trans experiences, lives, and
histories specific to the Twin Cities region.2
Carol’s oral history is useful for addressing questions about the connection
between friendship and oral history because more than forty years ago, via a
magazine named Transvestia, she befriended other transvestites in the Midwest
and formed a sorority-like social club. It is also useful because over the last thirty
years, Carol has moved away from identifying as a transvestite and has come to
identify as a transgender woman. Historically, the university has played a central
role in producing knowledge about unconventional gender expressions that we
now readily categorize as transgender. A culminating point of this history was
the introduction in 1980 of the psychopathology Gender Identity Disorder into
the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM). This entry into the DSM was the outcome of the study of transsexuality
in American universities since the 1960s, and it effectively concretized the medi-
calization of cross-gender identification. Some twenty-five years later, it is this
156 | FRIENDSHIP

diagnostic category that impels the institutional review board (IRB) at the Uni-
versity of Minnesota to view transgender research subjects first and foremost as
people who embody a medicalized mode of difference. Hence, when Dorthe
Troeften applied in 2003 for approval to collect transgender oral histories, the
IRB declared her project to pose greater than minimal risk to research partici-
pants because of its interpretation of their gender difference as pathology. The
research reviewer made suggestions as to how she should minimize risks for
potential participants, and after such changes, the project was given approval.
Because its ethical code is calibrated by a historical precedent of institutional
violence against marginalized communities, such as the infamous Tuskegee
syphilis study, the IRB assesses all human research with a primary goal of mini-
mizing risk.3
This is not to say that the IRB is wrong to concern itself with risk, or imply
that beneficence is ignored, or to argue that an ethical recalibration around
social change would automatically make for a progressive IRB. Rather, Carol’s
oral history presents us with an instance that contradicts the IRB’s general out-
look about the risks posed by transgender oral history. Because her current living
situation in a heterogendered retirement community requires her to present
herself daily as a man, the friendship that has emerged between Carol, Dorthe,
and me as a result of our interviews has empowered Carol to express herself
more as Carol. To put this another way, Dorthe and I have served as a positive
outlet for Carol’s gendered self-expression at a time in her life when she seems
to have little encouragement along these lines. These expressions have occurred
through her everyday interactions with Dorthe and me: when she has greeted us
at her apartment door dressed in a new skirt and blouse that she then proudly
discusses in her oral history, when she has told me over the phone about her
latest public excursions, or when she has hinted that she longs for friends who
understand her as she is. The interpersonal elements of creating her oral history
have catalyzed her everyday life and buttressed her will to make changes in how,
when, and where she presents herself as Carol and to whom she discloses her
transgender identity.
A dynamic between transvestite and transgender becomes apparent when we
look at Carol’s oral history through the lenses of friendship and institution. On
the one hand, Carol’s oral history proffers memories of cross-gender practices
and friendships that coalesced around and within a transvestite social club in
the 1960s. On the other hand, Carol shares her frustrations, enthusiasms, and
memories with Dorthe and me, representatives of an institutionally vetted trans-
gender oral history project. Each instance presents us with a different constella-
tion of institution, gender formation, and friendship: friendship among
transvestites in a sorority and friendship among a transgender oral history par-
ticipant and her university-affiliated cisgender interviewers. Pinpointing that
moment in Carol’s oral history when she believes she ceased to feel that she was
a transvestite or began to feel that she was transgender (not necessarily the same
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 157

moment, I know) is beside the point. And although Carol’s life could be used to
analyze the therapeutic and medical establishments’ impact on the develop-
ment of her gender identity, this approach marginalizes the significance of her
friendships in this process.
Instead, Carol’s oral history provides a basis for theorizing the connection
between friendship and oral history in institutional contexts. Each connection
between friendship and oral history demonstrates different ways that an institu-
tion mediates sexuality to elicit a particular kind of gendered subject formation.
As institutions, the transvestite social club and the IRB seek to elicit and repre-
sent the cross-dresser and the transgender oral history participant. Neither club
nor IRB represses gender expressions that jar dominant conventions of femi-
ninity and masculinity, but rather seek to incite and manage these expressions
to form hegemonic subjects supportive of a particular social order. Indeed,
Transvestia and its attendant community, including Carol’s social club, sought to
fend off the specter of homosexuality by presenting male-to-female transvesti-
tism as heterosexual devotion to women and femininity. And the IRB originally
rejected Troeften’s bid to interview trans people critical of the medical establish-
ment by insisting that she use more neutral language to recruit a broader array
of research subjects, all in the name of objective research.
These examples signal two different moments of the productive regulation of
gender identity and expressions. Yet, through her activities with the social club,
Carol formed profound friendships, and within the constraint created by the
IRB’s risk management, a friendship has developed through oral history. These
friendships are embedded within and enabled by their sheltering institutions,
but they also exceed them. A paradox emerges, then: friendship is cultivated
between male-to-female heterosexual transvestites and between an elderly trans-
gender oral history participant and her interviewers by those very conditions of
institutional regulation that seek to salt the earth of transformative relationships
to uphold hegemonies. Ultimately, it is this enduring quality of friendship that
illuminates how the interface of institution and friendship can paradoxically aid
in the production of new social movements and new ways of positioning one-
self in relation to society.4
To examine the links between oral history, institution, and friendship, we
should first review Carol’s oral history for the details of her life up until her par-
ticipation with the Midwestern transvestite social scene. Carol remembers her
experiences as a Korean War veteran who regularly “dressed up” in feminine at-
tire, as she puts it, throughout her childhood and adolescence in upstate Min-
nesota. During the 1950s, when she was in her twenties, Carol moved between
small towns in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In these towns, she worked as a
printer, a trade she acquired in the Army. One weekend a month, she would visit
her family, who had known about her cross-dressing since her youth and who
even would see her dressed in women’s clothing around the house at times, but
speak nothing of it.
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Another weekend a month, she would drive to Minneapolis, where she spent
much time dressed up in public, strolling through stores and streets. During one
of these forays, while shopping in a downtown bookstore for material about
others like her, Carol found an issue of the magazine Sexology that featured an
article about transgender pioneer Virginia Prince and the male-to-female hetero-
sexual transvestite social network that she was trailblazing across the United
States. Included in the issue was an ad for the magazine Transvestia, the nerve
center of Prince’s movement.5 At this moment, the idea of transvestism entered
Carol’s life as a socially viable identity and practice. She purchased Sexology and
sent off for Transvestia, which regularly included editorials by Prince, an array of
photographic and written reader contributions about the vicissitudes of Cold
War heterosexual transvestism, and a personals section for readers desiring cor-
respondence. Through this section, Carol struck up friendships with fellow
transvestites in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 1961, she relocated from a small
town in Wisconsin to Minneapolis to be, in her words, “more free” to be Carol.
Soon after her move, she coestablished in Madison, Wisconsin, with one of her
first transvestite friends, Fran, a club that was part of Prince’s national social
network for heterosexual transvestites. Because of the sorority-like structure of
Prince’s network, Carol and her friends’ club in Madison was called the Theta
chapter.
When Carol speaks about her life before her introduction to the transvestite
social scene, she gives an impression of solitude. This impression resonates with
her current living situation as a transgender woman having to pass herself off
daily as a man. As an adult in her twenties, she would drive to hotel rooms in
neighboring towns to dress alone and in anonymity. These moments of solitary
expression occur throughout her life and are especially pronounced now that
she lives in a heterogendered communal setting, when once again her car is
refuge from the gendered demands of her daily life. It is notable, then, that she
describes her Army service during the Korean War as central to shaping her cross-
gender identification. Reflecting on her military experience, she comments on
her transformation:

Well, you know, during my life I was not really a leader. Kind of set back. Don’t take
control, or [I would] be shoved a little bit and that. But then came that great day
when I went to the United States Army, and I became a leader. As long as I was in the
Army, I was somebody, not nobody. I was one of the important enlisted men there.
So that’s on leadership, you know? And then I come out of the Army and I kind of
slid back. Well, I knew I wasn’t a female impersonator, but . . .so my leadership kind
of slipped, you know. But . . .then you read a little more, and then you find out
about the transvestites. Well, I’m a transvestite. Then, as time goes on, then you find
out there’s more than just transvestites. There’s the transgender, and transsexuals,
and so forth. Well, I decided I was transgender because I want to be Carol, a woman,
and I want to live that way, and I don’t have any desire to be a transvestite.6
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 159

In this passage, Carol makes a connection between leadership skills acquired

during military service and the process of cross-gender identification. She makes
this connection following a discussion about her dual roles as vice president
and coordinator of entertainment at the retirement community. Expressing frus-
tration about the lethargy of the retirement community’s social scene, Carol as-
sociates her inability to freely dress as a woman with her visibility as a leader to
whom fellow residents look for direction and diversion. She comments at length
about the staidness and homophobia of many of her fellow residents and how
previous conversations with them convinced her that the retirement community
was a hostile and potentially unsafe environment for her to present herself as
Carol. In short, the friendlessness that Carol experiences, coupled with the sur-
veillance she feels as a well-known resident, foregrounds the previous quotation.
The gendered dimensions of her life in the retirement home, in which she is
expected to serve as a leader due to her outgoing personality and desire to con-
nect with others, invoke her memory of the gendered expectations of her service
during the Korean War as “one of the important enlisted men.”
It is no accident, though, that this quotation links Army service to the trans-
formation of a nobody into a somebody who becomes a transvestite. By doing
so, it indicates how military service is an intensely heteromasculine realm that a
male-bodied person who feels cross-gender desire would experience differently.
Indeed, Carol’s memories about the Army recur throughout her oral history but
are not prominent. She credits the Army for her trade skills and her leadership
skills, but she does not, for instance, reminisce about serving in Korea, fighting
against communism, or spending time with Army buddies. This is certainly due
to Dorthe’s and my focus on other aspects of her life and probably to Carol’s
thematic priorities in her narration. When remembering her Army service,
though, Carol focuses on stolen moments of cross-gender expression:

I took my basic training and schooling in—which was Fort, is Fort Gordon, Geor-
gia, now, but was Camp Gordon. And this desire we have, you can’t keep a cap on
it. So one day I was in town on pass, and I got a few clothes and that, and went over
to this little hotel and got a room there for the night, and dressed and went out for
a little while, but not, not long. But I could say I’ve been dressed in Augusta, Geor-
gia. . . . And then I ordered, when I was in Korea, I ordered some clothes from Sears.
And I went down and had my picture taken with them on, I dressed and had my
picture taken. I thought.  .  . . So that was another time. So I’ve been dressed in
Korea, too. Old Klinger, he’s not the only one.7

Carol does not express regret over having to contain her gender expressions to
the hotel room and the photographer’s studio. At plenty of other moments in
her oral history, she narrates habits of clandestinely dressing in “dumpy little
town[s].”8 In every memory shared, including those about the Army, she is
matter-of-fact about the need for discretion when she dressed.9 And even with
her current living situation, her frustrations stem not from having to leave the
160 | FRIENDSHIP

building if she wants to have a social life as Carol, but rather from the ignorance
of those people whose lives are braided with hers because of their coresidence
yet separate due to homophobia and transphobia.
What is telling about these memories, then, is her silence about friendships
during her experience in the Army that set her down the path of personal trans-
formation. Historically, war has been a crucible for male soldiers’ relationships,
which the military has sought to commandeer. In an interview titled “Sex,
Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Michel Foucault comments on “the prob-
lem of friendship” in the West that first makes its appearance during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. Namely, the rise of social institutions such as
the military, universities, and the medical establishment in this era correlated
with the reining in of potent relationships between people, relationships whose
everyday intensities of pleasure, camaraderie, joy, and devotion were at odds
with the institutional quest for power:

For centuries after antiquity, friendship was a very important kind of social rela-
tion: a social relation within which people had a certain freedom, certain kind of
choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations. There were
also economic and social implications to these relationships—they were obliged to
help their friends, and so on. I think that in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, we see these kinds of friendships disappearing, at least in the male society. . . .
The army, the bureaucracy, administration, universities, schools, and so on—in the
modern senses of these words—cannot function with such intense friendships. I
think there can be seen a very strong attempt in all these institutions to diminish
or minimize the affectional relations.10

Friendship’s life in the modern institution is contradictory, according to Fou-

cault. On the one hand, friendship is necessary for the institution’s survival
as a social entity that benevolently and productively governs people. Yet, on
the other hand, the institution regulates and discourages friendship because
of its capacity to dilute allegiance, to spark affections between people that
defy the mechanical heart of institutional protocol: “Institutional codes can’t
validate these relations with multiple intensities, variable colors, impercep-
tible movements and changing forms. These relations short-circuit it and
introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit.”11 Put
simply, the management of friendship has become a necessary balancing act
for institutions, the deft handling of a substance volatile yet vital to institu-
tional hegemony.
This balancing act between institutional imperatives and affectional relations
becomes prominent when Carol remembers her participation in the Midwest-
ern transvestite scene. After returning to the United States from Korea and trav-
eling from small town to small town throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota,
Carol’s life began to flourish in 1961. After moving to Minneapolis for greater
freedom to express herself as Carol, she became very involved with the Theta
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 161

chapter. Its monthly meetings, hosted by Fran and her wife in their Madison
home, drew ten regular members as well as a number of occasional visitors. At
meetings they would gather dressed and socialize alongside those wives or girl-
friends who knew of and accepted their partners. (One of these wives eventually
included a woman who married Carol in 1964. She initially accepted Carol’s
transvestism, and soon after their marriage, they began having children.) Mem-
bers would discuss the responsibilities of the club, including the publication of
a monthly newsletter contributed by Theta members and their wives, as well as
news from other chapters in the Midwest. Occasionally the group would submit
contributions to Transvestia.12 According to Carol’s memory, Virginia Prince vis-
ited the Madison club on at least four separate occasions while traveling through
the Midwest, and once Carol and her wife had Virginia to their Minneapolis
house for lunch.
Due primarily to the anger of one member’s wife, who threatened to go to
the police, the Theta chapter disbanded around 1967. According to Carol, Fran
feared the social and legal repercussions of exposure if the wife reported the
meetings to the authorities:

And then in one of the meetings one of the guy’s wives, one of the TV’s wives was
really mad about this thing [the collective transvestism]. So that was the end of the
meeting for Fran in there. Fran had the meeting at her home all the time. And, so
she said, “I can’t do this anymore because I don’t know what would happen if she
turned me in, and I’d have—the police would be out here.”13

Because of the club’s disbandment, and because of Carol’s own marital prob-
lems that centered around her wife’s growing disapproval of transvestism now
that they had children to raise, Carol’s participation in this scene waned in the
late 1960s. She attempted with friends to initiate a similar group in Minneapo-
lis; it met several times but never quite got off the ground. By the early 1970s,
she had lost contact with most of her transvestite friends. A certain solitude
returned to her life. She continued to dress up in private with brief public out-
ings over the following two decades, but only when her children and wife were
out of the house. Indeed, in her oral history, Carol recalls a fight in 2000 that
erupted when her wife unexpectedly came home from work to find her dressed
up, a fight she says that signaled the moment the marriage was over.14 During
the 1980s and 1990s, she would infrequently visit various transgender social
groups in the Twin Cities but never became a regular member because of her
wife’s protest and her dissatisfaction with the groups’ dynamics, which she felt
were inferior to those of the Theta chapter. Carol comments on one such
group: “I joined the club, and I quit the club, because . . .because I didn’t think
they were like the old days.”15 In 2000, around the time Carol separated from
her wife after thirty-five years of marriage, she moved into the retirement com-
munity and got a letter from her therapist certifying her as a transgender
woman.
162 | FRIENDSHIP

Carol’s friendships and her involvement in the cross-dressing scene in the

early 1960s provided her with a template through which to express her cross-
gender desire via a transvestite identity. In short, she achieved a social intelligi-
bility distinct from the solitude of her life before moving to Minneapolis and
after the Theta chapter disbanded. This intelligibility was brought about by the
network of friends that grew within the shelter provided by the institution of the
social club, yet at the same time this intelligibility was formulated by the
national campaign of Virginia Prince.
The magazine Transvestia was central to this campaign. Through Transvestia,
Prince provided to “males who are fascinated by feminine attire . . .an outlet to
express their feelings and a medium of contact with others of similar persua-
sion.”16 Disputing the popular rationale that typically smeared transvestism as
pathological, she denied any underlying motives of immorality and asserted the
harmlessness of the majority of male cross-dressers. Yet, despite her trenchant
critique of the widely circulated misconceptions about transvestism, Prince’s ad-
vocacy was not for everyone. Living in a paranoid Cold War environment in
which intertwining fears of a communist conspiracy and the insidiousness of
homosexuality intensified the state surveillance and persecution of self-identified
homosexuals and homophile organizations, Prince had to regulate her rhetoric
as a transvestite activist advocating for a practice long deemed symptomatic of
sexual perversion. Motivated to differentiate transvestites from homosexuals,
she appealed to the dominant ideology by casting transvestism as a normal var-
iation of human behavior. Such a claim on normality in effect separated gender
expression from sexual desire while attempting to evade any taint of deviance
commonly attributed to homosexuality. Indeed, Prince’s carefully deployed
contention that rigid concepts of gender and sexuality should open up to incor-
porate male-to-female cross-dressers paradoxically necessitated a dependence
on heterosexuality and marriage, two components central to the heteronorma-
tivity responsible for the stigmatization of transvestism.17
Carol mentions in her oral history how club meetings were occasions to
socialize with other transvestites. Despite the indispensability of wives and
marriage in Prince’s politics of respectability, wives in Carol’s oral history are
mentioned only in passing in the context of the 1960s scene. Carol focuses far
more on her friendships and activities with other transvestites than she does
on wives. Thus, even though Prince’s campaign was the occasion to initiate the
club, marriage in Carol’s memory is overshadowed by transvestite friendships.
This can be seen in two moments. One is that of the wife whose threats forced
the club’s closure. But another moment directly shaping the course of Carol’s
life is how she came to marry her wife. Carol remembers how before the Madi-
son scene she would end her dating relationships with many women before
they became serious because she “knew what [she] was going to do” if she
married: continue to dress up and express her feminine self and possibly seek
sex reassignment surgery.18 As she grew older, she did not pursue transsexual
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 163

health care services, as she had initially thought about in Korea when she first
learned about Christine Jorgensen in 1952. Instead, she “listened to other
drummers” and pursued a life of heterosexuality.19 In 1964, at age thirty-five,
after she had been involved with the Theta chapter for three years, Carol told
the woman she was dating at the time about her transvestism. The woman
supported her and accepted it, and feeling she ought to marry but not knowing
what to do, Carol turned to her married transvestite friend Fran for advice.
Fran was in favor of marriage to a woman who accepted her companion’s
transvestism. Yet, even this description in Carol’s oral history is immediately
followed first by speculation about whether Fran’s marriage survived and then
by a litany of complaints about the “miserable life” that marriage for Carol
proved to be.20
Carol is adamant that her friendships were platonic and she knew of no
members whose identities were overtly sexual in a way at odds with Prince’s
campaign. Indeed, the heterosexual accord that underpinned her experiences
and more broadly the community imagined via Transvestia contrasts with a mo-
ment in the oral history when she discusses her dissatisfaction with more recent
groups she has encountered. Specifically, she disapproves of these groups’ greater
permissiveness with respect to sexual expression, as indicated when she showed
Dorthe and me one group’s catalog of trans personal ads in which a trans wom-
an’s self-presentation was overtly gothic and sadomasochistic.21
This disapproval gains greater clarity in light of a memory of a femme lesbian
Carol encountered when she and a few transvestite friends from Wisconsin
attended a meeting of a Chicago-based chapter in 1960. She recalls a white, cis-
gender woman whose glamorous femininity and sexual unavailability excited
all in attendance:

There was one gay girl who attended the [Chicago] meeting, who .  .  . she was
dressed to the heights of fashion: nice skirt on and blouse and heels. And everyone
says, “Gosh, how can she be gay?” . . . And some guy who was a cross-dresser—he
was an older guy. He was wearing a suit at the meeting, and that. But he was a
cross-dresser, and he rented an apartment for her to live at so he could go and dress
every so often.22

The desire of a femme lesbian would have been understood as taboo for the
conjugal transvestism of Transvestia, yet she signals the adulation of white mid-
dle-class femininity so vital to Carol’s transvestite friendships and so decent in
appearance compared with the risqué personal ad. Thus, as Derrida has said that
every text proposes an institution,23 Transvestia and its contents gave rise to wide
readership and a network of social clubs united in the cause of sanctioning
transvestism as a normal heterosexual practice. Carol’s oral history, on the other
hand, recalls a space in which self-exploration, acceptance, and support flour-
ished in the form of friendship. Carol’s memories very well may stray from her
actions and feelings at the time described, but nevertheless, they demonstrate
164 | FRIENDSHIP

how friendships exceed the institution built by Prince, even as they emerge out
of and coalesce around that very institution.
The friendship that has developed between Carol and me cannot compare with
those of her past, but it still has productive effects in both of our lives in ways not
accounted for by the IRB. Unlike her past friendships, our friendship is not one of
shared sexual identity and gender expression: I am a cisgender gay man and she is
a transgender woman who does not identify as gay or lesbian despite her attrac-
tion to women. In our conversations, Carol’s only comment ever about gay men
has been to disapprove of the sexually explicit attire reported in local news cov-
erage of the Twin Cities Pride Parade, arguing that such behavior further stigma-
tizes sexual and gender minorities. Yet, I believe that in addition to a source of
encouragement, I have become part of her effort initiated in 2000 to articulate
herself as a transgender woman. When she shows me her letter from her therapist
confirming her as a transgender woman, or when she talks with an acquaintance
from the University of Minnesota’s Program in Human Sexuality about her con-
tribution to the OHP and the publication of this chapter, I get the impression that
her intention is typical of many of the other transgender people I have interviewed
for the OHP: to contribute to defining a regional transgender history not steeped
in the medical history that compels the IRB to define Carol as an at-risk subject.
Carol finds validation for her transgender identity not by emphasizing a personal
history of cross-gender identification, but by stating for the official record a public
history of transvestite friendships in Madison during the 1960s.
Moreover, my discussions with her on and off the record, in her small apart-
ment or over the telephone on those random, occasional nights one of us checks
in on the other, have served as a reassuring and elucidating contact for me in a
time in my life when I am finishing graduate school. But more to the point, in
talking with Carol about her friendships and everyday experiences, I feel that
they find an unexpected affinity with recent losses of mine: the untimely death
of my mother in 2006; the severe deterioration of my grandparents’ health and
their passing in 2009. These deep losses that I feel daily have for me a strange
communion with the longing that Carol has expressed for friendships in the past
and currently, on the oral history record and off it. I seldom discuss the details of
my personal life with Carol only because the occasions of our discussion in the
service of institutional business of the OHP invites her to speak about herself.
And I understand that our friendship is not outside of power, that it quite liter-
ally inhabits the confessional mode as theorized by Foucault. Yet even within
this vector of power, our friendship has emerged around the creation of her oral
history, the midwifing of her life’s narration that she drives but that Dorthe and
I redirect and refocus through our questions and words of encouragement.
If the university is increasingly becoming the domain for the administration of
sexuality in the competitive arena of global capitalism, I suggest that in its cracks
the contradictions of unlikely friendships can proliferate.24 Foucault asserts: “We
live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished.
 F R I E N D S H I P, I N S T I T U T I O N S , O R A L H I S T O R Y | 165

Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of rela-
tionships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We
should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric.”25 Transvestia
gave rise to a transvestite community charged with a heteronormative hegemony
and regulatory of suspect desires and practices, yet also contradictorily gave rise to
profound affections recalled at length that have created an unlikely friendship
more than forty years later. Oral history has the potential to enrich our relational
fabric through the shared articulation of queer and trans lives.26

Notes
1. Carol, oral history interview, Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project (Minneapolis, June 24,
2005), 4–20.
2. As explained in her book’s introduction, it was Miranda Joseph’s participation in a gay-les-
bian San Francisco theater group and its members’ uncritical deployment of identity in the
theater’s administration that informed her critique of idealized notions of community.
Conversely, it is the coming together of people across identity—in mutual affect, cause, or
need—that helps give practices of community their truest transformational potential.
Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), vii–xxxiii.
3. I explore this at length in “Calculating Risk: History of Medicine, Transgender Oral History,
and the Institutional Review Board,” Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, ed., Queer Twin
Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 20–39.
4. My thoughts about the paradox of friendship, institutions, and oral history have benefited
from Judith Butler’s assessment of the paradox of the diagnosis of gender identity disorder:
namely, that submission to this diagnosis constrains a trans person’s autonomy even as it
permits access to resources and social recognition otherwise out of reach. Judith Butler,
“Undiagnosing Gender,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 75–101.
5. Robert Hill, “‘We Share a Sacred Secret’: Gender, Domesticity, and Containment in Transves-
tia’s Histories and Letters from Crossdressers and Their Wives,” Journal of Social History, 44,
no. 3 (2011): 729–750.
6. Carol, oral history interview, Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project (Minneapolis, July 8,
2005), 42.
7. Ibid., 8–9.
8. Ibid., 8.
9. One major thread running throughout the oral history was Carol’s solitude and discretion in
the towns she lived in before moving to Minneapolis. One figure who reappears throughout
her oral history is that of the landlady. She describes how she would typically rent a room in
a house and how she would dress when the landlady was away. Sometimes she might present
herself dressed as Carol to the landlady with the story that she was practicing a stage perfor-
mance for a play in a neighboring town. She recalls this story working the several times she
used it. Indeed, this story diffused a potentially disastrous encounter Carol had one day with
a new landlady in the late 1950s. The landlady came home unexpectedly to find a “strange,
medium-size woman” leaving the house. She approached this woman, they spoke, and ulti-
mately the woman revealed herself to be the new tenant practicing a theatric role. The land-
lady had connections with the town’s newspaper and told her contact about the incident.
Soon after, Carol was approached with the request for permission to report the incident. She
reluctantly agreed because she feared refusal would raise suspicions and feed gossip. Roughly
fifty years later, this clipping now hangs on Carol’s wall, framed and accompanied with a
picture of her from this period. The clipping (with names changed) is reproduced here:
“Who in the world is THAT?” wondered Irma Bublitz to herself as she drove up her
driveway to the garage and caught a glimpse of a strange, medium-size woman wearing
a stylishly short green print dress open her front door and step with slow, studied care
166 | FRIENDSHIP

down the stairs in white, ridiculously high-heeled shoes. The stranger’s jet black hair,
worn quite bouffant, fairly bounced, however, when she sensed she was being observed
and swerved to retreat on her nearly unmanageable heels to the porch once again.
“I thought Jerry said that printer wasn’t married,” Irma silently fumed as she banged
the car door shut and stalked to the porch to demand an explanation from the woman
who awaited her there.
Her uninvited guest was the sister of the new printer, George Mueller, she informed
Irma and she had just arrived in town to see her brother in his new location.
After her brief introductory sentences, she became strangely monosyllabic in her replies
to the questions Irma plied, and her bejeweled fingers nervously twitched at her enormous
earrings as she evaded the queries which were becoming more and more pointed.
Finally, with a slight shrug, she asked, “Can you take a joke?”
“Well, I suppose I can as well as most people,” countered Irma. “Why?”
Without another word, the woman pulled off her wig and introduced “herself” as
the new printer at The Monitor office, and Irma’s new roomer. He further explained that
he was a member of an amateur play cast at Grantsburg, and since he had been alone in
the house had decided to practice dressing for the part and walking in the high heels he
was required to wear.
After a rollicking good laugh together, Irma, considerably relieved, and her new
roomer sat down to get acquainted.
10. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Essential
Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), 170.
11. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Rabinow, ed., The Essential Works of Michel
Foucault, Vol. 1, 137.
12. Every issue of Transvestia had a TV cover girl whose picture graced the cover and whose au-
tobiographical story was featured. Fran is the cover girl for the December 1963 issue: Trans-
vestia, 3, no. 24 (1963): 2–14.
13. Carol, oral history interview, 5.
14. Ibid., 26.
15. Ibid., 20.
16. Virginia Prince, Transvestia, 1, no. 2 (1960): 1.
17. For an overview of Virginia Prince and her work, see Hill, “‘We Share a Sacred Secret’”; Rich-
ard Docter, From Man to Woman: The Transgender Journey of Virginia Prince (Northridge, CA:
Docter, 2004); Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering, ed. Richard Ekins and Dave King
(Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 2005); Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal, 2008).
18. Carol, oral history interview, 10.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 24.
21. Ibid., 29–30.
22. Ibid., 18.
23. Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 101.
24. Roderick Ferguson “Administering Sexuality; or, the Will to Institutionality,” Radical History
Review 100 (Winter 2008): 158–69. For more background on the ascendance of corporate
imperatives in higher education since the 1970s, see Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Ac-
ademic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1997), 1–22; Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the
Making of the American University, 1880–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),
167–94; Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
(New York: New York University Press, 2008).
25. Michel Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” in Rabinow, ed., The Essential
Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1, 158.
26. The concept of friendship as a shared affect and practice is inspired by Thomas Roach Jr.,
“Shared Estrangement: Foucault, Friendship, and AIDS Activism” (PhD diss., University of
Minnesota, 2006).
9 G AY T E A C H E R S A N D
STUDENTS, ORAL
H I S T O R Y, A N D Q U E E R
KINSHIP
Daniel Marshall

Oral history by Daniel Marshall with Gary Jaynes and Graham Carbery,
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, August 6, 2008

The Gay Teachers Group (later Gay Teachers and Students Group) was formed in Mel-
bourne in 1975 and led a public campaign around homosexuality and schooling. It is
best known for its seminal self-help educational publication, Young, Gay and Proud
(1978).1 In 1979, Victoria was heading toward an election, and suddenly the booklet
and the GTSG became subject to intense media and political attack. Newspapers in
rural marginal seats took up activist campaigns against circulation of the booklet. Fun-
damentalist Christian groups, such as the Committee to Raise Educational Standards
and Citizens against Social Evil, mobilized supporters and petitioned the premier to
curtail the use of any material depicting homosexuality in any way in any school; the
holding of any meeting associated with any homosexual group; and the establishment
of any support groups for gay and lesbian teachers and students. In response, the pre-
mier ordered an investigation, and in March 1979 the minister of education issued an
edict to all secondary school principals directing them “to ensure that copies of books
seeking to foster homosexual behaviour are not available to children.”2 The GTSG broke
up toward the end of 1980.
This interview excerpt draws on two oral histories I recorded over the course of one
day in August 2008 with Gary Jaynes, cofounder of the GTSG, and Graham Carbery,
spokesperson for the group and, later, founder of the Australian Lesbian and Gay
Archives (1978). They are lovers. These oral histories narrate the story and the scandal
of the GTSG from two personal perspectives.3

GARY JAYNES: I wasn’t an activist; I would have been, if anything, more like a
bystander at Gay Liberation in 1972 when I went along to the meetings . . . the
ideas were very exciting to me, but . . . there was a big tension between those
168 | FRIENDSHIP

ideas and what seemed possible in my working life [as a teacher]. . . . [By] ’74,
Gay Lib seemed at a pretty low ebb in Melbourne. . . .

So Laurie Bebbington suggested that activists organize a National Homosexual Confer-

ence “to try and put some oomph back into the gay movement,” says Gary. It was held
in Melbourne in August 1975. Other people, such as Helen McCulloch (a teacher),
were also keen to organize gay teachers, and the Gay Teachers Group was formed at the
conference with the initial task of writing a manifesto.4

JAYNES: The aims were twofold. One was the protection of the job rights of gay
teachers, and simultaneously we wanted to do something to make for a better
curriculum in the educational experience for young gays coming out. . . . [Our
efforts] got a kick along around about June the following year, when the Aus-
tralian Union of Students, and again Laurie Bebbington, organized a National
Homosexuals in Education Seminar, which drew both teachers and a lot of
tertiary students. There were a few school students, but mainly tertiary gay and
lesbian students.  .  . . Our manifesto had been finished and had been sub-
mitted to unions, and the first union to take it up was [laughs] the Primary
School Teachers’ Union, of all of them. . . .5
DANIEL MARSHALL: Why was it first?
JAYNES: I think it was just chance, I don’t think there was anything sinister in it.
[laughs] No. But in retrospect it looked as though it could have been almost
a suicidal timing, ’cause you would have thought primary school—gay
teachers becoming public in a primary school union forum might have looked
pretty off.
But I think wherever we’d have made our début, I think it would have been
a bit controversial. And in a way it was probably good to have the primary
school one out of the way ’cause it paved the way for a fairly easy reception
within the other two teachers’ unions, which represented high school teachers
and technical school teachers. . . .
MARSHALL: Graham, can you talk a bit about your motivations for being involved
with the group?
GRAHAM CARBERY: Well, my motivation was because of my relationship with
Gary. . . . If I’m being brutally honest, I mean I was reluctant because I’m
more conservative by nature I think. I agree with many of the aspirations of
people who are involved in activism and so forth, but I haven’t always felt
comfortable in being involved, but because of my relationship with Gary, I
would help him and I would do things and I got involved. I could see the
logic of me being the public face for Young, Gay and Proud because there
was no one else who was in a position to do it, and so I felt an obligation
really to do it, but it wasn’t an onerous obligation, I certainly don’t regret
any of that. . . . I was aware that it was significant. I mean I think we were
all aware what was going on, what we were involved with, it was big picture
stuff. . . .
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 169

JAYNES: Planning for Young, Gay and Proud began in 1977 but ’78 was a pretty
intense year politically for a few reasons. There was a whole focus internation-
ally on issues of homosexuals and children that got expressed initially through
the Anita Bryant campaign in the U.S. and that got reported in a very prominent
way here, and I think that added some sense of urgency to get Young, Gay and
Proud out, that we didn’t feel as though we could go on the back foot. It was
far better to be assertive about those issues to do with homosexuality and
children rather than cower. . . .
CARBERY: At the end of ’77, during the school holidays, I went overseas to Eng-
land, America, and Canada. I’ve still got the little diary that I kept while I was
away, and I was only looking at it not so long ago. It was absolutely amazing
when looking back on it how much I put in, I mean I hardly had a spare mo-
ment. I certainly didn’t go cruising for sex, which is one thing I thought I
might do while I was away, but I didn’t. I was really busy; I was meeting
people, groups, and so on. It was an incredibly busy time, and I gathered a
heck of a lot of information, a lot of literature which, because we were starved
of things, there wasn’t stuff being produced here and we were coming across
things like the Advocate, Gay News from England, the Boston Gay Community
News, the Body Politic, Christopher Street, which were really interesting publica-
tions. So when you went overseas and [had] been involved in activism, you
were hungry for whatever you could get to find out what was going on and
what you could pick up. Some of the stuff that I brought back was relevant to
the book. We got a lot of feedback from people overseas, and I made some
really useful contacts, particularly at the Body Politic. Gary Ostrom, who did
some of the illustrations, he was very supportive and cooperative. . . . I went
on demonstrations in Canada against Anita Bryant, and Mary Whitehouse,
when I was in London.  .  . . So there were things going on internationally
about gays in education which fitted in and motivated us. . . .
JAYNES: It felt like gay teachers were really in the front line if there was to be a
backlash, which looked imminent, particularly when some of the initiatives
in the U.S. started getting rolled back. . . . And so much of the U.S. gay move-
ment’s gains had flowed to Australia, we thought their defeats might, too. . . .
MARSHALL: So what do you think were the most successful things the group did?
Was it publishing Young, Gay and Proud?
CARBERY: Well, to me I think yes because it was a first, it was breaking new
ground. . . . We wanted to write something in language that was different to
the language that had been used before, that used “us” and “we,” instead of
“them” and whatever, and it covered the issues I think that young people at
the time would have been interested in. . . .
JAYNES: I think the work with the unions was pretty important . . . [and] we got
that done really in two years.
CARBERY: That was amazing really when you think about it; it was so quick.
MARSHALL: What do you think enabled that?
170 | FRIENDSHIP

JAYNES: I think that first generation of gay lib activists, a lot of them were moving
into the education profession, not necessarily teachers but sometimes in sup-
port services, and I think that gave us a real strong, behind-the-scenes pres-
ence to get . . . motions up to AGM.
CARBERY: They were persistent; they were dogged.
JAYNES: They were pretty skilled activists, a lot of them, by that stage.
MARSHALL: When you think back on that time, is there a time when you felt re-
ally great about the work?
JAYNES: Well Young, Gay and Proud, my main memory of it was relief. I was expect-
ing prosecution as a possibility.
MARSHALL: How long were you concerned about the possibility of prosecution?
JAYNES: After about the first three months, I thought we were fairly safe. So I
don’t know that I felt particularly jubilant about Young, Gay and Proud.
CARBERY: Because I suppose when you’re involved with something for a long time
and after awhile it becomes, you just want to get it done and so on, so I can see
what you mean by relief. At the time I don’t remember any, but looking back
now, I think the fact there were 10,000 copies printed, that’s a hell of a lot of
copies, and despite . . . I mean, I know they say as soon as you ban something,
you make it a best seller, but it was a bloody good effort to get rid of those.
JAYNES: I felt really on a high after that third union adopted the antidiscrim
[policy] . . . which was the VTU, the primary teacher’s union, the most conser-
vative, I felt we’d really achieved something at that point. . . . We were involved
at that time with law reform, too . . . and around 1978, it seemed we were doing
much better with our education efforts through GTSG than we were with law
reform.6. . .
MARSHALL: Elsewhere, Gary, you’ve mentioned that adoption of antidiscrimina-
tion policies in teachers’ unions in Victoria was a lot easier to achieve than
getting sex education programs to include fair treatment of homosexuality.
Do you have any thoughts as to why that was more difficult?
JAYNES: At the time my view . . . [was that] I think there’s a lot of sympathy for
gay students in schools at the level of not wanting them to be bullied, but I
think a lot of that sympathy sort of stops at the point where open discussion
of homosexuality to the broader student population is suggested as a remedy
to that bullying. Well, that’s how I saw it then, I don’t know the extent to
which that’s true now . . .
MARSHALL: Did you have any mentors?
JAYNES: No, we didn’t. . . . I think that’s a difference between then and now, too,
because there wouldn’t have been too many middle-aged activists, hardly any
experienced gay advocates, or whatever you want to call them. There were a
couple who were older in Society Five, but they weren’t really activists. . . .
Whereas now you could imagine that there’s a whole generation of older gay
men and lesbians who’ve had activist experience who might be able to play
some sort of mentoring role in organizations. But they weren’t there then. . . .
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 171

MARSHALL: What was difficult about your work with the group?
CARBERY: Oh, the bureaucracy, having to deal with the director general and pol-
iticians, and I mean you could understand, anything to do with children
they’re always very protective and so talking about sex. . . .
JAYNES: Yeah, I felt that we’d been stymied once that directive went out [from]
Laurie Shears, and we couldn’t do much about that.
MARSHALL: Were there other reasons why the group stopped?
JAYNES: No, there were other reasons.
MARSHALL: Can you talk about that?
JAYNES: Like most activist groups, we were relying on the energy of half a dozen
or so people. I became involved with other things from the end of 1979, other
key people also moved on to other involvements, and the group didn’t have
ready replacements.
CARBERY: We just ran out of steam. . . .
MARSHALL: What do you think prevented that renewal, especially given that the
group sought to involve students as well as teachers, so it had a model, I guess,
that could theoretically have promoted some renewal?
JAYNES: Yeah, I see your point; it didn’t happen, no. The student activists tended
to come in for projects, like they were there when we needed to get Young, Gay
and Proud printed or distributed or defended, but some groups like CRAC7
out at Monash and the AUS people were similar; they’d help when we needed
money to do something but there wasn’t a continuity there. . . .
MARSHALL: Do you feel that the gains made by the group were compromised or
wound back to some extent in Victoria because of public anxieties around
homosexuality and pedophilia, especially around 1982 and 1983 with the Ali-
son Thorne case?8
JAYNES: I do.
MARSHALL: Can you talk about that a bit? In what ways?
JAYNES: I just think it became much harder to publicly raise [the] issue of homo-
sexuality in young people. The blurring of the issues became just too daunting
I think. . . .
JAYNES: Don’t forget that the group had already dissolved by then; it wasn’t as
though it dissolved because of that debate emerging. But having emerged, I
think it did silence the rational discussion of those issues of young people,
homosexuality, and consent, and virtually to this day. . . .
JAYNES: .  .  . There were other attempts at forming gay teachers’ or gay youth
workers’ groups. Context was one of the other, although that didn’t come
until the ’90s. . . . I think the other big change by 1998 was the emergence of
PFLAG as a force. I think that at least put young people on the agenda but sort
of vicariously, though, not in a direct way.
CARBERY: Groups like Minus 18 and that, they must have had an impact. If stu-
dents, because many of the people who belong to that are students, if they
find their way, that emboldens some students to come out at school or to do
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things which have a gay or lesbian emphasis, like going to a dance with a
same-sex partner or something like that. I mean that sort of thing does happen
but it’s not organized, it’s not a group that’s pushing it, sort of thing. It seems
as though society can handle it when individuals do that sort of thing, it’s
when things become organized, there’s an organized push, that seems to be
the really threatening thing doesn’t it? . . .
MARSHALL: Can you talk a bit about the legacy or the influence of the work with
the group and Young, Gay and Proud?
JAYNES: I’m not sure. I don’t know that there is one. I mean there have been other
subsequent efforts, I suppose, and each effort makes subsequent efforts a bit
easier. . . .
CARBERY: Someone has to be first. Someone does something, and it gets criti-
cized for its deficiencies, but people build on it, and Young, Gay and Proud, I
think, was successful because it did reach a lot of people, it sparked a lot of
debate and would have given people confidence, maybe not immediately
but certainly into the future to do other things. And not just in Australia, as
we say, overseas as well because in other countries there were attempts of
doing something like Young, Gay and Proud so in some small way it was a
positive. . . .
JAYNES: Well, the American edition’s gone through umpteen editions. I just think
contemporary equivalents of it in Australia won’t necessarily borrow directly
from Young, Gay and Proud, but I think it helped pave the way for later efforts.
MARSHALL: How do you feel now about the group and about Young, Gay and
Proud?
CARBERY: Well, it’s a different era, I mean it’s a lifetime ago. But I’m certainly
pleased that I had some role to play in it. You’d like to think you’ve been
involved in things that have been positive. . . .
JAYNES: Yeah, I mean compared to, say, with law reform, it’s very different isn’t it,
like the law reform is a very tangible outcome for the effort. But I think there
were risks to be taken that were worth taking. The benefits were a bit intan-
gible, but I think there were some. . . .
MARSHALL: Was there a reason why both of you stopped being active around is-
sues to do with schools and gay issues?
CARBERY: Well, my time was taken up with the archives, that’s where I moved.
And as you get a bit older, too, I just didn’t have the energy, I was slowing
down a little bit. I suppose I just wanted to focus on one thing.
JAYNES: I was in a job where I virtually couldn’t, I was told that I couldn’t recon-
cile gay teachers’ activism publicly with that role. Activism around gay legal
rights was seen as okay, but not around issues of education.
MARSHALL: When were you told that?
JAYNES: About 1980.
MARSHALL: And what was your response to that?
JAYNES: I wasn’t very happy about it, but I complied with it.
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 173

MARSHALL: And looking back now, how do you feel about that?
JAYNES: It’s a very complicated story, and the center I was working for was under
a lot of political attack in 1980 in its own right over sex education, and I think
the complication of my activism around gays in education, even though un-
dertaken in a private capacity, was seen as the straw that broke the camel’s
back.
MARSHALL: And you’d been involved for a long time with the group before 1980,
was there something that happened in 1980. . . .
JAYNES: Yeah, there was. There was to be a ministerial advisory committee formed
on health and human relations, and the center I worked for was very heavily
represented in it, and it was to produce a set of guidelines for the future con-
duct of human relations in Victoria. I think it was by the end of that year, and
in country Victoria there was this enormous backlash against sex education,
and a lot of the backlash centered around personalities, including me, in their
work at that center. . . .
MARSHALL: Do you feel any sadness about progress slowing in the 1980s after so
many great achievements had been managed in such a short period of time
with the group?
CARBERY: Things always go in fits and starts, though, don’t they. It’s never a con-
tinual push or movement.
MARSHALL: Gary?
JAYNES: Oh, it was a grim decade, there was no doubt about it.9

Commentary

Oral history can be a powerful methodology to enable intergenerational en-

quiry and negotiate intergenerational queer kinship. Reflection on how oral his-
tory as a method might help build relationships with older gay and lesbian
activists stems from a critical and political interest in gay liberation activist
expertise. In particular, this chapter explores oral history from the perspective
of developing cross-generational solidarities and engaging with experiences
accrued through the battles of the 1970s to enrich contemporary political and
cultural activity in Australia.
Friendships, collaborations, and mentoring relationships between queer
young people and queer adults are a crucial part of any future-focused queer
culture-building project.10 However, despite some limited exceptions, such rela-
tionships are made impossible by a profound and generalized fear of any contact
between homosexual adults and children. My critical interest in my inter-
views  with Gary Jaynes and Graham Carbery, two key members of the Gay
Teachers and Students Group, was not only to explore a history of resistance to
this dominant policing of queer young people and queer adults but also to
reflect on how oral history itself can contribute to that process of facilitating re-
lationships between older and younger gays and queers.11
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I was introduced to the GTSG and the educational pamphlet Young, Gay and
Proud while reading Andrew Lansdown’s memorably titled polemic Blatant and
Proud: Homosexuals on the Offensive (1984).12 Here, Lansdown rails against the
distribution of the educational booklet to students in Australian high schools.
Lansdown quotes the booklet’s advice to “young novices” to not panic if they
find anal intercourse “a little hard,” because “like anything else that’s new” it
may be that they just need “to practice a bit for the pleasure to come through.”13
His response is predictably condemnatory:

Homosexuals themselves14 not[e] how they had to “change their outlook” before
they could adopt and/or maintain a homosexual identity. Some have strongly
desired to be homosexuals; but many have learned to be homosexuals (and all have
made a choice). It is not improbable, then, that children who are subject to “posi-
tive” education on homosexuality will be “positively” influenced by such
education.15

In this passage, Lansdown strategically sexualizes the pedagogical relation by

associating the practice of anal sex with “learning” how to be a homosexual.
This tactic demonstrates an exemplary move of mainstream homophobia in
that it renders the pedagogical promotion of homosexual rights coextensive
with the intention to sexually penetrate male adolescents. This tactic plays a key
role in the policing of contact between queer adults and youths, especially
males. The horrifying specter of pedophilia is invoked to oppose and suppress
the development of any queer-affirmative dialogue between the generations.
Significantly, the imperative to separate queer adults from queer young people
is motivated not only by an expectation of adult homosexual predation but also
by the construction of adolescence as a period in which one’s sexuality is mal-
leable. Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson gloss this profound social fear in
Schooling Sexualities:

One of the primary ways in which we understand the sexual in contemporary so-
ciety is through recourse to discourses of the biological or the natural. In a theory
of development which is based on notions of ages and stages (phases), one of the
questions which causes anxiety to some is the notion that some girls and, maybe
more so, boys could have their development “arrested” during a “homosexual
phase” through contact with lesbians and gays. In this context, being gay or lesbian
is seen as potentially contagious. Indeed, some of the anxieties about lesbian and
gay teachers derive from this notion, which is then reinforced through the idea that
adolescence is a time of massive change and uncertainty.16

Extending this observation by Epstein and Johnson, it is clear that there is an

important relationship between the meaning of adolescence as developmentally
incomplete and the meaning of homosexuality as an arrested or failed develop-
ment. Indeed, the threat of homosexuality has been routinely employed to tell
the story of adolescence and its fragile relationship to development. Likewise,
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 175

the vulnerability of adolescence is a key feature of cultural stories about homo-

sexuality. Understandings of homosexuality and adolescence are routinely
bound together with understandings of development, reflecting the way they are
mobilized to simultaneously express and carry broad and profound anxieties
over the very nature of growth and development. It is these powerful and perva-
sive homophobic views of adolescence and homosexuality that form the context
for my interest in the transgressive and queer-affirmative potential of intergener-
ational oral history.
As familiar stories about the dangers homosexual adults supposedly pose to
young people demonstrate, homosexuality is commonly described with close
reference to adolescence for the main purpose of emphasizing the extent to
which homosexuals and young people should be physically kept apart. In Moral
Panic, Philip Jenkins considers the twentieth-century conflation of (particularly
male) sexual deviation with sexual crime. Jenkins argues that over this time a
cautionary psychopathological narrative that conflates homosexuality with pe-
dophilia has emerged as a familiar way of considering any possible relationship
between the adult homosexual and the adolescent. This illustrates the ironic
way in which cultural stories designed to argue for the segregation of homosex-
uals and young people do so by repeatedly talking about them together. Jenkins
quotes from a 1951 Psychiatric Quarterly editorial as proof:

The adult homosexual . . . is in a stage of arrested psychosexual development; he is

not far above the child level. . . . If most homosexual adults are attracted chiefly to
other adults—which is debatable—many are still attracted to children; and more
still are attracted to adolescents. The impulse to seduce [adolescents] is, like homo-
sexuality itself, characteristic of arrested development.17

In this sense, the only relationship between the adolescent and the adult homo-
sexual that was imagined to be possible was a sexual, pedophilic one. The
strength of this view, a view that routinely crowded out alternative visions of
queer intergenerational relationships, is further demonstrated by the common-
place conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia.18 Significantly, the homo-
sexual’s alleged desire for the adolescent represents not only an indication of his
outward threat but also a symptom of his internal psychology: to desire adoles-
cents as subjects in development is in itself an act of arrested development. In
this way, situating the adolescent as the exemplary object of homosexual desire
sustains the popular homophobic contention that homosexuality itself is a
developmental aberration. The cultural prohibition against queer intergenera-
tional friendships and mentoring relationships then stands as an expression of
a homophobic construction of the homosexual adult as the always-already
pedophile and the queer youth as the always-already victim. In political and
social policy terms, these views drive anxieties in education about “exposing”
students to gay and lesbian curriculum and nonheterosexual adults. In this con-
text, intergenerational queer oral histories offer the promise of intervening in or
176 | FRIENDSHIP

rupturing these dominant ways of thinking about and regulating homophobic

conceptions of adults and young people, and the relationships they share, by
providing new contexts for speaking, relating, and knowing.
Importantly, my perspective on the operation of these sanctions is further
informed by my own adolescence: a personal mourning for the queer young
people and adults I never knew. Their phantom possibility was dissolved by an
injunction against the existence of homosexual young people and a prohibition
against intergenerational contact. This is not to say that the injunctions and
prohibitions managed to totally wither the queer possibilities of my adoles-
cence, but they indeed worked to great effect.
This personal lament has fostered a politicized curiosity. How can we use oral
history to deconstruct the old, sad, and untrue stereotypes of homosexuals (and
especially gay men) as pedophiles and queer young people as victims? And how
can oral histories work as sites that claim the possibility and importance of non-
sexual intergenerational relationships? Can oral history function as an impor-
tant part of a queer culture-building project for the future? These questions led
me to my interviews with Gary and Graham. In this context, oral history works
as a queer method on two levels. In terms of content, it examines a history of
activist efforts in the field that document communication and education
between older and younger generations. In terms of method, it actually brings
together younger and older people.
Unsurprisingly, growing up in the 1980s meant that HIV/AIDS had a pro-
found, structuring impact on my understanding of homosexuality. It came to
literalize and symbolize the loss of potential queer relationships. Moreover,
because of the ongoing immeasurable cost of HIV/AIDS, I cannot imagine how
any queer experience of mourning cannot in some way be shadowed and
informed by the pandemic. As Simon Watney has written:

HIV has in many respects served to reconstitute homosexuality and identities

founded upon homosexual desire. This reconstitution involves many overlapping
elements, from attitudes toward sex, toward illness and death, mourning, and so
on. It informs the totality of our social and psychic lives in ways that we hardly
begin to understand.19

Watney writes about an “international unity” felt by gay men that is “forged in
relation to our direct experience of protracted illness, suffering, loss, and
mourning, together with the cultural solidarity we obtain from what has always
been a diasporic queer culture.”20 In Watney’s sense, mourning refers to literally
grieving for and burying friends, lovers, and strangers. In my own experience,
mourning related to AIDS is tied to a more generalized sadness and anger about
the losses of affectional relationships that homosexuals have endured, of which
AIDS is perhaps the cardinal sign.
Without seeking to distract from or diminish the physical loss of life
connected to HIV/AIDS, the erasure of queer childhoods and denial of queer
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 177

intergenerational mentoring relationships represents a historical loss that

defines some contemporary understandings of homosexuality. Of course, this is
not to say that queer childhoods and intergenerational mentoring relationships
do not exist, but that their likelihood is the target of active opposition. For this
reason, active resistance is required, and oral histories have often been employed
as acts of resistance in histories of sexualities. In my work with Gary and Gra-
ham, oral history became a shared moment that allowed us to grieve together
for that which has been lost while also building a relationship in the absence of
those intergenerational ties.
Thus, queer oral histories build a presence in the absence of queer intergen-
erationality, both in my personal life and in the broader epistemological field of
Australian history and culture. In content, I focus on the active efforts to build
educational networks between gay teachers and gay students in the 1970s and
early 1980s to raise awareness of the history of this struggle. In method, too, I use
oral history work to actively build intergenerational relationships. The method
of personal interview has a natural synergy with my political and critical inter-
ests in researching and building and rebuilding activist efforts to forge intergen-
erational queer networks because it methodologically relies on intimate and
personal processes of interaction, knowledge transfer, and trust. In this way, my
use of oral history draws explicitly on some of the foundational gay and lesbian
oral history research, such as Kennedy and Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold. This book had its genesis in the late 1970s, and it involved the development
of intergenerational networks between students and community elders to pro-
duce a collection of oral histories of older lesbians in Buffalo, New York.21
Slightly predating these efforts by Kennedy and Davis, Gayle Rubin began to
lay the conceptual groundwork for thinking about what might now be described
as intergenerational queer kinship in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Po-
litical Economy’ of Sex” (which, incidentally, was published the same year that
the Gay Teachers Group was established).22 I use “kinship” in a loose and
unmoored sense, taking up Rubin’s challenge to transform kinship into some-
thing other than a mechanism for the circulation of women as property. Drawing
on Judith Butler’s argument that “the topic of gay marriage is not the same as
that of gay kinship,” I use kinship in a more expansive way to reflect on how oral
histories might be able to help us imagine a broader range of possible queer
relationships.23 Using Butler’s description, kinship practices can refer to a broad
variety of relationships “that emerge to address fundamental forms of human
dependency, which may include birth, child-rearing, relations of emotional de-
pendency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a
few).”24 Importantly, however, while Butler uses kinship to reference a broad
range of (often) sexual relationships (broader than is currently accommodated
under the heteronormative gay marriage model), I use kinship not to refer to
sexual relationships but to nonsexual, supportive relationships that can develop
between queer young people and queer carers, parents, teachers, uncles, aunts,
178 | FRIENDSHIP

adult friends, elders, older adolescents, and mentors—and, most pertinent for
the sake of my argument here, multigenerational sets of oral history partici-
pants. I bring this (nonfinite list) of relationships together under the unstable
term “queer kinship.”
In “The Traffic in Women,” Rubin influentially argues that dominant models
of kinship crucially rely on normalizing ideas about “gender, obligatory hetero-
sexuality and the constraint of female sexuality.”25 “Feminism must call for a
revolution in kinship,” she writes:

The kinds of relationships of sexuality established in the dim human past still
dominate our sexual lives, our ideas about men and women, and the ways we raise
our children. But they lack the functional load they once carried. . . . Human sexual
life will always be subject to convention and human intervention. It will never be
completely “natural.” . . . Cultural evolution provides us with the opportunity to
seize control of the means of sexuality, reproduction, and socialization and to
make conscious decisions to liberate human sexual life from the archaic relation-
ships which deform it. Ultimately, a thoroughgoing feminist revolution would lib-
erate more than women.26

A world away in Melbourne, the Gay Teachers and Students Group was attempt-
ing this very task of “seizing control” and exercising “conscious decisions” to
intervene in the conventional operations of heteronormative families and
schooling and their reproduction of heterosexist and misogynist ideas about
gender, relationships, pleasure, and family. What comes into focus in the work
of the GTSG is what might be described as an early attempt at building queer
kinship ties. Significantly, however, without the relational data one gathers about
the GTSG through the interactive, conversational mode of oral history, it would
be difficult to gain insight into the kinship dimensions of the GTSG’s work.
At the base of the group’s project was a radical vision of queer kinship in
which gay adults and gay children could develop educational relationships
around mutually sharing experiences of living nonheterosexual lives. For ex-
ample, the group’s publication, Young, Gay and Proud, sought to achieve this by
drawing on antioppressive education techniques to circulate gay-affirmative in-
formation to young people. The group’s process (i.e., the work of the collective)
sought to promote queer intergenerational interaction by creating a collectivist
space in which gay adults and young people could collaborate and learn from
each other. The oral histories I conducted echo this process. By recording and
making available Gary’s and Graham’s stories, this work assumes an educative
role, designed to promote an awareness of Australian histories of queer kinship
networks. By interviewing Gary and Graham, my methodology has promoted
intergenerational interaction, echoing the GTSG.27
Returning to Butler again, and recalling my earlier reference to the exemplary
homophobia of the 1951 Psychiatric Quarterly, queer intergenerational kinship is
under routine threat and challenge:
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 179

In an interview with Jacqueline Rose, the well-known Kleinian practitioner, Hanna

Segal, reiterates her view that “homosexuality is an attack on the parental couple”
(210), “a developmental arrest” (211), and she expresses outrage over a situation
in which two lesbians raise a boy (210). She adds that she considers “the adult
homosexual structure to be pathological.” When asked at a public presentation in
October of 1998 whether she approved of two lesbians raising a boy, she answered
flatly “no.”28

Butler argues that to counter these attacks “with an insistence on the normalcy
of lesbian and gay families is to accept that the debate should center on the dis-
tinction between normal and pathological.”29 What is required, in Butler’s
analysis, is “a more radical social transformation,” which becomes available
“when we refuse, for instance, to allow kinship to become reducible to ‘family.’”30
If, instead, we choose to limit our politics to the normalizing goals of gay mar-
riage and gay parenting, we lose the capacity to imagine, let alone build, queer
kinship structures that don’t fit a heteronormative mold of social relationships:

If we decide that these are the decisive issues, and know which side we are on, then
we have accepted an epistemological field structured by a fundamental loss, one
which we can no longer name enough even to grieve. The life of sexuality, kinship,
and community that becomes unthinkable within the terms of these norms consti-
tutes the lost horizon of radical sexual politics, and we find our way “politically” in
the wake of the ungrievable.31

Patrick McCreery offers a similarly pessimistic account of contemporary (Ameri-

can) gay and lesbian emphases on normative models of gay families and gay
parenting, critiquing how this ironically resurrects the child protectionist poli-
tics for which beauty queen and antigay activist Anita Bryant is perhaps the most
pervasive cultural icon. He calls for a “progressive reconceptualisation of the
family,” although it is not clear from his analysis how such a reimagining should
progress.32 Intergenerational queer oral histories and the unstable queer kinship
relations that fall out of those shared experiences might be one humble, tan-
gible way to reimagine the new modes of relationships that Butler and McCreery
call for.
In contrast to political preoccupations best exemplified by the notion of gay
marriage, the set of relations embodied in queer oral history work provide a
promising nonnormative reconceptualization of kinship structures. While queer
kinship through oral history is still structured around a fundamental loss—the
loss of queer childhoods and queer mentors—it is not a loss that, like gay mar-
riage, holds our future hostage to questionable norms. Instead, it provides a
context for collective grieving and imagining, embodied through the question-
ing and narrating of the oral history exchange. Also, by foregrounding the prac-
tice of oral history as a potential site for the development of queer kinship
relations, queer oral history extends Butler’s critique of normative kinship
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structures. Queer kinship is founded on and mobilized by the constitutive loss

of queer childhoods and intergenerational relationships, so it provides us with
a “way” (to use the term in Butler’s sense) to pursue a queer politics that ac-
knowledges a broader set of supportive relationships than is often included in
conventional appeals to notions of marriage and family.
Oral history was influentially employed by feminist, gay, and lesbian activ-
ists and researchers in the 1970s to produce people’s histories, grounded in lived
experiences of ordinary people. These oral histories were conducted as inter-
ventions in the academy, protesting the omission of nonheterosexual experi-
ence and challenging familiar narratives about the threat of homosexuality.
Drawing on this heritage, the oral histories with Gary and Graham represent
a methodological intervention that challenges homophobic prohibitions of
queer intergenerational contact while expanding beyond normalizing concepts
of gay-affirmative kinship ties. Moreover, queer oral history as a research
method addresses Rubin’s call for revolution and Butler’s grief for a lost radical
politics through its privileging of the relational and personal over the official
and hegemonic. Indeed, to some extent, all oral history is a little queer in the
sense that it calls into question institutional knowledge by prioritizing people’s
memories.33
This understanding of oral history as an intervention implicitly relies on a
politicized interpretation of silence: queer oral history seeks to make audible
those voices and narratives that might otherwise go unheard. However, just as
sexual difference cannot be collapsed into a simple in-out binary, so, too, does
queer oral history eschew a rudimentary silenced-voiced binary. The told story
expresses its own silences. The interpretation of oblique references and silences
has played a major role in research on the history of sexuality. Indeed, when a
queer critical project is routinely preoccupied with identifying and analyzing
the omissions and occlusions in any given representation of sexuality, as well as
how power regulates what can be articulated or represented, the silences often
prove most instructive. However, in the context of oral history analysis, the si-
lences draw together at once the epistemological and the methodological con-
cerns of the exchange. Oral history is not only about the transmission of
information but also about the respectful tending of relationships. By observing
silences, omissions, and gaps, queer oral history research establishes itself ex-
plicitly on a deliberately fractured foundation: it does not present a complete,
universalized narrative. Indeed, as this chapter has discussed, a key political mo-
tivation for queer oral history work is its desire to challenge universalizing
narratives of homosexuality (e.g., the predator), and its methodological accom-
modation of multiple narratives is surely as much a part of this intervention as
the content of the histories themselves.
At one point during the oral history, I asked Gary and Graham why they had
stopped being active around issues to do with schools and gay issues. In Gary’s
response, he speaks of being given an ultimatum at work and being personally
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 181

attacked for his activism in a public campaign. He and I had discussed this
matter outside of the context of the oral history, and I knew this was all he
wanted to say. Unlike desktop research, oral histories are moments of both
research and relationality, of kinship, and so my role as researcher was guided as
much by care as by curiosity, both hanging in careful balance.
Everyone has memories that are hard to tell. It is no surprise that in asking
Gary and Graham to recount their involvement in a political movement that
drew considerable attention and scandal that some aspects of that story might be
too raw to tell. To be honest, for a brief moment I felt frustrated at not being able
to access all of the relevant information. But what my frustration brought into
focus for me was that you cannot extract information through an oral history as
if the other person were simply a database. As Joan Nestle reminds me, “The
histories of one generation cannot always be made accessible to the other.”34
The silences in the oral history speak to the fact that despite the recent explo-
sion in queer youth cultures, adult homosexuals can still feel intensely and un-
fairly policed in relation to their ideas about and contact with young people;
LGBT adults carry the burden of surveillance and anxiety. Queer youth cultures
are impoverished by the absence of relationships with adults. These examples
demonstrate the importance not only of telling the history of groups like the
Gay Teachers and Students Group but also of nurturing queer kinship ties
through activities like multigenerational oral histories. Multigenerational oral
histories can defuse the toxic suggestion that friendship and mentoring between
queer adults and young people is somehow a cover for or step toward child
abuse and pedophilia.
The human element of oral history research means that while it is research
oriented it is also relational, and in my case it was part of an attempt to build
queer intergenerational relationships in method and content. From this perspec-
tive, my expectations of Gary and Graham were influenced as much by my desire
to display affection and care (as a worthy response to their generosity and trust)
as it was by my intellectual interest in pursuing silences and questions left hanging.
But because queer oral histories foreground historical silences and do not claim
to provide a whole story, they promote a productive skepticism about the com-
pleteness of any given historical narrative. Further, there are always other versions
to look to (not least the official ones, important because they help dramatize the
differences, departures, and exclusions). For this reason, these queer oral histories,
like the broader work of queer culture-building, are still a work in progress.

Notes
1. An Autonomous Collective of the Melbourne GTSG, Young, Gay and Proud (An Autono-
mous Collective of the Melbourne GTSG: Melbourne, 1978).
2. L. H. S. Thompson (Minister of Education) and L. W. Shears (Director-General of Educa-
tion), “To principals of secondary schools,” March 19, 1979.
3. I would like to acknowledge Gary Jaynes and Graham Carbery for their enormous gener-
osity in allowing me to undertake this project and for providing invaluable assistance in
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countless ways. I would also like to thank Joan Nestle, who provided helpful comments on
earlier versions of the chapter. The oral histories recorded here were undertaken as part of a
broader research project, Beyond Homophobia, which I undertook with Lynne Hillier and
Anne Mitchell. I would also like to thank Annamarie Jagose and Clara Tuite, who provided
comments on earlier versions of some of the ideas I discuss in this chapter; and I would like
to thank Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, as well as Nancy Toff, for their
helpful editorial advice and assistance.
4. This is an edited excerpt of two oral histories recorded on August 6, 2008, at La Trobe Uni-
versity. The first interview was with Gary, and the second was with both Gary and Graham.
Throughout the drafting process, I have liaised extensively with both of them, and they have
provided corrections. Added text is indicated in [brackets] and ellipses refer to the omission
of words. Italics refer to sections that have been paraphrased. My questions are edited and
rephrased for brevity. The sequence of comments has been changed to suit the logic of the
excerpt. Gary and Graham are both happy with this representation of their comments.
5. This union, called the Victorian Teachers Union, was the first to print the GTSG’s manifesto
but the last to adopt an antidiscrimination gay rights policy at an AGM.
6. Throughout the 1970s, activists and lobbyists, including the Homosexual Law Reform Coa-
lition, were involved in efforts to decriminalize homosexuality, resulting in the passage of a
bill in December 1980 that decriminalized some aspects of homosexuality. See Graham Wil-
lett, Living Out Loud (St Leonards, New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2000),
149–56.
7. The CRAC (Community Research Action Centre) was based at Monash University.
8. In 1983, a controversy erupted over Alison Thorne’s alleged support for pedophilia. She was
removed from her teaching role in a Victorian school.
9. Gary Jaynes, interviewed by Daniel Marshall, digital recording, Melbourne, Victoria, Austra-
lia, August 6, 2008, held at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. This interview has been
edited by the author; Graham Carbery and Gary Jaynes, interviewed by Daniel Marshall,
digital recording, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, August 6, 2008, held at the Australian Les-
bian and Gay Archives. This interview has been edited by the author.
10. I use “mentoring” cautiously and a little uncomfortably—it risks naturalizing relationships
between adults and children in which the learning is unidirectional, when the type of rela-
tionships I seek to value are those in which adults and children learn from each other in a
nonhierarchical way.
11. Personal narrative, including oral history, has been employed effectively in lesbian, gay, and
queer scholarship to document histories of sexuality and resistance. See, for example, Joan
Nestle, ed., The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson, 1992).
12. Andrew Lansdown, Blatant and Proud: Homosexuals on the Offensive (Cloverdale, Western
Australia: Perceptive, 1984).
13. Ibid., 25. In the original passage in Young, Gay and Proud that Lansdown is selectively quoting
from, the authors acknowledge that not everyone will enjoy anal sex because it may not be
“your thing” (see An Autonomous Collective of the Melbourne Gay Teachers and Students
Group, 41).
14. Demonstrating the disempowering intent of his argument, Lansdown arrogates the right to
speak for homosexuals in the first chapter of the book, which he calls “The Homosexuals’
Self-View.”
15. Lansdown, Blatant and Proud, 25–26, original emphasis.
16. Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson, Schooling Sexualities (Buckingham, England: Open
University Press, 1998), 151.
17. Cited in Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern Amer-
ica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 62.
18. Jenkins provides one example: “Mid-century dictionaries and medical texts defined paederast
in terms of both ‘boy-love’ and anal sex and gave sodomite as a synonym, so that English
usage thoroughly supported the identification of homosexuals and paedophiles” (Ibid., 62).
19. Simon Watney, “AIDS and the Politics of Queer Diaspora,” in Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay
Identity, 130 (London: Routledge, 2000).
 G AY TEACHERS AND S TUDENT S | 183

20. Ibid., 126.

21. See Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The
History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), xv–xvii.
22. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Ellen
Lewin, ed., Feminist Anthropology: A Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). Originally published
1975.
23. Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 14.
24. Ibid., 15.
25. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” 94.
26. Ibid., 100–101.
27. And this process has occurred over some time, which is not to say that it took a long time
to gain the trust to conduct the interviews, but that we had already built friendships over a
number of years as volunteers at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Queer archives,
like the process of queer oral histories, has played a crucial role in providing a material site
for the development of queer kinship ties. Importantly, however, the intergenerational rela-
tionships among me, Gary, and Graham are necessarily different than those fostered by the
GTSG, as we are all adults. In many ways, queer intergenerationality loses its capacity to
electrify concern when “youth” are out of the equation. So, while I acknowledge a relation-
ship between the ambitions of the GTSG project and the design of my small oral history
project here, I am also aware of the important differences.
28. Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” 39.
29. Ibid., 39–40.
30. Ibid., 40.
31. Ibid.
32. Patrick McCreery, “Save Our Children/Let Us Marry: Gay Activists Appropriate the Rhetoric
of Child Protectionism,” Radical History Review: Queer Futures 100 (2008): 188; see also 202.
33. See, for example, Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 15–26.
34. Personal communication.
10 SHARING QUEER
AUTHORITIES
Collaborating for Transgender Latina and
Gay Latino Historical Meanings
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez

Oral history by Horacio N. Roque Ramírez with Alberta Nevaeres

(aka Teresita la Campesina), San Francisco, California, 1996

On April 19, 1996, the male-to-female (MTF) transgender performer Alberta Nevaeres
(1940–2002), better known in San Francisco and especially in the city’s Latino Mis-
sion district as Teresita la Campesina, met me to continue recording her life history, a
process we had begun earlier in the month. This recording began, like our first inter-
view earlier that month, with Teresita singing into the audio recorder as classic
ranchera song tracks played in the background. Our conversations were part of a
growing project on queer Latina and Latino life in the city, which I had begun a year
earlier as a small study on queer Latina and Latino activists organizing around HIV
and AIDS prevention. As someone who was openly HIV+, Teresita had become a client
of several Mission neighborhood health agencies. At these venues, she was known for
being quite loud in her singing, joking, telling tall tales, and laughing. Through all of
these actions, she contextualized queer life in the 1990s by comparing it with earlier
decades.
The following excerpt requires some explanation. In it, Teresita recalls her arrest for
being “found out” as a “drag queen” (the word of the day), somebody having outed
her for not being a “real woman” when she was working in Stockton, California, a
semirural town ninety miles east of San Francisco. She then details the intricacies of
gender identity, queering both the English and Spanish languages, back and forth, as
she describes the drag queens and gay men of the 1960s. In “queering” language,
Teresita spoke back and forth between English and Spanish, not careful to use the
proper terminology of the day in either language (say, “transgender” or “transgé-
nero”) and instead harking back to earlier terms used to denigrate, police, and gen-
erally stigmatize queer populations, especially transgender women and men. “Drag
queen” (and its Spanish-language version “vestida”), “sex change,” “operada”
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 185

(literally “operated,” meaning, having gone through a sex change surgically)—these

and other terms used liberally but also strategically made listening to Teresita’s narra-
tive quite a multilingual, multigender, and multivalent endeavor.1 Teresita and I
shared such a multilingual exchange in Spanish, English, and “Spanglish,” an im-
promptu mix of English and Spanish, in which we borrowed liberally from both lin-
guistic codes in ways not discernible to listeners who are not able to move so easily
back and forth between the languages. That she and I were also openly queer (I as a
gay Latino) allowed us to further queer our exchange, although she did most of talk-
ing as I tried to follow along. That both of us were bilingual but, most important,
spontaneously conversant in Spanglish was one of the main reasons that she and I
communicated so well, something a solely English- or Spanish-speaking oral historian
would not have been able to grasp in her narrative style and the subtleties of her gen-
der play.
The transcribed narrative appears first, almost verbatim. Bilingual readers, and es-
pecially those familiar with Spanglish, will appreciate the exchange. By contrast, the
English-speaking, non-Spanish-speaking reader may want to go directly to the second,
fully translated version of this transcript. The former will see a queer sense of Spanish and
Spanglish in the ways that gender—so basic to Spanish language terminology—was

Alberta Nevaeres—better known in San Francisco and especially

San Francisco’s Latino Mission District as Teresita la Campesina—
at a friend’s home in the Mission around 1978. Photograph by and
courtesy of Dan Arcos
186 | FRIENDSHIP

queered in Teresita’s recollections. In describing how she was outed for being a maricona,
for example, she is queering the Spanish maricón—“faggot”—by turning it female—
maricona, to mean more generally “queer.” Similarly, the common Mexican-Chicano
pejorative term joto for “faggot” often became jota, but also the diminutive jotito or
jotita (“little faggot”) as a term of relative endearment. To discuss gender identities
and meanings in the 1990s in reference to life in the 1950s and 1960s, when “drag
queen” denoted what later became transsexual and transgender, further complicates terms
denoting genders and sexualities and how they are understood today. This 1990s queering
or regendering of nouns and pronouns from earlier decades was part of Teresita’s style.
Since she was an illiterate singer (she could sign her own name only with very poor pen-
manship), voice and language were particularly important for her. Teresita had a knack
for recalling geographic details and names, but she also strategically introduced phrases,
especially of the rhyming kind. For example, she described her youthful appearance as
“bella como una camella”—literally, as beautiful as a female camel. Moreover, as she
clarified particular statements, her thinking was more in Spanish than in English, making
it that much more complicated to mix both languages and all genders. In many ways, she
was always producing a bilingual text, constantly offering phrases in both languages. Fi-
nally, the richness of her narrative derives from the challenge of following her re-creation
of other voices. She often performed (reenacted) conversations she had decades earlier,
and because those recollections usually involved multiple voices, she was performing a
multivoiced queer history, whether in song or in oral history.2

T R A N S C R I P T I O N 1 : U N T R A N S L AT E D , B I L I N G U A L
S PA N G L I S H V E R S I O N

HORACIO N. ROQUE RAMÍREZ: What was working in the bar like?

TERESITA LA CAMPESINA: I was working there as a woman.
HORACIO: How was it?
TERESITA: I was working with nothing but nationals. They would pick cotton and
berries. And I would work behind the bar, and I would sing to them. There
was gay people that used to come there from the fields and some of them you
could tell. They didn’t know [about me], but [some] knew me from LA. One,
a female [said], “Oh, that’s a drag queen! I know her from L.A. Her name’s
Alberta!” And she went and told. See, and even in our own kind, you have to
look out who your friends are ’cause your own kind will give you away. It was
some sissy punk, lowlife, working in the fields, didn’t have shit going. And I’m
working there with falsies, looking gorgeous, like a sunset, bella como una
camella, trabajando como una hembra con todos los machos, chupando
verga, engañando a los hombres—pos claro que le hiba a dar [celos] al joto—
era flamboyant—le hiba dar coraje. Y me conocía. Y jué y les dijo a todos que
yo era maricona. Entonces yo tenía una amiga que se llamaba Carmen—se
llama Johnny. Him and his old man are still together. They’ve been together
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 187

twenty years. So I got him a job in the field. And I says, “Este es mi amigo Juan.
Le dicen Carmen.” He was tall but looked effeminate, con la mano caida pero
grandote. And so I got him a job there and she always loved me. I haven’t seen
her in years. So anyway, when I went to jail, when I got busted, she got that
fucking queen that told on me, she says, “You motherfucker, Margie [Marga-
rita; Teresita] is good people. Why did you do that to her? She’s a sister. Como
eres gacho.” They beat the shit out of him.
HORACIO: Really?
TERESITA: Yeah, that’s what I was told. That Carmen—he beat the fuck out of that
queer. Lo golpió ’cause she went and told that I was a drag queen. I was never
no angel ’cause nobody is, nobody is perfect. But you know when the bar
owner wasn’t there I would give Carmen beers and my friends, the little
whores. They would come in and I would give them free drinks on the house
y todo. And I was just in my young youth, twenty-five years old. I was there
when Kennedy died. What year did Kennedy die?
HORACIO: Mmhh . . . I forget. . . . ’63? Maybe I’m wrong.
TERESITA: Okay, well around there. I want you to hear this story. So that, I used
to look at myself and feel sorry for the prostitutes and all that. There was a
black lady there; they used to call her “Tomato.” And after a while I used to see
these women cry and all that, how hard it’s for women and selling their vagina
and everything.
HORACIO: In Stockton, at the bar.
TERESITA: Yeah and I—
HORACIO: What was the bar called?
TERESITA: La Ocua. And I would give her drinks. So one day—everything in this
world ends; it’s got the beginning and its ending. I saw this real tall man,
named Chita, and he used to do Greta Garbo. That’s what he told me. And I’m
working in drag, okay; he doesn’t know I’m a drag queen. But I noticed. I
could tell he was gay as a fruitcake: big eyes and all that—very, la mano caida,
hand down, very swinging [at] the hand. And I didn’t say nothing. And she
was working in the fields. [lowering her voice] And then, I was alone with her
and she would looook at me, and we started talking. And she looooked at me
and everything. So she came up real close, y dijo, “¿Cómo te llamas?” Dije,
“Me llamo Alberta pero me dicen Margarita.” Dije, [whispering] “Ven par acá;
I’m a drag queen.” Y dijo, “¡Ay, eres manita!” Dije, “Sí, siéntate. Tómate un
trago. ¿Quieres un wine?” Dijo, “Me caes bien. Pareces mujer. Estás bella.”
Digo, “¿Y tú, cómo?”—Dijo, “Pués a mí me decían La Chita. Yo me vestía de
mujer y hacía drag como la Greta Garbo!” Y él ya era grande, señor, se razuraba
y todo pero tenía razgos muy femeninos, that I could tell, like that. Entonces
yo . . . como siguiendo mi carrera en la vida de homosexual y lo que llaman
ahora transgender, me ponía muy sad. Y me enseñó retratos. Jué a su cuarto.
She lived in a room. Showed me—this fucking bitch looked fantastic! Drag
188 | FRIENDSHIP

has been here since day one! ¡Se miraba como una hembra! ¡He was in show
business! ¡Hacía la Greta Garbo! Entonces dije, “Híjola.”
Entonces me decía la Carmen, Johnny, “Oh Marge, you got a good heart.” I
said, “Girl, that’s not it, it’s just that, you never know en qué pachos vamos a
quedar.” Y yo le regalaba tragos y me decía, “Yes,” decía la Carmen, “you have
a good heart, girl.” Y yo le decía, “Sabes que, this person, this man y me enseñó
retratos de él y todo.” Y me pongo a estudiar. Y yo estaba joven todavía, fíjate,
veinticinco años, y él ya pasaba los cuarentas. Dijo, “Hay que ser buena con él.
Es jota, es jotito pero es buena gente.” Y so. Y ella le gustaba tomar Burgundy
wine. It was only twenty-five cents. Y Vermouth. [whispers briefly] Dije, “Porque
mira, vamos hablando claro.” Y es que yo me entiendo mas . . . hablando en
español porque yo pienso español. And I could speak both languages. Dije,
pos esta jota me enseñó sus drag pictures, y ponte a pensar, “No sabemos, girl.
Hay que ser bueno con él.” Fíjate y yo ya era así. “Que tú te vas a ver como ella
some day. Mira que bella era. And I’m a drag queen, girl. [her voice breaking,
emotionally] Y yo estoy vestido de mujer. Y él es mi clase. Y es jotita y sufrida
y tal. But I like her.” “¡Uuuu, como eres! Como te quiero, Margarita” y todo.
No, no pues que yo me miraba como ella así. She went and looked like the
way I—she probably already passed away. God rest her soul in peace. We have
lost a lot of brothers and sisters. Tal vez ya falleció. Pero siquiera tuve ese
corazón, reconocer que todo se acaba. Uuu, la jota me gloriaba, me daba cosas
del fil y todo. [I said] “You don’t have to do that.” Y le decía a las otras jotas,
“Look out for her, cuídala. Es buena gente. She’s good people.” [raising her
voice] ¡’Pa que veas! So that carries me.
HORACIO: Great friendships.
TERESITA: Hm hhmm.
HORACIO: Gente que no se olvida.
TERESITA: Y yo mirando todo eso, dije, “Quién sabe si me voy a mirar así cuando
yo esté vieja.” Todabía no había hormonas ni implants, ni facelifts, ni de nada
como ahora. Por eso les digo a muchos que quieren vivir como mujer. Aunque
no te cortes abajo y quieres andar vestido de mujer con tetas—you can always
remove that. Por lo menos arréglate la cara y todo. Todo se acaba. Go in style.
Porque, if you are gonna live as a woman y tienes razgos de hombre y estás
medio feminine, have your face done, fix your features, that’s why they have
doctors. That’s the reason I talk to you that way because: if you’re gonna do
something, do it right! Don’t do it half-ass.
Ya que yo no me corté abajo porque yo no creo en eso. Yo ando vestido por
la vida como una mujer porque es parte—como un uniforme. Es como un
hábito. Porque yo soy hombre y mujer. Yo recibo; yo no doy. Pero ya que no
me corté abajo porque yo creo en los Siete Sacramentos del Altar. Porque yo
sé que aunque yo nací, yo nunca voy a quedar como una mujer. Yo respeto
cada quien que hace eso. Si se quieren hacer—pero nunca van a quedar como
una mujer perfecta. So, por eso me quedé hombre—por eso yo me nombro
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 189

hombre y mujer. That’s why I call myself a male female. Because I am not gonna
cut that off. No way in hell am I gonna be like a perfect woman. They could
adopt, they’re never gonna have a period. See, when I talk to a lot of friends of
mine that have the sex change—I had, not fights but we have argued, and I
have offended them.
So, I respect them but I’d rather just not even talk about it, ’cause that is my
feeling. See, once that feeling is gone, you know what I’m saying? And if you
know you like to masturbate, like I do, and I like to play with my cock daily,
and I like my titties sucked, and I like to jack off, honey—I’m not gonna make
a mistake. ’Cause see, God makes no mistake. We are women of the mind.
Though we are not women from gender, but you are a woman mentally,
though you are a man and you got everything of a man. But your mind thinks
woman. But you don’t have to cut off, and cut off the feeling, if you know
what I mean. That’s a psychological and it’s a very big step. Because once it’s
gone, it’s off. So, knowing myself mentally, I kept the family jewels and I’m
still Teresita, known as Alberto Nevaeres. I am still the man and the woman.
Thank you! Case closed. [thunderous laughter] Soy única. Unique! I’d rather be
unique, but no. That’s part of life. Oh, I was going to do it a long time ago. I
was a good candidate. When they told me that I was gonna be like a brand
new Cadillac—and no motor in it?! I’d rather keep this old jalopy, I still have a
lot of sparks. And a way of putting it in a comical way. But you know, I’d rather
make a joke and laugh at it than insult. But to each his own. . . . [in a quiet
voice] ¡A ver qué dice!

T R A N S C R I P T I O N 2 : T R A N S L AT E D E N G L I S H V E R S I O N

HORACIO N. ROQUE RAMÍREZ: What was working in the bar like?

TERESITA LA CAMPESINA: I was working there as a woman.
HORACIO: How was it?
TERESITA: I was working with nothing but nationals. They would pick cotton and
berries. And I would work behind the bar, and I would sing to them. There was
gay people that used to come there from the fields and some of them you
could tell [they were gay]. They didn’t know [about me], but [some] knew me
from LA. One, a female [said], “Oh, that’s a drag queen! I know her from LA.
Her name’s Alberta!” And she went and told. See, and even in our own kind
you have to look out who your friends are ’cause your own kind will give you
away. It was some sissy punk, lowlife, working in the fields, didn’t have shit
going. And I’m working there with falsies, looking gorgeous, like a sunset, bella
como una camella, working like a woman with all the machos, sucking dick
fooling the men—of course, the faggot was—he was flamboyant—going to be
angry. And he knew me. And he went and told everyone that I was a maricona.
So then I had a friend named Carmen—his name is Johnny. Him and his old
190 | FRIENDSHIP

man are still together. They’ve been together twenty years. So I got him a job
in the field. And I says, “This is my friend Juan. They call him Carmen.” He
was tall but looked effeminate, with a limp wrist, but really big. And so I got
him a job there, and she always loved me. I haven’t seen her in years. So any-
way, when I went to jail, when I got busted, she got that fucking queen that
told on me, she says, “You motherfucker. Margie [Margarita; Teresita] is good
people. Why did you do that to her? She’s a sister. You’re such a fucker.” They
beat the shit out of him.
HORACIO: Really?
TERESITA: Yeah, that’s what I was told. That Carmen—he beat the fuck out of
that queer. She beat him up because she went and told that I was a drag
queen. I was never no angel ’cause nobody is, nobody is perfect. But you
know, when the bar owner wasn’t there I would give Carmen beers and my
friends, the little whores. They would come in, and I would give them free
drinks on the house and everything. And I was just in my young youth,
twenty-five years old. I was there when Kennedy died. What year did Ken-
nedy die?
HORACIO: Mmm . . . I forget. . . . ’63? Maybe I’m wrong.
TERESITA: Okay, well around there. I want you to hear this story. I used to look at
myself and feel sorry for the prostitutes and all that. There was a black lady
there; they used to call her “Tomato.” And after a while I used to see these
women cry and all that, how hard it’s for women and selling their vagina and
everything.
HORACIO: In Stockton, at the bar.
TERESITA: Yeah and I—
HORACIO: What was the bar called?
TERESITA: La Ocua. And I would give her drinks. So one day—everything in this
world ends; it’s got the beginning and its ending. I saw this real tall man,
named Chita, and he used to do Greta Garbo. That’s what he told me. And I’m
working in drag, okay; he doesn’t know I’m a drag queen. But I noticed, I
could tell he was gay as a fruitcake. Big eyes and all that, he’s very—limp wrist,
hand down, very swinging the hand. And I didn’t say nothing. And she was
working in the fields. [lowering her voice briefly] And then, I was alone with
her and she would looook at me, and we started talking. And she looooked at me
and everything. So she came up real close. She said, “What’s your name?”I
said, “My name is Alberta but they call me Margarita.” She said, [whispering]
“Come here; I’m a drag queen.” I said, “Ay, you’re a girlfriend!” She said,“Yes,
sit down. Have a drink. Do you want some wine?” I said, “Listen, I like you.
You look like a woman. You’re beautiful. And you, what is?—” She said,
“Well, they used to call me La Chita. I used to dress like a woman and do drag
like Greta Garbo.” And he was already older, a gentleman and shaved and
everything. But he had very feminine features, but I could tell. So then, I . . .
like continuing the life profession of a homosexual and what today they call
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 191

transgender, I would get very sad. And he showed me portraits. She went to
his room. She lived in a room. This fucking bitch looked fantastic! Drag has
been here since day one. She looked like a woman! She was in show business.
She did Greta Garbo! So then I said, “Damn.”
So then Carmen, Johnny, would tell me, “Oh Marge, you got a good heart.”
I said, “Girl, that’s not it. Just that, you never know in what state we’re going
to end up.” And I would give her drinks and she would say, “Yes.” Carmen
said, “You have a good heart, girl.” And you know what, this person, this man
who showed me portraits of himself and everything—so I study him. And I
was still young, okay, twenty-five years, and she was already over forty. I said,
“You have to be nice with him. She’s jota, jotito but a nice person.” And so. And
she liked to drink Burgundy wine. It was only twenty-five cents. And Ver-
mouth. [whispers briefly] I said, “Look, let’s talk straight.” I communicate
better .  .  . speaking Spanish because I think in Spanish. And I could speak
both languages. I said [to Carmen], “Well this jota showed me her drag pic-
tures, and think about it, we don’t know, girl. You have to be nice to him.” See,
I was already like that. [I said,] “And you are going to look like her some day.
You know how beautiful she was. And I’m a drag queen, girl. [her voice
breaking, emotionally] And I am dressed like a woman. And he is my kind.
And jotita and suffering and such. But I like her.” [Recalling Carmen speaking]
“Ooo, how you are! How I love you, Margarita” and everything. No, no, it’s
that I already was seeing myself like her. She went and looked like the way
I—she probably already passed away. God rest her soul in peace. We have lost
a lot of brothers and sisters. But at least I had the heart, recognizing that every-
thing ends. Ooo, the jota had me on a pedestal, she would bring me things
from the fields and everything. [I said,] “You don’t have to do that.” And he
would say to the other jotas, “Look out for her, take care of her! She’s good
people.” [raising her voice] So there—so you can see! So that carries me.
HORACIO: Great friendships.
TERESITA: Mm hmm.
HORACIO: People you don’t forget.
TERESITA: And seeing all of that, I said, “Who knows if I am going to look like
that when I am old.” There were still no hormones or implants, or facelifts, or
nothing like today. That’s why I tell many who want to live as women. Even if
you don’t cut off down there and you want to dress like a woman with tits—
you can always remove that. But at least fix your face and everything. Every-
thing ends. Go in style. Because, if you are gonna live as a woman and you
have masculine features and you’re somewhat feminine, have your face done,
fix your features, that’s why they have doctors. That’s the reason I talk to you
that way because: if you’re gonna do something, do it right! Don’t do it
half-ass.
Since I didn’t cut off down there—because I don’t believe in that. I walk
around life dressed like a woman because it’s part—like a uniform. It’s like a
192 | FRIENDSHIP

habit. Because I am man and woman. I receive; I don’t penetrate. But I did not
cut down there because I believe in the Seven Holy Sacraments of the Altar.
Because I know that even though I was born—I am never going to look like a
woman. I respect everyone who makes that decision. If they want to—but they
are never going to look like a perfect woman. So, that’s why I stayed as a man,
that’s why I name myself man and woman. That’s why I call myself a male
female. Because I am not gonna cut that off. No way in hell am I gonna be like
a perfect woman. They could adopt—they’re never gonna have a period. See,
when I talk to a lot of friends of mine that have the sex change—I had, not
fights but we have argued, and I have offended them.
So, I respect them but I’d rather just not even talk about it, ’cause that is my
feeling. See, once that feeling is gone, you know what I’m saying? And if you
know you like to masturbate, like I do, and I like to play with my cock daily,
and I like my titties sucked, and I like to jack off, honey—I’m not gonna make
a mistake. ’Cause see, God makes no mistake. We are women of the mind.
Though we are not women from gender, but you are a woman mentally,
though you are a man and you got everything of a man. But your mind thinks
woman. But you don’t have to cut off, and cut off the feeling, if you know
what I mean. That’s a psychological and it’s a very big step. Because once it’s
gone, it’s off. So, knowing myself mentally, I kept the family jewels, and I’m
still Teresita, known as Alberto Nevaeres. I am still the man and the woman.
Thank you! Case closed. [thunderous laughter] I am única. Unique! I’d rather
be unique. But no. That’s part of life. Oh, I was going to do it a long time ago.
I was a good candidate. When they told me that I was gonna be like a brand
new Cadillac—and no motor in it? I’d rather keep this old jalopy, I still have a
lot of sparks. And a way of putting it in a comical way. But you know, I’d rather
make a joke and laugh at it than insult. But to each his own. . . . [in a quiet
voice, excited, referring to the recording] Let’s see what it says!3

Commentary

This essay explores the multiple roles and positions Teresita and I shared in rela-
tion to one another—the shared authorities, in Michael Frisch’s apt phrasing—
and the specifically queer gendering of language that made that sharing
particularly powerful, though not always perfect, given our different genera-
tions. That sharing began when we first met in the fall of 1994 in the lounging
area of a queer Latino HIV agency (Proyecto Contra SIDA Por Vida, or simply
“Proyecto”), continued at public community events, extended into simply
spending time together, and later led to publications in which I considered her
life, especially after her death.4
Frisch’s concept originated as a cautionary injunction to avoid the two poles
of public history: the supposedly legitimate, professional, and credentialed his-
torian, most often working in private through her writings and teaching, and
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 193

rarely coming up for air and conversation with the public outside formal insti-
tutions; and the alternative—some would say oppositional—new forms of
public history evidenced in community-based studies, grassroots video and
filmmaking, and popular theater, where the voices of oral history find a new
legitimized role. Aiming for a relationship between the two, sharing authority
encompasses “a synthesis” between them, assuming that all interested parties
involved can come together in and out of institutions for a conversation about
the production and consumption of public histories.5 However, the kind of syn-
thesis Frisch envisions might benefit from a more accurate understanding of the
consumption of historical research, especially its public presentations and
publications.
In my queer and academic life, I have variously shuttled between the poles
that Frisch describes, however unconscious I was of the conversations and ten-
sions between the two. In 1994, I landed at the University of California, Berkeley,
through an intercampus exchange program for graduate students, my home de-
partment then being a doctoral program in Latin American history at the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles. That program was quickly losing its appeal,
especially with my newfound consciousness as a gay Latino. Heading to Berke-
ley was also an excuse to be next door to San Francisco, that presumed gay
mecca and, luckily for me, then in the midst of profound queer Latina and
Latino organizing that was usually, but not always, tied to HIV and AIDS preven-
tion work. Thus, while I was reading 400-page history texts for my studies, I was
also meeting fellow queer Latino activists and elders (those in their forties, in
the context of the first waves of deaths from AIDS, and some even in their fifties).
That’s when Teresita, as a grassroots public historian who did not let go, pushed
herself on me. Eventually, the trick was for me to find a balance and a relation-
ship between that rich and still living oral history and the more sedate but also
attractive ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and their historical intersections in
the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies, from which I eventually earned
my doctorate.
In my analysis of a shared queer authority, I follow Linda Shopes’s astute
explication of Michael Frisch’s concept but, again, with distinctly queer twists.
Shopes delineates four key issues: that “collaborative oral history . . . is long haul
work”; that “collaborative work is personally and intellectually demanding, re-
quiring an ability—even the courage—to deal with people and situations that
can be difficult”; that “because collaborative oral history projects are frequently
linked to broader social goals . . . they inevitably raise the ‘objectivity question’”;
and finally, that the “biggest challenge . . . [is] analyzing the interviews gathered
and presenting them as published scholarship.”6 Each of these four key issues is
exemplified in the oral history work I conducted with Teresita.
The excerpt that accompanies this essay suggests many of the issues Teresita
was committed to putting down on tape, on paper, and on video, and the wide
scope of topics Teresita and I covered in our oral history work suggests a mutual
194 | FRIENDSHIP

commitment to the kind of “long haul” approach Shopes describes.7 Teresita’s

own life was quite a long haul. She was a survivor in many senses: as a young
mexicano queer teen disowned by his blood family to make it on his own in the
racialized policed streets of Los Angeles, surviving through various forms of
labor (bartending, singing, sex work) in various cities before that mythical queer
historical marker of 1969, Stonewall. She survived into the 1990s and by her early
sixties began to benefit somewhat from the availability of effective antiretroviral
medicine.
The issues and topics we covered included queer life—but especially trans-
gender life—in a rural, working, poor region of the United States in the 1960s
and the dangerous politics of passing and of being found out or outed, which
entailed jail time and forcibly regendering the guilty party to her or his “appro-
priate” sex, as Teresita experienced at least twice when her long hair was shaved.
She also explained the close parallels between transgender and nontransgender
sex-working women who shared marginalized, policed, often nonwhite,
working-class spaces. In one telling instance, she recalled the joy and pride of
recognizing a transgender self in the 1960s in meeting Chita (“Tomato”) from an
earlier, unknown, or unrecorded history of drag queens and performers who
had made history, one largely unknown. She alluded to the related unknown
queer future (in seeing the suffering in Chita and identifying with what may be
her own future as an aging drag queen) for transgender women like herself, who
in the 1960s had no certainty about what her life would be decades later, long
before any recognition of the legitimacy of their lives. Teresita was especially
conscious of the experiences of bilingual, bicultural, transgender mexicanas and
other Latinas like her, straddling two intersecting stigmatized minority posi-
tions: one racial/ethnic, the other gendered/sexual. She was aware of the politics
and possibilities for sex change, based not only on individual preference but
also on economic and historical possibilities. And finally, Teresita, as someone
living with AIDS, stressed the importance of remembering and recording in the
1990s her history of pre–gay liberation queer/trans life to establish how radically
different survival was then as compared with the possibilities for gay Latino men
like me, living in a time of post–gay liberation movements and with access to
health care.8
This last point was essential for Teresita in establishing her transgender Latina
authority, that is, to force openly queer people like me in the 1990s—those in
our teens, twenties, and thirties—to recognize who she was and where she had
been. She referred to herself as a pioneer, an artist (recognizing that she was
lucky to receive “un don de Dios”—a gift from God—of a naturally powerful
singing voice), and a mexicana proud of her roots but who had to hustle to sur-
vive when faced with her blood family’s homophobia, street policing, forcible
institutionalization at the former Camarillo State Mental Hospital to receive
electric shock “treatments,” marginalization within the mainstream and largely
transphobic gay and lesbian rights movements, and (later in life) HIV and AIDS.
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 195

She insisted on this multipronged authority as often as she could, whether in

the street, in restaurants, on the bus, or in any community setting—especially
whenever she felt ignored. And she took me along for the ride, because she had
found in me an interested party for the truths she was telling.
Indeed, the rides I took with Teresita for several years were not always easy,
and I was often required to play along with her performance requirements. She
controlled the situation most of the time. During our first recording session in
her cramped room in the low-income Mission Hotel, she played a videotape,
thus becoming the story of a story. It was a singing performance she had done at
the request of a gay Latino neighbor. He asked her to sing for his gathered guests,
and she acquiesced despite being exhausted from “una noche muy fuerte, ya com-
prendes la pasión y la ternura y el ardor, pues me sentía que ya ni me podía levantar”—
“a very heavy night, you understand, passion, tenderness, and ardor, so that I
barely could get up.” Prior to this first interview, I had shared only public spaces
with Teresita, but here, speaking to me from the privacy of her bed, she was
probably testing me to see how comfortable I was with the subjects at hand.
Teresita was probably also flirting with me, especially with her slow, suggestive,
and seemingly exhausted voice. I was still testing the waters of how to conduct
oral history at this point, so my discomfort was probably visible to her, but we
both went for the ride.
Shopes’s second key issue points out the demanding nature of oral history
work, and Teresita’s oral histories demonstrate not only her queer courage to
talk and listen but also my own commitment. Structured along different axes of
education, gender expression, sex, sexuality, HIV status, age, and class, these
interviews demonstrated that the queer authorities I shared with Teresita were
not always easily determined or democratic. We each had our own intentions,
motivations, and goals, yet we both wanted to historicize queer Latina and
Latino desires. In looking back, I am surprised how difficult it was to get her to
sit down with me in a quiet, private place to record. Teresita was clearly
performing—literally and figuratively—her queer history for me, a considerably
younger queer with a university affiliation but someone who took the time to be
with her, allowing her to take me to the bars, homes, and restaurants frequented
by some of the few remaining queer old-timers. She probably did not usually
have the patience to sit down for a formal recording, preferring instead to per-
form her story live by taking me to places and situations where others could
vouch for her life and talents. In introducing me to the many firsthand witnesses
of her accomplishments, each of whom confirmed her own narration, Teresita
made her authority all the more profound.
Teresita’s crassness, her often foul mouth, and her direct confrontational style
at times shocked me and embarrassed me, and there were times when she would
not stay in a place where she did not feel comfortable, especially after getting
into an argument with someone. Her sex life was also quite public—she was
infamous for having been arrested more than once in Reno for soliciting, for
196 | FRIENDSHIP

example—but this public persona was not one I was ready to address. For
instance, one day when I was driving back to my apartment in Oakland from
San Francisco, as I was entering the freeway ramp I noticed “an older woman”
provocatively dressed, seemingly waiting for someone to pick her up. I was
embarrassed when I recognized the woman in question, and I made sure she
and I did not make eye contact. I was trying to be more sex-positive then, but
Teresita was quite far ahead of me.
Even though Teresita’s sex life was no secret—she boasted, as the excerpt shows,
that she had fooled many men into believing she was a “real woman”—at the
time I was still uncomfortable with this facet of her life. Our shared queer bilin-
gualisms were definitely our joint, shared strengths: together, we queered English
and Spanish, perverting their respective uses. I was happy to share this queerly
gendered Spanglish with Teresita. Part of the reason I was so attracted to her was
the larger-than-life tall tales she could spin at any moment, even though I was
also uncomfortable when she would boast in public about what she had done
with whom and when, not always respecting the privacy of all the parties involved.
The intimacy I shared with Teresita produced a kind of queer reciprocity and
a feeling of social and political responsibility suggestive of Shopes’s third key
point, in which she describes collaborative oral history work as a project “linked
to broader social goals” and worries that “they inevitably raise the ‘objectivity
question.’” This was certainly true in my relationship with Teresita. For instance,
both Teresita and I met in the historical context of AIDS—she as someone who
was HIV-positive, and I as someone collaborating with an agency to support
educational, sex-positive grassroots movements—and learn how to remain HIV-
negative. Even if we came of age in different generations, we were both queers,
and our politics generally matched, especially because I cared so much about
her generation. She was Latina and I am Latino, Spanglish-speaking, so we had
our priorities about whom to visit first and try to record—other queer Latinas
and Latinos. We also both had our own criticism of the AIDS service industry—
recognizing that the bulk of the funding generally provided jobs with benefits
for those already better positioned by race, class, and education in society, rather
than the more marginal (the homeless, the illiterate, transgender women and
men of color, for example). Thus broader social goals clearly encircled our con-
cern with HIV and AIDS, health and survival, including how neighborhood
agencies could support queer homeless youth, the unemployed, those with less
access to education, and queers of color of all stripes (not just Latinas and Lati-
nos), who even in San Francisco remained isolated and at risk for different
forms of substance abuse. Although I never felt the need to refer to my oral his-
tory work as “activist scholarship,” any sense of objectivity in my work slowly
diminished.9
While my larger oral history project was progressing with modest funding
support, I was also trying to complete my dissertation. I began to teach during
my last years of the doctoral program, and I made the decision to focus on my
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 197

writing, complete my degree, and then figure out what lay next professionally.
As a result, I began to see less and less of Teresita and others in the community.
Teresita would still call me regularly, often leaving outrageously campy messages
on my answering machine, but my visits with her grew less frequent. I did send
her an invitation to my graduation, which she took very seriously, showing up
on time for the program, well dressed and ready for the occasion. That night, she
was also part of my extended family, accompanying my parents and the rest of
my family to a Chinese restaurant where she “behaved” by not using foul
language, but not before displaying her powerful singing voice in the short car
ride to let them know who she really was. My late father (who died at age ninety-
three in 2010) and seventy-six-year-old mother always spoke of her voice with
deep affection and respect; they also understood what it meant to me when
Teresita passed.
One of the last times Teresita and I met together was at a restaurant in the
Mission where mariachis—many of whom knew her—roamed for potential cus-
tomers. Unlike the classic Teresita who had hustled for money for decades—
sometimes mixing love with the erotic pleasure of song—this time she paid the
mariachis to accompany her in several live songs and for a sumptuous Mexican
shrimp dinner for us. She immediately became the center of attention with her
unannounced performance as she sang her history. This was the homage she was
giving me, someone who had cared to listen to the memories of her life as a bilin-
gual queen who never quite fit into any one place. The customers were stunned
by the powerful voice of this tall and big-framed singing mujer, but they had no
sense that this moment would be one of the very last impromptu cultural perfor-
mances of this queer pioneer, who was slowly dying. I played second fiddle in
moments like these, the much quieter, much younger oral historian, too preoccu-
pied with research. But Teresita was just too queer and too loud, and I was just
too hungry for queer Latina and Latino history, for us not to engage in an eight-
year, on-and-off dance toward the end of her life. This was also the beginning of
my queer consciousness, and it was important to share the respective authorities
we claimed: she, the elder, illiterate, but much more knowledgeable and thus sav-
vier about street life for queers—and especially queens of color like herself—and
me, the much younger, street-dumb intellectual committed to following her life.
Finally, to address Shopes’s fourth key issue in sharing authority, the chal-
lenge of publishing the scholarship requires equal parts patience and persis-
tence. For a recently hired tenure-track professor whose oral history–based
dissertation was slowly becoming “the tenure book,” I struggled to get pieces of
my years-long community research into public circulation. I tried to balance
professional and community-based publications, but ultimately the former
won, leading to a painful and rocky tenure review process. But an uneven collab-
oration remained. For instance, whenever I could, I got Teresita funding to per-
form at the university. Even more important, and returning to Frisch’s link
between oral and public history, Teresita was by far the center of attention during
198 | FRIENDSHIP

a very successful fund-raising anniversary celebration for Proyecto, where she

sang classic mariachi songs with a live mariachi on a stage in front of hundreds
of community members from different agencies that rarely came together. As
part of this multimedia performance, I prepared a PowerPoint presentation and
projected images and brief oral history quotes behind Teresita on a large screen
as she sang. Thus the collaboration and representation of queer Latina and
Latino public and oral history was sung, seen, and read.
I want to believe that Teresita vested unspoken authority in me—through her
constant phone calls, in taking me around the city to visit bars and restaurants
to meet the elders, in sharing quite intimate and painful memories about her
family—which I claimed days after she died. I knew from our recordings and
from community gossip that she had a long-standing and conflicted relation-
ship with the owner and the manager of the one remaining (as of 2010) gay
Latino bar in the Mission. She particularly disliked this place because she felt it
was symbolic of gay bars that made money off transgender performers but failed
to acknowledge their important history and contributions. In fact, she had been
banned from this bar for at least five years, and she did not mince words about
how she felt about the bar, its owner, its manager, and the illegal sexual activities
she claimed took place there. In the final minutes of our oral history together,
she claimed to have told the owner and manager the following during a
fund-raiser at the bar:

[Quoting herself] “Let me tell you something you two gay cocksuckers: the day that
I go, because we all have to go sooner or later, you’re not going to make no money
off my ass . . . after the way you treat your own kind.” I said, “You’re not going to
make one penny,” I said, “and I’m going to make sure that it’s in a power of at-
torney. So you could make money off my bones? After everybody that’s cared or
didn’t care that loved me? You may not like me, but you cannot take the love away
from other people that loved me, just because you feel that way and you hold a
grudge. You’re not going to make any money off me.”

When it came time to organize the community fund-raisers for Teresita’s burial and
other related costs, I spent several days with other community members coordi-
nating all the necessary pieces: where we would hold fund-raising events, what
agency would handle the money, where to print the funeral and mass announce-
ment cards, and so on. During one of these meetings, an activist commented that
he had been approached by this gay bar to hold a fund-raiser in her memory. Faced
with this request, I responded, “No way.” I quickly grew angry at the possibility that
in death Teresita’s transgender body would be used yet again for other people’s
purposes. My sharp response surprised the activist, as I had earned a reputation as
a community member and scholar who tried not to take sides (at least openly) in
intracommunity conflicts. But this moment to me was different; I felt the need to
stand my ground, claiming all the authority I could on Teresita’s behalf.
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 199

Oral historians often have a false sense of equality in the notion of sharing
authority, but some of us benefit much more than those we interview. As
researchers, we do give back; many of us have devoted years, even decades, to
projects with minority, marginalized, and neglected historical commu-
nities—queer, women, people of color, the working class, immigrant (espe-
cially the undocumented), those suffering from natural and unnatural
disasters, and those at any of these intersections—and the commitment
counts for a great deal. Although I am still confused about who benefited the
most from the authority I shared with Teresita, I do think in retrospect that I
did give back to her, not in any monetary way but in time, friendship, and
respect. I cannot deny that at that stage of her life I held advantages over her:
health, maleness, professional status, sometimes owning a car. Despite the
impossibility of a truly democratic shared authority, Frisch’s notion deserves
appreciation and careful application as we aim for more egalitarian projects
on behalf of publicly consumed histories, especially those aiming for social
change.
Teresita’s life and death have haunted me for years for the connections we
had and did not have as queer subjects from different historical periods and
for the differences in privilege. She repeatedly took her story back to the his-
torical place of the drag queen, especially the nonwhite drag queen, but she
also introduced me to nontransgender gay Latino men and Latina lesbians
who provided me with other pieces of the history I wanted to know and
share. And we both knew at some level that the queerly gendered shared au-
thority of Spanglish brought greater equality to our relationship and our
lives. My friend Ricardo A. Bracho once observed that Teresita was my method;
she embodied my methodological approach to community-based oral his-
tory because oral history was so basic to Teresita’s survival. Ironically, she
would never be able to read anything I would write about her in any language,
so my giving back continues to this day by writing about the significance of
her life.10
For instance, I have written about Teresita as a “living archive” of queer Latina
and Latino history—perhaps as an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense. I
have also written about her centrality as an artist to give voice—literally—sound,
history, and visibility to all Latinos in San Francisco and as someone who forced
us to keep the memory and the reality of HIV and AIDS alive.11 I have written
about Teresita as someone whose oral history is to be publicly consumed along-
side portraits of a time when she was in better health and as a transgender body
(male-to-female in her case) at the center of queer Latino history both in English
and in Spanish. Finally, I have written about her as someone who queered the
Spanish language both in songs (and very classic rancheras at that) and through
her never-ending storytelling. In queering Shopes’s four key issues and in
consideration of Frisch’s notion of sharing authority, my relationship and
200 | FRIENDSHIP

research with Teresita proved to be yet another example of how oral history and
public history can come alive.12

Notes
1. A useful exposition on the relationship between gay Latino studies and mainstream (white,
Eurocentric) queer theory is Michael Hames-García, “Queer Theory Revisited,” in Michael
Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, eds., Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 19–45.
2. I would like to acknowledge the late Teresita la Campesina for allowing me to record part
of her life history and for introducing me to key members of an elder generation of queer
Latinas and Latinos, Nan Alamilla Boyd for her leadership and wise comments in this col-
laborative project, Kathy Nasstrom for sound editorial advice, and the anonymous reviewers
for their suggestions. Some of the stages for the research discussed here were supported by
a small research grant from University of California, Berkeley’s former Chicano/Latino
Policy Project; a University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC
MEXUS) dissertation completion grant, and a University of California, Berkeley, Graduate
Humanities dissertation grant.
3. Alberta Nevaeres (Teresita la Campesina), audiotape recording, San Francisco, California,
April 27, 1996. Recording and transcription in author’s possession.
4. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “Teresita’s Blood/La Sangre de Teresita,” CORPUS: An HIV Pre-
vention Publication 2, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 2–9; “A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita la Campe-
sina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories,” in Antoinette Burton,
ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005), 111–35; and “Memory and Mourning: Living Oral History with Queer Latinos
in San Francisco,” in Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Mem-
ories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 165–86.
5. Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), xxi.
6. Linda Shopes, “Commentary: Sharing Authority,” Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (Winter/
Spring 2003): 105–8.
7. San Francisco–based gay Chicano activist, videomaker, and journalist Valentín Aguirre also
wrote, produced, and directed “Wanted Alive: Teresita La Campesina” (San Francisco, 20
min., video), part of the city’s 1997 Tranny Fest Film Festival.
8. An earlier related discussion on the relationship between lesbians and sex workers is Joan
Nestle, “Lesbians and Prostitutes: An Historical Sisterhood,” in Nestle, A Restricted Country
(Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1987), 157–77. In comparison to Teresita’s marginality, it is also worth
considering the one encountered by the better known, Stonewall-era MTF transgender
Venezuelan-Puerto Rican activist Sylvia Rivera (1951–2002). See “Sylvia Rivera Talk at
LGMNY, June 2001 Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, New York City,” CENTRO:
Journal for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 116–23.
9. I was not able to reciprocate as fully as I could have—or should have, I realize in hindsight—
with someone with the historical knowledge of Teresita. During our second recording,
Teresita pointed out her desire to try to reconnect with her blood family in Glendale. The
last time she had seen them had been during her mother’s funeral in the early 1980s, and at
that event, some of her family members openly welcomed her as a transgender woman,
though not all, especially not an older brother who insulted her by suggesting that because
she was HIV-positive, they would have to cremate her body after her death to avoid conta-
gion. Despite her stories of family separation and reunion, Teresita still felt the desire for
this trip, one that I could have facilitated financially, even with my very modest graduate
student means, but I did not prioritize this trip on her behalf.
10. For an earlier discussion of a public memory and art gallery event in the Mission, months
before Teresita died, which she herself could not read, even though it was based on her oral
history transcripts, see my “Memory and Mourning.”
 SHARING QUEER AUTHORITIES | 201

11. I address some of these historical politics around AIDS in “Gay Latino Histories/Dying to
Be Remembered: AIDS Obituaries, Public Memory, and the Gay Latino Archive,” in Gina M.
Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos Jr., eds., Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o
America (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 103–28.
12. I thank Augusto F. Espiritu for suggesting, during a presentation about Teresita’s life at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, that many of her qualities and daily interven-
tions in numerous community sites evoke the characteristics of the organic intellectual.
This page intentionally left blank
PART IV
POLITICS
This page intentionally left blank
11 DANCING WITH
STELLA, LOS ANGELES
DAUGHTERS OF
BILITIS PIONEER
Marcia M. Gallo

Oral history by Marcia Gallo with Stella Rush, Los Angeles, California,
March 15 and 19, May 2, May 21 and 22, November 17, 2002

In 2002, Stella Rush was among the first of the former members of the Daughters of
Bilitis (DOB) to respond to my request for an interview for my dissertation, a history of
the organization and its role in modern lesbian and feminist activism. A series of tele-
phone conversations before we met in person provided me with an auditory awareness
of Rush’s method of recounting her experiences. Our talks further underscored the sig-
nificance of establishing an interview context for all of my narrators that gave them the
freedom not only to describe their social and sexual activities in DOB and other arenas
of their lives in the 1950s and 1960s but also to articulate the feelings those activities
evoked. Stella Rush motivated me to create a flexible mix of methodological approaches
to doing oral histories.
Our first conversation took place on March 15, 2002; we talked for about thirty
minutes. That and subsequent telephone conversations before and after we met in
person on May 21 helped me in two important ways: first, as a researcher, talking
informally with Rush aided me in the process of creating a list of questions to ask
other narrators. A second benefit was an awareness of Stella Rush’s “verbal choreog-
raphy,” the seemingly random turns and spins of her storytelling. Within one con-
versation, she would reveal a range of disparate feelings, people, events, and their
meanings; in later talks, she often repeated certain memories, particularly those
involving her intimate relationships and her search for spirituality, self-love, and
knowledge. It became clear that her conversational denouements shed crucial light
on the emotional, as well as cultural, experiences of other nonnormative young
women of the 1950s.1
206 | POLITICS

MARCH 15, 2002 (VIA TELEPHONE)

MARCIA GALLO: Hello, Stella! How are you? Is this a good time to talk?
STELLA RUSH: It’s fine.
GALLO: I have some basic questions—your birthday, where you live—
RUSH: I’ll be seventy-seven soon! I have an April 30 birthday—I live near LA—
forty miles south. Did you know that Dr. Vern Bullough is now doing a book?
GALLO: Really? I’ll have to find out more about that—
RUSH: Your name is Mar-CEE-ah? I knew a Marcia—Marcia Herndon. She was
into anthropology of music—University of Maryland. Lived with Billye
Talmadge.
GALLO: Where did the name you used in DOB, “Sten Russell,” come from?
RUSH: Well, see, the “ST” was for “Stella”; the “EN” was for “Ben.”
I would make fun of being butch by signing “Ben” sometimes. That came
when I met Joan Corbin, “Corky Wolf” was her partner. [She was known as]
Eve Elloree—she staffed the magazine at ONE Institute. Since 1953, I was on
the periphery. I first got connected to the gay movement through ONE. I
worked in civil service during the “moral turpitude” days. I gave $100 to ONE
and it helped me get in.
I had read The Well of Loneliness and thought, “Oh God, I’m not.” I couldn’t
identify at all—didn’t want to be “this” or “that.”
GALLO: How did you meet Sandy [Helen Sandoz, her partner of more than thirty
years]?
RUSH: I met Sandy as part of the DOB contingent—she was of great importance
to both the San Francisco and Los Angeles chapters—she signed her real name
for the charter.
GALLO: What was the gay scene like in those days?
RUSH: At the old If Club—that was a bar in LA, mostly women’s, some men. And
“tourists”—including my church group—we’d go there after services, men
and women. We were Young Unitarians. So that’s how I started—I went to the
gay bar after church.
I was cutting off half my sexuality as a gay person. I lasted a day as a femme
and about three days as a butch—
GALLO: How about mixing butch and femme?
RUSH: No, that’s ki-ki. And that was a no-no. I was potentially bisexual if I
wanted to go that route—I liked the freedom—and it was a big deal about
how you made love, who did what. I can make love with a man—and I had
boyfriends in college—but I was a virgin at twenty-three! Only one I knew in
my crowd. Can you please send me a picture?
GALLO: Uh, a picture of myself? Sure.
RUSH: And a list of questions—
GALLO: Okay. I’ll do that. Maybe this is a good time to stop.
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 207

MARCH 19, 2002 (VIA TELEPHONE)

RUSH: In January 1957, there were plans to start an LA chapter. But I was into the
gay movement and with ONE from 1953 on—I was living with Joan Corbin
(“Eve Elloree”) in 1955—we were together when I met Sandy, I can’t remember
where she was. Oh, we met in a committee at the 1957 ONE Institute—she was
part of the contingent of Daughters there for The Ladder. Now, you asked
about names. I have no problem with the anonymity thing—it’s pretty much
an open thing with me—and it’s okay to name Sandy. Joan may be dead as
well. I would like to see what you write.
GALLO: Of course. I’ll send you a draft.
RUSH: I thought Sandy was the moon and the stars—but at one point she said to
me, “Stella, you got published before I did.” But at the ONE Institute, I looked
across the table and saw Phyllis Lyon. I leaned over and said, “Didn’t I know
you somehow?” Phyllis said, “Like from where?” I said, “Well, like maybe
University of California?” She said, “That must have been a long time ago,”
and I said “Not that long ago—1945–47.” I was a freshman—she was a junior
or senior—a minute thing, but on the Daily Cal [newspaper] staff, because she
was one of the wheels. I said, “Weren’t you so-and-so on the Daily Cal?”
[At the ONE Institute meeting] Sandy kept getting bored and going to the
bar—they sent me after her to keep her from getting in trouble. There was the
Prodigal Son—Sandy was like the Prodigal Son. It was so typical of Sandy—
she’d make a lot of protestations, she’d gripe and growl, but she’d be there
when you needed her—she was doing all this stuff out of friendship, but she
had a lot of complications. She was a Reluctant Dragon—but her service to
The Ladder and to DOB in general was monumental. She was hard to know—a

Stella Rush at her typewriter at home in Los

Angeles, about 1953. She contributed original
essays and served as roving reporter for the
pioneering American homophile magazine
ONE throughout the 1950s. Courtesy of Marcia
Gallo
208 | POLITICS

very private person—but I kept learning things at parties when she would
drink. I was a two-to-three drinks max kind of drinker—they’d say, “Let’s put
Stella to bed” and keep on going.
So I first got to talk with Sandy at that bar—she was perfectly delightful,
very funny. But we got onto this butch-femme thing that existed in bars—
she hadn’t come across it until she got to San Francisco. She had fallen in
love with a teacher in college and came out in that rarefied environment.
She was dressed in a nice suit when I met her—she hadn’t had to deal with
the harshness and arbitrariness; . . . that system wasn’t any good unless you
accidentally fit in. Her birthday was November 2, 1920. Sandy was dubbed
the butch—in SF any way—otherwise she was just herself. But see, I liked to
dress masculine and she liked to dress masculine—this put us at cross-pur-
poses. She was fascinated by me ’cause she’d not met one like me—back in
those days, you know, Del was the butch and Phyllis the femme, of course—
and dressed to match. Sandy was very funny, intelligent, graduated with a
BA in psychology. I had three years of college—was lacking three units of
social science or civics for my degree. I went to night school, Saturdays, ex-
tension courses—tried to get serious about it. I worked in civil engineering
department (as civil engineering assistant)—had to get past an arch femi-
nist. She wanted to know why I wanted to be a planning assistant and make
less money? Here I was going to ONE at night and we were catching some
trolley—getting from downtown LA—and I made a comment about a
woman as president and got into trouble—
GALLO: Tell me more about Joan.
RUSH: Joan was ONE’s artist. You know, maybe if you try to do any part of this
story, you should use people’s magazine names. Had loved her about a year
before it happened—she broke up with her partner of eight years; and I was
with her about two years. It was during that period that I started writing po-
etry. They were “Ann Carll Reid” (Corky Wolf), who was editor of ONE, and
“Eve Elloree” (Joan Corbin), the staff artist of ONE. They were a couple,
working on ONE magazine.
That’s enough for now.

M A Y 2 1 A N D 2 2 , 2 0 0 2 ( S T E L L A R U S H ’ S A PA R T M E N T I N
WESTMINSTER, CALIFORNIA)

GALLO: OK, Stella, to start, I just want to get the chronology right. . . .
RUSH: My birthday is April 30, 1925. It was 1953 when I got involved with ONE
magazine and after that learned about DOB. I met Sandy, Del, and Phyl in 1957.
But it was 1960—at our DOB convention in LA—that I got less fearful, used
my work name tag even though civil servants were subject to California
laws. . . .
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 209

I graduated from high school in 1943—Dorsey High School, West Adams

district in Los Angeles; from 1943–45 I was at North American Aviation as an
aircraft draftsman trainee; then I went to the University of California at Berke-
ley for two years.
In the second semester there, I got a scholarship—I was the daughter of a
World War II vet—it was the Alice Unkhart scholarship. I worked in the lab
while Oppenheimer was there, washed out glassware with sulfuric acid. Met
Phyllis Lyon at the Daily Cal (UCB newspaper)—she was a wheel—a
junior. . . .
In 1947 and ’48 I was at UCLA and joined the Unitarian church in LA—and
there it was rumored that I was “queer” and I didn’t know what that meant. I
was twenty-three, involved with men—like Mac (a boxer), a good guy, I think
we were engaged; . . . anyway, I dated him—he asked if I was gay, too!
In 1948 to ’50, the witch hunts were on; in 1949 I worked at Firestone Tire as
aircraft draftsman, fell into the If Club in LA—didn’t know it was gay. I met a
young black officer, fell in love with him; . . . he wrote poetry and later taught at
San Francisco State and at Berkeley. You know at this time they were burning the
KKK cross in the hills of Berkeley, . . . the FEPC law was being fought for. . . .
GALLO: That must have been horrifying.
RUSH: I was mad all the time in the 1950s. . . .
GALLO: Tell me more about Sandy.
RUSH: June 7, 1987, was when Sandy died, she had been sick for two years.
Sandy and I hit it off instantly—she grew up in Oregon, in a small town
near Eugene and got her degree in psychology from Reed College. Her mother
was an immigrant from Sweden, came with her family to U.S.—very poor.
Sandy’s mom got a job as maid to the Beldens, they were well-to-do—upper
middle class. Sandy’s mother was related to Sandoz, the pharmaceutical
people—they invented LSD. Her father was a railroad man—came through
town, had a roll in the hay with her mom—Sandy paid for it for the rest of her
life. Sandy’s father returned to town and married her mom. Her mother left
when Sandy was nine months old—she was taken to a TB institution.
Helen Jane Sandoz was Sandy’s full name—she met her father when she
was eighteen years old.
Reed didn’t let her graduate with her class because she was nice to Japanese
American schoolmates—wrote letters to them after they were sent away, with
chess moves included, and the FBI started investigating.
Del and Phyl dragged Sandy into DOB and to Sacramento to incorporate
the organization. When we met, I was lovers with Joan—she was an artist for
ONE Inc. Sandy came along in ’57—courted me like crazy—sent books, let-
ters, complimented me. November 2 was her birthday. I wrote a piece in The
Ladder, a thinly-veiled love poem to Sandy. I . . . in DOB, couples usually acted
in unison, but I didn’t, and Sandy didn’t like it.
210 | POLITICS

M AY 2 A N D N OV E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 0 2 ( V I A T E L E P H O N E )

GALLO: Let’s talk about the Prosperos, okay? How did you get involved?
RUSH: Religion was very much a part of Mom’s life—and mine, too, until I was
eighteen. I was very bored by Protestantism, I had read enough, studied
enough and couldn’t accept that God concept, so I broke with religion. I was
more lost and lonely when I decided I didn’t believe in God anymore—my
mind has been on this all my life. But I joined the Unitarian Church in Berke-
ley and then Los Angeles, with a lot of young people to whom the God con-
cept isn’t important.
It was a strange Unitarian group in LA—believed in doing good, primarily
humanist. It had a lot of Jewish people, kids fleeing Orthodox Jewish families
and Reformed Jews fleeing their Reform synagogues—lots of diverse creatures.
And it was right in the middle of the witch hunts [of the 1950s]—the spectrum
was anywhere from atheist to agnostic.
In 1955, I had an emotional crisis in my life because what I thought was my
true love was having a sexual relationship with the last person I had been
with—I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand an affair in the middle
of a brand new love affair. I was homicidal and suicidal at that time. During
this time I had a transcendent experience of being lifted out. I saw a book—
How to Use the Power within You [1955]—in a bookstore and thought, “Gee, if
there’s any power in me I’d like to get at it. . . . ” The authors were Claude M.
Bristol and Harold Sherman. It was the only thing that helped me at that
time.
I finally found the integration of things I believed—philosophy and prac-
tice—with the Prosperos a few years later, but you had to stay in the cult.
Prosperos still exists today—it’s limping along.
Sandy and I were in the Prosperos—1965, 1970 most active. There were all
kinds of students—mostly rebels, agnostics, atheists, freethinkers. It brought
me back full circle to where I’d begun. Sandy and I were in our late thirties
and forties when we were most actively involved. [Prosperos’ founder] Thane
[Walker] gathered archetypes from all over the world. He was a great deal
older than we were—may have been born in 1900. Thane was a Teacher with
a capital T. He was handsome—a white-haired gent—based in Hawaii [for
many years] but born and raised in the Midwest. There were groups through-
out the nation, in a great many states, with a center in Georgia. It would be
characterized as a New Age sect or cult. Thane was about “right thinking in the
abstract.” He came looking for us—he reached out to homosexual groups
because he thought it [his teachings] would help them.
Thane studied to be a psychiatrist and got the M.D.—Jung was his favorite
psychiatrist. But he quickly got off onto the religious path instead.
Thane’s sex lecture was the thing that won over anybody with a hole in
their life. He said that androgyny was the epitome—knowing, appreciating,
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 211

using masculine and feminine sides of self. He was in Germany in World War
II—ended up in jail for a while there, working on these principles when there.
He wrote pamphlets—“I Watched Hitler Do Black Magic” is one of them.
Thane was a student of Gurdjieff’s but we didn’t really have that kind of
school. He was greatly influenced by him and his thinking, had been part of
Unity, and he borrowed from all the offshoots of the day—Ernest Holmes,
Emmett Fox, the Fillmores, and Physical Miracles.
In San Francisco, in LA, where we met, he sent his teachers in to talk to us,
always sent beautiful women to our meetings. The name The Prosperos was
very symbolic. It followed the Shakespearean characters in “The Tempest”—
Caliban in the dungeon was symbolic of ancient animal-like instincts that we
have that can be destructive, Ariel was the bright fairy sprite. The symbolism
was gleaned from all over the world, but he kept trying to keep it to what
Anglo-Saxon white Protestants could understand. Thane taught us a five-step
exercise in right thinking in the abstract.
GALLO: Were many other DOBers involved, too?
RUSH: We were drawn into this circle of people by Billye (she was a wheel in the
group), and Del and Phyl. We were drawn in to this magic teacher (very
human) and they were going for it hook, line, and sinker—they were talking
a whole other language.
It was rather marvelous—there were miraculous results; Billye was able to get rid
of long-standing guilt or grief over her mother. We would write out a situation
and apply rules of syllogisms that Plato did:

“Truth is that which is so,

that which is not truth is not so,
therefore truth is all there is.”

This was called “translation.” We needed to practice to see the spiritual

connotations in that. In translation classes, we shared writings, and there were
workshops as well. But the ultimate was RHS—Thane called it “releasing the
hidden splendor.” Translation alone only takes you so far. He used the arche-
type of Joseph and his brothers—forgiveness and getting rid of guilts and
self-hatreds.
Prosperos was a home for those of us who weren’t able to go back to our
churches . . . but it did cause disagreements among people in DOB. Billye took
to it so strongly that she tried to teach it at our meetings. Our leaders got
hooked on it—and Billye was full of the holy zeal.2

Commentary

Started by four lesbian couples in San Francisco in 1955, the Daughters of Bilitis
initially was a secret social club for women. The eight founders, including Del
Martin and Phyllis Lyon, purposely chose a reference to a fictional female lover
212 | POLITICS

of the ancient Greek teacher and poet Sappho as a way to screen their new group
from unwanted scrutiny by a hostile heterosexual society. They reasoned that
any woman who recognized the name Bilitis would have been “on the qui vive,”
or knowledgeable about lesbian life. The year DOB began, Songs of Bilitis, a book
of erotic poems purportedly written by Bilitis to Sappho and “discovered” by
French poet Pierre Louys in the late nineteenth century, was enjoying a renais-
sance among readers of paperback novels with queer content. Despite recurring
debates about its awkwardness and difficult pronunciation over the next fifteen
years, the Daughters maintained their allegiance to their strange, secretive name.
In many ways, it is a reminder of their organizational roots in the midst of a
Cold War culture of cunning codes and clever deceptions; it also reflects a wari-
ness of exposure and misinterpretation on the part of the early DOB activists
that lasted well beyond the life of the organization itself.3
Despite the metanarrative they created about themselves and DOB, by the
early years of the twenty-first century, Martin and Lyon insisted that the insights
of other Daughters were crucial to any accurate history of their organization,
and Stella Rush’s name was at the top of their list. Still largely unknown outside
of gay circles in Southern California, she had been one of a handful of women
at the epicenter of post–World War II gay organizing in Los Angeles, the birth-
place of the U.S. homophile movement.
Rush is intriguing not only because of her longtime involvement in the les-
bian and gay movement, as well as the tangle of personal relationships that
propelled her activism, but also as a working-class white woman with a history
of social justice awareness and activism. She articulated a youthful racial con-
sciousness through vivid memories of being separated from Japanese American
classmates after the attack on Pearl Harbor and recounted similar experiences
that she said her longtime lover, Helen Sandoz, had had as a high school stu-
dent. “It was the first time that I was really aware of the cost of being different,
even in this great country of ours. How could this be happening in the land of
the free?”4 She easily made connections between systems of oppression, be they
racial or sexual. It took no prompting for her to link the internment of her
school friends with the harassment and arrests of other people in Los Angeles—
black, bohemian, or queer—as she described bucking the tide of postwar con-
ventionality in the late 1940s and early 1950s: “I was mad all the time in the
fifties . . . [news about] homosexuals leaving the State Department, witch hunts
for Communists. . . . And then there were the civil rights struggles in LA—we
discovered that we didn’t have any more rights than in the South. . . .”5
Rush began her gay activist life by writing “Letter from a Newcomer” for ONE
magazine. Formed by a small group of men and women who split off from the
pioneering Mattachine Society, ONE, Inc., focused on presenting educational
workshops, as well as publishing a monthly magazine. Rush was first introduced
to the group by a former girlfriend who took her to a party; meeting ONE leader
Joan Corbin, with whom she soon fell in love, motivated her to get involved.
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 213

Although the relationship ended in heartbreak for Rush, Corbin had encour-
aged her to write about her experiences of the gay scene in and around Los
Angeles in 1953. Her first-person account brought a great deal of response and
encouraged Rush to continue writing. She published articles in ONE from 1954
until 1961, using the pseudonym Sten Russell.
She also was instrumental in the expansion southward of the Daughters of
Bilitis. After DOB unveiled its monthly newsletter The Ladder in 1956, she became
the “Los Angeles Reporter,” recording the meetings and conferences organized
by ONE and Mattachine. A meeting at a conference in 1957 led to a long-distance
love affair with Sandoz, followed soon after by Sandoz’s move to Los Angeles.
Sandoz was integral to DOB’s development, yet she, too, is not well known
among queer activists today. Daughters of Bilitis founder Phyllis Lyon remem-
bers, “Sandy was one of the only lesbians we knew in San Francisco when we
moved from Seattle. We visited her and her partner once, I think, and that was
it. They were living in the hills of Marin, and Sandy’s partner wanted nothing to
do with DOB.” Lyon continues, “Sandy got involved after they broke up, and she
stayed with it for the next ten years or so.” Sandoz was one of the first members

Using the pen name Sten

Russell, Stella Rush was
one of the first women to
become actively involved in
the homophile movement.
In addition to her work with
ONE, she cofounded the
all-female Daughters of Bilitis
chapter in Los Angeles in 1958.
Courtesy of ONE National Gay
and Lesbian Archives
214 | POLITICS

of the Daughters of Bilitis. Using “Helen Sanders,” her DOB pseudonym, San-
doz became the group’s third president in 1957 and also served as editor of The
Ladder from 1966 to 1968.6
Born in 1920 in Corvallis, Oregon, Sandoz attended Reed College during the
early years of the war. She was the only daughter of a Swedish immigrant single
mother, who supported herself and her daughter by working as a maid for a
well-to-do family. Like Rush, Sandoz’s mother was ill and often hospitalized
throughout Sandoz’s youth. Her father, though well-connected and wealthy,
played no significant role in her life.
An energetic, independent woman, Sandoz moved to Alaska after college on
a civil service assignment, then to Washington, and back to Oregon, where a
serious traffic accident inspired her to look for a career that would not involve
sitting for long hours. She learned sign printing and, by the mid-1950s, had
found her way to San Francisco, where she soon met Del Martin. Within months
of moving to Los Angeles in 1958, Rush and Sandoz held the first of many years
of DOB meetings in their Silver Lake home. Sandoz died in 1987, but, even in
2002, Rush often spoke of her as if she were still a strong and vital presence in
her life; her absence was palpable.
Although Rush’s stories often careened wildly—from her relationships with
Sandy and her mother, to the problems with Christianity, to her passionate
crushes on both men and women—they were always riveting; our relationship
evolved via many intricate verbal “dances” performed during four years of con-
versations. One step forward . . . two to the side . . . three back . . . then a sudden
dip and a dizzying turn: the experience of following her lead revealed a great
deal of information and insight that was crucial to understanding the begin-
nings of lesbian activism in post–World War II America. It also illuminated a
larger truth—the rhythmic nature of oral history.
Adapting to the storytelling choreography of a narrator is a crucial compo-
nent of interviewing. With Stella Rush, it often was necessary to relinquish overt
control and preconceived notions yet maintain the momentum of the project.
She rewarded such agility with a great deal of openness, mountains of memories,
painfully honest assessments, and juicy tidbits of gossip. The relationship that
developed between us went beyond that of researcher and narrator; we experi-
enced what Gesa Kirsch has called “the dynamics of friendship and friendliness
as understood in the context of feminist fieldwork.”7 Further, the relationship
was fueled by desires: a shared desire to work together in crafting a good story, as
well as the strangely intense attraction between us. Although separated by more
than twenty-five years in age, and eons apart in our disparate experiences of
living openly as lesbians, we had a sisterhood of sorts, tinged by sensuality.
Throughout the initial and follow-up telephone conversations, the in-person
meetings and taped interviews, and finally the back-and-forth review and editing
of the manuscript, a process also evolved that was active and engaged. It was
then replicated, with very minor differences, with other primary narrators.8
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 215

However, the conversations with Stella always were different. They would
often center on what Kirsch refers to as the “seemingly abstract, impersonal
questions [that] could lead interviewees to reveal deeply personal, emotionally
charged information—as if to a friend.”9 Rush’s accounts of her experiences as a
homophile activist often included such “emotionally charged” memories. For
example, her symbiotic relationship with her mother and her mother’s increas-
ingly debilitating mental and physical illnesses were incorporated into her nar-
rative. Although at first the unexpected sharing of such intimacies made for
uncomfortable conversations, it soon became clear that they were very impor-
tant to her; they illuminated how she felt her life choices had been circum-
scribed. Rush described the feelings she wrestled with when she was unable to
continue her studies at UC Berkeley because of her mother’s need for care and
instead, after being summoned home to Los Angeles, completed her third year
of college at UCLA in 1948. She then dropped out and went to work for Firestone
Tire and Rubber as an aircraft draftsman, a line of work she would continue for
years, and rerouted her search for independence by becoming an active member
of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.
Soon Rush began to explore whether her attractions to women meant she
could be gay. The lesbian subculture in postwar Southern California and other
major metropolitan areas was centered in a handful of gay bars and “explained”
in a few books about homosexuality. She described both options as problem-
atic: the bars put patrons in danger of police raids, and the books were hard to
find and usually depressing. Rush said that what she read “convinced her that
the lifestyle of gay men and women meant living a series of lies.”10 Her experi-
ence of a police raid on a Venice Beach bar in 1949 reiterates her sense of secrecy
and futility:

I was scared to death, standing there shaking. This cop asked me to identify myself,
so I hauled out my driver’s license and said that’s me. “Where do you work?” “I
don’t have a job.” You don’t know. You don’t want to argue with a policeman or
anyone who has a gun and a billy stick. I didn’t give them any reason to take me
down to the station. At the same time, I wasn’t going to help them. The whole thing
with me was not to argue with them about anything if I could help it. . . . The police
officer told me, “You should cooperate with us,” and I answered, “I would, sir, if I
knew what you wanted.”
Actually, there were about four times I had to talk with cops, and most of the
time there was a good cop–bad cop scene. . . . The most difficult ones were not the
gay bar raids but were being stopped by the police about race, like the time my
partner Bea and I were taking a black man home from choir practice. I was ready, if
I had to, to go to jail for the right of free association with others and to take a stand
against race discrimination. I was a member of ACLU and could see what the ACLU
could do about it—that is, for the racial discrimination. I wasn’t prepared to go to
jail about the homosexuality issue because, as far as I could see, gays didn’t have
216 | POLITICS

any civil rights and ACLU didn’t have anything to offer. It took a lot of work and
education before the ACLU took us on—they had to get to know us and to read a
lot of our stuff.11

Her reference to the American Civil Liberties Union is another example of the
rewards that came from following her lead during the interview process. It initi-
ated discussions of the importance of ACLU chapters—in Los Angeles, San Fran-
cisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., among other cities—to
homophile activists and became a hallmark of interviews with other DOB and
Mattachine narrators; Rush provided a clue to the organization’s significance
that had not been readily apparent. So, too, did her memories of her search for
a spiritual home.
One of the most jarring verbal turns occurred when she suddenly recounted
a religious conversion experience she had had in the 1950s. It led to Rush de-
scribing many details about The Prosperos Society, which she, her lover Sandoz,
Lyon and Martin, and a number of other early gay leaders in California joined.
In 2002, no other DOB narrators were as willing as she was to discuss the group,
which was led by Thane Walker, a charismatic teacher who claimed to have stud-
ied with Gurdjieff. Prosperos emphasized group and individual empowerment
exercises that would lead to self-love and knowledge; Prosperos teachers and
mentors believed that all people combined both masculine and feminine en-
ergies and that through special exercises and the study of spiritual archetypes,
people could release repressed emotions and heal themselves from self-doubt,
guilt, and despair. In the early 1960s, before both the creation of alternative gay
religious institutions like the Metropolitan Community Church and the recog-
nition by mainstream religions of the importance of ministering to gay people,
The Prosperos Society provided a sanctuary for some Daughters; in hindsight,
however, some of them treated it as somewhat of an embarrassment. Rush’s
longtime involvement in the group did not blind her to some of its problems,
although the ways she initially described her search for spiritual answers were
bound up both with her strong ties to her mother and with the devastating
breakup of the love affair that launched her into homophile activism.
Rush continued her involvement with Prosperos until the early years of the
twenty-first century. It was as significant to her as her years of gay activism and
thus formed an integral part of her narrative. Yet, again, without a methodology
that allowed for her sometimes surprising conversational turns and the unex-
pected spins of her particular storytelling choreography, many of Stella Rush’s
most closely held secrets would not have been shared. The “implicit social con-
tract” that was established in the interview process was validated not only by her
informed consent but also by an understanding that we were engaged in a joint
project.12 But bridging the inherent power relations between researcher and nar-
rator to build the trust such engagement relied on required creativity and new
methods.
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 217

Using nontraditional methods as an oral historian usually means climbing

out of the archives, temporarily setting aside the secondary literature, and con-
fronting the fear of interviewing real live people and forming close relationships
with some of them. It means facing all the concomitant challenges such
“asymmetrical interactions”13 inevitably pose, including illness and death. The
exultation of excavating intimate memories is, as Horacio Roque Ramírez has
expressed, “intermittently at odds with the sadness, anger, and fear over the con-
tent of those memories.”14 Yet queer historians must be prepared to face the pain
as well as the pleasure that comes from probing into our narrators’ psyches and
sexual experiences.
Writing about her oral history interviews with women and men who had
been part of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) in New York in the
early years of the pandemic, Ann Cvetkovich foregrounds the intersections
between trauma and activism. She reminds us that, as queer historians, we
“grapple with the ways sexual trauma and queer trauma can be relegated to in-
visibility by distinctions between private and public trauma, often a gendered
distinction, and by structures of homophobia.” Her work is especially insightful
for oral historians who must take into account “this nexus of mourning and
militancy” that frames activist work against “systems of violence, oppression,
and exploitation.” Further, as was true for many Daughters, the narrative of or-
ganizing against AIDS “is a story of activism structured around the intensity of
friendship—a friendship that combines romance and collective work. These are
intimacies shot through with longing and loss, and they are the foundation of
activism’s affective power.”15
The experiences of homophile activists of the 1950s are refracted through the
cultural complexities of early Cold War America, a complex time of paranoia
and persecution. It also was a period of possibilities, when challenges to the
status quo were mounting. Yet for lesbians and gay men, whose emotional
desires were deemed pathological, their sexuality classified as diseased, it is not
unusual to hear the echoes of trauma in the stories they tell, in the spaces
between the shared erotic secrets and pleasures. Although their experiences were
not, and could not have been, the same as those waged by AIDS activists thirty
years later, what is similar for both groups is the linkage of sexual trauma and
queer trauma. Both forms of organizing were necessitated by the enforced
trauma of invisibility. “One of the hardships faced by gay men in the 1980s was
the lack of public attention to the deaths and losses of AIDS because of the ho-
mophobic dismissal of those who were not seen as innocent or average citizens.
Traditional forms of mourning were often denied, compounding the trauma of
loss, or funerals kept the dead closeted, erasing the grief of lovers and friends,”
wrote Cvetkovich. However, in sorrow and angry defiance, Cvetkovich reminds
us, “Gay communities also reinvented rituals of mourning, producing new
forms of public funerals that incorporated sexuality and camp.” Mourning was
turned into militancy, and a new form of queer activism was created.16
218 | POLITICS

These insights are crucial to incorporate into our experiences of oral history.
Reliance on a mixed methodology may be instinctive as well as informed for
many of today’s historians of sexuality, who can draw from feminism and social
history, as well as queer theory. Further, it is customary in oral history practice to
include methods such as meeting narrators where they are, literally and figura-
tively, whether the setting is living rooms and kitchens, a restaurant or bar, or a
quiet corner in an assisted living facility. There also seems to be a shared recog-
nition that some of the best stories often come when the recorder is turned off
and a more relaxed atmosphere encourages reflection. What is less acknowl-
edged is that, sometimes, the memories that an intimate setting can bring for-
ward—of former lovers, lost friends, and still-fresh emotional wounds—bring
nervous laughter, long-suppressed tears, or tense silences. How these wounds are
treated is crucial not only to the success of the interview but also to the integrity
of the experience.
The ability to create the space for intimacy within the context of queer oral
history is as important as any other methodological practice. As feminist oral
historians noted in 1987, “If we see rich potential in the language people use to
describe their daily activities, then we have to take advantage of the opportu-
nity to let them tell us what that language means.”17 Such an imperative is even
more compelling when encouraging narrators to share deeply felt, and often
closely guarded, erotic and emotional secrets. In recording and interpreting the
experiences of some of the first American women to publicly affirm their love
for other women, it has been essential for researchers to establish a strong
bond of trust and to check their presumptions about the nature of sexual iden-
tity, love, and loss. Narrators like Stella Rush, who saw themselves as lifelong
sexual outlaws regardless of their racial, socioeconomic, or citizenship status,
will reward those researchers with whom they can “dance”: who pay attention
“to the vernacular and to the mundane patterns of life,” and who give credence
to those stories that go beyond the standard tropes of contemporary sexual
identity and experience.18

Notes
1. As always, I am grateful to Stella Rush for sharing her life stories, and to my partner Ann
Cammett for sharing her life. My thanks also go to Nan Alamilla Boyd and to Horacio
Roque Ramírez: it is a privilege to have worked with both of them. Further, I acknowledge
the contributions of my colleagues and graduate students at UNLV, particularly those whose
incisive questions and comments during our “Oral History: Theory and Practice” classes
have helped me concretize the notion of “verbal choreography.”
2. Stella Rush, Westminster, CA; interview transcripts in author’s personal files. My conversa-
tions with Stella—as well as interviews and e-mails of varying lengths with nearly three
dozen other former DOB activists I communicated with from 2002 to 2006—formed the
basis for Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian
Rights Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006; Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2007). Transcripts are
being readied for deposit at community-based LGBT archives throughout the country.
3. For primary sources on the Daughters of Bilitis, see Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/
Woman (New York: Bantam, 1972); Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker, eds., The Gay Crusaders
 DANCING WITH S TELL A | 219

(New York: Paperback Library, 1972); Vern Bullough, ed., Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay
and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (New York: Haworth, 2002).
4. Rush interview, March 27, 2002.
5. Rush interview, May 21, 2002.
6. Phyllis Lyon, San Francisco, CA, May 15, 2002; interview transcript in author’s personal files.
7. Gesa E. Kirsch, “Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork,” Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society 30, No. 4 (2005): 2164.
8. In addition to extensive archival research, there were many conversations, interviews, and
e-mails with five primary narrators: Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Barbara Gittings and Kay
Tobin Lahusen, and Stella Rush. Not only were they always willing to verify other members’
accounts of events, correct mistakes, and clarify interpretations but also each offered dif-
ferent perspectives on the development and growth of the organization, as well as the rea-
sons for its demise.
9. Kirsch, “Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork,” 2164.
10. Judith Saunders in Bullough, Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical
Context, 138.
11. Ibid.; Rush interview, November 17, 2002.
12. Kirsch, “Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork,” 2164.
13. Ibid., 2165.
14. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “My Community, My History, My Practice,” Oral History Review
29, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2002): 88.
15. Ann Cvetkovich, “AIDS Activism and the Oral History Archive,” The Scholar and Feminist
Online 2, no. 1 (Summer 2003): www.barnard.edu/sfonline.
16. Ibid.
17. Kathryn Anderson, Susan Armitage, Dana Jack, and Judith Wittner, “Beginning Where We
Are: Feminist Methodology in Oral History,” Oral History Review 15 (Spring 1987): 111.
18. Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Who Is the Subject”: Queer Theory Meets Oral History,” Journal of the
History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (May 2008): 186.
12 “YOU COULD ARGUE
T H AT T H E Y C O N T R O L
POWER”
Politics and Interviewing across Sexualities
Martin Meeker

Oral history by Martin Meeker with Quentin Kopp, San Mateo, California,
April 16 and 17, 2007

Quentin Kopp is a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, an elected
member of the California State Senate, and a judge for San Mateo County Superior
Court. The interview that follows focuses on Kopp’s years in San Francisco politics and
his observations on the changing political landscape in that city. The interview demon-
strates how oral history can be a powerful tool to help establish new perspectives on the
queer past—in particular, demonstrating what can be gained by interviewing across
lines of sexuality (that is, gay interviewing straight) and across lines of political ideas
and policy positions. The interview with Kopp not only adds important factual informa-
tion to the well-rehearsed narrative of gay political achievement but also forces a recon-
sideration of some of the most foundational mythologies of the gay movement in San
Francisco. In one particularly revealing exchange, Kopp paints a fascinating portrait of
Harvey Milk, the politician who was assassinated in 1978. Kopp’s description should
help historians add complexity to the dominant image of Milk as a martyr and a gay
liberationist by contributing a more robust picture of him as a politician, with all that
word implies.

MARTIN MEEKER: The San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which was cre-
ated in ’64, was charged with enforcing local antidiscrimination laws in
housing and employment dealing primarily with race-based discrimination.
In April ’72, the Board of Supervisors voted to add sexual orientation to the
nondiscrimination ordinance. Do you recall that coming up?
QUENTIN KOPP: No. I don’t even know how I voted. Do you know?
MEEKER: No, I don’t know. I was going to ask you! [laughter]
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 221

KOPP: I’d be interested to know how I voted. [Upon reviewing the transcript,
Kopp added the following note: “I did vote for it.”]
MEEKER: I’d like to know your perspective on why this legislation was able to be
passed?
KOPP: Probably pressure, lobbying from gays—
MEEKER: So who would be lobbying, individuals or groups?
KOPP: Individuals, people I’d become friends with or at least acquaintances who
I’d see around City Hall.
MEEKER: Do you remember any of those people?
KOPP: Gosh, I don’t now. I remember there’s a fellow who had a shoe store on
Market, Larry, and I can’t remember his name. I don’t see him in town now.
So that group has become more strident than it was.
MEEKER: Meaning?
KOPP: Well, there are more, and they occupy positions in power throughout San
Francisco government. In fact, people argue, and you could argue, that they
control power. But these were earnest people, they were active in SIR [Society
for Individual Rights, a gay rights organization]. I met Harvey Milk, for ex-
ample, I think in 1975, because he ran for supervisor and I’d see him on the
stump. And I just can’t remember the names now.
MEEKER: I found your discussion of Harvey Milk in your previous interview in-
teresting because the way that he’s usually written about in literature is more
in a heroic sense, right? But you didn’t talk about him either as a hero or a
villain, but merely as a politician.1
KOPP: Oh, he was. He was as good a finagler as you could imagine, and he would
devote full-time to finagling. I don’t know what the camera shop brought in,
although that’s become legendary, but he was some finagler! And in ’75, he’d
get up and make speeches, and he’d say something that wasn’t right! And I
can remember at least once in the Mission District pulling him aside. I’d say,
“Look, that’s not correct! Here’s what is correct!”
MEEKER: Do you remember what that was about?
KOPP: I don’t remember the issue or the problem. I knew he’s no threat to me as
a candidate, he’s not going to come close to finishing number one [in the at-
large election for the Board of Supervisors], but he was a good schmoozer.
When I think now of what I did in ’76 for him, and then I’ll bring us up to ’77
with him, if that’s at all interesting: He ran for the Board of Supervisors in ’75,
and he wasn’t at the tail end. He probably finished around tenth, eleventh.
Well, there were six seats up that year, and it went me first, Molinari second,
Mendelsohn, I think Ron Pelosi finished fourth, and either Terry François or
Bob Gonzalez finished fifth and sixth, respectively. I think Terry finished sixth.
But so Harvey finished whatever, eleventh, tenth, and then so he started
coming around committee hearings. Well then, oh, George Moscone was
elected mayor in 1975, so now it’s going to be a liberal sweep, radical sweep,
and Moscone appoints Harvey to the Board of Permit Appeals.
222 | POLITICS

MEEKER: That’s a choice commission appointment?

KOPP: Yeah, that’s a strong commission, because you hear appeals from every-
thing, building permits, this, that, the other. So then in ’76, George is out of
the State Senate, so John Foran is going to run for the State Senate [Moscone’s
former seat]. And the Burtons [Phil and John] really had nobody for that
election, because it picked up a part of San Mateo County already by 1970 in
that reapportionment, and I remember there were a couple of people inter-
ested. Bill Schumacher was on the Daly City Council, I think he ran. But
Foran then vacates his Assembly seat, and Harvey Milk announces he will run
for that Assembly seat against Art Agnos. But George Moscone and Leo McCar-
thy must have cut a deal like this: okay, John Foran moves to the Senate, and
that’s what they did, sure, because Agnos was McCarthy’s chief of staff. That’s
what they did, and then Agnos would be elected to the Assembly.
MEEKER: So wait, spell that out for me. What was the deal you think that
happened?
KOPP: Well, the deal is this: George Moscone is elected mayor, he then vacates
the Senate seat. Foran was in the Assembly. And Foran vacates the Assembly
seat, and then Agnos moves into the Assembly. Well, Harvey Milk wants to
run for the same Assembly seat and says so. As a result George Moscone an-
nounces publicly that if Milk runs for the Assembly, he will be taken off the
Board of Permit Appeals as punishment. The appointment term was four
years, but it was not a fixed term, you could be yanked at will. So Moscone
threatened to yank Milk from the Board of Permit Appeals.
I made a public statement that it’s outrageous the mayor would do this—
the policy position was that it would be a conflict to have somebody running
for office while sitting on this commission. So then Milk files his candidacy
for the Assembly, and Moscone promptly fires him, and I promptly endorse
Milk against Agnos and helped him.
MEEKER: Then what were the politics, if you will, behind your endorsement of
him?
KOPP: It was 50 percent indignation over treating the guy that way, and maybe
another 50 percent with Leo McCarthy, because Leo and I were estranged, and
that began in his ’65 campaign when he lost to Moscone. I lost enthusiasm for
that campaign because of Leo’s personality, and he never tried to help me po-
litically. When I ran in ’71, for example, George was by then associated with the
Hanson Bridget Law Office, and I went to see George. You try to get everyone’s
endorsement, and George was friendly, and George had carried a bill to help
my father, and I knew George as a young lawyer and he was always a good guy
to be with, in North Beach or elsewhere. So here was a deal which Leo had
arranged, obviously, with George and the Burtons. So 50 percent of my en-
dorsement of Milk was attributable to not part of either. I’m not part of Burton/
Moscone/Brown, I’m not part of Leo McCarthy or John Foran, for that matter,
and in later years, all of that was mended. But in any event, I endorsed Milk. He
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 223

Quentin Kopp (left) campaigning for Harvey Milk during his run for the California
State Assembly, with labor leader Jack Goldberg (right), at San Francisco’s Wharfside
Restaurant, May 8, 1976. Photograph by McLeod, San Francisco Examiner Photographic
Collection, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

came close; I was with him election night, for example. He came close to pre-
vailing. So then he runs once they get this district election, 1977 in the fall.
MEEKER: Can we hold, pause there for a second? And get you to discuss the 50
percent motivation that was contra-Moscone?
KOPP: Yeah, the Burton machine, it was a collective machine to me.
MEEKER: Well then, there are push and pull factors in everything, and it seems
like might there also have been a motivation that Milk represented a new
voting constituency in San Francisco and that you were seeking those votes?
KOPP: There might have been, but I don’t remember. I remember Leo and I being
on the outs. I’d had experience with Agnos. Now I remember him, and Richie
Ross, who humiliated me out in the Bayview one night in 1975, and I was car-
rying water for Feinstein who was president of the board, and I was chairman
of the Health Committee. It was the sewers service project. I remembered
Agnos pretty good, and to this day I don’t know why Leo ever embraced him,
as a friend of mine observed, “A great mistake in judgment.”
MEEKER: So with supporting Milk, it was more a case of “the enemy of your
enemy is your friend”?
KOPP: Yeah, and then half of it was the principle. Milk shouldn’t have been fired.
So now we get to district elections in the fall of ’77—we didn’t pay enough
attention to that district election initiative, we being Barbagelata, Feinstein,
me, Molinari, so it passed.
224 | POLITICS

MEEKER: Well, it had been on the ballot before and been defeated, yes?
KOPP: Yeah, in ’72 it had been on the ballot. In fact, there were three different
versions. Voters rejected them all. Ron Pelosi played a part in at least one of
them, and so did John Barbagelata and I.
MEEKER: You were opposed to it in ’76.
KOPP: Yeah.
MEEKER: Why?
KOPP: Because we knew who was behind it, and who would come with it.
MEEKER: And who was that?
KOPP: The Community Congress, Calvin Welch, Nancy Walker. I can’t remember
all the names. Jeez, I’ll come back to them.
MEEKER: What was the Community Congress?
KOPP: Well, you got to look that up in history. They began meeting around I
think ’72. Take a look at the Bay Guardian’s old files, they covered them. And
they came out of that Alvin Duskin movement, anti–downtown develop-
ment. Sue Hester was in it. I think Arnold Townsend was, too; he’s a minister
now and has been for a number of years. I think Harvey Milk was part of it. So
we knew what it meant, you were going to get radicals on the Board of Super-
visors, and we did! We sure did!
MEEKER: Then when he ran in ’77, did you endorse him?
KOPP: No, because the only supervisor I ever endorsed was Barbagelata in ’73
against Feinstein.
MEEKER: And you must have run again in ’77. Everyone had to, right?2
KOPP: Yeah, I ran, and I was unopposed, so that’s another story. And so I got
about 22,000 votes, which was the highest. Everyone else had opponents, in-
cluding Feinstein, which leads to another story, and she got about 10,000.
Dan White got 5,000, and Harvey probably didn’t get much more, because
there were about five candidates in his district. Terence Hallinan ran, Bob St.
Clair ran. I’ve forgotten who else. Oh, there was a lawyer, a gay lawyer. What
was his name? Rick something.
MEEKER: Stokes?
KOPP: Stokes.
MEEKER: He ran, too.
KOPP: Yeah, he ran. So two nights after the 1977 supervisor election, we were up
on Grant in North Beach. La Pantera was the restaurant, and they had kind of
a street closing. Anyway, I got sick, and I wound up with appendicitis, it got
infected, and I was in the hospital almost two weeks. And that’s when Fein-
stein started putting together the votes to be president, even though I’m sup-
posed to be president on the board.3
But let’s forget that for a minute. She would bug me to come up and visit
me, and I didn’t want to listen to her. But Harvey came up to the hospital, and
I let him, and he was already wheeling and dealing about the president this
and that, and who was going to be board president. To shorten the story, John
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 225

Barbagelata had an idea that I cut a deal with Feinstein, and he would play on
her emotions by saying she’d been rejected by her party twice, ’71, ’75: “You
don’t think the Burtons were going to let you be Mayor, do you?” ’71, ’75: And
she had tried in ’76 to get a job under [President] Carter. I’d written a three
page letter for her. I wonder where that letter is, it must be in the National
Archives. Oh, God! [laughter] Feinstein was bereft of any political future, so
Barbagelata would play on her emotions so she’d endorse me for mayor
against Moscone [in the next election year, 1979], and in the meantime I’d let
her be president of the board. While I was in the hospital, and then home
another two weeks recuperating, she got this Dan White, if you can believe it,
she got him.
MEEKER: How so? What do you mean by that?
KOPP: She got his support. She lined up his vote.
MEEKER: To be president?
KOPP: Yes. So then John Barbagelata gets this meeting after I could get around,
with Nelder, François, John, her, and me, and the deal is that she promises to
endorse me for mayor in the 1979 election, and I promise to support her to
be president of the Board of Supervisors, which probably means bringing in
Lee Dolson, Ron Pelosi, and Bob Gonzalez. She’d already pretty much had
Molinari. The lefties wouldn’t vote for me, meaning Ella Hill Hutch, Harvey
Milk, Gordon Lau—
MEEKER: Carol Ruth Silver.
KOPP: Carol Ruth Silver. But the others would. Those who came from the old
board would all vote for me, and Lee Dolson would, and Dan White would,
too.
MEEKER: What, then, happened between ’76 and ’77, when you were endorsing
Milk, and then ’77 when he wouldn’t vote for you for president, even though
you were the top vote getter?
KOPP: Well, nothing as such happened. Harvey was an operator. I remember I
endorsed White. I endorsed two candidates in whatever that district was,
because I remember one was a Palestinian, Waddie Ayoob, who I knew from
hanging around the old deli out there, just hanging around San Bruno Avenue.
So I endorse two or maybe three candidates. There was a woman who I liked
who had been around City Hall. And I think I may have endorsed two in an-
other district. But I didn’t endorse in Milk’s race because Bob St. Clair by then
was a friend of mine. There was a woman, I’m trying to think of her name,
who was nice. She later ran for treasurer. Clint Reilly put her up to it, and she
put herself in hock with the mortgage—thank you, Clint—and lost, got blown
out! [laughter] So I endorsed maybe in two, three districts. Anyway, whatever
it was, I let Harvey come over to the hospital, and he’s talking, he’s wheeling
and dealing, all that stuff.
Anyway, to bring it on home, Dan White had only one issue. That was to
stop Mount St. Joseph’s, up there on University Mound in the Portola, from
226 | POLITICS

being turned into a home for delinquent children. It was a home for unmar-
ried mothers that the Catholic Church ran [University Mound Ladies Home],
but there were fewer and fewer unmarried mothers, right, with birth control
and everything. Feinstein promised that day of the vote, the endorsement
would be by April first. So now she’s the president, and now this Mount St.
Joseph issue comes to us.4 I’ve forgotten how it got to us, maybe it was a rezon-
ing ordinance of some kind. And, of course, Dan White loses, and Harvey
Milk votes no [thus allowing the property to be rezoned in favor of the youth
facility]. And Harvey had probably dangled White into thinking he might vote
against the rezoning [instead Milk voted for it]. Feinstein voted against it, and
I voted against it, and Dan White, maybe Lee Dolson, and that was it. Dan
White got wiped out. I remember White came across—he sat on the other
side, he came over to my chair, and he says, “You’re right, the leopard never
changes his spots.” Because I told him, “Milk isn’t going to vote for this. He
can’t! He’s liberal/radical!” That was Harvey. And then after that, Harvey was
always wheeling, dealing with this, that, and the other thing. The pooper-
scooper ordinance, which was fine, but who the heck cares? It’s not going
to change the world, but it got him a lot of press. Oh, he was a shrewdie. He
was a shrewdie political wheeler-dealer. The problem was you got a nut on the
board. His name is Dan White, and there was always something about him in
his eyes. He came down to me in that campaign, and came down to my law
office to get my endorsement, and I did eventually endorse him. But there was
something that was strange about him. And, of course, I knew people, friends
of mine had gone to high school with him—it was predominantly black even
then—and he’d get in fights, and he was just crazed. And Barbagelata had the
same sensation of him. John was no longer on the board, he’d have nothing
to do with district elections, thought he was “off,” too. And then, of course,
what added to it was White playing footsie with Feinstein. He had no business
from a political philosophy standpoint being with her, so it made him sus-
pect, and it caught up with Harvey. That’s why he killed him, because Harvey
had lied to him, probably, or if he hadn’t lied, he’d misled him to such an
extent. And then Dan White works up all this. He sees the voting patterns, he
sees how Harvey votes, and it caught up with him. I’m not condoning it, in
case anybody looks at it, but that’s what happened. It’s like what happened at
Virginia Tech yesterday.5 You get people who are crazed, right? Who would
ever think that someone would bring a gun into City Hall!6

Commentary

The history of sexuality is regarded by many as an oppositional history, and

lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender oral history even more so. For those
among us who conduct interviews with lesbians and gay men, not only do we
hear stories of discrimination and resistance but also we expect to hear those
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 227

stories. After all, for a lesbian or gay man to have lived through and even thrived
in decades past, especially in the decades before Stonewall, her or his life
becomes an act of bravery in itself. And while historians may disagree with some
of the opinions or political positions we hear expressed by our interviewees, we
tend to see these individuals in a heroic light. This approach has produced many
important interviews and a large number of path-breaking works of scholarship.
It has enabled historians to uncover long-forgotten forms of resistance among a
group of people who appear in the historical record—to the extent that they
appear at all—primarily as victims: victims of police raids on bars, purges in the
military, and defamation on the newsstand. Yet, this approach of interviewing
gay male and lesbian elders in a quest for heroes has produced myths and meta-
narratives that, while based in fact and containing truth, provide yet only part of
the story.
Oral historians seeking to gain new insights into the history of sexuality are
only now on the verge of making the most of this methodology. Oral history can
be a powerful tool in moving beyond the static discrimination-resistance para-
digm, and much insight can be gained by interviewing across lines of sexuality
(that is, gay interviewing straight) and across lines of political ideas and policy
positions. For instance, the interview I conducted with San Francisco politician
Quentin Kopp in 2007 explores a number of issues related to the formation of a
gay and lesbian political bloc between the 1960s and 1980s. Kopp’s responses not
only add important factual information to the well-rehearsed narrative of gay
political achievement but also force a reconsideration of some of the most foun-
dational mythologies of the gay movement in San Francisco. In one particularly
revealing exchange, Kopp paints a fascinating portrait of Harvey Milk as a hard-
nosed politician adept at the art of horse-trading and quite the opposite of the
dominant image of Milk as a grassroots activist solely concerned with giving his
people hope.
My interview with Kopp was conducted over two consecutive days in the
spring of 2007 and took place in the judicial chambers of the San Mateo County
Courthouse, where Kopp has served as a judge since 1999. The interview ran for
about four hours, and the finished transcript was nearly 25,000 words; the por-
tion of the transcript included here is not quite 3,000 words. The interview was
conducted as part of an ongoing, albeit intermittent, interview-based research
project on the development of minority-based politics and political constitu-
encies in San Francisco between the 1960s and 1990s. The project began with a
series of eight interviews examining the history of the San Francisco Human
Rights Commission (HRC).
Founded at the height of liberal civil rights activism in 1964, the HRC was
the city commission charged with enforcing municipal fair employment and
housing ordinances. The commission initially addressed the problem of
black-white inequality in the city, but its work soon expanded to become the
site at which groups seeking protection from discrimination would go to have
228 | POLITICS

their voices heard. These meetings witnessed some of the first proposals for
antidiscrimination legislation in the United States designed to protect homo-
sexuals. In conducting interviews with former commissioners and staff mem-
bers, it became obvious that it was impossible to examine the work of the
HRC in isolation from social movement activists, politicians, and bureaucrats.
After all, it was often the activists who brought new or persistent issues before
the commission, bureaucrats who administered the public policy implica-
tions, and politicians who engineered the city’s response, or lack thereof, to
the problems raised. So, I began to widen my net and seek interviews with
others active in San Francisco’s civic sphere.
Because I was particularly interested in the 1972 inclusion of sexual orienta-
tion as a protected category in San Francisco’s municipal administrative code
(under the same chapter that created the HRC), I sought to interview the politi-
cians who carried that legislation to passage: Terry François and Quentin Kopp,
then both members of the city Board of Supervisors. François had died in 1989,
never having been interviewed on the subject. Kopp, on the other hand, was still
alive and already the subject of a long and substantive life history interview
conducted by the California State Archives, which nevertheless did not touch on
this particular topic.7 I resolved to interview Kopp about it. But Kopp is a
complex historical figure, and my desire to interview him hinged not only on his
role as a gay rights pioneer but also on my prior knowledge that he was widely
reviled by San Francisco’s gay community because of his reputation as an anti-
gay conservative.8 Kopp, then, seemed to me a key and necessary witness to the
transformation of politics not because he was another gay hero but because he
probably had lost rather than gained status as result of the ascendancy of a gay
power bloc in San Francisco. In a 2001 interview, Kopp acknowledged as much:
“I was running for reelection to the board of supervisors [in 1984]. That was the
most disappointing election of my career, because not only didn’t I run number
one . . .but I ran number three. . . . I’d put a lot into it, campaigned hard, but the
demographics of the city were ever changing. I made a couple of utterances to
the press that were used against me, one on the gay parade for a reporter with
the New York Times.”9 In my interview with Kopp six years later, he was more
pointed in explaining his declining political fortunes: “[Gays] occupy positions
in power throughout San Francisco government. In fact, people argue, and you
could argue, that they control power.” Despite his advocacy of gay rights early in
his career, then, Kopp might be expected to provide a fresh, idiosyncratic view of
gay politics that a politician or bureaucrat who gained power in the context of
gay political achievements from the 1970s onward would not offer.
Quentin Kopp was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1928 to a middle-class Jew-
ish family: his father owned a drugstore, and his mother was a homemaker.
After attending Cornell as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School,
Kopp moved to California by late 1955 to start his career as an attorney. Like
many young lawyers seeking to establish themselves and build connections
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 229

among local politicians and businessmen, Kopp began to participate in local

politics. The first campaign on which he worked was the successful run by Dem-
ocrat Stanley Mosk for California attorney general in 1958, a historic election in
which Democrats swept candidates into most statewide offices, including gover-
nor (Edmund Brown). Democrats also won majorities in both houses of the
state legislature for the first time since 1891.
Many today view the 1958 election as a turning point in California politics that
established the Democrats as the party of urban liberals, while the Republicans
became identified with suburban conservatives.10 But the rise of a newly powerful
Democratic party in California also brought about a new generation of leaders
who nurtured competing power bases that subscribed to sometimes wildly dif-
ferent political positions. In San Francisco, for example, a generational and ideo-
logical battle was being waged between those Kopp described as “conservative,”
former New Deal Democrats and the upstart liberal politicos who gathered
around Phil Burton, a towering figure in San Francisco politics first elected to the
California Assembly in 1956. Kopp’s place in this knotty mix of personalities, al-
legiances, and positions was complicated. In San Francisco, Kopp never fit within
the Burton camp, and, after the 1958 election, he banded together with a small
group of what might be called moderate Democrats, including, among others,
Ron Pelosi, Leo McCarthy, Eugene McAteer, and John Foran. This group quickly
established itself as the alternative to the more liberal wing of the party that coa-
lesced around Burton. In Democratic primary after primary, Kopp’s group
squared off against “the Burton machine,” and they split victories: George
Moscone emerged victorious in 1966 in his state senate campaign against Leo
McCarthy, but then Leo McCarthy beat out a Burton-sponsored candidate in 1968
for a seat in the California Assembly. By 1968, however, Kopp was estranged from
both the Burton and McCarthy camps and thus started to blaze his own path.
During the 1960s, Quentin Kopp was a bit player in San Francisco’s political
contests, but he ran successfully for election to the Board of Supervisors in 1971.
He won a seat in that body but with something less than a clear mandate: he
came in sixth in an election in which the six top vote getters won seats on the
board. Shortly into his first term as supervisor, in spring 1972, Kopp did some-
thing that in retrospect appears surprising. He cosponsored legislation to add
sex and sexual orientation to the city’s antidiscrimination ordinance. And this is
where the section of the interview transcript included here begins. During
Kopp’s tenure on the Board of Supervisors, through 1986, he was one of its most
prominent and visible members; he also was rightly regarded as one of the more
conservative yet idiosyncratic members. In his 1975 reelection bid, Kopp gar-
nered the most votes and thus, by tradition, was elected president of the Board
of Supervisors. He then opposed the movement by neighborhood activists to
switch supervisor elections from citywide and at-large to district elections; he
and his colleagues won the first referendum on this, but lost when it came up
again in 1976, thus paving the way for Board of Supervisors district elections in
230 | POLITICS

1977. The 1977 elections ushered in a new group of supervisors, including Harvey
Milk and Dan White, Milk’s future assassin, who were more attuned to neigh-
borhood interests.
The 1977 supervisory election was important for reasons other than, but still
related to, the election of Milk and White. With the beginning of district elec-
tions in the city, all eleven city supervisors would have to stand for election in
1977.11 Many of the veteran supervisors decided not to run again in 1977, given the
changed circumstances, but Kopp was not among them. Instead, he was the sole
candidate in the 1977 election who ran unopposed in his district, thus he gar-
nered nearly twice as many votes as the next nearest district victor, Dianne Fein-
stein. Tradition, but not law, provided that the candidate who received the
largest number of votes would be elected board president. But with the election
of many first-time candidates who were selected on the basis of neighborhood
commitments rather than long-nurtured political connections, the rules of the
game had apparently changed. Kopp explained that after some election night
joviality he was rushed to the hospital for abdominal pain. It turned out he had
appendicitis, which put him out of commission for several days. Just as he was
recovering and planning his return to the field and postelection maneuvering,
he came down with a postoperation infection and thus needed additional sur-
gery. By the time he finally was released from the hospital, it became clear that
others were positioning themselves to be elected board president, chief among
them Dianne Feinstein and Gordon Lau.
As a result of an oft-repeated but little-documented political compromise,
Kopp opted out of the competition for the board presidency and instead sup-
ported his sometime rival Feinstein. According to Kopp, he approached Fein-
stein with an offer: in exchange for his support of Feinstein’s run for board
president, Feinstein would agree to not run for mayor in 1979 (she had previ-
ously run in 1975) and instead support Kopp in his bid for mayor in that election.
If the deal in fact happened, it is one that would come to haunt Kopp for the
remainder of his career in politics, for it probably marked both the high-water
mark in his political influence and the moment at which his fortunes began to
recede. What transpired over the next two years not only pushed Kopp to the
margins politically but also forever changed the landscape of politics in San
Francisco—and affected politics nationwide.
Early in the first terms of Harvey Milk and Dan White, a zoning question came
before the Board of Supervisors that was a key item on White’s agenda. According
to oral accounts, Milk apparently hedged his bets and left White with the impres-
sion that he would vote along with White. But when the question came up for a
vote, Milk voted with the majority in favor of rezoning, thus voting against
White. Shortly thereafter, White resigned his seat on the board. The mayor ac-
cepted his resignation, but ten days later White, feeling pressure from those who
elected him in the first place, sought to rescind his resignation. After some con-
sideration, the mayor refused, and White was out. Almost immediately, White
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 231

returned to City Hall, but this time to exact revenge on the two officials he felt
had wronged him: Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk. Using a revolver, which
he reloaded several times, White assassinated each man in his office, then
escaped. Later that evening, on the steps of City Hall, Supervisor Feinstein an-
nounced to the world that the mayor and the supervisor had been killed and that
the chief suspect was White. Precisely one week later, Feinstein was named mayor
of San Francisco by vote of the Board of Supervisors.12
In the face of two political assassinations, an account of the fate of a single
politician’s career may seem irrelevant and insensitive, but the impact of these
events on Kopp and the constituency he represented was important. With Fein-
stein’s ascension to the mayoralty in late 1978, she became well positioned to run
for that office in the upcoming 1979 election. But if Kopp is to be believed, Fein-
stein already had agreed not to run for mayor that year and to, instead, endorse
Kopp. Tragic circumstances had changed that arrangement, though, and besides,
backroom deals were necessarily unofficial and unenforceable, even if they were
the lifeblood of city politics. So, while Kopp ran a vigorous campaign for mayor
in 1979, he finished second to Feinstein, who went on to become the longest
serving mayor in the city’s history before moving to the national stage with her
election to the U.S. Senate in 1992.13
Much of Quentin Kopp’s political biography can be gleaned from published
sources. While I was certainly interested in learning more about what Kopp
thought were memorable aspects of his political life, then, I sought him out for
a different purpose: I wanted to interview him because he seemed to me the San
Francisco politician who lost the most with the rise of a gay political constitu-
ency in the city. I hoped to discover through the interview if Kopp concurred
with this notion. I wanted to capture his explanation for these changes, and I
looked to gain insight into the career of a politician who went from a supporter
of gay rights in 1972 to, within a few years, a figure reviled by the very gay com-
munity who benefited from his legislation.
Given Kopp’s complex historical relationship with the gay community, I pre-
sented my project to him in the broadest frame possible while still being true to
my research goals. I invited him to participate in a project on politics in San
Francisco history that would “focus on the politics of minority group political
constituencies and their influence upon policies, appointments, and elections
from the middle 1960s into the 1990s.” I also told him that I had read his long
interview conducted under the auspices of the California State Archive and that
I wanted to ask in-depth follow-up questions and to raise a few issues not cov-
ered in that interview. In all of these goals, I was honest and forthcoming. I did,
however, omit a few things. I did not mention that my main research interest
was in the development of gay political constituencies, that most of my publica-
tions are in the field of gay and lesbian history, and that I myself am gay. I had
no interest in deceiving someone who generously donated time and energy to
my project, but I also felt that if I communicated all the details I may have
232 | POLITICS

primed Kopp to respond in a certain manner. In particular, I was afraid that if he

knew more about me or my research agenda, he might bow to social convention
and provide banal or polite answers to questions about the gay electorate—or
perhaps answer no questions at all. Instead, I wanted Kopp to be frank, to be the
independent voice for which he has become so well known. Of course, Kopp
could have easily searched my name on the Internet, had he thought my back-
ground or specific interests relevant to the interview—and while I suspect that
he did nothing of the sort, I cannot tell for sure. In interviewing Kopp about the
rise of the gay electorate, I wanted to present myself as nothing more than the
inquisitive historian, interested in the arcane people and events of California’s
political history. And while I make no claims that I got the “truth” out of Kopp,
I do think that he provided an interesting and provocative outsider’s perspective
on the emergence of gay politics in the 1970s.
I did not bring up the question of the gay electorate until near the end of the
second hour of the interview.14 And I eased our way into the topic, asking him
about civil rights activism and the creation of the San Francisco Human Rights
Commission. I pointed out that the work of the commission started to change
in the early 1970s when sexual orientation was included as a protected category.
And while he did not recall how he voted during the course of the interview, he
spoke about San Francisco’s gay community as yet another minority political
constituency. Kopp noted that prior to running for supervisor, he spoke on
behalf on another candidate before the Society for Individual Rights (SIR), San
Francisco’s largest gay organization in the second half of the 1960s. In this and
other sections of the interview, he showed that he did not much like these meet-
ings, which he claimed were attended by people who tended to denounce the
speaker, if they were not outright “fanatics.” But Kopp also emphasized how
attending the meetings of political clubs and other organizations was a key way
in which candidates could reach out to self-defined political constituencies and
attempt to communicate ideas to which the assembled would be especially
receptive.
Appealing to political constituencies was certainly one way in which Kopp
and his colleagues gained access to elected office. But time and again, Kopp
returned to the power of personal and political relationships in explaining the
chances at success or failure for a politician or a piece of legislation. Accounts of
the centrality of personal relationships to politics are especially plentiful in oral
history interviews. The scores of interviews on California politics at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office provide just one
collection of this type. In the complete transcript of my interview with Kopp,
stories of backroom deals to earn endorsements or to sabotage an opponent’s
campaign are abundant. Kopp explains that it was largely due to personal rela-
tionships with gay activists, including SIR leader Larry Littlejohn, that inspired
him to carry the city’s first gay rights legislation. But in the excerpt included here,
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 233

the most interesting account of politics and personal relationships comes by

way of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.
According to Kopp, Milk’s adeptness at deal making and finagling was the
source both of his success and his ultimate demise. The picture that Kopp
painted of Milk was profoundly unlike the image of martyr, saint, and hero that
he gained since his death. It was also substantially different from his reputation
as a grassroots gay activist who, in his most famous speech, implored, “You got
to give them hope!”15 Kopp, in contrast, talked of Milk’s career as a political
narrative, and most certainly not as a story of a prophet or a savior or even a
gutsy gay activist. To Kopp, Milk was first and foremost a politician, and not
much more: he was a politician “on the stump,” a “finagler,” a “schemer,” a
“schmoozer,” an “operator,” and a “shrewdie.” One might quickly dismiss these
characterizations as homophobic or slanderous or, more likely, as easily dis-
counted because they came from the mouth of Quentin Kopp, a man described
more than once as a curmudgeon. And indeed, these are probably accurate ways
to label Kopp’s speech.
But I believe that historians of sexuality, and of gay and lesbian history in
particular, can gain a great deal by paying closer attention to the words of poli-
ticians like Kopp, for they provide an added and I think necessary dimension to
understandings of how homosexuals went from a despised group bereft of any
political power in the 1960s to a group that gained civil protections against dis-
crimination and elected its own representatives to public office in the 1970s.
Much of the current literature on this transformation emphasizes the role of
grassroots activists and social movement organizations.16 And while activism,
street protests, and the gay movement played an undeniable role in the process,
those forces alone cannot explain the massive transformations that occurred.
Personal relationships, political endorsements, backroom deal making, and,
indeed, finagling were instrumental in bringing about the successes of the gay
movement in the 1970s.
Perhaps the most instructive anecdote delivered by Kopp on this account
addresses his endorsement of Milk in his unsuccessful 1976 run for the California
State Assembly. In 1976, Kopp was the president of the Board of Supervisors and
thus one of the most prominent politicians in the city. He also was regarded as
an independent voice who appealed to diverse segments of the electorate, in-
cluding homeowners, civil libertarians, and the sizable minority of San Francis-
cans who disliked and distrusted the Burton political machine. Short of an
endorsement by a leader of that machine, an endorsement by its chief adversary
provided Milk with the best chance to win the Democratic primary and thus the
general election in this heavily Democratic district. But as Kopp makes clear in
my interview with him, his endorsement of Milk had very little, if anything, to
do with his support of Milk the man or his political agenda. Kopp explained the
conditions under which he made his decision:
234 | POLITICS

George [Moscone] is elected mayor [in 1975], he then vacates his [State] Senate seat.
[John] Foran was in the Assembly. And Foran vacates the Assembly seat [to run for
Moscone’s senate seat], and then Agnos [seeks election] to the Assembly. Well,
Harvey Milk wants to run for the same Assembly seat and says so. [As a result]
George Moscone announces publicly that if Milk runs for the Assembly, he will be
taken off the Board of Permit Appeals [as punishment, because Moscone and
Agnos were both part of the Burton political machine]. . . . So [Moscone] threat-
ened to yank him [Milk from the Board of Permit Appeals]. I made a public state-
ment that it’s outrageous the Mayor would do this. . . . So then he [Milk] does file
his candidacy for the Assembly, and Moscone promptly fires him, and I promptly
endorse him [Milk] against Agnos and helped him.17

When asked why he ultimately decided to go with Milk, Kopp responded, “It
was 50 percent indignation over treating the guy that way, and maybe another
50 percent with Leo [McCarthy], because Leo and I were estranged.” I then asked
him if his endorsement was a case of “the enemy of your enemy is your friend,”
and he replied, “Yeah, and then half of it was the principle. [Milk] shouldn’t
have been fired [by Moscone].” Kopp added, “I was with him election night, for
example. He came close to prevailing.” Although Milk did not win this election,
he garnered a substantial portion of the votes cast, as Kopp claimed, and thus
established himself as a legitimate political contender, whereas in his previous
runs for office in 1973 and 1975, he was considered marginal. This new legitimacy,
combined with the transition to district elections in the 1977 supervisory race,
translated into Milk’s first, and only, victory.
Kopp’s account of Milk is a necessary but heretofore absent element of the
larger story about the emergence of a gay electorate in the United States. Kopp’s
anecdotes point to the fact that it took someone, Milk in this case, to actually do
the work of schmoozing, finagling, and scheming as a politician within the
established political order to firmly establish the fact of gay politicians and po-
litical constituencies. In this revised, political narrative of Milk and his career, we
find a man who is motivated by the creation and maintenance of political con-
nections—and who was willing to make deals and trade endorsements with San
Francisco conservatives Quentin Kopp and John Barbagelata. This transcript also
provides insight into the character of Kopp and goes some distance to explain
why a conservative Democrat carried one of the nation’s first gay rights ordi-
nances and became an early supporter of Harvey Milk. But in a larger sense, the
interview sheds light on how gay rights legislation and gay politicians made it
onto the urban political agenda in the early 1970s and on how forging personal
and political relationships was a key—indeed, necessary—factor in casting such
laws and electing such individuals.
Methodologically, as a historian approaching Kopp revealing general (i.e.,
nongay) rather than specific (i.e., gay) interests facilitated the kind of frank
exchange of ideas that in fact transpired. But this is not to say that I consider this
 “ YO U C O U L D A RG U E T H AT T H E Y C O N T RO L P OW E R ” | 235

interview or even this slightly furtive, anonymous approach without pitfalls of

its own. In reviewing the transcript, I was disappointed to discover so many
instances when I failed to ask key follow-up questions or directly probe the rea-
soning behind some of Kopp’s more curious or outlandish statements. I attribute
this partly to the fact that I consider myself merely a student in the field of San
Francisco political history and was not precisely attuned to everything Kopp said
that ran counter to established narratives. But I must also admit that I feared
pushing the question of gay politics too hard out of concern that I would be
seen as an advocate or activist—again, I worried that he might become less than
candid or flatly uncooperative. With Quentin Kopp, this particular interview
strategy paid off.
By bringing the study of gay politics out of the exclusive realm of social
movements, gay and lesbian oral historians gain crucial analytic insights.
Because oral historians engage with living history makers, they create new op-
portunities to view gay political leaders as complex figures, even to the extent
of seeing them as something that many gays have not allowed them to be:
politicians—those who work within the state power structure in the arts of com-
promise, deal making, patronage, and constituent creation and appeasement.
Moreover, just as queer theorists claim that outsiderness is conducive to
making important critical insights into the history of gender and sexuality,
those, such as Quentin Kopp, who look from the outside at queer history can
offer productively disruptive insights into queer history as well. Thus, by inter-
viewing individuals who might not confirm our well-established heroic narra-
tives—figures who may sit well outside our personal comfort zone or political
orbit—queer oral historians become better situated to push the boundaries of
historical discourse beyond those metanarratives that have become comforting
in their power to confirm a surety of right and wrong, just and unjust, liberal
and conservative.

Notes
1. In a separate interview conducted in 2001, Kopp suggests that Harvey Milk attempted to
make a deal with mayoral candidate John Barbagelata in which, it was presumed, Milk
would offer his endorsement of Barbagelata against George Moscone in the mayoral runoff
in exchange for an unspecified commission appointment. According to Kopp, Barbagelata
rebuffed Milk’s overtures. Whether accurate or not, this assertion that Milk would enter into
a pact with archconservative (at least in San Francisco) Barbagelata provides a counterpoint
to images of Milk as a grassroots activists or a martyr to the cause. See Quentin Kopp inter-
viewed by Donald Seney (California State Archives, State Government Oral History Pro-
gram, 2001), 200.
2. With the passage of district elections for the Board of Supervisors in 1976, one result was that
every seat of the board was declared vacant, so incumbents were forced to run again but this
time specifically in the district in which they resided.
3. By tradition, the supervisory candidate who received the most votes in the election would
be named president of the board by his or her colleagues on the board.
4. To clarify, Kopp here argues that Feinstein was able to garner Dan White’s vote for her board
presidency bid in exchange for her support of White’s effort to block the rezoning necessary
to establish the youth facility in his district.
236 | POLITICS

5. This interview was conducted on April 16, 2007, one day after an emotionally disturbed
student shot students and faculty at Virginia Tech University.
6. Quentin Kopp interviewed by Martin Meeker, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft
Library, UC Berkeley, April 17, 2007.
7. See Quentin Kopp interviewed by Donald Seney, California State Archives, State Govern-
ment Oral History Program, 2001.
8. Gay activists point to Kopp’s 1980 quip about lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon
as evidence of his homophobia. On the occasion of their thirtieth anniversary, the Board of
Supervisors voted on a commendation for the women, but when it was Kopp’s turn to vote,
he voted no, adding, “Toleration: yes; glorification: no.” Quentin Kopp interviewed by Don-
ald Seney, California State Archives, State Government Oral History Program, 2001.
9. Ibid.
10. On the 1958 election, see John Jacobs, A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip
Burton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
11. Previously supervisors were elected citywide in odd years, each for four-year terms; for ex-
ample, in 1971, six supervisors were elected; in 1973, five were elected.
12. On the events leading up to the assassinations and the murders specifically, see Randy
Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s,
1982).
13. Throughout the 1970s, while still a registered Democrat, Kopp inched to the right of the
political spectrum in San Francisco. Although he detested Nixon and never voted for Rea-
gan, he also fought against school desegregation busing programs and supported Califor-
nia’s Proposition 13 “tax revolt” initiative in 1978, which is credited with keeping property
taxes low in the state and condemned for defunding public schools. But in liberal San Fran-
cisco, Kopp’s rightward drift did not play so well. After losing to Feinstein in 1979, Kopp was
reelected to the board again in 1980, when the city dispensed with district elections in large
part due to the tragedy of White’s murder of Moscone and Milk, which many saw as attrib-
utable in some way by the excesses of community-based politics. In the 1984 supervisor
election, Kopp’s fortunes sank lower, as he came in third in a field of six elected to the
board. Realizing that he was becoming unelectable on a citywide scale in San Francisco,
Kopp resolved to run for the California State Senate in a district that included the more
conservative western edge of the city but also bedroom communities to the south in San
Mateo County. By the time he was elected to this office in 1986, he had left the Democratic
Party and registered “independent,” but he largely steered clear of hot-button social issues
and instead became an expert in transportation and an advocate of high-speed rail in the
state. He served in the State Senate as an independent until 1998.
14. The entire transcript is available at: www.lib.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/roho_disclaimer_cgi.
pl?target=http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/kopp_quentin.pdf.
15. On Milk, see Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street; also see Rob Epstein, dir., The Times of Harvey
Milk (1985).
16. For examples of literature that emphasizes the power of social movement organizations and
grassroots activists, including those associated with the bar culture, see Nan Alamilla Boyd,
Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Marcia
Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights
Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006); and Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and
Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006).
17. Quentin Kopp interviewed by Martin Meeker, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft
Library, UC Berkeley, April 17, 2007.
13 DON’T ASK
Discussing Sexuality in the American
Military and the Media
Steve Estes

Oral history by Steve Estes with Brian Hughes, Washington, D.C.,

January 25, 2005

This interview with Brian Hughes, an American veteran of the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, was part of the Veterans History Project run by the Library of Congress. As a
historian at Sonoma State University in northern California, I conducted the interview
with Hughes over the phone. At the time of the interview, Hughes had recently com-
pleted four years of service in the U.S. Army (2000–2004), and he was living in
Washington, D.C., where he worked as an intern on Capitol Hill. The Hughes inter-
view was one of more than fifty interviews that I conducted with gay and lesbian vet-
erans who served from World War II to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These
interviews ultimately were published in the book Ask & Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans
Speak Out (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).1

STEVE ESTES: I’m going to start with a question I asked you a second ago; that is,
when and where were you born?
BRIAN HUGHES: Born in San Francisco, California, on the second of June, 1978.
ESTES: Okay, and what did your parents do for a living?
HUGHES: My father runs a company for private hospitals in England: psychiatric
clinics and drug rehab.
ESTES: Is your mom alive?
HUGHES: She is. She does not work, currently.
ESTES: Why did you decide to go to Yale for college?
HUGHES: Yale accepted me.
ESTES: [chuckles] That’s a good answer.
HUGHES: And when I visited the campus, that’s when I realized that this was re-
ally the place I wanted to go. So, it was a good fit for both of us.
ESTES: What did you major in there?
HUGHES: My major was math and philosophy.
238 | POLITICS

ESTES: Can you talk about your first couple of years there? What it was like?
HUGHES: Well, when you get there—it was a great time. I got there in—’96?
Would it have been? Yeah, sure, the fall of ’96. I guess I first came out the
Christmas of ’96, back home, in California, and when I came back to the cam-
pus, I came out to my friends. So I’d been openly gay for over three years—
three and a half years, before I enlisted in the army.
ESTES: How did your parents react to you coming out?
HUGHES: They took it very well; they are very open-minded folks. I came out
through my sister, and it was really very easy. The whole family is really very
accepting.
ESTES: Did you actually grow up in San Francisco proper?
HUGHES: No, I grew up in London. At the age of two, when I was two, 1980, we
moved to London, and so I grew up there and lived there for sixteen years
before coming back to college in the states.
ESTES: How do you think growing up in London affected you?
HUGHES: It’s a fantastic place to grow up. Traveling all around Europe is like
driving to Florida from D.C. You drive eight hours and you’re in Italy. It was
wonderful.
ESTES: Let me see—why did you decide to join the army after being at Yale for
three and a half years or so?
HUGHES: Right, I dropped out towards the end of my senior year to enlist. There
were a combination of factors. I wasn’t ready to graduate in some sense. I felt
that I needed some sort of practical, real-world experience before I actually
went out into the real world. I felt that I needed the mental and physical dis-
cipline that I would get in the army, as well as, you know—I knew it would be
very immediately rewarding. I knew I would be doing something worthwhile.
The call of duty was also strong in that sense. I felt that military service was
one of the duties of citizenship, and something I had to do. As to why I chose
to do it before graduating rather than after graduating, because for all the
earlier reasons I listed, I wanted to do my time as an enlisted man rather than
as an officer, and if I had a degree, I felt the temptation would be too strong
to go to OCS [Officer Candidate School] and get a commission.
ESTES: Why enlisted?
HUGHES: I felt the work would be more interesting and better and more physical.
I sort of needed a break from more intellectual pursuits and wanted to get
down and get my hands dirty.
ESTES: Gotcha. How did your family and friends react to you joining the
military?
HUGHES: They were very upset. My family in particular was very upset, probably
because we don’t really have much of a history of military service in our
family; you have to go back to World War II to find folks who served. Partly,
also, because I’m gay and they felt that the army was not really a friendly place
for gay people. The murder of Barry Winchell was just a year or two before,
 DON’T ASK | 239

After serving in Afghanistan and Iraq

as an Army Ranger, Brian Hughes put
down his gun and wielded his story
in the battle to repeal the “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell” policy. Courtesy of Steve Estes

and still very much a part of the public consciousness.2 My friends were also
surprised, but less so because I was right there on the scene to be able to
explain what I was doing, whereas my parents found out long-distance.
[We spoke about Brian’s decision to enlist as an army ranger and the rigors
of ranger school. He was completing this training in September of 2001.]
ESTES: Can you talk about—take me to that morning when you heard about the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
HUGHES: Yeah, we were in an airplane hangar on our way to a training mission
with a foreign nation: we were going to do a joint mission. We stopped over
in an air hangar, and our first sergeant gathered us together and said, “All
right, guys, terrorists have crashed two planes into the World Trade Center.
The buildings have collapsed. We think they were Islamic terrorists.” We
didn’t believe him, of course. We thought, “Oh, okay, this is part of the
training scenario. Instead of going where we were going, now we’re going to
go somewhere in the Middle East and train with Israeli forces or something.”
[laughter] But then we rigged some radios together, and we got the BBC World
Service, and we figured out that in fact, yeah, [laughs] the World Trade Center
had been hit. So we were stuck there, where we were, for a week or so, until we
could get back home. So then, we just carried on training, as usual, because
we knew that within a short amount of time, we would be deploying some-
where, for something. Sure enough, before the end of the year, a contingent
of rangers was in Afghanistan.
240 | POLITICS

ESTES: Right. Tell me about when you first learned you were going to Afghani-
stan: what went through your head?
HUGHES: Well my first tour to Afghanistan—although rangers started going in
’01 at the beginning of the war—my first tour was just after I graduated ranger
school in ’02. I went September through December–January of ’02. By that
time, it was my turn [laughs] to fly to Afghanistan. So I felt very ready to go,
because I had just gotten through ranger school, and I knew exactly what I
was and wasn’t capable of. I felt very well prepared, and I was going with a
great team, with a great platoon, with a great group of soldiers. I wouldn’t
say I was exactly looking forward to what I was going to do, but I was ready
for it.
ESTES: What were your first impressions of Afghanistan and its people?
HUGHES: Let’s see. [thinks for a bit] There’s a certain desertness to the area of
Afghanistan where I was. Water is a scarce resource there, and up in the moun-
tains, they have these very complex irrigation systems that they’ve built, to
drive their farms. Yeah, it was surprisingly barren. I thought it would be a little
more fertile. Bagram [Air Base] in particular was very depressing. It’s a great
big plateau, actually quite beautiful, until you realize why it’s such a com-
pletely empty plateau, and it’s because most of the area has not yet been
cleared of mines. There are mines just everywhere, land mines all over the
place, and you just can’t walk out of designated areas. So that made a strong
impression on me I think.
ESTES: And the people: did you get to know any of the people there?
HUGHES: Well, there was a strong language barrier obviously. They’re very hardy,
with a d, people. They have a very strong sense of themselves and what they
accomplished in the Soviet war. Every little village that we drove through
there had, in the town center, a burned-out, rusted-out old Soviet tank that
they had dragged in as sort of the monument in every village square. I think
that’s quite telling.
ESTES: Can you describe—you might only be able to do this in general terms,
and that’s fine—can you describe search patrols that you had to go on when
you were in Afghanistan?
HUGHES: Most of our patrols—well no, we did both mounted and unmounted
patrols. So we would walk through the mountains, and we would also go on
HMMV patrols along sort of major routes, and some minor routes [chuckles]
[. . .]
ESTES: Really minor?
HUGHES: Well, the concept of road out there is an interesting one.
ESTES: [Chuckles] Right.
HUGHES: So, yeah. We were conducting mounted and dismounted patrols in
search of men, weapons, and equipment. In other words, looking for terror-
ists and munitions, which we found.
ESTES: Both?
 DON’T ASK | 241

HUGHES: Yeah, all kinds of things.

ESTES: Uh huh. Did you ever take fire?
HUGHES: Yes. We were shot at. Our base camp was mortared and shot at with
rockets from time to time. And then, our patrols would also take fire from
time to time.
[Because Brian was unwilling or unable (for security reasons) to tell me
many specifics about his missions in Afghanistan, we quickly moved on to his
time in Iraq.]
HUGHES: We might have staged late February [2003], but certainly we were there
in March. My first incursion into Iraq was actually the night of April first, for
the Jessica Lynch rescue.3 We staged in Nasiriyah like the day before. It was
tremendously quick, though. Between the staging, planning, and executing
our mission, all within twenty-four hours of my chain of command being
alerted.
ESTES: Well, okay, give me the blow by blow that you give everybody on the
Lynch rescue mission, and then we’ll talk.
HUGHES: Sure. I was a member of the special operations task force that rescued
Private Jessica Lynch. Specifically, I was a member of the team that was detailed
to retrieve the other nine Americans from the site.
ESTES: Okay. And the other nine Americans were alive?
HUGHES: No.
ESTES: That’s what I thought. Okay, so—and you knew this going in?
HUGHES: Uh, yeah, we thought they were in the morgue, though. It turned out
they were in shallow graves just outside the compound. . . . We did what we
had to do. . . . I will say this: it was an amazing display of teamwork. Everyone
pulled together and did exactly what they were comfortable with, and got the
job done in a tremendously short amount of time. We were on schedule. We
got out on schedule, despite having to dig up the Americans instead of re-
trieving them from the morgue.
ESTES: Right. Now, there’s been a lot of media critique of that: of the Lynch res-
cue and how it was portrayed immediately afterwards. Do you have any com-
ment on that or any thoughts about it?
HUGHES: Yeah, well, we were sort of distanced from that, because we were still in
Iraq for several months while all these reports were coming out. I understand,
though, that there were reports that we were carrying blank ammunition and
that the whole thing was staged. I can’t really speak for any of the other units
that were involved, but you know, we were shot at, and when you think of the
fact that we were running short of cargo space coming over from the States to
supply us with water, it seems very unlikely to me that there were any blank
rounds in Iraq at all, let alone blank rounds taken on a combat mission
behind enemy lines. So I—yeah, I have serious reservations about those
reports.
[Laughter]
242 | POLITICS

ESTES: Okay.
[Laughter]
HUGHES: I was carrying live ammunition.
ESTES: All right. [Laughter] And running from live ammunition it sounds like. . . .
What was the rest of your service in Iraq—your tour like?
HUGHES: Then, after Nasiriyah, I moved up to Baghdad and conducted patrols
out of Baghdad International Airport. Again, these were all mounted patrols,
and we were doing a variety of search missions: again, men, weapons, and
equipment mostly. So, you know, we found, again, plenty of all of those.
ESTES: Okay. Um, let me see. [pauses] What was the morale like amongst the
troops in your unit, when you served in Iraq?
HUGHES: Great. Morale was great. We were an elite, special operations unit, with
everything that entails: all the camaraderie, all the high morale, and all the
high proficiency. So yeah, it was a great group of guys—great group of guys.
ESTES: Can you talk about friendships—I mean, you don’t need to talk about
individual soldiers by name, or anything like that, unless you wanted to—but
can you talk about friendships that were forged?
HUGHES: Yeah, they are going to last a lifetime. That’s the nature of the beast, you
know. Shakespeare was not wrong when he talked about a band of brothers,
and we’re not wrong to keep it in the cliché of the language of today. It’s true.
The men you fight with under those conditions are your brothers, and nothing
can ever change that.
ESTES: Can you talk a little bit about how “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” affected you—
or what it was like serving under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” before you were on
tour—on a tour of duty in Afghanistan or Iraq; I mean when you were back in
the States?
HUGHES: Uh huh. Well, I was back in the States frequently between tours also. I
don’t know, I was [pause] serving as a soldier and I was closeted and [pause] I
don’t know what exactly it is you want me to say. [laughter]
ESTES: I don’t have anything I want you to say. I just wanted to give you a chance
to talk about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and what you think about it.
HUGHES: Okay. Well I would say then that, you know, I knew what I was get-
ting into beforehand, because I was openly gay when I enlisted, and I knew
I would have to stay in the closet if I wanted to keep my job, and I found
that I did in fact want to keep my job. It was something that I loved doing,
and it was something I felt I ought to do, and those things didn’t change
over the four years of my enlistment. So I never really wanted to come out
in that sense, because I wanted to keep my job. On the other hand, because
of the close friendships that I was forming, I did want to come out to my
friends, to my brothers, because—[has trouble finding the right words]
ironically enough, the closer we got, the more I felt that was a wedge
between us, that there was this large aspect of my life I wasn’t sharing with
them, and that was preventing me from bonding as fully and as effectively
 DON’T ASK | 243

as I could have with them. Um, so after a couple of years I started to feel a
little isolated by my homosexuality, and by the fact that I couldn’t talk
about it, that I couldn’t share that aspect of my life with these guys. So I
became more and more withdrawn, more and more antisocial in a lot of
ways, and that was unfortunate, I think. I would have had a much fuller
experience in the army if I had been allowed to serve openly, and as a result,
I might have even been a more effective soldier. I don’t know, but certainly
in terms of unit cohesion, I would have experienced more unit cohesion
had I come out, not less. . . .
[We spoke about Brian’s second tour in Afghanistan and his promotion to
sergeant. After Brian left the army in 2004, he decided to come out publicly as
a gay veteran.]
ESTES: Ok, cool. So let’s fast-forward a little bit: why did you decide to come out
publicly and—well, let’s start there. Why did you decide to come out
publicly?
HUGHES: Uh, well, I was well convinced and remain convinced that “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell” is positively bad for our national security, as well as being unnec-
essarily discriminatory. And so, I felt that I was actually in a unique and strong
position to help bring that to public consciousness. And I was so advised by a
number of other former service members that had come out, by my family
and friends, and we decided it was the right thing.
ESTES: What was it like to be the center of attention—I guess in some sense, to
continue to be the center of media attention because of this?
HUGHES: Uh, another eye-opening experience. As I’ve said, some reporters report
more than you would like, and some perhaps a little less than you would like.
[chuckling] But, it’s very gratifying to receive the attention, and you just hope
that you can get the message out—not that I have much of a message, but that
you can make an impact on people. One of the overriding reasons why I came
out publicly was because in the winter of 2003, three flag officers came out:
General Kerr, General Richards, and Admiral Steinman. And these were the
first flag officers—they were retired, but the first flag officers to come out. And
that made a very strong impression on me; it was on the front pages of a va-
riety of papers, and I felt that if I could make some slight impression, as they
had made a large impression on me, that I would be doing something worth-
while, so I did. I received an overwhelmingly positive response as a result.
They warned me actually that I would receive a lot of negative mail, and that
hasn’t happened at all. And the response has been overwhelmingly positive
and uniquely positive: I haven’t received any hate mail.
ESTES: That’s good. I’m surprised, but pleasantly surprised.
HUGHES: Yeah, well so was I! [laughter] I wasn’t looking forward to reading the
other stuff. But it never surfaced.4
[At the time of the interview, Brian had just graduated from Yale, and he
was working as an intern for a California senator in Washington, D.C.]
244 | POLITICS

Commentary

Gays and lesbians have long served in the U.S. armed forces, but their official
exclusion before the early 1990s mandated silence and secrecy. In one sense,
President Clinton’s 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy simply made this silence
official; it was a new paint job on an old closet door. But in another sense,
debates about lifting the ban on gay military service shattered the silence,
making public discussions about sexuality central to considerations of military
policy. My interviews with more than fifty GLBT veterans revealed that “Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell” both silenced and elicited conversations about sexuality by
active-duty personnel. Beyond the military, the controversial policy stimulated
much more discussion of sexuality and service by military veterans and political
pundits. In fact, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became a metaphor for addressing
silence and hypocrisy in other political and cultural contexts. Though I believe
that both the policy and the metaphor are flawed, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” cre-
ated a unique opportunity to analyze the ways silence and speech are deployed
on the topic of sexuality not only in the military and in oral history interviews
with gay veterans but also in the American media.5
Many gay rights advocates welcomed the public debates around lifting the
military ban in the early 1990s, but the focus on sexuality in the services created
frustrating and frightening situations for many gays and lesbians in uniform.
Signed into law in 1993, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prohibited the military from
asking questions “concerning homosexuality” as part of recruitment or induc-
tion into the armed forces, and it allowed gay and lesbian Americans to serve as
long as they did not openly admit their homosexuality or demonstrate a “pro-
pensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts.”6 This policy was a political
compromise between those who wanted to keep homosexuals out of the armed
forces and those who wanted to lift the ban entirely. Yet it was also a tacit recog-
nition of the fact that gay troops had long served in the armed forces and in
every military conflict the nation fought during the twentieth century.7 Sadly, the
men and women most directly affected by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—gay and
lesbian military personnel actively serving, along with their families—were un-
able to testify openly about its effects. This was more than political; it was per-
sonal. In day-to-day interactions with friends, superiors, and even family
members, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” required a skillful navigation of silence to
hide homosexuality. “What did you do last weekend?” or “Are you seeing any-
one?” might seem like innocent questions, but for gay and lesbian military per-
sonnel, they took on the weight of interrogation even in friendly conversation.8
Such conversations called for more than silence. They often required the cre-
ation of fake heterosexual identities. Alan Steinman, a gay flag officer now
retired from the Coast Guard, told me that a promotion to admiral left him
feeling particularly vulnerable as a confirmed bachelor. As a result, he placed a
personal ad in a Washington, D.C., area magazine during the early 1990s seeking
 DON’T ASK | 245

a female partner. “It said, ‘Gay Senior Executive seeks . . . female companion for
meeting social obligations.’” With this cover, Steinman’s sexuality was never
openly questioned, and he remained close friends with this “partner” at the
time of our interview, long after he left the service.9
Patty Duwel was not about to risk a lifelong career in the Navy when rumors
about her sexuality began to fly. She had married the gay brother of a friend to
hide the fact that she was a lesbian. When she learned that she was being inves-
tigated, she later told me: “I grabbed the guy I was married with. He even put his
boxers on and pulled his jeans on. He wanted to look really butch. And we
tromped into the XO’s [executive officer’s] office and I said, ‘I hear I’m under
investigation for being gay, and I don’t appreciate that!’” Going on the offensive
may have saved her twenty-year career.10
For combat veterans, the silences and subversions were particularly painful.
Brian Hughes, whose interview appears here, forged lifelong friendships with
his buddies in the Army Rangers. “The men you fight with under those condi-
tions are your brothers,” he explained, “and nothing can ever change that.” But
still, because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Hughes felt that he had to conceal part
of his identity from his comrades the entire time they fought together in Iraq
and Afghanistan.11
Despite the potential consequences, other veterans I spoke with—particularly
younger ones and enlisted personnel—told me that conversations about sexu-
ality were nearly unavoidable. In fact, they often resulted in coming out to close
friends in the service. Lisa Michelle Fowler, a veteran of the first Gulf War, found
that coming out to herself was actually more difficult than coming out to her
best friend in the army. “She didn’t believe me at first because . . . you know, I’ve
been playing this straight role. Soon after that she believed me. . . . And she loved
me even more for it, I think.”12 Steve Boeckels, a 1996 graduate of West Point, told
me that rumors about his sexuality circulated in his unit until 1999, when he fi-
nally decided to come out to his roommate. “I told him I kind of was bisexual,”
he remembered, laughing about it later. “He basically said, ‘All right .  .  . why
didn’t you tell me sooner?’”13 Robert Stout recounted a similar coming out expe-
rience that happened in 2002.

At that time, all my pronouns were changed. “He” became “she,” and the guy I dated
at the time, I gave him a feminine name. So my team leader was asking me about
her/him. And so we get talking and it eventually got to the point where I thought,
“Wow! This is just not worth it. It’s too much of a pain in the ass.” And so I’m like,
“Hey Sarge, she’s a guy.” And the only thing he said after that was, “Wow! I need a
cigarette.” He got done smoking a cigarette and he goes, “Damn it! That means my
wife was right.” And it’s just like: “Wow! Okeydokey, I’ll play your game.” And
shoot, after that we never had any trouble.14

The coming out story is often the metanarrative of GLBT oral history inter-
views, regardless of the particular focus of the researcher. The centrality of this
246 | POLITICS

narrative seems especially prevalent in interviews undertaken since the gay liber-
ation movement, as coming out has become the foundation of public identity
and political liberation.15 Alan Bérubé heard the coming out narrative so many
times in his interviews with gay and lesbian veterans of World War II that he in-
corporated it into the title of his groundbreaking book, Coming Out under Fire,
with all of the meanings that the phrase implied.16 Bérubé argued that the social
movement accompanying wartime mobilization and the homosocial worlds of
military service provided the cultural space for gay and lesbian service personnel
to claim their sexual identities. Although my own interviews certainly support
these conclusions, I would add that both the age of Bérubé’s interviewees at the
time of their military service and the oral history method so crucial to Bérubé’s
study might have underscored or even overemphasized the importance of coming
out to the stories he heard. Bérubé understood that wartime service was a tradi-
tional rite of passage that paralleled the maturation process and self-awareness of
coming out. For GLBT military veterans, telling Bérubé (or me) about “coming
out under fire” became part of the more time-honored coming of age narrative
that has long been central to war stories. We might ask, then, whether military
service in World War II was unique in creating opportunities to come out or
whether oral history interviews focusing on other coming of age rituals in
American society (attending college, being bar mitzvahed, having a quinceañera
party, etc.) would similarly elicit coming out stories.
Given its centrality to modern GLBT identity, the coming out narrative is one
story that was explicitly proscribed by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Perhaps because
of this and also because my interviewees knew I was asking about gays in the
military, they would often begin their stories with the coming out narrative, even
when I did not ask directly about it. (Before the official interviews began, about
a third of the interviewees asked about my service and sexuality. I am the son of
a Vietnam-era veteran but have never served myself. This did not present a prob-
lem for any of the interviewees. When I told the interviewees that I am a bisexual
man, married to a woman, this occasionally raised eyebrows or elicited jokes
about bisexuality simply as a way station on the road to coming out. In the end,
these brief and frank discussions seemed to put the interviewees—or in this case,
interviewers—at ease so that they could speak more candidly about their own
service and sexuality.)
My strategy in most of the interviews with GLBT veterans was to start the
conversations with the traditional military narratives or “war stories” and only
later move on to sexuality. Though it may have been a naïve or misguided
strategy, I thought that starting with the war stories, a narrative tradition as old
as history itself, would set the speakers at ease. I also hoped that this structure
would highlight for readers or listeners (whether they were straight or gay) the
fact that these interviewees were just normal veterans who had done their duty
regardless of their sexuality. On one level, this interview strategy was an abject
failure, as many of my interviewees told their coming out stories early on and
 DON’T ASK | 247

wove the story of their sexuality into the narrative of military service. This was
true of World War II veterans and veterans of the Iraq War.
My third question to William Winn, a veteran of both World War II and
Korea, was about his parents being high school sweethearts. Though I had not
asked about his sexuality here, Winn smoothly segued from a discussion of his
parents’ romantic relationship to a delicate explanation of coming out. “I found
that somewhere after my thirtieth birthday,” Winn recalled, when “I had an
intense friendship with a young man my own age and one thing led to another
and then I found out, as I had suspected during my Korean War experience, that
my ability to tolerate society was much more in the masculine vein.”17 The ques-
tion that elicited Brian Hughes’s coming out story was simply: “Can you talk
about your first couple of years at Yale?” When interviewees did not address sex-
uality early in the interview, I would later ask them how their sexuality affected
their military service. Because sexual identity and coming out were often woven
seamlessly into the narratives of these veterans’ lives, it was difficult to separate
these topics from the war stories I had hoped to focus on. Perhaps it was futile
to even try, thus underscoring the problematic nature of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
The primary argument for retaining “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was that open
discussions of homosexuality would undermine unit cohesion. The assumption
was that such conversations would jeopardize camaraderie between gay and
straight troops. All of the veterans I spoke with agreed that such camaraderie is
absolutely necessary for combat effectiveness, but they questioned the assump-
tion that simple conversations about sexuality would sever the bonds forged by
military service. In fact, conversations about (hetero)sexuality have long been an
integral part of the bonding process. This was particularly true in the years before
the gender integration of the U.S. military in the 1970s. As one Vietnam combat
veteran told me, this was one reason why R&R (“Rest and Relaxation” or “Rest
and Recuperation”) was just as stressful in its own way as combat duty for gay
troops. “That’s where being gay is really frightening,” Michael Job told me.
“Because every guy who goes on R&R comes back with these fuck tales about
how many women they screwed. Now, as a gay person you have to make up
these stories, so I was well aware of that.”18
In the wake of gender integration of the armed forces, such conversations
continue, despite concerns that they create a hostile environment bordering on
sexual harassment. Because of the ban on gay service, such stories of heterosexual
exploits put military women in the proverbial Catch-22, leaving them vulnerable
to male sexual advances to “prove” that they were not lesbians.19 The various
branches of the military, particularly the service academies, have recognized this
as a problem and have tried to address it since the 1990s.20 Still, given the tradi-
tion of (hetero)sexual boasting in the military, it is not surprising that any dis-
cussion of homosexuality was seen as somehow dangerous to unit cohesion and
morale. Words, in this case, could stand in for sexual advances and fraterniza-
tion, because they have had this power in a heterosexual military context. Yet if
248 | POLITICS

it is possible for identity proclamations and sexual propositions to be separated

in a heterosexual context, this should be possible in a homosexual context as
well. As Brian Hughes explained, being able to tell his buddies that he was gay
would have strengthened their bond of friendship, not weakened the band of
brothers. Brian wished to tell his buddies about his sexuality not because he
wanted to fraternize with them, but because he wanted to be honest. Trust was
such a crucial part of the bond among soldiers and so integral to the military
code that it was tough for Brian to hide this part of his identity from the other
men in his unit. He did so, because he was a good soldier and that was military
policy, but the price of this policy was alienation, not unit cohesion.21
Though Brian Hughes did not come out while he was in the military, many
of my other interviews revealed that asking and telling went on in the military
despite the official silence imposed by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The consequences
of these conversations varied from unit to unit, with enlisted personnel, non-
commissioned officers, and junior officers tending to take the admissions in
stride, while senior officers seemed to be much more unpredictable. The older
and more senior-ranking gay and lesbian veterans I spoke with were less likely
to have come out to their comrades. But retirement or discharge from the service
opened up the floodgates. Gay and lesbian veterans have been much more vis-
ible in the mainstream media, with interviews in the New York Times and appear-
ances on television programs like the Daily Show and Good Morning America.
Dozens of GLBT vets have been interviewed by volunteers for the Library of
Congress Veterans History Project.22 In other words, the official censure of gay
military speech backfired. An exploration of the broader cultural context of the
policy may help us to understand why.23
Outside the military, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had some strange consequences,
beginning with speech surrounding sexuality but spinning out from that into
silences throughout American politics and society. In much the same way that
Watergate framed our understanding of many major political scandals from the
1970s to the 1990s, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ironically gave American politicians
and pundits a language for talking about issues that society deemed should be
kept quiet. This should come as no surprise, since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a
modern version of the old adage that same-sex attraction was “the love that dare
not speak its name.” Yet we should not make this comparison too lightly or
remove “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the historical context in which it was cre-
ated. The military policy was born at the height of the political correctness
debates, and placing it in this historical context is instructive in assessing its
broader ramifications.
In this context, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—and particularly the additional pro-
hibition “Don’t Harass”—theoretically did double duty: protecting the military
from acknowledging that gays existed in the ranks while protecting gay troops
from overt discrimination. This strange marriage of conservative thought
(viewing people as individuals not as identities or groups) and liberal beliefs
 DON’T ASK | 249

(protecting both individuals and groups from discrimination) contributed to

the surprising longevity of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” These bipartisan beginnings
also made the policy quite adaptable to other political and social contexts with
subtle, negative consequences for the images of gay troops and gay veterans.
Initially commentators used “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as a metaphor for under-
standing the growing albeit gradual and grudging acceptance of homosexuality in
mainstream American life. Unfortunately, but not unpredictably, the metaphor
often conflated the military’s policy regarding consenting, adult, homosexual
relations outside of the ranks with silences about fraternization, pedophilia,
workplace harassment, and other socially prohibited forms of sexuality. As sex
and pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church broke into the headlines during
the 1990s, commentators were quick to point out similarities between the treat-
ment of homosexuality in the church and the American military. A 1993 op-ed in
the New York Times warned that passage of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would make
the Pentagon “a cousin of the Catholic Church [where] homosexuals will be tol-
erated if they don’t homosex.” Mother Jones peered “inside the ‘don’t ask, don’t
tell’ policy of the Catholic Church” in a 1997 exposé of priests breaking celibacy
vows with consenting adults of the opposite sex. Such liberal critiques of church
hypocrisy shared headlines with stories that suggested that the pedophilia scan-
dal was a problem of homosexuality itself and not of the church policy on sexu-
ality per se. In 2002, the Washington Times suggested that an informal “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy of recruiting homosexual priests had led directly to the church’s
pedophilia problems because gay priests were inherently morally lax. The conser-
vative Times went on to suggest that political correctness in the media kept this
aspect of the story a secret.24
Beyond the scandal in the Catholic Church, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was used
to explain the sex scandals that ended the political careers of Florida Con-
gressman Mark Foley and Idaho Senator Larry Craig. Representative Mark Foley,
who had publicly opposed gay marriage and other rights, admitted that he was
gay and resigned from the House after the publication of several salacious mes-
sages he sent to underage male pages working on Capitol Hill. In a Boston Globe
op-ed piece arguing for the demolition of the Republican Party’s gay closet,
David Link called the Foley scandal “the revenge of don’t ask, don’t tell.” “If this
has a familiar ring,” he quipped, “look in the Catholic Church for the bell.” In
another article on closeted gay Republicans, the Los Angeles Times noted that
with the exception of the military, “perhaps no institution in America has as
strong a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach” than the Republican Party. Liberals in
the mainstream media delighted in hoisting the Republican Party on its own
pink petard, but even as they critiqued the hypocrisy of the GOP closet, they
unintentionally connected “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with vice and deception,
forging a double-edged sword.25
Some political commentators recognized the double-edged nature of these
scandals and also found their origins in a culture of religious conservatism that
250 | POLITICS

had arisen simultaneously with the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” When Senator
Larry Craig was arrested and pled guilty to lewd public behavior for simply tap-
ping the shoe of an undercover police officer in the next bathroom stall, the
press hammered the conservative Idaho Republican for hypocrisy. It seemed
clear to the police and most journalists that Craig was propositioning the under-
cover cop for sex, yet Craig had actually done very little to merit even the minor
charge of disorderly conduct. In 1993, Craig voted in favor of the “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy, which made such overtures grounds for dismissal from the
military. Even after his arrest but before it became a scandal, Craig explained to
a constituent that he still supported the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, because “it
is unacceptable to risk the lives of American soldiers and sailors merely to ac-
commodate the sexual lifestyles of certain individuals.” While it may be politi-
cally expedient to draw attention to the downfall of closeted conservative
opponents of gay rights, thoughtful observers noted that it was not their actions
or even their secrets that merited critique. It was the ideology that required such
secrecy in the first place. Still, the lines blurred in the media as outing closeted
conservative gays offered an overt critique of society’s homophobia while subtly
pandering to these same fears in the public mind. Society wanted to ask and the
media wanted to tell, but was it for the right reasons?26
The broader cultural meaning of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” linked gay and les-
bian troops to a culture of duplicity, but it also inadvertently inspired more di-
alogue and discussion of gays in the military. The military prizes honesty,
courage, and honor. While gay veterans did their duty and served their country
with honor, they were not allowed to be completely honest about who they
were when they served. The veterans I interviewed believed that this undermined
unit cohesion, camaraderie, morale, and ultimately, fighting effectiveness. Oral
history interviews provided a way for them to share in the long tradition of
telling war stories and to come out against a policy they believed was bad both
for them and for the armed forces. Beyond the military, popular usage of “Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell” conflated sexual and political duplicity in ways that subtly
undermined the position and image of the gay and lesbian troops that the
policy was initially intended to protect. The saving grace and final irony of
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is that it unintentionally inspired journalists and oral
historians to interview gay veterans to get the story “straight.” In other words,
the official censure of gays and lesbians in the military amplified the very speech
it was intended to stifle. Once GLBT service personnel came out of the military
closet and became openly gay veterans, they no longer said, “Don’t ask.” They
said, “Ask and tell.”

Notes
1. David Stolowitz transcribed the interview with Brian Hughes.
2. In 1999, nineteen-year-old Private Barry Winchell was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
When Winchell began to explore gay life in nearby Nashville, Tennessee, rumors spread
 DON’T ASK | 251

about his sexuality. “Pretty much everybody called him derogatory names,” Sergeant Michael
Kleifgen later told a reporter. “They called him a faggot, I would say, on a daily basis.” Kleif-
gen, a friend of Winchell’s, filed a formal complaint about the harassment, but nothing was
done. When Winchell also complained, his captain simply told the other soldiers to “knock
that shit off.” On the fourth of July, Winchell got into a fight with another private, eighteen-
year-old Calvin Glover, at a keg party outside of their barracks. On the surface, the fight had
nothing to do with Winchell being gay, but when he knocked Glover down, the taunts
began. Ashamed that he had been beaten by “a fucking faggot,” Glover decided to get
revenge. Later that night, he attacked Winchell with a baseball bat as he slept. Winchell died
the next day. For more on this, see Thomas Hackett, “The Execution of Private Barry Winchell:
The Real Story behind the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Murder,” Rolling Stone, March 2, 2002.
3. One of the leading stories to emerge from the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq was the ambush
and capture of members of the army’s 507th Maintenance Company, including a private
from West Virginia named Jessica Lynch. Injured when her truck smashed into another ve-
hicle during the ambush, Private Lynch was ultimately taken by her Iraqi captors to Saddam
Hussein General Hospital in the town of Nasiriya. Though she was a prisoner of war, Private
Lynch was treated well by the Saddam General doctors, few of whom were supporters of the
hospital’s namesake. When word leaked out that Lynch was being held at the hospital,
American Special Forces were sent on a rescue mission. For more on Lynch, see Rick Bragg,
I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
4. Brian Hughes interview with Steve Estes (January 5, 2005): 1–15. Brian Hughes Collection
(AFC/2001/001/43216), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Collection, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC. Also deposited in the Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical
Society, San Francisco, California.
5. For political and legal analysis of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” see Aaron Belkin and Geoffrey
Bateman, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 2003); Janet E. Halley, Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military Anti-Gay Policy
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Gary L. Lehring, Officially Gay: The Political
Construction of Sexuality in the U.S. Military (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003);
and Melissa Wells-Petry, Exclusion: Homosexuals and the Right to Serve (Washington, DC:
Regnery Gateway, 1993).
6. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a small part of the defense appropriations bill for fiscal year
1994. Pub.L. 103–160 (10 U.S.C. § 654).
7. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire (New York: Free Press, 1990); Steve Estes, Ask & Tell: Gay
and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and
Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military, Vietnam to the Per-
sian Gulf (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).
8. For more on the regulation of speech and silence inherent in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” see
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997),
103–26; Tobias Barrington Wolff, “Compelled Affirmations, Free Speech, and the U.S.
Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy,” Brooklyn Law Review 63 (1997), 1141–211; and Tobias
Barrington Wolff, “Political Representation and Accountability under Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell,” Iowa Law Review 89 (2003–04): 1633–716.
9. Alan Steinman interview with author (March 29, 2004). Full transcript of interview: Alan
Steinman Collection, Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Con-
gress. For an edited version and analysis, see Steve Estes, Ask & Tell. Unless otherwise stated,
all interviews included here are housed in individual collections at the Library of Congress
and are also included in my book, Ask &Tell.
10. Patty Duwel interview with author (June 24, 2003).
11. Brian Hughes interview with author (January 25, 2005).
12. Lisa Michelle Fowler interview with author (September 20, 2004).
13. Steve Boeckels interview with author (September 24, 2004).
14. Robert Leeding Stout interview with author and Steve Gatwick (July 1, 2005).
15. Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, “Oral History and the Study of Sexuality
in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940–1960,” Feminist Studies 12 (Spring
252 | POLITICS

1986): 7–26; Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945–
1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Leslie Tutti, “The Voices of Older Lesbian Women:
An Oral History” (Ph.D. diss., University of Calgary, 2001), 172–85, 217–18; Horacio Roque
Ramírez, “My Community, My History, My Practice,” Oral History Review 29 (Summer–Fall
2002): 87–91.
16. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire; Roger Horwitz, “Oral History and the Story of America
and World War II,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 617–24.
17. William Winn interview with author (June 25, 2003).
18. Michael Job interview with author (October 3, 2003).
19. Melissa S. Herbert, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the
Military (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
20. Elizabeth Hillman interview with author (June 14, 2005).
21. Brian Hughes interview with author (January 25, 2005).
22. For more on this, see Steve Estes, “Ask and Tell: Gay Veterans, Identity, and Oral History on
a Civil Rights Frontier,” Oral History Review 32, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2005): 21–47. In the ar-
ticle, I point out the irony that the government now asking for gay vets to tell their story is
the same one that silenced them when they were actively serving their country in the
military.
23. John Files, “Gay Ex-Officers Say ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Doesn’t Work,” New York Times,
December 10, 2003; Bleu Copas appeared on the Daily Show (September 18, 2006); Brian
Hughes appeared on Good Morning America (September 15, 2004).
24. Anna Quindlen “Another Kind of Closet,” New York Times, June 27, 1993; Cheryl Jones, “Un-
faithful,” Mother Jones, November–December 1997; Daniel McGinn, “Keeping Different
Kinds of Vows,” Newsweek, April 22, 2002; and Liz Trotta, “Media Silent on Gays in Clergy,
Catholics See ‘Moral Laxity’ at Root of Pedophile Scandal,” Washington Times, March 25,
2002. For a more academic comparison of military and church policy, see Shannon Gil-
reath, “Sexually Speaking: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and the First Amendment after Lawrence v.
Texas,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 14 (2007): 975.
25. David Link, “The Gay Problem in the GOP,” Boston Globe, October 5, 2006; Maura Reynolds
and Jennie Jarvie, “Path Is Risky for Gay GOP Politicians,” Los Angeles Times, October 6,
2006; and Eugene Robinson, “‘Values’ Choice for GOP,” Washington Post, October 10, 2006.
26. William Saletan, “Hypocritical? Don’t Ask,” Washington Post, September 2, 2007; and Aaron
Belkin, “A Sting He Didn’t Deserve,” Washington Post, September 1, 2007. Beyond the realm
of sexuality, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became a metaphor for understanding any political
cover-up or silence. Within the military, cover-ups ranging from the torture of Iraqi pris-
oners held in Abu Ghraib to the poor treatment of wounded American soldiers at Walter
Reed Medical Center have been linked to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mind-set throughout the
ranks. In politics more generally, stonewalling testimony from former Bush administration
officials like Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzalez, and Harriet Miers was lampooned as a new defi-
nition of Executive Privilege known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” See M. Gregg Bloch, “Mili-
tary Medicine’s Toxic Silence: Walter Reed, Abu Ghraib, and Other Crises Are the Result of a
Spreading Climate of Fear,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2007; Monte Wolverton, “A New
Definition of Executive Privilege,” caglecartoons.com, 2007.
14 THANKS FOR THE
MEMORIES
A Narrator Asks an Oral Historian
for Validation
Eric C. Wat

Oral history by Eric Wat with Ernest Wada, Los Angeles, California,
December 4, 1997

Japanese American, born and raised in Los Angeles, Ernest Wada (pseudonym) was
sixty-two years old at the time of this interview. He was one of the twenty-five narrators
I interviewed for my book, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral His-
tory of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles.1 Much of the book, especially its second half, addresses
the founding of Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG), the first formal organization
established by Asian American lesbians and gay men in Los Angeles, in 1980. The audio
recording of the interview with Ernest Wada is archived at the Center for Oral and
Public History at the California State University, Fullerton.

ERNEST WADA: I am the youngest son after four sisters, no brothers. Like one of
my sisters told me when I turned out gay, I had about the same chance as a
snowball in hell of turning otherwise. Most men [in Terminal Island, where I
was born] were fishermen, and they were out to sea a great deal of the time.
So I was brought up with all these sisters and women. Up until then, my sisters
were my role models. And I thought, I actually thought I grew up as the fifth
sister. I had very feminine traits.
When we moved to East Los Angeles [in 1946, after being released from the
Internment camp], there weren’t too many Japanese in that particular area.
Housing was very short during this period, so you had to take what was avail-
able. So we had to go out to the barrio. The grammar school that I went to was
highly Latino. This area of Los Angeles had a preponderance of Latino Ameri-
cans of the Mexican variety, along with whites and blacks. The thing is, these
people were very sweet people to me. They just took me under their wings and
never expressed any kind of bias. They accepted me right off the start.
254 | POLITICS

I had a lot of good friends that were Mexican. We used to run around and
do kid things. They were more sexually mature than I. Not only did they
mature early in this respect but also knew what to do about it. Based on my
experience, they just had a healthy appetite for sex and in many cases were not
discriminating about engaging in sexual activities regardless of the partner’s
gender. Boy, did we engage in these activities. They taught me a lot, and I liked
it. I began to discover my sexuality as far as preference for males only is
concerned.
Being that I’m very, like, sissified—because I didn’t know how else to be—
they knew, they were aware. My Latino school buddies taught me how to mas-
turbate and perform masturbation on them. When things became heated
(even at this age), they’d enjoy penetrating me anally. Being so feminine, I
thought all of this was natural. I recall an experience where I engaged in sex
play with a special friend who was a couple of years older than I. Before he
penetrated me, he kissed me in a manner that made me swoon. I really devel-
oped a big-time crush on him. Can you believe this behavior at age ten? Being
as sissified as I was, the horny boys would always take advantage of me and
single me out for their sexual release.
These boys were very protective of me. I mean, I had been picked on before.
In those instances, it was a racial thing. There were just the bully types, the
ignorant types, that made fun of other people anyway. For instance, the black
boys used to terrify me by calling me a “slant-eyed Jap.” The Latino boys
always came to my rescue.
To me, I was always looking at the guys. Never a question. But girls also had
crushes on me. Even when I went out with these girls, I liked their boyfriends
and other friends in their circle. I like the guys.
ERIC C. WAT: Why would you date them if you knew for fairly certain that you
were only attracted to guys?
WADA: See, you’re asking this question from a very liberated point of view. In
those days, you had to do that. Otherwise, immediately they’d think you were
queer. I mean, you’re as sissy as they come, but if you date girls, somehow it
seems that maybe you’re not. It’s a guy thing. Even at that point, you were
trying to do the right thing to be accepted. More for acceptance.
After high school, I tried to go into business college for a while, but I hated
it. So I dropped out and went to work. And I hated that. At the time, everybody
in our age group was subjected to the draft. It was mandatory that you had to
meet your draft obligation when you turned eighteen. So rather than waiting
for them to call us, a great number of us, right after high school, either volun-
teered or enlisted four years at a particular service branch. In my case, I volun-
teered for the draft to be called earlier to get my obligation out of the way.
We took basic infantry training. And then after that it was mandatory that
you go on to advanced infantry training, which was all in Fort Ord in Califor-
nia. After the two eight-week cycles of both basic and advanced infantry
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 255

training, they’d give you a short leave. I was then immediately stationed in
Korea.
By then, I was aware that I was homosexual, but I was still closeted. Very
much closeted because for one thing, it was not acceptable. If they had found
out, they drummed you out. But I saw a lot of gay guys in the army. I didn’t
know what was going on, but these people were just blatantly gay.
A lot of them were in clerical capacities, medical capacities, and so forth.
The line soldiers, the infantrymen, there might have been, but I couldn’t tell.
So I tried to butch it up because you were not going to survive if you acted like
a sissy under those circumstances. That’s what I did.
In the military, it was all about butching up. You have to. You’re going on
these bivouacs and sleeping in pup tents with these guys. In this one instance,
there was this particular friend I had made. We were in bivouac; we had what
you’d call shelter halves. It’s on your backpack. It’s your half of the tent that
you’re going to put up. So they call them shelter halves. You put your half and
I put mine, and we push them in [to make the tent]. So we each had our half
to keep us from the elements. I was in bivouac at one time, and I happened to
set up tents with him. The local prostitutes were camp followers that knew
when the men were going out in the field. That’s their best chance to get out
there and sell their work because they came out to the tents, and it was hard to
keep track of them. Well, this particular friend brought one in, a very pretty
girl. After he got through, he said, Take some. I’ll pay for it. And no way. But that
was one of the butch things that they’d do that I had to be subjected to. I
didn’t participate in that aspect, but all the other things I had to. Training itself
was just a man thing. I don’t see how these females survive in the military now.
But even though I was not out, I was having rendezvous. But not with gay
guys. It was with straight guys. These were just guys who, I guess, knew what
they were doing. They didn’t view it as they were being queer. It was just
release, sexual release. And I did it with them.
I mean, I was not entirely reckless about it. You know the process: You
find somebody who’s attractive to you, physically attractive, and then you
get to know the person and they get to know you, and they find out you are
decent and so forth, and then you wait for their vulnerable moments and
see if they would submit to it. And 90 percent of the time, they would
submit.
WAT: So you were pretty sure they wouldn’t tell on you?
WADA: No, they came back for seconds. . . . I had turned twenty-one in the ser-
vice. So by the time I got back here, I was old enough to go to the bars. I had
bumped into this particular guy before then who was gay. He felt me out. He
knew I was gay. In fact, he made a point of seducing me, which he did. He was
very active in going to this bar. It was called the Red Raven. And through that
seduction, he kind of educated me a lot about what was going on, as far as
being gay is concerned.
256 | POLITICS

WAT: What did you feel the first time you went to a bar?
WADA: I in particular feel that the whites set the standards of everything in this
life. Whether we realize it or not, we tend to follow those standards and
emulate them, which was no different in the gay circle then. But the selection
process in the bar scene was just deadly because the whites were going for
whites at the time, and Asian types were not a commodity.
The whites at the time, I feel, viewed us as more of the subservient type.
They expected us to be submissive—this is an extreme analogy—a geisha type.
We were supposed to wait on them hand and foot or something. They came
off condescending or patronizing to you. But at that point, you took it, and
then as soon as they talked to us, with what they were expecting out of us, we
opened our mouths and started talking, and they discovered that we were just
as Americanized as them. Then they felt intimidated. And after a while, it just
became too ridiculous. This person was so stupid, so ignorant. And you let
him have it. They didn’t know what was going on because, well, he’s an Asian,
how come he’s behaving this way? He’s just like the white queens, vicious, just as
vicious. Well, we learned.
I mean, what are their feelings on that, the white people that are attracted to
the Asians? Is it a physical thing, or is it something they feel inside? I don’t know.
WAT: I mean, I wouldn’t generalize the whole white gay community, but there
are certain people who believe in that.
WADA: It was very easy to generalize for me because that’s all . . . that’s the expe-
rience. You didn’t have a chance if you were an Asian. That’s the way I felt
about it. Plus the fact that you had this preconceived idea that the white
people were interested in other white people. They didn’t know what to make
of the Asians, and we were just a novelty they might try. Understand that we
were in the bar environment or the gay scene with that type of prevailing
feeling. That was the way I saw it.
It was compounded by the fact that, in the seventies, we had a tremendous
influx of these immigrant types and refugee types that came over from South-
east Asia, Vietnam or Thailand. Well, we were in there having to compete with
them as well. And they were the ones who were aggressive. Either that, or they
didn’t care. They were just going to all lengths to get a man. That’s the part that
used to piss me off. We [the American-born Asians] were not the aggressive
types. I highly resented these foreign types. Especially in the bar scenes,
thinking we were all Asians, at least we had that in common. But then, you
started talking with them, and you discovered that’s where it ended. As far as
being people were concerned, they were worse than whites to me.
I’m not a troll or reject. I felt I was reasonably attractive in my younger days.
You know, I could have suitors and so forth, but I never got that satisfaction.
The ones that I was drawn to, they were interested in their counterparts, other
Caucasians. You’d have to be really exceptionally beautiful for them to give
you the time of day, to be seriously involved with you.
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 257

WAT: So what type of men were you looking for?

WADA: (Pause) You mean other than Caucasians? My physical attraction is who-
ever that turns me on. It’s just not a specific type.
WAT: But not Asians?
WADA: No. No.
WAT: Why do you think that is? I mean, is it the white standards that you were
talking about?
WADA: Well, for one thing .  .  . I never thought about it actually. At school,
when I used to have these crushes and physical attraction, it was a mixture
of Asians, Mexicans, whatever turned me on, you know. But once I became
gay, I guess I was looking for . . . I don’t want . . . I want someone that is
masculine. I want someone that is masculine because I tended to be so ef-
feminate myself. And you know, I’m glad this came up. Now that I think
about it. I’m blaming all of this on the white standards and so forth. But I
don’t think that was so much it either. I think it was the fact that I was kind
of too nelly, or too swishy or whatever. I didn’t go out of my way to do it. I
just adopted that nature. Then it became part of me. And so I supposed they
saw that, and that’s not particularly a turn-on to these guys that you get
turned on to. And so that was me. I guess what it comes down to is who you
are and how you carry on, whether you sell yourself or not. In my case, I
guess I was a nelly faggot. That’s not a turn-on. I never thought of it in those
terms, but that’s true.
WAT: So a lot of Asians that you would meet were sort of nelly types, too?
WADA: Yes, or they just weren’t a turn-on to me. I’m not saying entirely. There
were really nice, attractive guys, Asians. Do you know Roy? Well, Roy is a
beauty. Now, in those days, I wouldn’t have any qualms tricking with him
because he’s really good-looking. A lot of Asians . . . there were several that
were very pretty and attractive. But they were just not my cup of tea because
they had this particular demeanor about them that was not compatible with
mine, regardless of how attractive. So in that regards, that’s a turn-off.
In my earlier days when I was active in the social scene, that’s part of how I
felt. But not now. I see all these Asian American types that are just out there
and doing things, and holding responsible positions, and really just inte-
grated into the strata of things, as far as social acceptance and so forth. They
hold good jobs. They are educated. See, I didn’t see much of that when I was
growing up. Maybe they [gay Asians] have something now. Maybe they have
come into their own. What I’m saying is, there were no bars like Mugi’s or
Chopstix or Xanadu that you hear of now. There was no place that was exclu-
sively Asian at the time. Most of us were the pioneers because our parents
definitely weren’t going on to universities. They came here and started
working, and then they went into the [internment] camps. And we were
always the down . . . I shouldn’t say the downtrodden, but we were always like
on poverty because we had to get started.
258 | POLITICS

I don’t want you to leave here thinking that I was just an Asian person
trying to be white, but that’s not it at all. I was just never comfortable with
who I was. I supposed being Asian was a part of it, too, because I felt like an
underdog in a lot of instances.

Commentary

At the onset of my research about the history of gay Asian men’s organizing in
Los Angeles, I was very clear that I did not want to explore Asian/Pacific Lesbians
and Gays. When I came out in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, A/PLG had a rep-
utation of being a cruising ground dominated by “rice queens,” non-Asians
(usually white and older) who have a particular and sometimes exclusive sexual
interest in Asian men, often based on prevailing stereotypes of Asian men being
boyish, submissive, and easily controlled. Only a few interviews into my project,
however, I began to realize that A/PLG represented a breaking point in how gay
Asian men viewed each other, and omitting the organization’s story would leave
their life histories incomplete.
Almost all of the twenty-five narrators in my book had occupied leadership
positions in A/PLG and/or the Gay Asian Rap Group (GARP), another support
group founded in Los Angeles four years after A/PLG. Twenty-three of them were
Asian, and the remaining two were white. Seven of the narrators were immi-
grants. I was able to conduct all of the interviews in English, and, with one ex-
ception, the narrators were comfortable using English. Most narrators were
Chinese and Japanese Americans, and there was a smaller representation of Fili-
pino, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian Americans. The post-1965 influx of
Asian immigrants and refugees into the United States had not percolated
through the A/PLG leadership by the early 1980s, although they were a signifi-
cant part of A/PLG membership. I interviewed only one woman, partly because
A/PLG leadership had always been marked by a gender imbalance, and partly
because I made a choice early on to focus my interviews on gay Asian men.
Wada was situated at the periphery of gay Asian organizing in Los Angeles. He
was a few years older than the first A/PLG leaders, though he was good friends with
some of them. Wada was also one of four narrators who chose not to use his real
name. He also never went through the consciousness-raising experience that other
narrators had in integrating their racial and sexual identities. Through their leader-
ship roles, many narrators had contemplated how their racial and sexual identities
contributed to their life decisions (including the organizations they led), but Wada
never had to confront these contradictions in the same way. Michael Frisch has
written that oral history can awaken the “beast of consciousness,” the personal his-
tory and memories that guide the way the narrator has lived his life. Similarly, Ron-
ald Grele argues that more than just a recording or a transcript, an oral history
interview is a “cultural construct,” a consciousness that is expressed in a complex
merging of both the narrator’s past and present and the different worldviews of the
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 259

narrator and the interviewer.2 In the act of our interview, conducted in the late 1990s,
Wada verbally worked out the contradictions of his racial and sexual identities
through recounting experiences and learned new truths (or at least new perspec-
tives) about himself. As the researcher, I was unprepared for Wada’s reinterpretation
of his life history on the spot as a direct result of how I asked my questions.
I had conceived my research about the history of organizing among gay Asian
men in Los Angeles as a political project. I had wanted to talk about the con-
scious act of community building among gay Asian men in Los Angeles that
required vision, progressive ideology, and the hard work of organizing. My idea
was a reaction to those who thought community is formed as a natural outcome
of population growth. Before I had started this project, my friend Steven Shum
and I facilitated a cross-generational roundtable discussion on the shape of gay
Asian community in the 1990s, which was later published in the anthology
Q & A: Queer in Asian America.3 During the discussion, the elders challenged us
to learn more about previous organizing efforts because many of the questions
we wrestled with at the time were not new. To a political activist like me, one
benefit of documenting this history was the ability to go back to a time when no
formal organizations existed in Los Angeles for gay Asian men. From this van-
tage, I could see how early organizations worked collectively (even if by neces-
sity) to create something out of nothing and, therefore, evidence how community
formation is a political act.
Again, I had been deliberate in excluding Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/
PLG) from my research questions because of its reputation as a playground for
rice queens. The stereotypes many of them held of Asian men—submissive,
boyish, easily controlled, exotic—had been the kind of characteristics that Wada
had felt imposed on him as he was becoming more active in the gay social scene
of Los Angeles since the mid-twentieth century. These stereotypes, and the infe-
riority they engendered in Asian men, have persisted. In a personal narrative
written in 1996, Sandip Roy talks about how racism in the gay community had
often driven him to seek the approval of “curry queens” (the equivalent of rice
queens who are sexually interested in South Asians in particular), even when he
felt no attraction to them.4 The story was all too familiar: the more our images
were not celebrated in the gay community, the more desperate was our need to
seek validation from the community that rejected us, and the more grateful we
became for each morsel of attention.
The theme of seeking validation from white gay men was not unique to the
gay Asian community. In his research on the gay Latino community in San Fran-
cisco, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez similarly found that the internalization of
racism by gay Latino men presented a challenge to that community formation
during the 1970s. One of his narrators, Jesús Barragán, observed, “What the prob-
lem here is everybody is after the white trophy. That’s the problem here. And
unless two people are comadres, you don’t want to have nothing to do with each
other. . . . And it’s like, you tear each other down . . . viciousness, because you’re
260 | POLITICS

after the white trophy. . . . I went around just saying these things to people and we
need to organize.”5
While these patterns of internalized racism were still at play for gay men of
color a generation later, my peers and I had come out in an environment that
resisted this sexual hierarchy and derided organizations like A/PLG (and any gay
Asian man who was willing to associate with it) as unenlightened, even
self-hating. Whenever I had thought about A/PLG at the time, I had this image
of these rice queens leering or brushing against younger Asian men in the most
inappropriate places. I had declined any opportunities to attend any A/PLG
events since coming out, eschewing one of the very few places that had been
developed exactly with gay Asian men like me in mind. So did I really want to
spend a year of my time interviewing (and validating) a group of people who
were willing to tolerate and include these rice queens in their milieu?
I had known it would be hard to tell the story of gay Asian men organizing in
Los Angeles without mentioning A/PLG, precisely because it was the first formal
organization for Asian gay men and lesbians in the city. Most of the narrators I
had begun to recruit had at one point or another belonged to the organization,
and many had assumed leadership roles in it. Several were even its founders. In
what I thought was a clever move on my part, I had devised an interview guide
that focused on the 1970s, asking these potential narrators to talk about life as
gay Asian men before any formal organization existed. I wanted to capture the
conditions under which community formation became necessary through orga-
nizing and establishing a formal organization—without mentioning anything
about the organization itself.
Any researcher who begins with such a biased agenda would, sooner or
later, meet his comeuppance. And thankfully, under the guidance of one of
the faculty members on my thesis committee (who is an experienced oral his-
torian), I learned early on that oral history, as a methodology, is a collabora-
tion between the researcher and the subjects. In the words of another oral
historian, Tamara Hareven, oral history is a “subjective process,” and the inter-
viewer is not like an academic expert but “like a medium, whose own pres-
ence, interests, and questions conjure corresponding memories.”6 The lack of
distance between the two is what makes oral history feel like a bastard in the
professional history discipline, that is, illegitimate in its scientific objectivity.7
However, to those of us toiling in ethnic studies, feminist studies, and sexu-
ality studies, this collaboration is central to our methodology. Gary Y. Okihiro
writes, “Oral history is not only a tool or method for recovering history; it also
is a theory of history which maintains that the common folk and the dispos-
sessed have a history and that this history must be written. . . . Ethnic history
is the first step toward ultimate emancipation; for by freeing ourselves from
the bonds of a colonized history, they will be able to see their true condition,
their own history.”8 To be in a true collaboration means that sometimes the
researcher has to give up some control of the research process and let the
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 261

narrators define for him what is important in the inquiry. After all, it is their
lives that are being documented.
By the third life history interview, I had to throw out my interview guide, which
contained no questions about A/PLG. I realized that to ignore A/PLG in the his-
tory of these gay Asian men would be like telling a story without the ending, for
A/PLG was either the reference point to which the narrators compared the rest of
their lives or the mark that had separated their lives from before and after. In one
interview, a narrator interrupted his own answer about gay life in the 1970s and
asked me if he could start talking about A/PLG. At that moment, I realized I had
missed the story altogether.
Equally important in my transformation at this point was the fact that the
men I had interviewed so far contradicted my own stereotypes of A/PLG and its
founders. They all had a very strong sense of Asian identity, some having grown
up in predominantly Asian communities or neighborhoods, and recalled those
memories fondly and intimately. They continued to occupy leadership positions
or were otherwise active in mainstream Asian American organizations. Frankly,
a couple of them had displayed such strong and willful presence of mind that I
had a hard time imagining them being pushed around by anyone, rice queens
or not. The three men I had interviewed by then had dispelled my stereotypes.
They were equally proud of being gay and Asian. That they had subscribed to a
white beauty myth demanded a more complex analysis than that of a popular
or conventional psychology that pathologizes them and their relationships as
markers of self-hatred, helplessness, or low self-esteem. As much as I hated being
wrong—because my own development as a gay Asian man had hinged on what
type of gay Asian man I was to be, that is, not an A/PLG member—I had the
good researcher’s sense that A/PLG somehow was the Rosetta stone by which
this complex interplay of race and sexuality could be decoded.
Around this time, I had also become more immersed in the early newsletters
of A/PLG. At the end of the organization’s first anniversary, A/PLG board mem-
bers reviewed the challenges and accomplishments of the organization. One of
them wrote about the part it had played in his identity development:

I think I came to the first meeting of A/PLG because I was intrigued by the idea of
an organization that was both gay and Asian. I was interested in knowing how to
deal with both being gay and Asian. I wasn’t sure it was possible to do this in a very
compatible manner. I guess I also wanted to meet new people and possibly even to
cruise. Through this, I got to meet many wonderful people I would not have been
able to meet any other way—certainly not in the kind of lifestyle I had been
leading. In many ways, it has been a tremendous growth experience for me.9

One can detect in this statement a transformation that the officer had not
expected when he first joined the organization. At least for this officer, A/PLG
had changed how he looked at his own racial and sexual identities and in turn
how he related to other gay Asian men. His statement echoes the life histories
262 | POLITICS

of many narrators who credit A/PLG for their leadership development and
self-esteem. Because of A/PLG’s existence, the late 1970s and the early 1980s
represent a disruption in the consciousness of gay Asian men in Los Angeles—
from a lack of community to self-identification, one that integrates both gay
and Asian in a “compatible manner.” This disruption in their consciousness
might not have eliminated the racist white standards that Wada and his gener-
ation had been subjected to, but it had provided an alternative where whiteness
did not have to be the center of the gay Asian men’s lives. By the end of this
project, I realized that, ironically, it was precisely this disruption that allowed
men in later generations like me to have other enlightened options in the com-
munity, to the point that we could deride A/PLG, fairly or not, as anachronistic
in our own times.
My interview with Ernest Wada was my fourth, and it was the first with the
new conceptual framework that included a satisfactory ending to the narrators’
lives. Wada’s narrative gave me one of the key insights into the kind of experi-
ence that shaped the identity and community formation for gay Asian men in
Los Angeles at that time. Ironically, Wada was never active in A/PLG. despite
being a close friend of some of its early leaders. He was also one of few narrators
who insisted on remaining anonymous. One of the main reasons he had stayed
away from A/PLG is because Wada, who was born and raised in this country, was
not entirely comfortable in associating with recent Asian immigrants in the or-
ganization. Some of his feelings toward immigrants were evident when he
talked about the competition he felt from this group in the gay bar scenes before
the formation of A/PLG. Regardless of what A/PLG had become to different
people in the community when I came out, as I put his narrative into the context
of other interviews for this larger history, I wonder how much of Wada’s view of
himself would have been different had he gone through the experience of
A/PLG in its early years, as some of the other narrators had.
What I thought had complicated Wada’s identity development was the natu-
ralized conflation of gender and sexuality at the time of his coming of age, a
time when queerness for boys and men was an epithet reserved only for those
who did not outwardly conform to the gender expectations of masculinity. He
talked about growing up in a fishing community, where men were often absent,
and being raised in a family with four older sisters. He recalled thinking that he
was the fifth sister. Later, after being released from the internment camps, his
family moved to East Los Angeles, and Wada talked about his affairs with young
Latino classmates there, presumably straight boys looking for “sexual release,”
targeting Wada because he was a “sissy.” Gender and sexual identities were inter-
changeable to him, and he fulfilled the “feminine” role that made these sexual
behaviors (such as masturbation and penetration) culturally acceptable for his
friends.
Wada also had to contend with possible outright abuse or violence in less
private arenas. He had to butch it up by dating girls (though he stopped short of
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 263

sharing a prostitute with a fellow soldier). At a time before affirmative action,

when many Asians were denied the opportunity to pursue higher education,
Wada sought out the military. Within this homosocial environment, Wada
found the cracks in American masculinist ideals, and he was able to find sexual
expression with straight comrades. Yet these experiences enforced for him the
proscription of both his gender and sexual identities.
What intrigued me most about this process for Wada—and for other gay
Asian men I interviewed—was the additional racial layer. Because of the prevail-
ing stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate and docile, the metonymy of sexual
and gender identities found another expression in racist discourse for gay Asian
men, which many internalized. For instance, as he explained why he was not
sexually interested in other Asian men, he recognized he had “never thought
about it actually. At school, when I used to have these crushes and physical at-
traction, it was a mixture of Asians, Mexicans, whatever turned me on, you know.
But once I became gay, I guess I was looking for . . . I don’t want . . . I want some-
one that is masculine. I want someone that is masculine because I tended to be
so effeminate myself.”
This passage stood out because it gave me an insight that contradicts the
common notion that gay Asian desire toward white gay men is natural or
changeless, a prevailing attitude in the community that I often had to contend
with as someone who tried to resist this sexual hierarchy. Wada was describing a
process of unlearning, where his childhood memories and multicultural desires
were being replaced by a singular longing for white men as he became more
active in the gay community, or “once I became gay.” Not only did he forget that
he had been attracted to Asians (and other people of color) when he was younger
but he also rejected the possibility of having an Asian sexual partner because
Asians—categorically—were not masculine, yang to his feminine yin.
This passage also stood out because it was expressed as a self-knowledge that
Wada had not reflected on until our recording. There were pauses, false starts,
and stuttering at this part of our interview. Initially, he genuinely thought he had
not excluded anyone based on race when he said, “My physical attraction is
whoever that turns me on. It’s not a specific type.” This statement might have
been true before he became actively gay, and I believe it was also what he truly
believed of himself at that point of our conversation, until I pressed him about
how he, as a gay man, felt about other Asians. As soon as he stated that he “never
thought about it actually,” he immediately began to think out loud as he sorted
out his memories and feelings, giving a litany of possible explanations for this
newfound discrepancy. Sitting across from Wada, as he struggled to find these
words to express his thoughts, I felt as if my probing had forced him to wrestle
with a forgotten memory, the very idea of which contradicted his current
self-identity.
In finding an answer to how such contradicting memories could exist in one
person, I realized that this contradiction is essential to the naturalizing of the
264 | POLITICS

sexual hierarchy in the gay community. In his ethnographic study of Filipino gay
men in New York in the 1990s, Martin Manalansan cites Martin P. Levine’s study
of the gay macho “clone” phenomenon, “a loose group of predominantly Cau-
casian men who dominated and set the tone for the post-Stonewall New York
City gay scene in the 1970s and early 1980s.”10 The clone body manifested itself
in gay bars, gyms, magazines, fashion, bathhouses and sex clubs, and personal
ads, and it created a standard of masculinity that alienated and excluded people
of color, including Manalansan’s Filipino informants. While Manalansan docu-
ments the counterdiscursive spaces created by people of color to decenter white
gay standards, he also found that “the ambivalent and mercurial quality of sev-
eral queers of color spaces point to the abject and marginal status of these sites
in relation to the mainstream gay topography.” He concludes, “As participants
in and observers of the various sites and places in the city, Filipino gay men are
keenly aware of their location and acknowledge both the opportunities and bar-
riers to staking a claim to any of these places.”11 Whether in New York or Los
Angeles, post-Stonewall or post-AIDS, contradictions seem to be a common
mark of experiences (and therefore identities) of queer Asian men across space
and time, though it seems some are more aware of these contradictions than
others.
I am also reminded here of Lisa Lowe’s comments about Franz Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks. She writes,

In alluding to the paradoxical fluency of the colonized subjects in the colonial

language and culture, Fanon astutely names the twofold character of colonial for-
mation. The imposition of the colonial language and its cultural institutions . . .
demands the subject’s internalization of the “superiority” of the colonizer and the
“inferiority” of the colonized. . . . Yet the colonized subject produced within such
an encounter does not merely bear the marks of the coercive encounter between
the dominant language and culture. . . . Such encounters produced contradictory
subjects, in whom the demands for fluency in imperial languages and empire’s
cultural institutions simultaneously provide the grounds for antagonism to those
demands.12

Memories can be evacuated but not erased, and the process is never complete or
irreversible. Lowe’s concept of the replacement of memories became one of the
main frameworks I used to analyze the experience of gay Asian men in the 1970s
before and during the formation of A/PLG.
And this is the power of oral history: the power to unearth a memory and the
potential to change the self-perception of a narrator in ways more immediate
than any research method. Tamara Hareven believes that oral history “is not
strictly a means of retrieval of information, but rather one involving the genera-
tion of knowledge.”13 I believe that the narrators I interviewed had expanded the
conceptual framework of my study so that their stories could be told more fully.
Yet, I know my power to ask questions tremendously shaped their stories. For
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 265

me, nowhere was this more apparent and immediate than my interview with
Ernest Wada. For other narrators in my research, they had begun to work out
(even if they had not completed) the decentering of whiteness in the very public
setting of A/PLG: by limiting the leadership to mostly Asian Pacific members, by
setting up Asian-only rap groups, by exploring each other’s cultures, or by de-
fining what was appropriate or inappropriate behavior among members in the
organization. Wada was never integral to these processes. At the age of sixty-two,
while being interviewed by a graduate student not even half his age, he learned
something new about himself.
But is self-knowledge always a good thing? At the time of our interview, Wada
had a live-in partner he had met two years before, a man he described as the one
he had been looking for. Wada was retired. He seemed happy. How useful was
his new self-knowledge? Since oral history is a political project, I wondered how
this knowledge would empower Wada.
The excerpt stimulated a series of reactions from Wada, ranging from innoc-
uous uncertainties to mild anxieties. Wada looked to me to validate his feelings
about white gay men who objectified Asians like him. He asked, “Is it a physical
thing, or is it something they feel inside?” I thought it was a rhetorical question.
When I realized it was not, the inexperienced interviewer in me, unaccustomed
to having the table turned, answered the question and risked biasing Wada’s
subsequent narrative. His responses thereafter sometimes sounded like pleading
for understanding or validation from me, the researcher. At the end of the inter-
view, when I asked if he had anything else he would like to add, Wada told me,
someone he had not met before the interview, “I don’t want you to leave here
thinking I was just an Asian person trying to be white.” He said he always felt
like an “underdog,” never coming into his own, and pointed to his lack of op-
portunities growing up and the lack of gay Asian spaces like the bars and orga-
nizations we have today. Weeks later, when I asked him to review the transcript,
he handwrote on the back of the transcript a long note in a similar tone. He
reiterated that it might have made a difference if he had come out now, with
gay Asian men more visibly in leadership positions and holding public
responsibilities.
I had thought empathy and shared authority would prevent ethical dilemmas
from arising during the oral history process. In some way, I believe it has made
for a better and more empowering research product. Understanding the circum-
stances of the narrators’ lives and being vigilant about my assumptions about
them led me to insights that I would have otherwise missed. In return for the
narrators’ brave frankness and generosity of spirit, I knew I had offered most of
them something valuable. For some who had lost touch with one another, I
helped renew their friendships. Others gained a new perspective on their experi-
ence in very positive ways. I don’t think any of them had thought of himself as
a pioneer. When they began organizing in the early 1980s, they were just doing
what they thought needed to be done. They did not do it because they wanted
266 | POLITICS

to be written about or honored decades later. I admire and learn from their hu-
mility, a mark of great leaders. For the readers, especially today’s activists and
organizers, I hope this history offers a continuity between what these narrators
accomplished decades ago and the shape of our community now. They matter.
But with Wada, I am more ambivalent about my contributions, and my
empathy and shared authority did not seem adequate. After all, the handwritten
note attached to his transcript told me that he had continued to struggle with
his recent self-revelation weeks after our interview. My empathy that day ended
when the tape stopped rolling. While I tried to be empathetic during the writing
and retelling of his stories, as well as those of his peers, Wada was left to deal
with this new information about himself without me, the person who had a
heavy hand in conjuring up that information. We oral historians do not want
distance from our narrators, but how close should we get?
Gary Y. Okihiro discusses oral history as a method that involves two dif-
ferent worldviews: that of the narrator and that of the interviewer.14 What if the
two collide? Through my probing, I had unearthed something unpleasant for
him (that “beast of consciousness”); even if not unpleasant, it was something
he felt compelled to explain. It is clear to me now that my line of questioning
had as much to do with my present anxiety about my own position as a gay
Asian man, about my need to explain certain racial dynamics that are still pre-
sent in my life (though perhaps not as dominant, thanks to the existence of
organizations like A/PLG), as it had to do with a pure desire to document his-
tory. I came at this, as he aptly said, from “a liberated point of view.” Likewise,
the products of my research—the thesis, the book, and even this essay—reflect
that worldview.
(I have not meant for this self-reflexive essay to be an apologia for my oral
history approach, but perhaps it is inevitable. Owning a possible trespass is dif-
ferent from absolving a real one, but is it better than not considering the trespass
at all? Or is thinking it merely academic, or can it preempt the next trespass?
Whom does this essay help more, Wada or me?)
Because of the intimate nature of our research methods, we oral historians
have endlessly debated the proper relationship between narrators and re-
searchers. Daphne Patai writes, “When lengthy personal narratives, in particular,
are gathered, an intimacy (or the appearance of intimacy) is generated that blurs
any neat distinction between ‘research’ and ‘personal relations.’ We ask of people
we interview the kind of revelation of their inner life that normally occurs in
situations of great familiarity and within the private realm. Yet we invite these
revelations to be made in the context of the public sphere.”15 However, I am not
convinced that the solution is to dissolve our own authority as oral historians
and avoid interpreting people’s lives that are shared so intimately with us. In
fact, some feminist oral historians believe that it would be a disservice to every-
one. Katherine Borland writes, “To refrain from interpretation by letting the sub-
jects speak for themselves seems to me an unsatisfactory if not illusory
 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES | 267

solution. . . . Feminist theory provides a powerful critique of our society, and as

feminists, we presumably are dedicated to making that critique as forceful and
direct as possible.”16 Yet, even Borland admits that the researcher’s worldview
cannot supersede that of the narrator. As oral historians, we walk a tightrope,
balancing the intimacy of supposed equals and our responsibility as academics
to produce a broader knowledge.
For what it’s worth, I do not believe I am the right person to validate Wada’s
self-esteem (if any validation is needed at all). To do so would mean assuming
an authority that I do not want for myself. How would this validation be dif-
ferent from the one he sought from white gay men when he was younger? I am
no more a holder of truth for his life than those white gay men were standards
of masculinity. In the end, I could only hope that I have kept the complexity of
his life intact, which frankly has tempered my self-righteousness about being a
proper gay Asian man. Furthermore, I hope he understands that in sharing his
story he has expanded our understanding of race and sexuality.

Notes
1. Eric C . Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
2. Ronald J. Grele, “Directions of Oral History in the United States,” in David K. Dunaway and
Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Lanham, MD: AltaMira,
1996), 67–68.
3. Eric C. Wat and Steven Shum, “Queer API Men in Los Angeles: A Roundtable on History and
Political Organizing,” in David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., Q & A: Queer in Asian America
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 166–84.
4. Sandip Roy, “Curry Queens and Other Spices,” in Eng and Hom, Q & A, 256–61.
5. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “‘That’s My Place!’: Negotiating Racial, Sexual, and Gender Pol-
itics in San Francisco’s Gay Latino Alliance, 1975–1983,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12,
no. 2 (April 2003): 229.
6. Tamara Hareven, “The Search for Generational Memory,” in Dunaway and Baum, Oral His-
tory, 247.
7. For a broader discussion on the evolution of oral history in this country and ongoing ten-
sion within the professional discipline of history, see Grele, “Directions of Oral History,”
62–84.
8. Gary Y. Okihiro, “Oral History and the Writing of Ethnic History,” in Dunaway and Baum,
Oral History, 209.
9. A/PLG Newsletter, January 1982, Issue 1B.
10. Martin F. Manalansan, IV. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 64.
11. Ibid., 88.
12. See Lisa Lowe, “Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Writing and the Question
of History,” in Immigrant Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 97–127.
13. Hareven, “The Search for Generational Memory,” 247.
14. Okihiro, “Oral History and the Writing of Ethnic History,” 205.
15. Daphne Patai, “U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?” in
Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral
History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 142.
16. Katherine Borland, “‘That’s Not What I Said’: Interpretive Conflict in Oral Narrative
Research,” in Gluck and Patai, Women’s Words, 64.
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 AFTERWORD:
“IF I KNEW THEN . . .”
John D’Emilio

The head spins. Or at least, my head spins, after reading the collection of essays
and interview excerpts that Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez
have assembled. The interviews themselves are compelling and revealing. They
provide evidence to skeptics, converts, and advocates that oral history as a
method has the power to enrich, deepen, and expand enormously the historical
record. And the analyses that contributors have provided cover so much ground
that it is difficult, even after more than one reading, to absorb it all.
When the editors asked if I would contribute an afterword to this book,
I imagined that I would use it to wrap up neatly the disparate observations of the
various authors. Instead, these pieces have moved me to reflect back on my own
experience using oral histories and to comment on how this anthology helps me
think about the process of producing as well as consuming oral histories.
Oral histories have played a part in my work since graduate school. Between
1976 and 1980, for what became Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, I interviewed
about forty men and women who had been active in the pre-Stonewall homo-
phile movement. Then, in the 1990s, I conducted a comparable number for a
biography of Bayard Rustin, a radical pacifist and civil rights activist who was
also a gay man. Now, in my current work on the history of sexuality in Chicago,
I am using oral histories done by others. In all these projects, I also pored
through a large body of documentary evidence, some in archives and some in
private hands.1
Oral histories functioned differently in these endeavors. In the case of the his-
tory of pre-Stonewall activism, I could not have produced a dissertation that was
up to snuff without the interviews to which so many activists graciously con-
sented. The archived materials at that point were slim; the private collections were
hard to track down and unprocessed. For the Rustin biography, I faced the oppo-
site situation. I could have spent a lifetime exploring every archive that touches
upon Rustin’s life and still have felt there was more to learn. But there were also
absences in the written record, most obviously in relation to Rustin’s sexuality,
270 | AFTERWORD

and the oral histories remedied some of that. In my current Chicago research, the
oral histories of other researchers have functioned as an archival source.
In 1971, when I started graduate school at Columbia, the writing of U.S. his-
tory was in upheaval. The radicalism associated with the social movements of
the 1960s was affecting the production of American history in at least two impor-
tant ways. One set of historians was revising the past from the top down. A New
Left school of researchers was reinterpreting foreign policy as a story of imperial
expansion and writing studies of political economy under the rubric of corpo-
rate liberalism. Another set of historians was reshaping an understanding of the
past from the bottom up. New social historians churned out books and articles
on topics ranging from seventeenth-century New England towns to daily life
within the antebellum slave community to worker militancy in early-twentieth-
century industrial cities. Both groups shared a critical distance from heroic nar-
ratives of U.S. history, and both saw writing and disseminating these histories as
transformative acts, capable of supporting progressive political change. Although
not all of my peers approached their studies from this perspective, enough did
to make graduate studies brim over with excitement. The sense of radical poten-
tial that some writers in this book attribute to oral history today was something
that, a generation ago, I attached to historical research itself.
Oral history and the new social history might seem to be natural bedfellows,
but, interestingly, oral history hardly figured in my graduate school reading. The
new social history that appeared on my comprehensive exam lists covered eras
too far in the past for there to be living interview subjects, though certainly stu-
dents of slavery were mining the life histories collected in the 1930s as part of the
Works Progress Administration. We did learn about the Columbia Oral History
Project, started in the late 1940s by Allan Nevins and, as we were told, the first of
its kind in the United States. But its purpose and focus were so far removed from
the radical spirit of the new social history that oral history seemed less than
compelling. The Oral History Project meant to remedy gaps in the written record
created by the shift toward telephone conversation as a main mode of commu-
nication. Because presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and
other Important Men increasingly relied on the telephone instead of the memo
or letter, interviewing had become a necessary form of research.
Still, the existence of the project at Columbia and the endorsement of the
method by someone as respected as Nevins gave oral history legitimacy. In com-
parison with the novelty of a dissertation on a gay topic, the fact that I expected
to do interviews created scarcely a ripple in the history department. And since
this was before I or anyone I knew had ever heard of an institutional review
board with the kind of power that Michael David Franklin references, a need to
gain its approval affected me not at all.
In the fall of 1976, I set out on a research trip to California, where I conducted
about three dozen interviews in four months. The interviews primarily covered
events that had occurred ten to twenty-five years earlier. In reconstructing that
 “IF I KNEW THEN . . .” | 271

experience now, I am acutely aware that I am drawing on memories of my own

older than the ones I extracted from my informants. As virtually every contrib-
utor to this volume attests, memory is complicated. The issue is not merely how
well or accurately we remember. Rather, we all have investments in our stories of
the past. They are influenced by present-day agendas, some conscious and some
not, that shape the telling. What investments do I have today in recounting my
experience with oral history? Writing about it seems even trickier because, as will
become apparent, I can’t be the “good historian” and simply go back to the
record—my transcripts—as a way of checking my recollections.
When I departed for California, I had already worked my way through runs
of ONE, the Ladder, and the Mattachine Review, the main homophile publica-
tions of the 1950s and 1960s. I had pored through two file cabinets of records
from the New York Mattachine Society and had read the small number of works
that touched on pre-Stonewall activism. I intended during my stay in California
to do both document research and interviews. But the boundary between the
written and the oral was porous. For instance, I interviewed Jim Kepner in his
apartment, the same space where he made available to me piles of clippings and
folders of documents. Even when I worked in libraries, interview subjects like
Dorr Legg and Don Slater were nearby, since they ran the libraries that housed
the documents. To them, the history I was researching was still alive—and they
lived with it. How did that influence their interviews and distinguish them from
those who had left behind the experience of homophile activism?
My dissertation advisor had given me two bits of advice about doing oral
histories. “Know as much as possible before going in to the interview,” he told
me. “And don’t be too directive.” The latter, which suited my personality, was
rendered easier initially by how poorly I was able to comply with the former.
Diligent as I had tried to be before approaching these activists for interviews,
I still knew precious little about these organizations and their work.
With each successive interview, my ignorance diminished a bit, and this can
serve as a reminder that doing oral history is itself a process that evolves in the
course of a project. As I learned more, I could conduct my interviews differently.
I was especially aware of this after I interviewed Jim Kepner. Kepner had made
himself the unofficial historian of the homophile movement. He had accumu-
lated massive documentary material; he stayed in touch with people; he
remained engaged in activism. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the
events, organizations, and people that constituted the movement.2 Interviewing
him was like opening an almanac and having the pages turn by themselves, with
very little effort from me. After more than twelve hours of conversation with
him, I was better equipped for future interviews. I continued to be nondirective
and open-ended in my initial engagement with a narrator—“tell me about”
rather than “did you”—but as the number of subjects I interviewed grew, I had
a better sense of places that I hoped an interview would go, and I could inter-
vene gently to steer the conversation in a direction.
272 | AFTERWORD

A theme that courses through most of the essays in this collection is power.
Power figures into every relationship, and it does not travel in only one direc-
tion. Power is also dynamic; it can shift over time. Heading into my interviews,
I was a graduate student in my twenties, still uncertain as to whether I had a real
dissertation topic. I was dependent on the power of my subjects to say yes or no
to my request. I was also dependent on their power, given my initially paltry
knowledge of the events under scrutiny, to tell me whatever version of their story
they chose to construct. Put most bluntly, I desperately needed what they, and
only they, knew. But once the interviews were over, my research done, and my
book published, the tables would turn, and they would be dependent on me,
the interviewer who had now morphed into author. I was interpreting their
stories. I was selecting from their memories and arranging them in a way that
made sense to me, without their continuing input. To become a historian,
I needed them. But if I became one, their place in history would be constructed
by me.
That is one way of describing the relationship between me and my subjects,
and there is a certain truthfulness to it. But if I had to reconstruct where I think
we actually were then, I’d describe the relationship with most of my subjects as
one of mutual gratitude.
Why my gratitude? A key element of gay liberation rhetoric in the 1970s was
its delineation of pre-Stonewall oppression. The queens of Stonewall rose up,
and those who followed their lead burst out of the closet, rebels against the in-
tolerable conditions of queer life. As I encountered men and women, all of
whom belonged to the generation of my parents, aunts, and uncles and all of
whom had lived under this earlier regime, it was hard not to be awed by their
bravery. Regardless of how I measured the success of their work, they had set out
on a path that, considering the objectively oppressive conditions in the 1950s
and early 1960s, made the courage of my generation less impressive. These were
pioneers.
Why their gratitude? In the last three decades, accounts of homophile-era
activism have appeared in so many books that it is hard to appreciate today how
thoroughly the Stonewall generation refused to acknowledge or validate this
early activism.3 A small number of the homophile generation—Frank Kameny,
Barbara Gittings, Jim Kepner, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon come quickly to
mind—had made the transition into the 1970s, and they continued to build
their activist resumes. But most had not, and most felt thoroughly neglected and
unappreciated. To have someone of the next generation affirm, as I was, that
their work mattered and that it needed to be told as history, was gratifying.
In one sense, I could describe these interviews as an exercise in creating cross-
generational ties, much as Daniel Marshall does in his essay on the Gay Teachers
and Students Group in Melbourne, Australia. Certainly, for many years after-
ward, I carried with me a sense of those connections. I lived with those inter-
views and those subjects, metaphorically, for a long time. Through writing I did
 “IF I KNEW THEN . . .” | 273

for a radical gay publication such as The Body Politic and through historical talks
I gave to community groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I held out the left-
wing origins of the Mattachine as a tradition from which my generation of queer
leftists could draw. And my feelings for some of them were passionate. Reading
Marcia Gallo’s description of her connection to Stella Rush, I was reminded of
something I wrote about Harry Hay and Chuck Rowland: “I could say that I fell
in love, though that phrase barely touches the depth and variety of feeling that
I have for them.”4
At the same time, partly because I was writing a history of a national move-
ment whose participants were dispersed rather than of a local community
bound together by place, I was at most a momentary visitor in their lives. It
would be interesting to test whether the appealing, almost utopian, hopes for
oral history articulated by many of this book’s authors materialize and are sus-
tained. How would one need to conceptualize and implement an oral history
project for it to realize such a vision? Did the oral histories, for instance, that
Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis conducted for their community history
of lesbians in Buffalo leave such a legacy behind in a way that, by contrast, my
interviews of homophile activists did not?5 Is the Twin Cities Project that Jason
Ruiz helped found doing this in a sustained way?
I returned to the practice of oral history in the 1990s, when I began working
on a biography of Bayard Rustin. There was a queer element to this work, of
course. Rustin was gay, and he had to navigate the intense homophobia of the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as he pursued his fight for peace and social justice in the
pacifist, civil rights, and labor movements. Yet oral history figured in this
project very differently than in my earlier one. Rustin’s life was not what one
might call “queer-centric.” His public career revolved around issues—nuclear
weapons, racial justice, economic inequality—that were mainstays of twentieth-
century U.S. history narratives. Thus, most of the individuals I interviewed
were not in any way queer-identified. I was also conducting these interviews
not to get the life histories of my subjects, but to have them elaborate on the
life of Rustin. Finally, not only was there a rich documentary trail for the orga-
nizations and movements with which Rustin was involved but also the archives
contained rich repositories of oral histories conducted by others, particularly
of the civil rights movement. In working on Rustin’s life, I not only did inter-
views of my own but also read transcripts of interviews in the Kennedy and
Johnson presidential libraries (recall the model and motivation of the Colum-
bia Oral History Project with regard to Important Men), as well as at Howard
University, with its substantial collection of interviews with grassroots civil
rights activists.
Early on, I made the decision not to interview the surviving civil rights leaders
with whom Rustin had worked. In the oral histories that I was reading in
libraries, I noticed a significant difference between the interviews that were done
in the 1960s, close to the events, and those done in the 1980s. A revision of
274 | AFTERWORD

memory appeared to be going on, not so much in terms of the facts of history—
what had happened—but in terms of the evaluation of people and their roles.
I was not interested in conducting a third round of interviews in which partici-
pants, in the more gay-tolerant atmosphere of the mid- to late 1990s, revised
their views of Rustin as an activist and a homosexual.
But the pacifist movement was another story. In certain ways, one could say
its history paralleled that of the homophile movement. Pacifists in the United
States of the 1940s and 1950s were beyond the boundary that separated normal
from deviant. Like the homophile activists, they had been largely neglected, not
only by historians but also by the antiwar activists who came after them. Most
of them had not been interviewed endless times by journalists and historians;
most of them did not have well-rehearsed versions of their history. As with ho-
mophile activists, one could make a claim for their bravery, since to be a pacifist
during World War II and the height of the Cold War was to stand way outside
the definition of a good American.
I also felt toward these pacifists a certain kinship. Just as the homophile
movement broke ground that I later benefited from in the 1970s, male conscien-
tious objectors in particular had, at mid-century, pioneered an opposition to
war and militarism that, later, I struggled to express as a draft-eligible young
man at the height of the Vietnam War. As I delved more deeply into the history
of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, the organiza-
tions for which Rustin worked, I found myself wanting to give these pacifists
their due. I hoped that my interviews with them would allow me to reconstruct
in as rich and nuanced a way as possible Rustin’s pacifist history.
I have to admit that I approached these interviews with a trepidation that
I did not experience in my earlier project. While I carried respect, admiration,
and, even, a bit of awe into both sets of encounters, my agenda, to the degree
that I had one, was very much out there with the homophile activists. But with
most of my pacifist subjects, I carried a worry that made me strategize how
I would raise the issue of Rustin’s sexuality. I did not want to make them defen-
sive; I did not want the interview to shut down. After all, Rustin experienced in
the peace movement a measure of censure and isolation because of his sexuality.
Would my raising it, even half a century later, create a barrier between me and
my subjects that would prove impossible to surmount?
I opted for an approach that seemed both sensible and ethical: waiting until
we were well into the interview before I introduced the subject. It made sense to
me because much of what I wanted from them was an understanding of pacifist
activism and of Rustin’s role in the peace movement. Talking about that had to
lead eventually to a discussion of his sexuality because, at some point in the
narrative, we inevitably came up against the scandals and controversies associ-
ated with Rustin’s homosexuality. As it turned out, I need not have worried. To
the best of my recollection, everyone was forthcoming about it. Some brought it
up themselves, and others talked about it once I introduced the topic. Some said
 “IF I KNEW THEN . . .” | 275

less than others, but not, I sensed, because of discomfort, hostility, or a con-
scious decision to withhold.
Interviewing heterosexuals about homosexuality is an interesting adventure.
I suppose one could argue that these were not typical heterosexuals, if such a
group even exists. As religious pacifists, these were good men and women com-
mitted to the dignity of every human life. They were devoted to building a world
based on allegiance to a common humanity. I learned, or perhaps had con-
firmed, that homosexuality in that era was not something named among them,
even as many also claimed to “know” about Rustin. And they knew about Rustin
in part because of assumptions made about masculinity. Rustin’s dress, his way
of speaking, his carriage, and his interest in the arts and high culture all marked
him as not traditionally male. I learned as well that there was a divide between
private and public. Rustin’s difference was of no consequence until there was a
public naming that, almost inevitably given the era, caused scandal. And
I learned that there was a difference between religious and secular pacifist cir-
cles. The latter could have cared less about Rustin’s sexual desires. Indeed, the
trouble he got into and the difficulty that religious pacifists had in dealing with
it almost seemed to make Rustin more heroic in the view of these secular
radicals.
Interestingly, work on the Rustin biography also pointed out to me how in-
dissolubly linked are the practice of oral history and research in print materials.
More revealing than any of the oral histories I conducted were two caches of
documents that I never expected to find. One was a large set of records detailing
Rustin’s time in federal prison during World War II. It provided correspondence
to and from Rustin, along with material from prison officials about Rustin’s
sexuality. It was a eureka moment unlike anything I’ve experienced in forty years
of studying history. The other was the correspondence between Rustin and Davis
Platt, his lover at the time. A generation older than me, Platt was someone who
had been in my extended gay social circle in New York in the 1970s. He had been
at parties at my home many times in that decade. I never knew about his rela-
tionship with Rustin, but when he learned that I was working on a biography, he
contacted me and made available letters that Rustin had written while serving
time in federal prison and that Platt had saved for half a century. He also con-
sented to two interviews, which had a warmth and vitality that went beyond
anything I experienced in interviewing Rustin’s pacifist colleagues. In this case,
the identity and the relationship of interviewer and subject deeply affected the
experience. Oral history helped strengthen cross-generational connections, as
well as friendship. With Platt, as it had been for me with Harry Hay two decades
earlier, the experience of oral history was magical.
For the last three years, I have been doing research on Chicago. I hesitate to
be more specific than that because, unlike my dissertation on pre-Stonewall
activism or my biography of Rustin, this work has not yet coalesced into a clear
and well-defined book project. Instead, I am allowing myself to roam around in
276 | AFTERWORD

materials about the history of sexuality in Chicago in the twentieth century.

Queer topics, in the broadest sense, naturally figure in this, but I cannot claim
yet that the project is queer centered.
For me, the most dramatic difference between this work that I have begun in
the first decade of the twenty-first century and the research I started as a graduate
student in the 1970s is that a huge mass of easily accessible material is available
for me to examine without my having to search and search and search for it. The
Gerber/Hart Library, a GLBT community-based library and archives, has lots
of collections, as well as runs of newspapers and newsletters produced by
GLBT community organizations. The Leather Archives and Museum, another
community-based institution, does as well. But materials about sexuality, in-
cluding things one could define as queer, are also to be found at such places as
the Chicago History Museum, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Illinois at Chicago. I know progress narratives are out of fashion these days, but
to me this is progress.
So, unlike in the 1970s, when I had to track down informants to interview,
I can now go to the Gerber/Hart Library and read transcripts of dozens upon
dozens of oral histories of GLBT activists and community members done by re-
searchers who came before me. It is a privilege and a thrill to be able to do this.
And once again, it evokes in me feelings of immense gratitude. I know that
because of this prior work, I will be much better prepared when I begin to do
interviews of my own for this project. I am also grateful for another reason.
Some of these interviews were conducted as long ago as the early 1980s. Since
then, some narrators have died, and these oral histories are the best source of
information we will ever have about their lives.
The transcripts can also serve as a curriculum for the practice of oral history,
a curriculum that I never took before I learned interviewing by doing it. Some of
these interviews are so rich, so overflowing with information and insight that
I wish they went on forever. And some of them are, frankly, terrible. The differ-
ence between the valuable ones and the disasters is almost never about the
narrator. Sure, sometimes one senses shyness or detachment in a narrator, a
reluctance to speak, or an abrasiveness of style that almost any interviewer
would have difficulty penetrating. But more of the time the failure is that of the
interviewer. She or he goes in there with an agenda, and the agenda simply does
not mesh with the life experience of the narrator. The interviewer poses too
many questions of a factual kind: did you know so-and-so? Were you at such-
and-such? Were you a member of this group? When the person says no, the
conversation grinds to a halt.
Reading these weak interviews makes me cringe, and not only because of the
wasted opportunity. Rather, I read them with the awareness that my interviews,
too, are now accessible to others who can pass judgment on them. I wonder
what they read like. I donated all my materials about Rustin to the Swarthmore
College Peace Collection, the archive that has the largest number of collections
 “IF I KNEW THEN . . .” | 277

that relate directly to his life. In the case of these interviews, I can just sit at home
and reread the transcripts because, when I worked on this project, I had the
privileges of a senior faculty member with a research assistant whose job it was
to transcribe the tapes. But as a graduate student, taking forever, it seemed, to
finish a dissertation, all I did was take notes on my interviews, as if I were lis-
tening to a lecture in class, and replay short segments to copy out what sounded
like good quotes. Those tapes I donated to a community-based archive in New
York City that later went under. Most of them made their way to the New York
Public Library where I know they have been used by others. To me, it is amazing
that they survive at all since, as a graduate student living at bare subsistence,
I bought the cheapest possible cassette tapes for interviewing subjects. Writing
this essay makes me want to go back there and listen to them.
Reading the interviews done by others and imagining listening once again to
interviews I did a generation ago put into bold relief for me something I did not
think much about when I made that trip to California in 1976. The living,
breathing, face-to-face interview becomes, in time, another collection in the
archives. For all the power and the magic of the experience, oral history requires
of us critical skills of assessment and evaluation not unlike what all archival
materials demand. Especially when our subjects are not the rich and the famous
and the influential, for whom a well-cleared documentary trail already exists,
oral history promises to make a place for them in accounts of the past—indeed,
to make history read differently because of their presence. But interviews are not
transparent. Like documents, they beg for analysis and interpretation. And once
that work commences, the values and life experience of the interpreter—the
historian—inevitably become part of the story.

Notes
1. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States,
1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; 2nd ed., 1998); and Lost Prophet: The
Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003).
2. See Jim Kepner, Rough News, Daring Views: 1950’s Pioneer Gay Press Journalism (Binghamton,
NY: Haworth, 1997).
3. See, for example, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to
1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters:
A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York:
Carroll and Graf, 2006); Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications
and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Marc Stein,
City of Brotherly and Sisterly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2000).
4. “Dreams Deferred: The Birth and Betrayal of America’s First Gay Liberation Movement,” in
Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992),
55. The essay originally appeared in the Body Politic, February 1979.
5. Elizabeth Lapofsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The His-
tory of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).
This page intentionally left blank
Contributors

Kelly Anderson teaches women and gender studies at Smith College and is an
oral historian at the Sophia Smith Collection. Her research interests include the
history of feminisms, sexuality, and LGBT communities. She has been conduct-
ing oral history interviews for more than twenty years and is completing her
dissertation about contemporary lesbian activists, titled “I Wanted It Like a
Lover, I Wanted It Like Justice.”

Nan Alamilla Boyd is a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco
State University. Her academic interests include the history of sexuality, histor-
ical methodology, and urban tourism. Her first book, Wide Open Town: A History
of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (University of California Press, 2003), charts the
rise of gay and lesbian politics in San Francisco. Her current research explores
the history of tourism in San Francisco.

John D’Emilio is a professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author or editor of more than half a
dozen books, including Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a
Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970; Intimate Matters: A History
of Sexuality in America; and Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. His
awards include Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS fellowships; the Brudner Prize
from Yale University for lifetime contributions to gay and lesbian studies; and
the Stonewall Book Award of the American Library Association.

Steve Estes is a professor of history at Sonoma State University, where he spe-

cializes in modern American history. He is the author of I Am a Man!: Race,
Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press,
2005) and Ask & Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out (University of North
Carolina Press, 2007).

Michael David Franklin is a historian, writer, and educator who received his
PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota in 2011. His disserta-
tion examines transgender cultural production on film and video over the last
sixty years in order to theorize biopower at the intersection of medicine and
mass visual culture. A member of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, he
is the coeditor of Queer Twin Cities (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
280 | CONTRIBUTORS

Jeff Friedman is associate professor of dance history and theory at Rutgers Uni-
versity. He researches theories, methods, and practices of dance documentation,
focusing on oral history for dance and performance as research inquiry. He is a
Fulbright Fellow and has received eight National Endowment for the Arts grants
and the James V. Mink and Forrest C. Pogue awards for his oral history work.
Friedman has published articles and book chapters in the United Kingdom,
Spain, Germany, Korea, and New Zealand.

Marcia M. Gallo is assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las

Vegas. She received her PhD in 2004 from the City University of New York
(CUNY) Graduate Center. Her 2006 book, Different Daughters: A History of the
Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, won the Lambda
Literary Award and was named a best book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Gallo
also received the Passing the Torch Award from CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies in 2007. Her next book is on the 1964 murder of Catherine “Kitty”
Genovese.

Carrie Hamilton is reader in history at Roehampton University, London. Her

research interests include oral history, cultural memory, histories of political
activism, revolution and violence, feminism, and the history of sexuality, with
particular focus on Spain and Latin America. Her book Sexual Revolutions: Passion
and Politics in Socialist Cuba is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina
Press (2012).

Karen Krahulik is associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Arts and
Sciences at New York University. She specializes in LGBT history, oral history,
and queer theory. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Mas-
sachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the Bay State Historical League,
Harvard University, Princeton University, and New York University and is the
author of Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York University
Press, 2005).

Daniel Marshall is a lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University in

Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include histories of sexuality and
education in Australia, queer and sexuality studies, educational policy, sexualities
education, and cultural studies and youth. He is vice president of the Australian
Lesbian and Gay Archives and holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Martin Meeker is an academic specialist with the Regional Oral History Office
of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his
PhD in U.S. history from the University of Southern California and has pub-
lished essays in the Pacific Historical Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality,
and the Journal of Women’s History. His books include The Oakland Army Base: An
Oral History (2010) and Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and
Community, 1940s–1970s (2006), winner of the 2005–2006 John Boswell Prize.
 CONTRIBUTORS | 281

Daniel Rivers is a visiting assistant professor at the James Weldon Johnson Insti-
tute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. His research
interests include LGBT history, histories of the family and sexuality, radical
social movements in the United States, and Native American history. He is
currently finishing a book titled Radical Relations: A History of Lesbian and Gay
Parents and Their Children in the United States, 1945–2003.

Horacio N. Roque Ramírez is associate professor of Chicana and Chicano

studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated
with the Department of History, the Department of Feminist Studies, and the
Latin American and Iberian Studies Program. His forthcoming book is titled
Memories from Queer Latino San Francisco: An Oral History, 1960s–1990s. He spe-
cializes in queer/LGBT Latino history, oral history theories and methods, and
Central American migration studies.

Jason Ruiz is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre

Dame, where he is also a faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. He
cofounded the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project with Kevin P. Murphy in
2003. The recipient of many fellowships and awards, Ruiz is the coeditor of
Queer Twin Cities (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and a special issue of the
Radical History Review (“Queer Futures,” Issue 100). He is currently completing
his first book, which examines the politics of empire in representations of travel
to Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Eric C. Wat is the director of research and evaluation at Special Service for
Groups, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles. He is the author of
The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He has taught Asian American studies at various
colleges in Southern California.
THE OXFORD OR AL HIS T ORY SERIES
J. T O DD M OY E (University of North Texas),
KATHR Y N N A SS T ROM (University of San Francisco),
RO BE R T P E RK S (The British Library), Series Editors
D O NA L D A . RI T C H I E, Senior Advisor

Doing Oral History, Second Edition Donald A. Ritchie

Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its
Transformations Edited by Jürgen Matthäus
A Guide to Oral History and the Law John A. Neuenschwander
Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals
David K. Dunaway and Molly Beer

Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II J. Todd Moye

Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History, Second Edition
Michael L. Gillette

The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi Gary Bruce

The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David
Boder Alan Rosen
They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History Alessandro Portelli
The Oxford Handbook of Oral History Edited by Donald A. Ritchie
Habits of Change: An Oral History of American Nuns Carole Garibaldi Rogers
Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War
Generation Donald J. Raleigh
Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History
Edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez
Index

Acey, Katherine, 138 discussion of sex wars and feminism, 15,

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 132, 133, 134, 135–36, 138–40, 144
215–16 discussion of transgender identities,
activism 136–38, 140, 144
AIDS, 8–9, 217 introductory notes, 130
cross-generational, 10 oral history staged as conversation, 15,
homophile movement of 1950s, 217, 269, 130, 141–43, 145n3
272 as part of Voices of Feminism project, 130,
intersections between trauma and, 8–9, 138–39, 145n2
19n15, 217, 219n15 photo, 131
See also feminism; lesbian activism/ silence on race, 144
feminism; LGBT community thoughts about gender in oral histories,
ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 143–44
217 transcript of, 130–38
Adelman, Marcy, 71n5 American Historical Association (AHA), 11
African Americans, 89 Anderson, Kathryn, 219n17
and queer bar culture, 95 Anderson, Kelly, 130
and Legacy Oral History Project, 89 See also Allison-Vázquez (conversation)
See also Martin, Vera Clarice (narrative) Anzaldúa, Gloria E., 19n12
Aguirre, Valentín, 200n7 Apuzzo, Virginia, 138
Ahmed, Sara, 17n1 Armitage, Susan H., 6, 18n10, 39n18,
AIDS/HIV, 194–95 219n17
activism, 8–9, 217 Asian American, 89
documenting lives of dancers with, 73, 80, Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG)
89n1, 90n3 founding of, 253
in Latina-Latino populations, 196 leadership of, 258
and Legacy Oral History Project, 73, “rice queen” reputation, 16–17, 258, 259,
79–80, 89n1 260
mourning associated with, 65, 118, role in identity formation, 16–17, 261–62
176–77, 217 See also Wada, Ernest (narrative)
stigma associated with, 4, 217 Ask & Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out
service industry, 196 (Estes)
See also Campesina, Teresita la coming out stories in, 246–47
(narrative), gay cancer, Pneumocystis interviews with gay and lesbian veterans,
carinii(pneumonia) 20n28, 237, 251n7
Allison, Dorothy. See Allison-Vázquez Australian Gay Teachers and Students Group,
(conversation) 10
Allison-Vázquez (conversation), 130–45 Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 167
commentary by interviewer, 138–45,
145n1, 145n5 Babcock, Barbara A., 56n22
creating safe environment for, 141 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 47, 48, 56n22
discussion of butch-femme sexuality, bar culture, 194–5, 198
130–38, 139–40 butch-femme role-playing in, 98–101
284 | INDEX

bar culture (continued) butch-femme identities

as community, 97, 101, 106, 112n17 and bar culture role-playing, 98–101, 101
discussions of sex in, 102–03 in Buffalo oral history project, 65, 72n8,
See also Boots of Leather Slippers of Gold: 121, 145n6
The History of Lesbian Community, and Cuban women, 36–37
Campesina, Teresita la Gonzales, Cheryl dykes, 69
(narrative); Streicher, Rikki (narrative) stone butches, 98, 99, 109
Barragán, Jesús, 259–60 in Wide Open Town oral history project,
Bateman, Geoffrey, 251n5 98–101, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110
Bauman, Richard, 55n3 See also Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold:
Belkin, Aaron, 251n5 The History of a Lesbian Community,
Benjamin, Walter, 48 Allison-Vázquez (conversation)
Bérubé, Allan Butler, Judith
founding of SFLGHP, 18n5 on gender identity disorder, 165n4
and Wide Open Town History Project, on queer kinship, 177, 178–80, 183n23–24,
103–04, 111n11 183n28
See also Coming Out Under Fire (Bérubé) on regulation of speech and silence, 251n8
Biren, Joan E., 138
bisexuality, 18n2 Campesina, Teresita la (narrative), 184–201
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 264 AIDS infection of, 184, 194–95, 196, 199
Blatant and Proud: Homosexuals on the analysis and publication, 197–98
Offensive (Lansdown), 174, 182n12–15 childhood and early adulthood, 194
Boeckels, Steve, 245, 251n13 demanding nature of interview process,
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History 195–96
of a Lesbian Community (Kennedy and interviewer’s commentary, 192–200
Davis), 20n28 introductory notes, 184–86, 200n2–3
on butch-femme community, 65, 72n8, linking with broader social goals, 196–97
121, 145n6 “long haul” approach in, 194–95
narrator anonymity in, 12–13, 20n26 photo, 185
as pioneering oral history project, 2–3, public documentation of, 200n4, 200n7,
18n3, 72n8, 120–21, 129n8, 177, 273, 200n10
277n5 queer gendering of language in, 184–86,
on role of sex in lesbian culture, 102, 108–09 192, 196, 199
spelling of “fem,” 111n2 reciprocity between researcher and
Borland, Katherine, 266–67, 267n16 narrator, 184–85, 196–97, 199, 200n9
Bourdieu, Pierre, 48 shared authorities in, 16, 192–200
Bousquet, Marc, 166n24 transcripts, 186–92
Boyd, Nan Alamilla, 90n1, 182n3 transgender identification, 189–92, 194–95
on LGBT vs. queer, 18n2 Carbery, Graham, 167
“Who Is the Subject?,” 18n2, 112n18, See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative)
219n18 Carillo, Hector, 129n12
See also Gonzales, Cheryl (narrative); Carol (narrative), 149–66
Streicher, Rikki (narrative); Wide Open cross-dressing and transvestism of,
Town (Boyd); Wide Open Town History 149–54, 157–58
Project friendships as theme in, 155–57, 162–65,
Bracho, Ricardo A., 199 165n4
Breitman, George, 71n3 interviewer’s commentary, 155–65
Bryant, Anita, 169, 179 introductory notes, 149
Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project, 65, marriage, 161, 162–63
72n8, 121, 145n6, 177 military service, 158–60
See also Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: photo, 152
The History of a Lesbian Community transcript, 149–54
(Kennedy and Davis) transgender identity of, 149, 156–57,
Bullough, Vern, 219n3 158–60, 164
Burgos, Adrian, Jr., 201n11 and Transvestia, 149, 150, 158, 161, 165
 INDEX | 285

and Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, institutionalized homophobia, 29, 34, 37
149, 156, 165n1 racial discrimination in, 34, 35
Castillo, Joanne, 18n5 religious discrimination in, 34, 35, 39n7
Catholic Church, 249 same-sex unions, 31–32, 39n14
cisexual, 102, 111n6 See also “Cuban Voices” oral history
civil rights. See LGBT community project; Laura (narrative)
class concerns Cuban National Centre for Sexual Education
in lesbian activism, 16, 19n12 (CENESEX), 29, 31–32, 38n5, 39n14
in oral history work, 65, 107, 108, 109, 110 “Cuban Voices” oral history project
Clinton, Bill, 244 Cuban interviewers in, 32, 38n1–2
Columbia Oral History Project, 270, 273 director and support institutions, 38n5,
coming out 39n9
centrality in LGBT life, 65, 69, 246 scope and targets of, 23, 29, 38n2–3
as metanarrative in oral histories, 245–47 sexuality and same-sex desire as themes in,
under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” 245, 246, 23, 29, 39n13
247 “taboo” subjects in, 34
Coming Out Stories, The, 65 use of term mestizo/a in, 23, 38n3
Coming Out Under Fire: The History of See also Cuba and Cuban Revolution;
Gay Women and Men in World War II Laura (narrative)
(Bérubé), 18n5, 20n25, 251n7, 252n16 cultural phenomenology, 79, 87
coming out stories in, 246 cultural translation, 40n26
as pioneering oral history project, 3–4, “curry queens,” 259
65, 71n6 Cvetkovich, Ann, on trauma, 8–9, 19n15,
pseudonyms used in, 12, 20n25 217, 219n15
racial breakdowns, 20n28
Committee on Lesbian and Gay History Damewood, Cassie, 71n5
(CLGH), 11, 19n23 dancing
Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and as communication, 15
Transgender History (CLGBTH), 19n23 See also Sendgraff, Terry (narrative)
Cook, Marguerite Beata (narrative), 41–56 Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), 211–12, 213,
Cook’s observations on gay community, 218n3, 219n8
53–54 See also Rush, Stella (narrative)
interviewer’s commentary, 46–55 Davis, Madeline, 251n15
interviewer’s methodology, 47–49 See also Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
introductory notes, 41 (Kennedy and Davis)
“origin” story, 49 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 56n22
on racial tensions, 54–55 Davis, Thelma, 95, 100
self-representations in, 47–55 De La Fuente, Alejandro, 39n23
silence on sexual orientation, 7, 15, 51–55 D’Emilio, John
transcript, 41–46 on Allan Bérubé, 111n11
trope of comedic anecdote, 50–51, 52, 55 biography of Bayard Rustin, 269–70,
Cora, Maria, 20n29 273–75, 276–77
Corbin, Joan, 208, 212–13 dissertation on pre-Stonewall activism,
Covina, Gina, 71n4 269, 270–73
Craig, Larry, 128, 249, 250 “Dreams Deferred,” 277n4
cross-dressing. See Carol (narrative) founding of SFLGHP, 18n5
cross-generation connections reliance on oral histories, 65
in oral history work, 10–11, 16, 173, research project on Chicago sexuality, 269,
176–80, 272–73, 275 275–76
See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative) See also Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:
Cruikshank, Julia, 48, 55n10 The Making of a Homosexual Minority in
Csordas, Thomas, 79, 90n2 the United States (D’Emilio)
Cuba and Cuban Revolution, 12, 15 Derrida, Jacques, 163, 166n23
“five gray years,” 34 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
“golden age” of, 34 Disorders (DSM), 155–56
286 | INDEX

Docter, Richard, 166n17 Fonfa, Lynn, 18n5

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy Foucault, Michel
justifications for, 247, 248–49 on friendship, 160, 164–65, 166n10–11,
as metaphor for cover-ups, 252n26 166n25
signing into law, 244 on sex and power relations, 111, 112n20
silences vs. truth-telling under, 16, Fowler, Lisa Michelle, 245, 251n12
244–50, 252n22 Franklin, Michael David, 15, 165n3, 270
See also Ask & Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans See also Carol (narrative)
Speak Out (Estes); Hughes, Brian Freedman, Estelle, 18n5
(narrative) Friedman, Jeff
Dore, Elizabeth, 38n5, 39n9 creation of Legacy Oral History Project,
“drag queen” 73, 79–80, 89n1, 90n14
historic use of term, 184–85, 186–87 on embodied performances, 8, 91n22
See also transgender; Transvestia clubs See also Sendgraff, Terry (narrative)
Duggan, Lisa, 111n9, 112n19, 129n16, Friendships, 2
145n4 formed in oral history work, 15–16
Duwel, Patty, 245, 251n10 Foucault on, 160, 164–65, 166n10–11,
dykes 166n25
defined, 69 See also Campesina, Teresita la (narrative);
See also butch-femme identities Carol (narrative); Jaynes-Carbery (joint
narrative)
Ehrlich, Esther, 8 Frisch, Michael
Ekins, Richard, 166n16 on “beast of consciousness,” 258
Eng, David, 129n11 on shared authority, 19n13, 192–93,
Epstein, Debbie, 174, 182n16 199–200, 200n5
Epstein, Robert, 18n5 Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Escoffier, Jeffrey, 18n5 (journal), 4–5, 6, 18n7, 18n9
Espiritu, Augusto F., 201n12
Estes, Steve, 20n28, 252n22 Galana, Laurel, 71n4
See also Ask & Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Gallo, Marcia M., 111n12, 236n16, 277n3
Speak Out (Estes); Hughes, Brian See also Rush, Stella (narrative)
(narrative) Garber, Eric, 18n5
Evans, Jeffrey E., 83, 90n11–13 Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of
Eversmeyer, Arden, 68 Northern California (GLHSNC), 72n7,
95, 103–04
Faderman, Lillian, 65, 71n6, 111n15 Gay Asian Rap Group (GARP), 258
Fanon, Franz, 264 gay community
Febvre, Lucien, 47 mourning caused by HIV/AIDS, 176–77,
Feinstein, Dianne, 223, 224–25, 226, 230, 217
231, 235n4 naturalizing sexual hierarchies in,
fem and femme 263–64
spellings, 111n2 racism in, 259–60
See also butch-femme identities and social movements, 12
Feminism, 87 willingness to discuss sex, 103, 119, 122–23
central role played by lesbians, 138 See also LGBT community
and kinship, 178 Gay Teachers and Students Group (GTSG),
and methodology 6–7 272
roots of queer oral history in, 2–7 and queer kinship, 178, 183n27
“sex wars” in, 138–39, 145n4 Young, Gay and Proud (booklet), 10, 167,
See also lesbian activism/feminism, 168–69, 170, 178
Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative)
Oral History (Gluck and Patai) Gender Identity Disorder, 155–56, 165n4
Ferguson, Roderick, 166n24 Gergen, Mary, 81, 82, 83, 90n5, 90n9
Filipino gay men, 258, 264 Gilreath, Shannon, 252n24
Flax, Jane, 82, 90n9–10 Gittings, Barbara, 219n8, 272
Foley, Mark, 249 GLBT Historical Society, 18n5, 95
 INDEX | 287

See also San Francisco Lesbian and Gay and religious conservatism, 249–50
History Project (SFLGHP) Rustin, Bayard, 273
Gluck, Sherna Berger silences created by, 15, 65–66, 121–22
on oral history in post-9/11 world, 20n27 See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative)
on women’s oral history, 4–5, 6–7, homosexuality
18n6–10, 39n18 conflation with pedophilia, 175, 176,
Gonzales, Cheryl (narrative), 95–106 182n18, 249
on bar culture, 97–101, 106 decriminalization efforts, 182n6
on butch-femme role-playing, 97–99, social policing and surveillance of, 181
100–101, 105–06 viewed as arrested development, 174–75,
discussions about sex, 99–100, 105–06 179
interviewer’s commentary, 102–06 See also homophobia
introductory note, 95 Horwitz, Roger, 252n16
narrator’s consciousness of audience, 106 Howard, John, 20n28, 121, 129n9
transcript, 95–102, 111n3 Howell, Clare, 145n7
Gramsci, Antonio, 47, 199 Hughes, Brian (narrative), 237–52, 251n4
Grele, Ronald, 19n13, 258–59, 267n2, 267n7 coming out as gay veteran, 243, 248
group interviews critique of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” 12, 16,
and oral history methodology, 141–42 242–43, 245, 248
See also Allison-Vázquez (conversation); interviewer’s commentary, 244–50
Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative) introductory note, 237
GTSG. See Gay Teachers and Students Group photo, 239
(GTSG) rescue of Jessica Lynch, 16, 241–42
Guridy, Frank A., 201n11 transcript, 237–44
See also “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy
Halbwachs, Maurice, 39n22 Hunter, Nan D., 111n9, 145n4
Halley, Janet E., 251n5
Hames-García, Michael, 200n1 IRB (institutional review board). See Twin
Hamilton, Carrie, 12, 38n5, 39n9, 39n13 Cities GLBT Oral History Project, 15
See also Laura (narrative) Islam, Naheed, 13, 20n30
Hareven, Tamara, 260, 264, 267n6
Herbert, Melissa S., 252n19 Jack, Dana, 219n17
Heresies, 129n6, 145n3 Jacobs, John, 236n10
Highlander Bar, 95, 97 James, Daniel, 48, 55n7–8, 55n12
See also bar culture Jaques, Elliott, 88–9, 91n23
Hillier, Lynne, 182n3 Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative), 167–83
Hillman, Elizabeth, 252n20 history of GTSG and Young, Gay and Proud,
Hill, Robert, 165n5, 166n17 10, 167, 168–69, 170, 172, 174, 178, 181
history, institutionalized as inquiry into intergenerational queer
New Left school, 270 kinship, 10–11, 16, 173–81, 183n27
new social history, 270 interview details, 181n3, 182n4, 182n9
oral histories discounted by, 127, 260 interviewer’s commentary, 173–81, 181n3
shared authorities in, 192–94 introductory note, 167
HIV. See AIDS/HIV,Pneumocystis carinii, 80 and queer kinship, 10
Hollibaugh, Amber, 18n5, 120, 127, transcript, 168–73
129n14, 138, 145n3 use of term “mentoring” in, 182n10
homonormativity Jaynes, Gary, 167
impact on queer oral histories, 110, See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative)
112n18–19 Jenkins, Philip, 175, 182n17–18
negative impacts of, 179 Jennings, Rebecca, 39n12
politics of, 128 Jensen, Joan, 4–5, 18n6–7
homophile movement of 1950s, 217, 269, Job, Michael, 247, 252n18
271–2 Johnson, E. Patrick, 20n29
homophobia, 160 Johnson, Richard, 174, 182n16
fears of queer adult-adolescent contact, 10, Jorgensen, Christine, 163
167, 173–77, 181 Joseph, Miranda, 165n2
288 | INDEX

Kalish, Barbara, 68 interviewer-narrator relationship, 33

Katz, Jonathan Ned, 65, 71n6 interviewer’s commentary, 29–38
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, 17, 20n31, interview locations, 32, 39n9
72n8, 251n15 introductory note, 23
See also Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold listening for same-sex desire, 12, 29–30,
(Kennedy and Davis) 31–32, 35–38, 39n10
Kepner, Jim, 271, 272, 277n2 silences in, 15, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 37–38
King, Dave, 166n17 theme of gender in, 26–27, 35–37
kinship, queer, 274 theme of race in, 35, 37
defined, 177–78 theme of religion in, 34–35, 37
losses founded on, 176–77, 179–80 theme of sexuality in, 33–34, 37
See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative) transcript, 23–28, 39n9
Kirsch, Gesa, 214, 215, 219n7, 219n9 translation concerns, 38, 40n26
Kissack, Terence, 111n11 See also Cuba and Cuban Revolution;
Kopp, Quentin (narrative), 220–36 “Cuban Voices” oral history project
ethics of being closeted while interviewing, Legacy Oral History Project, 73, 79–80,
16, 231–32, 234–35 89n1
interactions with gay community, 16, Lehring, Gary L., 251n5
231–35, 236n8 lesbian, 80
interview details, 227, 236n7, 236n17 working class, Boyd (commentary), Boots
interviewer’s commentary, 226–35 of Leather and Slippers of Gold: The
introductory note, 220 History of Lesbian Community”
photo, 223 lesbian activism/feminism
political biography of, 228–35, 236n13 and AIDS, 8–9, 217
transcript, 220–26 class conflicts in, 16, 19n12
Krahulik, Karen, 7 and origins of queer oral history, 2–3
on “arts of remembering,” 15 and “sex wars” of 1980s, 138, 139, 145n4
Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay See also Allison-Vázquez (conversation);
Resort, 41, 47, 55n2, 56n18, 56n24–25 bar culture; feminism; LGBT
and Provincetown Oral History Project, community
41 lesbian and gay parents
See also Cook, Marguerite Beata (narrative) parenting in homophobic world, 12,
Kulick, Don, 19n17 66–67, 68–69, 70, 71, 72n10
silencing in postwar era, 65–66
The Ladder, 213, 214, 270 struggles for civil rights, 66–67, 71,
Lahusen, Kay Tobin, 219n8 72n10
Lansdown, Andrew, 174, 182n12–15 Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA), 72n7–8
Larsen, Charles W. (narrative), 113–29 lesbians
interviewer’s commentary, 119–28 identifying as, 111n5
interview format, 119 unwillingness to talk about sex, 15, 102,
introductory note, 113 103–06, 108–11, 119–21
transcript, 113–18 Leslie, Larry L., 166n24
willingness to discuss sex, 119–28 Levine, Martin P., 264
as window into memory, 121, 123, 127 Lewin, Ellen, 183n22
as window into politics of Leydesdorff, Selma, 19n13
homonormativity, 121–22, 127–28 LGBT
Latina and Latino queers acronym, 17n2
and HIV epidemic, 184, 193 See also LGBT community
and Legacy Oral History Project, 89 LGBT community 17–18n2
and racism, 259–60 AIDS/HIV activism, 8–9, 217
studies of, 200n1 demand for civil rights, 66–67, 71, 72n10,
See also Campesina, Teresita la (narrative) 121–22, 127, 128
Laura (narrative), 23–40 liberation movements, 65, 69–70, 110
discussion of doble moral, 25, 28, 32, 34, pre-Stonewall era, 12, 65–66, 69–70,
39n8 272–73
impact of Cuban Revolution on, 15, 30, 34 racism in, 259–60
 INDEX | 289

understanding history of through oral video documentary, 111n13

histories, 12, 16, 64–71, 72n8, 181 See also bar culture; Streicher, Rikki
See also gay community; lesbian and gay (narrative)
parents McCreery, Patrick, 179, 183n32
Link, David, 249, 252n25 McKenzie, Ann, 113, 123, 129n5
Long Time Passing, 65 Meeker, Martin
Los Angeles. See Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Contacts Desired, 236n16, 277n3
Gays (A/PLG) on ethics of being closeted while
Louys, Pierre, 212 interviewing, 16, 231–32
Lowe, Joah, 80 See also Kopp, Quentin (narrative)
Lowe, Lisa, 264, 267n12 memory, in oral histories, 15, 47–48, 121,
Lunden, Blue, 70–71 122, 127, 271, 273–74
Lynch, Jessica, 16, 241, 251n3 Men Like That: A Southern Queer History
Lyon, Phyllis, 208, 211–12, 213, 216, 218n3, (Howard), 20n28, 121
219n8, 236n8 Metropolitan Community Church, 216
Milk, Harvey
Making of a Gay Asian Community, The:An assassination, 220, 226, 231
Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles photo, 223
(Wat), 20n9, 253, 258, 259–61, 267n1 political career, 104, 116, 221–26, 227,
Malcolm X, 64 230, 233, 235n1, 235n4
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 47 Mishler, Elliot, 82, 83, 90n7
Manalansan, Martin, 264, 267n10 Mitchell, Anne, 182n3
Marcus, Eric, 252n15 Moffitt, Aileen, 80, 84, 90n1
Marcus, Neil, 8 Mona’s bar, 101
marriage. See LGBT community Moraga, Cherríe L., 19n12, 120, 138, 145n3
Marshall, Daniel Moral Panic (Jenkins), 175
inquiry into intergenerational queer Moscone, George, 221–22, 229
kinship, 10–11, 16, 173–81, 183n27 Motivity 76–78
use of term “mentoring,” 182n10 development of, 77–78, 80–81
See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative) practitioners of, 90n4
Martin, Del, 111n12, 208, 211–12, 214, 216, See also Sendgraff, Terry (narrative)
218n3, 219n8, 236n8, 272 Murphy, Kevin P.
Martínez, Elena M., 39n12 critique of LGBT freedom struggle, 72n10
Martínez, Ernesto Javier, 200n1 and Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project,
Martin, Vera Clarice (narrative), 12, 57–72, 119, 129n2
71n1 on veil of homonormativity, 110, 112n18
birth and childhood, 57–58
interviewer’s commentary, 64–71 Nestle, Joan, 145n3, 145n6–7, 181, 182n3,
introductory note, 57 182n11, 200n8
marriages, 66, 67, 68, 70 Nevaeres, Alberta. See Campesina, Teresita la
moving between queer and heterosexual (narrative)
worlds, 65, 68–70, 71 Nevins, Allan, 270
on parenting in homophobic world, 12, Newfield, Christopher, 166n24
66–67, 68–69, 70, 71, 72n10 New Lesbians, The, 65
relationship with Kay, 59–62, 67, 69, 70 Newton, Esther, 9–10, 19n19, 111n10, 120,
shared understandings between narrator 122, 129n7
and interviewer, 69, 70
silences imposed by homophobia, 15, Ochberg, Richard L., 81–82, 90n5–8, 90n13
65–66 Okihiro, Gary Y., 260, 266, 267n8
struggles with racism, 67–68 Old Lesbians Organizing for Change
transcript, 57–64, 71n1 (OLOC), 70
as window into pre-Stonewall era, 64–71, ONE (magazine), 206, 207, 212–13, 213, 271
72n8 oral histories
Maud’s (bar) alternative storytelling methods for, 8
Cheryl Gonzales’s visits to, 95, 96, 97 alternative storytelling modes, 8
owner of, 95, 106–07 the body as central to, 7–11
290 | INDEX

oral histories (continued) and Alison Thorne case, 171, 182n8

class concerns in, 19n12, 64–65, 107, 108, homosexuality conflated with, 175, 176,
109, 110 182n18, 249
as collaborative process, 260–61 Pérez, Gina, 201n11
confronting trauma in, 8–9, 123, 129n13, PFLAG, 171
217 Pharr, Suzanne, 138, 141
creating safety during interviews, 141 Phoenix, Ann, 39n20
creating space for intimacy, 218 Politics, 2
cross-generational connections in, 10–11, of homonormativity, 128
16, 173, 176–80, 272–73, 275 silences imposed by political repression, 15
as “cultural constructs,” 48, 258–59 See also Hughes, Brian (narrative); Kopp,
discounting by institutionalized history, Quentin (narrative); Rush, Stella
127, 260 (narrative); Wada, Ernest (narrative)
as emergent process, 83 Portelli, Alessandro, 19n13, 47–48, 55n7,
ethical, political and academic challenges, 56n13–14
11–14 Powell, Achebe, 138
gender differences in, 143–44 Pratt, Mary Louise, 40n26
group interviews, 141–42 Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 138, 141
impact of homonormativity on, 110, Prince, Virginia
112n18–19 advocacy for transvestism, 162
importance in documenting LGBT history, Transvestia clubs, 16, 149, 152, 158, 161
64–71, 72n8, 181, 267, 269, 270, 272, Transvestia magazine, 150, 158, 162, 165,
276, 277 166n12
influences of feminism on, 2–7, 19n13 The Prosperos Society, 210, 216
interviewing across lines of sexuality, 227 Prosser, Jay, 17n1
linking with broader social goals, 196–97, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay
273 Resort (Krahulik), 41, 47, 55n2, 56n18,
and methods, 5, 9, 11 56n24–25
nonverbal communication in, 79–80, 82 Provincetown Oral History Project, 41
in post-9/11 world, 20n27 See also Cook, Marguerite Beata (narrative)
power dynamics in, 17, 81–82, 110, 111, Psychiatric Quarterly, 175, 178
216, 272
in queer communities of color, 13 Queer
relationships between narrator and and African American bar culture, 85
researcher, 1, 2, 12, 15, 33, 120, 141, And San Francisco, 95, 101
217, 272 and identity, 122
role of memory in, 15, 47–48, 121, 122, and pre-Stonewall, 57
127, 271, 273–74 and language, 184–186
shared authorities in, 17, 193, 199–200, and kinship, 10, 167, Marshall
265–67 (commentary)
silences in, 17, 29, 37–38, 81–82, 121, and storytelling, 80
180–81 and narrative, 89
using nontraditional methods, 217 as descriptor, 18n2
and women’s, 5 See also LGBT community; Allison, Dorothy
as young practice, 144–45, 270 and Vázquez, Carmen (conversation);
See also friendships; politics; sex and Anderson, Kelly (commentary); Boyd,
sexuality; silences; individual narratives Nan Alamilla (commentary); Campesina,
Oral History Association (OHA), 11, 20n27 Teresita la (narrative); Cook, Marguerite
Ordona, Trinity, 20n29 Beata (narrative); Krahulik, Karen
(commentary) Martin, Cera Clarice
parenthood. See lesbian and gay parents (narrative); Rivers, Daniel (commentary);
Passerini, Luisa, 19n13, 39n11, 40n26, 47, 48, Roque Ramírez, Horacio N and Boyd,
49, 50, 55n3–4, 56n15–16, 56n19, 56n21 Nan Alamilla (introduction); Roque
Patai, Daphne, 6–7, 18n11, 266, 267n15 Ramírez, Horacio N. (commentary);
pedophilia Ruiz, Jason (commentary)
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queer kinship creating space for intimacy, 218

defined, 177–78 images, 207, 213
losses founded on, 176–77, 179–80 introductory notes, 205, 218n1
See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative) involvement in DOB, 205, 206, 212,
Queer Nation, 18n2 213–14, 219n8
queer oral histories. See oral histories, See involvement in lesbian and gay
also . . . Roque Ramírez, Horacio and movement, 16, 212–13
Boyd, Nan Alamilla (introduction) relationship between narrator and
Queer Twin Cities, 149, 165n3 researcher, 214, 216, 218
Quiet Fire, 65 relationship with Sandoz, 206, 207–08,
209, 210, 212, 213–14
race and racism 20n28, 273 Sten Russell pseudonym, 206, 213
and masculinity, 275 transcripts, 206–11, 218n2
in Bangladeshi communities, 13 “verbal choreography” in, 205, 214, 216,
in gay community, 259–60 218, 218n1
in minority communities, 13 writing for ONE magazine, 207, 212–13
See also African Americans; Asian/Pacific Rustin, Bayard, 269–70, 273–75, 277n1
Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG)
Radical History Review (journal), 72n10, Salamon, Gayle, 17n1
129n17, 166n24, 183n32 Sandoz, Helen, 206, 207–08, 209, 210, 212,
Ramos, Juanita, 19n12 213–14, 216
Reid, Frances, 18n5 San Francisco 3, 4, 20n29, 184
“rice queens,” 16, 258, 259, 260 AIDS epidemic in, 73, 80
See also Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays See also Gonzales, Cheryl (narrative);
(A/PLG) Kopp, Quentin (narrative); Streicher,
research methods, see Roque Ramírez, Rikki (narrative), Bay Area, Mission
Horacio and Boyd, Nan Alamilla District, Roque Ramírez (commentary)
(introduction) San Francisco Human Rights Commission
Rivera, Sylvia, 200n8 (HRC), 227–28, 232
Rivers, Daniel, 12, 15, 72n10 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History
See also Martin, Vera Clarice (narrative) Project (SFLGHP), 4, 18n5
Roach, Thomas, Jr., 166n26 See also GLBT Historical Society
Roque Ramírez, Horacio N., 20n29, 200n4, Saunders, Judith, 219n10
252n15, 267n5 Schooling Sexualities (Epstein and Johnson),
academic career, 193, 196–97 174
on emotions in queer oral history, 9, Sendgraff, Terry (narrative), 73–91
19n16, 217, 219n14 coming out narrative, 86
on racism in gay Latino community, interviewer’s commentary, 79–89
259–60 interviewer’s voice, 87
See also Campesina, Teresita la (narrative) introductory notes, 73
Rosales, Karla E., 20n29 Motivity work, 77–78, 80–81, 88
Rosenwald, George C., 81–82, 90n5–8, narrative style in, 84–89
90n13 nonverbal communication in, 79–80, 82
Roy, Sandip, 259, 267n4 transcript, 73–79, 83, 84, 85–86, 88, 90n14
Rubin, Gayle Serano, Julia, 111n6
and SFLGHP, 18n5 Serlin, David, 72n10
“Thinking Sex,” 119, 127–28, 129n4, sex and sexuality, 2
129n15 and history of, 10
“Traffic in Women,” 177, 178, 183n22, public, 10
183n25–26 as revealing topic in oral histories, 1–2,
Ruiz, Jason, 10, 15, 19n20, 72n10 9–11, 111, 119–23, 124, 126–28
See also Larsen, Charles W. (narrative); role in structuring identity, 121–22,
Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project 123–24, 127–28
Rupp, Leila J., 39n10 socialization of queers not to discuss,
Rush, Stella (narrative), 205–19 121–22
292 | INDEX

sex and sexuality (continued) Streicher, Rikki (narrative), 106–10,

unwillingness of queer women to discuss, 111n14–15
15, 102, 103–06, 108–11, 119–21 on bar culture, 107, 109
willingness of gay men to discuss, 103, interviewer’s commentary, 108–11
119, 122–23 introductory notes, 95, 106–07
See also Allison-Vázquez (conversation); narrator’s awareness of audience, 110
Gonzales, Cheryl (narrative); Larsen, as owner of Maud’s, 95, 106–07
Charles W. (narrative); Streicher, Rikki on role-playing in butch-femme culture,
(narrative) 107, 108, 109
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The transcript, 107, 111n14
Making of a Homosexual Minority in unwillingness to discuss sex, 7, 107,
the United States (D’Emilio), 12, 20n24, 108–10
71n6, 236n16, 269, 277n1 Stryker, Susan, 17n1, 166n17
sexual trauma. See trauma
“sex wars” of 1980s, 138, 139, 145n4 “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory
SFLGHP. See San Francisco Lesbian and Gay of Politics and Sexuality” (Rubin), 119,
History Project (SFLGHP) 127–28, 129n4, 129n15
shared authorities Thompson, Paul, 19n13, 39n11, 20n31
limits of, 17, 265–66 Thorne, Alison, 171, 182n8
in oral histories, 17, 193–94, 197, Tobin, Kay, 218n3
199–200, 265–67 Toff, Nancy, 182n3
See also Campesina, Teresita la (narrative) Tracy, Sharon, 95
Shilts, Randy, 236n12, 236n15, 251n7 “Traffic in Women: Notes on the ’Political
Shopes, Linda, on shared authorities, 19n16, Economy’ of Sex” (Rubin), 177, 178,
193, 199–200, 200n6, Roque Ramírez 183n22, 183n25–26
(commentary) transgender
Shum, Steven, 259, 267n3 male-to-female (MTF), 4, 16
Silences, 2, 17 medicalization of, 155–56
created by homophobia, 15, 65–66, oral history documentation of, 4
121–22 and sexual attraction, 136–37
in oral histories, 17, 29, 37–38, 81–82, See also Campesina, Teresita la (narrative);
121, 180–81 Carol (narrative), Roque Ramirez
and racism, 13 transsexual, 186
role in lesbian history, 37–38, 138 Transvestia clubs, 16, 149, 152, 157, 158, 161
unwillingness of queer women to discuss Transvestia magazine, 150, 158, 162, 165,
sex, 15, 102, 103–06, 108–11, 119–21 166n12
See also Cook, Marguerite Beata trauma
(narrative); “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” confronting in oral histories, 8–9, 123,
policy; Laura (narrative); Martin, Vera 129n13, 217
Clarice (narrative) intersections between activism and, 8–9,
SIR (Society for Individual Rights), 221, 232 19n15, 217, 219n15
Slaughter, Sheila, 166n24 invisibility of, 217
Smith College, 130, 145n1 suffered by queers and queer
Songs of Bilitis, 212 communities, 217
Stanley, Julia Penelope, 71n4 Troeften, Dorthe
Steedman, Carolyn, 48, 55n11 and Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project,
Steinman, Alan, 244–45, 251n9 119, 156, 157
Stein, Marc, 277n3 See also Carol (narrative)
Stevens, Elizabeth, 18n5 Tutti, Leslie, 252n15
Stewart, Annalee, 65, 71n1, 72n9 Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project
stone butches, 98, 99, 109 IRB controls, 16, 129n13, 156, 165n3, 270
See also butch-femme identities legacy of, 273
Stout, Linda, 141 project description, 119, 129n10, 149
Stout, Robert, 245, 251n14 See also Carol (narrative); Larsen, Charles
Strawberry and Chocolate (film), 31 W. (narrative)
 INDEX | 293

University of California, Berkeley, oral assassination of Milk and Moscone, 220,

history projects, 8, 200n2 226, 231
University of Minnesota. See Twin Cities political career, 224, 225–26, 230–31,
GLBT Oral History Project 235n4
Wicker, Randy, 218n3
Vacha, Keith, 71n5 Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San
Vance, Carole S., 145n4 Francisco to 1965 (Boyd), 95, 111n7,
Vázquez, Carmen. See Allison-Vázquez 111n12, 111n17, 236n16, 277n3
(conversation) Wide Open Town History Project
Veterans History Project, 237 Bérubé’s mentorship in, 103–04,
VOICES (oral history project), 72n7 111n11
Voices of Feminism (VOF) project, 130, class overlays in, 107, 108, 110
138–39, 145n2 interview format, 104
1965 as cutoff point for, 111n7
Wada, Ernest (narrative), 253–67 transcripts, 95
introductory note, 253 unwillingness of queer women to discuss
narrator’s racial and sexual identity sex, 15, 102, 103–06, 108–11
development, 16–17, 257, 258–59, use of word “fem,” 111n2
262–66 use of word “lesbian,” 111n5
personal stereotypes of researcher, 258, See also Gonzales, Cheryl (narrative);
259–61 Streicher, Rikki (narrative)
power dynamics between researcher and Wilchins, Riki, 145n7
narrator, 17, 265, 266–67 Willett, Graham, 182n6
shared authority, 17, 265–66 Williams, Raymond, 47
transcript, 253–58 Willson, Margaret, 19n17
validation-seeking by narrator, 17, Winchell, Barry, 238–39, 250n2
259–60, 265, 266, 267 Winn, William, 247, 252n17
Walker, Thane, 210–11, 216 Wittner, Judith, 219n17
Walker, Willie, 103, 111n11 Wolfe, Susan J., 71n4
Warner, Michael, 18n2 Wolff, Tobias Barrington, 251n8
Wat, Eric C., 20n29, 267n3 Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of
personal stereotypes about A/PLG, 258, Oral History (Gluck and Patai), 6–7,
259–61 18n11
on shared authorities in interview process,
265–67 X, Malcolm, 64
See also Making of a Gay Asian Community,
The (Wat) Young, Gay and Proud (booklet), 10, 167,
Watney, Simon, 176, 182n19 168–69, 170, 178
Wells-Petry, Melissa, 251n5 See also Jaynes-Carbery (joint narrative)
Weston, Kath, 56n23 Yow, Valerie, 33, 39n16, 39n19
White, Dan Yusba, Bertie, 18n5