Reprinted with permission from History Happens

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Would You Be Caught Dead in That Outfit? The Powerful Fashion of Translatinas: New exhibit at SF’s GLBT Historical Society

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There are those of us with more conservative fashion tastes, others who are willing to be more fashion-forward. But the question “Would you be caught dead in that outfit?” isn’t just one that you’d whisper to a friend on a shopping expedition—or behind a bridesmaid’s back at a wedding. For members of San Francisco’s Translatina community, the question is less an interrogative than a defiant statement.

Artists Julián Delgado Lopera, who curated the 2016 exhibition Noche de Ambiente with the GLBT Historical Society, and Rebeka Rodriguez are unveiling their new exhibition Would You Be Caught Dead In That Outfit?/¡Que Perra Mi Amiga! on September 22 at the Pacific Felt Factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. In photographs and through journals, the exhibition celebrates the legendary intergenerational histories of the city’s Translatinas, with a focus on the power of dressing up and kiki, or gathering together. Some of the exhibition materials and work generated by the show will be donated to the GLBT Historical Society’s archives.

We interviewed co-curator and photographer Rebeka Rodgriguez to learn more about the exhibition.

Tell us about the cultural importance to Translatinas of extravagant fashion and dressing up.

RR: Clothes become our armor out in the world. All those incredible gowns and sparkly suits. Dressing up as survival is one of the through-lines here: the power of certain outfits gives you the courage to go face the world. The dance floor is our church, where we go and worship each other and our community. One of the pieces on display is a dress that was given to Julián’s drag mother by a queen in the 1990s. So outfits have been handed down from queen to queen over time, and remixed and referenced.

What was the germination of this exhibition?

RR: Both Julián and I have a deep personal investment and long history creating work with Translatinas, specifically with El/La Para Translatinas, an organization that represents trans, intersex, and gender-diverse Latinx people; I’ve been photographing the women at El/La for more than a decade. Julián’s book ¡Cuéntamelo! Oral Histories by LGBT Latino Immigrants was republished by Aunt Lute Books in 2018 and that is when Julián and I worked on “Would You Be Caught Dead in that Outfit?”, a multimedia event at the Stud celebrating the aesthetics of 1980s and 1990s underground clubbing. There was a panel discussion which included one of the people featured in the book and we had a runway where everyone who wore their outfits got a chance to strut their stuff. I took photos, it was fun!

And then at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, we facilitated writing workshops with five El/La Translatinas members who shared stories, drew images and wrote about their memories of creating outfits and hitting the club. I was able to photograph some of them in the intimacy of their homes. The journals with their stories as well as prints of the photographs will be part of the exhibition. So it’s been an evolution, it’s a project that’s a living history, and this is the latest incarnation. And it’ll continue when the work becomes part of the GLBT Historical Society’s archives.

How is this exhibition also a very San Francisco show?

RR: Part installation, part archival project, this show centers the lives of transgender Latin American immigrants and their contribution to the glorious fabric of San Francisco’s queer history. The contributions of Translatinas to San Francisco’s queer history is vast, deep, textured and layered, both physically and metaphorically Translatinas have always been here, on stage, in the streets and on the dancefloor. WYBCDITO highlights Translatina creative brilliance and resilience. By centering this history we make space for all of us.

NOTE: Would You Be Caught Dead in That Outfit? opens September 22, 2022 at the Pacific Felt Factory at 2830 20th Street, San Francisco, and runs through mid-October.

Would You Be Caught Dead
In That Outfit?
Opening Reception
 
Thursday, September 22
5:00 p.m.
In-person program
The Pacific Felt Factory2830 20th Street, San FranciscoFree
Join us for the opening reception of Julián Delgado Lopera and Rebeka Rodriguez’s new exhibition Would You Be Caught Dead In That Outfit?/¡Que Perra Mi Amiga! at the Pacific Felt Factory. Through dress-up and kiki, the exhibition celebrates the legendary intergenerational histories of trans Latinas on San Francisco’s 16th Street. Part installation, part archival project (with new material being donated to the GLBT Historical Society’s archives), this stunning visual collection centers the lives of transgender Latin American immigrants and their contribution to the fabulous fabric of San Francisco’s queer history. Would You Be Caught Dead is being mounted in collaboration with El/La Trans Latinas, the Transgender Cultural District, the GLBT Historical Society and AIRSF. More information is available here. No tickets are needed; entry is first-come, first-served.

Rebeka Rodriguez (she/her) is an artist, curator, and cultural producer whose work explores the body as a site for personal and collective histories, desire, community and queer aesthetics. She is currently working with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where she designs and implements creative programming, and is the Director for AIR-SF, a nonprofit project committed to supporting artists and producing relevant public art projects and expanding civic participation.

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Into the Vault: A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of the GLBT Historical Society Archives

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Friday, May 13
5:30–7:00 p.m. PT
Online program
$5 | Free for members
You’ve seen highlights from our archival collections on social media and in programs. Now join us on a behind-the-scenes look at the work of the GLBT Historical Society archivists. You’ll learn how archival staff preserve and share LGBTQ historical material, including processing collections, managing donations, digitizing records and more. You’ll get a peek into the vault, where the archivists will share some of their favorite pieces. Finally, we’ll be introducing a new workshop program we are launching this year that provides free archival skills training to the public. Speakers will include Kelsi Evans, our director of archives and special collections; Isaac Fellman, reference archivist; and Megan Needels, project archivist. They will also be joined by members of our Archives Working Group, a volunteer advisory group consisting of local archivists, historians and others in related fields. Tickets are available online here.

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SF GLBT Historical Society Offers a Virtual Tour of the Lyon-Martin House

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“A bronze sidewalk plaque just doesn’t cut it,” said architectural historian Shayne Watson when we spoke to her last year about the Lyon-Martin House, the San Francisco home inhabited for over five decades by Phyllis Lyon (1924–2020) and Del Martin (1921–2028). In 1955, Lyon and Martin co-founded the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), much of whose activities they oversaw from their house in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood.
 
Watson continued, “Just as Americans claim Independence Hall as a birthplace of American democracy, queer people throughout the world can claim the Lyon-Martin House as a place instrumental in the development and advancement of our fundamental rights—it’s part of our collective experience.”
 
That collective experience is now a three-dimensional one that anyone with an internet connection can enjoy. On March 22, the GLBT Historical Society, digital historic preservation firm CyArk, and the nonprofit historic preservation group Friends of the Lyon-Martin House unveiled a pathbreaking, 3-D virtual tour of the Lyon-Martin House. The virtual tour is available to the public and can be experienced on the society’s website at www.glbthistory.org/lyon-martin-house.
 
A City Landmark
 
The Lyon-Martin House is not simply a residence. Lyon and Martin purchased the house the same year that they and others co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis, and house quickly became the beating heart of the organization. They held meetings in its living room, planned events, edited DOB’s journal The Ladder, and built their lives together within its walls. Recognizing this, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously bestowed the status of San Francisco Landmark on the house on May 4, 2021. Friends of the Lyon-Martin House, a fiscally sponsored project of the GLBT Historical Society, is now working with the property owner, the city and other stakeholders to document the historic structure and plan for its long-term future.
 
CyArk’s virtual tour of the Lyon-Martin House is a groundbreaking evolution in digital historic preservation efforts, enabling far more members of the public to experience and learn about the Lyon-Martin House than would otherwise be possible. The house’s small size, limited occupancy and situation on a steep hill in a residential neighborhood present significant public access and accessibility challenges. The virtual tour eliminates all potential safety, accessibility and occupancy challenges while providing a seamless, three-dimensional experience for virtual visitors enriched by historic photographs, interviews and commentary.
 
CyArk created the 3D model for the tour using thousands of photographs and laser scans to accurately document the home as it exists today. The rendering additionally incorporates digital versions of several of Lyon and Martin’s possessions currently housed in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives to provide a sense of the interior when they lived there. The tour is organized into a total of 17 stations, taking in areas including the front yard, living room, second-floor landing and kitchen. At each station, visitors can use four keys on their keyboard to move in three dimensions and the right mouse button to rotate the camera 360 degrees.

Voices of Phyllis & Del

Each station is accompanied by historic commentary, reflections and interviews provided by LGBTQ historians, friends and family members of Phyllis and Del, including Marcia Gallo, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas; Don Romesburg, professor of gender and women’s studies at Sonoma State University; and Kendra Mon, the daughter of Phyllis and Del. Finally, the tour incorporates the voices and reflections of Phyllis and Del Martin themselves, drawn from the extensive oral histories and interviews conducted prior to the deaths and held in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives.
 
The GLBT Historical Society, CyArk and Friends of the Lyon-Martin House are very pleased to make this tour available to you. As San Francisco District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the historic landmark designation for the site and represents the Noe Valley neighborhood, remarked on March 22, “It’s one thing for the city to grant landmark status to a building, but it takes community-led efforts like this to make that history accessible and fresh, something that’s especially needed when it comes to queer history.”
Click to tour the Lyon-Martin House

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The Artistry of Leather and Desire: Archives Acquire Tool Box Mural

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Striking in its composition, this superb painted mural is yellowed with age and nicotine stains but still brims with sexual energy. The figures are seemingly drawn from a wide cross-section of mid-century society. A tattooed man in a sleeveless T-shirt fixes the viewer with a gaze suggestive of desire. A more bourgeois-looking fellow wears a striped turtleneck, while in the background a man in a full suit and tie looks on. To the left of center, a man wearing a leather cross-stitched shirt gazes at the rear end of a nearby patron, while in the very center a broad-shouldered man in what looks to be a leather motorcycle cap plays it coy, turning away.

The GLBT Historical Society is delighted to formally announce the acquisition of this remarkable work of art, which has joined the archives’ Art and Artifacts Collection. The panel, painted sometime in the mid-1960s, is the work of Chuck Arnett (1928–1988), a ballet dancer turned artist. Arnett painted it as a recreation of a mural he had originally executed on a glass storefront window that graced the wall of the Tool Box, a motorcycle and leather bar on the east corner of 4th and Harrison Streets in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood. Opened in 1961, this was one of the first gay leather/motorcycle bars in the city and became a pioneering leather establishment in this neighborhood that would come to be the epicenter of the city’s leather and kink community in the 1960s through the 1990s.

A Calling Card

The interior murals at the Tool Box, all painted by Arnett, were probably the establishment’s best-known calling card. Arnett painted one set of oversized murals along the south-facing, Harrison Street walls, and painted two mural panels on the glass storefront windows on the west-facing, 4th Street walls. One of the original glass murals was accidentally shattered when an angry janitor threw a broom across the room (the janitor later apologized to Arnett), prompting Arnett to paint several replicas on wood, including this one, probably painted in situ or from a photograph of the original. In contrast to the obscurity of the 4th Street panels, the Harrison Street murals became internationally known after photographs of the interior of the Tool Box were featured in a groundbreaking 1964 spread in Life Magazine entitled “Homosexuality in America.”

Though much loved and remarked-upon by patrons, Arnett’s remarkable Tool Box artwork was on display only a brief time; the Tool Box lost ground to other leather bars in the neighborhood and closed in 1971, and the building—with the Harrison Street murals still affixed to the southern wall—was torn down in 1975. Because the original glass panels were not shown in the Life spread nor in 1975 photographs of the building’s demolition, this panel provides valuable evidence of Arnett’s original artistic intent for his complete Tool Box decoration scheme. The panel was purchased and donated to the GLBT Historical Society in 2021. The donor acquired it from a San Francisco couple who had themselves purchased it at a garage sale some 30 years ago, and it had remained in their storage unit until last year.

Documenting Differences

We are still working with experts to determine when Arnett painted this panel and to fully document its provenance. Mike Caffee, an artist and former roommate of Arnett’s, and leather historian Gayle Rubin, have helped the GLBT Historical Society’s archives team with these efforts. In particular, Caffee identifies the leftmost figure as a portrait of biker and photographer Joe Winters. “[He was] drop-dead, movie-star handsome,” Caffee explains. “Chuck was smitten and included him many times in the murals.” Caffee also notes that rather than endowing the man in the white T-shirt with a tattoo of a black panther—a common motif used at the time to cover up older, unwanted tattoos—Arnett chose to give the tattooed figure a campy pussycat tattoo, while the text “My Sin” is borrowed from a women’s perfume by that name sold by Lanvin. Some interesting differences from the original glass panel include the fact that this mural includes men with blond hair, gray clothing, and a visible hand holding a bottle, none of which were present in the glass version.

While we are continuing to consult with experts in the field, we would love to hear more from the public about the Tool Box mural, especially if anyone has photographic evidence of the original glass panels. Our aim is to provide a complete picture of what the Tool Box looked like in its heyday!

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Curating With the Community in the New Year

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For over ten years, the GLBT Historical Society Museum has been a showcase for LGBTQ history, art and culture. Among our most beloved initiatives has been our Community Curator Program. This program invites members of the public, historians and curators to develop exhibitions under the guidance of GLBT Historical Society curatorial staff. As the society’s director of exhibitions and museum experience, I’m pleased to announce that after temporarily suspending the program in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have now launched a new format for our Community Curator Program!

Varied Approaches

Interest in community-curation models has grown dramatically in the museum and curatorial world over the past decade. Since we first swung open the doors to the GLBT Historical Society Museum in the Castro in 2011, about half of our temporary exhibitions have been conceived and curated by members of the public. Community curation has enabled us to mount unique exhibitions that reflect a wider variety of interests, approaches and topics than would otherwise have been possible.

In 2016, for instance, Julián Delgado Lopera and Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción curated an exhibition exploring the concept of ambiente(“environment”)  in the LGBTQ Latinx community. In 2017, artist and professor E.G. Crichton invited LGBTQ artists to create new artworks inspired by past issues of OUT/LOOK, a historic periodical of the late 1980s and early 1990s held in the society’s archives. And in 2019 Melissa Hawkins’s thirty-year-old photographs depicting bars and parties in the SoMa neighborhood formed the core of an exhibition about culture and resilience in the nightlife world during the worst years of the AIDS crisis.

A More Structured Process

While we temporarily paused new in-person exhibition proposals in 2020 and 2021, the break provided an opportunity for us to evaluate the program, identifying both strengths and areas for improvement. We have now updated and relaunched the program, providing a more structured application process, a revised set of timelines, clearer expectations and better support. These changes are designed to assist prospective curators in crafting strong proposals and further developing their professional skills in the process.

In line with the society’s Five Year Strategic Plan, adopted in 2021, we are especially looking forward to receiving exhibition proposals that focus on people with disabilities; people and communities of color; Native American/Indigenous people and communities; lesbians and women; and bisexual, transgender and gender-nonconforming or nonbinary people and communities. To support this goal, the new exhibition application form will be available year round. We welcome and will consider all proposals that demonstrate alignment with our mission.

Since 1985, the GLBT Historical Society has been a labor of love rooted in the LGBTQ community, and our museum has likewise sought to embody the society’s community-centered roots. This is your museum. We hope you’ll participate in the curatorial process.

To learn more about the Community Curator Program,please visit our new webpage, where you will find extensive information. The application form is available on that page and will be accepting proposals from January 10. And finally, I’m always available to answer your questions!

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Bridging the Lesbian Past and Present

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Over 30 years ago, Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve, the most successful lesbian magazine in the world, connecting lesbian community, changing the way lesbians are seen by the mainstream, highlighting the transgender experience, raising awareness of attacks on LGBTQ rights and amplifying the work of lesbian activists. One of the three 2021 recipients of the GLBT Historical Society’s History Maker Awards, Stevens reacquired Curve and co-founded the Curve Foundation last year to empower the Curve community — lesbians, queer women, trans women and nonbinary people of all races, ages and abilities.

The Foundation’s mission is to spur storytelling and cross-generational dialogue by supporting journalism inspired by the tradition of Curve magazine, investing in the next generation of intersectional leaders and bolstering community archives to ensure LGBTQ women’s culture and history are known. In addition to a fellowship to support emerging journalists, the foundation is establishing its own digital archives to preserve the living legacy of Curve magazine and inspire future writers. The foundation is currently hiring an archivist to oversee the launch of this initiative. We sat down for a chat with Stevens and Jasmine Sudarkasa, the Curve Foundation’s executive director.

The GLBT Historical Society’s archives enable people to learn about the LGBTQ past. Likewise, how are the new Curve Foundation’s activities inspired by the past 30 years of Curve magazine?

Jasmine: The work of the foundation is rooted in the magazine’s legacy: we resource stories and storytellers that embody authenticity, cultivate a sense of belonging and support intergenerational trust and resilience. These values are inspired by lesbian legacies of community building and culture work, particularly as embodied in Curve magazine. Putting these values into practice, then, we maintain two programs: The Curve Award, to resource LGBTQ storytellers, and The Curve Archive, which curates, activates and preserves lesbian stories well into the future.

Franco: There is no other organization that bridges our past and our present so directly. By preserving and making the Curve Archive available, we are honoring our history and making it visible and accessible today. By supporting today’s journalists and inviting them to find inspiration in the archives, we are fostering an intergenerational dialogue. All of the foundation’s programming is rooted in our history as a way of not only preserving our past, but also informing how we carve out our future.

The Curve Award is designed to foreground the voices of those who have been marginalized or censored. What kind of support do recipients receive?

The five winners of the Curve Award receive a $5,000 cash award, one-on-one mentoring through the National LGBTQ+ Journalists Association (NLGJA), cohort-based professional development and opportunities for outward-facing visibility. This might include conference presentations at NLGJA, writing opportunities for Curve, and so on. We are incredibly proud of the 2021 cohort—they are an incredible cadre of emerging journalists and have been published everywhere from the New York Times to Them. Applications for the 2022 cohort will go live in April, and we hope to hear from many more journalists this year. 

The Curve Archive will make the entire run of Curve magazine available to the public in 2022; how has the GLBT Historical Society’s work helped with this project?

The GLBT Historical Society has been an invaluable partner to us in our first year of operations. The archival and development teams have been incredibly gracious, helping us to understand what it really takes to orchestrate and operate a compelling archive. We have a lot of gratitude for the leadership of the society in both setting the standard for efficacy and creating space to teach new partners in the field. It’s a very generous way to steward LGBTQ history, and very much in line with our approach to the work.

Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve in 1990. She has served on the board of GLAAD, was a founding board member of the San Francisco LGBT Center, and has worked extensively to promote lesbian visibility and educate media professionals on the lesbian market. Franco is the subject of the documentary Ahead of the Curve (dir. Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow, 2020).

Jasmine Surdakasa is the executive director of the Curve Foundation. She learned philanthropic practice while serving as the program fellow for the Effective Philanthropy Group at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, exploring equitable methods and power-sharing. Before philanthropy, she served as the senior trainer on behalf of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), subject agency of the film Very Young Girls.

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Making Space for Other Voices: An ACT UP Veteran Looks Back

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n honor of World AIDS Day, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s. Mason, whose current project is an art, care and community-expanding network called Queering Dreams that they recently cofounded with Jason Wyman, also worked with the San Francisco AIDS Project as a case worker in the 1990s.

Mason was one of 23 ACT UP veterans who sat for an oral history as part of the GLBT Historical Society’s ACT UP Oral History Project, which was completed last year and is available here. In their oral history, Mason offered their thoughts on the importance of intersectional identity and why ACT UP had limited success integrating those perspectives as an activist organization. We invited Mason to discuss some of the issues they raised in their oral history and reflect on what they learned as an activist of color thirty years ago.

In your oral history, you mention that even from attending your first ACT UP protests, you were living in Washington D.C., before you came to San Francisco, you were interested in how AIDS was affecting poor people, marginalized people and people of color.  

CM: Yes, and in fact shortly after I moved to San Francisco I accidentally wandered into the Castro Sweep [a brutal police crackdown on AIDS activists in the Castro in October 1989] on my way home from work! I was taken by how physical it was. People were really willing to put their bodies, their physical selves, on the line, against police brutality. So right there, you’ve got the intersection of AIDS with policing and incarceration. That interested me, and I started attending ACT UP meetings. And I feel like part of my role during my work with ACT UP was to keep bringing up the fact that HIV was affecting other populations beyond what was commonly seen in the media and understood by the American public, which was largely gay white men.

I remember being in a meeting, trying to reach consensus, and I can’t remember what we were discussing—perhaps homelessness, and one guy got impatient and snapped, “While we’re sitting here discussing this, dozens of people have died.” And I said, “In my community people have been dying all this time—and for a hell of a lot longer.” So there was always that tension. It is true that there were some activists from earlier political movements who had been involved with larger social issues. There were also people who began their ACT UP work with a pretty narrow focus. And there were those who did eventually came to appreciate and align themselves with a larger worldview. But it was always a bit of a struggle.

In your oral history, you really insist on the fact that intersectionality informs priorities and that over time, ACT UP/SF deemphasized these. You mention specifically women and people of color.

CM: I did spend a lot of time on women’s issues, which many of the men were receptive to. AIDS did not affect women the same way, and for a long time that just wasn’t accounted for. Women who clearly had the disease couldn’t get a diagnosis, which meant they couldn’t access Medical, social security, treatment studies, and so on. But ACT UP was not successful in terms of issues that affected people of color and the most marginalized. There was a time, for example, when we focused on universal access to healthcare and health insurance, which would have made treatment more available to marginalized people, such as the homeless, people with mental-health problems, or low-income people. Ultimately when the focus became centered narrowly around “let’s get drugs into bodies,” these larger issues were deprioritized, and it turns out that they weren’t necessarily talking about poor bodies, brown bodies, Black bodies, homeless bodies…

And I really wonder how different things might be if we had centered intersectionality and been more strident about equity issues. Today many white gay people see HIV as a manageable disease, but it is still booming in the Black community. And it’s not just people of color; when I was a case worker at the SF AIDS Foundation, it was poor people and people with drug problems. Having mental-health problems or being homeless would automatically disqualify you from access to treatment and coverage. I’ve realized that over and over—in the women’s suffrage movement or the labor movement and today with voting rights—the notion of “urgency” has ended up deprioritizing marginalized communities. And this is going to keep happening until we create movements where the goal is really to create a better life for the most marginalized, including Black people, transgender folks, incarcerated people and sex workers.

What advice would you have for students, historians and members of the public who are interested in learning about ACT UP and AIDS activism today?

CM: I think that ACT UP in some ways was very successful and remains worth emulating. We were strident, even when we didn’t have social support. We were just one in a long line of movements that were more vilified than celebrated at the time. There’s such a thing as “respectability politics,” and a lot of LGBTQ people were not happy when we were out there protesting during Pride parades. But I’d also say to folks, be willing to look at what fell by the wayside. Yes there is a moral arc of history, and yes, it does bend. But that arc doesn’t bend without us. And when I say “us,” I mean all of us, we have to stop creating movements for change with this addiction to centering whiteness.

Black people and poor people and trans people are still fighting for a place at the table. Those who are at the table can’t speak for those who aren’t. What we can do is make space for other voices. And hand the microphone over from time to time. When we get in certain rooms, we have to demand that other people also get into that room. Not to see ourselves as singular, but realize our connections to the whole.

Photo by William Beverly

 Crystal Mason (they/them) is an activist who recently cofounded “Queering Dreams,” an art, care, and community-expanding network that uses the power of art to envision liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.

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A Rosetta Stone of My San Francisco Life

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Back in May, we ran a story about a digitized collection we made available this spring: the Daniel A. Smith and Queer Blue Light Videotape Collection. This remarkable collection consists of nearly 100 half-inch videotapes recorded by the Queer Blue Light (QBL) Collective, a grassroots guerilla project that documented the politics and culture of the local LGBTQ community in the 1970s. The footage was all shot on a Sony Portapak, one of the first self-contained videotape recorders from the late 1960s. 

While the majority of the tapes document the activities of the QBL Collective, they also include footage by QBL members of friends relaxing together and living everyday life. In her article in May, our project archivist Megan Needels was especially taken with a tape that depicted an informal dinner party that recorded what she described as “pure queer joy.” We’re delighted to bring you a follow up to this story: an interview with John Carr. Carr held the party at his apartment on Castro and Market Streets on February 29, 1980—it was a “Leap Day” party. Thirty-five years later, while attending the Frameline Festival, Carr recognized himself in footage licensed from the society by documentary filmmaker Stu Maddox for his 2015 documentary Reel in the Closet. Carr connected with Maddox and went on to donate three of his own Portapak videotapes to the GLBT Historical Society as the John Carr Videotapes. 

How did you find out that the QBL tapes existed and that some of your own Portapak tapes might be readable? 

JC: I knew the tapes existed because Dan Smith was a friend. His partner in QBL was Earl Galvin, who was my boyfriend at the time. Somehow, some of the tapes he made of parties at my flat ended up in the QBL collection. He had given three others to me. I did not know that the GLBT Historical Society now had the QBL tapes until I saw myself in Reel in the Closet in 2015. Stu Maddux told me about John Raines, a digital media whiz, who then digitized the other three tapes I had. Seeing those tapes again opened up a huge lost world, because it was 35 years since the tapes had been made and there was no equipment to play them on anymore. It was like finding the Rosetta Stone in terms of my life at that time. 1980 was a year before AIDS started. I lost count of how many friends I lost to AIDS, and several of the people in the tapes had died, but some that were possibly still alive, so I searched for them, found some on Facebook and brought them back into my life. 

What do you remember about this 1980 Leap Day Party?

JC: That party really showcased my friends, I think. Most of them were single and cruising others at the party, even sort of flirting with the camera. Haha! And the novelty of home video—people being on camera like that—was brand new at that time. [The Sony Portapak] was a cumbersome piece of equipment. The battery only lasted 20 minutes and the tape 30 minutes, so you knew you had to change either the tape or battery or both if you had a long program that you wanted to record! (Laughs). We were just having fun, Earl brought it over for the parties, and we got high and had a good time. I had just escaped from a toxic relationship and took that apartment, so I was a single person again, and February 29 was a Leap Day so it was a good time to have a first party, and I was finally ready to have some people over.

What feelings do you experience, seeing yourself in the footage?

JC: Seeing the people in the tapes alive again reminded me that you forget a lot in 35+ years. It reminded me of the wonderful times we had, which I held in a kind of generic way in my head but this was a specific moment, and it was delightful to see. Going through HIV a lot of people went home, and you may not have known where they went, they just disappeared. They may have died.

San Francisco was such a focal point, a meeting place, back in those days, I arrived here in 1975. It was quite a magic time to be here and everyone was coming from somewhere else, but all of them had a coming-out story. That’s what I remember most about that time: we were dealing with a very diverse group of people who had some very similar things in common, they were running from or running to something. And boy, when they got here it all just exploded in so many ways, the exploring of their intellectual, their sexual and personal lives just happened. It was so repressed up to that point. 

One thing that comes up for me strongly is, “Wow, there are people who are interested in this!” Now, as people make ephemeral recordings of their daily lives, they tend to think that future generations aren’t going to be interested in this, so it surprised me that there are people who are interested. And so, I say, please folks: If you have any of this stuff and you’re getting up there in years or whatever, consider donating it to the GLBT Historical Society, don’t toss it out. Give them a chance because you won’t know what’s important to future generations. Your life is important whether you’re here or gone, so let other people see into your life.

John Carr grew up in Colorado and has lived in San Francisco for the past 47 years, where he had a landscaping company until his retirement in 2004. Michael Lownie, his life partner of 19 years, is a fine artist.

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Displaying More of Our Rainbow: A Conversation With Ms. Bob Davis

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The Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive (LLTA or Louise), founded and managed by professor Ms. Bob Davis, is a fiscally sponsored project of the GLBT Historical Society. Located in Vallejo, California, it is one of the world’s largest repositories of archival materials pertaining to transgender and gender-nonconforming people in the world. In honor of Transgender Awareness Week this November, we interviewed Ms. Bob about Louise’s latest projects and on the significance of transgender history.

What are some of the initiatives that LLTA has been focusing on during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Ms. Bob: Back in 2019, I gave a talk at the “Queering Memory” conference in Berlin called “Glamour, Drag and Death: HIV/AIDS in the Art of Three Drag Queen Painters.” It focused on the artists and performers Jerome Caja, Doris Fish and Miss Kitty, all three of whom died between 1991 and 1995, and includes analysis of artworks held by both LLTA and the GLBT Historical Society. I published an article based on the talk in Transgender Studies Quarterly this February, and now I’m working on turning the material into a short documentary film to reach a wider audience. I want people to learn about how these artists confronted AIDS. It was less intellectual; they responded in a visceral, emotional way, in a very valiant fight to retain their identities in the face of this horrible crisis. It’s now thirty years since the height of the AIDS pandemic, and there’s a whole generation of LGBTQ people who simply don’t have that lived experience. It’s important to pass on this history so they can learn about what the community went through.

What can you tell us about your ongoing online “scrapbook” project on the LLTA website? 

Ms. Bob: It’s an online project called “I Think This is Our Denise: Discovering Forgotten Scrapbooks of Trans History,” and it’s based on a remarkable collection of six large scrapbooks donated by Taryn Gundling in 2014. They belonged to a trans woman named Denise, and contain over a dozen pages of candid photographs of transgender people and cross-dressers from the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time when the transgender community was just beginning to define itself and establish networks. It took four years of research to learn more about Denise and the people in the photographs. I recognized some of them in other LLTA archival collections; in issues of the first national transgender community magazine, Transvestia, which began publishing in 1960; and in photographs held by the Art Gallery of Ontario, many of which were published in the book Casa Susanna. These photos depict transgender people vacationing at several Catskill mountain resorts, one of them named Casa Susanna, run by Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie. These establishments served as safe spaces for transgender women to vacation in their gender of choice in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now we’re using the scrapbooks to do a deep dive into transgender history. LLTA is partnering with the Art Gallery of Ontario; the Transgender Archive at University of Victoria; the website “A Gender Variance Who’s Who”; and the Digital Transgender Archive to create an online hub that connects the resources of all five organizations to present photographs, biographies, and autobiographical articles about the individuals in the scrapbook. For example, many of the people in the snapshots wrote autobiographical articles in early issues of Transvestia, so the site connects you to essays they wrote about their lives. This project will allow them to really live again, and the site is being beautifully put together by our webmaster Robyn Adams.

You’ve been curating LLTA for many years now. What’s something you want people to learn about transgender history?

Ms. Bob: One of the things I’m personally interested in conveying relates to the growing awareness of trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, genderqueer identities that we see today. When you examine historical materials, you realize that these shades of gender and gender identity have always been with us; they aren’t just emerging or being “invented” now. Trans people in the early 1960s, when the community first began to organize, were working with different terms, often borrowed from the medical establishment and out of date now. They certainly didn’t have the vocabulary that is available today. But if you dig down, the documentation reveals that people were defining, exploring, and working out their identities in complex ways. Understanding this supports us in continuing the work of building our community in the present so that we can display more of our rainbow.

Ms. Bob Davis (she/her/hers) is the founder and director of the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive. In the 1990s she served two terms on the GLBT Historical Society Board of Directors.

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A Woman Worth Knowing: Reflections on the Passing of Sally Gearhart

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This past July, the LGBTQ community lost one of its most stalwart and influential leaders: Sally Gearhart (1931–2021). A multifaceted, multitalented woman, Gearhart wore more hats in her lifetime than many of us could in several: she was a teacher, feminist, science-fiction writer, and political activist. She became the first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track faculty position at the university level when she was hired in 1973 by San Francisco State University, where she established one of the first women’s and gender studies programs in the country. Among her contributions to the struggle for LGBTQ rights was her fight against Proposition 6, also known as the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 California ballot measure that would have prevented LGBTQ people from teaching in the state’s public schools.

In honor of Gearhart’s life, the GLBT Historical Society is hosting a special program on October 29 featuring as panelists four women who worked with Gearhart at various times in her life in different capacities. The program is designed not only to introduce those unfamiliar with Gearhart’s life and work to her remarkable academic, community-building and literary achievements, but to share a sense of Gearhart’s unique, humorously infectious personality. Here, two of the panelists have contributed short reflections about Gearhart: Deborah Craig, a documentary filmmaker and producer; and Dorothy Haecker, a scholar of women’s studies and feminist philosophy.

Deborah Craig: I first met Sally in the summer of 2014, while I was making a short documentary about lesbians and aging, A Great Ride. I had heard about an octogenarian living on women’s land in Northern California, still cutting her own firewood with a chainsaw. I couldn’t wait to see this! Although we didn’t witness any chainsawing, my camerawoman Silvia Turchin and I spent the weekend trying to keep up with Sally. She strode down wooded paths, rolled under barbed wire fences, and drove her battered Jeep down “roads” through the woods we weren’t sure were there.

But besides being an excitement-filled adventure that we dubbed the “lesbian safari,” this first visit with Sally was the beginning of a longer journey: More and more I understood that she was a towering figure for lesbian feminism and gay rights from the 1970s through the 1990s. She had an astonishing breadth of interests and talents: women’s studies, communication, religion and spirituality, speculative fiction and much more. With her death we’ve all lost a powerful spokeswoman and an amazing intellect. I hope the film we’re making about her life can celebrate her accomplishments, highlight her sense of fun and adventure, and underscore her important legacy of working for justice for women, for gay people, for animals and for the Earth itself.

Dorothy Haecker: Sally Gearhart spent her life obsessed with the causes and cures of violence among humans and between humans and everybody and everything else. She defined the suffering we cause one another in a broad way that included physical, sexual, psychological, political, economic and even rhetorical dimensions. Sally believed feminist consciousness and activism were paths to a less violent world. She wrote fantasy novels—The Wanderground, The Kanshou, The Magister—that envisioned (she would have said “pre-visioned”) such a world. She created a new theory of communication as a solution to what she considered the violence of persuasive speech.

In the late 1970s, she joined forces with Harvey Milk to change the minds of Californians about the Briggs Amendment that, if passed, would have deeply violated LGBTQ rights. She believed in the power of imagination, conversation, wild women and gentle men. She was a prophetic woman, full of radiant contradictions, whose ideas did and can make a difference. She is worth knowing.

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