WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Los Angeles to matriculate at the University of Southern California in 1998, I had no idea I was moving to the area that had been ground zero for the national homosexual rights movement in the 1950s. I did not know that the Joan Corbin and Corki Wolf, long time art director and editor to ONE Magazine, had lived blocks away from my home in La Crescenta. I did not know that the park on Alvarado that I passed by every day on my way to campus was the very park where Mattachine founder Dale Jennings had met and flirted with an undercover police officer, a fortuitous meeting that would soon galvanize Mattachine and propel it to the forefront of homosexual activism. I did not know that the area where I parked my car near campus was the same area where, in 1948, Harry Hay had attended a “gay” frat party and conceived the idea that homosexuals could and should be organized. I did not even know that ONE had existed, that many homosexuals in the country—and the world—had looked to the people in these neighborhoods for support, encouragement, and inspiration.
But gradually these ghosts revealed themselves—and they demanded to be heard. Many of the deceased, such as Kepner, I had never met; others were comrades fallen in the line of duty, taken by AIDS or by age. The first colleague to go was Ernie Potvin, friend to the late Jim Kepner, who had recruited me in 1996 while I was completing my masters degree in anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Potvin requested my help in authoring and managing the website for the newly formed one/igla, a “merger” between the academic aspect of ONE, Incorporated, called ONE Institute, and Kepner’s International Gay and Lesbian Archives. When Potvin died in 1998, I inherited the site—but did not know one lick of HTML, let alone a sophisticated application like Dreamweaver. But to honor the memory of Kepner and Potvin, I set out to learn what I needed to keep the website running and the information flowing.
My second encounter with GLBT cyber history was in working for what has turned out to be one of the first web resources for gay and lesbian academics, the International Gay and Lesbian Review, launched in 1996 by Walter L. Williams and John Waiblinger at the University of Southern California. Williams has learned from a librarian researching the history of the Internet that the Review may have been the first academic publication to emerge entirely online—others had begun in print and migrated over. The Review currently has hundreds of book abstracts and reviews, and readers are encouraged to submit reviews of their own. While the quality of the content varies greatly, the site’s value as a bibliographic resource is great.
As I began working on my dissertation, documenting Los Angeles gay history, the websites began to grow. I became increasingly interested in working with Jim Schneider and Billy Glover, directors of the Homosexual Information Center [HIC], and I created a new website for them to serve as a virtual archives of their amazing collection. It turns out that the late Don Slater, long time editor of ONE Magazine, librarian for ONE, Inc., and founder of the HIC, had envisioned such a project prior to his death in 1997, so my endeavor was certainly one he would have embraced and sanctioned. Glover and Schneider were delighted with my progress. We called the new website tangentgroup.org, after the HIC’s former publication Tangents magazine. The heart of the site was a timeline, the first to attempt to document the Los Angeles GLBT history, that was in reverse chronologic format (much like today’s blogs with the most recent items at the top) and featured links to specific documents, such as minutes of business meetings, photographs, and legal documents. By the time I graduated it had been referenced by several prominent GLBT journalists and academics. The sprits of my gay ancestors have thus been appeased, and their voices now live on in cyberspace.
GLBT History Websites to the Rescue
Of course I am not the only one to have realized the value of the Internet for documenting and recording GLBT history. Take Tracy Baim [author of a piece in this issue], who has been a writer for most of her life. Baim has always been a bit of an outlier among journalists—a vocal and opinionated lesbian who confessed to her subjective perspectives in an industry where objectivity was chanted as mantra.
In 2007, Baim created the Chicago Gay History Project. Frustrated that so much of lesbian and gay history was hidden in archives and sitting in storage, she began to put as much content as possible online. Her goal is to digitize the over 100,000 photos that she has in her collection. After she covered the deaths of twelve leaders in the Chicago gay movement last year, she bought an HD camera, recruited a few video editors, converted a vacant space into a mini-studio, and began to record interviews with as many of the surviving activists she could find. The results are a stunning new online resource: ChicagoGayHistory.org. The site is already a premier resource for GLBT history, though it was only launched last September. The site now boasts hundreds of videos and thousands of historical documents and photographs. There’s also a companion book to the site: Out and Proud in Chicago, which Bain co-edited.
Another pioneer in archiving GLBT history is Jonathan Ned Katz, author of Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., first published in 1976, the Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (1983), The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995), and Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (2001). In 2003, Katz was introduced to the founder of a website development company called Mediopolis, Carl Pritzkat, who was soon prevailed upon to develop a website to archive GLBT history. It was Pritzkat who suggested the name OutHistory.org, and through his good work the site was launched. This first version of OutHistory.org went online in 2004. Buoyed by a small grant, Katz held a planning meeting in early 2006 to discuss expanding the site, and the idea was met with enthusiasm. Richard Windall, Director of the National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay History, was especially excited and encouraged Katz to create a vision statement for the project.
Katz did precisely that. He took it to the directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and they decided to support the project for two years if supporting funds could be secured. Thanks to director Urvashi Vaid, the Arcus Foundation elected to provide that support by granting CLAGS a $50,000 grant to create the site and fund it for two years. The site officially launched last September and features seven “curated” exhibits on topics such as Esther Newton’s “Lesbians in the Twentieth Century,” Ron Schlittler’s “Out and Elected in the USA, 1974–2004,” and Marshall Weeks’ “Postcards: Masculine Women, Feminine Men.”
When I heard of Katz’s project, I knew that I wanted to participate. So I contacted him and offered to migrate much of my work on the Tangents website to the new site at CLAGS. The result is my own OutHistory module, “Pre-Gay Era in the USA: 1950–1969.” With the physical archives of the HIC housed at the Oviatt Library of California State University, Northridge, and the virtual archives being hosted through CLAGS, the GLBT scholars of the future will have ready access to the files, books, and documents collected by ONE, Incorporated and others over the past 60 years. As the materials are digitized and published, anyone with Internet access can find and read these rare and important documents. It will become a resource that our ancestors could only dream of.
The OutHistory.org website is already a rich resource, but it has a long way to go to reach its full potential. In the nature of the wiki, it depends on contributors to thrive—both content-wise and financially. With the Arcus funds now depleted, the site is already in crisis mode, desperate for funding so it can continue on in its very important mission of providing as much primary resource material as possible to meet the needs of GLBT activists, scholars, and journalists everywhere.
The Future of Our Past
In the world of Web 1.0, which began in the late 1990’s, several GLBT academic and institutional websites emerged that continue today. These were basically electronic bulletin boards that attempted to emulate the traditional newsletter or journal. Just after Y2K, the Blogosphere erupted into cyberspace, and a new, more interactive website (Web 1.5?) began to dominate the scene. Hundreds of others joined in with emerging voices such as Steve Schalchlin, and blogs today compete with professional journalists to record history and to entertain and persuade others. Now, through the increased trust and reliance on wikis, we are in a truly collaborative Web 2.0 era where anyone can not only comment but also contribute to knowledge. One need not be an expert in the traditional sense to be a scholar, editor, or activist—anyone with the facts and gumption can pitch in.
Over the past decade, the Web has become a vortex of thoughts, ideas, and opinions. But reliable facts remain a scarce commodity. Anyone can create a website now; the trouble is providing content. The websites that survive well into the future, in my estimation, will be those that have that content, and this is where wikis could have the upper edge.
Our history is rich, but it is not long. We have sixty years of unbroken history since the first homosexual-themed magazine was distributed in the dark bars and alleyways of Los Angeles. Yet how many of our youths have ever heard of or even read an old issue of ONE, the Mattachine Review, or The Ladder? These resources should have been posted online years ago, for most of the content is accessible and probably in the public domain. The newsletters of the organizations that created these magazines (ONE, Mattachine, and the Daughters of Bilitis) are likewise national treasures that need to be available. The content is there, and the resources are ready. What we need now is a solid investment from GLBT people to make sure these materials are available to anyone with Internet access, and in perpetuity.
In the twelve years that I’ve been striving to document the L.A.-based movement, many more of the pioneering GLBT activists have died. My first excursion into L.A., in fact, was to attend the memorial service for Jim Kepner, held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater on May 22, 1998. Soon after, I was helping to memorialize Dale Jennings, who died in May of 2000. More recently, through the passing of Harry Hay, Joseph Hansen, Barbara Gittings, Del Martin, Vern Bullough, and a host of others, we have lost most of the first and second generations of homophile and GLBT activists.
But it is not only the people who are going. This year, we are losing the Oscar Wilde bookshop in Greenwich Village. A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood is likewise closing down. We will now have no choice but to leave our cultural consonance to the care of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. Will they nurture our history for us? Will they welcome our GLBT authors, scholars, and activists? Or is our existence still too controversial to be brought up in polite conversations by latte-drinking heterosexuals?
We have fought for sixty years now to become a people. Let us not lose our sense of community through apathy. Let us preserve our history, continue to value the unique stories we have to tell as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered individuals. Let our voices rise up to the cyber heavens so that others, all around the world, can hear them and take heart. The stakes are high. This age of mass communication is also the era of mass eradication, as many of the classic texts by which we define ourselves are going out of print. New scholars and activists are not finding sustainable jobs, despite all the talk of diversity and inclusion. It is greatly ironic that our best hope lies in the most volatile and ephemeral storage device ever yet created: the Internet.
Through this essay, you have perhaps become aware of some Internet sources that you had not heard of, and perhaps you have learned a bit of the GLBT web history of which you were formerly unaware. My hope is that you will also log on and make use of them. Next time you’re bored at work or clicking through insomnia, take in one of the video clips at ChicagoGayHistory.org. Comment on a blog at the Bilerico Project, or upload a relevant photo to OutHistory.org. Chances are, you’re an expert on some area of our community’s history. Thanks to people like Tracy Baim and Jonathan Ned Katz, your own personal repository is waiting. Take a stand and be heard!
Also consider the ways in which you can become a friend of the GLBT libraries. There are not many, and those that are here are struggling to survive. Consider giving a gift subscription of The Advocate, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, or your city’s gay newspaper to your local library. Join the Lambda Literary Foundation and support CLAGS. Send a tax deductible contribution to the Homosexual Information Center, or support your local GLBT community center by helping them to establish a library or reading room. We cannot assume that our recorded history will preserve itself or the history that’s yet undiscovered will come to light on its own. Our collective social memory needs to be tended if it is to endure.
C. Todd White, PhD, is visiting assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA.
