“We had never held hands out in public, but before they put her in the ambulance, I kissed Bobbie on the forehead whispered that I loved her.” When interviewed for the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project (OLOHP), Jean, born 1927, talked
about losing Bobbie. They’d been together for more than 35 years, living in rural Texas and had never show affection towards each other in public. Although many things have changed for lesbians now, it is essential that we remember and honor the lives of the women who came before us, living during a time when there were no books or magazines and no organizations, when being homosexual was classified as a disease for which you might be institutionalized, when simply dancing at a bar with another woman might land you in jail.
Some historians were trying to tell the story of these women, but it was always their interpretation of the story. The Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project has worked for more than 20 years to document and preserve the life stories of lesbians 70
and older. The OLOHP presentation will not only tell you about the Project and how it works, it will include a few readings of excerpts taken from their collection of 700+ interviews.

Exploring experience training undergraduates to serve as oral history practitioners, including challenges and strengths of this ongoing effort to gather local LGBTQ oral history interviews.

Based in Boston, Massachusetts at Northeastern University, the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections. By digitally localizing a wide range of trans-related materials, the DTA expands access to trans history for academics and independent researchers alike in order to foster education and dialog concerning trans history. This presentation will provide an overview of the DTA’s history and ongoing work, outline our approach to accessibility and community accountability, and highlight materials from the Southern United States.

This presentation will use our work on a public history project about Naiad Press – an internationally prominent lesbian publishing company located in Tallahassee, Florida, from 1980 to 2003 – to think about legacies of racial segregation in queer spaces, as well as the ethics of framing a majority-white lesbian community’s history through oral history research.

This presentation demonstrates the basics of archival exhibit creation from concept creation, text editing and layout, material mounting, to final layout and installation. It will show simple inexpensive techniques that will allow archivists to create a professional looking exhibit, that is up to archival standards, and which is easy for visitors to digest.

A self-guided audio tour of sites integral to the LGBTQIA+ story in Atlanta. Curated and narrated by Dave Hayward, founder of the LGBTQ Story Tour, and co-founder of Touching Up Our Roots: Georgia’s LGBTQ+ Story Project. Lesbian herstorian Maria Helena Dolan provides additional narration. Developed and produced by Dave Hayward and Dr. Eric Solomon. In 2016 Hayward founded the live LGBTQ Story Tour with Atlanta Pride and the LGBTQ Institute.

This presentation explores the necessity for persistence in archival research, particularly archival research outside of conventional archives. I focus on queer geographies of the South, relational persistence, and emotional investments during a research project on LGBTQ involvement in citywide festivals in the urban South and Southwest.

The Invisible Histories Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit based in Birmingham, AL that locates, preserves, researches and makes
community accessible the rich and diverse history of LGBTQ people in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and the Florida Panhandle. IHP acts as an intermediary between institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives and LGBTQ people and organizations. Join us for this presentation on the history of IHP, an overview of the IHP model, and a discussion on the challenges faced in developing and implementing a public history and community archiving project and nonprofit in the Deep South.

In 2021, the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida celebrated its 16th anniversary, a milestone representing persistent collaboration between community members and university historians to interpret the region’s queer past. Recently, the Museum has expanded its preservation efforts to locate instances of queer community building that occurred outside of gay bars and nightclubs. This presentation will address the challenges of the Museum’s evolution by focusing on two specific cases: an archiving effort to document regional LGBTQ sports leagues and an exhibition that wrestled with the
shifting generational perspectives on what defines a “queer space.” Though gay bars have long represented a “safe haven” for the LGBTQ community, the future of these spaces is precarious – as evidenced in Orlando with the 2020 closure of the iconic Parliament House after operating for 45 years. Given this shifting landscape, how might queer historiography adapt to reflect a more nuanced understanding of community beyond its traditional preoccupation with barroom legends? What are the spaces (and the people who find belonging within them) that we have neglected in our interpretation of the queer past and how can new collecting endeavors address these oversights? In addition to reflecting upon these questions, the presentation will contribute to a larger reimagining of queer theory to be more radically inclusive within public history
scholarship and praxis.

This presentation describes a project to collect and share stories of trans joy across Louisiana. The Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, together with Last Call Oral History Project, are creating a online mapping tool to enable trans and gender non-conforming (TGNC) individuals from across the state to contribute audio and video narratives, specifying places that are personally important to them as sites of trans joy. For our purposes, a place of trans joy can include any location that individuals feel included, loved or honored, as well as places where significant personal or communal events happened.
Collectively, these narratives will create rich documentation of one of Louisiana’s most marginalized communities.

Given that queer culture and history are not taught in a comprehensive fashion in the United States public education system, queer youths, young adults, and adults are effectively left to situate themselves within such cultural and historical narratives as they choose to construct; as a result, these constructed narratives may be incomplete and value hegemonic culture and history over accuracy. How does the idea of using queer community archives to prepare a “queericulum” that presents a more inclusive and comprehensive depiction of queer culture and history interact with the notions of queer
liberation? How can we use counter stories about queer h0istory and culture in queer community archives to more effectively work towards dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy in the queer community and in mainstream society?

My research has focused on what has proved to be the earliest known LGBTQ history of Houston, Texas. I have explored a group of artists, writers and actors who were active in the city in the 1930s and early 1940s. Using archival, but also extra-archival resources, I have sketched the context in which they worked in a southern city in the VERY pre-Stonewall era. The LGBTQ people I have researched did their working and living with a shared sense of group consciousness, in a time and place when such groups are virtually unknown outside the major cities of New York, London and Paris. There are some limited archival materials relating to the group, so part of my challenge has been to link those archived items with other resources (gossip, life circumstance, visual/written/acted works from their artistic lives) in order to illuminate a previously unknown LGBTQ cohort in what might be considered an unlikely time/place.

This presentation will discuss the importance of oral history interviews filling in gaps in the archival record for queer history. Examples include a collection of oral histories conducted by Rice undergraduates with Houstonians who have
made contributions to the LGBTQ+ community and a collection of a community partnership’s efforts to collect, preserve, and make available the oral histories of individuals impacted by HIV / AIDS epidemic in Houston, Harris County and Southeast Texas, with special emphasis on those who experienced the early years of the epidemic.

This presentation outlines how the project started, its goals and projects, and challenges faced archiving LGBT+ history in Louisiana.

Join graduate students for this conversation about the challenges and opportunities faced by those doing research and
internship work around LGBTQ history and archiving in the South. This facilitated discussion will ask current and recently graduated students to explain their projects, explore the challenges they faced in this work, detail the benefits they received from their projects, and discuss ways in which they feel students can be better supported in their coursework and internships.