Herramientas para el análisis comparativo de los genomas mínimos 31

Meditations on Oral History, Archives, and State Surveillance

In 1985, when my mother Judy was pregnant with me, Vicki Gabriner recorded an interview with her. She wanted to capture the threshold moment of a lesbian having a child. Vicki asked Judy a series of open-ended questions. She then assiduously added the tape cassette to her personal archive of documents and ephemera from a life in movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Vicki Gabriner moved to Boston in 1978 after living in Atlanta where she helped found the Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance in 1972. While her Atlanta years will be the focus of this

Part, her closeness to my family, her role as a part of my family, must first be conveyed. When Vicki moved to Boston, she became a part of Judy’s friend group and close friends with my mother Marcy. In the early ‘80s, she started dating Judy’s best friend and housemate Claire Craig. Claire was from Baton Rouge and Vicki was from Brooklyn. When I was born, Vicki and Claire lived up the street in Jamaica Plains, Boston and stopped by daily. Vicki did not have children and Claire would not have a child until ten years later. Judy was the first person in her friend group with a child. Vicki and Claire were central caretakers for my sister and me from infancy to adulthood, as aunts, godmothers, figures of comfort and home.

In this Part, I offer a specific iteration of queer methods of archival research. After Part II’s study of reproduction in a queer context, I turn to non-biological relation to examine oral history as queer practice and archives as a space of collaborative historical inquiry. This work returns to some of my analysis in Part I of this dissertation, where I also examine the presence of the state in the archives.

In 2014, I visited Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center, which has housed the Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance archives since 1994. I was curious about Vicki Gabriner’s time in ALFA in the early 1970s. It was moving and unexpected to open the ALFA Collection box and see the folder marked Vicki Gabriner. I took out articles she wrote and saw her familiar handwriting. I found mimeographed letters with errors and edits. We had discussed her political past for a decade, but here she was in the archives saying things I had not heard.

After this first visit alone, Vicki came to North Carolina and we went through ALFA archives together. We spent a week at Duke’s archive, where I conducted an experimental form of oral history in the ALFA archives. Our collaborative method utilized the archive as a space of transmission between generations of queer experience. This oral-history-in-the-archives process, the practice of bringing the subjects of movement cataloging to the archives has been a central component of my study of inheritance and memory transmission. My work with Vicki is framed by questions of intimacy, institution, and intergenerational queer connectivity. This third node of my larger project focuses my queer-familial connection with Vicki and its inheritances and thus concretizes the implications of queer family-making practices, bringing to fruition the many threads of this dissertation.

To begin this Part, I first situate my work within the field of oral history and specifically the emergent methods of queer oral history. After this discussion of process I turn to the history of ALFA through an analysis of interviews I conducted with members Vicki Gabriner, Lorraine Fontana, and Claudette Hopkins.234

These interviews productively juxtapose the importance of both home and civic spaces in ALFA history. Located in Little Five Points, the ALFA house was where the grassroots ALFA archive began in 1972. Meanwhile, in public spaces ALFA created a

234 _{For the purposes of this Part, I will refer to the three interviewees by their first name. This choice distinguishes}

Part III from Part II. I make this shift to push pressure on the interlocking questions of intimacy and institution, which are the focus on this portion of the dissertation.

softball team that prided itself on being Atlanta’s first out-lesbian team. Softball participation was a political strategy that helped grow the organization. The story of lesbian softball in Atlanta opens up histories of race and class on the playing field and in lesbian spaces.

But I also had another story to tell. I make an argument that Atlanta was an early location for lesbian archival practice and a revealing urban space through which to understand

relationships between class, lesbian feminism, race, gender, and state power. My work in the first section draws on A. Finn Enke’s monograph Finding The Movement and its spatial analysis of softball. But I focus on the specific context of Atlanta’s softball leagues in the 1970s. In 1976, Vicki Gabriner published “Coming Out Slugging” in Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. Enke uses this very essay as a key theoretical text in outlining the relationships among radical politics, public space, and softball. Using both Enke and Gabriner, I delve into Atlanta’s queer landscape.

My triangulation of archive practice, oral history, and affect theory draws from a series of participatory methods. In tandem with our collaboration in the archive, I conducted a recorded interview with Vicki for UNC’s Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). It followed a life history approach that moved chronologically across her experiences. The following summer I conducted a second series of recorded interviews with Vicki for SOHP and spent time studying her personal archive in her home. Through this work, I entered another archive—that of the FBI—which Vicki had catalogued after her 1974 FOIA request. As an activist in civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s, Vicki was involved with the Weathermen collective for a year before moving to Atlanta. In 1973, the FBI arrested Vicki for accomplice to passport fraud and conspiracy to commit passport fraud. Her time in ALFA was framed by her legal preparations and federal trial. In this process, Vicki studied redacted memos and listened to FBI wiretap recordings of her. The role of FBI archives will be studied in the second section of Part III.

Before delving into this history, I must ground my oral history and archival work with founding members of the Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance within a larger matrix of (queer) oral history method.

Oral History as Queer Practice

On a warm August night in 2014, queer artists gathered at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden to memorialize the death of queer scholar, José Esteban Muñoz. In their piece “Cruising Hialeah or Ghosts of Public Sex,” the Digital Hostage Collective inaugurated a long-term project to connect Muñoz’s childhood in Hialeah, Florida with neighboring queer Miami. They

explained, “The Cruising Miami Project aims to bring José home to South Florida’s queer community… While growing up in Hialeah, Muñoz was largely unaware of the queer culture flourishing at that time in South Florida… Likewise, the queer community of South Florida is largely unaware of his work.”235

To mourn and remember Muñoz, the night’s events centered oral histories from the 1980s describing public sex at the Botanical Garden. Visitors could walk the grounds, hear soprano Celeste Fraser Delgado and tenor José Vilanova singing on the green, and pick up ear buds to listen to cruising stories of Miami’s Latino men of the ‘80s. Amidst “haunting arias” meant to evoke the long afterlife of loss, listeners were simultaneously mourners, voyeurs, and inheritors of ephemeral pasts. In the same moment, the recorded

narrators, many of whom did not survive the AIDS pandemic, briefly returned as aural ghosts of public sex. While some listeners knew the botanical pathways and its cruising history first hand, others stood in the locations described, and imagined summer night encounters for the first time.

The Collective’s use of oral history in a queer act of remembrance is illustrative of the possibilities queer oral history opens up. In 1996, Muñoz wrote a groundbreaking essay,

“Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” for Women and Performance. In the piece, he pushes back against the academic demand for evidence. He writes:

Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.236

Muñoz, like the queer artists of Cruising Miami, sees potential in interactions that do not leave traces. He encourages queer thinkers and performers to both expand concepts of

materiality/evidence and simultaneously divest from institutional models of preserving. “Queer acts, like queer performances, and various performances of queerness, stand as evidence of queer lives, powers, and possibilities.”237

In what ways is oral history a queer act? In what ways is it not? To practice oral history is to travel amidst qualities of mourning and landscape present in “Cruising Hialeah or Ghosts of Public Sex.” Oral histories are ephemeral and for queer and minoritarian communities, ephemerality has long been a tool and a process. With Muñoz’s concepts of ephemera and evidence in mind, this section examines the field of queer oral history.

236 _{José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance 8,}

no. 2 (1996): 6.

Figure 3. 2: "Ghosts of Public Sex" Digital Hostage Collective

Oral history records memory’s process and becomes a written and oral telling of the past. Queer oral history specifically provides a method for an encounter between mainly a queer listener and queer teller. It is an attempt to break down traditional dichotomies of the growing discipline of oral history. In a queer oral history, emotion/analysis, friend/lover/informant, and past/present are destabilized to some extent. Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque

Ramírez’s collection, Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, thinks deeply about what is queer about queer oral history. I seek to elaborate on their endeavor to carve out queer contours of method. I want to think deeply about the following questions. How have gay and lesbian oral history projects grappled with the genre’s subjectivity? How has the desire to gather historical fact compelled us and what does preservation produce? How have scholars engaged with the affective and erotic dimensions of oral history? As discussed in Part II, because of my position as queer, historian, and child of lesbian mothers, I am particularly attuned to how stories pass between generations of queer/lesbian experience. Oral history is a collaboration that brings to the fore methodological questions of listening, recording, and embodied transmissions of the past. In an examination of practice and process, I look at how queer methods have

developed and what central themes recur. I argue oral history is a queer practice in which temporal boundaries blur. I further contend there is much to yield by toying with the format of

oral history and, by returning to that Miami night, re-imagining how collected stories are shared. I close with my own explorations of oral history and queer intergenerationality.

“Inventing Ourselves”

But other parts of the story will soon be history, exactly the kind of details of a life that we always want to know. What does it feel like? I’ve read newspapers for that weekend, both dailies and Sundays, and nothing of what I remember is mentioned. Nothing in my experience of that weekend merited a public record…If someone ever wants to remember, to reinterpret that particular geography, to piece together those details, to imagine what it must have been like (Which pub was where? With what pleasure or hysteria was gay London celebrating that holiday? Why, at the beginning of the summer of 1984, were we being so carefully watched by the police?) then they will need more than what survives in the newspapers to help them.

- Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde In 1985, the Hall Carpenter Archive took up oral history in attempts to convey the type of London weekend Neil Bartlett found absent from the record. Forming two autonomous gay and lesbian working groups, members of the Hall Carpenter Archive (hereafter, “the Archive”) in London began to interview peers. The project of over 60 interviews resulted in two publications of edited transcripts: Walking After Midnight: Gay Men’s Life Stories and Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories. Both books pulled their title from narrators’ accounts. In Walking After Midnight, the men’s collective stated their desire to be active participants in history writing and saw the book as “a search for our past as gay men.” Interviewing men who came of age in the 1920s-1980s, interviewers looked for glimpses “of the language used, books read, and the pubs and clubs where gay men met.” In the era of AIDS, the group approached interviews with great urgency and saw the project as a way of “ensuring…we will not be hidden, neglected, or dismissed.”238

Both projects of the Archive sought to delineate gay and lesbian identities, but they simultaneously questioned the stability of such categories. Inventing Ourselves was titled after

the following excerpt, “I still find it difficult to believe that I was produced by my parents. I feel as if I invented myself…I don't know if perhaps being lesbian makes you see the world

differently. That you never see yourself as this one static being: 'Now I'm mature; now I'm grown up.' I see myself as somebody constantly able to change and able to take different viewpoints, and to learn new things.”239

This interviewee framed herself as a product of constant formation and reiteration.240 _{Without models, coming out was a process of creating. In conversation with}

the men’s collective, the lesbian working group stated goals of contributing to lesbian history, questioning the past, and witnessing each other. Through involvement in feminist organizing and women’s groups, the lesbian interviewers entered the project with knowledge of “the

significance of voicing and analyzing personal experience.”241

The Archive offers insight into 1980s projects of gay and lesbian oral history that sprung up formally and informally in this era. Project coordinators described why they chose oral history, “The wider oral history movement which aimed to broaden history's scope by looking at 'ordinary' experience still largely uses the personal landmarks of heterosexuality to question people's lives. It is painful to realize we cannot rely on our families to pass on our stories and validate our lives.”242

They describe being drawn to oral history because of its subjective qualities. “Critics of oral history who have a naive trust in society's written records of itself mistrust the subjectivity of oral accounts…Because it openly acknowledges the problems of looking retrospectively at the past, oral history engages honestly with the process of history, which is one of constant re-interpretation. The speakers in this volume are very attuned to this

239 _{Hall Carpenter Archives, Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories. (London: Routledge, 1989), 1}

240 _{For thoughts on the role of identity reiteration through oral history see Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Who Is The Subject:}

Queer Theory Meets Oral History” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (2008): 177-189.

241_{Inventing Ourselves, 1.} 242 _{Ibid., 1.}

and often are very careful to say ‘At the time I felt that. Now I don't.’ Following these

introductory thoughts, the edited interviews that follow have no explicit interpretation and only a short postscript by the interviewee.243

The books are a distillation of the extensive oral histories collected and archived. They argue that interpretation and analysis of gay and lesbian life can be found in the transcripts themselves. 244

They present feminist roots, champion interviews as theoretically generative, and describe the unique relationship of queer subjects to oral history. As a case study, the Archive frames key areas of my own inquiry: subjectivity, the body, mourning, and geography.

Telling Queer Stories

In historical works of the 1970s, oral history was a key component of collecting information about gay and lesbian life. To know the geographies and experiences, the actions and ideas of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, one had to interview those who were there. Historians such as John D’Emilio, Estelle Freeman, Allan Bérubé, and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy sought to garner lived experience through recorded conversation. In doing so, they were a more academic and in-depth aspect of larger dialogues between generations of queer experience that were

243 _{Clearly, the editing of transcripts highly impacts how such volumes can be used as historical documents. What}

the editors excised as extraneous or improper for their oral history publication could be read quite differently in a different era or editor. Oral history projects, like all archives, are partial and selective historical collections from top to bottom. This does not discredit their historical data, but rather adds layers of information and nuances of analysis. Who was selected as an interviewee? Who was not? Who interviewed whom—and what information was added or omitted due to the dynamic between teller and listener? These questions permeate oral history praxis and reiterate the problems of evidence.

244 _{For D’Emilio, oral history was a means to information and it served as the historical backbone to his first book,}

Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities in 1983. For Bérubé, it was an invitation for participation. He presented his interview-based studies of gay men and women in WWII service in a ‘traveling slideshow’ to get feedback and find new narrators. This format created an ongoing dialogue between the historian and the public about the queer history they shared (and desired). Allan Bérubé, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 41-125.

occurring in bars and community organizations.245

The impulse to gather data in the late 1970s