Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota

Introduction

1 Introduction More than one and a half million books, photographs, films, and other historical artifacts rest eight stories below Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank, a campus near downtown Minneapolis. Below the surface, professional archivists keep the library’s holdings in twin caverns that offer two football fields’ worth of storage space. The secure facility is moisture controlled, kept at a constant cool temperature, pressurized, and wrapped in a thick layer of rubber to ensure that unwanted moisture stays outside. In a distant corner of the underground facility, a lone quarter-sized rainbow sticker guards one of the world’s largest repositories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) thought, art, and history. Kept in an enclosed room for additional security , the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection offers one of the most comprehensive archives of international queer history in the world. Amid the collection’s many rows of shelving, a charred volume by the Marquis de Sade—rescued from smoldering remains of the Magnus Hirschfeld library in Hitler’s Berlin—rests in an acid-free container just feet from a flyer with the words “Get the Mafia and the Cops out of Gay Bars!” emblazoned across it. Saved from the landmark Stonewall Riots in New York, the flyer is part of an estimated forty thousand–item collection of materials in dozens of languages, one that accounts for thousands of years of historical knowledge. Local history (including most of the information in this book) rubs elbows with national and international artifacts in the safety of the underground bunker. Buttons from every Twin Cities Pride celebration sit in glass cases below a collection of glassware that includes a mug from A Woman’s Coffeehouse. Piles of newspaper clippings await the thoughtful hands of a volunteer “processor” and include a 1967 story that discusses Dr. Hasting’s Introduction Intro duc ti o n 2 Transsexual Research Project. In an acid-free cardboard tray, an ordered line of VHS tapes contains almost a decade of BiCities!, the nation’s only television show dedicated to the discussion of bisexual issues. The collection, storage, and description of an international queer archive pose innumerable quandaries that are addressed in this book. Not the least of these, one must continually ask: What is historically significant, and what is not? When and why is information rejected on the grounds that it is not appropriate, not “queer” enough? Do some stories and experiences take precedence over others? If so, who decides the order? Another question mirrors the dilemmas of queer scholarship: At what point does queerness end? Like the archive, Land of 10,000 Loves is a wide-ranging assemblage of artifacts , personal histories, and scholarly work that highlights commonalities in Minnesota ’s queer, geographic, and chronological expanses. This book is a collection of short stories, illustrations, and photographs that acts as an introduction to local queer history; it gives basic information about people, places, and events that have shaped the local queer community and places the stories into thematic chapters that follow a rough chronology. Some stories have been all but forgotten and will surprise almost everyone. Others identify well-known phenomena (such as the Twin Cities Pride celebration) and position their histories in a broader context. Too often, this information has vanished; by institutional indifference or active destruction, queer histories often become the hardest to save. An illustrated, concise, and regional queer history is important because the local LGBT community has been consistently maligned, misrepresented, or ignored. Too often, myths like the “homosexual recruitment” of children—made famous by Anita Bryant in the 1970s—have been embedded in the national consciousness. Similarly, the queer experience, particularly the gay male experience, has been oversimplified as licentious, drunken, and vacuous. Gay bars, while important as sites of sexual expression and community building, are not the only kind of queer space that has existed in Minnesota. Nonalcoholic dance parties, parade routes, bookstores, theaters , community centers, office buildings, and the great outdoors have all accommodated queerness. The Twin Cities, though home to the highest concentration of queer people, are not the only places where queerness has manifested. Small towns and cities in greater Minnesota, from the tiny township Ma­ nannah in Meeker County to Duluth, have witnessed fascinating queer historical moments since the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, most of this book documents queer history since the 1950s because surviving sources only go back that far, but that does not sug- [18.218.129.100] Project...