Queer history lives in its multitudes. While specific individuals like San Francisco politician Harvey Milk and Chicago businessman and photographer Chuck Renslow have historically dominated the spotlight, the real legacy of queerness is rooted in the untold stories of the historically forgotten and discarded, those refusing to passively accept their assumed fates. Every untold act of resistance echoes down to us today, whether we know it or not. As one web series of underreported trans narratives says: We’ve Been Around.
Annie Howard: At one point, you note “how tenuous the survival of LGBTQ history can be.” Can you give an example of a story that you were pleasantly surprised to find in the archives?
In many cases, you write about groups of queer activists like Latina lesbian group Amigas Latinas who just a few decades ago felt that their communities had no visibility or mainstream support. What does that historical context tell us about queer life today?
I was raised Catholic, but I’m not what you would call an active Catholic anymore. One of the things I discovered was this material about “gay mass,” where in the early 70s in Chicago, it was arranged that a Catholic priest said mass to a group of queer folks every week or every other week. That’s not the impression that we have of the Roman Catholic Church and its relationship to these issues, and it was amazing to me that something like this was happening here. I’ll be sitting there with my box and be researching quietly, and then I just get very happy and surprised, like, “Oh my God, who knew?” And I can imagine lots of other people, even if you’re not a historian, experiencing that same sense of discovery. v
