Guest Editor’s Introduction

When I stepped into the position of interim editor of the Oral History Review for the 2015 issues, I proposed a special issue, “Listening to and Learning from LGBTQ Lives.” Cliff Kuhn, OHA executive director, and Kathy Nasstrom, OHR editor, loved the idea, and Cliff’s support was crucial to the development of the issue that now rests in your hands (or on your computer screen). Cliff, however, is no longer with us—as you now know, he passed quite suddenly last year. Like all of us in the oral history community, I am stunned at our loss, but his work lives on in all of us and in the spirit of this issue. All of the authors featured here are also in his debt as scholars who seek to read the archives and create new repositories for the stories of people whose lives have been largely overlooked without the intervention of oral history.

This special issue brings together theory and method as well as the practice of oral history in the classroom, on the stage, in music, and in the practice of recollection. It opens with a thoughtful challenge to answer the question, “What makes queer oral history different?” Kevin Murphy, Jennifer Pierce, and Jason Ruiz trace the intellectual trajectory of queer oral history among early practitioners and challenge us to consider how a queer methodology enriches all of history, queer and otherwise.

Methodology is at the heart of Liam Lair and Ashley Mog’s article on Four Rehearsals and a Performance, a dance and music project at the University of Kansas. In their article, the authors explore the challenges of creating a fully accessible performance space, one that is inclusive of queer and disabled people whose bodies are valued and seen as capable of creative production. Laura Hodgman picks up a related theme in her short piece, “No Cinderella Story: Friends Remember Ben Scott “Benderella” Rae.” Benderella, a developmentally disabled transwoman, was murdered in 1977—an all-too-familiar scene in the first years of the twenty-first century. Hodgman uses the recollections around Benderella’s life to explore empathy and emotion around Transgender Day of Remembrance, as well as the methodological questions around empowerment or the lack thereof in transgender history.

Just as Hodgman turns our attention to the lives of people who do the remembering, Anne Balay takes us in a still another direction, exploring how oral history can lead to activism. In her study, Balay traces how her book, Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian Steel Workers, led to further social justice work to demand change on behalf of steel-working narrators. Community activism is also the focus of Scott Seyforth and Nichole Barnes’s article on LGBTQ community building in Madison, Wisconsin. Through the University of Wisconsin archives, Seyforth and Barnes trace midwestern gay liberation and activism for political representation.

Of course, college campuses have been mainstays of activism, LGBTQ and otherwise. David Reichard uses the archives of the Gayzette, UCLA’s Gay Student Union paper, to explore what queer expression looked like in the 1970s against the larger gay liberation movement. Reichard’s piece, coupled with Seyforth and Barnes’s, underscore what we learn about national movements when we look at particular locations. Evan Faulkenbury and Aaron Hayworth trace the origins of the Carolina Gay Association at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the first gay college organizations in the US South. Faulkenbury and Hayworth pay particular attention to the larger spectrum of outness, understanding and tracing historically the complexities of sexuality. They also remind us to notice how regional difference can influence queer identities, expressions, and communities.

Catherine Fosl and Lara Kelland explore intersectionality in the Louisville LGBTQ movement. While so much of the archives, queer and otherwise, are predominantly white, Fosl and Kelland explicitly trace the interpretative theory of intersectionality to understand interview scripts, narrators (and the selection thereof), and how an understanding of activists can be enriched by paying particular attention to the feminist theoretical model of broadening a single-identity analysis of a particular community to include multiple and overlapping identities.

Marion Wasserbauer and Elise Chenier...