Four Lessons from Queer Oral History
LGBTQ+ folks of all kinds share their personal histories.
Last year I did some work with our regional queer oral history project. The goal of the project is to accumulate a database of stories from all types of LGBTQ+ people from our area for the future. For my part, I conducted one interview myself and edited the collection of interviews conducted by others.
That means I spent hours listening intently to these interviews while reading along and making sure everything was spot on. While I wouldn’t wish transcription editing on my worst enemy, I learned much about what living a queer life means.
What to Expect:
- The Project
- A Conceptual Lack
- The Value of Relationships
- Queers Among Queers
- History is Human
The Project
The queer oral history project stationed at my East Texas university was designed to accumulate the life stories of queer folks in the area to save them for future generations.
Over the past few decades of queer research, there has been an issue with metronormative and bicoastal biases. All this means is that when we see queer folks on the screen, read about them in books, or hear about them on the news, they typically are queers from a handful of big cities or either the eastern or western coasts of the United States.
These places have long been places at the forefront of LGBTQ+ equality, so it makes sense for them to take up a lot of our attention. However, countless folks are living outside of those spaces, and many have never been to them at all. This project was designed to give voices to those who haven’t had the chance to speak before.
Below are some lessons I’ve learned from queer folks living around East Texas, South Arkansas, and North Louisiana.
A Conceptual Lack
As a gay man in his mid-twenties, there is a marked difference in how I grew up compared to the LGBTQ+ people that grew up before me. While there is still much violence around the world, there is more backing for queer folks today than a few decades before.
The purpose here isn’t to rank who has experienced more homophobia, but it is essential to remember where we’ve been compared to where we are now.
Several of our interviewees told stories about not realizing their sexuality until much later in life. A few even remarked that they had no concept of what being “gay” even meant, being shielded by their families from a young age.
For LGBTQ+ people my age and younger, we have almost no concept of what that kind of world is like. Even if stories shown to us weren’t particularly positive, we all had examples of queer folks on our screens, in the news, or in the sermons we heard at church that hinted at another way of living.
The remarkable thing about a few of our older interviewees was their ability to listen to their inner selves and find love when there were virtually no examples of their type of sexuality available to them. A handful of women told us they had not heard the term “gay” until their early twenties and hadn’t heard the term “lesbian” until much, much later.
So, if you’re a young person today wondering if you’ll ever find the right letter or group of letters in the LGBTQIA+ that represents you, remember that so many before have struck out with much less and lived a long, meaningful queer life.
The Value of Relationships
Listening to hour after hour of queer life narratives, there was one thing that almost every older person said that the younger folks seemed to miss: The importance of human relationships.
Our interviewees who were fifty or older told stories about how specific people directed the course of their lives. One woman spoke about how a relationship starting in grade school reverberated throughout her past sixty years. Another spoke about how finding their new husband brought them back to life after the loss of their former marriage had carried them to the brink.
Meanwhile, our younger interviewees focused more on their own identity struggles. They told stories about finding like-minded groups on the internet or the opposition they faced when coming out.
These aren’t hard lines, of course, but slight differences in focus. If, however, we are to take a page out of the book of our elders, the thing that helped them through the difficulties they faced was the other queer folks around them.
Queers Among Queers
I’ll say it again, the essence of queerness is being yourself. I’ll admit, as I listened to one woman talk about her devotion to Christ, my brain immediately started running through the diverse arguments against Christianity and why any self-respecting queer person should abandon it immediately. When another woman said roughly the same thing, I began to think differently.
This is their story, their queer story. While I was incapable of pulling religion and sexuality together, it would be decidedly anti-queer to dictate to anyone how they should go about stitching together their sexuality and life values into a cohesive narrative.
There are many historical examples of people who have done the same thing. John. Boswell’s foundational Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality explores the intricacies of these issues, and the work of historian Judith C. Brown has given examples of lesbian nuns in her book Immodest Acts.
The sheer difference between myself and these LGBTQ+ folks, and presumably your difference from them as well, highlights the individuality of queer lives. The only way to push back against the constriction of the heteronormative is to allow for all of these various queer identities and support their unique constructions.
History is Human
While the purpose of a project like this, a regional project like this, is to see how the lives of queer folks are different depending on time and place. Above, I’ve talked a lot about what I learned from the differences between myself and the interviewees, but that’s not all.
The reason their stories are so compelling is directly tied to our similarities. It is because we all have special qualities related to sex, sexuality, or gender that we can relate to each other as queers. Moreover, living in the same place gives us another commonality that can be shared with straight folks, allowing for connection across identity lines.
On that thought, the majority of our interviewers were straight men and women. Only me and our supervisor were actually part of the LGBTQ+ community.
This speaks volumes about the power of shared history (for them, a shared history of the region, for us, a shared queer history) to pull us together. The practice of engaging in a community history project allowed all of us to work towards learning more about our history and, thus, brought us closer in the process.
In the end, this is the goal of all historical work. Specifying our identities can help us bring new knowledge and new lives back to life while broadening our categories can show us how we overlap and envelop each other.
Whether they are queer histories, regional histories, or histories of certain eras, all of them are human histories.
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