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195 6 The Lavender Tower Institutions of Art and Education Queer academic investigation and queer cultural production have dominated the headlines and airwaves for decades. In 1967, a groundbreaking study at the University of Minnesota represented one of the country’s first steps in the field of sex-reassignment surgery. Led by Dr. Donald Hastings, the University’s Transsexual Research Project made the state attractive to transsexuals and other gender nonconformists. News of the study spread across the country and, without much knowledge of transgender phenomena, media outlets gave patients an opportunity to explain their lives on their own terms. The story of Lauraine and Lenette Lee, of “brothers become sisters” fame, spread like wildfire. Only two years later, after demonstrating its comparative institutional tolerance , the University of Minnesota gave a safe space to Fight Repression of Erotic Expression (FREE)—one of the earliest gay student organizations in the United States. FREE provided yet another opportunity for constructive publicity in November 1969 when NBC-TV aired coverage of “the first gay dance on a university campus” to living rooms across the country. Exposure to different kinds of queerness was essential in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. FREE was unique in this respect because it connected gay identities with activism, education, and artistic expression, thus making gay associations acceptable and accessible to many of the college-aged baby boomers in the Twin Cities. The student group supported the Club, an after-hours youth center on Hennepin Avenue that catered to “drag queens and their boyfriends.” When “Skogie,” the young lead singer of a Minneapolis rock band, briefly discussed his The Lavender Tower Th e L av e nde r Tow e r 196 performance at the Club with the Insider, a Midwest music magazine, he positioned the space as comparable to the Coffeehouse Extempore and other fringe venues. FREE supplied fliers for Skogie’s performance, and invited prospective attendees to “expose yourself to this!” Of course, initial exposure was also often met with media ignorance, so it had a mixed effect. In an interview, longtime Twin Cities columnist Julie Dafydd, who was a participant of the Transsexual Research Project, recalled: “It’s kind of funny: There’s a part of me, [laughs] that misses that whole . . . closeted thing. There’s kind of a . . . exclusivity, yeah. I remember being really pissed off, I’m still kind of pissed off . . . I remember when [The Rocky Horror Picture Show] first came out. I was livid. Livid about it. ’Cause I was like, ‘Oh, great. Just what I need. A musical that makes fun of trans [people]. Just what I need.’ You know, it’s not bad enough that there’s an episode on WKRP in Cincinnati where they’re making fun of Lonnie Anderson because there’s a rumor that she used to be a man, and everyone’s going ‘ooh-ooh’ and making a big fuss about it. And I was just like ‘Just shut up about it. Make it go away. The more the public doesn’t know about [transgender people] the safer I’m gonna be.’” Later in the interview, she added: “Ignorance makes you invisible and [I] was like ‘That’s okay with me!”1 Visibility, it seems, was not everything it was purported to be. This chapter is called “The Lavender Tower” because it focuses on the Tretter Collection, the Transsexual Research Project, FREE, the Club, and other examples of queer participation in Minnesota’s academic, cultural, and youth-based institutions . The ivory tower is a well-known euphemism for institutions that wall themselves off from everyday life, but the lavender tower is a tinted variation of that bleached concept. For forty years, intelligent and artistic queerness has attracted substantial media attention; the lavender tower suggests a visibility and an engagement with the outside world, instead of suggesting its namesake’s enclosed detachment . I selected sites that highlight the diverse history of Minnesota’s institutions: college offices, university programs, high school groups, operating rooms, libraries, theaters, concert halls, youth centers, and other societal forums are part of this designation . If the Transsexual Research Project acts as a foundation to the “lavender tower,” then I chose to end this chapter with the Transgender Commission because it is a crowning achievement. The commission represents an immense institutional change. Once, transgender individuals were patients whose fates rested in the hands of health authorities; now, the “patients” have come to arbitrate their [3.139.70.131] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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