This project was born from Dr. Angela Mazaris's Fall 2017 Queer Public Histories course at Wake Forest University. Over the course of several weeks, these students engaged with a number of questions concerning queer public history. What is 'queer?' How do we curate and demonstrate history? What does it mean to stage or collect a 'public' history? While studying public histories and queerness, we began to curate a public history of our own. Each student conducted an ethnographic interview with an individual who is or had been a member of the queer community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina or identified as an ally to that community. Those interviews have since been transcribed to be added to the Winston-Salem LGBTQ Oral History Project archive.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As students, we have used the information gathered from our narrators to create this project, Keep Winston Queer. The title 'Keep Winston Queer' speaks to two important points. First, it is a recognition that despite the relative lack of awareness that exists around LGBTQ individuals in history, there is undoubtedly a powerful and important queer history to the city of Winston-Salem. Second, it is a call to action to continue to create, record, curate, and publicize this history. As this project demonstrates, LGBTQ individuals have long called Winston-Salem home. Here they have struggled and have thrived, have suffered and have succeeded, been public and been erased, loved and been loved, feared and been feared, have lived and have died.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
On this site, you will encounter but a fraction of the stories these narrators have provided. Our goal is to center and highlight their experiences, covering decades of local, state, national, and world history. As E. Patrick Johnson does in Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, we have chosen to refer to our interview subjects as 'narrators' in order to recognize that their contributions far exceed providing a simple interview. By sharing their lives with us, these narrators are our collaborators and indeed authors of this history. Some of the information presented here is encouraging and uplifting. Other stories are traumatic and full of suffering. We have aimed to present the full range of queer experiences provided by our narrators. It must be stated that we cannot endeavor to present these stories as fully summative of queer experience in Winston-Salem. Several factors prevent us from doing so. Among those are the small sample size of our narrator pool, dearth of fully diverse voices, and the constraints of time that hinder our access to follow-ups, additional interviews, and extensive research. That understood, we feel that this history is important to record, to present, and to honor. We hope that this project, alongside projects occurring all over the world to uplift queer histories, will inspire interest in the subject and we encourage future students, scholars, activists, and historians to join us in this work to uncover and present queer histories at all levels and across diverse ranges of identity and experience.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This project has been inspired by a number of works. We would like here to highlight some of those that have been most influential to Keep Winston Queer. Our research questions, methods, analyses, and project construction are indebted to the following works:
Ethnographic Queer Histories (All Print Books)
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2012. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. 2014. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. 20th anniversary edition. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project (Minn.), ed. 2010. Queer Twin Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Academic Articles and Essays
Blee, Kathleen M. 1993. “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan.” The Journal of American History 80 (2):596–606. https://doi.org/10.2307/2079873.
Burg, Steven B. 2008. “‘From Troubled Ground to Common Ground’: The Locust Grove African-American Cemetery Restoration Project: A Case Study of Service-Learning and Community History.” The Public Historian 30 (2):51–82. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2008.30.2.51.
Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4):437–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.
Crimp, Douglas. 1987. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 43:237–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/3397576.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. “AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP’s Lesbians.” In An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, 156–204. Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press.
Duberman, Martin. 1997. “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence.” In Carryin’ on in the Lesbian and Gay South, edited by John Howard, 15–33. New York: New York University Press.
Dubrow, Gail Lee. 2003. “Blazing Trails with Pink Triangles and Rainbow Flags: Improving the Preservation and Interpretation of Gay and Lesbian Heritage.” In Restoring Women’s History Through Historic Preservation, edited by Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman, 281–302. JHU Press.
Hansen, Karen V. 1995. “‘No Kisses Is Like Youres’: An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Gender & History 7 (2):153–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1995.tb00019.x.
Mazaris, Angela. 2009. “Public Transgressions: The Reverend Phebe Hanaford and the "Minister’s Wife".” In Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives; History of Sexualities: Volume I, edited by Mary McAuliffe and Sonja Tiernan, 180–94. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Romesburg, Don. 2014. “Presenting the Queer Past: A Case for the GLBT History Museum.” Radical History Review 2014 (120):131–44.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1975. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1 (1):1–29.
Films
Ingram, Malcolm. 2006. Small Town Gay Bar. Red Envelope Entertainment ; Distributed by Genius Entertainment.