Desire for History
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DESIRE FOR HISTORY Above: Kevin Burke, AB’72, PhD’99, A College class uncovers the photographed fellow activist Murray Edelman, PhD’73 (center); Michael Krause, history of gay and lesbian X’69 (right); and another member of their “gay Marxist-Leninist commune” in San student life. Francisco. Founded by UChicago students on the North Side, the commune moved to the Bay Area in 1972 because rents were cheaper. Opposite: Gay pride pins from Burke’s collection. Photos courtesy Burke. By Elizabeth Station 26 / Reprinted with permission, the University of Chicago, The Core, Winter 2013 f the title of the course wasn’t bold enough notions of progress—like LGBTQ life sucked, to draw students’ attention, its ambitions and then [the 1969] Stonewall [riots] happened Then were. Offered this past spring quarter, and things started to get better.” Queer on the Quads: Uncovering LGBTQ At the University of Chicago, progress had What was it like for History at the University of Chicago its own complicated path. gay students when aimed—according to the syllabus—to introduce you were [at the I U of C]? undergraduates “to the practice, theory, and interpretation of oral history as a primary CommuniTy hisTory There was nothing, nothing, nothing. source in studying the history of gender and There was one sexuality in the 20th century US.” In the tumultuous 1960s, Allan Bérubé, X’68, dance—you had to Meeting twice a week in the library’s Special had a full scholarship to the College but left be so courageous to Collections Research Center, the class discussed school just weeks before graduation. He told go to that dance— I mean, to walk readings and explored sources in the University the story in an essay about his working-class into that room, and archives. Instructor Monica Mercado, AM’06, childhood in My Desire for History (2011). everybody knew that a doctoral candidate in history, also prepared Less privileged students, he argued, made was going to be the students to conduct oral-history interviews with a bargain with universities to work hard in first gay dance. It was really scary. It alumni and staff. It was the first step toward exchange for financial support and eventual was horrible. There building an archive to document the lesbian, career success: were about four gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) women. There was experience at the University. “But in 1968, during my senior year, I a gay bar called the Cove. And that The course was cross listed in history and dropped out of college. A crisis hit me was it. gender studies, but only a handful of the 18 in April as I started to confront my students came from those majors. Most enrolled homosexuality before gay liberation, —Novelist and because “this history is intensely personal or faced class panic when I was rejected playwright Sarah personally interesting,” says Mercado. for graduate school and didn’t know Schulman, X’79, in a 1993 interview Sonia Gonzalez, AB’12, a sociology major what came next, feared for my own life with the Maroon’s and “ally” to her gay and lesbian friends, took as I witnessed murders on the streets Grey City Journal the class because “I wanted to know more during the Chicago riots following the about the history of the school that is now my assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King alma mater.” Connor Gilroy, now a fourth-year Jr., and decided to resist the draft rather in biology and geophysical sciences, had never than fight in Vietnam. The world was taken a gender-studies course. But he is active coming apart around me, yet I blamed in the student group Queers and Associates myself for not working hard enough to and hoped to learn more about its origins. keep up my part of the bargain.” Readings and guest speakers put the evolution of campus gay and lesbian life A self-taught “community historian,” into a broader historical context, showing, Bérubé never earned a degree but became for example, how the social upheavals of a pioneer in the field of gay history. He the Second World War helped create gay shared his early work with gay and lesbian communities in cities across America. “The audiences in public talks and traveling slide 1940s were much more open than I would have shows—sometimes charging admission to thought, … and the ’50s weren’t uniformly bad help fund his research—and in alternative and terrible for everyone,” says Gilroy. “One publications such as the Gay Community thing the class did very well was shake up News and the Advocate. Reprinted with permission, the University of Chicago, The Core, Winter 2013 / 27 After dropping out the first gay student group at the University of college Allan of Chicago, and one of the first on any college Bérubé, X’68, campus in the country.” became a pioneering historian. Photo One of very few openly gay students in the courtesy GLTB College, Goldman says, “I was out of the closet Historical Society. while living in Henderson House in Pierce Tower. Most people were pretty tolerant. There were a few isolated examples of hostility—I had a Gay Liberation poster on my dorm door, and one day I came home and there were cigarette burns all over it.” Goldman’s friend and fellow activist Kevin Burke, AB’72, PhD’99, recalls Gay Liberation as a radical political organization whose members weren’t afraid to push publicly for change. In late 1971 the group heckled a speech by Chicago Seven prosecutor Thomas Foran at the Quad Club. Police forcibly removed the students and beat and arrested four, including Burke, Bérubé won a Lambda Literary Award for whose identification they inspected at the Coming Out Under Fire (1990), a national police station. “I have an Irish Catholic name history of gay and lesbian soldiers who served and the others didn’t,” he remembers. “They in the Second World War. The book was made said, ‘What’s a nice Irish kid like you doing into a 1994 documentary and Bérubé received with these faggot Jew commies?’” a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1996. He Gay Liberation successfully pressed once told a friend that historical work gave him the University administration for the right the chance to “use the skills I learned in college to establish a drop-in center in Ida Noyes … in an unalienated way.” Hall and to host public, same-sex dances on More broadly, Bérubé saw history as a tool campus. One of the first dances drew 600 for change and believed that people who knew people to Pierce Tower in 1970, a detail that their stories—whether about lesbians who delighted Matthew Krisiloff, now a third-year passed as men in 19th-century San Francisco student. (“My dorm—the dance must have or gay soldiers forced to leave the military taken place in the dining hall I eat in every with “blue discharges”—could be moved to day!” he wrote in a footnote to his paper for political activism. Queer on the Quads.) Assigned for Queer on the Quads and Along with these triumphs came episodes published posthumously, My Desire for of discrimination and loss—historical events, History gathers Bérubé’s early writings with rather than lived experiences, for most excerpts from a book project on the racially undergraduates born in the 1990s. Mercado diverse and “queer friendly” Marine Cooks sent the class to see Court Theatre’s 2012 and Stewards Union. The project merged revival of Angels in America to learn about the his interests in gay, community, and labor early years of the AIDS epidemic. The students history but was never finished. Bérubé died read newspaper accounts of antigay harassment unexpectedly from ruptured stomach ulcers in on campus and the protests that ensued. 2007. He was 61. Today, seven different student organizations and the Office of LGBTQ Student Life—housed in spacious quarters at The LegaCy of gay LiberaTion 5710 South Woodlawn—offer support, social events, and professional opportunities. Over Alumni who remember “nothing, nothing, the past century, Krisiloff wrote, the University nothing” for gay and lesbian students haven’t has slowly evolved “from treating homosexuals talked to David Goldman, AB’72. “I was very as an academic curiosity, to treating queers active in the Gay Liberation group that we with intolerance, and finally to embracing and started on the campus in 1970,” he says. “It was accepting LGBT identifying people.” I had a Gay Liberation poster on my “dorm door, and one day I came home and there were cigarette burns all over it. 28 / Reprinted with permission, the University of Chicago, The Core, Winter 2013 Hannah Frisch, Queer Studies and oraL hisTory Students in Mercado’s class learned AB’64, AM’69, interviewing techniques by practicing on each PhD’76, saved fliers Do oral histories provide reliable representations other. Paired with a classmate, each asked and memorabilia of the past? … Does the history of sex, sexuality, the other why they had chosen the College from her days as a student activist with and desire have a unique relationship to self- and the class. But when second-year Danielle Gay Liberation. disclosure and, thus, to oral history methods? … Wilson interviewed Zach Price, AB’12, she And is there something voyeuristically compelling says they both avoided questions that seemed about the way narrators (and researchers) create taboo or invasive: “He mentioned coming out social meaning out of sexual desire? on his own. I wasn’t going to ask about that. —Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Who Is the Subject? He didn’t ask me about my sexuality.” (Even Queer Theory Meets Oral History” (2008) during the week that the syllabus dubbed “Let’s Talk About Sex,” she adds, students George Chauncey taught at the University avoided the subject.) of Chicago from 1991 to 2006 and authored As the quarter progressed, the class got Gay New York (1994), a book that helped methodological guidance from Bodies of launch the field of LGBTQ history.