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Epilogue: Dust on the Weathervane
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277 Epilogue Dust on the Weathervane Working with people who donated material to the University of Minnesota’s Tretter Collection taught me lessons in patience and diplomacy. But one donor was different. Out of the blue, I received a polite e-mail from a woman named Toni McNaron, who had already donated many of her professional papers to the collection. She wrote that she was ready to part with a last installment of the papers if the archive was ready to receive them. As a matter of course, I familiarized myself with the McNaron papers we already held and made it my business to find out just who she was. A professor emerita of the University of Minnesota’s English department, McNaron had earned degrees at the University of Alabama, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Wisconsin before she began teaching at Minnesota in 1964. She had many published articles and books, among the latter Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia (1996), New Lesbian Studies: Into the 21st Century (1996), and her memoirs, I Dwell in Possibility (1992). I also learned that she had been a key figure in the Minnesota lesbian community: a force at both A Woman’s Coffeehouse and the Lesbian Resource Center, she was a witness to more than four decades of queer life in Minnesota. Once I was able to place Toni McNaron in queer history, I replied to her e-mail and worked with her to transfer the donation. She was refreshingly polite and helpful; the University of Minnesota Libraries’ shipping department picked up the documents at her home. As a result, I did not have a chance to meet her in person, but I did write her once more. She donated a nearly complete set of Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian literary and art journal that began in 1976 and continues to publish today. I had been completely unaware that such a long-lived repository of lesbian thought and art had existed right under my nose, and I thanked her for giving me an opportunity to read into it. Epilogue Epi lo g ue 278 My employment with the collection ran its course, but I came across McNaron’s name once again. While I rummaged through the archives in preparation for this book, I discovered a brittle piece of folded paper buried underneath a pile of boxes. When spread out, the document featured an odd drawing of gay men and lesbians with the caption “Come Out to Our Agency: Open House at Christopher Street.” I had never heard of the agency, so I began to consult other sources. I typed “Christopher Street gay lesbian Minneapolis” into Google, and the Web site produced an article by McNaron in The Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures that was listed as “Alcoholism and Substance Abuse.” Writing about the national development of gay and lesbian substance treatment, McNaron briefly mentioned Christopher Street as “a pioneering center for the recovery movement” that opened in 1972 and continues to operate as the Pride Institute—a national leader in queer addiction treatment. Armed with the address on the crumbling poster, I consulted the Minneapolis City Directory from 1972 and found two male names listed as “counselors” at the address. With high hopes of success, I used an online telephone directory and began calling every name that matched the directory listing. After hearing “I have no idea what you’re talking about” several times, I finally reached one of the listed men. After I described my research, the man replied, “Yes, I was a counselor at the address, but it wasn’t called ‘Christopher Street’—it was an addiction counseling center, and I did have gay clients, but we didn’t provide counseling to gays elusively . . . I didn’t even know that there was a gay counseling agency here [in Minneapolis ] at the time.” Disheartened, I thanked him and hung up. Then I sent an e-mail to Toni McNaron, hoping that she would be able to tell me more about the elusive organization. Describing my book project, I referred to my difficulty in finding information about Christopher Street. “Was it a ghost?” I asked in desperation. She replied: Christopher Street was anything but a ghost. It existed for years on the corner of Nicollet Ave. and 24th Street. It served both gay men and lesbian women recovering from alcoholism and drug abuse. It was an excellent program with solid successes. My participation, lasting several years, was to talk to...