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

Don’t skim over this review quickly in the mistaken assumption that this book has a limited audience of specialists. If you do, you will miss a gem of a book. Land of 10,000 Loves has something to offer those readers interested in histories and geographies of sexuality, the American Midwest, and gender history. In 280 pages, Stewart Van Cleve provides an engaging introduction to the history of queer Minnesotans, their lives, and loves. Organized into a series of thematic chapters devoted to history, geographies and places, activism, education, and community-building by and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (lgbtq) peoples Van Cleve’s book has a dual focus. The first is to showcase the incredible range of materials housed at the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter collection at the University of Minnesota. According to Van Cleve, the Tretter collection is “one of the world’s largest repositories of lgbtq thought, art and history. (1) Tretter is an omnivore collector, who amassed a wide range of materials from “Magnus Hirschfield’s burned books, the flyer from the Stonewall Riots, and innumerable newspapers, flyers, buttons, books, and photographs that tell the story of local struggles against heterosexist power.” (281) As one can imagine, utilizing such an archive, and trying to separate the historically important from the locally significant, takes skill. Van Cleve is at his best when he assesses the motivations of the original collectors, the ways in which their interests shape the histories that academics and graduate students will be enabled to write, and how matters of finances – initially acquisitions, but subsequently funds for curating, directing and cataloguing – impact communities, their histories, and their accessibility. As a former assistant curator of the collection, Van Cleve had significant time to immerse himself in the collection. He learned its complexities and limitations, a luxury few other scholars will have time to duplicate. The collection has benefitted from the largesse of the University of Minnesota, but without further investments, the potential of these materials cannot be realized. Those interested in the political and economic roles of community archives, and aware that they will increasingly need to be relocated to larger, more secure academic or public archives, will find this book beneficial. It should serve to stimulate some much needed discussions about the values, costs, and challenges of preserving our artifacts and histories while still providing access to multiple audiences.

The volume’s second goal is to provide an accessible history of queer Minnesotans. Van Cleve makes a compelling case for the importance of local histories stating “regional queer history is important because the local lgbt community has been consistently maligned, misrepresented and ignored.” (2) It will not surprise historians of sexuality that there were queer Minnesotans; what will be more notable is how prevalent they’ve been in the state’s history. Starting with histories of two-spirited peoples, through to contemporary queer politics and community building, Land of 10,000 Loves offers a series of intriguing snapshots of queer social histories throughout the state. Following on two notable earlier books, Ricardo J. Brown’s The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and the Twin Cities glbt Oral History Project’s Queer Twin Cities, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Van Cleve’s book showcases and historicizes documentary materials from the collection. The collection isn’t perfect (none are) and so Van Cleve notes that documents and cultural products about and by lesbians, African Americans, two spirited peoples, and bisexuals are not as well represented, nor as numerically plentiful, as those produced by and for gay men. To Van Cleve’s credit he doesn’t stop with that common caveat but attempts to compensate by making every attempt to highlight materials and histories from these less well-represented groups. Social historians with interests in race, class, geographies, and popular culture will be fascinated with the glimpses into Minnesota histories...