Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota by Stewart Van Cleve (review)

History is created much as a pearl is created. An initial irritant (in this case an incident) is introduced, and then slowly, over the years, the irritant is coated again and again by smoothing layers of a substance produced by the body in order to soothe what bothers it. This gradual accretion results, finally, in a valuable prize: in the case of an oyster, you get a pearl; in the case of human experience, you get history. What the body will not tolerate is either absorbed or expelled. Human lives are messy. Most of us don’t live day to day with a sense of how our experiences might be molded into a narrative, and almost none of us has any real sense of how our individual narratives, our personal stories, might be folded together with others to create history. We live our lives while moving forward and construct our histories while looking back.

The written history of LGBTQ people in the United States is scant. There are some excellent books out there, but when compared to the histories of those in the majority, those of us in the LGBTQ community have little with which to work. Because of heterosexism, ignorance, and hatred, many of our individual stories have been suppressed or lost. We are, too often, perceived as an irritant in the social body. Especially in the past, but even now, our narratives are absorbed or expelled by this body. Our queerness is erased or tamed, and those who resist this process of accretion simply disappear from the public record. Our absence is, sadly, one element that can be used to define us.

Stewart Van Cleve’s Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota is a pleasant, sometimes chatty, addition to LGBTQ history. The title refers to a motto commonly used to identify Minnesota: Land of 10,000 Lakes. Just as the number of lakes in the motto is an approximation, so too is Van Cleve’s history of LGBTQ history in the state. Based on the extensive contents of the renowned Tretter Collection, an archive of LGBTQ material at the University of Minnesota, the book takes a wide but selective overview of queer history and culture in the state.

Chronologically structured, the book is divided into seven chapters, and each focuses on some aspect of queer life in Minnesota. The first looks at the region before and after it became a state. It explores Native American two-spirit people, queer men and women who, rather than being ostracized, often had an elevated status within their tribes. The arrival of Europeans changed this perception, and two-spirit people became known as berdache, a derogatory French term for male prostitutes. The rest of the section, and most of the rest of the book, examines the history of LGBTQ European Americans, with a particular focus on urban populations. Chapter 2 delves into what Van Cleve calls “vice districts,” popular cruising spots in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Chapter 3 examines queer activism within the state, while chapter 4 returns to a more explicit look at urban sexuality. The book contains a wealth of information, and its attempt to cover more than two centuries of queer history should be applauded.

Land of 10,000 Loves isn’t scholarly, and it is unlikely to add to queer academic discourse on the construction of history. Instead, it’s a coffee table book filled with numerous illustrations, gossipy tidbits about well-known figures, and a somewhat confusing, though often amusing, choice of subjects. For instance, over two pages are devoted to the single night Oscar Wilde spent in the Twin Cities, an interesting factoid, but one that has relatively little to do with queer Minnesota history overall. Van Cleve does devote space to out and proud figures such as former state representative Karen Clark, former state senator Allan Spear, longtime Minneapolis city council member...