Queering Space
Preserving Queer Spaces and Embodiment in Oral History
Table of Contents
Introduction
Queer Spaces and Queering Space
Chapter One
Queer Spaces as Sites of Memory
Chapter Two
The Queer Interview
Chapter Three
Preserving Space
Conclusion
Queer Space and the New Normal
Introduction
Queer Space and Queering Space
Google maps had failed me. I was told to meet JR, a potential narrator for my upcoming storytelling project, at his bar called Why Not III and Google had led me here – to a mostly empty lot with one small green building. It looked completely abandoned and had no sign of life besides a small light above an imposing wooden door. My first two times around the block I completely missed this building – my eyes scanned over it as I searched for someplace with a rainbow flag, or even a neon beer sign in the window. On my third time around I realized this had to be the building Google was pointing me to. Maybe Google had an old address or maybe it wasn’t open yet? It was 9:30pm - maybe they don’t open till 10? Finally, I thought, maybe I should just leave. I could come back with a friend and I wouldn’t have to make the long dark walk to this menacing building alone. However, this meeting with JR was really important and I only had so much time to do this interview, so I slowly got out of my car and walked towards the door.
It was dead silent on the lot, and my doubt grew stronger with each step. As I got closer, I was able to see through the tall wooden fence that was to the left of the building and there I found a sliver of hope – patio tables with Miller Lite umbrellas. Those umbrellas gave me enough courage to finally open that door. The smell of smoke and the light of a neon sign hit me right away. I walked into a cozy styled bar with a pool table on my right, a small stage on my left and a short elderly man with a baseball cap and cargo shorts barely visible behind the long bar.
This was how I met JR Hook and how I was introduced to the Ohio gay bar scene. As I listened to more stories from the Springfield, Ohio LGBTQ+ communities, I realized my experience of entering JR’s bar had many similarities to those who have sought out gay bars for decades.
John and Bill are both gay men from Springfield who used to frequent gay bars to connect with the other queer folks in their community. While our fear stemmed from different places, theirs from being gay men in a conservative town and mine from being a young woman on a dimly lit street, I was similarly aware of my surroundings and very hesitant to walk up to that door. Like John and Bill, I also found the inside of JR’s bar extremely warm and welcoming and continued to come back to experience the feeling of safety and acceptance that comes from being in a queer space.
Queer spaces have taken on many forms throughout the years and are constantly changing. Internet access has been growing since the 1990s, and as it grew so did the amount of online queer communities.[1] These new online platforms meant that the need for physical spaces, such as JR’s bar, started to decline and many did not have enough business to remain open. Now, because of the way COVID-19 is impacting small businesses, we will most likely be losing an even larger portion of these spaces in the coming months.[2] When we lose gay bars and other queer spaces we are also losing the memories they hold and the intergenerational knowledge that has been passed down through them. If these spaces are gone, upcoming generations of the queer community will only be able to interact with them through listening to the stories of their elders, which is why documenting these spaces through oral history interviews is so urgent. Oral history, therefore, can play an essential role in documenting and preserving the memories of these spaces for future generations.
Preserving the stories of these queer spaces is the main goal of my ongoing Midwest Queer Spaces Oral History Project. So far, the interviews that have been conducted for this project have all taken place in Springfield, Ohio. During these interviews, I realized we were not only talking about queer space but creating new queer spaces in the process. The interview space became a queer space in which intergenerational queer knowledge was being passed down and a queer community, however small, was being formed. I realized that if I didn’t find a way to also preserve the space that was being created, then so much of what was going on in those interviews would be lost.
Originally, academic oral history focused heavily on creating primary texts and sources for research. This emphasis on transcription often led to the original audio of an interview being discarded after the documents had been archived. Alessandro Portelli, among others, pushed back at this and changed the common practice so that oral historians now cherish and preserve the orality of an interview.[3] However, only more recently has the idea of documenting the embodied element of an oral history become of interest to practitioners. Some oral historians have started to take a geobiographical approach, documenting the narrator’s embodied memories of space, and have engaged techniques such as mapping to preserve these kinds of spaces.[4]
Jeff Friedman has emphasized the importance of the narrator’s embodied experience in the interview, illustrating how embodied communication is essential to understanding an oral history.[5] Building off of a geobiographical and embodied approach, this paper will analyze the relationship between queer narrators and their embodied world. This paper will also introduce a third special aspect that has proven worthy of documentation within this project: the interview space itself and its’ affect on both the narrator and interviewer.
To truly discuss and translate embodied experiences we must think about the spaces we inhabit in a new way. During the interview, how does the space we are in affect us as interviewers and how are the narrators experiencing that space differently? How can the space become a narrator itself, and what happens when we allow it into the conversation? Ultimately, how can we as caretakers of others’ stories preserve a sense of place that allows for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of an oral history? This paper will illustrate how oral history is an embodied interaction and therefore space is an integral part of every story.
Queer Spaces
Queer spaces are everywhere. Spaces do not have to be publicly labelled queer to hold queer history and memory. They do not have to be labelled queer for a queer community to form inside of them, or for LGBTQ+ individuals to feel safe there. To me, all a space needs to be queer is for it to hold affirming significance to people who identify as queer in some way. This means that queer spaces are constantly changing and we are always creating new ones.
In this paper I choose to use the label queer as an umbrella term that includes the full range of sexual and gender diversity. To learn more about how different terms relating to the queer community will be used, click here.
The Midwest Queer Spaces Oral History project was born out of my own search for queer community and my curiosity surrounding how those who came before me found and created queer spaces while living in small Midwestern towns. When I began talking to queer elders in Ohio, I started to discover the broad range of spaces the queer community has inhabited over the years, along with the nuances and complexities that come with those spaces. From bars and parks to house parties and soft ball diamonds, LGBTQ+ communities were able to find many places to come together, but these different spaces highlight the multiplicity of what we call “the queer community.”
Divided by race, gender, class, and age, these spaces had unique personalities and created different kinds of communities. Dr. Anne Enke discusses the relationship between spaces and the communities they create in her book Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. She says that as spaces were created “rather than being preexistent or static, particular sexual identity categories became imaginable and usable in relation to particular spaces and the multiple stakes that actors had in those spaces.”[6] Enke discusses the exclusions and segregation that took place in these different spaces and the effect this had on the types of communities each space produced. Though Enke mostly uses this concept to discuss large urban areas, it is useful when thinking about queer space in small Midwestern cities as well. If space plays such an important role in what kind of queer communities are formed, then how can the research and exploration of these spaces expand our understanding of Midwest LGBTQ+ history?
I was also concerned with what I see as a disconnect between different LGBTQ+ generations. Millennials do not frequent spaces like JR’s bar. I have seen this feeling of separation come up not only in my personal discussions with peers and mentors, but also in interviews done with older LGBTQ+ individuals all over the country. In interviews done for the Act Up Oral History Project, multiple narrators express a division they feel between their own experiences and how they view the experiences of younger generations. The excerpt below is from an interview with Joan Gibbs conducted by Sarah Schulman. It shows the disconnect these older women feel towards more modern queer culture.
SS: Right. Because in our generation, if you came out into the community, the leaders were like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
JG: Right.
SS: But if you come out today, it’s like Ellen DeGeneres.
JG: Right. I wouldn’t say that. Do you think she’s a leader?
SS: No, but that’s who they see. There was no one who was out beyond the level of Adrienne and Audre.
JG: Right, right.
SS: That was the top.
JG: And they were great people.
SS: And now the top are these nothings. There are these voids. [7]
While reading Bodies of Evidence : The Practice of Queer Oral History, the interviews with Chery Gonzales and Rikki Streicher further illustrated this feeling of division as narrators were unwilling to share certain information with interviewer Nan Alamilla Boyd. Boyd comments on this saying, “she seemed concerned that future readers of the oral history might judge her so-called promiscuity or the value of nonreciprocal sex.” [8] This illustrates that these women don’t feel like the current or future generations of lesbians can understand or value their experiences. Because the LGBTQ+ community is ever-evolving, previous generations might feel disconnected from the current culture for many reasons: more terms have been entered into the vocabulary, queer culture is changing as it becomes more and more main stream, and activist movements are now focused on different issues.
“And now the top are these nothings. There are these voids.”
— Sarah Schulman
A study conducted by The Ohio State University in 2016 analyzed the varied ways in which LGBTQ+ individuals engage with online spaces, such as chat rooms, blogs, Facebook groups and dating apps, for the purposes of learning from and connecting with peers. This study discovered that this online space allowed for four different types of learning experiences: traditional learning, seeking out specific information by asking questions and receiving answers; social learning, being able to observe and model the behavior of peers and role models; experiential learning, being able to safely participate in these spaces by engaging in dialogue and receiving social feedback; and lastly teaching others through sharing resources and experiences. [9]
These online platforms have proven to be important resources for the queer community, playing a large role in “identity development and resilience and well-being of individuals.” [10] They allow participants to “choose to be visible or invisible while exploring, control the pace of interactions, and experiment with self-expression as their identity evolves and integrates with their offline worlds over time.” [11] However, the skills needed to access those spaces are ones that older generations did not grow up learning. These spaces are hidden and exclusive in new ways, and this, as Enke points out, has an effect on the type of communities that are created. JR discussed how this shift has affected his business as well as that of the other gay bar in Springfield.
The spaces we inhabit and who is included or excluded from them makes a large impact on the community’s collective memory. The lack of intergenerational communal spaces limits what queer knowledge is passed down and shapes the identity of queer communities. However, by documenting space we can build a stronger collective memory and validate queer experiences.
Queering Space
As mentioned above, building queer space is vital for the preservation of queer knowledge, but what does this queering of space actually look like? All spaces come with their own set of customs, norms, and restrictions. Whether or not a space blatantly states who is allowed entrance, underlying assumptions are always present. This type of division of space can be seen across many social structures including race, gender, and class. Through her work with Aboriginal space in Australia, Maria Nugent showed how Aboriginal people were constantly moving through and interacting with spaces white people assumed belonged solely to them.[12]
While the experiences of the Aboriginal community in Australia and queer community in the Midwest are not comparable, the concept of navigating spaces that others assume ownership of is helpful in understanding the struggles queer individuals face when trying to survive in straight space. Anywhere that is not specifically marked as queer is an assumed straight space, and whether or not that assumption is correct does not change the fact that this binary is a lens through which most people, straight and queer, view the world. However, queering space is a way in which the LGBT+ community pushes back against this assumption. Enke’s interviews with women in the feminist movement illustrated this, as she says:
“their life stories described pathways, and these pathways were not simply metaphors of journey but actually the product of struggle over who may occupy ostensibly public spaces. Frequently, narrators discussed their experiences of passing through public space, fighting for legitimacy within spaces closed to them, and creating new spaces of their own.”[13]
To queer space means to fight for the legitimacy of queer expression and community in a heteronormative society. Whether it is creating new space or finding ways to use existing space, queering space is necessary for the survival of the queer community. This paper will discuss how the narrators have queered the spaces they moved through and how we co-created a queer space within the interviews. Lastly, through highlighting the diverse way queer spaces exist in our world, it will attempt to inspire a reimagining of the landscapes of our communities.
As the Midwest Queer Spaces project developed, I started to realize how closely tied the idea of queering space was with the concept of embodiment. We queer space through our embodied interaction with the world around us and therefore it is necessary to analyze embodiment as it relates to space and the oral history interview. The field of anthropology describes embodiment as “a way of describing porous, visceral, felt, enlivened bodily experiences, in and with inhabited worlds.”[14] Embodiment is also the way in which our body holds and carries our experiences as we move through the world. In Nien Yuan Cheng’s article “‘Flesh and Blood Archives’: Embodying the Oral History Transcript”, she states, “one’s body is an assemblage of corporeal knowledge that is accrued over one’s life history.”[15] This accrued corporeal knowledge and our ability to describe our enlivened bodily experiences is why embodiment is particularly relevant to the field of oral history.
“One’s body is an assemblage of corporeal knowledge that is accrued over one’s life history.”
— Nien Yuan Cheng
In many of her public talks, Nyssa Chow, an artist and oral historian, points out that every experience we have is dependent on our embodied way of moving through the world. She asks us to imagine an oral history approach in which, “the body of our narrators is not the subject of the interview, the body is the witness that takes the shared world [] as it’s subject.”[16] The first chapter of this paper will analyze the queer spaces the narrators in this project have created or moved through. This analysis will show how documenting the stories of queer spaces allows us to better understand the embodied experience of narrators. I will also hypothesize what the narrators’ embodied experiences in these spaces can teach us about queer history and how this knowledge is helpful in reimagining the landscape of our communities.
The second chapter of this essay will move from documenting the past embodied experiences of the narrators to the experience that is being co-created in the interview itself. Jeff Friedman discusses the importance of embodiment in the interview when he talks about how it is occurring, “through the embodied co-presence of both the interviewer and narrator, but this process is also situated both in place and in time and is immersed in the interactants’ subjectivities, as informed by their respective histories.”[17] The site of the interview and the interactions happening within it are creating embodied experiences for both the narrator and interviewer and this will always have an effect on the interview itself. This chapter will provide clear examples of the important information that is lost if oral historians do not attempt to document the space and embodiment of an interview.
Queer spaces have a unique connection to embodiment because queer identity is so tied to the bodily experience. While in an interview, I am unable to remove the queerness from my own body and therefore connect to the embodied memories of these narrators in a specific way. If the embodied aspect of this interview is removed so is much of the meaning behind the interaction. While in theory preserving and curating the embodied elements of an interview is something to strive for, in practice it can be difficult to find effective ways of doing so. Chapter three explores the difficulties of preserving, archiving, and curating embodied experiences. This chapter also examines the new and ever evolving technology that may provide us with more accuracy and efficiency when attempting this task. Lastly, I will draw on the fields of digital and public history, as well as concepts from performance studies to discuss the importance of curating oral histories in a way that not only translates the space and embodiment of an interview but also creates some sort of embodied experience for the audience.
In 2020, we are constantly being forced to adapt and change how we interact with the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced our society to re-envision how we do our jobs, connect with others, and create community. Technology has played a key role in helping us find new ways to accomplish this. As oral historians we now have to think more critically about how to connect with narrators and make work that is more broadly accessible. Social distancing and virtual interactions create new kinds of embodied experiences so in what ways will this shift change our ability to interpret an interview’s subjectivity? I will conclude this paper with an analysis of what this time means for ideas of space, sites of memory, and embodiment as we start conducting oral history interviews remotely. In a time when we are unable to physically come together, we can still use oral history in innovative ways to preserve the queer spaces and queer knowledge that would otherwise disappear.
Jesse Fox and Rachel Ralston, “Queer identity online: Informal learning and teaching experiences of LGBTQ individuals on social media,” in Computers in Human Behavior 65 (December 2016): 636. This article examines how queer individuals have used the internet to find and learn from each other since the rise of search engines and social media spaces.
Liam Stack, “Can Gay Bars, an Anchor of N.Y.C. Nightlife, Survive the Pandemic?” New York Times (New York, NY), June 20, 2020. This article discusses the financial difficulties The Stonewall Inn, one of the most if not the most iconic gay bar in the U.S., is having. The article infers that if this extremely popular bar may have to close because of the pandemic, the other smaller bars probably won’t survive either.
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 47. Portelli argues that the orality of an oral history is what makes oral history distinct from other practices, and that, “the transcript turns aural objects into visual ones, which inevitably implies changes and interpretation.” Portelli’s ideas about preservation impacted the entire field as it is now considered bad practice to not preserve the audio. See the Oral History Association’s Best Practices on Archiving Oral History. https://www.oralhistory.org/archives-principles-and-best-practices-overview/
The idea of geobiographies comes from Maria Nugent’s work with Aboriginal place based oral histories in Australia. In her article, “Mapping Memories: Oral History for Aboriginal Culture Heritage in New South Wales, Australia,” she describes this geobiographical approach as, “transforming autobiographical memory into a textual and visual representation of the landscape, or from a slightly different perspective, in extracting the remembered landscape embedded in a life story narrative.” (p. 60) Examples of story mapping can be seen in projects like the East New York Oral History Project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Stories of Land and Place conducted by the Elkton Historical Society (See Paul McCoy’s article “Case Study: StoryMapper– A Case Study in Map-based Oral History”).
Jeff Friedman, “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment,” in Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 291. In this article, Friedman builds off of the ways in which oral history and embodiment have been used in a variety of fields including performance studies, folklore, and ethnopoetics, to discuss the importance of documenting the narrator’s embodied communication.
Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Duke University Press: 2008), 10.
Joan Gibbs, interviewed by Sarah Schulman, transcript, New York, July 21, 2012, ACT UP Oral History Project, MIX – The New York Lesbian & Gay Experiential Film Festival, 46.
Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Talking About Sex: Cheryl Gonzales and Rikki Streicher Tell Their Stories,” Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History (Oxford University Press: 2012), 105.
Fox and Ralston, “Queer identity online,” 638-40.
ibid, 636.
ibid, 635.
Maria Nugent, “Mapping Memories: Oral History for Aboriginal Culture Heritage in New South Wales, Australia,” Oral History and Public Memories eds. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008) 60-1.
Enke, Finding the Movement, 3-4.
Anna Harris, “Embodiment,” in obo in Anthropology, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document /obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0151.xml (accessed 21 Aug. 2020).
Nien Yuan Cheng, “‘Flesh and Blood Archives’: Embodying the Oral History Transcript,” in Oral History Review 45, no. 1 (2018): 128.
Nyssa Chow, “Listening for Embodied Knowledge: An Approach to the Oral History Interview,” presented virtually for the Oral History Master of Arts Summer Workshop Series on Anti-Oppression and Oral History, Aug. 13, 2020.
Friedman, “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment,” 292-3.
